Face the Strange Changes

It is perhaps [the concept of] time which best helps us to understand philosophical idealism in which the human intellect measures the physical world, the whole of reality, the whole of being, and gives it is meaning. Reality has no meaning for an idealist when it is not known; it does not really exist.

This is understandable when we realize that experience, bound to the judgment of existence, primarily regards that-which-is-moved. Now, that-which-is-moved is bound to time, measured by the present moment. Consequently, our intellectual life, the development of our intellect, is conditioned by time. It is easy to conclude, therefore—as some have done—that our intellectual life is determined by time and, by this very fact, that how we know time determines how we know being, how we know that-which-is. Is this not the deepest confusion of our intellect—confusing that which determines the judgment of existence and that which conditions it?

Marie Dominique Philippe, Retracing Reality: A Philosophical Inquiry

Reflection - OK, I haven’t had anything like this on the blog for some time: a genuinely dense philosophical passage that may be a little daunting for those readers not inclined that way (which is most of my readers…). Bear with me, and all shall become clear.

Philippe’s book is about the loss of metaphysics in the modern world, which means the loss of a sense of a reality that is outside of us, undetermined by us, but which is accessible to us as genuine knowledge. In place of metaphysics, philosophy has retreated to analysis of language (analytic philosophy), analysis of experience (phenomenology), and social activism (the various branches of philosophy roughly emerging from Marxist theory).

Now what does this have to do with you and me and the price of eggs? The importance of doing the work of philosophical reflection is that, if we do not do it ourselves, someone else will do it for us. Philosophy happens, whether or not we are inclined that way, and either we have a hand in our own understanding of reality or a pre-fab understanding of reality trickles down to us from lofty heights of academia and is presented to us with all the force of dogmatic certainty previous ages reserved for papal pronouncements.

For example, what Philippe is really referring to here is the one unquestioned dogma of our time, the one thing everyone ‘just knows’, although they can’t tell you why they know it, assume it to such an extent that it can hardly be questioned, even though when you think of it, it is rife with internal logical contradictions to the point of absurdity.

Namely: all things are in constant flux. This is the ‘knowledge determined (not conditioned) by time’ Philippe refers to. The one thing everyone knows today is that the world is in a state of constant change and motion. The stars in the heavens, which in a previous scientific model of the world seemed to be fixed in place, are themselves rushing along in their course, as is the earth in its seeming immobility. The whole cosmos is in motion, and there is nothing fixed, nothing stable, nothing unchanging in this world, and this world is all there is.

This is absolutely accepted today. This is why it is inherently offensive to use the phrase I used yesterday on the blog, that a given action can be ‘intrinsically evil.’ Everything is in flux: just because murder is ‘experienced’ as wrong right now is no assurance that tomorrow’s man, fluxing away, will not ‘experience’ it as quite right and proper. And this is why the march of progress cannot be gainsaid: once the flux of events is moving steadily in a given direction, there is virtually no reason to oppose it; in fact, if anything is an unchanging and intrinsic evil, it appears to be the act of opposing ‘progress’ as it is defined today. ‘Ch-ch-ch-ch changes, face the strange changes’, the prophet Bowie enjoins on us as the one law of post-modernity.

Of course all this is stuff and nonsense and doesn’t hold up to a moment’s serious scrutiny. This is why people are discouraged from thinking very much these days: the philosophy handed out to us is nonsensical in the extreme. Here’s a thought experiment to show this: we are told that all is in flux, there are no immutable moral standards, and that the only moral course is to go with the flow of social progress and evolution.

So, let us posit the world fifty years from now. Europe, that bastion of all things socially progressive and au courant, has largely become an Islamic society (current demographic trends suggest this as inevitable). Now I realize we don’t know what that will look like, but let us imagine that the Muslim population of Europe has continued on the path it currently is on: radical, Wahabist, Taliban-style Islam. Sharia law is enforced throughout Europe. Women are forced to wear the niqab or burka, or be harassed or beaten or worse in public. Gays are arrested and executed. Jews… well let’s face it, there won’t be any Jews left in Europe in this scenario, one way or another. This scenario may or may not happen; for the purpose of the thought experiment, that is irrelevant.

Now, if we are true relativists, believing in nothing but ‘progress’ and going with the evolution of society, we can, logically, have no response to that but to say ‘that’s just great! Sign me up! Boo, Jews!’ If we resist that, if we ‘feel’, at least, that there is something deeply wrong in a society that does these things, we have made the first step to retracing reality, to saying there is something that is not determined by time, by flux, by change. 

We have ceased to be relativists, and have begun to acknowledge the unchanging, the immutable, the presence of the true, the good, the beautiful, that lies under and underlies all our experience of change and flux in this world. We have begun, at least a bit, to bow before the unchangeable Law of God in this world.

What Pope Francis is Saying

Christianity must be given back its strength in us, which means, first and foremost, that we must rediscover it as it is in itself, in its purity and its authenticity. In the last analysis, what is needed is not a Christianity that is more virile, or more efficacious, or more heroic, or stronger; it is that we should live our Christianity with more virility, more efficacy, more strength and, if necessary, more heroism—but we must live it as it is…it is not a case of adapting it to the fashion of the day. It must come into own again in our souls. We must give our souls back to it.

Henri de Lubac, Drama of Atheist Humanism

Reflection – I have cited from this marvelous book previously on the blog. I recommend it highly; it is short, readable, and penetrating in its insight of the modern world. Published in 1967, it reflects the conditions and concerns of its day, but really is still profoundly relevant.

I said yesterday that I’m going to sit out the latest ‘controversy’ over Pope Francis’ interview in the Jesuit press. I’m standing by that… but on the other hand, this quote from de Lubac seems to me to put things very well. The nub of controversy is that the Pope seemed to be saying that the Church needs to stop talking about abortion and gay marriage all the time. The secular press was happy to pull that one or two sentences out of a long interview and blare it in headlines: ‘Pope to Church: Shut Up About Abortion’.

This is not remotely what the Pope said. As usual. The. Media. Got. It. Wrong. Sing along with me: ‘The media gets it wrong, the media gets it wrong, hi ho the dairy oh, the media gets it wrong!’ What the Pope was saying was that we shouldn’t talk about it ‘all the time’, and when we do talk about it, to talk about it in the whole context of God and Christ and love and mercy.

We live in a world where everything in the public sphere gets reduced to politics, and where politics gets reduced to simplistic binary left-right, liberal-conservative, pro-anti posturing. Nuance and a concern for human beings, an awareness that while right and wrong may indeed be simple in essence, human beings are complex and tortuous, and the placing of certain moral truth in a whole matrix of truths at the core of which is the merciful love of God—all this tends to be wholly absent from public discourse.

No, in the secular world it’s always a matter of picking your side and waving your flag, a then it’s a fight to the death against those no good SOBs on the other side. This is not Christianity. Christianity is concerned with the salvation of souls, with going out from the 99 sheep to the one lost sheep. Or, if it happens that 99 sheep are lost, we go out to them. And this going out is fraught with dangers and delicacy, with incredible sensitivity to the person and boundless compassion and understanding.

In other words, “we should live our Christianity with more virility, more efficacy, more strength and, if necessary, more heroism—but we must live it as it is…it is not a case of adapting it to the fashion of the day. It must come into own again in our souls. We must give our souls back to it.” De Lubac in his book has traced the whole history of atheistic thought, with great emphasis on Marx, Nietzsche, Comte, and Sartre, showing how the overthrowing of God in the world has led to the overthrowing of humanity and the denial of human dignity and freedom.

His answer is indeed this radical taking up of Christian love and Christian faith into our souls and from there our minds and actions. I personally believe that the core of the matter is the presentation of the mercy of God. As a priest I see people constantly who struggle to really believe in God’s mercy. Of course if God is not merciful then we cannot face squarely the evils of our world. Abortion is murder. Sex outside of marriage, or sex deliberately made sterile by an act of the will is intrinsically evil. And let’s not even start talking about our financial systems and globalized exploitation and impoverishment of much of the world for the enrichment of one narrow slice of it. So much evil, and so many lives destroyed because of it.

But if we don’t know—really know—that our God is a merciful Father who wants nothing but to forgive us, heal us, cleanse us, and restore us to the dignity and joy of being his sons and daughters, we cannot face up to all that stuff and our own personal cooperation with it. This is really why I wrote my book Going Home. I see so clearly how the absence of mercy from our conversation makes it near impossible to actually have a conversation about these critical social and moral matters.

So that’s what Pope Francis is saying, you know. It’s what he is calling us to, to truly be Christians and to not allow our Christian preaching and mission to be subsumed to the shallow, narrow, loveless polarized dictates of modern public discourse. It’s not easy, what he’s asking us to do, but did anyone ever suggest that following Christ was supposed to be easy?

Have a good Sunday!

Proof is the Bottom Line For Everyone

Staying on the human level, without speaking here yet of the testimony of the Gospel directly, we must say that testimony is a way of reaching certitude, a way as valid, in its order, as scientific demonstrations and experiments are in their order. Moreover, this is the only one which affords access to one certain order of reality.

This order of reality is nothing less than the order of persons. Now, if the universe of persons has infinite ascendancy over the order of the natural world, we must declare that the higher we go in the hierarchy of beings, the more does testimony, and not experimentation, become the means of knowledge.

Jean Danielou, The Scandal of the Truth

Reflection – I realize as I begin to write this blog post that once again the media is at its mischief profoundly distorting Pope Francis’ clear, crystalline and deeply Catholic words in his recent interview with America magazine. I think I might sit this round out—I really don’t have a great appetite for controversy, it turns out—and simply say to anyone disturbed by recent blaring headlines to read the interview itself, and not the media spin on it.

The time is long past when any thoughtful, careful Catholic should think to trust what the secular press writes about us. They don’t know what they’re talking about, and are deeply skewed in their perceptions by their own biases and presuppositions. Go to the source, and find out what the Pope actually said, not what the New York Times or whoever says he said. If my blog posts this past week showed nothing else, surely they showed that.

Meanwhile, I want to get back to a more reflective, philosophical tone for a little while on the blog. I have lots of good stuff on my files from my STL thesis research that I haven’t shared yet. This guy, for example, Danielou, and his book on truth and the problem of truth in the modern world.

He is challenging here the notion that truth can only be gotten from scientific experimentation under laboratory conditions, the reductive approach to knowledge that is a product of the (so-called) Enlightenment, and which rules out a priori any chance of metaphysics, the knowledge of God or the knowledge of first and final causes of things. All we can know is what we can measure experimentally, and that is the end of the matter of knowledge.

As Danielou points out, this excludes quite a bit more (in one way of looking at it) than God and metaphysics. It also excludes knowing whether one’s spouse really loves you, whether a friend is a true friend, whether anyone actually has done anything they say they have done—the whole world of personal relationships. If knowledge is only that measured by accurate instruments in laboratory conditions, then we know nothing about one another in our personal beings.

‘Faith is an island in the setting sun, but proof, yeah, proof is the bottom line for everyone,’ Paul Simon sang back in the day. There are real consequences to this shaking of our knowledge of one another. A hardness enters in, a cynicism, a suspicion. When ‘testimony’ is inherently suspect, when that post-modern weariness of competing narratives and the hermeneutics of suspicion becomes a living reality in a person, what emerges is not increased certainty and a surer foundation for life, but alienation, isolation, an atomized humanity where real communion is impossible.

We simply have to take one another’s word for things, and make some kind of leap of faith with each other. Danielou makes the very good point here, so often neglected in our modern day, that this is not some kind of second-rate knowledge. The real stuff is what you get dissecting frogs in the lab, and all this taking one another on faith is a poor cousin barely deserving the name knowledge. There is no scientific experiment that can prove the genuineness of the bond of love of husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend. There is no way forward to a knowledge of persons and what is inside them but the acceptance of their testimony about themselves.

Ultimately, if we get stubborn about it and insist on the scientific mode of knowledge as the only real one, we are forced to reject the notion of personhood and the self as ultimately insignificant epi-phenomena. The reality of things is the physical, the biological, what can be measured. The person, self-awareness, freedom, reason, emotions, love, hate, dreams for the future, memory of the past—all of that is ultimately either illusory or certainly irrelevant. We are just, in the materialistic notion, hunks of meat animated for a time by electro-chemical impulses that have a shelf life.

Because once ‘person’ is introduced as a genuine reality, as in fact the most important category of reality presented to us, then we do in fact have a metaphysics, first and final causality rush in on us on the heels of the human person and his or her reality, and in fact the door of heaven, long closed and barred shut by positivistic scientism, begins to creak open again, and the knowledge of God becomes at least a logical possibility, based on the testimony of humanity.

Gash Gold Vermillion

I caught this morning morning’s minion Kingdom of daylight’s dauphin

Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s heel swings smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, -- the achieve of, O the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold vermillion.

GM Hopkins, The Windhover: To Christ the Lord

Reflection – OK, so now I get to do something completely different. It’s my blog, after all, and sometimes I really just want to talk about poetry or literature or something nice. The blog is named from a Hopkins poem, so once in a while it’s good to have something by the man.

This sonnet is classic Hopkins, beautiful in expression and obscure in meaning. But it’s quite a meaning he’s got going on there, and worth digging for. Of course the great thing with Hopkins is that the language itself is so lovely that while hunting for what he’s trying to say one can enjoy the mere flow of the words: ‘gash gold vermillion… rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing… brute beauty and valour and act…’ and so forth. So many fine turns of rhythmic phrase and striking imagery.

But the literal minded among us will object: whassit about? Whassit mean? Or perhaps the literal minded don’t slur their words quite so much. What is he trying to say? Well, it’s at least a venial sin to ‘explain’ a poem, the meaning of which is supposed to emerge for the reader from the reading of it, but let me give me some pointers here.

The poem is about a bird, but dedicated ‘To Christ the Lord.’ That’s a clue. The bird is soaring in the morning sky, riding the wind, with great swoops and stridings and ecstasy. Hopkins, being a sensitive English poet guy, is enraptured at the sight.

But then comes this key word, the bird is swooping and soaring and riding the air, and then all his pride, plume here… buckle. Apparently this particular bird has a behavior of suddenly plummeting down from its height in free fall, rocketing down towards the earth, letting gravity have its way with him. And this, Hopkins says, is the loveliest of all, the most magnificent.

And so we have the final imagery of the clods of earth becoming luminous as they are trodden down and the embers of the fire, ‘blue bleak’ revealing their gold vermillion hearts only when they fall and gall themselves and are gashed.

To Christ the Lord… we just had the feast of the Triumph of the Cross last Saturday. ‘Why is the Cross the glory of God?’ someone asked at our lunch-time spiritual reading. The priest doing the reading chose not to answer that question directly, wisely knowing that words can only go so far here and the Spirit has to reveal this mystery to us all in His own way.

But this poem is really about the Triumph of the Cross and the manifestation of God’s glory. Jesus ‘fell’, or rather, Jesus plunged down from his glorious heights, his divine riding of the winds of heaven, the masterful striding and gliding of the Eternal Godhead in the heavenly realm (I understand precisely nothing of the words I just typed).

But we know He plunged, He plummeted, He descended. And in that descending, was gashed, was galled, was broken open. And this is the most glorious manifestation of God yet given to us. The windhover who rides the waves of the air and then plunges down to earth becomes a symbol of the Son of God who descends to the depths of the earth, the Living One who descends to death, the Mighty One who embraces suffering and helplessness.

And this is the great revelation of God’s glory. Glory is not best seen in power, in mastery, in dominance, but in suffering love. Beauty is not smooth perfection and a glossy, imperturbable sheen, but a man nailed to two pieces of wood, a man gasping and bleeding out his life because He loves us. The fire that breaks from Christ is one strong enough to set the whole world alight. It can even set me alight, if I want it to. So, does ‘my heart in hiding’ stir for this man, respond to that fire, desire that beauty and that kind of glory? It seems to me that this is the key question of faith.