Gods and Goddesses

While life has been happening, this blog has not.  In the last few months, we have:

• Left behind 10 years of the familiarity of military life
• Moved half way across the country (to be closer to L's family)
• Begun a new career

and...I've let all of that get in the way of the nudging I've been feeling to "get back after it."

I'm not sure exactly what direction that nudging will take at this period of our lives, but how often do we when we begin down one of those forks in the road, be they large or small?

So, I guess the long and short of it is, we'll see.

Separately, another "nudge" recently came in response to my prayer for help and clarity in dealing with a couple of difficult situations that have arisen at work.  While there hasn't been a crystal clear, lightning-bolt-from-the-heavens answer (again, how often does that happen?), I was prompted to pick up a book that Dr. Peter Kreeft published a couple of decades ago and mentioned after a recent talk was his favorite: Heaven: The Heart's Deepest Longing.

I'm only half way through it, but it has reminded me of the desperate need to spend significant, dedicated time in contemplative prayer--particularly adoration--and spiritual reading, both of which I had been neglecting.  Contemplative prayer is the time when the Lord speaks to our heart, sometimes in whispers and sometimes more.  It is the time when he feeds us mentally and reminds us of His perspective on things when we can so easily get lost in our own corner of the world.  Most importantly (for me, at least), it's the time among the beautiful, busy times of family life, work, relationships, and everything in between, when He reminds us who we are--sons and daughters of God, co-heirs with Christ, destined for a share of his divine, eternal life beyond our wildest imaginings.  This contemplation goes beyond the "be still and know that I am God" moments that are completely necessary; we can carry it with us into the moments of our daily lives to allow him to speak the peace and perspective into all of them, ordinary or chaotic.

Dr. Kreeft shares an excerpt from C.S. Lewis' The Weight of Glory that his this home point-blank:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.  All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or the other of these destinations...There are no ordinary people.  You have never talked to a mere mortal.  Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations--these are mortal, and their life is to our as the life of a gnat.  But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.

Wow! count on C.S. Lewis (and Dr. Kreeft) to give a little of that contemplative perspective.  God speaks to us, and counts on us to speak to us and love each other into relationship with Him.  What an awesome responsibility; unfortunately, one that we so often let life and the lure of the world get in the way of, but that he is ever faithful about gently nudging us back to.

+AMDG+

Article: It Is Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong

Yesterday, Judge Andrew Napolitano, of Fox News fame, published an article on Natural Law as a primer to his upcoming book of the same title, "It Is Dangerous to be Right When the Government is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom".  If the title looks familiar, it's because it is a quote by the 18th Century French philosopher Voltaire

In the article, The Judge draws together, with his usual wit and pragmatic examples, the relationship between Natural Law, Human Law, and the danger that lies in the movement we have seen recently to uproot the entire system (which has led to the most prosperous and free socio-economic system on earth) and replace it with the tried, tested, and failed political philosophy of Positivism.

Judge Nap concludes at the end of the article (bolded emphasis mine):

Although we have explored at length how man-made law must be subject to the Natural Law, perhaps the best indication of the falsehood of Positivism is that, deep down, we know that the transgression of our natural rights is wrong. We do not simply disagree with it, but feel a sense of visceral outrage that one human would try to treat us as inferior and subject to his will; it is antithetical to our selfhood. Thus it is in our human nature not just to yearn for freedom, but to recognize when those yearnings are unnaturally restricted. Elsewhere, V referenced Thomas Jefferson when he stated that "people should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." It should be clear that Positivism’s scheme of law relies upon the people obeying laws because they are afraid of the government, not because those laws are in accord with the Natural Law, and therefore just.

If we are to live forever in a legal system founded on Positivism, then we can only hope that we will have laws which, coincidentally, happen to be just. But there is another way, the way of the Natural Law: Rather than be content to follow the will of the truncheon, we can choose to listen to those words which enunciate truth, and our Founders’ promise that those truths will not be denied by government.

This book is about the titanic battle between adherents of Positivism and believers in the Natural Law; stated differently, between Big Government and individuals. As we shall see, the danger that befalls individuals inevitably comes from the government. The government makes it dangerous for us to be right when it is wrong.

Click here to read the full article at lewrockwell.com.


I look forward to reading his book and am going to get started on a post on the dangers of Positivism from the Catholic Perspective, which it seems the U.S. Bishops are just starting to wake up to.

+AMDG+

Values in A Time of Upheaval Part Three: Who Needs Guilt?

In Chapter Five of Values in a Time of Upheaval, entitled "If You Want Peace..." the Holy Father begins by introducing two opposing concepts of morality, and the journey that brought him to the Christian understanding of how our conscience must function to create peace within our souls and peace within the world.

Morality of Conscience

The first view of morality holds that conscience is the highest rule, that the fundamental system of accountability in safeguarding human freedom lies in following our own conscience, even when it leads us to oppose authority.  According to this view, conscience ultimately has the last word.  Some even take this so far as to believe that a person cannot go wrong by following their conscience, that conscience is infallible.

Obviously there is some truth to this--we are accountable first and foremost to ourselves--but to argue that the ultimate accountability is to our conscience is just plain wrong.  Our whole person, including our conscience, is subject to the distorting effects of sin.  This is dangerous because it ultimately only leads us back to into our fallen, broken selves, and closes any window that allows us to see the "Other," the Truth that unifies all things.  In that system, the truth about anything becomes subjective and individual instead of objective and universal.

"One must always follow a clear verdict of conscience....But it is quite a different matter to assume that the verdict of conscience...is always correct, i.e. infallible--for if that were so, it would mean that there is no truth, at least in matters of morality and religion, which are the foundations of our very existence...there would exist only the truth of the subject."

Isn't this view, what Pope Benedict refers to as" the idea of conscience found in liberalism," precisely what we see prevailing in our world today? This is exactly what leads to the phenomenon the Holy Father has referred to as the "dictatorship of relativism."  On the surface, its initial promise, that it would "enable human beings to live together" in peace, without our conflicting views rubbing up against each other, seems tantalizing.  But this quickly comes to an end where it meets the reality of the darkness that remains in the human soul.  We have seen examples of this time after time in history, and what seems to be almost weekly in the news headlines, of the terrible consequences when this darkness festers and erupts into the world in violent, often murderous, action.  If this darkness is not exposed (often painfully) to the outside light, it remains with nothing to quell it, twisting conscience more and more until the conscience itself becomes unrecognizable. Under this idea, even the worst mass murderer would be justified in his actions if, in the deepest part of himself, he believed that what he was doing was right.

So what is the antidote?  In one word: guilt. In a few more words, a properly formed conscience that guilt leads us to recognize we need.

Morality of Authority


This opposing view of morality of conscience argues that, basically, our conscience is fallible and needs help from outside (or, above).  The conscience can be led into error and distorted, and so it is not reliable as a final source of moral authority.  It forces us to look outside ourselves for another, authoritative source.  When we allow the darkness and sin within us to be exposed to that outside source of light, it creates a feeling that is painful, often deeply so.  It's like a cancer being exposed to radiation treatment, but in this case the "radiation" is Divine.  The pain that comes each time the cancer festers and is exposed to light is guilt.  Guilt comes when we recognize the difference between who we are and who we ought to be, and destroys any false notion of the conscience as absolute.  The Holy Father reflects upon this idea of guilt as he first came upon it in an essay by German psychologist Albert Gorres:

"The guilt feeling that shatters a conscience's false claim and the criticism made by my conscience of my self-satisfied existence are signals that we need just as much as we need the physical pain that lets us know our normal vital functions have been disturbed.  One who is no longer capable of seeing his own guilt is psychologically ill..."

Guilt is what sounds the alarm bells that something within us has violated our conscience, but more importantly has violated the objective Truth that conscience is designed to remind us of.  Guilt gives us the ability to look inwardly and realize that, for whatever reason, we have closed the window on that cleansing light, even if momentarily, and allowed the cancerous growth of sin to start accumulating again.  The Pope continues, "Jesus can work effectively among sinners because they have not become inaccessible behind the screen of an erring conscience, which would put them out of reach of the changes that God awaits from them--and from us." This is why, in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14), "the tax collector with all his undisputed sins is more righteous in the eyes of God than the Pharisee with all his genuinely good deeds."


The world today, which in so very many places subscribes to the morality of conscience, would have us believe that guilt is a bad thing, something to be done away with. "We have lost sight of truth as such, the absolute, the basic point of reference of our thought," the Holy Father says,  "and this is why...there is no longer any 'up' or 'down.'" There are no directions in a world that lacks fixed points for measuring."  In reality, guilt is absolutely necessary for our proper spiritual and psychological functioning.   We need it to let us know when the compass of our conscience is not working as it should, or that, if it is properly formed, we have disregarded it and allowed ourselves to be deceived that East, West, or South are North.

This all leads to the question of where we can turn to make sure that our conscience works the way it should.  To what--or, to who--can we can look to find the source of cleansing and healing that the Psalmist begs for in Psalm 19:12: "But who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults"?  That, and the "working examples" of the saints, whose lives are lived and whose example lives on for us as benchmarks of properly formed conscience, will have to wait for another post.

In the meantime, please pray for the Holy Father, that he will continue to be blessed with grace and strength as he leads the Church to remain a beacon of light in a world of darkness.

+AMDG+

"If You Want Peace..." A Primer

This past week in Britain, and in several less-reported instances in locations across the United States, we have seen the outbreak of violence from a generation of teens and twenty-somethings who, whatever their motivation, had no excuse for wreaking the violence and destruction that they did.  As I sat, browsing news article after news article, each offering a different slant on the unfolding situation and playing the "blame game," I couldn't help but try to probe each perspective looking for a common thread.  Surely, there must be something to explain why all of this pent-up (fill in the motivation) was coming to a head and finding its expression in such senseless violence against fellow citizens, their property, and their livelihoods.

It did not take much longer to figure out what drove them, or better, what did not restrain them from lashing out: a sheer, unadulterated lack of conscience.  Max Hastings put it perfectly in his August 10 U.K. Daily Mail article, "Years of liberal dogma have spawned a generation of amoral, uneducated, welfare dependent, brutalised youngsters," when he said:

"They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others."

Where are these rioters' consciences?  Did it not cross one of their minds that acting this way--invoking chaos and destruction--is evil no matter what the supposed justification?  Had they no shame?


Sadly, for many of them, the short answer is no. Growing up in an entitlement, me-me-me, I-I-I, now-now-now culture, many--even those who did not want for anything and had promising futures--either never had theirs properly formed to begin with or, worse, checked them at the door when they decided to step foot into the street.

This topic of conscience and the questions that follow from it are exactly what the Holy Father tackles in Chaper 5 of Values in a Time of Upheaval, an essay entitled If You Want Peace...: Conscience and Truth.

What is our conscience?

How does it function?

What is its purpose, both within our individual self and in the whole of human society?


What is our responsibility to obey and to form our conscience?

Look later this week for an unfolding of the Pope's discussion as he explores and probes the answers to these questions and more in If You Want Peace.

Until then...

+ AMDG+

Values in a Time of Upheaval Chapter 4 Conclusion: Heaven and Earth

In last week's post discussing Chapter 4 of the Holy Father's book, Values In a Time of Upheaval, I highlighted his reflection on the fact that for society, and the government whose task it is to regulate life in that society, to function properly, both society and government most first acknowledge the existence and preeminence of the transcendent Truth that precedes them.  The state is not the source of morality, nor is the will of the people in a democratic society able to "change" what is true.

Pope Benedict ended the chapter with a wonderful reflection, entitled Closing Reflection: Heaven and Earth.  In it, he took a step back from his previous discussion of the historical role of truth in forming the moral and ethical fiber of a society, to the eschatological perspective, the fact we are destined for something far greater, and a citizenship far more significant than that of our pilgrimage on this earth.  As St. Paul put it in his letter to the Philippians (3:20), "Our commonwealth is in heaven."

In his conclusion, the Holy Father pointed out that there has long been a perception among Christians that these two perspectives are separate, that our love and longing for the things of heaven is somehow opposed to and detracts from our "political task" here on earth, and vice versa.  But that perspective is mistaken.  The two are complimentary.  It is ultimately our love for the things of heaven that enables us to carry out the tasks laid before us here on earth.  In the Pope's own words,

"In reality, it is precisely this 'eschatological' attitude that guarantees the state its own rights while simultaneously resisting absolutism by indicating the boundaries both of the state and of the Church in the world.  Where this fundamental attitude prevails, the Church knows that it cannot be a state here on earth, for it is aware that the definitive state lies elsewhere, and that it cannot set up the City of God on earth.  It respects the earthly state as an institution belonging to historical time, with rights and laws that the Church recognizes....By both demanding loyal cooperation with the state and respect for its specific nature and its limitations, the Church provides an education in those virtues that allow a state to become good.  At the same time, it puts up a barrier against the omnipotence of the state....it sounds the cry for resistance whenever the state might demand something genuinely evil and opposed to God." (p.71)

Jesus Christ did not come into the world--and he did not establish his Church in the world--to be a government in the political sense.  That is exactly what Israel expected him to do, but as our Lord tends to do, he defied and exceeded human expectations.  As he answered Pilate's continued interrogation, "My kingdom is not from this world.  If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews" (John 18:36).

On the flip-side, he also did not dismiss political activity and the political power of the secular state in the regulation of the affairs of men (regulation in its original meaning, to "make regular," including self-regulation and being very different than control).  Instead, he established the former as a leaven of the citizens of the latter and entrusted us with the enormous responsibility of maintaining the proper relationship between both.  The bottom line is that the Church was established to work within the world, as an outpost of heaven and a standard of his law and kingdom that will never end.  As the world needs God, so it needs the Church.  And, one step further, mankind needs a healthy functional relationship between the Church and the state.  It falls to Christians, who are both temporal citizens of earth and destined to be eternal citizens of heaven, to see to it that His work of bringing mankind to salvation is continued:

"The fact that Christians are journeying toward the other city does not alienate them.  In reality, it is this that allows us to be healthy and our states to be healthy.  For if men have nothing more to expect than what this world offers them, and if they may and must demand all this from the state, they destroy both their own selves and every human society.  If we do not want to get entangled anew in the tentacles of totalitarianism, we must look beyond the state, which is only one part, not the totality.  There is no antithesis between hope for heaven and loyalty to the earth, since this hope is also hope for the earth.  While we hope for something greater and definitive, we Christians may and must bring hope into that which is transitory, into the world of our states." (p.71-72)

+AMDG+

Values in a Time of Upheaval Chapter 4: What Is Truth?

Welcome to the first installment of a series of posts reviewing Values in a Time of Upheaval a little more closely.  As I mentioned in Saturday's primer, I'm starting with Chapter 4 because it is the most striking and aligns precisely with the singular question that drives right to the heart of all of our other questions.

Pilate questions Jesus in The Passion of the Christ

What is Truth?

Those three words, asked of Jesus by Pilate as he stood falsely accused (cf. John 18:38), reverberate through history.  They seem to be amplified today, at a time when so many in our culture searching for the answer without finding it, or worse, have given up asking the question altogether.  Despite the temptation to give up in the face of what seems to be so much diversion and misinformation, the question has to be asked and cannot be avoided, for Truth cannot be found unless it (He) is sought with sincerity of heart.  The greatest danger lies when the seeker asks the question as a "loaded" question, with unmovable skepticism, and refuses to believe that it can lead to any answer other than that it is unanswerable.

The question, and the scene that surrounds it, are the centerpiece of the Pope's discussion in Chapter 4.  He begins the chapter by reflecting briefly on the prerequisite condition of freedom, that eventually leads into the deeper discussion:

The participation of everyone in power is the hallmark of freedom.  No one is to be merely the object of rule by others or only a person under control; everyone ought to be able to make a voluntary contribution to the totality of political activity.  We can all be free citizens only if we all have a genuine share in decision making.

So, to be truly free, we must all be able to contribute our "two cents," and know that our opinions are heard, weighed, and valued.  But being free in the sense of society does not mean being free to act on whatever whim we choose.  That freedom itself has to be anchored, grounded in something:

...the freedom of the individual to order his own life is declared to be the real goal of societal life.  Community has no value whatever in itself but exists only to allow the individual to be himself.  However, if the individual freedom...as the highest goal lacks contents, it dissolves into thin air, since individual freedom can exist only when freedoms are correctly ordered.

So our freedom must be ordered, or oriented, toward something in order to have meaning.  But, if we have billions of people, each a sovereign, what common goal or purpose can their freedom all be oriented toward?  Probably the most common and widely accepted answer is the "common good" (i.e. the best possible opportunity for each individual to reach their full human potential, not to be confused with the collective good of society at large). But even the "common good" of man remains vague and has to be further defined and grounded.

When it comes to evaluating the ultimate goal of a democratic form of government, digging deeper into the meaning of the common good leads to one of two positions.

1. First, the radical relativistic position, which makes the governing activity itself the highest source of good, by replacing the historical, Christian concept of good and goodness with the idea that will of the majority ultimately decides and comes to occupy the position of "truth."  This is the secular-humanistic view, and is the basis of pure democracy.

2. Second, the "truth first" argument that, to quote the Holy Father, "truth is not a product of politics (the majority) but is antecedent to political activity and sheds light on it.  It is not praxis that creates truth but truth that makes praxis possible." This is the Christian view, and is the foundation of the republican form of government that began to be explored even before the time of Christ by Plato and Aristotle, where certain preexisting realities (what our Founders referred to as inalienable rights) set boundaries on the power of the state, which derives its power, in turn, from the consent of the people.

In his conclusions, the Pope notes that, in order to properly fulfill its role of regulating society the state must "[create] a balance of freedom and good things that allows each individual to lead a life worthy of man." This requires some power to guarantee the law, but it must remain clear that the government must use its power to "safeguard the rights of each individual and the welfare of all.  It is not the task of the state to create mankind's happiness, nor is it the task of the state to create new men. It is not the task of the state to change the world into paradise--nor can it do so."

The bottom line is that, to preserve freedom grounded in truth, that state must "receive from outside itself the essential measure of knowledge and truth with regard to that which is good."  Further,

According to Maritain, the primary right of a people to govern itself can never become a right to decide everything.

This reality--the clashing of  two opposing views--plays out briefly and dramatically in the exchange between Christ and Pilate.  Referring to the German scholar Heinrich Schlier, who wrote against groups within the Protestant churches who cooperated with the buildup of National Socialism, the Holy Father notes that, according to Schlier,

...although Jesus in his trial acknowledges the judicial authority of the state represented by Pilate, he also sets limits to this authority by saying that Pilate does not possess this authority on his own account but has it "from above" (19:11).  Pilate falsifies his power, and...the power of the state, as soon as he ceases to exercise it as the faithful administrator of a higher order that depends on truth.

Jesus didn't comment on which specific form of government would best serve the needs of man and society, but he did lay out, in this exchange, what a government--no matter what its form--could never do.  It could never take the place of God or supplant his truths with the will of a fallible majority.  The minute it seeks to do so, and attempts to eliminate him from the position of ultimate authority, it loses any legitimate claim of power.

If you've made it this far, thank you for hanging in there.  Please chime in with your thoughts about how this political philsophy might apply to us today.  Until the next installment (chapter TBD), God's peace.

+AMDG+

Coming Soon: Values In A Time of Upheaval

In January of 2010, shortly after starting this blog, I posted a brief book review of Values In A Time of Upheaval , a collection of essays on political philosophy by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI).  A recent conversation with a friend on Facebook prompted me to pick the book up off the shelf, dust it off, and read through it again.  So I did, as it became my source of intellectual stimulation during 30+ hours of air travel this past week.

As I mentioned in the review, the Holy Father’s collection is an incredibly timely book.  Upheaval seems to be exactly what we are seeing in our culture at nearly every turn. In the area of politics in particular, it seems every day that we are becoming more a nation of men and less a nation of laws.  The world, and our society, seem to be changing in so many ways, and few of those changes appear to be for the better.   So, as I was thinking and praying for my next blog topic, it struck me that reviewing the book in greater depth would be perfect.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be taking each of the Holy Father's essays, doing my best to summarize them (without sacrificing the rich genius of his work), and offer my humble commentary.  I’ll begin this week with the chapter that impacted me the most, Chapter Four.  This chapter, the fourth essay in the collection, entitled What is Truth? The Significance of Religious and Ethical Values in a Pluralistic Society, explores the relationship between truth and the democratic process, and how that relationship must remain in proper perspective in order for a society to survive.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks to explore this and the rest of Pope Benedict XVI's essays on political philosophy, and please chime in with any comments or thoughts about his work.

+AMDG+

Fact and Feelings: Objective Truth vs Subjective Experience (Part 2)

Last week's post addressed the question posed by Pontius Pilate of Christ, What is truth?

The question that flows from that, even if we accept that there is objective truth, is, How can we know the truth when we find it?  Can we rely on our consciences, our "moral compasses," so to speak, to tell us when we have found it?

Well, first the short answer: no, we can't.  Our compasses have been contaminated and no longer reliably point toward north.

Of course that answer deserves some explanation.  Our intellects have been darkened and wills weakened by original sin to the point that they are unreliable when it comes to identifying truth on our own.  In fact, not only are we not able to recognize truth on our own, we also cannot accurately tell how far from the truth we have strayed (i.e. we cannot even recognize the existence or degree of our own sin).  This is a concept that is largely lost on our society today, which tends to discount the possibility of sin altogether and explain our suffering under the human condition "as merely a developmental flaw, a psychological weakness, a mistake, or the necessary consequence of an inadequate social structure, etc." (CCC 387).

Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, admitted that even once he recognized and conceded that there was evil, he could not discern where it came from.  This "mystery of lawlessness" as he referred to it, was only resolved by his conversion to the "mystery of faith."

So then, if we cannot recognize our own sin, what good is our conscience?  Doesn't it play a role?  Isn't our ultimate responsibility not to violate our conscience?

I tend to think of our conscience as being like one of those old cassette tapes (you remember those, don't you?).  The quality of the recording depended on two things: the quality of the cassette receiving the recording, and the clarity with which the original recording was transmitted to it.  In the same way, our consciences are only as good as we allow them to be by: (1) disposing ourselves--through an attitude of humility and obedience--to the source of truth and the grace by which we receive it; and (2) Seeking out that authentic truth as He has revealed himself to us, and not as we would intend him to be.  Just like a cassette tape whose fidelity quickly fades when it is re-recorded from itself or other tapes instead of the master, so it is with our consciences; their fidelity quickly fades when not frequently and properly oriented to the source of righteousness and goodness.

So, yes we do have a grave responsibility not to sin by violating our conscience, but that is only half of the equation.  The other half lies in our responsibility to form our consciences to be like the mind of Christ; in other words to have no tolerance to what he has defined as sin and to act as he has commanded us to act.

Then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger explained this idea in his essay, Conscience and Truth, which is included in the compilation Values in A Time of Upheaval:

It is true on this level of judgment (conscientia in the narrower sense) that an erring conscience obligates.  The rational tradition of Scholasticism makes this proposition absolutely clear. As Paul had affirmed (Rom 14:23), no one may act against his own convictions.  But the fact that one's conviction is naturally binding at the moment one acts does not mean a canonization of subjectivity.  One who follows the conviction at which he has arrived, never incurs guilt.  Indeed, one must follow such a conviction.  But guilt may very well consist in arriving at such perverse convictions by trampling down the protest made by the anamnesis of one's true being.  The guilt would then like on a deeper level, not in the act itself, but in that neglect of my own being that has dulled me to the voice of truth and made me deaf to what it says within me.

So, the ability to recognize the truth and live according to it--wisdom--is not something that comes organically from within us, at least in our fallen state.  Rather it has existed from the beginning of creation (cf Proverbs 8:22-36) and is given to us as a gift, to correct, untwist, and reorient us back to the purpose for which we were created, to know, love, and serve God.  To go with the early compass analogy, the grace and gift of wisdom frees our compasses to swing back toward north, so that we are able to live lives oriented toward the Truth--toward Christ--and not toward ourselves and society.  It cannot be obtained by grasping at it, only by submitting ourselves to His loving authority, as has been handed down to us in His Church.  Then we are able to do as St. Paul commends us in his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, To avoid the deception of the "man of lawlessness" (cf 2 Thess 2:3-10) and to "stand firm and hold fast to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Thess 2:15).


+AMDG+

Fact and Feelings: Objective Truth vs Subjective Experience (Part 1)

Welcome to the first installment of "Philosophy Fridays!"  In the interest of all of our very precious blog time, let's get right down to it.


"What is truth?" Pontius Pilate's words as recounted by St. John (18:36) tell us just as much about the man who asked them, and are just as much a searching of his own troubled heart, as they are about the God-man, Jesus Christ, who stood accused before him.  Pilate, in his questioning of the accused and the accusers (the Jews), became even more troubled when, after he had Christ scourged, found out exactly why the Jews were so violently adamant about having this seemingly innocent man not only scourged and publicly humiliated but executed in a way reserved for the most horrible of criminals: crucifixion; "by that law he ought to die, because he has made himself the Son of God. When Pilate heard these words he was even more afraid" (John 19:7-8).

In a way, Pilate's searching and questioning are a microcosm of the great question of the broken human condition:  What is truth?  Where can we find it?  How do we know it when we find it?  These are the the great questions that philosophers and theologians have pondered for the entirety of recorded human history.  In today's world, sadly, it seems that we have become surrounded by so many distractions and "creature comforts" that many are numbed by the droning on of everyday life and do not even bother to ask the questions any more.  Where we do, just as many others have become convinced by what Pope Benedict XVI has referred to as the "dictatorship of relativism," that truth is whatever we experience and believe it to be, and changes just as fluidly as societal norms.  When that happens, we begin to put feelings and sensory experiences above the truth that they are meant to point us toward.  Our feelings and experiences begin to take the place of faith and become idols in themselves, to the point that fact and truth become like flags waving in the wind instead of a firm foundation. This topic, the meeting of subjective experience with the objective, unchanging Truth that was at the heart of Pilate's question, is what I'll start on here and get more into in the weeks ahead.

Catholic Professor and Theologian Peter Kreeft, in his recent book Jesus Shock, retells a story by the Chinese Christian writer Watchman Nee that I think captures the properly ordered relationship between fact, faith, and feelings and what happens when that relationship gets out of whack:

Fact, Faith, and Feeling are three men walking on a wall.  Fact goes first, Faith second, and Feeling third.  As long as Faith keeps his eyes ahead on Fact, all three stay on the wall and make progress.  But as soon as Faith takes his eyes off Fact and turns around to see how Feeling is doing, Faith falls off the wall, and Feeling follows, while Fact walks on.

"The point is obvious," Kreeft adds, "the object of our faith is not feeling but fact, not subjective experience but objective truth." That, in a nutshell, is what it's all about.

Whether it is pop psychology, science, or what I like to call "feel good faith," the world offers so many ways (and so-called experts) to boost that subjective experience by giving us temporary, here-and-now answers, but do any of them ultimately satisfy our deepest longing for that eternal, outside-ourselves Truth?

Well, let's look at it with another analogy.  Imagine a play.  The key actors, in the hundredth or two hundredth casting and finding themselves somewhat removed from the original casting of the play, begin to wonder what the point of the play was in the first place.  Why was it written?  What message was it meant to convey? In other words, what is the point?  Assuming the playwright/producer/director is still alive and very much active in the play, although not in a way that the actors can explicitly perceive, wouldn't it make sense for the actors to take those questions to him?  What if they didn't?  What if they instead began to ask the question of each other (through speculation), of the set (nature), or even of the script (history) that has been lined out, crossed through, and highlighted in odd places by previous performers?  Could they reliably turn to any of these sources for the answer to the question that only the author himself can answer?

That turning inward and refusal to take the question to the author (and take his word for it--literally, since he sent his Word to us in the flesh) is exactly what we do when we refuse to take our longing to God and instead fill the desire that he leaves with other "stuff."  We substitute our own limited experience, perceptions, thoughts, etc. that leave us unsatisfied--our "truth"--for the Truth that never fails to satisfy.

Pilate probably didn't realize that the question he asked, he may as well have asked on behalf of an entire human race desperate to know the Truth.  He probably also didn't realize that the Truth was right there, standing right before him, who had already declared that "I am the way, and the truth, and the life..." (John 14:6).  His question had already been answered, and in a manner so generously, infinitely inconceivable that it could only be perceived with the eyes of faith and not feelings or the senses.

To be continued in Part Two.