Walk For Life

Patrick of Orthonormal Basis offers some thoughts after having walked in San Francisco's Walk For Life yesterday. Definately worth reading.

The Four Loves: Eros

I can't help thinking that Lewis's analysis of Eros doesn't quite live up to the standard set by the previous chapters on Affection and Friendship. In particular, I'm not sure that I entirely agree with his assessment of the role of the body. Here's a snippet of his thought:

Ass (refering to St. Francis's title of "Brother Ass" for the body) is exquisitely right becasue no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, loveable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body. There's no living with it till we recognixe that one its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon....Lovers...feel an element not only of comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body's expressoin of Eros. And the body would frustrate us if this were not so. It would be too clumsy an instrument to render love's music unless its very clumsiness could be felt as adding to the total experience its own grotesque charm -- a sub-plot or antimasque miming with its own hearty rough-and-tumble what the soul enacts in statelier fashion.

I won't deny that the body sometimes has its own ideas about what's appropriate at what times, regardless of what one wishes it would do. Lewis is enjoyably apt when he speaks a few paragraphs earlier about bodily desire striking at the most inopportune times and then deserting one when external circumstances seem to be perfect. Still, I don't know that the fact that our bodies are not completely under the control of our wills means that their main role is to be the comic double to our souls in terms of sex.

After all, one can't have sex without the body, no matter how you slice it. And if sex is the earthly expression of the love of Christ for his bride, the Church, then there must be an inherent dignity in the act itself that is more than a matter of souls uniting. Lewis's attempts to give the physical act of sex a dignity of it's own lead him to pontificate on what he calls the "Pagan Sacrament" of sex: man as Sky-Father and woman as Earth-Mother, enacting an age-old ritual. Uh, sure, but I don't really know that one has to reach out quite that far to bring the bodily aspects of sex in line with the sublime symbolism of the act. After all, God made our bodies and proclaimed them good, so the reality that the most intimate expression of human love involves our bodies shouldn't be a surprise.

Lewis doesn't seem to think that the bodily aspects of sex are transcendent, but merely mirror on a human level what's taking place spiritually. In these enlightened "Theology of the Body" days I think that we (as Catholics anyway, and Lewis wasn't) have moved to a more integrated and complete view of all elements of human sexuality. Not that I'm pitting myself or my theological insights against Lewis, mind you.

Putting the Cat Back in the Bag

You can bet that some time around 290 AD, there was a stolid, old-style Roman writing that imagining that you could roll back the clock to the days of Augustus' public morality laws was as impossible as pouring wine back into the wineskin. And what the heck was it with these middle-eastern religions and their backwards beliefs infiltrating the empire? Don't they realize that a cosmopolitan attitude toward morality is the inevitable result of a sophisticated urban culture?

But, of course, the difficulty is knowing whether you are looking at a cat that really can't be put in the bag, or just the outside end of one swing of the pendulum of history. That question seems especially to come to mind today in conjunction with the March For Life, as some people ask whether it's possible for Roe to be rolled back after 33 years of abortion virtually available upon demand.

One thing that struck me in reading Derbyshire's article is that it's essentially based on the fact that most people don't like to think very much. Sadly, there may be something to this, though I disagree with Derbyshire's conclusion that Roe is toothpaste out of the tube. Part of his argument seems to be: "Most people aren't interested in the 'abstract' argument over when human life begins, so protecting life from conception will never win out." (One is saddened to see "abstract" used as a pejorative term.) Well, that's true. Most people don't think or if they do think they do it badly. I wish one could say it were otherwise, but sadly that's how humanity is.

That is why, in order for us to attain a culture of life, we will need not merely the intellectual understanding that once you reach a unique string of DNA at the moment of conception there's really no other good place to draw a dividing line of "personhood", but rather the widespread feeling held deep within the heart that abortion is fundamentally wrong -- that there really is a small person in there waiting for his or her chance to enter the world, and a person's a person no matter how small.

It's nice to know this, but it's probably more important to feel it. I think many of us do feel it quite strongly, and many of us who do are raising up the next generation (and lots of them) to feel it just as strongly.

And yet, there's a lot going against us in modern society. Because modern technology has made contraception so available (and in many circles so unquestioningly accepted) and because it also allows us to detect pregnancy early, when it's possible for the rationalizing part of the mind to overcome the rational with the insistence that "it's just a lump of cells", we have an uphill battle. Those who don't bother to teach their children clearly on such issues are much in danger of losing them to the prevailing tide of our times -- a tide that still very much flows in the direction of the culture of death.

People on the extreme pro-choice end of the spectrum aren't having children. They can't create the next generation of pro-choicers. However, they can influence the children of those who provide their children with no clear guidance.

To create a culture of life we must do two things "go forth a multiply" and remember that parents have the first and most important duty to educate their children.

Two Evils

As MrsDarwin mentioned, we went to the library Thursday to stock up on books, and given that this was one of those insanely overwhelming kind of weeks at work, I pretty much sat around reading all day (in between duties pushing girls on swings and reading them their books from the library).

I checked out Anthony Beevor's two histories dealing with the Eastern Front in WW2: Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945. And (for no particular reason) I'm working out of order and reading Berlin first.

Although technically about the fall of Berlin, Beevor's book actually covers the period from late fall 1944 (when the Soviets stood poised to push the Germans out of Poland, once enough of the Polish resistance had been wiped out for them) through the end of the way, so you learn a lot about the end of the war on the Eastern Front generally.

Having just recently read Citizen Soldiers and Band of Brothers, both dealing with the Western Front in Europe during '44 and '45, you really feel for how profoundly unlucky the people of Eastern Europe were, trapped between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. You're hard put to find too worse governments in the history of the last century, and being "liberated" by either one was likely to mean having your village burned down, the men shot, the women raped, and half the people who hadn't already fled or been killed being led off to forced labor camps.

In Citizen Soldiers there were several stories of German units surrendering to the Americans and asking if instead of being sent off to POW camps they could join the American Army so that once the Nazis were defeated they could fight the Russians. It was something we had no intention of doing at the time, but you can see why that seemed like the best of all possible worlds to a German soldier in 1944.

Beevor makes the interesting point that the horrors of the Eastern Front were the result of two totaliterian regimes which both sought to dehumanize both their citizens (into total subservience to the state) and their enemies (into sub-humans) throwing everything they had at each other.

Books and laziness

Note to self: you're too old to stay up until 2 am reading mystery novels.

We went to the library yesterday evening with the monkeys. It's far easier to take the whole family than for one of us to go with both girls; they consider the library their own personal playground. We managed to impress upon them the importance of quiet in the library, but we still did lots of chasing down.

However, both Darwin and I had a chance to slip upstairs and get some things for ourselves. I relieved a shelf of all the Lord Peter novels that I either hadn't read or hadn't read in ages, and then checked out some Sayers essays for good measure. Hey, I'm supposed to be doing lots of resting, so there will be plenty of time to cover other authors later. Darwin has been interested in World War II history lately, so he picked up a few weighty tomes devoted to various aspects and events of that conflict. After lugging the haul out to the car, I felt I had gotten in my exercise for the day.

My concern for my health, however, didn't stretch as far as getting a good night's rest, since I laid awake until almost 2 am reading. Bad Mrs. Darwin! And what's more, that meant that I slept in this morning while Darwin rushed around feeding the girls and trying to get ready in time to make an early meeting. Then I was tired and had little patience for the small rivalries and little quarrels of tots. Perhaps I would have been better served to find some devotional works on the beauties of self-sacrifice...

Note to self: you're too old to stay up until 2 am reading mystery novels.

The Quality of Christian Work

A longish quote from Sayers:

The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, an to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon his is that he should make good tables. church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly -- but what use is all that if in the very centre of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table-legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie. Yet in her own buildings, in her own ecclesiastical art and music, in her hymns and prayers, in her sermons and in her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate, or permit a pious intention to excuse, work so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent craftsman. And why? Simply because she has lost all sense of the fact that the living and eternal truth is expressed in work only so far as that work is true in itself, to itself, to the standards of its own technique. She has forgotten that the secular vocation is sacred. Forgotten that a building must be good architecture before it can be a good church; that a painting must be well painted before it can be a good sacred picture; that work must be good work before it can call itself God's work.
--Creed or Chaos?

There's much to be said on this topic, but it's dinnertime here. More as time (and my work!) permits.

On Target

Interesting article in the Washington Times about a US Army sniper making the longest confirmed kill shot on record with a .30 cal rifle: 1,100 yards.

The Problem is Inklingism?

Mark Shea linked an editorial in the magazine Image which asserts that the problem with Christian literature "is not the Inklings, but Inklingism".

I love the line, but I think I disagree with the article.

I do think that there is far too much attempt to immitate the Inklings, which is odd, because they themselves were quite original. One should not imitate the original by being derivative. It seems often that some of the most interesting and charismatic Christian writers of our century have developed somewhat insular and annoying followers. Dawson, Chesterton, Lewis and Tolkien all seem to be troubled with there problem. There's nothing wrong with their writings, and a great deal that is very good. But (without devoting the time to do a great deal of thinking about what exactly it is) there is often something a little "off" about their too enthusiastic followers. Indeed, for the longest time I resisted reading any Dawson, because I found myself so put off my the self-proclaimed Dawsonists that I knew.

That said, Mr. Wolfe's editorial strikes me as very much off base. I do not see much basis for his contention that "realism" as a literary style stretches back to antiquity. Nor do I think he is well on the mark in asserting that Tolkien and Lewis sought to marry Romanticism and Christianity. Rather, I would say (and it seems to me that they themselves did say) that what they were trying to do was rescue to fantasy and mythic styles and story elements from the mess that the Romantic movement had made of them.

I certainly can't see his contention that the fantasy elements in the Inkling's writing represent an attemt to remain in personal or spiritual childhood. And his analysis of the character of Susan in the Narnia books strikes me as being wrongheaded, perhaps by being too clever. Why must one necessarily assume that Susan is condemned for "entering the adult world" rather than for being shallow. Is her condemnation really that much different than that laid upon the party attendees in Elliot's The Cocktail Party? Despite the semi-childish description of Susan's fall (it is, after all, a children's book) it seems clear to me that the problem with Susan is not that she has entered the social whirl of "adult society" but rather that in doing so she had denied that anything other than the social whirl exists. The same message is sent my more "realistic" writers such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, but because in The Last Battle it appears in a children's fantasy novel, Wolfe seems to entirely miss the message.

Curios and Relics, Here I Come

Work has been pretty all-consuming this week (leaving me with several long posts that I've started but not had time to finish), however yesterday a government agency actualy warmed my heart a little. I received my C&R license from the ATF, meaning that I am now legally able to purchase "curio and relic" (read more than fifty years old -- a catagory that Rick Lugari has yet to enter) firearms across state lines via mail order.

Just in time for my birthday...

Readable Theologians

The convergence of a trip to the library, Christmas, and a birthday have left me revelling in a wealth of Sayers, Lewis, and Chesterton. This is a happy thing, especially as I'm supposed to be spending time resting and these books give me excellent excuse. I'm currently reading a selection of Sayer's writings on various Christian topics -- brief excerpts from her other works that make me long to find the originals. Here's a snippet on forgiveness, from Introductory Papers on Dante:

...the blessed "joyously forgive themselves" -- a thing, as we all know,extremely difficult in this life, because pride gets in the way. For instance -- that dreadfully silly and unkind thing you said to poor Miss Smith when you were quite a child. Even after all these years, it makes you turn hot and writhe on your pillow if you remember it suddenly in the middle of the night; and the fact that Miss Smith was so decent about it makes you feel all the worse. But in Heaven, when you have purged off the sin, you will rememer the wretched little episode only as a fact: you will be free for ever from the ugly shame that is the protest of your pride against being humiliated in your own eyes; and seeing Miss Smith as God sees her, you will rejoice in her beautifulo charity and though it had been something else. and not your unthinking cruelty, that called it forth.

Marvelous!

A reviewer's comment on the back of Sayer's book states: "Dorothy L. Sayers stands in the great tradition of English writers -- Chesterton, Lewis, Charles Williams, and others -- who make Christian theology a joy to read." Sayers and Lewis were academics; Chesterton was a journalist; all published a diverse body of literature (fiction, philosophy, theology) that were popularly read and discussed. Re-reading these luminaries causes me to wonder: who are their equivalents today? Who is writing such well-reasoned and conversational yet deeply profound explications of Christian theology now?

I welcome all suggestions -- I need lots of reading material to see me through the next six weeks.

Lucky to be fat

I'm getting to that stage in pregnancy where one thinks, "Maybe the baby will be early -- really early -- say four weeks early..." Young Smaskig is scheduled to make her appearance in six weeks, and boy do I feel huge. I waddle when I walk; I have trouble getting off the couch and when I do, I have a twinge in my right hip; my center of gravity has shifted; baby is sitting on my friggin' veins! Get off! She's big and healthy and active and loves to kick me all around, especially when I'm trying to rest.

A dear friend of mine had her two girls at about the same time I had mine. She even had a miscarriage shortly after I did, though hers was harder and farther along than mine. So when she called me several weeks ago to tell me she was pregnant again, I could already tell her that she was going to have a girl, since that's what I'm having. She laughed and promised to let me know as soon as she found out.

Last night she wrote me to say that she just had her second miscarriage at 12 weeks. This is understandably devastating to her and to her family, coming within months of the first one. We had been so excited to find out that she was pregnant again, and I feel almost guilty that my baby is healthy and active and hers only lived a short time. Please remember her in your prayers.

It's hard now to complain about feeling uncomfortable.

As Seen On CatholicExchange

The family side business, PapalImages, has a piece up on CatholicExchange today featuring discounts and such. If you've been sitting around meaning to buy a picture of the pope (and I know you all have, right?) then this is the moment you might want to seize!

The Four Loves

If I had filled out the Top Ten Influences meme that was floating around St. Blog's a month or two ago, one of my influences would have been C.S. Lewis's The Four Loves. It's one of my favorite books and has shaped my thinking on love and friendship ever since I first read it at the impressionable age of 17. Lewis's clear prose and delightful style, along with his masterful analysis of both human and divine love, made a deep impression on me then. He so perfectly enunciated all my half-formed ideas about friendship that The Four Loves is doubtless a major reason why Darwin and I started dating a week and a half after we sat up until 3 am on the night we met (at a freshman mixer, believe it or not), talking about all our common interests.

As one of the great sorrows of my life is that Darwin had never read this book that was so pivotal in my intellectual formation, I recently began reading The Four Loves to him in the evenings. Lewis is eminently suited for reading aloud: he's witty, concise, and elegant. We just finished his chapter on Affection, which contains the marvelous example of the recently-deceased Mrs. Fidget as an example of natural Affection gone bad.

The Four Loves is about the four types of love as described by the Greek philosophers: affection (storge), friendship (philia), erotic love (eros), and charity (agape). In analyzing each type of love Lewis examines the purely human aspects of the loves, good and bad, and the various ways that merely human love can turn bad without the guiding influence of divine love (hence the bitter, manipulative Mrs. Fidget). I've always loved the parts where Lewis talks about the natural loves deteriorating because his examples are so recognizable. Who doesn't know a family where one or both of the parents have taken their affection for the children so far as to become controlling and over-protective? Or where one member's natural desire for affection becomes so demanding and overwhelming as to almost isolate them from the rest of the family? Or the sort of resentful character for whom any display of love is just not enough or too little too late?

As Lewis points out, he has to make up examples only because he and the reader don't move in the same circles; it's all too easy to find countless examples of such behavior from among one's own family and acquaintances.

Aquinas, Creation and Immortality

One of the great temptations of blogging is to make knowledgeable-sounding assertions based on something you're pretty sure you remember reading from a reputable source a while back. It's an informal medium, and so even when you're writing about a semi-academic topic, you feel like you can get away with things.

Of course, sometimes you get called on it, and sometimes that's probably a good thing because it leads you to find out something interesting, and thus blog more. The other day I said:

Aquinas questioned whether "and thus death came into the world" could be literally accurate, because according to the Aristotelian philosophy creatures do not change in kind, and a change from being mortal to immortal would be a change in kind. (Aquinas argued that the "death" that came into the world was "death" in the spiritual sense often used in scripture, rather than "death" in the biological sense. Thus, Aquinas actually addresses the question that some ask about Genesis and biological evolution: how could there have been evolution before the Fall if death only came into the world after Adam's sin?)

A commenter promptly called me on the assertion, and since I was working from a memory (which may have been second hand in the first place) I had to do a little homework before I came up with Summa, Part I, Question 97 where Aquinas deals with the question of man's immortality before the fall.
So here, more precisely, is what Aquinas has to say:

First, on the part of matter--that is to say, either because it possesses no matter, like an angel; or because it possesses matter that is in potentiality to one form only, like the heavenly bodies. Such things as these are incorruptible by their very nature.

Secondly, a thing is incorruptible in its form, inasmuch as being by nature corruptible, yet it has an inherent disposition which preserves it wholly from corruption; and this is called incorruptibility of glory; because as Augustine says (Ep. ad Dioscor.): "God made man's soul of such a powerful nature, that from its fulness of beatitude, there redounds to the body a fulness of health, with the vigor of incorruption."

Thirdly, a thing may be incorruptible on the part of its efficient cause; in this sense man was incorruptible and immortal in the state of innocence. For, as Augustine says (QQ. Vet. et Nov. Test. qu. 19 [Work of an anonymous author, among the supposititious works of St. Augustine): "God made man immortal as long as he did not sin; so that he might achieve for himself life or death." For man's body was indissoluble not by reason of any intrinsic vigor of immortality, but by reason of a supernatural force given by God to the soul, whereby it was enabled to preserve the body from all corruption so long as it remained itself subject to God. This entirely agrees with reason; for since the rational soul surpasses the capacity of corporeal matter, as above explained (76, 1), it was most properly endowed at the beginning with the power of preserving the body in a manner surpassing the capacity of corporeal matter.

This actually reminded me a little bit of Tolkien's description of the gift given to the men of Numenor, that so long as they remained virtuous and did not try to grasp immortality, they could choose the time of their own deaths, releasing themselves to God rather than being driven from their bodies by frailty or illness.

This is not the same thing that Aquinas is describing, but it is similar in interesting ways -- with Tolkien's ingrained Catholicity, I suppose it's hardly surprising. Aquinas believed because of Aristotelian natural phiosophy what I would tend to believe based on the evidence of modern science: that it is in the nature of biological creatures to be mortal, and that were an animal nor mortal, it would not be the same species with which we are familiar -- indeed, that an 'immortal horse' is not a horse at all, but a substantially different creature sharing the same appearance of a horse.

However, he needed to square this with the biblical description of Adam and Eve as being immortal until the Fall. His solution is elegant, and I agree with it, though perhaps with one opening for variation. Creatures were still mortal, he concludes, but man's pre-fallen soul was given by God a supernatural degree of control over the body, such that it could preserve the body from all corruption so long as the soul remained in perfect submission to God.

I would assume this left animals mortal, since animals do not possess a rational soul and will infused by God and thus nothing would have preserved them from death or disease. What strikes me as interesting is the question of whether man would have remained bodily immortal, or if eventually he would have voluntarily released soul from body in order to be united with God in heaven. Of course, the Church tells us that after the end of all things we will be reunited with our perfected bodies. Given that man is intended to be constituted of both body and soul, and that man in his unfallen state must have had a perfected body, perhaps there would be no call for an unfallen Adam and Eve to ever leave their bodies. And yet, would there be something lacking in our path to salvation if we never reached the beatific vision of heaven? Did Adam and Eve experience God in the form like the beatific vision, or is that one of the results of the fall, like Christ's saving mission. Is this another benefit of Adam's "felix culpa"?

In praise of the Single Mother

Darwin flies in this afternoon at 4:30, and the girls and I will be heartily glad to see him. Having no one here but us chickens has had some charms, but everyone prefers to have Daddy about, especially me. After having done stints as a single mother for three weeks out of the last five, I have to say that I have a heightened appreciation for the trials of mothers raising children on their own.

Let me say, of course, that in my opinion anyone who chooses outright to be a single mother a la Murphy Brown is simply off her rocker. To make a conscious choice to pursue motherhood without the support or someone who's legally bound to you and your baby seems foolish at the very basic, instinctual level of self-preservation. However that may be, there are many reasons women find themselves alone with children -- boyfriend backed out, husband left, or even, as in my case, husbands who must travel for various good reasons.

I've had it relatively easy. I don't live near my family, alas, but I have many friends locally who have been more than generous in offering to help while Darwin is away. I don't have to worry about picking up the kids from daycare after a long day at work. The girls and I have gone to church, to the park, done grocery shopping together, read many books, and have snuggled in bed at nights. But it's still not easy to be the parent on call 24/7, even for a short period of time. It must be very difficult for mothers (or come to that, fathers) who are raising children on their own, and I have a heightened respect for those who manage to keep it all together in those circumstances.

And while we're at it, let's have some words in praise of military wives, who deal not only with the stresses of caring for chilren on their own and maintaining a marital relationship long-distance, but who must also carry with them the terrible knowledge that their husbands could be killed at any time. As Americans we owe a debt of gratitude to the families and wives of the soldiers who protect us. Theirs is an incredible burden.

And now I must shake the two pounds of pasta out of my sheets and re-make the bed before we leave to get Darwin... I'm so glad he's coming home.

And for those of you who watch LOST...

Head over to Julie D.'s blog and join the conversation. Having just watched last night's episode (the timing is bad for catching it live) I have to say that I thought the Eko backstory combined with Eko and Charlie searching for the plane was the best episode so far. I don't think the writers of the show are religious, but they understand religious symbolism and definitely respect Catholicism. LOST is the best show on prime-time television, natch.

(Of course I don't catch any other shows on prime-time, but I'll stand up for LOST against anyone!)

What We're Reading

After asking everyone's advice for read-alouds, we've been working our way through Charlotte's Web. I recall watching the movie when I wasn't much older than Noogs, and I've always had a fondness for the book. Noogs seems to enjoy it, and often requests another chapter. I suppose I ought to tell her to wait until tomorrow, but I like hearing the story as well, so I often oblige. It should be a great vocabulary builder -- Charlotte often has to explain her word choices to Wilbur the pig.

We'd started on Stuart Little, which is a work of delightful style and charm, but it didn't seem to hold Noogs' interest so much, so we left off and will try again when she's a bit older.

Mama said there'd be nights like this...

Last night was just one of those nights where I couldn't get to sleep at all. Darwin had called about 1:30 am to say hi from California, and after that I was up. I laid in bed, I stared at the ceiling, I rolled around trying to get comfortable. Noogs, who was laying at the end of the bed, and I kicked each other.

Eventually I got up and ate the rest of the ice cream and read Chesterton. While pleasant in itself, this didn't put me to sleep because shortly thereafter I had to get up and take antacid for heartburn (welcome to being seven months pregnant!) So, being up, I surfed the internet, checked my email, and played poker on the computer -- and won, too.

At last, around 5 am, I started feeling tired. I climbed into bed, snuggled under my warm covers, got my pillow plumped just so, and stretched out my leg toward where Noogs was snoozing -- and promptly withdrew my foot, as the bed was soaked.

"Honey, you wet the bed!" I said to her.
"I am sorry," she replied, and padded toward the bathroom to change out of her wet jammies.

So Noogs was cleaned and put in her own bed. When I stepped into the laundry room to get the cleaner to spray on the spot, I realized that I hadn't closed the washer when I'd loaded laundry in this afternoon, so the clothes had been sitting in a washer full of water ever since. Closed the washer, stripped the bed (she managed to get everything but the pillows -- feather comforter, blanket, both sheets, and the mattress pad), sprayed the bed and laid a towel down, and remade it. All the while I was recalling what my dad used to say when things weren't going so well. "It could be worse," he'd say. "At least I'm not sitting in cow pies up to my neck." So true!

So at 5:30 this morning I finally laid down and fell asleep. Half an hour later Noogs comes to stand beside my bed and asks, "Mommy, can I sleep with you?"

The Vigil

Of your kindness, please remember Darwin and his family in your prayers this evening, as tonight is the vigil for his father before the funeral. They'll be praying three decades of the rosary -- the Crucifixion, the Transfiguration, and the Resurrection -- and I'll be praying them here at home as well. If you should have some extra prayer time tonight, join us in offering these decades for the repose of the soul of Jon Hodge.

The Bomb Shelter and the Ostrich

About a month ago (it's been a busy month...) a frequent commenter asked my opinion of an article called "Bomb-Shelter Theology" by Fr. Brian Harrison that appeared in Living Tradition in 1994. I read it almost immediately, but I wanted to write a substantive response to the article and time has been lacking. Anyway, here it goes...

Let me go ahead and open by quoting the first few paragraphs of Fr. Harrison's article:

Those who anxiously whittle down and attenuate the traditional Catholic faith to the point where it includes no affirmations whatever about physical, material realities (such as conception, virginity, crucified corpses, the earth, sun, stars, etc.), on the grounds that such matters fall within the competence of "science," do a very good job of what they set out to do: their theological bomb-shelter is indeed impregnable against any possible bomb which might be launched by physicists, geologists, historians, etc. No such missile could ever damage that kind of "faith," any more than a cloud can be damaged by firing a shot-gun at it: there is nothing solid there with which the shot might possibly collide. Nevertheless, if the Catholic Church ever came to adopt, or even officially permit, this scientifically-ever-so-respectable theology, her rational credibility would suffer death by the "asphyxiation" of self-contradiction. Let us see why this is the case.

The Roman Catholic Church's basic stance toward religious truth is not that of a plodding investigator. Rather, it is that of a faithful witness. Unlike scientists who search for truth in nature, or Protestants who search for it in the Bible, the original Church dating back to Christ Himself claims to have possessed the truth already for two thousand years, handing it on faithfully and continuously from generation to generation.... This is why her theologians can never simply imitate the methodology of other disciplines, in which the mark of intellectual integrity is open-mindedness, and a modest willingness to acknowledge and correct past mistakes....

For the credibility of an investigator and that of a witness have to be judged according to very different criteria. An investigator only need avoid self-contradiction in what he says at any given time. Provided he does that, he may - and indeed, should - contradict what he said only yesterday, if he happens to have found new evidence overnight that his previous view was mistaken. But a witness in a court of law is subject to more exacting requirements. Unlike the investigator, he is asking us to believe certain things on the strength of his word, not on the basis of publicly available data which the rest of us can inspect and evaluate for ourselves. He is asking us to trust him as a reliable source of information which is otherwise inaccessible to the rest of us. This means that in order for him to be credible in the claims he makes, he must avoid not only contradicting himself while under cross-examination today; he must also avoid contradicting today what he said yesterday -or the day before. Once he gives his clear, emphatic, sworn testimony to something, he must forever stick by it, and be able to defend it, on pain of destroying his whole credibility. Now, things like creeds and dogmas and solemn papal or conciliar definitions are the emphatic "sworn testimony" of the Catholic Church in bearing witness to the truth of God as it is revealed in Jesus Christ and in the natural moral law. So are those doctrines which, even though not defined in such specific documents, have been taught by a solid consensus of Popes and Catholic Bishops round the world as being "definitively to be held."

Now, I suspect that all of us would agree that a theologian who suggested that the Church back off from the truth of the virgin birth or the resurrection because physical science could disprove such assertions would be a deeply misguided thinker. The Church clearly teaches and has always taught that these events happened and happened 'literally' not in some metaphorical or symbolic sense. Throughout Christian history people who have denied the virgin birth or the resurrection have been invariably labeled as teaching heresy.

As such, if someone went back in history and discovered that Christ's body was not in fact resurrected, but was actually eaten by wolves, it would not be because the Church was being 'too literal', it would be because the Church was flat wrong. Similarly, if someone could somehow go back in a time machine and prove that Christ was not conceived by the power of the holy spirit, but rather by the intervention of a Roman soldier (as I believe some blasphemous writer or other suggested) this would not be a matter of the Church speaking metaphorically when it spoke of the virgin birth, it would be a matter of Christianity being false, pure and simple.

Now, I confess, I have never encountered a writer who insisted that giving science due respect in its own domain meant that the Church could not assert itself clearly on physical matters such as the resurrection or the virgin birth. Indeed, if you think about it, science itself cannot speak to such questions -- unless one imagines the existence of tools such as time machines (which current science believes to be impossible). Science deals with questions of general rules of physical behavior. Thus, science can state that it is not usual for a woman to conceive a son without receiving sperm from a man. However, one must remember that science is not in the business of stating eternal truths. Science cannot say "no woman could ever conceive a child except through one of her eggs coming in contact with sperm from a male of the same species." Rather, science says "so far as we have ever observed, all children are conceived through the process of a woman's egg coming in contact with a sperm -- and we don't know of any other way that conception could take place." Miracles, and other events that are the first observed of their kind, cannot be predicted or disallowed by science, because by definition they fall outside the experience set by which science works. Indeed, when the Church calls in a doctor or scientist to help confirm a miracle, what the scientist does is not say "this was a miracle" but "I can find no physical explanation for thisoccurrencee." Thus, I think it's important to note that any theologians who do subscribe to the "bomb shelter theology" described by Fr. Harrison suffer not only from a deficiency in their theological understanding, but also a grave deficiency in their understanding of the methodology of science.

In the second section of the article, where Fr. Harrison gets down to business and asks how we are to deal with the initial chapters of Genesis.

If the Roman Catholic Church must forever persevere (under pain of a fatal self-contradiction) in affirming the dogmatic principle that there exists a category of "dual-citizenship" truths which are both revealed and physical/historical, one of the specific questions that arise when we apply this principle to the field of Scripture studies is whether the truth of the creation accounts (Genesis 1-3) falls into this category, or not. Few people professing to be Catholics will want to say that this opening section of the Bible is simply "false" or "untrue." The big question is, What sort of truth does the Holy Spirit want to communicate to us here?

Good question. However, I have some concerns about how Fr. Harrison drills down into this topic. Fr. Harrison references an article in Pastoral and Homilitic Review by Fr. Stanley Jaki which he says boils down to the following syllogism:

Major - All Scripture (including Genesis 1-3) is inspired by God, and is therefore without error in all that the writers intended to assert.

Minor - Science has demonstrated that Genesis 1-3, understood as a factual, historical account of how the world and man began, would be in error.

Concl. - Therefore the author(s) of Genesis 1-3 did not intend to assert in these chapters a factual, historical account of how the world and man began.

However, Fr. Harrison does not like this line of thinking:

Such is the facile solution offered by a "bomb-shelter" hermeneusis of Genesis. One just reduces the asserted content of the creation accounts to a few simple transcendental propositions (for instance, "God made everything good"; "God made man in his own image"; "God made everything there is with the greatest ease") so that their "true" meaning is safely secluded or cordoned off from any conceivable damage that could be occasioned by the bomb-blasts of empirical science....

Consider this little parable. In a certain far-off land the dominant religion includes the dogma that on the dark side of the moon there are large craters full of salt water. Comes the twentieth century and space-travel. Rocket-ships finally get to photograph all angles of the moon, including the dark side. The believers are cast into deep anguish and a crisis of faith by the terrible news that, while the new photographs indeed show plenty of craters, all of them are bone-dry! At first there is a reaction of rejection. The hierarchy assures the faithful that the photographs are all faked, as part of a Satanic plot. As time goes on, however, this becomes hard to sustain, since some astronauts of hitherto unquestioned orthodoxy themselves take part in a space-flight to the moon and see for themselves the faith-shattering emptiness of those great craters, reporting this sad news to their brethren on return. Many of the faithful leave the Church in disillusionment; but for others, faith does not remain shattered for very long. The more learned theologians soon come up with a "bomb-shelter" solution which satisfies well-educated, sophisticated believers. It can be set out in another syllogism.

Major - It is revealed truth that there are salt-water craters on the dark side of the moon.
Minor - Science has demonstrated that no water of any sort is observed in the craters on the dark side of the moon.
Concl. - Therefore there is invisible salt-water in the craters on the dark side of the moon.

This eminently reasonable solution comes to be accepted by the bulk of the faithful, because after all, it is logical (the conclusion follows ineluctably from the premises); it is orthodox (the traditional dogma is faithfully preserved); and by accepting the minor premise, this revised faith is perfectly in line with the latest developments in science. Armed (and comforted) by this modern development in doctrine, the guardians of the new orthodoxy can afford to shake their heads condescendingly at the tiny minority of fundamentalists, who, in their naive literalism, regard the new theology as nonsense and continue to insist on the hypothesis of hoax and fraud in all the photographs and testimonies regarding the craters. These theological illiterates, locked into their narrow, fortress mentality which leaves no room for growth or flexibility, keep on stubbornly maintaining that if the traditional interpretation of moon-water turns out to be indefensible, the whole religion will be indefensible. The only perplexing thing for the more enlightened believers is that the great bulk of their contemporaries seem to agree with the fundamentalists on this last point. The new theology, designed especially to make faith more credible for modern scientific man, seems to hold little attraction for him. The churches keep on emptying, as a greater consensus grows outside the Church that there is, quite simply, no water of any sort on the dark side of the moon.

Fr. Harrison believes that this "moonie" example is in fact a pretty good example of where Genesis biblical scholarship has taken itself in recent decades:

A century and a half after the existence of a "non-historical" literary genre for Genesis 1-3 was suddenly "deduced" from the studies (not in Hebrew literature, mind you, but in geology and biology) of scholars such as Lyell and Darwin, our exegetes are still looking for it.... And since our deduction about the existence of a "non-factual" literary genre in Genesis 1-3 was not based on methods even remotely connected with literary criticism, it is also unsurprising that we have not found what we are looking for, even after more than a century of searching.... Since all appropriate literary methods have so far failed to identify the creation accounts as belonging to any known "non-historical" genre (such as poetry, drama, apocalypse, fiction, midrash, allegory, parable, etc.), and since the field of literature (unlike that of nature) now contains very little unexplored territory, then it might be time to recognize honestly that this genre which just "has to" be there is one which is permanently undiscoverable by any method at all which human ingenuity can devise! In terms of the parable, our "water" has failed not only the visibility test, but also the tangibility test.

Now, I've quoted a lot of Fr. Harrison's article. I hope you will forgive me the length, but I thought his approach was sufficiently novel (I haven't read anyone taking this approach to the creationism debate before) that it was worth being very clear (for those not up to reading all fifteen pages of the original article) on what Fr. Harrison is saying.

I have three basic issues with Fr. Harrison's position:

First, I think he takes an overly simplistic approach to what elements of scriptureconstitutee the Church's "sworn testimony" about the world. Clearly, the resurrection is something that the Church does and always has asserted to be a historical event. There is no getting around it without falling into heresy. However, though certainly not an expert in patristics, I've read a decent number of sermons and commentaries by the Early Fathers and medieval Doctors of the Church, and nowhere did I get the impression that the Church'scredibilityy relied upon the scientific and historical accuracy of Genesis in the way that Fr. Harrison's "moonie" religion apparently relies on the existence of salt water on the moon.

Without making a particular study of the matter, two of the Church's greatest saints andtheologianss (Augustine and Aquinas) both spring to mind as suggesting that the plain "testimony" of the Genesis narrative might not be "accurate" in the most literal sense. Augustine rejected the literal accuracy of the six days of creation, pointing out that God's eternal and all powerful nature would suggest that the work of creation was performed in an instant. He held that the six days represented not the literal working and resting cycles of God's activity, but rather the temporal perception of the angels witnessing God'sinstantaneouss act of creation. Aquinas questioned whether "and thus death came into the world" could be literally accurate, because according to the Aristotelian philosophy creatures do not change in kind, and a change from being mortal to immortal would be a change in kind. (Aquinas argued that the "death" that came into the world was "death" in the spiritual sense often used in scripture, rather than "death" in the biological sense. Thus, Aquinas actually addresses the question that some ask about Genesis and biological evolution: how could there have been evolution before the Fall if death only came into the world after Adam's sin?)

One can hardly accuse Augustine or Aquinas of being a bomb shelter theologian, and between the two of them, they challenge both the six day structure and the literal coming of death into the world -- both major elements of the creation narrative if taken historically. In the "moonie" parable, Fr. Harrison presents it as a given that the existence of lunar salt water was a dogmatic article of faith for the "moonies". While the parable's narrative is fully under Fr. Harrison's control, I think it would be inaccurate to say that the Church has historically preached the historical accuracy of the seven days of creation as dogmatic. For all of Fr. Harrison's scorn, most (indeed all that I can remember) ancient and medieval texts that discuss the creation narrative do focus on the "few simple transcendental propositions" that he considers such a cop-out. When being chatechized, new Christians were told "God created the world out of nothing" and "Man was created in God's image" not "water was created 48 hours before fish".

This leads to my second major problem with Fr. Harrison's analysis: His "invisible" literary style doesn't seem to me to be terribly illusive but rather the product of an overly modern approach to literature. Genesis 1-3 are, I would say, myth. Fr. Harrison rejects this idea because he seems to have in his head a definition of myth something along the lines of "a false and silly belief that people used to have when they didn't know any better". Certainly, that is what all too many modern people mean by "myth". However, I would say that those people are quite wrong in their assessment.

Although he's talking about a slightly different genre, I would recommend Tolkein's "On Fairy Stories" as a good discussion of true mythology, but I will attempt to cover some of the same ground with fewer words.

When I say "myth" I do not mean a "just so" story like such as Kipling wrong. Nor do I mean a superstition or false belief. True mythology is un-authored, going back so far in a culture that it is well known and available in many versions, not the product of any one author. It deals with serious questions about the world and human nature in a form that is not necessarily literally, historically true, because it deals with questions too old and basic for anyone to know the truth of in a historical fashion. In his recent First Things essay, Cardinal Schonborn pointed out the philosophical dangers of accepting the idea that to know a thing's material/historical origin is to know its essence and meaning. (For example, the idea that if human beings evolved from lower life forms, that this tells us something deeper about human nature and humanity's place in the divine plan, or lack thereof.) Mythology contains an implicit understanding of this distinction, in that it accepts that it may not accurately describe a thing's historical or material origins while attempting to explain its essence.

So, for example, the Greek myth of Pandora's box was not (I would argue) thought to be literally or historically true by the ancient Greeks. Giving the question due thought, one would not imagine that war, pestilence, greed, hate, envy, etc. were physical creatures trapped in a box, that a specific woman named Pandora released upon the world. Rather, the myth of Pandora's Box attempted to address the origin of evil in the world (and man's culpability in that origin) at a level more essential than the historical.

The earliest chapters of Genesis, I would argue, are also mythology, but mythology which is wholly true and successful in its attempt to address the nature of things, while pagan mythologies expressed only partial truths, as recognized by man's inherent grasp of God and natural law. Perhaps the easiest way to see this is by contrasting the biblical story of the flood with the Sumerian flood myth found in the epic of Gilgamesh. Both stories contain certain basic elements (a flood sent to purge the world of humanity and a single family which survives by building an ark), however in reading the Sumerian version one sees immediately how the pagan version reflects a false understanding of the nature of man and the relationship between man and the divine. In seeing that which is false in the pagan myth, one realizes how the biblical myth correctly reflects God's revealed truth, in the way that the myth of mere human origin does not.

My third point of disagreement with Fr. Harrison is in some ways the most urgent, and the reason that I have written such a long commentary on his piece. In his "moonie" parable, Fr. Harrison suggests that there are two honest approaches to dealing with the discoveries of science in relation to Genesis: either insist that science is a fraud and that it is wrong to assert that the world is ancient or that humanity (in the biological sense) evolved from lower life forms, or reject the bible as false and Christianity as a fraud. The "bombshelterr" route that his intellectuals and theologians in the parable dream up (with the "invisible water") he sees as inherently dishonest and dangerous.

This is all very well for Fr. Harrison, who apparently is satisfied in his own mind that the findings of modern astronomy, geology and paleontology are indeed a fraud. However, he binds up a heavy and dangerous burden for others to carry. Either they must assert that much of modern science is a fraud (Fr. Harrison even holds out hope that the bible is right that the earth is stationary at the center of the universe while the sun and all the stars orbit it once each day, though he does not fully commit himself to that view) or one mustabandonn Christianity as false.

This is the biggest reason I find myself drawn back into the evolution debate again and again. It's not so much that I have a fanatical devotion to evolution or to the aspects of modern astronomy and geology that suggest and ancient universe (though I do consider these explanations provided by science to be the best theories to explain the evidence we have at this time) but rather that many who have an antipathy towards these areas of science (as Fr. Harrison clearly does) feel it necessary to build up the threat to Christianity and make the argument: Either evolution is false or Christianity is false. Now you believe that Christianity is true, so surely you must reject evolution, right?

Given that the Church has said repeatedly that there is no inherent contradiction between the findings of modern science and our beliefs, it seems wrong to me (indeed, wicked) to risk destroying the faith of others by insisting that one must reject either evolution or the Church. I do not say that given the choice Fr. Harrison proposes I would reject Christianity -- because I do not accept that this is a legitimate set of alternatives to propose. But I do consider the choice set up to be dangerous and unhelpful.