I've been working on putting together a new blog for some time now. I've finally launched. We'll keep this one up and maybe still use it sometime, but just wanted to advertise my new blog:
https://backwardmedievalist.wordpress.com/
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Wednesday, November 27, 2013
St. Augustine and a Blanket
So what have I been reading and knitting?
Reading:
St. Augustine's Confessions. This semester I am taking an online course on
the Confessions, and it has been very interesting. The work is divided into 13 books, in which
St. Augustine tells the reader about himself, his conversion story, and most
importantly, God. I'm going to "double dip" by sharing one of my discussion posts from the class:
Throughout the Confessions, Augustine speaks of God in a few
different contexts. A significant
example is Augustine speaking in the context of how Manicheeism was wrong about
God’s nature, which he begins in book IV.
A second significant example is Augustine speaking of God in the context
of how the Neo-Platonic works helped him to understand the Christian concept of
God.
Augustine speaks of himself as a convert who has learned
from his past sins, and has been maturing spiritually and intellectually on his
journey toward God. He acknowledges his
intellectual weakness in comparison with God’s wisdom, and seeks a better understanding
of God.
The relationship of which Augustine speaks between himself
and God takes the form of acknowledging their comparative and complementary
natures, and in the recognition of God as the highest relationship of the human
heart. Augustine points out that God is
independent while he himself is dependent on God as his creator; that God is
changeless, and he himself is changeable and is able to seek God; that while he
as a person is spirit and matter, God is pure spirit, and chooses to dwell in human
memory, through which the soul may seek him.
At the very beginning of the Confessions, Augustine clearly states this
very important relationship between and human person and God: “Nevertheless, to
praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising
you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it
rests in you” (I.i).
Knitting:
Knitting has been my hobby for a while now, and
most recently I've been knitting something for the baby we're expecting in
February!
At first I was thinking it
would be a blanket, but I recently came up with a new idea. It's not finished yet, but it will have all
the colors of the rainbow (because babies like colors). After the purple, will
be blue, then green (and so on if I want it bigger). I'm thinking of making another one with more
contrasting colors, maybe black and white, and sewing them back to back, with
some batting in the middle, to make a double-sided playmat type thing. If I
don't do all that, then it will be a colorful blanket.
The pattern I'm using is the "Ten Stitch Blanket," by Frankie Brown, found here on Ravelry.
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Conscience and Tyranny
A
little while ago, I was hiking up a mountain in Lake George, NY with my father,
two brothers, and youngest sister.
Happily the mountain was a very small one, for my father and I probably
could have handled little more. As we
huffed and puffed in growing fatigue, my sister, then about 5 minutes ahead of
us, waited for us to catch up and then told us about some disfavor she had
fallen into at her work. In response, I
told her about a tyrant who once showed a visitor to his garden. Among the plants in the garden, one had grown
above the rest. The tyrant showed his
visitor about the garden and as they approached the one plant that grew above
the rest, the tyrant pulled out a machete and quickly cut it down to the level
of the others. The message was clear: no
subject must be allowed to rise above the rest.
Tyranny can tolerate mediocrity but never excellence.
The
tyrant in question might have been any number of men over the years. It might have been Napoleon Stalin, or Henry
VIII. Robert Bolton captured well the attitude
of Henry VIII toward the few men that dared raise their heads above the rest,
toward the few plants that dared grow above their appointed bounds. When Henry VIII broke with Rome and declared
himself the head of the Church of England, he demanded that everyone follow
him. Nearly everyone did—but nearly was
not enough. When almost everyone else
went along, Thomas More, did not. He did
not speak or write against Henry, he simply remained silent. One silent man perhaps should not have seemed
too much of a threat to Henry VIII, but Henry did not want More’s silence, but
his approval. When everyone else
supported Henry, why should one silent man have bothered him so much? Bolton’s Henry, speaking to More, gave the
answer:
Because you're honest... and what is
more to the purpose, you're known to
be honest. There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown;
and those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with
sharp teeth and I'm their tiger; there's a mass that follows me because it
follows anything that moves. And then there's you...
The
existence of even one good man is a spur in the conscience of the wicked. The existence of one good man tells the rest
of the world what it should be and
that it should not be what it is. Even
schoolchildren know this; it is why they dislike excellence in their
classmates. Henry stood condemned not by
any word of Thomas More’s, but by his existence. He stood judged not by a letter of More’s, but
by his very life. Faced with this
condemnation, Henry could have beaten his own breast in repentance, or he could
have beaten More’s head off. He did the
latter.
More
was not the first to lose his head to the tyrant’s blade. John the Baptist lost his head in like
circumstances to the same sort of petty tyrant.
King Herod had married his brother’s wife while his brother was still
living and John forbade him this. John
was only one weak prophet. He had no
armies and was no threat Herod, save that he threatened his conscience. But that was enough. John was a good man, known to be a good man
and hence by his very existence condemned Herod. And so Herod (and his wife) had to destroy
John. If there were only one good man
(or woman) in a bad world, the world would have to destroy that one man. How could it not, when on a gibbet before the
nations, it unfurled goodness itself (1)?
The
same persecution is still the case even today.
Many supporters of same-sex “marriage” insist they simply want to be “married”
and will leave everyone else alone. But
this is not true. There are multiple
examples of bakeries refusing to make a cake in celebration of a same-sex
wedding, and being attacked because of it (2).
Why that should be when many other bakeries would happily make such a
cake should now be obvious. It would not
matter if 99 bakeries in a city would happily make a cake for such a wedding. As long as only one would not, that one would
be too much. If one man only refuses to
support same same “marriage” and stands on silence, that one man will be too
much and it will be for the same reason Henry VIII could not stand for Thomas
More’s silence. As Bolton’s Cromwell put
it, “silence can, in fact, speak--” sometimes too much for a guilty conscience
to bear.
(1).
Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ
(2).
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/31/economic-terrorism-bakery-that-refused-to-make-gay-couples-wedding-cake-gets-threats-could-close-down/
(3) See also the interesting article: http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/08/26/it-is-the-price-of-citizenship-an-elegy-for-religious-liberty-in-america/
(3) See also the interesting article: http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/08/26/it-is-the-price-of-citizenship-an-elegy-for-religious-liberty-in-america/
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Love and Tolerance
As
modern society moves toward redefining marriage to include romantic attachments
between members of the same sex, the rallying cry of the redefiners is
“tolerance” and “acceptance.” One should
tolerate everyone and everything. One
should accept everyone as they are, not as they should be; those who fail to be
tolerant and accepting, who obey God rather than man, are hateful, bigots, fit
only to be attacked and demonized.
Tolerance is perhaps the highest value of a secular society, but not,
however, of a divine one.
When
God walked the earth two thousand years ago, a member of the intellectual
elite, wishing to test Him asked Him what was the greatest commandment. Our Lord replied, Love the
Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your
strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself (Luke
10:27). Later, at His last meal with his
disciples before His death and Resurrection, He gave them a last command
saying,
A
new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved
you, that you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you
are my disciples, if you have love one for another (John 13:34-35).
On
multiple occasions Our Lord commanded love, but never once did He command
tolerance. Never did he command his
disciples, “tolerate others as I have tolerated you.” Never did He tell a sinner He forgave, “I
accept you as you are.” He never merely accepted
a person as that person was, but sent
that person away as he should be. Recognizing that a person should be a certain
way implied that the person as he was, was unacceptable. But though a person’s actions might be
unacceptable and intolerable, that person himself was still lovable. Hence Our Lord could defend the woman caught
in adultery from her attackers, but also tell her to “go and sin no more.”
Tolerance,
as a former professor once told me, is simply the other face of
indifference. And Elie Weisel,
concentration camp survivor and author of Night,
once remarked that the oppossite of love is not hatred, but indifference. Mere tolerance or acceptance is not simply a
lesser form of love, but its oppossite.
No one who loves anyone ever merely tolerates them. A wife who did not love her husband very much
might tolerate his alcoholism (at least until it became inconvenient to
her). She might accept him as he was and
not bother trying to change him for the better.
In such a case though, we should have to conclude the woman’s tolerance
and acceptance indicated not the greatness of her love for her husband, but its
smallness.
Real
love may even entail a significant degree of intolerance and unnacceptance,
because love always entails truth. In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis said that one cannot love a lie, he cannot love a thing
that is not. Hence love entails truth
and truth always entails not only the recognition of what is, but what ought to be. It may entail recognizing that a thing that
is, should not be. Thus a woman’s love
for her husband will entail recognition of what he should be and hence an
unacceptance of him as he is and an intolerance of his alcoholism. It will be so even if her husband protests
about her intolerance, insists that he is happy as he is, and insists that his
wife accept him as he is.
Jesus
never merely tolerated anyone. He loved them. Not the love of a modern secular world that
is only sentiment, or romantic attachment,
or a sort of weak tolerance or mere acceptance. Love is not tolerance. It is something both higher and holier, more
terrible and more splendid. It is a
cross and a crown of thorns, a battle and a fight, but not tolerance and not
necessarily acceptance.
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Imagine No Religion...
In 1971, John Lennon composed one of his more popular songs,
“Imagine,” where he asked listeners to imagine a world with no heaven, hell, or
religion:
“Imagine there's
no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too...”
I recently saw an internet meme that celebrated this song
asking us to imagine all the supposed
benefits of a world without religion.
This is a common cant among the so-called New Atheists who, with much
noise and little sense, rail against what they see as the evils of religion,
its irrationality, and the stupidity of the deluded beliver. Against the evils of religion, the modern heathen asks us to imagine a world
with no religion, no God, no heaven, and no hell. In doing so, they think themselves
progressive, modern, and ahead of the times.
Richard Dawkins, prince of the New Atheists, along with the death of
God, proclaims that: “there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no
good, nothing but pointless indifference... We are machines for propagating DNA...” He and his followers imagine themselves to be
much ahead of their time. In reality,
they are at least a 100 years behind it.
In 1882, Fredreiche Nietsche, among the first prophets of
the modern God-is-dead movement, asked his readers to imagine a world without
God. He had his madmen proclaims God’s
death:
"Whither is God?" he
cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us
are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who
gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?... Is not night continually
closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear
nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we
smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is
dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. "How shall we comfort
ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Seeing the modern world slaying God, Nietsche proclaimed the
advent of moral nihilism, the destruction of all meaning and value in
life. Dawkins, in imagining a world
without God, a world with no good or evil, where man was only a machine, did
nothing new. He simply argued what
others had done before him. Likewise
today, there is no need for the modern man to imagine the death of God and no
religion, others, besides Nietsche, have already imagined this world.
Dostoyevsky saw the growth of atheism in Russia and imagined
where it would lead. Like Nietsche, he
saw a world bereft of meaning and value, right and wrong. In The
Brothers Karamazov, he proclaimed that “If there is no God, then all things
are permitted.” What Dostoyevsky saw
with fear, others worked for. Josef
Stalin imagined a world with no religion.
Yet he did more than simply imagine that world, he tried to create
it. He persecuted the churches and purged his enemies. Stalin’s world without God was a world where
all things were permitted—to him.
John Lennon was wrong.
In a world without religion, there was plenty to kill for. Stalin found many reasons, as did Mao and Pol
Pot. Men have scarce needed religion to
supply a reason to kill; the lust for power, wealth, and even sex has always
provided adequate reason.
Yet, Lennon was also partly right. He was wrong in claiming that a world with no
religion would leave nothing to kill for, but he was right that in a world
without religion there would be nothing to die for. If man is just, as Dawkins says, a machine
for propogating DNA, then why die for a fellow machine. Nor can one die for freedom; no machine is
free. This is why tyrants have either
tried to control religion or to eradicate it.
Stalin knew what he was doing.
Likewise, if there is “no purpose, no evil, no good,” then how can one
die for what is right? There is no
right.
With no religion, there would be nothing to die for. As others have said, if a man has nothing
worth dying for, he has nothing worth living for. Hence the atheist Camus saw that the only
serious question was whether or not one should commit suicide. This is the world Lennon imagined; but he had no need to imagine it. Others imagined it first. Worse, others have tried, and still try, to
make such a world happen.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Solemnity and Joy
A
short time ago, on April 9, the popular Jesuit writer Fr. James Martin spoke to
a large audience of Catholic students on the subject of joy, humor, and the
spiritual life. He gave a wonderfully
entertaining talk, bringing with him the full range of Jesuit jokes (A Jesuit
died and was accepted into heaven amid much fanfare. A Franciscan, asking why he did not receive
similar notice was told, “we get Franciscans here all the time, we haven’t had
a Jesuit in the last 250 years.”) and a range of humorous stories.
At
the same time, he spoke seriously about the real value of humor and a sense of
fun and its value for the spiritual life.
He talked about the value of humor to welcome, to express Christian
courage (St. Lawrence, martyed by being roasted alive on a grill, said to his
torturers “flip me over, I’m done on this side), and as a safeguard of
humility. A man should be able to laugh
at himself and even be able to make jokes at his own expense. If he cannot, he may be of the sort who
“carries his own importance as though afraid of breaking it. He urged against those who risked considering
fun and humor as enemies of the spiritual life and who were too concerned with
solemnity.
There
are two errors a man can make regarding solemnity in worship and spirituality. The one is to deny excitement, humor, and fun
any place in the spiritual life, the other is to give them an overwhelming
place and deny anny significant place to solemnity. The first error is puritan, but the second
just as bad. I do not think Fr. Martin
intended to deny a legitimate place to solemnity in the spiritual life, and I
do not think he meant to suggest solemnity to be the enemy of joy. Nonetheless some questions asked afterward
indicated that at least some of the audience had this impression and I think it
worth reflecting briefly on. If one
danger is that we deny excitement, fun, and humor any place in the spritual
life, then another is that we deny solemnity any and dismiss or ridicule any
attempts at solemnity as “dreary puritanism.”
Likewise, we might wrongly assume that solemnity must be the enemy of
joy. Afterall, if one is joyful isn’t he
naturally exuberant and excited?
Well,
no. Solemnity need not be the enemy of
joy; in many cases it may be its ally. If
I remember my own wedding rightly, it contained many elements of solemnity, but
was not the less joyful for that. Or a
scene from The Wind in the Willows,
Mole and Rat saw Pan in the woods:
Then suddenly the Mole felt a great
Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and
rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror--indeed he felt
wonderfully at peace and happy--but it was an awe that smote and held him and,
without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very,
very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his
side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter
silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew
and grew (1).
Awed into
silence from what they saw, Mole turned to Rat and asked if he was afraid,
Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with
unutterable love. `Afraid! Of HIM? O, never, never! And yet--and yet-- O, Mole,
I am afraid!'
Then the two animals, crouching to
the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.
The
animals were no less joyful because they were the more solemn for their
solemnity did not spring from dreariness, but from reverence. The solemnity came from the awe and the reverence,
whence also came the joy. I read another
writer who suggested that joy should come from wonder and awe not be based only
in warm feelings and fun (2). That seems
precisely right. Thomas Aquinas said
that “no man can live without joy.” There may be times, however, when this joy
may contain some elements of solemnity and it need not be the less joyful for
that.
(1) From chapter
7: http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/kgrahame/bl-kgrahame-wind-7.htm\
(3) See also
Peter Kreeft: http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/joy.htm
Wednesday, March 27, 2013
As a Catholic, I Support Marriage Equality
Equality
is one of those interesting words that everyone claims to want, but no one is
quite sure what it means. W.C. Fields
once proclaimed himself to be free of all prejudices, “I hate everyone
equally,” he remarked. Barry Goldwater,
no opponent of “gay rights” himself remarked that “equality... as our founding
fathers understood it, leads to liberty, wrongly understood as it has been so
tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.” I am not entirely certain what Goldwater
meant, but as our society debates the question of marriage rights and equality,
a man may be hardly certain what he ought to think about it. Nonetheless, whatever he may think, what a person ought
to think is clear enough: He ought to
support marriage equality.
As
a Catholic, I strongly support marriage equality. I support the right of all men to marry women
and the right of all women to marry men.
A man should never be prevented from marrying a woman by the color of
his skin, nor should a woman be prevented from marrying a man because of the
color of hers, or her social or economic status. An Italian man should not be denied the right
to marry an Irish woman if she will have him, though he may do so at his own peril. As a Catholic, I recognize that there is no
basis in natural law (or history) to deny a black man the right to marry a
white woman and that those who until recently would have denied this marriage
equality were creating a new and artificial definition of marriage where it
required spouses to have the same skin color.
Nonetheless, this unequality was an artificial novelty creating a new
definition of marriage with no basis in natual or common law. As such, it was a violation of marriage
equality.
Just
as a I support marriage equality, I support the right of all children to have a
father and a mother. I support a
marriage equality that attaches mothers and fathers for the purposes of raising
children, providing each child with a father and mother. Regardless of the child’s social and economic
status, his religion, his race, or any other factor, each child has an equal
right to be raised by a father and mother.
This provides children with greater stability than those denied a father
and mother, as well as models for the development of their own sexuality
(1). Children all have the equal right
to be raised by a father and a mother for their own sakes, not to become tools
for the fulfillment of adult desires.
Just
as I support marriage equality, I support the right of those with homosexual
inclinations to be supported in their struggle with those inclinations. I support their right to be loved and not
merely tolerated, “which parodies love as flippacy parodies merriment” (C.S.
Lewis). No one who loves anyone ever
merely tolerates them. A wife who loves
her husband would never merely tolerate his alcoholism, not even were he born
that way. Mere tolerance is always
easier than real love. It is always
easier to give alcohol to an alcoholic than to support him in giving it
up. It is always easier to tell a person he is fine with the way he is, than
that he needs to change. This may be
tolerance, but it is not love.
Finally,
because I support marriage equality,
I do not support changing the definition of marriage to include sexual
relationships by members of the same sex.
There is no basis for it in natural law, common law, or history. It is a modern, artificial creation, created
by the state and needing a state to
defend it, just like laws that changed the definition of marriage so that it
only included members of the same race. But
changing the definition of a thing, never changes its nature. Because
I support marriage equality I support the right of persons with homosexual
inclinations to be supported in their struggle with those inclinations so that
they too may be able to enjoy true marriage in fact, not merely by redefinition. To do otherwise would be like claiming to
help a blind man “see” by changing the definition of “sight.”
For
more on the benefits of a father and mother on a child’s upbringing see the
above study by Regnerus and another article responding to debate of it.
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Is the Church "Out of Touch"?
A recent poll in the New York Times found that a significant
majority self professed Catholics claim that the Catholic Church is "out
of touch" with the world (1). The
complaint is hardly a new one as modern man demands that the Church be in touch
with his needs, wants, and desires. He
wants contraception, divorce, same-sex marriage. He wants to be his own standard of truth and
his own yardstick. The Church, the
complaint runs, should get out of the dark ages and get with the times.
The complaint is hardly new.
The Church has been out of touch with the world before and she will be
again. Ancient Rome, for instance,
commonly practiced infanticide. The pater familias had the power of life and
death over his family and he exercised it; hence infant girls in particular were
being exposed in remarkable numbers.
Opposing this infanticide, as well as divorce and adultery, the Church
was "out of touch" with the world.
Later too, the Church opposed slavery in a world that demanded it. The Church was out of touch; slavery was an
economic "necessity." This did
not stop Pope Paul III from forbidding it as he wrote,
We…noting that the Indians
themselves indeed are true men…by our Apostolic Authority decree and declare by
these present letters that the same Indians and all other peoples—even though
they are outside the faith…should not be deprived of their liberty or their
other possessions…and are not to be
reduced to slavery, and that whatever happens to the contrary is to be
considered null and void (2).
The Church in
both cases was out of touch with the world, and thank God it was.
If the Church has been out of touch with the world, this is hardly
surprising. God Himself, when he walked
the Earth, was out of touch with the world.
When the world demanded it let it stone the woman caught in adultery, He
told the man without sin to cast the first stone. When He ate with tax collectors and sinners,
healed the sick on the Sabbath, and forbade divorce, He was out of touch with
the world. And so the world crucified Him, for it could
not stand a God who was not in touch with the spirit of the world.
If the Church is out of touch with the spirit of the world,
it is because it is in touch with the Spirit of God, Who also was "out of
touch" with the world. For this
reason, Fulton Sheen wrote,
Look for
the Church that is hated by the world, as Christ was hated by the world. Look
for the Church which is accused of being behind the times, as Our Lord was
accused of being ignorant and never having learned... Look for the Church which is rejected
by the world as Our Lord was rejected by men... and the suspicion will grow, that if
the Church is unpopular with the spirit of the world, then it is unworldly, and
if it is unworldly, it is other-worldly... and therefore is divine (3).
Elsewhere Fulton Sheen warned against the man would marry
himself to the spirit of the age for, he said, "to marry the spirit of the
age, is to be a widow in the next."
The Church, though, is not married to the spirit of the age but to God
and she will never be a widow. Nor will she simply "go with the flow." Chesterton
wrote that "a dead thing can go with the stream, but only a
living thing can go against it." Civilizations,
cultures, and empires have risen and fallen; even Rome lasted a thousand years,
but fell in the end; so too all the rest, one dead thing after another, in
touch with the world, going with the flow, swept off in the stream. But through it, the Church remains, writing
the epitaph of one civilization after another, out of touch with a passing
world, because she is in touch with an eternal one.
If the Church is out of touch with the world, it is only
because the world is out of touch with God; so much the worse for the world.
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