The Dark Knight

Over at National Review Online, Jason Lee Steorts has an article on the significance of the Joker in the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight.

The Dark Knight is a good movie, considerably more intelligent than one expects from the film industry these days. And Heath Ledger's performance is all they said it is. In fact, it is so good that Ledger has replaced Bruce Dern as Longhair in The Cowboys as my favorite movie villain. And that's saying something; Dern held the title for 36 years.

I don't think Steorts quite understands the Joker. This is what he says about him:

But that's not right, because the Joker doesn't do just anything. What he does is destroy. He is not chance, for chance might treat you well. He is, rather, a vandal. Why he wants to vandalize is not clear. Beyond question is that he thinks there is no such thing as right or wrong.

The Joker isn't a vandal, because a vandal is a barbarian who just wants to have a good time sacking a city. The Joker, in fact, doesn't actually do a lot of destroying. What he really wants to do is corrupt, or, more precisely, expose the corruption that is a hidden reality in all of us. We might call him a connoisseur of Original Sin. 

Like all villains of his type, the Joker claims to be a "realist" but he is really a secret idealist. For the idealist, only the perfect is worthy of respect or even deserves existence. Since nothing is perfect on Earth, especially men, the idealist thinks it an abomination that the world exists at all. He can't understand how someone like Batman would spend his life defending men even in their state of corruption. He thinks it must be that Batman doesn't really understand the depth of corruption in men. So the Joker makes it his task to expose the corruption in men, and makes it his special task to corrupt even the few men who seem to be purely good. And he the Joker is pretty good at being bad.

But Batman, like Christ, has no illusions about the nature of men. The difference between the Joker and Batman is that Batman thinks men are worth saving even though they are corrupt. A better name for the film might be the Dark Christ because Batman, like Christ, sacrifices himself for men who are not as good as him. 

The film does an excellent job of showing the two sides of the dual nature of man. Yes, even the best men have some store of evil in their hearts; but the converse is also true, that even evil men have some store of goodness in their hearts. The Joker sets up several "no-win" situations intended to expose the selfish nature of men, but he is (occasionally) thwarted by the surprise appearance of virtue in places one would least expect it. Good is as real as evil; in fact, it is more real. 

Books as Companions

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom mentions the notion of "books as companions:"

When I first noticed the decline in reading during the late sixties, I began asking my large introductory classes, and any other group of younger students to which I spoke, what books really count for them. Most are silent, puzzled by the question. The notion of books as companions is foreign to them. Justice Black with his tattered copy of the Constitution in his pocket at all times is not an example that would mean much to them. There is no printed word to which they look for counsel, inspiration, or joy.

What books really count for you, dear reader? Are there any books that you count as genuine companions, books that color the way you see the world and are always ready to hand as sure, steady guides? I'd be interested to know, if anyone happening to read this post would like to respond.

In my case, on reflection, there are four books to which I regularly return and that are instrumental in forming my vision of the world. They are, in no particular order:

1. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton.

2. Concluding Unscientific Postscript by Soren Kierkegaard.

3. Collected Dialogs by Plato.

and, of course,

4. The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom.

What makes a book worthy of being a companion? I don't think it is anything you necessarily decide. You just find yourself, over the years, when confused or depressed, gravitating to the same few books over and over again. But what is it about those particular books that draws you to them? One feature seems to be a depth that is nearly inexhaustible. These are books you can open anywhere, read a few lines, probably lines you have read many times before, and yet find a new meaning to them that you had not noticed before. They are books that seem to be almost alive, growing with you as you mature. This post was inspired, for example, by flipping open The Closing of the American Mind in an idle moment and reading the beginning of the Chapter "Books."

They are also books loaded with offhand remarks of great insight. At the beginning of the chapter "Relationships", Bloom says the following:

Students these days are, in general, nice. I choose the word carefully. They are not particularly moral or noble. Such niceness is a facet of democratic character when times are good.

These sentences sum up the character of my generation and after, the very tail-end of the baby boom and the beginning of "Generation X", and beyond. Prosperity hides a multitude of sins. The demanding religion of our grandparents just doesn't seem to make much sense to us. Life is good, safe and relatively undemanding. Christianity is about salvation, but salvation from what? We see no need to be saved from a life of 40 hour work weeks, $75,000 a year salaries, four weeks vacation a year, and all the comforts a modern technological society can provide. The lesson I got from twelve years of Catholic education (mostly in the 1970's) was that being a Catholic meant being a "good guy", what Bloom calls "nice." Well, after high school, I took stock of myself and concluded that I was a pretty nice guy. So what did I need a weekly religious service for?

But there is a deep anxiety hidden in "nice", an anxiety I experienced but did not really understand until I read Bloom and Kierkegaard. It is hinted at in Bloom's comment that the current generation is neither moral nor noble. "Nice" is comfortable but it is flat, uninspiring, and ultimately boring. It is the "aesthetic life" as described by Kierkegaard. A truly human life, a life worthy of a man, must involve noble actions and moral depth. Thus, unlike prior generations, which needed to discover the reality of salvation, we need to discover the reality of sin. Only a life lived in the possibility of sin can one find depth beyond "nice."

The Closing of the American Mind is filled with little asides that can set one thinking for hours, and that can, by themselves, change your life. Our bookstores are filled with "self-help" books that are useless; the true self-help books are written by Bloom, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas.

One of the great benefits of books-as-companions is that they give you a perspective outside the parameters of contemporary culture. This is one of the meanings of freedom as understood by classical education, and that it took as its goal. Chesterton's Orthodoxy contains an entire, perhaps somewhat eccentric, worldview, but a worldview that seems increasingly sane the more one immerses oneself in it, and in comparison with which the ordinary secular worldview seems crazy. My unfavorable reaction to the Harry Potter books is largely based on my reading of Chesterton, especially the Chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" in Orthodoxy. When I need a dose of sanity, I always return to Orthodoxy.

Kierkegaard and Plato taught me how to think. I had read some philosophy, and taken a few courses in college, but it didn't mean anything to me until I read Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard taught me the meaning of subjectivity, and with it the world of philosophy and Plato opened up.

Hope vs. hope

This post has spoilers for the film The Shawshank Redemption.

I've been reading He Leadeth Me by Fr. Walter Ciszek, S.J. This is the true story of an American Jesuit priest who spent more than twenty years in the Soviet Gulag. Fr. Ciszek's story has led me to meditate on the the difference between Hope (the theological virtue) and hope (the worldly confidence that things will turn out well.)

I think the difference between Hope and hope can be brought out if we compare Fr. Ciszek's story to the story of another prisoner, Andy Dufresne of the file The Shawshank Redemption. Both Dufresne and Fr. Ciszek spent many years in imprisonment under inhuman conditions; both performed good works for their fellow prisoners; and both eventually found liberation from prison and a life of peace and happiness. Andy Dufresne is an icon of worldly hope; Fr. Ciszek is an icon of the theological virtue of Hope.

The most significant difference between Andy Dufresne and Fr. Ciszek is, of course, that Dufresne is entirely fictional, the creation of author Stephen King, and Fr. Ciszek was a real person, born and raised in the United States. I don't mean to imply that this means that worldly hope is a fantasy and only theological Hope is real. Not at all. Worldly hope is a real phenomenon. But the fact that The Shawshank Redemption is fiction can lead to some illusions about the nature of secular hope. American films are famous, perhaps notorious, for requiring happy endings. Watching an American film, you know things will turn out well for the hero. This is no less true for The Shawshank Redemption. We see Andy Dufresne falsely accused of murder and thrown into prison. We see him exploited by the prison warden and abused by the guards. But we know that, in the end, things will turn out well for him, especially since the film is narrated by the reassuring, grandfatherly voice of Morgan Freeman. Freeman's narration gives the viewer the illusion of a "divine perspective" that provides a foundation of hope for Andy Dufresne. The suspense in the film is not whether Dufresne will be saved from his prison existence, but just how that salvation will be effected.

It is the nature of worldly hope, however, that is has no assurance that things will turn out well. Worldly hope is based on reason, specifically a calculation made by the hopeful of the probability that things will turn out well. A prisoner may have an appeal on file or know that a private detective is researching evidence that will exonerate him, for example. Or, like Andy Dufresne, he may have a plan for escape. But there is no guarantee that the appeal will be granted, the evidence found, or the escape end in success.

We discover in retrospect that Dufresne had a plan of escape that he implemented over many years. It was this plan and his chance of escape that formed the basis of hope that sustained him over his years in prison. The narrative perspective of the film, however, gives Dufresne's escape an air of inevitability that it could never really have. In fact, the escape involves considerable good fortune. It required the long, painstaking digging of a tunnel from a particular cell over the course of years, an effort that would have come to nought if his cell assignment were changed at any time over those years. It required the hiding of the tunnel entrance behind a poster, its existence somehow never discovered during the periodic cell inspections (although the warden quickly finds the tunnel shortly after Dufresne escapes.) Lastly, and most obviously, a thunderstorm fortuitously happens the night of the escape, conveniently covering the sounds of Dufresne hammering his way into a sewage pipe. It is the nature of secular hope that it cannot effect itself by itself and that it is subject to the whims of the "God of Good Fortune."

Is the secular hope of a film like The Shawshank Redemption merely what remains of a genuinely theological Hope in a post-Christian world? Pre-Christian cultures didn't speak of hope the way we do now. They saw life as dominated by fate. Aristotle taught that happiness is a life of human flourishing lived according to virtue. But virtue itself is not enough to assure happiness; in addition to virtue, good fortune is needed. A man born in miserable circumstances with no chance to improve his lot is fated to unhappiness. Life sucks (for some). Deal with it.

Christianity introduced the radical notion that true happiness, because it is based entirely on a personal relationship with God as known in Jesus Christ, is not dependent on material circumstances and is therefore equally available to all. Happiness flows from the grace of God, the possession of the "pearl of great price" for which man gives everything else, and in light of which all other concerns come to nothing. That includes material concerns. The man with theological Hope has confidence that "things will turn out well," but this is because, for him, the experience of the love of God makes him almost indifferent to material concerns. Things will turn out well because he already possesses the only thing that matters; things have already turned out well and can't change, however material circumstances might.

This is an easy thing to say, of course, for someone in comfortable circumstances like me. For me, "Hope" in such depth isn't much more than a nice idea. Even before he went to Russia, Fr. Ciszek was a man of much deeper faith than I am; yet in his suffering in Russia, Fr. Ciszek discovered that his Hope was tainted by a fair degree of purely worldly hope. He expected God to save him from the suffering he endured; in other words, the "pearl of great price" wasn't really enough. In addition to God, Fr. Ciszek needed more food and better conditions, and he expected God to provide it. 

There is a wonderful passage in He Leadeth Me when, after four years  and endless interrogation in Lubianka Prison, Fr. Ciszek finally abandons himself completely to God. His Russian interrogators had threatened to have him shot, and, almost without thinking, he had signed papers confessing to various "crimes." Now the Russians wished to turn him into a spy in the Vatican. With the grace of God, Fr. Ciszek refused, and had a deep experience of freedom, for he was genuinely indifferent to his fate. No matter what the Soviets did, whether they sent him to the Gulag, had him shot, or released him, God was with him and nothing else mattered. This is the "freedom of the children of God."

Now an atheist would say that Fr. Ciszek had merely talked himself into things for the sake of getting through his difficulties. His hope was not "realistic." There is really no way to prove the atheist wrong in any objective sense. Only God and Fr. Ciszek, in his heart, really know what happened. But consider that any hope, if it is to go beyond the fragile and temporary confidence that is the summit of worldly hope, must be "unrealistic" in this sense, for it must be "unreasonable" in worldly terms. Hope that is based on calculations of probabilities and material outcomes will always be suspect and fragile; only a Hope that is based on something eternal and unchanging has any chance of gaining depth, of transcending the "fates" that ruled the pagan world. The man in possession of the eternal and unchanging Love will naturally appear unreasonable, even crazy, to the rest of us, for his "calculations" operate on a level we can't even imagine. But it is a level that cannot help but call our own cynical judgments into question, as Fr. Ciszek's witness in the Gulag brought Christ even to those reduced to the bare minimum of human existence.

The truly crazy man appears unreasonable to us, but he is also unable to cope with reality as well as we sane people can. That is the real test between the sane and demented; we put the mentally disturbed in asylums because they are manifestly unable to deal with reality. (Is that what an "asylum" is, a "haven from reality?") Yet a man like Fr. Ciszek managed to handle the reality of the Gulag better than everyone else, as was universally acknowledged. The typical zek (prisoner of the Gulag) was surly, defensive, and did his job as poorly as he could get away with. Fr. Ciszek was kind, charitable, and did his job as well as he could, since he saw it as a participation in the work of God. If the test of the sane person is his ability to deal with reality, then Fr. Ciszek was among the sanest of men, and that sanity, in the end, testifies to the reality of the God Who sustained his Hope in a far more powerful way than any worldly calculations.

The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism, Continued

This is a continuation of this post.

I would like to explain by example what I mean by atheism offering cultural achievements to rival those of Christianity. I am speaking of the space program and the hippie movement of the 1960's and 1970's.

First, the hippie movement. The so-called "counterculture" was not explicitly atheistic, but it was generally antagonistic to organized religion, and definitely had a "this-world" orientation. The hippies thought they could bring peace and love to the world, now, and with no necessary help from divine intervention. As the saying goes, they attempted to "immanentize the eschaton." They did not trash religious symbols, but offered their own symbols instead, like the peace sign:



As a secular movement, the hippie movement was very successful at drawing people away from religion. The Catholic religious orders emptied out almost overnight in the early seventies. This is how easy it is for atheism to be successful; if it can offer a reasonable cultural alternative to religion, people will leave religion and its onerous demands in a heartbeat. The problem for the hippie movement was its essential shallowness; the culture it offered could not stand up to the problems of life once they came (e.g. when young ladies in the communes began having babies. Babies are not interested in peace and good feelings, but food, sleep and a clean diaper. And they want them now.) The peace sign is now a bit of nostalgia. But at least it was an attempt to go beyond mocking organized religion and offered an alternative.

The space program of the 60's and 70's offered a kind of "secular moment." Space exploration was about a lot more than solving some engineering problems; it was vocally promoted as the foundation of a secular spirituality. Any kid of that era remembers the excitement surrounding the Apollo Program. We all had our LM's and Lunar Rovers. As a kid in the Middle Ages might have dreamed of going on Crusade to the Holy Land, we dreamed of the secular crusade of the space program. The "space age" produced its version of high art, like Stanley Kubrick's 2001, A Space Odyssey. 2001 wasn't just a space movie; it was a meditation on the sublime meaning of space exploration itself.

The leading apostle of the space spirituality movement was Carl Sagan. He is known as a popularizer of science, but there isn't actually very much science in his popular books. What he was selling was not science, but the spirituality of science. Take a look at the cover of Demon-Haunted World, for example, with its image of the lonely candle in the dark. Sagan uses the image of the candle to create a mythology of science, with science as a kind of pagan hero struggling to survive through the course of history. But the spirituality of space was already losing momentum at the height of the Apollo Program. There is a telling scene in the film Apollo 13 where the astronaut's families listen to interviews of the Odyssey crewmen as they drift to the moon. The interviews were initially intended to be broadcast live on the major networks, but the networks bailed out in the end and broadcast their standard programming (typical dismal TV fare), because the public no longer tuned in to Apollo broadcasts. Even as soon as 1973, space exploration was losing its ability to inspire. President Bush a few years ago tried to reincarnate the ethos of the Apollo Program by announcing a Mission to Mars, but everybody yawned.

Carl Sagan, in the Demon-Haunted World, lamented the state of science education in this country but, even more, the lack of inspiration people, especially the young, felt from science. He wished to re-energize the spirituality of science. In effect, he was doing his best to prevent the culture from turning into a culture of Nietzschean "Last Men", people who have given up the attempt to do anything grand and are content to entertain themselves with small pleasures while they wait to die. He implicitly recognized that, if atheism is ever to displace religion, it will only do so if it can inspire people as religion once did.

The Meaning of Contemporary Atheism

Let me make the point I made in Nietzsche, Atheism and the Eucharist in another way.

Let us grant the atheist all his premisses. There is no supernatural, divine being as proposed by Christianity or the other great religions. Jesus of Nazareth performed no genuine miracles and did not rise from the dead. Furthermore, religion is a pernicious blight on the world. It is responsible, if not for everything bad in the world, at least most of it. We would all be better off if it simply went away.

Let us grant all that. Yet the facts of religion remain, and in particular I am thinking about the facts of Christianity. Whether it is true or false, the Bible is a fact. The two-thousand year old Catholic Church is a fact. Chartres Cathedral is a fact. Furthermore, the culture inspired by religion is a fact. The Christian-inspired West explored the world, invented modern science, and created Handel's Messiah, Shakespeare's MacBeth, Dante's Divine Comedy, Rembrandt's The Prodigal Son and the Calling of St. Matthew, and the Sistine Chapel.

My point is not that, because Christianity created Chartres Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, and inspired Handel, Bach, Rembrandt, Dante and Dostoyevsky, that it must be true. It is that these things happened whether Christianity is true or not. There are two possibilities:

1. The Bible and the culture it formed were inspired by God.

2. The Bible and the culture it formed were creative products of the human imagination.

The believing Catholic says the former; an atheist, of whatever stripe, says the latter. But in saying the latter, the atheist doesn't always understand the full implications of his own position. The Catholic attributes the profound achievements of Western culture to natural human creative powers taken to new heights by divine inspiration; the atheist must say that human creative power reached those heights all on its own. In eliminating God, the atheist necessarily elevates the purely human. 

And now we come to Nietzsche. If indeed Chartres Cathedral, Dante and Rembrandt are but purely natural products of human imagination, there is nothing stopping us from achieving similar creative heights, albeit without any reference to the divine.  The real test for atheism is cultural, and whether it can match the "divinely-inspired" cultural achievements of Christendom with its own cultural achievements that make no reference to God. We know the atheist can mock the cultural achievements of Christendom, e.g. by displaying Crucifixes in urine or smearing paintings of the Virgin Mary with excrement. Nietzsche would be disgusted by such sophomoric atheism. Mockery is the refuge of the immature and the uncreative; an atheist who is satisfied with atheism doesn't need to mock because he is secure in his own cultural achievements. The end result of such mockery is nihilism and, finally, the "Last Man", the denizen of the culture that has given up the attempt to do anything significant and satisfies itself with watching TV from cradle to grave. Sort of like our own.

Desecrating the Eucharist only testifies to the emptiness of contemporary atheism. It is an act that testifies to its own insignificance, for it has power only to the extent that the Eucharist itself is significant. Instead of mocking the Eucharist, the atheist should be creating his own rival, secular liturgies that match the Catholic Mass in sublimity and solemnity. When the atheist sees Catholics reduced to mocking secular liturgies, he will know that he has won.

Nietzsche, Atheism and the Eucharist

Nietzsche is indispensable in understanding the dynamics of atheism.

Mocking religion, undermining the authority of its institutions, and evacuating the meaning of its symbols is the easy part for atheism, just as the easy part in constructing a new building is knocking down the rickety old one occupying the lot. But there is a moment of danger once that old building is destroyed; while it existed, it at least provided some modicum of shelter however unsatisfactory. After its destruction, there is no shelter at all until the new building is constructed. The challenge for the building's occupants is to somehow make it through that transitional period of time between the destruction of the old one and the construction of the new.

Like an old building, traditional religion provides a system of meaning, a "building", within which man can live, however unsatisfactory any particular religion might be. The real challenge for atheism is to build a new system of meaning and significance to replace the one that disappeared with the destruction of religion, an event known as the "death of God." Just as homelessness is the threat that faces man after the destruction of his old dwellings, so nihilism is the threat that faces man after the destruction of his old systems of meaning. Nietzsche saw that facing and overcoming the threat of nihilism was the true task of atheism, not merely mocking religion.

How is nihilism to be overcome? By the creation of a new system of meaning. This is the task of Zarathustra, Nietzsche's "uberman." Nietzsche was not himself Zarathustra; he did not and never attempted to create a new system of meaning. He was Zarathustra's prophet, the way John the Baptist was the prophet of Jesus Christ, pointing the way to the One who would come. Nietzsche thinks of Christ as a kind of earlier incarnation of Zarathustra; far more than a merely political rebel, Christ managed a revolution in meaning, a "transvaluation of values." Christ managed to overturn the allegedly "noble" pagan virtues of strength, virility, ambition and pride in favor of the "slave" virtues of humility, mildness, patience and submission; Christ's victory is attested by the fact that we now look on the old Roman virtues as practically vices.

Just as Christ was not really a political figure, although he was mistaken for one, so Zarathustra, when he comes, will not really be a political figure. The revolution Christ effected went much deeper than politics, and a similar sort of revolution will be necessary if atheism is to succeed. What will be the measure of Zarathustra's success? Zarathustra succeeds to the extent that he is able to create a new system of meaning that is substantial in its own right, and in which people can live; to the extent that he fails in his act of creation, the threat of nihilism becomes ever more pressing - and people come to resent Zarathustra as a mere destroyer and become nostalgic for the old building they left.

There is another Biblical image relevant here, and that is Moses, an earlier incarnation of Zarathustra. The key to Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt was convincing them that they were meant to be free, that God Himself was behind their liberation. The best way to keep a slave a slave is to convince him that it is in the nature of things that he is in bondage; the only way to really liberate him is to overturn the system of meaning that places the noble master over him. Thus Moses effected a revolution by proclaiming Yahweh, the God of the Slaves who was more powerful than the Gods of Pharoah (a revolution that was finally completed by Christ, the New Moses and thus a New Zarathustra.) But Moses and the Israelites had to wander in the desert for forty years while their new system of meaning was built; a time when nihilism threatened, Moses was regularly denounced as a destroyer, and the Israelites pined to return to Egypt and slavery, where they would once again be in bondage but be comfortable in their old system of meaning. As Nietzsche saw, man finds nihilism unbearable and would rather be enslaved than endure it.

Atheism succeeded a long time ago in liberating man from religion's systems of meaning; in fact, the Enlightenment can be thought of as this very project, and it had largely succeeded by the turn of the 19th century. What followed was a wandering in the desert; a stroll that was initially fascinating and thrilling as new lands were explored, but one that became increasingly anxious as man was unable to make a home for himself anywhere. Nietzsche, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, understood the spiritual situation of man and the looming threat that nihilism posed.

The difference between John the Baptist and Nietzsche is that the Baptist knew that Christ was coming, whereas Nietzsche only recognized the need for a Zarathustra, whether one was actually coming or not. As it turned out, the twentieth century was full of false Zarathustras, tyrants who played on man's desperate need for meaning to impose their own degenerate visions through a combination of seduction, intimidation and unrestrained violence. A Hitler, a Stalin, and a Mao are only possible in a world made vulnerable by the threat of nihilism, a world prepared to submit to slavery if only the void in its center is filled.

The true Zarathustra is not a tyrant. He does not need to be; men follow him as sheep follow a shepherd, because his voice speaks to the meaning they so desperately need. But no true Zarathustra has appeared, and the experience of the twentieth century has made us wary of the false Zarathustra and better at recognizing him. We begin to wonder if perhaps God is not dead after all, and if maybe it is Zarathustra (or the myth of Zarathustra) that is really dead. Maybe Moses was not a Zarathustra, a creator of meaning, but truly what he said he was: A prophet of the One True God.

And who are the most visible faces of atheism today? They are Richard Dawkins, P.Z. Myers, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, etc., who don't even attempt to address the real problem of atheism. Instead, they avoid the problem altogether by returning to a thumb-in-the-eye-of religion atheism of the early days of the Enlightenment. It's as though Moses, after twenty years in the desert and lacking anything better to do, but hearing the increased grumbling of the Israelites, decided to crack his staff on the ground and call down a plague of locusts on Pharoah, hundreds of miles away and whom they hadn't seen in decades, if he was still alive at all. I scratch my head when I hear the fulminations of Hitchens, Myers, etc. against allegedly oppressive religion. Has Voltaire been caught in a time machine and unknowingly transported from 1750 to 2008? The chains, my friend, were broken a long time ago and melted down to make machine guns and barbed wire.

Sam Harris, one of the "new atheists" who is actually a reincarnation of very old atheists, wrote a book called "The End of Faith." The title is apt, but the faith that is ending is more likely faith in Zarathustra than faith in God. When atheists, after having a clear field for two hundred years, having nothing better to say than a return to the mocking of the Sacraments with which they started, but without the style, we know that atheism as a significant cultural force has about run its course.

I think the most appropriate response to P.Z. Myers'Eucharist stunt is not outrage, but laughter.

The Desecrated Host

I commented here on P.Z. Myers' request for a consecrated host so he can desecrate it. Well, he has gone ahead and done it. (Notice that his announcement of his sacrilege is on a "science" blog.) Here is a youtube video of the man stealing the Eucharist at Mass, which he later sent to Myers.

Some more or less disjointed thoughts about this act of desecration:

I am surprised this act is not getting more attention. We are not talking about some backwoods wacko here. Myers is a tenured professor at a mainstream university, a representative of the intellectual class in our society, and a prominent supporter of Darwinism. His act reveals the final bankruptcy of purely secular reason. He has come full circle back to Pontius Pilate, saying Quid est veritas and destroying the Word made Flesh.

Kierkegaard, in Philosophical Fragments, describes atheism as an acoustic illusion. It is an echo.

While therefore the expressions in which offense proclaims itself, of whatever kind they may be, sound as if they came from elsewhere, even from the opposite direction, they are nevertheless echoings from the Paradox [the Paradox is the Paradox of the Eternal Word made flesh in a particular Man -dt.]... the offended consciousness can be taken as an indirect proof of the validity of the Paradox; offense is the mistaken reckoning, the invalid consequence, with which the Paradox repels and thrusts aside. The offended individual does not speak from his own resources, but borrows those of the Paradox; just as one who mimics or parodies another does not invent, but merely copies perversely.

An echo requires resistance to be heard. The Grand Canyon gives an echo only because there is a cliff face to provide resistance to sound and bounce it back. Absent resistance, there is no echo. Atheism is essentially a shouting into the void; absent resistance, it is a shouting into nothing and falls into silence. The atheist needs the resistance of the Catholic Church. Without the resistance of something that is in itself substantial, atheism is revealed for the nothingness that it is. So while the atheist publicly calls for tolerance, he secretly wishes the Church to be intolerant. He must increase his offense until he draws a response of opposition from the Church. In that opposition he can convince himself that he is something substantial. But it is merely an acoustic illusion; it is the Church that is substantial, his own voice but an echo.

The nihilistic freedom of atheism is always just out of sight, over the horizon. In fact there is no freedom in nihilism, but the atheist can avoid facing this fact by rationalizing that some form of opposition prevents him from experiencing it. True freedom is on the other side of opposition and will be experienced when opposition is overcome. Yet when opposition is overcome in fact, atheism remains just as meaningless, boring and slavish as it was before. The advent of freedom should be at hand but it is not. Why is freedom not manifest? The moment this question is asked constitutes a moment in the Kierkegaardian sense: An opportunity for faith or offense with respect to the truth about man and God. If the atheist responds in offense, then he will suppose that freedom is not at hand because some new or overlooked form of opposition is preventing its advent. Freedom, in effect, retreats over the horizon behind this new opposition. The atheist is able to carry on in the hope that freedom will, finally, be found if this latest opposition is overcome. But, of course, nihilistic freedom, like the pot at the end of the rainbow, is always just out of reach.

We should ask ourselves why an atheist finds it necessary to desecrate the Eucharist. The Catholic Church is at a low ebb in its influence, especially in the United States. The United States has been in a "secular moment" since the 1960's. The last forty years have been the golden opportunity for secularism to show that it can, in fact, deliver a substantial alternative culture to the traditional religious culture of the West. The masses in the United States were ready to hear such a message. I was ready to hear such a message. But the message never came; the secular project, in nearly every respect, has been a dismal failure, which no one really denies. Freedom did not become manifest, only nihilism and new forms of slavery. Secularism can never admit this, so it must prod and poke the Church back into opposition so it can feel itself alive in the conflict. It is only in opposing the substantiality of the Church that atheism can avoid facing its own nothing.

Mao Tse-Tung understood the dialectic of nihilistic freedom. Since nihilistic freedom only exists in the search for it, in the unfailing hope that it is just over the next hill, there can be no rest for the atheist. The Revolution is not a means to the end of a classless society, as Marx and Lenin thought. The Revolution is an end in itself; true freedom is only found in Permanent Revolution. Thus the Cultural Revolution was a revolution against everything and nothing, an orgy of death and destruction not ordered to anything beyond itself, even in theory. But even the Cultural Revolution must come to an end, when everything is destroyed...

God is eternal and so transcends space and time; therefore His acts are eternal and for all time. In the Sacrifice of the Mass, we Catholics are literally present at the Death of Christ on Calvary. P.Z. Myers drove a nail through the Host and threw it in the trash, just as the Roman Guards drove nails through His hands and feet, and disposed of Him as so much trash. Even atheism testifies to the truth of the faith, and to the eternal nature of the Sacrifice of Christ.

There is a sort of negative wisdom in atheism. P.Z. Myers, with no theological training, understands what many Catholics do not: The Eucharist is the Source and Summit of the Catholic Faith. Destroy the Eucharist and you destroy the Catholic Faith. Myers did not trash a Bible, or a Crucifix, or a Rosary, let alone a contemporary felt banner or wooden Chalice. No, with the insight of hate, he went right to the beating heart of the Faith in the Eucharist.