Month: July 2013

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The Holy Trinity: A Simple Explanation for Children

Son: Dad? How can God be three in one and one in three? That seems crazy.

Father: Criminy, son. Can’t you ask me an easier question, like how an electron can be a particle and a wave at the same time?

Son: Right now, it’s the Trinity I’m worried about.

Father: OK, I’ll take a shot at it. The first thing you should be clear on is that God is not both three and one of the same sort of thing. That would be like saying that I had three oranges that are one orange, or three lines that are one line. It would be a flat contradiction.

Son: So you mean that he is three in one way, and one in another?

Father: Yes.

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The Etiology of Evil

Commenting on my recent post on sin as enacted falsehood, Lydia asked a tough question:

Kristor, here’s a question: If sin is always enacted lying, what about people who love to do evil because it is evil? What about a torturer of the innocent, for example? He isn’t saying that torturing is “the appropriate thing to do under the circumstances.” He’s torturing because it _isn’t_ the appropriate thing to do, and because he loves the perversion. Some people love perversion for being perverse–love to read the universe backwards. I take this to be the essence of the demonic, if the demonic can be said to have an essence. Since we can imagine such a thing as a demonic will which truly adheres to evil for evil’s sake, it seems that this must be possible, and indeed (more’s the pity) we do know of monstrously evil human beings who have enacted the demonic will in our mundane world.

This is an especially important question, it has always seemed to me. I’d be a long step closer to being convinced that there is an a priori argument (or nearly a priori argument) for the existence of an omnibenevolent God if I didn’t have a rather vivid sense of the possibility of an extremely powerful (all-powerful?) but truly evil will.

I responded:

Ugh. That’s a really tough question. I mean, it’s about fifteen tough questions. Thanks! I think …

I do have a response. But it’s too long for a comment. So, I’ll post it as a new entry.

This is that post.

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Out of the Antiworld

I have an essay in the current issue of Modern Age that’s available online through the Intercollegiate Review website. It gives an architectonic account of the various major political positions in present-day America that is intended to explain the necessity and awkward status of social conservatism. The piece started out as a lecture I gave a couple of years ago at a conference and then shortened and made a bit less specifically Catholic to fit into an officially non-Catholic publication. An excerpt:

Our current public order claims to separate politics from religion, but that understates its ambition. It aspires to free public life—and eventually, since man is social, human life in general—not only from religion but also from nature and history. The intended result is an increase in freedom as man becomes his own creator. The effect, though, is that human life becomes what those in power say it is.

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A request for good books on your church

I do try to understand belief systems other than my own, and I don’t consider that I have succeeded until I can explain the system to one of its adherents, and he will agree that I have stated his beliefs accurately.  I once tried to do this with Protestantism, writing a blog post on the difference between Catholic and Protestant theological concerns and trying to be equally respectful to both.  The subsequent discussion with theologically astute Protestant bloggers Gerry Neal and Alan Roebuck made it clear that I had failed my test.  I had not represented the Protestant view in a way that a Protestant would find adequate.  I still don’t understand Protestantism.

But I would like to, and I’m willing to expend a little effort on it.  What I am looking for is a book or essay, less than 300 pages (ideally much less), that explains the distinctive features of Protestant theology.  It must not be aggressively anti-Catholic (although, of course, it will disagree with Catholicism in places), because making me defensive will defeat the point of the exercise.  On the other hand, it must be written by a believing Protestant, because otherwise I won’t accept it as accurate.  I promise that I am not using this study to look for weaknesses and compose an attack on anyone’s creed.

Given recent discussions, I would also welcome suggestions for a good book or essay on Mormonism.  Again “good” means theologically sophisticated, sympathetic but not combative toward orthodoxy, and written by an actual Mormon.

And just for fun, I’ll throw this question open to everyone, including Catholics and Orthodox.  Is there a good book on your church for the educated and curious but busy?  If so, please give the title and author.  If not, somebody should really get to work on that, don’t you think?

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Warsaw

Poland holds a special place in the hearts of Cold War Catholics, so I was thrilled to be able to spend a week attending a conference in Warsaw.  It really is a lovely city–at least the old town and university area I was staying in.  The monuments and churches, the outdoor restaurants and street performers, the beautiful girls revealingly attired for the summer heat–everything comes together to make a pleasant atmosphere.  Did I mention the girls?  Well, that’s not what I’m going to be talking about.  I want to talk about the monuments, because I think some of you will get a kick out of it.  I didn’t have a camera, so I’m going to grab pictures off of Google Commons.  I saw this stuff, though, so I can assure you that it’s really there.

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Contra Ignosticism

For every phenomenon of nature, there is a perfectly natural explanation. Such is the credo of naturalism. In practice, it has worked out amazingly well, so far. This should not surprise us. In a causally coherent and ordered world, it could not be otherwise, for in such a world (as in no other state of affairs) every event would be neatly and completely tied to its antecedents and successors by definite and orderly causal relations. And this would be so, whether or not the causal relations were intelligible to its denizens, or even apprehensible. In other words, it would be so, even if there were nothing in the universe more intelligent than amoebae. If the world were not coherent, and therefore, in principle, completely intelligible, then we – i.e., members of the world – could not understand any bit of it. For, if things were not integrated with each other in an orderly way, then the world would not really hang together – it wouldn’t be a world at all, properly speaking. It would be nothing but a jumble of unrelated events, a Humean chaos.

Many people have quite naturally concluded that the causal integrity of the world precludes the operation therein of causes exogenous thereto. This is the second sentence of the naturalist credo: there are no causes exogenous to our world, and no things exogenous to it, either.

But it won’t do. For, there is no perfectly natural explanation of the natural phenomenon that there is a perfectly natural explanation of every phenomenon of nature. Nature can’t explain the fact that there is a Nature of Nature.

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Sin is Enacted Falsehood

I woke up Saturday morning thinking about sin. I know, I know: it sounds sick. But it wasn’t morbid, or anything. I wasn’t regretting my manifold wickednesses. No, I was enjoying the odd, synchronistic confluence in my intellectual life of inputs from several disparate sources, that each illumined the same issue of sin from slightly different perspectives, in such a way as to provide me as I woke with an increase in cerebral economy, otherwise known as an insight: the discovery of a connection between several ideas, that harmonized and integrated them.

In a post the other day at one of his several useful blogs, Bruce Charlton suggested that habitual lying, such as that in which the slaves of political correctness indulge themselves, deforms the circuitry of the brain in such a way as to cripple the ability to think. I have thought something of the sort for decades, ever since I read William Powers’ pellucid, masterful, amiable and penetrating Behavior: the Control of Perception.[1] The basic idea I derived from Powers, as implicit in his explication of the logical structure of the nervous system under the terms of control system theory, is that in lying, superordinate circuits override the truthful output signals arising from subordinate circuits, either damping them, or masking them altogether. In effect, one control system of the brain disagrees with another, and insists that it get its own way. But, therein lies the rub; for, there is never any free lunch.

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Guenon and Voegelin on “the Bactrian Episode”

I have an essay just up (21 July) at The Brussels Journal under the title “René Guénon and Eric Voegelin on the Degeneration of Right Order.”  The topic involves an excursion through the history of the Greeks in India and the essay entails a discussion of Voegelin’s term “the ecumene.”  On another matter, I spent the weekend at “Doxacon,” a conference organized under the auspices of a Greek Orthodox parish in Northern Virginia and intended to explore the intersections of religion and theology with the fantastic genres of literature, especially science fiction.  I hope to report on the event in a day or two here at The Orthosphere.

Here is a sample from the Brussels Journal essay:

It will undoubtedly have impressed those who have followed the argument so far that, simply at the level of descriptive phraseology, many of Guénon’s constructions and Voegelin’s suggest their own application to the contemporary state of affairs in the incipient Twenty-First Century. Guénon in Spiritual Authority mentions the origins of étatisme, with its relentless centralization of political power, in Fourteenth Century France. Voegelin in The Ecumenic Age refers to the ecumenic empires as ‘organizational shells that will expand indefinitely to engulf former concrete societies.’ The centripetal and centrifugal movements might seem opposite to one another and therefore non-compossible, but they are in fact simultaneous and complementary. They describe in structural terms the libidinous process by which the bearers of ‘moral apocalypse’ – that is, the Gnostic reformers of society – progressively obliterate the concrete societies that come under their imperial-entrepreneurial sway. Whether it is the arrogantly self-aggrandizing Federal Government in the United States of America or the inhumanly bureaucratic Brussels Parliament of the European Union in Western Europe, the attitude of the reigning elites towards the world is none other than the attitude of the auto-apotheotic conquistador toward the ecumene.

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My life among the Mormons

It turns out there are a lot of Mormons around here where I live.  All of my daughter’s close friends (the ones who visit our apartment for play dates) belong to Mormon families.  What’s more, I was actually relieved when I learned that they were LDS rather than, say, Catholic.  A Catholic I would assume regarded Jesus as, at most, a long-dead “great teacher” whose teachings are most fully embodied in the sexual revolution and the American Democratic Party, whereas there is a decent chance that a Mormon is on my side in the Culture War and acknowledges Jesus as his Savior in a more substantial sense.  True, this is a very low bar to clear.  In the last couple of months, I’ve had to admit to myself that Catholicism really is the sick man of Christendom, that there is no branch of Orthodoxy or Protestantism with as little vitality or as much contempt for its own spiritual foundations.  (Shopping at Wal-Mart has also forced me to admit the material superiority of communism.  Seriously, the free world can’t even make its own Elmo dolls?  That’s a lament for another day, though.)  However, as I’ve learned more about them, the Mormons have entirely lived up to my initial positive prejudices.

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