La plus ça change

"Primarily responsible, argued La Harpe, were those propagating the doctrines of Diderot, including in one crucial respect Rousseau. For despite the great quarrel that shattered their former friendship, from 1757, the two great thinkers nurtured one particularly subversive political doctrine that Rousseau derived from Diderot, namely that all the ills and crimes of the world arise not from the innate defects of human nature (which both saw as fundamentally good) but from the "radical viciousness" Diderot was the first to see in all existing institutions, systems of government, morality, and society."

--- from Revolutionary Ideas by Jonathan Israel

"The Tennis Court Oath" Jacques Louis David

Why do we not learn more about the French Revolution in school? I learned only a brief outline in sixth grade. The central thesis of the author quoted above is that the Revolution was one of ideas. The radical Enlightenment philosophes conceived of a new society based firstly on the abstract notion of equality and gradually won over what they saw as the ignorant common people of France, who were by and large content and ultraconservative (the prevalent myth of mass disaffection with the monarchy and aristocracy throughout France is squashed around page three). These philosophes formed a sort of gnostic party who believed themselves possessed of knowledge about human nature that the common man could be persuaded to believe but would not come to it independently because they were shackled by ignorance. They set about with what we would call a media blitz - publishing radical literature critical of the Church, the monarchy, the local parlements, the nobility - "all existing institutions." They fermented discontent by convincing the commoners that they were inherently blameless people caught in a web of vicious systems stacked against them.

This would be dangerous to teach in schools in the United States. We would not want anyone thinking that ideas have consequences. We would not want to reunite the abstract realm of philosophical ideas with physical reality - that could get messy. We would not want people to question those who have convinced us that all of our existing institutions are fundamentally rigged against people who are fundamentally good and whose choices must always be approved of. 

This will prove to be an interesting read. 

Spiritually consumptive monochrome

"In the holy places and in every upbuilding view of life we see the thought that helps us fight the good fight with flesh and blood, with principalities and powers, to free ourselves so as to become equal before God. [...] Equality is only a divine law, the strife is only truthful, and the victory is only legitimate when we are, each of us, fighting for ourselves, with ourselves, and in ourselves - but not if we preemptively presume to make the whole world equal in an external sense, which would mean that all the rest would owe a debt of gratitude to those who had brought about this "external equality" and no longer be their equals. Those who make haste in such an uncomprehending and worldly way well really believe that one or another external set of circumstances is the true state of equality to which what is higher has been reduced and to which what is lower has been raised. But all it produces is confusion and self-contradiction, as if true equality could be expressed as such in anything external or could triumph or be preserved in anything external. This would be like arguing that a monochrome-painted surface is the true likeness that could represent the life, truth, peace, and harmony of all things, whereas, in fact, it tends to destroy everything in a spiritually consumptive uniformity."

--- Søren Kierkegaard, Giving and Receiving 

(a meditation on James 1:17-22)

Victor Hugo on the cosmos

I am about 3/4ths through reading Les Miserables (only about 300 pages to go!), and it is proving to be one of my favorite books that I've ever read. It seems to me that Hugo, though certainly quite wordy, moves at just the right pace. The action never gets too far ahead of itself, and the background information on history and geography never (really) overwhelms the plot. In fact, I tend to quite enjoy these background chapters, because it gives the author some space to be a bit philosophical about the story at hand. One portion of such a chapter struck me as quite beautiful and worth transcribing in its entirety:

Nothing is truly small, as anyone knows who has peered into the secrets of Nature. Though philosophy may reach no final conclusion as to original cause or ultimate extent, the contemplative mind is moved to ecstasy by this merging of forces into unity. Everything works upon everything else. The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare to say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations. Who can predict the course of a molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who can measure the action and counter-action between infinitely great and infinitely small, the play of causes in the depths of being, the cataclysms of creation? The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is large and the largest is small; everything balances within the laws of necessity, a terrifying vision for the mind. Between living things and objects there is a miraculous relationship; within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub, there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other thing. Light does not carry the scents of the earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers. Every bird that flies carries a shred of the infinite in its claws. The process of birth is the shedding of a meteorite or the peck of a hatching swallow on the shell of its egg; it is the coming of an earthworm or of Socrates, both equally important to the scheme of things. Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose. A patch of mould is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an antheap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between things of the mind and material things. Elements and principles are intermingled; they combine and marry and each increases and completes the other, so that the material and the moral world both are finally manifest. The phenomenon perpetually folds in upon itself. In the vast cosmic changes, universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities, borne by the mysterious flow of invisible currents, making use of everything, wasting not a single sleeper's dream, sowing an animalcule here and shattering a star there, swaying and writhing, turning light into a force and thought into an element; disseminated yet indivisible, dissolving all things except that geometrical point, the self; reducing all things to the core which is the soul, and causing all things to flower into God; all activities from the highest to the humblest - harnessing the movements of the earth and the flight of an insect - to the secret workings of an illimitable mechanism; perhaps - who can say? - governing, if only by the universality of the law, the evolution of a comet in the heavens by the circling of infusoria in the drop of water. A machine made of spirit. A huge meshing of gears in which the first motive force is the gnat and the larges wheel the zodiac.

Wheel in the sky keeps on turning

During class this evening, for whatever reason, the vision of Ezekiel the Prophet came up in conversation. Lest it's been awhile since you've cracked open that corner of the Scriptures, I'll remind you that it's the almost hallucinogenic-seeming description of the angels, the heavenly temple, and God himself. The relevant point comes to us in Ezekiel 1, verse 15ish:

"All at once wheels appeared close to them, one at each of the four sides, [...] and each looked like a wheel within a wheel. Moved they, it was ever one of the four ways the living figures looked; and they did not turn round in moving. As for their size, their height was terrible to look upon; and the whole frame of them, all round, was full of eyes."

This portion of the vision has been traditionally explained as a revelation of God's omnipresence - nothing escapes his sight. This fact, of course, is testified to throughout the scriptures, such as in Proverbs 15:3: "Go where thou wilt, the Lord’s eye is watching; good nor evil escapes his scrutiny."

However, this vision stirs to mind some ideas from a class I took a few years back. Ostensibly, the class was an honors symposium on the advanced sciences and mathematics, but really it was a sort of math, quantum physics, ethics, and philosophy class all rolled into one. We read Jorge Luis Borges alongside Heisenberg. One thing that I distinctly recall is the unpredictability of quantum particles. According to Schrodinger and others, particles change their behavior depending on whether they are observed or not. There was one experiment that was left overnight with no one watching that seemed to show light acting as a wave. Whereas, when the same experiment was observed, it seemed as though light was acting as a particle.

In any event, at the quantum level, it becomes very tricky to get down to what more naturalistic types would call "reality", because sometimes reality is incredible odd. To get back to Ezekiel's rather terrifying vision of God, we once had a class discussion on whether or not the universe needs to be observed by something outside of it in order to exist. The all-seeing eyes of Ezekiel's wheels seem to hint that the operation of the universe is intrinsically tied into the observation thereof.

Dante's vision of the Empyrean

This little thought experiment begs the question of whether its acceptable to read modern sciences into ancient scriptures. Some may accuse me of playing the "God of the gaps" game, wherein we simply place our idea of God into the increasingly smaller gaps that science leaves in our understanding of the world. In taking this particular class, however, it became abundantly clear that there are many more gaps and uncertainties than we tend to think of on a daily basis - especially once one delves either too deeply or ascends too highly in the scale of the universe.

Furthermore, as a Catholic, I believe that there is Truth, with a capital T, which exists, a priori to ourselves. If God is creator, than creation testifies to this truth just as much as His revelation of Himself in the scriptures. Saying that God is an omnipresent observer necessary for the cohesion of quantum mechanics does not diminish what God said through Ezekiel in quite a different way. We have each foot in a different realm of knowledge at this point.

To muse further, I wish to consider the Medieval (well, Aristotilean originally) conception of God as the primum mobile - the unmoved mover. To the knowledgeable men of those ages, the universe was a series of revolving spheres that descended from God, though the heavens, to the earth. God, the Prime Mover, causes each sphere to rotate, which gives order to the sphere below it and so forth. Dante explains this perceived celestial hierarchy completely in the Paradiso, the final third of the Divine Comedy. In the final Canto, when Dante had reached the Empyrean (the fixed "sphere" wherein God abides) he describes it thus:

"In the profound and shining-clear Existence / Of the deep Light appeared to me three circles / Of one dimension and three different colors. / One seemed to be reflected by the other, / Rainbow by rainbow, while the third seemed fire / Breathed equally from one and from the other. / O how pale now is language and how paltry /  For my conception! / And for what I saw / My words are not enough to call them meager. / O everlasting Light, you dwell alone / In yourself, know yourself alone, and known / And knowing, love and smile upon yourself! / That middle circle which appeared in you / To be conceived as a reflected light, / After my eyes had studied it a while, /  Within itself and in its coloring / Seemed to be painted with our human likeness / So that my eyes were wholly focused on it. / As the geometer who sets himself / To square the circle and who cannot find, / For all his thought, the principle he needs, / Just so was I on seeing this new vision / I wanted to see how our image fuses / Into the circle and finds its place in it, / Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight — Except that then my mind was struck by lightning / Through which my longing was at last fulfilled. / Here powers failed my high imagination: / But by now my desire and will were turned, / Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly, / By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Dante's description of God clearly blends Ezekiel's winged wheels with the Medieval conception of the Prime Mover. God is the source of the turning of the spheres of the physical universe ("The Love that moves the sun and the other stars").

Perhaps we might further compare such an idea with that of the modern conception of string theory. The overly-simplified version states that all matter is composed of strings (of probability, essentially) which vibrate in the tenth dimension and give being to sub atomic particles. It is easiest to think of the tenth dimension as the realm of possibility - it is the sum total of all possible outcomes in all possible universes. Thus, strings are not bound by changes in reality, so to speak, since they exist in a non-(directly)-observable realm of all-things-are-possible.

Pantheism is a false belief, as God is not present in all things in an immanent way, but it is interesting to consider these strings as a way of bridging God's omnipotence and omnipresence. Since God is infinite, he is not bound by time, space, or, presumably, any dimension we could think up. But, it is intriguing to imagine the tenth dimension, wherein the strings vibrate, as a sort of modern primum mobile. It is a sort of Empyrean. If God were in the tenth dimension, He would see all (thus fulfilling the need for a universal observer), but also see all possibilities and all of their possible outcomes. This, I think, preserves our free will, but still allows for God's sovereignty and intervention.

*     *     *

I don't really know why I felt the need to write all of this out, and I'm certainly not sure that I believe it all, but, I think it can be fruitful to start drawing these connections, if only for a way of generating thought experiments. Does all of the above line up with historic Christian doctrine? I suppose it could. But, my purpose was not theological so much as philosophical. As we approach the limits of what we can know definitively about the deepest mysteries of the universe, I think it's sort of fun to jump from the empirical to the spiritual and consider the one's effect on the other. As a Catholic, the unseen is just as real as the seen after all.

Two interesting quotes

"Live with your century, but do not be its captive; render to your contemporaries what they need, not what they praise." - Friedrich Schiller

“Faith in Jesus Christ is quite simply true; and the truth never ages. Ideologies have their days numbered. They appear powerful and irresistible but, after a certain period, they wear out and lose their energy because they lack profound truth. They are particles of truth, but in the end they are consumed.” - Pope Benedict XVI

It is curious that I happened upon these two quotes this week. They are very much related, I think.

A Rare American Prophet

We are rather too neglectful of the American Presidency in this little corner of the web. We must confess this is at least partially due to our intense dislike for the last several occupants of the Oval Office, right on up to our current tyrant. Regardless of that trivia, previous Commanders-in-Chief were often also quite splendid orators who said what they meant and said it in style, as opposed to the current politically-correct espousal of topseyturveydom that belches forth from Washington. We are so accustomed to this deluge of nonsense that we regard it as normal and sometimes pay it lip-service praise. I even heard someone say that Obama's most recent State of the Union was great oratory! Yes, and Call Me Maybe is a great musical achievement.

I digress. In any event, I ask you, kind reader, to imagine any current American politician having the gall to speak the words below, spoken by Calvin Coolidge in Philadelphia on the occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence:

"The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped."

Wait, it's not all about money?! We're NOT to become pagan materialists?! Cultivate reverence... for HOLY things!? Spiritual and moral leadership? Our leaders can't be moral and spiritual leaders, there's a separation between church and state, remember?

To those who still claim that our society is on some constant noble march of blissful progress, I rest my case.

Born Again This Way

One of the more interesting ironies of modern pop culture that I've noticed recently is a very interesting juxtaposition between a sense of deterministic fatalism on one hand and a desire to invent your own meaning in life on the other hand. The first may be boiled down to Lady Gaga's annoyingly pedantic hymn to herself Born this Way. It says something along the lines of: "I was born to do this, this, and this, and I am thus forbidden not do these things." The second might be summarized more neatly by one of those sentimental pictures one sees so often on Facebook. You know the ones - a faded, faux-vintage picture of a beach with superimposed white script imploring the viewer to shake off his or her former personal shackles and live life in exactly the manner he or she sees fit. Another example may be the recent explosion of the phrase "You only live once", cutely shortened to the ubiquitous YOLO (or, more usually, #yolo).

These twin heresies are often espoused by the same people, though not often at the same times, for if they were spoken one after another, we would all be able to readily see that the Emperor is wearing few, if any, clothes. I call them heresies not out of any special contempt, but for the simple reason of that is what they are. Heresy as defined by St Thomas Aquinas is "...a species of infidelity in men who, having professed the faith of Christ, corrupt its dogmas". Notice here that our good St Thomas says "corrupt" rather than jettison the dogmas. Heresy is most usually an unhealthy exaggeration of one truth, which causes corruption in terms of other truths. For instance, the Pelagians over-emphasized the free will of man, and, in the process, denied the need for God's grace. The Arians exaggerated Christ's humanity and swept away his divinity in the process, while the Gnostics did the opposite.

Though my subject matter is not religious or even Christian per se, they are emphatically philosophical, and, like all philosophical matters, have immense bearing on our daily lives. Returning to the first error, which I shall name Gaga-ism: the concept of destiny or a set track for our lives is very convenient for the modern times in which we find ourselves. It excuses us from our actions. If we are meant to be a certain way, woe betide anyone who should call us to higher aspirations. It's a reverse sort of Calvinism dressed down in sparkly camouflage. Why attempt virtue when we are destined and born in vice? It's who we are. 

The second error, on the other hand, enigmatically often calls the modern man to do exactly what Gaga-ism says he can't do - change. It shouts up and down that life is all there is, make of it what you will, don't be burdened by your station in life, society's expectations, or anything else for that matter. Just be you! The implicit argument is that you can't possible truly be yourself while simultaneously adhering to societal norms, morals, or expectations. You can't be who you were born to be, you must utterly and completely disregard all that in the ever-important quest to be authentic, etc. You must live your life (whatever that means). You must seize every opportunity to experience life, even if it is immoral or wrong, because you invent what's right for you, and anything else is simply holding you back from your self-fulfilling quest.

As I mentioned before - this two-headed postmodern philosophical slop often sallies forth from the same people's mouths, though at different times. Some times they say "We can't possibly change because I am me" while other times they say "I must change because I am me." It's all a matter of convenience I suppose. The Christian truth, I'm afraid, is to be found in neither of these pop philosophies, and is frankly far more compelling. It says quite simply that you were born in sin, but called to holiness. It says "I love you as a child of God" and "Go and sin no more" simultaneously. It offers the free choice between good and evil. It fortifies the soul for the long labor of life, whose circumstances we can not often choose on some postmodern whim. It calls the soul to constant conversion toward the truth - not a one-and-done declaration or an obstinate refusal to declare. We can be born again as often as we find ourselves trapped in the way we were born.

In which we ponder science and religion

The feast of the Epiphany (today) seems an appropriate time to consider a subject that has cropped up in a few of my conversations of late - the relationship between science and religion (namely the Catholic Church). The appropriateness of the Epiphany for such an intellectual musing centers on God revealing himself to the world via the star of Bethlehem and the subsequent arrival of the magi from the east. The magi, we must assume, were pagan philosophers and astronomers who looked to the stars and the world about them for answers to the mysteries of life. With the birth of Christ, their vague searches among the shadows for spiritual meaning were over when they encountered the truth in the manger.

This is where our consideration of the twin subjects of science and religion must begin - the search for truth. In terms of religious, and specifically Christian thought, God is truth. Or, put another way, all that is true comes from God. The Scriptures testify to this readily for Our Lord proclaims in the Gospel of St. John, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." In order to conceive how science and religion fit together, we must consider God the author of all that is true in the universe, as he himself declares.

The second step we must take is to consider how we as humans come to know truth. First and foremost, we are born as material creatures in a material world - thus we have an understanding of the physical world around us through our senses and our investigations. We are also born with and develop an intellect, which subscribes to the natural law - the law written on the hearts of all human beings. Therefore, the things which we observe in nature and the things that we discern in our hearts tend toward truth. This tendency, however, is perfected by God's own revelation of himself - the divine law. Revelation is a third source of truth and is found in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition and is interpreted by the Magisterium (teaching authority) of the Church. This is the Catholic position on how truth may be known.

Science fits in quite nicely in this system of the world. For, we must note that science is founded on claims that can only be classified as mystical, or even religious in nature. That is, they cannot be proved or disproved through the sciences:

• The world is intelligible. This is the primary assertion of science. It is the basis of all scientific inquiry. Scientists must believe that the world is imbued with meaning and that it can therefore be made sense of. This premise is largely glossed over as common sense, but we can see its grounding in Western thought if we compare it to, say, the Native American worldview. Many Native American tribes (if not all) subscribed to the belief that nature is sacred and that it is not to be tampered with. Science could not develop under such philosophical circumstances. Science, the knowledge of the world around us, can only exist when we desacralize our surroundings. 
• The mind is capable of discerning truth. This is also so obvious to us Westerns that we often don't stop to think about it. However, in order for the scientific method to function, we must believe that our mind is capable of rational decisions. We must, in essence, possess that faith that our interior thoughts correspond with exterior realities. Hence the importance of the soul in theology. If we were soulless collections of randomly-collected cells, what faith could we have that our bodies naturally evolved to know right from wrong. Thus, the true skeptic is trapped by his skepticism into believing he is unable to know anything for certain. Science cannot exist under these conditions either. 

Now that we have examined how science exists in our culture, we must get on to the true heart of the issue. I have heard outrageous claims that the Church stands in direct opposition to science. These claims are fueled by Dan Brown half-truths and the straw-man arguments of the New Atheists who need a convincing theological bogeyman. The knowledge proposed by the Church and the knowledge developed by scientific inquiry are of two fundamentally different species. Theological truths, as proposed by the Church, attempt to answer questions of why. Scientific truths, on the other hand, are very convincing in explaining to us what things are and how they work. Science falters when it attempts to answer questions of ultimate meaning. Hence, the Church has consistently taught that knowledge gained by the sciences is inherently good, since it uncovers truth that God has imprinted in creation. And, subsequently, since the scope of science and the scope of theology are two different spheres of thought, they can never be said to contradict.

On the theological side of things, we must be conscious of how we are interpreting divine revelation when considering scientific claims. Biblical Fundamentalism, though a fairly recent phenomenon in Christian theology, has a firm claim on a vast segment of the population. This can exacerbate conflict between religion and science, and can quite frankly make Christianity out to look quite foolish. Catholics have never been Biblical Fundamentalists in the modern sense of the term. Yes, the Church teaches that the Scriptures are infallible, and yes she teaches that they are the inspired word of God. She does not teach, however, that all Scripture is to be read at literal face value. She has never taught such a doctrine that is quite foreign to the Christian mind.

The Bible must be understood quite carefully. The various books are written in various styles. To say that the Psalms are to be understood as plainly as the Letters of St. Paul is to deprive oneself of the poetic richness of those songs. So, when we consider the accounts of creation in Genesis, we cannot read them with the journalistic expectations with which we read newspapers. The Church has fantastic precedent in this arena when we consider the writings of the bishops and other members of the early Church. The modern disciplines of history and science were not around when the Biblical books were written, so it escapes me why some continue to force these views on ancient texts. Not even the biblical scholars of the early modern period did that. 

So, let us briefly consider the creation of the world (a tall order, I realize). The best of modern scientific research says that the universe is approximately thirteen billion years old and began with a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang (a theory which was put forward by a Catholic priest incidentally). Earth took shape slowly over the course of the ages and eventually life developed. How can we interpret the biblical accounts of creation in light of this knowledge? 

First, we must say with certainty that science will never be able to answer the question of why the universe exists, or why it was created in the first place. That is purely metaphysical in nature. Second, we must consider Genesis with our knowledge of what sort of writing it is. It is not journalistic, it is poetic. Just because it is poetic doesn't mean that we can't discern concrete truths from it. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• God created the world. It was not a random act of chance, but an act of the divine will to create.
• God created the world by speaking. In direct contrast to other ancient myths, whose creation stories were often violent, the God of the Bible spoke the world into existence. This prefigures the sending of Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, to redeem creation.
• Creation is good. The account in Genesis speaks quite clearly to the fact that God did not create evil. Material creation is not inherently evil. We are not to attempt to escape the material world, rather we are to sanctify it. 
• Man occupies a special place in creation. Man is the only creature endowed with intellect. We are also unique in our creation in the image and likeness of our creator. We are not mere animals.

I could probably go on (I am sure books have been written on the subject). But with this example we can see how theological truths such as the ones above can never be proven or disproven by science, yet this does not make them untrue. Additionally, we can understand the truth of these statements without disparaging the truth of scientific inquiry which paints a different picture of how the events transpired. 

Science and religion thus only contradict when we force them to. This comes from both sides. Perhaps it is an atheist setting up the Church as anti-science and anti-logic. Perhaps it is your local fundamentalist preacher decrying the purported age of the earth. Whenever you here such arguments, recall that in reality both sides are much more nuanced and compatible than it often appears. The search for truth is not confined to the stars nor is it confined to the crib in Bethlehem. We just need to be able to see the two of them for what they are and not confuse their relative importance and impact on our lives.

Paradise Regained?

"If we had to choose today, would Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Mary, the Son of the Father, have a chance? Do we really know Jesus at all? Do we understand him? Do we not perhaps have to make an effort, today as always, to get to know him all over again? The tempter is not so crude as to suggest to us directly that we should worship the devil. He merely suggests that we opt for the reasonable decision, that we choose to give priority to a planned and thoroughly organized world, where God may have his place as a private concern but must not interfere in our essential purposes." - Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Ch. 2

Ever since we got the boot out of Eden, we humans have been trying desperately to regain our earthly paradise. Perhaps we can say it began with the story of the tower of Babel, when we thought we could pridefully build our way back up to God. The attempts have continued since.

We have been discussing in my history of architecture class the various reactionary movements inspired by the Industrial Revolution. Mechanization of industry set in motion a number of attempts at Utopianism - attempting to create a beautiful, equal, and productive society. Of course, the most vile of these was Marxism, which lead to untold misery and disaster. However, it is perhaps the more milder ideas that still influence us the most. The captains of industry building rational, self-sufficient suburbs for their workers. The City Beautiful movement that sought to bring life and equality into city life. The Arts and Crafts movement that brought production away from the machines back into the hands of skilled artisans, who organized themselves in self-sufficient guilds.

The idea that we can somehow establish a utopian society on earth rests on two fundamental assumptions: that human beings are on a constant trajectory of moral and social advancement, and that our priorities are utterly and completely based alleviating all suffering in this world. Evidence of these two assumptions is plentiful in our American society. We laugh at the silliness and ignorance of those who came before us - thinking ourselves the most enlightened generation to ever walk the earth. We live in the 21st Century, for God's sake! We are naturally superior! We have evolved out of all that nonsense! Why does anyone need to suffer? Look at all of the technology we have developed, surely we can save ourselves from destruction of any kind!

We, as a society, have opted for a planned and thoroughly organized world. A world of complete rationality, escape from suffering, and constant material advancement. Where does God fit into a society where we set ourselves up as our own saviors? He is treated merely as an inherited cultural superstition - harmless to invoke in private, but an offense to our enlightened and decidedly sensible civilization.

My colleagues and friends are all engaged in professions that involve progress. I am not here to remotely suggest that progress in medicine, engineering, or design is inherently bad - quite the contrary! We are indeed called to assist our fellow man. However, it is when we suggest that we can exterminate suffering and live in complete peace and harmony that we approach the dangerous pride and subsequent ruin of Babel.

Pope Leo XIII and the Dictatorship of Relativism

I'm not sure what possessed me to do this, but, over the past few days, I've been reading (and annotating, and highlighting, and digesting) Leo XIII's encyclical Libertas which concerns itself with the notion of true, Christian liberty. It is fascinating, nay - astounding, how prophetic Leo's words are (this letter being written in 1888). Often, our current pope discourses and laments on what he terms the 'dictatorship of relativism' - the current vogue intellectual notion that claims that absolute truth is unknowable and each person is free to decide what truths work for them personally. In its extreme, such a philosophy could result in murder being acceptable to one person, but not for another, based on their disagreeing definitions of moral truths. Leo anticipated this radical departure from both faith and reason in Libertas. Have a read for yourself. The excerpt is a bit lengthy, I admit, but intriguing in its foresight nonetheless. Emphases mine.

"The fundamental doctrine of rationalism is the supremacy of human reason, which, refusing due submission to the divine and eternal reason, proclaims its own independence, and constitutes itself the supreme principle and source and judge of truth. Hence, these followers of liberalism deny the existence of any divine authority to which obedience is due, and proclaim that every man is the law to himself; from which arises that ethical system which they style independent morality, and which, under the guise of liberty, exonerates man from any obedience to the commands of God, and substitutes a boundless license. The end of all this it is not difficult to foresee, especially when society is in question. For, when once man is firmly persuaded that he is subject to no one, it follows that the efficient cause of the unity of civil society is not to be sought in any principle external to man, or superior to him, but simply in the free will of individuals; that the authority in the State comes from the people only; and that, just as every man's reason is his only rule of life, so the collective reason of the community should be the supreme guide in the management of all public affairs. Hence the doctrine of the supremacy of the greater number, and that all right and duty reside in the majority. But, from what has been said, it is clear that all this is in contradiction to reason. To refuse any bond of union between man and civil society, on the one hand, and God the Creator and consequently the supreme Law-giver, on the other, is plainly repugnant to the nature, not only of man, but of all created things; for, of necessity, all effects must in some proper way be connected with their cause; and it belongs to the perfection of every nature to contain itself within that sphere and grade which the order of nature has assigned to it, namely, that the lower should be subject and obedient to the higher.

"Moreover, besides this, a doctrine of such character is most hurtful to individuals and to the State. For, once ascribe to human reason the only authority to decide what is true and what is good, and the real distinction between good and evil is destroyed; honor and dishonor differ not in their nature, but in the opinion and judgement of each one; pleasure is the measure of what is lawful; and, given a code of morality which can have little or no power to restrain or quiet the unruly propensities of man, a way is opened to universal corruption. With reference also to public affairs: authority is severed from the true and natural principle whence it derives all its efficacy for the common good; and the law determining what is right to do and avoid doing is at the mercy of the majority. Now, this is simply a road leading straight to tyranny. The empire of God over man and civil society, once repudiated, it follows that religion, as a public institution, can have no claim to exist, and that everything that belongs to religion will be treated with complete indifference."

Many goings-on in our current societal state were predicted in these two paragraphs alone. The supposed power of the majority to overturn natural law (as in the case of redefining marriage). The pursuit of pleasure being made the basis of law. The dictum that all people have a radical right to complete emancipation from participation in the demands of civil society. The animosity toward the Church, which nowadays has to defend its reason as well as its faith, since society has clearly done away with reason.

I encourage all of my readers to read this document in its entirety. It is not that long (as far as Papal encyclicals go), and the dialect is not a huge obstacle. In my ideal world, this would be read in every civics classroom across the land. The full text can be found here.

The Daily Niblet: If human society is to be healed

As one of my good friends once quipped, "When a pope takes the name Pius, playtime's over." It does seem so. From Pius I who excommunicated the heretic Marcion, to Pius V who laid the smackdown on the Ottoman Turks - thus saving Europe, to Pius X who just flat wouldn't put up with Modernist theological nonsense, the papal name of Pius seems to have a certain tone of frankness about it. Pius XI was no exception. He saw the concluding of the Lateran Treaty, which guaranteed the Vatican's existence as a sovereign state, and he canonized several important saints such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas More, and Therese of Lisieux. However, the point of this installment of the Niblet comes from his teaching in his encyclical letter Quadragesimo Anno in which he discusses the moral and ethical dimensions of economic and social issues. For your reading pleasure, a snippet of his philosophy:

"'Wherefore,' to use the words of Our Predecessor, 'if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it.' For this alone can provide effective remedy for that excessive care of passing things that is the origin of all vices; and this alone can draw away men's eyes, fascinated by and wholly fixed on the changing things of the world, and raise them toward Heaven. Who would deny that human society is in most urgent need of this cure now?" - Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno

The pope wrote this passage in 1931, yet it still bears fruit for thought for our current age.

And now for something entirely different

My range of interests is broad, bordering occasionally on universal, so I thought I'd share with you this bit of intellectual delicacy from the world of biology. The excerpt below comes from a fantastic collection of incisive and poetic biological-themed essays entitled The Lives of a Cell. The author is a man named Lewis Thomas.

"A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought." - Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, Viking Press, 1974

Up North

I have spoken before about the wonderful Michigan tradition of heading "up north" in reference both to my family and to the general restorative feeling that walking in the woods has on a person. This past weekend some friends and I stayed at one of my friend's cottage on White Lake (a large lake near the western shore of Lake Michigan). This was the second time that I have stayed at a cottage that was not connected to my family in some way. However, with the experiences I have had all over "up north" it seems that the need to get back to nature can be accommodated in many diverse instances.

Up north is roughly defined in Michigan geography as the vast northern swath of the state above the cities of Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Flint (generally speaking). This region is the true heart of "Pure Michigan", the states ubiquitous tourism motto. Sure the cities of the southern half of the peninsula have some charms (I dare to include Detroit), but it is in the mild wilderness of the north that the true Michigan experience can be found.

Of course, the point of this post is that "up north" is not confined by geography, but merely accommodated by it. Going up north is so much more the journey to a state of mind. Up north is universally a place where gadgets are abandoned (no doubt helped in part by the lack of reliable cell phone service) and time slows down to a more human pace. Each family that makes journeys to their own special part of up north has certain traditions and activities that make the experience one of happy familial bonding. In my own family, we often simply spend time sitting on the boat in the middle of the lake, while at night the predetermined entertainment is often a good tournament of euchre (jokingly referred to as my family's primary religious affiliation). Interspersed are campfires, grandpa's stories, rides in the golf cart, and just being childlike in the woods.

There is something to be said of times like these; they help restore the soul. They help us live more deeply. When we strip away the day-to-day and throw out the ipods, ipads, and computers, and spend a few days in the company of friends, enveloped by nature, we emerge refreshed - and quite happier. Indeed, as I stated before, the location is not the key. The cottage we stayed at last weekend was small, humble, and uncluttered, yet it was the site of some of the best times I've had all summer. Heck, just sitting on the sun porch reading before dinner was ready was a nice moment.

So I guess this is part philosophy, part travel literature, but my point is that our lives are moving more quickly and we are losing real contact with both man and nature. Taking a trip up north, whether physically or just simplifying life for awhile, can have profound benefits and provide many happy memories for years to come.