What’s Wrong with the World

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Things should be what they are

What should we, as conservatives, be trying to preserve and trying to pass down to our children? Many things, obviously. One thing that gets, to my mind, to the heart of what we should be trying to teach is a love of the genuine as opposed to the fake. Our culture wallows in the fake. Everything has to be new, everything has to have been thought of yesterday. This makes it difficult for young people to appreciate anything like a genuine and valuable cultural oeuvre with a history or a tradition behind it. Many of them have never been exposed to such a thing in their lives.

A "liturgy" that you made up last year because you think you're good at writing isn't a real liturgy. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Tridentine Mass are examples of real liturgy. Imperfect they may be in various ways, but they are human artifacts that represent real human history. Pastor Joe's Worship Ideas for Advent don't.

Here, however, we run into a difficulty: If you love what is real in human history and culture, you are going to come smack up against the fact that the ideas that made various undeniably real (in the sense I'm discussing here) and also worthwhile and beautiful (this may be more controversial) cultures and artifacts possible are in conflict with one another. How, then, can you give the proper appreciation to two or more traditions founded on incompatible ideas? And, if we acknowledge that all good things come from God and return to God, what does this say about God? How does God view incompatible traditions and their artifacts? And how will what is valuable in them be preserved in eternity?

Let's face it: A Catholic Mass that tries to be Protestant is a mish-mash. A Baptist church service that tries to be liturgical is likely to be anemic and pathetic. Not that I've ever seen any Baptist churches seriously try to be liturgical, but I'd prefer not to. It's like good coffee and great red wine. Each is good by itself, but mixing them produces sludge. Things should be what they are and not try to be something else.

In The Personal Heresy, C.S. Lewis relates a dream: Falstaff had died, and Lewis found himself mourning over him. The people standing about consoled him by saying that Falstaff's eternal soul was in heaven. Lewis responded, "But we've lost his fatness!" Indeed.

Let's try to make this just a little more concrete. In no way am I claiming that all these examples are of equal aesthetic and cultural value, much less equal religious value. I'm just claiming that they do have aesthetic, cultural, and human value, and that the world would be poorer without them. Consider...

--Notre Dame cathedral
--A plain, white country chapel
--Rembrandt
--Fra Angelico
--An old-fashioned Quaker "silent meeting."
--The Tridentine Mass
--The Book of Common Prayer
--The hymns of Charles Wesley
--An orthodox rabbi
--A faithful Catholic priest
--A sincere Baptist preacher

Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus"

Hymns and choruses sung by a Gospel quartet

Let's not beat around the bush: If it hadn't been for the Protestant Reformation, a number of these things wouldn't exist at all. By the same token, if the Catholic Church had never existed, a number of these things wouldn't exist at all. And so on and so forth. The people who are producing works of genius or just works of joy, who are living their faith in ways that enrich the human experience, often don't agree with each other, and the things they write, do, and produce often arise out of their disagreements in ways that cannot be simply disentangled.

No doubt there are people who would be just as happy to be without some of them. I recall one commentator (and he is entirely entitled to his opinion, though I disagree with him strongly) who would write off the Book of Common Prayer as do-without-able. Apparently what I call the liturgical genius of Thomas Cranmer just doesn't impress everybody.

A few years ago I wrote to a friend about Fr. Michael Rodriguez and introduced this very subject--that things should be what they are. I said, "I wouldn't want him to be different, even where he and I would disagree about theology." My friend pointed out, astutely, that if I thought Fr. Rodriguez were going to go to hell as a result of our theological disagreements, I would want him to change.

You are free to make up your own examples. The exercise is not really a hard one if you have a moderate degree of cultural education in a variety of traditions: Come up with a work of art or architecture, a person, or an organization whose value and contribution you appreciate. Now notice the religious (say) presumptions on which that person's life or that work of art is based. Now come up with a different work of art, person, etc., whom you also greatly appreciate but whose work or meaning is bound up with or even explicitly expresses an incompatible set of religious presumptions. Now remind yourself how easy it is to multiply such examples. Now remind yourself that, insofar as the questions at issue can be clearly stated, someone is right and someone is wrong. Now contemplate how sad it would be (in a strange and somewhat heretical sense of "sad") if everyone got it right and agreed and if we lost the variety of traditions based on incompatible assumptions.

I have to admit that I don't know what this means.

Fortunately, not all things that "should be what they are" have as clear a connection to specific theology as the examples already given. We also have bluegrass music and French cooking.

I do know one thing: To the extent that it can be squared with your conscience, teach your children and other people to appreciate the beauty of a variety of traditions and of things that "are what they are." Teach them by example to love the strong flavor of real things and to reject the fake.

It won't answer all questions. In fact, it may raise some new questions. But it's an important thing to do.

Related post.

Comments (70)

I have to admit that I don't know what this means.

This isn't an answer, but it helps illuminate the problem.
http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/

"the liturgical genius of Thomas Cranmer"

Cranmer was just an early-modern Bugnini. The Book of Common Prayer is just the Sarum Use after it had been hacked up into little pieces, tossed with some Protestantism, and pasted back together. The result is not without its merits, but that's almost undoubtedly due to the quality of the Sarum source material, and the fact that it was written by literate Englishman, rather than illiterate assassins.

OK, I'm done with my jab; now onto something else.

What you've touched on, Lydia, is the real value of diversity. This is a theme out of Chesterton and Belloc: that part of the beauty of the world is that it is filled with unique things that are beautiful in their own way. It's what Benedict spoke of when he referred to the Church "breathing with both lungs." There are things in the world that are not worthwhile. (I might even think that one or two of them are on your list of examples.) But the accoutrements of a Christian culture are generally not among them.

Asking whether lasagna or pierogi is best is not a fruitful exercise: beyond the level of mere personal taste, they are incommensurable expressions of the good, the true, and the beautiful on the dinner table. It would be barbaric to compel someone to give up his subjective personal preference for one or the other, just as it would be impoverishing to lose even the option one did not prefer. This was the splendor of Christendom and the error of modern nationalism (as well as of modern identity politics). The truth may be a zero-sum game (in the sense that one is either right or wrong), but our cultural applications of it are not. Nationalism robbed people of the ability to esteem their neighbor's society so as to be able to work together for shared goods. Modernism has deprived people of any conception of good at all beyond esteem for their neighbor's society.

This is also connected, to shift gears dramatically, to the teleology of a thing. What is good for a country hamlet? Well, having a gothic edifice the size of three city blocks in its middle is not concomitant with country hamlet-ness. What things are governs what things should be.

I mean, for the Catholic, it's interesting. DO we want something made by, say, the Anglicans to exist? After all, their split with the Catholic Church was messy and unpleasant, and the Church certainly can't be happy about Anglicans leaving the fold.

On the other hand, we now have an Anglican form of the Mass, so we certainly don't discount the contributions to culture the Anglicans made. Very interesting food for thought.

My examples: Handel's Messiah. Vangelis's "Hymne". Euclid's final theorem of Book XIII. The Taj Mahal.

Lydia, I don't think I have the answer, but I may have a possible direction to look. When God created the universe, he didn't create just one star, just one planet, just one species of fish or bird, or just a few individual humans. He created a vast multitude of variety at every possible level. We think that at least part of the point of this is that His goodness is ample that it takes such vast multitudes to even sort of point to his immensity. So, looking at (just for example) the fact that cardinals and blue jays and sparrows and mockingbirds all inhabit roughly the same ecological niche, but do so differently, maybe we can glean some wisdom from that and apply it to ourselves. Maybe. Even if man is lord of earthly creation, that doesn't mean man has the perfections of both cardinals, and blue jays, and sparrows, and larks.

Also, even though all are called to worship God in as perfect a manner as they possibly can, that leaves room for each to approach Him from different starting points, and therefore along different paths at least part of the way. Even if we assume that there is one ultimate truth about man's highest good, men cannot help but move in that direction along paths that approach it - and therefore each other - somewhat asymptotically. So, even if in the ideal every good Greek Orthodox should become Catholic (for the sake of hypothesis, naturally :-)), in doing so they will make that "becoming" differently than an Anglican becoming a Catholic, and after they have done so they will continue to approach their own perfection in a manner that still reflects their prior Orthodoxy, and therefore differently than the former Anglican does it.

Likewise, seems to me that even if we assert that theology is the monarch of the sciences, as treating of the highest of man's aspirations for knowledge, that doesn't mean that the theologian himself holds in his own mind the perfections of all the other sciences. So also, even though we might assert that one religion holds the supreme place in its receptivity to God and speaking to us, that doesn't mean that that one religion holds all of the OTHER perfections, including non-religious ones. But all of our knowledge and sensibilities, including those of math, music, color, tempo, spatial relations, literature, etc go into our generation of such things as a liturgy, so it stands to reason that a Hindu's or a Buddhist's knowledge and sensibilities might have latched onto other aspects of "The Truth" than a Catholic's or a Protestant's, and successfully express elements of that truth in their own worship.

Apparently, God's plan for multitudinous variety includes - before we all get together and become good Catholics - that we develop many differently beautiful perspectives for the enrichment of all. This would be consistent with God's allowing divergent paths for different traditions of men - even ones that diverge IN PART by reason of contradictory doctrines. I don't think it necessary to say that the deepest, truest reason for the "rightness" of an Anglican vespers or a Buddhist chant is contradictory to the deepest reason for the rightness of the true doctrine, since all are grounded in the one true God. I think that the contradictory doctrines are window dressing on the parts that bear the "rightness", and although we cannot be sure that mankind would have come across that particular rightness without the contradictory doctrines, nor can we be sure that we wouldn't have, either. After all, even within a single religion, there are enough differences in sub-traditions among people who agree wholly on doctrine that there is some room for hope that men could develop distinct traditions of the beautiful and the good even had all religions given way to the one true religion.

Tony, that's a very good shot. I have to admit, though, that in terms of the concreteness of history, I find it impossible to imagine what it would have been like for the particularity of truth and beauty that are manifested in, I dunno, the life of Georgi Vins (Baptist imprisoned by the Soviets) to have occurred if he hadn't been a Baptist. Something similar in various ways (and of course there were plenty of non-Baptist sufferers in the Gulag), but not the same.

But perhaps (now I'm really going out on a limb, and people are going to ask, "Where is Lydia, and what have you done with the body?") all of this counterfactual talk is a result of the fact that we humans see from the perspective of time. God sees the completion of Georgi Vins and Gospel musicians and Catholic priests and J.S. Bach and on and on and on, each as a thing-in-itself, from the perspective of eternity, and takes their theological errors (whatever those may be) and uses them as means to His own ends.

Or something of the sort. Perhaps.

By the way, it may go without saying, but one of the peculiar crimes of the left for many decades has been a willingness to destroy or at least to alter radically, in the name of an abstract "principle," the what-ness of any institution or tradition.

The feminists were some of the first and worst offenders, and continue to be so to this day. The list would get depressing and tedious of all the institutions into which they have barged, utterly reckless of the nature of those institutions, a nature and essence honed over many years, sometimes centuries. The military, VMI. My post mourning the admission of females to the Spanish Riding School (and the striking fact that, as far as I'm any judge of German names, now suddenly _all_ the young elaves are female) also comes to mind. Ideologues just don't care. Equality uber alles. The phrase "dog in the manger" comes to mind. Better to destroy the thing than to have it not Open to All.

I understand that loving something means, to some degree, wishing to participate in it. But if you really love it, you're willing not to participate, so that it can remain what it is.

Maybe, due to our sinfulness, we DON'T SEE well enough to imagine coming up with the diversity we now have without it being attached to the multitudes of defect and error that it actually came with historically. But (just a suspicion) that is a reflection of the poverty of our damaged senses, imaginations, memories, affections, and intellects. Maybe with undamaged faculties, we could produce even greater differences.

Or, alternatively, the diversity we have is ITSELF a share of the reason why God allowed sin and division to take us. Part of the very point of His arranging things this way. For example, we now (after Babel) have the incredibly variety of texture of different languages, different forms of poetry particular to each, which maybe we couldn't have produced without Babel. Oh happy fault?

I understand that loving something means, to some degree, wishing to participate in it. But if you really love it, you're willing not to participate, so that it can remain what it is.

Loving a peregrine falcon means NOT owning and keeping it in your house, for it can't be kept in a house and be a falcon. They understand this well enough for wild things, but for the things of man, not.

I do not remember if it was Abraham Kuyper or Herman Dooyweerd that first made the distinction between structure and direction. The structure of a thing may be brilliant but its direction may be apostate because its architect did not seek to glorify God in his work. We can admire the aesthetic beauty of the Basilica of Ottobeuren or the austere grandeur of the Grossmunster Dom in Zurich without taking theological sides between Zwinglianism and Roman Catholicism.
The Ode to Joy by that reprobate Beethoven can be appreciated for its aesthetic brilliance without identifying with the Godless ideology that underpinned it. Beethoven was structurally correct even though his direction was apostate.
By the same token, I can appreciate the brilliance of the Tridentine Mass; both for its aesthetic majesty, and the clarity with which it sets forth Roman Catholic doctrine without agreeing with its Roman Catholic theology.
On the other hand I can appreciate many hymns because of their content even though they fall short of the mark as a piece of poetry or music. Their direction is correct. Their structure is flawed.

In defense of Cramner and the Book of Common Prayer allow me to observe the general orthodoxy of his Book of Common Prayer. As Titus correctly observes much of what he did was translate the Sarum Liturgy into the vernacular. Cramner also looked at the Lutheran reforms of the Mass that had been done in Germany. His genius may have been distilling from those sources an orthodox liturgy that could be broadly accepted by Christians of good will. This is evidenced by the fact that an Anglican rite liturgy has been approved for use in Anglican use congregations in union with the Church of Rome. Some Western Rite Orthodox congregations use the Liturgy of Saint Tikhon. Both of these liturgical works are largely the work of Cramner.

Things have to be different from each other to be disparate in the first place. And they have to be different from each other essentially - i.e., irreconcilably - in order to be different sorts of things. Finally, to have a world, properly so called, you need different things and different sorts of things.

But it is perfectly possible to have a world where the disparate things are nit at war with each other. The north face is not the south face, but they are not in conflict; indeed, they could not exist except as aspects of the mountain.

Remember the last scene if The Last Battle, when the children discover that Narnia and Britain are different shoulders of the One Mountain. All is reconciled in Him, and by Him. Not just eventually, but right now. That's the only reason we still have a world, despite our obtuseness about our disparities.

As Titus correctly observes much of what he did was translate the Sarum Liturgy into the vernacular.

And what a vernacular! That's part of what I mean by rhetorical genius. Cranmer had a nearly perfect pitch for the language.

There are also portions composed by himself. I believe the Prayer of Humble Access is one of them, not having had a Sarum predecessor.

This is a riddle that will always remain inscrutable. Speaking for myself, I take real delight in it, but I don't pretend to understand it. What it is--this beauty and glory in seemingly opposed or essentially irreconcilable things--is the great mystery of God's power to bring forth good from evil, the evil in question being man's estrangement from the world and from himself.

As I am wont to do, I immediately thought of a line from Tolkien when I read this post. The Silmarillion describes how, in the paradise of Valinor, the fall of the High Elves began with a division in the bloodline of King Finwe, when his first wife was consumed by the birth of his son, Feanor, and he married another:

"In those unhappy things which later came to pass, and in which Feanor was the leader, many saw the effect of this breach within the house of Finwe, judging that if Finwe had endured his loss and been content with the fostering of his mighty son, the courses of Feanor would have been otherwise, and great evil might have been prevented; for the sorrow and the strife in the house of Finwe is graven on the memory of the Noldorin Elves. But the children of Indis were great and glorious, and their children also; and if they had not lived the history of the Eldar would have been diminished."

It is in this light that I look at, say, the King James bible, in my view a strong contender for the greatest achievement of the English language. I know that my fellow Catholics will rankle at this, and of course I understand. But I have to call these things as I see them, no matter how compromised the persons or how terrible the circumstances that brought them into being. I consider it providential and an artifact of God's mercy, evidence that He does not forget His children even in their exile.

"Things should be what they are"

Isn't this the entire dilemma of modernity in a nutshell? How can we believe in "oughtness" when we no longer believe in nature? A classicist friend argues that all the problems associated with modernity are rooted in the denial of nature, i.e., the rejection of the notion that things have unchangeable natures. That such a denial is corrosive of all things traditional and worth conserving follows as "sure as the turnin' of the earth."

I happened to re-read D.B. Hart's excellent essay "Christ and Nothing" last evening, and upon seeing this post the following quote came immediately to mind:

"It is fashionable at present, among some theologians, to attempt precise genealogies of modernity, which in general I would rather avoid doing; but it does seem clear to me that the special preoccupations and perversities of modern philosophy were incubated in the age of late Scholasticism, with the rise of nominalism and voluntarism. Whereas earlier theology spoke of God as Goodness as such, whose every act (by virtue of divine simplicity) expresses His nature, the spectre that haunts late Scholastic thought is a God whose will precedes His nature, and whose acts then are feats of pure spontaneity. It is a logically incoherent way of conceiving of God, as it happens (though I cannot argue that here), but it is a powerful idea, elevating as it does will over all else and redefining freedom — for God and, by extension, for us — not as the unhindered realization of a nature (the liberty to 'become what you are'), but as the absolute liberty of the will in determining even what its nature is."

Later in the piece Hart posits as the only possible counter an "effort to recall and recover the wisdom and centrality of the [Christian] ascetic tradition." Since we moderns have deified self-will, only self-denial can knock this false god off his throne. Conservatives do ourselves, our ideas, and the general population no service by embracing, either in full or in part, the dominant cultural philosophy of the reign of the individual will.


Sage, that's a _great_ Tolkien quotation, and very apt.

What you say about the KJV is very much the kind of thing I am thinking.

And here I want to say that in my opinion (calling it as I see it) Roman Catholics have the best track record of the right kind of broadmindedness on this subject. A certain kind of traditional Roman Catholic can appreciate the value of traditions incompatible with Roman Catholicism while not compromising his beliefs or getting all wussy. I'm not saying Protestants can't do this--obviously, I try to do it myself. But my impression is that it's more rare. One has Protestant ecumenists who don't really understand what is at stake and just want to be fwenz. One has Protestant aesthetes who fully acknowledge the value of Roman Catholic culture, but whose opinion is itself rather devalued by the fact that they are so artsy that they think we shouldn't dismiss the "artistry" of Andres Serrano. And so forth. And then there are those Protestants who are too disturbed by the theological differences to be willing to listen to the Mozart linked above. I would say the proper balance is more common among a certain type of RC than among Protestants.

Having said that, and knowing that Thomas Y. is not RC, I appreciate the distinction he notes between direction and structure, which I hadn't heard before.

Kristor, another Lewis passage is the long hymn (for want of a better word) of the eldila at the end of Perelandra. They don't get sidetracked there on the question of incompatible views. In fact, Lewis's great achievement in the space trilogy was showing how various intelligent races on different planets could in principle all believe and understand different aspects of a single, coherent theology. Hence, the sorns and the Green Lady both really do understand Maleldil, just different things about Him. As you imply, he gets into this a bit more in the Narnia books, with Emeth being both the most controversial and the most interesting example.

NM, here for once I'm going to agree with you. The denial that anything in the natural world has an essence (man, dog, cat, or even male and female) makes it inevitable that the somewhat more metaphorical notion of an essence we are looking at here--as Titus says, something like the "essence of country hamlet-ness" or as I am discussing the "essence of Anglicanism" or what-not--will be denied. If people can't see that things that have an essence in an utterly literal sense, things like mankind, then they certainly are going to act like bulls in a china shop when it comes to the more delicate and less literal sense in which institutions, traditions, and other human artifacts have an essence.

Whereas earlier theology spoke of God as Goodness as such, whose every act (by virtue of divine simplicity) expresses His nature, the spectre that haunts late Scholastic thought is a God whose will precedes His nature, and whose acts then are feats of pure spontaneity.

Scotus made a strong distinction between what is necessary and what is contingent and claimed everything that was contingent could only be explained by God's supreme will, otherwise it would also be necessary. Scotus wasn't a nominalist by any stretch, he used Aristotle's metaphysical framework albeit differently from Aquinas. His view of divine simplicity was that it was hostile to normal language, so he made an argument to prove infinite being and derived the divine perfections from that. You could say he simplified the idea of divine simplicity.

Hey, Kristor, it's been a while. Glad to have you.

Step2, do you have a good place to find all that in Scotus? I don't seem to remember anything of Scotus, not any detail, that is.

A profound essay, Lydia, despite inevitable disagreements on particulars.

If I lack conviction on the point, I echo Tony's sentiment:

"Or, alternatively, the diversity we have is ITSELF a share of the reason why God allowed sin and division to take us. Part of the very point of His arranging things this way. For example, we now (after Babel) have the incredibly variety of texture of different languages, different forms of poetry particular to each, which maybe we couldn't have produced without Babel. Oh happy fault?"

Hart isn't saying that Scotus was a nominalist. His point is that nominalism and voluntarism are the two errors that combined in late Scholasticism to kick start modernity, as it were. Hart doesn't mention Scotus, and there is, of course, much debate over whether Scotus can be "blamed" for other voluntarist extremes. I have little doubt that Hart is aware of this.

Iow, while Scotus himself might not be problematic, voluntarism is.


Patrick Henry Reardon frames the nominalist problem this way:

"Nominalism also produced modern materialism. Nothing so turned Western man’s thoughts back to the things of earth than this sudden persuasion of his being unable to grasp anything higher. The denial of man’s ability to perceive transcendent, intellectual realities above himself guaranteed that the Western mind would thenceforth turn ever more completely toward the only reality that remained, physical reality, the world of matter."

(“Materialism and the Abdication of Intellect,” Epiphany Journal, 1997)

This relates to the original post in that if all we can perceive is matter, then "natures" are imperceivable and therefore non-existent. Thus, as Marion Montgomery has pointed out, even nature therefore has no nature, and thus can be exploited by man's will, creating that bull-in-the-china-shop effect that Lydia mentions, both in the Creation and in human artefacts.

Reardon goes on to say, "I submit that a conscience formed by the Gospel will abhor such notions. How can it be that we who know the just God are possessed of minds incapable of discerning the essence of justice? How is it possible that we to whom have been revealed 'all riches of the certainty of the understanding, the knowledge of the mystery of God, . . . all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,' are natively unable to apprehend universal truths?"

Conservatives need to reject these ideas root and branch, as accepting them leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is nothing inherently worth conserving.

Lydia,

Sorry it took me so long to comment on this wonderful post -- I've gotten sidetracked on a couple of different projects and just didn't have the time I wanted to share my thoughts :-(

Anyway, here they are in all their inchoate glory:

1) When I first read the post I thought of an old debate I had with a good friend of mine back in my University of Chicago days -- he was an undergrad at the Committee on Social Thought under the influence of Alan Bloom and I was in grad school at the time and much less...conservative than I am today (and not at all religious). There is a famous (infamous) passage in Bloom's Closing of the American Mind in which he criticizes American pop and rock music as corrosive to the soul (as compared to the great works of the Western canon like Mozart or Beethoven). I vigorously disagreed at the time, making the case that in the right dose or at the right time a pop/rock song might appropriately capture a mood or lighten one's spirits as needed. Of course now that I'm older and wiser, I see more of the wisdom in Bloom's admonishment, but I think my original argument holds -- there are times and places that call for a well-crafted pop/rock song. Of course, this discussion is a bit orthogonal to your post, given that you are talking about handing down "genuine and valuable cultural oeuvre with a history or a tradition behind it" and I'm quite sure most pop music wouldn't qualify (although some rock might, given it's staying power and origins in the blues). I'll close with Roger Scruton's famous quote about Elvis:

Although I argue vehemently against modern pop music, on grounds of its musical incompetence, verbal impoverishment and general morbidity, narcissism and salaciousness; although I fiercely object to disco dancing as a sacrilege against the human form and a collective rejection of civilised courtship; although I defend reels, minuets, galliards, sarabands and (as limiting cases) waltzes and polkas as the only ways in which ordinary humanity should dare to put its sexual nature on festive display, and although I regard the 12-bar blues and the flattened subdominant seventh as the lowest forms of vulgarity in music, I find rock'n'roll in general, and Elvis in particular, irresistible, and would happily dance away the night to it. I cannot explain the thrill of delight with which I hear the first bars of Jailhouse Rock or the eagerness with which I at once search the vicinity for a partner: but there it is, appalling proof that, despite all my efforts, I am human.

2) This post made me think of ancient history -- particularly Greece and Rome. As a fan of classical world and the great works of art, philosophy and rhetoric that world produced it is quite easy to appreciate the radically different religious tradition of Homer, Cicero, Virgil, Aristotle, etc. And yet how strange (and yes sad) the world would be if there was no ancient Athens or Rome! I think the study of history (and I mean the real study and appreciation of different times and places -- we don't have to love slavery to appreciate certain aspects of the antebellum South -- which leftists find hard to do).

3) And speaking of #2, while I would prefer a "what if" world in which Muhammad was never born and Islam never swept out of Arabia, there are even aspects of Islamic history and civilization that I think are worthy of appreciation and admiration. What's ironic about some of those cultural icons is that today the radicals reject this history (their own!) and like the leftists they resemble, would prefer to destroy everything they hate:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323926104578276003922396218.html

I'm back again.

I realize now that my #2 above was cut off (and poorly worded to begin with). I meant to say it is "quite easy to appreciate" and yet look down on the "radically different religious tradition..." I don't particularly admire pagan religion, but I think it is important to try and understand it so we can know how it shaped Greek and Roman culture.

And I meant to finish the last sentence by saying that I think the study of history brings these contrasts that Lydia wants to highlight to mind quite frequentlty. As Lydia herself says: "If you love what is real in human history and culture, you are going to come smack up against the fact that the ideas that made various undeniably real (in the sense I'm discussing here) and also worthwhile and beautiful (this may be more controversial) cultures and artifacts possible are in conflict with one another."

I do think the resolution to such conflict lies in first, acknowledging that there are indeed capital Truths that transcend all times, places, and cultures but second; as Tony says, given our fallen nature we often express the truth in divergent and particular ways. I like this:

"Apparently, God's plan for multitudinous variety includes - before we all get together and become good Catholics - that we develop many differently beautiful perspectives for the enrichment of all. This would be consistent with God's allowing divergent paths for different traditions of men - even ones that diverge IN PART by reason of contradictory doctrines."

I don't particularly admire pagan religion, but I think it is important to try and understand it so we can know how it shaped Greek and Roman culture.

Very true, and it is also worth remembering what humanity was rescued from by Greek and Roman paganism--namely, the Phoenician paganism of Tyre and Carthage.

Thanks, all. Sage, your comment reminds me of Chesterton's chapter (I think in The Abolition of Man) called something like "The Wars of The Gods and the Demons" about the Punic wars.

Jeff, you raise the interesting question of when something counts as having a real tradition. Can we speak of relatively young forms of art (like rock) as having traditions at all? My own opinion is that we can speak of them as having some kind of a tradition but with appropriate caveats to recognize the gap between such young and relatively shallow traditions and much older and deeper ones.

Here I'm influenced a bit by my interest in Southern Gospel music. I don't claim to be an expert in its history, and of course it has _roots_ that go back a long way, but one can say that about almost anything. My impression is that southern Gospel music *as such* is not more than a hundred years old, at a generous estimate. Perhaps more like seventy years. (Others more knowledgeable than I may take issue with this unresearched guess.) If that's the case, then there are a lot more venerable musical and cultural traditions, even in America, which is itself a relatively young country. But I have a lot of respect for Gospel musicians precisely because of their respect for their own tradition. There is none of this desire to be ever-changing for its own sake (which I'm afraid _is_ to no small degree true of pop music and also of "Christian contemporary"). That genuine love for older musicians who have contributed to the genre and love of "old" (in modern terms) songs gives the Gospel genre a special cohesion across time and hence a special value and interest.

To the extent that something similar _might_ be said of classic rock (and I'm not sure to what extent it can be), I wouldn't want to write it off as "unreal" or intrinsically ephemeral.

Lydia and Sage,

Chesterton from The Everlasting Man (who I was thinking of when I wrote my comment):

And there fell on [Rome] the shadow from a shining and as yet invisible light and the burden of things to be. It is not for us to guess in what manner or moment the mercy of God might in any case have rescued the world; but it is certain that the struggle which established Christendom would have been very different if there had been an empire of Carthage instead of an empire of Rome. We have to thank the patience of the Punic wars if, in after ages, divine things descended at least upon human things and not inhuman… Can any man in his senses compare the great wooden doll, whom the children expected to eat a little bit of the dinner, with the great idol who would have been expected to eat the children? That is the measure of how far the world went astray, compared with how far it might have gone astray. If the Romans were ruthless, it was in a true sense to an enemy, and certainly not merely a rival. They remembered not trade routes and regulations, but the faces of sneering men; and hated the hateful soul of Carthage. And we owe them something if we never needed to cut down the groves of Venus exactly as men cut down the groves of Baal. We owe it partly to their harshness that our thoughts of our human past are not wholly harsh. If the passage from heathenry to Christianity was a bridge as well as a breach we owe it to those who kept that heathenry human. If, after all these ages we are in some sense at peace with paganism, and can think more kindly of our fathers, it is well to remember the things that were, and the things that might have been. For this reason alone we can take lightly the load of antiquity and need not shudder at a nymph on a fountain or a cupid on a valentine.

Also, your comment about classic rock made me think of The Rolling Stones. Actually it made me think of Keith Richards, who famously has talked quite a bit about the debt The Rolling Stones owe to their "elders" (in this case, blues musicians they borrowed from). Here is just one representative sample taken from a 2009 interview:

On first hearing the blues

It's very difficult to say - when did I identify the blues as a particular form of music? My mum was playing me jazz - a lot of Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan. I mean, it's not your country blues but, as I went on, I realised that I was brought up on a broad basis of blues music without even knowing it, so, in a way, I'm a result of what my mum played. I had a natural affinity for it, I think, so it wasn't like a conscious thing or anything like that. You know, I didn't think in terms of black or white then. You didn't know whether Chuck Berry was black or white - it was not a concern. It was just what came in the ears and, my, what it did to you. And then I slowly realised that what these cats were doing was closely related to what I'd grown up listening to. You know, it was more stripped down, it was more rural. And then I went into this thing of finding out - where did he get it from? And without actually being able to call up Chuck Berry - I was 15 - and say, "Hey, Chuck, where do you get that from?", you went through record labels and [found out] Muddy Waters had been the guy to introduce Chuck Berry to Chess Records - then there's a connection. Then I got into Muddy Waters and then, before I knew it, that leads you immediately to Robert Johnson, and then you're before the war and you're into this other stuff - and a lot of it's, like, pretty rubbish.

On the Stones' love of the blues

Mick was as much of a maniac. Brian as well, an absolute maniac. Charlie was more broad-based - that is, more jazz - but very much in this. We turned Charlie Watts on to Jimmy Reed, which, for a drummer, on the surface of it is the most boring job in the world. But it was the sheer monotony, the sheer non-stop throttling hypnotism that got Charlie into the blues. And these cats are great. After all, they were all jazz drummers in one form or another. The thing we didn't realise then is that cats in the States didn't put everybody in a bag. In England, you were put in a bag - he's jazz, he's this, he's pop, he's rock, da-da-da.

On what the bluesmen thought when the Stones visited Chess Records studios, the home of Chicago blues

They went, "Ah, man, I don't believe it, you're playing our music." They were just so effusive, so sweet - "Come over to the house," you know. I mean, you'd died and gone to heaven - it was the cats, gentlemen in the truest sense of the term. They'd stab you in the back, but gentlemen. They were so interested in what we were doing, and realising, at the same time, that we didn't know sh*t, really. They would all help, it was all encouragement, and that. To me, that was one of the most heartwarming things. 'Cause you figure you're gonna walk in [and they'd think], "Snooty little English guys and a couple of hit records." Not at all. I got the chance to sit around with Muddy Waters and Bobby Womack, and they just wanted to share ideas. And you were expecting, "Oh, English kids making money out of me," and it could well have happened. But they wanted to know how we were doing it, and why we wanted to do it, you know.


This relates to the original post in that if all we can perceive is matter, then "natures" are imperceivable and therefore non-existent.

They aren't imperceptible or non-existent, they are like clouds. What is the nature of a cloud?

Sweet sunshine, for split second there I mistook Jeff's 4:54pm comment for one from Lydia, and was rendered stupefied by the spectacle of her quoting Keith Richards. Such a thing might have indeed been like Carthage subjugating Rome to my mind.

The thing we didn't realise then is that cats in the States didn't put everybody in a bag. In England, you were put in a bag - he's jazz, he's this, he's pop, he's rock, da-da-da.

Add to that that many of the Early Blues Fathers had set lists full of Gene Autry tunes and even "Chatanooga Choo-Choo". That often makes the typical contemporary white blues fan's head explode. And to end on a note of levity, the only amusing part of Ghost World: http://youtu.be/ZaM6lTmhnak

...was rendered stupefied by the spectacle of her quoting Keith Richards.

If such a thing did occur, "Where is Lydia, and what have you done with the body?" becomes a legitimate question.

As a point of trivia, I will add that Scruton is right to be suspicious of the waltz, it was a scandal that shook all of Europe when it became popular.
http://cedance.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/the-waltz-a-forbidden-dance/

Unfortunately all this music talk has pushed my folksy sharing temptation into overdrive. It's okay, I've got all the time in the world: http://vimeo.com/57891996

The denial that anything in the natural world has an essence (man, dog, cat, or even male and female) makes it inevitable that the somewhat more metaphorical notion of an essence we are looking at here--as Titus says, something like the "essence of country hamlet-ness" or as I am discussing the "essence of Anglicanism" or what-not--will be denied. If people can't see that things that have an essence in an utterly literal sense, things like mankind, then they certainly are going to act like bulls in a china shop when it comes to the more delicate and less literal sense in which institutions, traditions, and other human artifacts have an essence.

I really do not feel like talking about here now, but you do agree that a pro-life ethic is grounded in essentialism and nominalism therefore undermines the pro-life ethic. Kreeft does use an essentialist metaphysics when debating abortion.

"My impression is that southern Gospel music *as such* is not more than a hundred years old, at a generous estimate."

Probably a little older than this, Lydia. There's discussion of this in the Sacred Harp documentary 'Awake My Soul.' I don't remember the details, but I seem to recall that Gospel had its roots in post-Civil War revivalism. In the South it largely supplanted the older Sacred Harp tradition, except in those small pockets where the latter was consciously maintained.

By the way, the Sacred Harp tradition as documented in that film is a near perfect example of how a tradition should operate. It's based in a living community, organic rather than manufactured, consciously handed down to younger generations, the elders and the departed members of the community are respected and viewed as part of the continuity of the tradition, etc. I don't believe there's a conservative out there who wouldn't gain some understanding of tradition by watching the film.

"As a point of trivia, I will add that Scruton is right to be suspicious of the waltz"

I'd say that Weaver is right to be suspicious of jazz as well.

Jeffery S., thanks for that incredible quotation. It's exactly on the mark I was aiming at--having read TEMmyself some time ago, it's likely that that is where the idea for my comment originally came from.

Re: the music of the 60s, one of the reasons I think that music stands out in the history of popular culture (and especially the "youth" variety) is that it was grounded in much older musical traditions than just the latest Top 40 or what have you. Most everything since has been shallow and derivative. One of the first questions put to a popular musician by a magazine like Spin or Rolling Stone is, "Who would you say were your biggest influences?" Which is just another way of asking what he began listen to on the radio (and began copying) when he was 15 years old.

BR, yes and no. The pro-life argument is based on common sense. If common sense ends up in some sense being essentialist, so much the better for both essentialism and common sense. However, it is not necessary to become a professional philosopher and delve deeply into the issue of nominalism and essentialism to know and understand the basic facts on which the pro-life position is based. If one accepts so radical a nominalism as to make one incapable of accepting those basic facts, one has wandered off into a sort of crazy-world in which one also is going to have trouble (if one is consistent) with a lot of other things--such as whether I am a human being right now, for example.

Since I know where you are going with this I am not going to be somehow "trapped" into saying, "Oh, yes, the pro-life position is essentialist" in some sense so heavy that then you are going to say, "Aha! Therefore, if one accepts the aspect of evolutionary theory according to which the origins of man involved gradual species change, one shouldn't be a pro-lifer." Because that's baloney. And I know that's where you're going with this. So...y'know. Don't bother.

Lydia,

thank you for your reply as it satisfactorily answered my inquiry. I honestly do not want to expend any energy debating about abortion here, so your limited qualified response serves my rational interests by removing a temptation. I can say more and I might reply again tonight if I am in the mood.

*breathes a sigh of relief that BR hasn't been in the mood thus far*

Tony writes:

I don't think it necessary to say that the deepest, truest reason for the "rightness" of an Anglican vespers or a Buddhist chant is contradictory to the deepest reason for the rightness of the true doctrine, since all are grounded in the one true God.

I’ve got some news for you, Tony. The Buddhist chant is not grounded in the one true God; it’s grounded in the one true Devil. And that goes for the Anglican Vespers, too. To suggest that God is the ground of these false (so-called) religions is blasphemy pure and simple.

Have a nice day.

George R.,

Welcome back -- I missed you!

A couple of questions occassioned by your latest comment:

1) Do you have a source for your claims about the Buddhist chant or Anglican Vespers? Because I noticed this in the Catechism which seems to contradict what you are saying:

I. The Desire for God 27 The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for: (355, 170, 1718) The dignity of man rests above all on the fact that he is called to communion with God. This invitation to converse with God is addressed to man as soon as he comes into being. For if man exists, it is because God has created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence. He cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and entrusts himself to his creator.1 28 In many ways, throughout history down to the present day, men have given expression to their quest for God in their religious beliefs and behavior: in their prayers, sacrifices, rituals, meditations, and so forth. These forms of religious expression, despite the ambiguities they often bring with them, are so universal that one may well call man a religious being: (843, 2566, 2095-2109) From one ancestor [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For “in him we live and move and have our being.”2 29 But this “intimate and vital bond of man to God” (GS 19,1) can be forgotten, overlooked, or even explicitly rejected by man.3 Such attitudes can have different causes: revolt against evil in the world; religious ignorance or indifference; the cares and riches of this world; the scandal of bad example on the part of believers; currents of thought hostile to religion; finally, that attitude of sinful man which makes him hide from God out of fear and flee his call.4 (2123-2128, 398) 30 “Let the hearts of those who seek the LORD rejoice.”5 Although man can forget God or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find life and happiness. But this search for God demands of man every effort of intellect, a sound will, “an upright heart,” as well as the witness of others who teach him to seek God. (2567, 845, 368) You are great, O Lord, and greatly to be praised: great is your power and your wisdom is without measure. And man, so small a part of your creation, wants to praise you: this man, though clothed with mortality and bearing the evidence of sin and the proof that you withstand the proud. Despite everything, man, though but a small part of your creation, wants to praise you. You yourself encourage him to delight in your praise, for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.6 II. Ways of Coming to Know God 31 Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of “converging and convincing arguments,” which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These “ways” of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world and the human person. 32 The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe. (54, 337) As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.7 And St. Augustine issues this challenge: Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air distending and diffusing itself, question the beauty of the sky... question all these realities. All respond: “See, we are beautiful.” Their beauty is a profession [confessio]. These beauties are subject to change. Who made them if not the Beautiful One [Pulcher] who is not subject to change?8 33 The human person: With his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material,”9 can have its origin only in God. (2500, 1730, 1776, 1703, 366) 34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls ‘God.’”10 (199) 35 Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason. (50, 159) III. The Knowledge of God According to the Church 36 “Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.”11 Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God’s revelation. Man has this capacity because he is created “in the image of God.”12 (355) 37 In the historical conditions in which he finds himself, however, man experiences many difficulties in coming to know God by the light of reason alone: (1960) Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator; yet there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty. For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation. The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.13 38 This is why man stands in need of being enlightened by God’s revelation, not only about those things that exceed his understanding, but also “about those religious and moral truths which of themselves are not beyond the grasp of human reason, so that even in the present condition of the human race, they can be known by all men with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error.”14 (2036)

Of course, Buddhism in particular is more problematic as a religion/philosophy, as John Paul II once famously said:

"...in 1994’s Crossing the Threshold of Hope with comments regarding Buddhism that received a good amount of press at the time (and also a lot of debate). In his comments, our late pontiff really didn’t pull any punches, calling Buddhism “in large measure an ‘atheistic’ system’.” He pulled the carpet out from under comparisons to Catholicism by pointing out that the ultimate end of man for Christians is union with God, while for Buddhists it is Nirvana (complete detachment, or a state of nothingness)."

[from this excellent overview of Catholicism and Buddhism: http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/articles.cfm?id=121]

You have a great day as well :-)

1) Do you have a source for your claims about the Buddhist chant or Anglican Vespers?

Yes.

Papal Encyclical Mortalium Animos, Pope Pius XI, 1928:

2. Certainly such attempts can nowise be approved by Catholics, founded as they are on that false opinion which considers all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy, since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgment of His rule. Not only are those who hold this opinion in error and deceived, but also in distorting the idea of true religion they reject it, and little by little. turn aside to naturalism and atheism, as it is called; from which it clearly follows that one who supports those who hold these theories and attempt to realize them, is altogether abandoning the divinely revealed religion. [emphasis mine]

Read the whole thing, Jeff:

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11MORTA.HTM

George R.,
Your things should not be what they are.

Step2, that actually raises a rather interesting, if touchy, question: Would my Catholic friends and colleagues be more authentically Catholic if they believed that I am going to hell because I am a Protestant? Has the essence of Catholicism been partly lost or watered down as it has become softer and gentler and lost the urgent edge on "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus"?

John Henry Newman converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism because he believed he was going to hell otherwise. He says so expressly in his letters. The Catholics might have never won him over had they been more ecumenical.

I have to admit that I'm rather glad _not_ to be urgently petitioned by my Catholic friends to become Catholic lest I burn forever. But perhaps that is just laziness on my part. Ecumenism is easier on me and my friendships. That doesn't necessarily make it more Catholic.

(But now you'll say I'm just encouraging George R.)

George, you missed the whole point of what I was saying. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I suspect that a little bit was on your side as well.

I am not saying anything remotely like "all religions to be more or less good and praiseworthy, since they all in different ways manifest and signify that sense which is inborn in us all, and by which we are led to God and to the obedient acknowledgment of His rule.". Not in the least. That would be a terrible distortion of what I said.

Whatever evil resides in Buddhism, whatever evil Satan is using within it to draw people away from the true religion, it remains true that Satan uses facets of beauty and truth to do his dirty work. He uses facets of beauty in the metered rhythm of chant when he urges men to formulate such chant for a false religion. THOSE facets of truth and beauty are, at root, God's doing, not Satan's. They are, at root, little elements of the right and real in the poison. Sure, Satan is using good for evil purposes - he HAS to because man is drawn to the good, not to evil. And he is forced to use God's little pieces of good, because Satan on his own cannot create any good. If absolutely EVERYTHING about Buddhism or Islam were false and ugly, nobody would buy into them. In order to entice men, Satan has to allow them facets of truth.

What I was saying was that where Buddhism has such elements of the good, they originate in the one true source of good, God, and so they ultimately FIT with all the other elements of the good, including all of the truths taught by the true religion.

Tony writes:

What I was saying was that where Buddhism has such elements of the good, they originate in the one true source of good, God, and so they ultimately FIT with all the other elements of the good, including all of the truths taught by the true religion.

Boy, has Vatican II done a number on you.

Tony, Buddhism itself has NO good elements. It’s a complete and utter abomination. Why? Because it denies worship to the true God. It’s a direct violation of the First Commandment, which is the greatest of all crimes (although not always the most obvious one.) Does it have some elements that in another context would be agreeable? So what? As long as they are part of Buddhism, they are wicked. To illustrate my point, consider this analogy: A young criminal volunteers to carry an old lady’s groceries up to her apartment in order to rob her. Should we, therefore, praise this punk for at least helping the old lady with her bags? Of course not. The “good” elements were all of a piece with the wicked deed. Moreover, even if we concede that some Buddhists are good people and that they are merely deceived, so what? Is deceiving good people deserving of praise? Does the participation of good people in an evil make the evil good? I don’t think so.

So you see, Tony, Buddhism doesn’t “fit” with any good things whatsoever, let alone with the truths taught by true religion.

Has the essence of Catholicism been partly lost or watered down as it has become softer and gentler and lost the urgent edge on "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus"?

After reading George R's joyful comments I'll let you decide whether a kinder, gentler Catholicism is better.

I have to admit that I'm rather glad _not_ to be urgently petitioned by my Catholic friends to become Catholic lest I burn forever.

For the sake of historical accuracy if nothing else, Sheol started off being morally neutral, a place where all the dead went. Gehenna was an actual place cursed as a valley of death (supposedly where pagan priests conducted child sacrifices), but it had a theological aspect as a type of Purgatory for a maximum of twelve months, after which the soul would ascend, be destroyed, or exist in remorse forever.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_in_Christianity

Does it have some elements that in another context would be agreeable? So what? As long as they are part of Buddhism, they are wicked.

Oh, George, put a sock in it. You know better than that, and if you hadn't got your back up misunderstanding me first time around you would have seen it already.

You are confusing the ontological good with the moral good. If a musician plays a really good piece of music really well in order to lull the hearer into some grave mistake that he is going to use for his evil purposes, then YES, the moral character of his playing the music is really, truly, through and through evil. His ENTIRE act is evil. Morally evil. We don't praise his playing as a human act AT ALL, because the whole human act is morally vitiated.

But the really good music that he plays remains really good music. It really is harmonious, melodic, etc - it harbors those excellences that make music good whatever his intention. Music that is melodious and harmonious is good QUA MUSIC, even if the act of playing it is morally evil qua human act. If a record player is playing it, it is good music, even though the record player has no intentions and cannot bear any moral quality of act.

And if it is good music, it is good precisely by being some sort of a incomplete reflection of God. That is, its goodness is all of a piece with the rest of the good universal order that flows from Him.

Step2 (in re George): Your things should not be what they are.

Lydia: Has the essence of Catholicism been partly lost or watered down as it has become softer and gentler and lost the urgent edge on "extra Ecclesiam nulla salus"?

George better hope there is a large gaping loophole in the "extra Ecclesiam" doctrine, because by choosing to reject the several latest popes and the last ecumenical council one places oneself outside the Church of Christ, the one who said "He who hears you hears me."

As for me, I am fine with my Protestant friends taking as long as St. Augustine did to become a Catholic. Or even a little while longer. St. Monica didn't condemn him to the outer darkness during his wild years, didn't cast him off, didn't assume he was destined for Hell, but took the patient path. I don't think St. Paul was a wimp of a Catholic, but he is the one who tells us "love is kind, love is patient..."

Step2, Jesus had very definite and very negative notions about hell. It was in the sense of the place where Dives went that I was thinking of it. I think Christianity can take its line from him, for obvious reasons.

Tony, thanks, I appreciate that. :-)

Tony sayeth:

"love is kind, love is patient..."

Oh, George, put a sock in it.


Where's the love, man?

Tony, believe me, you'd feel a lot better if you'd just come clean and admit that you have erroneously associated God with false religions, and not merely indirectly by being the cause of all things. Of course, as everybody already knows, God allows false religions, just as He allows evil. Moreover, without God there could be no false religions, nor evil; for He is the cause of there is. If this is all you were trying to say, it wouldn't even be worth saying at all; for it is denied by no one. But, Tony, it really seems that you were trying to suggest more than this. You seemed to be saying that both Buddhism and the true faith have the same source (the one true God), but that the former has been particularized in such a way that the full light of truth is obscured from the view of its adherents. That, of course, would be the heresy of Modernism, condemned by Pope Saint Pius X. Now if this is not what you meant, I'll accept your saying so; but I'd still say your wording was highly ambiguous.

The truth, on the other hand, requires no ambiguity to hide behind -- and here it is: Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and, yes, Anglicanism are all unequivocally evil. Those who participate in these "religions" are participating in evil, even if their culpability may be mitigated by their ignorance of the true faith.

That is the teaching of the Fathers. Accept no substitutes.

Boy, has Vatican II done a number on you.

Perhaps I am wanting in a proper understanding of the subtleties of Catholic doctrine, but it appears to me that George R. is basically sneering at the authority of an ecumenical council of the Church, in order to argue for the authority of the Church. Fascinating.

You seemed to be saying that both Buddhism and the true faith have the same source (the one true God), but that the former has been particularized in such a way that the full light of truth is obscured from the view of its adherents.

That is not what I meant OR said, and to try to draw that out of what I said is deforming my whole point. I never said BUDDHISM comes from God, only that some aspect of a Buddhist chant comes from God. I first pointed to all becoming Catholics because I believe that all should be Catholics.

So, even if in the ideal every good Greek Orthodox should become Catholic...differently than an Anglican becoming a Catholic,...

Secondly, when I referred the true religion not holding all truth, I specifically mentioned non-religious aspects thereof:

So also, even though we might assert that one religion holds the supreme place in its receptivity to God and speaking to us, that doesn't mean that that one religion holds all of the OTHER perfections, including non-religious ones.

Thirdly, I wasn't pointing in the direction of DOCTRINE AT ALL in suggesting ways in which some other religious tradition might give us something worthwhile:

But all of our knowledge and sensibilities, including those of math, music, color, tempo, spatial relations, literature, etc go into our generation of such things as a liturgy, so it stands to reason that a Hindu's or a Buddhist's knowledge and sensibilities might have latched onto other aspects of "The Truth" than a Catholic's or a Protestant's, and successfully express elements of that truth in their own worship.

Unless, George, you come to your knowledge of doctrine by way of math, music, color, tempo, and spatial relations, I would think it would be obvious to you that I was talking about such aspects as church architecture or music, OTHER THAN doctrine, and that harbor beauty independently of doctrine. Unless you want to claim that Handel's Hallelujah Chorus holds no beauty because it was composed by a Protestant, you accept my point that a Protestant can produce something of beauty even while he is wrong about doctrine. That's because his sensibilities can perceive something rightly even while his intellect remains partly in darkness.

There is only one religion in the world that is the true religion divinely revealed to us by God, as I have always said of course, and it isn't now Judaism. However, Judaism was at one time the only true religion revealed by God, and it would be SHEER IDIOCY to suggest that the very same ceremonies that Jews practice now that they practiced in 50 BC are "evil" as such, and that they harbor nothing at all of truth or beauty, merely because men who practice them now do so with a taint of evil in their hearts in their rejection of Christianity.

Now if this is not what you meant, I'll accept your saying so; but I'd still say your wording was highly ambiguous.

Only to those who wanted to find fault.

It was in the sense of the place where Dives went that I was thinking of it.

You know that was a parable aimed at the Pharisees, not a literal story.
http://www.christadelphianbooks.org/haw/sitg/sitgb43.html

George R. has won the lifetime achievement award for surreal arguments, twice.
"What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously. We are rather insignificant little bundles of energy and vitality in a vast organization of life. But we pretend that we are the very center of this organization. This pretension is ludicrous; and its absurdity increases with our lack of awareness of it. The less we are able to laugh at ourselves the more it becomes necessary for others to laugh at us." ~ Reinhold Niebuhr

Tony,

I'm afraid you are still not on the right side of this issue. You still don't seem to grasp that an act can be evil and completely devoid of merit simply because it is contrary to the will of God. Nothing done contrary to the will of God can be good, no matter how meritorious it may be in another context; neither can the goodness of the people who participate in it make the disobedient act any less evil; neither can the beauty of the voice make an idolatrous chant any less diabolical. And as for the ceremonies practiced by the Jews today, I tell you they are now as hateful to God as the worship of the golden calf was when the Israelites came out of Egypt.

Now it is certainly possible for a person of good will and pious intentions to perform these things and still have merit imputed to him, provided, of course, that he is innocently ignorant of the truth of them. But understand, it's the good will and pious intentions that are meritorious and not the acts themselves, which are objectively wicked.

@ Paul Cella,

We unfortunately live in fascinating times.

You still don't seem to grasp that an act can be evil and completely devoid of merit simply because it is contrary to the will of God.

Well, let's have it demonstrated where Tony denied this.

No, Paul, I definitively and utterly refuted that George's comment has any bearing on my thesis, at my May 2 8:53 comment. An ACT of playing music can indeed be evil and completely devoid of merit, even while the music itself is very good music. He does nothing to refute my distinction, he only rejects it out of hand by continuing to insist on a confusion between evil in the human act and evil in the thing produced. And for reason: because it is irrefutable. The very reason Satan can tempt us to do evil acts at all is because we are drawn to GOOD THINGS that are not the ultimate good thing. If they weren't good things in themselves, they wouldn't tempt us to use them inappropriately, thus making our use of them evil acts. The good in good music is a kind of good even when the use of it is an evil act, or you couldn't want to do the evil act at all.

And as for the ceremonies practiced by the Jews today, I tell you they are now as hateful to God as the worship of the golden calf was when the Israelites came out of Egypt.

Only because the acts of those entering into the ceremonies come from wills deflected from the true good. But it remains true that the ceremonies themselves harbor the some of the same original aspects of good, such as being pointers to the Messiah (as passover does), and so on. Passover continues to be a pointer to the Messiah whatever the will of the person who does the act, THAT signification was set by God, not by man's will.

George R.,

Are you a Catholic, then? If so, I hope that you reject everything Lydia and Paul say say as hateful to God since they aren't part of the Catholic Church, the Church you and I believe is founded by God. Obviously you think that their writing, no matter how intelligent or beautiful it may be, is utterly and totally diabolical with no merit whatsoever.

If you DON'T think that, you are being inconsistent.

I also find it rather telling that you brush off Paul's comment about Vatican II by making a pointless comment devoid of real content.

Acts 17:23

George R. has won the lifetime achievement award for surreal arguments, twice.

Now that's funny. Thanks, Step2.

However, as to your link to explain the Dives passage, it explores in depth non-literal senses, but it fails utterly to reflect on the way in which the non-literal senses are based on the literal sense. Harry Whittaker says:

Thus, as a basis for belief in disembodied immortality the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is about the most fragile sheet-anchor imaginable:

Then why, it may very fittingly be asked, did Jesus couch his parable in terms of an utterly false idea?

The simple, very adequate, answer is: In this parable it was the Lord's intention to parody and expose as ridiculous the false ideas of both Pharisees and Sadducees.

Whereas, John McCarthy of the Roman Theological Forum reminds us:

St. Thomas Aquinas defines the four senses of Sacred Scripture in his Summa Theologiae (part I, quest. 1, art. 10). First he distinguishes between the literal sense and the spiritual sense in general, where he says that "the first meaning, according to which the words signify things, pertains to the first sense, which is the historical or literal sense, while (the other) meaning, according to which the things signified by the words again signify other things, is called the spiritual sense, which is based upon the literal sense and presupposes it." Thus, he points out, the Bible is a special kind of book like no other book, inasmuch as it has two senses expressed in the very same words. Here the most obvious aspect of the spiritual sense is the typical sense, which pertains to the allegorical sense. Msgr. John E. Steinmueller [consultor to the First Pontifical Biblical Commission, during the days of Pope Pius XII], in his well-known Companion to Scripture Studies (vol. 1, pp. 256-257) remarks: "Hence, the literal sense would be the meaning expressed immediately and directly by the words of the sacred writers," while the typical sense "is based only indirectly upon the words and directly upon things, events, or persons (either individually or collectively) used to express something else on a higher level and to foreshadow some great truth." And Msgr. Steinmueller gives as an example the expression in Osee (Hosea) 11:1: "I called my son out of Egypt," which refers literally to the descendants of Jacob brought out of Egypt under Moses, and which refers typically to the Infant Jesus returning to Palestine from Egypt. In this study we are going to seek to identify clearly the literal sense and to distinguish it from possible spiritual senses contained under the same words. We are going to look for three different kinds of spiritual sense, namely, the allegorical sense, the tropological, or moral, sense, and the anagogical, or final, sense. The typical sense will be considered as an expression of the allegorical sense.

Nevertheless, the "literal sense" is and always has been the sense of the words as considered and intended by the person who wrote them. This means that for an explicit parable, the author doesn't intend to say that the parable "events" actually happened - there is no reason to think that Luke was trying to make us think there was a man named Dives who did these things. But that non-factual reflection about the existence of Dives doesn't imply anything about the accuracy of the picture of the afterlife outside of Dives or Lazarus or Abraham's actual making those statements. Saying that Jesus was poking holes in the Pharisees' ideas, while true, overstates how far the parable implies He was poking: Jesus wasn't trying to poke holes in their belief in God. Nor, from the parable, is there any reason to think He was poking holes in belief in an afterlife in which persons are separated according to a difference in this life. Jesus wasn't using the parable to teach why to believe in the existence of an afterlife, HE DOES THAT ELSEWHERE. He was teaching something else here.

The article also confuses the temporary disembodied immortality after this life with the eternal embodied afterlife after the final judgment, which confusion allows other illogical failures in interpreting the meaning of the parable.

Paul writes:

Well, let's have it demonstrated where Tony denied this.

He's denied it implicitly. For example, notice how says that Jewish practices today are not evil because they are contrary to the will of God, but "ONLY because the acts of those entering into the ceremonies come from wills deflected from the true good." You see? It's not the will of God that determines whether an act is evil, but rather the state of the soul. The distinction is subtle but crucial. For if the evil of the act is predicated on the bad intention of the actor, and if it's admitted that one cannot presume intention, then the act itself cannot be judged evil with any kind of certainty. In fact, it may even be thought of as a good thing -- for instance, as a sort of "pointer to the Messiah," or some other such nonsense.

Hypothetically speaking, if God Almighty says, "Do A, B, and C," there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for saying, "No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do D, E, and F instead." To do so would be an objectively evil act, for the simple reason that it would be contrary to the will of God. Moreover, it would remain evil not withstanding any and all good intentions, talent, solemnity, and aesthetic value that might be associated with it. Furthermore, to say that "D, E, and F" and "A, B, and C" "have the some source, the one true God" just because both sets of acts depend on God for the being and attributes of those performing them (as if anybody on planet Earth is denying this) is just a blatant case of equivocation. Lastly, to suggest that God somehow wants people to disobey Him (at least for the time being) in order that there be more variety in the world (as Tony does above) is just, well, beyond ridiculous.

George R., I get the feeling at this point that you're just being willfully obtuse. I furthermore am shocked that you are even willing to dialogue with Paul since, as a Protestant (and it seems as if you're a Catholic), everything he says is totally and completely evil.

The way you're twisting what Tony is saying is almost beyond laughable at this point.

Right on, MarcAnthony. Rebellion against God looms so large in view that it crowds out everything else.

Psssst--Did you know that Chesterton praised certain pagans, along with certain Jews, even certain Muhammadans? Every once in a while he let loose, even, with a word of kindness or esteem for a dirty Protestant. I swear I've even read GKC say appreciative things about agnostic rationalists like Rousseau.

Then again Chesterton was a hellbound fool.

MarcAnthony,

Thank you for your comments.

Why would you say that I should think that anything a Protestant says is completely evil? That does not at all follow from what I've been saying. Protestantism is evil, but Protestants themselves have many admirable qualities. I'm a young-earth creationist, and I follow the publications of the leading creation-scientists -- and they-re almost all Protestants. Most people who call themselves Catholic, on the other hand, seem to believe that Darwinism is an article of the faith.

George R.,

You wrote,

"Why would you say that I should think that anything a Protestant says is completely evil? That does not at all follow from what I've been saying."

Of course it does. You said:

"Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and, yes, Anglicanism are all unequivocally evil. Those who participate in these "religions" are participating in evil, even if their culpability may be mitigated by their ignorance of the true faith."

"Tony, Buddhism itself has NO good elements. It’s a complete and utter abomination. Why? Because it denies worship to the true God."

Both of these statements are compound statements. You seem to imply that because one tenet of the religion false or evil, all aspects of it are evil. This is so much more complicated than you are making it.

What can I say? Proof by counter-example: the Eastern Orthodox Church rightly and validly has Holy Orders and confects the Eucharist (as acknowledged by the Roman Catholic Church, since forever). Since the Eucharist is wholly Good, by your logic, it would be impossible for something which is a wholly evil, which I take you think is anything not in union with Rome is, to manifest a good, nay, even the perfect Good.

Since, the Eastern Orthodox and the Russian orthodox can certainly bring forth good, while not being in visible union with Rome, then your argument is incomplete, at the least.

Also, since Christ came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it, why is it not conceivable that the Jews have the Law, but unfulfilled and incomplete because it is missing Christ? Again, if the Law were not a good, Christ could not have participated in it, nor would the Transfiguration have meant anything, since Christ associated himself with Moses and Elijah. Now, a law may be superseded in several ways: 1) one may replace the law with something different, 2) one may replace a part of the law, leaving the rest intact, 3) one may add a perfection to the law ether by the addition of a new statute or by adding a new or more correct interpretation to the law. Since Christ did not come to abolish the Law, sense 1 is excluded. Likewise, if 2 is admitted, a part of the original law still remains and is not suddenly transformed into an evil. If 3 is admitted, then the original law is left untouched. Since only senses 2 or 3 are permissible by Scripture, it, necessarily, follows that since the Jews still obey the Ten Commandment (something definitely accepted by the Church as a good), then you are mistaken if you think the the Jewish religion is evil. Do you think that, suddenly, at the wink of an eye, the Jews started worshiping another God then the God of Abrahm, Issac, and Jacob? It is true that some Jews worship God so wrongly as to be worshiping a false version of God and when Jesus walked this Earth he railed against them, but he never told anyone to stop being a Jew. Christianity is not a different religion than Judaism, it is the completion of Judaism, or else the whole idea of Christ being the Messiah makes no sense. We are waiting for the remaining Jews to catch on to that truth, but that in no way means that they or their religion is evil.

You seem to not understand that a religion can be defective in more that one sense and some defects, such as with the Orthodox, do not render them evil, in themselves.

Your quote from Pope St. Pius X is totally out of context. This was a response to the idea floating at the beginning of the Twentieth century of a United Council of Churches. Obviously, such a thing is impossible because of the inherent contradiction in some doctrines between the other ecclesial assemblies and the Church. Unity without consistent doctrine is impossible. He, nowhere, called them evil, but said that the notion of a Union born of Mere Christianity, in Lewis's sense, is impossible and that such an idea moves these bodies farther from the truth.

Have you read the Summa Theologica, II.II Q1 - 16, esp., 10 and 11?

Aquinas, while not side-stepping the errors of the Jews, points out:

"I answer that, Human government is derived from the Divine government, and should imitate it. Now although God is all-powerful and supremely good, nevertheless He allows certain evils to take place in the universe, which He might prevent, lest, without them, greater goods might be forfeited, or greater evils ensue. Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority, rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain greater evils be incurred: thus Augustine says (De Ordine ii, 4): "If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust." Hence, though unbelievers sin in their rites, they may be tolerated, either on account of some good that ensues therefrom, or because of some evil avoided. Thus from the fact that the Jews observe their rites, which, of old, foreshadowed the truth of the faith which we hold, there follows this good--that our very enemies bear witness to our faith, and that our faith is represented in a figure, so to speak. For this reason they are tolerated in the observance of their rites."

Now, last I heard, when an Anglican baptizes, as long as he follows the rite as set forth by the Church, he certainly baptizes. He baptizes, not because he is Anglican, but because he accepts at least a portion, however obscurely, of the Church's teachings. In baptizing, is he doing a good? Of course. Now, I put it to you: how is it that something wholly evil, who, is incapable of a good act, can, nevertheless, perform a good act - an act, by the way, which is pleasing to God? If you say that it is because they are following the will of God as set forth by the Church, then you speak correctly, but answer: if they are evil because they are separated from the Church, then they must be totally separated from the Church, or else you must admit that they share a certain desire for acting with the Church in doing good, at least in part. Thus, while Faith must be consistent, those who would follow it may sometimes err in parts of it without destroying their every connection to it, or else the Church would not be able to say that even pagans can baptize. Whenever one does what the Church does, for that brief moment, has not a spark of Faith been kindled? When a Jew and a Christian resist the urge to commit adultery, have they not, for that instant, worshiped the same God?

Pope Pius IX, allocution, Singulari Quadem, December 9, 1854, also wrote:

"For, it must be held by faith that outside the Apostolic Roman Church, no one can be saved; that this is the only ark of salvation; that he who shall not have entered therein will perish in the flood; but, on the other hand, it is necessary to hold for certain that they who labor in ignorance of the true religion, if this ignorance is invincible, will not be held guilty of this in the eyes of God. Now, in truth, who would arrogate so much to himself as to mark the limits of such an ignorance, because of the nature and variety of peoples, regions, innate dispositions, and of so many other things? For, in truth, when released from these corporeal chains 'we shall see God as He is' (1 John 3.2), we shall understand perfectly by how close and beautiful a bond divine mercy and justice are united; but as long as we are on earth, weighed down by this mortal mass which blunts the soul, let us hold most firmly that, in accordance with Catholic teaching, there is "one God, one faith, one baptism" (Eph. 4.5); it is unlawful to proceed further in inquiry.
"But, just as the way of charity demands, let us pour forth continual prayers that all nations everywhere may be converted to Christ; and let us be devoted to the common salvation of men in proportion to our strength, 'for the hand of the Lord is not shortened' (Isa. 9.1) and the gifts of heavenly grace will not be wanting to those who sincerely wish and ask to be refreshed by this light."

The point that you seem to not agree with is that every good thing comes from God. All gifts are mediated, in some way unknown to man, by the Church. Whenever anyone does something good, has he not, for that brief instant, touched the Church? Now, a continual relationship is needed for salvation, so mere touching is not sufficient for salvation, but, nevertheless, your claim that no good can come from evil men is wrong in the sense that even evil men are not always evil as long as there is life in this world. God can make even an ass sing his praises. How much more the sinner touched for an instant by grace?

Are you a sedevacantist? Would you be the first to light the match that burned the library at Alexandria? Both of these questions seem, by your statements, to be answered, yes. Do you reject Aquinas's use of Aristotelian logic and facts in his Summa because Aristotle was a pagan and must produce evil? Really, your comments seem to contradict the use that the Church has always made of the good in pagan discoveries.

I've written too much, but perhaps you should take the matter up with Aquinas or, indeed, any artist who paints with colors created by the pagans. Does the Church condemn them under the idea that one must never use an evil means to a good end? Even the Church uses the musical scales invented by pagans for its chant.

Your ideas seem to be inconsistent with the perpetual practices of the Church. Since those same scales were used in the worship of pagan cults, is the Church to shun them.

At the very least, you seem to have been talking about different goods and different evils without clearly delineating them when you use the term. The original question of this post was whether or not the diversity of music from various sources should not be saved by virtue of their goodness. You say that because they are used in Anglican services, the songs are, necessarily evil, since the service is evil. If that were the case, then the Church would have no music at all because all it knows of music comes from pagan sources.

Now, if all you wanted to say were ex eccleisia nulla salus, then, fine, but that is not the topic under discussion.

The Chicken

Yeah, I'd say something more, but TME pretty much nailed it.

It's TMC this time. :-) We don't see the Chicken around here nearly enough, IMO. He used to post more before your time, MarcAnthony.

Chicken,

As for the Eastern Orthodox, I'll just ask you this: If a thief steals something good, does the goodness of the thing stolen make the thief less wicked?

As for St. Thomas's passage, I say this: He believes the that the Jewish rites are evil; so do I. He believes that sometimes evil should be allowed so that good may come from it; so do I. He believes that the Jewish rites provided such an occasion; so do I. So, I don't think you have a very effective criticism here.

As for all the great achievements of the pagans, et al., how many time do I have to say that I recognize the many good qualities found in non-Catholics? Well, I'll say it one more time: non-Catholics have good qualities.

And as for Catholics appropriating the good things found among the pagans for their own, I cannot be more in favor of it. We should pick'em clean.

It's TMC this time. :-)

Ah, my apologies! I suppose my mind jumped automatically to the end when I read "Masked".

George, what on Earth are you protesting of Tony's then? I don't disagree with a word of what you just said OR what Tony said, since I'm missing the contradiction.

George R.,

You wrote,

"As for the Eastern Orthodox, I'll just ask you this: If a thief steals something good, does the goodness of the thing stolen make the thief less wicked?"

What, exactly, did the Orthodox steal that they didn't have a right to? They have had, in continuity from the beginning, exactly the same access to the Eucharist as the Roman Church.

"As for St. Thomas's passage, I say this: He believes the that the Jewish rites are evil;"

So evil that the Church still celebrates Pentecost, Passover, and a form of Yom Kippor, albeit with a more mature knowledge of what they were meant to mean? Not only that, but the early apostles went every day to the Synagogue. In fact, the structure of the Mass is derived, in its original form, from the Synaxis of the Synagogue.

You misunderstand what St. Thomas means by the rites being evil. Evil denotes a lack of a Good that should be present. As such, because of the incomplete understanding of what they are doing, the Jewish rites lack a Goodness of completion that they should have. In that sense, they are evil, but, then again, so is a Mass said with vodka and toast. He does not mean to say that the Jewish rites are morally evil. That would be a contradiction, since Christ, who is Moral Goodness, itself, celebrated them. So, what exactly St. Thomas means by evil is more nuanced than you put forth.

"As for all the great achievements of the pagans, et al., how many time do I have to say that I recognize the many good qualities found in non-Catholics? Well, I'll say it one more time: non-Catholics have good qualities."

I will accept that, but, earlier, you said:

"Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, and, yes, Anglicanism are all unequivocally evil. Those who participate in these "religions" are participating in evil, even if their culpability may be mitigated by their ignorance of the true faith."

They are participating in evil and, yet, even the Church uses Bach's music, since it finds in it nothing incompatible with the Faith. So, obviously, when the Lutherans sing a Back motet, they are not participating in evil, since if it were, the Church could not permit that evil in its own ceremonies. Either both participate in evil or neither do when they sing a Bach motet. If you mean to say that the religions you mention are all defective in holding the correct doctrines of the Faith and this is what you mean by evil, then yes, we can agree on that, but as far as making a blanket condemnation of all of the aspects of the religions, that seems to go beyond the bounds of reason, since, as demonstrated, there is some good contained in each of them. That was exactly Tony's point, I think.

So, back to Lydia's reason for writing this post - the Church does not have the unity Christ wishes for it in the sense that there are many people who reverence the Cross of Christ, who have died for His Name, who, nevertheless, are not part of a visible, united, Catholic Church and yet, in their sincerity and even with incomplete unity, they have produced marvelous works of art, literature, and science. Those good things are worth holding onto, but not, I think for the reason Lydia struggled to articulate. They are worth holding onto, precisely, because they are the inheritance, the dowry waiting for the body of believers when, sometime in the next thousand years, the divisions are healed and they are one, once again in that perfect marriage of persons that is the Body of Christ made visible. It is one thing to know the Lutheran hymns as a member of a group that exists by itself; it another thing to know the hymns in the fullness of what they will signified when one voice, one Church sings them. In all of these things, the good will remain when the evil passes. The unity underlying them all will be exposed when the divisions ceases. The Church earnestly prays for that day, but I fear it may be long in coming and not without the mixing of bloods.

They days are coming when you will long to see beauty and you will only see ugliness, misery, and pain. They days are coming when you will wish for truth and all you will have are lies. The days are coming when you will hope for rest and all you will have is the Cross. In all of these things yet to come the Church and its hope for unity must pass. There has been much blood shed and there is much blood-letting to come that will bind the old wounds and transfuse life for life. There will emerge a united Church, but it will not be a silent marriage ceremony of merely old ways. It will not be a shot-gun wedding of convenience. It will be a union of hearts born of a more sure and certain understanding of what it means to be Christian than has ever been known, before. That knowledge will be an old knowledge and a new knowledge as the Church is always bringing forth that which is old, but, new. What I fear, however, is it will not an easy knowledge.

The beauty that Lydia mentions is the faintest fore-calling of that future time and a promise, perhaps, that when the trial has passed, the beauty will remain. What we may hope, with all of our hearts, is that this beauty, now disunited by Creed and Conviction will, when the time is right, will form a perfect picture of unity within the Body of Christ.

The Chicken

MC,
Have you ever thought of becoming a priest? I'm just saying that was a mighty fine sermon. :)

He's denied it implicitly. For example, notice how says that Jewish practices today are not evil because they are contrary to the will of God, but "ONLY because the acts of those entering into the ceremonies come from wills deflected from the true good."

The Jews have a covenant with God, the same God you call Father. Please explain how an eternal, omniscient God could provide them with evil beliefs and promote practices contrary to his own will?

Hypothetically speaking, if God Almighty says, "Do A, B, and C," there is absolutely no justification whatsoever for saying, "No, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do D, E, and F instead." To do so would be an objectively evil act, for the simple reason that it would be contrary to the will of God.

Under the normal definition of contrary you would have to do the opposite of A, B, and C. Your example suffers from the fact that you aren't even attempting to define a relationship between the two sets of acts, as if they were wholly incompatible in every way, when the assumption should be there is going to be some level of overlap, however minimal.

MC, Have you ever thought of becoming a priest? I'm just saying that was a mighty fine sermon. :)

I'm going to have to second that one.

I have nothing else to say, really. It was just a great homily.

For example, notice how says that Jewish practices today are not evil because they are contrary to the will of God, but "ONLY because the acts of those entering into the ceremonies come from wills deflected from the true good." You see? It's not the will of God that determines whether an act is evil, but rather the state of the soul. The distinction is subtle but crucial. For if the evil of the act is predicated on the bad intention of the actor, and if it's admitted that one cannot presume intention, then the act itself cannot be judged evil with any kind of certainty.

Now we see clearly that George is being tendentious and ornery for the mere sake of argument, for not only did I not say or even imply the thought he ascribes to me, but I have repeatedly and definitively rejected it. For example, here, from which I borrow one passage:

There are three fonts of morality: 1. Intention, 2. moral object, 3. Circumstances.

The first font (first in time) is the intention of an end or purpose for which the act will be chosen. After the moral agent determines what he intends to accomplish, he selects an act so as to lead toward that intention. The second font is not the moral object all by itself, but the chosen act, with its inherent moral meaning (i.e. the moral species or moral nature of the act), as determined by the moral object. The circumstances are all the other aspects: the identity of the actor, the place, time, other persons and physical things being acted on – all of which determine the moral weight of the reasonably anticipated good and bad consequences of the act, considering the consequences as distinct from the act itself come to completion in its object.

Which follows St. Thomas exactly. See Prima Secundae, Q 18, A 2, 3, and 4, that evil human acts are evil from their object, intention, or circumstance.

So, if an act must be good in all 3 fonts to be morally good, it will be bad if it fails only one of them. That means that the act can be for a good object, but a bad intention, and still be a bad act. But notice, being for a bad intention DOES NOT MAKE IT FOR A BAD OBJECT. Thus the bad act may have a good object.

The act of a Jew today in saying the Shema cannot be evil on account of the object of the act, because it is the very same object now that it was in Jesus's time, when it was normally a good act. The evil involved must come in from the other fonts. The object is of itself either good or neutral.

George didn't even realize that HE is the one that equates my "wills deflected from the true good" with his own "bad intention", instead of realizing that an evil action is evil because of a will deflected from the true good either by reason of the object, the intention, or the circumstances, all 3 versions of moral defect are found in the WILL, and not just that of wrong intention.

Further, ALL evil acts that are evil because of bad intention only are evil because of what is in the will of the person acting: what is in his soul. But, as George FAILS MISERABLY in identifying, the evil is due to that intention being in not in conformity to God's will. Which I have always said and George's idiotic words are so much poisonous tripe - trying as he does to locate the evil in "God's will" of all things!!!! instead of in the will of the actor. You see?

Are you a sedevacantist?

Yes, Chicken, George is a sedevacantist. Somehow he manages to believe due to Christ's promises to Peter and the Apostles ("On this Rock" and "He who hears you..") that the Church of Rome was kept free from error until the reign of Pius XII, but has now had 6 popes (elected under clearly valid elections and installations), but somehow these Popes failed to be protected from error by the Holy Spirit - or (worse yet) that the elections or installations were invalid but only by some defect that is hidden from us, known only to the Holy Spirit! And yet he roundly abuses the Protestant theory (such as that of Thomas Yuetter sometime commenter here) that the Church was kept free from formal error until Council of Trent, and then went off the rails. I wonder how many more popes it will take before he sees a problem with consistency in his position.

I am mystified by George's position with regard to Eastern Orthodoxy. St. Augustine of Hippo reached out and reconciled Donatist and Novation schismatics to the Church Catholic. Augustine held that schismatics were fundamentally differnt from heretics like the Arians. George seems to view the Canonical Orthodox Churches as heretics.

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