Of Mosques and Men

As you know, I have more than a passing interest in religions' PR efforts.

So, let me begin by saying that, if the Imam behind the Ground Zero mosque-building (GZM) proposal really wanted to "improve the image" of his religion (as an old and dear friend recently suggested to me that he might), he might offer some of his $100 million in funding to rebuild St. Nick's at Ground Zero (you know, the Greek Orthodox church that was the only house of worship to be completely destroyed by the collapse of the towers), or at least come out publicly in support of fast-tracking for the St. Nick's project (which, to the best of my knowledge, he has not done).

Just so we're crystal clear: I do not think Rauf is required by justice to do any such thing, or even by plain good manners to make the offer.

Just some considerations.

Really, though, the whole question of "image" is ephemeral, almost by definition.

The real question is whether there is, in any meaningful sense, a "brotherhood of religions", as that same old and dear friend also suggested to me the other day.

There may be some meaningful sense in which there is such a fraternity, but usually terms such as "the brotherhood of religions" are shorthand for the idea that every religion at heart promotes universal peace, reconciliation, justice, harmony and love.

Tosh.

Only Christianity does that.

Christianity also tells me that it is a sin to use or to threaten violence in order to win converts, a sin to punish people for unbelief.

Christianity tells me that these things are sins, not because they go against explicit precepts and injunctions found in the Holy Scriptures (although they do), but because they are unreasonable.

This is important: one need not accept Christianity in order to recognize that such things are wrong - though recognizing that they are wrong brings one (whether one wants to admit it or not) closer to Christianity.

Now, Islam does not work quite the same way.

Take the question of "peace":

Does Islam promote peace?

Frankly, this is a loaded question.

When English authors employ the word, "peace" they are more or less consciously wording a concept represented by the Christian political and theological authors with the Latin, pax.

Arabic is the language of Islam.

The Arabic word most often translated to English as "peace" is salaam, which is, like pax, a technical, juridical term.

In the Christian tradition, pax (peace) is the presence of "justice". Justice, in its turn, is the condition of concord in society achieved through the rule of law. Law is a dictate of reason promulgated by competent authority and ordered to the common good. Reason is a peculiarly human faculty, by the proper exercise of which human nature may attain to an understanding of Divine ordinance.

Salaam, on the other hand - and as far as I understand it - refers to the state of absolute submission to the manifest will of the one God. Now, "submission" in this case renders the Arabic word (another juridical term) islam, from which the Muslim religion has its proper name; the Arabic for "one God" is Allah, and the Arabic for "manifest will" is Qur’an, which is also the name of the Muslims’ holy book, often transliterated as Koran.

In any case, the Qur'an is the source and ultimate authority in and for law under Islam - for it is the revelation of the Seal of the Prophets, Mohammad.

Peace, according to the Muslim religion, is the absolute rule of Islam, or absolute submission to the will of Allah, as made manifest through His revelation, which is Law.

It would seem to follow, therefore, that there is no salaam where there is no islam, no "peace" outside the complete subjection of each and every living person’s will, to the will of Allah as made manifest in the Koran.

In other words, there can be no "peace" until everyone living has submitted to the dictates of the Muslim religion. Once the Law has been proclaimed, to refrain from an act of submission is, quite literally, to place oneself outside the law, i.e. to be an outlaw.

On the other hand, and as we have seen, peace in the Christian tradition (pax) is the presence of justice, which is the condition of social concord through rule of law, and that law is the perfection of reason (ratio), by which human nature participates in the Divine order.

There seems, therefore, to be little to justify translating both the Christian pax and the Islamic salaam with the English "peace".

"Law", after all, is for Christians the participation of human reason in the Divine order, while for Muslims, law is ultimately the manifestation of Divine will, a will that one cannot hope to understand and to which one must only submit.

The question whether Islam is a religion of peace is therefore not even a real question: it only seems to be capable of being raised because of an inappropriate use of a single word in English to translate two different words from two different languages, words that function as technical juridical terms in disparate and conflicting cultural systems.

I could go on.

Incidentally, that universal peace, reconciliation, justice, harmony and love are the real and exclusive teachings of Christianity (all of them together, I mean; you will always be able to find one or another of them in one or another of the world's religions), is not the reason I am a Christian.

I am a Christian because Christianity is true (N.B. the things Christianity teaches are true, but when I say, "Christianity is true," I mean something more than that - though that is a subject for another time).

LD

A farewell speech

While here on the beach, my thoughts were diverted from the gyneaceum that is the bathing resort where I go for my little swimming, or from the mess that is the Italian political situation (not to speak of the American one), or still from the more elevated thoughts my Bible studies prompt in me, by a beautiful example of style and humor published in the opinion newspaper I read.

Click and find the surprise of how a man of action can turn into words his sense of virtue.

HP

A little reflection from the beach

I'm out of Rome, in a little beach town where I use to spend the month of August.

Not to do anything special: a little swimming in the morning, and for the rest of the day what I usually do, i.e. cultivate my studies.

This year I brought with me my Bible and a few books about the Bible.

As a matter of fact, I must confess that, being an old style Catholic, I am more confident with the doctrine and the philosophical reflection on it than with the Sacred Scriptures. For what concern these, I am mostly confident with them through their use in the liturgy.

It isn't that I didn't do my amount of reading in Bible studies. And I definitely have my liking and disliking among Bible scholars. The ones I dislike make the scriptures into something speaking about those who wrote them; the ones I like make them into something of enduring significance, hence speaking of and to us.

Here it is what makes me an old style Catholic, over against the contemporary protestant like trend toward a direct reading of Scriptures: in acknowledging that such a reading needs a guide.

It is hard to crack the code, so to speak, of Scriptures: especially the Old Testament, to see how and why the New Testament makes no sense without it. Or, if it makes sense, it is because it implies it, even though its reader might not be aware of it.

The Christian reader must learn the essential imagery the Old Testament writers employ. Speaking from the beach, one example is sufficient.

On the beach the sea looks rather tame. For the Old Testament writers the sea was the untamed element par excellence. It was God who tamed it, setting limits to it.

Isn't it, such a natural image of chaos, also a nice metaphor for human passions? And though, we pretend to do away with God and at the same time to keep our passions in sufficient control to make social life possible!

Possibly to be continued.

HP

A further reply to the specification

Dear HP,

Whenever I hear someone ask whether the President really is "post racial", my concern has more to do with what a given interlocutor might mean by the term, than with anything else.

I think the more constructive question to ask would sound something like, "Is America in 2010 post-racial?" and the answer there must be: sic et non.

To be sure, it is pertinent to this discussion that America elected a black man (a mulatto or mixed-race man, if you will - but if the POTUS self-identifies as a black man, I can extend him the courtesy of following his suit) to the nation's highest office, and all through the hard fought, 15-month campaign, no one ever seriously asked whether America is "ready" for a black president.

When former President Jimmy Carter suggested that popular opposition to the proposed health care reform was based on lingering racial hatred or at least inability to accept a black president, the incumbent POTUS went on a popular national talk show and responded, saying, "I think it's important to realize I was actually black before the election."



Indeed, Obama's personal story is in many regards beautiful, in many controversial, and always powerfully moving even if it is not always compelling.

The representative power of Obama's story will, I think, bear comparison with that of one of our favorites: TR.

His scriptis, I disagree with Obama on just about every question of policy - and that is the point: his election proves that, beyond its resolution in principle, America is post-racial in at least one extremely important existential sense, but we continue to talk about it as though the issue were not resolved in principle.

LD

A specification

To LD and to whomever it may concern.

Perhaps my remark about Obama repudiating his mother and grandparents was too scathing. Not a good one. I didn't mean it as a personal repudiation, but as a racial one, and it came from these lines of an interview to Barbara Walters:

BARBARA WALTERS, "THE VIEW": Your mother was white. 

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Uh-huh. 

WALTERS: Would it be helpful or why don't you say I am not a black president, I am biracial? 

Here was Obama's telling response:

OBAMA: You know, when I was young and going through the identity crises that any teenager goes through, I wrote a whole book about this…Part of what I realized was that if the -- if the world saw me as African-American then that wasn't something that I needed to run away from. That's something that I could go ahead and embrace. 

OK, I realize, as you made me remark in a previous occasion, that being Italian I might not have the required American sensibility to racial matters. I can understand that in the USA it is enough to be half black to appear all black. And this is what Obama embraced.

What I wanted to say with my remark is that in this way he embraced racial America, and, being thus incapable to represent a post racial America, rekindled racial matters rather than assuaging them.

Sorry that I made it sound as a "personal dig", as you say. It is true that I don't like the guy, but for a political argument this is not here nor there.

HP

A few brief considerations in reply to the HP

Alright, HP: the main thrust of your point is taken.

I do not agree, and would not say, that the President has "renegaded" his mother and her parents.

He has said some moving things about his mother, on the record.

He just does not want to make an issue of it, to which I say, "Fine. After all, you, POTUS, are the one who ran for and was elected to the office, not your family."

Let others in the media say what they will.

I am in Col. (eventually Gen.l) Chamberlain's camp.

I do not think it matters to America who your father (by extension, your mother) was - though this is different from the crucial point that one have a father and a mother, who are such before and beyond the grip of the state, but I digress...

Yours strikes me as a personal dig that 1) does not stick and 2) distracts from your main point, with which I agree, if it is as I have understood it: that Martin Luther King jr's vision of and program for achieving racial harmony is the right one, and that the is demonstrable from within America, herself.

Right?

Let me post the following, again, for our edification and delight:




LD

Two kinds of religion

This could be an interesting question to ask: how come the presidential candidate who presented himself as post-racial and post-partisan turned out to be as president not only the most partisan imaginable but also so racial that the "racist" name calling is more burning than in decades?

The easiest answer is that the presidential candidate image was a total construct: i.e. a fake.

It might be true, but it doesn't help in answering deeper questions: like those concerning the creeping civil war going on in America and in Europe.

So I don't want to focus on POTUS, but on two or three ways of looking at the racial issues.

One was that of Martin Luther King Jr.: he was a Christian, and not only reminded Americans of their being all children of God, but also called for forgiveness, as the way not to forget but to overcome past wrongs without falling into retaliations, wrongs of opposing color.

On the other side there were movements such as the Black Panthers – of which there is again talk nowadays.

A third side were the guilt ridden liberals, who recognized that racial discrimination went against the grain of their belief in the essential equality of all men, but forgot about the root of equality in God: those called by Tom Wolf radical chic, who would invite a token Black Panther to their fashionable parties.

Now it seems that with the first mulatto President of the United States (such he is, however he wants to renegade his mother and grandparents) we are thrown back to that.

Where is the fault?

Let me try this answer: in POTUS's inadequate understanding of religion, of which he has given many signs.

He has been able to gain the presidency back to the democrats by statements that recognized the importance of religion, so neutralizing the sting of the accusation moved to them by the center and the right of being all secularized and godless.

What came out, though, was that religion is nothing else for him than some kind of pious feeling concerning God and the meaning of life that whatever tradition can give. This was shown especially in his Cairo speech.

Now, that is a very partial view of what religion is about. It is, instead, also about what makes for justice among people, and can make, should justice have failed, for an appeasement.

Here there are several kind of answers, which show that not all the so called religions are the same. I'll focus on two, that more concern us.

There is the one pointed out by Martin Luther King, that of reciprocal forgiveness. Let's call it, if you like, conservative, because it requires a recognition in the tradition of an evidence of love that makes men virtuous.

The other one, let's call it liberal, doesn't demand that men be virtuous, but only that they follow the rules, by which some power from above equalizes (in the name of God or of the State) all men.

No doubt about which POTUS follows. My question is rather which is the one you would pick.

HP

Summer Hiatus

Dear readers,

Chronicles will be very slow throughout August.

Thanks to all, and best wishes for a Summer well spent!

LD

HP

Cccf's latest is of especial interest to readers from the nutmeg state.

LD

Cardinal and theological virtues for America

Dear LD,

My answer to your question about the transferability of an institutional model from one country to another is yes and no.

No, if we simply try to transfer the institutional mechanics, so to speak, e.g., regarding our Western democracies, the electoral mechanism. Yes, if we look at the underlying ideas of a political experience.

The tragedy, as you pointed out yourself, is that we too might tend to forget the latter, laying all the stress on the first. Hence the creeping civil war.

One of the few authors who had something serious – should I say scientific? – to say in political matters, the Notre Dame Scottish professor Alasdair MacIntyre, laid a strong stress on the need of recovering an ethic, which is also a psychology, of the virtues.

For whomever is reading who is not inside such matters, I am speaking of the four cardinal virtues, already identified by Plato and Aristotle: prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice; and the three theological virtues, identified by Christian theology, but I think of equal universal import as the other: faith, hope and charity.

However, MacIntyre remarks that the doctrine of the cardinal virtues was classically tied with a certain model of man fit for a certain society: that of the Greek city state, the polis. So he asks himself how could they be transferred to men of a different kind of society, thus being made universal as for example in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa.

Now I go by memory, and I haven't verified MacIntyre's answer. It seems to me to be something of the kind: because St. Thomas makes them proper for any human intercourse, so much more if it involves people coming from different human groups. The way I understand it, this necessarily requires complementing the cardinal virtues with the theological ones.

Calling faith, hope and charity "theological" doesn't mean that they depend on a religious doctrine, which only confers them their ethical validity. It is quite the reverse: they are rooted in any human intercourse, and therefore it's them that measure the religious and political validity of a doctrine, its "catholicity".

Now, back to America. Two things.

First: one of my teachers, Will Herberg, strongly stressed America being a land of immigrants: i.e., coming close to realize the situation envisioned by St. Thomas, where naked human intercourse demands the full set of the four and three virtues.

Second: it wasn't, though, made by the convergence of peoples of any kind whatsoever (as POTUS suggested in a speech of his) but of peoples who, for all their ethnic differences, somehow knew of the virtues required by the American experience.

That's why some peoples seem fit for America, like, more recently, Koreans or Vietnamese; while others seem unfit, like, alas, Islamics (with all the due qualifications of the case).

Your work on America, dear LD, is important, and needs to be carried on, precisely because both liberals and conservatives tend to think in abstract terms, detached from the core of the American experience. This needs to be unearthed in its most characteristic manifestations, to bring it consciously to philosophy.

HP

On Plato and the Closed Society: conversational indirections occasioned by the HP

Dear HP,

Yes, it is true that I have written that book. I had almost forgotten all about it. I suppose I really ought to get rolling in the search for a publisher.

Who wants a book that makes no policy prescriptions, and writes out of a place that is before and beyond the ground on which the liberals and the conservatives grunt and spit at one another?

It is a serious question, earnestly asked.

You will recall that, at the recent public scrutiny of my effort, Fr. Flannery questioned whether the notion of the city as a man writ large and of society as the cosmos writ small - a guiding idea for me and, so I argue in the book you mention, for what I call, "America" - is really central to my defense of America as really and adequately responsive to man's natural aspirations.

In raising the question, Fr. Flannery pointed out that neither the political societies that were the consitutive elements of the United States, nor their several constitutions, nor the federal constitution, could reasonably be described as similar to the constitution of the ideal city as discussed and presented in the Republic of Plato, in which the supposedly guiding notion has its origin.

I roughly and readily replied that, if one reads Plato as the source of metaphysical doctrines and political prescriptions, then his objection is unanswerable; I went on to suggest that, fortunately for me, there is another way to read Plato: as a dramatizer of the philosophical moment - by which I meant that Palto's works (re)create the drama (in the strict, etymological sense of the word) of realizing that one is a disciple in a way of life called friendship in wisdom; I was content at the time of the raising of the question to escape the strictures of the former way of reading, but I failed to address how it is that, if one reads Plato in the latter way, then it is at least possible to see expressions such as Publius', "Government...[is]...the greatest of reflections on human nature, (Federalist #51)" as more than dappling allusion, but as a sign that America's way of thinking about the basic questions of how we do and ought to order our lives together, is really in the tradition of thinking, the roots of which are in and through Plato.

This kind of thinking will have consequences.

It might, for example, press upon us the serious hermeneutical question whether - as Popper would have it - Plato is an "enemy of the open society (whatever that is)" or whether America really is an "open society" if it is really in the way of Plato.

While I would never discourage anyone from pursuing that question, nor would I suggest that my work could not be brought to bear on such a question, neither would I pursue it myself, as couched - my work is not inspired by such a question.

I am rather interested in the question, around which which your posts have been teasing, whether it is not true that governments are given for societies of men - and societies are not all the same, certainly not equal - so that a government, which protects life and secures property adequately and even admirably for one society, may do disastrous disservice to another if the elements of the former society's government are simply and merely counterfeited and placed over the latter society.

I am interested in the question whether societies of men are capaable of choosing good government by reflection and choice - which Publius asks America pretends to answer; I am interested in the further question: what does the thinking of America have to teach us about the (way toward an) answer to the problem?



LD

How liberal conservatives can be

The LD has written a book that we hope to see soon published, The soul of a nation, where he investigates the political philosophical meaning of the American experience: meaning, what in the shaping of the American body politic can be of universal philosophical significance.

Now, it seems that there are two principles in America being played one against the other, both going back to some of the key words of the Declaration of Independence: equality and liberty or freedom.

The stress on the first or on the second seems to define the opposing parties of the creeping civil war I speak about as, in common parlance, progressives or liberals and conservatives – with the first relying on the state to assure equality, while the second look at the individual with his natural place in civil society to preserve freedom.

While certainly not friend of the state, I feel a certain embarrassment when I see how some conservatives defend their case as one of liberty versus tyranny. Also because, in the reconstruction they make of the casus belli, there would be nothing particularly interesting in the American experiment that the LD examines. The culture war today in America between liberals and conservatives would be the same that had been going on for centuries, through European history, all the way back to the supposed origins of Western civilization in Greek philosophical reflection on politics.

Already then, Karl Popper suggests, the opposition of principles took shape following Plato's envisioning a city (non a state) ruled by a philosopher king, to which, we are told, Aristotle opposed a vision of a city of free citizens.

Strange pairing of thinkers follow in such a reconstruction of political philosophical history: that of Plato with the anti-Platonist Thomas Hobbes, on one side, and of Aristotle with John Locke, who can't be certainly classified as an Aristotelian, on the other.

Actually Plato and Aristotle, for all their differences, go together in their emphasis on the virtues required of men for a good ordering of the city.

Equally together go Hobbes and Locke, to the point that the second can be seen as having done nothing more than gilding the Hobbesian pill. While Hobbes is brutal in his expressions, requiring a sovereign – it doesn't matter whether "single or assembly" –, Locke appears much more suave, when he definitely grants sovereignty to an assembly.

The trouble is that in any case the sovereign has the power of making laws, thus bringing order to an otherwise disordered world.

What embarrasses me is how "liberal" is this whole historical reconstruction, although in a sense of the word closer to the Nineteenth Century usage than to that of the century just passed.

The whole progressives versus conservatives opposition is no older than two centuries or two centuries and a half.

The much older question about which America represents a novel experiment is another: that of the relation of politics and religion.

Here America has parted from Europe. For liberal European states, to keep religion out of politics means to make it publicly irrelevant, preserving for themselves the education of the citizenry. In America, instead, it is politics that has to be left out, so to speak, of religion. Save for a Europeanizing cultural elite, that wants to affirm the subordination to the state of civil society with all its cultural-religious manifestations.

Essential then to the American experiment is, as the LD reminds us, that tradition of virtue which from Greek philosophy passed into Christian theology. Which is, we could claim, universal, thus making possible to keep Church and State separate, without destroying society.

HP

in verba Mansueti Impudentis de civitate Dei et terriugena

These remarks being a reply to the Humbly Presumptuous in the Matter of the city of God and the earthly city:

In the very first, thanks, HP, for your exposition of what is for us a (or one side of the) basic problem of that noble way of life that men used to call philosophy.

You will recall that I wrote a little book at the beginning of the century (as yet unpublished - I am not sure who would want it just as it is), which I was happy to title, Sighing for Jerusalem: the political nature of virtue in the two cities of St. Augustine's De civitate Dei.

In that book, I dealt with a fundamental, even if overlooked fact: namely, that in his book (twenty-two books, really, which Augustine described famously as his magnum opus et arduum), the great Bishop and Doctor of the Church from the now buried and all but forgotten city of Hippo - buried, I hasten to add, under a massive urban sprawl in the northeast corner of Algeria - faced the question whether Christian religion is suitable to the morals of a republic.

More preciesly, he responded to the assertion that Christian religion is not suitable to the morals of a republic, arguing instead that Pagan religion cannot (nor could it ever) sustain the morals of the Roman republic (by which he meant also the vast empire accrued to the city through the centuries), and that Christianity could do so for Rome or any republic worth sustaining, insofar as it is verus cultus veri Dei, the true worship of the true God.

I will have more - much more - to say about what the phrase, "the morals of a republic" really means, though that discussion will have to wait for another post; my concern at present is with the origin and scope of the creeping civil war.

First, a very little history, in very broad strokes:

Augusine seems to have convinced enough people of the contrary, to make the next thousand years (at least) of history in the West an effort to order society according to his vision and adapt the vision to social circumstances without warping either into unrecognizability.

Augustine, in other words, gave us something between an artist's impression of and a blueprint for what came to be called Western Civilization, the principal unit of which was the res publica christiana - an intellectual, cultic and spiritual union of the Christian principalities in the world.

The Peace of Westphalia is generally given as the death knell of the res publica christiana as a coherent civilizational idea, though it is important to note that it is in no wise necessary to receive this wisdom absolutely and without qualification.

Indeed, wherever cultural notions of catholicity, i.e. ideas of universal validity and transcendently grounded and ordered authority, continued to exist, the anthropological elements of the res publica christiana survived and even thrived, even as the institutional political trappings of it withered.

As one of my favorite thinkers, Eric Voegelin, has written:

The corrosion of Western civilization…is a slow process extending over a thousand years. The several Western political societies, now, have a different relation to this slow process according to the time at which their national revolutions occurred… The American Revolution [emphasis mine - LD], though its debate was already strongly affected by the psychology of enlightenment, also had the good fortune of coming to its close within the institutional and Christian climate of the ancien régime. Western society as a whole…is a deeply stratified civilization in which the American and English democracies represent the oldest, most firmly consolidated stratum of civilizational tradition. - The New Science of Politics: an introduction

In the United States of America (and I would include contemporary Europe as a rejection of one vision of America in favor of another vision of America - i.e. as a reply or a response to one or another side of the promice of America, even as America is a reply to the problems of Europe in Modernity), we are perpetually at risk of losing sight of the older anthropological vision out of which our particular political institutions grew and for which they were peculiarly built to suit.

We tend in this day to derive our freedom from our institutions, and we forget that those institutions were given for a certain kind of men. In the words of Publius:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.- The Federalist #55

We need to recover our sensibility of and our sensititvity toward this basic tension in our nature both personal and popular - otherwise we risk losing both.

LD

City of God and city of men

The few readers who might have followed our blog probably remember one of my fixed ideas: that we live a creeping civil war. That's why we called the blog "Chronicles from the front".

I am not sure how clear I have made who the sides of this war really are.

Of course there are external enemies, who eventually one day hijack some airplanes and go to crush themselves against New York skyscrapers and the Pentagon. But they wouldn't be so strong, if we weren't so divided.

Reading news of the day I feel therefore continuously pressed to come back to my painful fixation.

The Church is under attack because of the sins of her ordained members. By whom?

Well, I'd say by the servants of the Emperor: i.e. by the state's governing bodies, whether legislative, judiciary and executive.

Our history teaching never makes clear enough why the roman emperors were against Christians. And yet the answer should be pretty simple: because they refused to deify the human community to which they willingly belonged, because they thought that there was a higher community of all men in God to whom it went their full allegiance.

Thus Christianity became the warrant of men's freedom, our freedom, against the self-divinization of the state, pretending to exhaust the full compass of human life.

Was the Church always up to it? Of course not, because the distinction of church and state is not a severing of men in two halves, so Christians are at the same time members of the one and of the other, always tempted into making of the Church a state, or of the State a church. The story of this distinction, with all that it involved, is that of Western history.

Men are always again tempted into making their world into the world. It happens therefore that in the name of an "open society" (cfr. K. Popper, The open society and its enemies) society is actually closed in the confines of a state: the worldly state of public things (status rei publicae: hence simply the state) in the western world of the last centuries.

To this the Church opposed herself. Until it came a time when it was said: we Christians have to learn to dialogue with the world, learn again to address it.

This was the hopeful message communicated by the Vatican II. Which leaves me with a paradox to account for: while the last Ecumenical Council announced itself as a recasting of the Church's eternal truths in a new language more apt to modern times, her capability to address people of these same modern times appears to be weakened.

Was it perhaps because it wasn't made explicit enough that there is a creeping civil was always going on, i.e., to say with Saint Augustine, between the "city of God" and the "city of men"?

HP

From the Archdiocese of St. Louis...

We have this statement from Archbishop Robert J. Carlson:

Money qute:

Since the first century, the Church has addressed the moral evil of abortion and the killing of a defenseless baby in the womb. People who are casual about the sin of abortion and who choose to view it as a political issue rather than the serious moral issue that it is are guilty of violating the Fifth Commandment. You cannot be "pro-choice" (pro-abortion) and remain a Catholic in good standing. That's why the Church asks those who maintain this position not to receive holy Communion. We are not being mean or judgmental, we are simply acknowledging the fact that such a stance is objectively and seriously sinful and is radically inconsistent with the Christian way of life.

As I said at Fr. Zuhlsdorf's place (to whom, a tip of the hat, (/:-)), This is an excellent statement, and deserves to be circulated as widely as possible, as an example of how to balance the ad intra and ad extra aspects of the message.

One the one hand Abp. Carlson makes the Catholic position very clear to Catholics, and amkes it clear that he is speaking to the faithful, directly and specifically, saying: this is what our Church teaches on these matters, now and forever.

Then, in paragraph 6, the archbishop explains that the Catholic teaching is not incompatible with the requirements of citizenship.

He wraps it up very well, too.

Well done, indeed!

CCCF: "Guttmacher's Wrong...Again°

Juan O'Callahan at the CCCF blog continues his signal service.

Go see: GUTTMACHER'S CALIFORNIA DATA CANNOT BE CORRECT

I continue to encourage bloggers to support the Cccf in every possible way.

Best,

LD

Friendship, eros, charity

A New York sexologist by the name of Esther Perel has gratified us with a book, Mating in captivity, lavishing all her wisdom about sexual desire and how to keep it alive.

It seems that many couples after a while that they are together experiment a dreadful fall of their sexual desire. They want to stay together as a couple, but don't feel like making love anymore. Well, if they just accept it, it's no big trouble: there is no law that prescribes to do it. The trouble springs when desire is aroused by other people, and they follow their impulse. Then you have infidelity, and that's no good.

OK, Perel argues, we can't stand infidelity, it is dishonest; but there is a solution: to be utterly honest with each other. She envisions so negotiating couples, who come thus to agree on what one can accept from the other in violation of the exclusiveness of their sexual involvement. In this way, she suggests, even their mutual desire can gain in vitality.

I would suggest another kind of therapy: ama et fac ut vis (Saint Augustine). For those who don't know Latin: love, and do as you want.

The catchword here is ama. What does it prescribe?

C. S. Lewis wrote a marvelous little book, Four Loves, in answer to the question of what is "love". So much more marvelous, the less it claimed to any originality in the basic finding. It was enough for him to observe that we use the word in four different way: to mean "affection", "friendship", "eros", and "charity"; and analyze each one in turn.

Now, I leave aside the first, which is that we can prove toward our doggies, in general pets, or the things we are familiar with.

Eros is the one in question here: i.e. the attraction between a man and a woman that makes them engage in sexual games, which seems to falter after a while, so they are driven to look for novel experiences.

The alternative (to Perel's) therapy I suggest is to keep eros together with friendship and charity.

Friendship is the pleasure people draw from each other's company. Thus said, we can ask where such a pleasure comes from. Lewis' acute observation is that people are always friends in an idea, some shared likings. More: from Aristotle to Cicero it was stressed that only virtuous people can be friends, thanks to the appreciation of the good present in the other.

Charity is the readiness to give.

Now, back to the imperative ama. It doesn't prescribe a feeling, which would be absurd (how could you ever obey such a prescription?). What it prescribes is always a performance, the reciprocal giving of one's own life, in whatever ways one might willingly manifest it.

Here is also the idea in which lovers (in the current, erotic sense of the word) can be friends: that of a relationship in which one looks at the other as precious and uniquely good. Having something that only he or she can give: his or hers total self.

I assure you that in such a case, where friendship and charity are alive between lovers, eros cannot fail. Sexual desire stays alive too.

HP

For What It's Worth: a letter home on Independence Day

When our forbears mutually pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the independence of America, they were effecting a momentous change in the world - though not the one which springs to the mind of most people. They were, in effect, making their personal commitment to the truth of the claims laid out in the Declaration. The signatories’ pledge was in the name of the United States, in Congress assembled, so that their pledge was to order their lives in a way that made (makes) the truth of the claims advanced in the Declaration plain for all to see.

Even so, a half-dozen generations of scholars in the United States have attempted with varying degrees of success to reduce the ideas of the Declaration to a minimally modified mimicry of John Locke’s formulaic for the purpose of government, and make the revolution the Declaration proclaimed to justify a mere exercise in Lockean political theory.

John Adams, who sat on the Declaration’s drafting committee and all but single-handedly carried the day for independence, spoke of the independence of America and the American Revolution in the following terms:

Who was the author...of American Independence [?]…We might as well inquire who were the Inventors of Agriculture, Horticulture, Architecture, Musick [sic]…[The] only true answer must be the first emigrants. The Revolution was [therefore] effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.

The question, “Who was the author of American independence?” wants to know in whom American independence has authority. Adams’ reply, that the only true answer must be the first emigrants, would find authority in their experience of exodus, for he describes them as emigrants, and not as immigrants. They came out of the Old World; their coming into the New, where they established a way of life, eventually allowed their descendants to say with probity, “this is good,” in describing the way of life that they had inherited, and so without reference to the king of Great Britain.

Whatever else this means, it tells us that the American mind does not express itself in others’ terms; the words it speaks are its own, though deliberately, they are not novel. America does not speak first, but is called upon to speak, and expresses itself in a way that is appropriate to the call to which it speaks:

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

A pertinent practical example of this way of thinking is to be found in in Stanley Cavell’s 2004 book, Cities of Words: pedagogical letters on a register of the moral life, precisely in his chapter on Locke:

I recall…Emerson’s accusation and confession that we no longer speak or think for ourselves, no longer say “I think,” “I am,” but “quote some saint or sage.”… [I]t follows from this loss of capacity to outface a doubt of our existence, that we in effect declare that we haunt our existence. The implications for the body politic are immediate, since if I have no voice of my own in which to express my thoughts, I cannot give my consent to be governed and our condition is that we haunt our society. It cannot hear us.
But here, could we express Emerson’s longing for America to discover itself by imagining him to declare, “Man is timid, he is afraid to say, ‘I think,’ ‘I consent,’" but instead quotes, for example, Locke?

The Declaration is not exactly quoting Locke.

Some of the words of that document are similar enough to Locke’s language to let us note and possibly – so we might understand the Founders to be requiring of us – to know the difference.

The Declaration says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident:” so that the thirteen political societies are united in claiming these truths each for its own in America; what is more, the thirteen States of America, through their representatives to Congress, are claiming that the truths of the Declaration are visibly present as ordering forces in American life, if only one will come and see for oneself.

There is no argument in the Declaration because self-evidence cannot, as such, be argued - only shown: but are we showing, by our conduct and example (as Publius a few years later would say it is our duty and our privilege and our Providentially-appointed task to show), that societies of men are really capable of establishing good government from reflection and choice, i.e. that they are not forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force, and that they do not require the chains of despotism to keep them from destroying and devouring one another?

The resolution of the 2nd Continental Congress, which, on the 2nd of July, 1776, voted in favor of Richard Henry Lee’s June 7th motion:

RESOLVED: That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

The members of Congress were signing their own death warrants, and committing the states they represented to war, and all the immense expense in life and treasure that is the price of war.

To say that they did so in order to test a parlor theory of the origin of politics, is not to praise the worth of philosophy; it is to indict the founders as moral imbeciles, at best; at worst, they would be rabid, bloodthirsty ideologues.

Jefferson described the Declaration as an expression of the American mind. Though Locke is clearly present as one contributor to the sentiments of the day, the authority of the Declaration rests on its harmonizing of those sentiments, which, as Jefferson himself has just attested, is an expression of the American mind.

This is not Lockean. This is something different.

The question whether we are still commited to the task, to which our fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, is one that must be front and center, now and forever, in our national and our individual minds.

This is the price of liberty.

Weekend Briefing

• I have been looking, so far desultorily, for either a German (I believe it was conducted auf Deutsche) or an English transcript of the debate between Charles Taylor and Card. Schoenborn. Any news from readers on this point would be greatly appreciated, as both the HP and I would like to enter our own remarks by way of criticism/commentary.

• I am thinking my way through a post on the TV series, LOST. Be on the lookout - and feel free to post here or e-mail thoughts, links to interesting criticism, etc. I could use some help getting my head around the literary sub-genre of television criticism.
  

• A request: the blog has seen an increase in traffic of late, and this is very pleasing. Are there questions, topics, stories, issues, which the readership (whether new or established) would like to see either the Hp or me address?
  

• It is 4th of July weekend. I will be posting by the morning of the 4th, if not before. To my countrymen: INDEPENDENCE FOREVER!

LD

Unsecular age

There are several things that deserve attention, unfortunately of a not very pleasant character.

It is taking place an attack on the Church that endangers us all. I mean, it endangers our civilization, one could say, I prefer to say our whole legal civility.

Think of what happened in Belgium, a country whose raison d'etre was to be Catholic, and now sees his bishops practically detained for hours to be interrogated, while the tombs of dead bishops were ransacked.

It is all happening because of the sins of the Church's sons, it is the easy reply.

No playing victims from our great Pope Benedict. Just a right call to penance. The worst enemies of the Church are inside, he tells us.

It is so, but who are the enemies he is talking about? just the pedophiles?

How about the unacceptable understanding of things shown by our high prelates? Sinning, as it looks, of an ignorance that is a betrayal of Christ.

I was appalled by reading a debate between a highly considered cardinal, the archbishop of Vienna, and the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find an English text to comment upon it. So I will have to stay with the title of Taylor's last book: The secular age.

Let me be a bit paradoxical, or at least go against the grain of current conceptualizations of present day society.

I don't believe that any such a thing as "secularization" exists. Usually it is meant by it the progressive loss of a religious understanding of the world, by turning to the saeculum so called: a desacralization of it. I see happening quite the opposite: a sacralization of it.

Christianity taught us not to identify God with any finite things. Now, what appears to be happening is the reverse (as I argued in my previous posts on "typhus").

So, I confess I don't understand what the archbishop is debating about with the philosopher.

HP

A reply to the HP

Dear HP - I enter my reply to your remarks here, rather than in the combox.

I really do not know what to think about Gen. McChrystal's remarks.

I think it possile that he wanted to "fall on his sword" in order to dramatize what he considers to be an appalling lack of competence and conviction at the highest level of civilian leadership.

There are ways to do that, which do not compromise the absolute and indiscutible principle of civilian control over the military.

So, it was folly: either a perplexing lack of discretion, or a consternating failure of prudence.

More alter...

LD

McChrystal and MacArthur

I'd like to raise a point of discussion with the LD, I am not sure whether it is dissent or just a specification.

I don't think General McChrystal forgot his history. It might be he knew it all too well. Otherwise his behavior was just silly.

Thus said, I come to General MacArthur speech, that the LD so gloatingly quotes. To this line:

In war there is no substitute for victory.

Shouldn't this be valid also for the civilian Commander in Chief? How about if he is rather working to undermine victory? As it appears to be the case, for example, when he announces that by the middle of next year he will start withdrawal. Which is like telling the enemy, it is enough for you to resist until then, and you win.

This sounds also like putting the high military command as well as the troops in a "double bind", by sending them contradictory messages like: I want you to win – I don't care whether you win or not. Certainly it is not made to keep up their morale.

Duty, Honor, Country.

Together with MacArthur the LD let's these words resound. A question then: shouldn't they apply also to civilians?

Of course the POTUS had no other choice than to relieve the General. So he did and did well. He held the honor of the office. How honorable, though, is the behavior of the incumbent?

Can we really say that this is an irrelevant question? MacArthur stated that the military shouldn't enter into politics. Ok. But are we sure that we are dealing here just with politics?

To know what I mean it might be the case to revert to my previous posts on the "creeping civil war".

HP

I have been engaged...

in a discussion at the Kresta in the Afternoon blog.

You may find my exchange with Nick (I believe this is Nick Thom, the executive producer of the Kresta in the Afternoon program).

Let me say that I am one of the Kresta program's avid, daily listeners.

The whole operation does a terrific job of presenting and analyzing the thorniest issues in a spirit of faithful fairness that is in the very best tradition of Catholic communications specifically and radio journalism, generally.

To read the discussion, click here.

LD

De amicitia III

Clayton has published the full outline of his Friendship series, along with a letter explanatory.

If you would be edified and delighted, then follow this link.

LD

Dissenter Priest Names "his" Bishops

With a tip of the hat to Fr. Zuhlsdorf...

Fr. Richard McBrien has "fondly and gratefully" remembered:

• Leroy Matthieson, Amarillo, Texas, 1980-97;
• Francis Hurley, archbishop of Anchorage, Alaska, 1976-2001;
• John McCarthy, Austin, Texas, 1986-2001
• Richard Cushing, cardinal-archbishop of Boston, 1944-70
• Lawrence Shehan, cardinal-archbishop of Baltimore, 1961-74
• William Borders, archbishop of Baltimore, 1974-89
• Francis Mugavero, Brooklyn, 1968-90
• Albert Meyer, cardinal-archbishop of Chicago, 1958-65
• Joseph Bernardin, cardinal-archbishop of Chicago, 1982-96
• William Hughes, Covington, Ky, 1979-95
• Victor Balke, Crookston Minn., 1976-2007
• Maurice Dingman, Des Moines, Iowa, 1968-86
• John Dearden, cardinal-archbishop of Detroit, 1958-80
• William McManus, Fort Wayne-South Bend, Ind., 1976-85
• Donald Pelotte, S.S.S., Gallup, N.M., 1990-2008
• Lawrence McNamara, Grand Island, Nebr., 1978-2004
• Joseph Breitenbeck, Grand Rapids, Mich., 1969-89
• Joseph Imesh, Joliet, Ill., 1979-2006
• Michael Kenny, Juneau, Alaska, 1979-95
• Thomas Kelly, O.P., archbishop of Louisville, 1982-2007
• Cletus O’Donnell, Madison, Wis., 1967-92
• Rembert Weakland, archbishop of Milwaukee, 1977-2002
• Peter Gerety, archbishop of Newark, 1974-86
• Raymond Lucker, New Ulm, Minn., 1975-2000
• Terence Cooke, cardinal-archbishop of New York, 1968-83
• John Cummins, Oakland, Calif., 1977-2003
• Victor Reed, Oklahoma City, Okla., 1958-71
• John McRaith, Owensboro, Ky., 1982-2009
• Charles Buswell, Pueblo, Colo., 1959-79
• F. Joseph Gossman, Raleigh, N.C., 1975-2006
• Walter Sullivan, Richmond, Va., 1974-2003
• Francis Quinn, Sacramento, Calif., 1979-93
• Kenneth Untener, Saginaw, Mich., 1980-2004
• John May, archbishop of St. Louis, 1980-92
• John Roach, archbishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis, 1975-95
• Patrick Flores, archbishop of San Antonio, Texas, 1979-2004
• John R. Quinn, archbishop of San Francisco, 1977-95
• Raymond Hunthausen, archbishop of Seattle Wash., 1975-91
• Bernard Topel, Spokane, Wash., 1955-78
• John Leibrecht, Springfield-Cape Girardeau, Mo., 1984-2008
• Frank Harrison, Syracuse, NY, 1976-87
• Bernard Flanagan, Worcester, Mass., 1959-83
• James Malone, Youngstown, Ohio, 1968-95
• Robert Joyce, Burlington, Vt., 1957-71
• Paul Leibold, archbishop of Cincinnati, 1969-72
• James Casey, archbishop of Denver, 1967-86
• John Whealon, Hartford, Conn., 1969-91.
• Ernest Primeau, Manchester, N.H., 1960-74
• Carroll Dozier, Memphis, Tenn., 1971-82
• Thomas Grady, Orlando, Fla., 1974-89
• John Snyder, St. Augustine, Fla., 1979-2000
• Thomas Murphy, archbishop of Seattle, 1991-97
• William Friend, Shreveport, La., 1986-2006
• Joseph Maguire, Springfield, Mass., 1977-91
• John Nevins, Venice, Fla., 1984-2007.
  

Rembert Weakland? The disgraced homosexual embezzler of archdiocesan funds? I really don't begrudge anyone the right to a political agenda - even an ecclesiastical one: but, geez! Has Fr. McBrien entirely abandoned even the most basic tenets of human decency?

A Note to General McChrystal

Apparently, the good General forgot the story of his predecessor, General MacArthur.

It is worthwhile to revisit General MacArthur's Thayer Award acceptance speech, delivered at West Point in May of 1962.

Below, an excerpt, followed by a link to the full text and audio recording at American Rhetoric:

We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.

And through all this welter of change and development, your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable: it is to win our wars.

Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment. But you are the ones who are trained to fight. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very obsession of your public service must be: Duty, Honor, Country.

Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds; but serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war-guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.

Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government; whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing, indulged in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be. These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a ten-fold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.

For the full text, and an Mp3 recording of the speech, click here.

Typhus 2

Just two words more on the same theme of last time.

Being Italian, I follow with interest the performance of my country's team at the world cup.

We do feel represented when a team wearing the name of our country plays, and identify with it: so, according to the case we say "we won" or "we lost".

No qualms about that, and about the fact that the result of four year ago was a satisfaction.

It's a natural process of identification: "natural", I mean, according to man's nature, which is of being a social animal.

The question is to what extent it can be carried.

"They" tell us, in many ways, that we shouldn't indulge in social and cultural belonging, because it creates discrimination. The worse would be if our socio-cultural belonging came from a religious narrative: like the one telling the story of God's word made flesh.

If that story makes you happy, again "they" tell us, good for you. But don't dare advance any claim in the name of it, your belief is your belief, and that's it. To travesty one's need of belonging with God's name is purely and simply wrong.

This way "they" overlook the fact that identification doesn't come from a need of belonging, but is a natural process; and that God's name is not there to close, but to open the scope of belonging, to embrace potentially the whole of mankind. Useless to say so: "they" know better, and don't listen.

"They" can't but marvel, therefore, when "they" look at what happens around them, like the fact that interest in a soccer team becomes a fever: not just the mild feeling I spoke about, but typhus.

Identification, thrown out of the door, comes back from the window. And for many people a soccer team is the only thing left to represent them. It takes religious overtone: it becomes idolatry.

HP

De amicitia: parts V-VII of Clayton's series on friendship

...may be found here (V), here (VI) and here (VII), for the edification and delight of the readership.

Typhus

Indeed the Hyundai ad was blasphemous; but the real blasphemy is what we have allowed soccer to become.

Over here in Italy we call support for a soccer team tifo, i.e. "typhus", a contagious sickness that gives very high fever.

I don't know whether the same fanaticism, often violent, that is unleashed in connection with soccer matches in Italy or in England and elsewhere, is aroused by any of the preferred American national sports (football, baseball, basket ball …) .

I would have liked to expand on this, and perhaps I'll do it in another post. For now just one comment:

When we abandon the true God, inevitably we fall prey of idols.

HP

Unbecoming: a consideration of the Catholic League's involvement in the Empire State Building controversy

Dr. William A. "Bill" Donohue, in his official capacity as President of the Catholic League, has engaged in a campaign against the ownership and the management of the Empire State Building (ESB).

In his campaign, he accuses the ESB operators of anti-Catholic bias in their decision not to accept the Catholic League's request that they illuminate the ESB with the colors of the Missionaries of Charity on August 26th, to mark the centenary of the birth of MC foundress, Blessed Teresa of Calcutta.

Donohue's campaign is inconsistent with the nature, purpose and traditions of the organization he leads; Donohue's conduct of the campaign is unbecoming a Christian gentleman.

The following considerations are offered as substantiation of the critical observations, which I have made of Donohue's behavior.

Controversy in Context

The Jesuit priest and professor of political science at Marquette University, Virgil Blum, SJ, founded the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in 1973.

The Catholic League tells us that its purpose is:

[To defend] the right of Catholics – lay and clergy alike – to participate in American public life without defamation or discrimination.

This is a cause around which all Catholics have a right and a duty to rally. Immediately following this mission statement, we discover the following specification:

Motivated by the letter and the spirit of the First Amendment, the Catholic League works to safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened.

In the broadest sense, then, the Catholic League exists in order to defend the place of the Church and of her members in the public square.

We find this understanding confirmed in the following words, taken from the "What do we do?" header of the "About Us" page at the League's website:

In essence, the Catholic League monitors the culture, acting as a watchdog agency and defender of the civil rights of all Catholics.

The Catholic League has often acted in keeping with its mission statement, bringing violations of and encroachments on the rights of Catholics and of the Church to the attention and the scrutiny of the broad public in a manner consistent with Christian charity and the common morality of all people who fear God.

The Present Case Considered

The Catholic League has, under Donohue's leadership, sought a secular honor for Mother Teresa, one of the Church's blessed. To seek such an honor is not to preserve the Church's place in the world; rather, to seek such an honor is to desire the approval and even celebration of the world - and this is not in keeping with the stated mission of the League.

Peculiarly distasteful is Donohue's use - as a trope - of a daughter of the Church, who so perfectly despised such dappled vanity while she was on Earth.

Donohue's ungrounded insistence that the ESB operators must have been motivated by anti-Catholic bias in their refusal, bears none of the marks of prudence, temperance, or justice.

Donohue, in leveling an accusation of mendacity against the ESB operators - an accusation based on the most uncharitable possible reading of comments torn from a statement published to the building's website in shocked response to Donohue's unexpected vitriol, and with the most exquisitely studied disregard for the full circumstances of the statement's publication - has behaved in a manner that is frankly indefensible.

I do not doubt the sincerity of Donohue's commitment, nor do I believe his intentions were dishonorable.

Nevertheless, his behavior has weakened the credibility of the Catholic League; he has done a real disservice to Catholics; he has wounded our national discourse.

LD

Friendship with the Weight of Glory

My friend, Clayton, who is proprietor and operator of the Weight of Glory, has an excellent series of posts about friendship (I) (II) (III) (IV).

Well worth a visit.

LD

Hyundai Motor America Pulls Offensive Ad

Hyundai has removed its blasphemous spot from circulation, after receiving what they described in a letter to concerned customers as, "[An] unexpected response."

I, for one, am glad that Hyundai executives have pulled the spot, and apologized for their lack of sensitivity in conceiving, creating and executing it.

I believe them when they say that they were not intending offense.

LD

Hyundai's Blasphemous World Cup Advert: a call to action

Hat tip to Fr. Zuhlsdorf at WDTPRS

Here is the advert, below which I have offered a sample letter to the president and CEO of Hyundai Motor America:



I encourage you all to write to Hyundai.

Christopher R. Altieri
[ ...]
[ ...]
craltieri@yahoo.com

John Krafcik
President and CEO
Hyundai Motor America
P.O. Box 20850
Fountain Valley, CA 92728 – 0850

Re: offensive Hyundai advert

Dear Mr. Krafcik:

Your company has recently released a television advertisement to air during World Cup matches, in which certain rites of Catholic religion are parodied.

The advertisement is offensive.

The advertisement depicts the following: a soccer ball crowned with thorns (a symbol of Our Lord's passion); a glowing soccer ball in place of the Blessed Sacrament (Christ really and truly present in the species of bread); a mimickry of the Rite of Communion, in which the Eucharistic Bread is replaced with pizza.

In all these, your company's advertisement passes out of the realm of mere irreverence, and into the realm of blasphemy.

I am quite willing to understand that it was not Hyundai's intention to offend Catholics, though even if you were sincerely to offer proof of the most absolute lack of malice, you could not remove the objective insult to our Faith and to our God, which your advertisement has given and continues to give.

I ask that you remove the ad from circulation immediately, and publish an apology as soon as practicable.

Yours Truly,

Christopher R. Altieri

Again about science

I'll try to be, if I can, less esoteric.

Someone describes to me an experiment he made, e.g. by throwing some objects from the Tower of Pisa. You see, he adds, this proves that… whatever. If you repeat it, and reach the same results, then you'll have to agree with me. And all triumphant concludes: that is science.

Good, I say, I understand. If, by repeating the experience others relate, we prove the same thing, then we have science.

That's right.

I knew it. I followed the way my parents showed me in their model of love story, and I found marital bliss. That why the Gospels recommend to follow Christ' example: to acquire the true science of life.

No, no, no! You got it all wrong. Love stories are literature, the Gospels are religion. They are not science.

Why not? I thought I was only drawing conclusions from what you just approved.

Whatever answer he might give at this point to my question, it would be the equivalent of a blunt "because I say so!".

Or, at least, I so wrote this fictional dialogue, because I haven't heard a different answer yet.

HP

Not other

Perhaps my previous post was a bit sibylline. Let me add some gloss, hopefully less sibylline.

I'll start from this:

An eminent philosopher theologian of the XV century, by the name of Nicholas of Kues or Cusanus, wrote a book entitled Non Aliud, "The not other": meaning God.

Interesting, considering that we tend rather to speak of Him as "The wholly other" – actually so other, that we are tempted to consider Him inaccessible to us, to the point of falling into agnosticism.

A Jesuit friend of mine once gave me a clue to understanding Cusanus with this maxim:

I am other than God; God, is not other than me.

Whao. Then all my being is in God, is God's being!

The same exclamation came from a student of mine, lost after Nieztsche, but with enough esteem of me to ask me what I thought about it.

I tried to explain to him, against the grain of our current culture, that we are "social animals", and what this implies. I used to do it, the set theory today widely used to teach mathematics. Society, I said, isn't anything empirical. Empirical are the subsets of society, all the different definable groups to which we happen to belong; while society, well, is the most encompassing set, that we can name but not define (there is nothing in fact to which we could oppose it, so to define it): like being.

My student got the point, and exclaimed: you mean then that we are in God?!

Well, yes.

Not just us, but everything. Of which we have knowledge because in society we transcend anything definable, hence corporeal.

A corollary concerning science:

There are sciences of bodily things, but what makes them sciences is our capability to look at things defined in the light of the indefinable – shed on us, I repeat, because we enter the world in society.

Here you have the science I asked for (without which there is no science): the science capable of accounting for the knowledge professed by, and in favor of, the practitioners of all other subordinate sciences, so called; as well as, moreover, for the knowledge professed by all peoples who equally bear witness of what knowing means.

Because of the kind of evidence you could call it cultural anthropology.

Because it concerns noantri (literally "us other"), they would say here in Rome, meaning who we are in comparison we all the rest of us, so as to be able to give each his due, you could call it political science, or, more classically, episteme politike.

Because it involves the Non Aliud, call it simply theology.

HP

Absence of science

I have a fixed idea: that our western world is plagued by a very serious sickness. It is like the virus HIV, that makes the organism incapable to defend itself.

Let's call it lack of rationality, absence of science.

How can you say that? Don't you know that ours is eminently the world of science?

May be, but I have a question: apart from having given to a certain kind of research practices the name of science, do we have cogent rational arguments for so calling it, with a name that just means knowledge? as if outside of it there were nothing of the kind: no knowledge but simply opinions?

I can hear the appalled answer: of course there are! And it stops at that. May be adding a few platitudes, explaining how rational science is in opposition, say, to magic or religion.

Fine, I retort. But you didn't really answer my question. You keep on assuming which research practices are science, while my question was why we should grant only to them the name of knowledge.

There are, as a matter of fact, people claiming that the only harbinger of knowledge is religious experience. Appeal to science, so called, is of no avail with them.

If you can't justify your giving the name of science, then there is no science (QED).

Science is lost for our social discourse, if we aren't able of giving reasons for it. And we end ailing for lack of any reason, if we leave out what matters most to us: let's call it religion.

HP

The Tea Party (alleged) Jacobins

Mark Lilla presented us with his reflections on the political phenomenon of the day, which he styles as the Tea Party Jacobins.

Now, I have been away from the States since a few years, and to be more sure of what I say I should come for some fieldwork, to go around a speak with people. But, even basing myself on my recollections complemented by my studies, he doesn't convince me.

Lilla rightly remarks that the main trait of the Tea Party movement is diffidence toward the "educated elite" that wants to control their life; but, alas, his analysis of this diffidence shows that he belongs to this same elite, incapable to understand the people it pretends to guide.

A first question I could address to him, for which there is no answer in the article, is why he calls the Tea Party goers "Jacobins". But I leave it at that.

My main objection is to the uncritical way in which he stresses the alleged individualism of the movement. See all the intellectual conceit of these words:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

Which Americans is he here talking about? Liberals or conservatives (or, if you want me to be verbally exhaustive, add to them moderates)?

The trouble I found in talking about American political things is that on either side they make appeal to the "individual". But they don't' mean exactly the same thing.

Read again these other lines:

Americans are and have always been credulous skeptics. They question the authority of priests, then talk to the dead; they second-guess their cardiologists, then seek out quacks in the jungle. Like people in every society, they do this in moments of crisis when things seem hopeless. They also, unlike people in other societies, do it on the general principle that expertise and authority are inherently suspect.

Lilla doesn't seem to notice that "expertise" and "authority" are not quite the same thing. What appears "suspect" to the Tea Party folks, I'd say, is the first, claimed by an elite really "swaddled in self-esteem". Authority is another thing, what particularly the self-referential individuals of the elite refute.

In the American conservative lingo the individual is something else. It is the common man, endowed, as such, of common sense. How much it is involved in this "common sense" that conservatives oppose to the education of the elite: the whole education that they have inherited from the centuries past, which the elite appears to have dropped.

In America, like in Europe, the elite doesn't understand any more people like those alleged individualists in America, whose distrust toward (invading and corrupting) institutions doesn't come from "confidence in the self".

Probably they would rather say (in whatever confused way): in God we trust.

Two words

What is "political correctness": to think that you can change reality by changing words.

Well, in some cases it may be true, because name calling has been known since ever. And since ever it has been reprimanded.

However, a blind man is no less so if you call him "not seeing".

And present day terrorism doesn't cease to have its well known matrix if rather than calling it "Islamic" you simply qualify it as "violent".

Was it this the "change" promised?

HP

Bipartisanship

There are two persons, friends or lovers, squabbling. One says to the other: you have got a problem. The other might say: we have got a problem.

Who has more chance of being right?

Just a question

I wonder: is it an ideological prejudice to say that the present incumbent of the presidency is an incompetent, unable to face a crisis?

I mean: it is I don't remember how many days that the collapsed platform in the Gulf is spilling oil, determining what is perhaps the worse ecological disaster ever. And POTUS is waiting for BP to take care of it, while blaming it and threatening to make it pay.

So I ask: isn't the American army a most powerful technological apparatus? Wouldn't have been possible to mobilize this apparatus to face the problem?

Wasn't in the POTUS' power to say to BP, now you get out of the way; then call all his military engineers and ask them for the possible solutions? Listen to the options, and implement whichever appears to him the best? So taking his responsibility, and only later, in a second moment, asking BP to pay the expenses?

What is this man capable to do? Beyond blaming others for everything that doesn't work?

These are meant as bipartisan questions.

HP

A clarification

To be clear, I actually didn't deny that there is something like common sense, but only observed that it is not legitimate to use it as an argument.

I looked back at what one of my preferred authors - little known in America but one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the last two centuries, the blessed Antonio Rosmini, who lived in the first half of the 1800 - says on this regard. He defined common sense as the faculty of first principles, something like what previously used to be named synderesis. But a simple appeal to it risks of losing the strength of the "common", to make it sound as an absolutization of our own ways of thinking and living.

That was the zest of my post. As human beings we are educated, and education makes the first principles reflexive, but, alas, con also deviate from them. That's why I oppose two styles of education, a kind of ivy league one, where the sense of tradition is lost into an empty universalism, and another, may be apparently less sophisticated, but better rooted in a tradition of wisdom.

I claim that only by starting from the second it is possible, in deep humility, to reach the higher learning that allows to really comprehend common sense, the knowledge and wisdom by which all men can come to know themselves as naturally participating of society, and, by way of society, of God.

Those who think to do without God, have actually taken themselves out of society, save wanting to reconstitute it by way of what is for them common sense. Too bad, for them and for us, that it is far from being common. Actually, in wanting to do away with God, they just fall prey to idols.

HP

Uncommon sense

I've been absent from this page for a while, and I feel in debt at least of a few lines. Just a short thought.

Some conservatives like to describe their preferred characters as endowed of common sense, over against liberals' claim of knowing better because better educated.

Well, if it is put it in such simple terms, I must disagree. It might be true, but to explain why would require a ling discourse, and I wanted to be short.

To this end, the only thing I can do is to overturn that description: things stand the other way around, and it is the reverse to be actually true.

It is liberal education that, dropped all reference to tradition, doesn't have anything to ground itself upon other than the alleged evidences of the common sense of the last three centuries. On the other side, then, there isn't common sense, but genuine education, grounded in the tradition and rationality of millenia.

For now, this paradox is enough.

HP