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.

A Pro-life Prayer for Amnesty

     "O God Almighty who chastises the nations and orders us to oppress not the widow, nor the fatherless, the stranger, nor the poor: we give you thanks and we ask your forgiveness. Grant us amnesty from our sins against life as we grant amnesty to the sojourner. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.  For every child denied his mother’s milk by scalpel and suction, may we feed another with our nation’s bread. Forgive us our trespasses. For every empty high chair at our nation’s table,  may we add a setting for our neighbor.  Let this act of reparation renew our nation in the love which binds us.  May the immigrant see us as friends, and may this act of Charity enkindle in us the fire of Thy love. May the new mother look kindly on her child, and may our nation know the protective shelter of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of men." 

Libya, Benghazi, and Mrs. Clinton

From a columnist’s description of the Secretary of State’s recent appearance before Congress:

The most dramatic moment came early, when Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson tried to get Clinton to explain why the State Department blamed the September 11 terrorist attacks in Benghazi on an impromptu protest over an anti-Muslim video. In a rehearsed moment of spontaneous outrage, Clinton yelled back, “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided to kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make?”

Doc Pence says the senator should have been ready with a response such as the following:


Mrs. Clinton,

You are right that it really wouldn’t make any difference if it was "guys on a walk who just wanted to kill Americans" or spontaneous demonstrators.  There would, however, be a very significant difference if the attack was planned by a group which is actively organizing a military movement in Libya to be the core of a new government. It would make a very big difference if this attack is evidence that there is a well-organized armed group that controls the streets of Benghazi at night, and used the anniversary of 9/11 as a time to show that control.

If this is evidence of an al-Qaeda like movement perched to bid for control of the Libyan government based in Benghazi… If this means that the primary organized opposition which overthrew Muammar Ghaddafi is not a democratic populist movement… If the killing at Benghazi was planned by an Eastern Libyan group who are the true heirs of the US-aided victory over Ghaddafi… then that makes a very big difference indeed.

The attackers are neither spontaneous demonstrators nor “guys walking by wanting to kill Americans.” We can all agree: that distinction would make no difference. The Benghazi attack is the tip of a very dangerous iceberg; not the culmination of a single day’s passion. Understanding this makes a big difference – not just in Libya, but throughout the region.

The victors of the Egyptian revolt are the Muslim Brotherhood, not ‘yuppie’ pro-American tweeters. They have formed a very different government with a very different strategic goal than the government of President Mubarak. No matter how much we identified with the 2011 demonstrations in Tahrir Square, the new controlling element in Egyptian politics is part of the Sunni purification movement that is going to hurt liberty in general and Christians, Shiite Muslims, and the State of Israel in particular. These kind of differences must be attended to as we decide to send advanced military equipment to the new Mohamed Morsi government.

Everywhere men are arming in the Mideast. We must admit that the one coherent ideology which will organize these armed men is the jihadist Sunni purification movement associated with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. Even the Tuareg guard of Ghaddafi have returned to their homeland and joined with US-trained troops in Mali to form a military group to rule that emerging nation. What is their ideology?  It is not an existentialist spontaneity – it is a return to purified Islam.

Does it make a difference if the best organized groups of the Arab spring are going to be religious jihadists replacing the secular dictators of the last half century?  Did it make a difference that the Russians who overthrew the Czar were Bolsheviks and not liberal democrats?

Many of us thought that this killing was not about a video. We saw it as planned; as clear evidence that the best organized forces in Libya are not planning democracy, but some kind of sharia-based purification of the nation. Understanding this makes all the difference in the world, and it is precisely what some of us think you as Secretary of State have not understood throughout your tenure. To be honest, we have to say that we as Republicans have not been as articulate in demanding a more comprehensive national strategy which puts these events in context.

The problem in the Mideast is that armed groups of men are re-positioning themselves to rule nations from Turkey to Libya to Syria to Egypt. Armed men do not fight simply because they have testosterone. They fight for reasons and causes which must be understood.

Your "issues" have been the empowerment of women and internationalization of homosexual rights.  You organized your department so that those kind of concerns reached your desk, while the ongoing mobilization of armed men was deemed historically less significant. A few weeks after you were too emotionally exhausted to publicly explain what happened in Benghazi, and a few months before you were too sick to testify to Congress, you found the time and energy for a trip to Peru for an Empowering Women Conference.

We all see the world in certain categories, and organize our priorities through those lenses. Your set of priorities has led to a deep confusion about the goals and strategy of our country in dealing with the religious and military landscape of the Mideast. Even your emphasis on finding the particular killers at Benghazi belies the fundamental impoverishment of your tenure as Secretary of State. After Pearl Harbor, did we try to hunt down the particular pilots who bombed our ships?  No, we put up a map of the Pacific and started outlining our friends and enemies, and the territories we would have to concede and the islands we would take. That is what we must do now. Our failure to do this has been a bipartisan failure. Republicans have talked about Iran and nuclear weapons but seldom mentioned how that Persian nation comprises the largest organized Shia resistance to purified Sunni Islam. And let us not forget it is the Sunni purification movement that has driven the jihadists.

This is a problem much bigger than you. I hope that you take none of these remarks as implying you are solely responsible for the strategic confusion that besets our nation. The confusion preceded you. You came, you traveled, you were praised as a woman pioneer, and now you are leaving.

Hopefully, with the new team at State – and a new Congress – we will all start thinking in the broader geographic and historical terms that are necessary to establish public policy. I wish you well in private life.    

Moses, Joshua, and Barack

by Dr. David Pence 

Moses led the Israelites through a parted Red Sea, out of slavery in Egypt some 2500 years ago. He received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai to bind the people in a covenant with the living God of History. Because he doubted once, he was not allowed to enter the Promised Land. That was left for Joshua – who honored the primacy of God by sending the priests with the Ark of the Covenant to first enter the Jordan River. The Jordan, too, was parted by the God of Nature; and the sons of Israel entered the Promised Land. In preparing to fight the battle for Jericho, Joshua encountered the sacred and removed his sandals. He bound the men together by ordering that they submit to the sacrificial sign of the covenant: circumcision. They fought as one, and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down.  

President Barack Obama has referred to himself as the Joshua of a new generation. He refers to Martin Luther King as his Moses. Reverend King himself, in a sermon shortly before his assassination, said he had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land but he knew he might not be allowed to go there.  King really was a Moses figure, but President Obama cannot be confused with Joshua.  Better to recall another leader of the Israelites – his namesake Barak.

Joshua united the men for battle. He did not squander a legacy or betray it. He took on the next necessary task.  President Obama has done nothing distinctly for young black men as men. They still leave our high schools too early and enter our jails too often. He has no heart for the men who will make their living by labor, not college. He has never tried to unite the men of the country as brothers, as fellow men with common duties as social protectors and fathers. In his inaugural address, the masculine pronoun never appeared.  As American men are murdered in cities at home and deserts abroad, he does not inspire the fraternal love of American men by binding us in a common circumcision of duty and protective sacrifice. He cannot call us fellow soldiers and policemen and citizens and fathers and brothers. Calling forth his countrymen, as countrymen, would be too sexist. It is not a strategy he has rejected. It is a formulation that is not conceivable in his thought patterns, which have replaced the Fatherhood of God with the feminist implant. The biblical cadence of Martin Luther King does not shape his tongue. The masculine patriotism of John F. Kennedy does not square his shoulders. The heart of Joshua does not fill his chest.

He sings of little girls, and parrots the whining of amply-paid college females. He is his mother’s son. The only male union he exalts is a private one that Joshua would abhor. He hitched those braking baggage cars of Seneca Falls (feminism) and Stonewall (a homosexual bar) to the freedom train of Selma.  Just when Christian souls of the religious civil rights movement rose from their graves to cry “sacrilege,” his soaring rhetoric listed another task for his generation: to make sure no one has to wait in a voting line for more than an hour.  That quieted those angry righteous souls who were prepared to shake the monuments with their screams. They receded… to let the text condemn itself with concerns not ready for monuments. They saw – this is definitely Barak, not Joshua – and they let him be.

The Israelite leader Barak would not go to battle without Deborah as his cover, and because he endangered and hid behind women in a time of battle, he was deprived of the honor of killing the enemy chieftain. Deborah told him, “The journey that thou takest shall not be for thine honor.” The glory went instead to a woman who found the chieftain in a tent (see Judges 4; the movie ‘Zero Dark Thirty’; or the Hillary Clinton retirement parties for details).

Certainly the men of our country know what has not been mentioned at Barak’s inaugural address or Deborah’s retirement interviews. We are not ending a decade of war. We are entering another century of conflict. We do this with little agreed-upon assessment of the strategic relations of the countries who may be our allies or enemies. Empowering women may be a great theme for conferences uniting three female 'baby boomer' secretaries of state, but it has not given our Senate or the public any sense of our geo-strategic alternatives in a game with a lot of players on the board.  We look out on this changing religious and military landscape, with offenses against God in our midst that some would perpetuate and extend as the natural heirs of the civil rights movement. Exalting these offenses bears a cost.  Re-configuring the nature of love and duty undermines our spiritual task of perfecting the Union and deprives us of the moral grammar necessary to shape a just peace among the nations.  The men of our country will fight again as one, but we cannot be one if we do not seek firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right. If we forsake God, there will be no brotherhood.

“My fellow countrymen” is a form of address we wait to hear.  Joshua will know how to speak to us when his time shall come.        

Why Sunday Football beats out Sunday Mass

Pence writes:

Why will so many men be watching the NFL playoffs this Sabbath?

Those games will manifest some natural communal truth which stokes an essential masculine emotion that the domesticated liturgy of Father Steve, his altar girls, and that older female lector can’t quite elicit.  Masculine hierarchical communities of loyalty in contest – this is the fundamental public form of mankind.

Men are meant to love one another as well-ordered public bodies in conflict with an Enemy, as surely as we are meant to be joined in an intimate union with a woman to generate new life. That’s why the quarterback of the winning male group gets the beauty queen, and we begrudge that natural justice. That’s why Brent Musburger is a master teacher of anthropology and Fr. Steve hasn’t got a clue.