Month: December 2013

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This is Hell

My speculations of the other day about apokatastasis don’t strike me as heretical, although I suppose they might seem that way, to some. I would emphasize that my conclusion that there is no contradiction between the doctrines of Hell and of apokatastasis does not mean there is no such thing as Hell, or torment; nor does it mean that residence in Hell is not permanent for some, or even most.

God’s ubiquity entails that Hell is a region of his domains. But if the torment of Hell is what it is like to be alienated from God, then this Fallen, busted world is a department of Hell, and our life here below in Midgard is what it is like to be in Hell, or at least in its outer circles. Yet worldly life can seem awfully nice, and much to be preferred to ascesis and mortification of the flesh – this fun, pleasant aspect of sinful life being an indication of why the damned might prefer Hell to the alternative. But it could seem that way only to those who have enjoyed no foretaste of Heaven.

St. Augustine says that the fires of Hell are to the fires of Earth as the fires of Earth are to paintings of fire; likewise, St. Paul says we cannot begin to imagine the ecstasy of Heavenly life. I take these two statements to mean that we are so accustomed to the fires of Earth, to the disease of alienated, Fallen life, that we think it normal and pretty much OK, except in its most acute moments of agony. Presumably the damned who live closer to the central districts of Hell feel the same way about their lives. Meanwhile, if we were once in Heaven, we would instantly see that the pleasures of sin are really horribly painful, by comparison with the beauties of Heaven, which constitute true normality for our natures.

None of this so far really worries me that much, qua theological problem. What really worries me is the problem that Arakawa raised in his comment to my post Sex Matters: if anyone remains in Hell, mustn’t the perfect compassion of the saints and angels result in their torment?

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Apokatastasis of the Damned

All things have their being by and from God. This is a restatement of the doctrine of omnipotence.

All things have their being in and by way of God: in him we live, move and have being. This is a restatement of the doctrine of ubiquity.

All things have their being for and toward God; he is the end toward which they tend, and that end is the reason of and for their being. This is a restatement of the doctrine of pronoia.

God is then the origin, ground and end of all things; and all things are therefore integral to his life, and partake therein, whether or not they wish to do so, or realize that they do. This participation in the life of God is the mode of their existence, for God is the being of beings. By this participation are they known to him, as aspects of his own life; by that knowledge are their acts of existence completed, for no act of existence is fully complete until it is known and reckoned by God. So the inception of creatures by God and their completion in him are aspects in the singular, integral act of their creation, of which their inception, evolution and completion are phases.

The integration of all things in the life of God is a restatement of the doctrine of omniscience.

By omniscience, all things are in their truest nature integrated into the being and life of God, and are thus – in their truest natures, mind, albeit not necessarily in the relatively defective natures of their creaturely actualities – rendered consubstantial with him.

What then is the nature of the defect in defective creaturely actuality? It is an error about our consubstantiality with God – about the fact that we begin, proceed and end in, from, by, and toward him. It is the illusion that we and our fellow creatures each subsist independently, and are therefore our own creation, beholden only to ourselves. Because it errs in regard to the true order of things, such vanity generates acts that disagree with reality, and thus inflict harm upon the world – sinful acts.

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The Bohemian Theory of Decadence

Luc van Braekel, managing editor of The Brussels Journal, has given generous and handsome treatment to my essay on “Poe and his Frenchman, and Baudelaire and his Americans.”  The article is a worked-up version of remarks made at last November’s Baltimore meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club, whose theme was “decadence.”  The subtitle is “The Bohemian Theory of Decadence.”  The essay explores a line of influence passing from Joseph de Maistre and Edgar Allan Poe to Charles Baudelaire and from Baudelaire to a group of American genre-writers of the first half of the last century.

I offer a sample –

Baudelaire, following de Maistre, regarded modernity as a recursion to sacrifice; and quite on his own, Baudelaire also regarded modernity as effeminate, as an abdication of manhood hence also of procedure, discrimination, and moral rigor. For Juvenal, too, with an invocation of whom the present discourse began, the decadence of society appeared, if not exclusively, yet signally, in effeminacy and the abdication of manhood, noticeably in the prevalence of eunuchs and homosexuals among the trend-setting, taste-making elites of the Imperial City, but also in the appropriation of religion by women. (The scholarly consensus, by the way, is that Juvenal was himself homosexual.) In Juvenal again, the reader discovers an anticipation of Baudelaire. What is the satirist’s image of the descent of the social order into formlessness and grossness? In Satire VI, Juvenal records a symptomatic ruckus in the forum: “Now here come the devotees / of frenzied Bellona, and Cybele, Mother of Gods, with a huge eunuch, a face for lesser obscenities to revere.” Rome has indeed, in Juvenal’s day and as he sees it, become one great continuous multicultural and feminist celebration, marked by the “solemn rant,” “Horoscopy,” and ready access to “the abortionist’s arts.”

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Supersubstantiation

[This post is an edited transcript of a brainstorm that overtook me a few weeks ago, while I was reading Stratford Caldecott’s pellucid and penetrating recent book, The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity, and madly scribbled as a marginal note therein. The quotations below are cited to page numbers in that volume.]

In the Lord’s Prayer, God calls the Bread of the Presence that we Anointed Priests of his House consume in the Divine Liturgy of the Temple our “supersubstantial bread.” The doctrine implicit in this term subsumes, reconciles, and integrates all the various doctrines of the Real Presence in the Eucharist – memorial, pneumatic, sacramental, consubstantial, transubstantial, and so forth.

Of these doctrines, transubstantiation is the most inclusive – if it’s true, so are all the others – but also the most difficult to take on board:

What makes us uneasy [about transubstantiation] is that the substances of the bread and the wine seem to have been destroyed [by Grace, rather than perfected thereby]. And yet Aquinas is very concerned to show that this is not the case; the substances are not destroyed but converted.

–          page 231

They are turned from their own lives, toward and into the life of God. The elements are no longer occasions of their own careers, but of God. So likewise with the communicant: “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20).

The Host has all the properties of bread, and all the causal effects of bread. These do not disappear at the Consecration. As Caldecott says, we don’t expect the consecrated bread to look any different under an electron microscope (nor do communicants look any different after they have partaken thereof). After the Consecration, the bread still behaves like bread, whatever else it may be doing. In so far forth, then, it is indeed – literally – bread. But it is not, ultimately, merely bread. Which is to say that it *just isn’t* bread anymore. It is God. It is supersubstantial bread.

How does supersubstantiation work?

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Ernest Bloch and the Prophetic Impulse: Music as Spiritual Protest

Ernest Bloch (1880 – 1959), Swiss-born but American by naturalization, plays tag with the usual categories.  An inheritor and continuator of the European tradition in concert music, he nevertheless made common cause with his adoptive countryman-composers by attempting after 1916 to write music in an idiom that would reflect conditions in the New World to which he had sworn allegiance.  Bloch was also self-consciously a Jewish composer who understood that the vast majority of his potential audience belonged to the Christian-Protestant professions of a largely Anglo-Saxon nation – a challenging rhetorical situation.  Bloch’s Judaism, moreover, was the Judaism, not of the rabbinate, but of the Prophets.  When he “spoke” deliberately in his distinctive American dialect, he did so in the mode of a musical nabi, and like the nabi, he gave voice, as best he could, to the judgment of divinity on the existing offense of humanity’s disorderliness.  For it must be said that Bloch’s music, from his earliest mature compositions, functioned by intention as a protest against the modern world.  Is Bloch one of those “reactionary” composers, whose reputations traditionalists would like to revive?  In many ways, the answer is “yes,” even though during Bloch’s American years his musical style became increasingly less Romantic and noticeably more modern in its motivic terseness and harmonic astringency.  Yet the composer of the late Trombone Symphony (1954) is unmistakably the same as the composer of Schelomo (1916), the “Jewish Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra” that remains Bloch’s best-known and most-played score.

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Sex Matters

The modern instinct is to treat sex as a private matter that is of no real consequence to the body politic, and thus no legitimate concern of the sovereign, or of the public. Against this conservatives argue that sex has all sorts of important consequences for the health and welfare of the body politic, whether demographic, epidemiological, economic, pedagogical, or cultural, so that sexual morality matters to the polis a very great deal, and is therefore a fit concern both of the sovereign and the people.

These sorts of pragmatic objections to liberal social and sexual mores do tell, of course, and heavily. But they don’t begin to get at the immense importance of sex in the long run – the really, really long run, under which the whole history of the universe is like an evening gone.

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Catholic perspectives

I think it’s dawning on many conservative Catholics that our Church is no longer obviously having any better success resisting modernity than any of the Protestant bodies.  Of course, the ongoing collapse that prompts this realization is evil, but the end of our complacency is for the best.  The “Protestantism=anarchy” apologetic was stupid and didn’t win converts; it just made us feel better.  Now we must reconsider and spell out precisely what it is about our Church that inspires our faith and loyalty.  I’m giving my own answer as a series at Throne and Altar; the first instalment is here.  Since this is an ecumenical site, I thought my old blog would be a better place for it, although Protestant and Orthodox readers will find that I do not criticize their doctrines or communions.  I do not find it necessary, because Catholicism does not define itself in opposition to any other denomination or religion.

If you’d like to comment, you are welcome to do so at Throne and Altar.

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Christianity Responsible for the Decline of the West?

“Yes,” say many non-Christian traditionalists, and they seem to have a point. The western church promotes liberalism almost as much as the secularists, and it’s easy for a cynic to see current Christendom as just another part of the Left’s evil empire—with exceptions being sufficiently rare not to alter the overall judgment. And it’s easy for the selfsame cynic to see the liberalism that is dragging us down as a bastardized version—or perhaps even the natural fulfillment—of Christianity.

And if Christianity is responsible for the decline of our homeland and our people, it would seem that we ought to stay away from it.

But the validity of this judgment depends on the referent for the word “Christianity.” Does the word simply refer to the totality of persons, institutions, words and deeds that are conventionally called “Christian?” Or, while conceding the validity of this first meaning, can we see an additional and more fundamental meaning? Continue reading →

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Supersizing the Whopper: Higher Ed in the Trenches

My old graduate-school office-mate “Ivar the Midwesterner,” who teaches at “a nondescript, mid-tier state college west of the Mississippi and east of the Left Coast,” has, for years, collected the wildest, most desperate student-improvisations from the final examination in his survey of the classics in translation.  Some entries in the following catalogue come from as long ago as ten years while others are of recent vintage.  Ivar writes that he started to insert sic where it seemed necessary, but soon grew sic of it.

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World without Men: A Novel of Totalitarian Lesbiocracy

When I teach my course on science fiction at SUNY Oswego, I concentrate on classic texts of the highest literary merit – those by Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, and Ray Bradbury.  When I pursue my lifelong hobby I am less selective.  When I discover an unknown paperback title in a second hand bookshop, I frankly judge the item by its cover while where content is concerned I hope for the best.  Most of the moldering paperbacks fall short of memorability.  Occasionally, however, a jewel appears among the rubble, a short story or novel more or less forgotten that, for one reason or another, merits contemporary re-visitation.  One such, which I encountered again three or four years ago after a lapse of decades, is Charles Eric Maine’s World Without Men (1958), a novel about the long-term implications of birth control, abortion, and the so-called sexual revolution that treats these matters in a bold and prescient way.

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