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.

Redefinitions and Redefining Away: Religion, Marriage, and Life

My wife is a librarian.  This means several things.  First, she likes rules (she loves canon law).  Rules are very important to her, they help keep things, and especially people, neat and orderly.  They keep them out of places they should not be, like behind the library employee’s desk.  Second, she likes order.  Everything needs to be in its proper place.  Heaven help the student worker who puts a book back on a shelf where it doesn’t belong.  Heaven help her husband if he decides to be helpful, puts away the dishes one morning, and does not put the measuring spoons exactly where they belong.

Whether my wife became a librarian because she liked rules and order, or else grew to like them because she became a librarian, I do not know.  I only know that she likes both things. 

The medievals liked order as well.  They were terribly concerned with the meanings of things and wanted to put everything in its proper place.  I never appreciated this until I read G.K. Chesterton’s book on Thomas Aquinas, The Dumb Ox.  Chesterton remarked that having a proper place for things is a far bigger problem in philosophy than in real life.  When I put a thing in the wrong place in real life, no serious consequences ensue, but when something is not put in its proper place in philosophy, that thing ceases to exist.  If God is just a physical being, a giant physical, humanoid figure with a white beard sitting in the sky, then He did not create the universe and there is no place for Him.  He would not exist.  If God is a transcendent being beyond nature, then He has a proper place, and can exist.  

The same can be seen in a smaller example.  Some have remarked today that they word “hero” is over-used.  In past times, a man was a hero who fell on a grenade to save his friends, today every soldier is a “hero.”  Every fireman, a hero.  In this way, the word refers no longer to extraordinary service, but to ordinary service.  It becomes drained of all meaning.  If everyone is a hero, then no one is.  Heroism, having been redefined, no longer exists.  

The same is true of three other things often not put in their proper place and redefined today, religion, marriage, and life.  If they are redefined, as our modern world has attempted to do, they will cease to exist. 

C.S. Lewis once commented on one absurd writer who redefined religion to mean “what man does with his solitude.”  Today, many would have us redefine it to mean the same thing.  Religion is to be solely a private affair, and when it does, it will no longer exist.  Hence, the United States government would redefine religion to mean that a Catholic hospital, or school, or soup kitchen is no longer “religious” because it serves men who are not Christian.  I pass by the obvious point that others have made that by such an absurd standard, Mother Teresa or Jesus Christ himself would not have counted as religious.  Rather, the point here is that as the domain allowed to “religion” becomes smaller and smaller, religion itself, being redefined and removed from its proper place, will cease to exist, as is no doubt the goal of those who would so redefine it

Marriage too is being redefined today.  What was once a committed relationship (for life) between a man and a woman for mutual love and help for the upbringing of children has slowly been redefined.  The level of commitment required has been lessened by no-fault divorce laws.  The upbringing of children has become optional through birth control.  By such, marriage has been weakened.  At least 40% of children today are born to single parents.  4,000 more are aborted per day.  Now even the requirement that marriage be between a man and a woman is being redefined away.  Marriage has been redefined to be a relationship between two individuals to be kept until one party wishes to break it.  Soon even the requirement that it be between two people may be gone.  Having been redefined, marriage will cease to exist.

Finally, what counts as human life is being redefined today.  It has already been redefined so that it does not include a child in the womb.  Two medical “ethicists” have suggested that a child after-birth does not count as a living human person either, and so now advocate infanticide (1).  Human life is being redefined away.  Or as one writer put it, An ethicist’s job is like a magician’s. The main job of both is to distract you from the obvious. The magician uses sleight of hand to pretend to make people disappear. But when ethicists do it, people disappear for real”(2).  

Life, religion, and marriage are today being removed from their proper places, as forces attempt to redefine them.  And as they are redefined, they are redefined away.  They will no longer exist. As one atheist philosopher said of morality without God, “the words remain, but the meaning is gone.”  So it is here.  The words, “religion,” “marriage,” and “life” will remain, but the meaning will be gone.

(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9113394/Killing-babies-no-different-from-abortion-experts-say.html

(2) http://www.jillstanek.com/2012/03/ethicists-magicians-who-can-make-people-disappear-for-real/

Modern Man and the Ugliness of Modern Art

I recently made an album of some pictures I took on my recent research trip to several Italian cities. While I would work during the week, I spent the weekends playing the tourist at various historic sites, especially many of the old Churches. When I returned, I made an album of a selection of the photographs that I had taken and was showing them to some relatives at a recent family gathering. They were suitably impressed by the photos, especially many of the Churches, and some remarked that one did not see artwork and architecture like that today. I was forced to agree.

This exchange reminded me of a couple remarks made by the Archbishop Fulton Sheen. In the first, he speculated on why modern art and architecture was so ugly. He suggested that in religious ages, art and architecture was more beautiful because men believed in a spiritual world that they could represent materially. The material was used to represent the spiritual, and the former was dignified by the comparison. In the modern age (or rather, the second pagan age), artwork and architecture is often so ugly because there is nothing to represent materially. All that is left is the weird, and so much modern art has given up on the search for beauty and simply tries for the strange and unfamiliar.

Many of the Churches that I saw and photographs I took inclined me to agree with the late archbishop. The first image here is of the Florence Duomo. The second is of the world trade center in New York City.
If a picture is typically worth a thousand words, then these are worth far more. The former twin towers were little more than large concrete rectangles, The Florence Duomo far more.

It may be protested that this consists of a remarkably small sample size. Very well, the reader is invited to consider on his own whether there might be something to this, and whether myself and my relatives, untrained artists all of us, are right in agreeing that modern art and architecture is far worse than medieval. One wonders then why "medieval" has become almost a synonym for "backward" in the modern world.

If so, then surely this represents an indictment of the modern world. A material world that cannot believe in the spiritual is a far poorer world. And human sense rightly revolts against it.

Some do not. While traveling Italy, I met a young Scandinavian woman on a bus trying to find her way to a hostel. We began talking about our travels and I mentioned my fascination with all of the old Churches. She responded dismissively, "oh, when you've seen one Church, you've seen them all."

First of all, this is hardly true. It is the ugly buildings of the modern city that all look alike. The sheer variety all the all old Churches makes me think of the remark by C.S Lewis, "how monotonously alike all the tyrants of the world, how gloriously different all the saints." Second, it reminded me of a story told by Fulton Sheen. He told of a tourist at the Louvre who, on exiting commented contemptuously to a security guard who was standing by that he (the tourist) saw nothing to admire in those paintings. The security guard responded, "Listen! These pictures are not on trial; you are!"

It was not only that art has become ugly; it is that the modern materialist, like my Scandinavian acquaintance, also gradually loses his ability to appreciate beauty where it may be found. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, that right or wrong, materialism gradually destroyed the modern man's humanity.

What was true of that tourist is true of the modern world-- and of us. The modern world is on trial and the case for the prosecution, the ugly artistic consequences of our materialism alone, is a strong one indeed. The judge is just, the verdict coming. If the modern world does not reject its materialism, it will find, not only will it have lost the ability to produce beauty, but, it will also have lost the ability to appreciate it, with devastating consequences for its ability to enjoy heaven and the new creation that began with Easter.

The Cross of Christ: Embarassment or Reason to Boast?

The Cross of Christ: Embarrassment or Reason to Boast?

Here begins the first a several blogs posts for the Easter season on the Resurrection. This is simply some brief reflections on a favorite John Updike poem.

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

—John Updike, “Seven Stanzas At Easter,” 1964

In Galatians 6:14, St. Paul said, “may I boast in nothing but the cross of Christ.” For a Christian the cross is a tremendous source of pride and cause for awe, as we boast in a God who took on human flesh and became man, thereby committing the greatest act of humility the world had ever seen. Similarly, He took the full force of all the world’s evil onto himself, defeating sin and death in the greatest act of love the world had ever seen.

Though St. Paul boasted in the cross, for much of modern society and many people, even some claiming the name of Christian, the cross is not a source of pride, but a source of embarrassment. It was of those that John Updike wrote warning lest they be embarrassed by the miracle.

Modern embarrassment with the idea of a God who took on flesh, died, and then rose in glorified flesh essentially dates to the so-called Enlightenment and rise of materialism toward the end of the eighteenth century. Modern people “knew” that dead men did not rise as their silly unenlightened ancestors, bless their fruit of the looms, had believed. This change affected even theology as 20^th century theologians began to reject the reality of the Resurrection. Rudolph Bultmann, (I think) remarked that no one who had seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope could be expected to believe in the literal Resurrection. Consequently, he turned the Resurrection into a metaphor, a sign of the call to authentic existence in the face of death.

A modern material mind cannot believe in the Resurrection, it believes that dead men do not rise. Yet, the modern mind, still does not become wholly irreligious. Like Bultmann, it may try to retain some “spiritual” (though the belief is really very unspiritual) metaphorical meaning, thereby “mocking God with metaphor.” The modern mind, like the pagan antique mind, cannot accept a literal, physical Resurrection. God as matter is repellent to it.

It is a strange thing that the more materialist the word becomes, the more disgusted with matter it becomes. A literal resurrection is foolishness to the gentiles, but a “spiritual” religion such as Buddhism or the eastern paganisms are perfectly acceptable. This disgust with matter may come from the fact that in a material universe, the universe is simply, as one writer put it, the random product of time plus chance. There is nothing to give it purpose or meaning, and hence nothing to dignify it. And so matter and the material world becomes a prison.

This embarrassment with the crucifixion, however, is nothing new; rather it goes back to the beginning. Paul in Corinthians wrote that ‘we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.” Peter himself confessed Our Lord as Messiah, but then objected to the Crucifixion and was denounced as Satan. Indeed, disgust with a God become man who suffered, died, and rose, goes back further still. One of the speculations about Satan’s fall, was that God revealed to him the episode of the cross and Satan objected. Satan refused to adore a God who would so humble himself and become man. He was too enlightened.

To the Christian, however, the cross is not an embarrassment. Rather, the love and humility of God become man, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and the Resurrection are not a cause for embarrassment, but a source of pride, and indeed, the only real source of pride in the whole universe. Children boast on the playground that “my daddy can beat your daddy.” The Christian can similarly boast, with St. Paul, that Our Father, the God become man in Jesus, has fought and beaten the entire forces of evil, sin, and death, and Resurrexit.

Happy Easter

God, Suffering, and the Earthquake

One skeptic, commenting on the recent earthquake and the tremendous suffering it caused in Japan, asked how anyone could seriously believe God had some reason for allowing that suffering. Are people supposed to believe that God sits around and does nothing because He has some grand plan to make it all work out? The skeptic continued that seeing such suffering was causing him to suffer a mental breakdown.

In spite of his conclusion in favor of skepticism, there was something almost Christian in this unbeliever’s reaction. The English Cardinal Newman once said that if he did not believe that the wrongs and sufferings of the present life would be made right by God in the next, that he would go mad. The skeptic was right to consider madness a logical conclusion, he was wrong to deny the afterlife. The skeptic was also right to think that there was something unsatisfactory in the idea that God sits on his hands doing nothing, simply watching evil happen as part of his grand plan to bring about a greater good. But he was wrong to think that God does nothing.

God does not do nothing. He does not merely sit on his hands watching human suffering as part of his grand plan. Rather, as part of his plan, He became man himself, entering into and sharing human suffering. He suffered rejection from his hometown and misunderstanding from his own family. He suffered from hunger and the temptations and attacks of devils. He suffered the evil of a corrupt religious hierarchy, a corrupt government, and a sham trial. Finally, He suffered the most cruel and humiliating death his society could devise, though He was wholly innocent. He suffered all the evils in the world and wondered where God was. Finally, He asked “my God, my God, why have you abandoned me. A moment, as Chesterton said, when God Himself seemed to be an atheist. A glorious moment for any rebel or sufferer forever; a moment when God Himself felt abandoned by God.

If the story ended here, for God or us, the story would be a tragedy, but it does not. In one of those ironic little twists that make for good stories and better history, the cross, a symbol of torture and shame, became a crown. Evil could not hold the one person who had never given in to it. Abandoned by all his friends “he stood up the bridge alone, and fire and shadow both defied” (1). And then He rose. The gates of hell were locked with a hatred and bitterness stronger than adamantine or steel; they were smashed open with something far stronger, a wooden cross and the sovereign love of God. And when He rose, he still had the wounds from which He had suffered, but neither they nor the memory of His suffering would ever torment Him again. They were the signs on an enemy, but of a defeated enemy, and became part of His glory.

And then he ascended into heaven, but not to twiddle His thumbs. Rather he said “I am going to prepare a place for you. A priest at my church says that he finds this one of the most hopeful passages in the Bible; I think that I can see why. St. Paul speaks of Jesus as the firstfruits, and of his Resurrection as the model for ours. This means that there is hope. The modern skeptic, like Newman, need not go mad. He need only believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. There is a next world to right the wrongs and suffering of this one. I do not think (though I am not sure) that they will be forgotten, or made as if they had never happened, but they will be defeated enemies, and their scars will become the marks of our glory.

The story then, is not a tragedy. It is not one for God, and it need not be one for us. Rather, it is a heroic quest. It is so because there is a goal and a purpose, and at the end, a triumph. Fulton Sheen, quoting, I think, of all people, Nietzsche (2), said, “ ‘We can bear anything in this world, any kind of a how, as long as we know the why,’ and the why was given, on the road to Emmaus.”

This post makes no pretense at learning, completeness, or originality, it is simply some confused notes of a slightly overworked and very presumptuous graduate student. Take it as such.

Further Reading:

David Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? (2005).

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

NT Wright, Evil and the Justice of God (2009).

1. Frodo Baggins in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring.

“A Virgin Shall Conceive”: Isaiah 7:14 and a Problem with the NABRE

On Ash Wednesday of this year, the revised edition of the New American Bible will be released (1). In preparation since 1994, the appearance of the new translation is long overdue and generally welcome, but the text contains one serious flaw. In Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah prophecies the birth of the coming Messiah. God commands Achaz to ask a sign and Achaz refuses, saying that he will not tempt God. The prophet replies,

“Is it a small thing for you to be grievous to men, that you are grievous to my God also? [14] Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign. Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel.” (2)

Jewish readers, recently joined by modern skeptics, have protested that the word “virgin” is not in the original Hebrew and originates from an ancient Greek translation of the Bible, the Septuagint. In the NAB-Revised Edition (henceforth, NABRE), the US Catholic Bishops have capitulated and render the highlighted text “a young woman will conceive.” This capitulation fails to account for several good reasons for keeping the word “virgin,” including, its initial translation by BC Jews, the social context of the time, and the context of the passage itself.

Early in the 3^rd century B.C., many Jews, spread abroad by the diaspora, no longer knew or could read Hebrew and so Hebrew scholars translated the Old Testament into Koine Greek. St. Augustine relates a legend of how the Septuagint, as this Greek translation of the Old Testament was named, came to be. One of the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt (Ptolemy Philadelphus), desired a Greek translation for his library and commissioned the translation by 72 learned Jewish scholars. Working independently, these 72 scholars each returned a translation of the text that was in perfect agreement, taken to be a divine sign of its excellence (3). The Septuagint continued to be used by Jews and Early Christians until the 2^nd/3^rd century AD, when the Jews, probably for several reasons (4), went back to the Hebrew .

After Jesus’ Ascension, early Christians searched the Old Testament for messianic prophecies fulfilled by Jesus. Probably using the Septuagint, they found in Isaiah 7:14, a passage perfectly suited to their needs, reading, “a virgin shall conceive etc.” Such a passage was naturally a good fit for the early Christians, much of whose strategy for preaching Jesus to the Jews included appeals to fulfilled prophecy. Ancient Jews who remained resistant to Christianity began to protest that the Hebrew text did not read “virgin” at all, but rather simply almah, “young woman,” while many modern secularists have taken up the critique.

Despite the recent capitulation by the US Catholic bishops, however, at least three compelling reasons remain for supposing that the translation of the Hebrew word almah should remain “virgin,” rather “young woman.” First, Septuagint was translated by Jews for Jews. Closer to the context and understanding the language better than we, they chose to render the word almah by the Greek word for virgin, parthenos rather than neanis, young woman. Second, while true that almah does not explicitly mean virgin, this is misleading. The late Carsten Peter Thiede has pointed out that,

“critics have asserted that “virgin” should read, young woman… [but] almah [is] a young unmarried woman of childbearing age. Given the social culture of Isaiah’s days, she was therefore either a virgin or a prostitute. Since the context of the prophecy rules out the prostitute, we are left with the virgin (5).”

Finally, the context of the text of Isaiah itself speaks of this as a sign. As Origen said long ago, a young woman becoming pregnant would not be a remarkable sign, but a virgin becoming pregnant would (6).

Welcome as the NABRE is, the choice to render the Hebrew almah in Isaiah 7:14 as “young woman” rather than “virgin,” unfortunate and flawed. As it has read for the past 2,250 years (and has meant for longer), Isaiah 7:14 should still read, “a virgin will conceive and bear and son and his name shall be called Emmanuel.”

1. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110302/us_nm/us_religion_bible, see also: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/04/controversial-bible-revision-about-that-virgin-thing/

2. Isaiah 7: 13-14. Douay-Rheims Bible. http://www.drbo.org/chapter/27007.htm

3. Augustine, City of God bk.18.ch.42 http://www.bible-researcher.com/vulgate2.html

4. These may have included a declining use of Greek among the Jews, perhaps the result of many Jews of the Diaspora becoming Christians, as well as the desire to avoid a text that became associated with Christianity.

5. Carsten Peter Thiede, Jesus: Man or Myth, (2004) p.47. Thiede was Professor of New Testament History and Papyrology and Archeology at STH in Basel Switzerland. He is also author of, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Jewish Origins of Christianity (2003).

6. Origen, Against Celsus, ed. Henry Chadwick, (1953), p.34. (Available on google books)

-additionally, the greek word for young woman, neanis, occurs elsewhere in the Septuagint, which makes it appear that the initial Jewish translators did have reason to render almah as parthenos (virgin), rather than neanis (young woman).

The Spark and the Flame

Reflecting on the joys of married love, Archbishop Fulton Sheen once suggested that couples recognize that such joys, though great, were only glimmers and echoes of the joys of heaven. He advised couples to accept them as such and ask themselves, “if the spark is so bright, what must be the flame?” In doing so, he followed an old Christian tradition of seeing the goods and joys of the world as glimmers of the future weight of glory and signposts to God. Hence, in one of his more beautiful passages, St. Paul compares the union of a husband and wife to that between Christ and the Church. This attitude recognizes the natural human orientation to God. In the same way, a medieval Franciscan observed that man naturally desired the infinite, since anything less would not content him, hence man naturally desired God. These attitudes recognize the orientation of human nature to its divine end and confirm the world’s goodness as a sign and promise of that of God. And when the material world can be a sign of the spiritual world, the universe suddenly becomes both larger and more exciting.

Today though, the conviction that we are living in a materialistic universe pervades society. God is thought dead, and now the material world can no longer be a sign of the spiritual. In such a world, the universe is forced to take on the role of God. (1) It is not the spark that points to the flame, rather the spark must now become the flame. The finite has to satisfy the human desire for the infinite. There is no hope for heaven; heaven, if it is to be at all, must be in this world.

Doubtless this explains the odd strand of utopianism in modern, often especially modern scientific, thought. The Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has pointed to a recent Time Magazine cover story that asked why the world was getting so much better (and by better, Time meant wealthier). Another modern philosopher commented on the strong sense of utopianism at a recent Mexican science and technology conference. And the same is present in politics; surely, the next politician or next social program will cure society’s ills.

Yet, there is something empty and unconvincing in materialism and the thought that it really suffices for human hopes. Chesterton suggested that the appropriate response to a modern lunatic who claimed to be Christ would be to tell him that if he were God, then he is not much of a God. He observed the same of a material universe. If the universe be solely material, one has the feeling that it is not much of a universe. If the universe is to fill the role of God, then it is a cheat of a God. The spark is not much of a flame. In politics, we find we have placed our hope in fallible institutions and fallible men, and that science and technology are no cure for human sin.

The youth recognize this. In the same article, Peter Kreeft observed that suicide among the youth has increased 5000% since the 1950s (2). They can no longer say with St. Paul, “I reckon the sufferings of the present life are not to be compared to the glory that awaits us.” They no longer believe future glory does await them. Divorce rates show it too. Marriage cannot be a sign of God, it has to replace God. Forced into a role it was never meant to play, it is a poor replacement, and so rather than accept their love as a glimmer and anticipation of God, the couple thinks their love a cheat and separates in search for the real infinite they desire. An author I do not remember said that they are right to seek the infinite, but wrong to seek it in human persons.

St. Augustine offers the answer. He sought for God and said,

“I asked the earth and it said, ‘I am not He…’ I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars. They replied, “neither are we the God Whom you seek…” I said “you have told me something concerning my God that you are not He; tell me something of Him.” And they all answered with the loud voice, “He made us!” (3)

The world is not a cheat, it was never meant to fulfill the infinite desires of human beings. The material is a sign of the spiritual, and so the answer is to affirm human and worldly joys and say of them with Fulton Sheen, “if the human heart can so thrill me, what must be the heart of God; if the spark is so bright, what must be the flame?"

(1) Incidentally one skeptical astronomer, Carl Sagan, has always spelled “Cosmos” with a capital “C.”—cited from Reasonable Faith (2008) , p. 82.

(2) http://www.integratedcatholiclife.org/2011/01/kreeft-the-winning-strategy/

(3) Confessions, Book 19, chapter 6.