The Overwhelming Appeal of Truth

I have been re-reading Richard John Neuhaus' Catholic Matters, and as with all his writings, the book has become well highlighted and my journal is filled with notes. He writes,

[M]orbid introspection, the delusions of religious enthusiasm...are called to order by truth that is accountable to no higher truth. The One Who is Truth speaks in the voice of the Church -- "I baptize you"; "I forgive you your sins"; "This is my body." (p. 50)

He goes on to say,

Ideas that are not held accountable to "the Church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of truth" (1 Timothy 3:15) will, in time, become the enemy of that truth. (p. 58)

And then there is this.

[T]o say that I have a felt need for authority is no criticism at all. Of course I have, as should we all. The allegedly autonomous self who acknowledges no authority but himself is abjectly captive to the authority of a tradition of Enlightenment rationality that finally collapses into incoherence. (p. 70)

It is not bragging, but a simple statement of fact to say that I am a well-educated man. If anything, it is a compliment to those extraordinary educators I knew from Kindergarten through graduate school. I have a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Classical Studies for work that has apparently warranted numerous academic laurels. I am a highly analytical person, especially when it comes to areas of belief and knowledge. Perhaps for this reason I enjoy so much one of the courses I teach, called simply enough Theory of Knowledge.

I say this as preface to acknowledging quite openly that I am finished with trying to figure things out on my own. It is not that I have been unable to figure out quite a number of things about life that way. I have. And it is not that I am unfamiliar with the variety of ways for knowing things or how to employ those ways. It is precisely because of my familiarity with them that I know their limitations.

I am tired of the morbid introspection so rampant in our culture, as if navel-gazing were the road to truth. It is instead more like the Cumean Sibyl, a path to the underworld. Nor do I agree with nor will I be duped by religious enthusiasms that stake credibility on emotion alone, sola commotione as it were, yet another in a list of divisive solas. Solipsism cannot be the order of the day.

And so it is I must agree with the late Father Neuhaus. There must be a truth that is accountable to no higher truth, or as St. Anselm put it, that than which no greater can be conceived.

Of course, as Neuhaus rightly observes,

The question is not about the "felt need for authority" but about where that authority is located and how it is exercised. (p. 70)

More on that in another post...

Torrent of Pleasure, Part II

A comment on my previous post, "Torrent of Pleasure," said, "Those who do not understand true pleasure would not understand The Song of Songs (or Canticle of Canticles) either." This made me think further about the whole matter. We do not understand such things because we do not understand God, and because we do not understand Him, instead making Him over in our own image, we have a tendency to drift toward one of two extremes, which is the very definition of heresy.

The first extreme is toward an all-physical perspective. The physical is everything. From this comes the notion that there is no such thing as a mind or a soul, but rather only a brain and various brain states. Another consequence of supreme physicalism is a determinism that says no one can be held accountable for his actions. Yet another consequence is inordinant attention on and affection for the physical. Witness only our obsession with sports and sex to see this in action.

The other extreme, a huge temptation for Christians who want to react against the consequences of the physicalist extreme, is to head toward a life of pure spirit. All that is physical is despised and incorporeal spirituality becomes the goal. Consequences of approaching this extreme include Buddhism and certain brands of Protestantism. Admittedly, these do not often collide in the same sentence, but consider only the minimalist architecture and liturgy in many Protestant congregations and you will see what I mean. The most significant consequence, of course, is a denial of the Real Presence of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist.

Yet God, that torrent of pleasure, blows all this away. God Who is love, God Who is spirit, God Who is word became flesh. The transcendant deity became immanent in the flesh of a Jewish male. The Lord our God Who is one is also three. In such ways does God mock our heretical notions.

I, for one, tend toward the second of the extremes mentioned above. I am intellectual and an academic, and while I can hold my own in a mean snowball fight with our children and enjoy sports and the outdoors as much as the next guy, mine is a life of the mind. Not only do I see the pitfalls of the physicalist model as real and dangerous, I find much pleasure in the purely spiritual and incorporeal. Yet I need to be reminded, as the phrase "torrent of pleasure" so aptly does, that real pleasure is just that, it must realized, it must be "thingified," to draw on the Latin root res, meaning thing.

Therefore true pleasure is at once real and spiritual, corporeal and incorporeal. It is expressed in the physicality of eyeballs and neurons, synapses and ear drums, paint and stained glass and rhyme. Smells and tastes combine with visions and raptures to produce the complete, the whole. The purely physical is but inanimate and boring stuff. The purely spiritual is but desiccated and undesirable paleness. True pleasure is a torrent that cannot help but sweep me away.

Torrent of Pleasure

What do you think of when you hear the phrase "torrent of pleasure?" Do you think of God? Most would not. I remember several years ago reading a small handbook of Latin prayers while I waited in the car with our children as my wife ran an errand. Sitting in some parking lot I ran across this beautiful expression in a prayer by St. Bonaventure. He wrote,

[Cor meum]...te semper sitiat fontem vitae, fontem sapientiae et scientiae, fontem aeterni luminis, torrentem voluptatis, ubertatem domus Dei.

"May [my heart] ever thirst for Thee, the fountain of life, the fountain of wisdom and knowledge, the fountain of eternal light, the torrent of pleasure, the fullness of the house of God."

How sad that for so many people the idea of pleasure is completely separated from the idea of God, to say nothing of the overwhelming metaphor of a torrent of pleasure. Too many people have come to see God through the eyes of William Blake's poignant poem, "The Garden of Love," the final stanzas of which run

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

While it is true that our own desires and pleasures, left unchecked and unmeasured by the standard of God can run amok and lead us into perdition, the thin, anemic, dessicated view of the Church and God that so many know is utterly at odds with the truth. Consider what a torrent is in this passage, perhaps my favorite, from Homer's Iliad. It is from Book V in Pope's translation and describes the acts of Diomedes, the fierce Greek warrior.

Thus toil’d the chiefs, in different parts engaged.
In every quarter fierce Tydides raged;
Amid the Greek, amid the Trojan train,
Rapt through the ranks he thunders o’er the plain;
Now here, now there, he darts from place to place,
Pours on the rear, or lightens in their face.
Thus from high hills the torrents swift and strong
Deluge whole fields, and sweep the trees along,
Through ruin’d moles the rushing wave resounds,
O’erwhelm’s the bridge, and bursts the lofty bounds;
The yellow harvests of the ripen’d year,
And flatted vineyards, one sad waste appear!
While Jove descends in sluicy sheets of rain,
And all the labours of mankind are vain.
So raged Tydides, boundless in his ire,
Drove armies back, and made all Troy retire.

Now that is a torrent! And that is what St. Bonaventure, taking language from Psalm 36:8 (Psalm 35:9 in the Vulgate), says of God. I will never forget being arrested by that image sitting in a parking lot one day, and it remains one of my favorite divine metaphors.

Mickey Spillane and Statesmanship

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled "What is a Statesman?" In that post I argued that there was a significant difference between a statesman and a politician. Lo, and behold, pot boiler author and master of the pulp fiction crime novel, Mickey Spillane, agreed. In his 1951 novel The Lonely Night, a reporter says of an up-and-coming senator, "He's strictly a maximum of statesman and a minimum of politician."

Hey, even the creator of Mike Hammer, the working man's James Bond, knows that a statesman is the better thing to be!

As for those who would be surprised that I occasionally read something like Mickey Spillane, to me, there is no hypocrisy with my also enjoying Cicero, Vergil, Plato, and Homer. I deeply admire beautiful, classic automobiles as much as works by Michelangelo. I love wood working and the sense of accomplishment from household repairs. I savor a fine fountain pen, muscle cars, rock 'n' roll, and driving my wife to an elegant dinner while listening to smooth jazz. As the Roman playwright Terence once wrote, "Homo sum: humani a me nihil alienum puto." "I am a human being. I think nothing that is human is foreign to me." (Heauton Timorumenos, 75)

Of course, this also means that I can find even the worst of humanity in me. The daily adventure is to steer the course toward what is good and away from what is bad. What I cannot deny, however, is my humanity.

End of Story

Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan said yesterday that active homosexuals cannot enter Kingdom of Heaven. The article is worth reading in its entirety, if only to be encouraged by an example of how to speak the truth in love. His statement, which he rightly acknowledges as not being of his own invention, is based on Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I cite both below.

Romans 1:18-32, NIV

18The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

21For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

24Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. 25They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

26Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. 27In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion.

28Furthermore, since they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, he gave them over to a depraved mind, to do what ought not to be done. 29They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, 30slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; 31they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.


Chastity and homosexuality

2357 Homosexuality refers to relations between men or between women who experience an exclusive or predominant sexual attraction toward persons of the same sex. It has taken a great variety of forms through the centuries and in different cultures. Its psychological genesis remains largely unexplained. Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity,140 tradition has always declared that "homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered."141 They are contrary to the natural law. They close the sexual act to the gift of life. They do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity. Under no circumstances can they be approved.

2358 The number of men and women who have deep-seated homosexual tendencies is not negligible. This inclination, which is objectively disordered, constitutes for most of them a trial. They must be accepted with respect, compassion, and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided. These persons are called to fulfill God's will in their lives and, if they are Christians, to unite to the sacrifice of the Lord's Cross the difficulties they may encounter from their condition.

2359 Homosexual persons are called to chastity. By the virtues of self-mastery that teach them inner freedom, at times by the support of disinterested friendship, by prayer and sacramental grace, they can and should gradually and resolutely approach Christian perfection.

This is it. End of story. As a certain singer once crooned (I dare anyone to catch this reference without a Google search!), "I stand guilty of a thousand crimes, and I suffer temptation still." I must confess my sins before God and I have placed all my hope in Jesus Christ, that His blood will be sufficient to make me clean in the eyes of God. For that reason I would not dare ask the world to embrace my sins as the norm. For that reason I would not dare ask the world to teach my sins to children as if it were okay to commit them.

And for that reason I cannot condone and will not support and must speak against the promotion of the authoritatively condemned sinful lifestyle of homosexuality within public schools, often subversively attempted under the guise of tolerance education.

Sorry for What?

A California junior high school recently allowed 8th grade students to be subjected to a homosexualist agenda from an outside group during three days of a leadership workshop. The principal was apparently unaware of the content of the presentation, and the teacher who apparently was well aware of it, did not disclose the content ahead of time to parents, per district policy. An email from the teacher to parents says,

I apologize for not being explicit about the topics covered in the Just Communities presentations.

The negligence of not informing parents certainly needed to be apologized for, but the greater transgression was allowing such a workshop to have taken place at all. Not surprisingly, there is no apology for this.

And why would parents expect one? In a recent post I talked about the poisoning of the well that takes place at some university departments of education in which teachers-to-be are led away from the light of truth and into the dark cave of indoctrination, presumably so that they will go forth and do likewise. The result? An instance such as this. What this one sentence apology says in fact is,

I apologize for not being explicit about the explicit diagrams and discussions that were to take place in the Just Communities presentations, through which your children were to be taught to see the prejudice of their heteronormativity as inculcated in them by you, their poor, benighted parents. I apologize for not being up front that we would be helping your children shed the shackles of the antiquated belief that gender is part of a person's natural makeup and guiding them to see that it is mere social construct, one that can be changed at will. I apologize for not letting you know that the school to which you have entrusted your children for the greatest share of their waking hours during the most formative years of their lives would be helping them to accept sin as A-OK.

I repeat what I said in that previous post. All Christians...Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant...must work together. Those who are called to teaching in the public schools must continue to take stands for the true, the good, and the beautiful and to expose the morally reprehensible and intellectually untenable positions that form the crumbling foundation of dangerous schools. At the same time, we must provide academically rigorous and faithfully orthodox alternatives for families who take seriously God's command to train children in the way they should go. So far from being a retreat from the world, as critics often charge private schools, such institutions that are built on the Truth, with the Truth, and for the Truth stand as beacons of what can and should be.

Right to Kill

According to Rev. Carlton Veazy, president and CEO of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, told a group of pro-abortion protesters, "You not only have a constitutional right for abortion, but you have a God-given right."

It is true that each human being has a free will. I can exercise that will in any way I choose, toward good or toward evil. And God seems to care enough about that free will that He will not trump it even to force me into accepting Christ as Lord. Instead, He allows my will to remain completely free, which leads to the inevitable fact that in fallen world, all of us will at times use that free will to act against the will of God.

But is this the same as saying a woman has a God-given right to kill her baby? Would Rev. Veazy say that a person has a God-given right to slaughter fellow soldiers at Ft. Hood or to shoot heroin?

Such statements are an absurd interpretation of free will. Of course, all talk of rights is based in what a view of what is owed to a person. I assert my rights not to be overcharged for car repair because, in our society, the customer is owed fair treatment. Yet rights do not enter into our relationship with God. God owes me nothing. I owe Him everything. If I have anything from God it is as a result of His overflowing grace, His purely gratuitous love, and for this reason, no one has a God-given right to kill an unborn baby.

For War Counsel, See Hollywood

Activist film maker Michael Moore has posted an open letter to President Obama regarding the President's decisions about Afghanistan.

I do not have enough time to critique the sophomoric style of Moore's letter. I will instead focus on two sentences from the letter. "It is not your job to do what the generals tell you to do." "We love our kids in the armed services, but we f*#&in' hate these generals, from Westmoreland in Vietnam to, yes, even Colin Powell for lying to the UN with his made-up drawings of WMD (he has since sought redemption)."

No, it is not the President's job to act as a rubber stamp for the military, which is what Moore seems to think is taking place. We are not led by a military dictatorship. It is, however, the President's job to listen to his military commanders on military issues. These are the people who have the most intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of warfare. They are the ones schooled formally and on the battlefield in the art of war. Theirs is educated counsel that should be given the strongest consideration.

And then there is the counsel of Hollywood. There is a reason I do not adivise the President on military matters. I have not the competence to do so. I am not sure what credentials one gains from standing behind a movie camera or scribbling a screenplay.

The second piece of absurdity is Moore's childish use of the expletive, and the dropping of the final "g" in its participial form. Who, outside of high school, talks like this and thinks he is being serious when doing so? Who talks to the President this way? Serious communication to Hitler or Hussein would not have adopted such vulgarity.

And then there is the attack on the generals because Moore, like so many, needs someone to blame someone for his lot in life, not that his lot is particularly bad, mind you, just not what he thinks he deserves. Have our current generals perpetrated crimes against humanity? Have they deliberately given advice to bring harm to Americans? What have they done to deserve such vitriol?

I cannot imagine that Moore is deluded enough to believe that the President of the United States will take into seriou consideration the rant he has posted on his website. Given that, the only real reason for it is that Moore needs the limelight once again.

Love Teaching, Despise Education

Today my Latin II students continued reading the story of Jason and the Argonauts. No matter the challenge, the line that has appeared in our text numerous times has been negotium libenter suscepit, or libenter excepit, "he freely took on the work." We ran across the line yet again today, and I took a moment to talk about integrity. We explored the meaning of the words "integer" and "fraction" in math, talking about how the first is a loan word from the Latin integer, meaning "whole," whereas the second is a derivative of the verb frangere, "to break." From there I pointed out that integrity means one's life should look essentially the same in any circumstance. It should be whole. I asked the students not to respond in any way, but to think whether their lives look the same at school, with a grandparent, on Friday night with friends, at work, and alone. I said that if their lives were essentially the same in each of these circumstnaces, then they had integrity. If not, like the fraction, their lives were in some measure broken.

This is why I love teaching, especially Latin.

It is also why I despise education. I later found this article about the University of Minnesota's teacher training program. The original piece from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune can be found here. Among the key points of insanity are:

"Future teachers will understand themselves as beings who position themselves and are positioned by others in relation to dimensions of differences (racial, social class, gender), and other hierarchies in school and society."

I do not now nor will I ever understand myself merely as a being. I am a human, created in the image of the living and triune God. In that regard, I stand separate from and above other created beings, such as dogs, cats, and squid.

I do not now nor will I ever understand myself as a being that is positioned by others in relation to dimensions of differences and hierarchies. I am a creature of God, endowed with free will, a will that I sometimes exercise for good, too often exercise for bad, and sometimes surrender entirely to those who should have no authority over that will, but I am not merely or primarily or even significantly a puppet of human-authored ideology.

"Future teachers will be able to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions of white privilege, hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity, and internalized oppression."

If, as Proverbs 9:10 (NIV) states, "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding," then this sort of navel-gazing is hardly the place for a teacher to train. I will not discuss here the assumed "white privilege" and "hegemonic masculinity" in a society that is increasingly hostile to white males under the assumption that all such are evil and that only when they have "got theirs" will justice be accomplished. Nor will I discuss the notion of "internalized oppression," since the more significant oppression is that which is external and being promulgated through departments of education such as this. I will, however, take direct issue with "heteronormativity" being lumped into what is clearly meant as a list of things to be overcome and avoided. Yes, heterosexual relationships are the norm. This is so because God has willed it. In and of itself, do I care what the people in the school of education in Minnesota have sex with? No, not really. But I am not the one to make such a call any more than I am the one to decide whether protons are positive and electrons are negative. All this was established by God. It is worth noting, however, that the school of education is not interested in teachers being able "to discuss their own histories and current thinking drawing on notions" of the true, the good, and the beautiful as revealed by God most fully through Jesus Christ and ongoing through His divinely inspired word and His church.

You get the idea. If you care about the education of your children, if you care about education in this country, you really should read the passages from the links above. When the well is poisoned in ways like this, what, seriously, should we expect from our schools? Of course, we should expect much, much more. We should expect that our children will learn in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but we should not make this a blind expectation, one of entitlement, as if we and our children were somehow owed a proper education. We must work to see that it happens. Christians, whether parents or not, must work to see that the will of the Lord as He has shared it in Deuteronomy 11:18-21 (NIV) is fulfilled.

Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your children may be many in the land that the LORD swore to give your forefathers, as many as the days that the heavens are above the earth.

Does this mean that all Christians should abandon the public schools? I do not think so, at least with regard to teachers. There must be Christian educators in the public schools as surely as Jesus Himself went among the tax collectors and prostitutes, if only to bring the light. But Christians must commit themselves also to showing the world the proper alternative. Christians must work together to offer a different, a true education, one that will train their children in the way they should go (Proverbs 22:6) and one that will be a light on a hill, a beacon for the rest of the world that is caught in the death throes of false, and therefore destructive, ideologies.

Civil Wrath

I ran across the following line from Ovid today.

Exercet memores plus quam civiliter iras. (Metamorphoses XII.579)

It speaks of Neptune and an awkward, literal translation would read, "He more than civilly exercises his mindful wrath ." A better version by Frank Justus Miller has "He indulged his unforgetting wrath excessively." David Raeburn renders it, "He crossed the bounds of civilized conduct to vent his implacable anger." A.D. Melville gives us, "He nursed his rage, rage more than decent and did not forget."

What struck me when I was reading the Latin was the advebial phrase plus quam civiliter, "more than what is appropriate for a citizen." We live in a culture in which people seem to think it is their right to act upon every emotion at the moment they feel it. I recently intervened in an altercation between two students at our school. As the crowd gathered and teachers raced down the hall, the two antagonists escalated both the volume and the ferocity of their verbal threats. Physical blows were imminent. Reflecting on the matter later with a colleague, I remarked how they seemed to have no awareness that there was anyone else in the world. Standing in the middle of a crowded hallway full of teachers and students, these two could see nothing but each other. It was as if they were blind to everything but their own emotions. Whatever happened to waiting at least until after school for the fight?

As cives, as citizens of a community, we have a responsibility to check our base, animalistic impulses. We have a duty to exercise not our "unforgetting wrath" and "implacable anger," but self control. To understand Ovid's phrase plus quam civiliter, we must first know what it means to be a citizen. Learning to be a citizen is something that is best done at the feet of parents, extended family, church and community leaders. Since most of these have either abdicated this responsibility or found their voice drowned out by the barbarians at the gate, we must turn once again to the great writers of antiquity for a guide. Once we have learned what it meant to Plato, to Aristotle, to Cicero, to Seneca, and yes, to Jesus, to be a citizen, perhaps we will have an inkling of an idea how we should act in our own societies.