Month: September 2013

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Humanitarian Humbug and Hostility

A guest post by commenter JMSmith:

When we say that Western Civilization is post-Christian, we do not mean that Christianity has become irrelevant.  It will not be irrelevant so long as we continue to be defined in a vital way by our answers to the decisive question that Jesus posed to his disciples: “whom say ye that I am?”  To this question three basic answers are possible.  There is the orthodox Christian answer that he is the Son of the triune God, there is the infidel answer that he was a silver-tongued grifter, and there is the humanitarian answer that he was an exemplary human being and harbinger of what all men will one day become.  We are post-Christian because the first answer is not so popular as it once was, but also because the question itself remains vital and decisive.

Today the humanitarian answer is the most respectable, and quite possibly the most popular.  It avoids the offensive nastiness of the infidel answer and the metaphysical mysteries of the orthodox answer, so it appeals to people who aspire to be nice and normal.   Moreover, it carries the flattering implication that these nice and normal people are also more than a little Christ-like.  The question is, are they Christian?

Continue reading →

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Losing our religion IV: Mercy without sin

Apropos my recent musing about the ultimate futility of trying to proclaim mercy for those who don’t believe in sin, here’s this intereting smidgeon from Rod Dreher on his refusal to reenter a Church hobbled by its obsession with the therapeutic (h/t Fr. Z.):

Just over two decades ago, when I began the process to enter the Roman Catholic Church as an adult convert, I chose to receive instruction at a university parish, figuring that the quality of teaching would be more rigorous. After three months of guided meditations and endless God is love lectures, I dropped out.

I agreed that God is love, but that didn’t tell me what He would expect of me if I became a Catholic. Besides, I had spent four years dancing around the possibility of returning to the Christianity of my youth. When I made my first steps back to churchgoing as an adult, I found plenty of good people who told me God is love, but who never challenged me to change my life.

What needed changing? Lots. My own brokenness was plain to me, and I was ready to turn from my destructive sins and become a new person. The one thing I didn’t want to do was surrender my sexual liberty, which was my birthright as a young American male. I knew, though, that without fully giving over my will to God, any conversion would be precarious. By then, I was all too wary of my evasions. To convert provisionally — that is, provided that the Church didn’t hassle me about my sex life — would really be about seeking the psychological comforts of religion without making sacrifices.

What I was told, in effect, in that university Catholic parish was that God loved me just as I was — true — but that I didn’t need to do anything else. It dawned on me one day that at the end of this process, all of us in the class would end up as Catholics, but have no idea what the Catholic Church taught. I bolted, and a year later, I was received into the Church in another parish.

If you only know about the Catholic Church from reading the papers, you are in for a shock once you come inside. The image of American Catholicism shown by the media is of a church preoccupied with sex and abortion. It’s not remotely true. I was a faithful mass-going Catholic for 13 years, attending a number of parishes in five cities in different parts of the country. I could count on one hand the number of homilies I heard that addressed abortion or sexuality in any way. Rather, the homilies were wholly therapeutic, almost always some saccharine variation of God is love.

All the disproportionate emphasis on God’s love and mercy might have been useful in the 14th century, when penitential movements traveled the country flogging their backs bloody and occasionally trying to “purify” the Church by butchering its shepherds, or in a hypothetical modern world where people are overly preoccupied with God’s justice, worshipping the Cross instead of the Christ nailed to it, or despairing of their salvation and turning from the Church in ruinous numbers to seek a spiritual palliative amidst the muck and mire of the world. Whatever kind of world we’ve got today, it’s clear that it ain’t that kinda world.

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Article on Ancient Atomism

My article on ancient atomism appears at Angel Millar’s People of Shambhala website.  In particular, I undertake a reading of Lucretius’s great poem On the Nature of Things, a strange mixture of bold speculation that anticipates modern physics and cosmology more interesting perhaps for its fairly concerted critique of sacrificial religion.  I offer a sample –

 

Posterity knows only a little about Lucretius and much of what it knows it gleans from autobiographical references in his poem.  The poem itself is paradoxical.  Alleging to explicate, for the sake of a potential recruit, the scientific truths discovered by Epicurus, the truths that will redeem life for the one who accepts them, On the Nature of Things couches itself in the language of insistent evangelism, making of its intellectual hero, as George Santayana noted in his study of Lucretius in Three Philosophical Poets, a secular saint.  The poem attests a powerful experience on the part of its author, which can only be described as spiritual conversion, which he then wishes to foster in another.  Already in the generation just after Epicurus, his followers acquired the habit of referring to him under the honorific of soter or “savior,” an etiquette that imitated in turn a propaganda device of Alexander’s successors, the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasts.  Lucretius, whose time and place knew the afflictions of political breakdown, picks up this thus slightly tainted habit.

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The Incarnation: A Simple Explanation for Children

Son: Dad, I’ve got a problem I need to ask you about.

Father: OK, son, glad to help. But I’m warning you: I know nothing about girls. For that, you’d be better off asking your mother. That’s what she would say.

Son [blushing violently]: Dad! It’s not about a girl! Sheesh!

Father [laughing]: OK, OK; got you good there, son. Man, you kids are so easy to tease.

Son [wearily]: Yeah, yeah. Always with the Dad jokes.

Father [wiping away tears]: I’m sorry, kiddo. What’s your problem. Schoolwork? Better to ask your mother about that, too …

Son: No, it’s not that. I was wondering in church this morning about the Incarnation.

Father: Oh boy. Here we go.

Son: What? What’s the problem?

Father: You guys always seem to pick the hard ones. OK, let’s have it.

Son: Well, how could God be a man? I mean, did he sort of take a break from all his God jobs, in order to come and be Jesus here on Earth for a while? Or what? Who was running the universe while God was Jesus on Earth, eating fish and building stuff and walking around? Was part of him left over up in Heaven, and running things? I don’t get it.

Continue reading →

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Losing our religion III: The Francis issue

I was alarmed when Cardinal Tauran, standing on the balcony of St. Peter’s, announced the name Georgium Marium … Bergoglio. I’d heard the name before somewhat in connection with liberals, specifically the detestable careerist Cardinal Sodano, who had supposedly advanced Bergoglio as the anti-Ratzingerian candidate in the 2005 conclave and who appeared on the balcony next to Francis with a smile that I thought bordered too much on triumphal smirking for my liking. My stomach sank. I worried and prayed for some time. Continue reading →

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Losing our religion II: A Mass to our liking

Some time ago, I complained about an especially bad experience with sacred music at Mass. It involved a tambourine with little LED lights that lit up when struck. I tried to be in good humor about it but, really, I was appalled; afterward I wanted to weep and do penance.

A few of the commenters at the time had remarked that I should seek out a traditional Latin Mass, which of course I already had — my diocese is still recovering from the disastrous 15-year-long reign of an extremely liberal bishop and it is frankly impressive that we have the three TLMs we currently do given that none of the celebrating priests had even the option of taking Latin as an elective during their seminary formation, but all three are 90 minutes or more away from me and gasoline doesn’t rain from the sky (Deo gratias) so it’s not a regular option. At a TLM, they said, I might be able to find music less objectionable, homilies more bearable, etc. A Mass more to my liking.

It’s good prudential advice as far as it goes but it makes clear what the major problem now is in the Church — that its whole theological and devotional and liturgical heritage, which found its most perfect expression in the Mass that was for so long the one visible mark of communion among millions of Catholics the world over and which was so intimately bound up with their daily life and their entire self-understanding — that the practical faith of our fathers as it emerged from the catacombs and was forged in the crucible of the intervening centuries — has now been reduced to a matter of liking, of mere taste. And in the minds of most, to prefer having your priest ascend to the altar amidst a haze of incense while the plaintive, longing notes of Sicut Cervus echo through the nave over Fr. Flake prancing about in rainbow vestments to the brutal and invasive blast of a 16-year-old mariachi “music minister”‘s sackbut is just an irrational and arbitrary value judgment with nothing more to recommend it than might recommend your equally-interesting preference for crunchy over smooth peanut butter. A far crueler blow to the memory of those generations martyred for that faith than was dealt them on the day of their martyrdom, to say that the Mass they loved and died for was merely a diverting novelty. At best, you might get a concession that the former type of Mass is ideal but we have to meet people where they are, have to be “pastoral,” have to be realistic, and the unspoken reality is that many pigs would rather eat slop.

Such is another hard fact of life in the postconciliar Church: not only would most historical Catholics (including a few thousand saints) not be at home in it but they would be told, with all the cruel “pastoralism” that coddles the unrepentant and berates the devoted, that the visible home they loved was never more than the epiphenomena of neurons firing pointlessly in the void. This is why there is no easy way back, not in our lifetimes, because the damage is done, the attitudes and the narratives that accompany them are formed, and even if tomorrow a hypothetical Pope Pius the Fifth the Second came along and suppressed all the flimflam with fire and sword, half of the Church would grouse that they liked things better before and many of them would (with their bishops) schism on the spot and souls would perish by the millions, dying alone and far from the Sacraments. There’s no getting the worms back into the can.

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Charlton vs. Kristor on the Orthodox and Mormon Doctrines of God

I’ve been inactive lately here at the Orthosphere because my sparse mental energies have been focused elsewhere: Bruce Charlton and I have been talking amiably for the last few days about the Mormon versus the Christian doctrines of God, over at his valuable site The Notion Club Papers (which is devoted mostly to the Inklings). Those with a taste for metaphysical disputation might want to check it out. Bruce has said that he wants to keep that thread exclusive to the two of us, for clarity’s sake, and invited those interested to comment upon it in another post at his main site, Bruce Charlton’s Miscellany. I’ll say likewise: comments on this post are closed, so if you want to add your two cents, please do so over at the Miscellany.

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Throne and Altar is back

If you haven’t noticed already, our own Bonald is once again posting actively (though not, thankfully, exclusively) at Throne and Altar and has burst out of the gate with a series of characteristically excellent posts. See this one for his rationale about restoring the blog. Go check it out, and if you haven’t visited before, please do avail yourself of the really excellent essays he’s posted there.

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Losing her religion

Mary DeTurris relates in a two-part post (here and here) her growing disillusionment with the Catholic Church’s liturgy and her increasingly inability to put up with its foibles. There’s a lot to sympathize with and a little to criticize in Ms. DeTurris’ posts. She is bored by bad homilies (a complaint shared by a few Orthosphere writers), for instance, but it’s not the average parish priest’s fault that the Pauline lectionary stinks and has the effect of reducing the proclamation of the Word from a theophanic encounter with the Word incarnate to a dry undergraduate exegesis lecture. (Compare crummy diocesan parish homilies to the truly exceptional ones given by Traditionalist priests, who are not tied to the mast of a purely and exclusively didactic lectionary).* And she is alienated by the near-absent community life of her parish, but evidently doesn’t feel the need to take any steps to ameliorate it, as if community life is something that can only be handed down ex cathedra by the hierarchy, as if the laity are not itself members of the body of Christ. (EDIT: And one absolutely must not take seriously her suggestion to withhold support from the Church, i.e., to neglect our duties in a grave matter).

Still, she’s on to something, especially when she writes: Continue reading →

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How To Argue Against Radical Freedom?

In a comment to Alan Roebuck’s recent post, Why You Need Traditionalism, Ita Scripta Est raises an excellent question:

[Hostility to radical freedom] distinguishes us from liberals and modern conservatives alike[, but t]o question radical freedom is to fundamentally question liberalism: something that good liberals simply cannot acknowledge.

What are effective techniques to argue against radical freedom?  Traditionalists generally argue from things like deontological moral theories, metaphysics, tradition, and biblical interpretation. Alan argues in the linked post from natural law and from divine command, for example.

Since deciding to try to give up being a modernist, my attentiveness to these modes of argument has risen. Back when I was a happy modernist, though, these arguments looked like “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”

However, arguments claiming that liberalism had bad consequences bothered me.  Especially annoying were arguments to the effect that liberalism had bad consequences for vulnerable people but good consequences for me and people like me.  That my embrace of liberalism was about thieving and looting the weak. Continue reading →