RENEGADE TRADS

When High School Girls Fight

2012-02-10T10:20:00.004-06:00

It can get naaaaaaasty:

Claims of a bizarre plot to assassinate Pope Benedict XVI are reverberating through Italy in what observers say signals the latest twist in an increasingly cutthroat internal Vatican power dispute.

The Italian daily Il Fatto Quotidiano published the sensational "mordkomplott" letter detailing an alleged plot against the pope on its front page on Friday. Despite a Vatican spokesman's claiming it was "nonsense not to be taken seriously", the content of the anonymous warning letter, dated 30 December 2011, was reported widely in Italian and German media.

The letter was delivered in early January to the Vatican secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, and the pope's private secretary, Georg Gänswein, by Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos of Colombia, according to Il Fatto Quotidiano. The paper suggested it had been written in German to avoid attracting the attention of certain Vatican officials while communicating clearly and directly with close advisers to the pope, who is German.

Labelled "strictly confidential for the Holy Father", the detailed letter reports several conversations that Cardinal Paolo Romeo, the archbishop of Palermo, allegedly had with Italian businessmen in Beijing on a trip last November during which he predicted the pope would die within 12 months and suggested his replacement would be Angelo Scola, the archbishop of Milan.

"This seems something so far from reality and not serious that I don't want to even comment," the Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, said when asked for comment by the paper.

But Castrillón Hoyos felt the threat was serious enough that he suggested the Vatican open an inquiry into exactly what was said during the mysterious China trip, which, if it happened, was not widely reported publicly. Hoyos is older than the 73-year-old Romeo, and part of the more traditionalist wing of the church.

According to Il Fatto Quotidiano, these latest revelations are further proof that a messy internal power dispute is unfolding inside the Vatican. Earlier this month, four clerics publicly defended their management of the sovereign, 108-acre Vatican City, in the heart of Rome, after a former deputy governor levelled harsh criticisms of corruption over how bids and contracts were managed.

I'm sure we'll hear more about this. If it were true, it would be rather scary, the stuff of a Dan Brown novel even. As it is, it seems like some sort of poison pen type intrigue. I can just imagine some Cardinal doing his nails and watching an Italian soap opera while dictating it to his minion...

Omerta

2012-02-08T10:52:00.006-06:00

I don't know if anyone saw this yet. I've really stopped reporting on every little thing that comes out of the abuse crisis because, well, it looked like the clergy's strategy ended up working: hit us with so much bad news that we just get accustomed to it and stop being as outraged as we should.

However, I thought these comments were interesting:

Hiding behind a culture of "omerta" -- the Italian word for the Mafia's code of silence -- would be deadly for the Catholic Church, the Vatican's top official for dealing with sexual abuse of minors by clergy said Wednesday.

Monsignor Charles Scicluna made the unusually forthright comment in his speech to a landmark symposium in Rome on the sexual abuse crisis that has rocked the Church in the past decade.

"The teaching ... that truth is at the basis of justice explains why a deadly culture of silence, or 'omerta,' is in itself wrong and unjust," Scicluna said in his address to the four-day symposium which brings together some 200 people including bishops, leaders of religious orders, victims of abuse, and psychologists.

Rarely, if ever, has a Vatican official used the word "omerta" - a serious accusation in Italian -- to compare the reluctance of some in the Church to come clean on the abuse scandal with the Mafia's code of silence.

"Other enemies of the truth are the deliberate denial of known facts and the misplaced concern that the good name of the institution should somehow enjoy absolute priority to the detriment of disclosure," Scicluna said.

Victims groups have for years accused some bishops in the Church of preferring silence and cover-up to coming clean on the scandal, which has sullied the image of the Church around the world, particularly in the United States.

"No strategy for the prevention of child abuse will ever work without commitment and accountability," Scicluna told the symposium at the Jesuit Pontifical Gregorian University, called "Towards Healing and Renewal."

Scicluna, a Maltese whose formal title is "justice promoter" in the Vatican's doctrinal department, is the Vatican's point man for dealing with cases of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy.

The symposium's participants are discussing how the Church can become more aware of the problem, make a commitment to listen to victims and prevent future cases of abuse.

Groups representing abuse victims say the Church must do much more to own up to the past, when known pedophile priests were shuttled from parish to parish instead of being defrocked or turned over to authorities.

It must also make greater efforts to prevent future cases, they say, accusing the Church and the Vatican of a cover-up.

Extraterrestrial "Intelligence"

2012-02-04T18:33:00.014-06:00

One story that gets dug up every so often on a slow news day is that some priest or official at the Vatican Observatory have said something (positive, usually) about extraterrestrial life and its compatibility with Faith (usually the headline is sensationalistic and misleading...)

In itself, I see no real problem there, but think speculation is useless. We'd really have to see what "they" were like before we reached any conclusions. If there are myriads of bodiless spirits in the angels (and demons), why couldn't their be other material creatures with immortal souls? We would then have to re-examine our definition of man as a "rational animal" and see whether these other races, not descended from Adam presumably, had fallen themselves, whether they had been given some other Revelation or other "dispensation" of salvation from us, etc.

If the angels can exist as a separate spiritual "race" with a somewhat different dispensation, I see no reason why aliens with bodies couldn't also exist. Tolkein, as a "sub-creator" in fiction, imagined a possible world with many races on earth with different dispensations from God, and Aquinas even seems to hold out the possibility that God could have incarnated more than once, or in a Person other than the Son (or even two or three of the persons taking on the same created nature; see questions 5, 6, and 7 especially.)

So, really, who knows. Likely they'd be so far away that barring something like the invention of a real hyperdrive, we'd never actually meet before Judgement Day (and, if they're out there, won't we all be so surprised, to find out we were not alone after all, to meet our brothers after all those vast eons!) Though, surely, if it did happen, First Contact would be the most important event in [secular] history if it happened, and would probably constitute a massive paradigm shift and revolution in consciousness for many people (in a way that might threaten religion and have other massively unexpected results, so we should prepare).

However, lately I've been thinking that I'm not even sure it is meaningful to expect "intelligent" life to be found out there in the cosmos. Not for scientific reasons (most scientists seem to expect the universe to be teeming with civilizations), but for metaphysical reasons.

A friend recently pointed out to me this salient quote from Solaris by Stanisław Lem:

We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all a sham. We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don't want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can't accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don't like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don't leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us - that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence - then we don't like it anymore.

I've only seen the movie, but it raises the spectre of alien "intelligence" that is totally, well, unintelligible to us. Whether because it is so far "above" our own, or because it is simply different.

I am not sure there is any reason to expect that we will find life that will be mutually intelligible with us in the cosmos. Because our notion of intelligence is conditioned by our categories, which are mental, and another sort of creature may well have incomprehensible categories.

What I mean is based on some other things I've been thinking about lately related to Idealism (the philosophical school) and the knowability of God from natural reason. Like, is "number" really a feature of the external universe? Or is it just a category in how human brains organize/construct reality in a way that another species may not have? Same/different, more/less, good/bad, etc...who is to say that these dualities of human thought would be any part of the syntax of the "programming language" of extraterrestrial brains? And yet, of course, such categories, such Forms, are what render the universe intelligible to us. We simply can't think outside the limits imposed by the box of our own system of thought.

When people speak of finding extraterrestrial intelligent life, they seem to be imagining ultimately human brains just put in weird looking bodies on weird planets, but assuming that the Forms will be constant and in the end "translate" across all intelligences. For those who believe there is a God, there is some more basis for believing this, at least; it is much less clear to me why atheist scientists would make this assumption (by analogy: try to input Java code into a C++ engine.) It can be difficult even for two human cultures to be entirely mutually intelligible to one another, so why should we expect any sort of empathy or communication or mutual understanding would be possible with aliens?

So, yes, I think people are looking for Man out there. And I see no reason to expect that we will find him. We may well find life, very complex life even, and life that creates highly advanced [inorganic] "technology" (as do chimps, and bees, and termites, and human beings). But I am not sure it makes sense to expect these creatures whose brains evolved totally separate from ours will be meaningfully intelligent in the human sense we would recognize (perhaps they don't even have a concept of intelligence! Or of living vs. dead!)

I think 2001: A Space Odyssey makes this point wonderfully and hauntingly: HAL, the Artificial Intelligence, bore man's image, because it was created by man. It has super-human computing capacity, of course, but ultimately it is programmed on the model of human thought, human intelligence, human categories (and so fittingly expresses very human flaws). On the other hand, what we assume is alien life in the last act...is simply wholly Other. There is something totally sublime as it blows our mind. It's "intelligence" cannot even really meaningfully be called that, as it is not comprehensible to us.

And why should we expect it to be?

Women, Modesty, Aesthetics, Pants and Skirts

2012-01-22T19:41:00.013-06:00

I was thinking about women's clothing.

This may start like the sound of a post that could go some strange places very fast, so I should explain a couple threads (get it?? I've actually made that pun before, in another old post about clothing) that have been floating around my head. (The title of the post is rather straightforward, by the way, because I hear that makes it easier to find in search engines for people looking up the topic.)

The first is just a minor point I should make about the common trad obsession with "modesty." The point is just to remind people that the vice opposed to modesty is vanity. It isn't "seductiveness" or "sluttishness" or something like that. Trads seem to have an overly sexualized notion of modesty; "modesty" is thought of as "covering up" enough (almost always thought of in terms of women), as not dressing in a lust-inducing manner, or one designed to flaunt ones sensuality.

However, this is a perversely narrow view of modesty. Modesty is really related to humility in outward appearance, manner, attitude, etc. People understand this "other" connotation of modesty well enough; we say "Oh, don't be modest!" when someone tries to downplay an accomplishment. But this really shouldn't be understood as a "separate" connotation of the concept of modesty. Really, it's the only connotation. Of course, not dressing like a whore can be part of modesty inasmuch as it means not showing off ones erotic capital or drawing attention to oneself, but the reason this is modesty has to do with the avoidance of pride in oneself, not lust in other people.

Any notion of "modesty" that associates it with, say, an overgeneralized aversion to nudity or to blushing at the thought of exposing certain body parts (even in appropriate contexts)...is really just a recipe for a neuroticism that fears the body and embodiment. It also can be a serious moral distraction or illusion from what really matters.

For example, I know a Muslim woman who is very "conservative" about covering everything up, wears a headscarf, would never dare expose an ankle (gasp!) or anything like that, and always has a long-sleeved thing even underneath whatever fancy outer dress she may have on. But that's just the thing: this woman wears extremely fancy outer-clothes, is always bragging about her jewelry, make-up, nail-painting, and expensive purses and shoes with other women.

Sure she's "covered up" extremely conservatively (what some trads understand to be "modesty"), her clothes don't reveal her figure...but she nevertheless loves to draw attention to herself through her showy self-adornment. Really, a woman in reasonable shorts and a plain t-shirt is much more "modest" in my mind because she is, in context in our culture, unremarkable and not putting too much thought into her appearance. This is real modesty.

The other point I was thinking about along these lines was the trad obsession with women wearing pants, and the insistence of some that they wear a skirt. Obviously, to make a moral argument of this is batshit crazy. But, nevertheless, I'd suggest that maybe the trad attitude comes from a good place aesthetically. Skirts and dresses are pretty! Of course, even men wore tunics and robes in other ages (trads want priests to still wear their frocks)...but there is something so nice about flowing loose cloth on a woman especially, as typifying beauty specifically feminine. Forget arguments about modesty or "proper dress" for a woman, it's the aesthete in me who would prefer to see women at Mass wearing skirts and covering their heads.

I mean, c'mon:

versus

Mind you, this isn't a judgment on the women pictured here, nor on their innate physical appearance; I'm just talking about style of clothing. And while you cannot legislate good taste morally, and while there of course many informal situations where convenience or comfort is everyone's (men and women) first consideration over beauty...I have to think that when one deliberately sacrifices beauty to make a very clear politico-ideological statement (I think of both the "communist drab" cliche, and the "populist" low-church earthen-wear-vessel Marty-Haugen-music polyester-vestment ideology promoted at places like Pray Tell) you should seriously reconsider your priorities and beliefs. And this iconoclasm in the modern world extends for some people (especially liberal women) even into the realm of clothing choices, methinks.

I'm not going to tell women that wearing pants is a sin. I'm not insane. But I will say a dress or skirt is prettier. And that's not "nothing." I think the self-conscious decay into the bizarre and ugly and grotesque of modern art is obviously a huge sign of the decadence and corruption of the values of civilization as a whole, as are general trends in mores regarding slovenliness, tackiness, kitsch, and...whatever you want to call most of the folks on "The People of Wal-Mart." Taste and beauty are considerations that, at least in certain settings, have a very real weight when it comes to promoting The Good in the world. Beauty is not an amoral category, and there is often accounting for taste.

The Scandal of Particularity

2012-01-17T08:53:00.007-06:00

There was a post on Vox Nova recently that dealt with the selection of new Cardinals, who do not seem as diverse/international a group as has been usual in the recent past. This turned into a discussion of the tension between the local and the universal, the particular and the general, in the "Roman" Catholic Church (though, of course, as I've discussed before, that's really not Her proper name, though it does capture something of this "paradox"), and just what sort of "balance" is desirable in this regard.

I've discussed this before in regards to the question of local rites and the seeming "imperialism" of the globalized Roman Rite becoming the "default" rite for places even outside that geographical patriarchate (and, in turn, the ironic result of Novus Ordo being stripped of much of its specifically Roman urban particularities and quirky historical accretions for the sake of becoming this one-size-fits-all bland "United Nations Liturgy," constructed as if in a theoretical vacuum of timelessness and non-contingency; the over-extension of the local to the universal ended up with something like localizing a universal rather than universalizing a local.)

I also have my own thoughts on the question of how to "balance" the local and universal in the College of Cardinals. That's not really the point of this post, but it really doesn't deserve a post of its own either so I'll just quickly summarize: currently, the College of Cardinals has cardinal-bishops who are the ordinaries of the suburbicarian sees of Rome, cardinal-priests who are the pastors (technically) of parishes around Rome (originally just the 25 tituli), and cardinal-deacons who are assigned to various parishes with diaconal titles now too (different from the presbyteral titles, and originally representing the 7 diaconia districts of Rome).

Rather than making random "important" Sees around the world cardinalatial by having their bishops be the titular pastors or deacons of parishes in Rome, I'd be inclined to keep the local cast by really having seven deacons of Rome again, and the 25 pastors of restored tituli. However, I'd also be inclined to have the college on a sort of "continuum" from local to more universal just like the Pope's own roles. So I wouldn't stop at the bishops of the suburbicarian sees. I'd also have archiepiscopal cardinals, who would be the archbishops of Italy (of which the Pope is Primate). I'd have primatial cardinals, the primates of all the Latin Rite nations (of which the Pope is Patriarch). And all the Patriarchs would be cardinals too automatically. Basically, the Pope's direct and immediate "suffragans" in any of his various roles, the various "concentric cirlces" of his office.

But, that's an aside. What this post was really about, per the title, is the idea of the "scandal of particularity." This is a phrase/idea that a friend introduced me too that I find quite useful. I was going to try to describe it myself, but a Dominic Holtz, O.P. described it well enough on the Vox Nova post so I'll just quote him so that readers can understand what is meant by this term:

I am not sure that tension is the best way to talk about the Romanitas of Roman Catholicism. I suspect the more fundamental worry here is the so-called “scandal of particularity.” It is tempting to imagine that something, to be universally valid, is only universal to the extent that it is free from the particularities of time, place, experience, culture, etc. The attractive idea is a kind of free-floating truth which then can embed itself in anyone, anywhere, anywhen.

The Incarnation, I think, indeed the whole of salvation history from the election of Abraham through the story of the people of Israel, through Jesus and the Church, is a history of particularities. We do not get to know God better by abstracting what was particular of the experience of Israel, or of the first-century Mediterranean, or for that matter of the very concrete, particular life of Jesus of Nazareth in Galilee and (briefly) Jerusalem. God apparently speaks his Word once for all to his saints not in universalized ways, but through very particular people and places, and we appropriate these not by bypassing their particularity, but by letting the full and robust specificity of that moment enter into the equally robust particularity of our own, which God has prepared so to receive it.

This means that, e.g. the eastern Mediterranean, Hellenic and Hellenized culture which stamps the early Church and the Fathers is an intended and enduring feature of the life of the Church. It also means that Rome is not merely where the Vicar of Christ happens to be, but where God in his providence means for us to encounter the charism of Peter in its particularity. What we will see as the permanent and abiding contributions of west Africa or east Asia remain to be seen, but they will undoubtedly be there.

I think Ratzinger said something like this in Spirit of the Liturgy about how, say, the matter of the sacraments (wheat bread, grape wine, olive oil) cannot be "localized" (say, rice bread in Asia or something like that), nor should the liturgical calendar be flipped to fit the seasons (Easter in Southern Hemisphere Springtime, for example), because they refer to the first century Levant and Hellenic culture in the Roman Empire. Christ is not some "colorless flame" of generic abstract ideas. No, God entered into the contingencies of history, a specific time, a specific place, a specific human life. This is the real scandal of Christianity.

Wow, Fr. Z. Just...wow...

2012-01-13T19:47:00.000-06:00

There's really nothing that can be said.

Production and Distribution

2012-01-12T11:07:00.004-06:00

A recent Vox Nova post on Mitt Romney as a capitalist putting people out of work made me annoyed at both sides of the question. Once again, I find it very hard to think “within the system” on these questions.

In one sense, the capitalists are not wrong. There is no reason that efficiency of production should be limited for the sake of labor. The role of production is to produce the most goods at the least cost, period. A free market achieves this, there is no doubt. It is frankly robbing humanity as a whole to limit production or make it less efficient than possible merely for the sake of “employing” people.

This is where I must agree with the fundamental critique of our current economic system (which is really a critique of the current monetary system more than the “economic” system) from the Social Credit perspective, namely: the bootstrapping of an income to “employment.”

This situation is due to credit being conceived of as a privately created (rather than a public or social) reality. When money-creation is a private industry, all the rest of us who can't create our own money will be beholden, enslaved really, to those who can, who have set up an elaborate rat-race to obtain the "tickets" to society's production. Private money creation basically allows the bankers to claim everything society produces as their own (even though they themselves have produced nothing).

Really, ruthless efficiency wouldn’t be a bad thing at all (in fact, it would maximize production, total wealth, over all) if our system were not arranged, because of this, to (ultimately arbitrarily) bootstrap distribution to participation in production.

That the replacing of people with machines, for example, can be seen as a “bad” thing under our current system because it “takes away a job”…shows the absurdity of our current system. Production would have met it’s proper end if it produced all the goods needed (or demanded) without “employing” a single person, without distributing a single cent.

Participation in production deserves renumeration, to be sure, either a salary for labor or dividends for those who own the capital. But there are vast social dividends to which we are all entitled equally, since we are all co-heirs to an enormous capital which is mankind's as a whole; specifically, the time and natural resources God sends upon the earth each year, and the inheritance of mankind's technological and scientific progress (not to mention the capital of the social network itself!)

Credit should be social rather than privately created. Focusing merely on the question of "charging interest" (which can mean different things in different contexts and systems, not all of which are equivalent) and on the Church's apparent "back-peddling" on this...misses the essence of the condemnation of usury in the first place.

The essence of the (still valid!) condemnation of usury is condemning the notion that credit is privately created rather than a social good, is condemning the theft which is private individuals or institutions creating money (through a variety of deceptive "financial" techniques, which pull the wool over the eyes of most people through their convoluted nature). Credit is a social good; private individuals monetizing it (and thus keeping for themselves the fruit of what belongs to everyone, to sell it back to us) is evil.

In reality, everyone should get their share of the newly created credit each year. When it is distributed in the first place, mind you, not through the “re”-distribution which "welfare state" liberals seem to prefer. Any notion of "re"-distribution of wealth is only treating (with the coercive powers of the State, of which I'd rather be wary) the symptoms, without addressing the root problem of why distribution is unworkably skewed in the first place.

The Social Dividend would be enough, certainly, at this point in history especially, to sustain, and thus we wouldn’t need to sacrifice productive efficiency for the sake of being distributively humane. Mitt and other capitalists may be monsters in this regard if we assume you have to play within an intrinsically exploitationist system in the first place. But, really, I’d rather spend my time attacking the unjust system rather than attacking someone whose actions, in a just system, would be perfectly fine and even good (without denying that, within the current context, they’re ghoulish).

In condemning "capitalism," we really must be condemning usury. There is nothing wrong with the free market nor with the private ownership of capital (and the investment that creates in being efficient in order to compete). What is condemnable as "capitalism" however is the concentration of most of the capital in the hands of a cabal of "capitalists" (set over and against labor, basically). This extremely skewed concentration is only possible, however, through the deception of usury by which these capitalists come to control more and more through their usurpation of creation of money, their privatization of a good (credit) which is essentially social.

I would propose that the Church would do well to re-emphasize the condemnation of usury by including among its fundamental tenets of Social Teaching the proposition that "credit is a social, rather than private, good" (and then reminding people of the implications of this when it comes to monetizing credit, to the creation of money, the means of distribution).

The Cause

2012-01-08T17:21:00.002-06:00

I want to send a shout out of gratitude to a young married couple and parents who have been some of Renegade Trads most persistent supporters. The husband helped me with the layout of the blog early on, and started the "Official Unofficial" Facebook page. The wife has now written a post on her blog with a proposal for showing support and associating with our growing "network." Thanks so much!!!

A Brief Note on MCs

2012-01-07T22:05:00.008-06:00

I don't like them.

The Master of Ceremonies in liturgical services strikes me as an example of what should have been an anomaly becoming the rule.

An MC is vested only in cassock and surplice (except in certain cases, such as the first Solemn Masses of a new priest where he gets an "assistant priest" in cope, like a bishop does, but who is really just sort of a glorified MC to help him through the services). This indicates his nature as a sort of extra-liturgical figure, as this is choir-wear (of course, acolytes and their lay substitutes began to wear that too; I prefer medieval albs for them, but that's another discussion). He is basically there to whisper in the bishop's ear (or even just the priest in many Solemn Masses now, though I'm not sure he is "required" as in a Pontifical Mass) and be his liturgical training-wheels.

This is disturbing because it is indicative of how bishops came to be detached from the liturgy. A bishops role, first and foremost, is as chief priest in his diocese. The administrivia comes second. And yet, at a certain point bishops celebrated (at least with full ceremonial) so infrequently that they needed these "experts" to specialized and then basically lead them by the hand through the whole ceremony. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need this; bishops and everyone involved in liturgy would know their parts without needing this sort of tutor to "guide" them through what should already be their expertise!

Now, I wouldn't ban MC's either. Especially for people just learning the ceremonies, I suppose one might be helpful. And I don't think there is anything wrong with having one as a "behind the scenes" role who orchestrates and prepares and rehearses things beforehand; I just think it looks a bit aliturgical to have him actually up there at the altar during the liturgy itself.

In a movie, the "director" is usually not on camera, is "invisible." This is how I'd rather MCs function. Turning them into a rubrically called-for feature of liturgy in-themselves (when, at best, they are not a liturgical role, but a facilitator of liturgical roles) seems to me a development that must have occurred as the pontifical office and liturgy became unnaturally separated, and as pontifical liturgy became unnaturally complicated by the rubricism and minutiae of the "feudal court" accretions of the prince-bishops.

"I Had No Choice"? Agency and Martyrdom

2012-01-06T22:04:00.006-06:00

I've discussed the existentialist notion of mauvaise foi or "bad faith" a couple times before. The idea that many people have a tendency to disown their own agency, and thus responsibility, by (self-deceptively) constructing their decisions as a matter of their hand being forced or of being constrained when really they are not.

In truth, we are free. We always have choices, and our freedom is a major source of our human dignity (really what constitutes us in the Image of God). To deny one's own agency and to think of oneself as at the mercy of external forces is ultimately contemptible. Even on just a gut level people know this; it's why the Nazi plea of "I was just following orders! I would have been killed myself otherwise!" disgusts us so much.

This notion of human freedom is also at the heart of the Christian imperative (yes, I say imperative) of martyrdom. We must be ready to die rather than to deny Christ, rather than to mortally sin. If anything, even the threat of death, "excused" us from our own agency, then there would have been no reason for the martyrs to not sacrifice to the emperor; otherwise they just could have said, "I had no choice, I had to, they were going to kill me." But even if someone is holding a gun to our head, we still have our agency, we are still free, we do have a choice: we can choose death. And death is preferable to sin.

Of course, we know that a variety of forces can reduce culpability. If an external threat translates, internally, into such great fear that free will really is impaired, personal responsibility can be mitigated. But, though it should remind us not to judge others, we shouldn't depend on this "loophole" ourselves or embrace it anyway, lest we put ourselves in bad faith. And we certainly shouldn't think of it as a good thing; sometimes our freedom may be reduced so that we are not culpable, but lacking freedom like this is, in itself, a very bad thing.

Virtue and holiness are ultimately about internal freedom from any such coercion or constraint, which is why it truly is a process of liberation from the enslavement to ourselves that sin and vice represent. The holiest person (which is to say, the freest person) will not be beholden to any enticement or any fear, because they have set their desire on God, beyond this life. Such a person is very dangerous and subversive to This World, because there is nothing The World can offer them, and nothing The World can take away from them. They are beyond the satanic dominion of the Prince of This World.

In this context, perhaps, we can more easily understand the message being sent by the Church in the stories of virgin-martyr Saints, such as Maria Goretti and Pelagia of Antioch, who resisted their would-be rapists to the death rather than succumb (the latter jumping from a rooftop in a manner that was not suicide, because death was willed neither as an ends or a means presumably, even if foreseen).

Some people are disturbed by this, perceiving a message something like "raped women are at fault if they don't stop their attacker." I don't think that is exactly the message; if someone is truly physically forced, there is no culpability. If someone stronger literally grabbed a Christian, kicking and screaming, and physically forced their hand to place some incense on the imperial altar against their will...obviously, no culpability. Likewise, the Church has always taught that women who are truly raped against their will do not forfeit virginity in the theological sense.

However, I think the point of martyrdom, as I started this post saying, is that "against our will" is a lot stricter a standard than some people might like to imagine. Like I said, if someone is holding a gun to my head or threatening to kill me...I still have a choice: I can choose death. If I relent or give-in, I can't disown my agency for it, cannot truly claim "I had no choice." Now, overwhelming fear or something of the sort may indeed mitigate culpability internally, but only at the price of our own freedom (which is not a desirable state of affairs either).

To some this may sound insensitive to all the various victims of various forms of oppression around the world, but the message is actually liberating: it is a returning of agency to victims rather than seeing them just as helpless passive automatons at the mercy of outside forces. This is in some ways why, though I sympathize with certain elements of Marxist analysis, I cannot ultimately accept its conclusions (nor, of course, its rejection of God).

While claiming to discuss human freedom and alienation, the materialist view of the world also ultimately seems to imply that people really are simply at the mercy of grand structural oppressing forces. Sure, the idea is that we could rise up and overthrow them, and that this would be the triumph of the human spirit, but even that is portrayed as the playing-out of some inevitable historical process. The way Marxists talk about human behavior, it is always so fatalistic.

It is implied, like in the position refuted by my favorite Thomas Merton quote, that we can blame society or the world for whom we've become. "Here's why I am the way I am, and only some massive socio-political restructuring [which isn't going to happen] could change it! So, there, it's not my fault, I'm not to blame! But at least I'm aware!" is what so many "academic" Marxists sound like; their philosophy is not really about economic justice, it's about whining to justify their own soft uselessness to themselves (while sounding smart and smug in the process). But this, of course, is simply mauvaise foi.

This is not to dismiss structural evil and exploitation in the world (which certainly exists), nor that structural evil has an effect on the spiritual outlook of the population as a whole. But, at the end of the day, oppression and alienation are still a matter spiritual and ultimately individual; to the person who is holy, no one can truly oppress them; and, to the person who is not, no revolution, in itself, is going to free them (though it may distract them).

Frickin' Adorable

2012-01-04T20:48:00.007-06:00

And the slashy glory doesn't end with the show (which I've never actually seen), it extends into real life!

Take me to Glasgow!

Gratitude

2012-01-01T21:17:00.008-06:00

The most boring sermon I ever heard in my life was on the "Seven Parts of Gratitude," the one time I ever attended an SSPX Mass (in context, however, this experience proved that one can still be crazy-happy, for other reasons, during a very dry sermon). It was almost like that Simpsons episode where Reverend Lovejoy gave his sermon on "The Nine Tenets of Constancy" (sweet constancy) and everyone fell asleep so he pressed a button to wake them with a bird noise and then they all clapped confusedly ("Sermons about constancy and prudissitude are all very well and good, but...")

Anyway, gratitude is something I have a bit of a hard time with personally. Specifically as it relates to my parents and the fourth commandment. I was thinking about this because I visited home over Christmas, but also because some of my friends do have such a reverential attitude towards their parents, a gratitude for taking care of them as children and all that, which to me has never made much intuitive sense at least, even if I have come to accept it theoretically. If I were adopted, like my own father, perhaps I would feel that more, but my gut instinct was always different, and this perhaps says something (and not necessarily something spiritually healthy) about my outlook on life in general.

Specifically, I always ("used to") feel entitled to be cared for by my parents because of a notion something along the lines of that, essentially, it's their fault I'm here. I didn't ask to be conceived or born, and for a long time I wasn't terribly happy with "having to" exist, and so how dare anyone expect one ounce of gratitude from me! If you want kids, then they're your responsibility, I'd say. You made the mess (either out of a real desire to start a family, or out of love for each other, or just because you couldn't keep it in your pants) and so why should the mess then be responsible for cleaning itself up?

Of course, this logic, extrapolated, leads to some odd conclusions about God. Because, of course, if I can "blame" my parents for my existence, all the moreso, then, should I consider it all God's "fault." How dare He bring me into existence without asking me, and expect me to then play by His high-stakes rules where there is infinite happiness available, yes, but also the possibility of infinite punishment if I screw up?! Shouldn't there be an option to "opt out" and simply not exist anymore?

However, what I realized when thinking about these former attitudes of mine (but which still very much resonate with me on that gut level of existential angst) is that what I'm saying only makes sense on the subjective level, and that our gratitude for existence actually has to be "objective."

What I mean is that for all the other good things in our lives, it is rather easier to be grateful just because they bring us subjective happiness. I should be grateful for this or that, I think, because I can imagine that if I didn't have it, I would be worse off, I would suffer more or enjoy less. For the basic category of existence itself, however, this is much less self-evident. If I didn't exist, it is unclear that I would suffer in any sense of the word, as there would be no "I" in the first place to suffer.

From a subjective standpoint, then, it is not immediately obvious or evident (for me at least) that existing is any subjectively "better" than not existing, in fact the question seems to come out, at best, an ambiguous wash. Some Eastern religions are based on the notion of achieving final non-existence or dissolving of consciousness as the ultimate spiritual liberation. Though then, on the other hand, it could be compellingly argued that the whole idea of the self not existing may in fact be cognitively meaningless from a subjective standpoint, and how are we supposed to be "grateful" for something we can't even ever really imagine not having?

However, we know from theology that we didn't actually have to exist, that our existence was and is objectively contingent (even if we can't comprehend that from "inside" our own existence). We also know, of course, that existence is good by definition metaphysically, that knowing and loving something (into existence) is good from God's perspective. Even to the point that it is objectively better, in the final evaluation of creation, for the souls of the damned to exist rather than not exist (and, in fact, only existence makes anything conceivable as "good" at all really).

Having gratitude for our own existence, then, is part of the existential leap we must make out of our own solipsism. Now, I would argue that people who subscribe to an "instinctive" gratitude for existence on even the subjective level are likely of the variety who also fear death. However, then, I think that going through a phase where the goodness of existence is seriously called into question and grappled with can actually be a good thing spiritually, as it should resolve itself in an affirmation of the objective goodness of our existence, of a gratitude for the fact that we exist because our existence glorifies God (prior to and apart from any question of whether it makes us subjectively happy).

True gratitude for our own existence (of this "critical" variety that realizes that non-existence is not self-evidently subjectively inferior, as opposed to the "uncritical" variety born of mere animal self-perservation instincts) thus requires us to step outside ourselves and to see ourselves and the value and meaning of our life not from our own perspective, but from God's perspective. To love even ourselves with supernatural charity, with God's own love, by which we love people not for our sake, not even for their own sake, but for God's own sake.

We can't love our neighbors as ourselves unless we love ourselves first, not with malignant self-interested Self Love, but from the perspective of God's own love for us as having a purpose in His creation (even if it means playing a bit part or being ground through the mill). In my experience, this can be difficult, and yet the irony is that the difficulty of loving oneself in such cases comes exactly from a perspective of subjective self-absorption (from which the goodness of our own existence is not at all self-evident; from which it is actually very easy to conclude that non-existence isn't necessarily worse, and might even at times seem comparatively better).

But when we look at our existence from outside ourselves, from God's perspective, then how can we not love ourselves? How can we not be grateful for our being, which may not always seem a subjective good, but which is most definitely an objective good?

Happy New Years!

2011-12-31T13:59:00.002-06:00

And if anyone says anything about Holy Days, I'll kill them.

i

2011-12-31T13:57:00.004-06:00

In what ways is God like and unlike the imaginary number?

I had this thought, today, contemplating the Eastern essence/existences/energies distinction (which I consider quite useful and correct), and the notion that God in His incomprehensible essence (ousia) is beyond all categories and dualities, even the being/non-being duality (From what I understand, the Orthodox would emphasize that it is only in His hypostases that God can be said to "exist," while the essence is "hyperbeing".) Of course, the West would formulate this by saying that "to be" is God's essence, also not incorrect, and also essentially apophatic; equivalent to saying nothing more than "God is God" basically...

"Crazy" versus "Mainstream"

2011-12-30T20:53:00.006-06:00

One thing that can be incredibly frustrating for me is the notion of the "mainstream" and the sense that, if ideas are outside it, they can simply be laughed at or dismissed, very often as "crazy."

This, I think, is especially a problem for those on the Right as opposed to on the Left. Though I'd like to think I avoid easy placement into either of those categories, my "default" attitude or narrative definitely tends towards the conservative. I am a traditionalist after all, and think an optimistic view of historical progressivism is incredibly naive; we do not "know better now" on human/moral/spiritual questions, not at all.

Either way, I think this problem is bigger for the Right perhaps because the common progressivist narrative means that the Leftists can be seen as edgy "revolutionaries" whose ideas have never really been tried, who may be "proven right" in the future like their progressive-banner-carrying fore-bearers, whereas those voicing more traditional opinions are seen as advocating something that was "tried and found wanting" (even though, in reality, they were never really tried, or else there is no real evidence that the "failure" in the past was anything more than a contingency in certain historical circumstances that may no longer exist...)

However, there are a lot of crazy ideas out there (and just as many in the mainstream as outside of it!) If sanity is defined by normativity, we've got a huge problem, because today's normativity sucks. And yet, unfortunately, a division of the world into "fringe" versus "mainstream" opinions has a tendency to marginalize even legitimate ideas by constructing them as hand-in-hand with truly absurd ones.

I've worried before about this sort of "martyrdom of ridicule" affecting Catholics, even my own friends. No longer does the threat of violence deter people from the faith (because we have a narrative where overt persecution like that, at least, is heroic and noble), but rather what deters people most seems to be a sort of incredibly powerful social shaming or intellectual bullying that causes most people to want to conform to what is "mainstream" in opinion; a smugly patronizing toleration can in this way be more undermining than active oppression. And many of those who do reject this conformity are then of a pathologically oppositional bent, are disgruntled "outsiders" who have an attitude of defiance towards the world, and axe to grind with society, and their neuroses in this regard can then be used to discredit any ideas associated with them in a self-fulfilling prophecy. (I myself know I need to watch out for this).

For example, I recently attended a meeting of the Pilgrims of St. Michael (the "White Berets" who publish the Michael Journal) in Toronto. Now, if you've been a consistent reader of this blog, you will know that I'm a big supporter of the Social Credit monetary reform proposals, and think they make sense of a financial system that has become an obfuscated game detached from reality. I think some common sense (and adherence to the social teachings of the Church on things like usury) would help establish a more economically just and equal world through the elimination of debt-money, etc, which also would have a profound effect on the very way people viewed their relation to labor and material goods (and the meaning of life in general).

So I went to this meeting expecting to hear a lot of solid stuff about monetary and banking reform and getting the word out about the social credit proposals. Instead I go and it's clearly a lot of crack-pots all pushing conspiracy theories in long-winded ramblings, touching here and there on how the bankers are abusing the system through exploitationist financial wizardry, but otherwise sounding totally bonkers. It would have been fascinating and hilarious if it didn't get so tediously boring after the first hour.

Luckily, I'm enough of a rational being to realize that association with kooks doesn't suddenly legitimatize an idea. I'm absolutely still convinced, on its own merits, that Social Credit is basically common sense, and that there is no reason to dismiss the idea of changing the current financial system just because it is the status quo supported by the "serious" men in suits (duh! They benefit from it!) and the smug "academic" economists of the pro-capitalist-apologia camp (who seem to believe that just because they can explain with complex mathematical models how the current system works, that this for some reason means it is the way the system should work.)

However, for many people, the sort of nuttiness I witnessed would cause them to throw out the baby with the bathwater and immediately dismiss the ideas about monetary reform. Mind you, I'm not saying there aren't connections between the corrupt, usurious financial system we currently have, the military-industrial complex and wars, and the networks of power among corporations, politicians, and the media. There clearly are, but I think the connections are much more the accumulation of the rotten effects of self-interest and greed playing out sociologically and geopolitically, and don't require any sort of particularly organized or "deliberate" conspiracy. In fact, I think it is the emergence of these evil structures from so many disparate and even competing interests that makes the whole situation even more terrifying; Satan's army has always been divided against itself, has always wrought destruction through its own Babel-chaos rather than through organized evil.

Nevertheless, it is extremely concerning how good ideas can be "tainted," as it were, by their contingent association together with other ideas that may be, actually, entirely unrelated. I've heard people who see, for example, that Republican conservatives in the US both are against abortion and deny global warming and evolution...use the obviously idiotic latter positions to conclude that the former pro-life position is idiotic (because only obvious idiots, meaning those who deny global warming and evolution, seem to hold it).

Likewise, I fear that the crediteers themselves are probably Social Credit's own worse enemy (the same, of course, can be said for trads and traditionalism) because of how they discredit (a nice little pun there) the whole thing through their other crazy ideas. And this, of course, serves the interest of the "mainstream" status-quo powers-that-be, who have an interest in marginalizing good ideas which threaten them, who prefer to neuter us with that "martyrdom of ridicule" rather than actively persecute.

To sum things up, I found a good quote explaining this phenomenon in a recent article about the Republican primary candidate Ron Paul (of whom I am a rather strong supporter, inasmuch as I do feel I have a duty to not simply withdraw from politics entirely, even as imperfect as all candidates will always be) and the recent attempts to discredit him, to delegitimatize him through ridicule or classification as "fringe" or "a kook" (because the attempts to simply dismiss him through a patronizing tactic of merely ignoring him failed) based on some old newsletters of his:

So why were Ron Paul or his ghostwriters engaged in racism and conspiracy theories? And why did Ron Paul allow this?

The first answer is simply that marginal causes attract marginal people.

The Gold Standard and non-interventionism have long been pushed to the fringe of our politics, and ambitious people tend to dive into the mainstream. That means that some of the 'talent' that marginalized ideas attract will be odd and unstable.

There are two strategies for dealing with this problem. You purge your movement of cranks to preserve credibility and risk alienating a chunk of supporters. Or you let everyone in your movement fly their freak flag and live with the consequences. Ron Paul, being a libertarian, has always done the latter.

I think this is a huge problem. Today, talented people (driven by ambition) dive into what is "mainstream" or socially acceptable or popular, taking sides within narrowly defined pre-packaged ideological platforms (of liberal or conservative, usually), in this culture war of identity politics...rather than actually considering each idea on its own merit or trying to form a consistent philosophy from foundational axioms and logic. Even the politicians who portray themselves a "outsiders" or "mavericks"...are always actually entirely "mainstream."

And when most of your intelligent people "sell out" (sell their souls, really) in this manner to the "mainstream," when most of the people in power are more concerned with conforming to media-mass-marketed ideologies (that are conveniently self-serving)...then your society is stuck in a mire that only a radical revolt against this malaise could overthrow. But radicals, by the very fact of being willing to stand up and say the emperor is naked on one thing...also often tend to be the sort of people who take oppositional or non-conformist stances on a lot of things (even though in most other cases that is unnecessary). This is the problem of freakiness.

It takes a radical, someone unconcerned with being "normal" or holding socially acceptable positions, to overthrow the status quo, or at least to stand against it consistently with a voice that can gradually influence the "mainstream" horizons to expand to include it or drift in its direction. Indeed, it often takes a sort of freak. But most of the sort of people willing to be radicals, willing to take a freakish stand on one thing...are, correlated with that, crazy in general (and not merely "crazy like a fox"). And hence a difficult catch-22.

Good For Bishop Johan Bonny!

2011-12-29T22:29:00.006-06:00

Rorate Caeli threw a hissy-fit today over this completely innocuous quote by a Belgian bishop:

I fully understand it. The Church can not avoid the debate about the criteria for ordination. Personally, I strongly believe in the value of the unmarried priesthood and a full availability for Christ and the Church community. But I also think that the ordination of a number of married men or deacons to the priesthood can be an enrichment for the Church. In the eastern Catholic Churches married priests are more the rule than the exception. That fact is therefore not unfamiliar for the Catholic Church. The ordination of women to priests is theologically far more difficult. In the west that concern is present in broad layers of society, but worldwide the support is extremely small. But I do think that there needs to be more discussion about the place and role of the woman in the Church. Women must be allowed to take on responsible duties in the Church, on all levels.

Okay, so he didn't say "theologically impossible," but only said "far more difficult." He also seems to suggest some notion that level of "support" somehow matters in whether we do it (and if the support did materialize worldwide, is he saying we then could do it? Ordination of women to the priesthood is impossible regardless of support level).

Still, the statement is in-itself entirely non-controversial, and I'm glad bishops are starting to say stuff like this. I think you have to say it when the average age of priests in your diocese is 75-80! Either the criteria for ordination must be loosened, or you collapse institutionally!

The fact that Rorate Caeli keeps acting like suggesting married priests is heresy and lumps it with other forms of actual dissent...means they're flying their crazy flag again. I did however find interesting the comment from the user Gabriel regarding the priesthood in the East:

For the record, I don't support the current movement to allow married priests within the Latin Rite. With that said, I sense more than a bit of derision toward the Bishop's choice to reference the unbroken tradition of the Christian East to allow married priests and deacons so long as the marriage occurs prior to ordination. (There are some variants even within the East. For instance, the Slavic Churches generally don't allow elevation to the Subdiaconate until marriage.)

Even so, there's room for some nuance here. For centuries, priests in the East (and I am referencing the Orthodox specifically, though this generally applies to Eastern Catholics as well) functioned as civil servants, serving the Liturgy once-a-week (and on some feast days) and performing baptisms, funerals, etc. Spiritual guidance was largely left to the monasteries and many monastics heard confessions more regularly than parish priests (secular clergy). Most secular clergy held what we would call "second jobs," either teaching or, in rural areas, tending to farming in order to support their families. The concept of a "full-time priest," which most Catholics take for granted, was simply not the case unless one lived in a major urban center or had a monastery near the village. Even in the U.S. today, most Orthodox parishes are open on Sundays (and maybe Saturday night for Vespers) and that's it. Most missions have a difficult time supporting priests because it means supporting their families as well. Moreover, the common assertion made by Orthodox (and some Eastern Catholics) that a married priesthood is superior because the priest can better relate to his flock strikes me as dubious. Yes, that may be true in some instances, but there are plenty of terrible married clergy in the Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches.

I would also add that married priesthood in Orthodoxy (I can't speak on this in Catholicism) has some other downsides which few comment on. There is a longstanding joke within Orthodoxy, particularly in America, of the nervous seminarian praying his bishop won't ordain him before he can lock-down a bride (which isn't as easy as you'd think, given what the future will look like). There's also a tendency in Orthodoxy to treat the priesthood as a jacket you put on and take off, similarly to a pastorate at a Protestant church. This is reinforced, intentionally or not, by the fact that defrocking is a far simpler process in the East than the West; people quit being Orthodox priests all of the time, and there are no repercussions for it.

I, of course, have often suggested the notion that a married priesthood, as well as a part-time volunteer priesthood (ala the permanent diaconate), are absolutely essential at this point in history if we're going to save the Church from demographic collapse. I also think defrocking should be much easier, and that we must eliminate this idea that a priest can never be "fired" (to the point that some dioceses even give a sort of "alimony" to laicized priests, even as they are shamed and banned from all public service in the church), which protectionism was clearly a huge factor in the abuse crisis. The Orthodox get many things right.

Two Years

2011-12-28T09:07:00.002-06:00

Today is the two-year anniversary of this blog. This second year has had only half as many posts as the first (still quite a lot!) and things are definitely slowing down (though I do have a whole backlog of post ideas I hope to get around to now that the Christmas rush is over and life is settling into a more regular routine), but truly I can say that this experience has changed the course of my life in some extremely concrete ways, especially as regards the relationships I've formed through networking with readers. My message, looking back, is pretty much the same as last year really, so I won't repeat; beyond that, I'm praying for all my readers, and please pray for me.

Two Important Statements

2011-12-27T11:12:00.002-06:00

The New Liturgical Movement today has two letters posted that I consider very important in their implications and in what they indicate about the current atmosphere or direction in the Church.

The first was the rather incredible statement from Cardinal Ranjith saying:

It is my firm conviction that the Vetus Ordo represents to a great extent and in the most fulfilling way that mystical and transcendent call to an encounter with God in the liturgy. Hence the time has come for us to not only renew through radical changes the content of the new Liturgy, but also to encourage more and more a return of the Vetus Ordo, as a way for a true renewal of the Church [...] the time has come for us to be courageous in working for a true reform of the reform and also a return to the true liturgy of the Church, which had developed over its bi-millenial history in a continuous flow.

This is rather astounding, it seems to me. We have a Cardinal calling for the new liturgy to be radically changed (in content, which is to say in the text and rubrics itself, and not merely in the ars celebrandi, as so much of the useless "reform of the reform" idea has focused on before).

But, more than that, he's also essentially saying that the old liturgy is better, more fulfilling, that the "time has come" to basically go back to it, and that it is actually the "true" liturgy of the church (the Latin church, at least; I have my own mixed feelings about a Cardinal from Sri Lanka pushing Tridentinism rather than that region of the world using traditional Indo-Syrian liturgies as would seem appropriate...but that's another gripe for another day).

This is a rather strong statement to be coming from a Cardinal!

The other was this letter from the Institute of the Good Shepherd that outlines their own self-defined role (approved by the Church) as offering "constructive critique" of the modern status quo in the Church (both liturgically and doctrinally), yet in full and regular communion. I once coined a similar idea, "His Holiness's loyal opposition," of which this reminded me.

I've discussed before, in regards to the question of Vatican II and continuity, that if there is to be any reconciliation on these matters (and of the Church with Her own history and tradition) an attitude along the lines of "this is a prudential question, Catholics are free to debate this" is going to be key (on questions such as Church-State relations, institutional diplomacy with other confessions, pastoral approach, theological style, etc). This attitude of the Institut du Bon Pasteur seems like an example of that, a positive development.

The Magic School Bus, Dolly Parton, Recycling, and One of My (Sort of) Favorite Christmas Songs...

2011-12-25T13:31:00.004-06:00

I couldn't find just this clip online, so I had to make a video with only a still image, but the whole holiday special is now available here.

Internal Dialogue

2011-12-25T12:35:00.010-06:00

Often I come up with post ideas in the form of hypothetical conversations I have. I don't know if anyone else does this (I assume some people do), but my internal life has increasingly become, from my childhood self-speaking imaginary, more and more a dialogue, usually with a few important figures in my life whose voices I have internalized and with whom I (in my mind) have "practice" discussions.

I also vaguely imagine myself speaking to St. Thomas Aquinas quite a lot, but oddly not in theological type discussions (as I assume we already agree there); rather, my "conversations" with St. Thomas usually involves "explaining" various aspects of the modern world (technological, political, social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, etc) that a medieval would find baffling.

I'm sure this is really about reconciling, for myself, these developments (which can seem so discontinuous with ideas of an organic human "default" imagined as medievalesque) in some sort of rational contextualization to prove, to myself, that we're still living in the same civilization, the same humanity, the same reality. That, ultimately, the same human (and, of course, Christian) Reason, of which Aquinas (in the Summa) in some sense symbolizes the supreme historical voice (in my imagination at least)...can still accommodate all of it. That the basic framework or paradigm, while it may need to be "expanded," does not need to be "overthrown."

Now, all these sorts of internal discussions (about topics both lofty and mundane, sacred and profane) are not nearly as rich as actually talking to the real human beings, of course. Really, this small "cast of characters" serve as little more than Socratic interlocutors who agree with me or ask questions or raise the objections I anticipate, but their main point is just to help me consider how I'd present an argument to this or that person or type of person (the "type" the specific person represents to me) in a manner that assumes the common ground or set or presumptions or experiences we already share based on our relationship.

This helps me flesh out ideas, and it also allows me to "rehearse" potential conversations in real life (often with those people themselves) and to prepare a script I can use in actual conversation. Or, rather than a script, it's more like a whole tool-box or repertoire of pre-prepared ideas or structures or anecdotes or analogies or particular turns of phrase I can deploy in conversation or debate in a dynamic fashion.

And, indeed, very often these internal conversations are continuations, in a l'esprit de l'escalier sort of way, of conversations I had in real life, sometimes recently, sometimes from months and months prior. As I implied above, only real conversations with real human beings are ever truly "generative" for me creatively (you will notice that many of my posts here start with "I was having a discussion the other day...") There are some pretty famous movies that are just conversations like this, that capture the energy and dynamism when two people really "click" conversationally, but there is nothing comparable to actually being an active and integral participant in mind speaking to mind and heart speaking to heart; this is Trinitarian relationality at its best.

And yet, of course, it does not end with the conversation itself in this life. Rather, the conversation brings up a variety of arguments and ideas and threads that usually are not (and, for time constraints, cannot be) resolved in the original conversation itself, but which ferment and continue playing out in my head for days or weeks afterward, but definitely set in motion and "fueled by" the original conversation (and sometimes by follow-up conversations).

Sometimes the direction these takes is quite surprising, and sometimes this involves the input of several unrelated conversations, with different people, juxtaposed over the course of days leading to an even richer coalescing of ideas in my mind. Just recently, combined with the enthusiasm from some positive emotional factors, one of these "brainstorms" has been occurring, which has "activated" an energized a variety of previous conversations and ideas, and this has spawned a variety of ideas for posts that I'd like to write if I find the time.

For now, though, Merry Christmas to all, especially those of you in my life with whom dialogue has been so productive, and the synergy so creative and transformative.

Our Lady's Virginity In Partu

2011-12-21T20:53:00.012-06:00

The New Theological Movement has a post on the Virgin Birth which lays out the orthodox dogma and then goes on to interpret it in the traditional pious manner (ie, in the most extraordinarily miraculous and literal way), but some interesting points have been raised in the comments thread.

I wrote a reply there which I'll re-post (and maybe expand on a bit) here. These are just thoughts and musings, really, I don't have any firm claims or conclusions on any of this yet really, and if I slip into anything heretical sounding it is unintentional. I am, however, quite frank in my physiological descriptions, so be warned if you are squeamish or think such biologizing of Our Lady is indelicate. Anyway, my thoughts:

The virginity "in partu" is certainly dogmatic.

I do wonder, however, how much of the specific theories or implications about what "virginity in partu" concretely means...are dogmatic.

That (to use the frank biological terms) Mary's hymen was not ruptured, at least, seems unquestionable. If the dogma of her virginity in partu is to have any meaningfulness to it rather than just being an empty tautology, that seems to be the bare minimum.

As Cardinal Ratzinger himself once said, "The cavalier divorce of 'biology' and theology omits precisely man from consideration; it becomes a self-contradiction insofar as the initial, essential point of the whole matter lies precisely in the affirmation that in all that concerns man the biological is also human and especially in what concerns the divinely-human nothing is 'merely biological.' Banishment of the corporeal, or sexual, into pure biology, all the talk about the 'merely biological,' is consequently the exact opposite of what faith intends. For faith tells us of the spirituality of the biological as well as the corporeality of the spiritual and divine. On this point the choice is between all or nothing. The attempt to preserve a spiritual, distilled remainder after the biological element has been eliminated denies the very spiritual reality which is the principal concern of the faith in the God become flesh."

So, clearly, for Mary to be a real "sign" or signifier...we have to be talking about physiological and not just moral virginity. The outward sign must signify the inward reality in our Sacramental understanding of the world and our typological system.

However, I'm tempted to wonder just how much is necessarily implied beyond that.

Indeed, the way the Fathers and Theologians (and even the post on NTM) speaks...it sounds sometimes like these men didn't or don't have a terribly good understanding of the female anatomy...

For example, physiologically speaking, the hymen and the cervix are two different things. Saying that Mary's hymen was not ruptured and that her "womb was not opened"...are two very separate physiological claims.

The womb is always "open" a bit before pregnancy, that's how menstruation happens (though this interesting article, from which I got the Ratzinger quote, explores that very question about Our Lady under the appropriate title "Where Angels Fear to Tread"). And certainly, while there is an understandable symbolic connection between physiological virginity, in the sense of an intact hymen, and moral virginity (ie, though one can happen without the other, first penetration and rupturing of the hymen often coincide)...there is no immediate connection between the stretching of the cervix and lack of sexual intercourse (it is not the "closure" of the womb, the uterus, which is immediately affected by sexual experience, but only of the vagina).

[All this also brings up the question, as an aside, of just what constitutes even "moral virginity." The Catholic Encyclopedia, following Aquinas in the Summa, defines it as, "the absence, in the past and in the present, of all complete and voluntary delectation, whether from lust or from the lawful use of marriage; and the formal element, that is the firm resolution to abstain forever from sexual pleasure." It should be noted that, strictly speaking, under such a definition any willful sexual pleasure, not merely intercourse but even just solo masturbation, would forfeit the aureole; as Aquinas says, "whether copulation takes place or not." This may disturb some of you accustomed to the "pop cultural" definitions of virginity which (at their most "technical") refer only to penetration or (at their broadest) only to genital interaction with another person. Then again, this "theological" definition also thankfully sees women who are raped as still potential moral virgins and it is, of course, only a total lack of any willful venereal pleasure which makes sense as an internally consistent moral category.]

Either way, there are some strange questions raised if we insist that her womb, her uterus itself (and not merely the seal of her virginity, ie, the hymen) remained "closed" afterward. Do we mean the mucus plug (which only would have developed with pregnancy in the first place) never released (ie, water breaking)? And then what happened to the umbilicus, the placenta, or the fluid of the amniotic sac? Did they all pass out miraculously too? I will add for consideration this interesting tidbit: I've heard that the Lateran at one point in history claimed to have the after-birth and umbilicus of Christ as a relic preserved as some sort of gelatinous mass in a vat of oil.

Furthermore, passing through "like light through glass" doesn't necessarily seem the only way to preserve the virginity in partu. For example, the hymen could have miraculously stretched (like bubble gum or something) only to "snap back into place" after the infant Jesus passed through; the hymen is already perforated (for menses to pass out) anyway, there's already an opening or openings. And so a "stretching" theory, for example, would not necessarily exclude pain. And yet would be another possible way to imagine virginity, even physiologically, being preserved in partu; the dogma requires us to believe it was preserved somehow, it does not require us to believe it was preserved by Christ passing out in the manner of a subtle body (ie, the "beaming down like Star Trek" theory).

Which does bring up Revelations. Yes, as one might point out, the Woman of Revelations crying out in labor pains is Ecclesia in the pains of persecution, of birthing Christ into the World. But the thing about our typological system is that it is wonderfully coherent. If we can say something of the Church, we can almost always say it of Mary. If the Church has "birthing pains" parallel to Her suffering at the foot of Her Bridegroom's Cross throughout history...there is something potentially fitting about the idea that the Virgin Mary (as Type of the Church) would have "played out" this same symbolism (even while remaining a virgin like the Church).

Furthermore, the No Birth Pains idea seems to involve a notion of the Immaculate Conception that is perhaps an over-extension. Mary was conceived already a state of sanctifying grace, in original justice...but that didn't mean she had the Preternatural Gifts restored. Arbitrarily granting her some but not all of them on account of her sinlessness strikes me as, well, arbitrary (I even have questions about just what her freedom from concupiscence would have meant; I'm not convinced it necessarily meant the Preternatural Gift of Integrity...)

Then again, maybe it was just because Christ did not want to hurt His Mother, or as merely a miraculous sign (though, for whom? Who would have possibly seen the state of Our Lady's cervix!?) along the lines that Aquinas, I believe, suggests that Christ took on each of the four features of a glorified body (impassibility, clarity, subtlety, and agility) during various miracles even before His Resurrection in glory.

So I'm not saying the traditional very extraordinary interpretation isn't possible or correct. I just don't know if the bare minimum of the dogma itself requires it. One would not seem to be a heretic (though, perhaps, guilty of something like "offense to pious ears") if one proposed any of the alternatives I mention above, as long as one held that the hymen itself remained unruptured somehow. I think there is at least room for discussion and debate when it comes to the "minimalist" vs "maximalist" interpretations of this dogma.

Our Lady remained even a physiological virgin in the miraculous birth of Christ, to be sure, but just how, by what method this was accomplished, or how much it implies for what specifically and concretely went on behind the "cloister wall" of the hymen (ie, in terms of the dilation of the cervix, or stretching of the birth canal, or bleeding and fluids, or the afterbirth)...I do not think are within the scope of the Revealed dogma itself. And so, I would also point out, that any teaching about lacking birthing pains would necessarily be a separate article of faith, as a lack of pain is not intrinsically required by either the idea of in partu virginity or the Immaculate Conception.

Old News Apparently, But So Funny

2011-12-18T17:48:00.001-06:00

I'd never seen it, though many of you apparently already will have. From here:

700th Post

2011-12-15T19:09:00.002-06:00

That last one was my 700th. This is my 701st. I'm not sure I have 100 more in me, honestly. But a few people have suggested somehow compiling my best posts into a book. I'd need an editor for that to cut my rambling style down. I guess the "good" posts are the substantive ones I've listed in the Index in the side-bar (having weeded out mere article recommendations, humor, and personal esoterica). Things are definitely slowing down here, though. I have a rather lengthy list of ideas I still want to flesh out, but real life takes precedence now, I can't waste so much time online anymore right now. But I'm not going away either. I hope all is well with everyone during this season.

On Apostates: Dogs Returning To Their Vomit

2011-12-10T20:48:00.003-06:00

I'd never read 2 Peter before. It's only three chapters, but I found the second particularly powerful regarding the especially odious damnation of those contemptibles who, having been saved for a moment, return to their old ways. People who think of the New Testament as full of love rather than fire and brimstone should take heed:

[6] And reducing the cities of the Sodomites, and of the Gomorrhites, into ashes, condemned them to be overthrown, making them an example to those that should after act wickedly. [7] And delivered just Lot, oppressed by the injustice and lewd conversation of the wicked. [8] For in sight and hearing he was just: dwelling among them, who from day to day vexed the just soul with unjust works. [9] The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly from temptation, but to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be tormented. [10] And especially them who walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government, audacious, self willed, they fear not to bring in sects, blaspheming. [11] Whereas angels who are greater in strength and power, bring not against themselves a railing judgment. [12] But these men, as irrational beasts, naturally tending to the snare and to destruction, blaspheming those things which they know not, shall perish in their corruption, [13] Receiving the reward of their injustice, counting for a pleasure the delights of a day: stains and spots, sporting themselves to excess, rioting in their feasts with you: [14] Having eyes full of adultery and of sin that ceaseth not: alluring unstable souls, having their heart exercised with covetousness, children of malediction: [15] Leaving the right way they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam of Bosor, who loved the wages of iniquity, [16] but had a check of his madness, the dumb beast used to the yoke, which speaking with man's voice, forbade the folly of the prophet. [17] These are fountains without water, and clouds tossed with whirlwinds, to whom the mist of darkness is reserved. [18] For, speaking proud words of vanity, they allure by the desires of fleshly riotousness, those who for a little while escape, such as converse in error: [19] Promising them liberty, whereas they themselves are the slaves of corruption. For by whom a man is overcome, of the same also he is the slave. [20] For if, flying from the pollutions of the world, through the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they be again entangled in them and overcome: their latter state is become unto them worse than the former. [21] For it had been better for them not to have known the way of justice, than after they have known it, to turn back from that holy commandment which was delivered to them. [22] For, that of the true proverb has happened to them: The dog is returned to his vomit: and, The sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire.

Traditional Lectio Cycle

2011-12-10T00:13:00.006-06:00

I was actually very glad today to see (the usually crazy) Rorate Caeli point this out:

Now, since what I want to do is read all of Scripture (yes, I am rather obsessive about continuity and completeness), I have decided to follow the order prescribed in the Breviary only in broad outline. So rather than reading exactly that which is prescribed in the Divine Office, I am going to read every book of the Bible at the time in which the Divine Office prescribes selections from that book.

I'm so happy Rorate posted this as I've been thinking of making something like this myself a lot lately, so this is very helpful and a good reminder.

Now, I'd alter it to fit my own tastes/needs. Specifically, I'd like to keep a "three lesson" structure every day, the premise or conceit being that someday the actual liturgical lectionary for Matins and Mass could have a "long form" that included all of it (with the Old Testament/Prophecy lesson at Mass being usually simply the "most important" selection of what would be included more fully/comprehensively at Matins). But this certainly provides a good general outline of how the books are distributed traditionally throughout the year.

In my lectionary/lectio dreams, since Epistles are read at Mass (and that 1967 Ferial Lectionary gives room for a much greater selection in that regard), I would probably be inclined (in my own "ideal" lectionary having three lessons at Mass) to replace at Matins the parts of the year where that hour has New Testament readings with more Old Testament readings (and to move those Epistle readings to [daily] Mass); this might allow one to "spread out" the Old Testament books (especially of the Pentateuch) a bit more. I'm also not too terribly concerned about how the Psalms are integrated into this because those are being prayed weekly in the Divine Office anyway (though he makes an interesting point about wanting to read the Psalms as a book "in order" that I do have to consider).

Still, for anyone looking for a lectio cycle with only one selection each day (rather than a Prophecy, Epistle, and Gospel as I'd prefer; the latter two selections probably being quite short)...this is a very good arrangement, I think. Although, as I just said above, I'd be inclined to make Matins exclusively Old Testament by adding the Epistles from those parts of the year to [ferial] Mass instead...the fact that they do have a traditional place in the yearly Matins cycle (even if that cycle is a sort of skeletal remnant pointing to a much greater ancient fullness) does at least then help to give them a "place" in any one-selection (as opposed to three-selection) lectio schema for the year which is attempting to base itself on a traditional liturgical cycle (and I then I think then suggesting the Gospels for Easter Week makes sense.)

I don't know when I'll get around to completing my own expanded/"long form" lectionary proposal (which would, to my liturgically-oriented mind, inevitably function as my "private" three-selection lectio cycle too, to the point that I might just read the expanded Old Testament lesson [divided in three of course] when praying Matins rather than the tiny "representative" snippets it actually gives), but maybe soon I will do a post compiling the various charts I've made of these liturgical things; I have "hidden" links to the files in various old posts of mine, but it would be convenient for people to have them in one place and explicitly labelled, I suppose...

What If: Gift Money

2011-12-04T18:32:00.006-06:00

When you buy something at Canadian Tire, you get some "Canadian Tire Money," which is basically a small reimbursement to try to promote customer loyalty. I've never bothered to save mine to use later (it's usually only a few cents), I just put it in the big bin they have at the door for donating it to some cause instead. This caused me to have a weird thought on the subway the other day: what if money (or a certain proportion of our money) could not be spent on ourselves, but could only be donated to a cause of choice?

What if, instead of an economy where we used the money we earn to purchase goods and services that we want, that by the very exchange of the money transfers possession of those things to us in a quid pro quo...instead we had an economy where our money (whether wages for labor, or profit from owning a share of the capital, or rent from land, or something else like the Social Dividend) could only be donated to various "causes" which then produced their corresponding goods to be freely distributed.

This would be equivalent to using our money as a sort of impersonal "vote" about what should be produced by society (with no guarantee that we ourselves would be a beneficiary of what was produced unless the overall proportions of the distribution worked out that way.)

In other words, where we gave our money to various firms based on what we wanted to see produced (but without that vote, in fact, giving we ourselves a title to those things). Perhaps, once the votes about what should be produced are in, the totals are then distributed equally or something like that.

I'm not proposing this as a workable economic system necessarily, don't get me wrong (though I don't think this idea would necessarily conflict with my support of the Social Credit monentary reforms). In fact, it is unclear what incentive people would have to work any more than anyone else in this system (unless somehow the various producers considered how "generous" you were when determining your allotment).

But I did have to think that, in such a system where we were voting on what we wanted society to produce generally without bootstrapping our vote to our own obtaining of those goods...probably a lot more production capacity would shift onto necessities of life rather than superfluous consumerist goods.

Now, classical economists would probably tell us this system (even if people did have an incentive to earn more) would be incredibly inefficient because, they'd say, supply should be dictated by demand. And yet, wouldn't this be a way of expressing a different, and more altruistic, form of "demand"? Specifically, it would force us to consider what we want to be produced in general as opposed to just for ourselves. It would render the expression of our economic desire communitarian rather than individualist.

When you have money to spend on yourself, you might buy some ridiculous big-screen TV. But if you could only donate your money, essentially voting on what society should produce without any guarantee of obtaining one yourself, would you vote for "big screen TVs"?? Or would you, more likely, vote for necessities like food and productive "humanitarian" things? Wouldn't you probably in such a situation put a little more of the total into, say, food production "just to be safe" to make sure society produced enough (for you and others)?

In a sense, spending is a "vote" in the free market for what should be produced. But it's a vote we're also "bribed" for because by making it we, in fact, are given the good. "Vote for resources to be allocated to our production and we'll give you a cut in the form of the very good produced!"

But if we all had money (or at least some money) that didn't work that way, that we couldn't spend on ourselves but could only "donate" (in order to produce goods which could then only be freely distributed according to some system), I tend to think the causes we'd donate to (equivalent to saying: the forms of production we'd "vote" for) would be very different than the ones we choose when we're spending on ourselves.

This sort of reminded me about the idea of a "gift economy" (albeit in a more complex, and impersonal, institutionalized form) that does not have quid pro quo.

Just a weird little thought I had.

Very Relevant Quote

2011-12-03T00:33:00.003-06:00

Thanks to Vox Nova for this quote from Thomas Merton, which strikes me as very relevant given that I know people who (in the mauvaise foi sort of way) reject their own (and others) spiritual (and even just psycho-emotional) agency through this sort of viewing themselves as inevitable products of modernity, as if that somehow constitutes an excuse for the rot within them:

So now [about to enter Columbia as an undergraduate, after two failed years at Cambridge], when the time came for me to take spiritual stock of myself, it was natural that I should do so by projecting my whole spiritual condition into the sphere of economic history and the class-struggle. In other words, the conclusion I came to was that it was not so much I myself that was to blame for my unhappiness, but the society in which I lived.

I considered the person that I now was, the person that I had been at Cambridge, and that I had made of myself, and I saw clearly enough that I was the product of my times, my society, and my class. I was something that had been spawned by the selfishness and irresponsibility of the materialistic century in which I lived. However, what I did not see was that my own age and class only had an accidental part to play in this. They gave my egoism and pride and my other sins a peculiar character of weak and supercilious flippancy proper to this particular century: but that was only on the surface. Underneath, it was the same old story of greed and lust and self-love, of the three concupiscences bred in the rich, rotted undergrowth of what is technically called ‘the world,’ in every age, in every class. [From part one, chapter four, "Children of the Marketplace," p. 147 of the Harvest Books edition, 1999]

Organic Development?

2011-11-27T18:28:00.007-06:00

A friend send me this interesting article about a parish in full communion with the Church that has apparently been doing its own sort of improv vernacular liturgy since before Vatican II, and thus has been using an English translation similar to the new new one for longer than the old new one was even around in the first place:

But for one Mass at Corpus Christi, the parish church of Columbia University, little if anything is expected to change. That is because this small church, with its intellectual history and fierce stubborn streak, never fully adopted the more modern version of the Mass that the church’s hierarchy is now ordering replaced.
For example, starting this weekend, all parishes will be saying, “And with your spirit,” as Corpus Christi’s has been saying for decades. And where there are small differences between the new translation and Corpus Christi’s version, which stems from the 1960s, Corpus Christi is expecting to stay with its own words.
“There are a lot of us who feel that the last 35 years of translation has been very banal and pedestrian, and the way that one wants to address God in a liturgy should not be pedestrian,” said Brenda Fairaday, a parishioner here since the 1970s and an ardent defender of the church’s liturgy. The new translation, she said, “is better,” but at times reads as if it was translated by a nonnative English speaker: “It needs severe editing,” she said.
How Corpus Christi has managed to do its own thing in a church that insists, as a general rule, on uniformity in the Mass is steeped in local lore. But most agree it began with the progressive priest who built the current church in the 1930s, the Rev. George Barry Ford, who is perhaps best known for inspiring Thomas Merton, the renowned 20th-century Catholic mystic and writer, to convert to Catholicism when he was a Columbia student.
Long before the Vatican permitted Mass in the vernacular, Father Ford would station a priest in the pews to translate the mass into English as the main priest performed the sacred rites in Latin, parishioners said. The congregation would respond to parts of the Mass in English, highly unusual for the time.
“Elements of our Mass, when we started doing it here, were very progressive at the time,” said Bill Derby, a eucharistic minister at the church. “Then we kept doing them when the tide changed and became way more modern. And now they are going back to what we have been doing all along.”
In the 1960s, the parish priest was Msgr. Myles M. Bourke, a liturgist who directed the first English translation of the New American Bible. Informed by his own work, he solidified the mix of Gregorian chant, classical hymns and English-language liturgy that is still in use. The well-worn 1966 hymnals in the pews contain a translation of the Mass close to the one that Rome is unveiling.
In recent years, Corpus Christi’s current pastor, the Rev. Raymond M. Rafferty, switched most of the Masses to the modern, accepted translation, in part, he said, because “I found there was a cacophony at the Masses: some were saying the old and some the new.” But he maintained the traditions of the parish in the 11:15 a.m. Mass on Sundays.
“With the type of music that we do, it fit with the music,” Father Rafferty said. Many chants come from a 1978 Latin text, Liber Cantualis, and they also add some contemporary commissioned pieces. “It’s quite amazing how well the congregation can do these hymns,” he said.
There have been attempts over the years to steer the liturgy more in line with “downtown,” meaning the seat of the archdiocese, at St. Patrick’s, Mr. Derby said. (“Ain’t going to happen,” said Kathy Darling, a Corpus Christi parishioner since 1971.) But in the end, Mr. Derby said, the parishioners say what is in their hearts.
The Rev. Daniel J. Merz, associate director of the secretariat of Divine Worship at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is in charge of putting the new liturgy in place, was surprised this week to hear of the small parish church that was already saying some of it.
“Sometimes,” he said, “it’s more important to have peace in the church than uniformity.”

I wonder if the fact that the books for this idiosyncratic liturgy of theirs apparently come from before the Novus Ordo means that their liturgy is basically a translation of the Old Rite (or at least the 1965 version) into the vernacular? Given that the New Rite wasn't around yet, it must have been like that at some point, even if they Novus Ordo-ized (while keeping their traditional translation) later.

I'm going to look into that, actually, contact them. It would be a huge deal/precedent (even if they are saying "and with your spirit" instead of "and with thy spirit" and the guy was a translator of the *shudder* NAB.) Either way, it's a fascinating case of local liturgical development shirking hyper-centralization that sounds like it didn't turn out as a complete disaster. The Western Rite Orthodox would be proud.

I've been meaning to do a post on the possibilities of organic development and how a more "hands-off" approach from the Vatican could be prevented from collapsing into total liturgical decadence, trying to find the happy medium between legitimate innovation and adaptation on the one hand and "abuse" that devolves into kumbayah clown Masses and giant puppets on the other (which reminds me: I actually attended a Reggae Mass last night, lol. Not as bad as you might think but, then, my musical tastes and liturgical wet dreams have already been made clear here, so perhaps I'm not entirely objective.)

Basically, I think "restarting" the idea of local tradition and organic development would have to involve an approach that weeded out the bad, but wasn't the sort of textual-positivist liturgical totalitarianism that the "say the black, do the red" crowd proposes; in other words, the governance on the matter would have become proscriptive, not prescriptive. And the example of this parish has given me a lot to think about in that regard.

The Holy Dark...

2011-11-24T19:27:00.005-06:00

"...was moving too, and every breath we drew was..."

Artificial lighting always impinges upon my sense of the Sacred. Of course, this is "merely" emotionalism, sensualism, aestheticism, what-have-you. Nevertheless, the Sacred in liturgy is in some part emotional, an "altered state of consciousness" induced which touches the very core of our being, and this is why Beauty in liturgy and church architecture is so important.

My most nostalgic memories of "the sacred" in my childhood, before I was really personally religious, were of the deep dark-blue stained glass in my home parish on hot summer mornings when the church was all dark and silent inside. I don't know why I was there, something for religious education ("CCD") perhaps. Also dressing up and going to Mass Easter morning (when Easter fell late enough for the Spring weather to be nice), and they had an "overflow" Mass in the school gym, but the gym's big windows meant the only light they needed was that of the Easter morn. And they'd at least use the "O Filii et Filiae" melody for the Alleluia (..."hallelujah.")

On the other hand, one of the most annoying memories I had was when the power went out at church one Sunday morning (in the Summer!) and they were rushing around to get a generator and to get at least some lights on, as if Mass couldn't proceed without them. I also remember some friends and I being a bit obnoxious giving a hard time to a priest friend during my undergrad about relying on the big overhead lights in our little chapel for the morning Low Masses we served even though the room has literally a whole wall of full length windows.

One of the things the trads are always pushing about the old liturgy is the opportunity for "sacred silence." Of course, they then totally subvert this by "singing over" or playing organ motets over all the inaudible parts as if a little silent respite were the worst thing in the world that could happen. And of course, the Novus Ordo's attempt to reclaim sacred silence (which is not "built into" it) is when that awkward thing happens some places where everyone just sits for a token 20 seconds after one of the lessons to "meditate" on it (even though I'm usually using the time to think about cartoons from the 1990's, which were awesome, or trying to discretely find some eye-candy among the younger congregants).

Oh, and the white-noise of heaters or air-conditioners doesn't help. And if you've got the buzzing of fluorescent lights, that's a double-whammy of profaneness inserted into what's supposed to be sacred space and sacred time. And, while I'm on this "cascading criticism" (a term my dad taught me): wall-to-wall carpeting in churches is vulgar and stupid too; I'm supposed to hear footsteps echoing, dammit!

Is all the artificial lighting so that we can all read along in our missalettes? Wasn't the whole point of putting in English so that we wouldn't have to have our noses buried in books?!?

As I've been attending the daily morning Mass at the Cathedral here lately, I'm happy that it's better than most places inasmuch as it's a big space and the lights are high above and hidden in yellow-glass "lanterns" that make them vaguely less intrusive. Still, I wish churches, especially when there is that beautiful, calming, Sacred morning light of the dawn golden-hour streaming in...would just turn off the lights. There is something so amazing about a darker room naturally lit when it's bright outside, something a bit drowsy, but definitely something Sacred.

This Made Me Cry A Little

2011-11-22T20:35:00.004-06:00

I saw this a few months ago, it's so true. My own evolution around the teenage years wasn't exactly like this, but the progression idea is certainly spot-on, especially in terms of where it ends up:

An unconventional source for something so genuinely touching.

The Ordering of the Ordinary

2011-11-22T19:44:00.020-06:00

I'm currently reading (though stalling in progress) The Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor, a book that I've had on my to-do list for a year and a half now.

I'm really only at the beginning. Frankly, he's taking quite a long time to say a lot of things I already knew and believed. But maybe the sort of "philosophers" who infest our universities today, poisoned with their modern arrogance, take a lot more words to convince, and maybe they're his real intended audience. But, basically, the main point I've gathered so far is that because The Good is only definable relative to human subjectivity, that any attempt to construct an "objective" philosophy of it is incoherent.

This is something I've just always assumed. Specifically, as Catholic Encyclopedia points out, we can only define the good circularly with reference to desire and vice versa; the good is that quality which moves the Will, like magnetism is that which moves a magnet. This is something I discussed on a Vox Nova thread a few months ago and plan to eventually come back on this blog regarding eudemonism and the natural law (which the poster seemed to have some fundamental misunderstandings about).

To me, consciousness clearly must be a "structural" feature of any picture of the universe we have, and the only perspective we can have it from. This was always just intuitive to me since I was a child. I think pure materialism is a delusion that involves defining ones own conscious subjectivity out of existence; it is solipsism, not pure materialism, that is the much more "likely" philosophical extreme for me. After all, all the external matter could all just be a "dream" in my own consciousness, "illusory" sense impressions, whereas my consciousness itself is immediately apparent to me as real (in the only possible definition of "real" I could formulate; something else I've written about before and maybe will come back to again on this blog).

Taylor specifically seems to be framing this truth in the form of an argument that notions of identity don't even make sense without notions of relative valuation, and so that to try to apply an "objective" account onto the realm of human behavior or meaning (and this latter, especially, is the only real job philosophy has) like we do with the material world...is basically a category error, as human beings exist as subjects who do make subjective valuations, but these are no less "real" for the fact of their subjectivity, and any account of moral questions cannot simply dismiss this in a naturalistic way.

Perhaps I just didn't realize how decadent the state of modern philosophy was, as to me all these things go without saying and I find that having to make these points through meticulously revealing the internal contradictions in the naturalistic paradigm to be rather plodding. But then, I am in some sense (it seems so far) a choir being preached to.

Another point he keeps hinting at (and which I'm sure is explicated later) is about the "affirmation of ordinary life" as a feature of modernity. This is a defining feature of the secularity characteristic of our age (secularity, not secularism; secularity in the sense of "in the world," secularity in the sense that diocesan priests are "secular," or at least should be.) In the medieval past, people understood the monastic life of contemplation, religious consecration, and constant prayer and worship to be the clear "standard," whereas today there is a sense that "the good life" is to be found (or, at least, can be found) in the ordinary life of work and family, of production and reproduction. Whether this takes the form of "the American dream" or of Jeffersonian agrarian fantasies or romanticization of the working class (or the "peasants.")

The observation of this contrast is clearly true. But what should it mean for us? I'll be interested to see what Taylor says as I keep reading, but right now I would like to just sort of share some of my own thoughts on the question of "ordinary life" vs. "extraordinary life" (say, of religious consecration or monastic contemplation, etc), and what an affirmation of ordinary life implies (and doesn't imply) philosophically and morally.

It has been noted often before that Christianity, by its very nature, contains something like the seeds of humanism. It is, after all, the story of God becoming Man. However, does this necessarily lead to something like Nietzsche's "death of God"? Does, like Žižek says, Christianity need to abandon real faith, is it "possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of institutional organization (and, even more so, its explicit religious experience). The gap here is irreducible: either one drops the religious form, or one maintains the form but loses the essence. That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge."

After all, isn't the characteristic feature of our society compared to any past analogues that ours is a post-Christian society? That it is one who has seen Christianity's insights, cannibalized them perhaps, but ultimately is what we got something inherent in the values of Christianity from the start? Did or will the valuation of human life that began in the Christ story necessarily play out as man's self-actualization transcending God through escaping self-alienation in the Marxist sense? Was Christianity just "scaffolding" needed to get to a certain point of humanitarian development that now can be discarded?

I don't think so. And I highly doubt that's what Taylor himself is saying. The valuation of ordinary life is, I think, actually highly compatible with the Catholic vision which also recognizes the extraordinary life of the contemplative. This is one of the geniuses of the Catholic notion of The Good: that transcendent meaning is present, that the eschaton breaks into history and confers goodness and meaning here and now.

There was perhaps, mistakenly, a notion in the past something along the lines of "labor and getting married and having children...are only good inasmuch as they are means to an end; labor allows you to keep living so that you can praise God (and materially support those who do so more constantly). Having children is only good because they perpetuate the institutional church (some of your descendents may become priests or monks someday!)" There was perhaps an attitude among some (or, at least, some people misunderstood it that way) that ordinary life was purely functional, "merely" a means to an end (of contemplation). That life was "merely" a test or preparation for heaven with no value or meaning right now, with value or meaning constantly deferred to the Beatific Vision.

However, what this attitude (or, rather, this modern interpretation of past attitudes; I'm not convinced it ever really was the official stance in the past either) fails to understand is the Catholic notion of the value of being ordered or oriented towards the good. I've discussed this regarding NFP and sexual morality. I've also discussed it regarding the use of language and the question of lying.

You see, the real genius of the Catholic notion of morality is that meaning can be dependent on the Absolute, on the transcendent, and yet is also immanent, is here in this moment. Yes, sex (of the natural variety) is good "because of" procreation, that is the only reason that renders that desire intelligible. However, if it is good "because of" procreation, that also means it is good, period. It is ordered towards that goodness, but that ordering towards makes that goodness already inherent, internal to the nature of that act itself (whether it bears fruit or not, or even can). A couple doesn't need to wait for procreation to result (and, indeed, maybe it never even does, or they don't even want it to) for the act itself to be rendered good, as if it only happens "retroactively" in the light of the procreation. Rather, it's goodness with reference to procreation is not conferred externally like that, on account of some subsequent effect to which it was a cause, some subsequent end to which it was a means, but as something that is part of the very "internal logic" of the ordering of the act itself (whereas, you will note, other sorts of [unchaste] sexual acts can only "explain" themselves with reference to that natural act; they contain their own subversion or contradiction).

Many people will object that if a couple positively doesn't want children to result and deliberately takes advantage of natural infertility, there is no way it can tend morally towards procreation (though tend towards is all it has to do.) However, I think there are many examples that prove this untrue. For example, policemen or armies. A state or municipality can have these while still truly saying they don't ever want to use them. A policeman on a street corner, or army training exercises, are only intelligible with reference to crime or war, they only make sense as ordered towards those ends. And yet that doesn't mean a policeman or army is purposeless if there is no crime to stop currently or no war going on. Indeed we can, and usually should, hope there never is! Yet a person would be stupid to say that, for this reason, we should get rid of the police or army, or that a policeman skipping work is equivalent to him going to work in a quiet neighborhood where he knows he won't have to stop any criminals.

Or a hospital. Doctors (should) hope no one is ever sick or injured, and yet hospitals are ordered towards helping the sick and injured, and the doctors still go into work each day prepared to ("open to") helping the sick and injured, even while at the same time they should be hoping there is actually no one to help. As a friend suggested to me, "even when the ER is empty, nurses and docs need to be awake," they can't all go out for beers just because they hope (or even know for sure) that no one is coming. Or just even more simply: you don't run a red light even when you can clearly see there are no cars coming at 3AM, because that's not how Law works, civilization would fall apart if people lived like that. The lack of (or hope of lack of) explicitly fulfilling a purpose, or of actually realizing the Reason that renders something's existence intelligible, its end, does not mean they are not still ordered towards that end (if they do their job correctly), because "realization" is always eschatological. It's always just a "tendency" towards final meaning, the question is whether its "trajectory" is correct in orientation, whether it is connected back up to the transcendent chain of meaning internally (or whether it is curved in on itself and self-contradictory and unintelligible).

Or take language. Language only makes sense in a relational context (and this is something else I remember Taylor mentioning). A solitary creature would have no language, language is by nature communicative, the very concept of "meaning" makes no sense outside the concept of having someone else to receive and understand your words. Language would not have developed with people just speaking to themselves. And yet...we can write meaningful things that we never share with anyone else. I can write a poem and keep it a secret. And yet, my words have meaning because, as language, they are ordered towards communication. Communication is a good contained in the very internal logic of language, and thus even if I never share my poem with anyone, it may be rendered good and meaningful nevertheless, still by communication (even though that good is never externally actualized, nor even desired to be actualized, in this case!)

I think the same idea is essential to our understanding of an "affirmation of ordinary life" or of "Christian humanism" or whatever you want to call these notions. Certainly I think it would be a misunderstanding (both of Christianity and of Taylor) to see an affirmation of ordinary life as necessitating some sort of rejection of the extraordinary life, as saying that ordinary life is "better" than it, or that there is some imperative to be ordinary, secular, ("normal," mediocre, etc, as the case often turns out.) I don't think the message is "no one should be a monk anymore, I shouldn't consider that vocation, it's mere escapism" or that "suburban family life is the real highest calling" (which would be nothing more than bourgeosie capitalist propaganda ala "the apotheosis of the family.")

No, I don't think that's the point. I think the point is that things being ordered towards a good end (ordered, not disordered; the ends can't justify the means) means that they are good even without immediate or explicit reference to that end. I often quote the Catholic Encyclopedia article on gluttony on this point: "it must be noted that there is no obligation to formerly and explicitly have before one's mind a motive which will immediately relate our actions to God. It is enough that such an intention should be implied in the apprehension of the thing as lawful with a consequent virtual submission to Almighty God."

Yes, there is a "chain of meaning" that connects eating back up to the Absolute and makes it good, something along the lines of: eating is ordered to nutrition, which keeps us alive, which allows us to continue living and praising God in soul and body, so that we can be saved and merit and someday get to heaven. However, as I said above, the statement "eating is good because..." implies that eating is good. Period. The "because" doesn't mean that the only thing of real value is at the end of the causal chain and that all the means on the way there are ultimately worthless in themselves, that meaning is "deferred" until we get to heaven, and that if we don't our eating during life was really just meaningless. No, the very nature of this "because" is that the Good at the end of the chain "shines back down upon" all the means on the way there; their ordering towards their Final End makes them, in some sense, also ends in themselves. The final end is contained not merely at the end of the chain when it is actually achieved but, like how the eschaton breaks into history, actually becomes immanent in each and every "step" on the way there.

And so, language is still meaningful as ordered towards truth-communicating even if you write something that you never intend to share with anyone else (as long as you don't disorder it by making it a lie). Natural marital sex is still meaningful, the desire and pleasure still intelligible, as ordered towards procreation even if the couple knows it will be infertile (as long as they don't disorder it by choosing an act without that natural significance). Labor is meaningful as ordered towards sustaining ones life for worship, yes, but that doesn't mean it is in itself meaningless fluff, a practicality that we need to "get through" so that we can "get to the real point of life" which is worship. No, indeed, the very ordering of ordinary life towards the extraordinary confers a meaning on it here and now, before we ever know if that outcome is ever realized! Yes, in some ways we toil (like God) for the whole week to make it to the Sabbath, but if we died in a bus crash on Thursday, that doesn't mean Monday-Wednesday were all just meaningless because we never actually made it to Sunday where the chain of meaning could terminate.

The post-modernists speak about how meaning is always "deferred," about the so called dictionary paradox (where you can only define a word with reference to other words which are then defined only with reference to other words) and yet we know this whole grand relational chain nevertheless does contain immediate meaning when a word is spoken, if only by the very fact of human consciousness perceiving its place in that semantic web. We have the question of "turtles all the way down." Meaning is deferred, and yet we understand here and now in the present!

Likewise, if I became Pope someday, I might be inclined to see this as conferring "meaning," as it were, "back onto" the lives of my Polish peasant ancestors toiling away in the 18th century. However, the wonderful thing about the Christian message is this: I don't ever have to become Pope. Their lives, their having children, were meaningful even then as ordered towards descendents glorifying God. I think something of this notion is symbolized in the fact that St. Thérèse of Lisieux's parents are soon to be canonized. Both of them dreamed of entering religious life, but found married life instead and at first were "disappointed." However, their ordinary life went on to produce five nuns, one of whom is one of the greatest Saints of our times! And this reflects back on and "redeems" even this ordinary life. However, once again it must be emphasized: this is not "conditional" on a family producing a Saint. The meaning that the "openness" of ordinary life towards, say, producing Saints, gives it a meaning in the present, not merely after-the-fact if a Saint actually results.

Life is a preparation for heaven, yes. It is only heaven that gives life meaning. But, it gives meaning to each and every moment even in the here-and-n0w in an "internal" way. This is the genius of Christian eschatology. The Second Coming of Christ is an event at the end of time, yes, but this eschatological reality confers meaning at each and every moment to my life, which is why the Parousia is important spiritually for Christians of every age, why our spirituality must needs be Apocalyptic even if we are not the generation that will see the literal end of the world. I don't need to "wait" for the actual event to have its meaning, I have had meaning here and now with reference to the eschaton, the great chain still hangs on a "hook" even if that hook is in the future. (And, you will note, all this remains true even if fall into sin and die and go to Hell; my life up to that point still had real meaning with reference to God).

So is the contemplative life higher, or at least a more "immediate" fulfillment of the purpose of human life? Yes, there can be no doubt of that. However, this does not denigrate ordinary life, but elevates it, for ordinary life "basks in the glow" of heaven, or of the monastic life, etc, to which it is ordered.

I think this same dynamic is also seen in the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. We know that the Old contains the New in the manner of prophecy, in the manner of typology, etc. Everything in the Old Testament is really about Christ. But this isn't true only after Christ came. We have to assume it was "there all along" in the text. Maybe we only "see it" now, but the Old Testament was rightly revered and held meaningful by the Jews even before Christ came.

Even Christ's descent into hades to redeem the righteous of the Old Testament symbolizes something like this; they weren't just "scaffolding" to be discarded or dismissed once the building was built, as it were, once Christ came. No, rather, the "grounding" in Christ conferred meaning "back onto" their lives. In one sense this is "retroactive," but in another this "retroactivity" was already there in the Old Testament, the meaning was not "deferred" until Christ, but was there in the present (and yet still because of Him).

The danger, of course, is this: that we will forget the absolute that grounds our meaning. This is the threat that faces our age, the reduction of everything to essentially just masturbatory, as it were. Human life was recognized as valuable because of Christ and because of God. But being valuable "because" of something else, also means it is valuable, period. But then once we have the recognition of human life as valuable, period, modern man thinks we can just discard the God and Christ that made it valuable in the first place!

Sex is desirable and pleasurable because of the good of procreation, which means it is good, period. But then people think we can just discard the ordering towards procreation that was the whole reason for its goodness in the first place, the "foundation" which rendered its desire and pleasure intelligible. Language exists to communicate truth, and it remains meaningful even if you are not actually speaking to anyone; symbols carved in a rock remain "meaningful" even if no one is reading them at the moment. But then people use it to communicate lies!

Ordinary secular life is recognized as good because it is ordered towards heaven, and even in some sense towards worship and the contemplative life (whether in the form of descendents someday pursuing that, being able to support it materially with our donations, or just we ourselves making it to Mass again on Sunday, etc), which means, however, that it is good, period (ie, it's goodness does not depend on the "eschatological realization" of the promises it already inherently contains; it is good, because of that, even now, even before that, and thus even if it never happens). And yet, people think the fact that meaning is immanent, is here and now, means we can discard the transcendent, can ignore the eschaton that is the source of meaning. That since "such and such is good because..." means that "such and such is good" here and now, even before the realization of the "because" (and even, thus, if the "because" is never realized)...that we can just discard the "because," that it must be superfluous.

However, we have seen the results of that in our society. That becomes a philosophy of despair. Hope is good in the moment even before the thing hoped for is achieved. And if it is good in the moment, it is thus good, period; it's goodness in the moment cannot be "undone" just because the thing hoped for is never achieved. And yet, "hope" is only intelligible with reference to the thing hoped for. Hope is good because it is ordered toward that hoped for, and that means that it is unintelligible if we "pull the carpet out from under" it and remove the reference to the thing hoped for.

There is a common confusion (and I'm just repeating myself now) that might think that because hope is a good experience in the moment even prior to its fulfillment (and even if it is never fulfilled or we know it can never be fulfilled and yet choose to keep hoping as an end in itself; I think unrequited or unrequitable love is the example par excellence here) that this means that its fulfillment is accidental and thus can be discarded as unnecessary. But obviously, nothing could be farther from the truth. The very concept of hope, its "in itself" goodness in the moment...is nevertheless still dependent on its fulfillment, its ordering towards that fulfillment (whether that ever comes or not), because the concept of that fulfillment is already internal to the idea of hope itself, and thus the source even of its "in itself" goodness.

Some people will say the quest for the Holy Grail finds its meaning in the quest itself. That the nobility or adventure or relationships built along the journey are what it's all about, not the "destination." That the Holy Grail is just the "stone" in Stone Soup. And yet, there is no quest if you aren't questing for something, there would have been no stone soup without the stone! Even if it's something I know it is highly unlikely I'll ever find, like the last unicorn, an End like that is necessary for any sense of purposive action. Otherwise it's just wandering around. And, say what you will about wandering around, that certainly has a different dynamic than a quest ordered towards something, that has an end driving it. There can be nobility in a quest, even a failed or impossible quest. There is no nobility in wandering aimlessly.

And we can have an aim (or, rather, our wills can be "aimed") even when we hope not to actually reach the end, mind you. Like my "hospital" example above...take searching around a house for a burglar, for example. You come home, you think someone may be in the house, so you check every possible place a burglar might be, even while positively hoping you won't find someone, and even perhaps speaking loudly to scare him off (if he is there) before you reach him, or coming home only at those times of day when you know that no burglar will be there (even if he may have been there at some other time). And yet, the act of going through the search is clearly ordered towards something (finding a burglar), this action is intelligible and purposive to that end, even when you are hoping and trying NOT to find him. It is very different from just wandering around a house not actually looking (either randomly, or because you're too afraid of what you might find and so deliberately omit searching certain nooks or crannies).

The Absolute may never be reached in this life, and yet it is a sort of limit, it is asymptotic (to get mathematical). Just because nothing in this world is truly infinite does not mean the concept of Infinity is not structurally important to mathematics; in fact, as it turns out, Infinity is necessary to make sense even of finite things once you start getting to calculus and beyond. God plays a similar role in the cosmos. Even if you think the meaning in the here and now is really "in the tension" of meaning being forever deferred, that tension is still held in place by the hook upon which everything hangs (even if it's a hook "out at infinity") and if you remove that anchoring "hook" (no matter how inaccessible it is)...the present tension of the rubber band in the here and now will "snap."

So let us never lose sight of this, about language, about sex, about hope, and about "ordinary life" in general. A society that removes the eschatological end towards which everything must be ordered, that "cuts the cord" on which all meaning hangs, out of some notion that "because life is good now, even before heaven, why do we need heaven?" or "things are meaningful now, even before terminating in the ever-deferred Absolute, so the Absolute itself must be unnecessary," is like saying "hope is good now, even before its fulfillment, so what's the point of positing a fulfillment?" And yet, of course, hope would not be hope without referencing a fulfillment, and certainly would not be good. And neither would life, ordinary or otherwise.

"Imposing" Morality??

2011-11-22T19:14:00.004-06:00

Something I heard today got me thinking again about my basic "pastoral" stance, as it were. During a session with my personal trainer, I overheard some people at the gym saying something about conservative Christians trying to "impose" their morality (I think they were probably talking about sex; it always comes back to sex) on people, and laughing at the idea that you could ever "enforce" our standards on the general population.

And I just had to think: what an odd way to look things.

If practical success or compliance or "enforcibility" were the measure of a moral teaching, all moral systems would be screwed. Morality is about ideals, not the question of whether people are living up to them.

I don't think "ought" necessarily translates into "is" in our fallen world, and any concrete pastoral approach has to realize were dealing with sinful human beings, not pie in the sky models of already-accomplished perfection. (I think, for example Brideshead Revisited, though I wasn't enthralled with it the way some trads are, shows this understanding of grace working subtly and even in or through merely mediocre "results" quite well.)

But, being a "lamb in the confessional" doesn't mean you shouldn't still be a "lion" in the pulpit, and a subjective compassion for human weakness doesn't mean we change the objective standards. Trust me, I know my own weaknesses in various areas, but I also am not going to let them make me "give up."

The language of "imposition" is interesting, because I (at least) am not trying to "impose" anything on anyone. The conservatives in the institutional church, maybe; that sort of politicization of the Gospel (whether through the formal venue of the State, or informally through a mindset that expects to create heaven on earth) is exactly the problem that is in some ways at the heart of what this blog has always critiqued.

To me, a moral norm is just categorically different than that, does not constitute an "imposition" of any sort. It's more like an invitation. I'm not "trying" to "stop" anyone from doing anything, and neither was Christ. We can only live as examples and offer people a message. But hoping for their conversion is different from trying to "make" them change. The latter is not only an exercise in futility, but also in pride; it is not up to us to change people, it is up to God. Any evangelism that sees its goal as arguing or otherwise pressuring or coercing people into submission (intellectually or in other ways) is problematic, which is why I have a certain distaste for "apologetics" as a tool of evangelization; for me, apologetics is mainly useful for those who already believe.

Of course, there's a fine line. I was thinking about this when writing my recent posts on the question of tolerance and respecting people's beliefs in a pluralist society (while still holding our own very firmly) and about whether we must "hide from" the fact that bad things are going on (such as by attending the irregular weddings of those who don't even share our premises to begin with; I conclude it can be okay).

Obviously, there is no way to coerce belief from anyone. But is telling them there is a Hell and that they might be going there an "imposition" in the form of applying the force of fear or guilt? Is any "fire and brimstone" preaching bad, or is a distaste for it merely our modern political correctness showing itself? I tend to think more the latter than the former, though there is a balance. But, ultimately, I have to think, if the threat of Hell does get a rise out of people, then it means that they're conscience isn't quite dead yet. And at that point, how is making them face it an "imposition"? Can it be rude? Maybe. But rude isn't always bad when it came to saving souls. Christ had no problem being a scandal, a controversy, nor was He "nice" by modern standards. The morality of the nice/inoffensive is asinine.

Unhate

2011-11-22T18:12:00.005-06:00

I thought this story was funny following on the heels of my recent post.

When will the Vatican and their counterparts learn that giving a negative reaction is probably the worst thing you can do in a situation like this. In reality, you should either just ignore it (sending a message something like "we're above engaging that") or you react with good humor, laughing at yourself or whatever.

Heck, if I were Pope, I'd see if I couldn't stage a photo-op with that Imam recreating the advertisement! (Kiss of Peace anyone??) If the Imam himself was too stuffy, then we could get an impersonator (and score one against two enemies!) If they're laughing at you, subvert it by laughing with them, even take it up a notch. At least that way you neutralize, through sheer self-deprecating confidence, the "threat" or "challenge" they pose to you (and possibly get some serious "cool" cred). Why don't the old men in Rome (or the slightly younger men in Washington; Obama was also "targeted" in this campaign) realize this yet?

At The End of Ropes...

2011-11-21T20:55:00.000-06:00

Believe It Not!

2011-11-20T16:55:00.012-06:00

Sometimes you come across something in a translation that isn't quite right, whether it is just an unfortunate choice of words by someone who obviously has no sense of English idiom or double entendre, or simply a mistake; the whole phenomenon of the humor found in "Engrish" is about this.

Now, in this case I think it was partially a typo too (as the most salient word is actually supposed to be in the plural, I believe), but I read a quote of the Gospel from today's (Old Rite) Mass, and came across this:

"If therefore they shall say to you: [...] 'Behold he is in the closet,' believe it not!" (Matt 24:26)

And I had to think: isn't that what the institutional church has been telling us about our priests and leaders for centuries now? I guess it goes back to the beginning!

"He's not in the closet; don't believe it!!"

Toronto Readers?

2011-11-19T09:52:00.005-06:00

I've been seeing a lot of unfamiliar IPs and computers on my Stat Counter originating from Toronto (whither I myself just moved from Chicago in September). I may know who a few of you are already (and they'd know I know) and maybe they're just using all sorts of different computers at different locations for some reason. I know IP may not be fixed even for the same computer, but there is enough variety in the information even beyond that (browser, computer type, screen-size) to suggest that there are probably some locals whom I don't know yet reading the blog with relative frequency. So if there's anyone else I haven't gotten into contact with yet, please email me, it would be great to get in touch: renegadetrad@gmail.com

I Suppose Savings Accounts Are Okay

2011-11-16T20:09:00.004-06:00

I recently wrote again about Social Credit and how our modern fractional-reserve debt-money system of private credit creation (at interest!) is intrinsically usurious and the cause of all the economic inequality in the world.

This position used to lead me to believe that having a savings account and collecting interest was participation in usury and wrong. However, as I was thinking after Mass today about how the Master/King in the Parable of the Talents says, "why then didst thou not give my money into the bank, that at my coming, I might have exacted it with usury?" and I changed my mind about savings accounts exactly because of the fact that, I remembered: the relation between deposits and loans is illusory! In modern debt-money banking the loans aren't coming from your deposits in the first place. The money is literally loaned into existence. The deposits, at best, serve as a sort of legal benchmark (the "fractional reserve") for how much new money the bank is allowed to loan into existence (a limit increasingly reduced to insignificance).

So too, the "interest" paid to savers is not directly connected to the interest collected on loans (though an illusory connection is suggested to a naive public). The interest paid to savings account holders is not "your share" of the profits the bank makes from lending from its deposits. It's not that this is the share of the interest you get in exchange for letting the bank lend out your money, because the bank doesn't really lend out your money (if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to withdraw your money, or at least not all of it, at once or without prior notice, as it might be "out on loan.") A "run on the bank" is no longer really an issue, or if it is it's for different reasons. All your "gold" is still safely in the vault and available for withdrawl, the loans are not from deposits.

And the corollary to this is that, likewise, your interest in a savings account is really not particularly causally related to the interest the bank collects on the new debt-money it loans into existence. Really, your interest in a saving's account is a token amount that comes from the bank's same money-creating power. And unless you want to argue that spending Federal Reserve money (or any debt-based monetary unit or species of credit) is sinful, neither can merely having a saving's account be accounted as such.

This is sort of like Aquinas's argument that only the lender sinned in usury, I guess. I also thought this article from the Summa about different kinds of consideration for money "lent" are usury and which weren't...is very interesting. Although he is still clearly making assumptions about the economy that are medieval (and thus not necessarily true in the modern economy), if you read the objections and replies carefully, he actually approves of several things that some people use to argue that usury is okay (but which aren't really usury; such as, for example, expecting a share of the profits if one "lends" to a merchant or craftsman, which is really investment and not lending).

Trini-Marianism

2011-11-15T15:42:00.011-06:00

I was looking at a stained glass window at the Cathedral today that portrays one of my favorite Western "iconographic" themes: the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin.

There are many nice images of the type I'm referring to. I couldn't get a great photo of the window in the light with just my phone, but I do want to share the one I have just because I think the color scheme of the robes of the Father, Jesus, and Mary (in rich purple, red, and blue) is so nice. (Before reading the rest of this post, it might help to read or re-read my post regarding Images of the Father in Christian art, where I argue that they're always really images of the Son in some sense):

As you can see, it's the common image of the Father and Christ seated at His Right Hand, with Our Lady kneeling in between and the Holy Spirit as a dove floating over the crown. I find this image sums up the context of the Virgin Mary in my own theological vision/spirituality. Although I may not seem like your "typical" Marian devotee in the "private devotional" sense (who see her in very personal familial terms, but in a manner that treats Mariology as something of a "side-show" to the central questions of the Faith), for me she actually plays a very important "structural" role in my whole Catholic symbolic-system. Specifically, I would say my Marian devotion is subsumed into my conception of divinization and the mystical Ecclesia, and through Her into my Trinitarianism itself (by way of my Pneumatology).

It is specifically this which so appeals to me in the image of the Coronation, and which I was thinking about again today. One of my pet peeves, theologically, is the way Catholics popularly refer to Mary as "Spouse of the Holy Spirit." This is not untrue. However, this title usually is placed at the end of a triad of appellations relating her, in turn, to each of the three persons of the Blessed Trinity ("Daughter of the Father, Mother of the Son, Spouse of the Holy Spirit.") The implication of this is that "spouse" is Mary's "specific" relationship to the Spirit in a manner making it equivalent to her relationships as "daughter" and "mother" with the Father and Son.

However, I would argue this is misleading. In reality, Our Lady is in some sense "spouse" of all three persons of the Trinity. The Father, exactly because she is the Mother of His Son, the Son exactly because she embodies His Mystical Bride, and the Holy Spirit because of His most perfect indwelling in her. However, if you are perceptive in following my line of thought, you will notice two interesting points here: the first is that I do not attribute her "spousal" status with the Holy Spirit primarily to the fact that she conceived by the Spirit, and the second is the question of what exactly (if "spouse" is her common relationship to all three persons) should we say is her specific/unique relationship to the Holy Spirit (parsed in human terms).

My preferred answer to this question is something like "Perfect Image" or "Perfect Icon of the Holy Spirit." St. Maximilian Kolbe, probably the greatest Mariologist of our age besides his heroic martyrdom of charity, went so far as to use the term "quasi-incarnation." This formulation may frighten orthodox ears, but I think it reveals a great mystery. There is much here to be unpacked, but I'd like to share a long quote from this article discussing St. Maximilian's thoughts on the matter:

In his writings on the "Immaculata" (the name he used for Mary under the title, Immaculate Conception), he would often ask, "Who are you?" For Our Lady did not say "I was immaculately conceived," but rather identified herself, her very being ("I am") with the "Immaculate Conception." Kolbe says these words of Mary "point up not only the fact that she was conceived without sin, but also the manner in which this privilege belongs to her. It is not something accidental; it is something that belongs to her very nature. For she is Immaculate Conception in person."
The above words are taken from the Polish Martyr's last writing, a few hours before his final arrest by the Nazis on February 17, 1941, when he would be taken to Auschwitz and eventually be killed by lethal injection after offering his life in place of a fellow prisoner. In this same "Final Sketch" Kolbe arrived at a profound insight, an "answer" it seems (at least in part) to his persistent question, "Who are you, Immaculata?": he calls Mary the created Immaculate Conception, created sinless and from conception uniquely filled with an abundance of grace, in order to be made superabundantly fruitful when she would become the Mother of God through the work of the Holy Spirit. As Kolbe says: "He [the Holy Spirit] makes her fruitful, from the very first instant of her existence, all during her life, and for all eternity." Additionally, he calls the Holy Spirit the Uncreated, Eternal Immaculate Conception, who is "conceived" from the love that flows eternally between the Father and the Son; a love so perfect that it is personified. Kolbe explains:

Everything that exists, outside of God himself, since it is from God and depends upon him in every way, bears within itself some semblance to its Creator . . . because every created thing is an effect of the Primal Cause.
It is true that the words we use to speak of created realities express the divine perfections only in a halting, limited and analogical manner. They are only a more or less distant echo — as are created realities that they signify — of the properties of God himself.
Would not "conception" be an exception to this rule? No, there is never any exception . . .
And who is the Holy Spirit? The flowering of the love of the Father and the Son. If the fruit of created love is a created conception, then the fruit of divine Love, that prototype of all created love, is necessarily a divine "conception." The Holy Spirit is, therefore, the "uncreated, eternal conception," the prototype of all the conceptions that multiply life throughout the whole universe.

In other writings the Polish friar attempts to describe Mary's deep, intimate union with the Third Person of the Trinity from her conception, by calling Mary the "quasi-incarnation" of the Holy Spirit. He is careful to stress that this union "is not of the same order as the hypostatic union linking the human and divine natures in Christ"; for he repeated often that the Holy Spirit does not dwell in Mary in the same way in which the Eternal Word is present in the sacred humanity of Jesus. The notion of the Holy Spirit becoming "in some manner" (quasi) incarnate in Mary may at first seem to be an extreme idea. However, it is somewhat analogous to the statement by St. Louis de Montfort, that "God the Son wishes to form himself, and in a manner of speaking, become incarnate every day in his members through his dear Mother." Along the same lines, St. Paul says: "It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Gal. 2:20).
With the term "quasi-incarnation" Kolbe means that Mary is so much like (quasi) the Holy Spirit, in that she reflects the Third Person of the Trinity especially in two qualities or attributes: receptivity and fruitfulness. The Holy Spirit is the Fruit of the Father and the Son. He was "eternally conceived," if you will, as the Fruit of the all-pure love which has forever flowed between the Father and the Son. He receives the mutual love of the Father and the Son and eternally fructifies it within the inner life of the Trinity. Mary's sinlessness from conception is the fruit of God's love. At Mary's conception the Holy Spirit conformed her to himself. The Blessed Virgin, by reason of the singular grace of her Immaculate Conception, is totally receptive to the love of God. At the Annunciation she receives God's love and in cooperation with the Holy Spirit makes that love fruitful — infinitely so — in conceiving the Incarnate Word.
Mary's receptivity and fruitfulness did not end with the Conception and Birth of Christ. Now in Heaven, Mary remains the living, human conduit for the graces that the Holy Spirit distributes to us. As Kolbe says:

[T]he Holy Spirit manifests his share in the word of Redemption through the Immaculate Virgin who, although she is a person entirely distinct from him, is so intimately associated with him that our minds cannot understand it. So, while their union is not of the same order as the hypostatic union linking the human and divine natures in Christ, it remains true to say that Mary's action is the very action of the Holy Spirit.

St. Maximilian sees Mary's ineffable union with the Holy Spirit from the very first instant of her conception as giving her a privileged place in God's saving plan. In keeping with what God has revealed in Scripture and Tradition regarding Mary's intercessory role in the order of grace, he says:

When we reflect on these two truths: that all graces come from the Father by the Son and the Holy Spirit; and that our Holy Mother Mary is, so to speak, one with the Holy Spirit, we are driven to the conclusion that this Most Holy Mother is indeed the intermediary by whom all graces come to us.

All of God's grace comes to us through Mary's intercession. This is the "descending" order of grace. For Kolbe, there is a corresponding "ascending" order, for Mary is our means for going to God: "Have no doubt that her will is entirely united to God's will. It is a matter, then, of uniting our will to hers, and thus we will be united to God through her." The Polish Saint sees uniting oneself to Mary as the means of conquering the world for Christ:

"The Knights of the Immaculata [members of the MI movement] seek to become ever more truly the property of the Immaculata; to belong to her in an ever more perfect way and under every aspect without any exception. They wish to develop their understanding of what it means to belong to her so that they may enlighten, reinvigorate, and set on fire the souls living in their own environment, and make them similar to themselves. They desire to conquer these souls for the Immaculata, so that in their turn they may belong without reserve and may in this manner win an ever greater number of souls to her — may win the entire world, in fact, and do so in the shortest possible time."

Perhaps what most attracted St. Maximilian to Mary is her beauty: the beauty of the deep and unfathomable mystery of her Immaculate Conception, and the beauty of her spotless purity throughout the entirety of her earthly life, which now radiates forth in heaven. St. Bernadette gives witness to this when, describing the apparitions at Lourdes, she says of Our Lady: "She is so beautiful, that one would be willing to die to see her again."

There are a few things I am a bit uncomfortable about in the emphasis here, but for the most part I think this is remarkable insight, and perhaps the greatest theological insight of the past 500 years in how it ties Mariology, Christology, Trinitarianism (and specifically its most neglected branch Pneumatology), Soteriology, and Ecclesiology up into one remarkably integrated and beautiful package!

I mention Ecclesiology at the end there, and that is the one thing that disturbs me a bit about the emphasis: I think that the idea of Mary as Mediatrix of All Grace, or the wonderful symbolism of the St. Louis de Montfort statement "God the Son wishes to form himself, and in a manner of speaking, become incarnate every day in his members through his dear Mother" are both true. But, as I said, my Marian devotion is subsumed into my concept of the mystical Ecclesia, of Mother Church as Christ's Bride and Body, and I think we risk a certain incompleteness or a certain imbalance in our emphasis on Mary personally if we forget, in these contexts, a typological principle something along the lines of "everything that can be said of Mary can be said of Ecclesia, and vice versa."

Mary is simply the perfect Type, the embodiment as it were, of the Church as Bride. Which is also, of course, Mother, and Christ's body. Not just because, as St. Paul says, "The husband is the head of his wife, and the wife the body of her husband," but because Christ becomes incarnate (either literally or mystically) through her/Her. (The symbolic integration of the Church as Body of Christ, and Holy Communion as the Body of Christ is something else I can only briefly note here, but which is likewise incredibly intricate and elegant symbolism).

And, likewise, Mary also represents simply the perfect degree of what all individual souls could be through divinization in the Church, taking Christ as bridegroom of our souls. I think it is important to keep this association or symbolic equivalence between Mary and Ecclesia (and, to more or less perfect degrees, both and the souls of the saints) in order to understand more fully the relation of both to Holy Spirit (whom we go so far as to call the "Soul of the Church.")

My point in emphasizing Ecclesiology at this point is simply that in calling Mary the "Perfect Image of the Holy Spirit" or even "quasi-incarnation"...I do not think we are elevating Mary to some status of her own as some sort of additional independent divine figure, the "Mariology as Side-Show" attitude I expressed concern about earlier. But rather we must think of all this in its broader typological (and specifically Ecclesiological) context, which I fear Marian devotees of the "private devotional" variety sometimes forget (in the same way they can form a cult of personality around the figure of the Pope without remembering his holistic ecclesiological-symbolic context).

In saying these things about the Virgin Mary, we are simply proclaiming a truth that in a broader sense belongs to the whole mystical Ecclesia, the whole Church (and each saint in it), about the process of divinization (in the East "theosis") and the relationship of the Holy Spirit to that (Trinitarian) process. What we say about Mary here does not set her apart from us, but rather should be indicative of a template that applies to our own souls in the Church (which Mary simply had to the perfect degree).

If we say that Mary is the Mediatrix of All Grace, we are saying that the Church is the Mediatrix of All Grace, and also that we can be mediators of grace for each other within it (though not to the perfect "complete" or "total" degree that Mary herself is.) And the reason it is mainly Mary who is the "stereotypical" private apparition, is because it is the Church which instantiates locally in each time and place and culture. That there are so many "local Maries," that each place has its own special Marian Title or Apparition or Image (or "avatar"), is representative of the fact that the universal Church appears as the local church in each given place. "Our Lady of..." is like "The Church of...[Ephesus, Smyrna, Sardis, etc]" as addressed in the Apocalypse of St. John.

I'd like to return now to the specifically Trinitarian/Pneumatological question. The great thing about Catholicism is how all the symbols ultimately "collapse" upwards into each other. This is one of the things that has always made Catholicism feel true to me and like its author must be Divine: the way that these symbolic resonances are inherent to the system in an internally consistent way, and yet have remained "undiscovered" sometimes by man (implying that they were designed into the system deliberately, and yet not designed into it by man; mathematicians call the corresponding trait in their field "elegance.")

I would like to point out a great article by Stratford Caldecott that specifically links the Coronation of Mary (as the final mystery of the Rosary) with Theosis, the Immaculate Conception, and the Holy Spirit. Many of my insights are the same as or similar to its own, especially as regards the need to integrate Mariology back into Ecclesiology and the other branches of theology. It is a truly excellent article. Read it!

Specifically I would like to share the following quote, which begins to get to the very heart of defining not just Mary's relationship to the Holy Spirit, but setting both in the Trinitarian context. About Kolbe's "quasi-incarnation" formulation, Caldecott says:

This formulation remains highly controversial, not least because it does not seem adequate to preserve the distinction between the generation of the Son and the procession of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity. The phrase "Uncreated Immaculate Conception" would seem to apply more directly to the Person of the Son as the one "begotten" by the Father than to the Spirit "breathed forth". I would be inclined to defend Kolbe's phrase by arguing that "Conception" here refers rather to the act of conception than to the one conceived or begotten in or through the act. The Holy Spirit is thus the one "in whom" the Son is eternally begotten, the one "in whom" the Father contemplates and loves his Son. The motherhood of the Mother of God then becomes an image of the active conceiving of this Word in the bosom of the eternal Trinity - the Word carried on the breath of the Spirit, the wings of the Dove. She is the earthly image of the "hearing" or "understanding" of the Eternal Word. For the Word generated by the Father is understood by the one in whom it is received perfectly - by that person, in fact, who is the Immaculate Conception. The Mother of God is thus the earthly image not of the Father's generation of the Son, nor of the Son's generation by the Father, but of the Holy Spirit's conception of the Son as a gift for the Father and for the world. This means also that the Mother of God is an image of the way the Son is loved in the eternal Trinity, since in God to understand is to love and to love is to understand.

Of course, to some this might sound like it is getting dangerously close to declaring the Holy Spirit as "Mother" in the Trinity. I do not think this actually follows from what is being said, however I do think it means that notions of the Holy Spirit as feminine (internal to the Trinity, not in His ad extra attribution necessarily) or as maternal may have some merit. After all, if there is a correspondance between Maria and Ecclesia and the Holy Spirit in our symbolic system, this would suggest itself.

The objection to the vision Caldecott presents above, of a maternal interpretation of the procession of the Holy Spirit, is usually to be found in, ironically, a particular form of "familial" interpretation of the Trinity that is another pet peeve of mine.

[Note that what I say in the rest of this article is from an unabashed Filioquist perspective, involving the "relations of opposition" within the Trinity. Nevertheless, remember, I've done a post before (and plan to do another following up on that sometime soon) on the Filioque and believe that the Orthodox and Catholic views are complementary and actually referring to two different "levels" of Trinitarian reality (in the former case to "hypostatic existence," in the latter to "eternal energetic manifestation"). In this case, however, I'm referring to the latter in which sense the Filioque is true, involving the Persons of the Trinity undestood as "relations of opposition."]

The familial interpretation of the Trinity that bugs me is related to the way that emphasizing Mary as specifically "Spouse of the Spirit" (when that is true of all three persons as discussed above) irks me. There is a certain popular (but hopelessly convoluted) explanation of the Trinitarian image within a human family as something along the lines of "Just like the Father's love for the Son overflows as the Holy Spirit, so does the husband's love for his wife overflow in a third person which is the child."

The mixing of metaphors here is grating to anyone with any critical thinking skills. It's not that I deny that there is a Trinitarian image in the human family. There is. In fact, in spite of certain Church Fathers' reluctance to place the Image of God in man in this relational aspect (as opposed to our intellect and will), to me it's pretty obvious that the very Revealed names of "Father" and "Son" imply just such a familial context for interpretation. That's not to say the intellect and will thing isn't true also, but God did not Reveal the Son as "Intellect" primarily or the Holy Spirit as "Will."

However, if the Trinitarian analogy is "Father+Son = Holy Spirit, just like Husband + Wife = Baby"...this is hopelessly confused. As it ends up turning the Son into the Mother, and the Holy Spirit into the Son. This is clearly mixed up. In any familial interpretation of the Holy Trinity, the relationship of Father generating Son can only possibly find its analogue in a father generating a child (duh).

This same sort of mix-up happens with how Catholics sometimes peak of Mary's relationship to the Holy Spirit. Specifically (once again "Spouse of the Spirit" understood improperly causing problems) there is this tendency to speak as if the Holy Spirit played the paternal role in the conception of Jesus. But again, obviously, this is terribly confused. Clearly, it is the Father who is the paternal force. The Father is the father of Christ, not the Holy Spirit.

What to make of the dogma, then, that Mary "conceived of/by the Holy Spirit"? I think both Kolbe and Caldecott suggest the correct solution: the Holy Spirit was not the divine paternal force in the conception of Christ in Mary, but rather was the divine maternal force, which rendered Mary able to conceive the Father's Son, which rendered her receptive to the Father's paternity in such a way that she could enter into a real relationship of Divine Maternity with the Son. And this constituting of Mary as receptive in this manner, this taking her up into divine maternity began not at the Annunciation, but at the Immaculate Conception itself where the Father rendered her a fitting Mother through the (foreseen merits of) the Son.

This clarification, I think, provides the key for how the proper interpretation of the Family as Trinitarian should work, and for how the Holy Spirit may be envisioned as maternal within the Trinity (as a "collapsing" of Mary and the Church "into" the Holy Spirit would likewise imply.) The common objection to this notion by those holding the simplistic analogy (the one that turns the Son into the mother and the Holy Spirit into the son in a family) is that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. If the Spirit was maternal, it would be the Father + the Holy Spirit = the Son. This, however, is the great misunderstanding (and probably only further pushes the Orthodox away by the simplistic and wrong way this understanding invokes the Filioque idea).

We must remember what, in the Western tradition, the persons of the Trinity are. They are relations subsisting. The Father is really "fatherhood," is paternity subsisting, the Son is really "sonship," is filiation subsisting. I think you may be able to see now why mothers should not be conceived of as the "second person" in a family, but rather as the third. Or, rather, why motherhood is the third relation, even if the woman constituted in that relation precedes the child in time. But in the order of logical causation of the relationships, it is "father" that implies "child" first, and only then through the child is a "mother" implied.

When thought of in terms of relations, it becomes rather obvious: what is the first concept immediately implied by the word "father" or "fatherhood." It's not "mother." That's more remote. Obviously, the first thing, the thing logically implied by the very definition of "father" is "child." A father is only a father relative to a child and vice versa. If mother came second in the order of logical implication this would be incoherent (as there can be no father or mother without child!) So it is the generation of son by father, and the oppositional definition of fatherhood and sonship, which are the first two relations in a family. Then, "through the son," a third person is constituted in relationship relative to both of them (namely the mother impregnated).

I have pointed this out to my own father before. He sometimes insists that he "isn't related to" my mother (as he is to his children, or us to both of them). What he means is that they share no common ancestors, no blood, no genes, etc. However, I point out to him, while they may not have common ancestors, they do now have common descendents. Whatever else happens, they are now biologically "related" in an irretrievable sense; she can never not be the mother of his children, he can never not be the father of hers.

This is why procreation is at the heart of the Catholic conception of marriage (if only in the abstract for some couples, like the infertile, etc). Before the child (or, at least, the concept of the child in their promise of sexual exclusivity), the father and mother are just a man and a woman, not "really" related except in a voluntary way. But through a child they become truly related through and in a person. Their relationship is really constituted as generationally irrevocable (ie, there will be a "plus sign" on a family tree forever) through the child. It is the generation of a child by the father, and the establishing of the mother into relationship with both that constitutes, which truly binds up the family in Trintarian relationality.

Just as brief aside (perhaps biased by my own familial experiences) I think this point has relevance for how families should be prioritized. Many people nowadays (and it goes along with the whole incorrect version of Trinitarian analogy for families) tend to think of the love between the husband and wife as the "primary" relationship in a family, as the "foundation." However, once again, the Trinity itself should give us pause. The primary relationship in the universe is between Father and Son, the primary love is of Father for Son. I think that in any family, the love of parents for their children must be placed conceptually before the love of the husband for the wife. That love, that relationship, is not "substantial" until there is a relationship of father to child (from which the relationship of mother to both overflows).

Before a child (or at least the idea of child), they're just two people living together. The relationship of "motherhood" (which is a relation to both child and the father, mind you) is only constituted through the generation of child by the father in her. So, appealing to the Trinitarian fact that the primal relationship of the universe is not a dualistic male/female one, but the like-by-like love of Father for Son, I am inclined think families based on the love of parents for their children (and, most symbolically appropriate, of father for first-born son) are bound to be more stable than those based on the love between husband and wife.

So, does all this mean we should call the Holy Spirit "Mother"?? No. In fact, this is where the familial analogy falls short. While we could imagine a father and son coming into being in the very act of generation of latter by former, we could not really imagine this for a mother. Which is to say, "father" can be abstracted from any pre-existent man and taken just as a relational term. So can "son" especially (as no child pre-exists the act of generation). But the very notion "mother" implies a pre-existent woman "in whom" the father is generating the son, a woman who pre-exists her being constituted as "mother" through that generation.

The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, does not function like this, obviously. If there is in some sense in which the Son is conceived "in" the Holy Spirit (ala Caldecott's language) this does not mean there was any pre-existent Person (in terms of the order of logical causality) for this to happen "in." It might be more appropriate to say the Son is generated "into" the Holy Spirit, as the procession of the Holy Spirit flows from or through the generation of the Son (in the order of relations of opposition). As Caldecott says, like "the Word carried on the breath of the Spirit," the breath does not precede the word, in fact it proceeds from the speaking.

Some will find resonance with one or the other in the feminine Sophia/Wisdom who appears in the Old Testament. Though often interpreted as an image of the Second Person in His passive relation to the Father (hence the feminine), I think it might make more sense to read Sophia as the Holy Spirit; after all, Wisdom is not Word, but rather proceeds through Word, is what is conveyed by Word (and yet, at the same time, is the "conception" in the intellectual sense in which the Word is spoken). It is notable in this regard that the traditional Roman Liturgy uses all the Wisdom passages in a Marian/Ecclesiological fashion rather than a Christological one.

Either way, while the Holy Spirit is like the relationship of motherhood in some important ways, we cannot speak of the Holy Spirit as "Mother" in the sense of "maternity subsisting," because of how the analogy breaks down in this way: a mother comes before her child (even if she only becomes "mother" because of the child), whereas the Holy Spirit (in the causal order of the divine processions, at least the "eternal energetic" ones) comes only after the Son or dependent on the Son, because of how the divine persons are pure relations subsisting. Furthermore, though I have pointed out here that motherhood actually constitutes a relation to both the child and the father, we do not predicate the word "mother" to her relationship to the father; she does not become her husband's "mother" (though, perhaps, a term like "baby-mama" could, taken in two different senses, connote the relationship constituted to both the child and the father.)

We actually have no word from the natural analogy that would represent the constituting of the third relation through the second (yet without reference a pre-existent subject). Citing "impregnation" or "conception" as a relationship-constituting action referring to the event itself rather than to the fruit of that event (as Caldecott describes) comes close, as does the analogy to the Immaculate Conception (where Mary was constituted a fitting mother only first by referencing the merits of the Son) and Kolbe takes advantage of this with his suggestion of "Uncreated Immaculate Conception," but this is clearly not a proper name in the same sense that Father and Son are.

In reality, the Holy Spirit (and His corresponding spiration/procession) has no proper name like this. Aquinas explains in the Summa:

While there are two processions in God, one of these, the procession of love, has no proper name of its own, as stated above (27, 4, ad 3). Hence the relations also which follow from this procession are without a name (28, 4): for which reason the Person proceeding in that manner has not a proper name. But as some names are accommodated by the usual mode of speaking to signify the aforesaid relations, as when we use the names of procession and spiration, which in the strict sense more fittingly signify the notional acts than the relations; so to signify the divine Person, Who proceeds by way of love, this name "Holy Spirit" is by the use of scriptural speech accommodated to Him. The appropriateness of this name may be shown in two ways.

Firstly, from the fact that the person who is called "Holy Spirit" has something in common with the other Persons. For, as Augustine says (De Trin. xv, 17; v, 11), "Because the Holy Spirit is common to both, He Himself is called that properly which both are called in common. For the Father also is a spirit, and the Son is a spirit; and the Father is holy, and the Son is holy."

Secondly, from the proper signification of the name. For the name spirit in things corporeal seems to signify impulse and motion; for we call the breath and the wind by the term spirit. Now it is a property of love to move and impel the will of the lover towards the object loved. Further, holiness is attributed to whatever is ordered to God. Therefore because the divine person proceeds by way of the love whereby God is loved, that person is most properly named "The Holy Spirit."

This question of names and what they signify as regards the relations has an interesting implication too that it's fun to point out:

In the name Son we understand that relation only which is of something from a principle, in regard to that principle: but in the name "Father" we understand the relation of principle; and likewise in the name of Spirit inasmuch as it implies a moving power. But to no creature does it belong to be a principle as regards a divine person; but rather the reverse. Therefore we can say "our Father," and "our Spirit"; but we cannot say "our Son."

So, though clarifying the role of maternity in the familial analogy and associating the Holy Spirit with that (especially in Mary and the Church) hopefully will provide a richer and more dynamic understanding of Mariology, Pneumatology, and the Family for people, the Holy Spirit remains without a proper name. Perhaps this is fitting, however, as each of us individually (each with our own proper names) receives the indwelling of the Holy Spirit at baptism, are incorporated thereby into the Church and, after the pattern of the Blessed Virgin Mary are taken up into the bosom of the Trinity itself through our divinization by grace.

Singing "Over" a Latin Low Mass? Intriguing Possibilities, Especially Regarding the Vernacular

2011-11-14T13:59:00.005-06:00

I am a big supporter of vernacular in liturgy. I recently held up this Western Rite Orthodox celebration as approaching my ideal, for example, which would basically be to use translations of the Propers of the Old Mass according to a nice "thee and thou" kingly English translation (ala the Anglican Missal or English Missal), leave the Ordinary in Latin, and make the priest's spoken "private devotional" parts (Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, Offertory, Communion prayers, Last Gospel, etc) audible but probably in the vernacular, as I sort of hate the practice of "singing over" parts of the Mass or using motets at High Mass, etc.

Some of what I am about to suggest might then sound a bit counter-intuitive, as it involves both a whole lot of "singing over" and the possibility of vernacular for even the Ordinary of the Mass, though the point of the latter would be to "ease people into" the Old Mass who are entirely unfamiliar, who only know the vernacular Novus Ordo.

In fact, I also thought-up once a graduated system of different "internally consistent" combinations of music and/or language that I'd like to see approved for the Old Mass (given that one of my pet peeves at the Novus Ordo is inconsistency in this regard; where, for example, a priest will chant the collect at the beginning but then only read the postcommunion, or where the Agnus Dei is randomly in Latin even though none of the rest of the Ordinary was, etc). That system would be nice, but what I'm saying here now, however, is an attempt to work "within" the current rules.

Basically, I had this idea during university that the permission/tradition of having vernacular hymns sung at/over a Low Mass, and even to have private devotions (like the rosary) being prayed aloud in the church at the same time, could be used to, essentially, create a "virtual" Old Mass in English, or to make a Low Mass into a sort of virtual High Mass (whether Latin or vernacular).

The idea was essentially: fine, have the priest praying his Low Mass entirely spoken and in Latin, but if the congregation is free to extra-liturgically sing hymns (including vernacular hymns) or pray prayers "unofficially" while that's going on...why not have them sing the Ordinary during Low Mass, "unofficially" as "hymns"? If we're allowed to "unofficially" sing hymns (Latin or vernacular) over the Low Mass, why couldn't those hymns be the Mass itself?

And, what's more, why not have them sing/chant a vernacular translation of the actual Proper antiphons while the priest reads them quietly up at the altar (and, ideally, waits for the congregation to finish singing; a big part of what I dislike about "singing over" Mass parts is how the priest often "moves on with" his Mass independent of the choir and so the whole thing gets disjointed/out of synch). Or even pray the priest's "private devotional" parts out loud in the vernacular as their own congregational "private devotion"? Heck, maybe even the collects or readings could be sung by the choir as "hymns" over the corresponding parts (there is also, of course, the permission to read the lessons in the vernacular to consider too.)

However, I was told by some, this was forbidden. They insisted: you can sing anything at Low Mass except the Ordinary or Propers (in Latin or the vernacular). On the one hand, this extremely frustrated me and seemed bizarre and impossible (how can what the congregation sings be legislated with reference to the Low Mass, if the Low Mass is technically "private" anyway with the congregation technically just "observing"?)

On the other hand, it made some sad sense: if the Vatican was trying to resist a vernacular liturgy tooth-and-nail (until it finally gave up and gave in), allowing a "virtual" one to be created through basically layering an "unofficial" translation as "hymns" or "private prayers" over a silent Low Mass...would be sort of a cheat or loophole they might want to close (I was sad they were clever or prescient enough to do that.) And at that point I'd rather Low Mass just be spoken, then, as a dialogue (because I don't really like using totally extra-liturgical hymns, Latin or vernacular, at any sort of Mass, except maybe the seasonal Marian Antiphon for the recessional...but then, that isn't totally extra-liturgical.)

However, an event I recently saw advertised on the blog of Una Voce Toronto (which I missed, unfortunately; I wish I had known of it) apparently put something into practice which would suggest to me it isn't entirely forbidden as some sources claim. Basically they had a Low/Read Dialogue Mass (though I hate that some people treat the "Dialogue Mass" as a separate category: all Masses should be dialogue Masses! The people should make their responses and recite or sing the Ordinary!) with hymns and motets (as is usual). But the interesting thing was that this time some of the "hymns" were going to include singing the Latin Ordinary parts from Mass VIII (I know, not my favorite, but well-known) over the corresponding parts of the Low Mass.

And if this can be done, of course, the jump to doing that for the Propers too, or for either in the vernacular...is inevitable. If unofficially singing Mass parts over a Low Mass is allowed, and vernacular hymns are allowed, then unofficial vernacular translations of Mass parts as "hymns" can't logically be forbidden.

So I did some research and found this Fr. Z thread where quite a debate once raged. While some people put forward the "you can basically sing anything at Low Mass, Latin or vernacular, except Mass parts or translations thereof" interpretation, other voices said this was a misunderstanding of the relevant decrees, that it only applied to the priest, or that this was definitely not true, or wasn't any longer at least, or that at least there were no definitive sources saying you can't (and some even citing sources seeming to approve the practice as regards the Latin Ordinary).

So, it seems to me now that the practice is not definitively condemned! It is at least ambiguous as to whether this is allowed, and what is ambiguous may be done and is apparently practiced some places sometimes (including here apparently). Certainly, I don't think anyone could try to claim it was unambiguously illicit (after all, maybe a choir is just "practicing" for a vernacular Novus Ordo later, and a priest "just happens to be" saying his "private" Low Mass in the same church in a manner that "coincidentally" syncs perfectly with that, lol!)

You'd have to be careful about who you let see it. A rad trad who came expecting to pray their rosary during an entirely silent Low Mass might get a rude awakening and raise a hubbub with Ecclesia Dei or something like that. But, still, the possibility is intriguing if one could find a priest and choir willing to participate in such a venture...

Sensationalism...But A Good Story

2011-11-14T11:56:00.003-06:00

I had never heard this story about the Swiss Guard Murders in the Vatican in the 1990's. Who knows if the saltier theories are true or not, but they certainly make for the kind of racy gossip that the Vatican prefers to hush (and yet, I feel, by that very fact sometimes deserves) about what goes on within its walls:

On May 4, 1998, five shots rang out inside a private apartment tucked within the fortified walls of Vatican City in Rome. Dead were Alois Estermann, the newly appointed commander of the elite Swiss Guard army that protects the pope; Estermann’s Venezuelan wife, Gladys Meza Romero, a former model; and Cedric Tornay, who was a corporal in the Swiss Guard. No one heard the shots, according to neighbors who were interviewed after the murders, but the three bodies were enough proof to solve the crime, at least according to the Vatican. The Holy See’s official line was that corporal Tornay had killed Estermann and his wife before putting his 7mm pistol into his mouth and blowing his brains out. The motive was simple, they said. Tornay had been passed up by Estermann for a promotion and could not contain his rage.

[...]

In the years that followed, reporters followed several leads in a yet- unsolved quest for the truth about what may have really happened that night. Several books have been penned about the case, but none so far have truly solved the crime. It was no secret within the Swiss Guard that Estermann was a bisexual who had a weakness for young recruits and had allegedly just ended a sexual relationship with Tornay, who was 23 at the time. One theory is that when Estermann turned his affections to another young recruit, Tornay allegedly lost his temper and killed Estermann and his wife in a jealous rage. In a book written on the case called Verbum Dei et Verbum Gay ("God's Word, Gay Word"), author Massimo Lacchei writes that in the days before the murders, he had observed Estermann and Tornay at what he describes as a gay brunch and had later interviewed Tornay, who he said was clearly attached to his superior. He says, ''They were so intimate and friendly for a subordinate and a captain.”

Another theory is that Estermann was at the core of a power struggle within the Swiss Guard itself. On one side was the über-conservative Opus Dei movement, and on the other a Masonic sect with growing strength within the elite guard. Estermann, who was appointed as the guards’ new commander just hours before he was murdered, was caught in the middle, according to a book called Blood Lies in the Vatican, written by anonymous authors who claim to be priests and insiders who live inside the Vatican walls. They maintain that Tornay was attacked and dragged to the Vatican cellar, where he was “suicided” by commandos and then later placed in Estermann’s apartment after the real assailants did their dirty work. They conclude, “The element that undermines the official truth is the fact that no one heard the five loud shots fired by the powerful pistol found under Cedric Tornay’s body.”

It's like a real life Da Vinci Code (with just as much credibility maybe, but still fun! By which, I mean, the salacious "mystery" aspect, not the fact that people died...)

Grace and Free Will: A Thomist Double-Standard?

2011-11-12T20:08:00.009-06:00

The question of grace and free-will is one of the thorniest in theology. How are we to affirm that every good act of the human will is a grace from God (God being the only possible cause for goodness in something, of course) without either slipping into Pelagianism or Semi-Pelagianism, and yet without turning God into either the author of sin in a Calvinist way? Exploring the history of this debate in the Church and trying to wrap ones head around these questions is daunting to say the least, and has left many a theologian feeling like he was running in circles.

I've discussed this question in a few posts before. Most recently, I think, was when I was explaining the correct sense of Cardinal George's statement that "God loves some more than others." This statement is no doubt true in a very real sense, as God's love is the cause of goodness in things, things are only "good" inasmuch as He wills them to be, and so the very fact that some people have more goodness than others...means by definition He loves them more in one sense. I will quote Aquinas again on this point, which it is essential to believe in order to properly understand the metaphysical relation of God to the concept of goodness:

Since to love a thing is to will it good, in a twofold way anything may be loved more, or less. In one way on the part of the act of the will itself, which is more or less intense. In this way God does not love some things more than others, because He loves all things by an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same. In another way on the part of the good itself that a person wills for the beloved. In this way we are said to love that one more than another, for whom we will a greater good, though our will is not more intense. In this way we must needs say that God loves some things more than others. For since God's love is the cause of goodness in things, as has been said, no one thing would be better than another, if God did not will greater good for one than for another.

No orthodox person who really understands the issue disputes this. The "debate" is really over why God loves some more than others. Is it pure gratuitous whim on His part? After all, He doesn't have to love anything in any particular way anymore than He has to create any specific thing (which means, after all, to love it in the sense of willing it the good of existence). Or, is there some way in which consideration of human free will can play a more substantial role in determining to whom God gives which or how much grace (yet without positing anything Pelagian like a good act independent of or prior to God's willing it first)? The Church has allowed this question to remain discussed for centuries and never definitively favored any of the tolerated schools.

I've discussed this before in relation to the solution that I have found most appealing for a long time, the one proposed by Fr. William Most. However, discussions I had in the comments section of that post, as well as discussions I had elsewhere with strict Thomists on the issue afterward...gave me some pause and made me wonder whether that solution really actually solves anything, for reasons of an objection I will summarize below.

And so for a while I doubted my preferred solution and was sympathetic to erring on the side of speaking in the language of strict Thomism, at least (even if something felt a little too "Calvinist" in it, and I really thought that it must simply be expressing a sort of chicken-and-the-egg mystery). However, another blog post recently made me realize that there is sort of a double-standard inherent in the objection Thomists were making to the Fr. Most solution to this predestination question.

The strict Thomist opinion (though I'm not entirely convinced it is what Aquinas himself had in mind when he was writing) certainly has a robust and internally consistent theology of grace and free will that avoids any sort of Pelagianism, but to many of us it can seem to make God's decision just a little too arbitrary, can seem like it turns "free will" and "sufficient" grace into just a sort of ontological legal fiction by which God is able to exculpate Himself from active causation from sin through how He defines the terms of secondary causes.

And yet, if He arbitrarily doesn't stop sin some cases, by not granting the grace of non-sinning that we all need to not sin, isn't that sort of a cheat, sort of a passive causation given that He's also the one who designed the system to work in such a way that sin is the "default" if He doesn't actively provide grace?

The answer is actually, technically, no, not in any coherent understanding of causation and intent (in fact, the allowance for NFP hinges in part on this important distinction regarding active causation vs. permissive will, though it's different here given that God set the conditions in the first place too). And yet, often a technicality is all this seems to be when it comes to our gut reactions to it. There is still a sense in which God's non-giving would seem to "lead to" sin inevitably (even if we can't call it an active "cause") given how He made the requirement about needing His giving to not sin, and could give, and yet then didn't. It seems like stacking the deck; the person never even had a fair shot, and "blaming" it on their free will (even though God was the one who made that free will in the first place in such a way that it could do no good without His grace) like sort of a legal loophole for God.

On the other hand, of course, that's just the problem with the non-Thomist schools: how can non-sinning be anything other than a grace? If we are to avoid Pelagianism or Semi-Pelagianism, then a notion of free will that says "some people chose to reject grace, and that's why they didn't get it" is problematic. It's true in a sense, to be sure. But the other people's choice not to resist grace like that...must itself be a grace, and the people who chose to reject grace obviously weren't given that grace of a choice of non-rejection, and why not? So we're back to where we started.

And so, the "best" solution I've seen is something along the lines of Fr. William Most redefining the problem so that sin is not the "default" (which indeed would seem to make God look like a real jerk if He arbitrarily left people in that default, even if that's technically a "passive" non-choice, given that He's the one who set the default in the first place.) Or, rather, defining the "sufficient grace" that is given to everyone to mean that a good choice is made the default (through that grace).

In other words, shifting the burden of active choice (or passive non-choice) from God to man. Non-resistance, rather than sin, now becomes the default requiring no further causation from God (and yet is still attributable only to grace), and so sin can be attributed only to man's making an additional active choice to reject (and no longer relies in any sense on God's non-making of a choice to give grace for some).

Of course, the Thomists would object, that solves nothing as the other people not making such an active choice must itself be a grace (and one that that the people who do actively reject obviously did not get). However, I think that the solution to such an objection would have something to do with the fact that in such a scenario goodness has already been made the "default" by way of the sufficient grace, and so such non-sin would not necessarily require explanation by any additional cause, because it is not an additional active choice (though the sin is).

And this is where I see a certain double-standard here: the objections to this theory I have seen all rely on insisting that a spontaneous evil free choice on the part of the sinners implies that a corresponding additional grace of not doing that has been given to the saints, distinct from the "default" non-resistance of the proposed sufficient grace. However, this notion of causation, inasmuch as it parses continued non-choice as a sort of good choice in-itself requiring an additional cause...seems to go against the very notions of passive non-choice that they use to excuse God not giving grace to everyone in their theory!

In the Thomist scenario, God choosing to give efficacious grace (only) to some is not taken to be an active willing of the (nevertheless then inevitable) sin of the others, anymore than me giving alms to one beggar should be interpreted as me actively or positively willing the poverty of the others. True enough, and it remains true technically even if I could give to the others but simply don't (my giving being gratuitous in the first place).

But. If that passive non-choice on God's part is recognized as a sort of metaphysical zero in such cases (ie, the choice to grace some is not equivalent an active or positive choice not to grace the others, even if that is the practical effect)...then why should a similar non-choice be interpreted as an active act requiring an additional cause/grace when it is human wills in question? Why would not positively choosing to actively work against the "default" be a metaphysical zero with God when it comes to giving grace to prevent sin, but then something requiring additional explanation with humans? Why can non-choice be written off as totally non-causal on God's part, a mere negative, but then construed as something substantial, a positive reality requiring an additional intervention, when it comes to us? It seems like two different metaphysics of causation and choice suddenly.

As such, I'm back to being convinced of Fr. Most's explanation. It is not that God arbitrarily doesn't-give (albeit that would "only" be a non-choice) efficacious grace to some, leaving them (albeit in a "passive" and "negative" sense, not an active causation) to sin by default (which really does seem to me to make talk of "sufficient" grace and "free" will into technicalities). Rather, in His universal salvific will (which thus has a very real sense), He gives sufficient grace to everyone, making good (and not sin) our default. If some people then spontaneously actively resist (as are truly free to do), that is on them, their freedom alone is the inscrutable and irreducible explanation for it (just as God's will is the inscrutable explanation for "Why these?" in the Thomist theory).

But for the rest, their non-resistance requires no additional cause or grace or explanation as it is non-act (just as God's non-act of giving to the sinners is not a positive reality; "Why these?" can be answered, but "Why not those?" is asking an explanation for a negative, which is erroneous; my choice is do what I do, it would be absurd to think of it as a positive choice to not do every other conceivable thing possible), and so the original "default" carries them through to a good act; efficacious grace, then, is sufficient grace non-resisted rather than something substantially distinct.

Of course, I may be making a distinction where there is none. Perhaps there is nothing mutually exclusive about what I'm saying and a Thomist position, really. Perhaps answering, "Why did God give grace to these?" with "His will alone," and answering "Why did these choose to sin," and answering, "Their will alone," while at the same time recognizing that asking "Why didn't God give grace to those?" and "Why didn't those choose to sin?" is impossibly asking the causes of negatives...are really just saying the same thing looking at it from two different directions or perspectives. As either way it comes down to this: our good choices can only be attributed to God's sheer grace, our bad acts can only be attributed to our own free choice. It feels rather Eckhartian to me, but perhaps God's freedom and our freedom are in some sense just two sides of the same coin, the limit of each being only each other.

Squeamishness

2011-11-11T10:35:00.003-06:00

I once did a post exploring the hypothetical of industrializing production of human breast milk for sale, either for babies themselves (or even for adults!) The post ended up discussing the phenomenon that, even though I can't find anything intrinsically ethically wrong or immoral with the idea (wet-nurses have always existed, people sell their hair for wigs, etc) there is something that "feels wrong" about it. But on the other hand, maybe that's just squeamishness.

I just came across another article that raises related, but also very different, issues for me. This article suggests that soon enough meat (and other sorts of animal products) will be grown from animal stem-cells in laboratories rather than having to actually raise a whole animal and then slaughter it (and waste the unuseable parts, etc). That this will both solve the objections of vegans and vegetarians and animal rights folks (since there was never a whole living animal alive and killed in the first place) and also make meat-eating much more sustainable for mankind, as we won't need to waste all that land and water and grain on feeding the livestock (the proportions of which truly are unjust and unsustainable: the grain that could feed 16 people creates enough meat to feed only 1).

However, there is something a bit icky seeming about this, no? I mean just based on the sheer artificiality of it. And yet, if they made it absolutely indistinguishable, would any of us care? We wouldn't even be able to tell.

On the other hand, to do a reductio ad absurdum thought experiment...what if we used human adult stem-cells to grow human meat (never part of a living person, mind you)? Surely this couldn't be good? And yet, no one would object to swallowing a hang-nail, which is a little piece of your own skin, after all...so how would this be different in nature rather than merely degree? Still, the commodification of something human seems so wrong, even if we didn't eat it, even prior to the natural revulsion/taboo against consuming human flesh. And yet, as I think back to my breast-milk question...wet-nurses have long sold their breast-milk, as it were, and people have often grown out their hair to sell it for wigs, so maybe it's just the thought of living tissue that makes us squeamish? And, no one is objecting to adult-stem-cells used to grow new organs to implant to save lives.

Of course, no one is actually proposing using this process to popularize cannibalism, but rather to deal with animal meat. And squeamishness is relative, I suppose: is the idea of lab-grown "humane" meat really any less disgusting than the fact that, currently, eating meat involves violently excising bloody muscle from the corpse of an enslaved animal? And yet, I still love eating meat...

Personhood?

2011-11-10T14:26:00.003-06:00

The so-called "Personhood Amendment" recently failed to pass in Mississippi, though the referendum was quite close.

I support the intent of such amendments. Pro-choice folk (even and even some "moderate" pro-lifers now, whatever that means) are calling such an amendment extreme, granting full legal protection to all fertilized eggs as persons under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment and such. Of course, if you do believe life begins at conception, then its homicide regardless of the circumstances (rape or, they always add as a scare-tactic, "incest"...even though that's redundant as the incest in question is almost certainly already rape) and even in things like IVF and certain forms of "contraception" which work by preventing implantation of already fertilized ova.

Now, human life clearly begins at conception; there is a unique living organism there of the species Homo Sapiens with separate DNA from either the mother or father, and it's growing into a baby. As such, abortion is at least virtual homicide.

However, the idea that personhood (in the sense of rational ensoulment) begins at conception is a separate question, and one not actually binding on Catholics. I am frankly rather agnostic on the question.

On the one hand, I am inclined to sympathize with Cardinal Ratzinger when he said in Donum Vitae, "the conclusions of science regarding the human embryo provide a valuable indication for discerning by the use of reason a personal presence at the moment of this first appearance of a human life: how could a human individual not be a human person?" Though the document recognizes, "The Magisterium has not expressly committed itself to an affirmation of a philosophical nature, but it constantly reaffirms the moral condemnation of any kind of procured abortion. This teaching has not been changed and is unchangeable."

I am likewise sympathetic to the argument from potential/finality something along the lines of: "Though as miniscule as the dot of a pen, a unicellular human organism is an individual substance with the substrata of rationality there in place, ready to evolve into the complexity of a human brain and related organs. Since every stage of hominization is a needed building block integral to ongoing growth, ensouled personhood [...] begins at the very beginning of a uniquely individual identity with inherent human potential."

However, of course, there are arguments against this too. For one, the mainstream philosophical assumption of the Church for centuries was that ensoulment happened later than physical conception, that it happened at "quickening," or at 40 days for a boy and 80 days for a girl, because the embryo had to first pass through stages with just a "vegetative" soul and then a purely "animal" soul before receiving a rational soul.

And while a distinction between male and female fetuses now seems ridiculously, and while something as cut-and-dry as "40 days" seems absurd, in some ways it does seem counter-intuitive (or like a mere abstract philosophical proposition, however true it may be) to think that a clump of cells has a rational nature, or that a little fish-looking thing has anything more than an animal nature at that point. Before it starts looking like a baby, before it has a brain even, telling people that consciousness-of-nothing is different than not being conscious (as true as that may be) can seem rather metaphysical and detached from anything concrete. It's hard for people to think of something microscopic with no face or even feelings as human when even animals have those things.

I am also given pause by the enormous number of spontaneous abortions that apparently happen within the first few weeks of pregnancy (before it can even be detected). What are we to think of the fate of all these children in a world where the only means of salvation (that God has Publicly Revealed, at least) is baptism? Does it make sense to imagine that most of the human race never really has a human life, never even develops a brain or senses or even knows another human being?

And yet, I come back to, "how could a human individual not be a human person?" I'm not sure Aristotle or Aquinas were right that "progressive ensoulment" makes any sense. Why should rational nature only come after a certain (but still very minimal) stage of brain or bodily development? Isn't it the already rational form of the human substance that makes it tend toward developing that in the first place (whatever material impediments may arise to its fulfillment?)

Still, I will make two points: one, either way it is better to err on the side of caution. Since there are problems with any other "line" we might draw, fertilization is still where we must err. Second, even if ensoulment were concluded to occur at a later point, this is an abstract theological question that does not change the sinfulness of abortion nor the need to protect all human life on the civil level. Human life is sacred, a human individual would be sacred even if it were somehow not an ensouled person. Abortion would remain [virtual] homicide equal in gravity to any murder either way (and this was the constant attitude of the Church even when ensoulment-at-a-later-date was the mainstream assumption).

But even beyond the realm of immorality, in the realm of ethics and rights, it will be noted that the civil law's protection of human individuals, human lives, is not dependent on some theological notion of ensoulment. Even officially atheist communist countries punished murder and recognized a general imperative of the State to protect people from violence. The State's imperative to stop homicides is not dependent on some notion of human beings having a soul; even officially atheist States that do not believe in souls recognize such a natural imperative to protect life.

An appeal against abortion dependent on the existence of a soul is not necessarily the best argument to use with people who don't believe in souls for anyone in the first place, and though we probably have bigger fish to fry with such people, it is still not impossible to tell them that abortion should be illegal for the same reason killing they themselves should be illegal (unless they are so disgustingly nihilistic or materialistically utilitarian that they don't even have an absolute opposition to that).

Western Rite

2011-11-09T13:12:00.007-06:00

Nice to see. Someday maybe in the real Church...

That they did Lauds beforehand is a nice touch. Nevertheless, there are still a few things I'd be inclined to modify. Besides the fact that I'd like a Solemn Mass of course (maybe they just didn't have the ministers), I still generally have this aversion to "singing over" things in liturgy (especially with non-liturgical hymns or instrumental motets), and would rather have things like the Prayers at the Foot of the Altar, the Offertory, and the Last Gospel read aloud (even if they did start as "private devotional" prayers of the priest). I've said before that I'd be inclined to have actual Entrance, Gospel, and Offertory processions with the appropriate antiphons instead.

And it is odd to me that they'd sing the Kyrie in Greek and the Ite Missa Est in Latin, but then keep the Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, (and, I assume, though the video skips from the elevation of the host to the people's communion, the Agnus Dei) in English. I'd think these Ordinary chants (along with the Pater Noster, the Ordinary dialogue parts, and certainly the silent Canon itself) could be kept in Latin as a nod to tradition, even if I think we should put the Propers and those "priest's devotional" parts in the vernacular. I think that would be the best balance.

Baptists, Alcohol, and Catholic Barbecues

2011-11-08T08:50:00.015-06:00

I was thinking again about the post I did recently on the difficult question of attendance at invalid or unnatural weddings or unions (outside the Church; ones done disobediently under a co-opted banner of alleged Catholicism, ala Rent-A-Priest, are an even pricklier question).

This is not at all just a theoretical question, but one of (increasingly) practical import in our modern world. People in my generation, at least, especially if we run in circles which are intellectual and diverse (as all the best people do!)...are likely to receive an invitation to a gay union/"marriage" at some point in our lives, just like many of you probably attended at least a couple bar mitvahs in your day (though I never did...) And certainly my parent's generation began very quickly being faced with lapsed Catholics marrying outside the Church, or with non-Catholic friends remarrying after divorce, etc.

My basic conclusion in that post was that there is a difference between tolerance and approval that would seem to allow attendance (with mental reservation) at such ceremonies. That, just as it isn't the Church's job to try to institutionalize Gospel values on the rest of society, on non-believers, in the political sphere, it also isn't our job in our personal lives to "impose" our framework on outsiders in this sort of practical way ("punishing" them by not attending their wedding for example). We can and should share our beliefs in a charitable manner, of course, but there is a way to do that while still respecting theirs.

It is a bizarre putting of the cart before the horse to hold them to our moral standards if they haven't even embraced our moral system (yet), or to think that it is "scandal" to attend an invalid wedding for people who don't even share our paradigm of morality in the first place (and thus, I would think, can't possibly be scandalized relative to it internally). As I said in my first post, if I attend a Unitarian Gay Marriage and am more concerned with the fact that it's gay rather than the fact that it's Unitarian...I really need to reconsider my motives and priorities; that's focusing on a tree while hypocritically ignoring the forest. It seems to me utterly absurd to expect two Protestants in a divorce-and-remarriage situation to approach the Catholic Church for an annulment; they're not Catholic, why would they do that? It would make no sense, so why should it be the hypothetical criterion for whether we should attend their wedding or not?

At the same time, I meant to emphasize, this doesn't mean reducing our moral doctrines to "mere" disciplines (like not eating meat on Fridays or something like that) as if they are not universal or objective or absolute. A temptation of a few friends of mine, I've noticed recently, has been to shy away from fully embracing Catholic morality theoretically, while still following it practically as something like a personal devotion. Trying to couch it as "merely" a "personal calling" or "personal commitment" for themselves, or as something only applying to practicing Catholics (like the Sunday Mass obligation, etc), but stopping short of saying that it (theoretically) applies to everyone as part of the natural law. In order to not offend friends or whatever.

However, this is well-intentioned but misguided, as there is a happy medium! It is not acceptable to view Catholic moral teaching merely as a personal calling or as a sort of ecclesial discipline or tradition; if you don't admit something is a sin (or view the sin as only that of falling short of a personal calling or commitment), you can't repent of it as needed. If you're willing to admit a category of action is truly sinful, however, then that means it is sinful for everyone objectively, not merely "wrong for me personally."

But. We can hold something is objectively immoral according our beliefs without imposing it on others who do not hold our framework. And while such a "live and let live" attitude does not work when it is a question of ethics, of someone's rights being violated (say, the right to life), when there is a victim who needs us to defend them...when it is "only" a question of morality, of "merely" personal virtue, it is very possible to respect someone's different beliefs (or behaviors according to those beliefs) while still believing that they are objectively wrong.

If we had to make a scene and avoid people over all their sins or heresies, evangelization would become impossible, as no one would be able to be friends with anyone outside their own cult. Rather, it is possible to respect people's beliefs while believing they are wrong, and it is even possible (and probably even spiritually healthy!) to take an attitude of "What they do is none of my business as long as they don't force me to participate. My concern is my soul and my relationship with God, and I know what what my conscience says not to do. Their conscience and their relationship with God is between Him and them, I'm not going to even going to speculate on it or try to place it in my framework. All I can do is be a good example of Christian cheer and share my beliefs charitably, in a non-pushy fashion, when appropriate." (This is similar to the question of hope vs. presumption when it comes to the non-water-baptized, I think.)

As for how all this affects attending weddings, I thought of an analogy (which puts us on the "other end" of things) that I think helps elucidate why it can be okay and what attitude we should take:

A Catholic man invites his strict Baptist neighbor to a barbecue. Being a Catholic BBQ, of course, there will be plenty of alcohol, yet the Baptist is a strict teetotaler (and not merely as a "personal life-choice" as it once was for me, but truly because he believes drinking is a damnable sin).

Yet, surely, the Baptist can attend and simply not drink himself. Surely that's enough. There is no need for him to "protest" the drinking of us Catholics, whose own system doesn't forbid it. And surely we'd feel that if he insisted on "punishing" our drinking (rather than merely not drinking himself) by skipping the barbecue altogether, he'd be being unreasonable, that would seem a sort of haughty attempt to impose his beliefs on us (not positively through actively trying to stop us, but negatively through refusing even passive toleration by his presence.)

And yet, surely, people who believe drinking is wrong attend parties where drinking is present (even "the main event") all the time, and simply choose to personally abstain according to their own conscience, yet without being a jerk about it. We understand the strict Baptist's non-drinking is because he thinks it is objectively immoral. I suppose we also realize, if we think about it, that he must think we're doing a terrible thing. And yet if he attends and is friendly nevertheless, we're not going to mind or try to force him to engage in what goes against his conscience (and I'm sure, in turn, he recognizes that in the subjective forum it doesn't go against ours, even if he thinks it is objectively wrong and that our conscience is malformed in this regard). It is possible to respect each other's beliefs like this while still holding them firmly.

And speaking of BBQ, I'm reminded of an episode of The Simpsons regarding the dilemma that vegetarians or vegans face in this regard living in a meat-eating world that I think sums up my own feelings on the matter, especially the conflict Lisa gets in with Homer over the question, and the conversation between Lisa and Apu (and Paul and Linda McCartney) near the end. Actually, in this case the attitude goes beyond even what I'm recommending, as Apu clearly sees this as a matter not only of personal morals, but of ethics (ie, the animals' rights are being violated from his perspective) yet he realizes he can't do much to stop it except influencing people subtly rather than than driving them away:

Lisa: When will all those fools learn that you can be perfectly healthy simply eating vegetables, fruits, grains and cheese??
Apu: Oh, cheese!
Lisa: You don't eat cheese, Apu?
Apu: No! I don't eat any food that comes from an animal!
Lisa: Ohh, then you must think I'm a monster...
Apu: Yes indeed I do think that. But, I learned long ago Lisa to tolerate others rather than forcing my beliefs on them. You know you can influence people without badgering them always. It's like Paul's song, "Live and Let Live."
Paul: Actually, it was "Live and Let Die"...

Reminder: Social Credit!

2011-11-06T19:39:00.007-06:00

I was at Occupy Toronto today and thought it might be a good venue for someone to "evangelize" a bit for Social Credit there. Of course, in Canada there really was a Social Credit party once, it moved farther and farther away from ever actually implementing social credit monetary policy (while nevertheless remaining associated with anti-semitism), and though it even maintained a majority government in Alberta for decades apparently, finally sort of fizzled out. This historical "baggage" might have to be addressed (or avoided by not using the word "Social Credit") so as to not be seen as pushing something "discredited" (sort of a pun I guess).

I encourage everyone to brush up on the theory of social credit by reading my post that I linked to above, or the 10 simple lessons at the website of the Pilgrims of St. Michael who promote the ideas of social credit as the best concrete comprehensive fulfillment of Catholic Social Teaching (only the first 6 lessons are really important for understanding the system itself). Certainly the recent call by the Vatican (lambasted by the evil neocons) for a World Central Bank resonates with me through social credit, as the only way to really get rid of inequality in the world is for the distribution of new credit (to represent new production) in the form of the social dividend...to be global. Implementing social credit domestically in one country could be a start, but without all mankind being equally entitled to the same dividend, problems will remain.

Given that my last post on this was so long, I'm using this one to basically try to narrow down my "talking points" on Social Credit. I think they'd come down to: money is just a symbol, what is physically possible in this age of abundance should be made financially possible, A cannot purchase A+B, creating money as debt is the modern incarnation of usury, the purpose of the production system is to maximize the efficiency of production while any connection to distribution is accidental, therefore the idea of income being bootstrapped to employment is outmoded, and we all have a right to credit as co-heirs of mankind's advancement and the natural resources God sends us which in one sense belong to no one individually.

First, the most important thing to remember is what money is: a signifier only. It is unnatural for the means of exchange to become essentially a commodity in itself (even if sometimes the sale is couched under more abstract concepts like "risk" or "time"). This is a thread I am noticing in terms of the nature of sin, especially in the modern world, and Catholicism's approach to morality: the concept of the signifier emptied of substance, of the fetishized signifier. Certainly, in unchastity, the masturbatory/contraceptive sexual pleasure has this dynamic, and so too it seems to be operative in the moral problems with how people treat money.

Money is not wealth; wealth is goods and services, money only has any meaning or value inasmuch as it signifies these, is only ultimately desirable because of these (though that certainly doesn't mean that you can only desire money with the explicit intent of buying a specific good in mind; that's not necessary anymore than every marital act explicitly intending a conception...in either case the important thing is that the will is ordered towards the transcendent good, even if only in potentia, rather than making the money or pleasure the end-in-itself).

This reflection on the nature of money raises two issues which should be touched upon in turn: the question of goods and services, and the question of where money comes from. In other words, we need to consider production and then distribution as the two important facets in economic life.

When it comes to production, it must be emphasized that we live in an age of abundance. Though there is some naysaying regarding a looming scarcity of energy (oil specifically), or of arable land for food production, or of certain species of timber or fish threatened by over-logging or over-fishing, the truth is that our production capacity is higher than ever, and has not suddenly decreased for any reason. This only stands to reason: capital generally increases. The population has been increasing, so there is no shortage of labor. Factories and machines, once built, don't just go away. Technological progress is cumulative, and so every year we are more and more advanced, and more and more efficient at producing.

The recent crisis was entirely "financial." There was no sudden crisis of production capacity. Labor did not suddenly die off in some plague. Machines and factories did not burn to the ground. Food was not destroyed in horrible locust attacks. Pollution (while a real problem) did not suddenly make all sorts of farmland unusable. We did not suddenly run out of metal or stone or wood or plastic. Nor was there suddenly a tipping point where a bunch of people were born all at once and suddenly we outstripped our production capacity. If anything, abundance is the problem; a lot less than 100% of the population is now able to produce everything needed (and even, within reason, wanted) by the entire population. This shouldn't be a problem, in fact it is absurd to view this as anything less than a triumph of human ingenuity, and yet because of how we have bootstrapped distribution to participation in production (the problem of "unemployment") it is a problem.

When machines replace workers...this shouldn't be seen as problematic! It should be seen as liberating. If a machine is more efficient at doing the job of a worker, can produce more, that's great! There is no reason to limit production for reasons of distribution or finance. Production capacity should work at maximum at all times, and the financial/distribution system should be tailored to this situation. The current problem is, as I mentioned above, that distribution has been bootstrapped to employment, to participation in production. So, suddenly, if a machine replaces a worker, he sees it as a bad thing; he no longer has a job, and the money that would formerly have gone to his wages now goes to the owner of the machine (some fat-cat capitalist, who owns the capital.)

Of course, the final extreme outcome we can imagine of this situation proves it's absurdity: finally, "the 1%" eventually replace all labor with machines, and then just keep the produce of those machines for themselves, and leave the rest of us as "surplus population." Perhaps we imagine the government taxing "the 1%" at exorbitant rates in order to re-distribute goods to the rest of us (making us dependent on the State in a servile fashion). Or perhaps we really know some massive revolution would happen to distribute capital to everyone in the fashion of land re-distribution schemes in Latin America and such.

However, there should never be a need to re-distribute wealth; it should be distributed correctly in the first place! Any distribution system that is dependent on constant "correction" or "adjustment" in the form of "re-distribution"...obviously has serious problems. It clearly needs to be changed to distribute correctly the first time around, rather than needing to re-distrubute through some sort of coercive force (be it of the State through taxation, or a less orderly revolution).

In reality, we are faced with a "problem" that shouldn't be a problem at all: technology is making it so that (even though our population has reached 7 billion and will continue growing to at least several billion more before peaking) we simply do not need "full employment" to produce everything. Technology is meant to free man from labor, and it's doing just that...and this is seen as a problem. Because we have tied distribution to participation in production, to "employment," or else to owning the capital, the means of production, and thus taking in the income when the goods are sold. But this is clearly becoming outmoded.

This brings us around to the second issue I said that the reflection on the nature of money raises, which is how money is created. Under our current system, money is created as debt. Banks are authorized to lend money into existence (they do not lend from deposits as people imagine, even if certain reserve requirements may create a vague link between how much new money a bank can loan into existence and how much they have on deposit.) Money in our current system is created privately, money is just credit after all.

This, however, is the source of the inequality. The truth is, even if we redistributed all the capital in some great revolution tomorrow, I would bet that within a generation or two, the inequality would be right back at the levels it's at. There is a natural inequality among human beings in terms of their financial cleverness (moral/ethical or not) and you can be sure that redistributed capital would not stay redistributed evenly for long.

Communism tries to solve this problem by nationalizing the capital. The State owns everything, the collective owns everything. Everyone owns the means of production, and so everyone gets a share of the production. Sounds good on paper. But of course, we've seen how such a State monopoly on capital actually works in communism: a lack of competition and actual investment by people in their work (for lack of incentive) leads to a massive inefficient bureaucracy and generally low quality.

In reality, ownership of the means of production is not where the problem lies. That inequality would even itself out naturally soon enough. The real problem lies in the ownership of the means of production of the means of distribution. In other words, the power of money-creation. Private bankers authorized to loan money into existence as credit in a way private individuals can't.

And then, of course, they charge interest on this money. This is the usury the Church was vocal for so long in condemning (and still does, though certain voices have bullied the hierarchy into retreating into a sort of embarrassed silence on this question.) It is one thing to invest in a venture and to share in the risk, to get your share of the profit when it succeeds and to take the loss when you fail. It is quite another to expect repayment beyond the initial loan regardless of whether the venture succeeds or not, to share in none of the risk and yet maintain a title to more than you put in. Now, there can be legitimate reasons even for this, there is after all "opportunity cost"; if you choose to loan to me, you lose the ability to invest in anyone else during that time (a situation much less true in the Middle Ages, hence why basically any lending was usury back then). A fair market rate of interest could be determined from this principle, based on how much investments on average are returning, and taking an interest-rate on non-investment loans equal to this. However, this assumes lending from money you already have.

In the current system, this is not what banks do. They are not lending from money that exists, they are creating credit. They are thus expecting interest to be paid on something that wouldn't even exist unless the loan had been taken in the first place. There is literally no real risk in default for the bank (as what was not paid out was created out of thin air in the first place), and no opportunity cost (as they couldn't have used the money until it was created in the form of the debt anyway). To expect repayment beyond the principal, then, is to set up a sort of rat race (as this video describes). Since banks only create the principal in our money supply, where does the interest come from? Either people default, or the banks continually get back the money they create. Either way, its a confidence scheme that involves bankers potentially getting an ever greater proportion of the money.

This might not be a problem if this was truly equally distributed to those holding savings accounts as interest (and if everyone in the country had a savings account). In reality, however, the interest given in savings accounts is only a token amount compared to what the financial sector as a whole amasses through its scheme. Most of the profit is actually put into the abstract "casino" of financial markets, whose operations are too complicated for common folk to even begin to understand and which stack numbers on illusions on paper on dreams. The result is "the 1%" getting more and more money through their ability to create money (and the fact that they've hidden it through an elaborate system of credit that confuses most people).

Social Credit's solution, then, is simple. Some now are saying that the problem is that the Federal Reserve system has a monopoly on the credit (in the US) and that if the "money market" were a free market, everything would work out. Social Credit, however, proposes that the creation of credit should, in fact, be nationalized. "What is physically possible should be made financially possible" is a motto. Social Credit's basic proposal is to have a national credit office essentially just keep the money supply balanced proportionately to total real wealth. And since real wealth is always increasing, the money supply should keep increasing (at a proportionate rate that thus avoids any inflation or deflation). This new money, to represent the new production, would then be distributed equally to all members of the populace as a social dividend and a general rebate on all goods. Everything else would remain the same. The competition of the free market would remain in place. Workers would still get wages, producers would still get paid for the goods they sold, etc.

The money supply always must increase to represent the new wealth. Companies only make goods with profit in mind. But the prices will always be higher than purchasing power! Just consider: if a company pays $90 dollars (in wagers, or in buying capital or raw materials, all of which eventually winds up as someone's income) to produce a product, but then the equilibrium price for that product is $100 dollars...where does the extra ten dollars come from in the economy?? If the economy as a whole spends $9 million to produce $12 million worth of goods (and the goal is always to turn a smaller investment into a bigger profit through the addition of human effort)...there will only be $9 million of purchasing power out there, but $12 million in prices. Currently, this "gap" is made up by credit. The new money is loaned into existence on credit cards or mortgages, etc. This is not "living beyond our means," the very fact that the goods exist prove that they are, in fact, "within our means." The problem is that the loans are expected to be repaid, and repaid at interest at that.

Social Credit proposes that the government should simply create the new money to fill the purchasing power gap, to represent the new wealth, debt-free...and then distribute it to the citizens. It's so simple.

Some nowadays are calling for a return to the gold standard, but that's silly. There is no need to tie money to any one commodity. It should represent the available wealth as a whole. Gold may or may not be a good indicator of how much economic growth has taken place. It's much more direct to just base the increase in money supply on total GDP, and this could be just as transparent and inflation-resistant (as it is not hard to independently calculate GDP with reasonable accuracy to prevent the government from simply "printing money" in a manner that leads to inflation; in fact, obviously, the comedic tragedy of hyper-inflation only results because of debt).

This is the basic message of social credit: increase the money supply debt-free in proportion to the increase in wealth each year. Close the purchasing power gap by simply creating this money without interest, and distribute it equally to the population, or else spend some of it on the public works/services rather than taxing. As we have a right to this credit as the "co-heirs" to the enormous capital which is our technological advancement as a race thus far, as well as the Time, and sunlight, and natural resources that God sends each year and which are the property of no individual.

Workers would still get wages (though hopefully labor would be needed less and less, wages gradually being replaced more and more by the dividend as machines took over). The owners of capital would still get the profit on the products they produced and sold (though hopefully this system and banning usury would make it so that capital became more and more evenly distributed). And so the free market and competition would all remain in place, and some would have more than others based on their natural talents or ingenuity or effort applied, but everyone would be guaranteed a living.

No Easy Answers: Attendance at Invalid or Immoral Weddings

2011-11-03T17:54:00.013-05:00

In our increasingly confusing and pluralistic modern world, one question that seems to come up time and time again in the Catholic blogosphere is the question of wedding attendance.

Certainly there is no question about a presumably valid Catholic wedding in a Catholic church. Nor would any sane authority object to passively witnessing valid marriages (Sacramental or merely natural) outside the Church, be it the wedding of two baptized non-Catholics, a Catholic to a non-Catholic (baptized or not) with canonical dispensation, the wedding of a Christian to a non-Christian, or the wedding of two non-baptized Jews, Muslims, pagans, atheists, etc.

As long as one maintained mental reservation and remained a "passive" observer and did not take any sort of communion or actively assent to any heretical or blasphemous rites or prayers, natural marriages (or even the Sacramental marriages of Protestants) are certainly good in-themselves to some degree and a Catholic need not worry about attending. Simply examining the complex history of Christian marriage and intermarriage with the pagans would be enough to demonstrate this.

However, the question gets admittedly trickier when it's a question of presumptively invalid marriages. What if I'm invited to the wedding of a Catholic outside the Church without dispensation? Does it matter if they've formally apostatized or not? What if I know the Catholic has been married before without annulment? What if it's the non-Catholic one who was previously married? What if the previous marriage in question was only a natural marriage? What if it's two Protestants (who have no concept of annulment) but I know one has been married before (and thus, by the Church's standards, the marriage is invalid)? What if it's all simply non-baptized parties and natural marriages involved? What if it's a homosexual "marriage" ceremony?

These are admittedly hard questions, and most even conservative Catholic sources (such as the Catholic Answers posts I linked above) will tell you there is no one-size-fits-all answer. (Though it is worth being reminded that since the change to canon law in 2009, it no longer matters in terms of validity if a Catholic has formally defected; the new canonical principle is essentially "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic" in terms of being bound by canonical form or dispensation requirements.)

The basic advice is: is what you are doing scandalous? Does it constitute encouragement of sin? Most conservative sources seem to take the position that one is safest to err on the side of not attending, but then also say the Church does not forbid "observing" (with mental reservation) a presumptively invalid marriage, and that it's really a case-by-case thing.

However, there are some double-standards evident in the sort of advice you'd probably usually get. For one, if it involves a Catholic, one is likely to get a more negative reaction from Catholics. Attending the invalid marriage of two people who have never been Catholic (but, say, one has been previously married and divorced) is unlikely to raise as many objections from conservative Catholics. I suppose the logic goes that the Catholic framework (of no divorce and remarriage without annulment) is foreign to these people anyway, that they thus won't consider your attendance or not in light of such a framework, and thus that it is in some ways beyond our concern to be imposing an understanding of marriage internal to our religion onto this external situation. "We'll cross that bridge if either of them converts to Catholicism" seems to be the attitude, and I suppose this is my instinct too.

It's not that I don't believe our moral code is universal or our Truth absolute, the behavior of non-Catholics can certainly be judged for the most part by the same standards (except for the Precepts of the Church, it's not like we have a Mosaic Law for us insiders and a much looser Noahide code for the "gentiles.") But, at the same time, if they aren't even Catholic (or, in our world, even any sort of informed or practicing Christian at all really)...then I feel like we have bigger fish to fry. Objecting to their (objectively) adulterous or fornicatory union seems a misplaced priority if that marriage is taking place in a schismatic or heretical or pagan or utterly godless secular millieu! And yet, we've said that attendance at such services (for, say, valid marriages; or even just out of "anthropological" interest) is not forbidden and does not in itself (if done as a "passive" observer with mental reservation) constitute affirmation of schism, heresy, idolatry, or atheism. If such attendance does not constitute affirmation of the religion or ideology in question, why should it anymore constitute an affirmation of the by-Catholic-standards validity of the marriage?

And, generally, Catholic sources will tell you it doesn't, necessarily. However, as I began saying above, conservatives seem to sing a different tune in two cases: A) if it involves a Catholic (however lapsed), or B) if it's a homosexual union. Then suddenly people get a lot more wary.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I suppose the logic is that if a Catholic is involved, then the Church's standards for marriage do suddenly become a lot more relevant. No longer can the mental fence be drawn distinguishing between "outsiders" with a different framework from ours (which we can't "impose" on them) and ourselves. If there is a Catholic, suddenly that sort of pluralistic hairsplitting raises more cognitive dissonance for the conservatives.

Though some would argue that even the ability to "suspend our belief" when dealing with non-Catholics, and to expect only a sort of minimal decency based on the "common" morality of secularism, is already a concession to the World and a sign that religion has become essentially "privatized," removed from the public sphere...I would somewhat disagree. A distinction was always made, even at the height of the Middle Ages, between the Jews and Muslims and pagans who had never been Catholic on the one hand, and heretics on the other. Say what you will about how we treated heretics, the non-baptized were always pretty much (at least in terms of official policy) supposed to be left to their own devices when it came to things like regulating marriages. I don't think the Church tried to stop Jews from remarrying after divorce in the Middle Ages, for example.

And given that nowadays we no longer treat Protestants as anything more than "material" (as opposed to formal) heretics, no longer hold them to the standards of Catholics...I really see no reason why lapsed Catholics should be treated any differently either. Most of them are not particularly "informed" heretics. They fall away because they never really internalized Catholicism in the first place but got caught up in something else (usually secular culture, or possibly some sort of evangelical Protestantism). To treat lapsed Catholics differently from how we treat Protestants on this matter seems absurd. Unless we know the person knows what they are doing is wrong and is defiantly pursuing it anyway, I'd think we can give lapsed Catholics remarrying invalidly just as much "benefit of the doubt" in terms of ignorance, and in terms of assuming our passive attendance won't be understood in the framework of scandal (by people who obviously aren't thinking in that framework in the first place.)

I think that Catholic Answers takes such a hard-line on homosexual unions (after being sort of accommodating for objectively adulterous heterosexual ones) is likewise a double-standard. The outlook here seems to be essentially culture-wars political. Like their absolute stance against voting for any pro-abortion politicians (without even taking into account the possibility of voting for one in a situation where that position of theirs will not effect the status quo, and where you cast your vote even while disapproving of that position of theirs), this refusal to accommodate a modern reality or to touch it with a ten-foot-pole seems like a "politically" inspired absolutism. And certainly it seems like a homophobic double-standard along the lines of those cases where homosexual couples weren't allowed to have their children baptized or sent to Catholic school (even though plenty of divorced and remarried people, even Catholics, are).

The message seems to be: well, divorce and remarriage is an issue already "lost." That's already no longer part of the "common" secular morality, so we don't have to impose it on people outside the Catholic context or framework. But the question of homosexuality (like abortion) is potentially (the conservatives think, naively) still "on the table," still something with a fighting chance at remaining part of the public "lowest common denominator" morality, and thus we should still try to impose that standard on everyone else so as to not lose the "culture war" on that question.

I find this approach problematic to say the least. While I don't think we should ever stop publicly fighting against abortion (because that involves real defenseless voiceless human lives being taken, the fundamental right to life being violated) or ever take an attitude of "abortion is tolerable...for non-Catholics who don't share our assumptions or framework," I think it's pretty clear that on the question of homosexuality we've lost the culture war, or at least I don't particularly care to fight it in that sphere. At this point, expecting us to pretend like that's a standard assumed by everyone, or like our attendance at such a ceremony will be interpreted according to that framework (as scandal) in a way that it for some reason won't for divorced and remarried Protestants...seems like a stretch.

Yes there is a Natural Law that should be common to all people, it does not just apply to Catholics, but at the same time we seem to live in an age where the two alternatives are Revealed Religion and Atheism (as opposed to Revealed Religion and Natural Theology.) Somehow, ironically, it seems like more and more the natural law and natural theology can only be known in the light of revealed religion, and so try to impose certain moral principles on non-Catholics piece-meal without having them adopt the whole system...seems bound to fail and inconsistent. If they don't have the Faith, and yet we're not worried fraternizing with them (or even attending their ceremonies) constitutes some sort of scandalous participation in unfaith...why should we suddenly, and contradictorily, worry just that very thing about their sexual immorality?

In all these cases really, I don't think we have too much to worry about when it comes to attending weddings usually, for two reasons. For one, because as discussed above, in a pluralistic society our attendance won't even be considered by most people according to the framework of scandal, our paradigm in that sense is external to their lives (they may even be ignorant of it), and if they aren't even (practicing) Catholics, then there is that bigger fish to fry already. Worrying about a prior divorce, or even about sodomy, at a non-Catholic ceremony, rather than worrying about the fact that it's non-Catholic, seems to be picking specks and leaving logs. If I attend a Unitarian Gay Marriage and my biggest concern is that it's a gay marriage rather than that it's Unitarian...I have my priorities misplaced (and yet, Catholics can clearly attend Unitarian services sometimes).

Even fraternal correction of fellow Catholics is not usually obligatory, and imposing our own moral assumptions (even if we do believe they are universal) on non-Catholics (or lapsed Catholics who are the equivalent), or acting like our mere presence at something they (not coming from our framework) already assume is unobjectionable constitutes scandal...strikes me as naive. We must remember the result of the debate in the early Church about keeping kosher with the Jews vs. when eating with the Gentiles.

But secondly, I would like to add, because attendance at a "wedding" doesn't necessarily involve approbation of the sex. We know divorced and remarried couples can live "as brother and sister" (especially if, say, small children are involved) and we should view any such ceremony among non-Catholics as in large part about celebrating a relationship, a partnership, and not focus on the fact that it is (probably) a sexual one. There may be much to celebrate in these relationships and commitments even if they contain a tragic moral flaw when it comes to their sexual expression. Whether it's a correct outlook or not (and we do have to be wary of reducing the essence of matrimony to romance as opposed to mating) most people nowadays would tell you their wedding was about a social expression of the love, not a legitimization of the sex.

Having said all this, I must admit I still remain a gut sort of uncomfortableness about attending invalid or objectively immoral marriages (and, indeed, I have a hesitancy about attending non-Catholic worship of any sort in general, or any expression of opposed ideology). And I don't think this uncomfortable feeling is bad. I have consistently said above that "mental reservation" is necessary in any such attendance. That, while we may out of a sort of secular courtesy attend these services for friends and family who already do not share our framework, we must nevertheless not let this undermine our own framework, must not let such recognition that not everyone shares our framework "normalize" such things for us personally, must not let ourselves buy into the "lowest common denominator" of the secular morality, must at least in our sphere (however semi-private it may now be) maintain our own moral standards and recognize them as (objectively) absolute. As such, I think we should feel uncomfortable at such events, and should remind ourselves and any fellow practicing Catholics who know about it that our own theoretical disapproval (ie, internal to our own framework) does remain intact, even if we do suck it up for the sake of not alienating people (if only so that we can remain witnesses in their lives down the line).

Intellectual Pride

2011-11-02T08:29:00.008-05:00

I've written a few times this year on the supernatural virtue of Faith. This Spring I largely just quoted from and highlighted the Catholic Encyclopedia article on the topic, and I think this is worth a re-read for anyone. Then in late Summer I wrote a post referencing back to that about how Faith is not ultimately about intellectual satisfaction, which is at best preparatory.

My concern in both cases is a trend I've seen even among some orthodox (or erstwhile orthodox) friends and online acquaintances...to see Faith as primarily about intellectual conviction. As I described it in my post, there a sense (even among the modern conservative "apologists") that Faith is nothing more than being overwhelming rationally convinced and intellectually satisfied by the arguments for it. However this is not true, as Catholic Encyclopedia says, " We must insist upon this because in the minds of many faith is regarded as a more or less necessary consequence of a careful study of the motives of credibility, a view which the Vatican Council condemns expressly." The "motives of credibility" (in other words, the rational "arguments" for the Faith) at best can provide a sort of natural "knowledge of revealed truth which precedes Faith [and] can only beget human faith; it is not even the cause of Divine Faith."

As much as the natural "motives of credibility" can lead us to the "door" of Faith, in itself (to quote the Catholic Encyclopedia article again) "the Church has twice condemned the view that faith ultimately rests on an accumulation of probabilities." In reality, "it is evident that this 'light of faith' is a supernatural gift and is not the necessary outcome of assent to the motives of credibility. No amount of study will win it, no intellectual conviction as to the credibility of revealed religion nor even of the claims of the Church to be our infallible guide in matters of faith, will produce this light in a man's mind. It is the free gift of God."

In reality, of course, the nature of the Mysteries assented to in Faith make it impossible that the intellect should truly grasp or understand them, because they are beyond it. Instead, "the disposition of a believer is that of one who accepts another's word for some statement, because it seems fitting or useful to do so. In the same way we believe Divine revelation because the reward of eternal life is promised us for so doing. It is the will which is moved by the prospect of this reward to assent to what is said, even though the intellect is not moved by something which it understands." Faith is always a choice made to assent to truths beyond its grasp, yet which are presented to it by that supernaturally infused Light, by the Holy Spirit, for the sake of the prospect of the heavenly reward which the Will can also only be moved by grace towards.

No amount of rational "truth-seeking" or consideration of the extrinsic arguments can ever bring us to the supernatural virtue of Faith; "Authorities are to be found on both sides, the intrinsic evidence is not convincing, but something is to be gained by assenting to one view rather than the other, and this appeals to the will, which therefore determines the intellect to assent to the view which promises the most. Similarly, in Divine faith the credentials of the authority which tells us that God has made certain revelations are strong, but they are always extrinsic to the proposition, 'God has revealed this or that,' and consequently they cannot compel our assent; they merely show us that this statement is credible. When, then, we ask whether we are to give in our free assent to any particular statement or not, we feel that in the first place we cannot do so unless there be strong extrinsic evidence in its favour, for to believe a thing merely because we wished to do so would be absurd. Secondly, the proposition itself does not compel our assent, since it is not intrinsically evident, but there remains the fact that only on condition of our assent to it shall we have what the human soul naturally yearns for, viz., the possession of God, Who is, as both reason and authority declare, our ultimate end."

Assenting to the truths of the Catholic religion because they convince us rationally...is not Faith. Faith is assent given for the sake of heavenly reward (and, I would argue, one is fooling oneself if you think any amount of rational argumentation can ever produce the certainty of Faith in the intellect). "It is here that the heroism of faith comes in; our reason will lead us to the door of faith but there it leaves us; and God asks of us that earnest wish to believe for the sake of the reward — 'I am thy reward exceeding great' — which will allow us to repress the misgivings of the intellect and say, 'I believe, Lord, help Thou my unbelief.'"

Only such an act of Faith, given by grace, constitutes the supernatural virtue. One chooses to believe or not, and only God can move the Will supernaturally like that, given that both the Truth in question to be assented to is above the intellect's natural capacity, and that the motive for the Will's choice to assent nevertheless is also above its natural capacity (ie, Heaven). "Not feeling convinced" by the arguments is irrelevant. One could still make an act of Faith in such a situation assuming God was offering it.

As Cardinal Newman said, "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt." Doubt itself is incompatible with true Faith, and a grave sin, as the Catholic Encyclopedia's article on Doubt says: "It will be evident from what has been said that doubt cannot coexist either with faith or knowledge in regard to any given subject; faith and doubt are mutually exclusive, and knowledge which is limited by a doubt, becomes, in regard to the subject or part of a subject to which the doubt applies, no longer knowledge but opinion."

A "difficulty," meaning that my fallible fallen human intellect perceives some apparent logical contradiction in various propositions of the Faith, or doesn't find the motives of credibility to provide even a natural knowledge, is not incompatible with Faith however. I could still assent to the Truths on divine authority for the sake of heavenly reward due to the infused virtue...even while such a difficulty nagged at my intellect. The proper attitude is, in fact, not to suspend assent until such difficulty is resolved, but rather to assent in spite of such difficulty and then to strive to understand, to trust in Faith that the difficulty can be resolved and then to seek its resolution. And to trust that even if our own weak intellect cannot resolve it (though I've never found that to be the case if I think and pray on something enough) or is not satisfied by certain arguments, that this is a problem with us, not with the Truth of Faith in question.

However, this has thus-far all been a sort of review. The "new" point I want to make regards the loss of Faith. It should be clear from what has been said above that mere natural rational argumentation or intellectual dryness or non-satisfaction in the motives of credibility or internal consistency of the system...are not enough to make us lose Faith, which is 100% certain in spite of such things, and a supernaturally infused virtue that moves the Will to assent even though it does not understand (and it never fully can).

Rather, as Catholic Encyclopedia again explains very well, "From what has been said touching the absolutely supernatural character of the gift of faith, it is easy to understand what is meant by the loss of faith. God's gift is simply withdrawn. And this withdrawal must needs be punitive, 'Non enim deseret opus suum, si ab opere suo non deseratur' (St. Augustine, Enarration on Psalm 145 — 'He will not desert His own work, if He be not deserted by His own work'). And when the light of faith is withdrawn, there inevitably follows a darkening of the mind regarding even the very motives of credibility which before seemed so convincing. This may perhaps explain why those who have had the misfortune to apostatize from the faith are often the most virulent in their attacks upon the grounds of faith."

Faith is not "lost" because we hear some new argument that makes us no longer intellectually satisfied or rationally convinced. Assent can be willed in spite of that, Faith is 100% certain in spite of that. The only way Faith once had can be "lost" is if God takes it away. And obviously, He sometimes does, as people do lose Faith.

Why would God take it away? As Catholic Encyclopedia said, as a punishment (of the "medicinal" variety we'd hope, of course) for sin. But what I'd argue here is that it's usually not just any sin. Even though mortal sin destroys supernatural Hope and Charity in the soul, the infused intellectual habit of Faith can clearly remain even if it is a "dead" Faith because of how the Will (without grace) can no longer choose to continue building that habit in the intellect (given that such a choice requires an orientation towards God that the sinful Will no longer has). Still, it is a real sort of Faith; a mortal sinner can still believe, obviously, why else would he seek confession if he didn't?

And yet we are told Faith is withdrawn as punishment for sin. Surely it is not arbitrary. Although many sins, surely, can dispose us towards this, the argument I would make is that it is intellectual pride specifically which finally makes God withdraw Faith. This pride can be primed by many sins (including especially greed and unchastity) but I would tend to think that Faith is withdrawn by God ultimately as chastisement for placing its origin in our own intellect. For choosing to see our belief not as an utterly gratuitous free gift infused by God beyond our natural capacities, but as the result of us having built a "tower of Babel" to heaven with (ultimately flimsy) intellectual arguments or rational apologia by which we think we have attained the Truth by our own natural powers and place our faith in that mere fallible intellectual sense of satisfaction in those arguments.

This scares me, however, because I see so many even orthodox Catholics who clearly have tendencies to view Faith this way. In fact, it is how I think I was inclined to view it in my days as a hot-headed young re-vert, "Oh, look at me, I'm smarter and so I've logicked my way into discovering this gnosis which makes sense of the world and which answers all the question. You other people have clearly faulty frameworks, and I can out-argue you about it in a debate."

This is why I am wary of "apologetics" as a tool of evangelization. While there is, of course, a place for the preparatory motives of credibility, Faith is ultimately a gift that even a child exposed to no complicated philosophical arguments or "apologetics" can have. Apologetics seem primarily useful for resolving difficulties (not doubts, difficulties) in someone who already believes by Faith. If we see it as the cause of our Faith, however, we do not really have Faith at all, and the devil will likely come along then with even better arguments and convince us away, or with more enticing natural motives to draw our Will's assent away. As the old saying goes, "For those who believe, no proof is necessary. For those who don't, no proof is enough."

Two Different Arguments

2011-11-01T09:32:00.008-05:00

I have been vaguely planning to do a post on the homophobia (different, mind you, from holding to the Church's orthodox teachings regarding chastity, as I do) so blatantly evident sometimes in conservative Catholic circles, and on the incoherence or lack of precise definition and distinction I find in recent rhetoric about "homosexuality" (beyond even just the question of homosexual sex acts) from the Vatican and conservative sources, and on practical questions of this nature both pastoral and political.

However, my orthodoxy must come prior to my "liberalism" and so today I'd just like to share some thoughts I have had based on some recent discussions with heterodox apologists against traditional notions of chastity. Specifically, on the pattern I've noticed in how these arguments about homosexuality (or, in similar ways, divorce-and-remarriage or contraception for married couples) always seem to progress, and how what starts as one argument for them always seems to end up switching to a different argument, one with a much higher burden of proof.

Specifically, I've almost always found that arguments for [sexually active] homosexual relationships being allowed...always ultimately transform (upon probing) into an argument that sexual relationships are (practically) obligatory (not merely "allowed," but obligatory or "necessary") for everyone (or almost everyone). This is related to what I've said before about how "conscience obliges rather than permits."

This is the direction the logic takes when pushed a little (as much as a nominal shout-out for those "actually" "called" to celibacy may be included as an afterthought). Usually St. Paul's "better to marry than burn" is trotted out at some point, and also Christ's line about "he who can accept this, let him accept it" regarding the voluntary nature of [some] celibacy-for-the-kingdom (always forgetting conveniently that He also made it clear that some are born eunuchs or made so by men).

The arguments start out with, "There is no good reason this shouldn't be allowed," but when pressed (for example, by actually good arguments for the Church's morality) usually becomes "But...I need this. People need this. Condemning it isn't just condemning fulfillment of some optional desire, it's condemning a fundamental necessity, an essential moral obligation even. Trying to stop us is in fact to make people act against good-conscience. And this existential/experiential practical 'argument' trumps any mere theoretical argument!"

I simply find that ridiculous. "Needing" anything in that manner strikes me as spiritually dangerous by nature, and while I could perhaps see at least "feasible" (though I ultimately disagree) an argument that homosexual sex acts are "allowed"...the idea (which in my discussions with people has always revealed itself as intrinsic to the internal logic of that argument) that homosexual sex acts are positively necessary or essential or obligatory for some people (ie, most homosexuals) is something I just find absurd.

At the very least, the burden of proof for such a claim of positive necessity or obligation is exponentially higher than for the merely negative claim of non-condemnation/allowance. There is a sort of clever bait-and-switch in this tactic in which they attempt to use all the rhetorical strength of a "necessity" plea, and yet try to sneak it into the debate under the much lower burden-of-proof standard of a merely "allowed" argument.

This subtle (or not so subtle) switch from an argument that there's "nothing wrong" with homosexual sex acts, to an argument that they're positively necessary or essential to people's well-being or even moral health (and thus morally obligatory) is, however, inherent to the whole liberal/heterodox gay agenda on the question. In order to justify their "struggle," to cloak it under the banner of "civil rights" or "human rights," etc...it can't just be about fighting for some optional pleasure they happen to want. It has to be (in order to make themselves not look entirely selfish and absurd) made into an argument that they're fighting for something essential to human happiness or even spiritual flourishing (as mere maximal hedonistic satisfaction can hardly be called a "right").

Usually this is done through linguistically befuddling "love" for "sex" and making the argument about the necessity of "relationship" (without even considering that loving relationships or even a partnership of some sort might be possibly chastely. This takes advantage of the nearly universal modern sentimentalist error, common to contraceptive heterosexuals too, which regards sex as essentially an "expressive" act, "expressing" affection or bonding or some crap like that; something I fear "Theology of the Body" has bought-into too much itself, albeit it then focuses on "correct" expression/significance.)

I have to look at that line of thought however and think that, in the process of trying to convince society to let them indulge themselves, they've wound up convincing themselves that something is necessary or essential to their lives which is not. And that is not what I call true freedom in any sense of the word. To crib from the existentialists, I'd call it bad faith/mauvaise foi.

Anyway, be on the look-out for this line of argument in your own conversations, and if it pops up please do feel free to use my concepts here to deconstruct the ultimately flimsy rhetorical deceptiveness of that facade. Any argument that takes the form that something must be allowed because it is necessary...is backwards. Proof that something is allowed would come before proof that it is a necessity, because the former (should be) much easier to demonstrate given that allowance has a much lower burden of proof compared to positive obligation. If someone is relying on a claim of necessity to bolster a claim of allowance (especially if it's a vague psycho-emotional or "existential" sort of "necessity") then they are likely intellectually bamboozling you.

Cited in Usus Antiquior

2011-10-30T12:38:00.008-05:00

Renegade Trads has officially received a mention in the academic liturgical journal Usus Antiquior!

I consider this quite an honor. It can never be a bad thing when our "movement's" profile is raised even just a little bit through mention in "mainline" traditionalist and/or Catholic venues. Bit by bit, the renegades are becoming part of the landscape, are carving out a niche for ourselves in this subculture (and as I've run this blog and networked with people, I've learned just how much of a "small world" it really can be).

The mention was in an article submitted by a fellow blogger and independent researcher. I've quoted the relevant section below:

While other writers have commented on the changes to the psalter there has been little work published on other changes that took place in connection with the publication of the new Breviary. An independent researcher in the USA, Mr [My Real Name] of [My Hometown], Illinois, has compiled and published a series of comparative tables showing the distribution of antiphons, invitatories at Matins, and versicles at Matins [26]. [My Real Last Name] demonstrates that, with regard to the antiphons, only sixty-two that were found in the old Psalter are found in the post-1911 arrangement (and of these thirteen were adapted in a minor way). In the region of seventy-nine antiphons disappeared from the Roman Breviary following the reforms with the creation of 158 new ones. What is curious is that in many cases new antiphons were created even if the psalms had remained the same (as will be noted, e.g., with regard to Sunday Vespers below). The antiphons associated with the various Commons were untouched. The invitatories were changed for four days of the week (and for some of the ‘green’ Sundays) even though Ps. 94 remained unchanged. Likewise, despite the creation of the new structure of Matins to allow for three nocturns or a single nocturn while using the same psalmody, some versicles and their responses were changed, e.g. the second nocturn of Sunday Matins.

The footnote [26] says:

These can be found on [My Real Last Name]’s blog ‘Renegade Trads’ <http://renegadetrad.blogspot.com/2010/02/re-attempt-reform.html> [accessed 3 May 2011]. I am grateful to Mr [My Real Last Name] for allowing me to quote from his work.

(The charts/inventories referred to which I made of the antiphons can be found stored under hyperlinks in Section #6 of that post of mine.)

To be cited in an academic journal for my work, albeit minor, on an issue I'm interested in (if only as a sort of hobbyist), having only a bachelor's degree and being only 22 years old...is something I feel rather proud of today. And especially given how much some of the rad trads hate the "renegades"...to have the blog mentioned in the journal like this makes me feel a bit smug too...

Medieval-tastic!

2011-10-29T15:55:00.003-05:00

I hope a friend and reader won't mind that I cribbed this from him. I'm sorry I've been scarce on posts lately or only posting music videos, but I really couldn't pass this one by given my own medieval leanings:

Somehow it seems fitting for today. It was this perfect late-October day, a little brisk, but sunny enough, the level of light as the afternoon wore on being absolutely sehnsucht-inducing for me (an emotion strongest for me, perhaps, starting right around this time of year and through the holidays). I could imagine this song playing at harvest time around some medieval market or castle great-room hearth as the days grow shorter and things start to get cozy.

I took a long walkabout for several hours today to continue exploring my new surroundings. I realized that my life schedule is finally becoming more regular again thanks to work. Since high school it hasn't been, I think. Classes in university are rather minor (lol) and I had lots of unstructured time especially given my irregular path through the past four years. So I slipped into a slothful habit of naps and irregular sleep-hours and procrastination from school work.

School work, homework specifically, really messed me up psychologically throughout my life, I think; even in high school I would nap after school and lived procrastinating online. The thing about procrastination is, it's not like you let yourself do anything else useful or truly enriching during that time either. You sit around online or at the TV buying time in an escapist fashion, but you don't replace the task you're avoiding with anything creative or fruitful or constructive of self-growth-inducing either. Mainly I'd sit at home or in my room.

But finally, now, I have a job during the day, get enough sleep that I don't nap in the evenings, and then on the weekends can stay up a bit later and sleep in and then feel totally free and non-stressed during the day. I also tied up several years-long-standing "loose ends" before I moved to Canada, so there are no longer nagging tasks weighing on me.

This structure and balance and true freedom (there is no "homework" for my job!! Finally!!!) really feels healthier to me, and I can already feel myself using my time more constructively and in a non-procrastinating manner. When there is no longer anything to procrastinate from, genuine leisure, genuine free time becomes possible. I can walk around with no particular goal or purpose and it becomes an end in itself. That is truly liberating. I'd like to be a bit more financially secure, but that will come soon enough, and I'm feeling quite at peace and optimistic today. L'chaim!! Deo Gratias!

Head of State or Figurehead? The "Relational Networks of Power" Model of Politics

2011-10-24T18:52:00.012-05:00

I had occasion recently to listen while some people had a conversation about constitutional monarchy and the role of a Head of State in the government of a nation. After all, I am now living under Her Majesty, and happily so (though not yet a subject...)

As much as I've critiqued crazy trads for being purist about it or seemingly wanting to return to absolute monarchy, I do have [constitutional] monarchist sympathies, especially in places where there is a tradition of that. Because, heck, I love tradition and symbolism, of course, and a monarch symbolically embodies the nation as a living "tradition" from the past, as it were, embodying the legitimacy and continuity of the State (especially if above this or that faction or party.)

And while an elected leader can do this (just as the elected line of Popes or elected/appointed bishops in a diocese can in the ecclesiastic sphere) by taking up the mantle of the Idea of The State being conferred on them by whatever more abstract process...there is something about organic natural genealogical descent, physical and material, that seems to most fittingly symbolize the continuity, the "tradition" (in the literal sense of "handing down") of temporal nationhood.

As nationhood is ultimately a reality of biological descent (or, at least, the original concept is rooted in that, all exceptions for immigration, etc, aside), which is ultimately something inherited by us first and foremost physically, as a body related to other bodies familially (the nation and/or State, the civic sphere, is the material and temporal power, after all, not the spiritual). I suppose being a "sacramentally" minded person, this is why I'm inclined to prefer a "genetic" Head of State to a purely "memetic" one, when it comes to symbolizing the temporal nation or State. Because nationhood is "supposed to be" (in the root concept, at least) a reality of birth; "nation" and "nativity" share the same etymology in "birth" after all. (Whereas it is membership in the Church which is a reality of adoption, which is supposed to be the spiritual as opposed to fleshly community. All talk of "cradle Catholics" aside, no one is "born Christian"...we are all born pagans and become Christian only with baptism).

However, then people always bring up the question of "actual power." They scoff and call constitutional monarchs "figureheads" or "merely" symbols. In some systems there is a monarch specified by the very constitution as purely symbolic (take the Emperor of Japan since after WWII). This symbolism, this ceremonial role, is not, however, (as any good traditionalist should know) a "mere" thing, I wouldn't think.

That's like saying that a bishop's role as chief priest (liturgically speaking) in his diocese is "mere," when really...it's the foundation and cornerstone of everything else! It is in being the central ceremonial/liturgical figure, in symbolizing (being!) "Christ" for His diocese in that act, from which the bishop derives his other "administrative" powers (and those are the secondary thing), not the other way around.

The same for a Head of State (whether hereditary or elected). There must be a signifier capping the institutions of the State, a "hook" for the abstract notion of legitimacy to hang on (in the system of signifiers in the mind of the populace), a "final node" in which the sum result of the contribution of all the other nodes in the network is ultimately totaled. Because otherwise a State has no "real" existence, it is just a group of people. Corporate personhood (whether in the form of Church or State) requires ultimate "heading" in a real individual or the symbolic system which coordinates that notion tends to collapse, I think. The Head of State has a very important role in "tying together" legitimacy among the populace, to keeping the State-body cohesive, in this sense. Is in this way a "cornerstone" or "keystone" for the whole edifice of power.

And it's not just their body, their external physical persona which symbolizes the State (the Queen is Canada, for example, her body "is the locus of two distinct legal personae, one public, one private" as they say). This gets back to that question of the "figurehead" accusation, to the question of "real power." I would, in fact, assert that it is also, very literally, the Head of State's very Will in which must be located, in a very real sense, the Will of the whole nation or State. One can try to abstractly distinguish between their "private Will" and their "public Will" represented by the institutional organs of decision making, but I think this distinction is ultimately only abstraction. Just as a monarch does not have two bodies, they cannot have two Wills.

So what of "real powers"? Elected Heads of States (like presidents) are officially recognized as explicitly having them, certainly. But constitutional monarchs are usually seen as totally neutered. Whatever "reserve powers" they may officially maintain are seen as practically impossible to use. And yet I have basically just attempted to assert in the last paragraph that the Queen's Will is the legitimate one for the whole State, that her Will is the only one that can be called the Will of the corporate person which is the State, and not merely that of a private individual. How can these two things be reconciled?

I just gave a hint, the whole point of this post, I think: "practically" impossible is of a very different order than constitutionally impossible even if they are practically the same. As the wonderful thing about human wills is exactly that the do naturally exist in a world of circumstance, and specifically in a social network with other human Wills, that imposes consequences on their choices and which thus influence them. Yes, even to the point of a sort of duress. And this, I think, is the reality represented by the requirement, say, that the Queen only act "on the advice of her prime minister" etc. It's not that the Prime Minister has the "real" power in the sense of political legitimacy being rooted in his Will. But he may have the practical power based on how the web of relationships (all the State can really ever be) have been institutionally structured around the "central" Will of the monarch.

And they have been structured in such a way, yes, to "neuter" the monarch. To arrange the consequences in such a way that acting unilaterally would not "work." If the Queen tried to pull something unilaterally, other persons and blocks of persons, other Wills, would simply act to delegitimize her or the decision (except in the rare circumstance that she had broad popular support in the face of corrupt politicians; and even then it would still be the result of the relationships in society being structured in such a way that her Will would be the popular Will). But this doesn't mean that her Will is any less the "real" seat of legitimacy, it's just that she is under a certain type of duress or "under the sway" of those around her in the institutions of State. In fact, collectively, ultimately under the practically irresistible influence of every other Will in the nation "feeding into" her decisions through the channels of power.

This is how governments have always worked. Different people or groups of people may have, by their privileged positions in the structure of the network, yielded more relative influence in the past, their Will may have had a disproportionately high influence on the final collective outcome relative to other people. This is still true now, of course, but we tend to recognize that there has been a certain structural diffusion of power to lessen this through democratization. And we may agree or disagree that this is ideal. Certainly, I do not think absolutely "leveled" democracy (where everyone has roughly equal influence) is necessarily ideal a priori for any reason, and so I certainly think we may debate whether/how to structure the relations of power so that certain people or groups (perhaps even the Head of State or monarch personally, as in certain periods of the past) have a more or less proportionate influence on the final outcome. But ultimately these differences in structuring are differences in degree only, not nature, they exist along a historical continuum.

And this structuring of power through relationships is true of all of us, to some degree, in real life. I may be the "official" holder of my bank account, my Will is required to withdraw from it...but there are friends who know how to finagle (or bully, or beg) me into giving them some money. A father may be the official (in the legal sense) head of a family for various purposes, but he still may be "under the thumb" of a domineering wife. A Pope is the one who really is invested with supreme jurisdiction and infallibility, and we have to believe that Providence and the Holy Spirit are still working even if this Pope is beholden to some iron-willed housekeeper nun (lol) for whom he will do whatever she says.

Similarly a constitutional monarch. They do have the "real power" inasmuch as all the power and legitimacy of the State is indeed seated in their Will. There is no way for a State to act as a corporate person, as an organism, if this is not true. A 535-man congress cannot actually make a decision "collectively," the vote must ultimately be assented to by some unitary Will (that of the Head of State) to truly be the Will of the nation in terms of legitimacy. However, that doesn't mean we must accept "absolute" monarchy either. It is perfectly legitimate for Wills to be influenced by other Wills around them, for people to be "controlled" or limited in their decision making by the influence or "peer pressure" of those around them.

The question is how those various Wills (which may be in conflict) are able to exert or balance their respective influences over the supreme "central" Will of a State, how this network of relationships (and power therein) are structured. And I, for one, am certainly inclined to say that some degree of diffusion of power (on "democratic" lines) is best, as well as the structures of power being orderly and reasonable; power should be "channeled" in a "contained" fashion through the Rule of Law, the collective decision should not be made by a chaotic "storm" every time, but in a manner procedurally calm and non-volatile.

No king has ever truly ruled unilaterally. Even tyrants without widespread popular support obviously still had a certain type of tacit legitimacy, inasmuch as they were able, as a matter of practical fact, control the State. The "political" relational network (the one dealing with the exertion of power) were still such that the forces with the power (the army, say, and the wealthy) were arranged and structured relative to each other such that the king retained legitimacy in the sense of being able to carry out his Will by operationalizing the relationships he had, his privileged position in the relational network of power. But if his generals all ever got together and decided to kill or desert him or pressure him into making the decision they wanted...they would have easily been able to, objectively speaking (the genius of many "good kings" was in their ability to play powers against each other in balance.)

However, as I said above, what "democratization" has been is, essentially, the gradual diffusion of this power to more and more (in theory). Structuring the relational network in such a way as to (attempt to) equalize the respective power (in terms of the network as a whole) among all citizens, so that the "popular Will," the Will which the Head of State is ultimately under compulsion to make officially his own, is more majoritarian (while still structuring things so that minorities have their own sort of protections and influence).

But just because it is under compulsion at the center of the network of power, doesn't mean the Head of State's Will is any less real, any less the seat of legitimacy, and it still very much has a "structural" role as the central node wherein the "final calculation" of this network and all its many variables is resolved. Mind you: this doesn't mean the Head of State can never be removed or replaced (in fact, especially if he tries to resist this overwhelming "influence"...a restructuring like that may well be the result of the final calculation that does indeed play out in certain circumstances, in which case a new head will be found.)

Politics can only ever be understood in this "sociological" sense. Naive essentializations of government, legitimacy, political will, or power...lead to many problems. Politics or government is nothing other than the structuring of relationships (and the power therein) on a mass scale whereby what is concretely just millions of individuals are organized, effectively, into a single organism, a corporate person, based on the how those channels and organs of power are structured. But in such a system, there still must be a central Will (however "influenced" by all the others in the system), a Head, a final node in which (according to the structure of the network) the final calculation of the respective contributions of all the various other Wills can be preformed and the "combined" effect of all these various pushes and pulls can be played out.

Like a compass that must ultimately settle on one direction; in spite of there being strong magnets all over the room, it's simple physics: the sum of the various vectors of these magnetic forces will ultimately balance-out in one final concrete direction when all the opposing forces cancel out. And serving as this final node in which the respective influence of all the other nodes on the network of power finally resolves is, I think, the structural role of the Head of State in government.

And so if it's structured "properly" (by which I mean in such a way that the Head of State's "personal" influence is equally as tiny as that of each of the other millions of individual in the nation; though there can certainly be debate about whether that is "proper," about how much personal influence the Head of State should proportionately have) then I see no real threat in the office also being hereditary instead of elected, if only for symbolic purposes (and indeed, as I started this article by explaining: the two are not separate at all. The Head of State's Will "symbolizes" legitimacy for the nation collectively because that's exactly what it, in fact, is. The signifier of their personal assent is not an empty one, a sort of ceremonial rubber-stamp after-the-fact, but truly is the functional "barometer" that ultimately indicates/reveals the selfsame complexly-calculated collective decision signified by that personal decision.)

Back For Now

2011-10-22T10:58:00.005-05:00

As I alluded to in my post earlier this month, I've obviously been relatively scarce thanks to my international move, various melodramatic distractions, and the fact that getting internet in my apartment was a huge hassle involving the postal system and the phone company (two bureaucracies you don't want to deal with! Especially not in a mildly socialist country...) But finally I do have internet again, so hopefully I will be posting more very soon; I do have a few backlogged ideas. For now, prayers would still be very much appreciated. And a little nostalgia:

Meeting In The "Middle"

2011-10-15T11:44:00.006-05:00

A number of debates I've had recently with friends have centered around notions of what our "default" inclination is "politically." Ironically, we all have pretty much the same values and priorities now, and generally are hesitant to side with any movement or party or faction of This World.

The truth is, though, sometimes we have to side with something. But I think people may legitimately disagree on what is the lesser evil. I think Catholics have different “default” inclinations. My “default” inclination is, in fact, to err on the side of the Right when such a compromise much be made. Yet many of my (Catholic) friends actually have a “default” that is very much Liberal.

I'll admit: I've always voted Republican in the US, even if holding my nose while doing it. If I must choose between the Right and the Left, my inclination is still to see the Right as the lesser evil. My personality is just naturally "conservative" that way.

However, as I think is a big part of this whole "Renegade Trads" thing, I'm finding that I have “met in the middle” with a variety of people. Or perhaps “middle” is not the best way to describe it (because the position we ultimately hold is not so much moderate or centrism, as an attempt to always stay “transcendent” or “above” politics, yet not in an escapist sense, etc). So many debates I get in now are less about what the good looks like, and more about which evil is lesser. Less about the final destination, and more about which direction it makes more sense to arrive at it from.

Some people are “coming from the Right,” others are “coming from the Left.” Hopefully we’ll all meet in the “middle” (or whatever you want to call it). But I wouldn’t look down on the authoritarian and repressive tendencies of “coming from the Right” without equal criticism of the tendency towards naivitee of “coming from the Left.” And I wouldn't condemn the atheism and secularism that is more explicit on the Left without recognizing that the Right often co-opts God and notions of the transcendent for agendas that are completely secular and materialist.

Certainly, I'd no longer be inclined towards the simplistic "Catholic Answers" view that its a sin to vote Democratic (or for any pro-choice politician). Really I think political questions are not so straightforward now. I'll always err on the side of pro-life politicians personally, but I think voting for someone else can be legitimate as long as you're not voting for them because of their pro-choice position, and as long as you sincerely believe the situation is such that their position on abortion will be inconsequential in terms of actually affecting the current status quo.

It is no better to “sympathize with” Marxism than with Fascism. They’re both bad, but the fact that for most people one or the other is going to tug our heartstrings a little bit more on the level of pure appeal-to-emotion is not something to be making value judgments on. A concern with Equality or Freedom is no more noble a “political” concern than a concern with Order. Both are necessary values, neither should be sacrificed for the other, and having a “default” priority for one or the other (as long as we do eventually reach the correct synthesis) is not better or worse.

Likewise, there is ultimately no real conflict between people being good and people feeling good, between meaningfulness and happiness. But inasmuch as this false dichotomy can play out in the fallen sinful world, I'm more inclined to preserve meaningfulness and objective goodness over feeling good, over subjective pleasure and happiness. Others are more inclined to sympathize with a "sacrifice" working in the other direction, which is very much against my personal instinct on these questions.

Similarly, I recently had a discussion about whether there has been a sort of moral improvement of humanity along the lines of the Progressive narrative which would say that, yes, as technology and science has progressed, so have attitudes and philosophies and institutions. I very much disagreed; there is nothing new under the sun since Christ in this regard, and while there may be a cycle of more or less pious or idealistic periods, I think if anything evil has simply gotten more globalized and industrialized rather than things being any "better" nowadays (So we've gotten rid of official slavery; the global economy is based on structurally exploiting whole sections of the Third World! So we in the First World pride ourselves on a certain type of individualist empathy and non-bigotry, on being "nice people" basically; but then we live decadently and allow millions of infants to be slaughtered in the womb each year!)

However, as long as we all "meet in the middle" I think what direction we're "coming from" in these regards, whether our personality is naturally inclined to be liberal or conservative as its "default" sympathy...doesn't really matter. The perspectives are complementary.

Is The News Good?

2011-10-14T17:25:00.002-05:00

So, I'm still without internet in my new apartment thanks to the postal system, but just to do a quick post I bring to your attention these two stories many of you probably already saw.

The first involves Bishop Finn being charged for not reporting what he knew in the Kansas City case. Lots of conservative Catholics are going to be crying "persecution." I think that, whatever ultimately happens, they sort of had this coming. Whether you think it is entirely just in this specific case or not, beginning to prosecute bishops for their role in the sex abuse can only be a good development.

The second involves Assisi III. It sounds like there is little to worry about, like the Vatican has done everything it can to neuter any sort of indifferentist, Liberal, interreligious spirit at this gathering. Oh, some people will never be pleased (it'll be interesting to see how the SSPX reacts to the events) but it sounds like there won't even be any prayer or specifically religious interaction, just some meetings, speeches, and a dedication to peace. Fine.

In terms of the first story, during the height of this recent scandal last year, I had some very strong (even disgusted) critical words for this Pope in terms of acting decisively and being willing to think outside the culture of clericalism. But still, in light of the second story, I'm nevertheless so glad we've got him. I think he's managed to turn the train around, pretty much.

Bishops and Marriage

2011-10-09T12:43:00.005-05:00

An old article, but a principle I generally support. Bishops should, generally, be elected by the cathedral chapter of canons or diocesan presbyterial senate, probably from among their own number, and ordained by the archbishop of the province and co-consecrators from the nearest dioceses. They should not change dioceses (that ring is a wedding ring!) and there should be no notion of promotion.

Presbyters changing parishes is a bit less problematic as technically the "parish" is not a theological unit; priests belong to the dioceses as a whole sort of like the bishop and are his "hands" to use as needed to bring the sacraments to various locales.

Still, we can't be absolutist. Obviously, even in the early church there was sometimes movement between Sees (Peter from Antioch to Rome, for example) and sometimes it makes sense for a Pope to be elected from the bishop of another diocese, etc.

I'd tend to think that's "more okay" if the guy is moving up to a jurisdiction that includes his former jurisdiction; like, if a bishop is promoted to archbishop in the same province, archbishop to primate of his nation, a metropolitan to patriarch of his sui juris church or rite, a bishop to the papacy, etc, then there is less of a sense that he's "deserting" his former "bride" because he's still related directly to it in some hierarchal sense.

A Rather Striking Admission

2011-10-08T17:19:00.002-05:00

I don't know where they got this letter form the Pope, but I wish he would discuss issues in the Church with this sort of candor publicly:

I understand quite well your concern regarding the participation at the Assisi meeting. However, this commemoration would have to have been celebrated in some way and, all things considered, it seemed to me that the best thing would be for me to personally go there being thus able to determine the direction of it all. I will nevertheless do everything in order that a syncretistic or relativistic interpretation of the event will be impossible and so that what will remain is that I will always believe and confess that which I had called to the attention of the Church with [the Declaration] 'Dominus Iesus'.

Wouldn't it be great/funny if at Assisi III itself he got up and said, basically, "Yeah, the other two events were real scandals, gave the impression of relativism/indifferentism, and I'm here to basically put an end to that. Make no mistake: Catholicism is the one true Faith. Thanks for coming, though, we're more than willing to cooperate on a humanitarian level in spite of your schisms, heresies, and false gods."

Absent (and 666)

2011-10-05T16:21:00.005-05:00

I'd like to apologize to my readers for having been absent and posting rather infrequently for about a month now. I moved to another country at the beginning of September, am living in a self-sufficient manner for really the first time, have been without internet (it should be on early next week), and have had a lot of other emotionally exhausting things on my mind. Prayers are appreciated; this is also my 666th post, lol...

Rorate Caeli Confesses Its Fascism...

2011-09-29T16:42:00.003-05:00

Did anyone else see this on Rorate Caeli today? Ridiculous:

When a group of priests whine publicly that their superior is being "authoritarian", we must admit that our immediate reaction is to defend the superior; and when the "climate of fear" decried by these priests is a "climate" of "internal police" related to, shall we say, "homosexual matters" - well, then we are absolutely certain that the superior is correct and that whatever he is doing is certainly in the right direction.

So when someone is accused of being authoritarian, their gut sympathy is to side with the accused authoritarian? And when there is a climate of homophobia and "policing" they're absolutely certain what he's doing is correct?

I mean, I'm all for rooting out those who would make a mockery of the priesthood and Christian morals, but an atmosphere of authoritarian repression based around insinuations about sexuality is just McCarthyism, it sounds like.

I don't know if the situation in Rome is actually like that; the priests complaining may indeed be liberals whining that their party is over. But for Rorate Caeli to gleefully knee-jerk sympathize on the terms outlined above...is everything that's wrong with non-renegade reactionary traditionalism and conservatism in the Church today.

Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away...

2011-09-28T21:05:00.000-05:00