A gift of life

It might be proper to put down something on Easter.

As if it were an easy thing to do!

First of all we should recollect what we are celebrating; or better, where our celebration stems from.

Why, you could say, it is clear: the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Yes, but wherefrom do we know about it? The answer is less obvious than it should be: the Church – i.e., the first witnesses, whose testimony was on one side written down in the New Testament, while on the other was kept alive in the community of their successors.

Let's recover the marvel of it: in the old times of Tiberius, second Roman emperor, a little bunch of Jews started going around preaching, by telling a strange story.

Everybody can read it in St. Peter's words at the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles. On my side I like to put it in this way:

Our teacher, who had done and said great things, and from whom we expected still greater ones, was taken prisoner and put to death. We were dumbfounded, utterly discouraged, thinking that was the end of all our hopes. And yet… three days later we saw him alive again, he stayed with us and ate with us.

Quite marvelous, isn't it? To see a man who had been dead, alive again.

Mind me well: they didn't say "we saw his ghost", but "we saw him in the flesh".

Today we might be prone to attribute it to their credulity. But no, for them it was as incredible as for us, men of a disenchanted world. Otherwise, if he had been just a ghost, there wouldn't have been much to marvel about, nothing to preach about.

Besides the marvel, what did that mean for them? That a priestly king had offered himself in sacrifice, once and for all.

Do you know what is a sacrifice, and how it pertains to a king? If you don't, try to think of the gift of life that men make for those whom they love; and, in Jesus' case, multiply by infinite.

HP

Democracy: a creeping civil war?

It pains me strongly the profound division that affects our western democracies.

Now Obama had his law on health reform passed. But at what price!

I do not enter in the merit of the thing. From what I read on the newspaper I trust, it isn't a radical thing, on the contrary, it is rather moderate, to the point, it suggests, that it could have won a bipartisan consensus. Instead, it was passed without a single republican vote. And it left the country more polarized than ever.

Why to do it this way?

All of Obama's talk in electoral campaign about wanting to reconcile the country revealed itself just hot air.

Is it possible, I ask, that our democracies have to be some sort of creeping civil war among at least two opposing factions?

HP

Abortive Attempt to Reform Health Care

I recently had an exchange with an old and dear friend, who, as a result of a comic case of mistaken identity, engaged me in a discussion of abortion, its legality, and the best way to help assure that abortions do not happen.

My friend encouraged me to support adoption, rather than decry abortion, saying that time and resources are better spent in positive rather than destructive work.

Below is an excerpt from my reply, revised and expanded for present purposes:

Dear ________,

I share in your dismay over many pro-lifers' incessant and often seemingly exclusive desire to condemn, decry and denounce.

I do believe that people who hold in the sanctity of life have a duty to allow their conviction to inform their action.

I often find myself saying to fellow pro-lifers: "Well, why would you expect the folks on the other side of the issue to listen to what you have to say, after treating them as you have? Are you generally well disposed to total strangers who accost you on the street and call you a murderous monster? Screaming and shouting invective may make you feel better for five minutes, but if what you want from your pro-life advocacy is a fleeting feeling of righteousness, or worse, a permanent sense of moral superiority, then I am afraid I cannot come with you."

The thing is, the vast majority of pro-life people see it as I do, and act accordingly. You and most folks hear only the loudest, and not the best or most representative voices in our chorus. This is very sad, for it leads many people, as it has apparently led you, to believe that people in the pro-life camp are angry, self-righteous prigs perpetually in peril of tumbling permanently into full-blown hypocrisy. When you have for your interlocutors such people as I have described, and only such as I have described, it is easy to avoid asking yourself whether the position they espouse may have some small grain of merit, their convictions a crumb of truth.

Too easy, if I may.

More important, however, and much more disappointing, is your apparent inability to distinguish the question of personal witness, which is essentially private, from the essentially public question of policy, and the debate of the relative merits of various public policy positions, and the more basic issues on the ground of which those questions of policy are debated.

Take Roe, for example: I think it is a bad opinion, and ought to be overturned. I think it ought to be overturned in a way that returns the question to the states, where the power to police the medical profession has traditionally been and generally is lodged in our system.

I think Roe is bad because it is based on the notion that the absolute liberty of opinion, which we have by nature and in which we are protected under fundamental law, circumscribes a whole area of conduct and segregates it from the oversight and regulation of legislatures - and so on grounds that the area is "private".

There are two problems with this:

1. Nothing involving more than one person is private: abortion involves at least the pregnant woman and a doctor. The claim to protection under privacy constructions, even granting these last, mus appear to you to be utterly absurd, when you consider that abortion clinics and providers are subject to all public health laws.

2. While it is true that no man-made law can compel a person’s assent to a given opinion, yet a government must be able to regulate conduct in order to fulfill its duty to protect life; in a regime such as the American one, where the power to make law rests with elected legislatures, such bodies must be assumed not only competent, but duty-bound to enact laws based upon the informed consensus their members reach regarding opinable questions such as the proper age to drink, the maximum permissible speed at which a motor vehicle may move, and when human life begins.

Now, you may not ever come to agree with my way of thinking. You may not dismiss it as religiously motivated, let alone as the raving of a religious fanatic.

Let me offer the following appeal to everyone involved in public policy debate, and especially to those in public intellectual life: as we engage each other, let us always remember to ask our interlocutors to share their their position(s), and let us never foist personal caricatures upon our interlocutors.

At Long Last: a reply to the HP in re Prophet

It has been too long, since I appeared in these pages, if I do say so myself.

A good deal of water has passed under the bridge in that time, and I have much to say about it all, especially about the health care reform legislation that just passed, about the debate over it, and the consequences of it.

Before I get to those things, however, I owe a reply to the HP, who has kept the hearth admirably in my absence.

The issue is one of closed versus open witness, articulated in two separate posts (part 1 & part 2).

Specifically, the question is whether the description of Mohammad as "the prophet" in journalistic pieces is a violation of the neutrality that ought to attend the practice of that profession.

I tend to think it is, generally.

Coupled with journalists' and editors' naked references to Jesus, i.e. to Jesus sic et simpliciter, rather than as, "Christ", the appellation, "the prophet", is definitely inappropriate when attached to the founder of Islam.

The reason for this is that the two claims are basically incompatible: if Jesus is the Anointed One of the Lord, in the sense His followers claim He is, then the founder of Islam is a false prophet. Conversely: if Mohammad is a prophet in even the loosest possible interpretation of the sense he claims to be, then the claim of Jesus' followers, i.e. their participation in the confessio petri, "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God," is utterly vacant and completely false.

So, to call Mohammad a prophet is to violate the spirit of journalistic neutrality.

I would propose referring to Jesus as Jesus, and to Mohammad as either Mohammad, or as the founder of Islam.

As the HP points out, to call Him by name is not to deny His nature.

Best,
LD

An invitation

I am waiting for the Lazy Disciple's repartee on my recent comments on how to call the founder of Islam and why.

I know in fact that, while in agreement with the general intent of what I said, he doesn't agree with my granting Muhammad the title of "prophet".

I tried to explain in the last post the why of a possible granting of that title to that man: everybody is a "prophet" for that in whose name he is claiming to speak.

Probably, by saying so, I strand away from the current use of the word, to which we should after all stick, if we don't want to engender confusion.

The trouble is that confusion is already there in our current use of words. Taking words – like prophet – in their simple etymological meaning, is just a way to befuddle the reader, inviting, nay, provoking him to question the current use.

Who knows, it might help to make some clarity and dispel the present confusion!

HP

Notification:

Iàve been under a rock with work for a couple of weeks. I have lots to say to my stalwart fellow, the Humbly Presumptuous, and will be doing so starting tomorrow morning.

LD

Closed and open witness II

It's a week that I am brooding over the conclusions of the previous post, and consequently the title I gave to it, thinking they need some explanations, while, taken by other business, I didn't find the time to give them.

The other business is my teaching cultural anthropology. Now, we all know how close the question of culture is to that of religion, to the point that I dare say that religion is nothing else than culture, i.e. the understanding of the world out of which we live in its ultimate implications.

Multiculturalism is therefore nonsense. Even to declare all cultures equally legitimate, it's a way of affirming one's understanding of the world, and hence one's culture.

So, these days I was trying to introduce my students to cultural anthropology by explaining them this simple fact: simple, and though hard to accept in our liberal society, where what we call science is actually the culture by which we are taught to understand the world.

Thus, believe it or not, the problem we face with science is specular to the one raised by the religion of the book.

With the name of science it is brought forward a knowledge that is claimed to be based on evidence, and not on faith in someone, let's call him a prophet.

From Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century to Karl Popper in the Twentieth Century, the objection advanced to any talk of revelation is the same: you claim to have had an experience of God speaking to you; I don't say you didn't, but neither I can say you did, because I have no way to tell, being the evidence you appeal to foreclosed to me.

That's because you don't want to see the evidence available to you as proof of where my words come from – could the prophet retort, and throw the ball back to the scientist: your evidence is good enough to build atomic bombs, but not to prove that by so doing we achieve control of nature, because there is no such thing, but only God's will, to which we submit ourselves even when building such bombs.

Here it is the result of direct witness for alleged evidence: two kinds of "prophesy", speaking in the name of God or in the name of Nature, set the one against the other.

Reciprocally closed.

Cultural anthropology, instead, at least as I understand it, withdraws from such a confrontations of opposing prophetic claims. It's task is to take comparatively into exam men's witness. By way of this, the evidence it appeals to is neither immediately of God or of Nature, but of what human beings represent for each other.

Should we say their divine nature? God's potentia present in them and among them?

HP

Closed and open witness

How should the press refer to the son of Mary, in comparison, say, to the founder of Islam?

An article I run into sounded rather appalled by the familiar Jesus often used in recent articles instead of Jesus Christ; while the same newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, etc.) would preface the name of Muhammad with the title of Prophet.

Does this mean to recognize in Muhammad the "prophet of God", and make of Jesus a simple historical figure? And the same goes with Moses, equally mentioned without titles?

I don't think so.

Perhaps this use shows a concern to be over respectful of Muslim sensibility; but there is also something else.

I remember when I was in America, and I had at times occasion to deal with the kind of evangelicals who would ask, "Do you believe in Jesus?"

They didn't say: Jesus Christ, simply Jesus.

No way to be mistaken: nobody else bears his name.

Jesus is only him, that unique historical figure of whom it is witnessed that lived in Palestine about two thousand years ago, said and did formidable things, suffered under Pontius Pilate, died and was buried and… it is not the end of the story, because it is also witnessed to have been seen again alive.

On the contrary, Muhammad is a very common name among Muslims. By itself, this might not justify the adding of the prophet to the name, which, when used without specifications, shouldn't engender confusion. It would unequivocally refer to that historical figure who…

Who did what? Well, proclaimed himself "prophet", and, with those who believed him, waged war against those who didn't believe him.

Does this sound too reductive? It might be, but I don't think it is; if anything, it is just too short a summary of his life.

So, I willingly grant the title of "prophet" as part of the name. After all, that is the one Muhammad demanded for himself, and a detached observer can concede it. With the mental reserve of keeping the right of asking what it means: whom or what he speaks for.

The answer one gets, by reading the Quran, is quaint.

The book reports in writing Muhammad's words, uttered in trance as coming from out of him. What is quaint is the short circuiting of the witness so given. As prophet, Muhammad should bear witness to God; but, to the question how one knows to be so, he has no better answer than saying that it is so because God bears witness to him.

The detached observer, that I am, cannot help feeling a pang of dissatisfaction: he is left with the unavoidable doubt, whether Muhammad isn't actually bearing witness, through God's name, just to himself.

How much better, then, that simple familiar Jesus, naming someone who nothing wrote, and about whom we know that he bore witness to the Father because others bore witness to him. This way, doubts are open to reasoning on the nature of witness.

HP

To account for knowledge

You are always asking questions, and rarely give answers. It's right, how could I if there were no questions raised? After which anybody could see that at the heart of all political debates is the understanding of religion and science: what science is, and, correlatively, religion.

Let me give an answer: science is
a knowledge capable of accounting for itself.

Everyman, to whatever society he belongs, is convinced to have knowledge of the world he lives in, and accounts for it to the other members of his society. Are we able to do the same and to account for the knowledge of world in a society become planetary?

Well – so runs the average reply in liberal society – we have to distinguish: yes, for science, no, for culture and religion.

The trouble is that such an answer contains a petitio principii: it presupposes that there is a knowledge for which it is already reserved the name of science, while it is precisely the use of such a name that is in question.

We saw a couple of years ago, in occasion of the sentence of a tribunal in Harrisburg Pennsylvania, where this leads to: the demise of any rational discourse, by which knowledge could account for herself. As the sole justification for his sentence, stating that only the most accredited theory of evolution by chance is scientific, while any talk of intelligent design is a matter of religious faith, the judge gave the fact that such is the current use of the two words, science and religion.

It was like saying, on his part: I am competent to judge of a similar question because after all even the experts have no reasons to give, one way or the other.

Because there are no reasons to be given, not just for culture and religion but even for science, so called, all knowledge remains unaccounted for.

If the definition given above is correct, as I think it is, present day Western society appears, in spite of all the boasting for scientific achievements, very poor of real science.

To close, just a hint to further answers: only by turning to the Word made flesh, as the key to a comparative study of culture that includes together science and religion, so called, we can achieve a knowledge capable of accounting for itself.

HP

An European and an American question

The main difference between Europe and America…

Wait a minute, which Europe and which America do you mean here? Easy, America and Europe as they stand today, as political entities called EU and USA.

However, if you insist, I'll qualify them, from the cultural bias prevailing in one and the other, as new Europe and old America.

Funny thing, to qualify them in this way, one would rather think the reverse: Europe being old and America new!

It's not really so, because America appears to be closer to the overall European tradition than Europe, where the fashion of the day appears to be the detachment from her own tradition, often rejected with venomous hatred. It is there to prove it what I started saying:

the main difference between Europe and America is that in the USA nobody taking a radical anti-religious stance, say, with open declarations of atheism, would have any hope of being elected to high office. Not so in the EU, where it is quite the opposite, and declaring oneself a man of faith might even be politically an handicap.

Therefore the first, European question is: who, between an atheist and a theist, has a better claim to be a thinking man with the science necessary to govern?

The second, American question is: does any theism whatsoever enables to such a science?

HP

I love America

I live in Europe… and I love America.

What do you love in America? Europe, of course.

Then you love Europe, where you live. No way, I detest it.

And what do you detest in it? America, of course.

You are teasing us. Well, yes and no: I wanted to signal the ambiguity of the names by way of which we advance our claims.

The fact is that there are two Europes in America fighting each other:

an older one – made of Protestant Catholic and Jews – that found the way of flourishing in America, by an ongoing struggle to make her worth weigh more than her defects;

a newer one, that sprung from the older one with the claim to correct her defects once and for all, by exchanging reliance on faith with that on the rule of law: church with the state.

Over here, one of them Europes hates America; but was ready to love her again when Obama was elected, and showed her love by an unwarranted peace prize, declaring in this way: now you are like us.

Which is like which? One feeds on the other.

So, this America beloved by this Europe hates in herself the other Europe, hated in turn by this Europe as America, i.e. the other America.

It might be useful at this point to speak of Europe1 and Europe2, and in the same way of America1 and America2. This would clarify things. But things have to be kept muddy, because it is in the unspecified name of Europe and of America that claims are made to represent the overall thing.

Barak Obama, for instance, made some ambitious claims of wanting to rejuvenate America, in a way, he made it sound, to unify the two Europes in her.

The appearance, however, didn't last long.

Hey, with all this you haven't clearly come out in the open and declared which Europe or America you are for. And most of all you haven't told us yet why you started by saying that you love America.

It's clear, to make a claim. In Europe, for all the political squabbles, the fight is rather dormant. In America, it appears still quite lively. Here you have what I like in America, that makes America different from Europe. With this, if you don't see in favor of what or whom I am making the claim, there is nothing I can do about it.

HP

P.S. All this was prompted by the reading of Marc Steyn's article on which the LD called our attention. If you want, you can blame him.

A 'Must Read' from Mark Steyn

Neither the first, nor, we hope, the last.

"Keeping You Safe"

From Mark Steyn

on

NRO (that's National Review Online)

Money Quote:

[E]ven without launching a single missile, Iran will at a stroke have transformed much of the map — and not just in the Middle East, where the Sunni dictatorships face a choice between an unsought nuclear arms race and a future as Iranian client states. In Eastern Europe, a nuclear Iran will vastly advance Russia’s plans for a de facto reconstitution of its old empire: In an unstable world, Putin will offer himself as the protection racket you can rely on. And you’d be surprised how far west “Eastern” Europe extends: Moscow’s strategic view is of a continent not only energy-dependent on Russia but also security-dependent. And, when every European city is within range of Tehran and other psycho states, there’ll be plenty of takers for that when the alternative is an effete and feckless Washington.

A Blessed 1st Sunday of Lent to one and all:

LD

“Host” and “guest”

I kept on thinking on the question raised by Fr. Zuhsldorf about the right translation of the cumsubstantialem Patri of the Latin creed: whether it is better "one in being with the Father" or "consubstantial with the Father".

Now, from what I understand the question has been settled, by those who have authority to do it, in favor of the second option. If nothing else, this has the advantage of being closer to the Latin creed previously in liturgical use.

This granted, and convinced as I am that there is no substantial difference in the meaning of the two formulas, there remains, as a good topic for a blog salon, the question why Fr. Zuhsldorf should find the first one offensive.

A lady expert in translation (actually my wife) gave me the cue.

Schleirmacher, among other things translator of Plato into German at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, remarked that in translating one has to make a choice: between giving prevalence to the "host language", so to make the translation sound as smooth as possible, or to the "guest language", which can make the translation sound awkward.

In our case, consubstantial is certainly faithful to the Latin "guest", but not so familiar to the English "host". One in being might be more consonant to this last.

Even too consonant, if we share Fr. Zuhlsdorf's reaction, suspicious of English as metaphysical language: its lack of precision could lead to confusion, nay, confusion is already there!

In the way of conclusion, a maxim: he who wants to be confused, will certainly succeed in finding something to confuse him.

HP

Translating common sense

I was meditating a political post, prompted by the recurrence in Sarah Palin's speeches of the expression common sense, after finding it again in an article by a brilliant Italian journalist on Pope Benedict's speech to the Pontifical Academy for Life, where he proposed it to translate the more traditional expression natural moral law, itself a translation of the simpler lex naturalis, which, people used to know, implies a moral law.

Ah, misery and splendor of translation: traduttore traditore, is a common Italian pun.

It is not simply that what is natural and hence commonsensical for one, isn't so for another: it is worse; we don't mean the same thing by "natural" and "commonsensical".

And though, don't we know what common sense means? In a way we do, because the expression belongs to the common repertoire that is for us our language: it means, because we so use it, an appeal to our audience, an audience we'd like to be as wide as possible.

So, while I was pondering such thoughts, I ran into a large diatribe launched by Father Zuhlsdorf about the translation of the creed, from Latin into English, specifically where it says of the only-begotten son of God that He is… well, what He is, i.e. "one in being with the Father", or "consubstantial with the Father".

Father Zuhlsdorf made a substantial question of the choice between these translations of the Latin consubstantialem Patri. Meaning with this that… – hoops, here I am: needing to translate substantial. If I need to do so, can it then be a third alternative that of translating the original Latin expression with "of the same substance"?

It looks like we know, whichever translation we choose, what is a "substance"; or perhaps that we know what is the ousia contained in the original Greek homoousios , that consubstantialis translates into Latin.

Knowing as a matter of course how all these expressions translate from one language to another, it follows that we should be equally able to evaluate the correctness of each one of them!

And that would make a difference in what we hold as true, by way of which we define our Catholic identity!

Perusing the great number of comments provoked by Father Zuhlsdorf, I run into one that seems to be coming from palinian common sense. I copy it just as I found it:

I'm sorry to play devil's advocate here, but I sort of find it hard to believe that many Catholics will "stop and think" when they come across the word consubstantial. as a poorly catechized Catholic, I certainly didn't "stop and think" about anything that I didn't understand. do you think most Catholics without a solid faith foundation understand the reference to the bloodless sacrifice of Melchezidek? or what precisely "with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father" means? or how about even "hallowed be thy name". no, most simply recite it as a script. "Oh, this is when we say the Our Father". I once had a non-Catholic friend come to Mass and asked another Catholic about the order of things and finally this person said "OK and then we sing the Holy, Holy, Holy". When the non-Catholic asked why, the answer was, "i don't know, that's just when we do it." Similar responses to why the bells, why the incense, etc. why stand for the Gospel? I really don't think that simply changing the language is going to get people to stop and contemplate without explicit urging from their shepherds. in fact, I would imagine that most people who are Mass-going regulars who are confused on the issue would simply think "oh, consubstantial means 'one in being'". I'm not saying we're incapable, I'm just saying that I don't think the typical person who isn't grounded in the faith is going to step up and investigate without good solid homilies and catechesis.

Just a few comments. The Mass-going regulars might not be sufficiently grounded in the faith to be able to sort out what all the things referred to by lux_perpetua mean. But they might be sufficiently attuned to common sense to know what natural moral law requires - and might perceive that faith nurtures this natural understanding of theirs.

I am sorry. I disagree with Father Zuhlsdorf. Word by word translations, be it "one in being" or "consubstantial", are always betrayals of the original meaning.

The correctness of the meaning comes from the overall translation of the liturgical action, the purpose f which is to communicate to us who Christ is (which is to say, communicate His being to us), and why it makes sense to say that as the Son he is other than the Father, and that at the same time they are not other, being with the Holy Spirit the same and one God.

Does it sound as a riddle? Well, in a way that's what it is: the riddle of life, which we humans sense in the experience we make in common, of being one and many, diabolically torn by hatred or united by love in the Deus qui est caritas.

Liturgy, preaching, catechesis, are with the example of any saintly man given in order to introduce us to such common sense.

HP

Dear Postmaster General: a critique of CatholicVoteAction.org and a counter-proposal

With regard to the recent agitation for a repeal of the planned philatelic issue honoring Blessed Theresa of Calcutta, CatholicVoteAction.org has its heart in the right place.

Unfortunately, and as I have argued consistently in these pages, that is not enough by half.

I shall never cease to insist that, when it is possible to make one's point without questioning the motives of those on the other side of an issue, and especially without casting aspersions on the bona fides of those who think differently from us, we have a moral obligation to take care that we do so.

In this spirit, I would offer the following alternative language to that, which appears in the CatholicVote.org petition to the Postmaster General:

John E. Potter
Postmaster General
475 L'Enfant Plaza, S.W.
Washington, D.C. 20260

Dear General Potter:

We, the undersigned, write to you to express our support for the USPS decision to honor Blessed Theresa of Calcutta with a philatelic issue.

We understand that many of our fellow citizens are concerned that issuing the stamp might violate the principles on which our government is founded, and by which our civil society is ordered, insofar as the issue would honor a religious figure.

With due respect for the right of our fellow citizens to have and to express their opinions, and careful to eschew any suggestion of doubt regarding their good faith, we submit that their concerns in this regard are unfounded and their objections without merit.

The United States Postal Service has a long and distinguished tradition of celebrating humanity's great benefactors with philatelic issues. In the past, the USPS has honored eminent statesemen, soldiers, jurists, churchmen, artists and humanitarians.

Blessed Theresa of Calcutta has been honored by governments for her great work on behalf of the downtrodden, for her indefatigable defence of human dignity and for her ceaseless promotion of human happiness. For her absolute and utterly fearless militancy in the cause of peace in our world, she was made a Nobel laureate.

For the United States Postal Service to renege on plans bestow a posthumous honor on Blessed Theresa because she was animated in her life's work by religious conviction, were inconsistent with the best traditions of the United States Postal Service.

That's how I would have done it.

Psychology is Weird

Alright, eruderrimi lectores, I confess a certain perplexity: the new diagnostic and statistical manual, the DSM, is being prepared for publication.

Most folks familiar with the instrument (not a diagnostic tool. despite the title, and not to be used or really even examined by lay persons, despite its wide availability in leading bookstores) also know that there have been some fairly important revisions of the manual's basic structure through the years.

One of the proposals that caught my attention was that of folding the diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome into that of the general autism spectrum, meaning that there would no longer be a separate diagnosis for Asperger's.

Here's the thing: Asperger's is a disorder, the main symptom of which is extreme social awkwardness. Thing is, there's no cognitive dysfunction associated with AS. On the contrary, people diagnosed with AS are often considerably more intellectually gifted than other people their age.

So, this leads me to wonder: why is being a geek a mental disorder?

On the other hand, why is, say, the basic sexualizing of friendship not a mental disorder?

Serious question.

Discuss.

LD

A sign of grace

I read, in the new website vivailconcilio.it, run by a group of Italian theologians, the following strange statements:

that the Council's constitution on the Church Lumen gentium, declare her to be something like a sacrament, veluti sacramentum, because "without that veluti anybody could have suspected that the Council wanted to impose the Church to the world in her divine transcendence, rather than humbly proposing her as a 'sign' of God's grace revealed in Jesus Christ and to promote her industriousness amidst men as an unassuming 'instrument', aimed to the realization 'of the intimate union with God and of the unity of all mankind'".

What's so strange in this statement? you could ask.

Well, the fact is that I don't see the difference, in conceptual terms, between the Church presenting herself (why call it "imposing"?) to the world in her divine transcendence, and her being a sign of God's grace in Jesus Christ (and why this wouldn't be "imposing"?).

Well, I could be asked, don't you see that the author gave to the two things different connotations?

Of course I do, and it is precisely this that makes the statement strange: that to the same thing can be given, according to its verbal expression, a negative or a positive ring.

But it is the same nevertheless. So the difference is only in the author's head. In a way that makes him sound humble and unassuming toward the world, presumptuous and assuming toward the Church's past.

What else has ever wanted the Church to be, I repeat, except a sign to the world of God's grace in Jesus Christ? And the world, doesn't it stand because of it under judgment?

I thought that this is what Saint John's Gospel said.

By way of a hint. I think that all the trouble stemming in particular from the much famed Gaudium et spes (the pastoral constitution on the Church and the modern world) is in that word: world. We have been made to take it as referring to a neutral state of things, about which we don't need to exert our discernment and be judgmental. And we have been made to take it wrong: never, in human experience, there was, is or will be any such neutral state of things.

HP

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner!

Over at the redoubtable Fr. Zuhlsdorf's place, there is a great thread going on the ideal dinner party.

I urge you to go there and participate.

Here at the Chronicles, I would propose a variation on the theme, to wit:

A list of 8 living people, experts or public voices on a particular field or area of human life, who, brought together for a weekend house party, would be expressly forbidden to talk about their common subject.

E.G.

Bill Keller (NYT)
Giuliano Ferrara (Il Foglio)
Sylvie Kauffmann (Le Monde)
Berthold Kohler (Frankfurter Allgemeine zeitung)
James Harding (ToL)
Zhang Yannong (People's Daily)
Valery Ignatenko (Itar-Tass)
Sam Adesua (Nigerian Tribune)

would gather for a weekend in each other's company, during which they would not be allowed to discuss politics. Anything and everything else under the Sun, but no politics.

Any takers?

LD

The rhetoric of freedom

OK, I understand, dear LD.

You want an answer to the second of your quibbles. I delayed, because it is much harder to give. You object to the opportunity of raising the question of discrimination, more suited, you say, to an academic discussion, than to a press conference, where journalists will pick up your words and use them as they like. It is enough, you fear, to discriminate on the use of the word discrimination, to open oneself to the accusation of favoring "discrimination".

You might be right. And I indulged in lingering on the question of how we got there: at the point in which we should expect that that word would be taken the way you fear.

It is a question of rhetoric, you rightly say: knowing how to address one's audience.

Now, ancient theoreticians of rhetoric – which is the same as saying the Socratic philosophers Plato and Aristotle – teach something that is almost common sense, but of which it is always good to be reminded: to have a conversation, or to persuade an audience, it is necessary to find some common ground – tropoi (Greek) or loci communes (Latin) – from which to proceed.

The question is then: what loci communes can Church spokesmen find when addressing an audience of not very sympathetic journalists, more prone on raising scandal about her that anything else (also because, as you suggested in the last post, it sells better).

At stake, in the British equality bill on the background of this discussion, is the freedom of the Church, you say. It's here, perhaps, the common ground we are looking for. Because it is not at stake the freedom of the Church only, but everybody's freedom: the very idea of liberty on which our liberal societies are grounded.

Not easy idea, this of "liberty".

Sir Isaiah Berlin, in his Four Essays on Liberty, distinguished between "freedom from" and "freedom to": i.e. a negative idea of liberty, as freedom from constraint, and a positive idea, that gives to liberty a positive content, the state of things at which we have to aim by liberating ourselves from constraint. Only the first would be compatible with liberal society, the second would tend toward totalitarianism.

I humbly disagree from the eminent theoretician of liberal society, or at least I disagree from his overt formulation of the question. Once we include "freedom from" in a theory of society, we are ipso facto envisaging the whereto of liberty. Let's call it a civil society, in which people feel free to be in conversation, without constraints. And, let me add, there is no conversation without the truth of it.

My disagreement in not as such of great momentum. I only remark it, to point out why and how I see in liberty the common ground for a rhetorically sound approach on the side of the Church to present days' liberal audience.

And this takes me back to the first point, on which I lingered in the previous posts.

The letter of a theory of liberal society, like that of Isaiah Berlin I took as example, overshadowed its spirit, and liberty has come to be understood exclusively as freedom from all constraints: first of all, that of truth, and, with it, the truth of what conversation requires to be effective. The main preoccupation appears that of assuring liberty, in its wholly negative sense, equally to everybody. But in this way equality, no longer warranted by the cultivated capability for good conversation, has to be imposed from on high. Made into indifferent sameness, it enters in contradiction with liberty.

With affection

HP

A Calrification for the HP

I may be reading more subtly than I ought, but if I take the HP's invocation of Kung-Fu-Tsu (that's Confucius for you myopic Eurocentrists) as a gentle reminder, I am moved to revisit the text with which I conclude the original quibbling post, and to offer the following clarification.

I offered the following by way of conclusion:

Saying things like what the excellent bishop of Cardiff said may score you some points in a faculty coffee room debate, but it will also get you murdered in the press, and that last is the only one that counts, if your goal is to protect the rights of the Church and serve the real interests of society.

My point in these lines is most emphatically not to disparage the professoriate as such, nor much less to deny the centrality of the university (properly understood as a privileged place for the life of a community dedicated to free inquiry into the truth) in the Western civilizational project. Indeed, I think Hobbes had it right when he said that those who control the schools control everything (or words to that effect).

Rather, I wish with those lines to convey a rhetorical point, to wit: know your audience, and speak to them. The bishop of Cardiff offered excellent fodder for faculty discussion, and, had he been in a faculty lounge or even a Downing Street smoking room with other prelates, priests and MPs, his point would have been well made. He was, however, speaking at a press conference, to people whose job it is to write news articles and opinion pieces for concerns, the only purpose of which is to sell ad space at the highest possible rates, a purpose they accomplish by increasing circulation, which they accomplish by featuring scandalous and tittilating headlines.

The issue is basically one of rhetoric: it was not the bishop's invention that failed, but his disposition and elocution; he made a valid point, though he made it at the wrong point in the conversation, to the wrong audience and in the wrong terms. However clearly stated his argument might have been in action, it was ill-advised to give it then and there, for there and at that moment the only thing that counted was, well, something else.

LD