It's All in Where You Put Your Emphasis

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

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

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

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

H.T.:James Taranto.

Some Notes on Explanations and Inference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike suggests a number of healthy criteria:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Dubruiel, R.I.P.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fidelium animae per misericordiam Dei requiescant in pace.

Fr. Richard Neuhaus, RIP

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

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

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

Thoughts on the Violence in Gaza

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

Simultaneity and Relativity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert George on Obama's Extremism

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

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

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

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

Some Propaganda Is Better Than Others

From CatholicVote.com:

But Then We Already Knew That Tradition Means Nothing To Them

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

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

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

Dear Leader

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