Quote of the Day: Saint Ignatius on Obedience

"It is not hard to obey when we love the one whom we obey."
-Saint Ignatius

There have always been a great many dissenters within the Church, heretics who are not so honest as to acknowledge their heresy. They do not necessarily have much in common, but this one thing: not one of them really loves the Church as she is. Every one of them seems to demand that the Church should change in accordance with their heresy. Of course, if the Church were to heed such voices, she would be torn asunder, for there are wildly varying voices. Surrounded as she is by such cacophony, the Church is tasked only with listening to her Master's voice, and obeying it. For she is bride of Christ and not of the world, and it is His voice which speaks most reassuringly to her. "I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it."

The dissenters whom wish to cling to the Catholic identity if not the Faith have shown whom they love, and it is not the Church. Nor is is the Spirit Who speaks through her, nor her Bridegroom. For they refuse to heed te Lord's words, "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me."

Pride

Standing head and shoulders above the rest
I look down upon friend and stranger
Fearing nothing-no one--I feel invincible,
Untouchable by the masses of men.
I'll pick a fight when feeling contentious,
I have never met another better than I,
Though never have I tried to seek Him:
Such a person doesn't well suit my tastes.
My laughter is loud and ever boastful,
It causes the decent man to shudder and cringe,
Many say my mirth is misplaced,
But he who laughs last has the slowest mind.
I maintain that obedience to superiors is virtuous,
None who know me would think such of me,
For they still don't understand this about me:
I'll never find He who is greater than I.
Yet I've been told by those who would be my friends
That I am too eccentric, or a hypocrite:
That my obstinacy is infuriating to them;
Since when is a little pride the source of such discord?

The Tebow Ad Controversy

It appears that there is quite a bit of controversy over the ads to be aired by Focus on the Family starring the Tebows. A number of womyn's groups take issue with the fact that Mrs Pam Tebow chose not to have an abortion during a life-threatening pregnancy. She is, of course, alive and well, as is her son Mr Tim Tebow. Now Mr Mathew Archibold of the Creative Minority Report has the latest round of controversy: the President of the Center for Reproductive Freedom, Ms Nancy Northup, is accusing Mrs Tebow of being a liar. From the Creative Minority Report:

Let's get this straight. The Center for Reproductive Rights is calling Tim Tebow's mother a liar because she's saying that an abortion was recommended to her in a country where abortion is illegal.

Are these people so insane that they can't believe a woman turned down an abortion? I know. I know. With all the fringe benefits of abortion including a lifetime of guilt, depression, higher risk of suicide, increased chance of infertility and cancer who could say no to an abortion, right?

And CRR's logic falls apart in that aren't they the same ones who say if you make abortion illegal, the same number of abortions would still occur but they'll be performed illegally and dangerously? In one of their own documents they say, "The Court's decision in Roe v. Wade all but ended the back-alley and self-induced abortions that once killed hundreds if not thousands of women each year."

But wait?! Abortion was illegal in this country before that, right? So how did all those women die? So, I guess, abortions still take place even when it's illegal, huh? I mean, did they not see Vera Drake?

But wait, there's more. In the Philippines, as in many other non-Islamic countries which have prohibitions against abortion, there are exceptions made in the law for the case of the mother's life. More precisely, there is a distinction between abortion--the deliberate murder of the unborn child--and life-saving surgery to correct, say, an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fallopian tube is removed, which results in the unfortunate death of the embryo. Such a procedure would have been legal in Mrs Tebow's case, even in the Philippines.

And, along with Mr Archibold, Mr Marcel Lejeune of the Aggie Catholics blog has one more point to add to this:

As CMR points out - the halftime show will have The Who performing. This is a group who is headed up by a man caught with child pornography.

In other words, a man who admitted to having child porn is not controversial at all, while a woman who decided to CHOOSE to keep her baby is a scandal. I know a lot of other women that kept their babies - the mothers of all who think keeping a baby is crazy-talk.

If only rock stars could marry, and if only women were allowed to be rock stars, I'm sure we wouldn't see cases like that of Mr Townsend. Still, it is quite shocking that the bigger scandal is the not-yet-public, not-yet-aired commercials by Mrs Tebow and not the child pornography scandal of the entertainment. You can bet that if Townsend was a priest instead of a rock star, there would be all sorts of public outcry over this; but since Townsend is a rock star, the Tebows' ad is the biggest controversy. After all, the media, the lawyers, and especially groups like Center for Reproductive Freedom gain nothing from tarring the rock star profession (as opposed to the clergy, a small fraction of whom are also guilty of this kind of thing). The children don't take center stage in this controversy; then again, groups like the Center for Reproductive Freedom never were too big on protecting children.

Nicene Guys: Explanations in Good Faith

"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible."
--Saint Thomas Aquinas

Since today is the feast day of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a few words of wisdom from him are in order. In school, St Thomas was often teased by his peers, who though him to be dumb--they called him "the dumb ox"--yet ironically he was one of the greatest thinkers ever to live. To return bring the irony full circle, let me note that everybody thought I was a smart person in school, and now I will add my own thoughts, which will be considerably less enlightening than those of St Thomas.

I have said before that faith is like a pair of glasses--it really does alter one's perception of the world. Things which were once muddled can become clear, and things which were lost in the blur become visible. Gaining (or losing) one's faith really does change how one views the world. The change is rarely overnight--it's often gradual--but such things have happened before. Sometimes the change is not so much in what we see, but how we interpret it.

Read the Rest!

Quote of the Day: Newman on Resentment

"It is very difficult to get up resentment towards persons whom one has never seen." --Venerable John Newman

Yet, in spite of Newman's healthy observation, there is much resentment in the world. To be fair, it is more accurate to say that it is difficult to resent a person with whom we have never interacted. In Newman's day, that meant for the most part only people whom we have met in person. To meet in person is to shed anonymity, to attach a face to one's actions and a name to one's words.

Most such meetings in person have been a great deal more civil than "virtual meetings." Might it be because of the anonymity or at least the distance afforded by the internet? I know of any number of websites which require a person to be a registered member before posting comments--my other site included. For whatever reason, the comments on such sites tend to be more civil when the threat of banishment looms--but perhaps also because in giving a name, one steps out of anonymity and places one's own reputation on the line as well.

Quote of the Day: Chesterton on Dogma

"There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic."
-G.K. Chesterton

Always one to look at the world in an unconventional manner, Chesterton exemplifies what I will call, for lack of a better word, a true freethinking Catholic. I will not claim to know all of the thoughts of every self-professed "skeptic," nor will I claim that there are no true skeptics (I know a handful of skeptics who seem to me to be honest and genuine in their skepticism). There are those who live a self-consistent life outside the Church: who call a thing absurd and then treat it as ridiculous, who will on occasion find themselves on the same side as the Church and will nevertheless retain their point of view, who are occasionally able to live as if skeptical about everything unless and until it justifies itself.

Unfortunately, such people are a rare breed. Chesterton once remarked that in a way, the Church made sense the the average person--even the non-believer--in many of her practices and rituals. Why, for example, should people not gather together to sing praises or anthems? What better representation of God's infinite mercy than bread and wine: our staple food and the drink of merriment for time immemorial? Yet, the man who would be unconsciously dogmatic does so in a far more dogmatic manner. He rejects the dogma of transubstantiation, yet defends to the last such dogma as the right to an education: a right which was not universally possible as recently as a few hundred years ago. He rejects the dogma of spiritual salvation, and yet holds rigidly to the dogma of economic or social salvation. He practically rejects the dogma of man, and yet insists upon the dogma that such a creature has rights without duties.

Most of the modern skeptics are tragically only selectively so. They are perpetually skeptical of the Church, because she upholds her dogmas and doctrines, yet not for a moment do they stop to question their own.

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If you enjoyed this post, here are some related ones:

On Canonizing Chesterton, Heroic Virtue, and Everyday Life
A Sort-of Review of Chesterton's Heretics (Book Review)
Chesterton on Christianity and Asceticism
Chesterton on Dogma (again!)
C.S. Lewis on Apologetics (Quote of the Day)
Chesterton on Birth Control
Chesterton on Ceremony and Science
The Idiocy of Modern Man
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Nicene Guys: Abortion, Torture, and the Culture of Death

The Texas Alliance for Life—along with the Diocese of Austin—commemorated the infamous Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton decisions on Saturday. It was a day filled with Masses and marches, rosaries and rhetoric, statistics (over 50 million dead in the American abortion holocaust alone) and speeches—of prayer and politics. The problem in America—indeed, in what was and may someday again be Christendom—is one not merely of politics, but also of culture. The late (and perhaps great) president Ronald Reagan once referred to the Soviet Union as the evil empire; it was true, but the late and certainly great Pope John Paul II offered a more profound critique of culture when he called ours “the culture of death.”

Read the Rest!

Father Zuhlsdorf on Marriage Prep

Father Zuhlsdorf has posted (and commented upon) an article about the Diocese's of Phoenix approach to marriage preparation: more preparation, and a longer period (nine months minimum instead of the usual six). My fiancee and I are currently undergoing marriage preparation from my parish, and are also taking an NFP class from the couple-to-couple league; on the latter, subject, I think that any couple who is planning to get married ought to at least take an NFP class, but that's a topic for another post.

As for marriage preparation, I have a few brief thoughts. First, our marriage preparation is done mostly by parish volunteers, and I am grateful for their effort and time. Second, many of the people who are taking our marriage prep class haven't had some conversations which I'd think would be prerequisites to engagement, such as: "Do you want to have children?" "No." "Really? 'Cause I want to have a big family."

Then there is the expense (thankfully, they will wave the cost for some couples who really need it): most of our prep classes ran between $175-350 depending on which class. Given that every church in Austin seems to want at least $600-800 for the wedding, and then throw in the hidden expenses at some ("What do you mean we have to pay your organist $300? We have a friend who is coming to play for us!"), and pretty soon the lion's share of the budget is going to church-related expenses (we're trying to keep the total cost under $5K, since we're young and poor). The expense combined with the time commitment to the course may make it hard to make the requirements more stringent--then again, if anybody is complaining about a several-month commitment as preparation for a lifelong one, he may be ignoring the bigger problem--may make it difficult to implement (more people may just choose to eschew church weddings).

My main comment, though, on the marriage preparation aspects are that it's a good thing that the Diocese of Phoenix is trying to increase the amount of preparation given to couples. Currently, the preparation is ok--and I think I'm in one of the better preparation courses--but it could be better. Our seems at times to be taught to the lowest-common-denominator, which is rarely useful for the rest of us. It has sparked some good conversations between my fiancee and I already, but a more advanced preparation would be welcome. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is to lengthen the amount of time required for preparation, because in this case, sacrificing the lowest-common-denominator is not a good policy to pursue.

Quote of the Day: On Language, and the Sexes

"We may dismiss the idea that masculine pronouns are misleading. Words are misleading when they mislead. If nobody is mislead by a turn of phrase, it is not misleading, and there is no one over the age of three who has been been fooled by 'he' into thinking that women are unpersons. It is not possible to produce a woman who believed (until feminists cleared things up) that 'He who hesitates is lost' did not apply to her....Feminist linguistic reform is an attempt to make all thought whatsoever concern feminism to the exclusion of everything else."
-Michael Levin

I might add that this quote is somewhat applicable to the other ideologies which hope to usurp and/or subvert the English language. However, the feminist revisionists are at least somewhat consistent in that they consistently want to abolish the use of "he," "him," "man," etc as generic (pro)nouns. Thus, these are about the only "small" words which remain too big for the minds of the average feminist--a pity, since one often needs to use small words when communicating with many such womyn.

On another note, Ms Danielle Bean has written an article about some of the differences between husbands and wives. It's certainly worth a look--unless you really believe that there are no differences between womyn and men, in which case you probably object to the use of the generic "man" (not to mention the common spelling "women") and stopped reading this by the end of the quote.

Three Quotes for Today

I've been playing around with the idea of bringing back my "quote of the day" posts--if not daily. There are three quotes for today. First, since today is the anniversary of what is and may likely be ever-remembered as the most notorious pair of Supreme Court rulings ever handed down--Roe v Wade and Doe v Bolton--a quote from St John Chrysostom is in order:

"Why sow where the ground makes it its care to destroy the fruit? where there are many efforts at abortion? where there is murder before the birth? for even the harlot thou dost not let continue a mere harlot, but makest her a murderer also. You see how drunkenness leads to whoredom, whoredom to adultery, adultery to murder; or rather something ... See Moreeven worse than murder. For I have no name to give it, since it does not take off the thing born, but prevents its being born. Why then dost thou abuse the gift of God, and fight with His laws, and follow after what is a curse as if a blessing, and make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter? For with a view to drawing more money by being agreeable and an object of longing to her lovers, even this she is not backward to do, so heaping upon thy head a great pile of fire. For even if the daring deed be hers, yet the causing of it is thine."

Second, a quote from the book which I'm reading, The Gods of Atheism by Fr Vincent Micelli:

"The Christian affirmation of the existence of God is not a 'blik,' that is, a fundamental attitude or commitment to see a being in a certain way, even though empirical reality cannot verify this being or view of the being. Christians find God in the realm of the empirical; for them, a universe of being, beauty, truth, order convinces their reason about the existence of its Author. Through faith, however, Christians know that God entered human history through the person of Jesus Christ who infallibly proved Himself to be God by an overwhelming number of wondrous deeds and signs, culminating in His physical resurrection from the dead. There is nothing exclusively subjectivistic about this knowledge. Certainly, this unique God of the Christian cannot be asserted to be compatible with anything and everything. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, of the Old and New Testaments, unique in Nature, powers, and transcendent ways of acting. As for the New Testament truth that God was in Jesus, St. Paul relates his own witness and the eye-witness of over five hundred others [many of whom were still alive while St Paul was writing] who saw, touched, ate, and drank with the risen Lord. Indeed so empirically certain is St. Paul of the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus, his Lord and God, that he bases the life of his mission and of Christianity on the empirical historicity of this event. 'If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain.' The early Christians gladly subjected their belief to concrete empirical tests; there was nothing blind or esoteric about their faith, grounded as it was on historical facticity."

And finally, a quote from G K Chesterton's most undervalued work, Heretics:

"An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age, but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. Your might as well say of a view of the Cosmos that it was suitable to a half past four. What a man can believe depends on his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age."

Note that Chesterton's use of "natural law" refers to the laws of nature (physics or "natural science"), not to the Natural Law philosophy (a philosophy pertaining to morality). And now a discussion question: how are these three quotes related?

Book Review: "The Line Through the Heart"

“The case for modern man can be better understood when it is realized that in this century [the twentieth], he has hit the bottom of his soul. The cheap Liberalism, the spineless indifference, the false tolerance which failed to distinguish between good and evil, night and day, wrong and right, did but to make man inactive and unhappy….His beliefs of right and wrong change like the weathercock.”

-Archbishop Fulton J Sheen, Thought for Daily Living and Way to Happiness

In our modern and highly scientific civilization, it has long been a trend to discuss “the laws of nature.” The secularists amongst the scientific community and their myriad followers in society would have one believe that salvation—by which is meant the salvation of a society and not a soul—can come only from education. Specifically, such salvation will be attained only be an enlightened and scientific community, one thoroughly instructed in the laws of nature. On the other hand, the late scientist and philosopher Stanley L Jaki noted—quite correctly—that “Actually, crime is becoming universal, owing in no small part to the misuse of tools provided by science and technology. Today, we have more science than ever and more scientific education than ever, but also a crime rate which is skyrocketing.”

In its rush to learn more of the scientific laws of nature, the West has all but forgotten the natural law of morality. Those things which men once knew—right and wrong, a law written on the heart, as St Paul put it—have become distant memories. Valiant efforts have been made to keep the Natural Law alive in the West’s conscious; no less a figure that Cardinal Ratzinger—Pope Benedict XVI—has lent his support to these efforts; as have such American philosophers as J Budziszewski, Hadley Arkes, Russell Hittinger, and Robert P George.

Budziszewski’s latest work on this subject is The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction. This book is written in two parts: one to tackle the moral implications of the Natural Law, and the other is to outline the political implications. Whereas some books have been written for a wider audience, Budziszewski here concerns himself with a predominantly Christian audience, and thus begins by stating that the Natural Law is a fact.

“Of course the ‘thereness’ of natural law is questionable in a certain sense….One might maintain that it is not there. But insofar as we are serious about being Christian philosophers…we should already know the answer to that logically possible question. At this stage of the game, it would be frivolous—a squandering of what has been given to us—to waste breath on whether the human person has a constitution, just as it would be frivolous for a mineralogist to ask whether there are minerals, or an oceanographer to ask whether there is an ocean.”

Yet, to state that a thing is fact does not close the door to the possibility of theorizing about it. Indeed, the very act of calling a thing fact is also an act of theory, as Budziszewski himself notes. “Law may be defined as an ordinance of reason, for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated….The claim of the [natural law] theory is that…natural law is both (1) true law, and (2) truly expressive of nature.” The basics of the natural are indeed written on the heart of men, and can’t not be known. As an example, Budziszewski might cite murder: all men know that murder is wrong, that it is indeed objectively wrong; moreover, murder is against the common good, and it has been authoritatively forbidden, e.g. by God the Creator.

All of this leads to a brief discussion of conscience—man’s natural guide to the natural law. The conscience has three modes of operation: it cautions, it accuses, and it avenges. It cautions against breaking the natural law, and does so more strongly if the break is greater (e.g. the conscience is more averse to murder than to insulting). When the law is transgressed, it accuses through remorse. And if a man ignores his remorse and does not repent, then his conscience with avenge the wrong, sending the four Furies of atonement, confession, justification, and reconciliation to pursue him.

“Even when remorse is absent, as it sometimes is, guilty knowledge generates objective needs for confession, atonement, reconciliation, and justification. These other Furies are the greater sisters of remorse: inflexible, inexorable, and relentless, demanding satisfaction even when mere feelings are suppressed, fade away, or never come. And so it is that conscience operates not only to caution, not only to accuse, but also to avenge, punishing the soul who does wrong but who refuses to read the indictment.”

Saint Thomas Aquinas makes the claim that the basic principles of morality are “the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge.” Budziszewski furthers this claim by contending that there are no real moral skeptics, only people who are playing games with the natural law.

“To be sure, the game is played very hard, and not only by skeptics. I must not take only innocent human life—but only my tribe is human….A law is written on the heart of man, but it is everywhere entangle with the evasions and subterfuges of men….For natural law theory, the consequence of the Fall is that we don’t want to hear of the natural law. We cannot fully ignore it, because its first letters are written on our hearts. But we resist the inscription, and the letters burn” (emphasis in original).

Thus does the natural law exist as a sign of contradiction, for fallen man chooses to ignore what he knows, and thus also to pretend that he does not know it.

In light of this dilemma, Budziszewski goes on to pose a question: “Can the unnatural become natural to us?” This is not so suggest that man’s nature itself changes: it cannot. “If it could, it wouldn’t be our nature. Nor…[can we] create a new morality to suit ourselves. Morality is something that obligates us whether we like it or not.” Neither nature nor morality may be changed, but this says nothing about so-called “second nature” or “connaturality.” A thing which is unnatural can become like second nature if it is practiced habitually. Budziszewski uses the analogy of coffee: “We naturally avoid bitter flavors, and I have never heard of anyone liking coffee at first taste. Yet it is possible to learn to enjoy that particular bitter flavor, even to savor it.”

It is similarly possible to pursue vice, even savor it, through time and practice, though such takes an extreme act of the will. It is similarly possible for man to train himself to practice virtue, even in his fallen state, through practice and habituation. Such acquired virtues or vices are termed “connatural.”

“Initially, it is difficult to be good, to be brave, to be true—difficult and most unpleasant. Yet if, with the help of grace, one persists in this unpleasant discipline, then one can see a day coming from afar when it will be more difficult and unpleasant not to be good, honest, and true than to be that way. On that day, the actions that virtue require will be second nature” (emphasis in original).

On the other hand, vice can just as easily become connatural.

“A human being may be drawn to something, or take pleasure in it…because of a corruption of nature incident to that being in particular….Someone who does suffer such corruption will connaturally think and do and feel in a way that is radically contrary to his connatural good, even to the point of finding his anti-good lovable….Not only can a man come to oppose his connatural good—he can even come to hate what promotes it. He can learn to loathe the very things that tend to the happiness we humans are fashioned to seek. Evil of some kind has become second nature to him.”

This is not to say that natural law theory is itself unified. Among other things, there is a division between the mainstream of natural law theorists and some of the less religious adherents of the theory as to whether or not the reality of God is a part of the natural law. There are some who would have the Second Tablet of the Decalogue while discarding the first. There is, therefore, a movement to divorce the morality of natural law from its theology—a sort of “Second Tablet Project” as Budziszewski calls it.

“The Second Tablet Project is probably more popular among lukewarm religious believers who wish to make the moral law palatable to nonbelievers than it is among nonbelievers themselves. Nonbelievers who want to get rid of the first tablet usually have doubts about the second, too—and for the same reasons.”

Such attempts to retain morality are doomed to failure. It has become something of a favorite expression of the popular apologist Mark Shea that “You can’t derive (or obtain) an ‘ought’ merely from an ‘is.’” Morality is reduced at best to a form of prudence, a consequentialist thing which can be circumvented. Morality is reduced to little better than legalism. “The Second Tablet depends on the first; whoever denies his duty to God will find, if he is logical, that he can no longer make sense of his duty to his neighbor. Conscience will certainly persist, reminding him of both, but it will seem to him an absurdity in a sea of absurdities.”

The Second Tablet is lost without the first. On the other hand, it is illumined by the first, so that not only is it not lost, it also becomes more clear. “Through the prism of revelation, at least five different colors of light shine on the natural realities. We may call these perceptive, affirmative, narrative, promissory, and sacramental.” Put plainly, the natural law is ordered by a reasonable God, and so it commands or forbids only things which the mind can understand as either right or wrong. Further, it does so in such a manner that reason can work out the implications of the natural law. The natural law is tied to the story of creation-fall-salvation, and so it becomes clearer when thought of in these terms.

“If we had never seen healthy feet, it might have taken us a long time to discover that broken feet were broken—to reason backwards from their characteristics even in their present broken condition, to the principles of their purpose and design, to the fact that their condition deviates from that design”

Revelation also brings out the light of divine promise, revealing both divine forgiveness and divine providence—all wrongs repented will be forgiven, and all wrongs will be set right. And finally, revelation sheds light on to the natural law through the sacraments.

Natural law is not limited to its moral implications, but rather has political implications as well. For example, the Fifth Commandment abolishes murder: “thou shalt not kill.” Specifically, man is commanded not to take the innocent life of another person. But who counts as a person? This debate is at the center of many issues which are treated politically, including abortion, euthanasia, and the death penalty. And, as with any debate, there are two sides to the argument.

“The Western tradition, including revealed religion, traditional medical ethics, and the common law, favors [that]…. ‘Though shalt not kill’ means that we are not to take human lives. Modernism—including feminism, ‘bioethics,’ liberal jurisprudence, and the euthanasia movement favors [that]…People are not entitled to absolute regard unless they can do things like feel, think, have friendships, ponder themselves, and carry out their plans—unless they can exercise capacities like sentience, cognition, self-awareness, sociality, and ‘full deliberative rationality.’ Should someone be deficient in these respects, extinguishing him becomes a moral possibility, even if he is human….[But] People can be more or less sentient, more or less cognizant, more or less self-aware; they can be more or less adept at sociality, more or less clever at making plans. Plainly, then, they can be more or less abundantly endowed with what modernists call personhood, from which it follows that overpersons must rule and underpersons serve….You cannot make moral personhood mean just what you want it to mean and nothing else. The cloth of our common nature is too tightly sewn; it is made of a single strand. Pluck loose one stitch, and the rest unravels, too” (emphasis in original).

Indeed, this scenario has already been played out in the twentieth century, both in Germany and in the old Soviet Union. In Germany, it began with lebensunwerten Leben, and ended in the death camps. In Russia, it followed a similar course. It was ended only with the overthrow of those governments. In the West as a whole—Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia—it has begun again with abortion, and has continued with euthanasia and infanticide, with no end in sight save to return to the traditional morality.

However, as Budziszewski argues earlier, traditional morality is inseparable from traditional religion: Judeo-Christian at the very least, if not more explicit. Yet, liberal society is built largely on the on concept of religious toleration, which presents an apparent dilemma: that religious toleration discourages religious certitude, conviction, or specificity. Thus, a “broad” religion like those of the Unitarian Universalists or Anglicans is more tolerant than a narrowly defined religions, as with the Baptists or the Catholics. In short, the dilemma is based in the assumption that religious toleration must undermine religion, and that the more exact a religion, the more it must be undermined.

However, Budziszewski contends that this not necessarily so.

“Religious toleration is not supposed to eviscerate religion; had liberalism been sold to the Western nations on the promise that it would achieve peace among faiths only by undermining faith, it would have been rejected….If toleration does gut faith, we seem to be left in a logically impossible position, for in that case universal forbearance wreaks universal suppression; the thing that accomplishes the intolerant result is toleration itself.”

If this seems a paradox, it is only because the promoters of the liberal concept of tolerations share three faulty assumptions. “The first is that all religion is essentially intolerant; the second, that liberalism is essentially tolerant; the third, that the practice of toleration is essentially neutral—that it accommodates all varieties of belief, suspending judgment as to their merits” (emphasis in original). Indeed, the first assumption is false as regards at least some religions. Christianity, for example, largely views itself as a religion based on faith—and faith, unlike mere assent, is a thing which cannot be coerced. Thus, “Persecution for the sake of God would in this case be a rebellion against Him; persecution for the sake of faith would be a crime against it.”

For moral virtues must be correctly applied under certain circumstances and for the right reasons. It is true that one should not use force against an innocent; but using force to prevent a rape or murder is another thing entirely. Thus, “the virtue of toleration lies not in merely tolerating, but in tolerating for the right reasons, in the right way, at the right time, about the right objects, and toward the right people....A man is not properly called courageous for dashing into a collapsing building to save the pencil sharpener; nor is he properly called tolerant for putting up with perjury or theft.” Nor would a person be tolerant for putting up with any other kind of grave evil. Therefore, a truly tolerant religion must have “a sound understanding of goods and evils.”

Nor is liberalism itself properly tolerant, because it does not, in and of itself, have such a proper understanding of good and evil. For this reason, neutralist liberalism “undermines religion, not by making a virtue of religious toleration, but by enforcing a deadly misunderstanding of it.” Such a misunderstanding of toleration would have the various religions tolerating each other only be discarding their creeds—or at least the parts of those creeds which are unique to each religion.

Budziszeewski concludes by returning to an important practical question concerning the relationship between the Christians, revelation, the natural law and the civic law of the “earthly city.” The question is “What may Christian citizens demand of the earthly city, a city whose laws regulate not only themselves, but nonbelievers, too?” To this question, he suggests first an approximate answer, and then explains why it is only approximate.

“A good first approximation to the answer is that we may demand civic enforcement of the natural law, but that we may not demand civic enforcement of the divine law [of revelation]. The former is the law of God as reflected in the arrangements of creation, while the latter is the law of God as more perfectly reflected in the arrangements of salvations” (emphasis in original).

This answer is good as far as it goes, but “it fails to do justice to the dynamic elements of good and privation of good—of how the good is affected by salvation history” (emphasis in original). It reflects a sort of “two-story” understanding of the goods offered to man: the lower story being natural, the upper being supernatural. Budziszewski here proposes that to this architecture, a basement and a mezzanine ought to be added. The basement, because “Man after the Fall is injured even in his enjoyment of the natural goods….It may seem utopian to demand robust civic enforcement of the natural law. That is the ideal, but in practice, most of our energy will go toward robust amelioration of its most grievous and damaging violations. We are not even on the first story of the building. We are in the basement.”

This is the picture of a civilization which is left to itself: it falls below the first story (of natural goods) and partially (if not fully) into the basement of sin. However, men are not left to themselves—rather, there is the possibility of intervention by God, in the form of grace. In the simplest form, this grace grants men “premonitions” which “not only dispose us to seek something above nature, they move us to seek something within nature that is really a supernatural gift….Even in its shame, so powerfully does nature point beyond itself that the strings of the lute preserve a faint memory of the lost music” (emphasis in original).

“When the heavenly city bears faithful witness to the earthly, it prolongs and amplifies that reverberation, sharpening the longing for the music itself. This possibility transforms Christian citizenship. It turns out that keeping the earthly city out of the basement is not our only work after all. We may be able to uplift its imagination by singing the music of higher things [that] it has heard of.”

Such, then, is the ultimate duty of the Christian towards the earthly city. For natural law even points beyond itself, and beyond nature, into supernature. The "line through the heart" not only divides good from evil; it points the way to God.
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This review was originally written for and published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute on their book reviews blog.

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WDTPRS on Washinton Post's Plug for Priestettes, And Nicene Guys on the Golden Calf

Or, as father Z calls them, "wymynprysssstsssssss." And as an aside, one of his readers asks
"What particular “heresy” does this garbage fall under, I wonder?" My answer is: neo-Montanism. Or maybe just (post) modernity. Meanwhile, my latest (though not really greatest) piece is up on the Nicene Guys blog: "The Golden Calf of Narcissism:"

When the people became aware of Moses' delay in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, "Come, make us a god who will be our leader; as for the man Moses who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him." Aaron replied, "Have your wives and sons and daughters take off the golden earrings they are wearing, and bring them to me." So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron, who accepted their offering, and fashioning this gold with a graving tool, made a molten calf. Then they cried out, "This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." ( Exodus 32:1-4)

So begins the story of the golden calf—Israel’s “sacred cow”—as recorded in the Book of Exodus. Many a person hears this story and laughs at it, or at the foolish Israelites who would abandon God so easily. Others take more heed of the literally dozens and more homilies for the Sunday Masses about not making idols for ourselves, not worshiping the things of this world, and of being faithful only to God. While these are good lessons to draw from this passage, there is another and often-overlooked lesson which can be drawn.

Read thou the rest of it!

Nicene Guys Feed: Contraception and Discernment

A little more than three years ago, when I first moved to Austin, I had very few friends of my own in the area. The nearest and dearest person I knew was my brother, who at the time lived less than a mile away from my apartment complex. He was a residential assistant at the time, and so lived in the dorms and had all of the duties and responsibilities which go with that post. I spent a good deal of my free time with him at St Edward’s, but he often had to make rounds or resolve some crisis or other, and so I spent a good deal of time talking to his fellow RAs and his residents.

I remember very few specific conversations which I had, but one stands out a bit in my mind today. One of the residents had taken up riding horses—my favorite activity growing up, and a thing which I still dearly miss—and so I had frequent short conversations with her. We talked a few times about horses, but on this particular night, we talked about something else. I don’t specifically remember how we got onto the topic of birth control and religion, but we did. It actually may have been a conversation about religion—she was an Anglican of some sort—but it drifted into the realm of birth-control. At some point, she mentioned that some relatives of hers were Catholics and that they insisted that one couldn’t use birth control. They didn’t know why they couldn’t, only that they couldn’t BECAUSE THE CHURCH SAYS SO.

Read the Rest!

Nicene Guys: Some Thoughts Concerning the Permanence and Sacramentality of Marriage

The topic of marriage has been on my mind quite a bit as of late. My fiancée and I are in the midst of our wedding (and marriage) planning. We just sent out the cards announcing date and time (so save the date!), and I've been discussing suits with my groomsmen. She's changed her bridesmaids' outfits a couple of times (making picking the aforementioned suits a bit more difficult), and has been meeting with her tailor to make the wedding gown. Today my fiancée and I begin our marriage preparation classes, and last night was the first of three NFP classes. We've even found a little time to read up on some materials and go to a few extra talks to prepare us for marriage: Fulton Sheen, John Paul the Great, Christopher West, and even a few discussions with the local priest.

All of this has caused me to think a bit about the theology which underlies marriage, especially in light of the high divorce rates. There are many people who believe that marriage ought not to be necessarily permanent, and others who want theirs to be permanent, but excuse failed marriages by saying "Too bad, so sad," but then turn around and complain about the Church's teaching against "remarriage" after a divorce.

Read the rest.