All Things Without God

The morality that the Church teaches is not some special burden for Christians; it is the defense of man against the attempt to abolish him. If morality—as we have seen—is not the enslavement of man but his liberation, then the Christian faith is the advance post of human freedom…

Man needs morality to be himself. But morality requires faith in creation and immortality, that is, it needs the objectivity of obligation and the definitiveness of responsibility and fulfillment.

Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?

Reflection – This is another nifty little book by the future Pope Benedict that I like to recommend to people. The title may sound rather euro-centric and hence of little interest to those of us in other parts of the world, but ‘Europe’ in Ratzinger’s thought really stands as the place of the modern/post-modern existential choice of man—to press forward to increasingly radical secularism and the attendant ideologies, or to turn back to the coherence of faith and its integration into life. That is what this book is really about, and as such it is relevant to all of us.

The abolition of man is a phrase that Ratzinger seems to have borrowed from C.S. Lewis, whose work of that name he cites with approval in this book. It is of the essence of modernity that there is no such thing as ‘man’, that human nature is not a thing, or that at best humanity is defined by its infinite malleability, its radical plasticity.

This means that we can shape and fashion humanity any way we please, whether it is the capitalist project of reducing people to units of production, the communist project of reducing people to the service of the collective, the genderist project of severing biology, sexuality, and personal identity in the service of an extreme form of libertinism (ironically enforced by the coercive power of the state), or the positivist project of reducing man to a unit of technical and scientific study to be shaped and managed for optimal efficiency—the trans-humanist dream of transcendence through scientific progress.

Post-modernity, meanwhile, rejects all these big ideologies and in fact all the large sweeping narratives that claim to give coherence to reality in favor of a radical individualism, perhaps a nihilistic rejection of meaning, but at any rate essentially an embrace of incoherent relativism in service of personal freedom. The problem of post-modernism is that it provides no defense nor any possibility of defense against the large ideological agendae that still operate in the world at the hands of those who wield them.

Whew—that’s a mouthful. But this is more or less the world that secularism delivers us to, isn’t it? Once God and any objectively real transcendent order of reality is either denied or ignored, considered illusory or unknowable or irrelevant, then ‘man’ is delivered over to the ideologues who hold power at the moment.

And this is quite important. We can think easily that it is a great liberation to get rid of God and the objective moral law. Sartre and Nietzsche assure us it is so. But in fact, as Bob Dylan put it, ‘You gotta serve somebody’, and the illusory freedom from God in fact delivers us to the unbearable slavery to the spirit of the age. And, more to the point, it delivers the mass of humanity to being objects of use and manipulation for the small elite who wield the levers of power at this moment.

And that is a fairly precise description of where we are right now. This little citation from Ratzinger, then, shows us the way out of this degrading slavery. There simply must be a transcendent, objective order to the cosmos, not to confine and hamper us, but to preserve us from being annihilated by the powerful and the rapacious. There must be a moral order, simply to provide us with a solid ground on which to stand against tyranny and exploitation. There can be no ab-use of a human being if there is no proper ‘use’ of one.

Without a real moral order to the universe, there really is no grounds for objecting to virtually anything anyone might do to anyone else. We may dislike people having their heads chopped off or large men belting their wives in elevators or policemen being trigger-happy (to name a few random examples plucked from my Facebook newsfeed), but we can’t really object to those things on moral grounds, unless there are moral grounds.

And there are no moral grounds without an order to creation and the personal responsibility and ultimate signification to human life that is our immortal nature. And these do not exist without God. As Nietzsche said, and Dostoevsky echoed, without God all things are permissible. It is faith, and particularly the Christian faith which on strictly theological grounds privileges the infinite worth of the individual person over any other consideration, that is the best defense and solid ground of human freedom and dignity in the world.

Season of Matter

The essence of modern materialism… consists in the way in which the relationship between matter and spirit is conceived. Here, matter is the first and original element; it is matter, not the Logos, that stands at the beginning. Everything develops out of matter in a process of contingencies that becomes a process of necessities. Spirit is never more than the product of matter. If one knows the laws of matter and can manipulate them, then one can also change the course of the spirit.

A Turning Point for Europe?, 83-4

Reflection – Well, it is the season of matter, isn’t it? Christmas time, shortly, and hence the great feast of the Incarnation. God becoming flesh; God, pure spirit, assuming to himself matter, taking a body from the flesh of Mary to carry our human flesh to the very heart of the godhead in his suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension.

But at Christmas we contemplate the baby, this little creature of flesh lying in the straw, warmed by the animals because he can be cold now, fed by his mother’s breasts because he can be hungry now, soon to be fleeing with Mary and Joseph to Egypt because he can be killed now.

This rather dry (perhaps) philosophical reflection from Ratzinger directly relates to the Christmas mystery, this central dogma of the Incarnation, God become flesh. Matter without spirit, a strictly material universe, is locked wholly into a series of laws and rigid patterns of motion and rest. Even if those laws are complex in their interactions, and so we have things like chaos theory which means we cannot predict the movements of bodies in complex systems accurately, nonetheless matter is entirely constrained by unbreakable laws. You canna’ defy the laws of physics, Captain!

It is only spirit, and Spirit, that brings freedom into the material picture. It is only a person who can make a free decision for or against a course of action. The stars in their courses and the atoms in their vibrations are set, determined.

And it is materialism that more and more yields determinism of various kinds. We are controlled by our genes… or by our environments… or by our brain chemistry. Personal identity is more and more determined by factors outside our choice and control, like sexual orientation or race, and those things we have chosen for ourselves, like our religion, are more and more marginalized as significant considerations for our choices or meaningful human rights to be respected.

The Incarnation—the Spirit overshadowing the flesh of Mary, the very Logos of God becoming flesh in her womb, the very life of God embracing and transforming the whole material universe in this mystery—this is the permanent Christian answer to materialism and determinism. God, in a sense, became man so that man could be liberated eternally from the determinations of matter.

Not so that we become free from matter itself—the resurrection of the body means that we will be physical material creatures for eternity. But we are free from matter’s limits, its exigencies, its finite mortality, its locked-in-to-itself quality. Because of what God did to matter in Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, all of matter is made into a vehicle of God’s grace and God’s life.

All the material universe is made into a vessel for love and communion. It was made to be so from the beginning, but sin and failure frustrated this divine plan. Christ opens the door again, and the divine presence, mercy, love, grace flows forth from his risen body into the life of the Church and its sacraments, and through the Church into the whole cosmos.

Well, that is our answer to materialism: O come let us adore him. God became matter, and so matter is permanently disposed to receive the life of God. And this is the true meaning of Christmas.

Fight or Flight

The real untruth of the worldview of which drugs and terrorism are symptoms consists in the reduction of the world to facts and in the narrowing-down of reason to the perception of what is quantitative.

A Turning Point for Europe?,  35

Reflection – This short passage may seem a bit obscure. It may even seem like practically nonsense, a bunch of familiar-type words jumbled together into a single sentence. Whassit mean?

Now of course this is one sentence lifted from a lengthy analysis of the subjects mentioned, namely drugs and terrorism. It’s nice to know that Ratzinger has really engaged with all the manifestations of modernity in his writings. A while ago I mentioned that he has theologized about rock music; here he philosophizes about the drug culture and terrorism.

These two may seem unconnected from one another, especially since the form of terrorism we are most familiar with right now is the Islamist variety. What does the quest for the global caliphate and universal sharia law have to do with toking up? But both drug use and political violence spring from a common source, which Ratzinger deftly identifies here.

Namely, the world of ‘facts’ is a bad world. All we have are facts, ‘the way things are,’ and the way things are is bad, bad, bad. And so, let’s get high. Let’s escape from the way things are into a cloud of artificial bliss. Sure it’s not real, but reality is highly over-rated, right?

Or, let’s blow stuff up. Let’s force the world of facts to change by violent direct action. The lives destroyed by this may or may not be regretted, but the bottom line is that the way things are is intolerable and we must pull it all down around us, tear it to pieces, and make things be some other way.

Flight from reality or fight with reality—drugs and terrorism, two different responses to the same apprehension of things. And Ratzinger rightly links this to the logical positivist approach to reality that I have often discussed on this blog: that all we have are the bare quantifiable facts, that there is no reality outside those facts, and that there can be no reality outside them, and we are all trapped in a world of brute matter and meaningless clashings of particles and energy fields.

Fight or flight—that is all that’s left to us in that positivistic world. Oblivion or destruction—what a choice! And even for those few of my blog readers who are neither raging coke fiends or members of terrorist cells, the ‘fight or flight’ approach to reality may beckon. We can fly into other things besides drugs, into banal entertainments or ceaseless busyness or (Internet users beware!) constant low-level intellectual stimulation. All of this can take us out of reality in ways subtle or not, out of our own hearts and the here and now demands of our lives.

And we can ‘fight’ reality in ways that don’t involve plastic explosives or high jacked airplanes. All the paths of manipulation, dominance, spin, influence peddling, politicking, and the manifold rejections of the moral law and rationalization therein, can be ways of rebelling against reality, bending and shaping it to my specifications and ideas with little regard for the human costs of that rebellion.

Fight or flight—when all we have are bare facts, and those facts are painful and ugly, that’s all we can do. But what, then, is the Christian alternative? It is to go forward towards reality, towards ‘the facts’, and embrace them in love. To meet the world as it is with the love of Christ, a love not our own, but given to us in baptism and fostered in us by the life of prayer and virtue.

This calls us, then, not into oblivion or destruction, but into the passion of faith. Because the world of facts will do to us what it did to Christ; it will crucify us. But because we are not bound by the mere brute facts, because there is a deeper, higher, truer reality around and within us—the nascent kingdom of God—we can enter this passion, this crucifixion.

We do not have to flee from reality or attack it. We can love it, and in loving it with the heart of Christ, enter into His work of transforming reality into Reality, facts into The Fact, meeting brute matter with the power of the Holy Spirit and in that power raising up a fallen world into the new world, the new heavens and the new earth, coming to us not in violence or terror or fantasy or escape, but as a gift of God descending from Him out of love for us.

Close the Door

The most opposite modern views of the world share the same starting point: the denial of the natural ethical law and the reduction of the world to ‘mere’ facts.

A Turning Point for Europe?,  34

Reflection – ‘We can change the world. Rearrange the world… Rules and regulations who needs them? Open up the door…’ The Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song Chicago remains the unofficial theme song of our times. We have been proudly ‘opening up doors’ for centuries now, changing and rearranging and jettisoning all rules with… well, I was going to say ‘with impunity’ but I don’t think it quite works that way.

Some of those doors have monsters behind them. Other doors were fire doors, holding back the annihilating forces of nature. Other doors were trap doors leading to oubliettes, and our flinging open of those means millions of forgotten ones have plunged down into the abyss of obliteration.

When we jettison the natural law—that is, when we start from the premise that there is no ‘ought’ and ‘ought not’ built into the nature of things, the very structure of reality—then we are left in a world of facts and figures, forces of energy and brute matter. But this world of facts proves to be far more cruel and pitiless than any moral system ever developed.

We proudly uphold ‘reproductive freedom’, meaning the aggressive separation of sexual activity from pro-creation. Birth rates plunge throughout the developed world, virtually to extinction points in some countries. And so the demographic crisis heightens and tightens and worsens… and in a few years we will start euthanizing our elderly, the same elderly who in their youth proudly chose the path of contraception and abortion. The children they didn’t have are now unable to care for them and love them in their declining years. Rules and regulations, who needs them?

Oh yeah, we do… the same holds true for the looming global economic crisis. For years, decades now we (that is, our governments) have been living on credit and fancy bookkeeping and borrowing from our children and grandchildren to pay for a prosperous lifestyle. Well, our children and grandchildren have proven to be no-shows (see above paragraph for explanation). And the debt is coming due; the money is running out. What does this mean and what does will look like? I honestly don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.

And the environment… ‘we can change the world…’ can we change how food grows from the earth? Can we change the nature of living creatures? Can we really sustain the current system of food production, the heavily urbanized civilization which requires a global network of food supply chains, fewer and fewer farmers feeding an ever-growing non-food growing population? When the money runs out (see above paragraph), how is all this food going to keep moving as it must?

Anyhow, sorry to be a downer on Canada Day. But we need to reclaim this ethical sense, this sense that in the very nature of things, given by God, is a structure, an order, a truth which yields a genuine good, a truth and goodness which respected and lived from yields a genuine beauty. Otherwise, we are at the mercy of pitiless ‘facts’, a tsunami of facts that is, in fact, rushing at our civilization fairly quickly now, and will swamp us in the coming decades.

God is merciful; nature is not. The moral law is a gift of mercy from God, to teach us how to live in this world so that ‘nature’ is our friend and companion, our intimate teacher of the ways of God and our nursemaid in the ways of the Spirit (I have much more to say on that subject, but for another time…).

Without that moral law, and the sense that it flows directly from the natural order, we are terribly vulnerable, terribly endangered, and I fear that all of us—my beloved nation of Canada very much at the top of the list—are going to feel the weight of mere facts very soon indeed, if we do not recover the true values coming from the heart of God.

My Vocation

The idea that another will, the will of the Creator, calls us and that our being is right when our will is in harmony with his will is an idea that is foreign to most people.

A Turning Point for Europe? 28

Reflection – ‘To thine own self be true.’ ‘Nobody can tell you what is right for you.’ ‘Listen to your heart.’ These are the secular maxims for the pursuit of happiness in our post-modern world. To discover what is ‘right’ for one’s own being means looking inward and deciding based on what is found there.

While there is certainly an element of truth to this, maybe even a large element of truth, the quote from Ratzinger above sheds light on what is missing here. Namely, the whole reality of dialogue, of our being ‘from another’, and of this Other standing before us, above us, surrounding us, and calling to us from His own being.

Of course part of this calling, this Divine shaping of us and forming us according to His will comes through his fashioning of our inward being in a certain way, his making us to be a certain person with a unique experience of reality. And that is the measure of truth in all ‘the answer lies within your heart’ approach to personal happiness and fulfillment.

But it’s not enough. Our hearts are tricky, prone to lead us astray, as anyone with any adult experience of the world knows very well. And our hearts are not always so easily read. I can’t remember the name of the singer or the song, but I remember a song lyric: You talk about your needs as if you know just what they are/When in fact to really know them is like traveling to a star/It takes so long you die along the way.

No, our hearts are prone either to lie to us or to speak to us in such cryptic terms that we cannot easily decipher their messages to us. Today happens to be the anniversary of my first arrival at Madonna House, the community which would prove to be my vocation, in 1986. It was a beautiful May day, much like today is here – sunny, warm.

I was 19 years old, already plenty bruised and battered by life and its calamities. When I walked into this place about which I knew very little, I realized very quickly that the life I found here was exactly that for which my heart had been crying out for many years, exactly what I was made for. Now, 26 years later, I know a little better what that means, what it would ask of me, where it would take me, what is involved with making and sustaining a serious life commitment, the sacrifices and death to self it demands.

And certainly at times in the past 26 years my heart has quailed or rebelled at those demands to greater or lesser degrees. If I had gone on simply listening to my heart and its cries without any other source of information I would have left decades ago, and my life would have been disastrously impoverished.

It is this ‘other will’, this mysterious One who somehow is present, always veiled, always hidden, who has met my heart through all these years. And I think most people of faith who have committed their life to a marriage or priesthood or religious life or some dedicated life in the world know what I’m talking about.

Our hearts have their intuitions, their desires, their dreams… but the real happiness and fulfillment comes only when those interior desires and dreams are met by this strange Other, this God, this Will that is not our own. Dialogue, encounter, a love affair with God—it is in this alone that the true happiness and ‘rightness’ of our being is found. The externals almost cease to matter at a certain point (not entirely –we’re only human, after all!). What matters really is to be with Him, to follow Him, to let Him shape us and make us and remake us and if need be break us according to his perfect plan for our life.

This brings us to the Cross, of course. If need be break us... His will and our own will eventually meet at the sign of the cross. Sooner or later there are nails and wood involved, and blood, and piercings. But this too is part of the great love affair of God and man. This strange union of will and Will, of heart with Heart, comes to its consummation on the wood of the Cross.

And this is where we are Resurrected in Him and with Him. And in that mysterious resurrection, we begin life anew in His love and will, and this life is the life of Nazareth, of communion with God in the ordinariness of daily life. And this is my Madonna House vocation (poorly as I live it out), which by God’s grace He gave to me 26 years ago today, on a beautiful sunny warm day in May. Thanks, God.

Neigh Sayers

The creed of materialism is that the irrational stands at the beginning… Reason is a by-product of the irrational… This makes man the assembler of the world, which he designs according to the criteria of his goals.

A Turning Point For Europe?, 105

Reflection – Atheistic materialism of the Dawkins/Hitchens/Dennett variety normally touts itself as the great voice of reason and science as opposed to religious nonsense, superstition, and unreason. Ratzinger in this short passage, which in its brevity contains several key themes of his life’s work, shows the fragility of this New Atheist rationalism. It is a matter of strict logical argument: if one is an atheist materialist, then reason is not at the center of reality. The universe somehow just happened or is just happening, or has always been happening—for no reason. Literally this must be so. As soon as one interjects ‘reason’ into the origin or structure of the universe, one has posited a ‘god’ of some sort, and this is the one thing a materialist will not and cannot do… and remain an atheist.

So reason, if it exists, comes from unreason. Again, strict logical necessity here. The universe is irrational from the beginning. We are not from the beginning by any account of things, so our ‘reason’ comes out of unreason. Reason, far from being supreme, is an accidental byproduct of unreason.

Essentially, this means that everything collapses into unreason. The rational efforts of human beings, including Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, are of no more significance that the clucking of a chicken or the mooing of a cow. Chickens cluck, cows moo, horses neigh, and human beings write long learned tomes about how everything is meaningless. The women of River City in The Music Man are quite correct: pick a little, talk a little pick a little, talk a little, cheep, cheep, cheep! We are all just common fowl.

Anyhow. Now the atheist materialist may counter with, essentially, “Yeah, and so what?” The universe is meaningless, you’re meaningless, I’m meaningless. It’s an ugly picture, but that’s reality.” The argument would be, then, that religious people flee from this meaningless ugly picture into a fantasy land of gods and laws, while the courageous Brights face the stark truth without fear.

But this is nonsense. Because of course in doing this sort of thing atheists project a whole field of meaning of their own onto reality. They are the brave ones; we the cowardly. They the progressive ones; we the backward. They smarties; we dumb. You Einstein; me Tarzan. Ugh!

Anyhow. A whole ‘meaningful’ understanding of human life and the human project is present throughout the atheistic literature. Why do they get so irked at religion? After all horses neigh, cows moo, and human beings, among other things, theologize! If its all just clucking, why is one kind of cluck ‘good’ and another cluck ‘bad.’

They argue that religion causes violence (which is laughable), but if meaninglessness is king, then what’s wrong with violence? Bears are violent, and so are wolves—why not us? Cows eat grass, humans kill one another in wars. If the universe is, as they claim, vacant of any ‘law,’ what’s the problem?

The truth is, we cannot not seek meaning. We cannot avoid value judgments of good and evil, even if we contort ourselves to avoid using those specific words, freighted as they are with religious overtones. And the truth is, the position of materialist atheism is not a result of clear logical analysis, but of emotion-driven arguments. They don’t want God to exist. So they say nay (or neigh) to it. But even without God, they posit meaning, right, wrong, having only cut off the possibility of these things having any rational or solid basis.

Atheism, far from being the bastion of reason it claims to be, is a tissue of emotion, sentimentalism, and irrational prejudice. And the God hypothesis remains as the most rational, simplest explanation of human experience, particularly the human experience of the universe as a meaningful, rational, and moral entity.

What do you all think of that?

The Slavery of Desire

Moral obligation is not man’s prison, from which he must liberate himself in order finally be able to do what he wants. It is moral obligation that constitutes his dignity, and he does not become more free if he discards it: on the contrary, he takes a step backward, to the level of a machine, of a mere thing.

A Turning Point for Europe?, 36

Reflection – I’m on a roll here—from Marxism to scientism to today’s passage, describing just why a binding moral law is the only safeguard of human happiness and dignity.

This passage really undercuts the moral theory of ‘consequentialism’ – that model of morality which says that the only moral principle binding on us is to do that action which we deem will have the most overall positive effect. So we can torture prisoners who may (or may not) have information about future terrorist attacks, since to abuse and debase one human being is a better consequence than the deaths of thousands.

We can abort a baby who is going to be born in difficult circumstances: better that the life be ended just as it begins rather than ‘condemn’ the child to lifelong deprivation. And we can have sex whenever and however we wish, as long as all are consenting adults (although even that last word is being disputed by some): the obvious pleasure of sexual activity is a good consequence not obviously undercut by any bad ones. Telling lies is good if it spares pain or gets you what you want.

Consequentialism is rampant in North America—I can’t speak for the rest of the world. It is the assumed moral theory by almost everyone, even Catholics, even ‘conservatives’ (see torture example above). And it is entirely wrong.

For one thing, it is useless as a practical tool to measure morality. We can never know all, or even very many, of the consequences of our actions. Every action we take has ripple effects that wholly escape our powers of observation or prediction. Even our past actions have consequences we cannot gauge, so how can we evaluate our potential future actions? We just don’t know how this or that action is going to play out, consequence-wise. So to say we have to evaluate all the consequences of a deed to make a moral judgment about it is impractical in the extreme.

What we do know is the immediate moral content of what we are doing. If I am physically abusing a prisoner in my control, if I am participating in the killing of an unborn child, if I am using my sexuality as an immediate means of self-gratification, if the truth means nothing at all to me, then I know I am contravening human dignity. The act itself contains its own moral status.

Ratzinger’s point is that all of this moral weight given to the acts themselves really is a matter of preserving human freedom and dignity. Without this strong moral sense, we are reduced to the level of the beast or the machine, just recklessly pursuing our own interests and desires. No deeper consideration, no deeper concern for the fullness of our humanity and the humanity of the other. Far from releasing us from the prison of morality, amorality casts us into the prison of the rampaging ego, the slavery of desire.

To live a moral life is to live as a free man or woman, pursuing the good, the true, the beautiful even when it causes me pain or is the occasion of great sacrifice and struggle. This is the grandeur of the human person: that in this world of exigency and brute physical law and force, we frail creatures of flesh can stand in freedom and choose to live as sons and daughters of God, in goodness, justice, and charity for all. Without this, we are beasts or machines, nothing special at all. Our choice.
Update: Welcome, Sheavians! Uhhh, Sheavites? Shea-valanche? While your here, enjoy the scenery - I'm talking these days about tattoos as a response to persecution, Mae West and the Immaculate Conception, and being committed to the truth while we sweep the floor or clean the toilet. Enjoy!

A Dump or a Masterpiece?

The image of man that dominates in modern [culture] is a primarily a gloomy image. The great and the noble are suspect from the outset… morality counts as hypocrisy, joy as self-deception. [At the same time there is a kind of optimism] that the fundamental trajectory of human development is progress and that the good lies in the future—and nowhere else.

A Turning Point for Europe? 15-16

Reflection – “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” goes the memorable Oscar Wilde quip. Ratzinger echoes this in his analysis of modernity and its view of humanity. Everything stinks—bluntly put, this is the typical view of the cynic. It is, at base, a rejection of the transcendental truth and goodness of all being. When this sense of goodness, of intrinsic value is lost, all that is left is the current market value. How is your personal stock price doing today? Are you a valuable commodity? A treasured resource? What are you trading at (i-trade!)?

Running alongside the dour cynic with the cash register heart is the optimist of sorts: everything stinks… now. But let us pull everything apart and tear everything to bits, and we’ll fix it. This, as far as I can make out, is the general ‘idea’ (if that’s not too strong a word) of the protestors on Wall Street right now. Not sure what they want, but they hate the way things are – let them burn everything down, and they’ll eventually get around to figuring something else out.
I sympathize with them in their frustration. I don’t sympathize much with the cynic—I’ve always considered cynicism to be one of the cheapest ‘outs’ available to men. It’s too easy to just sneer at everything. But the Christian response is different. We begin with “God saw everything He had made and said ‘It is very good.’” We begin with ‘In God’s image and likeness He made man’. We begin with the apprehension of truth, goodness, and beauty, ineradicable at the heart of every creature, of every molecule God made, and above all every person God made.
It’s only from this that we can even know what to think about the world and the mess it inarguably is in. It’s only from this that we can do our little bit to love, serve, help, clean up the mess at least a bit—whatever we can. But if we don’t know that we’re not so much clearing out a dump as restoring a great masterpiece, then we won’t go about it correctly. It takes reverence, care, caution, and above all much love and compassion to move into the world’s pain and wounds. All of this is what is lacking too often today; this is what Christians must bring.

Rendering to Caesar What is God's

The idea of a personal relationship between the Creator God and each individual… in its pure form is limited to the sphere of biblical religion. But there is an objective connection between this and the conviction that was common to almost the whole of mankind before the modern period, the conviction that man’s Being contains an imperative; the conviction that he does not himself invent morality on the basis of calculations of expediency but rather finds it already present in the essence of things.”

A Turning Point for Europe?,  28-9

Reflection – The idea of a natural moral law is not especially Christian, either in origin or by necessity. It is theistic—there can be no law without a Lawgiver, after all. But the idea that there is a structure to reality, an inherent way that things work, that they are supposed to flow, and that morality lies in conforming our own free choices to the structures of reality in existence—this can be found in Plato and in Aristotle, in the Greek dramas and the Jewish Torah.

Once we exclude that idea from our calculations, which is the commonplace attitude today, we truly are in a bind, at least intellectually speaking. We’re not in so much of a bind in our actions—'just do whatever the heck you want!', basically, is the outcome of rejecting the natural law. But to justify our actions rationally without recourse to a natural law has proven to be more difficult than was originally thought.

Most ethicists have ended up taking one strand of the natural law and elevating it without justification to an absolute position. Utilitarianism does this; so does consequentialism. The ‘natural’ law for these ethicists seems to be to do whatever is most useful or has good consequences. But without a theory of nature, in other words a theory of what it’s all for, how are we to calculate what is useful and good? I might think it’s good to rob the local liquor store and spend the loot on fast cars and loose women. Certainly, it’s useful to me to do this. Why exactly should I subordinate my immediate needs and desires to the common good?

Theories that disallow any kind of inherent structure to reality, and particularly any kind of purpose, or end, to human life, fail to justify this. And smart guys like Sartre and Nietzsche see through that, and counsel us to just do whatever we want to do. The strongest will prevail, and its all pointless anyhow.

And many follow this counsel today, without the hyper-dramatic emotional climate of European existentialism. But what happens when your unfettered will and mine clash? How do we resolve the conflict? Rock-paper-scissors? Pistols at dawn?

Usually we go to court. In other words, the government decides. Having refused to render unto God what is God’s, we render unto Caesar… everything, basically. If there is no power, no truth, no justice higher than the state, then the state is the highest power of all. And this is the bind we increasingly find ourselves in, in our modern world. Allowing no natural law to hamper us, we find ourselves increasingly hemmed in on every side by ever-expanding numbers of decidedly unnatural laws.

The Freedom of Love

Philosophies of what is necessary assert that they can explain everything. They offer user’s instructions on how to bring about the better world by necessity. The philosophy of freedom that comes from faith cannot do this. It has no simple formula for the world. Or, to put it more exactly, its formula for the world is the freedom of God’s love, which calls us in Jesus Christ and ever anew shows the path for man’s freedom.

A Turning Point for Europe? p. 110.

Reflection – Oh, how we desire to explain everything! It is such a typical human reality. To have it all figured out, get everything, and everyone, nailed down. Seven habits of highly effective people. The Secret to getting what you want. Say this prayer every day, and watch your life flourish. The five-year plan which will yield the worker’s paradise. Tragically, the Final Solution to the “Jewish Problem.”

From the perky self-help books promising the world to their readers to the gas chambers of Auschwitz may seem like a bit of a stretch. I am not, of course, saying that there’s even remotely a moral equivalence of any magnitude between them. But the common thread linking them together is this deep human urge to get everything figured out, settled, tidied up, and nicely squared away. It really is, at heart, a longing for Heaven, for the kingdom where everything will be just as it should be... but channelled into our own efforts and projects.

How hard it is for us to live in the freedom of God’s love! We say we want to. We make the right sounds about the love of God and the beauty of His mercy. But when we realize that this freedom of God’s love calls us to live in a world that we do not control, that is messy and burdensome and dirty and at times excruciatingly painful… and we are called to extend that same mercy, that same free gift to that world, as it is—well, let’s see if there’s one more self-help book that will give us a better option.

The trouble with the self-help books, the ideologies, the programs and plans, is that they exclude the person, the individual, the relationship. There's this set of principles or rules or structures that are going to guarantee our success, and we just have to plug all our relationships and people into those structures... or eliminate them if they won't plug in. The reduction of people to parts of our schemas. Because it's the schema that will make us happy, not the people.

And of course, people as such won't make us happy, will they? But we go looking for our happiness somewhere other than the real communion of persons, the self-gift, the embrace of love between the Father, the Son, the Spirit into which we are called, and out of which we are destined to live.

No! That's too messy, too insecure. Too much trust required! We will make our happiness on the seven secret habits of the highly effective rules of the Marxist Jabez Nazis! Or something.

Freedom. God. Relationship. Communion. Mess. Somehow it is in embracing the untidy messiness of the world that we open up to the freedom of God’s love, the depths of His mercy, both the receiving of the Gift, and the giving of our little gift.

That’s all we’ve got, we Christians. Is it enough? What do you think?