Expert advice

Thanks to Elaine, I found a passage in St. Jerome (Letter 107, 12) in which he suggests a (rather detailed) course of instruction in the Holy Scriptures for the daughter of Laeta, who had written him asking how to bring her up as a consecrated virgin:

Let her treasures be not silks or gems but manuscripts of the holy scriptures; and in these let her think less of gilding, and Babylonian parchment, and arabesque patterns, than of correctness and accurate punctuation.

Let her begin by learning the psalter, and then let her gather rules of life out of the proverbs of Solomon. From the Preacher let her gain the habit of despising the world and its vanities. Let her follow the example set in Job of virtue and of patience.

Then let her pass on to the gospels never to be laid aside when once they have been taken in hand.

Let her also drink in with a willing heart the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles.

As soon as she has enriched the storehouse of her mind with these treasures, let her commit to memory the prophets, the heptateuch [Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges], the books of Kings and of Chronicles, the rolls also of Ezra and Esther.

When she has done all these she may safely read the Song of Songs but not before: for, were she to read it at the beginning, she would fail to perceive that, though it is written in fleshly words, it is a marriage song of a spiritual bridal. And not understanding this she would suffer hurt from it.

Let her avoid all apocryphal writings, and if she is led to read such not by the truth of the doctrines which they contain but out of respect for the miracles contained in them; let her understand that they are not really written by those to whom they are ascribed, that many faulty elements have been introduced into them, and that it requires infinite discretion to look for gold in the midst of dirt.

Cyprian's writings let her have always in her hands. The letters of Athanasius and the treatises of Hilary she may go through without fear of stumbling. Let her take pleasure in the works and wits of all in whose books a due regard for the faith is not neglected. But if she reads the works of others let it be rather to judge them than to follow them.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Getting the Word out

There is, if you'll pardon me saying it, an excellent -- and terrifically important -- discussion going on in the comments of the post below. Well, this particular instantiation of the discussion may not be terrifically important, but the topic of discussion is, and some very good things are being said.

I suspect most Catholics who say that reading the Bible is hard are reading it wrong. That's understandable. The Church is still trying to get the word out (ha!) that it is right and good to read the Bible. How to read the Bible is a follow-on question.

So a good Catholic is likely to read the Bible in much the same way he would read War and Peace, or any other Improving Book: find a quiet spot, open to Page One, and begin. How far is a good Catholic likely to get? We might take a poll; pious little keener that I was, when I started at Page One as a twelve-year-old I made it to the middle of one of the Chronicles before crying, "Enough!" (But then, I was reading the Living Bible, an empty-calorie paraphrase that goes down a lot easier than any of the real translations.)

American Catholics are also likely to read the Bible in much the same way he imagines his Evangelical neighbor would read it, as a sort of textbook or Divine FAQ. This leads to all sorts of difficulties. I recall a man once telling me (I'm not sure why he thought I should know; I think I was helping out with the parish library's book sale at the time) that he had satisfied himself regarding the Biblical basis for every sacrament but Reconciliation. It just doesn't work well Catholic to have a fundamentally different understanding of Scripture than the Church has.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Dei Verbum

Discussion on a post below has turned to the traditional Catholic disinclination to read the Bible. Brandon Field makes what I think is a key point:

But, it is not necessary for Salvation for the faithful to own and read their Bible.

In Europe and North America, and perhaps wherever most Catholics are baptized as infants, there is a great emphasis on the bare necessities of salvation. Folks are perfectly willing to be Catholic, but they'd as soon leave holiness to others. As long as not reading the Bible doesn't make someone a bad Catholic, Catholics in large numbers aren't going to read the Bible.

The excerpt from Fr. Pinckaers I quoted offers a different, and likely more fruitful, tack than the "Rules for Not Being a Bad Catholic" approach.

Do you know anyone who, if God called them on the telephone, wouldn't take the call? Oh, a woman giving birth might say, "Take a message!", but in ordinary circumstances who would not knock down his grandmother to get to the phone?

And yet, things are such that the traditional Catholic ritual for reading Scripture includes the step of blowing the dust off the Bible (Old Calendarists do it after thrice crossing themselves; everyone else does it before crossing themselves once).

Which suggests to me that Catholics don't believe God is waiting to speak to them in the Scriptures. How come that?

Link | John da Fiesole
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"Women are irrational, that's all there is to that"

An odd story of the human heart:

A woman we'll call K is scandalized by the apparent indifference, not merely to Church law, but to basic human decency in a well-publicized, Church-blessed marriage. The news hurts her, because her own hoped-for Church-blessed marriage would require an annulment as well as a year of "marriage prep with a celibate single guy," which she sees as "one of the kinks we still haven't quite ironed out of the system." She decides she'll be "getting married in City Hall after all," and worry about a Church blessing later if at all.

The response to her "Bite me"? An "incredible outpouring of emails" expressing sympathy, while generally urging her to do the right thing according to the Church.

Her response? She immediately contacted her diocesan tribunal to begin the process of obtaining the Sacrament of Marriage.

Now, I may be reading too much into this particular story. K had been planning on the sacrament previously, and may well have returned to that plan on her own. But if I were to abstract a moral, it would be something like this:

People can be loved to the truth.

It's not a new or startling moral, I realize, but it's worth keeping in mind, as is its corollary: People can be hated to falsehood.

You hate someone to falsehood when your hatred of them causes them to reject the truth you represent to them. It's the old, "If you're the product of Catholicism, I'm not having any." When you hear yourself saying, "Don't let the door hit you on your way out," it's a good bet you're not loving them. And when you say, "Take it or leave it," that may well be the choice they're faced with, but you may not be the one to make them face it.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Just a reminder

From Servias Pinckaers, OP:

Actually, Scripture, especially the Gospels, is addressed to believers rather than to scholars. This means that every Christian possesses the capacity to grasp the kernel of the Gospel, the nourishing meat within the shell of words, the Word that will touch him, convert him, lead him along the road to God. Better still, this means that God can speak directly to the heart of everyone who reads and listens to the Gospel with faith. He reveals Himself to him with the help of this text, as one person reveals himself little by little to another during conversation.

In light of this, I should like to ask you: if God has truly spoken to us in His Scripture, do you think it is enough to listen distractedly to the two or three readings at Sunday Mass? If the Lord has spoken to us, is it not because He has something essential to tell us that will interest us personally? ...

Take the Gospel in hand. Here is a letter God sends you in friendship today. Let no person, no pretext, stop you from listening to this Word, from joining in this intimate conversation.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Divided loyalties

Well, why not? If it's good for the sport. (The Washington Post provides a little context and background.)

Link | John da Fiesole
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Caritas Splendor

In his speech last week to the Pontifical Council "Cor Unum," Pope Benedict said:

Today, the word "love" is so spoiled, worn out and abused that one almost fears to pronounce it. And yet, it is a fundamental word, an expression of the primordial reality. We cannot simply abandon it, but we must take it up again, purify it and bring it to its original splendour so that it can illumine our life and guide it on the right path.

This is certainly true, and "love" isn't the only word that has become spoiled, worn out and abused.

In advertising, "sinful" and "decadent" are used to mean "pleasurable, good tasting, and unhealthful." "Marriage" signifies a best efforts contract between (if we're lucky) two consenting adults. "Heaven" and "hell" mean "a time and place of pleasure" and "a time and place of discomfort."

Some of this is, I guess, just the natural entropy of language; over time terms become less specific in meaning. (Was it C.S. Lewis who wrote that eventually every word means either "good" or "bad"?) Some of it is the adolescent rejection and inversion of adult values. But all of it should be resisted, if Christians are to be able to proclaim their faith.

Maybe we can regard the abuse of such terms as a good sign, insofar as it shows that people are still somehow close to such ideas as love, sin, and heaven. Everyone has what he needs inside him to respond to Christ; it just wants straightening out.

It seems to me, as well, that what the Pope is inviting us to do is not so much to discard the abuses, not to say, "No! There is nothing of love in what you've been calling 'love,'" but rather to correct the abuses, to say something like, "Love is so much more than you think, and when you see how much more it is, you will see that some of the elements of your concept of love are contrary to love."

I need to reread the encyclical to be more confident, but as of now I sense a strong grace-perfecting-nature vibe in the statement, "Fundamentally, 'love' is a single reality."

Link | John da Fiesole
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As a theologian, he's a great astronomer

Fr. George V. Coyne, SJ, Director of the Vatican Observatory, reportedly gave a talk titled "Science Does Not Need God, or Does It? A Catholic Scientist Looks at Evolution" last night at a university in Florida. If that link does indeed "represent[] the essentials" of his presentation (I don't know why it wouldn't be, but I wasn't there), then my reservations regarding him as an authority on the intersection of science and faith are only strengthened.

A post at Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex raises several detailed objections to that text. Let me add two or three others.

After mentioning a few historical incidents showing "the ups and downs of the view ... of the Catholic Church, with respect to Darwinian evolution," Fr. Coyne proceeds:

The most recent episode in the relationship of the Catholic Church to science, a tragic one as I see it, is the affirmation by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn in his article in the New York Times, 7 July 2005, that neo-Darwinian evolution is not compatible with Catholic doctrine and he opts for Intelligent Design.

This is one of those "Only Genuine Pre-War American and British Whiskeys Served Here" statements, remarkable for the number of inaccuracies it contains. I count three.

The first and most forgivable is the assertion that the Cardinal's July 7 op-ed piece is the "most recent episode." Since then, Cardinal Schönborn has begun a series of public lectures on creation and evolution; the third has just been translated into English. In addition, he published a substantial article in last month's First Things, in which he summed up his clarification of his op-ed piece and responded to his critics. Events have moved far past July 7.

As I say, though, this is forgivable. The speech may have been written several months ago and the provided text not revised to account for what has happened since.

What is less forgivable -- not even entirely understandable, to my mind -- are the other two errors. Fr. Coyne claims Cardinal Schönborn made a double affirmation, but he is wrong about both prongs. The Cardinal did not affirm that "that neo-Darwinian evolution is not compatible with Catholic doctrine," nor did he affirm that "he opts for Intelligent Design." That Fr. Coyne would say otherwise, even without the benefit of the Cardinal's subsequent elaborations, suggests that he was reading into the Cardinal's op-ed piece opinions he expected to find, rather than what was actually there.

When Fr. Coyne turns "to interpret the scientific picture of lifeÂ?s origins in terms of religious belief," I think he demonstrates he would be better off sticking to the scientific picture. He writes:

Do we need God to explain this [scientific picture]? Very succinctly my answer is no. In fact, to need God would be a very denial of God. God is not the response to a need... We should not need God; we should accept her/him when he comes to us.

Without further development, this is simply guff. It depends on an equivocation on "need," using it first in a scientific sense of something required to explain something, then in a psychological sense of something stoutly desired.

Even leaving out the scientific part, though, it strikes me as underbaked theology. How do you square, "We should not need God," with the empirically observable fact that we do actually happen to need God? Why the false dilemma between needing God and accepting Him when he comes to us? How does needing God imply God is a need?

Fr. Coyne goes on to write:

If they respect the results of modern science, religious believers must move away from the notion of a dictator God, a Newtonian God who made the universe as a watch that ticks along regularly. Perhaps God should be seen more as a parent or as one who speaks encouraging and sustaining words.

This I would call a straw man argument. "Perhaps God should be smoremroe as a parent" than "a dictator God"? In blog lingo, ya think?

God lets the world be what it will be in its continuous evolution. He does not intervene, but rather allows, participates, loves.

I agree with David that this sort of language suggests "that Fr. Coyne seems to fall into a sort of scientism." He wants religious belief to stop sticking its nose into modern science, yet he insists that modern science -- which operates only by assuming axioms that are not true -- gives a true picture of God. The argument looks like this:

1. Modern science assumes God does not intervene.
2. Modern science does not observe God intervening.
3. Therefore, God does not intervene.

Even setting aside the tendentiousness of implying that "God intervenes" makes any theological sense, the argument is question-begging as structured.

There is a sort of milquetoast theology in claiming that God deals with the universe like a parent allowing a child to grow up, but to properly engage it (which I suspect would involve shredding it, with all parties involved agreeing not to mention it ever again) it would need to be disentangled from the scientism which, in Fr. Coyne's case at least, gave it birth.

Link | John da Fiesole
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With non-rapt attention

A post at Flos Carmeli suggests that I am puzzled, when in fact I am merely correct.

What that post's author misses -- I say this imputing no blame; pious convention refers to such Carmelite inattentiveness in terms of contemplative rapture, a circumlocution I can work with -- is that the part of my post he refers to was written from the perspective of a[n imagined] disappointed reader who wants the Pope to insist on concrete and dramatic changes within the Church now, in proof-text-worthy terms.

There may be some irony, for those who look for such things, in that where the encyclical calls for concrete and dramatic action, it does so in markedly un-proof-text-worthy terms.

Well, it does have this sort of thing:

People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone.

But it's a pretty sad conversation that requires a participant to say, "Wait a minute! Didn't you read what the Pope wrote? 'People who pray are not wasting their time'!"

Be that as it may, most of the call-to-actionable stuff in the encyclical is more along these lines:

Interior openness to the Catholic dimension of the Church cannot fail to dispose charity workers to work in harmony with other organizations in serving various forms of need, but in a way that respects what is distinctive about the service which Christ requested of his disciples.

Asking yourself whether your charitable work serves in a way that respects what is distinctive about the service which Christ requested of His disciples is an action the Pope calls us to, but it's not a particularly dramatic or percussive act. It ought to effect some change in the Church, but I don't think it will cause anyone to say, "Non serviam! I don't need to serve in a way that respects what is distinctive about the service Christ requested!" It is, so to speak, a "soft" action, something a person can claim to have done without having done it.

Maybe the distinction I'm looking for is that this is a teaching letter, not the disciplinary letter I suspect a lot of people were hoping for (and not a few fearing). And I mean "disciplinary" in a broad sense, including not only correction and punishment, but a program of training and formation.

Link | John da Fiesole
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In style

So Happy Catholic comes right out and admits she's a weirdo. Others agree.

For me, the problem I have with reading the works of the blessed John Paul II has less to do with the words he uses than with all the visual clutter surrounding them.

Let me rephrase that: For me, the problem I have, with "reading the works" of the blessed John Paul II¹, has less to do with the words (cf. John 1:1) he uses than with all the visual clutter surrounding them.

I haven't yet read enough of Pope Benedict XVI to have much of a feel for his style, beyond "professorial" and "expositorial."

Clearly, what is needed is a contest, along the lines of the Faux Faulkner and the Bad Hemingway. Maybe the John Paul the Second-Rate Writing Competition and the Bum Benedict Bout? The winning entries of each would then face off; the more awful one would prove which pope is the better stylist.

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1. Not to be confused with the blessed John Paul I.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Potent stuff

Writing "we heartily endorse Divine love" in the post below, the thought occurred that, had Gerard Serafin lived to see Deus Caritas Est published, he may well have been sent into a swoon of ecstasy from which he never emerged.

Link | John da Fiesole
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In the cold light of fawn

By now, most everyone who set his alarm early last Wednesday to get his own copy of Deus Caritas Est fresh off the Web has had a chance to read it. A lot of people, even some you might not have expected, have said nice things about the encyclical and the man who wrote it. (Granted, not all the nice things said have been well grounded in reality.)

I wonder, though, whether the occasional quibble expressed in public by Benedict boosters (e.g., Mike Liccione's, "I'm somewhat disappointed that the encyclical is not more specific and therefore more offensive.") might indicate a broader or deeper disappointment with the inoffensiveness, perhaps even the ineffectiveness, of the encyclical.

Here Cathoholics had waited nine months for the new sheriff in town to put up the wanted poster, or maybe the "No Guns Allowed" signs, or something. Anything.

What we got was an insightful, clear, and even moving exposition on Divine love. All to the good, of course; we heartily endorse Divine love. But now what?

Am I imagining the feelings within certain broad quarters of the Church that they would have preferred the encyclical to be more of a call to action? More percussive, so to speak? Or even concussive?

I have seen perhaps two comments so far to the effect that Pope Benedict is simply laying the groundwork for, you know, the red hot stuff, which we can expect Real Soon Now.

But what if he isn't? What if he wrote Deus Caritas Est, not to pad the footnotes of a barrage of Notices from the CDF he's been preparing for two decades, but to teach the Church about Divine Love?

Link | John da Fiesole
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Despise him not in his mirth^*

St. Thomas had what you might call the classical distrust of laughter. When he wrote of mirth, he was as likely as not to have in mind "senseless mirth" (ineptam laetitiam), "which Gregory calls a daughter of gluttony." You don't have to follow St. Gregory's line of reasoning too closely to see that he didn't think much of senseless mirth.

But the "senseless" is a critical modifier. In traditional monastic thought^**, laughter is a sign of suspended reason. When you're laughing, you aren't thinking. If you laugh a lot, then, you spend a lot of time not thinking, which is contrary to the religious life -- and, more generally, to our rational human nature.

It's senseless mirth, then, that is a daughter of gluttony, not mirth as such. In fact, that one reference to senseless mirth appears in the article, "Whether there can be sin in the excess of play?" (Hint: yes), which is followed by the article, "Whether there is a sin in lack of mirth?" (Hint: yes):

Now it is against reason for a man to be burdensome to others, by offering no pleasure to others, and by hindering their enjoyment... Now a man who is without mirth, not only is lacking in playful speech, but is also burdensome to others, since he is deaf to the moderate mirth of others. Consequently they are vicious, and are said to be boorish or rude, as the Philosopher states (Ethic. iv, 8).

He does go on to argue Aristotle's point that "lack of mirth is less sinful than excess thereof," but in the end he sees mirth as capable of being virtuous, when reason -- more precisely, temperance -- keeps it between two extremes.

It's also interesting (if you're the sort of person who finds it interesting) that St. Thomas mentions the human faculty of laughing twice when discussing the simplicity of God, then again when explaining that God is the efficient cause of all beings. When he wants an essential accident of man to contrast with the absence of essential accidents in God, or an example of something without which man cannot be, St. Thomas picks laughing. My guess (subject to correction) is that he got this example as a cliche from Aristotle, but it's still worth chewing over that to be human is to be able to laugh.

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*. The Douay-Rheims Bible Online has a typo of great mirth: "Rebuke not thy neighbour in a banquet of wine: and despise him not in hip mirth." For a moment, I thought the Bible was directly condemning The Daily Show.

**. I should mention that my knowledge about traditional monastic thought is within an epsilon neighborhood of squat. Do not wager on the correctness of this post.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A friar walks into a bar

If someone were to compile a book called The Wit and Wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas, he would probably spend a lot more time working on the wisdom part than the wit part. Whatever might be said for him, St. Thomas was not known for his playful banter.

In fact, one story told of him suggests more killjoy than wit. It seems some fellow students in a playful mood called to Brother Thomas as he labored at his studies, "Brother Thomas, come quick! There's a cow flying in the field!"

St. Thomas made his way to the window, at which point the friars began to laugh at him. He answered, "I would rather believe a cow could fly than that a friar would lie."

It's hard to know how seriously to take this story. Maybe we should just say turning a practical joke into an illustration of the virtue of truth is the sort of thing he might have done, and leave it at that.

But I shouldn't leave that term "killjoy" unchallenged. Per the story, Br. Thomas wasn't killing joy, but mirth at another's expense. As he would write years later:

Jesting implies nothing contrary to charity in relation to the person with whom one jests, but it may imply something against charity in relation to the person who is the object of the jest, on account of contempt....

If indeed he managed to kill anything with his remark, it wasn't the effect of charity called joy.

For that matter, if the story of the flying cow were told, mutatis mutandi, about Samuel Johnson -- which, for all I know, it has been -- it would be received as a clever and cutting riposte.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Like peas and carrots

And after all, why shouldn't they make these? They're both from Scotland. No stranger than the ceramic haggis I've got on my shelf.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Moral paralysis

I made the claim, in a comment on this post, that swearing off all forms of the principle of double effect (PDE) leads to moral paralysis.

You can check this old post for the four-pronged PDE as I know it. I referred in the comments to "all forms of the PDE" because others may have their own prongs, but the basic idea of all forms is that, under certain circumstances, an act with foreseeable bad consequences can be morally licit.

So to swear off all forms of the PDE is to insist that acts with foreseeable bad consequences are never morally licit.

By "moral paralysis" I mean something like "lacking morally licit means to a licit end." In acute cases, the moral paralytic is pretty much literally damned if he do and damned if he don't: anything he can do is immoral, and not doing anything is also immoral. In milder cases, moral paralysis is more like extreme rigorism, preventing the sufferer from doing rather common things the Church has never forbidden.

How does swearing off the PDE lead to moral paralysis? Consider the following examples:

Human Act	:	Foreseeable Bad Consequence
Driving a car	:	Pollution
Surgery	:	Pain; immobility
Jury trials	:	Conviction of the innocent

("Jury trials" is more properly "formal cooperation in a criminal justice system that uses jury trials," but that doesn't fit on one line.)

Do those who think the PDE is poobah think it is immoral to drive a car or to use electricity (which also causes pollution)? Do they think medical surgery that results in the patient being in pain and bedridden for hours or days afterward is objectively evil? It seems to me that either they must, or they actually do accept some flavor of PDE (possibly under cover of a very ad hoc notion of "bad consequences").

UPDATE: Post modified to satisfy the persnickitiness of a moral theologian who pointed out that, strictly speaking, one of my examples was incorrect.

Link | John da Fiesole
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This Year's Model

Ho hum.

Two words to suchlike: Simon Templar.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Okay, just one thing

In skimming Deus Caritas Est to see if he mentions this blog, I note this:

The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her three-fold responsibility: of proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria), celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia), and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia).

Hmmm.

• Kerygma: to preach
• Leitourgia: to praise
• Diakonia: to bless

Referring to the motto of the Dominican Order as the expression of the Church's deepest nature, on top of that "In Truth, Peace" message for the World Day of Peace. I knew I liked this guy.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Magistra, Si; Pop Quizzes, No

I'll get to it when I get to it.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Abusus non tollit usum

In the recent dispute about means and ends on Catholic and Enjoying It!, a few people advocated a position that might be paraphrased thusly:

People who say the end doesn't justify the means just play around with the definition of the means until they can justify the end they desire.

You understand how the process works. You can work your way down the chain of intent: "Getting drunk is sinful? But I'm not getting drunk, I'm celebrating the New Year." Or the other direction: "But I'm not getting drunk, I'm pouring a clear liquid into my mouth and swallowing."

It wasn't clear to me at the time what the point of advocating that position was. Do people try to rationalize their sins? Certainly. Does this invalidate the moral principle that the end does not justify the means? Certainly not. If the advocates were merely trying to impugn the moral honesty of those they were arguing with, then it's no big deal for discussion; I personally can't claim to have never done some weaselly ratiocination to excuse something appalling I had done or was going to do. It may also have been the last, bent dart in the quiver, thrown into the discussion out of sheer cussedness. Sheer cussedness don't confront me.

If, however, it was meant as an attack on the principle itself -- if it was intended to suggest that the principle can't be properly applied in practice -- then we've got an issue.

We would all agree, I trust, that misuse does not take away use. (Good thing, too, since there is pretty much nothing humans are incapable of misusing.) Pointing out that people sometimes or even often misuse a moral principle is only an attack on the principle itself if the implication is that people always misuse it, or at least that there's no objective way of verifying that in a particular case the principle was used correctly.

But in fact there is an objective way of verifying that in a particular case the principle was used correctly. You just start with the end, with the answer to why you're doing something, then work your way backward along the chain of intent until you reach a purely natural (or physical or pre-moral) act, an act that has no associated moral choice. Since the end does not justify the means, and we intend the means we choose, every link in this chain has to be morally good.

Each link can be seen, for the purposes of analysis, as the object of an act the intent of which is the subsequent link. As the blessed John Paul II put it in Veritatis Splendor 73, the question is "whether that object is capable or not of being ordered to God, to the One who 'alone is good,' and thus brings about the perfection of the person."

Now, figuring out whether an object is capable of being ordered to God can be a tricky business, and it may be done more or less correctly in a particular case by a particular person. But it is not impossible; the perfection of the person is not a wholly opaque state. There is a perfect Person sacramentally present in your neighborhood Catholic church, if you want to go check your answer with Him.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Perspective in exorcism

ZENIT has published an introduction written by Georges Cardinal Cottier, O.P., to a book on exorcism. It's a bit disjointed in translation, but there are some interesting bits.

Though he sinned, the fallen angel has not lost all the power he had, according to God's plan, in the governance of the world. Now he uses this power for evil.

I've never thought of the devil's power in the world as being fundamentally the same power God intended him to wield according to His will. But of course it is; it's not like God said, "You've passed on doing My will and have chosen Door Number Two, which has... demonic power!"

The devil is much more dangerous as tempter than through extraordinary signs or astonishing external manifestations, because the gravest evil is sin... A sinner who remains set in his sin is more wretched that one who is possessed.

I admire myself for not being curious about demonic possession and related topics, lest through presumption I leave myself open to attack. Meanwhile, the demons are probably delighted with how open I leave myself to plain old temptation.

Saint Thomas and Saint John of the Cross affirm that we have three tempters: the devil, the world (we certainly recognize this in our society) and ourselves, that is, self-love.

If I had to identify a tempter in my life, I think I would much prefer to go with "the flesh" rather than "myself," which is an awfully personal way of putting it, don't you think?

The Sacraments have in truth a priority over the sacramentals, a category in which exorcisms are included, which are requested by the Church but not as a priority.

We tend to think of exorcism as the elephant gun in the Church's spiritual armory. When all else fails, we put in the call to Max von Sydow and take cover.

Really, though, exorcism isn't so much powerful as very focused, more scalpel than elephant gun, and the exorcist himself draws strength from the Eucharist above all else. And after all, time was the office of exorcist was one step down from the office of altar boy.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The object of the act

A recent dispute with other commenters at Catholic and Enjoying It! has helped me to clarify my understanding of traditional moral analysis.

As has been mentioned often enough on Disputations, three factors have been identified which determine the morality of a particular human act. (A "human act" is an act freely willed by a human, and therefore either good or evil.) The factors are the object of the act, the intent of the actor, and the circumstances in which he acts.

I used to think of the object of an act as being objective -- that is, as being determined apart from any subjective input from the actor. That's true, but I was overlooking the role of the actor's will in determining the object of the act.

Of course, the actor's will must have a role, or else it wouldn't be a human act, and it would have no moral dimension at all. In fact, the will plays two formally distinct roles, one in determining the object of the act and the other in determining the intent.

How it works can be seen by considering the example of lying. "To lie," the Catechism tells us, "is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error." An argument was offered: Doesn't this mean that, by definition, the actor's intent can determine the objective moral nature of the act?

The answer is no, because the "in order to lead someone into error" is not the intent of a lie, it is the object. The intent of the lie is the end sought by the liar in telling the lie, and with the possible exception of very perverse persons, there is an end sought beyond simply leading someone into error. The actor intends this end be achieved through the means of leading someone into error.

(That, by the way, is what makes the object of an act objective. We intend the means we choose (since we, you know, choose them), and if we choose sinful means we can't deny their sinfulness simply because, subjectively, we mean to do good.)

Note what happens in the case of lying if we take out the object (which some would have be the intent): "To lie is to speak or act against the truth." But speaking against the truth is not, per se, a lie as anyone understands it; I might be mistaken, I might be talking in my sleep. More fundamentally, it is not even a meaningfully characterized human act, since it fails to characterize what the human will thinks it has chosen.

For there to be a human act, an act to which we can apply some moral value, the will has to choose to do something, and it is that choice which specifies what human act is being done.

I'd summarize the above with this table, showing different perspectives or ways of expressing the two ways the will is involved in every human act:

Object - Intent
Means - End
Proximate End - Remote End
What human act is done? - Why is it done?

Link | John da Fiesole
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More curling links

Curlgirls.com is the official website of Team USA's women's curling team. They took silver at the 2005 World Championships, so there's good reason to bet on gold at Torino.

Team Fenson, the USA's Olympic men's curling team, also has a website. They placed sixth at World last year, so they're facing longer odds, but that's why they play the game.

And do you even have to ask whether there is a web page that features images of every known curling stamp ever issued anywhere?

Link | John da Fiesole
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Do you not know?

I gather that, this past Sunday, a lot of people heard that the body is not for immortality. (That's not unbearably bad, as the passage goes on to say the body is "for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body; God raised the Lord and will also raise us by His power." If you don't mind your natural end being different than your supernatural end, a case could be made that... ah, never mind.)

The words that popped out at me on listening to them, though, were from verse 19:

Do you not know ... that you are not your own?

And, well, no. I don't know that. At least, I might say that I am not my own, but I certainly live as though I were my own.

But if I am my own, then I cannot be holy, which is to say, I cannot be dedicated to God, which is what St. Paul explains in the words I elided from verse 19: "that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, Whom you have from God." St. Paul is speaking of sexual immorality, but it's true in general: the Christian is not his own, any more than a building given to God and consecrated as a church belongs to the one who donated the building.

We do know of a case where someone tried to have it both ways, to keep his property while announcing that he was giving it all to God, but that didn't turn out well for him.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Not my choice

I admit to being surprisingly disappointed by George Weigel's God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church. My disappointment is surprising because I was toying with the idea of buying the book when a review copy was offered me.

The opening chapter, "The Death of a Priest," was great. It covers the final sickness and death of the blessed John Paul II, and those of us who love and miss him will find this chapter a clear exposition of the first few months of 2005, and a good reminder of those experiences.

In Chapter 2, "The Church That John Paul II Left Behind," Weigel lists the "EPIC ACCOMPLISHMENT" and the "FRUSTRATIONS AND AMBIGUITIES" of that papacy. Here things get a little... skewed.

I think I'm reacting to Weigel's reportorial tone, well suited to a recitation of the chronology of the events covered in the book, extending into his opinion and analysis. Certainly one man's epic accomplishment may be another's frustration, but Weigel seems content to simply assert his judgment rather than defend it, as for example when he writes that "the Church and the world will be wrestling with the thought of John Paul II for centuries."

Well, maybe.

Weigel also seems even more reluctant than I to criticize John Paul II. None of the frustrations and ambiguities are the Pope's fault, not even Weigel's dissatisfaction with many of the bishops the Pope appointed. The papacy is interpreted as though it had only a two-part munus, of priest and prophet; to the extent the blessed John Paul II chose to govern as prophet, Weigel gives him a full pass. Which is fine as a personal choice, but it doesn't produce the most insightful analysis.

And then some other oddities creep in, bits of ecclesial flotsam some of which constituted a nine-hours' wonder on St. Blog's, but that seem really out of place in so durable a format as a hardcover book. (I think in particular of the mention of sleazy pictures (sorry, Googlers, you're out of luck here) once posted on a Jesuit website.)

So my initial enthusiasm cooled, and it got to the point where reading the book was a chore, where I'd think, "Oh, I should finish that so I can blog a review." But then, getting to the point where reading the book is a chore is itself suggestive of a review.

I know a lot of other bloggers have commented favorably on God's Choice, and I was expecting to as well. I will say it seems like a good record of the events, and a handy overview of Pope John Paul II's papacy you might be able to hand to your kids in a decade or so when they ask what the big deal with him was anyway. I can't say how the book is on the title character, since I'm not going to force myself to read past Chapter 3 (on the funeral; subsequent chapters cover the conclave, an overview of Pope Benedict XVI's pre-papal career, and the future of the Church).

Labels: Reviews

Link | John da Fiesole
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No, I mean the god of Szechuan cooking

I've noticed that, when people talk about what can be known about God by the natural light of reason vice faith in revelation, they often use terms like "the Christian God" and "the God of the Bible."

I understand the point -- to emphasize that what we can know with certainty about God by reason falls far short of what we can know with certainty about Him by faith -- but I think it's an unfortunate way of expressing it.

It is, after all, the same God.

I think our habits of speech should reinforce our habits of thought, and "the God [or god] of X" is a Biblical formula for identifying and distinguishing God [or god] from gods. To say that the Christian God cannot be known by reason is, literally, heresy, even though the intended meaning be orthodox.

When talking about our Faith, particularly on subjects like natural theology where we are likely to encounter non-Christians (or, for that matter, Christian fideists), we should be careful not to leave room for error to creep in due to our language. In this case, we should be careful to prevent the inference that the God Who can be known with certainty by the natural light of reason is not the God Who so loved us that He sent us His only Son.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Baby, You're the greatest!

Enbrethiliel tells the remarkable story of Sto. Nino de Cebu, the Christ Child who prepared the way for the Church in the Philippines.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Curling Fever

Catch it!

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Don't I know it

After saying some nice things about me^*, Scott Carson worries over some things I wrote on what Vatican I says about knowledge of God by the natural light of reason.

He quotes me:

In any case, the Church asserts that from philosophy we can learn that God is one, that He is true God, that He is our creator, that He is our lord, that He is the source and the end of all things, and perhaps most importantly, that His nature is perceivable in creation.

Then comments:

The way Tom has put it ("the Church asserts THAT...,THAT...,THAT...") the "knowledge", such as it is, is all propositional.

I think that's mostly true. The last proposition though, that God's nature is perceivable in creation, implies knowledge that is not necessarily so propositional.

Scott then says something curious about propositional knowledge:

So I can pass on this knowledge just by telling it to someone else.

So if I say to Richard Dawkins, "God exists, He is One, He created the universe", Richard Dawkins now knows all of that.

I say this is curious because, to me, it seems like Richard Dawkins now knows that Scott Carson said to him, "God exists, He is One, He created the universe," which is quite a different proposition (ha!) than knowing God exists, etc.

Scott lists a set of commonly held necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge:

1. Knowledge is a form of belief.
2. Knowledge is always true.
3. Knowledge requires an understanding of the reason why one's belief is true.

I read the first one more in sadness than in anger, having spent two weeks mulling over St. Augustine's definition of belief, according to which it would be more accurate to say belief is a form of knowledge, but if one isn't prepared to be broadminded in dealing with philosophers, one shouldn't deal with philosophers.

More to the point, saying to an atheist, "God exists," does not provide him with an understanding of the reason why "God exists" is true, so even by Scott's definition, I can't see how we can say the atheist now knows God exists.

Next, Scott writes:

How is it possible for somebody to know something with certainty when they don't even believe it? Tom's answer:

It has also been pointed out that the Richard Dawkinses of the world don't necessarily want to be convinced.

This seems to turn the question of knowing into a psychological, rather than an epistemological, problem, and that doesn't seem right to me. I don't know the things that I know because of the sort of personality that I have--after all, plenty of other folks with very different psychologies know precisely the same things that I know.

I think Scott actually does know a lot of the things he knows because of his personality. Ancient Greek, for example. As finite creatures, we can't know everything, and we choose what we are going to try to learn based on what seems good to us.

And just as temperamental interest is a necessary cause of us knowing a good deal of what we do know, I'd say temperamental prejudice prevents us from knowing some things we could know. In the case of the militant atheist, he may well reject the truth of a demonstration of God's existence (much less His other attributes that can be demonstrated by the natural light of reason) out of ill-will. He can choose not to assent to a "self-evident" premise, or choose to insist (contrary to reason) that a demonstration is invalid.

In short, if the question of knowing includes what is actually known, and not just what can be known or how it can be known, then it includes psychology.

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*. Don't be fooled by the nice things Scott says. He's still trying to make up for heartlessly failing to name me his son's godfather eleven years ago. One forgives, of course. But one does not forget.

Link | John da Fiesole
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How about a boy scout with a pea shooter?

Let me unseasonably conclude the Christmastide series of posts on thinking with assent with a brief look at the "thinking axis" of those plots, at what might be said to increase in relation to our thinking that signifies an increase in our faith.

"Pondering" may be the best term for the sort of thinking St. Thomas has in mind here. Pondering is thinking about something in order to understand it better or more fully; in the case of a matter of belief, in which one assents to what one ponders, pondering attempts to see more clearly what can be seen, including the implications and consequences of the belief and what is involved in making room for that belief in the believer's life.

This concept of pondering is extremely subjective. It's not the sort of thing that can be compared between two people, in terms of time spent pondering or effort spent while pondering. One person may quickly understand all he ever will understand regarding a belief, while another person may spend hours in unprofitable noodling. Moreover, a person may find that different beliefs call for different amounts of pondering.

See how I snuck in talk of the "amount" of pondering? I mean pretty much what you'd think I mean: the effort put into pondering over time.

I've been a bit fast and loose on the distinction between believing, which is thinking with assent, and faith, which is the virtue of sharing God's knowledge. Believing is the interior act of faith (confessing is the exterior act), which is to say it's what you do when you engage in your habit of faith.

So if you have faith in Christ, there are a whole bunch of things you believe, but you're only actively believing at most a few of these things at any given time. (That you actively believe all of them over time means you habitually believe them, which is to say you have faith.)

With all that said, I think there's a case that the more one ponders the elements of a set of beliefs, the more faith one has.

Now, I've already pointed out the subjectivity of pondering, so we can't say that someone who spends more time pondering Christian beliefs necessarily has greater Christian faith than someone who spends less time pondering. The simple-minded saints are in no way indicted as lacking in faith by this line of thought.

Similarly, such comparisons as between the centurion, who seems to have made up his mind and gone fully into external action well before he had a chance to speak to Jesus, and the disciples, who never stop pondering and never start acting with great faith, aren't objections so much as illustrations of this subjectivity. The centurion was well-prepared to understand and accommodate his belief that Jesus could command the servant be healed, even as the disciples were still trying to graft their beliefs regarding Jesus onto their wrong opinions about what the Messiah would do.

Another objection is that certainty is more clearly essential to faith than is pondering, and certainty and pondering seem incompatible, if not contradictory. "God said it, I believe it, that settles it," as the saying goes. We can preserve St. Augustine's formula of "thinking with assent" by using a modest reading of St. Thomas, that the thinking is less a deliberating action than the state of incomplete deliberation. If you believe Jesus is both God and man, will you actually believe it any more if you chew on it for an hour or two? And if you're constantly worrying over the same belief, doesn't that suggest you don't really believe it?

Sed contra, "And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart."

Respondeo, faith is a habit, habits involve acts, and performing the acts involved in a habit more can't be a sign of a weakening of the habit. In this case, belief is assured by assent, so thinking about it more doesn't mean you believe it less.

What happens through pondering the truths of the Faith is that they become more completely a part, eventually the focus, of your life. For the objection, I was trying to think of an example of something I believe that I don't think I need to ponder more, and I couldn't. The most basic beliefs -- God exists, Jesus is God -- reward on-going pondering; even the superficially dry "facts" of the Faith -- that Jesus went here and did that -- reveal themselves as unbounded mysteries.

Moreover, I suspect it's in some sense true that a belief you do not ponder [or confess, but that's another show], at least occasionally, is not part of the faith you hold.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Not reason alone

While I'm thinking of it, let me quote reluctant penitent's comment from below:

Our intellects might be capable of arriving at the conclusion that God exists. However, we are, by nature, more than intellect. We have other aspects of our nature that might rebel against believing in a God to whom we owe our being and who places moral demands on us. Consequently, there is, in our nature, something that inclines us to deny that God exists and, consequently, to refuse to believe something that our intellect tells us is certain--or, in many cases, that refuses even to allow our intellects to consider seriously the evidence for the existence of God.

I think this is a good point.

The full paragraph from Humani Generis I quoted in part in my last post runs like this:

It is not surprising that such discord and error should always have existed outside the fold of Christ. For though, absolutely speaking, human reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world, and also of the natural law, which the Creator has written in our hearts, still there are not a few obstacles to prevent reason from making efficient and fruitful use of its natural ability. The truths that have to do with God and the relations between God and men, completely surpass the sensible order and demand self-surrender and self-abnegation in order to be put into practice and to influence practical life. Now the human intellect, in gaining the knowledge of such truths is hampered both by the activity of the senses and the imagination, and by evil passions arising from original sin. Hence men easily persuade themselves in such matters that what they do not wish to believe is false or at least doubtful.

I had been thinking of the difficulties and admixtures of error in coming to certain knowledge of God by reason as being due to our all-too-fallible intellects, our philosophical mistakes being akin to arithmetical errors.

As the Pope and the penitent point out, though, we also have all-too-peccable wills that prevent us from arriving at certain knowledge as surely as a student's disinclination to concentrate on his math homework prevents him from getting the right answers. (Of course, few students are so contrary that they want to get the wrong answer, but they might -- if, say, that insufferable know-it-all next to them says the answer is 15,647.)

Link | John da Fiesole
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Sound convinced?

It has been pointed out that quoting Vatican I won't convince the Richard Dawkinses of the world that God can be known with certainty by the natural power of human reason.

True enough.

It has also been pointed out that the Richard Dawkinses of the world don't necessarily want to be convinced.

It would be a misunderstanding of the dogma to think it means there's an argument -- call it the Babelfish Argument -- that persuades everyone who encounters it that God exists. If anything, the canon itself is directed less at atheists than at fideists who insist we can't know God exists (much less anything else about Him) except by faith. (This fideism seems to be alive and well in certain Catholic circles where it is mistaken for mature and modern faith.)

So what are we to do with the skeptic who says, "You say God can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things. Prove it!"?

For starters, I think we should try to understand what he means by, "Prove it." If he means something like, "Convince me God exists," or even, "Convince me we don't need faith to know God exists," we should point out that, going into it cold, there is no cause to be sanguine about the possibility of convincing him of anything. Again: the dogma says what is possible for reason to do, not what is necessary. If someone isn't convinced by a sound argument, that doesn't make the argument any less sound. (I'm using "argument" in a broad sense; I don't want to reduce human reason to syllogistic logic.)

But perhaps the skeptic means, "Walk me through an example of knowing God with certainty from the consideration of created things." In that case, I'd take him down the Uncaused Cause path, which in my opinion suffices to demonstrate God's existence.^*

And I wouldn't stop there! As I've said before, Church teaching goes clearly beyond knowing that God exists by reason. Humani Generis opens with the observation that

absolutely speaking, human reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world....

Given that there is an Uncaused Cause, what can we learn about It from Its effects? I have some ideas about how to get to the "personal, "providence," and governance Pope Pius XII mentions, though I haven't given much thought to scrubbing these ideas with the wire brush of Reason Alone.

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*. Yes, I know a lot of people think the Uncaused Cause is an invalid argument. See my point above about the difference between a sound argument and a convincing argument.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The natural light of reason

I've been discussing this canon from the First Vatican Council with others in the comment boxes at Catholic and Enjoying It!:

If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.

This dogma is expressed in friendlier form in Chapter 2 of the council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith:

The same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason : ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.

This is kind of a peculiar dogma, in that it makes something about natural reason a matter of Christian faith. It's in the news, of course, because of the Intelligent Design dustups and the very public and extensive comments of Christoph Cardinal Schönborn on evolution and evolutionism. (See for example his interview with Beliefnet; link via Schonborn Sightings.)

This teaching contains several parts of interest in themselves. For one, it asserts that there is something (in fact, Someone) we can know "with certainty." If human beings are able to know things with certainty, we can toss out a bunch of modern philosophical positions. Of course, those Catholics who want to affirm Vatican I while insisting that nothing can be known with certainty will still play their games -- "I can't be certain I'm understanding this canon properly," "The Church goes beyond her competency in making dogmatic statements about epistemological matters," and so forth -- but the teaching can't be held responsible for those who refuse to accept it.

It also makes the assertion that Who can be known by the natural light of reason is none other than "the one, true God, our creator and lord." This, I think, is a stronger assertion than the old "God of the philosophers" wheeze -- or perhaps the old God of the philosophers is not the remote, featureless Cause He's sometimes taken to be. In any case, the Church asserts that from philosophy we can learn that God is one, that He is true God, that He is our creator, that He is our lord, that He is the source and the end of all things, and perhaps most importantly, that His nature is perceivable in creation.

You might run that last bit by a philosopher, but to me talk of perceiving an invisible nature goes beyond uncaused causes and unmoved movers and starts getting at the kind of God Who created this particular universe. That anything exists tells us some things about the Creator, but the things that actually have been made tell us even more.

Precisely what more we could quibble over. I suspect it's things like His love of order, His sense of beauty, His careful providence. But when you say "ever since the creation of the world, His invisible nature has been clearly perceived," it seems to me you're talking the homely philosophy of design and purpose, not the more rarefied arguments of some being having of itself its own necessity.

Again, there are those who would dismiss all such philosophizing, the plain and the fancy. Again, the dogma only tells us what is true; it doesn't say everyone will believe it.

That's a point that seems to get confused, when we say that we can know that we can know something by reason by faith. Well, people ask, which is it? Do we know that we know God with certainty by faith or by reason?

And the answer, of course, is that we can know God with certainty by reason, and that we know, "We can know God with certainty by reason," is true by faith.

It may also be that we can know, "We can know God with certainty by reason," is true by reason. Nothing prevents God from revealing what in principle we could, with the natural light of reason, work out for ourselves "after a long time, and with the admixture of many errors." But the Catholic faithful need not be beholden to human reason on this question of the capability of human reason.

So what does all this mean? I can't see how it could mean, as one person suggested, that the Council Fathers meant merely that the one, true God can be known with certainty, but not that He ever actually has been. That would be a nonsensical teaching.

It also doesn't mean the Fathers meant one can prove God exists, if by "prove" we mean demonstrate according to an argument that all must accept as sound. In fact, the teaching doesn't even speak of God's existence; it speaks of knowing Him, which is a whole different proposition. Further, it speaks in quite general terms of the capability of human reason, given God's nature and His creation; it makes no claims about the intellect or will of any particular person.

At the same time, it doesn't mean that any particular claim (much less every claim) of knowing God by reason alone is true. (This should be clear enough, given that many people argue for a cruel or indifferent god based on the world as they find it.)

But the best a person can do is reason from true premises to valid conclusions. He can't force someone to accept true premises or valid reasoning who is determined to reject them.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Egged on

You want to celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, but you've been drinking eggnog by the quart for six weeks, and if the next egg you see isn't scrambled with bacon there's going to be trouble. What to do?

Twelfth Night Nog.

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