The Desk Chair Review of Books, Continued

The Hidden Wound
Wendell Berry

In order to provide a meaningful summary of this book, I need to fill you in on some details about my classwork, so please indulge a brief digression. The last ten weeks of classes were fairly typical for me—a few intense academic courses and a few that, while necessary for my education, didn’t seem to demand as much from me. One of these less important classes, “Pastoral Practice and Racism,” was in my schedule because one class I had initially enrolled in was intended to satisfy a cultural requirement but was obviously geared towards students of another background who came to the United States. “Racism” worked in my schedule, and so I took it, though it was the in the dreaded once-a-week time slot, from 1-4 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons.

My basic sense of the class was this: there is something to all this talk about racism, prejudice, and discrimination, but none of the prevailing explanations (power, politics, xenophobia, etc.) taken by themselves held any water. All the talk about “celebration of diversity” and “learning from non-white communities” sounded enlightened and welcoming, but no one could ever tell me outright what it was we can learn, or what they have to offer. There was plenty of call for dialogue (which was taken up with even greater vigor when the Reverend Wright began his crusade), but I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to be talking about as long as we made sure we were talking. Now, most of this was due to the fact that the class was being taught by a local priest who was committed to the civil rights movement but didn’t have a formal grounding in it. He also conducted his class in the interrogative mood, answering questions with questions; this certainly got us talking, but at a cost of accumulated frustration. I wanted something to chew on, but all this added up to a buffet of statistics and good intentions that spread about a heavy malaise as we sampled from it.

In one of our assigned readings, the author made a passing reference to the book I am reviewing now, and having read one of Berry’s books before, I set out to lay my hands on a copy to supplement the coursework. It was the best decision I made all quarter long, and saved me from personally writing off the class as unsalvageable. For the first time, I was reading an informed and reflective opinion about what white racism did to whites and what whites had to learn from blacks. He is a southern writer dealing in southern racism, and so not all of it was clearly applicable to our own situations of a primarily urban setting, but after the shadowboxing I’d been engaging in for weeks, I was delighted to have a sparring partner.

The first third or so comprises Berry’s reminiscences of growing up as a white child with black mentors. It’s not immediately appealing, but stick with it—much of the rest of the book will operate on this body of experience. Berry ranges wide as he catalogues the ramifications of racism. He takes up the effect slaveholding had on southern Christians and their leadership, insisting that the heavy emphasis on faith and the soul in southern varieties of Christianity was necessary to gloss over the contradictions inherent in attending church with one’s slaves. He discusses the American culture and its superficiality born of smoothing over the festering sore it must conceal. He points to Tolstoy, Twain, and Homer as offering exemplars for what is possible (and necessary) for contemporary relations between classes and races.

But by far the most compelling treatment is the way he ties the race question in with his passionate defense of the land and humanity’s relationship with it. The greatest loss the white race ever suffered from its slaveholding was the loss of contact with the land as a lived experience, substituting the capitalist’s abstract management for the sake of profit. Actually working the land was relegated to “nigger work” and hence was unworthy of the white man. While this did much to enrich whites, a corresponding impoverishment fell upon them (as is so often the case with sin—nobody wins).

Berry describes this impoverishment this way: “It seems to me that the black people developed the psychology, the emotional resilience and equilibrium, the philosophy, and the art necessary to endure and even enjoy the hard manual labor wholly aside from the dynamics of ambition. And from this stemmed an ability more complex than that of the white man to know and to bear life. What we should have learned willingly ourselves we forced the blacks to learn, and so prevented ourselves from learning it.” Interestingly enough, this is a perceptive investigation of the mechanisms and anthropological effects of social sin. In an age when we are only beginning to recognize and dismantle the structures that undermine human flourishing, these insights are valuable even thirty years after they were written.

In short, I found Berry’s insights to be unrecognized more than a quarter century after they were put into words. To his credit, he continues to be a vocal defender of the same ideals he puts forward here. Those of you who get through The Hidden Wound might want to pick up his 1996 book Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community, which doesn’t deal directly with racism but articulates in greater detail the dehumanizing forces at work in the culture and economy of our own day. It is an equally informative (and pleasing) read.

The Desk Chair Review of Books

Orthodoxy
by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

After reading this cover-to-cover for the first time since high school, I was struck not only by Chesterton's delightful rhetoric but by just how relevant his insights are to contemporary discourse. I take this as a clear indication as to just how far off the mark our contemporary discourse has wandered, since so little progress has been made. There is very little outright philosophy in this book, or what we nowadays would call philosophy. (One might argue that this book is an instance of what contemporary philosophy has lost to its own demise.) Nonetheless, it is a systematic overview of decades of imaginative reverie thoroughly conditioned by a philosophical worldview. Strangely enough, it happens to be in direct contradiction to the prevailing attitudes among the educated in his time ... as well as in ours. While postmodernity can lack the sort of earnest optimism so prevalent among Chesterton's opponents, I sense a kinship between them that demands a real familiarity with the framework of his arguments, if not their rococo embellishments.

Remarkably, the Church finds itself doing precisely the opposite of what GK sets out to do in his chapter on the Maniac. Whereas Chesterton finds it necessary to undermine the rationalism of his era, our own age needs to hear the Church's defense and affirmation of reason (so felicitously articulated by the Holy Father at Regensburg. It is a testimony to Chesterton's trustworthiness that he himself takes up that defense in the very next chapter (the Suicide of Thought) and proceeds over the course of the book to explain, by way of his own intellectual journey, just what this nuanced reverence for rationality looks like.

Do yourself a favor and give this one a hoist.

Dawkins Speaks For Himself

Richard Dawkins recently published an editorial in the LA Times, accusing the makers of Expelled of twisting his words regarding his apparent belief that life on earth was "seeded" by highly developed extraterrestrials. You can find the story here. He claims elsewhere that the question he was answering with this statement was "under what conditions would 'Intelligent Design' be a valid theory?"

Honestly, I can't imagine any other explanation for why Dawkins would say such a thing as he did, on film, with prepared questions. If this is so, the filmmakers are guilty of grave dishonesty. This sort of conduct is not helpful for the ongoing public conversation about these issues, which the film claims to desire. Given the producer's juvenile behavior towards PZ Myers in the past (he told reporters he wanted Myers to have to pay to see the movie), regardless of how arrogant and condescending the man can be (he certainly can), it does not justify these sorts of moves.

Apart from the moral component, there is a rhetorical one as well. This strategy is known as the "straw man" argument, in which one sets up a weak summary of a position in order to demolish it utterly with one's own more carefully formulated argument. This would seem to be an effective strategy to convince the untutored and unreflective, but we should keep in mind the example of St. Thomas, who strengthened his own arguments by doing his utmost to formulate his opponent's position before refuting it. If what Dawkins and Myers claim is true (even if we take their perspectives with a grain of salt), I would not support the makers of this film in their actions. Such attacks only give those who disagree a license to be dismissive and flippant, something all too common already.

If we're not prepared to fight fair on this issue, there isn't much point in fighting at all.

The Moonlight Devil

The evagatio mentis, St. Thomas calls it. A footloose restlessness of mind, a refusal to sit with oneself in the presence of God, choosing instead to dissipate the powers of the soul on baubles.

I’m coming out of just this state right now. It’s a periodic thing for me, coming on almost always in the late hours of the evening when I should be sleeping but can’t bring myself to let go of the day. My sense of the passage of time subsides and I linger in an agitated, restless lethargy. A desire to consume dominates all other inclinations, and I reach out for anything—books, music, movies, blogging, emailing, but especially casual reading on the internet, which requires no sustained effort and allows me to flit around from flower to flower. I remain no longer than is absolutely necessary to draw the nourishment required to fuel my move to the next thing that catches my attention. I’ll do anything to get the feeling that my time is being well spent, but the sugary sweetness I gulp only winds me tighter and pushes me on through thinner and thinner layers of superficiality.

Soon, it becomes impossible to dwell on anything for any period of time and I lapse into inactivity, my mind racing with the potential pastimes but unable to rouse myself to commit to one of them (least of all, sleep). I feel like I am going to explode from the inside of my chest. My whole self is consumed with a sort of anguish that is (bizarrely) delightful, overcome with “an irreverent urge to pour oneself out from the peak of the mind onto many things,” as Aquinas so aptly puts it. Prayer is never further from my mind than at this time, and if it does occur to me, almost always my response is to turn away.

The desert fathers spoke of this acedia as the “noonday devil.” Cassian notes that the monk is troubled with sloth chiefly about the sixth hour: it is like an intermittent fever, and inflicts the soul of the one it lays low with burning fires at regular and fixed intervals. For me, it’s quite different, coming on at that peculiar time of night when the passage of time seems to stop. Without the sun to move the shadows along the floor and charge across the sky, existence sinks into stillness. It has always seemed to me that restlessness at this time of night was a longing for some kind of absolute, for an existence unfettered by the stream of time in an unconditioned present. Perhaps there is some truth to this. CS Lewis remarked that our frustration with time’s sequence (“Look how the time flies!” “It seemed like hours while I waited for my food”) is like a fish constantly exclaiming how wet the water is. It’s just odd why we find time so restrictive if it’s all we know; my late nights spent in restlessness seem to be that reaching out for eternity of which he speaks.

Yet perhaps that is just what is wrong about them, for that is not the condition in which I, as a human being, live. To dwell on a form of existence in which “there is always time” while being a sort of creature that has very little time turns out to be less a pious longing than a grasping for what must not—cannot—be. Inevitably, this grasping leads to a desire to hide from God, just as reaching out for the fruit led Adam to hide himself. At times like these, God asks “where are you?” not to receive an answer but to tell me he knows what I’m up to, and it leads nowhere good.

Pieper says all this is a “kind of anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him. One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great in order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness.” Wouldn’t it be nice to pretend I don’t have to get up tomorrow and just dawdle with my books and plants? Can't I just take a break from all this?

The morning after, it’s easy to shake off the cobwebs and step back into the stream. It’s always easier to pray after a night like this, like after sitting in on an exorcism. I have a sense that I just lost a fight and need to get back into training if I’m not going to get beat up so bad the next time. For what’s so alarming about this (as I read through Thomas, Pieper, and the pope on this subject) is that this refusal to own up to the true calling of a disciple (and a fortiori a seminarian or a priest) is the root of all despair, and abundant traces can be found throughout our culture.

It makes you want to get down on your knees and pray … which is what I am about to do. Enough of all this! Time to sleep.

Papal Imagery

Nick's Papalpalooza

Click on the photo above and then click on "slideshow" to see my photos from the youth and seminarian rally in Yonkers, NY at St. Joseph's Seminary.

On Pilgrimage

Friday, 18 April 2008
8 p.m.

The first day of our pilgrimage to see our Holy Father is far from over. We’re still in Pennsylvania and we’ve got hours to go. Though I’ve been on cross-country bus rides many times before, today is different—today there is something unique about what it is I am going to become a part of. I have a feeling of being part of something far, far greater than simply a sightseeing venture or seeking out an enriching experience to satisfy my curiosity (though I will confess that such motivations are not entirely beyond me). There is something momentous happening on the world stage that I, in my own small way, participate in, for Pope Benedict is more than a functionary or a hierarch. He is a custodian, a mystagogue, a teacher, a father, not just to me but to millions who look upon him in person or through the media.

The mild earthquake at 4 a.m. this morning helped to give us a sense that something important is afoot, though I am not in the habit of assigning deep significance to these things. But I do find earthquakes in Chicagoland worth noting.

This bus ride has provided ample opportunity for reflection on the recent writings of the pope, including his recent addresses to the U.S. bishops and university faculties. It was after a long hiatus over the lunch break that a remark from the former gave me pause. We’d been waiting for well over an hour because the bus had leaked some fuel and needed to report something it to the authorities; meanwhile, I was ready to be underway.

Only afterward did I realize the source of my discomfort. My life in the seminary is highly structured, and every moment there is something that could be getting done. For sustained periods of time I operate under a constant pressure to be moving down the list of things to be done and checked off—studies, prayer, chores, exercise. Even leisure can get pigeonholed in this way.

What I was given this afternoon was a taste of what life was like before all that, when it was a simple, timeless childhood. Nothing to be done, nowhere to go. Just live the moment.

Even more important than the experience of this little respite and my gratitude for it was being able to share it with some of the men I’ve lived alongside for the last couple of years. Of all the elements of the happy life, friendships suffer most from the need to always be making progress towards some goal, for they admit of no urgency or intentionality if they are to retain the name of friendship. Earlier that day, I’d read over Benedict’s words to the bishops, when he mentioned in his closing remarks the need for priestly fraternity.

Each of us knows how important priestly fraternity has been in our lives. That fraternity is not only a precious possession, but also an immense resource for the renewal of the priesthood and the raising up of new vocations. I would close by encouraging you to foster opportunities for ever greater dialogue and fraternal encounter among your priests, and especially the younger priests. I am convinced that this will bear great fruit for their own enrichment, for the increase of their love for the priesthood and the Church, and for the effectiveness of their apostolate.

How dangerous it would be to pare down my priesthood to a highly structured, pressure-driven lifestyle; yet there is danger, too, in seeing relationships as a means to greater effectiveness and fulfillment. It is a matter of zealous pursuit without having been the result of a conscious decision; in other words, a habitual disposition to pursue the good. Those Greeks were on to something.

It has been a blissfully undeliberate day. Here’s hoping there will be a few more to come before this gig is up.

Sunday, 20 April 2008
9:30 a.m. EST

Guess what? I saw the pope yesterday.

From the lowly man’s view of things, it was unbelievable just how much waiting was involved. Collectively, millions of man-hours were expended by various groups who traveled for a few minutes in the company of the Holy Father, but there are few who would not have judged their sacrifices of time and the discomforts of travel worthy of the reward they received.

We arrived at the rally site around 10 a.m. yesterday morning, and I secured a spot right in front of a platform that extended out from the stage into the crowd, hoping Benedict would at least come out to greet the seminarians assembled there if not come down to the lawn to shake our hands. With about seven hours until the pope’s scheduled arrival, I tied on a bandana, chugged some bottled water, and got settled.

Each of the acts scheduled during the hours prior to Benedict’s arrival managed to occupy the attention with spectacle and thus helped to pass the time. The best performer was a Franciscan priest by the name of Fr. Stan Fortuna, who had a short act woven from be-bop, funk, and quotations from recent papal addresses. With a 5-string bass guitar and a mixing machine he operated with his feet, he looped his own playing (a la Keller Williams) and soloed over himself, rapping all the while. It was by far the least flashy, while also being the most entertaining, though he was only on stage for ten minutes. Other acts included Third Day (who did some ah … “interesting” things with the Nicene creed) and Matt Mahar, who managed to lead the whole crowd in praise & worship that was probably the most effective in setting the tone for the pontiff’s arrival. There were numerous acts by local kids doing various cultural performances that were pretty good, but I was just too stinking tired to enjoy them. My loss.

Kelly Clarkson was the last act before the pope, and if the point was to bring in a big celebrity to get everyone excited then I guess she did her job—though I’m not sure how her rendition of “Since You’ve Been Gone” fit in with the whole “Christ our Hope” thing. I suppose the kids loved it, which is the real reason the organizers sought her out. A passage from the Gospel came to mind in the midst of all this, though: “What did you come out to the East Coast to see—a celebrity? Why then did you come?” (Mt 11:7f, slightly adapted)

Back to Benedict.

Seminarians were given access to the front section of the lawn, closest to the stage, and as the day passed it became more and more crowded. Short guys kept trying to work their way in front of me, and I found it difficult not to be rude! I felt bad for them (especially when the yellow and white hankies were being waved) as they probably couldn’t see much of anything, but my hours of standing in the same place were being reduced to nothing and it was hard not to resent it. Because I was determined not to lose my spot, I held tight and refused to go for lunch, munching on a couple of granola bars I had in my pocket. In between acts, we chanted “Be-ne-detto [clap, clap, clapclapclap],” “Christus vincit,” and whatever else was easy to pick up on the fly. When it got too packed to move, the event staff brought us water and we passed it back to those behind us after snagging one for ourselves. The sun was fierce on the sea of black cassocks and suits, and not a few faces were red and swollen from its rays.

By the time four o’clock rolled around, my dogs were barking. I’d been standing in the same place for nearly seven hours and my resolve was flagging. There would be respites here and there; when the bishops and cardinals started filing in, I managed to shake hands with Archbishop Naumann (my ordinary) and exchange a few words.

Once the pope showed up on the seminary grounds for his meeting with handicapped children, the energy went way up—he is here, this is what we’d been waiting for! We watched the prayer service in the chapel via a video feed to the Jumbotron, greedily devouring every glimpse we could get of the Holy Father as he blessed each of the handicapped children who sat on either side of the aisle. We prayedthe responses to his invocations and signed ourselves when he blessed the assembly, though it was all taking place on the other side of campus.

As he moved down the aisle, he tenderly signed each forehead with the cross and cradled the children’s faces between his hands. One little girl reached up and put her hands on his as he did this, a gesture that brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t tell you why it wasn’t anything more than sentimentality, but such things are rare enough for me that I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t. Plus, there was plenty of “awww” being tossed about, and this happens to be an utterance I find abhorrent. It didn’t bother me that this was a choreographed moment—something genuine shone through the script and registered with me in spite of it.

It took another forty-five minutes for him to get onstage, but once he was there, all bodily fatigue was forgotten. When he came out, he immediately walked out right in front of us on the stage extension, and the whole mass of thousands of people pressed us forward onto the fence. Everyone was packed so closely together that had anyone fainted, they would’ve been held up by the force of everyone else straining towards the Holy Father. He came within ten yards of me, and it was electrifying—in retrospect, I realize there were few non-dignitaries that got to be that close to him. Out of hundreds of thousands of people who will be seeing him during his time in the US, I was one of the luckier ones.

The cheering lasted for something like fifteen minutes—it just wouldn’t stop. Benedict was very gracious and patient, though he did try to quiet us down when cardinal Egan was interrupted by a particularly rousing chorus of “Viva Il Papa,” as if to say, “This is no big deal for me, I deal with this all the time … but I wouldn’t tick him off if I were you.” It was all immensely entertaining for us, though I’m sure it made watching it on TV a little frustrating. (They didn’t have to ride halfway across the country on a bus and stand in the sun half the day to see him … so there …)

Another great moment was when one of the youths presenting the pope one of his gifts stepped forward to embrace him, and the whole front section started chanting “FU-TURE-PRIEST! FU-TURE-PRIEST!” I’m not sure the pope heard it but the bishops did, and we all regarded ourselves immensely entertaining.

It’s the little things, you know.

All that chicanery ceased when the pope delivered his address; the crowd was all steadfastness and rapt attention. Though he read the whole thing in his typical no-frills style, he managed to create some dramatic moments as he outlined the challenges that the youth face. His remarks to seminarians were pointed and I intend to look them up in order to pore over them later. There was nothing spectacular or revolutionary in them; yet the simplicity of what he had to say, calling us back to prayer, contemplation, liturgy, and friendship with Christ, should be taken all the more seriously for that very reason.

At this point all sense of time had vanished so I couldn’t tell you if he was up there for one hour or for three. I’d like to believe it was our enthusiastic response to his entrance that motivated Benedict to come down in front of us again to say goodbye; the crowd pressed in again with the same fervor as before. This time, I forsook the camera and just soaked in the encounter, and I called out “thank you!” to the pontiff as he passed by, though he didn’t hear me—I was too hoarse to be heard over the roar.

When the final hymn was over (they picked, of all things, “City of God”!), we all made our way back to the buses and were finally able to connect with the seminarians we’d been hoping to meet up with but were prevented because of the crowds. A few moments were all we could afford, and then off to our separate ways. There were even a few surprises, including a former FOCUS missionary, recently wed, and his pregnant bride! By this time my camera batteries had died and so some crucial moments went unrecorded. The memories will serve.

The day ended as a mirror image of the first half: wake up, shower, Mass, eat, bus ride, SEE POPE, bus ride, eat, Mass, shower, crawl back into bed. All told, we were on our feet for over ten hours without a break, and when I peeled off my cassock and clerical choke collar a modest helping of heat rash was waiting for me. The shower rinsed off hours of sweat, dust, and sunblock in a cleansing that could only be described as baptismal.

Yet before all that, as we all knelt in the conference center auditorium after communion, our silence was more than just fatigue after an exhausting day; it was silence born of a deeper sense of purpose, of mission, of grace. Our travels had exercised in us a greater faithfulness to the call of God, like metal that is polished with use. The crowds, the fanfare, the spectacle was all gone, and what remained was the memory of a “humble servant laboring in the vineyard of the Lord.”

Sunday, 21 April 2008
11:59 p.m.

We’re back safe at the seminary, 17 hours of road behind us. The first thing I did was check the news to see what the coverage was saying, and I’ve found a couple of good sites worth checking out:

Godspy
The New York Times—one, and two

Pictures forthcoming.

In The News

Wondering where I've been the last couple of weeks? Well, there's just too much to talk about in detail, but at least some of my time has been spent talking with Chicago Tribune reporter Manya Brachear about Pope Benedict and vocations to the priesthood. Though the article doesn't get at the heart of what's going on with the papacy, the priesthood, Tradition, the relationship between JPII and Benedict XVI, and the Church, and tends to take a superficial view of "trends", nonetheless it's got my name in it. Hooray.

Amy Welborn has a good piece in the New York Times that has a perspective closer to home.

As the Tribune article mentions, I'll be traveling to Yonkers to see Il Papa, so check back here next week for my thoughts. This will be my first encounter with a pope, and though I am currently frustrated with the complications this visit has introduced into my life, I'm fully confident that I will be reaping dividends within a few days.

A Carapace Dissolved

"Batter my heart, three-person'd God," a poet once prayed,

For you

as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me; and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I couldn't help but remember the opening lines to Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV as I wrapped up Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych for a class on death and grieving here at the seminary. Back in college, we had an all-school seminar on this work of short fiction, and though I enjoyed it then, the intervening years have only enriched my experience of it. It is the ultimate drama: the inner dialogue of a dying man confronted with the possibility that his entire life was lived in the pursuit of vanity, and nothing less than eternity is at stake. Every other story derives its dramatic power from this possibility of salvation (or its loss). One moment stands out. Ivan lies in pain, waiting for death, yet unable to let go of life; as the truth of his situation slowly dawns upon him, all those who peopled his life and participated in the game of bourgeois society along with him are stripped of their charm. Only the duplicity and superficiality remain, and they are loathsome to him.

He lay on his back and began to pass his life in review in quite a new way. In the morning when he saw first his footman, then his wife, then his daughter, and then the doctor, their every word and movement confirmed to him the awful truth that had been revealed to him during the night. In them he saw himself—all that for which he had lived—and saw clearly that it was not real at all, but a terrible and huge deception which had hidden both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical suffering tenfold. He groaned and tossed about, and pulled at his clothing which choked and stifled him. And he hated them on that account.

Consider the agony of this moment: the possibility that what by all accounts was a decorous, gentlemanly, and entirely correct life might have been spent "plowing the sand and sowing the ocean" is real; I have reason to believe that my life has been spent this way, and every relationship I examine in the light of this possibility, even the most intimate, reinforces my conclusion that it is so. Now, at the end, I am forced to discard all my labors and sacrifices as so much smoke and wind. Had this knowledge come when I was in a position to do something about it, it might have served some purpose. All that is left to me now is to die in despair, rueing the day I ever asked the question "what was it all for?"

Anger is understandable in this situation. Augustine remarked in passing about this in his Confessions:

Why is it that 'truth engenders hatred'? Why does your man who preaches what is true become to them an enemy (Gal 4.16) when they love the happy life, which is simply joy grounded on truth? The answer must be this: their love for truth takes the form that they love something else and want this object of their love to be the truth; and because they do not wish to be deceived, they do not wish to be persuaded that they are mistaken. And so they hate the truth for the sake of the object which they love instead of the truth. They love truth for the light it sheds, but hate it when it shows them up as being wrong. Because they do not wish to be deceived but wish to deceive, they love truth when it shows itself to them but hate it when its evidence goes against them.

Yes: it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. For we provoke Him to wrath with our misdeeds; yet His wrath is nothing more than His steadfast resistance to the encroachment of the forces of sin and death upon His creatures. God's wrath is good news, as it's been said. It is the wrath of a protective Father. The discovery of an awful truth about oneself is a gift, never to be refused in order to return to manufactured illusions. In His mercy, a moment of clarity is offered. For those with eyes to see, it is presented through the ordinary things of life, standing behind them, knocking, breathing, shining, healing. Yet for those whose sight fails them, who render themselves incapable of apprehending reality as it is, other more forceful means are available to the physician. And it is here that we find ourselves confronting the reality of suffering.

What strikes me as wholly inadequate in most attempts at theodicy (the justification of God's ways to humanity, the presence of evil and suffering in the world, etc.) is that they are always directed outward. They are meant to explain the suffering of another to the audience that observes it, and one that observes it from a distance, no matter how compassionately. Ivan Karamazov is not plagued with his own suffering, but that of the innocent five-year-old girl pounding her chest with her little fist and crying out to "dear God" to protect her from her cruel and hateful parents, or the infants skewered on the bayonets of pillaging soldiers. Yet it is precisely the meaning of her suffering that is inaccessible to him. What would lead us to believe that we have access to what transpires in the hidden and silent recesses of the person when the full weight of pain is laid upon him? It is incommunicable, for it is inexhaustible, unable to be labeled with neat classifications and placed in a scheme that somehow takes Everything into account. It is always more.

What these fail to take into account is the meaning of suffering for the one who suffers. This is not to glibly dismiss it in the way the genuinely compassionate find so repulsive; it is to ground it in the infinite dignity of each person in the sight of God.

Our own pain speaks plain words, though we may not have ears to hear them. What it has to say, it says to us and to us alone. To me. I alone am responsible for discerning its truth and learning its lessons. I cannot interpret the suffering of another, and so I cannot justify it or explain it away. Only I can discover the secret resistance to the love that draws me to itself, and so the messenger of that love—be it ever so kind or savage—is meant to overcome that resistance without force or compulsion.

If we truly understood what was at stake, the poet's prayer would ever be on our lips. The possibility of refusal is very real. We must cultivate a readiness to be o'erthrown:

That we might rise and stand.

All the Facts, None of the Meaning

I’ve looked over my last post after doing some reading this past week, and I’m convinced I could be a bit more specific about what exactly is at stake with the “science and faith” controversy as it’s being presented in the public square. Specifically, towards the end of the post, I allude to the Regensburg address and Benedict’s insistence that the contemporary self-limitation of reason is a disastrous move. Allow me to quote briefly from the address to make clear the point to which I refer:

… [to the modern mind] only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.

In this post, I’d like to take a closer look at what this “reduction in radius” feels like in more specific terms. Over the last few days, I had a feeling that I should be able to explain just what Benedict (and countless other thinkers) mean by this self-limitation language. It was in this mindset that I came across an old favorite: Lewis’ essay on what he calls “transposition,” published in a collection of some of his best addresses entitled The Weight of Glory. Lewis managed to do in this essay exactly what I wanted to convey, so what follows is more or less a summary of this lucid little piece, with comments and reformulations of my own interspersed throughout. If what you read here is of the least interest to you, I advise you to run to the nearest bookstore and purchase a copy. It makes for fantastic (and quite relevant) reading.

The occasion of his remarks is Pentecost Sunday, and he chooses to highlight an odd theme to preach upon: the gift of speaking in tongues. It is a case that is quite difficult for the Christian to explain in supernatural terms, for while we must accept the miraculous nature of the apostles’ preaching in languages unknown to them on that day in Jerusalem so long ago, nevertheless most contemporary instances of this strike many of us as embarrassing and unrelated to the real substance of our faith. No doubt there are true movements of the Holy Spirit in this charismatic gift, but it is also likely that sometimes it is nothing more than a bad case of nervous energy being spontaneously discharged. 

At this point, the skeptic steps forward to invoke Occam’s razor. “Why,” he intones, “would it be reasonable to accept multiple explanations for one phenomenon—namely, the pronunciation of gibberish while in a state of ecstasy? Would it not be much more reasonable to say that a purely physical explanation which holds in most cases holds in all of them? Can we not dispense with the supernatural entirely?” Caught between the given of revelation and the plausible reductionism of the skeptic, the Christian may start to feel a little warm under the collar and start asking himself how important is this speaking in tongues stuff is, anyway.

Well, regardless of what you think about speaking in tongues, this difficulty can apply to any number of different things within the Christian worldview, for it is one case in a whole class of similar difficulties. Certainly the sacraments, being the use of natural signs to signify and effect supernatural realities, would be susceptible to this objection. Christian language about heaven is filled with references to purely natural, physical realities. The seven "infused" virtues have the same names and descriptions as their natural counterparts. We hear this language in other circles as well, such as among those who conjecture about the place of humanity in the cosmos: when all is said and done, isn’t human existence just a particularly refined and complex animal existence? Isn’t all this talk of a soul and of spiritual existence just a poetic and metaphorical way of describing our highly developed powers of tool making and communication, which we share with the animals?

Lewis summarizes,

Put in its most general terms, our problem is that of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which, it is claimed, are spiritual; the reappearance in what professes to be our supernatural life of all the same old elements which make up our natural life and (it would seem) of no others.

To refute the skeptic, Lewis seeks a case in which all would recognize that the simple explanation, which is plausible at first glance, is false. Lewis finds his case within the emotions and their physical manifestations, a realm common to the experience of all. Most would acknowledge that one and the same physical reaction may result from different emotional states: that unsettled feeling in the chest is present not only after successfully asking a girl out on a date but also after receiving a piece of horrible news about a loved one or getting caught in telling a boldfaced lie. The one physical reaction is both delightful and anguishing depending upon the emotional state that accompanies and gives rise to it.

Furthermore, the physical sensation is not merely a sign of the emotion, but is wrapped up in the emotion itself, truly becoming what it signifies. There is not only continuity between them but an overlap, a mingling. Here, then, we have a similar situation to our class of difficulties listed above in which the natural and (allegedly) supernatural are very closely tied, indeed so closely tied that it is quite reasonable to dismiss the supernatural as a figment. Yet in our present case, no one would deny that while emotional states are of a higher order than physical sensations (in the sense that the emotions are a more complex and richly varied phenomenon than the physical sensations that carry them), they are nonetheless real. What conclusions can we draw from this example?

In the emotional life, a more complex system (emotion) must be expressed through a less complex medium (the nervous system). Because there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence between elements of the two systems, linking every emotional state with its own peculiar nervous reaction in the body, multiple emotions must be associated with one and the same physical sensation. Hence, the same tight feeling in the chest I described above accompanies both delight and anguish. It is this “expression” of a more complex, “higher” system in a lower one that Lewis calls transposition.

A few examples might be of assistance here. When a language with 22 vowel sounds has only 5 vowel characters available to it, multiple sounds must be assigned to each character in order for the spoken language to be fully represented in writing. In an orchestral composition that is transposed for the piano, the notes originally played by flutes, violins, and oboes must be the notes of only one instrument in its transposed form. 

The example of drawing was especially helpful to me. In order to represent a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional piece of paper, one must use what artists call “perspective,” which means that one and the same shape must be able to represent multiple realities; a triangle must be able to represent both a dunce cap and a straight road receding into the distance. 

What if you tried to explain to someone who had never heard English spoken that each written character a, e, i, o, and u could refer to multiple sounds? There’s no reason to think otherwise based on the characters on the page. What if someone listening to a piano piece originally composed for an orchestra had never heard an instrument other than the piano, and doubted the existence of other instruments? All the talk in the world would never convince her that the performance on piano was merely a hint of the symphony it imitated. And if one could imagine a creature that existed entirely in two dimensions examining the lines of a drawing (if you’re having trouble, it was wonderfully imagined by the author of Flatland, from which this blog takes its name), even an initial openness to the idea of third dimension would soon be deflated when all the evidence for it was just the same old lines and shapes. Lewis steps into this perspective for a moment and speaks convincingly from the skeptic’s corner:

You keep telling me of this other world and its unimaginable shapes which you call solid. But isn’t it very suspicious that all the shapes which you offer me as images or reflections of the solid ones turn out on inspection to be simply the old two-dimensional shapes of my own world as I have always known it? Is it not obvious that your vaunted other world, so far from being the archetype, is a dream which borrows all its elements from this one?

In short, one can never understand the higher system when one approaches it from below. It is only when one understands the higher system or medium that its expressions in the lower one make sense; it is a prior acquaintance with them from the inside that renders them intelligible in their less complex expressions. It is only because we live in a three-dimensional world that two-dimensional drawings make sense to us.

Hence, the skepticism we encountered with regard to speaking in tongues makes sense, and is exactly what one would expect when approaching a supernatural reality “from below.” For confining oneself to the lower system or medium prevents one from ever moving beyond the most simplistic, reductionistic explanations from the outset.

Of course, none of this is to argue for the existence of the supernatural; the point is merely that the sorts of objections we do get from contemporary materialists are just the sort we should expect to get, for by consciously limiting themselves to the material, materialists render themselves unable to move beyond the material. We should not be surprised, then, when we hear claims (such as the one above) which insisted that humans are nothing more than highly developed beasts. For, when considering the expression of a highly complex system (the mind) in its less complex physical substrate (the brain), it will always—ALWAYS—be possible to deny that there is any real difference between the two as long as a purely naturalistic explanation is the criterion for all truth.

It is as if a man falls in love with a woman and suffers terribly after a stormy breakup. In his grief, be begins to look over the relationship and start to pick it apart. Though the love was real enough while he was in the midst of it, his examination in hindsight started to reveal her flaws and selfishness as well as his own imperfect motives. These, too, were real; yet if in order to dull the pain of his loss he chooses to ignore what was good about their love and dwell only upon what was shameful, soon enough that’s all his memories will contain, no matter what the reality of the situation might have been. His mistake is to consider the results of his analysis as truer than his experience.

Here we have the crux of the “self-limitation of reason” of which Benedict speaks. In a conscious effort to understand the world, it is possible to temporarily bracket all cumulative knowledge and start afresh with the plan to consider only what can be verified by experiment—that is, to look at reality from below, from within the framework of material existence. This is a perfectly valid way to approach the world; it is the scientific method. If, in the course of a long process of discovery that illuminates a great deal about reality, one forgets that this method is only a tool and not an end in itself, and begins insisting that there is nothing more to understand than what this method reveals, well, there isn’t much that can be done, for to him it will always be perfectly reasonable. As Lewis notes, “It is no good browbeating the critic who approaches a Transposition from below. On the evidence available to him his conclusion is the only one possible.” He has locked himself in a prison of his own making and thrown away the key. 

I will leave you with the author’s final analogy. It is a powerful one, and accurately diagnoses the impasse at which we find ourselves in the current exchanges over science versus faith. Perhaps you have tried to point out to a dog a piece of food lying out of his sight. Instead of looking where you point, he sniffs your finger. The world of the dog is all fact and no meaning, and it is precisely this habit of mind that a significant and vocal portion of the world induces upon itself. What does this mean for our continuing dialogue between faith and reason?

As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even when such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. The critique of every experience from below, the voluntary ignoring of meaning and concentration on fact, will always have the same plausibility. There will always be evidence, and every month fresh evidence, to show that religion is only psychological, justice only self-protection, politics only economics, love only lust, and thought itself only cerebral biochemistry.

Chesterton, too, was an articulate defender of the power of reason to plumb the depths of reality when set free from the restrictive boundaries set by modernity upon itself. Disgusted with the reductive and impoverished anthropology and cosmology that sprung from the loins of the scientific revolution, he sought to portray for the materialist the real mistakes he was making.

He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding. His cosmos is smaller than our world. Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth; it is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers, or first love, or fear upon the sea. (Orthodoxy)

We are very much accustomed to accepting explanations for things that are far removed from our experience. We all believe our planet is spinning at a high rate of speed and hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour despite having no perception of this motion whatsoever. Few of us understand the principles at work when we flip on a lightswitch or a computer. Daily we are offered the most preposterous and counterintuitive explanations for such ordinary, simple things as the colors in a sunset or the propulsion of a sailboat into the wind, and we swallow them whole … which is not to say that we should not. They are, after all, true, so far as they go. 

But if it is demanded that we ignore our spontaneous wonder at the beauty of the setting sun or our delight in mastering the wild air using the work of our hands, it is time to politely end the conversation and get back to placating proud mothers and savoring first love.

Ben Stein's "Expelled" and the Reason I Don't Watch PBS

A passing comment from a certain learned Jesuit some months ago prompted me to dive into a subject of significant importance in the public square these days. After following through on his suggestion to pick up a copy of Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, the issues at stake were placed within the context of the larger debate over faith and reason within the long intellectual history that extends to the very roots of western civilization. This had the remarkable result of justifying my (vicious) inclination to buy books I have no immediate intention of reading, for when I came across a copy of Moral Darwinism sitting on my pile of untouched purchases, I experienced the temptation to read it, and gave in. It was written by Ben Wiker, a former professor of mine from Thomas Aquinas College, back when I didn’t have no clue ‘bout nothin’. He led me through 2400 years of intellectual history in a way that recast the way I discerned the principles (explicit or otherwise) that lay below the troubled waters of the “culture war.”

Following this, a thorough search through the First Things archive produced a 130-page collection of articles going back to the mid-nineties that I printed and read on an exercise bike during this ninth-circle-of-hell winter we’ve been having in Chicagoland. A recent exchange in that periodical between Cardinal Schönborn and Stephen Barr of the U. of Delaware has been particularly helpful. Other papers and theses by friends have made their way onto my desk since then, and it’s been a real joy to engage in the pressing philosophical issues of the day with the consciousness that a growth in competence will serve me very well in the mission to present the long tradition of the Church’s teaching on human reason to the faithful.

It’s certainly given me cause to approach the public dialogue with a heftier measure of cynicism than is my natural disposition; these are times that try men’s patience, after all. Without question it’s instilled in me a deference for minds far more capable than my own, on both sides of the issues. While I don’t feel my grasp of the questions would permit me to lay them out for others, I feel a greater confidence in filtering through the great deal of noise that various public figures continue to emit in one another’s general direction.

One thing in common among the authors that I found most compelling was their tendency to distance themselves from the parameters of the debate as it is presented in the media. It’s with this in mind that I’d like to weigh in with a few thoughts on Ben Stein’s new film “Expelled,” which will be released sometime next month, I believe.

I was given the chance to view a pre-production version of this film at the 2008 FOCUS National conference back in January. It is a film you must go watch on opening weekend (which, if the release date isn’t postponed again, happens to coincide with the papal visit). It is a well-done film that wins some points for the Intelligent Design movement, and clarifies some issues with the neo-Darwinian perspective that need to be clarified. It gets into some heavy matter when tracing out the potential consequences of rigorous Darwinism (eugenics, genocide) and its contemporary instantiation in organizations such as Planned Parenthood, while managing to not come across as wacky conspiracy theory. Stein, after all, in addition to being rather erudite, is Jewish, and while this doesn’t give him a license to brand his opponents an anti-Semite on a whim, it does allow the filmmakers to broach the subject convincingly. A visit to the Charles Darwin museum allows Ben to gaze upon a life-size statue of Darwin as if putting a question to him: “Did you see what we would do with your discoveries?” It is one of the most powerful moments of the film, all the more so for its subdued and earnest tone. There is some mockery of figures such as Dawkins in the film, which I could have done without, but overall the approach is civil and measured.

One exception to this is a conversation at the end of the film in which Richard Dawkins, with no real effort necessary on the producers, makes himself look like a deluded scientologist grasping at straws. I watched this conversation with great pleasure (and a new reluctance to acknowledge among the popular atheists even a thimbleful of good faith—which felt more like a wound than a victory). It would not be surprising if the popular scientific culture never takes him seriously again after his willingness to hypothesize that highly developed extraterrestrials are responsible for the beginning of life on earth.

At the very same conference, however, only a day or two before a talk was delivered to about eighty students by a certain Mark Ryland of the Institute for the Study of Nature, in which he laid out a critical perspective of the evolution / ID debate. Alluding to a number of different addresses and articles by Benedict XVI and Cardinal Schönborn, Ryland made it clear that both sides have succumbed to what is known formally as “scientism”: the refusal to acknowledge any form of knowing as valid other than the empirically verifiable. It can at times be referred to in terms of “materialism” or “positivism.” Whatever its specific form, its fundamental attitude is best summed up in the words of one of its foremost representatives, the geneticist Richard Lewontin:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

This sort of talk simplifies things greatly, for it allows people of religious belief to take issue not with those who work within the reductive bounds of science but those who claim that knowledge so gained is exhaustive. With this distinction in hand, we can let the scientists do their work without feeling threatened by their explorations and conclusions, though always conscious that it will be necessary at times to make corrections.

What does this look like? Ideally, science and religion—reason and faith—work to mutually encourage and purify one another. John Paul the Great succinctly noted in his 1988 address to the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences that “science can purify religion from error and superstition, [just as] religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes …” The operative word here is “ideally.” Stephen Jay Gould famously outlined this relationship as between “non-overlapping magisterial authorities,” in which reason and faith, science and religion, exercise sole authority over their respective domains. Only at the point of intersection will any wrist-slapping be necessary, with the net effect that by and large the two realms of science and religion can leave one another alone.

While this bifurcation seems reasonable, there is a catch. When science names itself the arbiter of what is empirical and verifiable, it is in effect denying any possibility for religion to make truth claims by confining the consideration of facts to science alone. What is left to religion (and other non-empirical disciplines, for that matter) are the fuzzy and ultimately unimportant questions of personal meaning, responsibility, and identity. Truth, then, is reduced to what can be verified by experiment—that is, by the scientific method.

This is the “self-limitation of reason” to which Benedict XVI referred so ominously in his highly misunderstood Regensburg address. The effect of this restriction is momentous. As he explains,

... if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science’ so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective.

Since the secularist wonks were busy trying to pin the explosive backlash of Islamic jihadists on the passing remark of this theologian to a university faculty, very few of the pope’s substantial remarks were able to gain a hearing much beyond his immediate listeners present with him that day. This is very unfortunate, because what he had to say was crucial. With regard to what's been said above, it makes clear that the NOMA principle of Stephen Jay Gould (non-overlapping magisteria), one that has been thoroughly internalized by the West, is unsatisfactory.

What is unsatisfactory about it is that it is ultimately a compromise of the human. The secular paradigm of “rational” public debate devoid of any reference to what cannot be assented to by all “reasonable” persons is nothing less than a dehumanized society that is ignorant of where it is headed and which has forgotten where it’s come from.

Just what needs to be done in the face of this situation will be taken up in a later post—perhaps even my next one. (Hint: Benedict has some interesting suggestions.) What’s of interest to me now is what the Intelligent Design movement in general and Ben Stein’s movie in particular can mean for us. Critics of ID point out that agency is never invoked in scientific explanations; the goal of science is to provide explanations of phenomena solely with reference to natural causes. Intelligent design, they claim, is not science, but something else masking itself as science in order to find an audience within our scientifically-minded culture—a Trojan horse of sorts. This seems to be a valid criticism.

However, to accept this does not render ID useless: I believe a particular example of this is Expelled. While it was produced by advocates of ID, the movie prescinds from much explicit endorsement of ID beyond whatever is necessary to establish a basic rapport with the audience over its viewpoint. It consciously restricts itself to two goals: pointing out the holes in Darwinian theory as it now stands, and loosening the deathgrip Darwinists hold over the scientific community that stifles the principled exchange characteristic of good science. This bears a remarkable similarity to JPII’s clarification of religion’s competence to “purify science from idolatry and false absolutes” quoted above.

I am certainly not saying that Expelled is at heart a religious film, doing religious work. What I am saying—nothing more than an echo of Schönborn, Benedict, and others—is that it is neither a scientific nor religious issue, but a philosophical one. This is their critique of the debate: no one wants to acknowledge that it will continue to go nowhere as long as materialists are allowed to determine its parameters through a restriction of the object of reason to matter. Philosophy, and indeed the Church, finds it(her)self in the unique position of having to defend human reason from those who would deny its applicability to the realm of purpose, meaning, and all things human. Expelled does a fine job of raising the question in a compelling way, and in that sense, religion finds its philosophical perspective a welcome bedfellow.

If there’s some back and forth on these questions, so much the better. After all, if it’s a matter of survival of the fittest, we wouldn’t want those Darwinists getting fat and happy, would we?

(By the way, if you are interested in that compilation of articles from First Things, which includes the relevant correspondence generated after each article or series of articles was published, post a comment indicating your desire and I’ll send it to you via email. This does, of course, presume you are not posting anonymously.)

After These Messages ...

Circumstances have conspired against my posting this last week and a half, which has frustrated me to no end as I have some thoughts cooking which are in desperate need of publication. Look for a post on faith, reason, science, and, yes, BENEDICT in the next couple of days. Be assured it will be droll and opaque to all but the most tenacious readers.

In the meanwhile, I highly encourage you to read Amy Welborn's thoughts on the upcoming papal visit and the media spinstorm that is brewing.

The One Thing Necessary

When there's not much for me to say, I'll let others continue to speak.

‘It would strengthen my faith in the Holy Eucharist, if I could only watch the Holy Eucharist making a difference, from year to year, in my own life.’ For goodness’ sake don’t talk like that. I’m sure we aren’t meant to think of the grace of holy communion as something which can be gauged and weighed up in a balance and written down in the form of a debit and credit account. Do let us get it into our heads that holy communion is an intimacy with Jesus Christ, and that if we do our best to throw our hearts open to his Sacred Heart, there is bound to be an influence passing from him into us. It is the law of friendship.

Msgr. Ronald Knox