The Concept of Sin

Another excellent work of Joseph Pieper, The Concept of Sin, has been translated into English. A few excerpts:

"In other words, only pride --which is a word we use to describe an attitued that intends to turn away from God--makes sin in the first place into the definitive wrong that it is.

Consequently, the less the concrete deed contains the element of "pride" and the more cupiditas it has, the less the guiltiness of the action. But the more spiritual a human being is, that is, the more he has rendered himself immune to the seductions and charms of the sensible world by living a life of self-abnegation and disciplining his will, the more he can now commit the offense, the sin of unadulterated hybris and blatant pride. Only if all the powers of my being obey me does the question suddenly occur to me: whom do I myself now obey?

This leaves us with an unsettling conclusion: only a purely spiritual being could become guilty in this extreme sense. Of course the philosopher, qua philosopher, has no competence to speak of angels and their sin. Nonetheless, we can learn something of philosophical import about the essence of human guilt when theology tells us that the first sin of the angels could only have been the sin of pride."

-p. 62

"At first hearing, Nicholai Hartmann's own answer [to the question of original sin] sounds quite plausible: "There is no freedom for the good that would not be at the same time freedom for evil." But on further reflection we see how this statement introduces an impermissible simplification into the argument. Were this thesis true, then God would not be free(nor, for that matter, would the person who has attained final fulfillment, the saint in heaven--a category that only the believer can be convinced of).

In any case, in its long history the Western tradition has conceived of the problem differently from Mr. Hartmann. Thomas Aquinas speaks only as one of its witnesses when he says that to be able to sin is indeed a consequence(De Veritate 24,3 ad 2), or even a sign of freedom, quoddam libertatis signum(De Veritate 22,6), but "it does not belong to the essence of the free will to be able to decide for evil."(De Veritate 24,3 ad 2; Commentary on the Sentences 2d; 44,1,1 ad 1) "To will evil is neither freedom nor a part of freedom."(De Veritate 22,6) In other words, the inability to sin should be looked on as the very signature of a higher freedom--contrary to the usual way of conceiving the issue."

-P. 79

And here's a review from elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Name Change

The title "Velleity of Velleities" has become too insouciant for my tastes. "Philokalia" means love of beauty and, in my opinion, is the basis for all philosophy. I add "republic" to its name to denote my taste for political thought.

"Shameless Acts" Revisited

Robert P. George on Martha Nussbaum's perjury in a Colorado Supreme Court case which overturned an amendment to the Colorado constitution prohibiting special rights for homosexuals. This is a followup to John Finnis' Shameless Acts in Colorado

Spring 1971 Intercollegiate Review

"One does not have to be an anarchist or a cynic to hold that society is meaningless; no less a personage than a US Ambassador to a South American country--Mr. John Cabot Lodge--said in a recent ceremonial public speech that "society is an abstraction, only individuals are real." This latter-day nominalism is destructive and silly: society is "man writ large," and the proof is that no two communities are interchangeable--precisely because they embody experiences which make increasing sense within a given framework, which translates the reality of the world into the language of specific shared relationships."


Thomas Molnar, Tradition and Social Change

The manner in which society exists has always intrigued me. Does a given society have its own "essence," its own way of life that forms its members by its very nature? Or is it simply the sum total of its relations? Time to revisit the nominalist controversy.

The authors[of The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition] undertake to illuminate the problem that has been generated by liberal domination since the Great Depression. That interpretation has attempted to show that the only American tradition has been "liberal" and that the liberal view has been the basis for the utopianism of contemporary reform. For the liberals, the interpretation of the American tradition has created a unified myth that America stands primarily for liberty, equality, and the rights of man, making the Declaration of Independence the foundation stone of the new edifice.

[...]Our authors attack the overemphasis on the idea that the Declaration is talking individual rights, and more particularly the illegitimate use of the Declaration by Abraham Lincoln. Such a use was a derailment of our tradtion, not its proper interpretation. And this leads to the problem of definitions of equality. The authors affirm that there is no foundation for saying on the basis of the Declaration that individuals have rights that stand above the government of their community by a virtuous people.

[...]It is our constitutional morality not to have a showdown between the three branches of the government. Our system, say Kendall and Carey, cannot survive such confrontations. But the new morality of the judges does not want us to go through the laborious process of gathering the deliberate sense of the community: We march instead toward an "open society" of equality.

Francis G. Wilson, Reclaiming the American Political Tradition

Foresight, or Paranoia?

Freeper NWU Army ROTC attended a fireside chat with Cardinal George, and gave a short description on Free Republic. He declares:

His[George's] most sobering comment concerned the status of the Church in twenty years. His foresees the Catholic Church being forced underground as in China (with less physical persecution). He argued that for example, a woman sues the Church to be a priest saying it is her right. She gets five justices to agree that it is a right. The Church cannot argue legally from a sacramental standpoint, because Roe v. Wade changed the argument from institutional and community to individual rights, as such the Church must argue on the basis of rights, and here has no argument. The Five justices decree women's ordination, the result is two churches. One a state sponsored Catholic Church and the other an underground Catholic Church. His actual timeframe was ten years.

Cardinal George isn't a fringe character. He's a man of deep reasoning and analysis. I hope he's wrong.

More ISI Articles

The Guises of Philosophical Nihilism

The Death of Liberalism

Newspaper Editing at its Finest

A Los Angeles Times music critic who wrote that a Richard Strauss opera was "pro-life" -- meaning a celebration of life -- was stunned to pick up the paper and find his review changed by a literal-minded copy editor to read "anti-abortion."

Intercollegiate Review Winter 1968-69

Some articles:

Cicero and the Politics of the Public Orthodoxy by Frederick D. Wilhelmsen & Willmoore Kendell

The Science and Demonology of Politics by Ellis Sandoz, a review of Eric Voegelin's excellent Science, Politics, and Gnosticism

Darwinian Platonism?

Because Darwinism gave a new explanation for how and why each organism is so well adapted to its environment, this enormous record of convergence surely must say something as well about the environment. In other words, the fact that so many biological forms developed photosensitive cells and then eyes (or their equivalents) also testifies to the ubiquity of light, just as the fact that wings developed independently on insects, birds, bats, some dinosaurs, and so forth, testifies to the density and viscosity of the atmosphere of the earth. So too with complex brains: to be adaptive, brains have to evolve in response to the environment. In other words, if wings evolve over against and in response to air and eyes over against and in response to light, then brains must evolve over against and in response to something like “mental air.” By that admittedly metaphorical term I mean those a priori ideal structures already part of the universe that make a mathematics-capable brain possible in the first place. In other words, Darwinism is not only compatible with Platonism, it presupposes it.

It cannot be the burden of this chapter to establish the argument and grounds for advocating such a “Darwinian Platonism,” except perhaps to say that a denial of this thesis would run into the difficulty of suddenly finding that the human brain, alone of all organs and organism, is not adapted to its environment and did not evolve over against any selecting force in nature, the way air and light work for wings and eyes respectively. I should also perhaps add that arguments for Platonism , when reinforced by Darwinian perspectives, can help heal the neuralgia currently afflicting atheist Darwinians like Richard Dawkins whenever they hear the word religion. For that reason, the Platonic implications of Darwinian theory will often be resisted for just this reason by atheists, but that is to argue against the conclusion on prior grounds, not against the evidence or the logic of Darwinism.
-Edward T. Oakes, SJ, "Complexity in Context"

Father Oakes has commented on this elsewhere. Quoting Daniel Dennett:

It has often been pointed out that Plato's curious theory of reincarnation and reminiscence, which he offers as an explanation of the source of our a priori knowledge, bears a striking resemblance to Darwin's theory, and this resemblance is particularly striking from our current vantage point. Darwin himself famously noted the resemblance in a remark in one of his notebooks. Commenting on the claim that Plato thought our "necessary ideas" arise from the pre-existence of the soul, Darwin wrote: "read monkeys for preexistence."

George Orwell's Despair by Russell Kirk

Hitler's Accomplice

Fran Buber-Neumann, wife of a leading German Communist, who was thrown into a Stalinist concentration camp after her husband was purged, then (in 1940) handed over to Hitler's institution. Wife of a Jew, she happened to be a non-Jewish Prussian woman; she and dozens of Jews were delivered by Stalin to Hitler, no doubt as a friendly seal on their alliance.

-Thomas Molnar, The Robot Mentality, Intercollegiate Review March-April 1967

Catholic Theologian belittles Biblical Text

No, it's not about sodomy. Here's Michael Novak:

"In the ancient and medieval world, commerce was much despised. The desire for money was described as "the root of all evils.""

It's only St. Paul, after all. And isn't Fidelio's Rocco superior?

On Debate and Existence

This Voegelin essay is quite thought provoking. I'm still trying to decide if I agree with him that Thomistic/Aristotelian categories of being, which once clarified, now only obscure.

A few links on Leo Strauss

Strauss's Conservatism by Harvey Mansfield(Word Format)

THE CLOSING OF THE EARLY MODERN MIND: LEO STRAUSS AND EARLY MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT, claiming Strauss does not, indeed, cannot accept Early Modern philosophy on its own terms.

The Materialistic Curtain in Higher Education

The Open Society and Tyranny

There are some who see the excellence of modern civilization in a tendency toward the "open society," that is a society in which the organic view of social life which makes for a "closed society," is overcome by a new individualism, which makes it possible for men to associate as equals, and having been freed from the older ties, to enter into free relationships of a more "spiritual" nature. Man, by a kind of "naked" reason, uncorrupted by the customs and traditions of his forebears, decides the quality of his life; he is, in this view, an end in himself, and recalls the old Protagorian expression that "man is the measure." Thanks to technology and education, man can free himself from nature, which he now sees as a hindrance to be dominated, and which no longer serves as a guide to his activities. He will now shape the world to his image, and anything which obscures his goal or directs his view to those things which should measure him in his activities must be eliminated as obstructions to his dignity, rooted as it is in the extension of his own proper personality. Marx, in fulminating against religion, sees it as "but the illusory sun which moves around man as long as he does not move around himself."

According to this view, all previous societies contained ways by which some men have dominated others, the remedy for which is a new society, which permits each man to choose his own kind of life, to exercise a myriad of ever-growing rights all severed from the trace of duties, which have become superfluous(for there are really no duties we owe ourselves).

The aim is to make possible the exercise of the tyrannical life for all men. Remember that the tyrant rules, not for the sake of the common good, but for his own private good. The state is merely an extension of himself, to be ordered peculiarly to him as to its end. He is not a part of it, and therefore subject to its laws and customs, but is rather beyond them, and his own appetites and desires have taken their place.

[...] man is superior because he is indeterminate, because he can choose his own way of life, and hence is not limited to any kind of existence. There is no consideration here that the man who is unformed is inferior to the good man, that the peccability of his liberty is a precarious "dignity," a lack to be overcome by the acquisition of the virtues which perfect his powers and their exercise. In short, man is considered perfect insofar as he is, not insofar as he is good(which entails, as we have seen that he order his life to things other than himself). What in fact Pico [della Mirandola] does is to speak of man much as if he were God. God, using St. Thomas again, is by his very being good and perfect, but man, insofar as he merely is, cannot by virtue of this be called good; the powers of his being, in fact, are directed toward other things, and he will be called good if he orders his soul the way it is created. God, on the other hand, is His own end: His liberty, the measure of all things, is impeccable; all its consequences good.

But if man were as God is, he in his own being would be his own end, anything he desires would be good by the fact of his desiring it, and the distinction between the good man and bad man would vanish.

-"Tyranny, A Private Good" by Ronald P. McArthur, Intercollegiate Review January-February 1966

A Strauss-inspired reading of Locke

The so-called right of self-preservation, upon which Locke builds his entire politics, is nonsensical--because it is evolutionary not only against the traditional teachings of philosophy, but against philosophy itself. It has no status philosophically. Its status is ideological, not philosophical. The proposition that asserts it is born out of defiance of the norms of philosophical discourse, because it claims a right that has no correlative duties. Philosophy knows no such right; it is incapable of knowing any such rgiht. To put it otherwise, right-of-self-preservation political theories are all ideological, and recognizable as such because they owe their survival, in large part, to their habit of stealing terms from philosophy, giving them without due warning a new and philosophically illegitimate meaning, and using them to mobilize for political purposes the respect and reverence that philosophy, using them in their correct meaning, has won for them(as the Communists use words like "freedom," "justice," etc.). The proposition that asserts the right to self-preservation is adopted by those who appeal to it not because of the cause that can be made out for it philosophically, but because of its potential value as a weapon. And make no mistake about it: the "right of self-preservation" is the weapon that the modern politics has used for the overthrow of the traditional politics.
-Willmoore Kendall, "John Locke Revisited," Intercollegiate Review January-February 1966

Civil Liberty vs. Civil Liberties

Jim Kalb links to this article, Is American Democracy Safe for Catholicism, by Professors Gary Glenn and John Stack arguing that "civil liberties" is a vastly inferior version of "civil liberty." Here's their main argument:

The Transition from Civil Liberty to Civil Liberties
In the 1940s, while Father Ryan was both restating the Church's traditional objections to the secular liberal state and arguing that they could be prudentially accommodated to American democracy; the Supreme Court began intensively to secularize American democracy. The rubric was a new reading of the establishment clause which in principle, and eventually in practice, rendered all revealed religions, including the Protestantism which it partially resembled but which it displaced, incompatible with any significant place in public life. By "secularism," we understand "the doctrine that morality should be based solely on regard to the well-being of mankind in the present life, to the exclusion of all considerations drawn from belief in God or in a future state."(n23) This is today thought to require excluding public support from religious schools and prohibiting both religious practices in public contexts and moral teachings based on revelation when those teachings cross secular morality or secular ideas of freedom. Post-1940s democracy, thus authoritatively articulated and fashioned by the Court, appears to regard secularism as the sine qua non of liberal democracy.

We argue this mandatory public secularism is part of a new constitutional regime which the Court instituted at this time. The new regime is verbally indicated by the Court's introducing, for the first time in our constitutional history; "civil liberties" in contrast to the traditional "civil liberty."(n24)

"Civil liberty" is the language of Blackstone, common law and The Federalist. The latter speaks of it in the context of the problem of maintaining "the order of society."(n25) WESTLAW first finds "civil liberty" in a Supreme Court opinion in Marbury (1803),(n26) but not until the Slaughterhouse Cases (1872) is it given explicit judicial definition. There, Justice Field refers approvingly to Blackstone's definition, given by Senator Trumbull in the debate on the Civil Rights Bill of 1866. "Civil liberty is no other than natural liberty, so far restrained by human laws and no further, as is necessary and expedient for the general advantage of the public."(n27) Field quotes Blackstone's editor's gloss on this definition: "that state in which each individual has the power to pursue his own happiness according to his own views of his interest, and the dictates of his conscience, unrestrained, except by equal, just, and impartial laws."(n28) Thus, "civil liberty" did not privilege individual power to the extent of requiring the laws to grant it as much latitude as possible. The laws only had to be "equal, just and impartial," thereby giving as much emphasis to the restraints of such laws on an individual's power as to his license to exercise that power. The modern idea that "rights are trump" is alien to "civil liberty" but is the cutting edge of the new "civil liberties" regime.

Under the old "civil liberty regime," religion was permitted in public life, including ritual public prayer, which survives to this day in the opening of each day of Congress and the Court, and the public school Baccalaureate Service and graduation prayer, found unconstitutional as late as Lee v. Weisman (1992).

The grounds for the old 'civil liberty' regime's solution to the problem of the relation of religion and government was publicly advocated at the Founding by James Madison.

In a free government, the security for civil rights must be the same as for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests and in the other, in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government.(n29)

This Madisonian regime publicly assumed that "religious rights" included influencing public policy through truck and bargaining among the multiplicity of sects. Speaking for the Constitution's advocates, he argued that this system would so limit any particular sect's influence as generally to produce "justice and the general good."(n30)

This public religious pluralism permitted legislatures to work out pragmatically the relation between religious belief, churches, and government without conforming to a constitutional theory of what the outcome should be.(n31) This regime, constitutionally in place from 1789 until the 1940s, also permitted public schools to have a character forming function which warranted "impartial governmental assistance of all religions."(n32) Thus McCollum's publicly supported religious instruction was consistent with the old public religious pluralism.

It was this traditional "civil liberty" regime which Murray in 1960 thought compatible with Catholicism because that democracy both permitted and presupposed "the coexistence within one political community of groups who hold divergent and incompatible views with regard to religious questions-those ultimate questions that concern the nature and destiny of man."(n33) Murray further denied that the First Amendment religion clauses embodied any theory. Rather, he maintained that they are better understood as "articles of peace," that is, practical formulations the concrete meaning of which is negotiated from time to time in legislatures and school board meetings, and renegotiated as circumstances change--democracy as government by the people as one might once have conceived of it.

In contrast to this "civil liberty" regime, which permitted widely differing views of what religion is, as well as what its relation to government should be, the secular regime the Court began instituting in the 1940s attributed 'to the religion clauses a new substantive theory that seems to require all Americans to understand religion as a private matter lacking either public encouragement or consequence.(n34) The seed of this secularism was planted by the Court's declaring in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), without evidence or precedent, that the establishment clause mandated government neutrality between religion and nonreligion.(n35) The first blossoming was finding unconstitutional government sponsored religious instruction in public schools as a means to combat growing juvenile delinquency in McCollum (1948).(n36) The mature fruit became visible for all to see in finding unconstitutional publicly sponsored prayer and Bible reading in public schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington v. Schempp (1963), respectively.(n37)

The Court's replacement of constitutionally permitted public religious pluralism with constitutionally mandatory public secularism is part of the new "civil liberties" regime which the Court began instituting in about 1940. The novelty of this regime is indicated superficially by its name. Although now a preeminent category of constitutional law, WESTLAW shows "civil liberties" first used as a term of art in a Supreme Court opinion only in 1940.(n38) It first occurred in a Supreme Court case as the proper name of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1938. However, "civil liberties" was not yet an accepted term of legal art, according to then Professor Felix Frankfurter. It was only "a very loose expression" used in communication with "the laity."(n39) "Civil liberties" appeared only twice in Supreme Court cases prior to 1938 and in neither is it the Court's language. In the first case (1892),(n40) it is part of a 1701 quotation from William Penn. In the second case (1904),(n41) it occurs in a military order which was part of the evidence in the case.

"Civil liberties," as it developed after 1940, differs decisively from traditional "civil liberty" by intensified license to individual choices and desires as against other constitutional goods. "Civil liberty" had privileged "the general advantage of the public" (Justice Field [1872] citing Senator Trumbull [1866] quoting Blackstone [1776]) or "justice and the general good" (Federalist, No. 51 [1788]). "Civil liberties" privileges individual rights and that probably generates constitutional secularism. "Civil liberty" permitted governmental support for religion and relied on the competition between, and compromise among, the multiplicity of sects to prevent injustice. It did not define justice as requiring constitutional equality between religion and nonreligion. When the Court instituted that equality in Everson (1947), it redefined injustice to something like exposing an individual to government supported religious activities with which that individual did not agree. Thus one atheist's right not to have to listen to the traditional Baccalaureate' prayer is constitutionally superior to the community's determination that such prayer is for the "general advantage of the public" (Lee v. Weisman, 1992). If an individual's choice constitutionally trumps the legislatively determined "general good," then public secularism apparently, or at least plausibly; follows.(n42)

Secularism may even more sharply contrast "civil liberties" with "civil liberty" than does the intensified individualism from which it springs. For while Professor Tribe thought "extraordinary" Clarence Thomas's reasoning politically on the basis of the Declaration's theological content, under the "civil liberty" regime even Jefferson thought it proper to state for America that we are "endowed" with rights "by our Creator." And elsewhere he asked "can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath?" And because slavery violates them "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep for ever . . . . The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."(n43) Nor did Lincoln think the Declaration's theological argument "extraordinary." Indeed, at Gettysburg he declared that America was dedicated to the Declaration's proposition "under God."(n44) Similarly; Frederick Douglas cited the Declaration and quoted Psalm 137 "By the rivers of Babylon . . . ," declaring "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie."(n45)

The "civil liberties" regime transformed secularism from at most a common social opinion(n46) into a constitutionally obligatory theory.(n47) Tocqueville had foreseen that, as equality becomes more absolute,"trust in common opinion will become a sort of religion, with the majority as its prophet."(n48) However, "Christian morality" was still the common American opinion of his day and still "the first of their political institutions." Yet he foresaw that if Christian morality ceased to be an "impediment, one would soon find among them the boldest [moral and political] innovators and the most implacable logicians in the world."(n49) He did not foresee that the justices of the Supreme Court would become the hierarchy of the new equality-inspired religion,(n50) or so far mimic Catholicism as to claim "infallibility" in teaching doctrine. "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final."(n51) Tocqueville may have foreseen better than he knew in finding Catholicism even more compatible with American democracy than is Protestantism.(n52) Catholics' faith in papal infallibility need only be transferred to faith in the infallibility of "common social opinion" and the Supreme Court.

By 1960 the original Madisonian regime had not yet been completely overthrown by the new judicially created secular regime. The Court, in particular, had backed off from its 1947 McCollum decision under attack from many religious sectors, and even the New York Times. It did so in 1953 by finding constitutional an ever so slightly different plan for public encouragement of religious instruction.(n53) However, the subsequent bans on governmental encouragement of prayer (1962) and Bible reading (1963) in public schools visibly established public secularism as authoritative. Public secularism's exclusion of religious practices as such from a place in public life has now worked its way through a score of subsequent cases.

Kenneth Craycraft(see below) argues that Madison's encouragement of a multiplicity of sects was meant to weaken religion, meanign that religious is a sham. These professors make a good argument that our civil liberty was in fact part of the Amercian republic from the beginning, and only recently marred by unfortunate court decisions.

"A Very Scary Person"

Peter Sean Bradley called me that here, after I hazarded a guess at what a "stavrological concentration" was. I'm still laughing.

A Couple of Links on Religious Freedom

First, Separation and Its Discontents summarizing Kenneth Craycraft's The American Myth of Religious Freedom. The author of the review essay veers towards the Lefebvrist thesis on Dignitatis Humanae, so I can't give the article my full endorsement. However,I read Craycraft's book at the very beginning of my forays into political philosophy, and I think his thesis still has some hold on my mind today. I took away two main points from his work: (1) liberalism views religion through the prism of voluntary associations; religion is good only if it is freely chosen by the autonomous individual. It is unscriptural(See Jn 15:16), pelagian, and if applied consistently would forbid infant baptism and religious education for children. (2) liberal theories of religious liberty are always state-centered: the government decides what constitutes religion and liberty, not the Church.

Next, John C. Rao's article Why Catholics Can't Defend Themselves argues that pluralism is a fideism.

Finally, a quotation from the current First Things:

Liberalism was originally a theory of the state based on representative democracy and individual rights--a theory that was compatible and even harmonious with religion. There can be powerful religious justifications for such a system. But contemporary liberalism is much more than a theory of the state and its limits. Whereas the older liberalism required the state to allow individuals to pursue, within certain bounds, their differing understandings of the objective good for man, the newer liberalism requires individuals, at least in their role as citizens, to be entirely subjective in their understanding of the good. That is, in the newer liberalism, the supreme good, at least for all public purposes, is personal autonomy--a person choosing for himself, without any objective constraint, what shall be good and what shall be evil.
-Robert T. Miller, "A Jury of One's Godless Peers"

Craycraft and probably Rao would argue that this subjectivism is inherent to the liberal project, dating back to Locke. A reconsideration of that argument is in order.

The House of Habsburg, Defended

Archbishop Chaput Praises Marcus Aurelius

And declares the necessity of being open to wisdom:

The more secular we become - both as individuals and as a country - the less we care about the true, the right and the lasting. And here’s the reason: We don’t really believe these qualities exist. Philosophy today is an ailing discipline because our idea of "wisdom" has detached itself from higher, permanent truths about the human person. Wisdom has shrunk down to mean "common sense based on experience." But wisdom is much more than that. It’s the moral memory of a culture. The more we reinterpret the past according to this or that political agenda, the less coherent our memory becomes… and the more irrelevant "wisdom" (like the content of the Bible) seems. Our moral vocabulary becomes confused. We begin to see and judge everything in terms of its utility right now. In other words, what’s useful and productive is seen as good. What isn’t, is seen as bad.

Speaking of Beauty

Take, for example, the line of another Marxist critic, Frederic Jameson, now plying his trade at Duke University, who asserts that "the visible is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination." Now it is true that pornography is the premier sign of the decadence of late capitalism, and the fact that liberalism can offer no moral or legal objections to it is a sure indication that liberalism is far more complicit in capitalism?s dynamic than are non-libertarian schools of political conservatism, paleo-, neo-, or whatever. But only a Marxist utterly hung up and scandalized by disinterested contemplation could equate all gazing with consumption of pornography.

-Edward T. Oakes, SJ

What is not forbidden is mandatory!

From the Boulder Valley School District:

Many American schools have sponsored pro-gay speakers, allowed pro-gay art displays, and sanctioned clubs called "Gay-Straight Alliances." But Colorado's Boulder Valley School District is going a step further, advancing new curriculum standards that would require students to "demonstrate" their acceptance of homosexuality.

Among the skills the district has proposed as essential to a proper education: Students would have to demonstrate they can "provide peer support" for homosexual classmates; students would also have to demonstrate they can "advocate for a school environment free of ... homophobia."

Other standards would require students to explain the health consequences of "heterosexism," and identify "diverse groups in American society ... by culture, ethnicity, age, sex, religion, sexual orientation ... "

-World Magazine

Thomas Molnar on Existentialism

Let us note that already in The Seven Storey Mountain Merton spoke of the culture of our world as "rotten, spurious, empty... not worth the dirt in Harlem's gutters." The point here is not whether these violent denunciations are justified or not: it is, rather, that the American authors quoted, Jewish or Catholic, couch them in the language of Hegelian-Sartrian dialectics, and speak of guilt not in terms of personal responsibility, but, true to their masters in thinking, as if guilt were a collective burden,l borne by a class or a race before the judgement of History.

Existentialism and the American Intellectual, Intercollegiate Review, September 1965

Be still, my beating heart

Intercollegiate Review Archives are now on-line!

Michael Novak Smackdown!

Litigation and Natural Law

Russell Hittinger on Judicial Interpretation of Natural Law:

"[...] preoccupation with judicial appeals to natural law can easily fall into the trap that Aquinas himself discussed. Recall that in the passage cited earlier Aquinas pointed out that insofar as a judge proceeds case by case the laws are apt to be disconnected. The business of a judge is litigation, and, on the whole, litigation is not the best context for taking stock of what the natural law requries: (1) litigation gives the judge little time for reflection; (2) it moves along according to adversarial procedures, which are not the best way to develop a systematic position on the moral quality of laws; and (3) the interests of the various parties are usually narrowed so drastically that it is difficult to find generalizable principles for the common good.

-Russell Hittinger, "Natural Law in the Positive Laws," The First Grace

A Soldier's account of the destruction of Monte Cassino Abbey

The monastery was not responsible for all the calamitous things happening to the Allied infantry and machines of war moving about in the valley or on the slopes around it. But the men over whom it held so much sway, firmly believed that the Abbey indeed was being used by the enemy. Nothing could convince them otherwise. It was the ideal artillery observation post and the Germans would be stupid not to use it as such, so they thought. Setback after setback finally influenced General Bernard Freyberg, Commander of the 2nd New Zealand Division into believing that the only way to throw the valley wide open was to destroy the Abbey from the air, to obliterate the enemy observation points there. He was sure that every move his men made, the Germans observed from their vantage points in the Abbey, and so after much wrangling in the caravans of the mighty it was finally agreed that the only way out of the impasse was to bomb Cassino and the Abbey.

On the cold, but clear windy morning of February 15, 1944, 143 B-17 Flying Fortresses came over at 18,000 feet, followed a quarter of an hour later by waves of Mitchell and Marauder medium bombers. In the short span of no more than twenty minutes 576 tons of bombs rained down on the huge building and on the surrounding slopes and also on the town of Cassino itself. For all of its massive construction of stone the Abbey was blasted and churned into a smoking hell of rubble and dust. It was learned not long after, that there'd been only a dozen monks and close to 1000 civilians inside its walls. The Italian peasants and Cassino inhabitants still remaining, had sought refuge from the fighting going on around their homes. Not a single German soldier, it was found, had been inside the Abbey. When the last bomb had fallen and the last numbing blast's echo had faded away into the hills and valleys, over 300 people lay dead beneath the huge mounds of rubble. The wounded exceeded three times that of the dead.

It has been proven since, that the few Germans who had entered the Monastery in the weeks before the bombing, had gone in to arrange for the transfer to Rome for safekeeping all art works, books, and religious documents. It was only after the Monastery had been reduced to rubble that the Germans took over the ruins and utilized it in their defence system. And as those of us who've read the books about the battles fought here know, the enemy utilized it to the utmost. In retrospect, they'd gained through a great Allied high-level blunder what proved to be an outstandingly strong fortress position. Once the building was destroyed the Germans had no qualms about using the ruins for defensive purposes. In the months that followed, the Allies were bled white trying to dislodge the enemy from the ruins and the surrounding heights, with little to show for their efforts. Only in the fourth and final battle which began one hour before midnight on May 11th did success finally come. Even then, the Monte Cassino Abbey, or the ruin thereof was not wrested from the paratroopers until seven days later when the Poles firmly planted the Polish Eagle flag in the rubble.

von Kuehnelt-Leddihn is much more skeptical of the allies' account of the abbey's destruction than this soldier. See below.

Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn on Monarchy and War

We spoke already about the indoctrination of draftees, which,
naturally, becomes important in a time of war. An even greater evil
is the fact that, since the recruits are taken from the population at
large, the people itself has to be indoctrinated, in other words,
made to hate the enemy collectively. For this purpose, modern governments
invoke the support of the mass media, which then inform
the populace about the evil of the enemy (with little or no regard
for the truth). The attack stresses the wickedness and inferiority of
the hostile nation and the evil deeds committed by its armed forces,
which consists of cowards, a low breed recruited from a fiendish
people.

* * * * * *

Curiously enough, it was the Third Reich (although planning
aggressive wars) which desired to ban aerial warfare except on
well-defined battle fronts. In 1935, the Germans, wanting a pact
outlawing war on civilians in the hinterland, suggested this to Great
Britain, which at that time had a Labour government. However, the
offer was rejected on the ground that all efforts to humanize war
would make wars more acceptable, and would thus be a blow to
the noble cause of pacifism.

* * * * * *
One of the worst and most idiotic feats was the U.S. army’s
destruction of the ancient Italian monastery of Monte Cassino. The
Allies had been informed that there were no German troops inside,
but since the building remained intact, a hue and cry was raised in
the United States that to spare the monastery would be yielding to
“Roman Catholic interests” at the cost of American lives. “Our
Boys” would have to die to please the Pope! Finally, the military
yielded to bolster the “home front.” The vox populi should not be
thwarted, and a political decision, not a military decision, was made.
The old building went up in flames, thus making it safe for the
Germans to occupy the ruins, whereas to defend a huge building
under artillery fire would have been suicidal. Now the American
soldiers faced an enemy much better entrenched and more fully
protected by the rocks of the destroyed abbey. No falling walls
could bury them. The Allied losses became much bigger, as did
those of the poor betrayed Poles who had to fight with them, but
public opinion was satisfied: the war was fought democratically.

Yet, what did the American soldie rs think of such irreparable
losses of architectural beauty? An officer stationed near
Benevento, asked whether he had any misgivings, replied to an
American journalist, “There’s nothing what can be done about it.
Italy is just lousy with clerical monuments.”

* * * * * *

One of the worst results of the democratization of wars was—
and remains—the difficulty in terminating a war by peace, or, at
least, by lengthy periods of peace. In a partially or fully democratic
order, having fought with conscripted soldiers, one is governed
largely by representatives of the people who do not think historically,
but politically. Of history, economics, cultural mentalities, and
geography, they know nothing. Moreover, they think “personally,”
not dynastically. What do they have primarily in mind? The weal of
their grandchildren and great grandchildren? Or the winning of the
next election? Furthermore, the returning soldiers, if they have been
fighting on the winning side, want to see the fruits of their suffering,
so they yearn for a “peace” with maximum gains for their country.
(Mercenaries thought otherwise. They had their next job in mind.)

* * * * * *

Yet, to make people happy (after one’s own fashion), sometimes
requires a little and occasionally even a lot of pressure. In
February 1914, Mr. Wilson thought that the Mexicans would be
much happier if, politically, they imitated the United States, which in
turn had imitated France.71 This worried Sir Edward Grey, the British
Foreign Minister. Between him and American Ambassador
Walter Hines Page, a curious dialogue developed. The theme was
Mexican reluctance to adopt a full-fledged democracy, which the
United States, after all, had fostered and abetted in Mexico even
before they had supported Benito Juarez, the murderer of Emperor
Maximilian.72 The exchange of opinions went as follows:
Grey: Suppose you have to intervene, what then?
Page: Make ’em vote and live by their decisions.
Grey: But suppose they will not so live?
Page: We’ll go in again and make ’em vote again.
Grey: And keep this up for 200 years?
Page: Yes. The United States will be here for 200 years
and it can continue to hoot them for that little space till
they learn to vote and rule themselves.

* * * * * *

Monarchy had several great advantages. First of all, one could
expect a monarch to be psychologically88 and intellectually prepared
for his task. Considering the intellectual preparation of some
leading politicians for their task, we can only throw up our hands in
horror, as often their looks and their gift of gab alone got them into
office. A second asset is (or rather was) their international rela-
tionships and their lack of local ties.89 Number three is the fact that
they owe their position to no party, faction, interest group, estate, or
class, but only, to use the words of Bossuet, to “the sweet process
of nature.”90 The fourth advantage is that monarchs had the
chance to act historically. In democracies, where the primary task
is to win elections, and where instability with nicely spaced changes
is even a matter of pride, a constructive foreign policy is well-nigh
impossible.91 Monarchs were in office until they died, at which time
they left their realms to their sons or nearest relatives. They could
act historically, not politically, in a way without a time limit. Hence,
their various “Political Testaments.”

This has been aptly demonstated by Professor Hans-Hermann
Hoppe in an essay which likens the democratic procedure to a
small child wanting his wishes fufilled immediately, and protests in
tears if there is a delay or a negative reaction. A monarch, as a
member of a dynasty, can plan for the distant future, even for generations.
92 Yet, it would be most erroneous to believe that a return
to monarchy, even a Christian monarchy, would solve all of our
problems. Recall the praise the great monarchist Charles Maurras
bestowed on this form of government: “Le moindre mal. La possibilité
du bien. (The least evil. The possibility of something
good.)”

Still, a monarch as member of a dynasty can plan for the distant
future, even for generations. In our times, in which the globe
has been transformed into an immensely complex scene, the abyss
between the Scita and the Scienda, the actual knowledge of voters
and candidates compared with the necessary knowledge, unavoidably
widens all the time. And since the required knowledge among
those active or passive in the democratic process is minute, only
sentiments, sympathies, and antipathies, pleasing and unpleasant
factors, are now effective. Hence, democracies act like rabbits
jumping in all imaginable directions, into unwanted wars,93 idealistic
crusades, and undesirable, fatal peace arrangements. From childhood,
monarchs were prepared for their duties. They “inherited”
their profession as traditionally as craftsmen did theirs. The son of
a tailor became a tailor, and so forth. These tailors produced sometimes
bad garments, occasionally excellent ones but usually passable
ones. So, too, with monarchs. Yet dentists, lawyers, cobblers,
farmers, or plumbers could not have produced any clothes whatever,
only monstrosities. Hence, the decline of Europe, already lasting
more than 200 years, which also means that one should not forget
the already mentioned fact that monarchy compromised with
democracy during the nineteenth century, and thus acquired merely
a psychological role in the twentieth.

94We have to bear in mind that democracies boast of their instability and
their dislike for expertise. The real “hero” in democratic folklore is always
the “successful amateur,” not the expert, which implies that knowledge
and experience have no value.

JPII on Suffering

Man " perishes" when he loses "eternal life". The opposite of salvation is not, therefore, only temporal suffering, any kind of suffering, but the definitive suffering: the loss of eternal life, being rejected by God, damnation. The only-begotten Son was given to humanity primarily to protect man against this definitive evil and against definitive suffering.

* * * * * *

Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering through which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.

* * * * * *

Those who share in Christ's sufferings have before their eyes the Paschal Mystery of the Cross and Resurrection, in which Christ descends, in a first phase, to the ultimate limits of human weakness and impotence: indeed, he dies nailed to the Cross. But if at the same time in this weakness there is accomplished his lifting up, confirmed by the power of the Resurrection, then this means that the weaknesses of all human sufferings are capable of being infused with the same power of God manifested in Christ's Cross. In such a concept, to suffer means to become particularly susceptible, particularly open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ. In him God has confirmed his desire to act especially through suffering, which is man's weakness and emptying of self, and he wishes to make his power known precisely in this weakness and emptying of self. This also explains the exhortation in the First Letter of Peter: "Yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God"

* * * * * *

Suffering as it were contains a special call to the virtue which man must exercise on his own part. And this is the virtue of perseverance in bearing whatever disturbs and causes harm. In doing this, the individual unleashes hope, which maintains in him the conviction that suffering will not get the better of him, that it will not deprive him of his dignity as a human being, a dignity linked to awareness of the meaning of life. And indeed this meaning makes itself known together with the working of God's love, which is the supreme gift of the Holy Spirit.

* * * * * *

[...]It only means that the Redemption, accomplished through satisfactory love, remains always open to all love expressed in human suffering.

* * * * * *

A source of joy is found in the overcoming of the sense of the uselessness of suffering, a feeling that is sometimes very strongly rooted in human suffering. This feeling not only consumes the person interiorly, but seems to make him a burden to others. The person feels condemned to receive help and assistance from others, and at the same time seems useless to himself. The discovery of the salvific meaning of suffering in union with Christ transforms this depressing feeling. Faith in sharing in the suffering of Christ brings with it the interior certainty that the suffering person "completes what is lacking in Christ's afflictions"; the certainty that in the spiritual dimension of the work of Redemption he is serving, like Christ, the salvation of his brothers and sisters. Therefore he is carrying out an irreplaceable service. In the Body of Christ, which is ceaselessly born of the Cross of the Redeemer, it is precisely suffering permeated by the spirit of Christ's sacrifice that is the irreplaceable mediator and author of the good things which are indispensable for the world's salvation. It is suffering, more than anything else, which clears the way for the grace which transforms human souls. Suffering, more than anything else, makes present in the history of humanity the powers of the Redemption.

* * * * * *

The parable of the Good Samaritan, which --as we have said--belongs to the Gospel of suffering, goes hand in hand with this Gospel through the history of the Church and Christianity, through the history of man and humanity. This parable witnesses to the fact that Christ's revelation of the salvific meaning of suffering is in no way identified with an attitude of passivity. Completely the reverse is true. The Gospel is the negation of passivity in the face of suffering.

-Salvifici Doloris

Roger Scruton on Communitarianism

Conservatives would agree with the burden of Etzioni's message. But they would point out that much of the damage to the sense of community in America has issued from liberal reforms that Etzioni and his followers seem to endorse. Communitarians regard sexual conduct as a private matter and liberal legislation on such matters as essential. They are "caring" people who do not wish to disturb or interfere with anybody's chosen life-style or to take an "authoritarian" attitude toward the problems that freedom creates. Although they are wary of the attitude that places me and my wants at the center of the universe and regards others in terms of their potential contribution to my own fulfillment, they are equally wary of the spirit of community as it tends to show itself in ordinary people. For the spirit of community is vigilant. It stands in judgment over the acts and omissions of individuals and seeks to impose a common morality, a common culture, and a common respect for basic social norms. Human beings may need to live in communities, but there is a cost attached to doing so--a cost that the modern liberal is not always prepared to pay.

Communitarian Dreams

Of course, the Constitution doesn't have to be a liberal fiefdom. But it becomes so just as soon as its interpretation is detached from the tacit endorsement of the community that first invented it. Judges like Robert Bork, who interpret the Constitution in terms of the civic aspirations of the Founding Fathers, restore it to its true place, as the foundation of American society. Such judges give to communities their true and deserved place in our scheme of things. And that is why every effort is made to keep them out of the Supreme Court by those for whom the purpose of the Constitution is not to safeguard the inherited community but to protect the modern urban solipsist.

Community, Yes, But Whose? A Reply

Suffering is Good?

For the real issue here is not so much the plurality of religions and the heightened sensitivity to cultural and religious imperialism. Much weightier is what church proclamation says validates the claims of the historical Jesus: that he plumbed the depths of the world's sufferings. That is today's Provocation. St Paul says, "this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison" (2 Corinthians 4: 17). But as Balthasar readily concedes in the fifth volume of the Theo-Drama, "To someone who is really suffering, Paul's words on the relationship between earthly suffering and heavenly joy are hardly to be endured." And yet, with St. Paul, and based on his own theology of Holy Saturday, Balthasar will go on to claim that suffering is something good. In a modern utilitarian world, whose ethic is largely based on a pleasure-pain calculus, such words will provoke outrage. But Scripture does not flinch from boasting of suffering. "I consider that the sufferings of this present age", says St. Paul, "are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us" (Romans 8: 18)

-Edward T. Oakes, No Bloodless Myth

Imaginative Origins of Modernity: Life as Daydream and Nightmare by Catholic University's Claes G. Ryn

At 4am on November 12 1915, a woman named Anna Bollinger gave birth at the German-American Hospital in Chicago. The baby was somewhat deformed and suffered from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities, as well as other complications. The delivering physicians awakened Dr Harry Haiselden, the hospital's chief of staff. Haiselden came in at once. He consulted with colleagues. There was great disagreement over whether the child could be saved. But Haiselden decided the baby was too afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. It would be killed. The method: denial of treatment. Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of Bollinger's, heard the news and sped to the hospital to help. She found the baby, who had been named Allan, alone in a bare room. Walsh pleaded with Haiselden not to kill the baby by withholding treatment. "It was not a monster - that child," Walsh later told an inquest. "It was a beautiful baby. I saw no deformities." Walsh had patted the infant lightly. Allan's eyes were open, and he waved his tiny fists at her. Begging the doctor once more, Walsh tried an appeal to his humanity. "If the poor little darling has one chance in a thousand," she pleaded, "won't you operate to save it?"

Haiselden laughed at Walsh, retorting, "I'm afraid it might get well." He was a skilled and experienced surgeon, trained by the best doctors in Chicago. He was also an ardent eugenicist. Allan Bollinger duly died. An inquest was convened a few days later. Haiselden defiantly declared, "I should have been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child's life. My crime would have been keeping in existence one of nature's cruellest blunders." A juror shot back, "What do you mean by that?" Haiselden responded, "Exactly that. I do not think this child would have grown up to be a mental defective. I know it."

After tempestuous proceedings, the inquest ruled: "We believe that a prompt operation would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the child. We find no evidence from the physical defects that the child would have become mentally or morally defective." But they also decided that Haiselden was within his professional rights to decline treatment. No law compelled him to operate on the child. He was released unpunished, and efforts by the Illinois attorney general to indict him for murder were blocked by the local prosecutor. The doctor considered his legal vindication a powerful victory for eugenics. "Eugenics? Of course it's eugenics," he told one reporter.

Haiselden became an overnight celebrity, known for his many newspaper articles, his speaking tours and outrageous diatribes. In 1917, Hollywood came calling. The film was called The Black Stork. Written by Jack Lait, a reporter on the Chicago American, it was produced in Hollywood and given a massive national distribution and promotion campaign. Haiselden played himself in a fictionalised account of a eugenically mismatched couple whom he advises not to have children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually, the woman does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die. The dead child levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ. It was unbridled cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement; the film played at movie theatres around the country for more than a decade.


Hitler's Debt to America

That's an utterly surreal line about the film's victim levitating into the arms of Christ. Either a terribly confused Christian wrote that scene, or it was a deliberate ploy to sway Christians into the eugenics fold. Probably both.

When the Temple was still standing in Jerusalem, every Yom Kippur the priests would take the crimson thread that held the scapegoat and tied it to the temple door. When God accepted the atonement sacrifice, the thread would turn white. Look what the Babylonian Talmud says about the last years of the temple:

"Our rabbis taught: During the last forty years before the destruction of the Temple the lot ['For the Lord'] did not come up in the right hand; nor did the crimson-colored strap become white; nor did the western most light shine; and the doors of the Hekel [Temple] would open by themselves"
-Babylonian Talmud, Soncino version, Yoma 39b

The temple was destroyed in 70 AD, Christ was crucified in 30 AD.

"Democracy cannot exist when [people] prefer ideas and opinions that are fabricated for them. The actions and statements of the citizen must not be mere automatic "reactions" - mere mechanical salutes, gesticulations signifying passive conformity with the dictates of those in power."
- Thomas Merton, in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Memo to all entertainers: taking off your clothes isn't remarkable for anyone over the age of 2.

The November 8 bombing took place in a Lebanese Christian neighborhood of Riyadh, and of the seven publicly identified Lebanese victims, six were Christian. Lebanon's newspapers are replete with photographs of Maronite Catholic and Greek Orthodox victims. Daleel al Mojahid, an al Qaeda-linked webpage, praised the killing of "non-Muslims." The Middle East Media Research Institute quotes Abu Salma al Hijazi, reputed to be an al Qaeda commander, as saying that Saudi characterizations of the victims as Muslims were "merely media deceit."

Misunderstanding al Qaeda
What you weren't told about their targets in Saudi Arabia.

Eamon Duffy on Fasting. I hardly ever fasted. But after spending two weeks without food and little water, I was perfectly reconciled to whatever God should intend for me. After seeing such a spiritual benefit, I think I will fast once I get better.

I never follow the injunction to do a penitential act on a Friday. Time to change.

Wow, my last post from my last healthy day. Sick now for seven weeks, hideously so for three. Lost twenty pounds, got ultrasounded and CAT scanned, and still no diagnosis. At least suffering makes me holy.

Pray for me, all you saints.

"Shameless Acts in Colorado: Abuse of scholarship in constitutional cases by Oxford law professor John Finnis, detailing misleading, even perjurous statements in abortion and homosexual rights cases. I linked to a cached version of this article on Fr. Johansen's blog, but Cwnews.com has posted this as well.

Also of interest: Reason, Faith and Homosexual Acts

This is a sad day for the freedom of speech. Who could have imagined that the same Court which, within the past four years, has sternly disapproved of restrictions upon such inconsequential forms of expression as virtual child pornography, Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, 535 U.S. 234 (2002), tobacco advertising, Lorillard Tobacco Co. v. Reilly, 533 U.S. 525 (2001), dissemination of illegally intercepted communications, Bartnicki v. Vopper, 532 U.S. 514 (2001), and sexually explicit cable programming, United States v. Playboy Entertainment Group, Inc., 529 U.S. 803 (2000), would smile with favor upon a law that cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government. For that is what the most offensive provisions of this legislation are all about. We are governed by Congress, and this legislation prohibits the criticism of Members of Congress by those entities most capable of giving such criticism loud voice: national political parties and corporations, both of the commercial and the not-for-profit sort. It forbids pre-election criticism of incumbents by corporations, even not-for-profit corporations, by use of their general funds; and forbids national-party use of “soft” money to fund “issue ads” that incumbents find so offensive.

-Justice Antonin Scalia, in his dissent in MCCONNELL V. FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N

Paul Cella's Take on the ruling

Father Rob Johansen takes on the popular notion that the ancient Greeks approved of sodomy in this post.

This Claremont Review of Books piece discusses President John Quincy Adams and Islam. I think it errs at the end, when the writer says:

Perhaps Islam and the West may find common ground in the idea that all the Abrahamic faiths share, that God created all of us in his image, and for that reason no man is born a slave.

As far as I know, Islam does not teach that all men are created in the image of God. And I don't think there's an Islamic equivalent to that line in the Gospels where Christ says "You are no longer slaves, but friends."

Flannery O'Connor analysis and criticism

"On the House floor, Nick Smith was told [by GOP Whip] business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. "[money presumably for his son's campaign] from Hammering Fellow Republicans

I'm shocked, and not in the ironic Casablanca French officer way.

Are Just-War Principles Enough?

The Vanishing Case for War

"Shakespeare thus places himself between utopian totalitarians and libertarian fundamentalists. He provides us with no easy answers to the questions that confront us now and that will always confront us. His is a call neither to draconian severity and repression, nor to utter leniency and permissiveness, the two temptations of those who like to argue from first principles. He calls us to proportion, that is to say to humanity. We must both recognize the limitations imposed upon us by our natures and at the same time not give up striving to control ourselves. If we fail to do either, we shall succumb to ideological or instinctual beastliness—or (the curious achievement of our own age) to both."

-Theodore Dalrymple, Sex and the Shakespeare Reader

It fortuned before the matter of the said matrimony brought in question, when I, in talk with Sir Thomas More, of a certain joy commended unto him the happy estate of this realm, that had so catholic a Prince, that no heretic durst show his face, so virtuous and learned a clergy, so grave and sound a nobility, so loving and obedient subjects, all in one faith agreeing together: "True it is indeed (son Roper)," quoth he, and in commending all degrees and estates of the same went far beyond me, "and yet (son Roper) I pray God," said he, "that some of us, as high as we seem to sit upon the mountains, treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not the day, that we gladly would wish to be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves; so that they would be content to let us have ours quietly to ourselves."

"But if I should speak of those that be already dead (of whom many be now saints in heaven) I am very sure it is the far greater part of them, that all the while they lived, thought in this case that way that I think now. And therefore am I not bound (my Lords) to conform my conscience to the council of one realm against the General Council of Christendom."
-Roper, Life of Sir Thomas More

Canadian Muslim deported to Syria by US govt, tortured.

No doubt the uberhawks will start quoting Lenin's line about breaking eggs to make omlettes.

St. Almachius
d. 400 Feastday: January 1

Also called Telemachus, a martyr and hermit who died in a Roman arena. He lost his life for protesting against the inhuman practice of having gladiators fight to the death for entertainment. During one of the events, Almachius entered the arena in Rome and demanded an end to the barbaric custom. He was promptly stoned to death by an irate crowd. His actions prompted Emperor Honorius to put end to the gladiatorial duels across the Roman Empire.

Theodoret of Cyrus, The Ecclesiastical History

Book V, Chapter XXVI: Of Honorius the Emperor and Telemachus the monk.

"Honorius, who inherited the empire of Europe, put a stop to the gladitorial combats which had long been held at Rome. The occasion of his doing so arose from the following circumstance. A certain man of the name of Telemachus had embraced the ascetic life. He had set out from the East and for this reason had repaired to Rome. There, when the abominable spectacle was being exhibited, he went himself into the stadium, and stepping down into the arena, endeavoured to stop the men who were wielding their weapons against one another. The spectators of the slaughter were indignant, and inspired by the triad fury of the demon who delights in those bloody deeds, stoned the peacemaker to death.

When the admirable emperor was informed of this he numbered Telemachus in the number of victorius martyrs, and put an end to that impious spectacle

Porcupines at the University and other Donald Barthelme stories

Professor of Creative Writing describes his teaching methods

"What TV is extremely good at--and realize that this is "all it does"--is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it. And since there's always been a strong and distinctive American distaste for frustration and suffering, TV's going to avoid these like the plague in favor of something anesthetic and easy."

-David Foster Wallace

This obviously affects our politics as well.

The Immaculate Conception as the Decisive Confutation of Pelagianism

from Pattern of Redemption: The theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar by Edward T. Oakes, SJ

..."Answer," then, is quintessentially feminine, and this is why it was so "fitting," as Thomas Aquinas says, that the consent to the incarnation come from a woman.[7] Moreover, not only was Mary predestined to be the Mother of the Savior, whose consent to the incarnation would inaugurate the drama of our redemption, she would do so entirely by the power of the grace of God.[8] Only this realization, enshrined in the infallibly defined dogma of the Immaculate Conception, can preserve the essential feature of our theodramatic redemption: that God has in his infinite freedom decided to save us in a way that respects our finite freedom but which also demands his infinite power of grace to fulfill:

In the course of unfolding these implications, two difficulties were encountered that have occupied theology right up to medieval and modern times. The first arose from the realization that God's action in reconciling the world to himself in the Cross of Christ is exclusively his initiative; there is no original "collaboration" between God and the creature. But as we have already said, the creature's "femininity" possesses an original, God-given, active fruitfulness; it was essential, therefore, if God's Word willed to become incarnate in the womb of a woman, to elicit the latter's agreement and obedient consent... God could not violate his creature's freedom. But where did the grace that made this consent possible come from--a consent that is adequate and therefore unlimited--if not from the work of reconciliation itself, that is, from the Cross? (And the Cross is rendered possible only through Mary's consent.) Here we have a circle--in which the effect is the cause of the cause--that has taken centuries to appreciate and formulate, resulting in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and the exact reasoning behind it.[9]

Many of the objections of Protestantism to the so-called "innovations" of Roman Catholicism, its "departures" from the truths set forth in Scripture, would vanish with a proper understanding of this circular movement of understanding. Marian dogmas naturally flow from theological reflection on the few(but crucial!) scenes in which Mary appears: above all, the Annunciation, the wedding at Cana, her presence at the foot of the Cross, and her fellowship with the apostles and disciples on Penecost Sunday. These scenes, coupled with a basic reflection on the meaning of Mary's motherhood of the Savior, lead naturally to the unfolding of all the doctrines of mariology.

Footnotes

[7]"Non enim invite tantum beneficium praestari debebat" (De Veritate, q 12, art. 10, ad 6): "For it was not right that so great a benefit be granted without consent." Although Thomas Aquinas also denied the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, I think Protestants do not sufficiently realize how much a denial of this doctrine contradicts their own views on the necessity for prevenient grace if one is to give assent to God: far from glorifying the creature at the expense of God's grace, this doctrine is a witness to the overarching and ever-present necessity for God's grace.

[8]Which is why the patristic and medieval theologians liked to contrast her free and conscience consent with Adam's sleep: "The Virgin was not visited by sleep(like Adam) but by an angel sent by God... to make known to her this great mystery.... Moreover, God wished not only that she should know of this but also that she should cooperate so that he could give his Mother the greatest privilege of honor and grace." (William of Newburgh, Explanatio sacri Epithalamii in Matrem Sponsi, text ed by JC Gorman

[9] von Balthasar. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, vol 3, 296-297.
It is in this tangle of an effect being the cause of the cause that Aquinas went astray; but if as part of the logic, the Cross itself is made possible only through Mary's consent(which is clearly the case), then the heretical implications of a denial of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception should be obvious: for it makes our salvation dependent on the power of one human creature, Mary, to say Yes to God on her own power. Denial of this dogma therefore not only leads to Pelagianism, but even makes the whole drama of salvation hinge on a human work! Denial of the Immaculate Conception, then, is the very apogee of the Pelagian heresy!

"The ideal of scripture is not independence. It is community. The independent individuals of today confront in scripture a very different ideal of human relationships. They confront God's desire to form one body out of many different self-willed, selfish individuals. They confront the call of Jesus to lose their lives so that they can gain them. The contemporary world demonstrates little real community. This is no accident, because the principles by which so many people live do not allow real community. Contemporary people need a conversion to a whole new ideal, to the call of God to lose one's life and to be united with other members of the body of Christ. They must be ready to subordinate their lives to the Lord and to other human beings."

-Stephen B. Clark, Man and Woman in Christ, Chapter 2

Affirmation Generator. Funny.

10 Mistakes Writers Make

Eureka Street, apparently the Aussie Jesuits' equivalent of America

The Gift Economy. Lots of silly stuff along the lines of "the future will be a very different place" cliche, but some interesting analysis of human life. "'Tis better to give than to receive."

"I am driven to observe of the ultra-Darwinists the following features as symptomatic. First, to my eyes, is their almost unbelievable self-assurance, their breezy self-confidence. Second, and far more serious, are particular examples of a sophistry and sleight of hand in the misuse of metaphor, and more importantly a distortion of metaphysics in support of an evolutionary programme. Consider how ultra-Darwinists, having erected a naturalistic system that cannot by itself possess any ultimate purpose, still allow a sense of meaning mysteriously to slip back in. … Third, as has often been noted, the pronouncement of the ultra-Darwinists can shake with a religious fervour. Richard Dawkins is arguably England’s most pious atheist. Their texts ring with high-minded rhetoric and dire warnings – not least of the unmitigated evils of religion – all to reveal the path of simplicity and straight thinking. More than one commentator has noted that ultra-Darwinism has pretensions to a secular religion, but it may be noted that, however heartfelt the practitioners’ feelings, it is also without religious or metaphysical foundations. Notwithstanding the quasi-religious enthusiasms of ultra-Darwinists, their own understanding of theology is a combination of ignorance and derision, philosophically limp, drawing on clichés, and happily fuelled by the idiocies of the so-called scientific creationists. It seldom seems to strike the ultra-Darwinists that theology might have its own richness and subtleties, and might – strange thought – actually tell us things about the world that are not only to our real advantage, but will never be revealed by science. In depicting the religious instinct as a mixture of irrational fundamentalism and wish-fulfillment they seem to be simply unaware that theology is not the domain of pop-eyed flat-earthers."

Conway Morris, Life’s Solution, pp. 314-316. Quoted by Edward T. Oakes, SJ in a response delivered at a Harvard conference on "Biochemistry and the Fine-Tuning of the Universe."

This is doubly delicious, for Morris is not a theologian but an evolutionary paleobiologist.

Man and Woman in Christ, an on-line theological study by Yale sociologist Stephen B. Clark. Thanks to the_spacemouse.

Speaking of porn, Fr. Bryce Sibley directed me to an article on how internet porn affects relationships. Here's an editorial by Naomi Wolf, saying much the same thing:

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

JPII's Theology of the Body actually predicts this. I might make the effort to track down some relevant sections later on.

Cornelis has posted an exerpt from Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, dealing with music. The chapter titled Music: A Runaway Train on the Rails of Adolescence is a searing attack on rock music, declaring it all pornophony. Following Plato, Bloom sees our music as the mark of a disordered society. Many have, like Eve Tushnet, attacked this as an overgeneralization. Nobody I've read, however, acknowledges the obvious pornophony that's all over the music industry, say Nine Inch Nails' I Want to **** you like an Animal or even less salient works like U2's Discotheque.

Complaining about raunch in pop culture has all the effect of beating back the Pacific with a table sponge. But if virtue is indeed habituated, listening needs as much formation as any other human faculty, which means subjecting it to the right training, the right music. Indeed, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that, just as pornography dulls the person to real sexual intimacy, pop music enervates the person's capacity to enjoy all but the most exaggerated tunes.

Prometheus Unbound: The Musical

An old essay arguing against women's suffrage, would be useful to Carrie's upcoming speech against women in combat. It does provoke the question, though: does opposition to women in combat necessitate opposition to women's suffrage? via Zorak

An Essay on Ralph Waldo Emerson via Cacciaguida

As is the case with all collective enterprises, the social sciences have many more practitioners than they do ideas and principles. I would even argue that they rest upon one sole principle, the separation of facts and values, which sets them apart from philosophy and testifies to their scientific character. The demise of political philosophy is of a piece with the triumph of this principle. I admit that generally such sweeping statements are better avoided. Nevertheless it is a fact that the fact/value distinction has become not only the presupposition of present–day social science but also the prevalent opinion in society at large. In present conditions, a teenager proves his or her coming of age, a citizen proves his or her competence and loyalty, by making use of this principle.

[...]To put it in a nutshell: while previous societies organized themselves so as to bind their members together, while they extolled the ideas of concord and unity, our democratic society organizes itself so as to untie, even to separate, its members, and thus guarantee their independence and their rights. In this sense, our society proposes to fulfill itself as a dis–society. An extraordinary phenomenon indeed!

[...]We have seen that predemocratic societies were "incorporated" societies, rooted in the fecundity of the body, culminating in the King’s body. As for democratic societies, while they are not particularly religious, they are politically and morally spiritualist, even otherwordly. Electing a representative, unlike begetting an heir, is the work of the will—of the mind or the soul.

[...]It might be argued that this heterogeneity is adequately taken care of through the public acknowledgment of the legitimate plurality of human values. Nothing could be more mistaken. As Leo Strauss once tersely remarked, pluralism is a monism, being an –ism. The same self–destructive quality attaches itself to our "values." To interpret the world of experience as constituted of admittedly diverse "values" is to reduce it to this common genus, and thus to lose sight of that heterogeneity we wanted to preserve. If God is a value, the public space a value, the moral law within my heart a value, the starry sky above my head a value . . . what is not? At the same time, for this is confusion’s great masterpiece, the "value language" makes us lose the unity of human life—this necessary component of democratic self–consciousness—just as it blurs its diversity: you don’t argue about values since their value lies in the valuation of the one who puts value on them. Value language, with the inner dispositions it encourages, makes for dreary uniformity and unintelligible heterogeneity at the same time.


-Pierre Manent, The Return of Political Philosophy

The Onion interviews Whit Stillman. Money quotation:

It's okay in our country to be bigoted if it's heading in a slant we consider upward.

Zorak links to a fascinating essay titled The Progressive Era and the Family, by Murray N. Rothbard. It outlines the influence of pietistic Protestantism on the progressive movement. Not only were public schools, prohibition, women's suffrage, and the eugenics/birth control movement choice examples of the moralizing pietistic impulse, they were also intensely nativist. Public schools, of course, were means of subduing the Popish menace, attempting to convert Catholics' children. The birth control movement was a similar means for reducing Catholic and other immigrant influence. Women's suffrage was a key blow struck by the pietists, for the women in more ritualistic forms of Christianity tended to leave politics to the menfolk. And where did the men gather for political association and argument? In the saloons, of course--which was another reason why Prohibition was implemented. This last fact makes me so mad I'm tempted to start up a political saloon of my own--which of course would promptly fail, the old ethnic neighborhoods having been destroyed by suburbanization. And suburbanization itself, some would argue, was an intended result of desegregation.

A few excerpts:

The pietist doctrine was essentially as follows: Specific creeds of various churches or sects do not matter. Neither does obedience to the rituals or liturgies of the particular church. What counts for salvation is only each individual being "born again"—a direct confrontation between the individual and God, a mystical and emotional conversion in which the individual achieves salvation. The rite of baptism, to the pietist, therefore becomes secondary; of primary importance is his or her personal moment of conversion. But if the specific church or creed becomes submerged in a vague Christian interdenominationalism, then the individual Christian is left on his own to grapple with the problems of salvation.

[...] In contrast, the Northerners, particularly in the areas inhabited by "Yankees," adopted a far different form of pietism, "evangelical pietism." The evangelical pietists believed that man could achieve salvation by an act of free will. More particularly, they also believed that it was necessary to a person's own salvation—and not just a good idea—to try his best to ensure the salvation of everyone else in society.

[...]Specifically, it was clear to the pietists that the role of women in the liturgical "ethnic" family was very different from what it was in the pietist Protestant family. One of the reasons impelling pietists and Republicans toward prohibition was the fact that, culturally, the lives of urban male Catholics—nd the cities of the Northeast were becoming increasingly Catholic—evolved around the neighborhood saloon. The men would repair at night to the saloon for chitchat, discussions, and argument—nd they would generally take their political views from the saloonkeeper, who thus became the political powerhouse in his particular ward. Therefore, prohibition meant breaking the political power of the urban liturgical machines in the Democratic party.

But while the social lives of liturgical males revolved around the saloon, their wives stayed at home. While pietist women were increasingly independent and politically active, the lives of liturgical women revolved solely about home and hearth. Politics was strictly an avocation for husbands and sons. Perceiving this, the pietists began to push for women's suffrage, realizing that far more pietist than liturgical women would take advantage of the power to vote.

[...]A laboratory test of which women would turn out to vote occurred; in Massachusetts, where women were given the power to vote in school board elections from 1879 on. In 1888, large numbers of Protestant women in Boston turned out to drive Catholics off the school board. In contrast, Catholic women scarcely voted, "thereby validating the, nativist tendencies of suffragists who believed that extension of full suffrage to women would provide a barrier against further Catholic influence.”

[...]One way of correcting the increasingly pro-Catholic demographics was to restrict immigration; another to promote women's suffrage. A third way, often promoted in the name of "science," was eugenics, an increasingly popular doctrine of the progressive movement. Broadly, eugenics may be defined as encouraging the breeding of the "fit" and discouraging the breeding of the "unfit," the criteria of "fitness" often coinciding with the cleavage between native, white Protestants and the foreign born or Catholics—or the white-black cleavage. In extreme cases, the unfit were to be coercively sterilized.

[...]Many observers, indeed, reported in wonder at the strongly religious tone of the Progressive party convention. Theodore Roosevelt's acceptance address was significantly entitled, "A Confession of Faith," and his words were punctuated by "amens" and by a continual singing of Christian hymns by the assembled delegates. They sang "Onward, Christian Soldiers," "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," and finally the revivalist hymn, "Follow, Follow, We Will Follow Jesus," except that "Roosevelt" replaced the word "Jesus" at every turn.

[...] Thus the foundations of today's massive state intervention in the internal life of the American family were laid in the so-called "progressive era" from the 1870s to the 1920s. Pietists and "progressives" united to control the material and sexual choices of the rest of the American people, their drinking habits, and their recreational preferences. Their values, the very nurture and education of their children, were to be determined by their betters. The spiritual, biological, political, intellectual, and moral elite would govern, through state power, the character and quality of American family life.

[...]It has been known for decades that the Progressive Era was marked by a radical growth in the extension and dominance of government in America's economic, social, and cultural life. For decades, this great leap into statism was naively interpreted by historians as a simple response to the greater need for planning and regulation of an increasingly complex economy. In recent years, however, historians have come to see that increasing statism on a federal and state level can be better interpreted as a profitable alliance between certain business and industrial interests, looking for government to cartelize their industry after private efforts for cartels and monopoly had failed, and intellectuals, academics, and technocrats seeking jobs to help regulate and plan the economy as well as restriction of entry into their professions. In short, the Progressive Era re-created the age-old alliance between Big Government, large business firms, and opinion-molding intellectuals—an alliance that had most recently been embodied in the mercantilist system of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.

Other historians uncovered a similar process at the local level, especially that of urban government beginning with the Progressive Era. Using the influence of media and opinion leaders, upper-income and business groups in the cities systematically took political power away from the masses and centralized this power in the hands of urban government responsive to progressive demands. Elected officials, and decentralized ward representation, were systematically replaced either by appointed bureaucrats and civil servants, or by centralized at-large districts where large-scale funding was needed to finance election races. In this way, power was shifted out of the hands of the masses and into the hands of a minority elite of technocrats and upper-income businessmen. One result was an increase of government contracts to business, a shift from "Tammany" type charity by the political parties to a taxpayer-financed welfare state, and the imposition of higher taxes on suburban residents to finance bond issues and redevelopment schemes accruing to downtown financial interests.

[...]In every case, we see the vital link between these intrusions into the family and the aggressive drive by Anglo-Saxon Protestant "pietists" to use the state to "make America holy," to stamp out sin and thereby assure their own salvation by maximizing the salvation of others. In particular, all of these measures were part and parcel of the long-standing crusade by these pietists to reduce if not eliminate the role of "liturgicals," largely Roman Catholics and high-church Lutherans, from American political life. The drive to stamp out liquor and secular activities on Sundays had long run into successful Catholic and high-church Lutheran resistance. Compulsory public schooling was soon seen as an indispensable weapon in the task of "Christianizing the Catholics," of saving the souls of Catholic children by using the public schools as a Protestantizing weapon. The neglected example of San Francisco politics was urged as a case study of this ethnoreligious political battle over the schools and hence over the right of Catholic parents to transmit their own values to their children without suffering Anglo-Saxon Protestant obstruction. Women's suffrage was seized upon as a means of increasing Anglo-Saxon Protestant voting power, and immigration restriction as well as eugenics was a method of reducing the growing demographic challenge of Catholic voters.

Of course, Pietism found its international expression in the form of Wilsonian diplomacy. It's not a suprise that today's neo-Wilsonianism walks hand in hand with pietism.

The Von Mises Institute has a blog.

A sample, which provokes fantasies of greed even in indifferent little me:

The New Yorker Magazine this week features a review of two investment classics, Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor and Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Benjamin Graham, one of the teachers of billionaire investor Warren Buffert, comes down on the side of financial entrepreneurship. Based on simple mathematical models using the future profits of a business, he provided analytical methods for estimating the "intrinsic value" of its securities - the price that an informed investor would pay to purchase the asset. The intelligent investor will apply Graham's methods to company financials, looking for bargains: companies selling for less than their intrinsic value.