As I was strolling through the parking lot of the music building today on my way to my trumpet lesson I happened to notice a shiny new Jaguar parked in one of the prime parking places reserved for folks with either lots of service or lots of clout. It was a beautiful machine and I just had to wander over to admire it, though I was careful to stay far enough away to avoid setting off any alarms.
As I drew nearer, I noticed the license plate: 1GR8TFL, which I assume is supposed to mean something like "I [am] grateful". I suppose I would be, too, if I had the sort of job that would allow me to buy a car like that, pay the taxes on it, and keep it running. I'd be even more grateful if it came with a parking space like that, but I suppose you can't have everything. I've often wondered what I would do if I had that kind of money, because I'm the sort of person who is not very good at having a lot of money around--instead of feeling gr8tfl I just feel gilT, wondering how many starving children I could feed by sending this shiny new trumpet's worth of money to OxFam. You can't save the world, of course, but you're lying to yourself if you think you can't save one or two people here and there. The next time you think about buying a CD for yourself, think about the fact that OxFam could take your $15 and keep five children alive for three months with that money (OxFam is rather famous for having extremely low overhead).
As I was peering inside at the beautiful leather seats and what I assume was a real wood dash and not some plastic fake, I noticed a book lying in the back seat. Now I happen to think that you can learn a lot about folks from the sorts of books they leave lying around in their car. Once, after I was nearly killed by some crazy moron who decided to pass me on the right on a two-lane road, I found myself parking next to the guy at the local Kroger, so I went over to his car to give him a piece of my mind. He had already gone inside, but I noticed a copy of Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them lying on the passenger seat. What a surprise. Anyway, the book in the Jag was the Bible. Given the fact that I was already feeling substantial Christian angst about my seedy covetousness and selfish desire to have a car like that for myself, I found myself wondering what sort of a person owned the car. The presence of a Bible in the back seat of a Jaguar is a conjunction of facts that renders the possibility that the owner of the car is a professor logically impossible, so it had to be either an administrator or some kind or perhaps well-to-do minister or maybe a doctor or a lawyer. I don't know why a doctor or a lawyer would park at the music building (let alone have a Bible in the car--is it in case you forget your black bag, or the judge is feeling grumpy?), and since administrators don't work in offices anywhere near the music building, I drew the rather shaky inference that the car belonged to a minister.
OK, I realize that was a dumb inference; in my own defence I will say that I didn't really draw that inference, it just popped into my head that it might be a minister's car, because when I was living in North Carolina I was often astounded by the kinds of cars driven by evangelical clergy. It was as if they thought of the thing as somehow a part of their job, the way my brother-in-law, who is a real estate broker, always drove a black Lincoln town car on the grounds that it couldn't hurt his reputation with the clients. I imagined these guys (it's always guys who drive penis cars like this; guys and Ann Coulter) driving around town on their pastoral visits wanting folks to feel that, here comes a guy who's got his act together, I can trust him--look at the car he's driving! In North Carolina it was always a BMW, though, or a Porsche. I think I saw a Bentley once, too, in Raleigh. That's where the real money is--you're not going to see a car like that in Durham, even in the parking lot of an evangelical church.
All of this clergy-with-wheels experience came from North Carolina, though, where the desire to tool around town in style at least appeared to have benign motives of impressing little old ladies. But once I moved to Ohio I made a rather startling discovery by the name of Joel Osteen. I had never heard of the guy until I started channel surfing late one night when Lisa was away on business and I happened upon one of Osteen's shows. I was captivated by his pleasant speaking style, his warm and friendly manner, and his gnarly threads. I watched pretty much the whole damn show and I couldn't believe that I was actually finding him interesting to listen to. But something was a little weird about him, and I started to look into his ministry a little. You'll have to forgive me, because I've been a little wary of these TV ministers ever since I saw Dr. Gene "Kill a piss ant for Jesus" Scott sitting in a captain's chair on an otherwise empty stage, wearing a construction-worker's hat, smoking a huge cigar, and explaining "why it is that I hate my ex-wife--because she won't give money to my ministry!" So when I see these guys I usually just assume that they're all like Scott, and the slicker they are the less I trust them, and Joel Osteen is nothing if not slick.
And yet I found that I liked the guy. Don't get me wrong--he's not a Catholic, and so I assumed he would say something heretical eventually, but I never heard him say it, so I kept looking into his ministry to uncover the error that I knew had to be there. Eventually I hit pay dirt: he's one of the "prosperity" Christians, folks who believe that if you are right with God, God will reward you with material prosperity. If it's true, of course, you'd have to think that Joel Osteen is about as right with God as a person can get, since he seems to be prospering more than most. Personally, I don't think he's really in it for base motives, I think he really believes what he says and is a "faithful" Christian to the extent that someone so wrong about Christianity can be, but it may be that I'm just being swayed by his savory clothes--maybe he's a complete charlatan; I just don't think so.
I hadn't given ol' Joel much thought of late, until I was reminded of him simply by virtue of seeing a car in a parking lot and wondering whether it was owned by a minister. Earlier this week I had heard a story on NPR about "prosperity" Christians in Nigeria, of all places, and it occurred to me that this prosperity message is not merely wrong, it is sort of in-your-face-wrong, and it misleads a lot of people. "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones."
Of course I have no idea whose car that was or what their beliefs are like. That such cars even exist is something of a scandal, since the money could certainly be better spent, but I suppose someone will argue that the existence of such things drives an economy that enables everyone to live just a little better than they would otherwise be able to live.
Right.
Don't forget about OxFam, now: it's a great way to avoid cluttering up your living room with more CDs than you really need.
He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.
He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.
Don't get sent away, Joel, or whoever you are: sell your car--sell everything!--and follow Him!
Friday, June 16, 2006
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Why I Will Never Borrow A Bike
If I ever had any qualms about riding my bike naked, the Zombie has dispelled them with this chronicle of the Naked Bike Ride in San Francisco. It's nice to know that all things really are relative, and that, in comparison with some folks, I really do look like Fabio.
Meaning and Music
I'm a huge fan of 13th century liturgical chant--who isn't, after all?--and one of the interesting differences between Catholic and Protestant liturgical music is nicely illustrated by a prominent feature of such composers as Perotin and Leoninus. Listen to some of the clips available at Amazon.com from the collection "Music of the Gothic Era." The very first clip in particular, "Viderunt omnes", nicely illustrates the feature I am talking about. In this kind of music, single words can be drawn out over hundreds of notes, constituting a kind of meditation in itself, independent of the word's function in the overall sentence in which it occurs.
This is in marked contrast with the polyphonic and harmonic music that came to dominate Protestant liturgical music starting in the 16th century, where the emphasis is on the semantics of the whole text. In some ways this is typical of Protestantism, I think: forget about the imagery and sheer beauty of incarnate sound and zero in on meaning meaning meaning. If you're not saying anything then you're not expressing anything worth paying attention to. It's all very logocentric. I don't mean to be too bitchy about this, but it's a point of view that, when taken to an extreme, tends to be exclusivist, denying the authenticity and value of other modes of expression, sometimes to the point of iconoclasm. I don't think that the same is true of the chant tradition, since there are certainly many passages in chant that amount to melodic expressions as direct as any in later polyphony.
I was put in mind of all this by a story I heard on NPR about the musical accompaniment to the movie The Da Vinci Code. It's mostly mood music, obviously, but I was particularly interested in the bit in the interview with the singer, Hila Plitmann, where she talks about trying to communicate feelings and even conceptual matter by singing non-words, that is, she literally vocalizes in the sense that she is articulating phonemes, but for the most part what sounds like language is nothing more than meaningless sounds.
And yet not meaningless, seemingly, if feelings and conceptual content can be "communicated" by articulating these sounds. The interview is quite interesting from the musical point of view: it does, indeed, seem to be true that certain nuances lie in the effects produced by softening a consonant here, blurring a vowel there, and changing the timbre of one's voice from time to time. The 13th century liturgical chant that I love to listen to will sound a lot like meaningless sounds to many people--even to some people who know Latin, I imagine, due to the dramatic melisma employed--and yet, as I remarked above, it is precisely the same here as in Plitmann's work: nuances of meaning are communicated by this very distortion away from the ordinariness of the spoken version of the same sounds.
Is this use of sound texture, tonality, timbre, etc., a kind of language in itself? If it really does "communicate" something, it seems as though it is at least like a language, but it is difficult to see how there could be any grammar to it, rules of syntax, accidence, etc. It all seems very subjective, somehow, and yet not entirely--the old saw about minor keys sounding "sadder" than major keys hits on something that strikes people from all cultures as somehow right. Chomsky's project of trying to uncover a "universal grammar" in the hardwiring of the human brain has borne little fruit, but there appears to be a grain of truth to it; maybe there is something analogous in the case of music, a kind of universal "grammar" governing the modes that we use to express certain kinds of ideas.
Probably not, I'm guessing, and even if there were such a thing it's hard to imagine what sort of confirmataion one could possibly find for guesses about its various features, but it's fun to speculate.
This is in marked contrast with the polyphonic and harmonic music that came to dominate Protestant liturgical music starting in the 16th century, where the emphasis is on the semantics of the whole text. In some ways this is typical of Protestantism, I think: forget about the imagery and sheer beauty of incarnate sound and zero in on meaning meaning meaning. If you're not saying anything then you're not expressing anything worth paying attention to. It's all very logocentric. I don't mean to be too bitchy about this, but it's a point of view that, when taken to an extreme, tends to be exclusivist, denying the authenticity and value of other modes of expression, sometimes to the point of iconoclasm. I don't think that the same is true of the chant tradition, since there are certainly many passages in chant that amount to melodic expressions as direct as any in later polyphony.
I was put in mind of all this by a story I heard on NPR about the musical accompaniment to the movie The Da Vinci Code. It's mostly mood music, obviously, but I was particularly interested in the bit in the interview with the singer, Hila Plitmann, where she talks about trying to communicate feelings and even conceptual matter by singing non-words, that is, she literally vocalizes in the sense that she is articulating phonemes, but for the most part what sounds like language is nothing more than meaningless sounds.
And yet not meaningless, seemingly, if feelings and conceptual content can be "communicated" by articulating these sounds. The interview is quite interesting from the musical point of view: it does, indeed, seem to be true that certain nuances lie in the effects produced by softening a consonant here, blurring a vowel there, and changing the timbre of one's voice from time to time. The 13th century liturgical chant that I love to listen to will sound a lot like meaningless sounds to many people--even to some people who know Latin, I imagine, due to the dramatic melisma employed--and yet, as I remarked above, it is precisely the same here as in Plitmann's work: nuances of meaning are communicated by this very distortion away from the ordinariness of the spoken version of the same sounds.
Is this use of sound texture, tonality, timbre, etc., a kind of language in itself? If it really does "communicate" something, it seems as though it is at least like a language, but it is difficult to see how there could be any grammar to it, rules of syntax, accidence, etc. It all seems very subjective, somehow, and yet not entirely--the old saw about minor keys sounding "sadder" than major keys hits on something that strikes people from all cultures as somehow right. Chomsky's project of trying to uncover a "universal grammar" in the hardwiring of the human brain has borne little fruit, but there appears to be a grain of truth to it; maybe there is something analogous in the case of music, a kind of universal "grammar" governing the modes that we use to express certain kinds of ideas.
Probably not, I'm guessing, and even if there were such a thing it's hard to imagine what sort of confirmataion one could possibly find for guesses about its various features, but it's fun to speculate.
Reviews as Rants
Here's a book that I actually am reading: Aquinas' Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction, by Anthony Lisska (Oxford, 1998). It argues--gasp!--that Thomas Aquinas--prepare yourselves, now!--is an Aristotelian in the foundations of his moral theory!
Tony is a friend of mine, and I know him to be a very serious scholar. Although he is not a religious person (he actually argues that Aquinas' moral theory, grounded in natural law, works better without the notion of God floating around in it like a turd in a cesspool), this book makes for a very good introduction to the scholastic version of natural law theory. I was therefore somewhat amused by one of the reviews of the book available at Amazon.com, written by Stephen Heersink, a gay activist who rejects natural law morality for rather obvious reasons. He completely trashes the book, even going so far as to impugn the editorial process at Oxford University Press ("How this travesty passed its high editorial standards is deeply puzzling"), and yet, when one reads around in his other writings available on the internet, one cannot help but think that he doth protest too much.
Heersink (he has a blog here) claims to have some education in philosophy, and yet he writes the following inexplicable sentence:
To see an example of Heersink's capacity for serious philosophical reasoning, check out his blog entry on abortion.
I've written a couple of reviews for Amazon.com myself, but lately I've begun to wonder what the point of such an exercise is. Most of them are completely worthless (well, except for mine, of course). Sometimes you can use them to figure out whether or not you want to read a particular mystery novel, but more often than not they are just rants. Pick some particularly popular or controversial book, for example, and check out the customer reviews. Try it with the Da Vinci Code. There will be hundreds of five-star reviews, all challenged by hundreds of single-star reviews. It's as if the purpose is to drive the overall rating in one direction or another regardless of the means necessary to accomplish that end. Such reviews are basically useless from a critical point of view.
On the other hand, I recently saw a review at Amazon.com that consisted entirely of the sentence "This is the worst book I have ever read", and 13 out of 30 voted it a "helpful" review! And there are dozens of such reviews on Amazon.com--it makes me wonder about the methods employed at Amazon.com for "clearing" these reviews. Even though I've seen many of these vapid reviews consisting os single sentences, there have been a few times when I've had reviews rejected by Amazon.com, with bizarre reasons being given: "It did not say anything substantive about the book", "it was too negative", etc. Too negative? Since when do you reject a review because it was too negative? Maybe the author himself was checking the reviews. And in light of the millions of illiterate and pointless, single-sentence reviews they do accept, it's hard to make sense of their policy, if they really have one. And in one case, a review I wrote (of Allan Levine's [Pavel Chichikov] Lion Sun) was actually removed after being on the Amazon.com website for nearly a year. So who knows what's going on at Amazon.com.
Tony is a friend of mine, and I know him to be a very serious scholar. Although he is not a religious person (he actually argues that Aquinas' moral theory, grounded in natural law, works better without the notion of God floating around in it like a turd in a cesspool), this book makes for a very good introduction to the scholastic version of natural law theory. I was therefore somewhat amused by one of the reviews of the book available at Amazon.com, written by Stephen Heersink, a gay activist who rejects natural law morality for rather obvious reasons. He completely trashes the book, even going so far as to impugn the editorial process at Oxford University Press ("How this travesty passed its high editorial standards is deeply puzzling"), and yet, when one reads around in his other writings available on the internet, one cannot help but think that he doth protest too much.
Heersink (he has a blog here) claims to have some education in philosophy, and yet he writes the following inexplicable sentence:
A fifth principle [of natural law] requires "truth" as a correspondence theory between mind and things (see, Searle, "Construction of Social Reality" for why this is no longer so).While it is true that correspondence theory has its difficulties, it is simply ludicrous to "cite" a single book--not a scholarly book but one intended for a general audience and that is now quite dated--as though this somehow "proves" that the whole project has been toppled and is now as unworkable as phlogiston theory. This betrays a rather shallow and banal grasp of the principles of philosophical methodology, and succeeds only at vitiating the entire review.
To see an example of Heersink's capacity for serious philosophical reasoning, check out his blog entry on abortion.
I've written a couple of reviews for Amazon.com myself, but lately I've begun to wonder what the point of such an exercise is. Most of them are completely worthless (well, except for mine, of course). Sometimes you can use them to figure out whether or not you want to read a particular mystery novel, but more often than not they are just rants. Pick some particularly popular or controversial book, for example, and check out the customer reviews. Try it with the Da Vinci Code. There will be hundreds of five-star reviews, all challenged by hundreds of single-star reviews. It's as if the purpose is to drive the overall rating in one direction or another regardless of the means necessary to accomplish that end. Such reviews are basically useless from a critical point of view.
On the other hand, I recently saw a review at Amazon.com that consisted entirely of the sentence "This is the worst book I have ever read", and 13 out of 30 voted it a "helpful" review! And there are dozens of such reviews on Amazon.com--it makes me wonder about the methods employed at Amazon.com for "clearing" these reviews. Even though I've seen many of these vapid reviews consisting os single sentences, there have been a few times when I've had reviews rejected by Amazon.com, with bizarre reasons being given: "It did not say anything substantive about the book", "it was too negative", etc. Too negative? Since when do you reject a review because it was too negative? Maybe the author himself was checking the reviews. And in light of the millions of illiterate and pointless, single-sentence reviews they do accept, it's hard to make sense of their policy, if they really have one. And in one case, a review I wrote (of Allan Levine's [Pavel Chichikov] Lion Sun) was actually removed after being on the Amazon.com website for nearly a year. So who knows what's going on at Amazon.com.
Wednesday, June 14, 2006
More Books I'll Never Read
Well now let's see if I can tick off ol' Apollodorus with another rant about books I haven't read.
Today's email brought me a review from Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews of a new collection of essays out from Duke University Press: Dale B. Martin, Patricia Cox Miller, The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 364. ISBN 0-8223-3422-4. I imagine the title is based on the title of Richard Rorty's collection of essays The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago). The three elements of the subtitle of the newer collection (is it some kind of unwritten rule, by the way, that all academic books must now have subtitles? I can't remember the last time I saw one without one) pick out what have been, arguably, the three biggest areas of emphasis in cultural studies in classics departments since the late 1970s. The element that unites them is what a philosopher might call constructivism, the idea that concepts such as gender, asceticism, and history are in and of themselves cultural constructs and, hence, open to a wide variety of interpretations that are dependent only upon one's cultural milieux. This has the effect of banishing realist normativity from the study of such concepts.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I suspect that gender really is nothing more than a social construct. Asceticism may be, too, for all I know, and history certainly is. But check out this claim from the review:
This is not to say that these essays do not sound interesting in spite of the difficulties that their own methodologies raise for their own results. Here's a good example:
I was a little more excited by the description of an essay from Dennis Trout, perhaps because I know him from Duke. His essay has an archeological flavor:
In short, you gotta love this stuff because it plays on both sides of the street: it champions underdetermination like no other discipline, only without saying so, only to put on a studied ignorance of the phenomenon when drawing inferences. In fact, why draw inferences when mere assertion will do? Inferences are for realist saps; real men, when they're not thinking about women, or just dressing like them, go for heartfelt avowal every time.
Fun fact: the review was written by a Rabbi. Read the whole thing here.
Today's email brought me a review from Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews of a new collection of essays out from Duke University Press: Dale B. Martin, Patricia Cox Miller, The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Pp. 364. ISBN 0-8223-3422-4. I imagine the title is based on the title of Richard Rorty's collection of essays The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago). The three elements of the subtitle of the newer collection (is it some kind of unwritten rule, by the way, that all academic books must now have subtitles? I can't remember the last time I saw one without one) pick out what have been, arguably, the three biggest areas of emphasis in cultural studies in classics departments since the late 1970s. The element that unites them is what a philosopher might call constructivism, the idea that concepts such as gender, asceticism, and history are in and of themselves cultural constructs and, hence, open to a wide variety of interpretations that are dependent only upon one's cultural milieux. This has the effect of banishing realist normativity from the study of such concepts.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. I suspect that gender really is nothing more than a social construct. Asceticism may be, too, for all I know, and history certainly is. But check out this claim from the review:
...the essays make substantive claims about monastic ideology, Christology, clerical and episcopal authority, heresy, Hellenism, individual characters, and the invention of Christian Rome. The essays admirably apply theoretical models to specific exempla, thereby illuminating methodology while simultaneously advancing our understanding of particular subjects and providing numerous insightful readings.There is an interesting tension here between the deconstructive critique that is almost always at work in such scholarship and the notion of the possibility of "substantive claims", particularly those that claim to "advance our understanding" of anything. You'd think that if we'd learned nothing else from postmodernism it is that there's no such thing as "understanding" as such when it comes to areas of study such as this. I suspect that what our reviewer really means is that he finds these essays interesting to read and, after reading them, he felt as though he knew more than he did before. That is an admirable effect for any collection of scholarly essays to have, but it should probably be embarrassing for this one to have it. Oh well, shame went out the window during the sexual revolution. I mean during the cultural turn.
This is not to say that these essays do not sound interesting in spite of the difficulties that their own methodologies raise for their own results. Here's a good example:
Starting from the recognition that in the world of the monks women were physically absent, but mentally omnipresent, David Brakke accounts for the anomalous instances of the presence of actual women in a place where "there are no women" (p.25). Such rare instances involve a female pretending to be a male monk, whose true gender is revealed only after her death. Since, however, these instances of real women appear in apophthegmata and sayings attributed to Amma Sarah, the "actual" female must be viewed as a discursive construct, who, according to Brakke, ultimately complicates or reinscribes monastic conceptions of gender. For the monks, manliness is performed by resistance to the female. Such accounts reveal the performative character of the real and rhetorical monastic world because they include the discovery (what Brakke calls "materialization") that a female played the role of male.There's so much equivocation here in just a few sentences on the words "actual" and "real" that it's difficult to distinguish it from self-parody. Buried in there somewhere is the very interesting idea that men who live together in a community sometimes think about women, but the jargonics are rather thick: "manliness is performed by resistance to the female," for example, is really just a way of saying that some men find it macho to put on a show of not thinking about women. This "reveal[s] the performative character of the real and rhetorical monastic world", that is, those monks weren't fooling anybody--we all know they were thinking about women. The proof lies in the "fact" (whatever that is on this account) that a woman snuck into a monastery now and then and pretended to be a man, or at least some later woman outside the monastery told a story according to which that kind of thing happened, but stories and histories are all interchangeable anyway, so what difference does it make. Oh, and don't forget about Pope Joan.
I was a little more excited by the description of an essay from Dennis Trout, perhaps because I know him from Duke. His essay has an archeological flavor:
The tombs of the martyrs become a national cemetery performing a national Christian ideology: whoever stands at the tomb of the martyr beholds a direct link between heaven and earth.An interesting idea, and true, to boot. I mean in a realist sense of truth. You've always got to add that in these contexts. But wait--there's more:
Damasus's work provides a specific instance of Henri Lefebvre's general observation "that the impulse to civic 'self-presentation and self-representation' readily lodges in sites where death can be both 'represented and rejected'" (p.305). In this sense then, Damasus is like a new Augustus and new Livy.Don't go too far, now, he's like a new Augustus and a new Livy. Presumably we're told, somewhere, how Augustus and Livy represented and rejected death and, more importantly, why they're the ones to compare Damasus to.
In short, you gotta love this stuff because it plays on both sides of the street: it champions underdetermination like no other discipline, only without saying so, only to put on a studied ignorance of the phenomenon when drawing inferences. In fact, why draw inferences when mere assertion will do? Inferences are for realist saps; real men, when they're not thinking about women, or just dressing like them, go for heartfelt avowal every time.
Fun fact: the review was written by a Rabbi. Read the whole thing here.
Monday, June 12, 2006
More Thoughts on Trinitarian Property Relations
Now there's a catchy title for you. My wife is always telling me that I need to get an editor for this blog; if anyone is willing to send me some titles I'll be happy to use them. Provided they're in line with my family values, of course. Of course, my wife will still be grumpy whenever I call anyone a moron, but you can't have everything your own way unless you start your own blog!
So anyway, I got to thinking about the property relations I talked about in my previous post: how the Father begets but is unbegotten, the Spirit proceeds but the Father and Son do not, etc. The various Creeds give us all of the relations we need to keep the three Persons straight, and--at least according to the author of the Quicumque vult--those are the only relations we need to know about in order to be saved. But that is not to say that other interesting relations don't follow from the ones that we know about, or that there aren't other, otherwise unstated but interesting facets of the ones that we know about.
The one that got me to thinking (if you want to call it thinking: it popped into my head while I was in the middle of a 10 mile bike ride this afternoon) is the relation of God the Father as arkhé, source or principal. In (Eastern) Orthodox theology is there great stress laid upon the principle of monarchy, the idea that the Father alone (monos) is the source or beginning (arché) of all things. An interesting example of this principle, I think, can be found in the passage in Mark 13.32 where Jesus tells his disciples that even the Son does not know the hour at which the Father will bring an end to this fallen world. If the Son is one with the Father, as Jesus also says (see, for example, John 10.30), how is it that the Father knows things that the Son does not know?
One way to approach this problem that I find particularly fascinating is the discussion of the nature of the Trinity is St. Augustine's treatise De Trinitate (On the Trinity). There he compares the Trinity to the relationship that exists between mind, object of thought, and content of thought. When I love someone, we may speak of three things. First, there is my mind, my self, that does the loving; second, there is the act of loving itself; third, there is the object of my love as conceived in my mind. In one sense these three things are clearly distinct; in another sense, they are also clearly simultaneous in their existence and ontologically bound to one another. Without a cognitive self to do the loving, no loving takes place; without an act of loving for the cognitive self to engage in, no loving takes place; without an object of (transitive) love, no loving takes place. The cognitive self is, in a sense, in charge here, since it is therein that the act of the will to love itself takes place. This means that in the case of the human cognitive agent there is a one-way ontological dependency that is not present in the case of the Trinity. I can choose not to love and, if I do so choose, there is no act of loving. But God is love, so although God the Father is the source of the Son and of the Spirit, we do not say that the Father could exist without the Son or the Spirit: all three necessarily exist precisely because love is the very nature of God Himself--God cannot be God without loving, and the Son and the Holy Spirit are the manifestations of God's love--as is also the Father, of course, as the great Cosmic arkhé of love.
But the Father is still the source, the origin, of all things, and in some sense this serves to remind us that God is totally free--nothing about him is constrained in any way by the will of any other being. The fact that the Son does not know the hour of the end is a sign to us that nothing constrains the Father's will--it will happen whenever He chooses, and nothing--not even the human will of Jesus of Nazareth--can direct the will of the Father (though Jesus' human will always willed in unity with the Divine Will, so although there were two wills and two acts of willing there was always only one object, one will willed).
But the Divine Will of the Second Person is numerically one with the Father's Will, since the Son and the Father are one. This seems to suggest that, if it is really true that the Son does not know the hour when the Father will consummate the world, then there is a distinct difference between the content of a will and the cognitive content of an epistemic subject. The Son can will that the end come when the Father wills it, but the Son cannot know the "when" of that object of willing, even though the Father can. This is a function, I suppose, of the three different First Person Perspectives that are present in the Persons of the Trinity. The Freedom and Sovereignty of the Father is underscored by this cognitive difference between Him and His Son.
So anyway, I got to thinking about the property relations I talked about in my previous post: how the Father begets but is unbegotten, the Spirit proceeds but the Father and Son do not, etc. The various Creeds give us all of the relations we need to keep the three Persons straight, and--at least according to the author of the Quicumque vult--those are the only relations we need to know about in order to be saved. But that is not to say that other interesting relations don't follow from the ones that we know about, or that there aren't other, otherwise unstated but interesting facets of the ones that we know about.
The one that got me to thinking (if you want to call it thinking: it popped into my head while I was in the middle of a 10 mile bike ride this afternoon) is the relation of God the Father as arkhé, source or principal. In (Eastern) Orthodox theology is there great stress laid upon the principle of monarchy, the idea that the Father alone (monos) is the source or beginning (arché) of all things. An interesting example of this principle, I think, can be found in the passage in Mark 13.32 where Jesus tells his disciples that even the Son does not know the hour at which the Father will bring an end to this fallen world. If the Son is one with the Father, as Jesus also says (see, for example, John 10.30), how is it that the Father knows things that the Son does not know?
One way to approach this problem that I find particularly fascinating is the discussion of the nature of the Trinity is St. Augustine's treatise De Trinitate (On the Trinity). There he compares the Trinity to the relationship that exists between mind, object of thought, and content of thought. When I love someone, we may speak of three things. First, there is my mind, my self, that does the loving; second, there is the act of loving itself; third, there is the object of my love as conceived in my mind. In one sense these three things are clearly distinct; in another sense, they are also clearly simultaneous in their existence and ontologically bound to one another. Without a cognitive self to do the loving, no loving takes place; without an act of loving for the cognitive self to engage in, no loving takes place; without an object of (transitive) love, no loving takes place. The cognitive self is, in a sense, in charge here, since it is therein that the act of the will to love itself takes place. This means that in the case of the human cognitive agent there is a one-way ontological dependency that is not present in the case of the Trinity. I can choose not to love and, if I do so choose, there is no act of loving. But God is love, so although God the Father is the source of the Son and of the Spirit, we do not say that the Father could exist without the Son or the Spirit: all three necessarily exist precisely because love is the very nature of God Himself--God cannot be God without loving, and the Son and the Holy Spirit are the manifestations of God's love--as is also the Father, of course, as the great Cosmic arkhé of love.
But the Father is still the source, the origin, of all things, and in some sense this serves to remind us that God is totally free--nothing about him is constrained in any way by the will of any other being. The fact that the Son does not know the hour of the end is a sign to us that nothing constrains the Father's will--it will happen whenever He chooses, and nothing--not even the human will of Jesus of Nazareth--can direct the will of the Father (though Jesus' human will always willed in unity with the Divine Will, so although there were two wills and two acts of willing there was always only one object, one will willed).
But the Divine Will of the Second Person is numerically one with the Father's Will, since the Son and the Father are one. This seems to suggest that, if it is really true that the Son does not know the hour when the Father will consummate the world, then there is a distinct difference between the content of a will and the cognitive content of an epistemic subject. The Son can will that the end come when the Father wills it, but the Son cannot know the "when" of that object of willing, even though the Father can. This is a function, I suppose, of the three different First Person Perspectives that are present in the Persons of the Trinity. The Freedom and Sovereignty of the Father is underscored by this cognitive difference between Him and His Son.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Substantial Being
Speaking of knowing God's Trinitarian nature, one element of the new Mass translation that is not changing is that part of the Creed where we say "one in being with the Father." Or at least that part of the translation will stay the same in the United States--other English speaking countries will use the new (older) "consubstantial with the Father."
What is the difference supposed to be, you may ask yourself. The motivation for keeping the wording the same may be nothing more than the same old banalization of American liturgical English that we've all grown accostomed to since the 1970s. "One in being" is a little easier to grasp, let alone say, than "consubstantial", and our Bishops are rather notorious for thinking that we're all a bunch of morons when it comes to participating in the Mass. But I'm not so sure that there's no difference in meaning between the two phrases.
To say that two things are one in being suggests a kind of identity relation. Hesperus and Phosphorus are one in being because they are really the same thing--the Morning Star is the Evening Star just because the expressions are nothing more than different semantic signs for the same entity, the planet Venus. The expressions have slightly different meanings, of course, since the Morning Star is what we call Venus when we see it in the morning, and the Evening Star is what we call it when we see it in the evening, but they refer to the same object.
But the Son and the Father are not the same object in quite the way that the Morning Star is exactly the same object as the Evening Star. Insofar as the two names pick out objects, those objects have all qualities in common save for the referring expression that we use to name them. That is not the case with the Son and the Father--although they are, in some sense, one, they do not share all the same properties. The Son is begotten, but the Father is not. So they do not participate in the same sort of identity relation that the Morning Star and the Evening Star participate in.
Yet they are one in some sense. The sense in which they are one is that they have the same essential nature. In old-fashioned philosophical jargon the word for an "essential nature" is "substance". I say "old fashioned" because in ordinary modern English usage the word "substance" tends to refer to some material stuff: "What is this substance on my shoe?" "Please fill my glass with some more of that delicious substance!" etc. But in the old scholastic tradition a substance is simply a kind of being, and if you're a scholastic then kinds of beings do not need to be material things. God is a substance, angels are substances, and so on. In the case of substances that are material objects then it is precisely the matter that differentiates one instantiation of the substance from another. One human being and another are idential in terms of their essential nature, humanity, but they differ in respect of the particular matter that they are made out of. Matter is thus the principle of individuation in the case of material objects. Since non-material objects cannot be differentiated in this way they must be differentiated in some other way. Angels, for example, differ from each other in their essential natures--each one has its own specific essence. Angels are, thus, indivudally sui generis, one of a kind.
God also is a non-material substance, and so, if God were like the angels, he would be sui generis, one of a kind; and so he is. And yet we speak of him under three aspects: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are names of the "persons" of the Trinity, and they--strangely--differ from each other not in respect of some material principle but in respect of the relations that exist among them. The Father begets but is not begotten; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but the Father does not proceed from anything, etc. And yet, because all three Persons are non-material substances, and there is only the one substance common to all three--the one essential nature--they are not like the angels, who differ from one another and are not one. The three Persons of the Godhead are, by virtue of this rather unusual metaphysics, literally one in being in just the way that humanity itself--as opposed to the individual humans who share in it--is one single thing.
But it is a very unusual metaphysics that draws distinctions regarding a sui generis, one of a kind entity in this way. In fact, the Godhead is the only entity of which any of this could possibly be true, otherwise metaphysics itself wouldn't make any sense. The Godhead is a kind of exception to a general metaphysical principle. The Latin term, consubstantialis, used in the traditional Latin translation of the Nicene Creed, probably should be translated as "consubstantial", rather than "one in being", if only to preserve the fact of this truly bizarre feature of our theology. "One in being" is a phrase that is true of lots of things; but "consubstantial" is a word that has always been reserved, so far as I am aware, to this one specific theological usage.
What is the difference supposed to be, you may ask yourself. The motivation for keeping the wording the same may be nothing more than the same old banalization of American liturgical English that we've all grown accostomed to since the 1970s. "One in being" is a little easier to grasp, let alone say, than "consubstantial", and our Bishops are rather notorious for thinking that we're all a bunch of morons when it comes to participating in the Mass. But I'm not so sure that there's no difference in meaning between the two phrases.
To say that two things are one in being suggests a kind of identity relation. Hesperus and Phosphorus are one in being because they are really the same thing--the Morning Star is the Evening Star just because the expressions are nothing more than different semantic signs for the same entity, the planet Venus. The expressions have slightly different meanings, of course, since the Morning Star is what we call Venus when we see it in the morning, and the Evening Star is what we call it when we see it in the evening, but they refer to the same object.
But the Son and the Father are not the same object in quite the way that the Morning Star is exactly the same object as the Evening Star. Insofar as the two names pick out objects, those objects have all qualities in common save for the referring expression that we use to name them. That is not the case with the Son and the Father--although they are, in some sense, one, they do not share all the same properties. The Son is begotten, but the Father is not. So they do not participate in the same sort of identity relation that the Morning Star and the Evening Star participate in.
Yet they are one in some sense. The sense in which they are one is that they have the same essential nature. In old-fashioned philosophical jargon the word for an "essential nature" is "substance". I say "old fashioned" because in ordinary modern English usage the word "substance" tends to refer to some material stuff: "What is this substance on my shoe?" "Please fill my glass with some more of that delicious substance!" etc. But in the old scholastic tradition a substance is simply a kind of being, and if you're a scholastic then kinds of beings do not need to be material things. God is a substance, angels are substances, and so on. In the case of substances that are material objects then it is precisely the matter that differentiates one instantiation of the substance from another. One human being and another are idential in terms of their essential nature, humanity, but they differ in respect of the particular matter that they are made out of. Matter is thus the principle of individuation in the case of material objects. Since non-material objects cannot be differentiated in this way they must be differentiated in some other way. Angels, for example, differ from each other in their essential natures--each one has its own specific essence. Angels are, thus, indivudally sui generis, one of a kind.
God also is a non-material substance, and so, if God were like the angels, he would be sui generis, one of a kind; and so he is. And yet we speak of him under three aspects: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are names of the "persons" of the Trinity, and they--strangely--differ from each other not in respect of some material principle but in respect of the relations that exist among them. The Father begets but is not begotten; the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, but the Father does not proceed from anything, etc. And yet, because all three Persons are non-material substances, and there is only the one substance common to all three--the one essential nature--they are not like the angels, who differ from one another and are not one. The three Persons of the Godhead are, by virtue of this rather unusual metaphysics, literally one in being in just the way that humanity itself--as opposed to the individual humans who share in it--is one single thing.
But it is a very unusual metaphysics that draws distinctions regarding a sui generis, one of a kind entity in this way. In fact, the Godhead is the only entity of which any of this could possibly be true, otherwise metaphysics itself wouldn't make any sense. The Godhead is a kind of exception to a general metaphysical principle. The Latin term, consubstantialis, used in the traditional Latin translation of the Nicene Creed, probably should be translated as "consubstantial", rather than "one in being", if only to preserve the fact of this truly bizarre feature of our theology. "One in being" is a phrase that is true of lots of things; but "consubstantial" is a word that has always been reserved, so far as I am aware, to this one specific theological usage.
Populus Trinitatis
Writing in the 12th century about the Battle of Hittin on 4 July 1187, the scribe Imad ad-Din al-Isfani described the defeat of the Crusaders this way:
The Christians on that day "were consumed by a worldly fire", but Christians of all times are continually consumed by the Divine Fire that is the Holy Spirit, who teaches us wisdom and truth. In that sense we never shall be, we cannot ever be, defeated.
Victory occurred on that day, Saturday 4 July 1187. Tormented by thirst, the Franks succumbed to defeat, impotent to recover their fall. The breeze was in their direction, and beneath their feet was grass. Some of our holy warriors set fire to the grass. Its flame bore down on them, and its heat became intense. They, the people of the Trinity, were consumed by a worldly fire of three types, each invincible and obliterating: the fire of flames, the fire of thirst, and the fire of arrows.I've always been struck by that description of the Christians: The People of the Trinity. The joke, obviously, is that these people who believe that God is Three in One were consumed by three kinds of "fire", but the real joke is on our scribe: the Jews were blessed by God to know His name, but Christians are blessed to know His Nature. Saladin and his army, alas, knew neither.
The Christians on that day "were consumed by a worldly fire", but Christians of all times are continually consumed by the Divine Fire that is the Holy Spirit, who teaches us wisdom and truth. In that sense we never shall be, we cannot ever be, defeated.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
The Ontology of Moral Culpability
Adam Gopnik has a review in the 5 June number of The New Yorker of two recent titles, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France, by David Andress, and Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, by Ruth Scurr. Both books sound very interesting, and Gopnik does an excellent job of piquing one's interest in both the books and the period. One passage of his struck me as particularly insightful:
This thought makes me wonder about one element of--well, either Gopnik's review, or of the books under review, or perhaps the mindset of Gopnik's editors--it's difficult to tell who is ultimately responsible for this element. As is often the case, there is one of those full-page cartoonish illustrations accompanying Gopnik's review. It is a drawing of Robespierre, who is depicted holding the rope of a guillotine (fully loaded with a moderately corpulent representative of the enemy class) and calmly holding a book with a cross on the cover. The caption of this illustration reads: "The Terror wasn't secular reason run amok. It was a faith-based initiative, and the guillotine was another kind of auto-da-fé". I confess that it was this illustration with caption that first prompted me to read the review: I thought perhaps that Gopnik was going to claim that religion was ultimately responsible for the Terror. The caption is indeed taken directly from the review, but it is not in the least bit representative of the tone taken by Gopnik in his review. His comments on the contrast between Enlightenment rationalism, as personified by Voltaire, and "faith-based initiatives" are contained in less than two paragraphs near the end of the review. Some editor, I suppose, thought it the most interesting--or perhaps the most controversial?--element of the review and solicited the illustration with that in mind.
Whatever--there are no sweeping claims about the ills of religion, not even of Robespierre's vaguely deistic kind (Gopnik does not distinguish between deism and theism in his review, and one does not know whether to blame this on him or on the books he is reviewing). Which is a very good thing: even if one were to grant that Robespierre was himself motivated by religious sentiments (and it is not clear from the review whether this is a claim made by Scurr herself or is merely Gopnik's own extrapolation from the claims that are made in the book), it by no means follows that the massive outpouring of sectarian violence over which he presided was in every case motivated by similar sentiments. People do what they do for their own peculiar reasons, never because they are mere automata following the programming of a Robespierre.
One often hears secular humanists complain of the violent impulses of the religiously inclined. Even in a university setting one find folks clinging to the myth that "more people have died because of religious extremism or persecution than for any other cause" etc. etc. Granted, it is usually students--most often freshmen--who make this claim, but I can't say that I've never heard it leaking from a professor's lips. It may actually be true that a lot of carnage has been due to mistaken application of religious principles, but it is no more interesting a claim than the fact that people have also fought and died and killed in defense of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, not to mention all sorts of other political ideals that have no connection to religion at all other than to be opposed to it (Communism, for example). To say that sectarian violence, or the sort of tribalism that would drive one to eliminate, even by violent means, other tribes, is a characteristic of "religious sentiment" per se is banal and simplistic. In every case of hatred, violence, oppression, and killing of innocents, what is to blame is not religion or atheism or any political ideal, but some individual human being who has made a mistaken decision to hate, harm, oppress or kill an innocent. All such decisions are in themselves mistaken, and they would be as mistaken if they were made by an atheist for atheistic reasons as they would be if they were made by a religious person for religious reasons.
It is often said that terror of this kind is possible only when one has first "dehumanized" some group of people--aristocrats, Jews, the bourgeoisie. In fact, what motivated the spectacle was exactly the knowledge that the victims were people, and capable of feeling pain and fear as people do. We don't humiliate vermin, or put them through show trials, or make them watch their fellow-vermin die first. The myth of mechanical murder is almost always that.This strikes me as very true, and it emphasizes, for me at least, the personal nature of evil. It is too tempting to dehumanize the "dehumanizers" by labelling them "evil" or making them a part of some group that is then said to be acting according to the dictates of some mechanistic plan to "exterminate" some other group. (I have complained about this reification of groups and institutions in previous posts.) In general it is safe to say that evil acts are perpetrated by individual persons who have their own passions, desires, and motivations lying behind what they do. They are not robots who "just follow orders"--that is precisely why we may hold them morally culpable for the evil acts that they commit. If they really were just robots then they would have no moral responsibility for their crimes.
This thought makes me wonder about one element of--well, either Gopnik's review, or of the books under review, or perhaps the mindset of Gopnik's editors--it's difficult to tell who is ultimately responsible for this element. As is often the case, there is one of those full-page cartoonish illustrations accompanying Gopnik's review. It is a drawing of Robespierre, who is depicted holding the rope of a guillotine (fully loaded with a moderately corpulent representative of the enemy class) and calmly holding a book with a cross on the cover. The caption of this illustration reads: "The Terror wasn't secular reason run amok. It was a faith-based initiative, and the guillotine was another kind of auto-da-fé". I confess that it was this illustration with caption that first prompted me to read the review: I thought perhaps that Gopnik was going to claim that religion was ultimately responsible for the Terror. The caption is indeed taken directly from the review, but it is not in the least bit representative of the tone taken by Gopnik in his review. His comments on the contrast between Enlightenment rationalism, as personified by Voltaire, and "faith-based initiatives" are contained in less than two paragraphs near the end of the review. Some editor, I suppose, thought it the most interesting--or perhaps the most controversial?--element of the review and solicited the illustration with that in mind.
Whatever--there are no sweeping claims about the ills of religion, not even of Robespierre's vaguely deistic kind (Gopnik does not distinguish between deism and theism in his review, and one does not know whether to blame this on him or on the books he is reviewing). Which is a very good thing: even if one were to grant that Robespierre was himself motivated by religious sentiments (and it is not clear from the review whether this is a claim made by Scurr herself or is merely Gopnik's own extrapolation from the claims that are made in the book), it by no means follows that the massive outpouring of sectarian violence over which he presided was in every case motivated by similar sentiments. People do what they do for their own peculiar reasons, never because they are mere automata following the programming of a Robespierre.
One often hears secular humanists complain of the violent impulses of the religiously inclined. Even in a university setting one find folks clinging to the myth that "more people have died because of religious extremism or persecution than for any other cause" etc. etc. Granted, it is usually students--most often freshmen--who make this claim, but I can't say that I've never heard it leaking from a professor's lips. It may actually be true that a lot of carnage has been due to mistaken application of religious principles, but it is no more interesting a claim than the fact that people have also fought and died and killed in defense of liberty, equality, and brotherhood, not to mention all sorts of other political ideals that have no connection to religion at all other than to be opposed to it (Communism, for example). To say that sectarian violence, or the sort of tribalism that would drive one to eliminate, even by violent means, other tribes, is a characteristic of "religious sentiment" per se is banal and simplistic. In every case of hatred, violence, oppression, and killing of innocents, what is to blame is not religion or atheism or any political ideal, but some individual human being who has made a mistaken decision to hate, harm, oppress or kill an innocent. All such decisions are in themselves mistaken, and they would be as mistaken if they were made by an atheist for atheistic reasons as they would be if they were made by a religious person for religious reasons.
State Interference in Matters of Conscience
Here is a news story about Rod Blagojevich, governor of Illinois, who demands that everyone conform to his own personal vision of morality.
Hat tip: Mirror of Justice.
The department's head will be in Edwardsville on Friday to seek public comment on the sign proposal.I wonder where the rest of him will be.
Hat tip: Mirror of Justice.
Friday, June 09, 2006
Life in the Ivory Tower
Many a blogger has inwardly groaned upon reading such as the following:
There, now that I've been laughably pompous myself I can back off a little and try to explain why this article was so irritating to me. The article itself is actually quite good: it explores in some detail the chronological development of the Church's understanding of the theology of the Eucharist, and much of it is very informative. What I found irritating was not the scholarship itself, but the self-consciously deconstructive attitude towards popular piety. So what if Jesus did not do exactly the same things that the priest and congregation now do at a Mass? The point of calling Holy Thursday the First Eucharist is not to make a historical claim about the origins of our practices in the Eucharist, rather the way creationists want to make a historical claim about the literal meaning of the first chapters of Genesis; the point is rather that we recognize in the story of the Lord's Supper the beginnings of what has come to be, in Daly's own words, "the high point of both the expression of and the inchoative realization of the Church's marital covenant relationship with God." In making his little dig at how simplistic and naive popular piety is, Daly falls into the same fundamentalist trap himself, taking way too literally the things that are often said and done in popular contexts, as though we must assume that everyone in the Church on Holy Thursday is some kind of uneducated simpleton.
This is what comes of having too much time on your hands or, to say the same thing in a different way, of being an academic. And academic Jesuits seem to have a little more time on their hands than most. I've been perusing Theological Studies with some care lately as part of my own time wasting--er, I mean, research, and I find myself wondering, sometimes, what's up with some of these people. Here are a few items that have managed to catch my eye:
It seems unlikely, somehow, as interesting and important as such knowledge is, that it would be necessary for everyone to have it. It's enough that the scholars have it--they can discuss these things at their leisure, since that's what they get paid to do. But I'm still a little irritated, in my own intellectually proud way, that the principal Jesuit journal in America is playing this game. I've been reading Antonia Fraser's The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605, and I see a very different sort of person serving in the Jesuits in Elizabethan England. These are men who died for the faith--the traditional faith--in particular they died for the faith of the earlier generations of English Catholics for whom orthodoxy was as much a matter of praxis as of doctrine. When you have to assemble secretly for Mass at 2:00 in the morning in the basement of a country house for fear of being arrested, tortured, and killed, there's little time to worry about whether what you are doing is really literally "what our Lord did".
One hopes that it is close enough.
Many a liturgical theologian has inwardly groaned on Holy Thursday upon hearing the assembly sing "At That First Eucharist..." or upon hearing the homilist proclaim that we are "doing what the Lord did at the Last Supper."These are the words of Robert J. Daly, S.J., writing in the quasi-scholarly Jesuit journal Theological Studies, published four times a year from Marquette University. The reason why I, at least, groan upon reading such things is not so much because they are manifestly pompous but rather because I can see no point to starting off an article "reviewing 20th-century research into the origins of the Eucharist" with the subjective complaint of a man who really needs to get a clue about what it means to go to Church during Holy Week.
There, now that I've been laughably pompous myself I can back off a little and try to explain why this article was so irritating to me. The article itself is actually quite good: it explores in some detail the chronological development of the Church's understanding of the theology of the Eucharist, and much of it is very informative. What I found irritating was not the scholarship itself, but the self-consciously deconstructive attitude towards popular piety. So what if Jesus did not do exactly the same things that the priest and congregation now do at a Mass? The point of calling Holy Thursday the First Eucharist is not to make a historical claim about the origins of our practices in the Eucharist, rather the way creationists want to make a historical claim about the literal meaning of the first chapters of Genesis; the point is rather that we recognize in the story of the Lord's Supper the beginnings of what has come to be, in Daly's own words, "the high point of both the expression of and the inchoative realization of the Church's marital covenant relationship with God." In making his little dig at how simplistic and naive popular piety is, Daly falls into the same fundamentalist trap himself, taking way too literally the things that are often said and done in popular contexts, as though we must assume that everyone in the Church on Holy Thursday is some kind of uneducated simpleton.
This is what comes of having too much time on your hands or, to say the same thing in a different way, of being an academic. And academic Jesuits seem to have a little more time on their hands than most. I've been perusing Theological Studies with some care lately as part of my own time wasting--er, I mean, research, and I find myself wondering, sometimes, what's up with some of these people. Here are a few items that have managed to catch my eye:
"The Indissolubility of Marriage: Reasons to Reconsider," by Kenneth Himes, O.F.M., and James A. Coriden, who argue that the Church's constant teaching on the indissolubility of marriage is not, after all, irreformable, in spite of having been unanimously believed and taught by the Magisterium for nearly 2000 years.These articles are all from 2004-2005, and of course there are many other articles appearing during that time that are not only scholarly but sound, interesting, and well worth reading. But as I browsed through the journal I couldn't help but groan inwardly at the manifestation of intellectual pride that boosts itself up by tearing down what has already been established by cleverer, more thoughtful people. I suppose I'm in that same camp myself, as most of these writers are probably cleverer and more thoughtful than I am about most things, but in matters of faith I'm not altogether sure that being cleverer and more (academically) thoughtful is going to be enough to get the job of turning towards God done. How important is it, in the final analysis, to roll your eyes heavenward in condescension when a homilist talks about "doing what the Lord did"? Do I need to have, in the back of my mind, all of the conclusions of all of these scholarly articles in order to have a lively and saving faith when I am present at the Eucharist? When I am working at a soup kitchen, or at Habitat, does it matter if I remember which Council defined which of my beliefs, or if I fully understand the social and political background that probably influenced the development of those definitions?
"Homosexuality and the Counsel of the Cross," by Paul G. Crowley, S.J., who complains that "papal" advice to homosexuals to join their sufferings to those of Christ on the Cross betrays a simplistic and inadequate understanding of the complexities of homosexuality.
"The Magisterium's Arguments Against 'Same-Sex Marriage': An Ethical Analysis and Critique," by Stephen J. Pope [!], which claims that the traditional, natural law approach to the rejection of homosexuality makes the mistake of "casting gay people in a negative light."
"Cohabitation: Past and Present Reality: A Response to Lisa Sowle Cahill," by Michael G. Lawler, who argues that "the Catholic Church needs to pay attention to [recent social scientific research] data so as to develop a more discriminating pastoral approach to the phenomenon of cohabitation."
"Feminism and the Vatican," by Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., who avers as to how he thinks the Vatican has a simplitic understanding of contemporary feminism that makes its pronouncements on social matters embarrassing to the more enlightened Jesuits of the West.
It seems unlikely, somehow, as interesting and important as such knowledge is, that it would be necessary for everyone to have it. It's enough that the scholars have it--they can discuss these things at their leisure, since that's what they get paid to do. But I'm still a little irritated, in my own intellectually proud way, that the principal Jesuit journal in America is playing this game. I've been reading Antonia Fraser's The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605, and I see a very different sort of person serving in the Jesuits in Elizabethan England. These are men who died for the faith--the traditional faith--in particular they died for the faith of the earlier generations of English Catholics for whom orthodoxy was as much a matter of praxis as of doctrine. When you have to assemble secretly for Mass at 2:00 in the morning in the basement of a country house for fear of being arrested, tortured, and killed, there's little time to worry about whether what you are doing is really literally "what our Lord did".
One hopes that it is close enough.
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