The Cartesian-Baconian Influence on Liturgy

A friend highlighted this Evening Prayer intercession for the Liturgy of the Hours (Thursday of Week IV):

Lord, it is your will that men use their minds to unlock nature’s secrets and master the world, – may the arts and sciences advance your glory and the happiness of all peoples.
Give us light, peace and security, Lord.^{1, 2}

"That men use their minds to unlock nature’s secrets and master the world": For me, this phrase has too many overtones of Decartes and Bacon.

Descartes says his purpose is

[...] to discover a Practical, by means of which, knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that surround us, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artizans, we might also apply them in the same way to all the uses to which they are adapted, and thus render ourselves the lords [or masters] and possessors of nature. And this is a result to be desired, not only in order to the invention of an infinity of arts, by which we might be enabled to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth, and all its comforts, but also and especially for the preservation of health [...] ³

Francis Bacon reveals his purpose by describing himself as

come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to you service and make her your slave.⁴

"Master" the world, indeed. Bacon elsewhere advocates vexing nature to reveal her secrets.⁵

Both Descartes and Bacon justify mastering nature in order to (in Bacon's phrase) "relieve man's estate", which is fine. But as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man, “What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

The Latin original of the prayer is revealing:

Qui voluísti ut hómines ingénio suo secréta naturália investigárent ad mundum regéndum, — da ut sciéntia et artes ad glóriam tuam et ómnium felicitátem dirigántur.
Da lucem, pacem et salútem, Dómine.

The phrase of concern "ut hómines ingénio suo secréta naturália investigárent ad mundum regéndum" translates something like "that men should investigate natural secrets with their ingenuity in order to rule the world". As the song says, Everybody wants to rule the world.

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Notes

1. English and Latin text from iBreviary.

2. It would be interesting to know the origin of this line from the Liturgy. Just from the face of it, I'm doubting it's an inheritance from the preconciliar Liturgy and suspecting it's a Bugnini device. I could be wrong, but from my brief investigations, it appears the intercessions didn't exist before the Council.

3. René Descartes (1596–1650). Discourse on Method. Part VI. (emphasis added)

4. Francis Bacon. "The Masculine Birth of Time" in Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 62.

5. Bacon, Novum Organum, Bk. 1, Aphorism 98.

Heavenly families?

The epistle from St. Paul for yesterday's solemnity contains the following clauses that I've often heard:

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named... (Eph 3:14-15)

But something struck me for the very first time yesterday. Apparently there are two different domains for families, heaven and earth. Earthly families we're all very familiar with. But what's a heavenly family?

Most likely it's not an earthly family whose members have made it to heaven. Such earthly families are already named on earth, not in heaven. Besides, Jesus communicates to us very clearly that such fleshly relationships don't have much weight in themselves in the world to come through the parable of the seven brothers who married one wife on their successive deaths (Mt 22:23-33, Mk 12:18-27, Lk 20:27-40). When we humans make it to heaven, we will be like angels, Jesus says, which begs the question: can angels have families? So the question remains: what is a heavenly family?

Coincidentally I recently started re-reading The Silmarillion and on the solemnity I turned to the "Valaquenta." The latter speaks of some of the Valar (the gods or highest angels), who are all created by Eru-Illuvatar (the One God) and effectively his children¹, as being siblings². What makes them siblings? Certainly it isn't parentage, since they are all equally created from the thought of Eru. Is there some other sort of grouping that's analogous to family relationships?

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Notes

1. Though of course not "Children of Illuvatar" (i.e., elves and men).

2. Námo and Irmo are said to be brothers, whose sister is Nienna. And Vána is younger sister to Yavanna.

Ratzinger on Augustine on Time

On this day when we look back to the past year and forward to the new year, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on time. Recently I read Pope Benedict/Cardinal Ratzinger's excellent Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life. The original motivation for my picking up the book (which required my obtaining it interlibrary loan, though it's so good that now I will have to buy my own copy) was that it was recommended by Sister Timothy Prokes as a book in which Ratzinger discusses the natural world. Largely that promise has not borne out, but one notable exception is the following exceptional passage:

... we must ask how time belongs to man precisely as man, and so whether it is possible to find here a starting point for conceiving a human mode of existence beyond that which depends on physical conditions of possibility. Pursuing this question, we will find that "temporality" pertains to man on different levels, and so in different ways.

Most valuable in such an analysis is Book X of the Confessions where Augustine traverses the varied landscape of his own being and comes across memoria, "memory." In memory he finds past, present and future gathered into one in a peculiar way, which, on the one hand, offers some idea of what God's eternity might be like, and, on the other, indicates the special manner in which man both is bound to time and transcends time. In these reflections, Augustine comes to realize that memory alone brings about that curious reality we call the "present." This it does, compass-like, by cutting out the circumference of a circle from the continuous flux of things, and demarcating it as "today." Naturally, the present of different people differs, in dependence on the extent of that which consciousness presents as present. Yet in memory, the past is present, albeit in a diverse manner from the presence of that which we take to be "the present." It is praesens de praeterito: the past, present in its quality as past. And something similar is true of the praesens de futuro.

What does this analysis tell us? It tells us that man, insofar as he is body, shares in physical time measured as that is in terms of the velocity of moving bodies by parameters which are themselves in motion and thus also relative. Man, however, is not only body. He is also spirit. Because these two aspects inhere inseparably in man, his belonging to the bodily world affects the manner of his spiritual activity. Nevertheless, that activity cannot be analyzed exclusively in terms of physical data. Man's participation in the world of bodies shapes the time of his conscious awareness, yet in his spiritual activities he is temporal in a different, and deeper, way than that of physical bodies. Even in the biological sphere, there is a temporality which is not mere physical temporality. The "time" of a tree, expressed in the yearly rings of its trunk, is a manifestation of its specific life cycle, and not a mere unit of rotation around the sun. In human consciousness, the various levels of time are at once assumed and transcended, rendering that consciousness temporal in a way all its own. Time is not just a physical quality ascribed to man but wholly external to him. Time characterizes man in his humanity, which itself is temporal inasmuch as it is human. Man is temporal as a traveller along the way of knowing and loving, of decaying and maturing. His specific temporality also derives from his relationality—from the fact that he becomes himself only in being with others and being towards others. Entering upon love, or indeed refusing love, binds one to another person and so to the temporality of that person, his "before" and "after." The fabric of share humanity is a fabric of shared temporality.

When I read Confessions in my undergrad studies, I was fascinated by time. I must have overlooked the import of Confessions X because it struck me as too "subjective," and not enough about the nature of things in themselves. I did not yet realize that when we give an account of physical reality, we primarily have to give a phenomenology of human experience (at very least a preliminary one). I will definitely have to re-read Confessions X!

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Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1988), 182-184.

Machines vs. Biomachines

Last week I went with my father and brother to see James Cameron's Avatar—in 3D no less. I have to say it was a well made film. The visuals were amazing and the plot well drawn if cliché: highly entertaining. The characters weren't all that deep, but then one doesn't see an action film for deep characterization. Technically this is what a Hollywood action film should be. (No spoilers in this post, with the exception clearly labeled below of the single paragraph on the final scene.)

From a philosophical point of view however, the film was highly deficient. Conservative commentators will no doubt remark on the rather overt environmental, anti-capitalist, and even anti-human message of the film.¹ (As one might expect from Hollywood, there are even a few allusions to U.S. tactics in current Middle East conflicts.) Frankly if the cruelty in the service of greed depicted in the film were typical of humans, it would be rather difficult to be pro-human.

But below the message about the relationship of rational (humanoid) creatures to their environment is a subtler message about their relationship to the world, in particular to their bodies. The human-wielded machines are clearly departures from nature, but Cameron's conception of "nature" is a far more insidious danger to the natural world.

The film sets out a conflict typical in science fiction: an advanced, technological civilization attacking a primitive, nature-loving society.² The humans are exploring exoplanet Pandora first of all to exploit its mineral wealth, but secondly to scientifically investigate its flora and fauna, including the indigenous Na'vi people. The main protagonist, Jake Sully, is a veteran marine (now paraplegic) sent to take the place of his recently deceased twin brother, who was part of a scientific mission to Pandora. The planet is hostile to humans, including an unbreathable atmosphere, so the scientists explore through remote-control "avatar" bodies. The bodies need to be hybrids of indigenous Na'vi and the human operator/driver (the actual words used in the Pandorapedia) so that a mental link can be established for full immersion into the Na'vi body's world. (The genetic hybridization makes it plausible for each avatar body to physically resemble its driver, conveniently linking the bodies/characters in the audience's mind.)

So effectively, these bodies are puppets. Immersive puppetry has disturbing consequences brilliantly spelled out in Charlie Kaufman's Being John Malkovich. Naturally what is true of immersive puppetry extends to the relationship between our own (human) bodies and souls: our bodies aren't really "ours" in the sense of being essentially connected (one body-one soul: anima forma corporis), but "ours" in the sense of possession, that is, demonic possession. Likewise, Avatar has a strong theme of mind-body dualism: thanks to modern science, bodies are somehow interchangeable and what defines a person is the untouchable, invisible and wholly transcendent mind or "personality." Cameron conceives of ourselves as having very little to do with our particular bodies: really our identities must have a broader corporeal basis than a few DNA similarities.

It would seem that the film is opposing nature and technology: humans use mechanistic technology, while Pandorans are close to nature. But look again. The "nature" of this world is likewise created in the image of the machine. For one the neuronal "linkages" between the Na'vi and the mounts (direhorses, mountain banshees) via the Na'vi rider's queue and the mounts' antennae is a simple reflection of the linkages that typify the internet age. The connection between the mount and the rider is different from that of the Amplified Mobility Platform (AMP) suit and its operator (cf. the power loader in Cameron's Aliens) only by being through neurons instead of mechanical sensors and electronics.

Pandoran bodies are likewise similar to machines. The mountain banshees have "air inlets, or spiracles, face forward at the front of the chest cavity, like the engine intakes of a jet fighter" with "unidirectional flow, venting aft through gill-like slits." The Na'vi are about twice the height of humans. It would be reasonable to attribute this fact to gravity half as large as Earth's, but the gravitational difference makes no noticeable visual difference to physical motion in the film. To overcome the scaling problem and make such oversized and extraordinary creatures structurally plausible, Cameron invokes "naturally occurring carbon fiber" to strengthen the bones of Pandoran animals.

Nature seems to take a back seat to politically correct doctrine as well. In Na'vi society, both women and men participate in the warrior culture. One has to wonder who takes care of the children (ironically, the ones whose lives the humans are supposedly so careless about late in the film). Of course it is possible that the grandparents or other relatives care for the children. But still, has it ever been known for a primitive society to disregard sex roles? If anything these differences tend to be more pronounced in more primitive societies: childbearing here is essential to community survival. It is only rich, "advanced" societies that can (apparently) afford to blur sex roles.

**SPOILER** Most morally troubling is the final scene, in which Jake, through the power of Eywa (the Na'vi diety) in the sacred tree, "uploads" his consciousness into his avatar body.³ Note that, unlike the earlier similar attempt with Dr. Augustine, Jake is not dying. Clearly then in this transfer, Jake (his body) is put to death so that his "mind" can "live on" in the Na'vi dummy. Notice that Jake's only physical problem is his paraplegia. Aside from the euthanasia in the simple sense of putting someone to death, there is a disturbing overtone that a handicapped person's life is less worthy of living.⁴

The final verdict is the movie's opposition of machine vs. nature is a false facade. The "nature" the film presents is a mechanical reconception of nature along mechanical, dualistic lines. The result is a technological view of the world as infinitely open to human manipulation and a consequentialist take on ethics.

Now, one might object that the film is surely to be understood as a work of fiction and not meant as a reflection of reality, especially with the world of the film clearly a fantastic, mechanical playground of the imagination. Whatever the intention, the photorealistic computer imagery, not to mention the 3D and souped-up audio undermine any audience detachment. Art, but particularly visual art, is very good at forming the imagination, especially of children, but very much of adults as well. Given the widespread currency of mind-body dualism, this film can only cement the dominance of this paradigm into our cultural mindset.

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Notes

1. Similar to the "straining a gnat and swallowing a camel" of criticizing the lyrics of rock music while passing the music itself.

2. Here is an insightful (if politically correct) piece on how the film represents a privileged white male perspective. Speaking of PC, the MPAA rating says, "Rated PG-13 for intense epic battle sequences and warfare, sensuality, language and some smoking." Yes, it's fine to saddle young people with a fallacious worldview that it will make it impossible for them to find happiness—just as long as they don't smoke!

3. From an Aristotelian perspective, it seems nearly inevitable that the driver would eventually "go native"—that the soul is the form of the body means it's not so much our souls that control our bodies (as if from far away), but our bodies and their senses, desires, and habits that dominate our souls, that in some sense constitute our souls. To be immersed in a world is to take that world as real.

4. Equally, Jake's paraplegia could also be a symbolic statement about the human condition, one that feeds into a gnostic view of the body as a prison. Such a view would explain Cameron's anti-Christianity, as evidenced by his 2007 film The Lost Tomb of Jesus.

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James Cameron, Avatar (Twentieth Century Fox, 2009).

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Update January 20, 2010: David Brooks has an insightful and superbly written piece on the film in the Times: "The Messiah Complex." Here's one particularly well written passage: "The peace-loving natives are at one with nature, and even have a fiber-optic cable sticking out of their bodies that they can plug into horses and trees, which is like Horse Whispering without the wireless technology. Because they are not corrupted by things like literacy, cellphones and blockbuster movies, they have deep and tranquil souls." The bottom line:

[The White Messiah fable the film embodies] rests on the stereotype that white people are rationalist and technocratic while colonial victims are spiritual and athletic. It rests on the assumption that nonwhites need the White Messiah to lead their crusades. It rests on the assumption that illiteracy is the path to grace. It also creates a sort of two-edged cultural imperialism. Natives can either have their history shaped by cruel imperialists or benevolent ones, but either way, they are going to be supporting actors in our journey to self-admiration.

Love: Marital vs. Romantic

Some may think it takes chutzpah for a bachelor to write on marriage, But just as a medical doctor doesn't need to have cancer to diagnose a patient's illness, I hope my detachment will aid my objectivity.

Before anyone misunderstands the title of this post, I need to be very clear that I'm not trying to say that marriage is necessarily opposed to romantic love. What I am trying to say is that they exist in tension. To the modern mind, romance is the only justification for marriage. But when one looks at marriage itself, the reasons for it are much more practical and earthy.

What brought this subject to mind is a book I recently read, Captain from Castile by Samuel Shellabarger—an entertaining novel, but by no means a literary classic. The story is about Pedro de Vargas, a young Spaniard nobleman from Jaén who accompanies Cortez in his conquest of the Aztec Empire (Mexico) after a frightful run-in with the Spanish Inquisition. Pedro has two love interests. On the one hand, there is Luisa de Carvajal, a young noblewoman, who is his romantic ideal. On the other hand, there is Catana Pérez, a common girl who works as a barmaid and entertains as a dancer, whom he also loves.

These two women don't respectively represent the two sides of love that are the subject of this post, but rather two perspectives on love, one of which divides the two sides, while the other unites them. On the one hand, there is the upper-class perspective, represented by Luisa. For the rich, (romantic) love is a game, an entertainment, while marriage is for the practical purposes of children, allying families, and securing societal station. The poor, meanwhile, lack the luxury of "playing" at love, but must find whatever (romantic) love they can in their spouses.

Of course, from our modern perspective, "love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage," so the separatist perspective is incomprehensible. Despite the fact that the song attributes that opinion to the "local gentry," a large part of our belief comes from the democratic, egalitarian times in which we live: we're all commoners; we lack the cultured detachment that plagues the wealthy.

Despite this incomprehensibility—in fact because of it—it is especially important to make an effort to appreciate the merit of the position. Please don't mistake me to be advocating adultery or making love a game. I am not here advocating a line of behavior, but simply an appreciation of a lost perspective.

The Divine Romance

Romantic love is prefigurement of the Divine Love. This was plainly realized by the time of Plato's Symposium, which praises love as divine.¹ In Michelangelo's "Creation of Man" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Eve hides under God's arm; Adam extends his finger in longing as much to Eve as to God. There's something similar being shown in Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II's The Jeweler's Shop when Anna encounters the Bridegroom (Christ) with the face of her husband Stefan, even though their marriage is suffering grave difficulty: it is through her human bridegroom that she will reach her Divine Bridegroom.

Francis Schaeffer, in his video series How Should We Then Live?, takes issue with the separation of the romantic ideal from one's spouse, particularly in reference to Dante's love for Beatrice, whom Dante may never have met and who was definitely never his wife. (He says the idealization of Beatrice degraded Dante's wife to "a dray horse of a woman."²) But there's something Schaeffer is obviously missing here: Dante's love for Beatrice drew him to God in a particular way.

In the mysterious, inexhaustible "otherness" of an unfulfilled love, don't we catch a glimpse, albeit fleeting, of the mysterious, inexhaustible "otherness" of the Love that will be fulfilled only after death?

True, no finite creature can fully re-present the goodness of the Creator. God is always much more than us and we will never exhaust his goodness, whereas a human lover cannot help but fall short and cease to draw us effectively to God. The shortcomings of someone with whom you consort on a day-to-day basis are so much more familiar.³ (Familiarity breeds contempt, the adage goes.) The sacred is set apart from the mundane. This is why it's so much easier for a near-stranger (like Beatrice) to represent the sacred.

Loves' Perils

Of course, there is a danger of seeing in romantic love, not a reflection of eternal love, but the eternal love itself—and this may be an error to which many practitioners of courtly love fell prey. The key is to understand that this world is a pale reflection of a greater world. Realizing this difference, we can use the longing human love puts in us to understand more fully and draw us to love God, as it is clear that Dante did with his love for Beatrice.

But there is also a danger of confusing marital love for eternal love.⁴ I think this is the danger to which we are particularly prone today. Marriage is a very practical societal reality and it may be that one's spouse will not stir one's heart forever. That spouses should be perpetually head-over-heels "in love" is a false ideal; along with the human failure to live up it, this expectation is the culprit behind the staggering divorce rate in this country. It's also the reason so many young people cohabitate instead of marrying: they realize (usually from the example of their divorced parents) their own inability to live up to this unattainable illusion. Of course the degradation of marriage to a legal formality instead of a lifelong commitment (a commitment based on the continuation of love beyond feelings of love) is why homosexuals think they can wed: if marriage means simply benefits from society without real commitment, they are as capable as anyone else!

At the root of confusing marital with eternal love is the confusion of marital love with romantic love: the idea that the two are necessarily identical. Certainly it is best for spouses to have feelings of love to assist them in their duties to one another. Marriage is not always going to be a heart-stirring affair. It's hard work at times. What we need nowadays is to reaffirm the practicality of marriage: it is the cornerstone of human society. The difficult truth is that, whether there's romance involved or not, we need to have marriage. There is a human need for romance, but romance will come and go, and humans can learn to live in its presence or absence. The unavoidable truth is that no society can long endure without marriage to raise up the next generation.

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Along similar lines, here's a though-provoking article by Sam Schulman I ran across on why homosexual "marriage" cannot bear the weight of that name.

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Notes

1. Procreation is one divine aspect of love, as it allows finite creatures to participate in the eternal. Is it any surprise that we would have feelings of eternity in an act that allows us to participate in it?

2. Quoted from memory. Cf. p. 58 of the book version.

3. I mean "consort" in multiple senses.

4. It's probably truer to say that we today confuse all three loves (romantic, marital, eternal): we have such a one-dimensional ideal of love today. C.S. Lewis's book on The Four Loves is an apt antidote.

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Samuel Shellabarger, Captain from Castile (Garden City, NY: The Sun Dial Press, 1946).

Seven Deadly Sins of Religion in Science Fiction

"The 7 Deadly Sins Of Religion In Science Fiction" by Charlie Jane Anders gets it just about right.¹ I'll leave it to you to read the column's illustrative examples and entertaining language, but here are the "sins" to which I add a brief explanatory paraphrase:

1. The cargo cult. [Primitive peoples worshiping more advanced technology]
2. The cheap Jesus. [Christ imagery plopped on]
3. The dumb space gods. [Appearances of the Divine should appear divine.]
4. The all-purpose patch for lazy writing. [AKA Deus ex machina ending, i.e., pulling a ending outta "heaven" that's actually thin air]
5. Simplistic religion vs. science battles. [as if a Dawkins drone wrote the script]
6. Simplistic science-bashing in the name of religion. [don't see how this can be clarified briefly]
7. New-agey-ness. [yeah, Boomers should be banned from writing and directing]

Numbers 1-3 might be summarized by "simplistic or caricature religion"—the religious counterpart to number 6's simplistic science. Number 7 might be called simplistic "self-caricature" religion—the real pity of it is that new age practitioners don't recognize what a superficial, ersatz "spirituality" they've fallen for. Number 4 is just plain bad writing, but then these all reflect bad writing. But I most appreciate number 5: it's a point that can't be made too often these days.

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Note

1. My blind spot in commenting on this column is that it jumps off of the Battlestar Galactica series that recently ended, and I've seen exactly zero of the episodes. (Perhaps my lacking a television excuses me.)

The New Scrooges

"Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat...
but please don't put a penny in the old man's hat,"

or at least that's what the classic carol would go if some intellectuals could re-write it according to their ideology.¹

Lew Rockwell site still has posted Butler Shaffer's defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge from Dickens's A Christmas Carol. (I will not dwell on Shaffer's misspelling of Cratchit, but merely speculate that Shaffer was following the irregular spelling conventions of Dickens's time. For clarity of commenting, I have taken the liberty of replacing Shaffer's brackets with parentheses.)

Shaffer's defense of Scrooge centers around the claim that there is no just wage. In fact, he blames Bob Cratchit for being underpaid:

One of the offenses with which my client [Scrooge] has been charged was that he had not paid Bob Cratchett a large enough salary. Cratchett has worked for an allegedly substandard level of pay – whatever that may mean – for my client for many years. Why? Why did he not quit? Why didn’t he go to work for some other employer – perhaps one of the politically-correct businessmen who periodically show up at Scrooge’s office to solicit and browbeat charitable contributions from my client?

...

To anyone with even the most rudimentary understanding of [abstract] economics, two things should be clear: (1) if, as has been alleged, my client is a tight-fisted, selfish man, he surely would not have paid Bob Cratchett a shilling more than his marginal productivity was worth to Scrooge’s firm, and (2) if Bob Cratchett was being woefully underpaid by my client, there must have been [!] all kinds of alternative employment available to this man at higher salaries.

"Must have been"! What question begging! Shaffer fails to consider the possibility that if all of Crachit's possible employers are poorly formed wretches like Scrooge, then none of them will give him what he justly deserves. For comparison one might ask: how much is slave labor worth? Slavery was a social institution. A single family could not have held slaves without the consent of an overwhelming majority of fellow citizens. Else, the slaves could have sought refuge with a neighbor. Slaves were paid nothing, not because their labor was worth nothing (the basis of the antebellum economy!), but because society unjustly agreed to pay them nothing.²

Similarly, I claim that Cratchit was like a slave unable to better his lot with another employer by the broad consent of all possible employers, whose common misunderstanding and personal injustice permitted them to underpay employees.

Shaffer reveals the assumption behind his argument:

If Cratchett cannot find more remunerative work, and if my client is paying him the maximum that he is marginally worth to his business, then Cratchett must be worth precisely what my client is paying him! Economic values are subjective, with prices for goods or services rising or falling on the basis of the combined preferences of market participants.

What's being asserted here is far more than the truism that a thing's price is what you pay for it. The claim is that goods are only worth what people (arbitrarily) agree to be their price: they have no intrinsic worth. As much as I agree with the Austrian school of economics on many of its concrete prescriptions and proscriptions, its fundamental problem is its disbelief in intrinsic worth.

The ridiculousness of the Austrian school on this point is shown by examples of things that people pay for that are demonstrably valueless and even harmful, such as addictive drugs, pornography and the like.³ There are also borderline cases: how much are relatively injurious commodities, like cigarette's, worth?

Then there are inflated prices: How much does the latest celebrity news (Britney, Paris, et al.) add to our existence? Does anyone seriously think that tulips in seventeenth-century Holland contributed so much to human life that they were actually worth the enormous prices of the tulip bubble?

Another class of counterexamples transcends normal economic valuation: how much is motherhood worth? It is surely part of the myopia of modern economics (and their MBA minions) that mothers aren't figured into economic indicators like gross national product. If stay-at-home mothers don't "contribute" to the economy, no wonder women feel pressure to work outside the home!

The values of things come from their connection to real human goods, like health and education. For example, the food you buy in the grocery store has value to you because it provides nutrition that allows you to keep living. To deny intrinsic value is to deny intrinsic good. Shaffer and fellow travelers have become relativists through economic nominalism.

Nominalism is the denial that universals point to realities in the world. To a nominalist, "cat" is simply a useful label to group a bunch of particulars that have no real commonality, so that there is no way for the intellect to grasp⁴ the essences of things in order to form universals.

Similarly, in nominalist economics, there is no way for the intellect to grasp a commodity's connection to real human goods (e.g., nutrition, family, safety) in order to discover its intrinsic value.⁵ As Richard Weaver wrote, "The genius of value seems to have taken wings along with the other essences which nominalists would deny." If we cannot know what is good, we are moral agnostics—relativists, effectively: the good is just what each person says it is.

Most certainly there is a subjective element in prices, but that does not deny each good's intrinsic value. Valuation is something that only a conscious subject can engage in, so we would expect the subject to enter into it and to bring a knowledge of hard-to-quantify realities and relations. It is difficult to consider all factors that give a commodity a particular value to a particular person. Essences and goods are more closely allied with qualities than quantities, and it takes a person to evaluate qualities.⁶

Plus, valuation is subjective in that it is different for each person relative to his situation. A starving man would justly part with gold for a meal, while a well-fed man rightly values food more moderately. Nevertheless, the human ends at stake are the same and can be objectively evaluated—which is not to say that some sort of rigid mathematical formalism can be applied universally.

So there are real values for things, and there is a just wage a man should be paid for his labor. Of course, the existence of a just wage doesn't guarantee that we will always know it in any particular case. Even less does it mean that a legislature can know it well enough to mandate it for an entire country, as many proponents of the minimum wage assume.

The whole point of Dickens's melodramatic portrayal of the Crachit family is to remove any doubt that Scrooge is underpaying its patriarch. How can Shaffer ignore this?

It takes a recalcitrant blindness to deny an author's manifest meaning. As we'll see, for Shaffer, this blindness doesn't stop at Dickens's creation.

Values in the Soul and the Supernatural

Human happiness comes from enjoying human goods, and unhappiness comes from lacking these goods. Shaffer himself admits that Scrooge is profoundly unhappy:

Taking my client as the miserable fellow Dickens has presented him, let me be the first to admit that if Ebeneezer’s obsession with materialistic pursuits rendered him an unhappy person, and were it the purposes of his detractors to help extricate him from his self-imposed miseries and to restore him to that state of happiness and innocence so common to most of us in our childhood years, no one would be happier than I. But it is not my client’s happiness that the prosecution endeavors to obtain, but his money.

I claim that Scrooge's unhappiness comes from the fact that he knows in his heart of hearts that his miserliness is wrong. Shaffer casts these "detracts" as if they simply wanted Scrooge's money, instead of wanting his money as a means to a greater end. It's been a while since I've looked at Dickens, but might it be possible that Scrooge's "detractors" want him to part with his cash as a means of growing out of his miserliness and finding happiness?

Is it not enough that Scrooge's own conscience condemns him? The supernatural also condemns him in the form of the three spirits of Christmas. But Shaffer has a rejoinder to this as well:

Keep in mind, these specters are possessed with the powers to suspend ordinary rules that operate throughout the rest of nature. They can successfully defy gravity, move backwards and forwards in time, cause matter to become invisible, raise the dead, and foresee the future. Having all of these amazing powers, why did these spirits not intervene to cure Tiny Tim of his ailment?

But take this argument further: if there is a God in heaven, why doesn't he cure all the Tiny Tim's of the world? Perhaps because exercising a spiritual good like generosity is more important than physical health. Perhaps because, just as a parent knows it is good for the child to clean his own room, the Supernatural knows that good actions are overall better for the actors.

It is significant that atheists use these same sorts of arguments: maintained consistently, the same relativism that denies intrinsic goods and intrinsic value eventually leads to a denial of the Author of All Good.

If it weren't for the divorce between abstract economics and the reality of human goods, there wouldn't be the philosophical rift between economic and cultural conservatives that we suffer from today. But then again, the divorce of economics from integral goods is emblematic of the rupture in the constitution of fallen man.

Even in tough economic times like these, charity is still in order, so please do put a penny (or a pound) in the old man's hat.

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Notes

1. That it is an ideology is somewhat evident in the rhetoric of this more recent Lew Rockwell piece in which he absolutizes economic actions as "good" or "evil": "Don't Cave!." While I agree with his conclusion that these interventions are wrong, to call them "evil" is to conflate prudential economic decisions with moral absolutes like the right to life.

2. When I say slaves were the basis of the economy, I am of course not saying that they were the only ones who contributed value to that economy.

3. I understand Murray Rothbard admitted these sorts of cases, but didn't let them cloud his belief in Austrian-school principles.

4. Notice I didn't say "comprehend": we needn't have comprehensive knowledge to grasp a thing's essence.

5. The irony is that such economic relativism would seem to be more characteristic of supporters of "fiat currencies" and less of Austrian-School economists, most of whom advocate return to the gold standard.

6. That our current economic system (read: the souls of its participants) is overly obsessed with quantities is evident from the fact the recent uproar over lead-paint on toys from China. Why should it take a violation as serious as this to wake us up to the crisis of quality in goods not only from that country, but from everywhere we buy to cut the bottom line?

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Butler Shaffer, "The Case for Ebeneezer," LewRockwell.com (December 13, 2004).

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: Phoenix Books, 1948), 142.

The Mystical Vision of Pan's Labyrinth

Recently I saw a powerful film called Pan's Labyrinth. The filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro, is obviously of a man of the left, but it appears to me that he is groping toward something much bigger than political ideology. As with any great work of art, there's a lot going on in this film, and I'll try my best to lay it out systematically, but it may be too much for me to bind together into a coherent argument.

I'm writing this assuming you have seen the film. BE WARNED: this means that I'll not shy from SPOILING the surprises. It's a powerful film, worth seeing without my interpretations supervening from your memory, although it is at times frightfully and somewhat gratuitously violent.

The film reflects the particular character and gifts of the Hispanophone soul and actually consists of two parallel stories. First the grim reality of Ofelia's "real" life in post-Civil War Spain: she is a 12-year-old girl enthralled by fairy tales that follows her mother to the Nationalist outpost commanded by her new step-father, Captain Vidal (her actual father died before the action begins). (Recall that the Nationalists under command of Francisco Franco had won the war; the leftist Republicans were their opponents.) Second, the fairy-tale side, best introduced by the voiceover just after the initial scene and a later monologue by the faun:

A long time ago, in the underground realm, where there are no lies or pain, there lived a Princess who dreamed of the human world. She dreamed of blue skies, soft breeze, and sunshine. One day, eluding her keepers, the Princess escaped. Once outside, the brightness blinded her and erased every trace of the past from her memory. She forgot who she was and where she came from. Her body suffered cold, sickness, and pain. Eventually, she died. However, her father, the King, always knew that the Princess's soul would return, perhaps in another body, in another place, at another time. And he would wait for her, until he drew his last breath, until the world stopped turning...

Faun: Your real father had us open portals all over the world to allow your return. This is the last of them. But we have to be sure that your essence is intact, that you have not become a mortal. You must complete three tasks before the moon is full.

The three tasks require Ofelia to exercise various virtues. The first requires courage. The second additionally requires temperance (she nearly fails for lack of it). The third requires a virtue that transcends the cardinal virtues. We will later return to the third task.

Ontology and Obedience

As you may have already noticed, the fairy-tale premise of the film relies on a form of mind-body dualism (hence the idea of earthly reincarnation). In such views the body is a prison for the spirit. For this reason, it is really no surprise that the film has the doctor, one of the "good guys," employ euthanasia¹ to end the pain of a Republican that Captain Vidal has tortured (and plans to torture further). In answering Vidal, the doctor explains his disobedience of Vidal's order to heal the prisoner for further questioning, "But captain, to obey—just like that—for obedience's sake... without questioning... That's something only people like you do."

Obedience is an issue in Spanish culture. From my outsider's perspective, it seems that historically the Spanish have either obeyed without question, or not at all. You may recall that the tragedy of the Spanish Armada turned on the question of obedience. At the Armada's approach, the English fleet was trapped in port for many hours by an inauspicious tide, and the Spanish admiral could have ordered the Armada to take it out like fish in a barrel, were it not for his unwavering obedience to his King's orders as to how the English were to be engaged. In other words, the greatest defeat in Spanish history could easily have been its definitive victory, were it not for blind obedience to orders.²

More modern generations naturally enough reject this morbid rigidity, but go to the opposite extreme. What's lost is the happy medium: intelligent obedience, in which a leader specifies a general result and allows the subordinate to determine the most appropriate means.

One thing I found annoying about the film is the unquestioned and uniform presumption that the Republicans (the leftists in the Spanish Civil War) are good, and that everyone representing the traditional order is evil. The only clear representative of Christian Faith in the film, an old priest, chows down to a hearty meal while he cheerily agrees with Vidal's plan for severe rationing of the local people.

The Nationalist troops are even worse, especially Ofelia's step-father, Vidal, who is a monster rivaling those in the Ofelia's fairy tales. Of course the actual history of the Civil War is not so clear cut. The Republicans were far from the doughty boy scouts of the film.³ A.O. Scott's New York Times review put it well: "Mercedes’s [the maid's] surreptitious visits to the rebels often coincide with Ofelia’s journeys into fairyland, and it may be that the film’s romantic view of the noble, vanquished Spanish Republic is itself something of a fairy tale." (As we'll see later, it could even be this air about Mercedes and the rebels is part of Ofelia's fairy tale.)

The Republicans rejected Spain's traditional Catholic Faith. When Ofelia asks Mercedes whether she believes in fairies, Mercedes replies, "No. But when I was a little girl, I did. I believed in a lot of things I don't believe anymore." One senses that Christian Faith is one of those things.

Self-sacrifice and Meaning

Despite the rejection of Christian Faith, the film transcends the usual cramped ideologies of the left. The baby brother is clearly a human person even in his mother's womb (and del Toro even goes through the trouble of using a CGI to show him). Indeed, the lives of innocents play a central role in this film.

Ofelia's failure to control her appetites during her second task results in the deaths of two of her fairy guides. Concupiscence is exactly the vice that issues in so many abortions.⁴ (Notice how the Pale Man represents concupiscence: insatiable appetite and eyes in his grasping hands. When the he chases Ofelia, he is that vice roused to life.)

In Ofelia's third and final task, the faun asks her to surrender her baby brother to him to regain her homeland.

Faun: Quickly Your Majesty, give him to me. The full moon is high in the sky. We can open the portal.

Ofelia: What is that in your hand?

Faun: (glancing at large ceremonial dagger) The portal will only open if we offer the blood of an innocent. Just a drop of blood: a pinprick, that's all. It's the final task. [Early in the film, Mercedes had advised Ofelia that fauns are untrustworthy.]

Faun: Hurry. You promised to obey me. Give me the boy!

Ofelia: No! My brother stays with me.

Faun: You would give up your sacred rights for a brat you barely know?

Ofelia: Yes, I would.

Faun: You would give up your throne for him? He who has caused you such misery, such humiliation?

Ofelia: Yes, I would.

Faun: As you wish, Your Highness.

It is clear how Del Toro has returned to the theme of obedience here. He's showing that blind obedience is wrong. Point well made. What he may not see as clearly is that this disobedience to an earthly authority in this case is justified by obedience to a higher law made by an authority that transcends this world. Only a transcendent authority can guarantee the transcendent worth of a human person, even an infant. Lacking such an authority, the only support for human dignity is evanescent emotion or earthly might ("might makes right").

Vidal fatally shoots Ofelia in cold blood. While the girl lies dying, Mercedes weeps over her body, humming the mournful lullaby that haunts the soundtrack. A surge of light envelopes the dying Ofelia and she finds herself restored in her father's kingdom:

King: Arise, my daughter. Come. You have spilled your own blood rather than the blood of an innocent. That was the final task and the most important.

Faun: And you chose well, Your Highness.

Carmen: Come here with me, and sit by your father's side.⁵

The visual symbolism of this scene is revealing. Is it not significant that what is nominally the kingdom of the underworld is flooded by light? It is not clear what del Toro intended by the underworld kingdom (philosophical materialism?), but the spontaneous human response to light makes it the most potent sign of beatitude.

Is the cruciform symmetry of the round-stained glass purely accidental? Ofelia and her parents all wear red. But is it the red of the Revolution or the red of the martyrs' Love? That Ofelia has not drawn others' blood but surrendered her own would seem to imply the latter. As David Mills observed of Philip Pullman's Dark Materials trilogy, the story "works" to the extent that it reflects the Great Story.⁶

The poignant contrast between the stark, cold world and the child-like spiritual reality is reminiscent of the conclusion of Graham Greene's masterful The Power and the Glory. It is a mystical vision that sees the Divine in the face of the tragic, and I think it is especially characteristic of the Spanish mind. There is no middle ground, but the two extremes entail each other: the tragedy is the glory. You can hear the uncompromising "all or nothing" of the Spanish mind in the decisive snap of the Spanish "no." This lack of compromise is perhaps why Spanish is a language so suited to talking to God and has produced great mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. As Emperor Charles V is reported to have said, "To God I speak Spanish, to women Italian, to men French, and to my horse German."⁷ He was on to something.

After Ofelia's mother's death earlier in the film, the priest's funeral oration⁸ reflects the mystical recognition of God's presence in apparent absence:

Because the paths of the Lord are inscrutable.

Because the essence of his forgiveness lies in His word and in His mystery.

Because although God sends us the message, it is our task to decipher it.

Because when we open our arms, the earth takes in only a hollow and senseless shell. Far away now is the soul in its eternal glory.

Because it is in pain that we find the meaning of life and the state of grace that we lose when we are born.

Because God, in His infinite wisdom, puts the solution in our hands. And because it is only in His physical absence that the place He occupies in our souls is reaffirmed.

As in the story Ofelia spontaneously devises much earlier in the film to tell her unborn brother, eternal life can only come through death:

Many, many years ago in a sad, faraway land, there was an enormous mountain made of rough, black stone. At sunset, on top of that mountain, a magic rose blossomed every night that made whoever plucked it immortal. But no one dared go near it because its thorns were full of poison. Men talked amongst themselves about their fear of death, and pain, but ever about the promise of eternal life. And every day, the rose wilted, unable to bequeath its gift to anyone...forgotten and lost at the top of that cold, dark mountain, forever alone, until the end of time.

Like the whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory, Ofelia's final choice is not not so much to surrender for someone else her earthly life, but her eternal life. Recall that the whiskey priest is committing a sacrilege when he says Mass for his flock, because he is in a state of serious sin, and he knows he is damning himself. Similarly, Ofelia doesn't so much give up her life to save her brother from the faun (it is Vidal who kills her), but her chance to pass into her father's kingdom.

By materialistic lights, the fairy-tale ending is pure fantasy: if this life is all we have, the dream must die with the dreamer. Separating truth from dream in the events portrayed in the film is frustrated by the initial scene in which Ofelia lies dying alone with a ribbon of blood spreading from her nose. The blood then "rewinds" itself, implying that the rest of the film is a recollection of events leading up to that moment. But is it a recollection of events as they actually happened, or the wishful reconstruction of a young life tragically grasping for meaning and in a world devoid of meaning?

Del Toro's intention is unclear. He may be trying to say that meaning in the world is simply the wishful thinking of a childish imagination. Certainly we humans have a natural thirst for meaning, but just because we want it doesn't make it illusory. The existence of a thirst does not itself indicate that its object is unreal. On the contrary, as C.S. Lewis points out,

The Christian says, "Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. (Mere Christianity III.10)

Regardless of whether del Toro intends his film as a critique of mystical vision or an example of it, it is clear that he intends his film to have meaning, that is, to point to something—a truth—beyond itself. Whatever he intends, that the world itself cannot contain ultimate meaning highlights our need for it and points beyond the world to Real Meaning, a presence limned by absence:

And because it is only in His physical absence that the place He occupies in our souls is reaffirmed.

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Notes

1. Though it must be admitted that the issue is somewhat clouded in wartime, especially since the doctor is an ally of the Republican rebels.

2. I don't know the history in detail, but this obedience could well have been determined by a solemn oath.

3. The actual truth of the Spanish Civil War is not so simple. Among their many crimes, the Republicans were notoriously anti-clerical. They mercilessly hunted down and murdered clergy and religious (i.e., monks and nuns). They even exhumed the bodies of religious and put them on display as a sign of disrespect.

4. On the other hand the fact that Vidal has no real love for his wife (Ofelia's mother), but is only using her for the children she will bear, embodies the typical leftist charge that the wife in a traditional family is merely a baby-producing slave (abortion and contraception are typical means to "liberate" women). The charge ignores the fact that women are even more easily used merely for pleasure than for breeding (at least a man is tied to his woman by their progeny, whereas "love" feelings come and go). In reality neither the necessity of children nor the compulsion of erotic love is universally sufficient to break through masculine egotism. For man to consider his mate an equal, faith in fundamental human equality is needed. Some might build this faith on sentimentality, but Christian Faith is a much firmer basis.

5. One wonders how she would ever succeed in mounting such a stalagmite of a throne. These fixtures are certainly visually striking, but also completely impractical. They remind me of the doors of a well-to-do house I saw in Monterrey whose door handles were in their centers. The symmetry was visually appealing, but unhelpful for opening a heavy, wooden door.

6. A lecture David Mills gave at the International Institute for Culture Summer Seminar in Eichstatt, Bavaria, June 17-July 6, 2002: "Philip Pullman's Dark Materials" (July 1, 2002). Some of these insights were published: David Mills, "His Dark Witness," p. 23 sidebar to "Enchanting Children," Touchstone (December 2006), 19-26.

7. Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2nd ed. "Je parle espagnol à Dieu, italien aux femmes, française aus hommes et allemand à mon cheval." Evidently he was speaking to a man.

8. For whatever reason, this oration is absent from del Toro's original draft screenplay (available on the DVD).

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Guillermo del Toro, El Laberinto del Fauno (2006). [Official site]

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Note: Took me long enough to come up with this one, didn't it? I hope it was worth the wait.

Making God an Alien

In putting together last month's post on the Nature Institute, I was doing a little research on Lewis, Barfield, and Steiner and I came across this Kjos Ministries page of excerpts and commentary on C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man.

The page exemplifies an unfortunate presumption that has developed among some segments of the Christian community: that the the Fall so completely alienated creation from God that He has absolutely no claim on us apart from Christian faith.

Take a look at a selection from this page that quotes passages from chapter 3 of Lewis's The Abolition of Man. (I'm quoting everything here verbatim, leaving in place all emphases and brackets.)

Apparently, the Chinese Tao replaces the Bible as ultimate authority and guide for our lives -- and for the common good:

Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have not motive but their own 'natural' impulses. Only the Tao proves a common human law of action which can overarch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery."

"In the Tao itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common reason for humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application. While we speak from within the Tao we can speak of Man having power over himself in a sense truly analogous to an individual's self-control. But the moment we step outside and retard the Tao as mere subjective product, this possibility has disappeared."

"I hear rumours that Goethe's approach to nature deserves fuller consideration  -- that even Dr. [Rudolf] Steiner [occult founder of Waldorf Schools] may have seen something that orthodox researchers have missed."

The author (probably Berit Kjos) fails to acknowledge that Lewis is not directing people away from the Gospel, but making common cause with other traditions against "scientific" secularists whose flat view of nature permits them to manipulate the natural world and their fellow men. He uses the Tao as a name for the natural law accessible to a limited degree by all men, but made most perfectly manifest in Judeo-Christian revelation. As he writes in chapter 1,

The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. 'In ritual', say the Analects, 'it is harmony with Nature that is prized.' The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being 'true'.

This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike, I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as 'the Tao'.

In essence, the Tao is another name for the law that the Bible teaches (i.e., the Ten Commandments).¹ That Christianity teaches that there is a natural moral law open to all men is explicit in Scripture. Surely a "Biblical Christian" like Kjos is familiar with St. Paul's Letter to the Romans:

For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. (1:19-20; of course this a paraphrase of Wisdom 13)

...

When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus. (2:14-16)

In other words, man can know of God through His creation and God's law is written on the heart of men even in their falleness. (It would hardly be just for God to condemn men who had absolutely no way of knowing Him or His law.²)

In chapter three of Jesus through the Centuries, Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan reviews how early Christian apologists used the elements of pagan culture as sign-posts to Christ:

While messianic hope and messianic prophecy had been the peculiar feature of the history of the Jewish people, they were not the exclusive possession of the history of Israel. "Even in other nations," Augustine said, "there were those to whom this mystery was revealed and who were impelled to proclaim it." Job, Jethro the father-in-law of Moses, and Balaam the prophet were three such "Gentile saints," spoken of in the Hebrew Bible, with whose existence both rabbis and the church fathers had to come to terms. Armed with such biblical warrant, Christian apologists found in Gentile literature other evidence of messianic prophecy that pointed forward to Jesus. (35)

Not to mention those quintessential Gentile saints, the Magi, who arrived to worship Jesus on the Epiphany, the feast we celebrate today; their Zoroastrian religion prepared the way for them to recognize Christ. (Of course Zoroastrianism also brings to mind Cyrus, of whom Scripture goes so far as to call the anointed or messiah—see Isaiah 45.)

With the exception of the death of Socrates, the most striking example of Jesus' prefigurement in pagan literature is in the second book of Plato's Republic. As Pelikan recounts it, Glaucon tells (Plato's character) Socrates,

let this one "righteous man, in his nobleness and simplicity, one who desires, in the words of Aeschylus, to be a good man and not merely to give the impression of being a good man," now be accused of being in fact the worst of men. Let him, moreover, "remain steadfast to the hour of death, seeming to be unrighteous and yet being righteous." What will be the outcome? The answer, for whose gruesomeness Glaucon apologized in advance to Socrates, must be (and to preserve the neutrality of language, this translation is that of Gilbert Murray) nothing other than the following: "He shall be scourged, tortured, bound, his eyes burnt out, and at last, after suffering every evil, shall be impaled or crucified." (44-45)

Another Kjos page on Tolkien and Lewis comments revealingly:

Lewis was wrong in calling the gospel "a true myth" that works "on us in the same way as the others." The gospel is made alive in us by the work of the Holy Spirit, not by human imagination. God's mercy has always reached out to pagans around the world through the sacrificial lives of faithful missionaries. But His gift of salvation comes through His Word and Spirit. Believers who were formerly oppressed by occult forces were transformed in spite of, not because of their pagan beliefs.

Kjos certainly is correct that occult forces of themselves do not lead to truth. But notice the unfortunate opposition drawn between the Holy Spirit and the human imagination: as if the Holy Spirit couldn't work in and through the imagination and other human faculties. The implication is that God comes in solely from the outside: as if our omniscient Creator couldn't work with our native faculties.^3,4 The implication is that the world is not just wrong, but completely wrong and contains no elements of truth. It is to the core rotten: grace doesn't build on creation but negates nature, or merely covers it over.

But one has to wonder: if the flesh were completely evil, how could God come in it? To say that the flesh is completely corrupt is a subtle denial of the Incarnation. Rather, our Creator became our Savior to rebuild the goodness that He had made and that Sin could not completely destroy.⁵

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus is not of God. This is the spirit of antichrist, of which you heard that it was coming, and now it is in the world already. (1 Jn 4:1-3)

Kjos seems a sincere believer. She rightly repudiates the gnosticism of Steiner (that she thinks is also present in Tolkien and Lewis). The irony is that by going to the other extreme, by turning God from our Creator into an Invader, she has in fact made God an alien, and thus slipped into a subtle form of gnosticism. As in Hans Jonas's The Gnostic Religion: the Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, the gnostic god is "acosmic" and has no real relationship to creation, except perhaps to negate it.

Beloved, do not believe every spirit,
but test the spirits to see whether they are of God.

It is no wonder that this is the sort of extrinsic god that Philip Pullman, the atheistic author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, thinks Christians believe in: an old killjoy, that is, a Creator who seeks to frustrate His creation. Pullman is right to reject such a God, but wrong to think that it is the real Christian conception of God. In reality the Judeo-Christian conception of God is like a gardener, who prunes his garden to help it grow better. Our "natural" inclinations require discipline so that they work together to the good of our whole nature, not just some narrow slice of it on which we obsess.

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Notes

1. It may sound that Lewis is placing the Tao before God; this is true in the order of discovery (we know nature before we know God), and not the absolute order of things (God is prior to all in His creation). Of course, Christians identify the Torah or Law with the Logos: understood so, the Tao is uncreated.

2. Alas, integral justice isn't the issue for some Christians, so much as being decreed "just" through forensic or nominal justification.

3. God in this view isn't so much a creator (responsible for the integral being of every thing) as a maker, which is to say, one who simply re-arranges pre-existing matter.

4. I sincerely doubt that Mrs. Kjos is a feminist, but this extrinsic notion of God makes an interesting parallel with some feminist doctrines that portray the masculine element as completely foreign to the female: as if the female weren't made for the male and didn't find fulfillment in union with the male. (Lest I fall afoul of feminists out there, let me point out that I don't mean to imply that the male in our created world isn't completed in the female.)

5. In the first millennium there were seven ecumenical councils (meetings of all the world's bishops) to repudiate heresies about who Jesus was and is. Many of the early heresies taught that Jesus was either not truly God or truly man. One of the early heresies was monothelitism, the belief that Jesus had only one will. In reality, Jesus had a human will as well as a divine will. Through the Incarnation, God rectified the human will and didn't merely replace it with a divine will. God fixes our faculties and doesn't destroy them.