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

http://www.amazon.com/Life-of-Christ-ebook/dp/B001E2NXGG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378058425&sr=8-1&keywords=the+life+of+christ+sheen

(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/

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.

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.   

(1) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/06/us/poll-shows-disconnect-between-us-catholics-and-church.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

(2) http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2003/julyweb-only/7-14-53.0.html?start=2

(3) http://www.radioreplies.info/vol-1-preface.php

The Three Divorces III: Body and Soul

In two previous posts, I observed that what is true of a husband and wife—what God has joined man must not put asunder—holds to for others important ideas and unions in the modern world.  It was not only the marriage of a man and his wife that was to be permanent, but the marriage of other things as well.  Yet, all often, man does break asunder those things that God joined.  He puts apart what should never have been separated and breaks to pieces what ought to be united.  For this reason, not only the divorce of husband and wife is common in the modern world, but also the divorce between love and responsibility, between faith and reason, and between the body and soul. 

Like the divorce between love and responsibility and faith and reason, the divorce between body and soul is not unique to the modern world.  The ancient Greek philosophers professed the uselessness of religion, while the Christian Tertullian asked "what accord has Athens with Jerusalem or Christ with Baliol."   Likewise, others in history separated the body soul, some by giving primacy to one over the other and some by denying one all together.  This was not necessarily divided along purely religious lines.  Plato, student of Socrates and teacher of Aristotle, taught that the body was the prison of the soul, which lay captive in its dark dungeon until freed by death (1). 

Others in the ancient word went the other way, denying the soul and giving primacy to the body.  Such was the case with the Lucretius who, in The Nature of Things, ridiculed the idea of any sort of soul or afterlife and the Epicureans who denying the soul, decided the best man could hope for was to orient his life around pursuit of pleasure (2).  It is to this attitude that St. Paul seems to have referred when he wrote to the Corinthians that if Christ has not been raised, "let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die."   

The modern world is the same way.  Some give primacy to the soul denying the body.  N.T. Wright refers to some of these in his important book, Surprised by Hope (3).  These include even the modern Christian who thinks that the final Christian hope is nothing more than leaving the body behind and going to heaven or the Eastern religion where the soul tries to escape from the cycle of this world. 

More common, though, is the materialism of a modern world that denies man a soul.  In this world without God man is only matter, an animal, who though perhaps cleverer than other animals has the same fate.  The author of Ecclesiastes depressingly put it, "the fate of men and beasts is the same."  Lacking a soul, moderns believe, man has no soul to feed, it is enough to feed his body.  It is the error of the Marxist's heir, the modern secular liberal who thinks it enough to feed man's body, but do no more.   It is the error of those who claim the Church should sell its art and Church decorations to feed the poor.  As if the poor do not need  beauty and spiritual food as much as physical!  It is the error of the West when they think that supplying corn and condoms to Africa will solve its problems.  It suffices, so the West thinks, to provide for man's two main appetites, food and sex.  It is the error of a pagan West when thy ridicule the Pope for calling on Africa to experience a renewal of faith, friendship, and spiritual awakening.  Nonsense, says the West, Enlightened persons know that Africans, like all modern man, are only animals.  Feed their bellies and leave the souls, which they do not possess, alone.  

One need not be a Christian to recognize the absurdity of this view.  Matthew Paris, in his article, "As an Atheist, I Truly Believe Africa Needs God"(4), showed that Christian aid organizations do good that purely secular ones cannot.  When two such different people as the Twentieth century atheist Matthew Paris and the medieval Dominican Thomas Aquinas agree, the world should pay attention.  For Aquinas, man was not his body, nor did he "have" a soul.  Instead, he was body and soul.  C.S. Lewis, I think, wrote that a corpse is not a man, but then neither is a ghost.  Another writer observed that a body without a soul is a zombie; a soul without a body is a ghost, but neither of these is a man. 

Just as when love and responsibility or faith and reason are divorced, they lose all meaning, so too the body and the soul.  God has joined them for a reason, for when one side of a coin is separated from another, the coin loses all value, so the body and soul when divided are the same.  God has joined them, but man puts them asunder only at his own peril. 

(1) The Manicheans too, who counted St. Augustine among their adherents for a time, professed the body, along with the whole physical world, to be the work of the devil.  The body was not a necessary part of man; it was not a part of man at all. 

(2) By pleasure, they largely meant not a gross hedonism, but the absence of pain, a somewhat depressing view.

(3). N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven and the Resurrection.

(4)http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2155465/posts

St. Ignatius of Antioch

In my last 7 Quick Takes post, I mentioned St. Ignatius of Antioch. Since today is his feast day, I will write a little more about why he is so interesting.

Ignatius was the bishop of Antioch sometime between 98 and 117, when Trajan was emperor.  This was one of the periods when the Roman empire was persecuting anyone who was identified as Christian, bishops probably being easy targets. On his way to Rome for a trial, and to be martyred, Ignatius wrote letters to various churches (kind of like how Paul did), and seven of them survive (if I wanted to look up what all of them were, maybe I'd do a 7 quick takes on them, but I don't feel like doing research for quick takes.)

The letter that I read for class was his letter to the Magnesians.  Here are some thematic highlights from it.

I. Church hierarchy and episcopal authority:
Ignatius stresses authority of the episcopal office in relation both in terms of the people who are subject to their Bishops and in terms of the Bishops being themselves subject to God.  He describes the people's submission to the bishop in a way that reminds me of how Paul describes being subject to Christ.  About the bishop, Ignatius instructs, "render him all respect according to the power of God the father... even the holy presbyters... yield to him in their godly prudence, yet not to him but to the Father of Jesus" (III.1).

Later, he shows the hierarchy of the bishops and presbyters as a symbol of Christ and the apostles, and also direct people to Pauline mutual love: "...with the bishop presiding in the place of God and the presbyters in the place of the Council of Apostles... Be then all in conformity with God, and respect one another... in everything love one another in Christ" (VI.1).

II. Adhere to Christianity:
Ignatius instructs his readers to adhere fully to the Christian faith, and not merely to be nominal Christians: "It is right, then, that we should be really Christians, and not merely have the name; even as there are some who recognize the bishop in their words, but disregard him in all their actions. Such men seem to me not to act in good faith, since they do not hold valid meetings according to the commandment" (IV.1). Isn't it interesting that this was seen as an issue even back then?  As a modern reader, the first thing I think of is someone saying "I'm Catholic" but living or behaving in a way that it contrary to Church teaching. But I wonder what else he may have been thinking of, with the persecutions and heresies going on at the time as well.

Along the same line of not being only nominally Christian, he cautions people against retaining the Jewish faith.  He's basically pointing out that at this point the Christian Church is a religion itself, and they are not a sect of Judaism.  He says, "for if we are living until now according to Judaism, we confess that we have not received grace" (VIII.1) and "It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism..." (X.1).

III. Avoid false teachings:
Ignatius cautions his readers against believing in heretical teachings: "...not to fall into the snare of vain doctrine, but to be convinced of the birth and passion and resurrection which took place... for these things were truly and certainly done by Jesus Christ, our hope, from which God grant that none of you be turned aside" (XI).  He seems to have included this specifically to warn against the docetist movement. The docetists denied that Jesus truly suffered and died, but that he only was appearing suffer.  So Ignatius is trying to specifically warn his readers about those who do not belief in the Lord's Passion.

These are my highlights of St. Ignatius of Antioch's letter to the Magnesians. It's not a very long letter, and is easy to read. Here are links to two different translations (neither of which I was quoting from):
An older translation and a newer translation.

My quotations are from Readings in World Christian History vol. I, edited by Coakley and Sterk.

Sterilizing Africa: The New White Man’s Burden

In 1899 Rudyard Kipling penned, “White Man’s Burden” (1) in which he exhorted the European to conquer and colonize foreign lands like Africa for the good of the inhabitants.  In his opening stanza, he wrote:

            “Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child...”

The non-European people’s were only “half-devil and half child,” who needed to be instructed by their superior civilized betters.  Though the poem has a heroic ring, the phrase has come to mean a justification of conquest and colonialism for the good of native peoples.  Most today would reject—or at least profess to reject—such an attitude, that sees it as the white man’s burden to civilize his heathen, third world brother. 

Recently, however, various groups have called for a new white man’s burden, though they do not use the expression.  Led by people like Melinda Gates, secular foreign aid agencies, and even the government of China (2), have called on first world countries to again take up the White Man’s Burden and spread “civilization” to Africa in the form of contraception and sterilization.   Like European colonizers of old, arriving in Africa, professing the superiority of Western values and culture and the backwardness of African life, western secularists arrive on the dark continent professing to civilize Africans by means of pills, IUDs, and sterilization. 

Propagandists and apologists for the New White Man’s burden suggest that the move to sterilize African women will help promote women’s health, solve the supposed over-population problem, and empower women.   African bishops have protested that this move is “deeply de-humanizing,” and it is not hard to see why (3).  On the face of it one cannot help but think that women’s health might be better served if the 4.6 billion dollars to be spent on contraception and sterilization were spent instead providing clean sources of water, sanitation systems, medical facilities, and doctors.  Indeed, one cannot easily think of Western claims that Africa is over-populated and that Africa would be better off if there were fewer Africans, without thinking of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  The Ghost of Christmas Present might as well be rebuking the pro-sterilization westerner: “It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. O to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust” (4).

To the defender of the New White Man’s burden, though, modern Africans are “half-devil and half child,” or worse and here their attitude goes from merely foolish to dehumanizing.  Like a dog that we encourage people to spay or neuter lest there be too many, the pro-contraceptive West (and East) proposes to sterilize Africa lest it should be over-populated.  Worse still, in telling women that to be empowered, they must be sterilized, contraception advocates tell the same women that one thing that is uniquely theirs as women, is a source of weakness. Certainly in rendering herself unable to have children, a woman who contracepts makes herself the equal of a man who also cannot bear children; whether this is empowering, however, is another question. 

If one were to propose a modern updating of Kipling’s poem, suitable to the situation, it might run something like this:

                Take up the New White Man’s burden-

                Allow not Africa to breed—

                Go bind their fertility in exile

                To serve your captives need;

                Sterilize them with pill and device,

                But preach “empowerment” with great guile—

                To your new caught, sullen peoples,

                As yet, unenlightened and wild. 

(1) http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling.asp

(2) http://www.cisanewsafrica.com/?p=6475

(3) http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/dehumanizing-and-insulting-kenya-bishops-slam-melinda-gates-contraception-p/

(4). http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol_%28Dickens%29/Stave_3?match=it

Gay Marriage and the Wrong Side of History

As president Obama has recently proclaimed his support for same-sex “marriage,” supportive commentators have labeled his action “historic.”  One news anchor warned lest opponents of such unions should find themselves on the “wrong side of history.”

The expression is magnificent rhetoric.  Proponents use it to conjure up images of those who opposed civil rights for blacks or resisted the abolition of slavery.  Yet like many slogans in a culture that thrives more on rhetoric than reason and more on emotion than evidence, it is hollow at heart. 

Presumably such  people who warn the backward amongst us not to be on the wrong side of history think that we should make history our moral guide.  History says thus and we must obey.  The tide is flowing and we must follow it, lest we be caught like children in sandcastles.  Where the tide of history goes, so must we.  But this is not sound, for the tide may sweep us out to sea.  In following the tide, we may find ourselves drowned.

 In plain language, history does not always move in a positive direction.  It is not a safe guide for a man’s moral decisions.  The modern world may (or may not) have moved toward greater democracy and civil rights, but it also moved to world war and genocide.  The Middle Ages saw neither world war nor holocaust.  It was left to the modern world to discover those.  Nor should we think that history will always move in a positive direction in the future.   It has not always done so in the past, why should we think it will do so in the future?   History is a fickle mistress.  One century she may command freedom, the next genocide. 

Further still, history is no guide of morality because it is morally neutral.  This is the fallacy of seeking to derive an ought from an is.  History tells us what has happened.  It does not tell us what should happen.  Those who would try to derive their morality from history are in the same position as those who would derive it from science.  Both tell us what is, not what ought to be.  There is no rational inference from the claim “in history, x happened” to “x should have happened,” or “we should do x.”   

Indeed, making history out moral guide would put us in the absurd position of trying to anticipate what will happen in the future and then make it happen faster.  Perhaps, we project greater freedom in the next century.  Then we must work to make this happen even more quickly.  Yet, perhaps we anticipate a move to greater slavery two centuries hence.  If our mistress History commands it, I suppose we must work for it.

This brings us from the absurdity of history as a moral guide to the evil of history as  a moral guide.  If we are to always follow history, to not be on the wrong side of history, then we shall never be able to resist her.  There will be no room for the last desperate stand against the tide, no heroic resistance against inevitable onslaught. 

Only if morality is something beyond history and even beyond society, if it is something transcendent and what is more, divine, will we ever have a firm ground on which to stand, to plant our flag, and to cry “maybe thus far, but no farther.”