Michael Dubruiel, R.I.P.

I did not know Michael Dubruiel very well, though I did sometimes visit his website. I followed the postings of his wife, Amy Welborn, at her website, and I once defended Amy from a rather scurrilous and outrageous attack at the hands of someone by the name of Thomas Herron, but other than this most minimal of contact I knew next to nothing about Michael Dubruiel, other than that he was a faithful man, a good husband and father, and someone whose passing is to be mourned.

So I will mourn him. I will pray for the repose of his soul, and for the comfort and strengthening of his wife and family. I am reminded of a homily I once heard preached by the Right Reverend Robert Duncan, Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh, while he was still the Episcopal chaplain at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It was on the occasion of the feast of St. Bartholomew. Fr. Duncan pointed out that we know very little about the Apostle Bartholomew, other than that he was faithful. That's not much to know about a person, but in the Christian context, it is quite enough. C. S. Lewis wrote, in his redoubtable essay "The Weight of Glory", that the most important promise offered to us in the New Testament is the promise that we will be glorified in Christ. He considers what "glory" means in this context, and he worries that it seems odd to look forward to something very like "fame" or "good reputation" if one is supposed to be a humble, self-effacing Christian. But this is not what it means to be glorified in Christ:

When I began to look into this matter I was shocked to find such different Christians as Milton, Johnson and Thomas Aquinas taking heavenly glory quite frankly in the sense of fame or good report. But not fame conferred by our fellow creatures--fame with God, approval or (I might say) "appreciation" by God. And then, when I had thought it over, I saw that this view was scriptural; nothing can eliminate from the parable the divine accolade, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." With that, a good deal of what I had been thinking all my life fell down like a house of cards...

...what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures--nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator...and that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing.

In thinking about the passing of Michael Dubruiel I cannot think much about him, since I know so little about him. What I can think about him, because I do know this much, is that he was faithful, and so I can say--I hope, with my Lord--Well done, thou good and faithful servant.

Requiem aeternam dona ei, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace.

Fr. Edward P. Mahoney, R.I.P.

When I was just seven years old, I waited with my mother on a cold November evening for my father to come home from work. He was an executive at Goodyear in Akron, Ohio, and we were living in Stow, which meant that we couldn't really expect him home before 6:00, but on this particular night 6:00 came and went, and it got darker and weirder. Being only seven, I was getting bored waiting for dinner and started to get antsy, as bored seven year olds do. My mother began to give me the threat: "When your father comes home...". On this particular evening, the good news turned out to be pretty bad. I didn't have to worry about when my father came home. He wasn't coming home.

Around 7:00 there was a knock at the door. It was my father's boss and his wife. They didn't live in Stow. There were some serious-sounding adult voices, and they went with my mother into the kitchen. Being ignored is the universal signal for all children to start acting crazy, so I ran around pretending to be Mighty Mouse, yelling "Here I come to save the day" and rolling around on the floor. My mother suddenly appeared in the entrance to the kitchen, looking down at me as I lay on the floor battling some unsuspecting, invisible enemy cat. Her face was very stern-looking--I thought I was in for it for sure. "Your father's dead," she said simply.

The realization hit me like a ton of bricks. It's forty three years later and I can still remember that moment like it was yesterday. I jumped up and ran to throw myself into a nearby chair, where I screamed "No no no" and wiggled around a lot. I don't remember much else.

Growing up without a father was, in many respects, not very complicated. I never found myself pining for the life my friends had with their fathers, mostly because I didn't realize what I was missing out on. Ignorance, it turns out, really is bliss in some situations. Things began to get more complicated for me on 11 January 1994, when my own son was born. If you're good at math, you will have noticed that he just turned 15 on Sunday. I've had fifteen years to experience the father-son relationship from the other side--the side I didn't get to observe much of. In winging it, so to speak, with my own son, I have come to see very clearly what I lost out on, and so instead of ignorant bliss my life is filled with what J. R. R. Tolkien once called "eucatastrophe": the loss of my own father was a catastrophe, but it was precisely that loss that enables me to see the nearly infinite preciousness of the relationship I have with my son. There is literally nothing else like it: every such relationship is unique.

I find myself thinking all of these thoughts today because I have just learned of the death of an old friend and mentor, a man who, in some ways, drove me completely crazy but who, in other ways, enriched my life enormously. Fr. Edward Mahoney was a professor of philosophy at Duke University, but I actually first met him before I studied philosophy there. In fact, it was 1985, and I was still a graduate student at UNC in classics. He had just been ordained to the Deaconate, and was serving his deaconate year at my home parish, St. Thomas More, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We were introduced after a Mass one Sunday morning, and when he heard I was working on Aristotle he was very excited, and we wound up chatting about things. I saw him ordained to the priesthood in October of the next year, and in 1987 he became my spiritual adviser. Always an independent, stubborn asshole, I was not the ideal subject of spiritual direction. I'm probably lucky that he never tried to kill me. We wound up arguing more often than not, and eventually he fired me--but we remained friends and he presided at my marriage in July of 1989. The next year I quit classics and applied to study philosophy at Duke, and he helped me to get in. While at Duke I took medieval philosophy from him, and continued to argue with him about anything and everything. At times it seemed as though I couldn't even remark to him that the sky is blue without him challenging me about it. I remember a conversation I had with him in his office in which I began a sentence with "I feel like Plato would have..." and he immediately stopped me and said "Don't say 'I feel like'. You're not telling me what you feel like. Say 'I feel as though.'" Even though he was himself as conservative as anyone on matters theological and liturgical, he always took great delight in saying, whenever I made any remark at all about the Church, "Oh, you're such a conservative!" as though he were pointing out that I had neglected to close my mouth while chewing my food. At the beginning of every term he would stop me in the hall and ask me "How does it feel to be doing real philosophy, now that you're not in that historical discipline any more?" When it suited him, of course, he would put that slightly differently. When I took up an interest in the philosophy of science, he said to me "Oh come now, that's not rigorous! You're a scholar for goodness' sake! Why not do something challenging!" Probably he meant that I should take up medieval philosophy and become his student, but he never said so.

Nil nisi bonum de mortuis, you're probably thinking (well, if you think in Latin, anyway--and who doesn't, after all). But a 23 year relationship is, almost of necessity, going to be marked by highs and lows, sorrows and joys. In short, many of the dynamics of our relationship were probably not all that different from those of the relationship I might have had with my father, had he lived. It was not a perfect relationship, but it was a close relationship; a relationship in which one person is older and wiser, and the other thinks that he is; a relationship like the one I have with my own son. Having said that, the relationship was also quite shallow in most respects, and so was not in any sense a substitute for what I lost. In a sense, I think that I mourn that, too. I will never find another father, but the little boy in me keeps looking for one.

So I grieve rather deeply when people die--perhaps more deeply than I have a right to, given my philosophical attitude towards death. The Christian in me believes that death is just a transition; the philosopher in me believes that, well, if Christianity isn't true then death is just the end of being--no biggie, as Socrates was quick to point out. But every death, for me, symbolizes either a kind of lost potential or the end of something good for me, and this phenomenological aspect of dying tends to outweigh, in the moment, my more rational thoughts about it. I focus not so much on the end of the person who has died, but on the effects the death has on those who are left behind, as I was once left behind and affected more deeply than I suspected. The news has been filled with such departures of late, departures of folks who were, in one way or another, fairly significant in my life. Pope John Paul II, William Buckley, Avery Cardinal Dulles, Richard Neuhaus, and now Edward P. Mahoney, all people whom I liked or admired for one reason or another, have departed this world and left me behind to fend for myself. The little boy in me doesn't like that.

There is a grown man here, too, or so people keep telling me (you'd never know it if you were to observe, for example, my son and me watching Kung Pow together, or enjoying a marathon screening of very ancient Popeye cartoons together). What is it that he is looking for? Maybe nothing in particular--perhaps he just prefers life to death: being is better than non-being, presence than absence.

Fidelium animae per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace.

Fr. Richard Neuhaus, RIP

Nearly a year ago I lamented the passing of William F. Buckley, whom I characterized at the time as one of my cultural "heroes". Looking back on it now I realize that he was, in a sense, merely a political hero for me--I admired his Catholicism but I did not always see eye to eye with him on Catholic questions. If I have a modern cultural hero of the religious sort, it is Fr. Richard Neuhaus. I first encountered his writings in the pages of Buckley's fortnightly, The National Review, at some point in the late 1980s. At the time Fr. Neuhaus was still a Lutheran; when he converted to Catholicism I was excited enough to write him a letter of congratulations. I'm sure he received many such letters--perhaps many hundreds of them--but he responded to mine anyway, and in considerable detail.

Since that time I have followed his publications rather avidly. I am happy to count myself among the "charter" subscribers to his own journal, First Things, which has consistently offered sane and sensible analyses of our cultural and political situation from a religious perspective. My custom--as I suspect it was the custom for many readers of First Things--was to read each new issue from the back to the front, so as to enjoy Fr. Neuhaus's proprietary column, "The Public Square", "first thing", so to speak. His pithy little comments on all matters political, cultural, and intellectual were often stimulating and always a joy to read. One wonders what one can ever hope to find to replace them, and him.

Sadness is an appropriate emotion even for the Christian who believes in and hopes for eternal life, since death and suffering are the outward signs of the fallenness of our existence--to mourn them is, in the end, to express sorrow over the fact that things must be thus and not otherwise, to grieve over the pain and suffering that is brought about by human sinfulness. But all suffering for the Christian is tempered by the sure and certain knowledge that our redeemer lives and intercedes for us at the right hand of God. At a more mundane level our sadness is only that we will miss our friend, not that our friend is gone forever. We miss him as we miss the loved one whom we see off at the airport--we are sad that they will be away, but deep inside we know that we will see them again, and every tear shall be wiped away.

Thoughts on the Violence in Gaza

Christopher Blosser, a contributor at The American Catholic, has a thoughtful post up regarding the renewed violence in Gaza. As usual, his analysis is not only lucid and compelling but amply documented. Highly recommended reading.

Simultaneity and Relativity

This morning I came across a blog post in which it was claimed that "time is a construct":

everything is happening simultaneously. Right now, I am writing at my computer. Right now, I am voting at my local school. Right now, Christ is dying on a cross. Right now, He is making a covenant and receiving a kiss. Right now, Napoleon is heading to Waterloo. Right now, George Washington is facing defeat for the umpteenth time. Right now, I am being needlessly cruel to someone. Right now I am being born. Right now I am 78 years old and grousing that my kids never visit me. Right now, Obama has won the election. Right now John McCain has won the election.

There is an interesting confusion here between the epistemological and the ontological (along with what looks like a conflation of relativity with certain string-theoretical interpretations of quantum mechanics). Relativity theory, famously, describes a universe in which the concept of simultaneity is in need of serious theoretical revision since, according to the theory, there is no such thing as a privileged vantage point from which to describe discrete events as having any meaningful temporal relations. It does not follow from this point about the relativity of frameworks, however, that time is in every sense a construct. Obviously certain elements of our subjective experience of time are constructed, but just as obviously there are certain temporal relations that are ontologically independent of any particular framework.

So, for example, if a man in Beijing sits down in a chair at 2:15 his time, and I sit down in a chair at 14:15 my time, there is no privileged vantage point from which it can be known with certainty that we sat down simultaneously. For the same reason there is no privileged vantage point from which one could say with certainty that he sat down before I did, or that I sat down before he did. On the other hand, there is no vantage point from which it would make any rational sense to say that we do not know with certainty that Julius Caesar died before I was born. You can carry this relativistic crap only just so far.

It is also worth remembering that relativity theory, though robustly consistent with observation, is like any other scientific theory: it is one interpretation of reality among many. Indeed, if it is to be counted as a scientific theory at all, it must be deemed falsifiable, which presupposes the possibility that it may prove to be, after all, an incorrect interpretation of reality. This, in turn, presupposes that there are such things as incorrect interpretations of reality, of course, but if we don't presuppose that then there seems little point in doing science at all other than for mere mental masturbation. Those who, in the 1970s and 1980s, sought to turn the sciences into more geeky versions of the humanities (which were still in the throes of critical theory at the time) might find it congenial to argue that there is no such thing as correct or incorrect when it comes to interpretations of the world, but such people need not be taken seriously in the lab. Or really anywhere else either.

That relativity theory may fail to interpret the world correctly is a possibility that is sometimes forgotten by undergraduates in some of my philosophy of science classes, who seem to take a kind of perverse delight in saying things like "There's no such thing as simultaneity" or "It doesn't make any sense to talk about events being simultaneous" (or temporally ordered, for that matter). Why they don't take the time to preface their remarks with some such caveat as "According to one physical theory..." is probably a reflection of the exuberance of youth, but its cuteness wears off after a while and it comes to seem like a sign of dogmatic adolescence more than anything else. Being impetuous may get you into the marriage of your dreams, I suppose, but it might also get you into the marriage of your nightmares.

The theological claim that "all times are eternally present to God" has a rather nice pedigree going back at least as far as St Augustine, but theological claims are a lot like scientific claims: they are open to falsification. This is an artifact of their being only analogies: some of them become enshrined as dogmata and we are required to give them intellectual assent, but that does not alter the fact that, come the eschaton, we may find that things are not precisely as we supposed them to be. To say that God is Three Persons with a single nature may very well be the best thing that can possibly be said by humans about God, but at best it only borders on what the truth actually is, because it is merely a proposition, not a reality. One trusts that it is the best representation of reality that humans are capable of given the guidance of the Holy Spirit, but it is a representation nonetheless: actually experiencing God in the eschaton will necessarily be different from merely thinking about him as a Trinity of Persons with a single nature.

There is an interesting review article by Stephen Barr in the most recent issue of First Things in which he assesses a collection of essays by Wolfhart Pannenberg called The Historicity of Nature: Essays on Science and Theology ("Theology After Newton", First Things 187 (November 2008), pp. 29-33) in which a very different theological interpretation of reality is proposed, one in which temporal relations are an essential feature of creation and God's presence in it. While Pannenberg is no Augustine his views are extremely interesting, and one is reminded that while there may be some sense in which it is meaningful to say that "all times are eternally present to God", it may not be all that salutary to take such speculation either too literally or too seriously.

Robert George on Obama's Extremism

Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University has written a brilliant essay in Public Discourse, an organ of The Witherspoon Institute, in which he assess the reasons why many Catholics who count themselves as pro-life nevertheless favor Barack Obama in the presidential election.

I picked up the reference to the essay from Dr. Michael Liccione, my co-conspirator over at Philosophia Perennis. I agree with him that the essay is both very good and very important, but, sadly, I must also agree with him when he writes to me: "too bad it probably won't matter". It certainly won't matter in the broader sense of having any effect on the outcome of the election, but it is certainly very sad that it also probably will have no effect on the thinking of those pseudo-Catholics who think that they can support such a man for the presidency in good conscience.

A friend of mine once remarked that he would probably support Obama in the election, not so much because of his policies, but because of the two candidates he seemed less likely to actually have any impact on anything important. In short, according to my friend, there are some ways in which Obama is the lesser of two evils. Given the impotency of the presidency in the face of an unruly Congress there may be some truth to this, but if one pairs up an Obama with a Congress controlled by the Democrats, one shudders to think of what may happen to the SCOTUS and, ultimately, the most innocent of human persons. The irony here, of course, is that supporters of Obama portray his position as one that defends liberty: the liberty of women to choose. The argument is sometimes made rather doctrinally, as though choice in and of itself were the only liberty at stake, but more reasonably the argument is sometimes made that an Obama administration would promote values, programs, and institutions that, in the end, will make the "need" for abortion diminish to the vanishing point.

As Robert George says in his essay, this point of view is delusional.

Some Propaganda Is Better Than Others

From CatholicVote.com:

But Then We Already Knew That Tradition Means Nothing To Them

I have blogged several times about my fond memories of the Right Reverend Robert W. Duncan, the Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh and the man responsible for bringing me into the Christian Church. Search on his name at this blog and you can read more about the time I spent with him when he was the campus minister at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Recently he has been involved in the movement to restore some semblance of orthodoxy to the Episcopal Church but, sadly, he and his orthodox ilk appear to be very much in the minority in that train wreck of a denomination. Last month he was removed from his position as bishop of Pittsburgh by the House of Bishops because he had been advocating a kind of secession from the Episcopal Church. It's interesting that Shelby Spong, who, as far as I am concerned, does not count even as a Christian let alone as a bishop of the Church, was never even reprimanded for his heresies, and yet Bob Duncan is removed from office for advocating a return to orthodoxy. He is the one who gets blamed for schism rather than those who are really responsible for tearing the Episcopal church away from the Sacred Tradition of Christianity. I continue to think that I dodged a bullet when I left that church 25 years ago.

Speaking of traditions, a story in the New York Times mentions that the Diocese of Pittsburgh has voted to secede in spite of the removal of their bishop, and this has given rise to the predictable squabbles over who owns the millions of dollars worth of property belonging to the diocese. Strangely, the PECUSA is claiming that it should belong not to the diocese, but to the national church. I say that this is strange, but really it isn't. It's strange in one sense, because when Henry VIII split from Rome, effectively bringing the Church of England into autonomous existence, he took all the church's property with him, even going so far as to confiscate properties that had been held by religious orders for centuries. So when a diocese within the PECUSA decides to do exactly the same thing--leave the larger church and take the property too--it is strange that the larger church should object, since without that kind of maneuver the larger church itself wouldn't even exist. On the other hand, there is a sense in which it isn't strange at all, since to allow the diocese to seize the property would be to bow to a kind of old-fashioned Anglican tradition, and if anything is clear in that muddle-headed denomination it's that old-fashioned traditions, like the Sacrament of Matrimony, are always up for grabs and redefinitions. So maybe this is a new-fashioned tradition in the PECUSA: do whatever you want, just so long as you act unilaterally in upending some old-fashioned tradition. The diocese of Pittsburgh acted unilaterally, but it was in defense of an old-fashioned tradition, and that is worse than heresy as far as the PECUSA is concerned.

This is the sort of thing that's bound to happen when your ecclesiology has no sound intellectual tradition to begin with. It's always been a mystery to me why Bob Duncan never converted to Rome--in spite of the thoroughgoing influence he had on me there are many ways in which his thinking has always been somewhat opaque to me. Generally speaking the explanation lies no further than my own density. He is a deeply spiritual and profoundly intelligent person, so I have always assumed that whatever his reasons are for doing the things he does, they are in all probability far better reasons than I have ever had for doing anything. One can, at most, pray that God's will be done in all things, and hope that one is able to discern it when it happens.

Dear Leader

Even though Leni Riefenstahl is no longer with us, it's comforting to know that, should the United States ever be taken over by the Chinese or the North Koreans, we've already got a head start in the propaganda department:

Jerks (Knee Variety)

Once, when I was living in North Carolina, I called the office of then-senator Jesse Helms to make a suggestion. I began my conversation with the woman who answered the phone by explaining that I had supported Mr. Helms in the previous two elections, and that in general I liked his politics. She was very friendly with me throughout much of this conversation, and we got along famously for a while. My purpose in calling, I explained, was to make a suggestion regarding the way Mr. Helms approached the question of homosexuality. He was never one to pull punches, and he always said pretty much exactly what he thought, which is a remarkable thing for a politician--to say what one thinks is true regardless of how the statement will be received. I knew some gay folks who were also conservative, and it occurred to me that they might well support Mr. Helms if he just didn't talk about homosexuality so much. It seemed to me he had a choice: he could say the things he always said about gays, and get none of their votes, or he could change his rhetoric a little--not in such a way as to hide his beliefs, mind you, just enough to make his beliefs a little more palatable in some way to a broader audience--and perhaps gain the votes of a few of them.

There was a deafening silence on the other end of the line. "I'll pass your message along to Mr. Helms", the woman said, and she hung up on me. So much for my attempt at Machiavellian manipulation. I'm just an amateur, after all, and I didn't really expect to be taken all that seriously--I just thought I'd give it a try. Because I did, in fact, know quite a few gay conservatives who didn't like Jesse Helms and wouldn't vote for him, even though they wouldn't vote for his opponents either.

I was reminded of all this today because I got an email from Townhall.com letting me know about a new political ad they are pushing. The ad reveals how Barack Obama has sunk to a new low, mocking the Bible and Christian belief. Now this I had to see, so I clicked on the link, and was taken to a YouTube video showing Obama giving a talk in what looks like a Church (though it could be just some large lecture hall with marble columns--hard to tell the difference in some cases). I watched the video all the way through and it became evident to me almost immediately that Obama was mocking neither the Bible nor Christian belief, and that you would have to be pretty much a complete idiot or else on the prowl to catch him out even to imagine that he was doing such things, let alone make an entire political ad to that effect.

Now, I don't have to prove my conservative or Christian credentials to anybody. I am not a fan of Barack Obama or enamored of his oratorical skills, such as they are. His political ideas only stir my heart in the sense that they leave me torn between laughing at how ludicrous they are and crying about how many suckers are being taken in by them. In short, he's not fooling me for a second, and I'm not out to defend him. But it strikes me as insulting to the intelligence to be told that this talk of his, which is essentially about how the Bible is open to interpretation and it is unfair for one side or another to try to lay claim to it in a political context, amounts to ridicule of the Bible or Christian belief. Sure, it's ridicule of some kind, all right, but it's ridicule of the sort of people who read the Bible and their own Christian faith in a narrow, bigoted, and irrational way. It may be the one thing that he is right about--these people deserve ridicule.

Who are the people who think he's ridiculing the Bible itself or Christian faith? The people who made the ad? Surely these folks are too intelligent to think he's really doing what they are saying he's doing. Or are they? I once had a conversation with Lynne Cheney, of all people, back when she was the chairman of the NEH, in which I asked her some questions about the direction of humanities education in America, and I got some incredibly bone-headed political answers in response. Now, she's an educated person, but it was as if she had been programmed only to answer in political jargonics--no thinking on one's feet permitted in certain kinds of contexts, it seems, even if what one happens to be is a professional thinker. So maybe the folks who made the ad really think it's true. If so, they are morons. If not, they are liars. Neither alternative inspires confidence.

Philosophia Perennis

Dr. Michael Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae has launched a new group blog, called Philosophia Perennis, to host the writings of a number of Catholic philosophers who have been around the blogosphere for a while. I find myself among those invited to contribute to this new effort, and I will do so happily--if everyone invited actually takes part, the enterprise promises to be an exciting addition to the Catholic blogosphere.