The Fright of Infinite Spaces

The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

—Pascal, Pensées, 206

It's well known that the Milky Way in the Star Trek universe is surrounded by a barrier, as shown in the original series episodes "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "By Any Other Name". But I recently learned that there is also a barrier around the far-away Star Wars galaxy too. But why? Why a galactic barrier?

Is this simply a storytelling trope, the modern version of Aristotle's prescription that drama have unity of place? Perhaps that's part of it, but it still seems somewhat gratuitous. Why is it hard to believe that the true barrier between galaxies is not a hard limit, but simply vast distance?

I suspect the real answer lies deep in the heart of man.

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The significance of vast distances struck me at last year's Thomistic Institute Science and Christianity conference (March 4–5, 2022 at the Harvard Museum of Natural History). Some of the talks juxtaposed our modern scientific picture of the universe with passages from Scripture on creation, not just the act of creation, but also the relationship of creation to its Creator.

In particular, the beginning of Fr. Thomas Davenport's talk alluded to the way God's activity is much more immediate in the picture presented by Scripture, in contrast to the picture presented by science, in which God's activity is mediated by long chains of secondary causes (13.8 billion years, etc). This tremendous distance seems to present something of a difficulty for belief: God's Providence seems distant.

In such a universe, a gnosticism of a sort might seem reasonable. Recall that in the ancient Gnostic religions, the Creator of the universe is not the true Divinity, who lies behind the universe. Man, conceived as originally and purely spirit, is thrown or imprisoned in the material world, not a natural part of it. Nature/creation is sundered from the true God, and man must reject nature to align himself with the real God and true goodness. In the 20th century, Hans Jonas discovered the hidden parallel between ancient Gnosticism and modern Existentialism/Nihilism, which might be called neo-gnosticism. The so-called scientific picture has no place for man, such human concepts as teleology (purposes) supposedly playing no part in nature. As in Gnostic religion, humans are sundered from nature.

Akin to this gnostic alienation from the universe is the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, whose effect comes from the terror of the incomprehensible. But Lovecraft's universe is rather too malevolent (along with its denizens) to represent the apparent indifference lying in the vastness of the scientific universe. Perhaps that indifference was too horrible for even Lovecraft, though it might also be that the horror of the infinite empty quantity is simply so inarticulable that the closest neighbor is the quality of evil.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. (H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu")

At the very least, science by itself leaves us in a state of ambiguity: does nature bespeak God or not, and where do I belong in all this ambuguous vastness?¹ Pascal's Pensées elaborate:

205 When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me? Memoria hospitis unius diei prætereuntis [Wisdom 5:15, Latin vulgate: remembrance of a guest who tarried but a day].

229 This is what I see and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and I see only darkness everywhere. Nature presents to me nothing which is not matter of doubt and concern. If I saw nothing there which revealed a Divinity, I would come to a negative conclusion; if I saw everywhere the signs of a Creator, I would remain peacefully in faith. But, seeing too much to deny and too little to be sure, I am in a state to be pitied; wherefore I have a hundred time wished that if a God maintains nature, she should testify to Him unequivocally, and that, if the signs she gives are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether; that she should say everything or nothing, that I might see which cause I ought to follow. Whereas in my present state, ignorant of what I am or of what I ought to do, I know neither my condition nor my duty. My heart inclines wholly to know where is the true good, in order to follow it; nothing would be too dear to me for eternity.

Pascal stood on the cusp of modernity and the modern rethinking of the universe. It might be healthy to look back to the ancient world and take a lesson from the psalmist in reflecting on our smallness and the world's vastness:

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,
and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Yet thou hast made him little less than God,
and dost crown him with glory and honor.

Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands;
thou hast put all things under his feet...

(Psalm 8:3–6)

The reality is that in complaining about the size of creation, we're complaining about the size of the dominion given to us humans. The deeper problem is that we don't appreciate the goodness of the universe. There is an infinite distance between nothing and any finite reality. Maybe it's because the need to survive has wired us to always be so occupied with the next problem that we rarely take time to contemplate the tremendous good we have, that we've been given. It's a crisis of gratitude: we don't appreciate what we've been given, so we have little sense of God's continued presence and providence.²

Science as practiced today doesn't help matters. One big limitation of science is that it projects human knowing onto an unimaginably vast world. We only know the "scientific universe" in terms of experiments in the lab. This approach originated with Galileo's insight, which Newton completed: the unification of the sublunar and translunar realms. We describe the motions of stars and planets in terms of the motions of mechanical bodies on Earth, especially those we study under the controlled conditions of the lab.

We project our own emptiness and chaos on the vast world and then recoil on beholding our reflection.

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Notes

1. Collective Soul's 1993 song "Shine" asks this question, "Where do I belong and where do I find love?", poignantly.

2. A great book on this subject of God's providence and presence that I rejoice in having found though only recently is Providence by Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange.

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.

Abraham and Aristotle

I've been listening to the History of Philosophy podcast. One thing that has struck me with some force is the great similarity of the three Abramhamic religions in taking up Plato and Aristotle, especially Aristotle. The Jews have Maimonides, the Muslims Avicenna, and the Christians Aquinas as the most prominent philosophers of their respective faiths, and these men might fairly be called followers of Aristotle.

And each of these faiths has contributed something unique and valuable to Aristotelian thought. I think of Avicenna in particular, since he was the first to apply Aristotle's distinction between essence and existence to metaphysics, and in particular to the unique Existent that is the transcendant God of Abraham. I hadn't know that fact before; he is not popularly credited for this advance among Christians who, say, study Aquinas.

As has become more and more apparent over the years with the secular world in ascendancy, these three faiths already share so much in common, most prominently belief in the an omnipotent, all-wise Creator. Yes, there are deep differences and these are not to be glossed over. But it would be of mutual advantage—and advantage to the health of the broader world—if they would cooperate more. Aristotle, it seems to me, would be a sound reason for gathering for cooperation people who don't normally mix. If we are going to build peace in this world, it ultimately has to be based in reason, not force, since reason is how we build agreement that is co-natural to everyone involved, that is, rooted in our nature as rational animals.

Ultimate and Penultimate Currencies

Note: I started writing this in January 2010, and apparently put it away for some time. The basic theorem is an idea that has stayed with me and that I think on not infrequently. I actually thought I had published it here already. Oops.

In reading Cardinal Ratzinger's Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life on the evolution through salvation history of the notion of our reward from our Creator, a point that I've been mulling for some time struck me powerfully. As everyone knows and as is well attested in the pages of Sacred Scripture, the earlier conception of our reward was long life and worldly prosperity. Many are the Patriarchs given their farewell encomium by cataloging the preternatural number of their years before their passing, their great worldly wealth, and their long and lasting memory in their many descendants.

The Single Penultimate Currency Theorem

As I mentioned in my previous post, our concern for ourselves, our well being centers primarily on our bodily existence. All other wealth (jobs, money, possessions, children; even to some extent honor or reputation and education) is wealth to the extent that it succors our bodily existence. Hence, all good boils down to a single "currency"—our lives.

Yet it is also apparent to those who take the time to reflect on life and its meaning, that this life is not everything. The most evident manifestation of this truth is that this life ends. What payment does one receive at the end of life? It is all the same. And when one is dead, how does a happy memory profit the deceased? He is clearly beyond caring. And to top it off, this condition last far longer than one's life.

People can use whatever evil means they can to acquire the wealth that enhances and preserves life. But is a dishonest life truly worth living? People with integrity, who are truly worthy of respect, will say "no." But what good can we cite that would be worth living and dying without the goods of this life as long as one keeps one's honesty? One doesn't have to name it to recognize it must exist if justice is to prevail and goodness and happiness go together (NB: for many ancient philosophers, virtue was its own reward, so it needn't be eternal life). So, there must be another currency, one that is more ultimate than our corporeal existence.

Life is a currency, but it is thus only the penultimate currency.

Two Antepenultimate Currencies

But there are more immediate currencies (goods that humans work for) that become evident when we reflect on the sterotypical differences between what motivates men and women. Men tend to work for outward recognition, things like status, honor, and money. Women tend to work for love and personal connection. It's almost as if the “masculine” world of “achievement” and the caregiving world were two independent economies. (I think this is the reason caregiving is so poorly remunerated: the true currency here is not money.)

They aren’t truly independent of course. In truth these two economies are interlocking, two sides of support for human existence. Traditionally the masculine economy is seen as bigger and more important: naively it seems to provide the context for the caring economy, but really the two provide the context for each other. It’s been the Christian genius to reveal how the caring economy is in many fundamental ways more important; it is closer to the ultimate currency (according to Christian lights), without being identical to it of course.

Justice and gratitude

A friend recently reposted on Facebook a tweet that made the very worthy point that people who build accomodations for the handicapped in churches shouldn't expect effusive thanks from the people they've helped, since the act was a simply the duty of justice. It's a great point! But it made me reflect more deeply on the tension between justice and gratitude.

Justice of course is mandated by God. We need to treat our brothers and sisters justly. But gratitude is also mandated by God, and in fact is arguably the central Christian virtue. We need to give thanks, not only for what is granted us gratuitously, but also for what we receive that is simply our due.

These days everyone has rights. But (to vastly simplify) back in the day, all the rights belonged to one man (typically male), a monarch, or a small set of people, an aristocracy. Everyone else served them and received at their will. Whereas most people had to express gratitude for everything, the rulers got whatever they wanted, as their right, and thus had no need to express gratitude. The latter had no need to build the virtue of gratitude. So a small subset of people were designated with a tendency to lack a key virtue necessary for salvation, but the bulk of the population was given to exercise this virtue often.

These days of course, everyone is equal: we have all been elevated to the level of the rich rulers of the past. But our wealth is not primarily in money or real estate, but in rights. We all have equal rights, and thus we all equally are handicapped in the virtue of gratitude. Modernity has damned us by giving us nothing to hope for.

And Jesus said to his disciples, “Truly, I say to you, it will be hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mt 19:23-24)

So while there can be no argument that everyone should have justice, it is also clear why we moderns have such difficulty with Christian faith.

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.

Death to Self and Discernment

That outward circumstances play a part in the formation of a spiritual judgment may be seen by merely looking at the kind of circumstances that interior souls at one time or another have to face. It is easy enough to estimate the effect of these things upon their characters. Loss of material goods conduces to a man's discernment. With detachment from outward standards comes a greater reliance upon the significance of the inward.

Sickness conduces to discernment. There is nothing like a long illness to teach a man the difference between true and false compassion. If only from the sight of his own self-pity, he learns the value of entering into the pains of others.

Suffering of every kind—and especially the suffering of temptation—fosters the potentiality of discernment. Not only is the genuine need distinguished from the sham, but even in the need that is unjustified, that is brought upon itself, an element of sincerity can be discovered that demands an act of understanding.

Solitude ministers to discernment. Sometimes it is born in it. In fact, one wonders how a soul can come to possess the discerning spirit without the help of solitude and silence.

And, above all, in prayer: in the practice of unrelenting prayer, hours of it and carried on over the years, a soul chiefly learns to judge according to the spirit. Discernment is nothing other than this: the power to interpret God. How, short of the directly miraculous, can God's will be interpreted as it is capable of being interpreted apart from the light of prayer?

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Dom Hubert van Zeller, How to Find God ... and Discover Your True Self in the Process (Manchester, New Hampshire: Sophia Institute Press, 1998), 206.

The coming of the Light

In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us. (Lk 1:78)

Strange, New Things

I just saw the first episode of Oasis, an Amazon.com series based loosely on the 2014 novel by Michel Faber The Book Of Strange New Things. It's about a "priest" who travels to a far-distant planet in support of a human colonization effort. The premise of a Christian preacher in space is fascinating, though one could ask for a more robust presentation of Christianity.

In the first episode we see the protagonist, Peter Leigh, say goodbye to his wife dying of cancer. A later flashback shows her pushing the plunger for what we can only presume is her own medically assisted suicide. So it's little surprise that Peter is not even a C of E priest in a Roman collar, but an "ecumenical" pastor who, as he puts it, believes in the validity of all denominations. (I guess that pretty much amounts to the same thing.) The book is somewhat similar in the liberalism of Peter's Christianity: though there's no euthanasia, Peter apparently has no problem with contraception or masturbation.

From here, I'll be reflecting on the book as a whole, so there will be SPOILERS.

The plot of the book is pretty straight-forward. Peter signs up to be chaplain to the indigenous inhabitants of the new planet. It turns out they have a keen interest in Christianity. To get them to churn out the food-stuff the colonists need, they have to be kept happy with a preacher to instruct them in this new, fascinating religion.

The creatures are pretty much perfect targets for liberal Christianity, because they have no sins to be saved from. The part of Christianity that really interests them, we discover in the end, is the promise of eternal life. It turns out it's not even supernatural life that interests the aliens, but purely natural life: their bodies can't repair themselves. How in creation is it possible any of them have managed to survive to adulthood with such an incomplete metabolism? Mr. Faber should have studied some biology!

So, when an author has to contrive such an outlandish fictional species to make its interest in liberal Christianity plausible, is it any wonder that interest among very real humans in liberal Christianity is dying?

In the TV episode, the proceedings have to be drawn out to fill the episodes and create more interest. By the end of the pilot, we don't even know we're dealing with aliens yet, and there's more drama with the crew.

As I said, one could ask for a more substantial presentation of Christianity and its unique claims. The problem is that the World/"Hollywood" insists on portraying Christianity in its own image. But maybe we're supposed to take that as a compliment?

The Ascension in a Scientific Universe

The Catholic (universal and unified, as opposed to sectarian) confession of Christianity teaches that Jesus ascended into heaven. How is this belief tenable in a modern vision of the world, post-Copernicus, in which the heavens have been "dethroned"? Can there be any significance to rising into the sky if the sky has no significance? How are we to understand the Ascension in our modern scientific world?

John Henry Newman writes,

First, Christ's Ascension to the right hand of God is marvellous, because it is a sure token that heaven is a certain fixed place, and not a mere state. That bodily presence of the Saviour which the Apostles handled is not here; it is elsewhere,—it is in heaven.

He continues,

This contradicts the notions of cultivated and speculative minds, {208} and humbles the reason. Philosophy considers it more rational to suppose that Almighty God, as being a Spirit, is in every place; and in no one place more than another. It would teach, if it dare, that heaven is a mere state of blessedness; but, to be consistent, it ought to go on to deny, with the ancient heretics, referred to by St. John, that "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh," and maintain that His presence on earth was a mere vision; for, certain it is, He who appeared on earth went up from the earth, and a cloud received Him out of His Apostles' sight. And here again an additional difficulty occurs, on minutely considering the subject. Whither did He go? beyond the sun? beyond the fixed stars? Did He traverse the immeasurable space which extends beyond them all? Again, what is meant by ascending? Philosophers will say there is no difference between down and up, as regards the sky; yet, whatever difficulties the word may occasion, we can hardly take upon us to decide that it is a mere popular expression, consistently with the reverence due to the Sacred Record.

And thus we are led on to consider, how different are the character and effect of the Scripture notices of the structure of the physical world, from those which philosophers deliver. I am not deciding whether or not the one and the other are reconcileable; I merely say their respective effect is different. And when we have deduced what we deduce by our reason from the study of visible nature, and then read what we read in His inspired word, and find the two apparently discordant, this is the feeling I think we ought to have on our {209} minds;—not an impatience to do what is beyond our powers, to weigh evidence, sum up, balance, decide, and reconcile, to arbitrate between the two voices of God,—but a sense of the utter nothingness of worms such as we are; of our plain and absolute incapacity to contemplate things as they really are; a perception of our emptiness, before the great Vision of God; of our "comeliness being turned into corruption, and our retaining no strength;" a conviction, that what is put before us, in nature or in grace, though true in such a full sense that we dare not tamper with it, yet is but an intimation useful for particular purposes, useful for practice, useful in its department, "until the day-break and the shadows flee away," useful in such a way that both the one and the other representation may at once be used, as two languages, as two separate approximations towards the Awful Unknown Truth, such as will not mislead us in their respective provinces. And thus while we use the language of science, without jealousy, for scientific purposes, we may confine it to these; and repel and reprove its upholders, should they attempt to exalt it and to "stretch it beyond its measure." In its own limited round it has its use, nay, may be made to fill a higher ministry, and stand as a proselyte under the shadow of the temple; but it must not dare profane the inner courts, in which the ladder of Angels is fixed for ever, reaching even to the Throne of God, and "Jesus standing on the right hand of God."

I will but remind you on this part of the subject, that our Lord is to come from heaven "in like manner" as He went; that He is to come "in clouds," that {210} "every eye shall see Him," and "all tribes of the earth wail because of Him." Attempt to solve this prediction, according to the received theories of science, and you will discover their shallowness. They are unequal to the depth of the problem.

Along similar lines, Pope Benedict writes:

The New Testament, from the Acts of the Apostles to the Letter to the Hebrews, describes the "place" to which the cloud took Jesus, using the language of Psalm 110:1, as sitting (or standing) at God's right hand. What does this mean? It does not refer to some distant cosmic space, where God has, as it were, set up his throne and given Jesus a place beside the throne. God is not in one space alongside other spaces. God is God—he is the premise and the ground of all the space there is, but he himself is not part of it. God stands in relation to all spaces as Lord and Creator. His presence is not spatial, but divine. "Sitting at God's right hand" means participating in this divine dominion over space.

...

Because Jesus is with the Father, he has not gone away but remains close to us. Now he is no longer in one particular place in the world as he had been before the "Ascension": now, through his power over space, he is present and accessible to all—throughout history and in every place.

He is gone, but, now transcending time and space, he is still with us in a way that our science cannot fathom.

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Notes

Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week: From the Entrance Into Jerusalem To The Resurrection (Ignatius Press, 2011), pp. 282-3, 284.

John Henry Newman, "Mysteries in Religion," Parochial and Plain Sermons 2:18, no. 1.

The God Gene and Other Powers

Even though New Atheists seem to have shouted themselves hoarse some time ago, Deo gratias, I still remember them fondly. One of the sillier ideas of that age was the idea of a genetic pre-disposition to belief in God. For some reason it doesn't seem to have cross their minds that such a "God gene" is just as likely (according to their naturalistic lights) a good thing—a positive ability—as a handicap. One of their hobby horses, after all, is the denunciation of "the naturalistic fallacy," the idea that nature contains norms, or as more commonly enunciated: that you can "get an 'is' from an 'ought.'"

Of course the reality is that they are the unfortunate blind, unable to see the sun, puffing out their chests for their disability.¹ This realization made me aware that this sort of handicap pride, so to speak, is part of a larger societal trend. These days it's the fashion for all sorts of unfortunates to come out of the woodwork, band together, and to announce that their impairment is an actual superpower. At the apex of the power-pyramid at the moment seems to be a group of people who can't manage to synchronize their minds with the configuration of their bodies. Our society's elites are flexing their muscles by molding our institutions around the delusions of these poor people. But every child has to get a trophy.

In so many ways, we're letting the inmates run the asylum. But if you think about it a little, thus has it always been, although in far less obvious ways.

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Notes

1. I say "are," but poor Hitchens, may he rest in peace, has passed on and been cured of his atheism.

Second Triduum

In all the liturgical extravagance of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, it's easy to miss the second Easter Triduum that shadows the more apparent one, and that in important ways draws us closer to the heart of these days.

After the Holy Thursday Mass of the Lord's Supper, our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is moved to a side altar of repose for the rest of the night. There is a venerable tradition of visiting our Lord in seven churches--more of a challenge in our land and era of individuatedness and distance. No matter how many churches one has a chance to visit, this is a time to quietly pray to him in silence.

After the Good Friday Liturgy of the Passion, the Blessed Sacrament has been entirely consumed, the altars are stripped, the tabernacle evacuated, and the vigil light extinguished. The church is vacant of the Holy Presence that makes silence appropriate in a Catholic church in a way that is not possible for other denominations's churches. There is a new vacancy inhabiting the space. Without a nucleus, the silence takes on a new tenor: it is a time of silence from silence.

This unique silence continues through Holy Saturday into the night, up until the Easter Vigil/Mass of the Resurrection. We stand in a no-man's land. A desert. Our Lord is absent.

Liturgically speaking at least.¹ Historically we live after his resurrection, so in actuality he will always remain with us, as he promised. Like Virgil for Dante, visible aids can only take us so far.

But without the helps of the liturgy—most properly an orchestrated silence²—, we are invited this one time of the year to enter more deeply into the Reality to which it points, through the silence underneath.

He is there in the still, small voice that even the silence of creation swamps out and that not even the "eternal silence of these infinite spaces" can block out. Silence is the most delicate sound: any other sound destroys it. It is also the most sensitive. It takes silence within us to hear the silence Beyond. But, o paradox, the silence, the openness within, has to be maintained by activity,³ by the fortifications against Noise we've been building these forty days. The liturgy has pointed us in the right direction and readied us to receive.

Beneath the liturgical spectacles of these days, there is another triduum. If you are very still, you might just catch a glimpse out of the corner of your eye, the whisper beneath the fading echoes of the last Amen.

Listen.

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Notes

1. Yet he is made truly present to us liturgically, just as the Passover account in Exodus and the Passover questions now make present "this night" to all Jews who join in the celebration.

2. As here: Silence and Light

3. Activity that reaches a higher state, an inner activity synonymous with actuality.

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Of possible interest:

• Making Room for Light
• Darkness
• Keeping Silence
• An interesting line, though perhaps making a different point, from Pan's Labyrinth: "It is only in His physical absence that the place He occupies in our souls is reaffirmed."

Science & Faith Conference

Franciscan University is holding a conference on "Can Science Inform Our Understanding of God?" Friday, December 2 through Saturday, December 3. Dan Kuebler is one of the organizers.

Lots of prominent speakers, including:

• Edward Feser
• William E. Carroll
• Benjamin Wiker
• Mark Ryland
• Steve Barr

Topics:

• What is the precise relationship between faith and reason?
• What is the status of the Intelligent Design movement?
• What are the uses and abuses of scientific investigations?
• Where lie the boundaries between science, philosophy, and theology?
• What role do philosophical and theological positions have in scientific explorations?

Of course, it's taking place in Steubenville, OH, about an hour west of Pittsburgh.

The Inhumanity of Teilhard de Chardin

Once upon a time, among comments on Albert Camus's The Plague, Thomas Merton wrote a trenchant critique of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin¹:

The current apologetic reply to Camus’ dismissal of Catholicism goes something like this: Camus was exposed to Augustine when he was not ready for him. He paid too much attention to Pascal and to “sick” Christianity like that of Kierkegaard. And of course he was not favorably impressed by the French Catholic collaborationists and their jeremiads over sin and punishment at the time of the Nazi occupation. But it would have been a different story if Camus had been able to read Teilhard de Chardin.

Is it that easy? To begin with, let us state the question more exactly. It would be impossible to say whether or not Camus, under this or that set of “favorable circumstances,” would ever have become “a believer.” Such surmises are usually nonsense. The problem with Camus was that he simply could not find Christians with whom he was able completely to identify himself on every level. The closest he got was with some of the French priests in the resistance, and evidently that was not close enough.

What would Camus have liked about Teilhard?

Obviously, first of all, he would have been happy with Teilhard’s com­plete acceptance of nature and of material creation, Teilhard came as close to developing a Christian mystique of matter as anyone has ever done; and Camus, in some of his essays, extols the material, the phe­nomenal, the sensible, the experience of the fleeting moment, in quasi-mystical language.

A study of Teilhard’s writings and especially of his own spiritual de­velopment shows us to what extent he rebelled against the mentality we have seen in Paneloux: the self-righteous, censorious repudiation of a beautiful world created by God’s love. Writing from the trenches in World War I. Teilhard confessed, in a letter to a friend, that even in the midst of war he was meditating and keeping notes on the “real prob­lem of my interior life”—“the problem of reconciling a passionate and legitimate love of all that is greatest on earth, and the unique quest of the Kingdom of Heaven.” He explicitly rejects any concept of the world as “only an opportunity to acquire merit.” Rather he sees it as a good creation, coming from the hand of God and given us “to be built up and embellished.”

[215] It is of course typical of the spirituality of Paneloux to regard the created world merely as something to be manipulated in order to amass an abstract capital of merit. Paneloux is a spiritual profiteer, and his kind of Christianity is a reflection of the social establishment, with which it exists in a symbiotic unity. Of such Christianity, Teilhard says it makes one less than a man and a traitor to the human race. Those who observe it from the outside are repelled and “blame my religion for it” That is precisely what Camus does in his portrait of Paneloux. Teilhard’s criti­cism of this false supernaturalism is that in trying to divert man’s capacity to love and turn it aside from concrete human reality to the purely abstract and spiritual, it deadens and distorts man. “The capacity to love cannot with impunity be dissociated from its object: if you try, mis­takenly, to cut off our affectivity from love of the universe, are you not in danger of destroying it?” This is what has happened to Paneloux: a good, sincere, strong-willed man, with a strong tendency to intellectualize, he has fallen a victim to an abstract and inhuman spirituality. His power of love has atrophied. His affectivity has been channeled into will-to-power and rigid authoritarianism. When he tries to recover the warmth of love, he ends in a self-immolation which is part heroism and part algebra, an irrefutable conclusion to an argument which no one is able to understand.

Teilhard, on the contrary, wants to transform and divinize the human passions themselves. “I shall put the intoxication of pagan pantheism to Christian use, by recognizing the creative and formative action of God in every caress and every blow … I would like to be able to love Christ passionately ... in the very act of loving the universe.” And he asks: “Is there communion with God through the Earth, the Earth becoming like a great Host in which God would be contained for us?”

Camus’ basic sympathy for the element of Greek theoria in Mediter­ranean culture would incline him to accept this “Christian gnosis” up to a point. He could identify with the “passionate love,” if not with the theological elaboration. Teilhard also completely and totally accepts man; and the God of Teilhard is not simply a remote judge and creator, but a God who seeks to complete his epiphany in the world of man by bring­ing all humanity to convergence and unity in himself, in the Incar­nation. The Incarnation for Teilhard is, then, not just an expedient to take care of sin and bring the kind of “grace” that Paneloux was happy about. The Incarnation is ultimately the full revelation of God, not just in man but in the “hominization” of the entire material world.

Camus would have heartily agreed with Teilhard’s love of man and [216] with his aspiration toward human unity. But it is rather doubtful whether he would have been able to accept the evolutionary and historical scheme of Teilhardian soteriology. To be precise, it is likely that Camus would have had a certain amount of trouble with the systematic progress of the world toward “hominization” and “christification” by virtue of laws im­manent in matter and in history.

The point cannot be adequately discussed here, but anyone who wants to investigate it further had better read Camus’ book on Revolt (L’Homme révolté), which he wrote after The Plague and which he thought out at the same time as The Plague. This study of revolt, which precipitated the break between Camus and the Marxists (especially with Sartre), is a severe critique of Hegelian and post-Hegelian doctrines which seek the salvation and progress of man in the “laws of history.”

Camus was suspicious of the way in which totalitarians of both the left and the right consistently appealed to evolution to justify their hope of inevitable progress toward a new era of the superman. In particular, he protested vigorously against their tendency to sacrifice man as he is now, in the present, for man as he is supposed to be, according to the doctrine of race or party, at some indefinite time in the future. In Camus’ eyes, this too easily justified the sadism and opportunism of people who are always prepared to align themselves on the side of the executioners against the victims.. In other words, a certain superficial type of eschato­logical hopefulness, based on evolution, made it easy to ignore the ex­termination camps, the pogroms, the genocide, the napalm, the H-bombs that so conveniently favored the survival of the fittest, got rid of those who no longer had a right to exist, and prepared the way for the epiphany of superman.

At this point, it must be admitted that one of the most serious criti­cisms of Teilhard bears precisely on this point: an optimism which tends to look at existential evil and suffering through the small end of the telescope. It is unfortunately true that Teilhard, like many other Chris­tians, regarded the dead and wounded of Hiroshima with a certain equanimity as inevitable by-products of scientific and evolutionary prog­ress. He was much more impressed with the magnificent scientific achievement of the atomic physicists than he was with the consequences of dropping the bomb. It must be added immediately that the physicists themselves did not all see things exactly as he did. The concern of a Niels Bohr and his dogged struggle to prevent the atomic arms race put Bohr with Rieux and Tarrou in the category of “Sisyphean” heroes that are entirely congenial to Camus. After the Bikini test, Teilhard exclaimed that the new bombs “show a humanity which is at peace both internally [217] and externally.” And he added beatifically, “they announce the coming of the spirit on earth.” (L’Avenir de l’homme)

No matter how much we may respect the integrity and the nobility of this dedicated Jesuit, we have to admit here that at least in one respect he resembles his confrere Paneloux. True, they are at opposite extremes of optimism and pessimism; but they do concur in attaching more im­portance to an abstract idea, a mystique, a system, than to man in his existential and fallible reality here and now. This is precisely what Camus considers to be the great temptation. Lured by an ideology or a mystique, one goes over to the side of the executioners, while arguing that in so doing one is promoting the cause of life.

There is no question whatever that Teilhard believes in the “new man,” the homo progressivus, the new evolutionary leap that is now being taken (he thinks) beyond homo sapiens. Science certainly gives us a basis for hope in this development, and perhaps Camus needed to have more hope in the future of man than he actually seems to have had. Perhaps Camus was too inclined to doubt and hesitate. Perhaps his “modesty” tended too much to desperation. Perhaps there was much he could have learned from Teilhard. But it is not likely that he would purely and simply have agreed with Teilhard’s statement in Peking, in 1945, that the vic­torious armies of Mao Tse-tung represented “the humanity of tomorrow” and “the generating forces and the elements of planetization,” while the bourgeois European world represented nothing but the garbage (le déchet) of history. No doubt there may be good reason to think that a “new humanity” will arise out of the emerging Third World. Let us hope that it will. But Camus would not be so naïve as to identify this “new humanity” with a particular brand of Marxism, or to pin his hopes on a party which announced its own glorious future as a dogma of faith.

Both Camus and Teilhard firmly took their stand on what they con­sidered to be the side of life. Both saw humanity confronted with a final choice, a “grand option,” between the “spirit of force” and the “spirit of love,” between “division” and “convergence.” Man’s destiny is in his own hands, and everything depends on whether he chooses life and creativity or death and destruction. Teilhard’s scientific mystique and long-range view, extending over millennia, naturally did not delay overlong to worry about the death of a few thousands here and there. Camus could still pause and have scruples over the murder of an innocent child. He refused to justify that death in the name of God. He also refused to justify it by an appeal to history, to evolution, to science, to politics, or to the glorious future of the new man.

In short, Teilhard de Chardin's devotion to the powerful generalities of modernity blinded him to the plight of particular men living in the world.

Note

1. Thanks to Patrick Henry Reardon, whose mention of this analysis in the last issue of Touchstone alerted me to its existence.

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Thomas Merton, "The Plague of Camus: A Commentary and Introduction," The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New Directions Publishing, 1985), 214-217.

Patrick Henry Reardon, "A Many-Storied Monastic: A Critical Memoir of Thomas Merton at Gethsemani Abbey," Touchstone (September/Octobober 2011), 50-57.

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Note: These past couple months I've been completely occupied with an important project; it will take another few months to see it through to the end.

Peace on Earth (to Men of Good Will)

Hail the newborn Prince of Peace!

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." (Is 9:6)

I recently read Werner Heisenberg's Gifford Lectures (1955-56), on which I'll post later. In the meantime, I thought one particular passage was particularly appropriate to this feast. Here, Heisenberg is talking about the way scientists can advance peace in the world, and in particular how they are often asked to endorse peace resolutions:

Such [solemn] resolutions [in favor of world peace] may seem a welcome proof of goodwill; but anyone who speaks in favor of peace without stating precisely the conditions of this peace must at once be suspected of speaking only about that kind of peace in which he and his group thrive best—which of course would be completely worthless. Any honest declaration for peace must be an enumeration of the sacrifices one is prepared to make for its preservation.

Sacrifice. Peace needs sacrifice. Already in the Nativity we see the sacrifice of the Prince of Peace adumbrated: in the slaughter of the Innocents, in his Circumcision. In traditional icons, the bindings swaddling the Infant foreshadow the binding of the entombed Crucified.

For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. (Col 1:19-20)

Our redemption begins with the Incarnation, made manifest in our Lord's birth.

Merry Christmas!

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Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1958), 192-3.

Hawking off the Reservation Again

The media have been aflurry with Hawking's latest pronouncement. The Wall Street Journal features an excerpt of his recently published book The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow. Here's an excerpt of that excerpt:

Newton believed that our strangely habitable solar system did not "arise out of chaos by the mere laws of nature." Instead, he maintained that the order in the universe was "created by God at first and conserved by him to this Day in the same state and condition." The discovery recently of the extreme fine-tuning of so many laws of nature could lead some back to the idea that this grand design is the work of some grand Designer. Yet the latest advances in cosmology explain why the laws of the universe seem tailor-made for humans, without the need for a benevolent creator.

(But why not a malevolent creator?)

Hawking then reviews the so-called anthropic coincidences—the apparent fine tuning of constants in our mathematical laws of physics—without which the human life, or even the continued existence of the universe itself would be impossible.

Many people would like us to use these [anthropic] coincidences as evidence of the work of God. The idea that the universe was designed to accommodate mankind appears in theologies and mythologies dating from thousands of years ago. In Western culture the Old Testament contains the idea of providential design, but the traditional Christian viewpoint was also greatly influenced by Aristotle, who believed "in an intelligent natural world that functions according to some deliberate design."

[If the universe weren't intelligent in some sense, then how could intelligence discover its rules?]

That is not the answer of modern science. As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation [!] is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many.

Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.

As soon as Hawking invokes the word "creation," he's departed physics for metaphysics. Physics of any kind can only study things that move. Creation is not a motion: something either exists or it doesn't. There is no motion between the two discrete states of being and non-being. Mathematical physics can't even handle the concept "nothing" (of course zero is not nothing).

How could nothing (really nothing) generate something? Hawking is using "nothing" equivocally. Perhaps this fuzzy mode of thinking descends from Newton's equivocal use of zero in calculus (at once and in the same expression the variable is zero in one instance, while in another it's non-zero). Or perhaps it's just another manifestation of perennial fuzzy thinking inspired by the consequentialism of the hypothetical-deductive model of science.

Hawking might ask himself how the multiverse exists. And on what basis does Hawking presume the laws of physics¹ are self-existent?

"Off the reservation" is a phrase that means "gone rogue." Stephen Hawking hasn't so much gone rogue as shown once again that he is unable to restrict himself to the territory of physics at which he is so adept. He insists on trespassing outside to a subject he shows no evidence of ever having studied seriously: philosophy. Without a serious study of this subject (or at least consulting real experts), Hawking can only pull his ideas from the winds of unreflective (pop) culture: a disappointing performance from a world-class intellect.

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Of course the whole controversy (like so many in the media) is a tempest in a tea-pot. Why should anyone care what Hawking says about any random (i.e., non-physics) subject? Xkcd pegs it in this insightful cartoon.

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Note

1. Hawking was much wiser when he wrote: "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire in the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?"

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Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (Bantam, 2010).

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Update (2010-10-05): One can hardly do better than William E. Carroll in addressing the philosophical issues Hawking raises, as in this passage:

Creation is not primarily some distant event. Rather, it is the ongoing, complete causing of the existence of all that is. At this very moment, were God not causing all that is to exist, there would be nothing at all. Creation concerns the origin of the universe, not its temporal beginning. Indeed, it is important to recognize this distinction between origin and beginning. The former affirms the complete, continuing dependence of all that is on God as cause. It may very well be that the universe had a temporal beginning, but there is no contradiction in the notion of an eternal, created universe, for were the universe to be without a beginning it still would have an origin; it still would be created. This is precisely the position of Thomas Aquinas, who accepted as a matter of faith that the universe had a temporal beginning but also defended the intelligibility of a universe simultaneously created and eternal. ("Stephen Hawking’s Creation Confusion")

Ratzinger on Aquinas on Corporeality

I've read several of Pope Benedict/Cardinal Ratzinger's books, but I think the best I've encountered is the one I mentioned in the last post (on time). Lately I've been reflecting on how time and life go together like time and energy (in modern physics) and like time and money (in our financial lives). Clearly "to save time" means to escape the needless loss of a segment of our lives. The precariousness we attribute to the moment is really the precariousness of our biological lives. Hans Jonas realized this well:

Heidegger had talked about existence as care, but he did so from an exclusively intellectual perspective. There was no mention of the primary physical reason for having to care, which is our corporeality, by which we—ourselves a part of nature, needy and vulnerable—are indissolubly connected to our natural environment, most basically through metabolism, the prerequisite of all life. Human beings must eat. This natural law of the body is as cardinal as the mortality accompanying it. But in Being and Time the body had been omitted and nature shunted aside as something merely present.

...Perhaps my physical exposure to danger [as a soldier in the Second World War], a situation in which the precariousness of the body's fate becomes evident and fear of its mutilation becomes paramount, was responsible for my new reflections.

Anyway, enough transition from time to bodiliness! Among the many gems of Ratzinger's Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life is this extended passage on the Thomistic conception of human corporeality:

The crucial factor in reaching this solution was the entry of Aristotle into Christian thinking during the course of the thirteenth century. The Platonic heritage, in many ways so useful for taking up the intellectual challenge of the biblical message, has led to the dilemma between spiritualism and naturalism just described. Of itself, it was unable to clear a path through the thicket. With the help of Aristotle, however, a non-sensualist realism could be formulated and in this way a philosophical counterpart to the pneumatic realism of the Bible could be found. The decisive step was the new understanding of the soul which Thomas Aquinas achieved through his daring transformation of the Aristotelian anthropology. We saw above that the picture of the soul which developed in definitive fashion from Christianity implied at the same time a new view of the body. In Thomas' interpretation of the formula anima forma corporis [soul the form of body], both soul and body are realities only thanks to each other and oriented towards each other. Though they are not identical, they are nevertheless one; and as one, they constitute the single human being. As both expression and being-expressed they make up a dual unity of a quite special kind. For our purposes, this insight carries a twofold consequence of a remarkable sort. First, the soul can never completely leave behind its relationship to matter. Greshake's idea that the soul receives matter into itself as an "ecstatic aspect" of the realization of its freedom, while leaving it for ever to the clutches of the necessarily imperfectible precisely in its quality as matter, would be unthinkable for Thomas. If it belongs to the essence of the soul to be the form of the body then its ordination to matter would be inescapable. The only way to destroy this ordering would be to dissolve the soul itself. What is thus emerging is an anthropological logic which shows the resurrection to be a postulate of human existence. Secondly the material elements from our of which human physiology is constructed receive their character of being "body" only in virtue of being organized and formed by the expressive power of soul. Distinguishing between "physiological unit" and "bodiliness" now becomes possible. This is what Origen was getting at with his idea of the characteristic form, but the conceptual tools at his disposal did not allow him to formulate it. The individual atoms and molecules do not as such add up to the human being. The identity of the living body does not depend upon them, but upon the fact that matter is drawn into the soul's power of expression. Just as a soul is defined in terms of matter, so the living body is wholly defined by reference to the soul. The soul builds itself a living body, a self-identical living body, as its corporeal expression. And since the living body belongs so inseparably to the being of man, the identity of that body is defined not in terms of matter but in terms of soul.

The easy vividness of Ratzinger's summary of Aquinas's doctrine makes it easy to appreciate Ratzinger's resonance with Hans Jonas (a favorite of his)! Also note how he brings out the truth of Origen's apparently erroneous formulation.

In Thomas, these insights find their determinate expression through the Aristotelian understanding of prime matter and the role of form connected with this. Matter which does not belong with some form is materia prima [primary matter], pure potency. Only in virtue of form does this materia prima become matter in the physical sense [i.e., the modern sense]. If the soul be the only form of the body, then the ending of this form-relationship by death implies the return of matter to a condition of pure potency. This reversion should not, of course, be thought of as occupying a distinct moment in time: we are making an assertion in ontology. In point of fact, the place occupied by the old form is at once taken over by a new one, so that physical matter remains as it was. However, since this physical matter is not actualized by a different form, it is something fundamentally different from that which existed before when the soul was the form in question. Between the living body and the corpse there lies the chasm of prime matter. Consistently maintained, therefore, the Thomistic teaching cannot preserve the self-identity of the body before and after death.

Matter of itself (that is, without form) has no identity, no "individuation"; it is "pure potency," as Ratzinger says following the Aristotle Scholastics. Like modern bumper sticker slogans, the medieval maxim that "matter is the principle of individuation" is often invoked by superficial philosophers without real understanding.¹ Really it is form that individuates material things: the real meaning of the slogan is that matter is the principle by which a material thing's form modified. In other words, material things' forms can't change unless they have matter, the principle of change. Benedict Ashley drove this point home for me in a conversation some years ago.

This might seem to be an advantage in the case of the question of resurrection. Yet it has anthropological and ontological consequences which are strange, to say the least. For this reason, Aquinas' new anthropology, summed up in the formula anima unica forma corporis, called forth stiff opposition and ecclesiastical condemnations. At the philosophical level, it denied the identity of the corpse of Jesus with him who was crucified. Incidentally, if the body derives its identity in no way from matter but entirely from soul, which is not passed on by a man's parents, there would also be another problem here concerned with conception, with the genuineness of parenthood. This is why Thomas himself held back from embracing the consequences of his own theory and, in the question of the resurrection, fenced it in with additional considerations meant to supply for its deficiencies. Only Durandus of Sant Pourcain (c. 1275-1334) dared to accept all the consequences entailed in Aquinas' starting point, basing the identity of the risen body exclusively upon the identity of the soul. His remained a somewhat isolated voice in the medieval period. During the nineteenth century it was adopted by Billot, Michel, and Feuling.

Not quite sure what he means about the problem of the genuineness of parenthood. Except perhaps that if the immaterial soul is created (or infused) directly by God, then to what extent can one's parents be said to be the parent of that soul, which is the person himself? (Anyone know how this one is answered?)

(Also have to admire the translator's use of the English subjunctive: "If the soul be".)

Next Ratzinger turns in his brilliant way to discover the core concerns (behind the limitations) motivating the philosophical doctrines in order to do justice to them in a modern formulation.

In its original shape, the Aristotelian concept of matter and form underlying Durandus' thesis is no longer conceivable to us: the simple repristinization of a thoroughgoing Thomism is not the way we seek. The synthesis which Thomas formulated with such brilliance in the conditions of his century must be re-created in the present, in such a way that the authentic concerns of the great doctor are preserved. Thomas does not offer a recipe which can just be copied out time and again without further ado; nevertheless, his central idea remains as a signpost for us to follow. That idea consists in the notion of the unity of body and soul, a unity founded on the creative act and implying at once the abiding ordination of the soul to matter and the derivation of the identity of the body not from matter but from the person, the soul. The physiology becomes truly "body" through the heart of the personality. Bodiliness is something other than a summation of corpuscles.

Truly Ratzinger at his best!

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Notes

1. I suspect that this section would have been a good one for a couple Catholic philosohers to have read (and re-read and pondered thoroughly) in order to avoid the silly assertion that "we think the resurrection involves God's reassembling at least some of the numerically same particles that once were in our living bodies (us) when we were alive—and thus it is a true resurrection, that is, a re-arising." Invoking particles (modern matter) rightfully sets them in the cross hairs of physicist Steve Barr. If they simply meant "matter" in the Aristotelian sense, they would be equally wrong, because as we've seen matter as such has no identity. Modern, quantum-mechanical matter and Aristotelian matter coincide in this lack of individuation. The irony is that we have two Catholic philosophers defending the mechanistic conception of matter (in envisioning the resurrection, no less!), and a modern physicist (himself Catholic, but one who no openly admits of being no philosopher) effectively defending the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic view. (Another example of how the story of modern physics has turned to support the tradition, but not one Barr documents.)

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Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1988), 178-181.

Hans Jonas, "Wissenschaft as Personal Experience," The Hastings Center Report 32: 4 (Jul.-Aug., 2002), pp. 27-35. (Quoted: 31-32)

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.

Naivete or Stupidity? West on Hefner

Christopher West is a popular exponent of Pope John Paul II's "Theology of the Body," which teaches a positive view to spousal intimacy as a reflection of God's love.¹ Over the years I've heard untoward rumors about some questionable sexual practices that West is supposed to have advocated. In the absence of any solid evidence, I've discounted them as Jansenistic misunderstandings.

But now a friend sends me this ABC Nightline article. Here's the core of contention:

The seeming paradox of West's position is captured in the unlikely pairing of his two big heroes -- his muses, you might say. They are Pope John Paul II, and Hugh Hefner. A saint and a sinner.

"I actually see very profound historical connections between Hugh Hefner and John Paul II," said West.... Each man in his own way, West insisted, rescued sex from prudish Victorian morality....²

"I love Hugh Hefner," said West. "I really do. Why? Because I think I understand his ache. I think I understand his longing because I feel it myself. There is this yearning, this ache, this longing we all have for love, for union, for intimacy."

Pornography is a longing for intimacy...? Right. "Honey, I log into that website as an expression of my longing for intimacy," I can hear some husband trying to justify his porn addiction. Rather a remote reflection of any longing for intimacy!

Either West has been taken out of context, or else he needs to read more by Pope John Paul II and about Hefner, or both.

The Pope specifically condemns pornography in Love and Responsibility as a failure of real intimacy:

Pornography is a marked tendency to accentuate the sexual element when reproducing the human body or human love in a work of art, with the object of inducing the reader or viewer to believe that sexual values are the only real values of the person, and that love is nothing more than the experience, individual or shared, of those values alone. This tendency is harmful for.... the truth about human love consists always in reproducing the interpersonal relationship, however large sexual values may loom in that relationship.³ (192-3, emphasis added)

From what I know about Playboy, it's not exactly a complete interpersonal relationship that's being represented in its pages. That this is Hefner's schtick is grossly apparent in an article that West would be profitably familiar with, "The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner": "Sandy Bentley, the Playboy cover girl and former Hefner girlfriend (along with her twin sister Mandy), describes Hugh Hefner's current sexual practices in just enough detail to give you a good long pause." That Hefner's public persona includes two girlfriends at once is a big enough statement that the man doesn't represent a "longing for intimacy"—does anyone (outside of West) suffer from the illusion that playboys do? I won't reproduce the key passage on Hefner's practices, but here is the upshot:

Yes, you read that right. There it is, attributed to someone who ought to know, the stated fact on the public record. It may seem shocking or it may seem trivial, but it amounts to a significant confirmation that Hugh Hefner embodies what his detractors have been saying for years: All pornography is ultimately homosexual. All pornography stifles the development of genuine human relationships. All pornography is a manifestation of arrested development. All pornography reduces spiritual desire to Newtonian mechanics. All pornography, indulged long enough, hollows out sex to the point where even the horniest old Viagra-stoked goat is unable to physically enjoy the bodies of nubile young females.

(The entire article is well worth reading.)

Pornography is a serious problem in our society. Greedy businessmen hijack a God-given human desire and enslave a large fraction of the population for their own selfish gain.⁴ No one should trivialize the problem by proposing Hefner as any source of inspiration.

I vaguely recall from one of West's talks that he may have been involved in pornography before his (re)conversion. Perhaps his statements are part of such a recollection. Still, I can't understand why he would parallel Hefner with JP2. (On his website West rightly evaluates pornography.) On the other hand, it is easy to see how the MSM would magnify any misspoken word.⁵ At worst, this is an idiotic rhetorical move by Christopher West. At best this is West trying to appeal to more people and thinking rather naively that he can handle the media beast: West doesn't realize how easily attention-grabbing statements that work in a talk are taken out of context in today's slice-and-dice media culture... and thanks to ABC he's now learning really, really fast.

Either way, it is a genuine scandal. Christopher West should publicly clarify his position specifically in response to this article. Unfortunately whatever new statement he makes will not have nearly the reach of the old one.

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Notes

1. I highly recommend Michael Waldstein's excellent introduction to his new translation of the work, Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body.

2. As if "prudish Victorian morality" were the demon to flee. Love and Responsibility actually says that such morality and today's pornographic culture have much more in common with each other than with authentic sexuality:

If any one of the above-mentioned purposes of marriage is considered without reference to the personalistic norm—that is to say, without taking into account of the fact that man and woman are persons—this is bound to lead to some form of utilitarianism in the first or second meaning of the word 'use'. To regard procreation in this way leads to the rigorist distortion, while the 'libidinistic' distortion is rooted in a similar attitude to the tertiary end of marriage—remedium concupiscentiae. (67)

The two meanings of 'use': (1) employ as a means to an end, the end being procreation, and (2) enjoy. Thus both "prudish Victorian morality" and hedonism ignore the full reality of the person in favor of using the person either merely for procreation or merely for pleasure. Maybe West's invocation of "prudish Victorian morality" is rhetorical?

3. Extended quotation:

The human body is an authentic part of the truth about man, just as its sensual and sexual aspects are an authentic part of the truth about human love. But it would be wrong to let this part obscure the whole—and this is what often happens in art.

However, the essence of what we call pornography in art is further to seek. Pornography is a marked tendency to accentuate the sexual element when reproducing the human body or human love in a work of art, with the object of inducing the reader or viewer to believe that sexual values are the only real values of the person, and that love is nothing more than the experience, individual or shared, of those values alone. This tendency is harmful, for it destroys the integral image of that important fragment of human reality which is love between man and woman. For the truth about human love consists always in reproducing the interpersonal relationship, however large sexual values may loom in that relationship. Just as the truth about man is that he is a person, however conspicuous sexual values are in his or her physical appearance.

A work of art must get at this truth, no matter how deeply it has to go into sexual matters. If it shows a tendency to distort this it can only give a distorted picture of reality. But pornography is not just a lapse or an error. It is a deliberate trend. If a distorted image is endowed with the power and prestige of artistic beauty there is a still greater likelihood that it will take root and establish itself in the mind and the will of those who contemplate it. For the human will often shows a great susceptibility to deformed images of reality. But for this very reason, when we condemn pornography we should often put the blame on immaturity and impurity, the absence of 'emotional shame' in those responsible for it. (192-3)

4. Funny how silent liberals largely are about this manifestation of "evil capitalism."

5. On yet another hand, ABC seems to have faithfully transmitted West's nuanced stances on oral sex, etc. So one wonders where the fault lies.

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David Wright and Ely Brown, "Sex Sermonist's Heroes: Pope John Paul II and Hugh Hefner: Devout Catholic Christopher West Lays Out Unexpected Vision of What Sex Can Mean for Christians," ABC News Nightline (May 7, 2009).

Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993).

Read Mercer Schuchardt, "The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner," GodSpy (October 1, 2003), originally published as "Play Boy! The Cultural Victory of Hugh Hefner" in re:generation quarterly (July 1, 2001). The quotation I've omitted is from the June 2001 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Fr. Jaki Roundup

Last week I told you about the passing of Fr. Stanley L. Jaki. Eventually I will have to post something more in-depth about the man and his work. But in the meantime, I'll simply link to some recent items about him and highlight the more noteworthy information. This first group is obituaries.

• What Does Prayer Really Say? (April 7)
  a simple announcement, but the comments include a broadcast email from Seton Hall president Monsignor Robert Sheeran
• ISI First Principles (April 7)
• Communio blog (April 8)
• Pertinacious Papist (April 11)
  blog and discussion
• New York Times (April 12)
• Associated Press (April 13)
• Los Angeles Times (April 15)

The Los Angeles Times includes this interesting local detail: "From 1957 to 1960, Jaki lived and worked as bookkeeper at the Woodside Priory, which he co-founded with six other Benedictine priests, in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Portola Valley." The New York Times obituary concludes, "He is survived by two brothers, both Benedictine priests, the Rev. Zeno Jaki and the Rev. Theodose Jaki, who live at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma." So he is being buried at the Archabbey of Pannonhalma, about an hour and a half west of Budapest.¹

There is also a beautiful series of posts at Casa Santa Lidia:

• Father Jaki in Rome (March 30)
  photos from his last Rome visit
• Please Keep Praying for Fr. Jaki (April 7)
  more photos from Rome visit
• Father Stanley Jaki 1924 - 2009 (April 7)
  a couple more excellent photos
• In paradisum deducant te angeli (April 8)
  funeral arrangements
• From the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (April 14)
  memorial letter from Chancellor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo
• An update (April 16)
  burial arrangements

From which we learn that Fr. Jaki's funeral was at "Monasterio de Nuestra Senora de Montserrat in Madrid (plaza San Bernardo, 79) at 17:00 this evening (Wednesday the 8th April)" and "Father Jaki's body will return to Hungary on Friday [the 17th]. Burial will take place on the 29th April at Pannonhalma, at 14:30 (2:30 p.m.)." (h/t the Blue Boar)

This next group are older items that I include as background:

• His Gifford Lectures (later published as The Road of Science and the Ways to God)
• Absolute Astronomy bio
• His 1996 CV

In the wake of Fr. Jaki's death, the Duhem Society has been founded to study the works of those two great historians of science, Fr. Jaki and Pierre Duhem. (h/t the Curt Jester) One of the more useful posts so far is a list of their works available online.

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Notes

1. A friend has asked for a prayer card. If anyone has one, and would take the trouble to scan and post online, it would be appreciated.

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Update (4/24): Fr. Rutler has a wonderful tribute to Fr. Jaki on Inside Catholic. Yes, Fr. Jaki was a Benedictine, though in the photo he appears to be dressed as a Jesuit. ;o)