Really?

So, another post prompted by a First Things article. Seriously, if you don't read this journal, you should.
It bothers me when an author refuses to make a genuine intellectual argument and instead takes the easier route to winning you over by bypassing your mind and going straight to the emotions. Really? Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine that ranks right up there with New York Yankees fans. It annoys me so much, in fact, that on Saturday morning last, I literally could not fall back to sleep because of just such an article that I had read in First Things the night before. My mind subconciously began crafting a letter to the editor, slowly gaining in the number of exclamation points it contained, and after about a half hour of trying to get it to stop, I gave up, got up, and emailed the FT editor. I'm not kidding :)
All that to say, below is my response to an essay attempting to prove the case - with pages of statistics and sob stories - that the government should stop casino gambling.

"Dear Editor:

I was disappointed in reading Maura Casey's indulgent article on gambling in your November 2009 issue ("Gambling with Lives"). Ordinarily, even when I disagree with the author's stance, I enjoy each and every First Things contribution for its intellectual engagement much as one can enjoy a good fencing bout even while disliking one of the sportsmen. However, Casey's article exhibited annoyingly poor form and I'm surprised this essay made it through the First Things filter.

Casey makes the same, nonsensical argument we hear from all who would blame the object of a sin for the sin itself. The final straw for my patience was with her ridiculous and frankly insulting claim that "When corporations spend millions to design machines that keep patrons gambling indefinitely, when is it time to acknowledge that the machines, not the people, are the problem?" This is ludicrous. Is a human being really that incapable of knowing himself and availing himself of grace to avoid sin? It seems Casey seeks to replace religion with increased government restrictions in the equation to eliminate evil.

The psychological marketing studies and techniques that Casey sights as leaving the prospective gambler with no real "choice" but to return to or remain at the casino gambling are not unique to this arena but are used in every sector of the free market to one degree or another. I enjoy shopping. Thus, the mall is not the best place for me to go walk on my lunch break. Why? Each store in the mall has one object: to get me, the consumer, to spend as much money there as possible. They contrive elaborate buying incentives, send me coupons at home that their marketing research proves I respond to by spending more money in their store, and entice me with free offers when it has been a long time since I've visited. They offer store credit cards that are statistically proven to lead to debt on the part of the consumer and greater sales for the store, but make it seem like a deal for the consumer by pointing out all of the discounts they'll receive by being a "card carrying" franchise loyalist. But for my response to these temptations to be that my consumeristic spending binges are the store's fault and not my choice, that I have no control over these fliers that enter my house, that I am no match for the mall and thus mall's should be restricted by the federal government to prevent my having the opportunity to spend myself into debt: this is not only lazy logic and bad theology, it is downright hostile to the American tradition of personal freedom and noble virtue (noble because it is freely chosen, not forced upon you). By her arguments in the article, I can only assume that Casey would also lobby for, on top of casino and mall restrictions, liquor store and bar restrictions. Would she then argue that the years of prohibition were a blessing? What an insult to the capability of redeemed humanity.

I believe that Casey makes a strong case for how easy it is to become a gambling addict, and the quick destruction of your life that then ensues. But perhaps the missing breaks she seeks to provide to those speeding towards addiction are not government restrictions on slot machines and new casinos, but greater moral integrity in our culture. Perhaps the marketing schemes and consumerism people find themselves so susceptible to and powerless against stem from a culture that has left behind its cult - and now wonders why it is being overtaken by the Enemy.

I can't help concluding that this article stems from very poor theology as well as very fallacious arguments. I look forward to better intellectual fodder in next month's First Things.

Cheers,

A.N.
Greenville, South Carolina"

There she goes....there she goes again.

Surfacing after a long absence from the blog-o-sphere, I am tempted to relaunch my boat into the waters of the world wide web by a recent First Things article I read which prompted reflection on the Pope's latest encyclical - and thankfulness for the Rock solid truth we can always be assured will issue from the heart of the Church.

The article was the first I had read that seriously engaged Benedict's contribution to the compendium of social teaching in the Church. After a disappointed and uncharacteristically off-the-mark review by George Weigel, I felt like most Catholic intellectuals dismissed the encyclical (Caritas in Veritate - a must read if you haven't yet picked it up. Go to www.vatican.va to read it for free online) and left it to be trumpeted by liberal dissenters as the Church's blessing on the United Nations and Obama's wealth redistribution plans. This article's author, however, wisely scolded both Christians from the right and left who would read the Pope's encyclical only selectively, sifting out the uncomfortable statements that don't meld with their own world view. I must admit, as a modern conservative American, there were parts (and perhaps this had something to do with the translator more than the Pope) that made me squirm in my chair, but I think we forget that this is the role of the Church.

The Church does not make policy. Pope Benedict is very careful to repeatedly exhort his readers (interestingly enough, I've been reading a fascinating history of church encyclicals that sheds some light on their purpose, but that is a subject for another day...) not to take his encyclical in a vacuum. Like all doctrinal statements, they must be read in the light of the continuity of the entire church Tradition and Scripture - and understood only in that light. Any who would read a break with our Tradition into this encyclical is grasping at straws. Further, he reminds his readers on several occasions that this encyclical is not meant to dictate definite political actions. The Church is not a political institution. But, in so far as political policies and actions affect the dignity of human persons and the health of the cultures they live in, the Church speaks for Christ in showing politicians where they may NOT go.

The title of the encyclical is beautifully chosen: Truth in charity. Only in so far as our social and philanthropic actions are motivated by holy charity and informed by the truth of the human person and his ultimate spiritual nature can they actually be said to help our less-fortunate brothers and cause true global advances. And in America - as in other countries - we can begin our examination of how to apply the Pope's bold declaration here in our own neighborhood. So I don't think a bit of discomfort in reading this encyclical is out of order.

Benedict speaks from the Grace and Authority of his office - and those with ears, let them hear and reflect, not dismiss as impractical, European, or idealistic his exhortations.

On that note, we're going to a forum tomorrow night to discuss and break open Caritas in Veritate. There will be three presenters and then discussion and question and answer time, so I'm really looking forward to it. The pastor of Prince of Peace, Msg. Brovey, will be giving his reflections which should provide much food for thought.

The Church's Tradition of faithfulness to Christ's teachings in all times, ages, and seasons lives on, and those who thoughtfully build their houses on this Rock will not be disappointed.

Latest Drawing

Madonna and Child

Conscience, Proportionalism, and Birth Control

Three things are important to consider in determining the morality of human acts: the moral object chosen, the relevant moral circumstances, and the personal end or intention. It is in regards to this last aspect – intention – that the role of one’s conscience in making moral decisions comes into play. Properly understood, conscience contains both an objective element as well as a subjective. Conscience is subjective in the matter of one’s certitude in regards to proper action, but conscience is objective in regards to the determination of the intrinsic morality of an action: an action is not determined right or wrong by the conscience’s certitude regarding that action, but rather by the action’s objective conformity with truth. Contrary to this Thomistic and Catholic understanding of conscience and objective morality, however, many in the 20th century have assaulted the objective aspect of conscience and have attempted to overrun it entirely with subjectivism. One such attack has come from Proportionalists who claim that no act is intrinsically evil in all circumstances. One of the most controversial and highly publicized examples of a Proportionalist argument being used to justify an objectively evil action is the still-prominent discussion surrounding the Church’s teaching on birth control and its intrinsic moral evil – even when birth control is used to supposedly counter “more serious” evils. By dissecting first the Church’s understanding of the three aspects – or fonts – of morality and the role conscience plays in determining the morality of actions, we can see how the Propotionalist argument is a fallacious way to justify the use of birth control.

In Catholic teaching there are three relevant fonts for determining the morality of a human action. The first is the moral object chosen. The moral object can be defined as the “’object’ rationally chosen by the deliberate will ,” “in conformity with the true good.” Thus, an action may be deemed good or bad by how well the object chosen conforms to the objective truth of God. The second font in determining the morality of a human action is the relevant moral circumstance. Life’s circumstances can have a bearing on the morality of an action, but they are not primary in determining the action’s morality. Circumstances merely, “stand around or surround the kind of moral object it is”, but need nevertheless to be considered in determining an action’s morality. The third and final font is the personal end or intention. Intention answers the question of why one chooses to act. Intention possesses a bearing on the culpability of an action, but it does not affect its intrinsic moral goodness or badness. Good intentions cannot make an intrinsically evil action good: the ends do not justify the means. Thus, while the first font is the most weighty, all three come into play in judging an actions moral or immoral quality.

The role of conscience comes into significance when one considers more fully this third font of morality: the intention of the actor. The reason that intention cannot solely determine the morality of an action is that there are two components to conscience, both an objective and a subjective. Conscience is subjective in the question of certitude. In other words, when making a moral judgment one can be subjectively certain of their decision or subjectively doubtful. As such, one possesses an obligation to always act on a certain conscience, but never on a doubtful one. This subjective role, however, is not the only role of conscience. Conscience possesses an objective component as well that has to do with deciding whether one’s action would be (or is) objectively correct or erroneous. The correctness of one’s conscience judgment in this regard has to do with how closely one’s judgment mirrors the objective truth of God (which is where proper formation of one’s conscience becomes so very important). Thus, it is perfectly possible for one to possess certitude on a moral question, but to be in error at the same time because one’s judgment does not align with objective truth. Because certainty must conform to absolute truth in order to truly discern the morality of an action, one possesses an obligation to properly understand truth and desire truth, so that one’s conscience is both Correct and Certain.

Many in the 20th century have sought to diminish the objective component of conscience and morality and replace it with a disproportionate emphasis on the subjective. One such claim comes from Proportionalists who state that no action is intrinsically evil in all circumstances, but rather may be done if there exists a proportionately good reason for doing so: in other words, the ends can justify the means.

The false claims of Proportionalism are often applied to the question of birth control, particularly in regards to the use of condoms in Africa as a means of combating the spread of H.I.V. or as a means of population control in “overpopulated” countries. Their argument is that, since HIV and overpopulation pose such a threat to man, the moral evil of birth control (which is outside of the scope of this paper but involves interfering with the beautiful truth of the marital act and also the possibility of unintended – or intended – abortion of a human life or prevention of its conception) can be considered a moral action when undertaken to prevent these greater evils. The subjectivism of who decides which is the greater evil, however, or when a moral evil is permissible for a greater good makes the Proportionalist argument logically untenable. Furthermore, Proportionalism creates a relativistic morality, ultimately denying absolute truth as well as the intrinsic morality of certain actions.

Thus, it is easy to see how misunderstanding the fonts of morality and the proper role of conscience in making moral decisions could easily lead to more than just a disordered personal morality, but to grave moral evils being peddled as societal goods. The Thomistic wisdom kept pure in the bosom of the Church thankfully allows the honest student of morality to see through the errors of subjectivity such as Proportionalism, and hopefully come to a correct moral understanding.

Latest Drawing

John Paul the Great

St. Augustine and Pelagius on the Doctrine of Grace

Heresy drives doctrine. Almost universally doctrine develops in response to a specific attack against a truth of the Faith that spurs the Church to greater doctrinal refinement: so it was with St. Augustine and his doctrine of grace. St. Augustine fully developed and systematized the Church’s doctrine of grace (so much so that he is called the Doctor of Grace) in response to the heretical belittlement and perversion of grace by Pelagius and his followers, who denied the transmission of original sin and thus denied the necessity of grace for salvation. By understanding their respective positions, we can come to a deeper understanding of the Church’s doctrine of grace.

St. Augustine developed an extensive and rich doctrine of grace, but four themes in particular stand out when discussing his response to Pelagius. In looking at St. Augustine’s position, the first theme he concentrates on is the necessity of grace for the overcoming of original sin and the deathly consequences of sin inherited by all men from Adam. Augustine then moves on to stress that God’s grace by necessity must precede all human work as well as bear it along. God must begin and accompany all that is good: man can do nothing good wholly on his own. Thirdly, Augustine teaches that grace emancipates man from his slavery to sin and leads to true liberty. Only with grace can man be free from the bondage of his sin nature and fulfill the purpose for which he was created – the true definition of liberty. His forth major theme concentrates on the necessity of grace for salvation: without it man cannot “run the race to the finish line,” nor can he hope to grow during that “race” in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity which are necessary for salvation.

In order to fully understand and appreciate these themes and St. Augustine’s doctrine of grace as a whole, one must first understand the heresy to which it was a response. The heretic Pelagius and his followers denied the transmission of original sin, believing that Adam did not lose the state of original justice for all men. He taught that Adam would have died even if he had not sinned and that his sin only harmed himself and was not passed on to his descendents. Thus, according to Pelagius, all men are born with the same preternatural gifts of Adam and into his first state of original justice. Therefore, Christ’s sacrifice and God’s grace are not intrinsically necessary for salvation. Indeed, according to Pelagius man can reach Heaven by either following the Law or the Gospel and even apart from Christ’s saving sacrifice man can live a life wholly without sin, meriting Heaven thereby.

A deep understanding of original sin and the sin nature inherited by all men is the foundation of St. Augustine’s doctrine of grace. According to Augustine, only Adam was created in a state of original justice apart from an inherited sin nature and therefore had the power not to sin. By choosing to sin, Augustine writes, Adam condemned all of his descendents because the result of that first sin was a wounding of human nature and a severing of man’s relationship with God – not just for Adam but for all men. Therefore, “Adam had the power not to sin, but sinned. Fallen man cannot not sin, as his nature is wounded.” Man is not a sinner because he sins personally, but rather he sins personally because all men are by nature sinners. Because of original sin, man is by nature a slave to sin and only through grace can that bondage be broken and man returned to a state of liberty. Indeed, man cannot on his own choose the good, just as a prisoner cannot release his own bonds; rather, the Holy Spirit must first “intervene interiorly to justify the sinner and move him to do the good things he cannot by his nature do without God’s gracious aid.” Thus, unlike Pelagius, Augustine upheld that man cannot begin his work of salvation nor can he enter into Heaven through merit, but rather all action must be begun and continued by grace.

Because – as St. Augustine insists – grace is necessary for salvation and without it man can achieve no good work, grace also is essential for sanctification and growth in the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity on the road to salvation. According to the Church Fathers, grace is by its definition a participation in the life of God. St. Augustine strongly stresses this point (in the vein of the Cappadocian Fathers), often referring to the divinization of the Christian as a natural consequence of grace (divinization meaning participation in God’s life). Furthermore, he writes that an important aspect of grace is the indwelling of the Son and the Holy Spirit, whereby he states that “the Son and the Holy Spirit are sent to the Christians and so dwell in them when they are known and perceived.” Furthermore, this participation in the life of God is the foundation upon which man grows in the theological virtues (theological because of God’s grace as their source), of faith, hope and charity and advance along the way of sanctification.

Thus, in response to the serious heresy of Pelagius, Augustine eloquently crafts some of the core doctrines of the Church on grace: its meaning and effects in the life of the Christian and its necessity along the road to – and in order to reach – salvation. Key to Augustine’s view of grace is the understanding of original sin and the deathly consequences of sin inherited by all men from Adam. Only with grace can man be free from the bondage of his sin nature and fulfill the purpose for which he was created, and only by grace can man be saved.

Essence and Existence in the Hypostatic Union

Natural science cannot be used to prove supernatural truths beyond a shadow of a doubt. Reason can demonstrate, however, the logical plausibility of these truths, proving that their being true would not be a logical absurdity. In the thirteenth century, St. Thomas Aquinas used the natural science of Aristotle in this way to explain the Christological truth of the hypostatic union: how Jesus Christ can be one person but with two natures, both human and divine. Now it should be noted that the distinction between essence and existence is not clearly found in Aristotle but rather St. Thomas thought it was there in an inchoate form. Nevertheless, by extrapolating Aristotelian principles, Aquinas defines the real distinction between person (existence) and nature (essence) in man, contrasts that distinction to the unity of person and nature in God, and uses this basis to demonstrate that it is logically possible for there to be a divine being (Christ) with one person and yet two natures.

First, it is important to briefly explain St. Thomas’s premise of the necessity of a First Cause (which Aristotle would agree with). Since nothing in the universe came into existence of itself but rather as the result of a separate cause, he agreed with Aristotle in upholding that there must be some First Cause that began this sequence of causation. Thus, using the ideas of Aristotle as a base, St. Thomas strove to demonstrate first the necessary existence of a spiritual First Cause of all reality – which for St. Thomas was, of course, God, the Uncaused Cause.
Continuing with his use of Aristotelian ideas, St. Thomas argues regarding this necessary First Cause that His existence (person) and essence (nature) must by definition be identical: The First Cause’s essence is existence itself or else it would not necessarily exist. St. Thomas uses the word subsistence to describe this divine nature as any essence that “exist[s] in themselves, and not in another.” Therefore any person (which can be defined as “the very existence of a being who has spiritual intelligence and free will” ) “subsisting in a nature would be altogether one with its nature.”In other words, if one exists in themselves then their nature and person are indistinct. Furthermore, as Ralph McInerny states, “If there is something that exists by definition, which cannot not exist, it is unique and first, it is God.” Therefore, since the First Cause is the only necessary being – that is, the only being in which essence and existence are one and thus by His nature He must exist – then existence (person) and essence (nature) for all material and spiritual creatures must by definition be separate and distinct, because no being other than God (the First Cause) exists in themselves or by their very nature. As McInerny continues, “It seems clear enough that natural things do not exist by definition, as if existence were what they are or part of what they are, since, if that were so, they could not not be.” Indeed, only in the First Cause are existence and essence united: in all else they are distinct.

Once these Aristotelian definitions of both First Cause and the distinction between existence and essence are established, one can turn and apply this basis to help explain Christ’s two natures: the mystery of the hypostatic union. It should be noted, however, that just as Aristotle does not explicitly employ the existence/essence distinction in the above manner, St. Thomas does not explicitly apply this inchoate distinction to Christology but rather the ideas may be thought similarly implicit in his Tercias Pars. Nevertheless, according to the above-described Aristotelian explanation of essence and existence in the First Cause, Christ by His nature of being God and thus subsistent must possess both a divine person and a divine nature that are indistinct from one another. It must be a part of Christ’s divine nature to be an existing free and rational individual. That being said, all natures (essences) other than those of the First Cause by definition must be distinct from their existences (persons). Therefore, it is perfectly plausible that Christ could possess a human existence distinct from his divine nature. Thus, Christ is able to possess one divine person with two natures – one fully human and thus distinct from his person and one divine and thus indistinct from his person. Since it is logically possible for Christ to have two natures, one may make such statements as “it is literally true that God suffers as we suffer, although he suffers not in his divine nature but in his human nature.” This feat of theology and philosophy both was and remains a major development of the Christological doctrine in the Church and a central contribution of St. Thomas to the Church’s theology.

Building on St. Thomas, then, as St. Thomas built on Aristotle, the Catholic Church upholds that it is logically possible for Christ to have both a human nature and a divine nature that share the same divine Person, that of the Son of God, the Second person of the Blessed Trinity.