Harari on Polytheism vs Monotheism

I've been reading Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari. It's a "hot" book: #434 on Amazon overall and #3 in general anthropology. It's also a laughably tendentious treatment of human history from a secular perspective. Christianity and monotheism in general is bad, bad, bad and polytheism good, good, good. The author even has a problem with civilization itself, the early chapters arguing that the transition from a simple hunter gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one was a disaster for all concerned. It's very much Rousseau in spirit although the venerable Swiss is given no credit for originating this line of thought.

In this post I'd like to focus on what Harari has to say concerning polytheism. He first notes (correctly) that polytheists, although they believe in many gods, nonetheless generally believe in a single, unified power behind the gods. It is the nature of this supreme power that is the essence of polytheism:

The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interest and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans. It's pointless to ask this power for victory in war, for health or for rain, because from its all-encompassing vantage point, it makes no difference whether a particular kingdom wins or loses, whether a particular city prospers or withers, whether a particular person recuperates or dies. The Greeks did not waste any sacrifices on Fate, and the Hindus built no temples to Atman.

The only reason to approach the supreme power of the universe would be to renounce all desires and embrace the bad along with the good - to embrace even defeat, poverty, sickness and death. Thus some Hindus, known as Sadhus or Sannyasis, devote their lives to uniting with Atman, thereby achieving enlightenment. They strive to see the world from the viewpoint of this fundamental principle, to realize that from its eternal perspective all mundane desires and fears are meaningless and ephemeral phenomena. 

Most Hindus, however, are not Sadhus. They are sunk deep in the morass of mundane concerns, where Atman is not much help. For assistance in such matters, Hindus approach the gods with their partial powers. Precisely because their powers are partial rather than all-encompassing, gods such as Ganesha, Lakshmi and Saraswati have interests and biases. Humans can therefore make deals with these partial powers and rely on their help in order to win wars and recuperate from illness. There are necessarily many of these smaller powers, since once you start dividing up  the all-encompassing power of a supreme principle, you'll inevitably end up with more than one deity. Hence the plurality of gods. 

The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes 'heretics' and 'infidels'.

The first thing to say about this treatment is that it is entirely reasonable; in fact, we might go so far as to say that what has been described is the 'natural' religion of mankind - the way man would almost inevitably think about religion if left to his own devices. And, indeed, as Harari points out, it is the way most men have thought about religion in most times and places, from the ancient Egyptians to the Chinese, to the Indians, to the Aztecs and the Romans.

Jews and Christians do not disagree with the logic of polytheism, and probably would have followed the natural inclinations and reasoning of everyone else - except that the polytheist position contains a small hole in it: "The supreme power governing the world is devoid of interest and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans." Suppose that the supreme power, although devoid of interests and biases, nonetheless takes an interest in men? An interest men never asked for, expected, or even wanted, but that nonetheless occurs? Suppose this supreme power keeps pestering man even though we'd rather be left alone? That story, the story of the supreme power pestering an obscure ancient people into a relationship with Him, for reasons mysterious to us, is the real story of the Old Testament.

Suppose further that the supreme power not only pesters man from afar, but does the unthinkable and takes on the form of man and appears among us as a man among men - not because of any interest or biases He might have, but because He loves us. In other words, the supreme power pestered the ancient Jews and appeared in the form of Christ for our sakes, not His own.

This is an idea "unnatural" to man, and its unnaturalness is one reason I believe it. The fact that the supreme power, Atman or Jehovah or Fate, would act purely in our interest rather than His own is a thought that simply doesn't occur to us. That He would appear among us, voluntarily suffer, die and be buried by us, is also another idea that wouldn't occur to us. The only way the idea entered into human history is because it happened.

Harari doesn't get this in his explanation for the origin of Christianity:

The big breakthrough came with Christianity. This faith began as an esoteric Jewish sect that sought to convince Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was their long-awaited messiah. However, one of the sect's first leaders, Paul of Tarsus, reasoned that if the supreme power of the universe has interest and biases, and if He had bothered to incarnate Himself in the flesh and to die on the cross for the salvation of humankind, then this is something everyone should hear about, not just the Jews. It was thus necessary to spread the good word - the gospel - about Jesus throughout the world.

But we've already learned that the supreme power of the universe doesn't have interests and biases. At least this is what people always and everywhere naturally think. And why would Paul believe that this supreme power would, even if he did have interests and biases, humiliate himself by becoming a man and suffering and dying at our hands? That conditional is the crux of history - but Harari glides over it and onto the unexceptional point that if in fact one believes this happened, it's something the rest of humanity should hear about. There is a glimmer of insight at the end of the quoted text that Christianity is not fundamentally a view of the world, or a deduction based on the nature of the supreme power or the possibility that lesser deities might be open to influence, but news, i.e. an unexpected irruption of the supreme power into history. This news spreads within decades across the Roman Empire and within a few centuries captures the hearts and minds of Western Civilization, a massive upending of history that Harari can only remark is one of the "strangest twists" in history. It is indeed the strangest twist in history; perhaps because in it there was more going on than mere history?

Finally, Harari seems to embrace the contemporary conviction that tolerance is the highest virtue, and  prefers polytheists like the Aztecs or Hindus to intolerant monotheists like Jews and Christians. Tolerance seems admirable in the abstract, but perhaps not so much up close when we examine what polytheistic tolerance actually involves. As Harari notes, "In the Aztec Empire, subject peoples were obliged to build a temple for Huitzilopochtli, but these temples were built alongside those of local gods, rather than in their stead." He leaves unsaid that the subject peoples were also obliged to regularly send to the Aztec capital not only food and other goods, but also captives destined to suffer ritual human sacrifice. One reason Cortez was able to conquer the mighty Aztec Empire with a few hundred conquistadors is that the subject peoples were more than happy to join him in overthrowing the Aztecs, their "tolerance" notwithstanding. And in India, polytheists tolerated suttee (the burning of widows on the pyre of their husbands) for centuries until it was finally outlawed by the intolerant British.

The tolerant polytheist tolerates everything, the good and the bad. And nothing ever really changes, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. The intolerant monotheist, in the name of the supreme power, decisively intervenes in history in response to the supreme power's own decisive intervention in history: The result is the uniquely dynamic history of Western Civilization since the time of Christ.

Universalism

By Universalism I mean the position that all are eventually saved; in other words, that the population of Hell will be zero.

Edward Feser has had several back and forths with David Bentley Hart on the issue. My point here is not to enter the debate between Feser and Hart but to consider Universalism from a different perspective.

Let us suppose that Universalism is true, and that we know it is true. Then we know that everyone will eventually enjoy eternal bliss; in particular, I will eventually enjoy eternal bliss no matter what I do on this Earth. For me, at least, this is a very dangerous thing to believe, for I am always looking for reasons to remain in my sins, which I find quite comfortable even if I know intellectually that they are essentially bad for me.

I almost wrote "ultimately" bad for me, but that isn't quite right if universalism is true, for in that case no sin is ultimately bad for me, since I will ultimately enjoy eternal bliss. But even if that is ultimately true, it is nonetheless true that I know I would be objectively happier if I were not sinning rather than sinning.

There is no hurry, though, is there, if universalism is true? I might be more perfectly happy if I shed some of my sins, but I am not unhappy and in fact I'm quite comfortable as I am. So why stress out about confronting and conquering sin? Christ in the New Testament exhorts us to deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him. That's nice advice for someone with ambitions to be a saint, but I have no such ambitions. If I'm ultimately destined for eternal bliss, why go through all the hassle? As the Five Man Electrical Band sang - "Thank you Lord for thinkin' bout me, I'm alive and doin fine."

Sure, I might have to go through some pain in the next life before experiencing that eternal bliss, but that's all a little vague compared to the very real suffering and inconvenience involved with confronting sin in this life. I've never been one to seek out the hard road when the easy road is available - especially when I'm assured they both end up in the same place.

These points are not meant to be rhetorical or flip. I abandoned the Catholic faith after high school because I found it entirely irrelevant to my life. The upshot of my 70's Catholic education was that sin wasn't really a big deal, Jesus wanted to be my friend, and he was always willing to forgive anything - which, I presumed, would include ignoring him. So why not get on with the business of this world and then get back to Jesus sometime later?

It was only later when I began to understand that my Catholic "education" was no education at all that I began to rethink things. For me, the reality of sin and its eternal implications is the only reason to take Christianity seriously in the first place. If universalism is true, then sin is not (in Kierkegaard's terms) "eternally decisive."  Neither is our relationship to Christ in this life decisive. Follow him, reject him, ignore him, twice-a-year Catholic him, what does it matter? Ultimately, it won't.

I wonder if there is a mode of existence in hell that is universalist (this is NOT to claim that anyone believing in universalism is going to hell). But if universalism implies that there are no decisive eternal implications for a lack of a relationship with Christ in this life, why not in the next? Perhaps there are individuals in hell who recognize their sins but are comfortable in them, and tell themselves they will repent tomorrow, with tomorrow (naturally) never arriving. Maybe C.S. Lewis treated this idea in The Great Divorce. It's been a long time since I read that book.

I'm in danger of being one of those eternally procrastinating guys - which is why I find the idea of universalism a temptation to be rejected.

On Twice A Year Catholics

"Judge not, that ye be not judged."

But does that mean I cannot think? I find it impossible not to think of twice a year Catholics when I am at Christmas Mass, and it is obvious that many of the congregants are unfamiliar with the Mass; and that many of them obviously have no respect for the Mass. Standing with their hands in their pockets, surreptitiously checking their iPhones, chatting with each other like they are at a pub. And of  course everyone goes to Communion, during which it is best to keep one's head down in prayer so as at least to avoid seeing how they take Communion.

Do not judge. I think that does not mean I must pretend I do not approve of such behavior. It means that it is not my place to condemn anyone for their behavior. That is the prerogative of God.

We are all sinners. Discovering the reality and nature of our own particular sins is a necessary process on the way to becoming closer to God. Although we are not to condemn others for their sins, it is generally easier to see sins in others rather than ourselves. But in seeing those sins, perhaps we can recognize the same sins in ourselves.

Consider a man, a father, who is divorced and sees his daughter at Christmas. At that time he gives her gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her. He tells her how much he loves her. But after Christmas and into the New Year, the daughter calls and emails her father but gets no response. In fact this continues throughout the rest of the year; she regularly calls, leaves messages and gets no answer. Then at Christmastime the next year, her father again shows up with gifts, talks with her, plays with her, hugs and kisses her and tells her he loves her. He says he is sorry he didn't return her messages but he was very busy. But he is here now. Surely she understands. And this goes on year after year.

What is the daughter to make of this? Might she think her father is simply a liar and is using and cheating her, showing up once a year to get good feelings about pretending to be the father he is not? Might she not demand that he at least show her enough respect to be honest about their relationship? Instead he forces her to be complicit in the lies he tells himself. This is worse than indifference, for were he indifferent they would at least understand each other in their lack of a relationship. Her dignity would not suffer annual humiliation at his contrived intimacy.

What is Communion but a particular and deep form of intimacy that God has granted us? To take Communion indifferently or by rote or merely as just another part of the Christmas season, is to hug your daughter once a year at Christmas. Traditionally the Church has demanded of us that we make ourselves worthy of the Sacrament of the Mass through prayer and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Like all the Church's rules, this is for our own benefit so we don't find ourselves taking hugs from God without the prior respect for God that makes such intimacy true rather than a lie.

So then, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. (1 Cor. 11:27)

It is not for me to condemn once or twice a year Catholics. But I can learn from them the danger of taking Communion lightly, and renew my resolve to prepare myself properly for Mass.

Matthew 11:28-30

Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly of heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

What is it to be "heavy laden"? For me, it has been the effort to make my life meaningful by filling it up. You get one shot at life, I thought, and I didn't want to waste it. So I've got to be something and do things, and I've got to start right now, because life is passing by even as I speak. This was how I thought as a young man.

But be what and do what? That's not so easy a question to answer. For there is the problem of opportunity cost. To do something or to be something is implicitly to choose not to do or be all the other things you could have done or been. To become an engineer is not to become an English teacher, an historian, or a philosopher. Suppose you choose the wrong thing? You will have invested long time and effort to become something you should never have been. And there is no "do-over." You can't get those years back that you invested in becoming something you were not.

I always envied the nerds who knew who and what they were: engineers. No anxious struggle about life's direction for them. I, on the other hand, could be interested in just about anything but not overwhelming passionate about anything. So I would flit from thing to thing, hoping to land on one that I would somehow know was "me", like finding the girl you "just knew" was the one for you.

In his Either:Or, Kierkegaard discusses something he calls the "rotation method": This is a way someone bored with life keeps himself from going crazy. What he does is pursue an interest for a while until it becomes fatigued and he is bored with it. He then moves onto another interest, going from one to another until he eventually, after enough time, comes back to the first which has become interesting again through neglect. This was essentially what I did. My best friend used to ask me what "kick" I was currently on.

There is an alternative. And that is, instead of trying to fill up your life with either things you are becoming or things you are doing, to recognize the futility of that approach, and instead empty your life. But isn't that just giving up on life itself? Yes, it is and would be, and is why the great philosophers like Aristotle did not recommend it. But the fact of Christ changes everything.

For by emptying yourself and taking on the burden offered by Christ, you open yourself to the possibility that Christ Himself will fill you, and satisfy you in a way not possible for anything on Earth. As Kierkegaard would say, it is the difference between filling yourself with the eternal versus the merely temporary.

That sounds all well and good, but how do I know such satisfaction is an actual reality rather than, say, merely a pious hope? For if it is merely a pious hope, then the apparent death that would happen if I empty myself is an actual death. The rotation method may be unsatisfying and ultimately lead to despair, but at least it is something, and I get at least the satisfaction that I am trying.

This is where the matter of faith comes in. Faith in this context does not mean a blind belief in something you know to be false or have no reason to believe is true. It means to act take a chance and act on trust. Is the Gospel true? Did Jesus Christ really rise from the dead and show that a life of self-emptying is really a life of true fulfillment rather than a living death? I cannot prove that in any absolute sense. But then I don't think that is necessary. At least it wasn't for me.

It was enough for me to establish that the Gospel was at least plausible. Furthermore, I was and am firmly convinced that something highly unusual happened in Palestine in the first century. For the events that launched the Christian religion form a hinge point in history, one that turned the world from an eternal cycle of civilizational births and deaths, with one epoch not so different from any prior one, to a world launched in history, one condemned to development and change, and charging through time to some denouement to happen when no one knows. (See Chesterton's The Everlasting Man for the classic development of this theme.)

The conviction that something transcendent happened at the origin of the Christian religion, and my own recognition of the futility of trying to make life significant by filling it up, was enough to allow me to make the act of faith in renouncing the life I had been following and instead attempt to empty it and follow Christ. Yes, there was a bit of Pascal's Wager going on here.

What does it mean to embrace a self-emptying life in the name of Christ? It means to sacrifice all things you might have become or done for the sake of following Christ, and that means living for others rather than yourself. For me, it meant that instead of pursuing various hobbies obsessively I would spend that time coaching youth soccer or playing games with my children. It meant accepting a professional career that I might not have been passionate about, but was competent enough at to be successful enough to support a family. And it is to accept that as the years go on, working at a job that is just a job, and getting older and slower, missing the experiences I might have had, that in fact I was not slowly dying but rather accumulating treasure in Heaven, which is Christ Himself.

There are consolations. The vanity of earthly pursuits becomes more obvious as one grows older. And  we find that there are earthly rewards as well: Matthew 6:33. But these rewards also constitute a temptation, for they renew the possibility of life as self-fulfillment: I have filled my life with family rather than experiences or personal development. If we are following Christ, we devote ourselves to our family for His sake, not our own. If we give in to the temptation to the latter, then we are open to grasping after our family (e.g. helicopter parenting, or forcing our children to take their freedom when they are older rather than giving it to them as free equals.)

And it's not like flipping a switch. More like a slow process where one gradually weans oneself from the temptation to grasp at life rather than renounce it for Christ. And I am constantly tempted to grasp, especially in retrospect. The last few years I have taken up long distance running as a way to avoid getting old faster than necessary. Running a weekly 5k fun run here in town, I find myself envying the younger men (in their 30's and 40's) who did not wait until they were 50 to take the sport seriously. I wonder what I could have done had I taken running more seriously back then. But at that time I was changing diapers, or coaching youth soccer teams, or going to little league games, or playing board games with my daughter. I imagine an alternative history in which I have filled my life with such things and am happy, a history that I know is a lie, and thank God that he gave me the grace to see the futility of that life before I had misspent it.

Chesterton and Kierkegaard on the Difference of Christ

What difference does Christ make?

This question has many answers in many different contexts. Two of my favorite writers, G.K. Chesterton and Soren Kierkegaard, focus on the difference Christ makes in terms of human possibility.

Man is different from other animals insofar as he lives self-reflected in a world. Beavers and dogs don't worry about how they relate to the world; they just exist as they are unselfconsciously in the world. They are the world. But man knows himself as who he is in relation to the world. Kierkegaard describes this difference in The Sickness Unto Death in terms of the self as "a relation which relates itself to itself." The fact that man by nature relates himself to the world means his existence, unlike that of non-rational animals, is a dialectic of possibility and necessity. I understand who I am (or think I understand), and I also understand the world and my place in it, and in terms of that relationship life presents a present reality of necessity and a horizon of possibility. I exist as a relationship to the world, but I can know that relationship and (perhaps) change it - I can relate myself to the relationship which constitutes my self in the world.

But I can do that only in terms of the possibilities available to me, and those are constituted by my philosophy. What sort of possibilities are available to the natural but pre-Christian man, that is, the pagan man? Chesterton in Orthodoxy describes the pagan world as a world of pink. The great pagan virtue is moderation; a little of everything but not too much of anything. Red and white mixed together, not too much of each. This is a natural and sensible policy, and in the pagan world it produced great men like Aristotle and Marcus Aurelius. The ideal gentleman is a little bit of a warrior and a bit of a scholar as well. He drinks wine but not too much; he loves others but not too much of that either. For love is a form of madness and madness is unbalanced. Above all he maintains self-control, for he knows that the world contains good things as well as evil things, and that it ends in death. He keeps these facts before him and holds himself well so that he is neither carried away by good fortune, nor destroyed by misfortune, for life inevitably involves both. There is no better wisdom in a world without Christ, especially in a world that cannot imagine Christ. The life of balanced moderation is the best life that the best pagan mind could imagine; it defines the horizon of pagan possibility.

What has changed with Christ? The Gospel of John tells us that His first miracle occurred at Cana, and involved the replenishment of wine at a wedding feast that had run dry. We can assume that the host of the feast had on hand an appropriate amount of wine for the celebrations. It would seem, then, that any additional wine would violate the principle of moderation; we've gone from having a sensible good time to getting drunk in excess. But this is why it is a miracle, for a miracle is more than merely the suspension of ordinary physical expectations; it is a sign and revelation of a new order of existence, an order that breaks through the old pagan compromises and proposes a way of life that answers to the transcendent meaning of Christ. The exhaustion of the wine at Cana symbolizes the exhaustion of pagan virtue and the existential hopes it offered. The party is over; it is expected to be over and the celebrants are prepared to go home; no one can imagine the party continuing, or at least continuing with any propriety. But Christ can imagine it, and through His grace he turns water into wine, that the party may continue, theoretically indefinitely. From that moment forward the horizon of pagan hope has been forever shattered, for the possibility that it is not the final limit, that there is a way of life that is not bound by pagan compromises, has been permanently introduced into the human imagination.

Chesterton describes the difference as a world of pink becoming a world of bold reds and whites; reds for the warriors and whites for the monks. There were warriors in the ancient world, of course, and pacifists as well. But the pure warrior, like the pure pacifist, could not express an ideal human type because he violated the principle of moderation or balance. More significantly, the warrior and the pacifist had nothing to do with each other. Each might despise the other and, if they didn't, by the nature of things they at least expressed different philosophies of life. But in Christendom the martial Knight was as much an expression of the authentic Christian life as was the peaceful Monk. Far from expressing opposite philosophies of life, they both expressed different ways of performing the same mission: Redeeming the world in the name of Christ. Chesterton states the difference this way: In the ancient world the balance of existential possibilities was expressed in the single individual of the moderate, virtuous gentleman. In Christendom, the balance of possibilities occurred in the Church as a whole rather than individuals:

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescencies exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold an crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionnaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not walkways in one man's body ad in Becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England. This is what makes Christendom at once so much more perplexing and so much more interesting than the Pagan empire; just as Amiens Cathedral is not better but more interesting than the Parthenon.  - Orthodoxy, Ch. 6

For both Chesterton and SK, the advent of Christ permanently changed the nature of existence and of the world - and that whether you believe in Christ or not. The key point they share in this regard is that Christ revealed possibilities that were unimagined prior to the Incarnation. After the Incarnation, those possibilities cannot be eradicated from the human spirit, even if Christ Himself is later denied. The price of denying Christ cannot be a simple return to the pre-Christian world, for the possibilities he revealed will remain in the human imagination- it is only their fulfillment that will become impossible, since that fulfillment is only possible with the grace of God. The result is that post-Christian life can never be a simple return to paganism; it will instead be one of melancholy and despair.

Christianity and Disproof

Jerry Coyne, on p. 61 of his Faith vs Fact, asks the question:

It's a useful exercise to ask religious people what it would take for them to either abandon the "nonnegotiables" of their fath - like the view that Jesus was divine or that the Quran is the world of Allah - or to give-up on their faith entirely.

That's easy and well-known: Were the corpse of Jesus to be discovered, Christianity would be decisively disproven. And it's not so ridiculous as it might sound: We have in fact found the tombs of victims of Roman crucifixion.

Were the tomb of Mary to be discovered, especially with a body in it, that would disprove Roman Catholicism since the Church has taught the Doctrine of the Assumption authoritatively, but it would not necessarily disprove Christianity as such. But I would have a hard time continuing in Christian belief in such an event since my own faith is based on the historical witness of the Church.

Game of Thrones: Unleavened

[Warning: This post has spoilers for Game of Thrones]

"The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and buried in three measures of flour, until all of it was leavened." - Matt 13:35

This verse keeps coming back to me as I finish the third season DVDs of Game of Thrones. The world of Game of Thrones has no leaven; that is, no individuals formed in terms of the moral horizon of the Gospel. And that for good reason, for it is a world in which the Incarnation never occurred.

The leaven of the Gospel raises an entire culture, not merely the individual lives of believers. The important thing about St. Francis is not how many people he inspired to follow him in his passionate imitation of Christ, but what his example meant for the medieval world as a whole. When St. Francis joyfully rejects all standards of worldly success and failure, sings in his rags and his hunger, supremely happy with nothing but Christ in his heart, it is difficult for everyone, including sinners and unbelievers, to continue to take with absolute seriousness the worldly hopes that previously occupied them. We like to think that atheists introduced skepticism into the world, but actually Christ introduced a skepticism more radical than any atheist skepticism. The atheist, in his denial of God, leaves men where they are, focused on their temporal hopes of gold, glory, power, money, fame and romance (or simple lust). Christ shattered that existential horizon forever, and saints like Francis remind us of the fact.

Except in Game of Thrones. Without Christ, it is a world in which the secular goals of wealth and power remain absolute. It's actually a little worse than that. Even in the pre-Christian world philosophers like Socrates challenged conventional values to the point of driving their fellow citizens to execute them. Socrates never revolutionized a culture the way Christ revolutionized the West, but Game of Thrones doesn't even include a Socratic-like character, or indeed any philosophers worthy of the name. (This is one of the many ways in which it is distinguished from The Lord of the Rings, which includes genuinely philosophical figures like Gandalf who regularly shake men out of their moral complacency.)

The absence of the Gospel, and any authentically philosophical culture, gives Game of Thrones an ethically cramped and oppressive feel. The characters tend to melancholy, trapped in a variety of unhappy lives from which they'd love to be free, but escape from which they cannot conceive. Watching it, I found myself wishing that someone, somewhere, would muster a little moral imagination, sufficient to challenge the existential parameters that keep them prisoners. But this is Plato's Cave without a Socrates, who challenged the shadows from the inside, or a Christ, who shatters them from outside. For those in Game of Thrones, the shadows on the cave wall represent an absolute horizon.

The happiest people in the series are, naturally, those that have found some measure of love and romance. I say naturally because romantic love tends to subvert the scale of values one had previously taken for granted, and creates freedom by making one open to new existential possibilities. Combine this with the tradition of the nobility marrying for political reasons rather than love, and you have the primary engine of plot development in Game of Thrones. Cersei Lannister is matched in a loveless marriage with the drunk and sexually uninterested Robert Baratheon. In frustration she pairs off with her twin brother Jamie, and when Eddard's son Bran is crippled by Jaime after witnessing the incestuous Jaime and Cersei, we have the origin of the war that is the central action in the story. Robb Stark, the King of the North, is pledged to marry a daughter of Walder Frey, but instead marries the woman he loves, Talisa Maegyr, leading to perhaps the most shocking plot development of the series. Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf son in the family of the Stark's primary rivals, loves a prostitute but is forced to marry Sansa Stark, teenage daughter of the slain king Eddard Stark. Jon Snow, bastard son of Eddard, is vowed to the (celibate) order of the Nights Watch, but falls in love with a wildling woman while out on patrol. And on it goes.

But absent any religion or philosophy that gives them a taste of the transcendent, the love-struck in Game of Thrones typically fail to break through the Platonic shadows that define their lives. Tyrion's lover suggests that she and Tyrion elope (in effect) to a far off land, but he cannot get past the mundane question of making a living ("What would I do? Juggle?"), even though he is among the most educated men in King's Landing, and confesses that he finally cannot escape his familial ties ("I am a Lannister").  Jon Snow and his love Ygritte understand that neither Ygritte's wildling tribe nor Jon Snow's Nights Watch are really worthy of their devotion, but they ultimately can find no way to transcend their connections to each, and Ygritte winds up firing arrows into Jon as he returns to his people.

We are well short of the drama and passion of Heloise and Abelard here, let alone someone like St. Thomas Aquinas. Born into a noble family, St. Thomas not only renounced his aristocratic privileges, but insisted on joining the Dominicans, a mendicant order of friars. As G.K. Chesterton put it,

Thomas of Aquino wanted to be a Friar. It was a staggering fact to his contemporaries; and it is rather an intriguing fact even to us; for this desire, limited literally and strictly to this statement, was the one practical thing to which his will was clamped with adamantine obstinacy till his death. He would not be an Abbot; he would not be a Monk; he would not even be a Prior or ruler in his own fraternity; he would not be a prominent or important Friar; he would be a Friar. It is as if Napoleon had insisted on remaining a private soldier all his life. Something in this heavy, quiet, cultivated, rather academic gentleman would not be satisfied till he was, by fixed authoritative proclamation and official pronouncement, established and appointed to be a Beggar. (from GKC's St. Thomas Aquinas)

 His resolve survived two years of imprisonment by his own family and various subterfuges designed to corrupt his virtue and his vocation, like an attempted seduction by a prostitute. But, supported by the example of Christ and the grace of the Holy Spirit, St. Thomas only became more firmly dismissive of the worldly goals his family had in mind for him. St. Thomas is a wonderful example of a man, inspired by the example of Christ, expressing the freedom that the Gospel makes possible. There is nothing remotely like this in Game of Thrones. The point is not that Game of Thrones is poorly written because the characters are trapped within an existence prescribed for them by their culture. In fact, the reason I am writing this post is because of the excellent job Game of Thrones does in showing what happens to people in a culture that has no window into the transcendent. It shows by contrast just what it is that (true) philosophy and religion bring.

But isn't there religion in the series? There is the Lord of Light, after all, and a priestess that is his prophet, and various characters periodically pray to a variety of gods. All this is, however, a primitive paganism that is merely an expression of the utilitarian purposes of men rather than a window to transcendence. The gods are just another way to get what you want. Stannis Baratheon pays attention to the red priestess because he thinks she, and the Lord of Light she serves, might be useful to him in his efforts to regain the Iron Throne. There is no Gandalf - or Socrates - around to tell him that the gods do not serve men, and when they appear to submit themselves to our purposes, it is only on the way to enslaving us. There is one man who attempts to warn him, an old smuggler and compatriot of Stannis's named Davos Seaworth, and while he correctly senses the danger the red priestess portends, he is not philosophically sophisticated enough to be a match for her. He is certainly in no position to tell Stannis to forget about the gods and instead fear God, the utterly transcendent Creator of the Universe and Ground of Being. Since God created all we are, He would only be frustrating himself were he to frustrate us, so we know God is by nature trustworthy, red priestesses or not. Especially if He condescends to come in the form of a man, and suffer and die at our hands, for our sakes.

One of the distinctive features of Game of Thrones is the level of torture it shows, reaching to the virtually pornographic. The bad people in the series can be very, very bad. This is not disconnected from the fact that the series lacks any serious religion or philosophy. This absence limits the moral range of the characters in the positive direction. But to maintain our interest, the story needs to morally distinguish the players, so we can root for the good guys and cheer the defeat of the bad guys. The best people in the series are not much more than moral mediocrities, since they can see no end beyond the capture or retention of their thrones - the same ends pursued by the villains. The difference between them is the level of ruthlessness and duplicity the villains are willing to use versus the heroes. The bad are portrayed as such vicious, heartless and cruel men that we can't help but root for the alternatives, even if, in a normal state of affairs, we really wouldn't see much reason why we should care if Robb Stark is to become King of the North. But given that the alternatives are men who take various amounts of enjoyment in torture for its own sake, Robb appears pretty good in contrast.

The Stark family is, in general, the "good family" in the series. And that doesn't mean much more than that they are basically honest, brave, dutiful and take no pleasure in cruelty for its own sake. That is, among the classic Aristotelian four natural virtues, they are temperate, courageous and just. But they lack the crucial fourth virtue, wisdom, which Aristotle tells us is the most important since it underlies all the others (e.g. the courageous man must not only be able to overcome his fears, but be able to distinguish when danger is worth risking and when it is merely foolish). Eddard Stark, the patriarch, imprisoned by the Lannister family, is offered the opportunity to save his daughter in return for his life. One of the "wisemen" of the series, a eunuch named Varys, urges him to take this course. In the event, Eddard gives his confession, but then is immediately executed anyway by the cruel young king Joffrey Lannister. So Eddard not only loses his life, but damages his family's honor and goes down to history as a traitor.

It was Eddard's misfortune that he did not have the counsel of a true wiseman like Socrates or benefit of his experience. Socrates, like Eddard, was offered the opportunity to plead guilty to the charges against him in return for a small fine, but on the principle that he would do no evil to himself, whatever others might do, refused. This principle was developed in Western culture to the general principle that evil may not be done that good might come of it - something the characters in Game of Thrones desperately need to hear, but no one is around to tell them.

I mentioned above that Game of Thrones is well written to the extent that it shows what happens to people in a culture with no vision of the transcendent. There is a question as to whether this an accident or a deliberate intention of the author. I know nothing of the author, so it may very well be his intention, but I suspect it is not. One of the interesting points made by several friends with whom I've discussed the series is that, in their opinion, it is more realistic than The Lord of the Rings in depicting the true moral nature of men, and in particular the way life must have been in the Middle Ages. They base their opinion on the very thing I have been discussing in this post - the moral mediocrity of even the best characters in Game of Thrones. They are impressed by the fact that most of the characters are neither completely good nor completely bad, but are sometimes good and sometimes bad, and they think this reflective of real life.

This isn't quite true, as I discussed above. There are no superlatively good characters in the story, but there are several, like Joffrey Lannister, for whom it is difficult to find any redeeming qualities. The moral range of the story does not extend to extraordinary goodness, but it does extend to extraordinary evil. And this certainly was not true of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages had its vicious characters surely, but St. Francis of Assisi, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Louis, St. Catherine of Siena... these are not fictional characters. The point is not that these individuals never sinned - they surely did and would insist on the fact - but they transcended moral mediocrity through the imitation of Christ, a way of life that reordered their being from the bottom-up, giving them a perspective from which the incessant chasing of thrones and whores looked petty.

I suspect that the reason we might find Game of Thrones more "realistic" is that it effectively reads our contemporary moral exhaustion into a medieval setting. The people in Game of Thrones act more or less like the people around us, and respond as we might respond in their extreme circumstances. Like them, we can see no end beyond the purely secular aims of money, security and women, and we take it for granted that no one else can or ever could. Our one point of moral pride is that we are not as violent or cruel as people once were, and the series plays on that conceit in its emphasis on physical cruelty. And yet, while we can no longer imagine the moral greatness of a medieval saint, we have no problem imagining the moral depravity of a medieval sadist. Perhaps this is the characteristic contemporary manifestation of original sin.

Christianity and Mystical Experience

I am commenter #58 (J Climacus) on this post over at Ricochet.

One of the basic lessons we learn from Kierkegaard is that grasping the nature of Christianity is not an easy task. That is not to say it isn't a simple task, for often it is the simplest tasks that are the most difficult (another Kierkegaardian lesson). But there is a natural inclination to think that because Christianity has extraordinary implications about the nature of God, man, morality, the universe and indeed reality itself, it must be based on some extraordinary or difficult to grasp evidence.

But it isn't. Christianity is based on ordinary, even mundane experience - the experience of a group of witnesses who met a man, spoke with him, ate with him, and even touched his wounds. Nothing unusual about that. What is unusual is that these witnesses had seen this same man crucified and buried several days earlier. It is this extraordinary conjunction of ordinary experience that provides the basis for Christianity's transcendent conclusions.

And it reinforces Christianity's connection to the ordinary. Jesus Christ doesn't replace the ordinary, mundane world with an extraordinary world only reachable through mystical experience; he transfigures the meaning of the ordinary world through His Life, Death and Resurrection. Cana didn't just transform the meaning of a wedding reception in ancient Palestine, it transformed the meaning of all wedding receptions from then on. Wine is never the same after Christ transforms it into His Body and Blood at the Last Supper. The nuclear family is something more than merely a sociological statistic in a world that has seen the Holy Family. And the ordinary fact of death, which once heralded the everlasting end of all that is good, becomes instead a means to conquer evil when death itself is conquered by Christ.

Christianity and Universal Values

This was on a hobbyist blog - the exact source doesn't matter as it is a very common sentiment:

I love the Solstice. It's such an important day of the holidays for us, marking the root of the whole season. We're not Christian, so Jesus isn't the reason for our season -  but the ideas that he represents within that religion, light, love, compassion, kindness, generosity, these are pretty universal human values that we can rely on to guide us through the darkest days and the longest nights, and for us, those are the spirit of Christmas, Yule and the Solstice.   Every day between now and Twelfth Night, this family will concentrate on those things- like we try to all year - but it's just so much easier to keep our focus there when there's a big honking pagan symbol of the season in our living room.

Unfortunately, Jesus didn't represent values, or at least any values that make sense without him. The love Jesus represents is a self-sacrificial divine love that transcends the human: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." But more significantly, Jesus did not "represent" that love, he is that love. If Jesus is not real, then in fact God did not so love the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and in that case what becomes of the "universal human value" of love? It remains a merely "human" love, a love that perishes with us and has no more power than any other human value - for instance, the value of social stability (which is why agitators like Christ should be executed) or personal security (which is why it is foolish to give all you have to the poor). Love remains, it is true, but it is not the love with the revolutionary power of Christ. If it tries to be, it ends up crucified like Christ, but without a resurrection and therefore permanently dead and buried in the tomb. The universal human value of love without Christ is a muted love, a love that cherishes others to be sure, but must be tempered by worldly prudence and circumspection. For to love as Christ does is to become vulnerable to the point that suffering is inevitable, and death the only end.

Like Christian love, Christian generosity is revolutionary and, without Christ, appropriately dismissed as crazy. Thus the figure of St. Francis, who gave the very clothes off his back and ran naked into the woods. This is a nutty thing to do - unless you are do it in the Name of the God who volunteered to be nailed naked to the Cross.

And so it goes with all the values. In the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the universal human values are remade in His image. Without Him, you may keep your human values... but they remain merely human.

Merry Christmas.

Dawkins and God-like Aliens

I've finally gotten around to reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, a book I've had on my shelf for awhile. It's actually an enjoyable read as Dawkins has a nice style and some good humor. All your favorite village atheist arguments are here ("I just go one god further" among other favorites).

In his third chapter, Dawkins discusses the possibility of alien civilizations and the level of their technological development with respect to us. Apparently as a way of undermining the possibility of proof by miracle, Dawkins asserts that such a civilization might have technology so advanced that to us it appears magical:

Whether we ever get to know about them or not, there are very probably alien civilizations that are superhuman, to the point of being god-like in ways that exceed anything a theologian could possibly imagine. Their technical achievements would seem as supernatural to us as ours would seem to a Dark Age peasant transported to the twenty-first century. Imagine his response to a laptop computer, a mobile telephone, a hydrogen bomb or a jumbo jet. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, in his Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The miracles wrought by our technology would have seemed to the ancients no less remarkable than the tales of Moses parting the waters, or Jesus walking upon them. The aliens of our SETI signal would be to us like gods, just as missionaries were treated as gods (and exploited the undeserved honor to the hilt) when they turned up in Stone Age cultures bearing guns, telescopes, matches, and almanacs predicting eclipses to the second.

The first thing to be said about this is that theologians - even medieval ones - can surely imagine things beyond the power of superhuman aliens, specifically creation ex nihilo, which is in principle beyond the technology of any alien no matter how advanced, as it is beyond the power of technology per se. (I am not quite as demanding; I would be impressed simply with the Lazarus-like raising of someone from the dead. I do not believe this is possible whatever the technology.) More interesting is Dawkins's notion that the technical achievements of aliens would seem "supernatural to us." Surely they would not seem so to Dawkins, would they? Isn't the anticipation of the possibility of advanced alien technology enough to innoculate Dawkins from drawing any unwarranted supernatural conclusions? And us as well, since he's just done us the favor?

It is not insignificant that when selecting someone from the "Dark Ages" to transport into the modern age, Dawkins selects a peasant and not, say, one of his despised theologians or philosophers. Yes, Jacques the Crass might be overawed by modern technology, but would Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna or to go way back, Socrates?*  The reason Stone Age folks took explorers for gods is because primitive peoples know no distinction between nature and supernature. Reality is an unreflected continuum and to be a god really is to just be a superpowerful creature, not different in kind from any other creature. In that respect, it might not be too much to say that the Stone Age people were not actually wrong in thinking missionaries were gods. If the "gods" are just the most powerful creatures immanent in the universe, then the explorers with their guns and telescopes qualify. But Thomas Aquinas did not believe in such "gods" and was in possession of a thoroughly articulated philosophy of nature including the distinction between nature and supernature. If men showed up doing extraordinary things, he would certainly not conclude they were "gods", nor would he necessarily conclude that they were from God. Which brings us to Dawkins's comments about Moses and Jesus.

Dawkins doesn't seem to notice that the remarkable thing about both Moses and Jesus was that they weren't strangers come doing strange things, like missionaries visiting a primitive tribe, but apparently ordinary, familiar men doing extraordinary things. "Is not this the carpenter's son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?" (Matt. 13:55).  There is a "provenance" associated with both men that puts their extraordinary actions in context.  For the distinguishing mark of God is the union of power and wisdom; God is not just powerful, He is good. Jesus Christ did not begin his earthly ministry until the fullness of time, that is until he had fulfilled things in all righteousness. He was born and raised a faithful Jew so that when it came time for Him to fulfill His mission, He did it as a Jew known among Jews, not as a wonder-working stranger. What is the source of His power, then? It is nothing of this world, because we know the carpenter's son and his history; he is just like us.

And unlike an exploitative missionary or explorer, Christ did not serve himself with His miracles but others. This is an area where Thomas Aquinas might prove superior even to Richard Dawkins. While Dawkins is impressed purely with power (what tricks can you perform?), Aquinas is more interested in the question of what good you can do. Thus it's all the same to Dawkins whether a god proves himself with hydrogen bombs or telephones; Dawkins even seems uninterested in what a godlike person might actually do with bombs or telephones. Is someone just as godlike if he destroys the world with h-bombs or saves the world with an h-bomb by blowing up an asteroid about to collide with the Earth? Is he just as godlike if he tells lies over the telephone or if he tells truths? Not to Thomas Aquinas. The question of what one does with power is at least as important for Thomas as the question of whether one has power in the determination of the relationship of the extraordinary to divinity. The stranger who arrives among us performing astonishing tricks that serve no other purpose than to impress us should be treated with robust suspicion; the man among us whom we have known as a friend, neighbor and good man, who then performs extraordinary feats in the service of God and his neighbors, even to his own demise... well, he may be worth paying some attention.

*And even then, Dawkins may be selling the medieval peasant short. There is a wonderful movie made a few years ago named The Visitors, about a medieval French knight and his servant (Jacques the Crass) who are time-transported into the contemporary world (see the French version; the English remake is bad). The medieval Frenchmen are certainly bewildered by modern technology (on first seeing an automobile, the servant calls it a "Devil's chariot"), but they are not for a moment tempted to see anything supernatural about modern people. The medieval peasant may have interpreted certain modern technologies as involving a recourse to magic, but that doesn't mean modern people are magical - only that they are depraved enough to make use of the occult.

Luke 6:37 and Luke 6:29

Most of us find Luke 6:37 ("Judge not: and you shall not be judged") attractive. It seems to map nicely to our culturally dominant moral sensibility of live and let live, a philosophy always attractive since it simultaneously relieves one of the duty of caring what other people do while justifying a failure to make any moral demands on oneself. Who wouldn't be interested in a moral philosophy that turns moral laziness into a virtue?

But 6:37 only comes after Christ has already spoken 6:29: "And to him that strikes you on the one cheek, offer also the other. And him that takes away from you your cloak, forbid not to take your coat also." We don't find this verse nearly so congenial; this isn't live and let live, but die so that another may live. We may think we can take 6:37 and leave 6:29, but in fact they are logically related and it is perfectly reasonable that Christ follows the one with the other. We may think of 6:37 in the context of John 8 (the woman caught in adultery), and we are not wrong to do so. But if we are not to judge, we are not only not to judge the situation of "consenting adults", but also the unpleasant situation of someone striking us or taking our cloak. Do we take umbrage when someone strikes or insults us? Then we are judging them and not living according to 6:37. Luke 6:37 isn't really about the superficial live and let live philosophy, but something far more demanding and disturbing.

Following Luke 6:37 the way Christ intends it, as it does with everything else Christ commands, leads eventually to the Cross.

On the Commercialization of Christmas

This is about the time of year we begin to hear laments about the "commercialization of Christmas." Christmas, it seems, has become nothing more than a materialistic bacchanalia celebrating the worst aspects of our greed, all for the purposes of corporate exploitation. It has always struck me as odd that a holiday dedicated to buying things for other people should be denounced in these terms. The guy who otherwise spends his money on a new BMW and fancy clothes for himself, instead spends it on gifts for his relatives and friends. This is a bad thing? Money represents buying power and nothing else. The question is ultimately not whether it should be spent, but on what it will be spent. An annual celebration that involves a cultural tradition of spending your money on others seems like it should be far down our list of social sins.

Perhaps it is the whiff of excess that fuels the scolds. Christmas isn't just about buying a gift or two, but about buying a lot of stuff for a lot of people. But it is this element of excess that distinctively reflects its Christian origins. A distinguishing principle of Christianity is the notion of unmerited reward. Christ becomes Incarnate to save sinners who don't deserve to be saved. And not only that; Christ offers the greatest of all possible rewards, friendship and union with God Himself. I remember as child anticipating the cornucopia that would greet me Christmas morning. It wasn't just one or two things that would be under the tree for me, but a whole bunch of stuff. And although Santa supposedly knew who was naughty and nice, it didn't seem to make any difference as far as the amount of booty inevitably found under the tree. This is strictly in line with Christian principles: Christ grants the greatest of rewards to saints and sinners alike, so long as they simply believe in his willingness to do so. As I have remarked in the past, it doesn't really matter that you ultimately discover that the Santa in the red suit who lives at the North Pole is a myth, for someone was providing that unmerited reward, and the mere fact of its provision proves that a will capable of doing so exists in the world. This is part of what G.K. Chesterton describes as the education of the imagination that occurs when we are very young. In the innocence of youth, we are open to the association of seemingly contradictory ideas that we not only accept, but that form our perception of the world to the extent that they seem perfectly natural.  Anyone who grew up with the story of the the Nativity, for example,will forever have the association of infinite power with perfect vulnerability in his imagination. Our early experience with Santa stamps us with the idea of an infinite reward that is unmerited - a distinctively Christian fusion of seemingly contradictory ideas (isn't a reward a reward for something?)

What about those businessmen who cynically exploit Christmas for commercial gain? In this fallen world, there will always be people looking for a way to make a buck. The question is how that energy is channeled. The sort of guy who is looking to make the quick buck could be spending his time in far more destructive activities than trying to dream up the toy that every kid will beg his parents for next Christmas. This is one example of the famous compliment that vice pays to virtue. Because Christmas is about gift-giving, the businessman can't appeal to the consumer's own temptations or selfish desires; he's got to convince him that what he is selling is what someone else might like. In other words, the businessman, in order to make a profit, has got to get the consumer thinking about other people than himself.

What's really behind the complaints of the commercialization of Christmas has something to do with the psychology of a Judas, I think. Not Judas insofar as he was a betrayer, but insofar as he objected to expensive perfume being used to anoint Christ (John 12:4-6). Judas's pride prevented him from sharing in the mystery of Christ's redemptive act as did Mary. What follows is envy and the will to destroy the good of another. So he objects that the oil could better have been used for the poor. Similarly, some see the joy of Christmas expressed in others and are unable or unwilling to share it themselves. So they must find a reason to poison the fruit, and the method at hand is the condemnation of Christmas as too commercial.

Suffering

These posts (here and here) at the Secular Right blog, and recent family events, have led me to reflect on the meaning of suffering. What I write below is not particularly original, but having read similar things for many years, it is only now that I am truly beginning to understand what was meant.

The first thing we must understand about suffering is that it is unavoidable to some degree. The question then, is not whether we need to seek out suffering, but how we handle the suffering that life inevitably inflicts on us. Of course everyone agrees, secular and religious, that suffering should be minimized to the extent reasonably possible. The Catholic Church is the sponsor of hospitals and relief agencies throughout the world. I read somewhere that the Church is the single largest organized provider of such services; I don't know if this is true, but there is no doubt that the Church actively supports such activities in a big way. Clearly then, when the Church asks us to do things like "embrace suffering", she doesn't mean that we should needlessly endure suffering.

Despite our best efforts, however, some suffering in life is inevitable. In fact, quite a lot is inevitable. The basic metaphysical fact that our being includes a body that can be damaged means that suffering is a possibility in our existence; even if such physical suffering never becomes actual, its possibility causes anxiety which is itself a form of suffering. So as soon as we come into the world, we begin to suffer in one way or another. How shall we respond to the suffering that is unavoidable? This is the question of suffering that we all must face, religious or secular.

Furthermore, it is not obvious that avoiding suffering is the greatest good; there may be goods that we can obtain only through suffering, but that are worth obtaining even through suffering. In fact, it is obvious that there are such goods. Every child who endures vaccination shots has experienced this truth. And every parent who disciplines a child, even though such discipline causes suffering, knows that the suffering is worth it. (Both for the parent and the child. Remember "this hurts me more than it hurts you?") So the principle that "suffering should be minimized to the extent reasonably possible" takes a lot of unpacking, since it must involve a judgment with respect to goods obtainable only through suffering, and the degree of suffering that is reasonable in attempting to attain them.

My problem with the typical secular approach to suffering, as illustrated in the two posts linked to above, is that it never addresses this question, or even seems to be aware of it. In Andrew Stuttaford's post, he quotes a father grieving over the death of his daughter, a father who rages against what he takes to be the religious interpretation of suffering. I will not take issue with a grieving father, but I only note that Stuttaford offers no alternative interpretation of suffering. He simply agrees that the religious interpretation is unacceptable and moves on. In other words, he avoids addressing the question of suffering head on.

Is it merely accidental that Stuttaford quoted a grieving father in his post? If we begin to understand what Christ teaches us about suffering, we will see that it is not. For love is one of those great goods that is not obtainable without suffering. This is one of the meanings of the Cross. We live in a world where everything born must suffer and die; therefore, as soon as we love, we are presented with the fact that what we love will decline and disappear in one way or another. This knowledge in itself causes suffering, something every father or mother knows. As soon as a child is born, we are already anxious about all the things that can go wrong for him. And the more we love the child, the more anxious we become.

If we embrace love, then, we must also embrace the suffering that accompanies it. If we wish to avoid suffering, we must also avoid love. We see this happening in the fact that people no longer have love affairs, but "relationships." A relationship is understood to be an essentially temporary thing, makeable or breakable by either party at will, and so successfully avoids the deep entanglement  - and suffering - that a genuine love affair would involve. But if we wish to have real love affairs, and to love deeply, how can we deal with the suffering that we know must come our way?

This is what Faith and Hope are about, the two theological virtues supporting the supreme theological virtue of Love. Christ loved greatly and so suffered and died on the Cross; but that is not the end of the story. The Resurrection shows the far side of suffering when suffering is undergone in union with Christ. In Christ, there will be life and love when all appears hopeless, destroyed and finished. The key word is appears; for in this life, there is no "proof" that we will be experience a resurrection after suffering; all we see and know is the suffering and its apparent finality. But Christ reveals that suffering and death are not necessarily final; in Faith, we embrace the possibility through Him that it is not final, and through Hope, find the strength to face the suffering that will come our way through love. This is what Christians mean when they talk about "embracing suffering." It means not turning away from the suffering that love brings, but facing it and enduring it through the strength of Christ, for our own strength is not sufficient for the journey.

Absent a connection to Christ, how will we endure suffering? We all have greater or lesser natural gifts in this regard, but natural gifts are different in kind from the divine gifts flowing from Christ. Without Christ, we are simply unable to endure the suffering true love entails. So we find ways to avoid it: At the end of life by embracing suicide, or at the beginning of life by embracing abortion, and in the middle of life by avoiding the deep commitments true love involves.

Cana and Being a Spiritual Superhero

That's Tintoretto's Wedding at Cana that's now the banner of my blog. The miracle at Cana is perhaps my favorite that Christ performed. It's got a self-verifying quality to it that some of the other miracles lack. That Christ would miraculously cure the sick is something we might expect when God visits Earth; it's the kind of serious thing we imagine God would do, and therefore we can imagine someone imagining he did it. But who would imagine that the first miracle God would perform would be... to refill pots of wine so that a party could continue? And who would further imagine that God would perform this miracle because his mother asked him to? The miracle has a frivolous quality to it that is everlastingly shocking, as though the miracle really belongs in the Gospel According to John Blutarsky.

We find it difficult to accept one of the obvious implications of Cana: Christ expects us to have a good time. Maybe not with Animal House level excess, but the man who thinks he's too busy being holy to have an occasional beer with the lads is probably missing something important concerning what Christ is about (this post is inspired by a recent exchange I had in the comment box at the Maverick Philosopher blog on this subject. As usual, I was an utter failure at getting anyone to see my point.) Indeed, we tend to think that being seriously religious must involve being seriously miserable. So serious, in fact, that the necessary misery involved is reason enough to dismiss the claims of Christ altogether. Perhaps Christ performed the miracle at Cana, and spent so much time at parties, just to remove the excuse of those who avoid religion with the claim that they are not cut out to be spiritual superheroes.

But whereunto shall I esteem this generation to be like? It is like to children sitting in the market place. Who crying to their companions say: We have piped to you, and you have not danced: we have lamented, and you have not mourned.  For John came neither eating nor drinking; and they say: He has a devil. The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say: Behold a man that is a glutton and a wine drinker, a friend of publicans and sinners. And wisdom is justified by her children. Matt 11:16-19.

Like most other reasons for dismissing Christ, the refusal to entertain the idea that Christ doesn't expect, in fact doesn't even want, us to try to become spiritual superheroes comes down to the sin of pride. The implication is that Christ is satisfied with spiritual mediocrities. Who wants to be mediocre? But there it is. Peter, James and John were not spiritual superheroes - especially Peter, yet he was chosen to be the primum inter pares, better to show forth the glory of God, who is content to work with mediocrities.  Nor are the saints spiritual superheroes; they are just mediocre enough to give up doing it themselves and allow God to takeover.

More on The Dark Knight as Post-Christian Myth

In this post I asserted that The Dark Knight is a post-Christian myth. I've also been defending the moral vision of The Dark Knight in response to comments made to this post.

In the end, however, I agree that the moral vision of The Dark Knight is problematic; I just don't think it is problematic in the way that Amos indicates in his comments. Neither the "good guys" nor their actions need be pure for their cause to be just, nor does their victory need to be permanent, for us to agree that their victory is a victory of good over evil. Mundane works are always a mixture of good and evil, of reality and illusion; thus we need the virtue of prudence to help us advance the good even in a world thoroughly tainted by evil.

But I do think there is a problem with the moral vision of The Dark Knight, and it follows from the film's nature as a post-Christian myth. What makes something "post-Christian?" When Christian sensibility lingers on in a context in which its foundation has disappeared or has been undermined, we are in the realm of the post-Christian. Without its foundation, Christian sensibility is at least incoherent and probably absurd; the dramatic arc of the post-Christian myth is the life of that sensibility in light of its ultimate incoherence.

I've been stressing in the earlier posts that Batman's victory flows from the virtue of humility. Humility is not a pagan (non-Christian) virtue; neither Plato nor Aristotle recognize it as one. Humility is the virtue that relativizes the secular scale of values in light of the divinely revealed scale of values. It became a virtue at the time of the Incarnation. In the light of the Divine Pearl of Great Price (Matt.13:46), revealed by Christ, all worldly pearls lose their value. Thus worldly honor, reputation, and glory mean nothing to the Christian, who only cares for the honor, reputation, and glory that is in the sight of God. 

It's not just that humility doesn't seem to be a virtue in a non-Christian world; it really isn't a virtue. It is self-evident that the better should not sacrifice itself for the worse. Christianity does not contradict this truth (or any other truth, for that matter.) Christ sacrificed Himself on the Cross for sinful men, but His Sacrifice is meaningful only in light of the Resurrection. The better sacrifices itself for the worse on the Cross because the better will nonetheless triumph in the end, in contradiction to all worldly understanding. In light of the Resurrection, the Incarnation is what Kierkegaard called the Absolute Paradox, a paradox being what is only apparently absurd. Without the Resurrection, the Incarnation is actually absurd. It is in the light of Faith that the Incarnation escapes absurdity.

The Christian can follow Christ in His humility because, united with Christ, he knows that he will obtain the Pearl of Great Price. The Christian seems a fool and a "loser" in the eyes of the world, but that is because purely secular eyes cannot see beyond the horizon of the world to the glory beyond it:

Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.

Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied.

Blessed are you that weep now, for you shall laugh.

Blessed are you when men hate you, and when they exclude you and revile you, and cast out your name as evil, on account of the Son of man! Rejoice on that day, and leap for joy, for behold, your reward is great in heaven... (Luke 6: 20-22).

There is a mistaken understanding of Christianity that holds that Christianity holds suffering, per se, to be good. No, suffering is in itself bad; it is only suffering undergone in union with Christ that is good, for then is it suffering transformed into a redemptive act that has as its end ultimate perfection. Absent Christ, suffering can have at most instrumental value (e.g. in teaching virtues like courage and endurance.)

The pagan world does not have the virtue of humility. The sacrifice of the better for the worse cannot be relativized and is therefore always wrong. This made a problem for Plato in his Republic, for the best part of the city is the warrior class. Yet the warrior class is called on to sacrifice itself in war for the rest of the city, for that which is not as good as itself. Therefore Plato must resort to the "Noble Lie" as a means of convincing the warrior class to perform its duty. 

Socrates may be held out as a case of the better sacrificing itself for the worse, but the Apology teaches us better. Socrates did not hold death to be an evil; in fact, since Plato/Socrates see the body as an impediment to the philosophical life, which Socrates presumes will continue after death, death is actually something for which the philosopher longs; philosophy is nothing but a preparation for death. Furthermore, Socrates tells the jury at his trial that he will be victorious in the end; his death will redound to his own glory and to the infamy of the citizens of Athens. So Socrates not only expects death to be a boon to him, but that he will triumph in unambiguously secular terms as well.

The pagan analog to humility is the virtue of magnanimity. This is the best the better can do for the worse. In magnanimity, the "great man" condescends from his position of wealth and virtue to gratuitously assist the less fortunate; what he gets out of it is fame and honor. In no sense would the magnanimous man ever go to the absurd lengths of the Christian, selling all he owns and giving it to the poor. (And, again, notice the tag Christ puts on this command: Sell all you have, give it to the poor, and then come follow me. (Matt. 19:21) It is the relationship to Christ that makes the selling of all goods a morally sensible act.)

So what do we make of Batman in The Dark Knight? Batman is better than the citizens of Gotham; we may say he is the best part of Gotham. Like the warriors in Plato's Republic, Batman is called on to sacrifice himself for that which is worse than himself. Plato's warriors only do it because they are under the sway of the Noble Lie. But Batman is under no illusions; he himself is the author of the Noble Lie that will sustain Gotham. This is absurd and morally incoherent, for Batman is not Jesus Christ, nor does he act in union with Christ. Batman, in the pagan universe in which he exists, is duty bound to not sacrifice himself for Gotham, for with his destruction the best part of Gotham would be destroyed as well. Humility is not a virtue for Batman; it only lives on as an apparent virtue in the post-Christian sensibility of Gotham.

It is appropriate, then, that Batman is The Dark Knight, for his existence is absurd. As a film, The Dark Knight carries dramatic impact to the extent that the audience itself retains a post-Christian sensibility; that is, as long as it still retains some feeling of humility as a virtue. As lingering Christian sensibility recedes, films like The Dark Knight will become laughable, humility having lost all sense of virtue.

The Dark Knight as Mundane Christ

I've been having a conversation about the Dark Knight with several commenters in response to this post. I think a longer post is called for at this point to advance the discussion.

Being exists in two different ways:

1) As absolutely good.

2) As relatively good.

Mode 1 is primary, and mode 2 is relative to the absolute goodness of mode 1. Notice that "evil" appears nowhere in the description of being. Evil is an absence of goodness, or in other words, an absence of being. To describe something as evil is to say that it is not as good as it might be. It follows that there is no such thing as "absolute evil" as there is "absolute good." Absolute evil is pure non-being; it is nothing at all. The only kind of evil is relative evil, and that evil is relative to absolute goodness rather than absolute evil. Relative good and relative evil really describe the same mode of being; the only difference is the degree to which being has fallen into non-being.

A battle of "good vs. evil" is therefore a contest of one of the following two types:

1. Absolute good vs. relative good.

2 Relative good vs. relative good.

Only in the case of a type 1 battle is the victory of good over evil assured. And only in a type 1 battle will the victory be one of pure goodness; i.e. the victory will be a victory of pure being over non-being. The primary example of a type 1 victory is, of course, the victory of Christ in His Death and Resurrection.

In a type 2 battle, the victory of good over evil is not assured; and even if the relatively better does win, the victory will be tainted by aspects of non-being, for only in absolute goodness is action free from non-being. Because a type 2 battle is always a mix of good and evil on both sides, there is always a temptation to despair that goodness can genuinely be advanced in such a battle. For we can always find in any type 2 victory elements of non-being (evil.)

To take an example, World War II is sometimes called "the Good War." If this is taken to mean that the better side won, then there is no problem with the term. If it is taken to mean that the better side won in an absolutely good manner, then the term is misleading; for no merely human enterprise can ever be free from evil, especially war. And the Allied victory in WW II had its morally problematic elements - the incineration of hundreds of thousands of German civilians in strategic bombing being one of them. Nonetheless, the Allied victory was both necessary and just in its final outcome, despite the morally problematic means it took to get there. The (relatively) good guys won.

There is a cast of mind that cannot except that the relatively good is just that - relatively good. When it discovers the evil hidden in any relative good, it despairs of the relative good altogether. It demands all or nothing. Thus, when some people discover the horrors of the firebombing of Hamburg or Dresden, their understanding of the war collapses into moral relativism; we are no better than the Nazis and the Allied victory was not a victory of good over evil.

In my original post on the Dark Knight, I said that the Joker is a "secret idealist." By that I meant that the Joker cannot accept the goodness of the relatively good. It's all or nothing for him. The Joker is the kind of person for whom the strategic bombing campaign obscures all moral differences between the opposing sides in WWII. This is a manifestation of the sin of pride.

Batman, on the other hand, understands that the relatively good is worth fighting for even if it is mixed with evil; that his campaign against evil is worth it, even if his own efforts are necessarily tainted by evil; and that the salvation of Gotham is worth it even if that salvation is effected by illusions. So, yes, we may point out the morally problematic nature of Batman's means to victory: He induces Commissioner Gordon to support a Platonic "noble lie." Is it a mark against his character?

That is hard to say. Batman is a "post-Christian" myth. That is to say, it exists in a universe in which the salvific and revelatory Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Christ has not taken place; at least, no one seems to know about it. The Incarnation changed the meaning of the virtue of prudence by giving man an example of absolute goodness and also the sanctifying grace to perform it. Christ sets the standard by which man is judged in a Christian universe; absolute goodness is now the standard even if man can only approach it.

In a non-Christian universe, prudence does not have this relationship to absolute goodness. Prudence is the struggle to advance the good in a world where everything is tainted by evil. This is why the pagan Plato can advocate the use of the "Noble Lie", something no Christian needs to do, since the Christian is in possession of the Noble Truth of Christ. The standard of prudence in the pagan world is not absolute goodness; it is the effective advancement of the good in a world where good must compromise with evil.

So in the post-Christian world of Batman, the question about his character must be understood in terms of the meaning of prudence in that world. That Batman resorts to evil means is true; that such an act reveals a character flaw, I am not so sure. He did the best he could in the unredeemed world in which he lives.

The title of this post is the "Dark Knight as Mundane Christ". Like Christ, Batman sacrifices himself for the salvation of the world (Gotham). But Batman is merely a mortal man. He is not absolute goodness, nor does he have power over life and death. So his salvific act will necessarily include elements of evil (non-being), which Paul and Amos have been pointing out.

His victory is not absolute or permanent, but temporary and shaky. It is based on illusions the Gothamites have about themselves, Harvey Dent and Batman.

But it nonetheless remains true that Batman's victory is a victory of the relatively good over the relatively evil, and it fundamentally flows from a virtue he possesses and the Joker does not have, and cannot have: Humility. And goodness finally remains more powerful than evil, but not because the victory of Batman was inevitable. In any contest of the relatively evil vs. the relatively good, the relatively evil has the possibility of victory (as the Nazis came close to winning WWII.) But because it is based on being, the relatively good has more resources at its disposal, if it can only find the means to use them. In the case of Batman, he finds a way to use the good virtue of humility to defeat the Joker, a move the Joker cannot match because humility is unavailable to him.

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.