Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Nativity Prep
There's a great story at NPR about Nativity Prep in Wilmington, Delaware. It will make you proud to be a Catholic. If you know Latin, it will make you proud of that, too.
Saturday, March 18, 2006
March Sadness
I picked Duke to go all the way in my local pool, but although their chances of winning may be good, I didn't manage to pick some of the upsets that have already occurred. My pool is calculating the scores by multiplying the round number by the seed number, so even if I picked the champion there is still a very good chance that I will not win the pool.
Only four months until football preseason!
Only four months until football preseason!
Heirs by Adoption
Speaking of Saint Joseph, I'm often struck by how some folks continue to view adoptive children as, in some sense, not the "real" children of their adoptive parents. It is a strangely old-fashioned, parochial view, I think, to regard biological children as somehow more "authentic" than adoptive children. You don't run into this attitude all that often any more, but it has not disappeared by any means. When I was a kid it was endemic. You still find references to it in the popular culture--claims made by mean siblings that "You must be adopted" to siblings who aren't really adopted, or "I must be adopted" being said as a way of distancing oneself from the wacky shenanigans of the rest of the family. I suspect that these kinds of jokes are not all that funny to kids who really are adopted and who may have been struggling to come to terms with their status.
There are two manifestations of adoptive status in the Christian religion that ought to make us think twice about that sort of attitude. The first and most obvious is the relationship between Our Lord and Saint Joseph. Jesus, the Martyrology reads, "wished to be called the son of Joseph", and "He was obedient to him just as a son to his father". The second is the status of every Christian as an adoptive heir to the Kingdom of God. Through Christ, who lived as an adoptive child, God has adopted all of us as His children. That status makes us ontologically different, and the relationship that exists between us and God is no less authentic for being an adoptive relationship.
Whether thoughts along these lines will serve to comfort those who struggle with the fear that their "natural" parents somehow didn't want them or love them enough to keep them is perhaps difficult to know with any certainty. The Gospel message itself doesn't always comfort everyone, even though it should. Human nature is too weak to understand what it does not experience for itself, to paraphrase Plato.
There are two manifestations of adoptive status in the Christian religion that ought to make us think twice about that sort of attitude. The first and most obvious is the relationship between Our Lord and Saint Joseph. Jesus, the Martyrology reads, "wished to be called the son of Joseph", and "He was obedient to him just as a son to his father". The second is the status of every Christian as an adoptive heir to the Kingdom of God. Through Christ, who lived as an adoptive child, God has adopted all of us as His children. That status makes us ontologically different, and the relationship that exists between us and God is no less authentic for being an adoptive relationship.
Whether thoughts along these lines will serve to comfort those who struggle with the fear that their "natural" parents somehow didn't want them or love them enough to keep them is perhaps difficult to know with any certainty. The Gospel message itself doesn't always comfort everyone, even though it should. Human nature is too weak to understand what it does not experience for itself, to paraphrase Plato.
Sollemnity Transferred
For the two or three people who actually read the Martyrology over there on the right hand side of the screen let me just note that it is always keyed to the calendar date, not to the liturgical tables of precedence. So it shows tomorrow as the Sollemnity of Saint Joseph, even though in the dioceses of the United States the liturgical celebration of that Sollemnity has been transferred to Monday since tomorrow it is impeded by the Third Sunday of Lent.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Every Jot and Tittle
If you've ever browsed around in various translations of the Gospel of St. John, you may have noticed that there is some difference of opinion as to how best to punctuate verses 3 and 4 of the first chapter. In the King James Version, for example, the two verses read
Punctuation as such was not something that was in widespread use in antiquity. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find it much in evidence anywhere in the 1st century, when the Gospel texts were first being committed to writing. In fact, putting spaces between words was not exactly a common practice, let alone putting in little marks to indicate new sentences or breaks in thought. The text of these two verses on most manuscripts would have looked vaguely like this (I'm attempting to imitate the look of uncials here--it's only an approximation):
In the case of John 1.3-4 the problem of breaking up the text into sense units is an interesting one. We have evidence that St. Jerome punctuated these two verses differently at different stages of his career. In his commentary on Habbakuk, dating from around 391-392, he cites the verses in the form employed in the New American Bible. But in many of his works dating from the period 401-416, including his Homily on the Gospel of John (401-410), he cites these verses in the form employed by the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version. So within a period of about 10 years, it seems, St. Jerome changed his mind about the best way to read these verses. What may have prompted the change?
The Macedonians were given their name from the fact that it was thought that they were followers of Macedonius, Bishop of Constantinople from around 342 until he was deposed in 360 by the Arian Council of Constantinople. Although the association with Macedonius is doubtful, the Macedonian heresy, for better or for worse, was attributed by St. Jerome to him. The fundamental feature of this heresy is the denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit (hence the Macedonians are also known as the Pneumatomakhoi). In his Homily on the Gospel of John St. Jerome notes that there are many who read these verses "badly" (male legunt), and he goes on to explain their error this way. The heretics appeal to the punctuation that we find nowadays in the New American Bible, and that St. Jerome himself had used in his commentary on Habbakuk. Since it is the Holy Spirit that gives life through Christ, the heretics argued, we must read the Gospel as telling us that the Holy Spirit is a creature of the Word, since the Gospel itself tells us that "what came-into-existence through him was life, and that life was the light of men." In other words, the Gospel itself clearly tells us that the life that was the light of men, i.e., the Holy Spirit, was one of the things that came-into-existence through the Word. So St. Jerome, in his Homily on the Gospel of John, recommended reading the verses differently--in particular, he recommended the punctuation that we find in the King James Version--in order to avoid the possibility of reading the Gospel in the Macedonian, Pneumatikomakhoi way. Subsequent Fathers relied on St. Jerome's recommendation, changing the punctuation of the verses so that they say rather explicitly that only those things that came-into-existence (i.e., not the Holy Spirit) came into existence through the Word. Period. New Sentence. "In Him was life," etc.
It is worth pointing out, I think, that the older reading, the punctuation adopted by St. Jerome in his Commentary on Habbakuk, is preferable to the later, anti-Macedonian reading. First, the anti-Macedonian reading is extremely ad hoc, and has the Gospel telling us something rather banal, namely, that the things that came into existence came into existence through the thing that brought them into existence. That's like saying that all paintings are painted by painters. It's true, but trivially so. Second, it has the Gospel informing us that there was life in the Word, and that life was the light of men. Taken with the previous verse, this is just a restatement of the same thought: the Word is what brings things into existence and, in the case of living things, causes them to be living things. None of this is very interesting, but of course trivial truths are certainly truths, so we cannot accuse St. Jerome of perverting the meaning of the Gospel for purely polemical purposes.
However, the older punctuation tells us something quite extraordinary and remarkable. It tells us about something specific that came about through the agency of the Word, namely, the renewal of that eternal life that was lost by men at the Beginning. It is worth pointing out that this was the reading favored by St. Jerome when he was translating the Scriptures into the version that we now know as the Vulgate. This means, in my opinion, that it is arguably a more authentic reading of the tradition, since it was not influenced by a polemical purpose, namely, the combatting of a semi-arian heresy.
Little differences can add up to big ones, and the ways in which we read our texts are not always matters of easy and unambiguous decisions. In the present case the placement of a single comma can make an enormous difference. Imagine having to sort things out without any punctuation marks at all!
(3) All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. (4) In him was life; and the life was the light of men.This punctuation was maintained in the Revised Standard Version, which reads
(3) all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. (4) In him was life, and the life was the light of men.In the Revised New Testament of the New American Bible, however, the verses are punctuated this way:
(3) All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be (4) through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race.If you look into this matter further you will find that the majority of translations made before the 1980s favor the punctuation adopted by the King James Version and retained in the Revised Standard Version, but that there is a growing preference for the punctuation adopted in the New American Bible. What difference, exactly, could any of this possibly make?
Punctuation as such was not something that was in widespread use in antiquity. Indeed, one is hard pressed to find it much in evidence anywhere in the 1st century, when the Gospel texts were first being committed to writing. In fact, putting spaces between words was not exactly a common practice, let alone putting in little marks to indicate new sentences or breaks in thought. The text of these two verses on most manuscripts would have looked vaguely like this (I'm attempting to imitate the look of uncials here--it's only an approximation):
ΠANTA∆IAYTOYEGENETOKAIXΩPICAUTOYEGENETOOY∆EENIf it's hard to imagine reading a text like that for very long you needn't worry: not many folks in those days could read anyway. These manuscripts weren't for the idle middle classes lounging around after an eight hour day down at the office. The market for these texts was primarily a scholarly one (the word "scholar" is derived from the Greek word skholê, which means "leisure time"). The scholarly set was familiar enough with the writing conventions of the day to be able to read such texts with (relative) ease. I suppose we could get used to it, too, if we had nothing else to compare it with. To see some samples of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament, check out the website for the Center for the Study of New Testament Manuscripts.
OGEGONENENAYTΩIZΩHHNKAIHZΩHHNTOΦΩCTΩNANΘPΩΠΩN
In the case of John 1.3-4 the problem of breaking up the text into sense units is an interesting one. We have evidence that St. Jerome punctuated these two verses differently at different stages of his career. In his commentary on Habbakuk, dating from around 391-392, he cites the verses in the form employed in the New American Bible. But in many of his works dating from the period 401-416, including his Homily on the Gospel of John (401-410), he cites these verses in the form employed by the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version. So within a period of about 10 years, it seems, St. Jerome changed his mind about the best way to read these verses. What may have prompted the change?
The Macedonians were given their name from the fact that it was thought that they were followers of Macedonius, Bishop of Constantinople from around 342 until he was deposed in 360 by the Arian Council of Constantinople. Although the association with Macedonius is doubtful, the Macedonian heresy, for better or for worse, was attributed by St. Jerome to him. The fundamental feature of this heresy is the denial of the divinity of the Holy Spirit (hence the Macedonians are also known as the Pneumatomakhoi). In his Homily on the Gospel of John St. Jerome notes that there are many who read these verses "badly" (male legunt), and he goes on to explain their error this way. The heretics appeal to the punctuation that we find nowadays in the New American Bible, and that St. Jerome himself had used in his commentary on Habbakuk. Since it is the Holy Spirit that gives life through Christ, the heretics argued, we must read the Gospel as telling us that the Holy Spirit is a creature of the Word, since the Gospel itself tells us that "what came-into-existence through him was life, and that life was the light of men." In other words, the Gospel itself clearly tells us that the life that was the light of men, i.e., the Holy Spirit, was one of the things that came-into-existence through the Word. So St. Jerome, in his Homily on the Gospel of John, recommended reading the verses differently--in particular, he recommended the punctuation that we find in the King James Version--in order to avoid the possibility of reading the Gospel in the Macedonian, Pneumatikomakhoi way. Subsequent Fathers relied on St. Jerome's recommendation, changing the punctuation of the verses so that they say rather explicitly that only those things that came-into-existence (i.e., not the Holy Spirit) came into existence through the Word. Period. New Sentence. "In Him was life," etc.
It is worth pointing out, I think, that the older reading, the punctuation adopted by St. Jerome in his Commentary on Habbakuk, is preferable to the later, anti-Macedonian reading. First, the anti-Macedonian reading is extremely ad hoc, and has the Gospel telling us something rather banal, namely, that the things that came into existence came into existence through the thing that brought them into existence. That's like saying that all paintings are painted by painters. It's true, but trivially so. Second, it has the Gospel informing us that there was life in the Word, and that life was the light of men. Taken with the previous verse, this is just a restatement of the same thought: the Word is what brings things into existence and, in the case of living things, causes them to be living things. None of this is very interesting, but of course trivial truths are certainly truths, so we cannot accuse St. Jerome of perverting the meaning of the Gospel for purely polemical purposes.
However, the older punctuation tells us something quite extraordinary and remarkable. It tells us about something specific that came about through the agency of the Word, namely, the renewal of that eternal life that was lost by men at the Beginning. It is worth pointing out that this was the reading favored by St. Jerome when he was translating the Scriptures into the version that we now know as the Vulgate. This means, in my opinion, that it is arguably a more authentic reading of the tradition, since it was not influenced by a polemical purpose, namely, the combatting of a semi-arian heresy.
Little differences can add up to big ones, and the ways in which we read our texts are not always matters of easy and unambiguous decisions. In the present case the placement of a single comma can make an enormous difference. Imagine having to sort things out without any punctuation marks at all!
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Properly Formed Conscience
In a statement released yesterday by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinals Keeler and McCarrick, along with Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, re-iterated the Church's infallible teaching on abortion in response to a recent public statement by 55 Democratic members of the House of Representatives who also happen to call themselves Catholics.
In their statement, drafted by Rosa L. DeLauro of the 3rd District in Connecticut, the Democrats allowed as how they "agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life and the undesirability of abortion" BUT
This understanding of the "primacy of conscience" is distinctively American, growing out of not a Catholic understanding of autonomy but a distinctively American Protestant understanding of the primacy of the individual. We live in a country, after all, where every opinion is sacred simply by virtue of being an opinion. We don't live in some third world backwater where people are put in jail for having the wrong opinions, after all--it's the American way to live and let live.
All of which is fine and dandy as far as it goes--the problem is that it simply doesn't go when it comes to moral truth. Every American may vote however he pleases, and may express whatever opinion about morality that he pleases. Indeed, any and every American is free to dissent from what the Catholic Church teaches--politically free, that is: we are not morally free to dissent from infallible truth. To dissent from the Church's teaching on abortion is not something that will get you put in jail, but it is something that makes you the moral equivalent of someone who refuses to believe that 2 + 2 = 4.
Many people--including many Roman Catholic people--simply do not understand the Church's teaching on the primacy of conscience. That's why the statement of the USCCB is so salutary, because they put it quite nicely:
The American Bishops are to be congratulated for making this response so quickly and so pertinently: they were not duped by the language of the statement, which presumes to teach the Church what Pope John Paul II meant in his Apostolic Constitution Christifideles Laici and what role--if any--the Bishops of the Church can hope to have in teaching the truth to the lay members of Christ's faithful people.
In their statement, drafted by Rosa L. DeLauro of the 3rd District in Connecticut, the Democrats allowed as how they "agree with the Catholic Church about the value of human life and the undesirability of abortion" BUT
In all these issues, we seek the Church=s guidance and assistance but believe also in the primacy of conscience. In recognizing the Church's role in providing moral leadership, we acknowledge and accept the tension that comes with being in disagreement with the Church in some areas. Yet we believe we can speak to the fundamental issues that unite us as Catholics and lend our voices to changing the political debate -- a debate that often fails to reflect and encompass the depth and complexity of these issues.This is a claim that pseudo-catholics often make: they love having dialogue with the Church but, when push comes to shove, they'll be the arbiters of what's best for us. It's nice of the Church to give us advice and all, but we'll be the ones who decide whether or not to accept that advice. For such persons, that is all that is meant by "following your conscience": do whatever you want to do, as long as you can give some kind of a reason for it, and as long as you've listened respectfully to opposing points of view.
This understanding of the "primacy of conscience" is distinctively American, growing out of not a Catholic understanding of autonomy but a distinctively American Protestant understanding of the primacy of the individual. We live in a country, after all, where every opinion is sacred simply by virtue of being an opinion. We don't live in some third world backwater where people are put in jail for having the wrong opinions, after all--it's the American way to live and let live.
All of which is fine and dandy as far as it goes--the problem is that it simply doesn't go when it comes to moral truth. Every American may vote however he pleases, and may express whatever opinion about morality that he pleases. Indeed, any and every American is free to dissent from what the Catholic Church teaches--politically free, that is: we are not morally free to dissent from infallible truth. To dissent from the Church's teaching on abortion is not something that will get you put in jail, but it is something that makes you the moral equivalent of someone who refuses to believe that 2 + 2 = 4.
Many people--including many Roman Catholic people--simply do not understand the Church's teaching on the primacy of conscience. That's why the statement of the USCCB is so salutary, because they put it quite nicely:
As the Church carries out its central responsibility to teach clearly and help form consciences, and as Catholic legislators seek to act in accord with their own consciences, it is essential to remember that conscience must be consistent with fundamental moral principles. As members of the Church, all Catholics are obliged to shape our consciences in accord with the moral teaching of the Church.In short, if you find yourself in the position of disagreeing with an infallible teaching of the Church on the grounds that you are following your conscience, then you are fundamentally mistaken about the nature of what you are doing. You do not have a right to follow the dictates of a poorly formed "conscience", any more than a criminal can argue for an exemption from the law on the grounds that he feels differently about the legality of his acts than the rest of society. Imagine how folks would feel if a member of the clergy accused of child sex abuse were to say "I know that most of society views what I did as wrong, but I think our social mores are hopelessly old-fashioned--I was just following my conscience, which tells me that man-boy love is not only appropriate, it is the most perfect form of love there is." Nobody outside of NAMBLA would take that line of defense seriously for a nanosecond, and rightly so.
The American Bishops are to be congratulated for making this response so quickly and so pertinently: they were not duped by the language of the statement, which presumes to teach the Church what Pope John Paul II meant in his Apostolic Constitution Christifideles Laici and what role--if any--the Bishops of the Church can hope to have in teaching the truth to the lay members of Christ's faithful people.
Existential Mystery
In spite of previous death of Carrol O'Connor, Archie Bunker found dead in prison in The Hague.
Kent State 72, Ohio 59
Oh well, you win some you lose some. The Ohio Univeristy Bobcats lost to the Kent State University Golden Flashes (yes, that really is their team name, but it's better than the Akron University "Zips") last night in the MAC semifinals. Last year OU won the MAC tournament and got an automatic bid to the NCAA. Don't laugh too hard: they almost won their first round game.
I can't feel too bad about this since Kent State University is where I did my undergraduate work and I sort of grew up in and around Kent and Stow, so my loyalties, such as they are when it comes to sports teams, are rather divided. Living so near Cleveland didn't stop me from rooting for the Steelers in the Super Bowl, as traitorous as that is for a Browns fan, so you can see what kind of a sports person I am. My wife is always particularly on me about my loyalties in the ACC (we both attended UNC, but only I attended Duke--she's a Michigan girl), because she accuses me of rooting indiscriminately either for Duke or for UNC depending on who looks to be most likely to come out on top. I'm thinking I'll go with Duke this year.
The only sport in which I am not so capricious in my loyalties is golf, where I root for Tiger Woods no matter what, and go into fits of rage and endless bouts of pouting when he loses. I'm not entirely fanatical, though, because I do enjoy it when Tiger is given a run for his money, and I was not the least bit disappointed when Phil Mickelson won the Masters because I think he really deserved it and I genuinely like the guy and wish he would win more often, but I have to confess that if Tiger is not at least two strokes ahead going into the weekend I get knots in my stomach that don't go away until Monday.
So much for the life of rational contemplation. I guess Aristotle never imagined a sport like golf, otherwise he never would have written that tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics.
I can't feel too bad about this since Kent State University is where I did my undergraduate work and I sort of grew up in and around Kent and Stow, so my loyalties, such as they are when it comes to sports teams, are rather divided. Living so near Cleveland didn't stop me from rooting for the Steelers in the Super Bowl, as traitorous as that is for a Browns fan, so you can see what kind of a sports person I am. My wife is always particularly on me about my loyalties in the ACC (we both attended UNC, but only I attended Duke--she's a Michigan girl), because she accuses me of rooting indiscriminately either for Duke or for UNC depending on who looks to be most likely to come out on top. I'm thinking I'll go with Duke this year.
The only sport in which I am not so capricious in my loyalties is golf, where I root for Tiger Woods no matter what, and go into fits of rage and endless bouts of pouting when he loses. I'm not entirely fanatical, though, because I do enjoy it when Tiger is given a run for his money, and I was not the least bit disappointed when Phil Mickelson won the Masters because I think he really deserved it and I genuinely like the guy and wish he would win more often, but I have to confess that if Tiger is not at least two strokes ahead going into the weekend I get knots in my stomach that don't go away until Monday.
So much for the life of rational contemplation. I guess Aristotle never imagined a sport like golf, otherwise he never would have written that tenth book of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Friday, March 10, 2006
Book of Divine Worship
David Bennett of An Aid to Memory has a post about the Anglican Use Book of Divine Worship, the service book for Roman Catholics of the Anglican Use (basically, Anglicans who have converted to Catholicism but for whom the spirituality and liturgics of Anglicanism are too precious to abandon forever). The book may be ordered from here. You can learn more about the Anglican Use here.
Reason and Racism
I quoted at some length the other day from Dummett's preface to his book on Frege's philosophy of mathematics. The purpose of that quotation was to raise what I thought were interesting issues related to the every-growing demand put upon young scholars to publish or perish. While it is disappointing to me that my original post was so badly misunderstood by some of those who kindly took the trouble to read it, the experience has at least had the salutary effect of prompting me to go back and read some more Dummett, who was something of an inspiration to me while I was in graduate school.
Michael Dummett, who retired from the Wykeham Professorship of Logic at Oxford University in 1992, and who was knighted in 1999, has been a leading critic of the racist attitudes of his native Britain. He was raised in an Anglican family but like many young folks he regarded himself as an atheist by the time he was a teenager. In 1944, however, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and remains a very orthodox Catholic. For those of us who have struggled with materialism and empiricism--and particularly within the context of departments of philosophy, where standing apart from the dominant orthodoxy is often an occasion for ostracism--it is refreshing and invigorating to know that some of the smartest people on the planet have no trouble accepting the ontological claims of the Christian religion. I suppose that if Daniel Dennett is right, the ease with which even these brilliant thinkers accept Christianity is nothing more than a manifestation of some inner psychic virus, but perhaps that does not matter, since if Dennett is right then every view of the world is nothing more than a manifestation of some inner psychic virus.
Although my interest in the philosophy of mathematics is not small, I did not sit down and re-read Dummett's book on Frege's philosophy of mathematics. I decided instead to read his book on Frege's philosophy of language, since that is the direction in which my own interests have a tendency to wander more often than not. Unfortunately, the difference in my relative interest in the two subjects is more than equally matched by the difference in the respective page counts in the two books (331 in the former, 708 in the latter).
Rather than bore folks with the details of the argument in Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language, I will regale you instead with an excerpt from the preface to that book (p. xii):
But such expectations are not well-founded. The correlation between poor education and racism appears to be only very loose, and I have run into plenty of academics with advanced degrees who are also racists or bigots of one form or another. Readers of this forum will know, of course, that this kind of bigotry is often extended to Roman Catholics--there is a book that many of you will have heard of, written by another religious academic whom I admire: The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, by Philip Jenkins (Oxford University Press, 2003). Jenkins ably illustrates how philosophical ideologies easily translate into real prejudice and, ultimately, injustice.
When smart people can make such obvious mistakes, and, what is more, act so outraged when their mistakes are pointed out to them, it is difficult to avoid falling into a kind of despair. Despair, however, is a sin against hope. Since I'm constantly telling my son that patience is a virtue, it would be more than a little hypocritical of me to abandon hope because of my own impatience, particuarly impatience with people and their little foibles. Racism is not a little foible, mind you, but no sinner is irreformable, and it is that fact that ought to be kept in mind, I suppose, if one is to maintain Christian charity. Indeed, it may be a particularly Christian form of charity, since the desire for punishment, revenge, retribution, seems so rampant in our culture. So perhaps the reasonable thing to do is not to give up on the racists, but to work harder to eradicate the conditions that lead to such deleterious failures of rationality as one finds in them.
Michael Dummett, who retired from the Wykeham Professorship of Logic at Oxford University in 1992, and who was knighted in 1999, has been a leading critic of the racist attitudes of his native Britain. He was raised in an Anglican family but like many young folks he regarded himself as an atheist by the time he was a teenager. In 1944, however, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church and remains a very orthodox Catholic. For those of us who have struggled with materialism and empiricism--and particularly within the context of departments of philosophy, where standing apart from the dominant orthodoxy is often an occasion for ostracism--it is refreshing and invigorating to know that some of the smartest people on the planet have no trouble accepting the ontological claims of the Christian religion. I suppose that if Daniel Dennett is right, the ease with which even these brilliant thinkers accept Christianity is nothing more than a manifestation of some inner psychic virus, but perhaps that does not matter, since if Dennett is right then every view of the world is nothing more than a manifestation of some inner psychic virus.
Although my interest in the philosophy of mathematics is not small, I did not sit down and re-read Dummett's book on Frege's philosophy of mathematics. I decided instead to read his book on Frege's philosophy of language, since that is the direction in which my own interests have a tendency to wander more often than not. Unfortunately, the difference in my relative interest in the two subjects is more than equally matched by the difference in the respective page counts in the two books (331 in the former, 708 in the latter).
Rather than bore folks with the details of the argument in Dummett's Frege: Philosophy of Language, I will regale you instead with an excerpt from the preface to that book (p. xii):
There is some irony for me in the fact that the man about whose philosophical views I have devoted, over years, a great deal of time to thinking, was, at least at the end of his life, a virulent racist, specifically an anti-semite. This fact is revealed by a fragment of a diary which survives among Frege's Nachlass, but which was not published with the rest by Professor Hans Hermes in Freges nachgelassene Schriften. The diary shows Frege to have been a man of extreme right-wing political opinions, bitterly opposed to the parliamentary system, democrats, liberals, Catholics, the French and, above all, Jews, who he thought ought to be deprived of political rights and, preferably, expelled from Germany. When I first read that diary, many years ago, I was deeply shocked, because I had revered Frege as an absolutely rational man, if, perhaps, not a very likeable one. I regret that the editors of Frege's Nachlass chose to suppress that particular item. From it I learned something about human beings which I should be sorry not to know; perhaps something about Europe, also.Perhaps because of my view that they constitute one of the most important instantiations of that imago Dei that makes human experience meaningful and importantly different from other modes of existence, I have always found anti-Semitism towards the Jews to be one of the most offensive sorts of injustice. (A close second, at least for me personally, is racism against blacks. Dennett would no doubt dismiss this as just an artefact of my having an African-American daughter, but even when I was in junior high school I was enraged by expressions of racism against blacks. I did not know any blacks at the time, so I'm not all that sure where the feelings came from. Is it possible that I was simply outraged by the injustice?) With Dummett, I find myself perplexed whenever I encounter such an attitude in an otherwise rational person. Like Plato, I regard this sort of moral wrong an instance of ignorance of a certain kind, and in particular I regard it as a kind of ignorance that one ought to find more rarely in intelligent, well-educated persons.
But such expectations are not well-founded. The correlation between poor education and racism appears to be only very loose, and I have run into plenty of academics with advanced degrees who are also racists or bigots of one form or another. Readers of this forum will know, of course, that this kind of bigotry is often extended to Roman Catholics--there is a book that many of you will have heard of, written by another religious academic whom I admire: The New Anti-Catholicism: The Last Acceptable Prejudice, by Philip Jenkins (Oxford University Press, 2003). Jenkins ably illustrates how philosophical ideologies easily translate into real prejudice and, ultimately, injustice.
When smart people can make such obvious mistakes, and, what is more, act so outraged when their mistakes are pointed out to them, it is difficult to avoid falling into a kind of despair. Despair, however, is a sin against hope. Since I'm constantly telling my son that patience is a virtue, it would be more than a little hypocritical of me to abandon hope because of my own impatience, particuarly impatience with people and their little foibles. Racism is not a little foible, mind you, but no sinner is irreformable, and it is that fact that ought to be kept in mind, I suppose, if one is to maintain Christian charity. Indeed, it may be a particularly Christian form of charity, since the desire for punishment, revenge, retribution, seems so rampant in our culture. So perhaps the reasonable thing to do is not to give up on the racists, but to work harder to eradicate the conditions that lead to such deleterious failures of rationality as one finds in them.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Mini Darwin
I'm afraid that in all of my pouting and rambling of late I've completely neglected paying any attention to the truly miraculous: the birth of a new baby to the DarwinCatholics. I feel particuarly bad about this neglect because, although I don't know them personally, the Darwins have been very kindly towards me and my blog, acting as though it's actually worth reading. In addition, as I read their blog, not only on religious and political topics, but just about their overall home life, I feel that they are genuinely kindred spirits, and I wish that I did know them personally. That new baby is lucky to have found such a good home.
Anyway, a happy and heartfelt congratulations to them, and my warmest prayers:
Et pax Dei, quae exsuperat omnem sensum, custodiet corda vestra et intellegentias vestras in Christo Iesu. Philippians 4.7.
Anyway, a happy and heartfelt congratulations to them, and my warmest prayers:
Et pax Dei, quae exsuperat omnem sensum, custodiet corda vestra et intellegentias vestras in Christo Iesu. Philippians 4.7.
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