The Return of Fr. Jeffrey Steel

Fr. Jeffrey Steel, who recently converted to Catholicism with his family, has returned to blogging after a short hiatus. His blog, de cura animarum, has long been a source of intellectual stimulation and faithful reflection. In today's entry, Fr. Jeffrey discusses the difficult issue of approaching Marian piety from a Protestant background. As often happens, Fr. Jeffrey has had to deal with some folks who criticize the Church's reverence for the Mother of God. Also as often happens, Fr. Jeffrey gives an excellent treatment to this thorny matter.

A very good book on Mary's place in the culture at large as well as within the Church is the late Jaroslav Pelikan's Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (Yale University Press, 1996). It's a good place to start reading on the history of the topic.

Great News About Fr. Jeffrey Steel

It is always exciting for one convert to watch the conversion of another. I think, in my heart of hearts, that at least part of this excitement is due to the feeling that one did, in the end, make a rational choice--a choice that other reasonable people could be expected to make. This is not to say that those who have not so chosen are not acting rationally, it is only to say that, when leaving one's friends behind, one fervently hopes that one has done the right thing. When honest and intelligent men do as you have done, that is at least consistent with the possibility that you have done, if not the right thing, at least something for which there may be good reasons. Since I started blogging a few years ago, I've seen this happen a few times, and it always brings me great joy--not only for the new convert, but for all the rest of us who long for the unity in Christ's Body for which Our Lord Himself prayed so fervently.

Today, on the Sollemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, Fr. Jeffrey Steel announced, at his blog de cura animarum, that he is converting to Roman Catholicism. This is great news to all Catholic bloggers, for anyone with an ounce of sense knows that Fr. Steel has been, and will remain, an intelligent and vigorous defender of orthodoxy and orthopraxis. The news may not be welcome everywhere, as Fr. Steel remarks:

I realise that this decision is going to make some really happy, some very sad and others possibily angry. But, I have made the decision with the deepest sense of integrity and by conscience.

While I would not be angry if it were a decision going in the other direction, I do think I would be saddened, so I feel a degree of sympathy for those who may be dispirited by Fr. Steel's decision. Their comfort must lie in that final declaration, that he has acted with integrity and in conscience. He can do no other--they may not command him to.

His story is a deeply moving one for me, personally, coming as I did out of a similar tradition 26 years ago this month. I continue to pray for many of my friends who did not follow me; I hope Fr. Steel has better luck with his, because I sincerely believe that it will be to their benefit. Every religious tradition believes that it has "the truth", and one hopes that it is a love affair with the truth that keeps adherents in their religions, even if the vision of the truth to be found in other traditions is incomplete. If it is for reasons only of obstinacy, or pride, or mere complacency, then it is certainly not a good thing to stay where one is.

It is impossible to write something like that last paragraph without the knowledge that you are going to offend somebody somewhere, however unintentionally. But Fr. Steel puts his finger right on the button when he writes:

What I became aware of was that it was almost impossible to say 'the Church teaching is' within the Anglican church because there are so many various opinions on matters of sacraments, liturgy, morality, scripture etc. What I did not want to experience anymore was proclaiming the teaching of the Church only to end up defending myself rather than the Anglican church defending me. This has become an ever-increasing impossibility that is no secret to the entire Anglican world. My preaching would always be seen as a matter of personal opinion rather than having the authority of the Magisterium that backs up what I teach publicly. Of course there is dissent in the Catholic Church but it is always that, dissent towards what Mother Church proclaims as authoritatively true. It is the truth of Mother Church that I embrace as my own deep personal faith.

Not everyone can make that embrace--it really is an act of faith, rather like jumping into a broad and deep river, hoping to reach the other side in safety. Anyone who attempts to swim the Tiber--especially from as far away as the Thames, will find the waters perilous, but the beauty of St. Peter's Basilica awaits on the other side. If Plato was even half right about the relationship between The Good and The Beautiful, then the Vatican stands as an icon reminding us of the beauty of the truth. There is plenty of beauty in Anglicanism, too--you'll be preaching to the choir if you try to tell me that! But I am reminded of my first trip to Europe in 1990. I went first to London, and then to Paris. I looked at the great churches of London--St. Paul's, Westminster, and others--and found that I was deeply moved by their beauty, but more deeply moved by a sense of loss, the loss of what Fr. Steel calls, rightly, communio. It grieved me that these great places, with their rich history dating back centuries--and more importantly the people for whom these beautiful places were built--were somehow separate from me, and from the rest of my co-religionists. I felt that, if it had not been for some poor choices on the part of the ruling elite of the early 16th century, none of this separation would have happened. I confess it now to my shame: I was angry. When I went to Paris, I was already feeling the sting of this anger, and realizing that it was not good. I went to confession at the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, where a kindly old priest, who did his best with English, reassured me that, in the end, truth is one thing, mercy another. The Scriptures constantly tell us, he reminded me, that God waits for the Prodigal Son, and the Father who was waiting was not waiting in anger, but in hope and love. He saw him returning from a long way off, according to the Gospel of Luke--and how could he have seen him "from a long way off" if he had not been already standing there looking out for him, eagerly awaiting his return.

So, instead of dwelling on what hasn't happened yet, or getting myself bogged down in thoughts about what I think ought to happen in the future, I will simply be grateful for what has just happened in the present. Apparently, I'm not the only one who feels this way:

My deepest gratitude goes to the wonderful woman who said 'yes' to my question over sixteen years ago. She has given me six wonderful children and all of them have a deep Catholic faith and serve Christ as witnesses to his love. Rhea meant her vows 16 years ago and has followed me throughout our marriage as my best friend, supporter and wisest critic. She is so grateful to finally be becoming Catholic as her family did a few years ago. Lumen Gentium reminded me that, Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved. And so, I swim with my family entrusted to me by God. The process of our reception is now well under way.

Welcome home, Fr. Steel.

Ora et Labora

The beginning of May was once marked by the Feast of Saints Phillip and James--a "Double of the Second Class" in the old taxonomy--but in more recent times it has been marked by an Optional Memorial of Saint Joseph the Worker. To some, this represents an unsavory change: in the days when May began with Saints Phillip and James, Saint Joseph was celebrated with a "Double of the First Class with a Common Octave"--the highest rank in the old taxonomy short of a "Double of the First class with a Proper Octave"--and he was celebrated under his title as "Most Chaste Spouse of the Ever-Virgin Mary, Confessor, and Patron of the Universal Church". This was a movable feast, held on the Wednesday in the second week after the Octave of Easter. Some critics of the change have described it as at once throwing a sop to Pinkos, making Joseph the "Patron of Workers" on "May Day", while at the same time kicking Traditionalists in the groin by demoting poor old Joseph to a mere Optional Memorial in the execrable new taxonomy forced on us by "that 'council'".

I do not really have a dog in that fight: there are some elements of the old taxonomy that I happen to like, but I have no objections to the new one, which is far simpler for those of us who happen to take the Daily Office fairly seriously but who prefer the Benedictine custom of preserving, as much as possible, the weekly structure of the Psalm cycle. Having said that, however, I was struck this year by one of the readings from the Daily Office on the first of May. The reading is from Sections 33-34 of Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. This reading does not treat Saint Joseph's new aegis as "worker" as anything like a sop to Commies; it is, rather, a tribute to Joseph's role as archetype of mankind's triumph over the forces of nature by means the efforts of his own God-given capacities for manipulating the created order of things:

Where formerly man looked especially to supernatural forces for blessings, he now secures many of these benefits for himself, thanks to his own efforts....

Those who believe in God take it for granted that, taken by itself, man's activity, both individual and collective...is in keeping with God's purpose.

Man, created in God's image, has been commissioned to master the earth and all it contains, and so rule the world in justice and holiness. He is to acknowledge God as the creator of all, and to see himself and the whole universe in relation to God....

This commission extends to even the most ordinary activities of everyday life. Where men and women, in the course of gaining a livelihood for themselves and their families, offer appropriate service to society, they can be confident that their personal efforts promote the work of the Creator, confer benefit on their fellowmen, and help to realize God's plan in history.

So far from thinking that the achievements gained by man's abilities and strength are in opposition to God's power, or that man with his intelligence is in some sense a rival to his Creator, Christians are, on the contrary, convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God's greatness and the effect of his wonderful providence.

This reading resonated with me at a very deep level, because it touches on some of the themes that I myself have been working through in my own spiritual investigations and about which I have written in this forum. In particular I am struck by the description of man's success in the epistemological domain as a sign of God's greatness: I have often written of my belief that the Incarnational aspect of our religion carries with it an assumption that all of reality, no matter how mundane in appearance or base in its experience, is nevertheless shot through with the reality of God, and stands as a sign, for those who are able to read such signs, of God's presence among us. So here, too, in the case of human labor, we see a sign of God's presence among us: the universe is such that we are able to master certain elements of it by virtue of the capacities that God gave us for such mastery, and to the extent that we make use of these capacities and bring about good things by means of them, we make manifest God's presence and, more importantly, his love--an essential act of witness on our part to those parts of God's creation that are not yet, for whatever reason, able to read the signs for themselves.

There is a steady emphasis upon the integration of such human capacities into a God-centered way of life in the Rule of Saint Benedict. Writing in the sixth century Benedict saw the real benefits of manual labor to the maintenance of well-being in a well-balanced human life. Although his Rule is clearly modeled on the earlier Rule of the Master, he departs in some significant ways from the Master's conception of what that well-balanced human life was directed toward. They both agree, of course, that the goal is to gain heaven, but whereas the Master seems to treat our life in the material mode as something of an obstacle to that end, a kind of pre-purgatory to be endured until the End Time comes, Benedict is much more optimistic about the real presence of God's Kingdom among us in the here and now, and he writes his rule with a view to showing how his vision of this Kingdom can be lived out in Community.

This is an element of Benedictine spirituality that I find deeply compelling. If reality really is incarnational, as I have suggested, then it seems naturally to point towards the eschaton in a manner than is more than merely symbolic. It does so by means of a kind of revelation: reality, as we experience it in the here and now, is already a sign of God's presence among us. It seems to me, then, that we ought to interact with reality as though we believe that to be true, and not so much as though we are waiting to see God only at the end of time.

Work is sometimes seen as a figure for our fallen nature: we must engage in toil and live by the sweat of our brows in order to atone for our sinfulness. According to this view, the whole point of the Sabbath day is to illustrate for us God's merciful forgiveness: though we deserve to toil, he sets aside a day for us on which we are to refrain from doing any work, because God has it in his power to excuse us--forgive us--from our debt. To work on the Sabbath, on this view, is to reject God's forgiveness. This is why Jesus said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

But this view of work is only half the story. Work per se is not a punishment, only work that is dreary. In the beginning Adam was placed in the Garden in order to tend it, and as any gardener knows, tending a garden is most definitely work. But people who love gardening love the work that they do in their gardens--it is not dreary toil, but sheer pleasure--though if you are like me, you often spend the evening after a day of such sheer pleasure with you feet up and a cool drink by your side nursing your aches and pains. But you don't regret any of it.

So the Benedictine approach to work sees labor in its fullness: sure there is always the possibility for any job to become tedious toil, but it need not do so. Saint Benedict had manual labor in mind when he established his Rule for monasteries in which the monks would pray for eight hours, work for eight hours, and rest for eight hours. But we all have work to do, whether it is the manual labor of tending a garden, driving a tractor, working a lathe, assembling a chassis, or less physically demanding forms of labor such as working at a computer, advising a client about her investments, teaching a class, or keeping the files in order. Many of us do plenty of work that we don't get paid for: taking care of our children, cleaning our house, mowing our yards, doing our laundry--and it is sometimes this kind of work, the work that we don't actually get any money for doing, that we come to find the most dreary. And yet all of this work can be approached with an attitude that sees it as part of a communal project undertaken with our fellow men in order to advance the common good, whether we get paid for it or not. If we have this sort of attitude towards our work, we take a step towards Benedict's vision of how we ought to incorporate work, labor, into our overall lives, lives that, in their fullness, include prayer and rest along with work.

If we are to take seriously the Benedictine injunction to "pray and work" (ora et labora), we will need to find ways of making our work a prayer-like activity. That is, if it should happen, as it often does in this life, that we begin to find our day-to-day tasks tedious and toilsome, we need to search in our hearts for ways to offer up our dislike for what we are doing as a form of prayer; if we happen to love what we are doing, we should offer that up as well. In the former case we ask the Spirit to help us to see, and to help us to help others to see, that everything we do, we do for the Lord; in the latter case we rejoice with the Spirit in our communion with God's manifest image in the created order of things.

Prospective Perspective

I think one of the wisest things I have heard in the confessional was also one of the simplest and most straightforward: "Time is grace." The priest who said this to me was helping me to come to grips with one of my own most commonly confessed sins, a sin of omission: I often feel as though I have done virtually nothing to bring God's love to my fellow men, that there is still much to do in the way of showing to others God's mercy, kindness, and compassion. I found it very helpful to be reminded that one of the ways in which God shows us his mercy and compassion is in giving us time to repent and change our ways. He is a just judge, but he does not rush to judgment.

I have been reminded of this kindly, priestly advice often in the past few weeks. For many years (fifteen, actually) I took various medications to control a cardiac arrhythmia that I sometimes suffered from in my thirties. Atrial fibrillation is not a life-threatening condition, and in my case it was easily controlled with an anti-arrhythmic drug called flecainide. In fact, as long as I was on the medication I was totally free of the arrhythmia, but my doctor thought that there could be complications from using a drug like flecainide for so long, so he had me check in with a cardiologist to see about going off of it. I did that last December, and the cardiologist agreed that I should try to go off the drug, so I did. I made it until late February, but then the arrhythmia returned. I was very bummed out about this, but my wife kept telling me that I was being a baby about it all. She pointed out, quite rightly, that instead of bitching about such drugs I should be thankful that they exist at all and can improve my life. But you get to a certain age and your doctor is prescribing this drug for blood pressure and that drug for cholesterol and this drug for this and that drug for that, and eventually you begin to feel like a walking pharmacy. I went back on the flecainide, but now they wanted me to take warfarin as well, an anti-clotting agent that is often prescribed when atrial fibrillation is ongoing. I had to have weekly blood-tests to make sure my blood was properly thinned out.

So by the time May rolled around I was rather depressed about things. I had successfully completed a half-marathon at the beginning of April, but I was feeling more and more as though I was on the downhill side of life's journey. But then an extraordinary thing happened. It began when I had to go back to the cardiologist to see a specialist, an electrophysiologist (specialist in heart arrhythmias). This guy doesn't have an office in Athens, I had to drive to Columbus to see him. When I got there I was amazed at the facilities: a building the size of a large hotel filled with nothing but cardiologists. I walked into the lobby and it felt as though I was about to book myself onto a flight at a major airport. I mentioned this to the lady checking me in but she didn't think it was funny. After my two-hour drive I had to use those other facilities, but when I got there the door was locked. I had to wait a long, long time for the guy in there to finish. I began to worry that he might be having a heart attack or something, this being a place for people with heart trouble and all. When the door opened I saw what the problem was: he was burdened with a large oxygen tank and lots of tubes to deal with. I held the door for him and said a Hail Mary for him as I did my business. In the lobby I saw many such people: most of them elderly, all of them frail-looking. I felt like some kind of intruder: what was I doing here? I just ran a half-marathon, for goodness sake! My heart is healthy! I find that I often have to remind myself of that, because both my father and his brother died of heart attacks, and I don't want to continue the family tradition.

Well, to cut to the chase, as it were, the electrophysiologist told me that I do, indeed, have a very healthy heart, and that I could stop taking not only the flecainide, but also the warfarin and the beta-blocker I had been taking for my blood pressure. He told me that the arrhythmia may return, but I should just take two flecainide pills and see if it goes away. He says that there are lots of folks who do this, and that I shouldn't let my arrhythmia define my life. Well, let me tell you, it was as though someone had just flipped a switch, and my quality of life was improved immeasurably, just like that! I felt as though a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. On my way out, I made it a point to get a chuckle out of the lady who had checked me in, and I made my way back to Athens.

But in spite of feeling much better about my own prospects, I felt a new burden. I kept thinking about all of the other people in that waiting room, and the man with the oxygen tank in particular. It occurred to me that my wife was right: I had been a remarkably big baby about everything, and that many people--indeed, most sick people--have it far worse than I. If I had bothered to think about it, I would have known this much earlier, because you can't go into a hospital to get weekly blood tests without noticing all of the really badly off people wandering the halls. But at that time, of course, I was so self-absorbed that I didn't really notice them, unless they were ahead of me in line at the blood lab, keeping from getting to my other business as quickly as I would have liked. Now, the quality of my own life had just improved immensely, but what have I ever done to improve the quality of anyone else's life? There would not be a hotel-sized building filled with nothing but cardiologists if there were not a lot of people out there needing extremely complicated and expert care--I'm no cardiologist, but surely there are things I could be doing.

Perhaps one of the first things I can do is to get some perspective on things. I had--still have--a mild and minor problem. A friend of mine from high school has survived breast cancer; another friend from graduate school has survived kidney cancer; one of my colleagues has survived prostate cancer. All of these people have dealt with their difficulties and done some remarkable things--it seems to me that there is a sense in which they have dealt with their major difficulties with more grace than I have with my minor ones, and that should be food for thought.

But another thing that I can do is to be more prospective--instead of getting all scrupulous about my sins of omission I can look forward to the opportunity to make some changes in that regard. Time, in this sense, really is grace: the gift of yet another chance--further proof, if more were needed, of God's merciful kindness and compassion.

Ascension seems to be an essentially forward-looking feast in just this sense: as Christ was taken up from among them, the disciples might have chosen to dwell on the past, to regret the loss of the form of experience that they had enjoyed with the Lord for so long. Instead they looked forward to Pentecost and the continued life in the Kingdom that now is upon us. Now there seems to be plenty of time to go out and flip someone else's switch for a change!

Stay Tuned

As if to remind me that I do not, in fact, live all by myself in a cave filled with books and jazz cds I have received a number of inquiries from friends and strangers regarding whether I ever intend to write anything else for this, or any other, blog. If they had asked me just three months ago I might have hemmed and hawed and said something like "I've probably already overstayed my welcome". A number of interesting things have come my way since then, however, and some of them strike me as rather blogworthy.

First, the philosophy department here at Ohio University has just finished a three-day colloquium with Bas Van Fraassen, Emeritus professor of philosophy at Princeton University and Distinguished professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University, author of such seminal works in the philosophy of science as The Scientific Image and Quantum Mechanics: An Empiricist Interpretation. His most recent book, Scientific Representation, was the focus for our colloquium and I can honestly say that it is the best book in the philosophy of science that I have read in the last three years, and among the best books in philosophy generally that I have ever read. It is erudite, well-argued, thorough, thought-provoking, and just a plain old-fashioned page-turner. It presents some arguments that, for Van Fraassn, are rather new: he seems to be moving away from some of his older views towards a new, anti-realist view that he calls structuralist empiricism. I hope to discuss some of his arguments in a few future posts.

Second, I've come across a fascinating new book on St. Augustine's theological epistemology in the De Trinitate that has got me to thinking anew about some of the issues that I have explored before in this forum, and as I work my way through a more thorough re-reading of this book, I suspect that I will find that I have more to say along those lines.

Finally, on a more personal note, I have recently begun to explore Benedictine spirituality with some interest, and will be exploring the possibility of becoming an Oblate; in addition I have also answered the call of the Diocese of Steubenville for men interested in serving the Church in the Permanent Diaconate. Both of these steps open up some very new territory for me, and I find that in thinking through each of them, I have made some rather startling discoveries both about my faith and about myself.

So this blog is not yet moribund, as long as one doesn't count sheer boringness as a measure of such things.

All Is Not Lost

HT: Fr. Jeffery Steel, De cura animarum:

Maybe Size Does Matter

I have posted a number of times on what I take to be the nature of the development of doctrine within Catholic Christianity; I would link to the many posts here but there are too many of them--interested readers can use the blog search box to find them by using search terms such as "development".

Now some fellow Catholic bloggers (Michael Liccione, Jonathan Prejean, Elliot Bougis, and Apollonio Latar among others) and I have decided to have something of a blogging party over at Philosophia Perennis on the subject, and I posted something there on the topic a week or so ago. Now Dr. Michael Liccione has posted a major contribution to the topic, and I must say that it seems very impressive indeed. I have only skimmed it quickly tonight, and I intend to read it very carefully over the next few days, but my initial reaction is that he has, as usual, done a remarkably good job of putting his own point and responding to the points put by others.

The essay is rather long, but well worth reading. Indeed, it demonstrates rather nicely that a lengthy essay can nevertheless be a joy to read when it provokes thought in an intelligent way. The topic is probably such that shorter essays will not really do justice to the issue.

Alvin Plantinga vs. Daniel Dennett

Prosblogion has a fascinating account (with many comments posted) of the "debate" (really a philosophical paper with official comment) between Alvin Plantinga and Daniell Dennett on the compatibility of theism and science. Highly recommended reading!

It's All in Where You Put Your Emphasis

According to a report from FoxNews.com, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has hopes that the recession will end later this year:

The economy is suffering a "severe contraction," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told Congress on Tuesday. But he planted a glimmer of hope that the recession might end this year if the government managed to prop up the shaky banking system, and Wall Street rallied.

Reuters carried the same story, and relied upon exactly the same statement, to draw a rather different inference:

U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke warned on Tuesday that unless government efforts succeed in restoring financial stability, the nation's recession may not end this year.

H.T.:James Taranto.

Some Notes on Explanations and Inference

In some of the literature in the philosophy of science you can find a term of art that is sometimes alleged to refer to a special variety of inference that is not deductive in form but that is supposedly stronger than mere induction. The term "abduction" is due to Charles Sanders Peirce, a 19th century American chemist, mathematician, and logician who, along with William James, is credited with making seminal contributions to that distinctively American style of philosophy known as pragmatism. Abductions, he maintained, represent a kind of scientific inference involving explanations intended to connect samples to populations. Suppose, for example, that I have a small pond in my back yard, and I decide to do some fishing there one day. I spend the whole afternoon pulling small bass from the pond and putting them into a bucket, and at the end of the day I take my catch home and put the bucket on the front porch. Along comes my buddy Earl, who is in charge of stocking my pond. He sees the bucket and my fishing equipment and reasons to himself, "All of the fish in this bucket are bass; I stocked that pond over yonder myself with nothing but bass, knowing that there were no other fish in it; hence, the fish in this bucket must have come from that pond over yonder."

Peirce claimed that this is not a typical induction, because instead of reasoning from sample to population ("The fish in this bucket are all bass and came from that pond, hence that pond is stocked mostly with bass") or from population to sample ("That pond is stocked mostly with bass, so the probability of pulling bass from it is greater than the probability of pulling other kinds of fish from it, and that's why this bucket is full of mostly bass"), an abduction infers a certain relationship between a sample and a population. Peirce envisioned the scientific method as starting with abductions (basically, the "educated guessing" that goes into hypothesis formation), continuing with deductive inferences connecting an initial hypothesis to possible experimental results given certain initial conditions, and finally to hypothesis modification in light of new evidence. In his mature philosophy Peirce used the word "induction" to refer to this entire methodology.

Now imagine the following scenario. I come into my kitchen one morning to find that the big hunk of cheese I left out last night has little bite marks in it, and there are bits and pieces of it all over the counter, along with tiny little black things that look like the sort of chocolate sprinkles one gets on ice cream. As I stand there looking at the cheese, I hear a strange skittering and scratching sound coming from the kitchen wall. I reason to myself this way: "My little brother is always trying to lamplight me--obviously he has messed around with my cheese and sprinkled little chocolate sprinkles all over the counter and even now he's in the next room scratching on the wall to make me think that there's a mouse in my house." In comes my wife, who looks around, hears the sounds, and says, "We've got a mouse in the house."

Two possible explanations, but presumably they can't both be right, so which one is the "best" explanation? Abduction is sometimes called "inference to the best explanation", since one hopes, when formulating a scientific hypothesis, that one is "guessing" correctly about what will adequately explain the observable phenomena. In the case of my kitchen scenario, there are certain sorts of tests my wife and I could do to try to distinguish the one hypothesis from the other as a contender for the "best" explanation (e.g., see if my little brother is in town; check for mouse holes; see if the "chocolate sprinkles" are really made of chocolate), but to do so would be to move away from the stage of abduction and into the stage of deductive testing. The thing about abduction is that it takes place at the beginning of the investigative process, not in the middle or at the end, so what is the normative criterion at play in an abduction?

By "normative criterion" here I mean, what mark do we use to distinguish a good abduction from a bad one? Notice that in the kitchen scenario the question I posed was about which abduction was the best explanation, not which abduction was the best qua abduction. Presumably, the procedure to find out which abduction was the best explanation would have involved testing; what I'm asking here is, what sort of criteria would go into forming an abductive inference in the first place? It seems to me that in the kitchen scenario, the abduction that I came up with is clearly not as good as the one my wife came up with, but what marks that difference? Why is mine not as good as hers, and how can we know the difference independently of any testing? Someone might say something like "Your wife's abduction was better because it was simpler: it only involves a mouse, which many houses have; it does not involve a weirdo brother trying to lamplight you, which has got to be a lot rarer. In short, in similar sorts of cases, it seems much more likely that the mouse would be the cause than that a weirdo brother would be the cause, since the one cause is far more common than the other."

This sort of answer just reduces abduction to a post-inductive inference based on evidence. That is, it treats an abduction as a case of reasoning from population to sample (in the world overall, there are far more mice than there are weirdo brothers, hence it is more probable that this scenario was brought about by a mouse"). Can the same be said about the fishing scenario? Suppose Earl's brother, Homer, was with him when he found the bucket of fish, and when Earl tried to connect the fish to the pond, Homer responded by saying "No way, Earl, them fish was bought at the Wynn Dixie just this mornin', and they's a settin' there 'cause the boss is fixin' to cook 'em later today on yonder grill." In this case, again, we can imagine methods of testing the two hypotheses (see if Wynn Dixie sold a bucket o' bass recently; ask the boss where he got the fish), but the question isn't about how we can find out which one really is the best explanation, but rather how we can tell, from the get go, which one is better as an abduction, as an attempt to come up with the best explanation. In this case, however, the question is complicated by the fact that both explanations seem plausible in a way that just wasn't the case in the kitchen scenario, where one of the explanations seemed quite possible, while the other one seemed downright nutty, and it was easy to choose between them.

What does any of this have to do with anything? Believe it or not, I've been thinking about this in light of some posting at Sacramentum Vitae and Crimson Catholic on the development of doctrine. Both Mike Liccione and Jonathan Prejean seem to think that when doctrine develops, it does so abductively. Possibly all they mean by this is that, when doctrine develops, what the Church is trying to do is to come up with the "best explanations" for its doctrines. Indeed, Mike explicitly says that this is what he means:

I have long argued that a species of induction, namely "abduction" or "inference to the best explanation," is the standard form of DD's context of justification—as distinct from its context of discovery, which cannot and should not try to eliminate the charismatic element. It is the quality of the abduction, seen in light of the analogia fidei and thus to some extent charismatically, which suggests the difference between mere theological opinions and development of the Church's collective understanding of the DF.

If the "context of justification" means something like the texts that are used to promulgate and explain the church's teachings, as opposed to the actual process by which the content of those teachings is revealed to the church, then there is something of a mystery here, since abduction is not a method of justification in this sense but the beginning point of a method of discovery that seeks to explain. Perhaps the term "justification" is what is giving me trouble: what is meant by it, precisely? I tend to think of "justification" as encompassing such things as the giving of reasons with the aim of proving or "justifying" some claim or other, but this is not what an abduction is. When I posit the existence of a mouse in my house, or decide that a bucket of fish came from a pond, I am not trying to justify anything in that sense, I am trying to figure something out, to put together some pieces of a puzzle that are not linked by any matters of necessity.

Therein lies what I take to be a very important difficulty. Deductive inference always ensures truth when the premises are true; abduction, like induction, can offer no such assurance. Indeed, an abductive inference is as likely to be wrong as to be right unless one makes antecedent assumptions about what is more plausible. A mouse is more plausible than a weirdo brother--who would dispute that? But which is more plausible, a pond or a store, and who determines which is more plausible, who lays down the normative criterion?

Mike suggests a number of healthy criteria:

In general, explanations are evaluated in terms of a certain set of criteria: e.g., consistency (is the explanation consistent with what we already know?), capaciousness (does it cover everything that calls for explanation?), parsimony (does it avoid making assumptions and positing entities beyond what's necessary?) and other criteria depending on the subject matter.

As he quickly notes, however, such criteria are largely subjective. (He doesn't actually use the word "largely", but he ought to have.) Hence, an arbiter is needed even of the applicability of the normative criteria. This faculty he grants to the sensus ecclesiae, a deus ex machina if ever there was one from an explanatory point of view. On this sort of a view, there are almost no constraints on what sorts of "abductions" will count as normatively better than others. I say "almost" because, of course, formal contradictions are ruled out even on a subjective reading of the criteria, since there's really no nuancing that sort of thing. But it's not always all that easy to tell when to assertions are formally contradictory. In the end, Mike may be right about the role of the sensus ecclesiae, but not, I think, in quite the way he intends, if he intends that role to be part of an abductive process.

"When you hear hoof beats in Central Park, don't expect zebras." That piece of advice, sometimes given by Gregory House to his ducklings, seems to sum up the problem pretty well. When it comes to formulating abductive inferences, you have to already know a lot of stuff. You need to know already that there are no zebras in Manhattan, but that there are horses, even though it is a huge urban area with no large game to speak of. You have to know that Central Park is patrolled by police on horseback. In short, you have to already know what the relevant components of the explanation are before you formulate them as an abductive hypothesis. The only reason why "horses" is a better explanation of the sound of hoof beats in Central Park than "zebras" is, is because "horses" is the right answer. But there is literally no reason to believe that it is the right answer, independently of already knowing the facts I mentioned above: there are no zebras in Manhattan, but there are horses, and the cops ride them in Central Park.

Add to this mix the fact that abduction, like induction, is an inference pattern that is aimed at explaining empirically observable phenomena, not at unpacking the meaning of assertions. It is intended to connect observables with hypotheses, not to make clear the semantic content of previous utterances. Furthermore, abduction, like induction, always requires an inference to something new. That is, the conclusion of an abduction, like the conclusion of an induction, is a linguistic representation of a fact that is not contained in the premises. This is one of the principal differences between inductive and deductive inference patterns, and it is why inductions, unlike deductions, can never guarantee the truth of their conclusions--just as abductions cannot.

Suppose we were to take a typical case of what is sometimes called the "development of doctrine", and ask whether the doctrine, as developed, represents the conclusion of an abductive inference. We will see that there are a number of reasons why this should be worrisome. There are many good examples we could choose from--the doctrine of the Trinity, the procession of the Spirit from the Son--but let's look instead at one that is often cited in polemical contexts: the teaching on usury. This is a nice example because most Catholics can agree that God is a Trinity, and that the Spirit proceeds from the Son, but there are some Catholics who think that the teaching on usury has substantially changed over time, and in this they disagree with their own Church, which maintains rather that the teaching on usury has developed over time. So the notion of the "development of doctrine", in this polemical context, must be put up against a notion of "substantial change in teaching" which is somehow quite different from mere "development". If we are to make any sense out of the inferential process by which teachings "develop", we need to make some sense out of what the difference is supposed to be between "substantial change in teaching" and mere "development" of doctrine.

The claim that the teaching on usury has "changed", if I understand it correctly, amounts to the claim that the teaching has not merely new, but different semantic content than it used to have, and that the different content constitutes an explicit, formal contradiction of the old semantic content. That is, when people claim that the teaching on usury has changed, they think that, whereas the Church used to teach x, y, and z about usury, it now teaches either (~x & ~y & ~z) or ~(x & y & z). Either of these latter two assertions would formally contradict the first, so it may not matter which of them a particular critic of the teaching claims in that regard. In order to avoid this sort of thing, the person who claims that doctrine has merely developed must claim that, whereas the Church used to teach (x & y & z), it now teaches [(x & y & z) & p], where p cannot be formally analyzed into further assertions that would contradict x or y or z. To put it less formally, whatever the Church says about usury now, she must say it without taking back any of the things she used to say about it, hence, what she says now must be new and different from but also consistent with what she said before.

This is where the real arguing starts. The Church used to say that charging any interest whatsoever on a loan was usurious and, hence, sinful. Now the Church says that there are certain forms of lending in which it would not be usurious to charge interest, just so long as the interest rate meets certain criteria, hence not all lending at interest is sinful. The critics who claim that the teaching has changed say that the Church went from saying "All lending at interest is sinful" to saying "It is not the case that all lending at interest is sinful", and that is indeed a formal contradiction of the form (p & ~p). The defender of doctrinal development says that the Church now teaches, and has always taught, that "All usurious lending is sinful", but the prudential understanding (not the formal, de fide, teaching) of what the definition of "usurious lending" is has developed in response to the rise of a capital economy beginning in the 17th century. Hence there is no formal contradiction at all, only an explicit recognition of new historical conditions under which usuriousness is present only under certain empirically testable conditions, not all of which include the presence of interest on a loan.

Suppose we want to side with the defender of doctrinal development against the critic of the teaching. Shall we say that this new way of expressing the mind of the Church is "justified" by means of an abductive process? I hope not, because if that is what we shall say then we shall be saying that, upon discovering that lots of people, including many members of the Church, are indeed lending money at interest, the Church found it expedient to redefine "usurious lending" in such a way that it is no longer sinful, just as we decided to say that it was horses that we heard in Central Park rather than zebras when we realized that there are no zebras in Central Park, though there are horses. Since abduction, like induction, requires an empirical component, we are forced to admit that the only strictly empirical considerations impinging on the developed doctrine are the historical facts regarding lending at interest. What we would like to be able to say, by contrast, is that the Church has made her position with regard to the sinfulness of lending at interest clearer: in a capital economy, money plays an entirely different sort of role than the role it plays in a feudal economy, and lending at small rates of interest will not count as sinful because it does not impose anything like the burden that it would have imposed in a non-capital economy. In making our assertion, p, clearer, we never assert ~p. Rather, we assert, either some other proposition, q, which is not inconsistent in semantic content with p but which deals with the same subject matter as p, or we assert some other proposition r, which is derivable, in some sense, from p itself.

The expression, "in some sense", is, of course, hopelessly vague, but whatever else it might mean it certainly cannot mean "via abductive inference", for the reasons I've been rehearsing. Cardinal Newman, in the eighth, ninth, and tenth chapters of his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, comes closer than anyone ever has, I think, to doing justice to what we need to mean by this expression "in some sense" in this context, in spite of the fact that he was by no means a professional epistemologist. He claims, first of all, that revelation was completed during Apostolic times, and this can mean only that no new doctrines can be taught by the Church; at most, the Church may express old doctrines in new ways. If Newman is right about this, this immediately rules out both induction and abduction as an inferential pattern by means of which the Church may explain her teachings, since both provide conclusions in which something new is asserted, as I pointed out above. However, the inferential pattern need not be strictly deductive, either since, if we again assume that the Church is right to teach that not all lending at interest is usurious in a capital economy, this cannot be something that the Church has discovered by deduction, since at one time the Church taught that all lending at interest was, indeed, usurious (since at the time there was no such thing as a capital economy), and that is a direct contradiction of the proposition that not all lending at interest is usurious. They cannot both be the products of deductions working from the same premises, unless the premises themselves are inconsistent. The premises themselves, being the revealed content of our religion, had better not be inconsistent, or else our religion is just a bunch of hooey.

What has occurred, then, not only in the case of the Church's teaching on usury, but indeed in the case of the Church's teaching on slavery, the Trinity, the Procession of the Spirit from the Son, Papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception--you name it--is that the Church has clarified the meanings of the premises in such a way as to show how it can be possible for two seemingly disparate teachings (all lending at interest is usurious; some lending at interest is not usurious) can nevertheless follow from the same premise set. Although the motivation for making this clarification arises from empirically observable facts about the world (there was no such thing as a capital economy before; now it is the norm), this process of clarification (reformulation and restatement) is not itself an empirical and, hence, not an abductive or inductive process. Since it is not a formal process, it is also not deductive. This process of clarification does not include admissions on the part of the Church that she just did not understand the premises the first time around, since that would allow for the possibility not only that the earlier teachings were just plain wrong, but also that the present ones are. In short, if there has ever been a time at which the Church herself did not understand the premises, then that time could very well be happening right now, and we have no reason to believe anything the Church teaches on the basis of her claims to authority, including the proposition that Jesus is God or, indeed, that God exists at all. The Church simply must be both infallible and consistent, otherwise the entire religion falls--there is no reason to believe in it at all, other than wishful thinking.

So a fundamental assumption of any Christian must be that the Church has always fully understood the "premises" she has been given, that is, she has always fully understood the content of the divine revelation. What changes is not that content or the Church's understanding of it, but the mode of expression the Church uses to communicate that content to the faithful. Here, by "modes of expression" I mean more than just the language and concepts that the Church deploys in exercising its teaching faculties, though those things are included in what I have in mind. I also mean something a little more complex, however, namely the change in empirically observable circumstances to which I have already alluded in the usury example. I can further illustrate what I have in mind by means of another example. The well-known phrase, extra ecclesiam nulla salus, which can be translated as "outside the Church there is no salvation", dates to the third century, a time when there was no such thing as Protestantism. Some twentieth century Catholics understood the phrase in a very literalistic sense to mean that, if you are not literally inside the Roman Catholic Church (i.e., if you are a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist or what have you), then you have no salvation, you are damned forever. The Second Vatican Council thus found it expedient to make clearer just what this catchphrase really means: it equates the concept of Salvation with the mystical understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ. As Augustine noted, just as being a member of the Church in the pedestrian sense of having been baptized does not guarantee salvation, neither does being outside of the Church guarantee damnation. The phrase means only that the Church and Salvation are one and the same thing: the Church makes Salvation possible simply by being what it is. Some regarded this "clarification" of the doctrine by the Council as evidence that either the Church was changing its teaching on salvation or that the Council was not really an Ecumenical Council--indeed, the two claims usually went together: the Council was not an Ecumenical Council precisely because it was tinkering with the Church's teachings on salvation.

Tinkering is one thing, but changing is something else. The point here is that a mistake was indeed made, but not by the Church. The mistake was made by those literalists who had misunderstood the Church's teaching on salvation in such a way as to think that the teaching demanded full-blown membership in the Church in the sense of being a communicant in good standing of some particular Roman Catholic parish or other. At the time the teaching was first articulated, such a misunderstanding was probably not possible, but whether or not it was possible it did not become a problem until relatively recently, hence the clarification, or "development", if you prefer. In short, the original statement of the teaching was directed at a particular audience in a particular time and place, and the clarification of the teaching is directed at a different audience at a different time and place. The difference is an empirically observable one, but the empirical facts only motivate, they do not enter into the formulation of, the clarification.

The problem is made rather complicated by the fact that sometimes people speaking in the name of the Church can make things seem less rather than more clear, but in the present instance the cases where this has happened only further illustrate the principal I am talking about. Popes and other bishops have said things in connection with this teaching that do, indeed, seem to contradict what the most recent Council has taught. One must then decide (a) whether there is indeed a contradiction and (b) if there is one, whether the voice of a single bishop speaking on his own, even the bishop of Rome, can outrank, as it were, the teaching of an Ecumenical Council. But even in some of the cases where it looks as though things are being made less clear rather than more clear, an argument can be made that things are not as straightforward as they seem because historical conditions are often not parallel to our own. The Bull Unam sanctam of 1302, often cited by enemies of the Council, makes the teaching clear enough. What critics of the Council tend to focus in on, of course, are the words "We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff". They take this in a very literal way to mean that, unless you are "subject to the Roman Pontiff" in the sense of being obedient to him as a literal member of the Roman Catholic Church, you are SOL. They don't even consider the possibility that there are different ways of being "subject" to the Roman Pontiff, and that a Protestant or a Jew or a Muslim is de facto subject to him whether they obey him or not, just as the atheist is subject to God whether he believes in him or not.

Was this what Pope Boniface VIII himself meant and intended when he promulgated the Bull? Intentions are notoriously slippery things--it is, in fact, impossible to know what the real intentions of another person are with any certainty, even if he tells you himself what his intentions were, since he may have been mistaken about his own motivation. However, if Unam sanctam is difficult in this way, the words of Eugene IV in Cantate Domino, 1441, are crystal clear: "none of those existing outside the Catholic Church, not only pagans, but also Jews and heretics and schismatics, can have a share in life eternal." It seems difficult to mistake what this fellow intended to say, though he does go on to say that this fate can be avoided if "before death they are joined with [the Church]", but he does not elaborate on what he thinks are the necessary and sufficient conditions of being "joined" with the Church. Presumably he means getting oneself baptized, but he does not say so explicitly, thus leaving himself wide open to all sorts of interpretations. In any case, the polemical purpose of Cantate Domino is such that its entire purpose is open to multiple interpretations. From an empirical point of view, there may very well be historical conditions that inform what interpretation is more likely, which abduction really is the "best explanation" of what the particular fellow was trying to say. But from a doctrinal point of view--a point of view that of necessity must be distinct from such historical conditions precisely because the doctrine was already definitively settled during the Apostolic age--such empirical conditions cannot settle what it is that we must believe, since it is impossible for us to experience the empirical conditions that obtained at that time.

Who is it, then, that has the authority to decide which interpretations--whether of divine revelation or of the Church's own teachings based upon those revelations--are to be regarded as authoritative in a sense that is meaningful to us and to our historical conditions? Only the Church herself can have that kind of authority. If it seems to someone, whether inside or outside of the Church, that the Church is contradicting herself, he'd better have an airtight case. If, per impossibile, he does have such a case, he'd better leave the Church right away if he is in it, or stay away if he isn't, because a case such as that would show that the Church in fact has no authority at all.

Ultimately, then, the method, if it is one, by which the Church develops her doctrines is neither inductive, nor abductive, nor deductive, but merely authoritative. She makes proclamations, and the relationship between the semantic content of her proclamations, when they are authoritative, is always one of consistency, though not always one of full clarity, if by "full clarity" what one means is complete and full understanding on the part of the target audience. That kind of clarity comes through time as the Church articulates and re-articulates the same teachings to different audiences; as audiences change, so too must the articulations of doctrine. What seems clear to us today would not have seemed clear to an audience in Thessalonica in the 4th century, nor will it seem clear to an audience in Brazil in the 25th century. This is merely a feature of the evolution of human culture. But the Church's teachings do not evolve, so they must be explained and re-explained in such a way as to make clear the original intent of the original revelation in terms that can be understood by the faithful who must assent to them.

The work of individual pastors and theologians will certainly, on occasion, take the form of inductions, abductions, and deductions, but such work, all on its own, will never be authoritative and, hence, will never constitute any part of the process whereby the teachings of the Church develop. Instead, the corporate mechanism of the Church's teaching authority, the Magisterium, will incorporate or not incorporate such work as the Spirit moves it. How that happens is entirely beyond me, but I believe that it happens, otherwise I would be acting irrationally to remain in the Church. That teachings such as those the Church proposes must be accepted by faith should come as a surprise to no one; it is a sad feature of human willfulness and pride that it does surprise many to learn that the Church's authority to teach and to interpret must also be accepted by faith.

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.