March 25: LADY DAY

[First published in 2015]

Some questions for Dr. David Pence on this Feast of the Annunciation:

If we had lived in England during the period between the 12th and 18th centuries, we'd be celebrating today as the beginning of the New Year, right? 
                                   
Yes, here we are, exactly nine months before Christmas. This is the day that Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit -- and the Word was made flesh.

Jesus Christ who has always existed as the Son of God is now, with the Virgin's "fiat," incarnated. He is begotten, not made. The human species has been welded to a Divine Person in the Trinity. The species now has an incarnated Head-a center of meaning and gravity that integrates humans in a Body that will incorporate us  forever in an interpersonal relationship of love.

Creation -- and specifically, the human species -- had reached its epitome!  (It will take about eight weeks for Baby Jesu in the womb to become half an inch in size.)

We need to have some rough figures in our head. Matter (the protons, neutrons, and electrons in all atoms) was created almost 14 billion years ago. The first life on earth—the first bacterial cell was imprinted by the Holy Spirit about 4 billion years ago.

The first parents of the human species were probably created around 150,000 years ago. But it is 2000 years ago that the fulcrum event of humanity occurred. This is the true Enlightenment: when God's plan becomes incarnate in a person. The Head takes form and the rest of history is us filling in His Body.  

Where is our species heading?

Our biological destiny is not to eventually produce some new successful mutant that will evolve into a higher form of life. Quite the contrary.

Our highest male and female forms have already appeared and the task before us is to now conform to them more perfectly. At the Annunciation the feminine form was so receptive, so attentive to the Spirit, so submissive to the will of God that her own flesh was incarnated by the Spirit begetting the Son. All of us, as males and females, are trying to bring our souls to that level of responsiveness to the Spirit and submission to the Father so we can play our roles.

                                     

You say that humans are a 'eusocial' species. What does that mean, and what does it have to do with Christianity?

Actually it has a lot  to do with the Body of Christ, the nature of the Eucharist, the meaning of the Church, and the analogical reality between the Trinity and the destiny of the human species. First, I must apologize that I have been unsuccessful in communicating this biological truth which is so clear to me in my head, but which I always fall short at explaining in print or during our conversations.

"Eusocial organism" is a descriptive term from sociobiology, which is the study of the social structure of animals. It's a kind of subset of the larger term ecology. You know how fish swim in schools and wolves run in packs with certain social roles. Well, there is a group of insects called eusocial insects in which the ties of sociobiology go way beyond the pack and herd structures of other animals. The eusocial insects tend to act as a single organism. Reproduction is highly restricted and (wonder of wonders) what distinguishes one sex from the other is not the presence of a sex chromosome (like the 'y' chromosome distinguishes human males from females), but one gender comes from fertilized eggs and the other are "virgin births." Unfertilized eggs become, for instance, male bees. The perfection of bees occurs in how they function as a single organism. The perfection of  human beings will be realized in how we participate as eusocial members of the Body of Christ.

Our alpha male whom we worship is of a virgin birth (parthenogenesis in biology). Our most basic sacrament binds us together by eating the flesh that makes us one Body. We are still persons but we are incorporated persons. In ecology there is another term called symbiosis: organisms living together in some deeply interrelated union. Let me just say these biological phenomena are deeply suggestive of the Trinity, and the interpersonal destiny of human beings in the Body of Christ.

On this feast day of the Incarnation we are celebrating the "engraftment" of the human species into the Second Person of the Trinity. It is true that God comes into the womb of the Virgin and develops, but this is just as Christ comes into us now as the food of the Eucharist. We are emerging as the eusocial organism which the human species was destined to be from the beginning. There are all sorts of physical lessons written in the book of nature which help us see how man's nature is so much more "plastic" (capable of being conformed) than the angels. Lucifer, to his great consternation, recognized what great things the Almighty had planned for His lowly ones.


What's the connection between the Greeks achieving their independence from the Turks, and the feast day we're celebrating?

Ever since the sack of Constantinople in 1453 (marking the demise of the Byzantine Empire's thousand-year run), Greece had been under the thumb of Muslim rule.

On this day in 1821, however, the war of Greek independence against the Ottoman Turks began when Bishop Germanos raised the flag of revolution over a monastery -- and 'Freedom or death' became the motto. The struggle took years but when all seemed lost, the British and the French and the Russians came to the aid of the Greeks. Finally in 1829, Greece became an independent state; and March 25th is their high holy celebration each year.

When you think of the Greek nation, it is fine to remember Pericles and the polis of Athens and Sparta. However, it is the height of ancestral impiety and religious amnesia to forget that the blood and arms that set the Greek nation free came in the name of Christ, not Socrates!

"Through the bottomless mercy of our God,

  one born on high will visit us

to give light to those who walk in darkness..."

              (Gospel of St Luke, chapter 1)

UPDATE: Take a look at this article on the Orthodox patriarch, and how the Russian believers celebrate the feast in Moscow's Cathedral of the Annunciation.

It will be a great American tragedy if we insist on blinding ourselves to the common Christian ties we have with the better and deeper part of Mother Russia.



A line from Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop:

"A life need not be cold, or devoid of grace in the worldly sense, if it were filled by Her who was all the graces; Virgin-daughter, Virgin-mother, girl of the people and Queen of Heaven: le rêve suprême de la chair  [the highest ideal of the flesh]."

Friday BookReview: "Aristotle's Children"

[first published November 11, 2011]



"St. Thomas called art 'reason in making.' This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, this is because reason has lost ground among us. As grace and nature have been separated, so imagination and reason have been separated, and this always means an end to art. The artist uses his reason to discover an answering reason in everything he sees. For him, to be reasonable is to find, in the object, in the situation, in the sequence, the spirit which makes it itself. This is not an easy or simple thing to do. It is to intrude upon the timeless, and that is only done by the violence of a single-minded respect for the truth."
                                                          (Flannery O'Connor)



For the tale of the great Sundering, grab a copy of Richard Rubenstein's 2003 book, Aristotle's Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Dark Ages.

Aristotle's writings had been lost to the West for almost a thousand years. How did medieval universities and the leading churchmen react to their re-discovery in the 12th century? To Rubenstein's surprise, it turns out they "tried to modernize the Church by reconciling faith and reason" -- refusing to settle, as we moderns have, for a "split between the cultures of the heart and the head."

There will always be tension between reason and faith, but history shows us it can be a creative tension. Today's world of 'value-free' science and 'reason-free' religion is a house dangerously divided.

It is high time to restore the Aristotelian consensus. Faith and reason were not implacable enemies in the medieval era, and they need not be in our day.

There is no justification for the modern world settling for "a coldly objectivist science and a passionately subjectivist religion."

Professor Rubenstein writes of the malign influence of William of Ockham with his philosophy of Nominalism. It's a shame that someone such as Peter Kreeft hasn't written a book on the English Franciscan who died in the mid-14th century during the Black Death -- and of the deep influence he had on the thought of the Reformation. (Luther was trained at the University of Erfurt in nominalist theology.)

                                   

Hobbes

                                                                   
Who does Rubenstein say were the two leading Aristotle-haters of the early modern period? Martin Luther ("no one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle") and Thomas Hobbes (contra Aristotle's notion that politics is a branch of ethics, he asserted that the law of the state is the law). Rubenstein calls Hobbes "the most brilliant spokesman of the new ruling class," those elites who wanted to be free of all restraints on their power -- thus they wanted no truck with the ideas of Aristotle or Aquinas about reason and morality. Hobbes carried the new day with his glorification of will and power.

Aristotle

                                                                 

"Medieval students did not have to agree with him on every point -- in fact, on some points, Christians were expected to disagree -- but for four centuries, one could not begin a discussion of metaphysics, natural science, logic, theology, ethics, aesthetics, or politics without referring to Aristotle's views and dealing respectfully with them."

Catholic publisher Mark Brumley has written:

"The irony is profound. The Reformation sought to recover 'genuine Christianity' by hacking through what it regarded as the vast overgrowth of medieval theology. Yet to do so, the Reformers wielded swords forged in the fires of the worst of medieval theology – the decadent scholasticism of Nominalism."

UPDATE -- From another review of Professor Rubenstein's book:

"For, unlike those 17th-century Inquisitors who forced Galileo to recant, 12th-century Archbishop Raymund I of Toledo was one of the unrecognized heroes of Western culture, who 'did more than any man to make the treasures of Greek philosophy and science available to the Latin world... and opened the door to advanced Arab and Jewish ideas,' Rubenstein writes. Establishing a translation center in Toledo, he recruited 'the best scholars available... whether Christian, Jew, Muslim, Latin, Greek, or Slav.' "
                                       

Toledo is less than 50 miles from Madrid. It was the first great city of Al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) to be conquered by a Christian kingdom:

"When Castilian king Alfonso IV conquered the city in 1085, he found out that there were plenty of original works in the libraries of Toledo, including the remaining works from the library of the caliph of Cordoba, which had managed to gather up to 400,000 volumes."

Friday BookReview: DANTE in this Year of Mercy

(This was first published June 26, 2015. 

Pope Francis is urging Catholics to pick up The Divine Comedy as a way to contemplate the everlasting mercies of our Father in heaven.)


                                       

Dante was born in Florence (c.1265), where he achieved literary renown and political power... but was forced into exile for twenty years, and died in his mid-50's in Ravenna on the east coast of Italy.

Here is a brief video introduction to his DIVINE COMEDY. 

The journalist Rod Dreher has a new book on how that classic work lifted him out of illness and the 'slough of despond' -- and renewed his heart to appreciate the glory of the eternal Lord.

                            

                                            

                                                                                      

The thing that jumped out at me in Dreher's musings was his insistence that Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) kept two things in balance -- he absolutely loved Holy Mother Church, while he shook with hatred toward clerics who had made their peace with the stench of deep corruption:

"The poet was able to stare down the evil of the clergy, including its Supreme Pastors, condemn them as devils, and yet affirm the goodness of God through the Church, despite its rotten state. This astounded me."    (page 157)

Rod Dreher told a friend: "Dante decided that his wrath was keeping him from doing what he needed to do to get back on the straight path. Virgil told him to use good memories, peaceful memories, to fight off the ones that provoked him to wrath."

I wasn't expecting so much of the tale told by Mr. Dreher to revolve around his family in rural Louisiana, but it works well as a vehicle to gradually draw the reader into the medieval world of Italy and to appreciate the poet's imaginative limning of what awaits each of us when "the roll is called up yonder."

Dreher came to realize that when he moved back to the small town of his parents, he "made false idols of family and place" -- not making those goods subservient to "the ultimate good, which is unity with God." Hoping for a deep reconciliation with his father, Rod ended by realizing that he was "searching for unconditional love where it cannot be found... I had enthroned family and place -- and their personification, my father -- in my heart in the place of God. This was the greatest sin that led me to the dark wood in the middle of the journey of my life."

Mr. Dreher is also blessed to have a wise pastor (a former cop who got burnt out) instructing him:
"The Church is a spiritual hospital... Grace is the medicine that will heal us. Prayer and fasting open our souls to grace."

How did Dante Alighieri view sin? As a metaphysical phenomenon.

Mr. Dreher explains: "To sin is to introduce disharmony into the system... [T]he entire universe runs on the power of love. Sin, therefore, can be thought of as being like a blood clot that disrupts the smooth flow of love... Sin is not an abstract idea but something that is woven into the fabric of reality."    (page 130)

The historian Christopher Dawson called Dante the "truest son of Thomas Aquinas." In the poem, the Florentine genius encounters the Angelic Doctor who urges humility and patience on him -- to rein in his judgment of others, to "affirm the goodness of life despite its injustices." Exile is the human condition; thus, begging mercy from God -- and being merciful -- is our only hope.

                            

Guided by Virgil (L), Dante visits the gluttons in Purgatory

Rod Dreher praises the audio teaching series on Dante's classic by Bill Cook and Ron Herzman. A listener's review included this anecdote: 

"[The two men have had] extensive experience in teaching Dante (a) at the university level, (b) in the Attica maximum security prison [in western New York], and (c) to a group of monks. One of the fascinating revelations was how the young university students preferred reading 'Inferno'; the prison inmates preferred 'Purgatorio'; and the Trappist monks preferred 'Paradiso.' 

But what about Dante's original readers in the Middle Ages? ... [They] would have embraced the totality of the mystical experience, as opposed to any single portion of the poem."

The character Dante says: "Then it was clear to me that everywhere in heaven is Paradise, even if the grace of the highest Good does not rain down in equal measure."
(All forms of Procrustean egalitarianism -- along with mindless libertarianism -- will forever cease, along with so much else, when we depart this vale of tears.)

Here is a remarkable EWTN interview with Mr. Dreher.

UPDATE: An excerpt from an essay that Mr. Dreher wrote for 'Intercollegiate Review' --

For Dante, all sin results from disordered desire: either loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way.This is countercultural, for we live in an individualistic, libertine, sensual culture in which satisfying desire is generally thought to be a primary good.  

For contemporary readers, especially young adults, Dante’s encounter with Francesca da Rimini, one of the first personages he meets in Hell, is deeply confounding. Francesca is doomed to spend eternity in the circle of the Lustful, inextricably bound in a tempest with her lover, Paolo, whose brother—Francesca’s husband—found them out and murdered them both.
Francesca explains to Dante how she and Paolo fell into each other’s arms. How could she have controlled herself? she says. 

"Love, that excuses no one loved from loving, / Seized me so strongly with delight in him / That, as you see, he never leaves my side. / Love led us straight to sudden death together." 

She ends by saying that reading romantic literature together caused them to fall hopelessly and uncontrollably in love—unto death, at the hands of her jealous husband.
To modern ears, Francesca’s apologia sounds both tragic and beautiful. But the discerning reader will observe that she never takes responsibility for her actions. In her mind, her fate is all the fault of love—or rather, Love. We know, however, that it is really lust, and that her grandiose language in praise of romantic passion is all a gaudy rationalization. It’s a rationalization that is quite common in our own time, as everything in our popular culture tells us that desire is the same thing as love, and that love, so considered, is its own justification.

Bishop Barron of Los Angeles offers his tribute to Dante.

Friday BookReview: Remi Brague on the Structure of the World & the Purpose of Man

by Dr. David Pence


Remi Brague (b. 1947) is a French professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the University of Munich. He is an expert in Islamic medieval thought and philology. I read his The Law of God, a comparative historical theological reflection on law in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; and then turned to The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought.

I teach an integrated four-year Catholic science curriculum which begins with An Introduction to the Physical World and ends senior year with a study of The Human Organism. Brague described his project as "attempting something like a history of beings-in-the-world." How men describe the universe ('worldly wisdom') determines how man understands human nature. As Brague explains in his introduction: "[What] enables man to achieve the fullness of his humanity was conceived at least in a dominant tradition of thought to be linked to cosmology." Uncoupling this linkage between the workings of the universe and the purpose of man is a mark of modernity.
                 

No reviewer can simplify and order Professor Brague. One must describe a symphony, and then marvel at the philology interludes. So, instead of a summary, I will briefly describe two historical traditions of integrated cosmology/anthropology and two ruptures of the synthesis.

"The cosmology of the Middle Ages lies between Timaeus and Abraham." The Timaeus dialogue by Plato (360 B.C.) is concerned with the nature of the physical world and man's place in the larger reality. Timaeus proposes that the unregulated motion of the heavenly bodies is the divine order that is to be imitated by man. Man is an upright animal with a neck that bends so he can gaze at the heavens from their rising to setting. These perfect spheres and perfect circular movements present man with a transcendent portion of a hierarchical universe which he can imitate. This allows man to seek what is above, ordering his soul over his chest and his chest over his loins. (The soul commands the heart. The heart obeys the soul and commands the passions. The disordered man -- who becomes more bestial than the animals -- allows the passions to command and is out of harmony with the Universe. He is unto himself -- the literal meaning of idios -- an idiot. Brague mocks "silly Promethean tirades" as he labels disobedient man, not a hero, but a deficient man).

These formulations are not all in the Timaeus dialogue itself, but they all spring from its basic sensibility. For many ancients, the stars were animate beings possessing higher souls than man. The celestial bodies were not commanded, but self-regulated. Man found his place in the command structure by "studying the sky" (or "contemplating the heavens.") This was a fundamental cosmological/anthropological synthesis.
                                           

Da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man" (c. 1490)

Brague presents both Aristotle and Socrates as dissenters from this synthesis. Aristotle built human morality around phronesis -- a practical wisdom needed in ethical and political life. This kind of wisdom owed little to the larger "wisdom of the world." Aristotle had much to say about the structure of the world, but his moral arguments about ethics and politics did not rest on the structure of the world. In this, he was like Socrates and unlike Plato. Socrates was dismissive of the skies as a template for human happiness and morality. The study of good and evil was not to be found in physics (the study of nature), but in the polis where man learns about being man with his brothers. Brague writes: "For us viewing physical things as axiologically neutral has been a given for a very long time. We no longer see that such a conclusion had to be taken by force... (that was) the 'Socratic revolution.'" This is not a compliment. Here we have a subtle hint why so many anthropocentric humanists and boosters of 'Western Civilization' idolize Socrates, while downplaying the larger narrative and metaphysical actors of Christianity.

The monotheistic religions all postulate a radical connection between the nature of the cosmos and the meaning of man. The "excesses of Abraham" include: 1) God alone is the Creator with nothing limiting his free will; 2) the world had a beginning in time; 3) the creation of our visible world was preceded by that of an invisible world of forms or angels who are intermediaries of a continuing creation; and 4) the visible world is ruled by a teleology focusing on man that recapitulates all of creation in sin, but also of the resurrection of the body ultimately focusing everything on God alone.

Brague says that after Abraham the way the world manifests God is authentic but "nature is no longer how God reveals himself the best. The Revealed Law (for the Jews) and the Word Incarnate (for the Christians) say much more about God than does the world."

Brague calls Saint Augustine a "cosmoclast" because he held it was not necessary to know the structure of the world as long as one knows the Creator of it. The study of the world was not prohibited but it "loses a good part of its interest." (This tendency is alive and well in Catholic philosophy and theology departments at our universities which are staffed by men abysmally, often invincibly, ignorant of basic physical sciences.)

The introduction of the Creator, utterly apart from creation, dethroned the stars from their lofty, often divine, spot in classical cosmology. The Incarnation reconfigured the stars beginning at Bethlehem. The stars were de-animated by Albertus Magnus (teacher of St Thomas Aquinas) who said the celestial bodies are "deaf and mute."

Much earlier, Moses warned: "And beware, lest you lift up your eyes to heaven and when you see the Sun, the moon and stars, all the host of heaven you be drawn away and worship them and serve them, things which the Lord has allotted to all peoples."

Just as crucial as dethroning the stars in space was the religious revolution in concepts that would be played out two millenia later in the twentieth century as the Belgian Jesuit, Georges Lemaitre, argued for a beginning of matter (the Big Bang) against the steady-state infinite Universe concept of materialist physicists Hoyle, Einstein, and Hubble. Brague emphasizes what can easily be ignored: "The concept of world, until revealed religions, belonged in the realm of nature. With those religions it entered into the realm of history." A change in vocabulary is a sign of this. The world can also be referred to by a temporal name -- saeculum -- the age.

The World was one with Nature, but with revealed religions the cosmos is placed in time. The historicizing of the cosmos will feature the act of creation, the fall and subsequent incompleteness of man in the world, and the redemption culminating in the final tribulation and resolution ending the world as we know it. The world can still be studied and contemplated but now it receives its totality as an act of God's Will.

"It is indispensable to consider all beings as they really are," said the Jewish philosopher Maimonides. "Astronomy and natural sciences -- those are matters necessary for the apprehension of God's governance as this relation is in truth not just imaginings."

The idea of imitation of the world is no longer seeking to imitate the regular and perfect movement of the celestial spheres, but to obey the Will of God who created and ordered the movement of those spheres for a purpose with tiny man as a major teleological actor.

While Catholic and Jewish thinkers may have de-emphasized the study of the world for higher pursuits, they never sundered their understanding of the cosmos from their description of man. That becomes a very different story for post-Reformation Christianity -- a development not dealt with by Mr. Brague. (See 'Karl Barth's Failure' by Matthew Rose and The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory).

The sundering of the cosmos from anthropology by atheistic moderns is the subject of Brague's final chapters. Modern man can see that the stars are not a perfect set of spheres in perfect order. They are nuclear furnaces, dissipating, forming elements while dealing death. Every particle of matter is obeying physical laws but the laws are leading to cold and isolation. This cannot be imitated or we must quit on life. So the modern world posits a cosmos that is, at best, ethically indifferent and in most instances actually hostile to life. The perfect movement of perfect spheres is untenable as multiple phenomena in outer space, forever inaccessible, are occurring. The "sky died" as it was shown to be governed by the same physical laws as the earth. The falling apple explained the revolution of the earth around the sun. The imitation "of Nature known too well" becomes "shocking for the Moderns."
                                 

The seemingly more accurate view of the animal world as a battleground presented by Hobbes and Darwin, as well as Sade and Marx, was a model for criminality and competition -- not communion and transcendence. The new rebels of the biological, political, and psychological arenas wrote as if God did not exist. But they also ran from the whole cosmos. They shielded their eyes from astronomy and causality in the pre-human physical world as they formulated their new "world" visions. Their mini-Socratic revolutions made man the creator of a new material world with an embarrassingly limited picture of matter. Their worlds were no longer real totalities. It is one thing to have to suffer the foibles of Darwinistic evolution, Marxist history, and Freudian psychology. But to suggest these men see a larger world than a peasant kneeling in prayer says more about the loss of nerve among Christian intellectuals than any deficiency in Christian metaphysics. Remi Brague suffers no such loss of nerve. He has that large soul (the meaning of 'magnanimous') which distinguishes man as the creature who can observe and participate in the deepest manner in the totality of being.

There is a solution, says Brague. God, man, and the world must all be accounted for. The subjective world of the minds that we enter into contains both "our cradles and the galaxies." Above all, the world is not limited to the physical mass weighing upon us. The world must embrace a totality; and the mass in the universe is an awful lot of expanding matter but it is not a totality. "Forming a relationship between an idea of the world and anthropology does not consist in rejecting the infiniteness of the universe for the warm intimacy of environment." A cosmological anthropology or an anthropological cosmology can be reasserted in "an even tighter bond."

Professor Brague does not conclude by explicitly coupling Christian metaphysics with modern astronomy and biology as the source of "a dual reformulation of world and man conceived in their reciprocal relationship." He has left that proposal to his reviewers and fellow educators.



UPDATE: Check out this interview with Mr. Brague, conducted in the spring of 2016.

Friday BookReview: rediscovering Aquinas on the emotions

[first published February 1, 2013]

“The nature of our passions is to buttress the soul in knowing and loving God.”

In the Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion, a young Dominican priest, Fr. Nicholas Lombardo, O.P. turns his STL (licentiate of sacred theology.) into a book. This is usually a very bad idea--but not this time. He is an heir and contributor to a century of intellectual ferment in Catholic moral theology. "Virtue Ethics" is a tradition found in Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and revived in notable works by Joseph Pieper (1939), Servais Pinckaers (1964), Elizabeth Anscombe (1958) and Alistair Macintyre (1971).
"For Aquinas, ethics involves more than the analysis of discrete choices: it is concerned with persons more than their actions. The virtuous life is about the cultivation of a fully human personality...virtue is the expansion of the self to its fullest potential for greatness, happiness and creativity. The parameters of virtue are determined by the teleology of human nature not by rules or conventions." (p 242)
What Fr. Lombardo brings to this project of his elders is a sustained explication of Thomas Aquinas on emotions. He argues one cannot really understand an ethical system based on virtues unless he fully understands an anthropology based on natural appetites, passions, and affectivity. Those are the categories of Aquinas, which Lombardo fully draws out before he suggests how to apply the multivalent word of "emotion." It is a testament to his insight that Fr. Lombardo won the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise by suggesting that Aquinas is an indispensable teacher on the emotions-a category he never mentioned by name. Passions, natural, sensitive and intellectual appetites, inclinations, affectus, and habitus: ---so many terms--so much reality. They help scaffold the metaphysical "cathedral" of Aquinas's mature thought. It is the singular achievement of the author that he shows and reshows us how these different phenomena fit together in the emotional life of humans. And he is certainly right that an appreciation of passions, affections and appetites gives us a much sharper focus on the targets of different virtues and the integrative actions of grace.
The book begins, "Aquinas's account of the emotions centers on his account of desire". The account of man and his desires is set in a grand narrative of exitus-reditus--of God's desire to create and our desires to return to Him. Aquinas explained the perfection of different emotions with specific virtues inside the larger context of a "metaphysics of appetite". "Aquinas view of passion and telos does not derive from philosophical reflection alone. There is a massive theological premise that is never explicitly stated because it is so obvious: the passions carry us toward our telos because they were created by God and thus they are trustworthy. God is the guarantor of desire. In Him there is a metaphysical basis for welcoming and trusting the passions."(p43).
"The inner logic of Aquinas on emotions is difficult to penetrate." says the author for "Aquinas can be maddenly discreet about his theological agenda".
Aquinas is "discreet" about theology the way fish are discreet about water. The Angelic Doctor swam in a sea drenched in God's living presence. When he spoke of natural law he could not imagine such a notion divorced from Divine Law. He lived within a different set of unspoken givens. So for him, man is made for friendship with God and all his passions and appetites are ordered to that end. The unplugging of man from his constitutive relationship with God crisscrossed his circuits and thus the passions can often be chaotically arrayed against man's "telos." But it was not so in the beginning and it is not so in man's fundamental nature. Aquinas understands original sin and the consequent loss of sanctifying grace as a disruption of man's NATURAL STATE -- being in obedient love with God.
"One of the most crucial elements of Aquinas's account of the emotions is the premise that the passions naturally obey reason and naturally tend toward reason. Everything hangs on whether he is right on this premise. If he is not, the passions cannot be the seat of virtue... The natural obedience of passion to reason is the foundation of Aquinas's account of how virtue and grace perfect human affectivity."(p238-9) "The human appetite remains fundamentally oriented toward the authentic telos of the human person even after the fall. However the more fundamental challenge to his positive evaluation of human appetite remains: the fact that the experience of disordered desire is inextricably part of our fallen experience of desire." (p231) While Lombardo and Aquinas grant the reality of deeply disordered appetites (and they use just that language to describe certain proclivities) they insist that the nature of our passions is to buttress the soul in knowing and loving God. We often think of disordered passions in terms of too much intensity. Actually the source of disorder is more often either a deficit of intensity toward a proper object or an emotion falsely directed to an improper object.
There are many rewards in letting this scholar show us the picture that Thomas sketched of the desires and affections of man. Thomas drew a multi-dimensional man with a coherence of passions and soul because he drew him against the backdrop of the whole story of creation and Scripture. This is no journey into archaic language but a profound description of men who live today. The categories of this explanation provide a looking glass for self-reflection. Consider love and hate, desire and revulsion, joy and sorrow as fundamental emotions. Serving these basic desires and affections are hope and desire, daring and fear, and anger. These passions are not to be suppressed by a bludgeoning Will. They are here to help the Will to desire and love God more intensely. So let us add to the examination of conscience an examen of emotions. What are the proper objects for my emotions? How puny or robust is their expression?
I don't desire God enough. I don't hate the devil with near the emotion he deserves. I am angered by slights to myself but tepid in rousing ire at injustice to others. I have adjusted my emotions in synchrony with the worldly lesson not to feel revulsion at repulsive evil actions. I smirk when I should cringe. I tolerate what I should abhor. Somehow I consider fear of hell a relic of an earlier age or a deficit of less perfect contrition. Examining the emotions can redirect the examination of conscience. This practical fruit of virtue ethics, only partially realized in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, comes to greater maturation as specific virtues are more explicitly evaluated in terms of corresponding emotions. The discussions of justice and charity were particularly profound and practical. (Readers will sense a special joy when Fr. Lombardo's footnotes credit not a book he has read but a spiritual conference he attended in the course of his everyday life as a Dominican. Alistair Mcintyre predicted the penetrative power of such words coming from a man being forged by communal life. It was a Dominic though, not a Benedict, responsible for the formative polis.)
This book (like Aquinas) treats Sanctifying Grace and the gifts of the Holy Spirit as fundamental to man's flourishing. There was no attempt here to squeeze man's soul into the narrow linguistic confines of an honors course at a secular University. Grace and the Holy Spirit were not considered embarrassing ancient relatives who the young intellectual must hide away while trying to win his place among modern scholars. How refreshing to see a scholar unafraid of the sacred. How right to see a priest propose the efficacy of sacraments.
The Dominican godfather of the revival of virtue ethics was Rev. Servais Pinckaers (1925-2008). In 1952 he wrote his STL thesis on Le "Surnaturel" by Henri de Lubac,S.J. The theological project of deLubac was to reunify the constitutive relationship of man's nature and God's grace. He thought this had been torn asunder not by atheists but Catholic "manual theology". Today we see a peculiar version of this same tendency in civic discourse among Catholic "public intellectuals." Armed with an inflated view of their impeccable reason, they leave Scripture and God at the city gate and think they will explain natural law, the rights of the unborn or the purpose of national life stripped of spiritual telos. Fr. Lombardo counters the practical atheism of our day and the still present stultifying naturalism of Catholic intellectual life. His book is a tribute to Fathers De Lubac and Pinckaers and should have many edifying ramifications in Catholic psychology, preaching and public rhetoric. He shows us in the most striking way that nature desires grace and grace fortifies nature. That desire is especially engraved in the emotions of man who can neither live nor flourish without the God who made him.

Check out this earlier post with its link to a videotaped talk by Father Lombardo.

                                 

Spiritual Reality and a full tonal palette of Emotions

by Dr. David Pence

G.K. Chesterton wrote that a man who did not regard the devil as real, would forever picture reality on too drab a canvas.  Artists describe tone or value as the shades and tints of colors—how bright is the brightest and how dark is the darkest.  A “high key” painting employs a full range of tones and it affects how all the colors (hues) interact.

If our understanding of reality includes the full cast of characters – the whole dramatis personae from the eternal triune God to the fallen angelic creature Lucifer – then we will need a full tonal palette of emotions to respond to these beings. Our love should always dominate and surpass our hatred. God deserves a much deeper emotion than His adversary.

If we have no hatred for the devil in our emotional palette, then we are not apprehending and responding properly to Reality. If we lack this hatred, two very different pathologies can ensue. This deficit tends to dull a particular set of emotions: anger at injustice, aversion to evil, and fear of Hell. This is the tonal error of the American bishops.

On the other hand, hatred without its proper object may run amuck and consume us in hatred of our father or President; or some past personal malefactor; or a perceived racial or class enemy. That is the emotional tonality of the sexual Left. Man cannot disengage from the basic truths of reality—not in his comprehension and not in his emotional response.  He must employ all tonal values of his emotions because the picture of revelation has been drawn in high key.

                     

Whet, Suppress, and Reorder – Aiming Virtues at Emotions

Dr. Pence writes:

The original sin of Adam disassociated man from the ordering vitality of sharing in God’s life. This darkened our intellects and weakened our wills.  A light bulb is dysfunctional – not depraved – when it is disconnected from the electrical current for which it was made. The filament only works properly in relation to an external current.  That is why babies need baptism, not because they have chosen sin, but because they are disastrously disconnected.

Grace, faith, and religious education are all aimed at enlightening our intellects.  No serious Christian accepts the darkened intellect as his static life-state.  But with our slackened wills – our puny love for God, and all the disorders of appetites and affections that follow that paltriness of spiritual desire – we make peace. We take our desires as givens, and discipline our wills to become bludgeons instructed by the intellect to suppress our excessive passions.  We conquer our defective emotional drives with “will power.”  This leaves us desiccated men who no longer commit certain sins of passion, but are incapable of the magnanimity of soul which marks the person who "loves much."

Where your heart is, there is your treasure. Blessed are those who hunger for justice, and thirst for righteousness. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife or goods. These are all commands to order our appetites, affections, or emotions.

The virtue ethics movement (see Servais Pinckaers, O.P. and Romanus Cessario, O.P.) and the lucid work on Aquinas and emotions (The Logic of Desire discussed in this taped talk by Nicholas Lombardo, O.P.) are present-day Dominican contributions that refocus our virtues on the training of our emotions.

Deficiency of desire for God can be whetted; deficiency of desire for one’s wife can be rekindled; disordered desire for one’s neighbor can be repressed; apathy in the face of evil can give way to daring; and a disregard for Satan can be overcome by a cultivation of hatred for that vile serpent.

If certain well-regarded acts of the atheistic sexual revolution no longer cause physiological and moral aversion in one’s stomach and soul, then the emotional battle that decides group elections has been won by the other side. My modest proposal in the battle to awaken and reorder our desires and emotions is to learn virtue theology from Dominicans, and another set of lessons from Jewish and Islamic culture.  Both have long-standing traditions ("Stoning the Devil" and "Scapegoating") which cultivate those less popular but utterly necessary hatreds and aversions needed to expose, isolate, and cast out the Evil One.

"Bishops seem to think that anger at sin is un-Christian"

Any bishop worth his salt is always striving to elevate his fraternity of priests to become “men in full.”  A true spiritual father is vigilant, as well, about preserving any part of the Church’s rich patrimony that is being slighted.

Having come across an essay that Leon Podles wrote three years ago, I can only wonder why the “Touchstone” magazine editor – with his refusal to go along with our generation’s willful ignorance about Thomas Aquinas’ view of anger – is not being called daily by American bishops, asking him to come and address his priestly troops.

Even a man with such a towering legacy as Joe Paterno – who had been molded by the Jesuits at Brooklyn Prep – came to the end of his life knowing in his heart that he had not gotten angry enough at the evil of sin.

Yell bloody murder in the public square or “punch Jerry out”

If there’s one lesson from the Sandusky trial – and the countless other sex-abuse tragedies that have come to light in recent years – is that passivity allows a widening circle of lives to be destroyed.

Maybe Cicero (d. 43 BC), in his comments on politics, was onto something broader:

"Sometimes if you find yourself stuck in politics, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through."

"When you see with, not through, the eye"

The late Malcolm Muggeridge, who spent much of his life on both sides of the BBC cameras, would often recite these lines from William Blake:

"This Life's dim windows of the soul
Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole,
And leads you to believe a lie
When you see with, not through, the eye."

Eastern Orthodox Christians speak of man's spiritual eye as the 'nous.'  This essay from the New Liturgical Movement blog goes into detail on the "eye of the heart;" and how trinitarian anthropology became skewed when, contra the Apostle Paul, we began to equate soul and spirit.

(There is a cantankerous streak in man that always wants to "improve" things by knocking off a portion of any three-legged stool...)
                     
One of the links mentioned in the essay is to a piece by Stratford Caldecott -- which is, in part, a call to steer between the rock of Rationalism and the whirlpool of Romanticism.  Here is his comment on contraception:

"The sexual relationship, for example, if it is not open to new life, collapses into a form of narcissism. Connected with this is a strong sense of what is wrong with the act of contraception. To contracept is wrong because by acting against the being of the child who might otherwise come to exist through the act; it turns the relationship back into a dualistic one, no longer 'asymmetrical' and no longer open to a mysterious 'third person.' It is to act (however unknowingly) not just against the potential child but against the presence within the marriage of the Holy Spirit, who is the Giver of Life."

Mr. Caldecott on how we got in this pickle:

"Rationalism cannot be overcome by mere intensity of sentiment. Romanticism cannot be overcome by more careful planning and calculation. We are caught in the dichotomy characteristic of Western thought since Descartes: the radical division between cold objectivity ('clear and distinct ideas') and unintelligent subjectivity. According to Christian 'non-dualism', if two realities are to be united without losing their distinctiveness, they must find their unity in a third. If this is applied not to the relationship between persons, but to the human faculties within the individual, it suggests that reason and intuition, thought and feeling, may find their unity and fulfilment in a third faculty, the 'intelligence of the heart'... "

[The papal encyclical reaffirming the ban on artificial birth control, 'Humanae Vitae,' was published in the summer of 1968.  In January of that pivotal year, Malcolm Muggeridge resigned his rectorship of Edinburgh University in protest of the campus health center's decision to dispense contraceptive pills.  A decade and a half later, Muggeridge and his wife joined the Catholic Church.]

Christ cast out the darkness; Rene Descartes' philosophy had the opposite effect

One historian has written: "Philosophically, the Enlightenment began when Descartes made a search for clear and distinct ideas to serve as a foundation for knowledge."

Most folks today, in the disorder we call modernity, would concede that was a bootless search by the Frenchman who wrote all his major works in the Netherlands and died in Sweden.

From an interview with philosopher Peter Kreeft:

Christians today seem to practice a "sanctified rationalism." We don't tap into the sense of a higher reason that seems necessary to begin to apprehend the idea of a mysterious God.

Kreeft: "My favorite villains here are Descartes and Kant, both of whom have narrowed reason. Descartes narrowed reason to a human psychological thing—calculating. And Kant narrowed reason to a subjective thing—merely something that goes on inside our head that does not correspond to an objective reality we can know.

"In the Middle Ages and in ancient times, reason was the cosmic order of things which we understood intuitively before we understood it analytically. When the ancients defined man as the rational animal, they didn't mean he was a narrow, dull, abstract analytic thing. They included his heart, his moral sense of conscience, his aesthetic sense. It was part of reason to wonder at the beauty of the heavens."

From an essay by the Jesuit priest James Schall:

John Paul II makes the following startling statement: "Over the years I have become more and more convinced that the ideologies of evil are profoundly rooted in the history of European philosophical thought." What we think is not an indifferent matter, particularly if we think our minds are not bound by what is. This intellectual source of evil calls for a reexamination of the Enlightenment, which had a somewhat different form in each European country, including Poland. It erupted with particular violence in the twentieth century with Marxism.

Demonstrating his own careful philosophical studies, John Paul II examines the effect of Descartes and how his thought differed from the philosophy of St Thomas. Aquinas began with being, with what is. Descartes began with thought itself, the famous cogito. At first sight, this difference might seem a mere philosopher's quibble and not the origin of modern evils. But Pope Wojytyla makes a good case for why this difference enabled modern ideologies to be so lethal:

In the pre-Cartesian period, philosophy, that is to say cogito, or rather the cognosco, was subordinate to esse, which was considered prior. To Descartes, however, the esse seemed secondary, and he judged the cogito to be prior. This not only changed the direction of philosophizing, but it marked the decisive abandonment of what philosophy had been hitherto, particularly the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, and namely the philosophy of esse.

In Aquinas, thus, God was a real and self-sufficient Being who created an actual world to which we are open. God was the "necessary ground of every being."

The shift that took place with Descartes meant that God was "thought." All being, including the divine being, remained within thought. Indeed, in Descartes, for anyone to know anything outside of one's self, he first had to prove the existence of God in his mind. "Philosophy now concerned itself with beings qua content of consciousness and not qua existing independently of it."

The significance of this shift in emphasis is that a Creator God who is subsistent Being (Aquinas) might be able to communicate with real being from outside the causation of creatures, but a God totally under the control of our minds (Descartes) could not do this.

The dumbest angel & the wisest animal

Peter Kreeft is among those helping confused post-conciliar Catholics recover a true anthropology of man:

"Yes, this is the age of man, of self-consciousness, of psychology. And therefore it is crucial to 'know thyself' accurately today. The major heresies of our day are not about God but about man.

The two most destructive of these heresies—and the two most popular—are angelism, confusing man with an angel by denying his likeness to animals, and animalism, confusing man with an animal by denying his likeness to angels.

Man is the only being that is both angel and animal, both spirit and body. He is the lowest spirit and the highest body, the stupidest angel and the smartest animal, the low point of the hierarchy of minds and the high point of the hierarchy of bodies.

More accurately stated, man is not both angel and animal because he is neither angel nor animal; he is between angels and animals, a unique rung on the cosmic ladder.

But whichever way you say it, man must know angels to know himself, just as he must know animals to know himself, for he must know what he is, and he must know what he is not."

Dawson's choice of the truest son of St. Thomas Aquinas

Biographer Bradley Birzer says that Christopher Dawson -- the great Yorkshire Catholic and historian who died in 1970 -- had an Augustinian mind and reveled in the saint's emphasis of the moral imagination. But this certainly did not constrain him from having a deep love for Aquinas:

"According to Dawson, St. Thomas completed the work of St. Augustine, the other Latin church fathers, and the neo-Platonists on grace by sanctifying Aristotelian thought as well as incorporating Eastern Orthodox notions of Christification and the sacraments as means for deification."

Dawson called Thomas' reconciliation of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics his greatest achievement.

"By combining Eastern Orthodox thought with Augustinian thought, Dawson contended, Thomas dramatically changed the western notion of grace... 'It is not merely a power that moves the will but a light that illuminates the mind and transfigures the whole spirit.' It was this new East-West synthesis that the Protestant Reformers fought in the sixteenth century..."

Dawson, while revering the master, had nothing but contempt for the post-Thomas Scholastics. By turning Thomism into a rigid system which rendered "the imagination impotent," the opponents of Scholasticism responded with their own rigidity... and the Reformation was off to the races.

Dawson counseled students to temper their instruction in Thomism with some doses of the less brilliant St. Bonaventure [both he and Thomas died in 1274] -- but a man who emphasized the creative workings and imagination of the Holy Spirit.

The man, though, whom Dawson believed to be the most sublime heir of Thomism was the poet whom his Anglican father taught him to love: Dante.

Dante (who was 9 years old when Aquinas died) was the link between medieval and Renaissance cultures.

"For Dante, an objective reality existed. 'There is no subjectivism or idealism in his world,' Dawson claimed; 'everything has its profound ontological basis in an objective spiritual order.' Unfortunately, Dawson lamented, no one of Dante's caliber followed him... This was unfortunate, Dawson wrote; 'otherwise we might have been saved alike from the narrow rationalism of eighteenth-century Classicism and from the emotional debauches of nineteenth-century Romanticism.'"

"All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world"

Those are the words of writer E.B. White.

                         

It's fascinating to read the opening pages of Charlotte's Web -- written some twenty years before the Supreme Court's abortion decision:


   "Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
   "Out to the hoghouse," replied Mrs. Arable. "Some pigs were born last night."
   "I don't see why he needs an ax," continued Fern, who was only eight.
   "Well," said her mother, "one of the pigs is a runt. It's very small and weak, and it will never amount to anything. So your father has decided to do away with it."
   "Do away with it?" shrieked Fern. "You mean kill it? Just because it's smaller than the others?"
   Mrs. Arable put a pitcher of cream on the table. "Don't yell, Fern!" she said. "Your father is right. The pig would probably die anyway."
   Fern pushed a chair out of the way and ran outdoors. The grass was wet and the earth smelled of springtime. Fern's sneakers were sopping by the time she caught up with her father.
   "Please don't kill it!" she sobbed. "It's unfair."
   Mr. Arable stopped walking.
   "Fern," he said gently, "you will have to learn to control yourself."
   "Control myself?" yelled Fern. "This is a matter of life and death, and you talk about controlling myself." Tears ran down her cheeks and she took hold of the ax and tried to pull it out of her father's hand.
   "Fern," said Mr. Arable, "I know more about raising a litter of pigs than you do. A weakling makes trouble. Now run along!"
   "But it's unfair," cried Fern. "The pig couldn't help being born small, could it? If I had been very small at birth, would you have killed me?"
   Mr. Arable smiled. "Certainly not," he said, looking down at his daughter with love. "But this is different. A little girl is one thing, a little runty pig is another."