Anyone can be moral (or ethical) but only a passionate person can be virtuous

Thomas Aquinas was premodern but he was premodern in several ways. In some regards, we should be grateful that we have left that world behind. We should be grateful that we no longer live in a world where people believed that original sin was passed on sexually through the male. In other regards, we might feel ambivalent, for example, in that we no longer can easily believe that the world is oriented towards a single, divinely determined end. And there are other differences that we might simply regret.

Here is Thomas discussing "Whether all men have the same last end?" [I-II, Q1, Art. 7] He means by that whether we are aimed at the same last end and not, as our modern reading would imply, whether all humans have the same fate. It's an interesting question for, at first glance, people seem to have different goals in life. Indeed, we take it (correctly) that one of the great things about (real) liberalism is that it allows citizens considerable latitude in determining what the good life is for them. Thomas gives us an answer that may be compatible with that but isn't the usual one.

He begins, being a good medieval theologian, by making a distinction.

We can speak of the last end in two ways: first considering only the aspect of the last end; secondly, considering the thing in which the last end is realized.

I take this to mean that we can thing of the last end simply as something that is aimed at or we can consider it terms of the ways it is realized.

So, then, as to the aspect of last end, all agree in desiring the last end; since all desire the fulfillment of their perfection, and it is precisely in, and it is precisely this fulfillment in which the last end consists.

We might argue that we no longer believe that human beings have a given end which they seek to fulfill but I don't think that will hold. My counter-argument is an empirical one: most people seek to reach some sort of fulfillment of some end to which they feel they were ordained. Think of the notion of gender indeterminacy: the argument is made not in terms that a person can simply randomly pick a gender and go with it. The argument is always that people have some deep, inner sense of what they really are and a desire to become that. Which brings us to:

But as to the thing in which this aspect is realized, all men are not agreed as to their last end; since some desire riches as their consummate good; some, pleasure; others something else.

Gender identity would presumably fit under "something else". Thomas would be shocked, even stunned at the possibility but it's hard to think of a clearer example of people acting towards the end of happiness but seeing the thing through which happiness is achieved differently from others than through gender indeterminacy.

I also find it hard to imagine a project less likely to succeed. In a liberal society, however, we allow people to pick the thing that they believe will bring them happiness. That said, how do we determine what is the right answer, if only for ourselves. Here modern society has nothing to offer. We are sometimes told to look within ourselves as if there can be an answer there. Thomas's premodern answer still seems the right one to me.

Thus to every taste the sweet is pleasant but to some, the sweetness of wine is most pleasant, to others, the sweetness of honey, or of something similar. Yet that sweet is absolutely the best of all pleasant things, in which he who has the best taste takes most pleasure. In like manner that good is most complete which the man with well disposed affections desires for his last end.

We could say a lot about this. For example, "What are well-disposed affections?" In this particular instance, Thomas would likely say they are the ones in accord with natural law and go on to argue that the idea of gender fluidity is contrary to natural law. That is problematic because it involves an inconsistency in the use of natural law. Simply put, Thomas rarely uses the notion of natural law to directly derive norms in this way. Indeed, the only matter in which he (and the Catholic Church follows him in this) makes such derivations seems to be in matters of sexual morality. That sort of inconsistency tends to be self-refuting.

There is much more to Church arguments in this regard than the current culture would allow. It seems to me that if you wanted to make certain you'd be miserable, trying to live a gender identity contrary to your sexual identity is right up there with opioid abuse and divorce as a way to bring it about. But that is a different argument from simply deriving laws from some perceived regularity in nature.

The more interesting aspect of this for me, however, is how it plays out in terms of how we deal with self-mastery.

Mastery, noun
1.comprehensive knowledge or skill in a subject or accomplishment.
"she played with some mastery" synonyms: proficiency, ability, capability;
2. control or superiority over someone or something.
"man's mastery over nature" synonyms: control, domination, command, ascendancy, supremacy, preeminence, superiority;  

In the modern world, we tend to think of moral self-mastery entirely in terms of the second. Self-mastery is just an antiquated way of saying "self-control" for us. Thus the notion that we can medically over-rule our chromosomes. Far better, it seems to me, is the first definition that says we can play the roles that are given to us with mastery.

I'll stop there for now.

How church doctrine changes

Traditionalist Catholics have spent a lot of time sneering at Father Tom Rosica for the following:

Will this Pope re-write controversial Church doctrines? No. But that isn't how doctrine changes. Doctrine changes when pastoral contexts shift and new insights emerge such that particularly doctrinal formulations no longer mediate the saving message of God's transforming love. 

See, for example, here, here, or here,.

Yes, there is a spin there. Fr. Rosica can only imagine people changing doctrine for the best of reasons and he is implying that only his side of the argument are brave and honest and loving. This is classic Enlightenment thinking and it leaves us with the quandary of having to decide where it is more charitable to assume he is just dishonest or really blind.

That said, however, he is right about one very important thing: church doctrine can and does change and, if and when it does, the doctrines in question won't have to be rewritten. The Church condemns usury today just as it did hundreds of years ago. But the doctrine on usury has completely changed in meaning. The same could happen, I would argue that it already is happening, with church teaching on sexuality and contraception. The actual phrases setting out the Church's moral teaching have not changed but the doctrine is changing.

David Kasanof wrote a very funny column WoodenBoat magazine for many years. He once commented on the following joke:

How do you get a rat out of the lee scuppers?
Come about.

For those of you who aren't nautical. Scuppers are a gap left open between surfaces to allow water to drain, sort of like the gap inside the walls of your house. The lee scuppers are the ones on the downwind side of the boat. It's a difficult problem for the rat would feel trapped and if you tried to reach down into the scuppers to pull it out you'd be severely bitten. Coming about puts the boat on a different tack so that the downwind, or lee scuppers, are now upwind, or windward scuppers. As Kasanof commented, the rat doesn't move but all the words around him do. A lot of jokes work like that. The joke that life is playing on traditionalist Catholics right now works like that too.

And they have nobody but themselves to blame.

Same old, same old

Some emerging religious leaders like Rev. William Barber or Rev. Osagyefo Sekou offer a new understanding of morality that is intrinsically linked with social justice, which might appeal to religiously unaffiliated people seeking a greater meaning in these troubling times.

I've been hearing variations on this argument all my adult life. To be fair, Kaya Oakes qualifies her remark with a "might". Still, those religious organizations that have invested heavily in social justice have not succeeded in attracting many members. If anything, they are losing members even faster than other, less political groups. The Catholic religious orders that heavily directed themselves towards social justice in the last few decades are all headed for extinction. 

The article Oakes writes is based on a new survey by the Public Religion Research Institute and Religion News Service. And if you read that survey first and then her article, I think you will concluded that she has precious little to add. And neither do I.

The mistake she makes, and many have made before her, is that she considered things that she believes young people are interested in and then suggested that religious groups should offer these same things. As others have pointed out before me, if people can already get this stuff outside religion, why would they look to religion for it. Beyond that, I wonder if young people are much committed to social justice? I haven't seen any evidence that there is anything there but a lot of virtue signalling.

The thing religion seems to offer less and less, it seems to me, is a way of life. It's become something you do at certain moments in life. For some only when they are baptized, get married and die. But even for those whop go to church every Sunday (or even every day) religion is something they do separately from the rest of their life. And what would they do if they were being religious all the time?

Is it even a good idea to "be religious"?

Gloom and doom

There is a lot of it about these days. And it isn't completely crazy. As pointed out by Jonah Goldberg and others, there is a neo-fascist spirit abroad in the world and it is conceivable that the day will come again when we see horrors done. It might happen but it probably won't. A more realistic fear is that progressives will bring about a new Victorianism in which we all go to great lengths to protect the tenser sensibilities (often imagined tender sensibilities) of others. And I'm not entirely convinced that would be a horrible thing.

In any case, this is perhaps a good time to remind ourselves of some inspiring words spoken by a sainted man in the first year of my life:

It often happens, as we have learned in the daily exercise of apostolic ministry, that, not without offense to Our ears, the voices of people are brought to Us who, although burning with religious fervour, nevertheless do not think things through with enough discretion. These people see only ruin and calamity in the present conditions of human society. They keep repeating that our times, if compared to past centuries, have been getting worse. And they act as if they have nothing to learn from history, which is the teacher of life, and as if at the time of past Councils everything went favorably and correctly with respect to Christian doctrine, morality, and the Church's proper freedom. We believe We must disagree with these prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster, as if the end of the world were at hand.

That's from John XXIII's introductory remarks to the Vatican Council. I can't speak to the quality of the translation as I have only enough Latin to understand a few basic prayers I know by heart. It matches what other writers I trust have said. In any case, he's right.

We can also, of course, be too optimistic. Here is some more for your consideration:

But at the present time, the spouse of Christ prefers to use the medicine of mercy rather than the weapons of severity; and she thinks she meets today's needs by explaining the validity of her doctrine more fully rather than condemning. Not that there are no false doctrines, opinions and dangers to avoided and dispersed; but all these things so openly conflict with the right norms of honesty and have borne such lethal fruits that today people by themselves seem to condemn them and in particular forms of life which disregard God and his laws, excessive confidence in technological progress, and in a prosperity consisting only in the comforts of life. More and more they are coming to know that the dignity of the human person and his appropriate perfection are a matter of great importance and most difficult to achieve. What is especially important is that they have finally learned from experience that imposing external force on others, the power of weapons, and political domination are not at all sufficient for a happy solution if the most serious problems which trouble them.

That last sentence, read today, seems ludicrously optimistic. It's a bit jarring to consider that John XXIII was speaking in living memory of WW2. He had seen at first hand the brutal suffering that was imposed on others. He knew that some of the men in the audience listening to him had suffered. ANd yet he, along with many others, saw reason for hope.

Often our fears for the world are really just a projection of our fears for our world onto everything else. The professor of Classics who sees declining enrolment in her field, the union boss who sees the waning influence of the union movement, the taxi driver faced with Uber and the journalist seeing that their industry is rapidly shrinking will all have a tendency to imagine that the whole world is going south and not just their corner of it. They will do this because they will fail to see that there comes a point to get off a sinking ship.

To their numbers we should now add some kinds of conservatism including traditionalist Catholics. Yes, there was much good about the movement. Yes, they were unfairly attacked. Yes, much evil was done in the "spirit of Vatican II". But the traditionalist response to the Novus Ordo was always an over-reaction and the fight to establish socially conservative moral values in law and politics was always doomed to fail. That the walls are now crumbling is a good thing.

Reception

Today is the feast day of Saint Bartholomew. To which the vast majority of Catholics are going to answer, "Who is Saint Bartholomew?" In one sense, the answer to that is easy. He was an apostle. In another sense, it is very difficult for no one has the slightest clue as to who he was or what he did. We know only two things about him for certain: his name and his status as apostle.

And yet, of the four tiers of feasts in the Catholic Church—Optional Memorial, Memorial, Feast and Solemnity—Bartholomew rates the second highest. The obvious question is, "Why?" I'm going to ignore that question and wonder more about the issue of reception because it's one that intrigues me lately.

Bartholomew is remembered because he was received by the early church. The only thing that was received for certain is his name which appears in all three Synoptic gospels. That's nothing to sneer at. The gospels are grimly economical texts. Not a word is wasted. Anything that gets mentioned there does so because it was important. We can reasonably question what the role of the apostles was and we can reasonably question whether there really were exactly twelve of them. Questioning that Bartholomew was one of them in the memory of the early church is far tougher.

And, whatever the apostles were, they were very important.

Beyond that, however, the question of reception gets tricky. Further stories and traditions about Bartholomew are very thin on the ground. He may have done heroic things or he may not. Either way, not enough people were interested in passing them along. And not many people came along after the fact to make things up about him either. In any era, the willingness of other people to preserve, polish, embellish and create stories to tell about you is the key to your being received into the culture and that is just as true of the culture of the Church as any other. And Bartholomew has, for the most part, not been received.

Two groups of people have bucked this trend and they have done so largely on the basis of Bartholomew's credentials. If you have an image at all that goes with Saint Bartholomew, it is most likely an image of an Anglican Church or a hospital in England. And the reason for this is that he is in the Bible. The strong Calvinist streak in the Church of England discouraged naming of institutions after saints unless those saints had impeccable scriptural credentials. And poor Bartholomew doesn't have much but he does have that. The second group to preserve his memory have been members of the Catholic hierarchy. They have not done so with any great enthusiasm but they have done it. For Bartholomew has hierarchical credentials in that the Bible doesn't just mention him but also says that he was an apostle.

Beyond that, however, not much reception has taken place. He isn't part of Christian lore. Lore was passed on, and, in some cases, created, but it didn't take root.  That may be a good thing. It could also be a bad thing. It may be that very important truths were lost along with Bartholomew. One of the unquestioned responsibilities of the Church hierarchy is to counter reception. On the other hand, one of the important roles of the laity is to counter potential abuse of power by the hierarchy by being selective about what we choose to receive. Both side are capable of corruption. If the Holy Spirit is not influencing the process, then everything we do as Catholics is in vain.

Finally, spare a thought for Saint Bartholomew today. He was a real man who believed and acted on his beliefs, whatever he did and he was there at the beginning.

Bridal mysticism and Catholicism's man problem

Picking up from last week, one of the possible explanations of the low appeal that Christianity has for men is that it is, or has become, a feminized religion. One issue unique to Catholicism is what is called Nuptial or Bridal Mysticism. It's an idea with deep roots: the old testament talks about God marrying Israel and Paul uses marriage as a metaphor to explain the union between Jesus and the Church.

The thing to remember is that this only is a metaphor, only one metaphor of a number that appear in the scriptures. We also need to be careful about how metaphors are used. It's one thing, as the old testament and Saint Paul do, to speak metaphorically of God marrying a community and another thing altogether to speak of the sought for bond between individual Christians and God as a marriage. If nothing else, the second choice suggests vanity on a very grand scale.

It's also individualistic. Like the beatific vision, bridal mysticism suggests and intense bond between two beings. It doesn't require anyone else. It's weird that we're to spend our lives showing love for Jesus in the way we treat others only to enter into a state where others are irrelevant.

Finally, and most pertinent to the subject at hand, there are all the implications that go along with the word "bridal". It's not just that it suggests that feminine receptivity is the only legitimate spiritual life. Think of boys. Thirteen-year-old girls will sit around and gossip about their imagined wedding day. Boys will not.

If we look at what goes on in the church, I see enough smoke that I begin to think there must be a feminized Catholicism fire somewhere.

Consider the extremes of high Mariology. The major sin that turns Mariology into Mariolatry is when people forget that Mary is a member of the Church and make her representative of the Church. You get a lot of clergy who understand their vows as a commitment to Mary and not Jesus. They always subtle language to create enough nuance to avoid open heresy but you don't have to spend a lot of time with priests and lay people who have strong Marian devotions before you begin to see that a significant subset of them have made her into something she is not.

Consider also the sheer number of gay priests. Rates of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church are about the same as you find in your average school board but there is one huge difference in that the same-sex abuse is far more prevalent in the Church. The very highest estimates for the number of gay men in the overall population run at about 4 percent. The number of gay priests is much higher. What is it about the Catholic priesthood and religious that attracts a disproportionate number of gay men? And there is good reason to suggest that this has long been a problem. In his rule, St. Benedict sets very clear lines for the allotment of beds for young monks. It was already an issue in the sixth century.

Mary Magdalene

I've been away a while on retreat, just returning last weekend, which is why there hasn't been a lot of posting here. One of the things that happened while I was away was the first full feast of Mary Magdalene, which had only been a memorial until now. This created a dilemma for a lot of Catholics. On the one hand, Mary Magdalene is a saint and much beloved one. She plays a significant role in the gospels, much more significant than many apostles whose only role in the gospels is to be name-checked. On the other hand, it causes considerable uneasiness in that the move to raise her day to a full feast raises her status in a way that challenges the way people think about women and their role in the Church.

Some critics raise concerns about what this having taken so long says about the Church's treatment of women, and they are entirely right to do so. That it has taken this long to recognize her special importance is a scandal. It is still a scandal that Saint Martha day is not a feast and that her sister Saint Mary of Bethany has, who also merits a feast, for all intents and purposes, no place in the calendar.

Others resist this, fearing that elevation of Mary Magdalene and other holy women who served Jesus will open the way for female priesthood. The problem with this fear (it hardly deserves to be called an argument) is that it inadvertently undermines their side. For a male priesthood, founded on a notion of separate but equal roles, is undermined if we treat these women as second-class, and therefore not equal. To repeat, remember that all we know about for certain about saints Matthias, Bartholomew, Simon and Jude is their names and they all rate a full feast.

I think, however, there is another fear on the part of those who resist the full recognition of these holy women of the gospels and that is that it could change the way doctrine about Mary, the Mother of God is received. It does not change what is taught and believed about Mary but it could change the way it is received in the prayer and devotion of Catholics.

I'll come clean about this and admit that I think (and I very much emphasize that "I think") this would be a good thing. Mary, as was made clear by the Second Vatican Council, is a member of the church. She does not stand over and above it. Look at the calendar, however, and she has been, until this year, the only woman to rate a feast. All others receive only a memorial. When we think about feminine virtue, Mary is such a large presence as to overwhelm all others. This needs to be corrected.

I could say more and perhaps will some day.

Does Christianity have a nice guy problem?

The good folks at the Art of Manliness have begun a series on a subject near to my heart, Christianity's manhood problem. Christian churches attract more women than men and the men they do attract often seem less that manly. It's not necessarily a new issue and some might argue that it's not even a problem. Since at least the 19th century there have been churches that attracted more women than men and some of these churches were at the forefront of the movement to abolish slavery in the US and the movement to allow women to vote everywhere in the west. You could easily turn the problem around and ask not what is wrong with churches but what is wrong with the men who go to them?

I think the question should be, "Why don't men see anything in Christianity for them?" That's a question that could go either way. We might conclude that something is wrong with men that they cannot accept the message. Alternatively, we might conclude that there is something wrong with the message.

In line with the latter possibility, I wonder if the message of Christianity hasn't become what Dr. Robert A Glover calls a covert contract with life. A covert contract is an imagined deal. It's not a contract at all in that only one party knows about it. Give-to-get is a good example of a covert contract. I do something nice for someone and expect that they will return the favour. I don't actually mention this to them. You can see how that might not work out. A covert contract with life would be to generalize this and to believe that the world is set up such that things will ultimately work out well for nice guys.

A bit of interesting background, Dr. Glover used to be the pastor to a Baptist congregation. He became aware of the nice-guy syndrome when he saw it in himself. Ultimately he left the ministry and practices no faith today. He has occasionally expressed admiration for the new age, sex-and-God views of David Deida. He probably doesn't sound like a good example for any Christian man to follow.

I'd argue, however, that his book No More Mr. Nice Guy is one of the best books about manhood currently available. And much of Christian moral teaching does seem to offer exactly the sort of covert contract that Glover rightly describes as crazy. "Join our community and follow the rules and you'll be happy." For a lot of people this works out pretty well. I've seen people who had chaotic lives benefit from joining a church. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of lonely, miserable young men in Christian churches unable to connect with women. And I've heard a lot of women complain about the mopey weak men who pursue them. Is there something fundamentally wrong with modern Christianity? I think there is.

The big challenge, and something I'll explore in coming posts, is Saint Paul. He often says things that sound like nice-guy thinking: "be all things to all people" and "put others needs before your own".  The way to redeem St. Paul is, in a sense, straightforward: to argue that this isn't a covert contract but a very overt covenant with God.

I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

And that is right but it's something that is easy to forget. It's particularly easy to forget in the face of the challenges of the community. The community necessarily needs to make rules to accommodate all its members and to help everyone get along when there isn't complete agreement on what is acceptable praxis. It's easy to mix up these rules with the will of God; it's God's will that the community live in love but not necessarily his will that a certain rule about what happens when one person's ox gets gored be applied for all time in all situations.

More to come ...

Exotica and the comforting presence of primitive religion

"No anthropologist, observing a community in which the tenets of religion have taken root, would wish to disabuse his tribe of their sacred rites and stories. It is only those brought up in faith who feel the impulse, on losing it, to ruin the faith of others."

That's Roger Scruton from An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture. Casanova made more or less the same argument against Voltaire. He believed, and told Voltaire, that rather than abolishing superstition a proper philosopher would have remained silent on the subject. Wittgenstein made similar aruments.

The opposing view, popular since the Enlightenment, is that it is an act of bravery to shed our sacred rites and stories. This idea has been subject to relatively little scrutiny however. In any case, there are no knock-em-down arguments on either side. The best we can do, as Wittgenstein said, is a sort of propaganda in which both sides seek to remind the other of past weaknesses and failures. In this respect, the Enlightenment view is particularly vulnerable as all past attempts to strip the world clear of the dreams of superstition has tended to produce nightmares much as sterilizing a surface tends to prepare it for new and massive bacterial growth.

So let's put aside conclusive arguments for a while return to the album cover we were looking at yesterday.

Here's what it says about that cover in Mondo Exotica by Francesco Adinolfi:

The splendid album cover designed by William George portrayed a couple dancing among "threatening pagan idols."

But are they threatening? A lot would depend on how you looked at it. For millions of Catholics, the image of the crucified Christ is a source of comfort. That's a bit odd when you consider that it shows us a spectacularly cruel form of capital punishment. It's odd to see the torture and brutal murder of the person you place your hope in as comforting. And the Catholic seeing the crucifixion portrayed knows this. They would insist, in fact, that the spectacular cruelty and seeming hopelessness of the situation portrayed is the very point.

Something similar is happening with this cover. It's an altogether more commonplace instance and the deliberate use of the pejorative term "idols" above tells us that this is intentional. (We don't know who originally said or wrote "threatening pagan idols" as Adinolfi doesn't tell us where he gets this from or why he puts it in quotes.)

And we can grasp the real point of both the cover art and the music if we take the trouble to notice that the couple isn't dancing. It shows us something rather ambiguous: a man who wants to kiss a woman and a woman who isn't certain whether to refuse or accept his kiss. That's something like dancing and virtually all dancing is a ritualized encounter meant to recall such situations.

What will the woman be agreeing to if she accepts his kiss? Well, sex for starters. Perhaps not full sex that night but some sort of sexual interaction is being proposed. But what exactly? This could lead to some more kissing, hugging and squeezing and then never again. Or it might lead to sex. Or it might lead to love or even marriage.

And it's ambiguous both ways. She only knows that he wants to kiss her. She doesn't know what he hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what he'll settle for.  She also doesn't know what she really hopes it will lead to or, to be a bit more prosaic, what she'll settle for.

Think of how a woman kisses her husband and then think how the same woman, about to begin an affair, kisses the man she will have that affair with for the first time. She might tell herself that the second kiss is "just about sex" but is that ever true? Conversely, she might give her husband a kiss and think to herself, "this is about love and not sex", but is that ever true?

No matter how you cut it, the possibility of a kiss is never the purely rational interaction that Enlightenment thinkers of all eras want us to believe it is. Something more is going on and, if we see things that way, the pagan idols surrounding the couple make perfect sense. They fit the situation not because they bring a threat with them but because they allow us to recognize a threat that exists in the very situation and which threat it is that makes the whole thing so enchanting.

To return to Scruton:

The sexual revolution of modern times has disenchanted the sexual act. Sex has been finally removed from the sacred realm: it has become 'my' affair, in which 'we' no longer show an interest. This de-consecration of the reproductive process is the leading fact of modern culture.

Scruton, however, is guilty of the very thing he accuses the sexual revolution of doing. We see this in his use of the term "the reproductive process". Is there anything more disenchanting that a process? Imagine the couple above thinking to themselves, "I'm engaged in the reproductive process?" As Wittgenstein once said, the parsons are equal partners with the philosophers in doing the "infinite harm" that Enlightenment disenchantment has caused.

Since I must stop somewhere, I'll simply note that Exotica and Tiki culture were an act of rebellion more profound than the rock and roll that followed. What we see here is a movement not to re-enchant the word, for the world can not be disenchanted. Rather, it's a movement to recognize the primitive enchantment that never goes away. It matters little what the original context those "pagan idols" were taken from, nor does it matter who has an authentic right to invoke them. All that matters is what anyone can see in that picture if they are open to it.

To cultivate absurd dreams

I have the impression that fascism and adolescence continue to be . . . permanent historical seasons of our lives . . . remaining children for eternity, leaving responsibilities for others, living with the comforting sensation that there is someone who thinks for you . . . and in the meanwhile, you have this limited, time-wasting freedom which permits you only to cultivate absurd dreams. 

Frederico Fellini

The modern world is prone to fascism. As Fellini notes, it grows out of an adolescent worldview and adolescence is a peculiarly modern phenomenon. It ought to worry us especially now as we live in a world where adolescence has run wild; the generation that currently obsesses about microaggressions and trigger warnings and that has already embraced a cult of personality in Obama is ripe for fascism.

At the same time, we too easily look outside ourselves for someone or something to blame. Fellini looked to the Catholic Church. He wasn't crazy to do so. There was a lot about the Catholic church, especially in the period of high Mariology that culminated with Pius XII, that lent itself to an adolescent worldview and the sort of immature fantasies that fascism grows out of. But it didn't have to be that way; the people aren't responsible for the culture that they inherit but they are responsible for how they respond to it. You are responsible for the sort of soil you provide for the seed that is sown.

Today, we might just as easily blame the universities and there is no doubt that a lot of appalling nonsense seemingly designed to churn out adolescents who forever put off growing up, who comfort themselves by letting others think for them and wallow in empty freedom where they cultivate absurd dreams. Ultimately, however, they still have the power to embrace responsibility.

Virtue signalling (2)

I do not know whether the term virtue signalling will catch on or not. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it describes something human beings actually do. On the other hand, it was quickly appropriated by the perpetual outrage community as a cheap and easy put down.

The key fact is this: virtue signalling is a normal and unavoidable thing that all human beings do. It's not evil. You, me and everybody else we know will, under most circumstances, express the values the we believe the people we are with want to hear. It's a normal, and even productive, thing to do.

A friend of mine is pregnant with her second child. She noticed that her first child has started to grunt when he bends over. He does this because mummy, heavy with child, grunts when she bends over. That's virtue signalling. He's expressing a value, bending over is hard, because his mother expresses that value. In her case, it's actually true. In his case, it's not. He does it because he, like all human beings, is hardwired to learn by imitating others and because his very life depends on his mother.

That is true of us too. Our very life depends on the community around us. If you find yourself stuck with people you don't know well for an extended period of time, you will begin to mirror their behaviours and attitudes.

There are two lessons to be drawn from this. The most commonplace one is the that it takes courage to speak up for your values. Most of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in the presence of someone who brashly says things we deeply oppose but found ourselves unable to respond. We just sat there while things we found hateful were said. But there is a deeper and more important lesson here and that is that our expressed values are often at odds with our real values.

Think of the example I give above in a slightly different light. Imagine you are in a group and someone says things you deeply oppose and you do not object at first but soon notice that the others in the group do. And now you join in. Or maybe you wait a little longer to see if a few others also join and then you join in. Perhaps you wait until it's obvious that the person is rejected and reviled by the rest of the group and then you join in (perhaps "pile on" would be a better term by that point).

We've all done these things. What this tells us is that fitting in is a value we treasure deeply.

To return to the previous example, let's consider a further hypothetical: if the group started to be angry with the person who had expressed offensive opinions, at what point would we pull back? We hope that it would be sometime before someone got a rope to lynch them with but who knows what we are capable of.

We live in a deontological culture. That is to say, we live in a world where morality is largely defined in terms of duty defined by rules. Be tolerant. Don't use violence. Recycle. Don't have sex with teenagers. Be faithful to your spouse. Don't text while driving. And many more. Each of these rules comes accompanied with a justification in terms of duty. "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling."

This is a very compelling morality. It's clearly expressed and relatively easy to understand. Compared to utilitarianism, Do what will give the greatest happiness to the largest number," or virtue ethics, "Act in a  way to train yourself to be a better human being, " there is clarity and ease of application to be found in, "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling." You know what to do and you can easily figure out if you've done it. It's also liberating in one sense—once you've done what the rules tell you to be your duty, you can stop. "I've recycled, I can get a beer and watch television." That's nothing to sneer at, although we all do sneer at it.

But, at the same time that we accept deontology, we also reject it because we cannot and do not fully internalize these values. My real attitude toward recycling is something like: "I will do this up to a point but if I just have to get the place cleaned up because guests are arriving or because I've been getting depressed at the kitchen being so messy and I know I'll feel better if I can clean it up quickly then those plastic containers are going straight into the garbage and I don't think that will do any real harm so long as I don't do it too often but, at the same time, I don't want everyone thinking this is okay so I will continue to hold the hard line when expressing my attitudes towards people who don't recycle."

It's not that we have some alternative set of values that we really follow. It's more that we are willing to make a whole lot of exceptions that we aren't honest with ourselves or others about. And that is why we fear and love the expression "virtue signalling". We fear it because we know it can be justly applied to what we do. We love it because it can be justly applied to what other people do and that makes it a useful tool for making others talk and behave in a predictable fashion.

What do we do about this? I'll try and come back to it.

Virtue signalling (1)

From On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in Society, 1840

By Thomas Carlyle

It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. 

By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. 

But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. 

Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Skepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? 

Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them.

Amoris Laetitia: bureaucrat versus lawyers, lawyers get stomped

"...what the lawyer wants is authority, the newer the better ; what the historian wants is evidence, the older the better." Frederick William Maitland

There was a writer in the sailing world back in the 1970s named, if I remember correctly, Jack Knight. He once described how nice guys respond when they think the other side is cheating. The example he gave was team racing where boats are swapped after each race. A dirty crew might deliberately mess up a few things on their boat before passing it on. The nice guys in the new crew immediately find the most obvious problems but, not wanting to appear like whiners, they fix the problems rather than complain. But somewhere around the fifth or sixth minor act of sabotage they lose it and sail over to the committee boat to complain. And the committee members say, "What are you a bunch of whiners? That's only a little thing." The enraged crew say, "But what about ..." and abruptly realize that they have nothing to point to.

Similarly, having put a positive spin on what he has done before, even though they had to hold their noses and grit their teeth together to do so, traditionalists are now reading Amoris Laetitia and finding themselves in the position of suddenly thinking, "This is too much," but having no credibility to make the point they want to make. They played along because they thought there was a sharp limit to what he can do; they thought they had him over a barrel because a pope cannot change established church teaching. And they're right, he can't—not even the smallest letter or stroke. But, wily old bureaucrat that he is, he knew all along that that supposed trump card was nothing of the sort.

If you search "Pope Francis Pastoral" you get about a half-million hits as of today. The impression you get scanning the links is that this is a very pastoral pope—even his critics say so. Search "Pope Francis bureaucrat" and you get another half million hits and a quick scan of those suggests that Francis is to the very core of his being opposed to bureaucracy. What you wouldn't guess from any of that is that Pope Francis has virtually no pastoral experience. Nor would you guess that he spent almost his entire career as a church bureaucrat.

As a bureaucrat he understands perfectly well that praxis trumps the law every time. In that regard, I put it to you that these are the most important sentences in the entire exhortation:

I would make it clear that not all discussions of doctrinal, moral or pastoral issues need to be settled by interventions of the magisterium. Unity of teaching and practice is certainly necessary in the Church, but this does not preclude various ways of interpreting some aspects of that teaching or drawing certain consequences from it. 

Read the harshest critics of Amoris Laetitia, you can a bunch of links here, and you will note that what upsets them most is not so much what Francis does as what he doesn't do. He faithfully restates Catholic teaching but he doesn't provide narrowly proscribed guidelines for interpreting that teaching. And that is where the traditionalists are finding he has them over a barrel. They can claim two thousand years of tradition but what really matters to lawyers is authority, and the newer the better, and Francis has just taken that authority away from the lawyers (many of whom are only self-appointed lawyers) of the Catholic Church.

That said, I have to hand it to the traditionalists that they, at least, understand what is happening. This, as musicologist Peter van der Merwe and psychologist Jonathan Haidt note in very different fields, is not unusual. People wrapped up in "revolutions" rarely understand what they are doing. The traditionalist has a better grasp on what the revolutionaries are really up to. 

He is not repudiating in principle the objective truth of any revealed dogma or moral norm; but at the level of praxis he is shifting the emphasis away from objective standards of right and wrong behavior and placing it instead on presumed subjective sincerity and individual conscience.

Exactly right. Liberals talk about a revolution led by Pope Francis. There is no such thing. Rather, Francis is assuming that there has already been a quiet revolution at the grassroots level and all the magisterium has to do is stay out of the way for it to be completed. As Bing Crosby says to Grace Kelly in High Society, "I'd like a piece of that bet."

How many divisions has Pope Francis?

So how does this play out from here on down the line? All Francis has done is to take the cap off the toothpaste tube. The toothpaste is still inside and he isn't going to do anything to change that. But, good bureaucrat that he is, he's betting that his assessment of the Catholic zeitgeist is better than that of his opponents (who, it should be noted, still outnumber his supporters among the bishops if the final decisions of the two synods on the family are anything to go by).

Assessing this is more complicated than it might seem at first glance. You might be tempted to look at polls that show that Catholics overwhelmingly support a more lax approach to teachings on sexuality and marriage but the majority of those polled don't go to church regularly. The church that matters the most is the one made up of people whose bums are on pews more than 52 times a year. And here, as Father Z sarcastically notes, traditionalists would seem to have an advantage:

But wait! 

Are liberals or fallen away Catholics or people in “irregular” relationships beating down doors to get into confessionals? 

Maybe we don’t have such a big problem and not much has changed after all.

Alas, I think Father Z is going to be disappointed (and I'm pretty sure he knows it). 

I've been in traditionalist Catholic circles all my life. And I mean that quite literally, from my baptism to the present day. And I think that even there there is a solid plurality of people who, while not necessarily in "irregular situations" themselves, have a whole lot of family and friends who are and who are inclined to support a more charitable approach to these people. When push comes to shove, they'd rather emphasize presumed subjective sincerity and individual conscience. Francis has correctly judged that, even on their homeground, the traditionalists will lose this battle in the long run.

Barring the possibility that this papacy turns out to be very short-lived it's all over but for the shouting. And I would think that short-lived would have to mean months not years; even then there is no assurance his predecessor would change direction enough to make a difference.

The Populist

His appeal is largely emotional and not intellectual. At first, this is refreshing. The people have heard a lot of theory but they're fed up and frustrated with the very slow rate at which problems actually get fixed. Meanwhile, they've noticed that corruption and incompetence forge ahead. The Populist inspires them because  he has a simplistic sense of right and wrong. Unfortunately, he doesn't bother thinking about the deeper implications or unintended consequences of his thoughts and actions.  

The Populist believes that the only real barrier to solving our problems is a lack of good will. As a consequence, he believes that problems that have baffled generations of leaders have simple and straightforward solutions. Everything he says creates a sense of immediacy and hope. This has the unfortunate effect of creating unrealistic expectations. A lot of people believe him and start to believe that problems that are deeply rooted in human nature and have been impossible to root out of any society in human history can be easily made to disappear. 

Worse, The Populist's desire to be loved by the crowd is so intense that he is willing to sacrifice honesty in order to get approval. He makes what at first appear to be spontaneous gestures of solidarity with the poor and marginalized but these later turn out to have been planned media events. He says things that appear to promise much but, when carefully parsed, actually say nothing at all. Sometimes, carried away by the adulation of crowds or, much worse, journalists, he will say things that are just irresponsible. He never goes back and cleans up these messes he makes but leaves that work for others to do.

As time goes on, his need for adulation and the media's willingness to play along with it continue but many people notice that he doesn't actually accomplish much. The Populist's supporters begin to wonder how deeply he holds the beliefs he speaks of with such passion. Others begin to worry if he is likely to launch off in some completely new direction should the winds suddenly appear favourable. Others just stop trusting him. 

Some people go even further and become conspiracy theorists. They see a seemingly unintended loss of faith in key institutions and begin to worry that this all part of a deliberate attempt on the part of The Populist to destabilize institutions in order to bring about some sort of undeclared revolutionary goals. They're wrong about the goals—there is nothing deliberate about this—but they're right about the effects. Governance has become increasingly unstable and principles that have been in place for many, many years suddenly appear negotiable. Even those who sought to reform these institutions begin to worry that what has been produced is not a new bedrock of principles to direct future governance but a vacuum. 

In the face of this, many start to withdraw. They remain nominally part of the larger group and take part to a degree sufficient to maintain membership but, privately, they have shifted their faith, hope and love elsewhere. Perhaps they secretly long for the day the Populist is no longer in office so that things can be made right again. Perhaps they have given up and are focused only on their little corner of the larger institution. They may be shoring it up so that it can survive by itself should the centre not hold. They may be more cynical, having written the centre off as doomed already and are merely being pragmatic in not leaving until they feel their local group is strong enough to survive on it's own. They may have already left in spirit and all that is lacking is a final declaration.

That could be a story about any number of populist secular leaders who have just taken or might take power in the near future. The person I was thinking of, however, is Pope Francis.

I do this not to condemn him or even to single him out. What I want to call attention to is that Francis is not a leader but a follower. He is a man who is very swept up in the spirit of our times.

There is no point in railing against this or imagining that he can be changed.

Our life is over like a sigh.
Our span is seventy years
or eighty for those who are strong. 

And most of these are emptiness and pain.
They pass swiftly and we are gone.

Almost every human generation has had to live with the sort of uncertainty we currently struggle with. Some had to live with constant chaos and destruction all their lives. Things sometimes get better and they sometimes get worse. One day they will get much worse and that might be about to happen now. Or not.

In the meantime, I will die and so will you. Our only hope is in the name of the LORD who made heaven and earth.

Punishment as kind of love

If we accept, as I argued yesterday, that it sometimes makes sense to treat failure as a sin, we should also accept that God will punish some our failures and that he will do so even when we don't reject him in failing. That he might punish us for failing when we are "doing our best".

Yesterday, I argued that the mother who punishes her child for failing does harm when she wrongly assesses the child's abilities and the challenges they are facing. You should be able to pass in Math and History but it is not reasonable to expect you to be the most popular kid in your class. That said, some kids could reasonably aspire to be the most popular in their class, in which case we would have to ask whether this is a good goal when it is achievable.

God, being God, would seem to be the one most qualified for punishing our failings for he could make these judgments correctly.

In the end, we have to trust that he loves us.

We have come to believe in God's love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. (Benedict XVI)

Living morally, then, is a matter of establishing within ourselves the disposition that goes with that encounter.

Temperance and courage

Temperance: curbing the passions Courage: strengthening the passions against fear.

Those are Thomistic definitions cribbed from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I'm an Aquinas neophyte so I can't vouch for how good they are (I'm inclined to trust the source though).

From the same source, chastity, sobriety and abstinence are parts of temperance, as you would expect. But so is humility along with meekness, clemency and studiousness. Studiousness!?

One of the big challenges reading Thomas an Aristotle is that so much of it seems so sensible that you can just read it and nod along because everything you see seems easy to accept. I find I need to stop myself and force myself to see the weirdness: Why is "studiousness" a form of temperance?

Here is a list that goes with courage: endurance, confidence, magnanimity, patience and perseverance. We need to not nod along but see how some of those are weird enough that we need to think how they fit in.

Occasionally, the difficulty in achieving or avoiding certain objects can give rise to various degrees of fear and, in turn, discourage us from adhering to reason’s instruction. In these cases we may refuse to endure the pain or discomfort required for achieving our proper human good. Note here that fear is not innately contrary to reason. After all, there are some things that we should fear, like an untimely death or a bad reputation. Only when fear prevents us from facing what we ought to endure does it become inimical to reason.

Sometimes, however, we should risk death or loss of reputation. It's not an easy calculation to determine what circumstances merit that. 

As I've noted before, there is something masculine about courage. That isn't to say that there aren't courageous women or cowardly men but there is a natural link in the mind. Some would think me sexist for saying so but I don't think so. 

Looking back on my life, I grew up in a female dominated household and studied at female-dominated schools. Of the four cardinal virtues—prudence, temperance, courage and justice—the first two tended to get the most emphasis.
You see everywhere this in our culture. There are a whole lot of people out there who call themselves "social justice warriors" but they are really about controlling other people not about being just to other people. Their morality is the morality of the pack. And we can see this in how they stampede one way and then another. There is something pathetically cowardly about them, the way they shout down and attack in groups. It's really an attempt to shame others into conforming.

The problem here is not that they are "womanly" so much that there is a lack of balance. We need more courage and justice in our systems and our fathers didn't help us to acquire that.

A Lenten Project

I don't own this image or the words attached. I found them on Facebook. I do mean to own them in the sense of internalizing the moral attitude expressed. (If you do own the image and/or words and object to my using them, let me know.)

Some stuff I'm just working out

In theological parlance faith, hope and love are known as the theological virtues. Faith is especially related to the intellect and its pursuit of truth, hope to the memory and its experience of beauty and love to the will and its appetite for goodness. (from Benedict XVi: A Guide for the Perplexed)

Hope is related to memory and its experience of beauty! That is fascinating. I don't much about all this as the medieval accounts of the virtues are new to me.

The text goes on to say,

The theological virtues are also related to the Gifts of the Holy Spirit with wisdom, understanding and knowledge having a particular association with faith, fortitude with hope, and fear of the Lord and piety with love.

Why does fortitude go with hope?

Fortitude is a cardinal virtue. That means a lot of stuff but the thing that I'm thinking about now is that it is one of the virtues that you can cultivate on your own. That is unlike the theological virtues which only come with grace. On the other hand, how do "gifts of the Holy Spirit" work? Is the fortitude that comes as a gift of the Holy Spirit a special variety of fortitude that cannot be had through conscientious habit formation alone? Probably.

Fortitude, in Catholic moral thinking, is what gives us constancy. Is that constancy the same as what Jane Austen understood as constancy? It gets tricky here because the vocabulary is fluid.

In the medieval discussion of the virtues, "fortitude" replaces the classical virtue of "courage". Fortitude is understood to be more than courage. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1809) says,

Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause.

For Jane Austen, the supreme examples of Constancy are Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. We see it most impressively when Sir Thomas, irked at Fanny for refusing the marriage proposal of Henry Crawford, sends her home to endure the squalor of poverty in the hopes that this will make her change her mind. Fanny holds out even though it becomes painfully obvious to both her and us that she may live a horrible life as a price of her constancy. So, yes, I'd say that Austen means the same thing by constancy as the Catholic church does by fortitude.

And that's all I'll say for now.

PS: It is the Feast of Saint Agatha today and fortitude is the virtue of martyrs (speaking in the classic Catholic sense and neither in the sense of passive aggressive family member trying to undermine you nor of terroristt murdering others while committing suicide.)

A call to rebellion

"... because personalism drew upon Catholic social theory, its notion of community drew upon a heritage of corporatist thinking that linked the person to the intermediate collectivities of family, church, and nation. In this way, the individual would be protected from the depredations of the modern state. Significantly, in contrast to Fascism, which also deployed a communitarian, corporatist language, it refused to countenance the swallowing of these "natural" communities by the political state." (The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970, by Michael Gauvreau p 24)

In theory anyway. In practice, the social activists and politicians who grew out of the Quiet Revolution were only too willing to allow the government to swallow up organic communities. The wonderful thing about the Gauvreau book is that he gives us some inkling of why that happened. For the clerical activists pushing Action Catholique groups in Quebec in the first half of the twentieth century encouraged young Catholics to think of their parents' religious beliefs as empty.

Any evaluation of the cultural impact of Catholic Action must therefore take as its starting point the meaning of words such as "solitude," "community," "anxiousness," and "authentic," which recurred over and over again in Quebec between 1931 and the mid-1950s. What was significant that these words represented religious values that were always positively attributed to young people, and always in reference to the negative qualities of conformity, complacency, individualism, hypocrisy, a sterile obsession with moralizing, and bad faith, all of which marked the religious experience of the previous generation. (Gauvreau, p 15)

And I can testify that it didn't stop in the 1950s. These are the values my parents taught me when I was growing up in Quebec in the 1970s. It was also what I was taught in Religion (they stopped calling it "Catechism") classes at the Catholic High School I attended in Quebec in those years. And you can still hear this stuff from the pulpit of many Catholic churches in Quebec today (preached to mostly empty pews).

And the effect this was to have was disastrous for the church. To teach young people that institutions need to be preserved while, at the same time, teaching them that the people currently running these institutions are a bunch of lazy, moralistic hypocrites who have subverted those institutions was a recipe for that disaster.

And note that this was all going on before Vatican 2! There was, within the ranks of priests, monks, friars and nuns serving the church, an active rebellion ready to pick up the ball and run with it long before Vatican 2.

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

That's Raymond Chandler describing a world that, at first glance, seems utterly unlike the Catholic Church, although he is talking about the same period in history, the 1930s to 1950s. And it would be unfair to simply brush off this generation of reformers as deluded and selfish. They grew up with a church that had lost its way and needed to be reformed. On the other hand, it is painfully obvious, with the benefit of hindsight, that there reforms were a disaster. (Well, it should be, Pope Francis seems to think that the solution is to drive off the cliff again only faster this time.)

But what is the solution? There has been a lot of talk of a "hermeneutics of continuity" that is to be preferred over a "hermeneutics of disruption". But that needs content. What should be the basis of the continuity. Talk to some Catholic traditionalists and you will leave with the impression that "continuity" means to not reform at all.

Whatever a worthwhile reform is, it cannot be an abstract exercise and it cannot be a political exercise. It needs to draw on something deeper than that. That is why I favour a Catholic Romanticism. Not Romantic Catholicism because I don't want Romanticism to modify Catholic. I think Romanticism is the right way to approach the past but not any Romanticism. Romanticism needs to be modified and Catholic aims and goals is what it needs. I'm sure all that will seem silly to some. I don't blame them but I think the notion can be given real content.

Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul

Image of The Conversion of Saint Paul" by Caravaggio is courtesy of Wikipedia.

"Paul, more than anyone else, has shown us what man really is, and in what our nobility consists, and of what virtue this particular animal is capable."

Chrysostom, quoted above from today's Office of Readings, is speaking of Paul's conduct, of the way he lived his life. That's why he says that Paul has "shown" us. But Paul also told us. There is no better place to start reading about theological anthropology and morality than Paul.

Now, if you had told me that thirty years ago, I would have called you crazy and quoted bits of Paul that made him look like a nasty piece of work. It took until three years ago to really understand Paul.