Science, History, Literature

When I teach introductory level courses in the philosophy of science I find that many students approach the material with a few historical misconceptions that are rather revealing. One of the most common misconception, mentioned by at least one student in every class I have taught on this subject, is the belief that many people believed that the earth was literally flat until the voyages of Columbus. The reason why this is often mentioned in my classes is because one of our discussion topics has to do with the way in which even well-entrenched scientific theories can be replaced by utterly new ones, given the right sort of evidence. So some students think that this belief illustrates that point. "It was once universally (or widely) believed that the earth was flat, but now we know it to be round" is how it usually goes.

In fact there was never any time in Western intellectual history when this was true. There may have been a few individuals here or there who thought that the earth is flat, but the vast majority of scientists, philosophers, theologians, and other interested parties all knew that the earth is roughly spherical. Why do so many students think otherwise? One reason might be because the myth has been repeated by some people who ought to know better. For example, Daniel Boorstin repeats it in his 1983 book The Discoverers, and Boise Penrose mentions it in his 1955 book Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance. So where did this idea come from in the first place? Lesley Cormack has traced it back to a biography of Christopher Columbus written by Washingon Irving (of "Rip Van Winkle" fame). According to Cormack, Irving was trying to portray Columbus as a landmark figure, rather like Copernicus, who by virtue of his voyage of discovery put to rest one more vestige of the so-called "dark ages". In short, it was a piece of propaganda.

Of course, one cannot expect your average undergraduate to be so well-versed in these matters, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that they simply accept whatever they hear along these lines. Unsurprising, but still disappointing, since so many undergraduates these days like to portray themselves as skeptical inquirers after the truth who are not willing to blindly accept everything they are told. It turns out they are just like the rest of us in that regard.

So what sort of remedy is there for this kind of situation? I would like to suggest that one step in the right direction would be to re-integrate the study of the sciences with the study of intellectual history. Many of the best contemporary science writers are people who not only know a lot about science, they know a lot about the history and philosophy of science as well. More importantly, they are sensitive readers who are able to ferret out important details that can aid in the formation of more subtle interpretations of that intellectual history.

There is an interesting illustrative example early on in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. In I.3 he writes, in part:

Ireland is far more favored than Britain by latitude, and by its mild and healthy climate. Snow rarely lies longer than three days, so that there is no need to store hay in summer for winter use or to build stables for beasts. There are no reptiles, and no snake can enter there; for although often brought over from Britain, as soon as the ship nears land, they breathe the scent of its air, and die. In fact, almost everything in this isle confers immunity to poison, and I have seen that folk suffering from snake-bite have drunk water in which scrapings from the leaves of books from Ireland have been steeped, and that this remedy checked the spreading poison and reduced the swelling.

The last sentence of this report, in particular, is apt to make one roll one's eyes at the credulity of an earlier age, but H. Mayr-Harting, in his book The Coming of Christianity, has argued at some length that in fact this passage is not meant to be taken seriously, but is rather a parody, by Bede, of the sort of pseudo-scientific writing common in his day. Seeing this requires knowing, first of all, that Bede was a rather witty writer not above making jokes or parodies, and also knowing about the pseudo-scientific literature that he would have had access to. Again, this is not the sort of thing that we can expect just anybody to know off-hand, but clearly knowledge of this sort of thing would make a difference in how one interprets this passage of Bede.

I suspect that there are many such misapprehensions abroad. I think that much contemporary discussion of the conflict between Galileo and the Church, for example, suffers from a lack of full information on both sides, and that even when it comes to such obvious non-problems as the "conflict" between evolution and intelligent design, or anthropogenic climate change, the clearer heads are the ones who understand fully what sorts of issues are at stake on all sides and who, more importantly, are careful enough to know the difference between principled arguments and ideological scrums. This requires wide reading, and a careful assessment of merits of the arguments on all sides. The intellectual acumen required to accomplish this ranges more widely, I am afraid, than the typical training either in the sciences or the humanities can give. A broader education is required, and those who are fluent in both will have the best chance of making an accurate assessment of the situation.

Ectopic Pregnancy and Double Effect

Last month Sr. Margaret McBride, an ethical consultant at St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix, Arizona, was declared excommunicate by Bishop Thomas Olmsted on the grounds that she had cooperated in the procurement of abortion (apparently by giving the procedure her approval as ethical consultant). McBride defended her decision on the grounds that the life of the mother was at risk (she suffered from pulmonary hypertension, which put her at risk for eclampsia; her condition is sometimes referred to as pre-eclampsia. Eclampsia can be life-threatening, though pre-eclampsia rarely is--unless, of course, it leads to eclampsia). She appealed to the Church's teaching that only direct abortion is gravely sinful; indirect abortion (abortion in which the death of the fetus is not intended, though it may be foreseen) is regarded as, at least in principle, something that can be morally licit under the right conditions.

The basic idea here is to appeal to the principle of double effect, but it is not at all clear that pre-eclampsia constitutes a sufficient condition for invoking that principle. For one thing, pre-eclampsia, in itself, simply isn't as life-threatening as the principle would require. Second, even if the condition were life-threatening, it isn't clear that the principle would apply to this sort of case.

In a statement released in late June, the United States Bishops' Committee on Doctrine drew a distinction between kinds of cases based upon the nature of the threat to the mother's life. They gave the following examples to illustrate the distinction. In one sort of case, we are to imagine a woman whose organs are experiencing problems as a consequence of the added burden of pregnancy; in the other sort of case, we are to imagine a woman with cancer of the uterus. According to the document, the former case is not sufficient to render licit an abortion to save the life of the mother, because to remove the fetus in order to save the mother's life is a direct killing of a human being in order to save the life of another, and this is not permitted by Catholic moral theory: we may not do wrong in order to bring about good. In the latter case, the removal of the cancerous uterus is what is directly intended, and the death of the fetus, though foreseeable, is not intended, so the principle of double effect applies. It is difficult to avoid drawing the inference that, when it is the mother's own organs that threaten her life, they may be removed even if doing so kills another human being who is lurking therein; but when it is another human being who threatens the mother's life, that human being may not be killed, even if it is hiding in one of the mother's organs.

The case of ectopic pregnancy, in light of the directive from the Committee on Doctrine, is particularly interesting. Some Catholics have thought that an ectopic pregnancy is a clear case in which abortion to save the life of the mother would be licit under the principle of double-effect. But clearly not, if the distinction drawn by the Bishops' Committee is correct. In the case of ectopic pregnancy there is nothing organically wrong with the fallopian tube, so it is not analogous to the case of the cancerous utuerus. Instead, the fetus has become lodged in the fallopian tube, and the only way to save the life of the mother is to either (a) remove the fetus from the fallopian tube, which would be a clear case of a direct abortion and hence illicit; or (b) remove the entire fallopian tube, with the fetus in it. It is this latter scenario, (b), that those Catholics who defend this procedure as licit point to as the case covered by the principle of double effect. Their thinking is that the intention is to save the life of the mother, not to kill the fetus, and they save the life of the mother by removing, not the fetus, but the fallopian tube. The death of the fetus is, of course, foreseeable in this scenario, but since it is not intended, these folk reason, it is licit because covered by double effect. But according to the distinction drawn by the Bishops the removal of the fallopian tube cannot be seen as anything other than the removal of the fetus, since the fallopian tube itself is in no need of being removed, and certainly would not need to be removed if there were not a fetus lodged in it. If a stone had become lodged in the fallopian tube there is little doubt that the procedure would be referred to as the removal of the stone and not as the removal of a fallopian tube that just happened to have a stone in it.

Fortunately ectopic pregnancy is extremely rare, occurring in less than 2% of all pregnancies, though it is, apparently, on the rise: it has increased sixfold since 1970. Most patients that present with ectopic pregnancy have no identifiable risk factor, so the temptation to blame the rise of the condition on increasing use of fertility treatments (also frowned upon by Catholic moral theory) must be resisted. However, I won't resist the temptation to report the following (from MedScape):

One study has demonstrated that infertility patients with luteal phase defects have a statistically higher ectopic pregnancy rate than patients whose infertility is caused by anovulation. The risk of ectopic pregnancy and heterotopic pregnancy (ie, pregnancies occurring simultaneously in different body sites) dramatically increases when a patient has used assisted reproductive techniques to conceive, such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) or gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT). In a study of 3000 clinical pregnancies achieved through in vitro fertilization, the ectopic pregnancy rate was 4.5%, which is more than double the background incidence. Furthermore, studies have demonstrated that up to 1% of pregnancies achieved through IVF or GIFT can result in a heterotopic gestation, compared to an incidence of 1 in 30,000 pregnancies for spontaneous conceptions.

So apparently the only method of saving the life of the mother in the case of an ectopic pregnancy is not actually morally licit, according to the most recent statement by the United States Bishops. Not all Catholics commentators have argued that it is licit, but those who have will now have to rethink their arguments.

History and Evolutionary Theory

According to orthodox mythology, Galileo was something of a martyr for the cause of science and human enlightenment. After the publication, in 1632, of his Dialogo (its full title in English, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Copernican and Ptolemaic), he was condemned at Rome the following year. The way the story if often told, his only offense was to challenge the dominant scientific orthodoxy of his day, which claimed that the earth was motionless. The Church, it is often claimed, held this to be a theological truth not open to challenge by mere laymen, and his trial was, accordingly, one for heresy. He was forced to abjure his belief that the earth moved, and to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. As if to make the story even more dramatic--and to add a nice kick on behalf of the "good guys" who might be reading this story nowadays--it is also reported that he muttered "And yet it moves" under his breath after his public proclamation that the earth is motionless.

High drama--drama that would be rather spoiled if the whole story were told sine ira et studio. The story provides some comfort to those who would defend a kind of secular humanism, in which the saints are such figures as Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and their ilk. Comfort because, in our own enlightened times, we see the scientific community as the victors, the Catholic Church as the loser, in this earliest of modern-era culture wars. Indeed, when John Paul the Great offered up an apology for the condemnation of Galileo there was much rejoicing on the part of those who think that the Church has much to answer for in terms of her opposition to scientific enlightenment. The apology was actually seen, in some quarters, as some sort of a victory for the humanist side, if you can believe it, though that sort of thinking is of a pace with those who so often fail so utterly to understand anything about the Faith.

A similar culture war rages in our own day, this time not between The Church and The Astronomers but between The Church and The Biologists. In the present conflict, a few humanist biologists are pitting (in their own imaginations) the theory of evolution by natural selection against the truth of the Faith, in the rather vain hope that any rational person accepting the truth of the former will, by some strange (bio)logical necessity, have to reject the truth of the latter. There are a few humanist biologists who think this way who are not otherwise insane, so it is at least worth thinking about what on earth could possibly give rise to such a risible belief in a putatively rational person. My own hunch is that it is largely an accident of history.

The accident that I have in mind is the fact that Darwin did his work in the 19th century, while progress in molecular biology did not really occur until the 20th century. I think that if these two historically contingent facts were reversed, we would not see the present conflict. Darwin's idea was a big one: a grand explanatory theory that was sent forth fully formed into a public that was just beginning to grapple with the social and political pressures of materialism, industrialization, and internationalism. The perceived threat to religious belief was, it seems to me, already incubating on a number of fronts. When The Origin came along it was not a particularly revolutionary work from a theological point of view, but the popular culture was prepared to receive it as such principally because it came along at a time when religious folks were already beginning to feel besieged. If you add to this the rise, forty years later, of Protestant fundamentalism and the rather bizarre belief in the literal truth of the mythological cosmology at the start of the book of Genesis, along with the fact that the majority of Americans at the time (indeed, to this day) were Protestants who were also Americans committed to the view that every opinion is sacred, it is not all that surprising that things have evolved (so to speak) the way they have.

Contrast this with the rise of modern cosmology. The theory of the Big Bang seems to me to present no less a challenge to the cosmology of Genesis, but although I have heard a few religious skeptics discount it I don't think it has nearly the same hold on the popular imagination as the debate between defenders of evolutionary theory and the proponents of intelligent design. One reason for this is the fact that modern cosmology has taken shape during a completely different historical epoch, in which that sort of science was already widely accepted among a more materialist public. If Darwin had published The Origin in 1959 instead of 1859--after the growth of molecular biology and modern genetics--I think the public attitude towards evolution would be no different than it is towards the Big Bang. There would still be a fundamentalist reaction to it, but it would be much more marginalized.

To see where the present debate will be fifty years hence I think we need only turn back to the 17th century. None of the revolutionary scientific proposals from that era, including not only Galileo's contributions to astronomy, but the theories of universal gravitation, combustion, circulation of the blood, and many others, are not exactly on the table as matters up for continued debate between working scientists and armchair theologians. No one is going before the local school board demanding that Aristotelian gravitation be taught alongside the universal theory, or that the theory of the four humors be taught alongside other medical theories. One of the principal reasons, of course, is that the theories of universal gravitation and modern medicine have far more wide-ranging practical applications than does the theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Evolutionary theory is, principally, a historical discipline; but molecular genetics and other branches of modern biology have more important applications, and so far they are robustly consistent with everything predicted by evolutionary theory. So as these science continue to impact our lives, the rabble that continues to push intelligent design will become ever more marginalized until, like the flat-earthers, they are seen for what they are.

Of course, they are already seen that way by the folks who know better, but one does wonder when the media will catch on to this fact. Part of the problem, I think, lies in the fact that too many working biologists are playing into the hands of the crazies. I teach philosophy of biology at both the undergraduate and the graduate level, and most of the textbooks that cross my desk looking for inclusion in my classroom have sections on the "debate" between evolution and intelligent design. For the life of me I can't imagine why. No philosophy of science textbook contains articles by flat-earthers who challenge the Copernican system. There aren't many such articles to begin with, I suppose, but even if there were hundreds available that would not warrant anthologizing them along with real science. The sooner we begin to treat these folks as the outliers that they are the sooner the hubbub will die down. Since publishers have to sell books, I take it that the inclusion of this stuff is still in demand. This is a good reason never to use a textbook that has such a section in it.

Duh

I understand that there are some folks in the Catholic Church who do not agree with everything the Church teaches, but this one goes beyond mere dissent to the level of sheer stupidity. Maureen Fiedler, a Sister of Loretto with a PhD from Georgetown, writes in the online edition of the National Catholic Reporter (where else):

Imagine for a minute that it’s 1954, as segregationists faced Brown vs. the Board of Education, the Supreme Court case which mandated school de-segregation. And imagine that the Vatican, or the Catholic bishops, said to Protestant segregationists in the South, “You can come to our schools, to Catholic schools, and we’ll provide you with a home.” Most Catholics would have been outraged, I daresay. (And of course, precisely the opposite actually happened, as many Catholic bishops were outspoken against racial segregation, and integrated Catholic schools -- thank God).

But it’s a different story with gender segregation or sexual orientation. This is not a perfect analogy, granted. But the Vatican’s overtures to dissident Anglicans sound like those “imagined” 1950’s with a different twist. The Vatican is opening Catholic doors wide to Anglicans who believe in “segregation at the altar,” for women, and for openly gay/lesbian clergy.

Where is the outrage at this policy? I have heard some of it. I attended a small liturgy with friends this week, and they shared this sentiment: We have enough Catholics who have not come to terms with human equality and gospel equality… why would we go searching for more? We should welcome newcomers who wrestle with issues, yes… including these issues, … but why establish a policy that give special place to those with segregationist credentials?

Let's pass over in silence the rather laughable attempt to claim moral equivalence between racism and faithfulness to the Magisterium regarding admission to Holy Orders and sexual activity outside the Sacrament of Matrimony. Much more to the point is this: in admitting these particular Anglicans into the Church, the Church is admitting people who actually believe what the Church herself has always taught. In other words, it isn't like a non-racist Church admitting new members who are racists; rather, it is a faithful Church admitting new members who are also faithful. I'll tell you where the outrage is: it's at the National Catholic Reporter.

"Not a perfect analogy." Duh. More like, not analogous in the least. Ironically, just as Fiedler and her ilk ask themselves questions like Why welcome people like this into the Church, I ask myself, Why do people like Fiedler stay in the Church? One possibility is that they seriously believe these teachings may change, hence the talk of "human equality" as though it is the least relevant to the question of admission of women to Holy Orders. To think this way is to be seriously out of touch with reality, but it was not an uncommon way to look at things forty years ago. Just as one might claim that dinosaurs are not really extinct but rather have evolved into birds, so, too, the dinosaurs of academia are still with us even in this more enlightened age. What they have evolved into, unfortunately, is nothing quite so beautiful as a songbird. Instead, they have become like shrill harpies, continually shrieking about the same range of dead-letter issues. A quick perusal of the entries in Fiedler's blog is sufficient to show that her understanding of Catholicism is not only seriously wrong, it is seriously outdated.

And yet. Imagine for a minute that it is 1954, and a group of segregationist Protestants from the south seek reconciliation with the Church. I can think of no reason to say to them, You cannot come home--people like you fill us with outrage. Rather we should say: your desire to come home is like that of the Prodigal Son! Do penance for your sins and come on home! Fiedler writes as though, by welcoming these Anglicans home, we are "giv[ing] special place to those with segregationist credentials", without even considering the possibility that those whom we welcome are coming to us with humble and contrite hearts. Of course, if you look at the world the way Fiedler does, assenting to Church teaching is orthogonal to being humble and contrite, since the Church teachings themselves just are the "segregationist credentials" that she bemoans. So for people like her it's a lose-lose proposition: the teachings on Holy Orders and Matrimony are not going to change, and the people who are welcomed home are going to be continually diluting the influence of the heretics of Loretto.

It Depends on What You Mean by "Forward"

There has been some consternation among bloggers both Anglican and Catholic about what's happening at the Forward in Faith UK general meeting. Fr. Jeffrey Steel blogs about it today at De cura animarum. He writes, in part:

To be perfectly honest, it almost feels like a bluff has been called. Sitting and listening to those speeches made me sad and realise that for many in the C of E, the issue that alone makes them 'feel' Catholic is being against the ordination of women or so it seems. Let me state clearly that I did not leave the C of E over women's ordination or homosexuality though in regards to both of these issues I hold the Catholic orthodox line. I became Catholic because being Catholic was true, the primacy of Peter and his infallibility is true and the lack of the Magisterium in Anglicanism leaves the priest with nothing other than his (or now her) own opinion. I am afraid that this sort of approach has nothing to do with true Catholicism. This approach has nothing to do with the theological idea of communio in the writings of the Holy Father either.

I have a great deal of sympathy for this--my own reasons for conversion were similar. Indeed, women had already been ordained to the priesthood in the Episcopal church when I was a member of it, but that was not really what tipped me off that the boat was about to start sinking. It was rather the bizarre individualism that is the artifact of the phenomenon Fr. Steel mentions here, the lack of any sort of counterpart to the Magisterium.

But on the more personal level I also feel very deeply the same sort of sadness that Fr. Steel mentions in his post:

Many might ask me why I care. The answer is, because our Holy Father and pastor just extended a hand of welcome for reunion and reconciliation beyond what any could imagine and they have to think about it...I hope the Vatican isn't listening to that assembly.

What I feel is most problematic is that so many claim to have been praying for the very thing that the Holy Father has given and even more and now what is in reality a lovely piece of fish seems to be treated as if it were only a stone.

When I think back to the mid-1980s, when I was myself yearning for this very thing (along with some of my Anglican friends), I can't help feeling a little like a parent watching a talented young child drop out of medical school to join the circus--if I had had back the then the opportunity that they have now, etc.

Some might suggest that it is far better, for those who are not fully prepared to accept the Magisterium, to stay out of the Church, rather than to join it and become irritating dissenters. After all, some may say, there are enough of that ilk in the Church already, and some of them cause real harm. My own view is that those who do choose to make the conversion will make it for the right sorts of reasons--the sorts of reasons that prompted Fr. Steel to make the change, or Fr. Al Kimel. Such persons only strengthen the degree of orthodoxy in the Church by their presence in and contribution to it.

The folks at Forward in Faith seem remarkably reluctant to move, well, forward, preferring to remain in the stasis of separation. What the advantage of this could possibly be only they can imagine.

Sursum corda!

A very literal translation of sursum corda might be something like "Up with the hearts!" Personally I prefer the more standard "Lift up your hearts", which is one of the many places in which the English translation of the Latin Mass matches the English of the Book of Common Prayer used by Anglicans. I mention all of this because I have always thought that there is a great deal of commonality between Roman Catholicism and what is best about Anglicanism (in the interest of full disclosure I will remind my regular readers--both of them--that I am myself a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism). I have blogged often about the reasons for my conversion, so I won't go over all of that again, but in light of what happened yesterday I felt as though some sort of effusive outburst on my part would be appropriate.

So what happened yesterday, you ask? Well, let me begin by saying that if it had happened twenty-five years ago my conversion story might have been very different. Yesterday the Vatican announced the creation of a Personal Ordinariate for Anglican Christians, allowing as many as wish to enter into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church (see the story here at Catholic.org). This is nothing short of spectacular, in my opinion, and it is the first step towards the righting of the wrongs that began centuries ago when Christians first started disagreeing with each other so vehemently that they began to excommunicate each other.

A Personal Ordinariate is an ecclesial structure that allows for parallel Ordinaries. To put it more simply, if there is both a Roman Catholic Bishop of, say, Steubenville, and an Anglican Bishop in the same area, the Anglican Bishop and his entire Diocese can retain their current ecclesial structure--that is, they will continue on as the Anglican Diocese of Steubenville or whatever, and will not need to be "absorbed" into the Roman Catholic Diocese--and yet they will be in full communion with Rome. They will continue to use the Anglican Rite liturgies, their priests, if married, will continue as priests in communion with Rome, and their Bishops will continue to have autonomy within their Dioceses.

I have already seen many reactions to this, some happy, some virtually ecstatic, but also some not so happy and some downright negative. I suppose this sort of distribution of views is to be expected--you can't wipe away 500 years of bitter division overnight--but one does hope and pray for further healing, and not just between Romans and Anglicans, but among all Christians worldwide. Our greatest charism is our unity as members of the Body of Christ, and we ought to be ashamed of ourselves for having thrown that away, and we ought to work ever harder to make amends for what we have wrought. It is not an easy task, but yesterday's decision shows that it is not as difficult as some have feared it might be.

Many who call themselves Anglicans do not approve of this move, however, and they will say that it is easy for me to rejoice today, since I view myself as having made the right move long ago. Those who do not think this is the right move will have many different reasons for being unhappy. Some will say that Rome has been in error about many things, including Papal Primacy; others will say that to "come back", as it were, is to admit that you were wrong; still others will say that the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, that it just doesn't matter all that much if one is in communion with Rome or not. All of these views entail that it would be wrong to take the Vatican up on its offer, though clearly some of these views entail it much more strongly than others. Certainly the first objection--that Rome is the one that has been wrong all these years--is the biggest worry for some. If Rome has been wrong about such things as Papal Primacy, the Marian dogmata, the nature of justification, etc., then it would not only be a bad idea, it would be virtually heretical to rejoin her. But this sort of view is typical only within the more Protestant parts of Anglicanism, and I don't think it is very widespread. In any event, there is not much one can do about that sort of view, since the arguments against it are out there and anyone who is not yet persuaded by these arguments is unlikely to be persuaded by kindly invitations to just forget the whole thing. Much more to the point, I think, is the fact that many hundreds of thousands of Anglicans--if not millions--have secretly been longing for this sort of invitation for years, and now here it is. If charity and unity can be miraculous, then here is a miracle for you.

What would I have done had this invitation been made prior to my conversion in 1983? It's difficult to say with any certainty, obviously, but I remember quite clearly thinking at the time that I wanted to work for reconciliation. I had followed the work of the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission with great interest, and at that time the prospects for reunification did not seem so dim as they had come to seem in recent years as the Anglican Communion slowly began tearing itself to bits. The Anglican Use is an attractive one, and I imagine that I would have taken advantage of an offer such as this; but after 26 years of the Latin Rite I don't see myself getting rid of all my Latin Breviaries and taking up the Anglican one (though it is a wonderful thing and I heartily recommend it--you can order one here), or trying to find an Anglican Use parish somewhere around here. Time is grace, and I think that, in general, it is a mistake to try to undo what one has done thoughtfully and prayerfully (unless of course one discovers some serious error in one's thoughts and prayers). So I remain quite happy and content with my own choice, while rejoicing in this opportunity that has been made available to all those I was grieved to leave behind 26 years ago.

Those who have followed my last few posts will know that I particularly have Robert Duncan in my thoughts and prayers today. When I wrote my last entry, Sunt Lacrimae Rerum, I really had no idea that this sort of thing might happen, and I really wonder what his response will be. Many years ago I would have guessed that he might take advantage of such an offer, but as I indicated in my last post, it seems I did not know him as well as I had thought. So who knows? One can only hope and pray. Time is grace.

In the meantime, sursum corda! Rejoice in the Lord, for he has done great things for us, and this is surely one of them.

Sunt Lacrimae Rerum

It has been a while since I blogged about the man who brought me into the Church--by which I mean "Christian Church" this time, rather than "Roman Catholic Church". I thought of Robert Duncan again today because I have been getting some email about me previous post here, the one about appearing on Marcus Grodi's The Journey Home program on EWTN. I mentioned on that program how hearing the preaching of Fr. Duncan, when he was still an associate pastor for campus ministry at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was one of the principal factors in moving me from abject atheism to Christian theism. There were many other factors as well, of course, but the Christian community is essentially just that--a community, and so when one thinks of what brought one in to such a community it is inevitable that one thinks of the persons who helped to form one's conscience in such a way as to finally be able to discern the presence of God permeating all of creation.

Fr. Duncan was not the only such person in my life--I can name several others, beginning with my own mother who, as I also mentioned on The Journey Home, was not herself a theist (possibly she was some sort of deist, but I fear I know little about what her precise views actually were). But she taught me the words to the Lord's Prayer when I was just five years old, and although I have no idea what she herself thought about that prayer, either at that time or later in her life, it was surely a gift of some sort, freely given and dutifully received, though I never really realized how great a gift until decades later, when I finally learned to believe what the words of the prayer really say.

I don't think I could have learned to believe those words if Fr. Duncan, and certain other individuals like him, had not shown me by his own example what those words actually mean. Such discoveries are not to be made by the individual working on his own in the dark, separated from his brethren, whatever the post-Reformation individualist may like to think. And so, as I have written here several times before, Fr. Duncan was instrumental in my becoming a Christian, and I will always respect and admire him for that, another great gift that I was slow to appreciate.

That is why I find Fr. Duncan's present state of affairs so utterly depressing. He was deposed as the Bishop of Pittsburgh in the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States by that denomination's Presiding Bishop, Katherine Jefferts Schori, in September of last year. In my opinion, that would have been the perfect opportunity for him to find a way to make an appearance on Marcus Grodi's program. Given the number of ex-Anglican priests of my acquaintance--Al Kimel, Jeffrey Steel, Trevor Nicholls, among others--I can't help but hope to meet more, especially one who is already an old friend. But that, alas, was not to be. What was to be instead reads like something out of one of my worst nightmares--or one of my many rants right here in this blog about denominationalism in this country.

Things began, if not with the desired appeal to the Pastoral Provision of 1980, at least with a step in the right direction: Fr. Duncan made a move to associate with those elements of worldwide Anglicanism that still cling, however precariously, to the precious traditions of our faith. Happily, these elements are more numerous once one moves outside of the United States. But for whatever banal reason, the leadership in the worldwide Anglican communion feels a strange loyalty to that train wreck that is now the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, a body that has moved steadily away from authentic Christian belief ever since the election of John Shelby Spong to the episcopacy. Consequently Fr. Duncan did not receive the welcome that he deserved among those in communion with Canterbury. This too, would have been a good time to contact Marcus Grodi. What happened instead, sadly, was aptly described--it breaks my heart to say it--by Ephraim Radner, one of the co-founders of the Anglican Communion Network, in his statement of resignation from the ACN:

It is with sorrow and deep disappointment that I tender my resignation from the Anglican Communion Network. Since the time I assisted in its founding, its leaders, members, and mission have been dear to me, even when I have disagreed with some of its corporate actions. The recent statements by the Moderator of the Network, Robert Duncan, however, so contradict my sense of calling within this part of Christ’s Body, the Anglican Communion, that I have no choice but to disassociate myself from this group, whom I had once hoped might prove an instrument of renewal, not of destruction, of building up, not of tearing down.

Bishop Duncan has now declared the See of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference — two of the four Instruments of Communion within our tradition – to be "lost". He has said that God is "doing a new thing" in allowing these elements to founder and be let go. I find this judgment to be dangerously precipitous and unfair under circumstances when current, faithful, and hard work is being done by many to bolster these Instruments as servants of our common life in Christ. The judgment is also astonishingly self-confident and autonomously prophetic in a mode not unlike the baleful claims to visionary authority of those who have long misled the Episcopal Church. Finally, the declaration in effect cancels out the other two Instruments of Communion that also uphold our common Anglican life – the Primates’ Meeting and the Anglican Consultative Council. It is the entire Anglican Communion, therefore, that Bp. Duncan is declaring to be "lost". The judgment is far too sweeping.

Bp. Duncan has, in the end, decided to start a new church. He may call it "Anglican" if he wishes, though I do not recognize the name in these kinds of actions that break communion rather than build it up – for such building is what I have long perceived to be the "thing" God was "doing" with the earthen vessel of our tradition. In founding his new church, furthermore, he is, I fear, not working for the healing of our broken Body, but repeating the mistakes of Christians in the past, whose zeal has not only brought suffering to themselves, but has wounded the Church of Christ. It is not only his own diocese that his statements and actions will affect; it is many others, including parishes within them, many of which have worked for faithfulness and peace, truth in love, for some time, and for whom new troubles and divisions are now promised. Enough of this. I cannot follow him in this way. There is great work to be done, with hope and with joy, if also with suffering endurance for the faith once delivered, in the vineyards of the Anglican Communion where the Lord has called us and still maintains His calling; just as there has been in the past, and all for the glory of the larger Church Catholic.

He has, indeed, "decided to start a new church", and as my faithful readers will remember, that is one of the things that I so despise about Protestantism generally--the instinct to reboot things in one's own image that Radner rightly describes as "astonishingly self-confident and autonomously prophetic".

The only saving feature to all of this that I can see is that Fr. Duncan has at least moved towards orthodoxy, if not towards orthopraxis, simply by moving away from what was so egregiously heterodox and heretical. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and one ought not to praise the workmanship of such a clock just because one happens to look at it at the right time.

So what is a person in my position to do? When he remained in the Episcopal Church, Fr. Duncan was a voice for orthodoxy crying out among the heretics. In becoming the archbishop of what is basically his own denomination (this is, of course, somewhat hyperbolic--he did not create the "Anglican Church in North America", but still, I can't help but be reminded of this guy), he has done something that ordinarily would strike me as just plain wacky. Yet, of course, what he has done he has done in the name of orthodoxy, a kind of protestation against what Protestantism has become. While protesting the Protestants is perhaps not a bad idea, it can't be a good idea unless it leads you back to Rome. That is clearly not in the cards here, so orthodox or not this cannot be seen as an intrinsically good move.

I suppose the good news is that this provides further confirmation of the truth that our freedom lies in our capacity to make mistakes of such grandiose proportions.

Catholicissimi!

So last weekend I hopped on a plane and flew down to Birmingham, Alabama. I've never been to Alabama before, and in some respects I suspect that I have yet to see the real Alabama, because the purpose of my trip was not to visit the Yellowhammer State but to put in an appearance on Marcus Grodi's Journey Home program on EWTN. I've never been on TV before, either, so the whole trip was something of a novelty for me.

I was picked up at the airport by an EWTN car, and it was a short drive to "the compound", barely 20 minutes at the most. Since it was Sunday there weren't many people about and, in particular, there didn't seem to be anybody in the little booth at the entrance to check our passports or anything--we just drove right in and I was taken to a house (called "Madonna House" by the locals) where I would stay for the duration. It seems that EWTN owns a number of houses on its property and some of the employees live in them, some of them are used for guests, and at least one of them is used as a set for some of their shows.

The house was deserted when I got there, but I knew that there would be two more gentlemen joining me before my stay was completed. That didn't stop me from looking around a bit. It was a modest house, tastefully decorated. Lots of Catholic art on the walls, and a crucifix in every room (except the bathroom; I didn't actually look in the garage). There was a big TV just like in a hotel, and it had cable, including ETWN. I didn't check to see whether it blocked the sorts of channels that regular EWTN viewers would find objectionable. There was a computer but the internet connection wasn't working, which was probably a good thing or I would have wasted a lot of time reading my email when I should have been preparing my classes for my return to Ohio.

Since I had been traveling all day I had not had an opportunity to attend Mass, so when I heard bells ringing I thought that perhaps there was going to be an evening Mass that I could attend, so I high-tailed it to the chapel--the very chapel where they have the Masses that one can watch on EWTN each day. It turned out not to be Mass, but Vespers, which was the next best thing as far as I was concerned, so I stayed and enjoyed the largish community of folks who had turned out. After Vespers there was a Benediction service, and then I returned to my little house. I was soon joined there by Fr. Trevor Nicholls, a former Anglican Priest turned Catholic priest (thanks to the Pastoral Provision of 1980). He turned out to be a delightful conversationalist, and we had many fine conversations over the course of just a day and a half.

Monday morning dawned early for me, what with it being in a different time zone and all, and I got up to say the Office. By this time I was starting to get a little nervous about my appearance on Journey Home--what on earth was I going to talk about for an hour? My own conversion story seems prosaic and uninspiring to me, and it is very difficult to imagine why on earth anybody would want to hear all the gory details. My confidence was not the least bit increased by my conversations with Fr. Nicholls, who was not only far more articulate than I but who also had a nifty British accent sure to wow the folks in the audience.

To take my mind off my troubles, I attended the daily Mass at noon. The venue was small and it was packed full of people--I had to stand at the back, along with several others. The liturgy was exceptionally well executed, I thought, with great reverence all around. Indeed, many who received Holy Communion did so kneeling on the ground, and even those who did not kneel to receive made a genuflection rather than bowing the head prior to reception. Servers held small patens under the chins of all who received.

After Mass I walked around the compound, but there wasn't much to explore: part of the enclosure is a monastery, and one cannot just walk in and look about. On the other hand, right next to the house where I was staying was a "farm" of satellite dishes--seven in all, one of them as large as the two-storey house in which I was staying. (You can see these dishes, and the house in which I stayed, if you look at the EWTN compound with Google Earth. You will not see me snooping around the dishes, and you certainly won't see me trying to break into the monastery. I really have no idea what you're talking about.)

When it was finally time for the taping, I changed into my best dress uniform and walked over to the studio with Fr. Nicholls. His uniform was much nicer than mine, being all black and priestly, but I did have on a nice tie and a sweet little silk hankie that Lisa gave me for Christmas about twelve years ago. Nevertheless as I walked along beside him I couldn't help feeling like a pair of old brown shoes at a black tie party.

The studio was deserted except for Marcus Grodi, the host of The Journey Home, and his crew, which seemed to me to number fewer than a dozen people. There were three cameramen, a Franciscan stage director who also applied makeup to everyone, and the producer and director and whoever else was back in "the booth". Although there were chairs for an audience, there was nobody there watching the taping. Some episodes of the show are live, and they take calls from viewers and questions form the audience, but both shows we taped that night were canned.

Fr. Nicholls went first, which meant that I had to watch him be all urbane and sophisticated before I went out there with my countrified Ohio ways. Shucks, Padre, that there was some mighty fancy talkin'! When my turn came I was still a little nervous, but since the studio was basically empty it didn't seem so bad. I soon discovered that I wasn't going to have any trouble filling up the time allotted--what with my blabbermouth ways and all--and the conversation seemed to go fairly smoothly. At the end, however, I couldn't help feel that I had done a terrible job. It seemed that I hadn't really said anything very substantive--but on the other hand, I was just supposed to be bearing witness to my conversion, so I don't think there was any expectation that I produce philosophical gems (if only I could get the folks at Ohio University to see things the same way).

Then it was all over. Fr. Nicholls and I talked long into the evening about many things, and then the next day I flew home. All in all I found the experience rather exciting, and one certainly can't help wishing that one lived in a community with such a strong Catholic identity. The task, I suppose, is to make a community where one is, rather than travel around looking for one to sneak into. It's difficult in a secular university to make such a community, but we already have the beginnings of one here, at least among some of the Catholic students. But I have to admit that when the guy who drove me back to the airport told me that he had retired from the fire department in Florida in order to take a job at EWTN, the idea didn't seem like a bad one to me.

Ritual Apologies

The Rule of Benedict forms the backbone of Western monasticism. It has its roots in the coenobitic tradition that began in Egypt in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and draws upon such diverse sources as St Basil, St Augustine, John Cassian, and the anonymous Rule of the Master. While it is certainly worth reading on its own, one learns a great deal more from reading it with a commentary, and I can highly recommend the commentary of Fr. Terrence Kardong, OSB (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996).

Recently I came across a passage in Kardong's commentary in which he discusses the numerous times St Benedict calls for some sort of "correction" or "punishment" for "faults" committed during the liturgy (in this case "liturgy" refers to the opus Dei ["work of God"] or the Divine Office). The language used in Rule 45 moves gradually from mere mistake (fallor) through bad mistake (delinquo) to bad intention (culpa). Often these "faults" are merely mistakes in the chanting of the words of the liturgy or some other failure to follow the rubrics carefully. But in commenting on the progression from fallor to culpa Kardong says

...the author moves from description of the error to refusal to acknowledge the error. That recalcitrance is the real "fault" involved. And indeed such contumacy is the only real fault that Benedict ever punishes. But the effect here is to make it sound as if all such errors were rooted in bad will, which is manifestly not the case. Indeed, the whole question of liturgical faults and their correction is somewhat vexing. On the one hand, no one wants a slovenly and undisciplined liturgy. Yet the question remains as to how to achieve that goal without introducing disciplinary measures alien to the very spirit of the liturgy itself. In response to Vatican II, which calls for a much more humane approach to liturgy, most Benedictine communities have distanced themselves from the rather draconian measures suggested by Rule 45. And this has been done without any noticeable sign of deterioration, at least in the Divine Office.

This is a topic near and dear to my own heart, because like many converts to Catholicism (especially converts to Catholicism from Anglicanism) I am deeply wedded to the view that it is precisely the formal beauty and spiritual reverence of a carefully executed liturgy that connects the participant to the underlying realities of which the liturgical movements are signs. Some of these signs are particularly important ones, because they are Sacramental signs. There was much uproar in the 1980s over various liturgical experiments in which substances other than bread and wine were used as Sacred Elements for consecration, and in the end the Vatican issued an instruction requiring only unleavened wheat bread and real fermented grape juice (i.e., "wine") be used for consecration. We don't see the Vatican intervening in the case of lesser signs, although very recently there have been some exceptions to this general rule. For example, the faithful who approach to receive Communion are to make a profound reverence prior to reception--the intention behind this instruction was to emphasize through a sign the unity that is Communion by eliminating the many disparate forms of personal piety that one sometimes could find within a single parish (kneeling upon exiting the pew, for example, or making a sign of the cross after reception) and imposing a kind of unity of action on those who participate. But I doubt that we will see any Vatican instructions about whether one ought to bow one╒s head at the Divine Name (as some do, but many do not), and we certainly will see no penalties imposed for those who fail to follow these instructions (the situation is different for the Sacramental signs, of course, but laymen need not worry about those sorts of penalties).

So why the fuss over the chanting of the Psalms at the Office? In antiquity, monks who made such mistakes had to lie prostrate at the feet of their confreres while the latter filed out of the oratory after the liturgy, begging their forgiveness. In modern monasteries the penalty has been greatly reduced, if that is the right word: monks typically just touch their lips with a finger, or tap the pew, when they make a mistake. I'm not entirely sure that this is really what Kardong has in mind when he writes that the penalties have become more "humane" since Vatican II, so I won't comment on that. What I find interesting in this is not so much the penal character of the Rule, but rather the symbolic function of penalties in general as they are implemented in the Rule.

I play a lot of soccer, and anyone who plays soccer at the amateurish level at which I play it will often hear players all over the field calling out "my bad", "my fault", "sorry!" and the like (along with much more colorful epithets that I will pass over in silence). These are all of them admissions of mistakes, blunders that may well cost a possession or a goal or, in certain kinds of cases, an entire game. There is no requirement that anybody say anything at all after such a mistake, and in some sorts of competitions--notably those at a higher level of competitiveness--one doesn't hear them very often, if at all. I think that this can be explained by the sort of community one is dealing with. A pick-up game played by amateurs has a very different sort of social structure to it from what one might find in a competitive game played by professionals. Amateurs at a pick-up game often are friends getting together just to have some fun or to get some exercise. They often don't keep score, and they usually don't get into fights with other players. They see one another off the field at the grocery store, the farmers' market, their kids' schools, and other places, and they are friendly to each other in these other settings even if they are not otherwise very close socially. They talk about the games, of course, but they also wind up talking about other things. They are, in short, a kind of community. Professional athletes are often friends, too, of course, and they see each other in other settings, but I suggest that the situation for them is really quite different. When David Beckham plays soccer, he is not doing it for the exercise or even because it is fun (though it might be). He is doing it because it is his job. If he messes up, or if another player messes up, there might be some recriminations of some kind later, but then there might not be. It's just a job. What usually gets more notice than the mistakes are the great plays, the goals scored, the fancy footwork. Successes are admired and played and replayed on the Sports news or on YouTube; mistakes are often just ignored (unless, of course, they are spectacular ones, like running the wrong way with the ball, or scoring an own-goal). In a professional setting, the point is to play the game well, and it is the well-played game that gets the attention and the highlight footage attention. The game is an end in itself, not a sign of some greater end.

This difference in social structure explains why one hears "my bad" more often in amateur games than in professional games. True, amateurs probably make a lot more mistakes than professionals, but I think more importantly in the amateur setting the person who has made the mistake is more prone to say something like that because he is more prone to be sensitive to how his mistake will affect the other people he is playing with. Since there is no money on the line, to say "my bad" after such a mistake clearly has no purely utilitarian motive behind it: one says it because one genuinely wants to own up to something that was not done as well as it ought to have been done. The other players probably do not care all that much about the mistake, but I can say from personal experience that the other players appreciate hearing it the admission of a mistake, because it shows that the person who said it cares about how the game is going, and he cares about that not because he fears losing his bonus pay or because he is going to lose a bet, but because he sees that it was because of something that he did that the game was made somehow less, both for him and for the other players, and he is sorry about that.

Sports metaphors can be pushed only so far, of course, but my idea is this. In a coenobitic community the emphasis is not on perfection of liturgical technique, but on communal love. One does not bemoan a poorly executed neume because one wants to strive for a perfect performance as some kind of end in itself, but because the execution of the neumes in choir is a sign of something much more important than mere melody. The monks chant the Psalms together--in unison--because they are one body. Their execution of the liturgy is a sign of their community, and if an individual does something that makes the sign less effective, it diminishes the effectiveness of that sign. It is, in a certain sense, an insult to the unity of the community to be slovenly in representing it through signs, just as it is poor manners to slur your words and talk indistinctly when you answer a question someone has asked you in earnest. Since communal love is the highest Christian virtue, we are talking about something far more important here than mere bad manners. If you find it obnoxious that some artist somewhere has decided to immerse a Crucifix in a jar or urine and call it a work of art, or to portray the Virgin Mary using elephant dung as a medium, then you should see the importance of avoiding liturgical errors.

Just as I don't expect an amateur soccer player to run off the field in tears when he makes a mistake, neither do I think it essential that monks--or anyone else, really--prostrate themselves and beg forgiveness after liturgical mistakes. I guess I agree with Kardong that the finger to the lips or the tap on the pew will do, just as "my bad" will do in the soccer game. But that something ought to be done, if not to make the error go away, at least to admit that one is part of a community and that one has in some way diminished that community, whether intentionally or not, I think is an important point. Indeed, I think it may be one of the many gifts of monasticism to the rest of us that there is such a sense of communal obligation over such things. I don't mean to suggest that we introduce a whole new set of rubrics for things we ought to do when we screw up at Mass. I will be content if people are just a little more careful about things than many appear to be these days. And I certainly would have no objection if Andres Serrano were to lie prostrate and beg everyone╒s forgiveness for "Piss Christ".

Talking Past Each Other

There used to be something of a schism in the domain that is professional philosophy. During the 1960s and 1970s you could find some philosophers who would categorize themselves as "analytic", others who would categorize themselves as "Continental". This dichotomy was predominantly maintained by philosophers working in American colleges and universities, and it had to do, primarily, with macho posturing. Analytic philosophers, for the most part, agreed with Richard Rorty that philosophy had taken a "linguistic turn" sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, and that good philosophy consisted of the careful analysis of concepts and arguments. Continental philosophers, by contrast, used to be portrayed as being less interested in logical rigor (at least of the sort favored by self-styled "analytic" philosophers) and more interested in metaphysics and politics.

This false dichotomy was effectively emasculated by Michael Dummett in his 1996 book The Origins of Analytic Philosophy, in which he shows how the sort of philosophy practiced by both of these groups is descended from a common ancestor. Just as chimps and humans differ only very slightly in their genetic makeup, so, too, analytic and Continental philosophers have more in common then some of them may like to admit. (Some of them don't mind admitting it, just so long as we are straight about which ones are the chimps.) It turns out that most of the differences in this genetic makeup find expression in modes of discourse or, to put it in layman's terms, jargon. Analytic philosophers like to talk about inferences, abductions, modus ponens, punctuated equilibria, epistemological standpoints, defeasible theories, and supervenience. Continental types like to talk about subjectivity, The Other, bracketing of horizons, and manifolds of experience. To the outsider, all of it is gobbledygook, but for those of us who are members of the club, you can tell who the chimps are by their vocalizations.

I was reminded of this false dichotomy this evening after reading through a post by an old mentor of mine, Fr. Robert Connor, who blogs at The Truth Will Make You Free. In a series of posts there, Fr. Connor takes George Weigel to task for "misunderstanding" Benedict XVI's "hermeneutic of continuity". The posts are many and long--I particularly recommend this one, this one, and this one. It seems as though the principal target of Fr. Connor's critique is Weigel's complaint against some aspects of Caritas in Veritate. Other Catholic bloggers have already taken Weigel to task for his apparently schizoid reading of that encyclical, and I won't add to the confusion by taking him on myself. Upon reading Weigel's critique, I did get the impression that he was rather selective with his material, but one thing that he clearly did not get wrong, in my view, is the import of Benedict XVI's famous slogan, the "hermeneutic of continuity". The expression is drawn from the Pope's address to the Roman curia of 22 December 2005, and it refers to the fact that the Second Vatican Council stands in a relationship of doctrinal continuity with the totality of Magisterial teachings of the Church leading up to Vatican II. Although this fact should come as a surprise to nobody, there certainly have been pundits who wished to assert that "Vatican II changed everything", and by "change" they mean that the Council reversed, or else substantively modified, traditional teachings. This view Benedict rejected as the "hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture", that is, these pundits think that many of the Church's traditional teachings--the ones the pundits dislike the most, of course--are not only open to revision, but have, in fact, been revised.

This sort of a view is incoherent, and Benedict was right to contrast it with the proper view of the Church's Magisterium as continuous and unbroken. Weigel has put it this way:

Throughout his pontificate, and in Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI has been at pains to stress the continuity of Catholic life and thought before and after the Second Vatican Council: what he terms a “hermeneutics of continuity,” as distinguished from a “hermeneutics of rupture.” Or, in lay language, the claim that the Catholic Church reinvented itself at Vatican II is simply wrong.

Yet this statement, and others like it, from Weigel is what my old friend Fr. Connor objects to. He says:

It’s difficult not to contradict Weigel with Karol Wojtyla’s profound assessment of Vatican II as crossing the threshold from noetic object to subject. Nothing could be more profound and telling in that it is a reorienting of the entire doctrine of the Church from propositional truth to personal “attitude” of self-gift in the ontological horizon of subjectivity.

I don't know how difficult it is not to contradict Weigel, but I do know how hard it is to make sense of Fr. Connor's objection to Weigel, since I've been trying to do just that for some time now and I can't do it. As I read through Fr. Connor's various posts on this topic, it seems to me that he actually agrees with Weigel that the Church's teachings are consistent from the beginning right through Vatican II; his main point of departure is not on the logical point (which was also Benedict's), but on a more esoteric point that seems to come, not from anything Benedict had to say, but from a decidedly anti-analytic philosophical stance. In short, Weigel and his ilk are the chimps. But are they wrong? Well, about some things they are, but not about the hermeneutic of continuity.

Fr. Connor is surely right to note, as he does in many of his posts, that there is an emphasis in the Magisterium on self-transcendence and the struggle for holiness. Is this new since the Council? Of course not, and Fr. Connor certainly does not say that it is new--indeed, he argues, correctly, that this was one of the central teachings of the Council but that it informs rather than changes what went before (he quotes extensively from Pope John Paul the Great on this point). What Fr. Connor thinks is "new" (though not "really" new) is the emphasis on what he calls the "subjective perspective" that the Church took on at the Council. "Subjective perspective" here is Continentalese for what Fr. Connor sees as a move away from certain kinds of theological questions ("What does this teaching mean?") to certain other kinds ("What sort of a life ought I to be living if I am a member in good standing of Christ's Body the Church?"). All theology, of course, is metaphor, so whether this is new or not is irrelevant to the question of whether the substance of the Magisterium has changed. Certainly perspectives on the Magisterium change all the time--that is, indeed, precisely what gives rise to the continuity of rupture that Pope Benedict so rightly laments. But changes in perspective are not changes in substance, and on this point Fr. Connor and George Weigel are in agreement. The only real change has been in the discourse: that common descendant of analytic and Continental philosophy that Michael Dummett talked about was having its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century, just prior to Vatican I. From the time of Frege and Nietzsche we begin to see the real rift between the analytic and Continental styles of philosophy, with Frege standing at the head of the analytic tradition (it would be a little unfair to put Nietzsche at the head of the Continental tradition, but if anyone tried to do it I would not say him nay). So what was really "new" at Vatican II was a shift away from the old-fashioned Thomistic style of philosophical discourse that had dominated theological pronouncements since before Trent and towards a new style of philosophical discourse that was highly favored by the most important (so-far) of the post-conciliar Popes, John Paul the Great. Whether the Thomists and the Balthasarians are really saying anything different is a question that I will leave to my readers.

21st Century Gnosticism

Historically, gnosticism is any mystical movement in which knowledge (< Gr. gnôsis) is essential to salvation, and this knowledge is to be had only by those to whom it is granted. This special knowledge typically had to do with the deep structure of the cosmos and our place within that structure. In this connection the definition on offer from the old Catholic Encyclopedia, while clearly rather dated, is nevertheless perfectly serviceable:

A collective name for a large number of greatly-varying and pantheistic-idealistic sects, which flourished from some time before the Christian Era down to the fifth century, and which, while borrowing the phraseology and some of the tenets of the chief religions of the day, and especially of Christianity, held matter to be a deterioration of spirit, and the whole universe a depravation of the Deity, and taught the ultimate end of all being to be the overcoming of the grossness of matter and the return to the Parent-Spirit, which return they held to be inaugurated and facilitated by the appearance of some God-sent Saviour.

The role of special knowledge in these systems was often responsible for such cults taking on secretive attributes, with clandestine meetings, secret rituals, and restrictive membership requirements. In antiquity it was a pretty big deal to be a member of such a cult, and this continues to the present day in a more benign form in such institutions as Masonry or "secret brotherhoods" like Skull and Bones.

Recently I was put in mind of this sort of gnosticism after reading through some of the comments on a post at a blog I happen to like very much, Prof. Peter Gilbert's De unione ecclesiarum. Dr. Gilbert is Orthodox, but writes with an ecumenical spirit, and his posts are always intelligent and illuminating. Fr. Al Kimel brought my attention to a post at this blog a couple of months ago regarding some statements by St. Cyril of Alexandria on the principle of divine simplicity. It is well worth reading for the documentation it supplies, but the gist of it is contained in its introductory paragraph:

In the discussion to a recent post (The debate on Bekkos’s Epigraphs), some skepticism has been expressed concerning an identification, made by theologians like Thomas Aquinas and Bessarion of Nicaea, between God’s will and God’s being. For this reason, I thought I would present here a couple of passages which show St. Cyril of Alexandria asserting this very identification; i.e., he explicitly states that God is whatever he has, and that will and being in God are the same. A strong view of divine simplicity is traditional Christian theology, not a medieval, Latin invention or a Platonizing corruption.

In the comments to this post there are some remarks that are clearly gnostic in their orientation. For example:

They do NOT get it and won’t.

The author of the comment does not explicitly identify the referent of his pronomial "they", but it becomes clear from further comments posted later that he means (a) Western Christians and (b) any and all self-styled Eastern or Orthodox Christians who have any interest in some kind of meaningful ecumenical dialogue with the West. I say "self-styled" here because the author of the comment also makes it quite clear, in a later comment, that anyone who disagrees with him (that is, with the author of the comment) is not really a Christian at all:

“Fr.” [sic] Kimel,
I do not consider Peter [Gilbert], You, Michael Liccione, or any other person engaged in the pan-heresy of ecumenism as a “brother in Christ.”...If your [sic] expecting a dialogue where I view your RC views as equally valid or that I respect Dr. Gilbert [sic] views AS ‘Orthodox,’ you will be gravely disappointed. I do not believe the SCOBAdox agenda to be an Orthodox one, but rather a disease and infected with folks like Dr. Gilbert serving as one, among many, exemplars.

More interesting, however, is the claim that "they do NOT get it and won't". Get what? Well, The Truth, obviously--and they "won't" get it, because for whatever reason they are incapable of seeing the compelling nature of his (the author of the comment) views. This is gnosticism plain and simple: a claim to possess an important truth that is literally unknowable by certain persons, either because of their willful blindness in the face of "evidence" or because of some ideology to which they have sold their souls.

Who does know The Truth? Well, listen again to Our Author:

You’re not going to convince me of anything that you are giving because I had the privilege of learning these things at the feet of someone far greater than any one here arguing these points. In fact, as far as debate is concerned I think people are more impressed by my presentation of the data. I can solve questions that have plaqued [sic] western christianity, like the Problem of Evil, Predestination/Free-Will, and a Free Creation.

There are some interesting claims here, but first among them is the claim to have learned at the feet of a Master--someone whose arguments are literally irrefutable, even by compelling evidence. (I'm not altogether certain that Our Author is not also a Young Earther--it would not surprise me to learn that he is, since his appeal to "evidence" and "authority" is rather similar.) So no matter what anybody says, Our Author is not going to be convinced, since he has learned from The Master who has no equals. Thanks to this secret learning, he can solve any and all of the classic "problems" associated with Christian belief.

It is impossible to know for certain what sorts of emotional, intellectual, or inter-personal crises could lead someone to think in this way, but I suspect that the use of the term "infect" is, ironically, rather apt, since the gnostic world-view permeates this persons writing even outside the domain of theology. In other comments he writes such things as:

I was battling this type of modernism as a Traditionalist Roman Catholic, so it is by no mistake or accident that I scratched and sniffed my way into Traditional Orthodoxy...Even without the current theological mess, Rome is a highly compromised body, from Freemasonry run amuck in its butchered liturgy to the compromises it has made with the International Banking Cartel (well attested to by Hans Kung and Malachi Martin; folks who knew the continental figures and internal workings of the Vatican all too well). To be honest with you, and I mean this all sincerely, I could not walk into that place (the Vatican) without some realization that I am in a synagogue of Satan."

I found this particular comment rather revealing, as I have had quite a bit of experience with folks who see International Conspiracies, Trilateral Commisions, Area Fifty-oners, and other Scary Types behind every tree, and their thinking is all remarkably gnostic. It is, indeed, rather ironic that Our Author also avers his interest in The Truth in this way:

And much to Kimel’s ado, I submit myself to an authority: an apostolic bishop. I’m just very careful and perceptive in my selection [sic etiam!] (as we all should be). Confessing right doctrine is very important to me.

One does not know whether to laugh or to cry at such a claim, but it is certainly not surprising that one has to "shop around", so to speak, to find "an apostolic bishop" who endorses views such as these. Knowing who the "bishop" is leads me to suspect that, instead of a Synagogue of Satan, Our Author has joined a Synagogue of Two. This is why Our Author does not realize that he is a gnostic: he believes that it is not just his own opinion that is The Truth--rather, it is the opinion of "Orthodoxy" to which he subscribes. But it is an "Orthodoxy" of his own making, since he has set himself up as the final arbiter of which "apostolic bishop" is the one to hitch one's rig to. How this differs from mainline Protestantism is anyone's guess, but it is typical of the gnostic that he is in a kind of denial about the source of his own beliefs coming from within himself and having no real grounding in the external evidence that he himself cites. Instead, he looks for evidence that is already consonant with his own views, labels that "Orthodox", and then claims to be adhering to "Orthodoxy".

The greatest irony of all, however, is the number of times Our Author accuses the likes of Peter Gilbert, Alvin Kimel, and Michael Liccione of being the gnostics. Indeed, he uses the term in just about all of his several comments to the original post. His love affair with secret knowledge leads him to be jealous of others whom he suspects of believing that they, rather than he, are the ones who have it. So we must tear them down, label them heretics and intellectual hacks, and excoriate anyone who takes them seriously. Talking to them, he says, is a "waste of time". It is always a waste of time to engage in a discussion when you already know everything there is to know, and your interlocutor, for some insane reason, fails to grasp that fact about you. No prophet is welcome in his own land, after all.

The comments on Dr. Gilbert's original post are now closed; the whole episode is extremely sad, not only because of the sad divisions among the Members of Christ's Body that it brings into such high relief, but also--and principally--because it is such a stark and revealing portrait of a troubled soul. Some of the early gnostic sects were clearly intended to bring a kind of ataraxia, or freedom from concern, to their adherents, hence the final irony lies in the clear and disheartening suffering that such a world-view clearly evinces. If Christianity is a way of seeing, a way of experiencing the world, we must all pray for Our Author, and all who see the world and experience it as he does.