A Restlessness Which Leads to Peace

You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You
(St Augustine, Confessions I)

The 20th Century Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck said 'the point isn't the search, but rather the distress and unease which motivate the search.' This is a fairly sound observation. We are, each of us, individual subjects who seek in external objects the means to bring us that state of happiness which is necessarily an internal experience.

It is as if we were responding to a feeling of hunger by going dancing or shopping for new shoes. These can be such effective distractions that we forget our hunger. Nonetheless however busy we keep ourselves or however much we immerse ourselves in company there will always be times when we are alone and undistracted. It is then that we once again become aware of the gnawing emptiness at the centre of our being.

If the best response to hunger is eating then what is the best response to that distress and unease which proceeds more from the mere fact of being alive than from any one specific cause? My supposition here is that from the moment we first become conscious of ourselves as individuals until we draw our final breath we are always more or less uncomfortable about something. Since, during the course of a normal lifespan, every one of these particular somethings will change thousands of times the source of the discomfort does not rest in them as such but in our responses to them.

As I understand it (and I may be wrong) Zen argues that the problem lies in the human use of imagination. We do not experience reality as it exists in itself but only things which have been through a process of distortion by our thoughts before they present themselves to the observing part of our mind. That is, when looking at a thing or persons our ego, to put it crudely, asks and answers the question 'what's in it for me?' And then presents the image plus conclusion to the observing mind. Much of this processing happens below the level of consciousness and is practically instantaneous so that we are not aware of it, only of its results.

Additionally at any given moment we will, at some level, be thinking about the past or the future. Neither of these things have any real existence. Only the present moment exists. What, therefore, we hold in our minds is something which is both unreal and subject to ego centred imaginative distortions. The distress and unease which leads to a search for something to bring peace is a product of the radical strain we experience through inhabiting a reality which we never accurately recognise or appropriately respond to.

Much of this is good psychology and can be adapted fairly easily to Catholic belief. However Zen (again with the 'as I understand it' limitation) goes on to conclusions incompatible with Christian belief. Letting go of all our illusory thoughts, feelings and beliefs and being present fully and only in the moment we become aware that emptiness is the nature of being and that's all right. Our Self has no objective existence but is just something that comes into being and passes away with the moment, like the moment. The observing mind is simply the underlying Buddha nature of the moment and all it contains and of every moment. Realising our Buddha nature is to become one with all that really is and so our distress and unease, the products of imagination, melt away. Since we are oned with All we feel compassion for All and this compassion will be manifest in all the acts which we perform within the moment in which we happen to be.

While this Zen vision is not as nihilistic as some Christians claim it certainly lacks the Divine spark. If we are fully present in this precise moment then part of the reality we must encounter will be God. Not an abstract deity which is just another label for 'Buddha nature' but the personal God who loves me, who became Incarnate for me and suffered death for me on the Cross. This 'now' we are living in is not just something we observe it is also someone towards whom we are always relating, a relationship of love.

It is true that He is not the God of our imagining, the God we rebel against, the God whose existence we deny, the tyrant God. He is as He is and to know Him as He is we must let go our illusory thoughts about Him. It is true also that He may choose to be present to us in the form of absence; but this is a function of our relationship, it is the form He knows to be best suited to me at this time to help me understand Him better and love Him more. But He will appear to us under more than one form, as the sacrament of the altar, as the action of grace in our hearts, as 'something understood.' He is always with us.

If we are fully present in the God breathed 'now' and in all the 'nows' of eternity then this Love will grow as a reflection of His. And as His was a self-giving, sacrificial love for all that He had created, more than a passive compassion, then so must ours be. The restlessness that drives us to find rest in Him gives birth to the love that seeks to bring peace to all whom we encounter.
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The Charlotte Joko Beck quotation is from a talk called The Search in her book Everyday Zen

The picture is a detail from The Conversion of St Augustine by Fra Angelico 

The Gravity of Ascension

We believe we are rising because while keeping the same base inclinations (for instance: the desire to triumph over others) we have given them a noble object.
We should, on the contrary, rise by attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects.
(Simone Weil)

The time between the Ascension of the Lord and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost affords Christians the opportunity to reflect upon the necessity for grace. Without the Spirit we cannot ourselves ascend after Jesus. There is a gravity which draws us downwards to the things of the earth. Only God's grace within us can overcome this powerful earthbound force.

The absence of active grace opens up a void inside a person. Our Lady and the Apostles recognising this emptiness responded by prayer, vigil and a patient waiting for God to act upon them in a time and manner of His choosing. That which is best for us is that which He desires to give us.

For most of people, though, a vacuum is an abhorrent thing and we rush to fill it up with something, anything. The philosopher Simone Weil argued that the tool which we use most frequently for this purpose is imagination. In place of the true God, who has chosen to make absence His way of being present to us, we invent another god, or many gods to fill up that empty space.

One of the techniques which we use is to pretend that our wrongful desires, such as the longing to gossip maliciously about friends, family and colleagues, serve a good purpose. We are, after all, decrying their vices in order to implicitly praise the opposite virtues. Likewise if we respond to the angry and suspicious by being aggressively self-assertive in return it is because we are in the right and they are in the wrong.

This is transparently self-deceptive and we rarely convince even ourselves. Moreover when such behaviour becomes habitual not only do we not rise but the gravity of what we do drags us down until we are wholly of the earth earthy. Frequently repeated actions change who we are and how we think. And when those actions are founded upon self-serving fictions and our basest inclinations then they not only lead us to hell they become themselves, for us, a present hell of perpetual anger, maliciousness and distrust.

If we have families, jobs or studies to occupy us it is unlikely that we can set aside as much time for prayer and vigil as Our Lady and the Apostles did. While doing as much of this as we can we can use the rest of the time "attaching noble inclinations to lowly objects." Here the philosopher echoes St Therese of Lisieux who wrote "I applied myself above all to practice quite hidden little acts of virtue; thus I liked to fold the mantles forgotten by the Sisters, and sought a thousand opportunities of rendering them service." We rise then by doing the littlest of things for the sake of love and only for love. This is not an act of the imagination, we recognise these things for what they are, it is an act of the will which we make to overcome gravity while waiting for transforming grace.

Even the desire to do good is itself an action of the Spirit within us. Yet as He is infinite His presence can take an infinity of forms and grace be be present as a passive or hidden force in our hearts. It resembles the story of Jesus asleep on the boat (Mark 4:35-41) The ship cannot sink so long as He is aboard but it can be severely tried by the fury of the storm. In His own good time (perhaps sped up by prayer) He awakes and by His active power brings peace and "a great calm." So too with us, we cannot ascend to the spiritual heights without His active grace but by cooperating with His hidden grace through 'lowly objects' we can bring ourselves to Pentecost.
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Doing Good Because It Is Good?

Was it not thy duty to have mercy on thy fellow servant, as I had mercy on thee?
(Matthew 18:33)

It is sometimes argued that we should do good simply because it is good and not out of any desire for reward or fear of punishment. And, it is frequently added, the most powerful force preventing people from doing good is often religion. Although the argument is superficially plausible it contains multiple flaws.

One of these is the assumption that 'Good' is a category which is immediately obvious to all and that everyone shares the same understanding of it. That being so, where Good is 'common sense' or a thing that 'stands to reason' or an inherent 'natural' quality, then only an irrational counter-balance, like religion, can lead people astray. But it is not so. I propose to look at three concepts, Forgiveness, Mercy, and Duty, to make the point more clearly.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt, who was no Christian, wrote "The discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth" This does not mean that the concept had no prior existence what it suggests is that Jesus injected it into the everyday practice of ordinary people in a way which had not previously occurred. Rather like rock and roll existed before Elvis but until he released the single Blue Suede Shoes it did not enter the American mainstream.

Forgiveness is not a 'natural' reaction. Retaliation is the impulsive response to injury. While a case in Reason can be made to justify forgiveness one at least equally strong can be made to justify its opposite. So, a decision has to be made as to which of these is Good and it is by no means obvious to 'common sense.' Arendt put it like this "The freedom contained in Jesus’ teaching of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end." This is a fairly subtle point, albeit a significant one, and would not have entered into the current of daily life in the West had it not had a powerful agent promoting it. By which I mean, specifically, the Catholic Church.

The case may become clearer if we consider Mercy. Unlike forgiveness which anyone can practice Mercy is a quality which only the powerful can exercise. It means restraining that power when one could use it, not because such restraint benefits the strong one but because it benefits the weak one. Again, this is not something obvious to 'common sense' In ancient thought, summarised by Thucydides in the Melian Dialogue, it was held that the strong ruled because they could and the weak obeyed because they must.

Christianity introduced the idea that even the very powerful are themselves recipients of Mercy from God and if they desire to continue to receive that Mercy then they must themselves be merciful. Once more, the concept of mercifulness existed apart from the Church. The Stoic Seneca, who was to the Emperor Nero much like Steve Bannon is to President Trump, wrote an essay on Clemency. But the suggestion was not that Nero was under a binding obligation to be merciful simply that it befitted him as an adornment to his rule, nor was the principle capable of infinite extension to everyone with the least little power over another human being.

The Christian notion that we should give mercy and forgiveness because we receive it does not come from the realm of 'common sense' or 'nature.' There is no 'because' to be logically derived from a set of relationships where A receives mercy from B and then mercilessly denies a request for mercy from C. Why should A be merciful to C, from whom he has received nothing, just because B has given him something? Well, because he has a Duty to be merciful. But this Duty does not emerge from the realm of pure thought alone, it comes from the spiritual realm, that is, it is a religious Duty.

For more than a thousand years almost everyone in the West frequently repeated the words "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us." More than that from early childhood they were catechised into owning these words, into making them a reality in their daily lives. They became and have remained part of the furniture of the Western mind and Western sentiment. If they now appear to Westerners as 'common sense' it is not nature which has effected this level of understanding, it is the Christian Church, it is Jesus Christ.

At its highest possible expression Absolute Good is not a series of propositions we can deduce from our immanent surroundings. It is a transcendent reality which we encounter. God is Absolute Goodness and if we have a duty to do Good apart from considerations of reward and punishment it is because God is Good not because we are.
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On my *other* blog I have looked at this from another angle in- Are Atheists More Moral than Christians?

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The painting is The Parable of the Unmerciful Servant by Barent Fabritius.

Wicked Thoughts

Jesus read their minds, and said- 
Why do you cherish wicked thoughts in your hearts?
(Matthew 9:4)

Although Our Lord had a specific audience when He asked this question it is as apposite for us now as it was for them then. There is no record of them attempting an answer but I think it is possible for us to do so. The key words to think about, it seems to me, are 'cherish' and 'hearts'

The thoughts which we hold in the fully conscious part of our minds are open to be comprehensively analysed by our Reason. That is, we can examine them from all angles and consider their rightness or wrongness, their fitness for purpose. New ideas are easy to treat in this fashion, older ideas, which have become habitual, are more difficult to see fully because we have ceased being aware that they are ideas. Nonetheless, even with them, searching self-examination allows for their flaws to be spotted and corrected if we have the courage or imagination to do so.

This is not so with the thoughts of the heart. These exist in part below the level of our awareness, we know the conclusions but the process that led to those conclusions being reached is hidden from us. They cannot then be fully examined by Reason but they can powerfully influence what we do and say. The concealed root for many of our heart-thoughts is what Buddhists call desire and Christians lust. Although this last word is usually associated with sex nowadays it really means a strong want or longing for something attainable in this material world. When our lust for something is attached to our will so that we both desire and seek to obtain that something then our heart gives birth to its thoughts.

 We can be said to cherish them when we hug them close to ourselves despite the warning which we receive from Reason. Which is to say, because our heart-thoughts are linked to an insatiable lust and a fixed will they constantly present themselves before us (and others) as the wellspring for our actions in the world. To the extent that they do so we can apply our Reason to them and notice their wicked origins and outcomes. Yet Reason alone is powerless to defeat them because, as the Christ noted, we cherish them so.

Only the gift of God's grace through Jesus gives us the strength to defeat the thoughts of the heart. Alone we lack the strength though we may possess the desire. For most of us the last heart-thought to which we most stubbornly cling is the pride that imagines we can win our own battles with ourselves. Once we have the humility and realistic self-understanding to let go of that and allow the Holy Spirit to do His gracious work in us then we can hope to be set free from bondage to sin.
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The picture is Bathsheba bathing from a Book of Hours in the Morgan Library 

Repent! Of What?

In contemporary English the command 'Repent' is generally considered to have 'of your sins' as its object. This, however, is not necessarily so. That is, while the correct response when considering your sins is always repentance it does not follow that the correct response when thinking about repentance is an exclusive focus on sin. The two things are not invariably linked in Christian Scripture. St Mark reports the beginning of the mission of Jesus in this way-
After John had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God: “This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
(Mark 1:13-14)

The final clause might be interpreted as two separate commands-
1)Repent of your sins and also 2)believe in the gospel.
But it seems to me to be more likely that it is a single command-
Repent and therefore believe in the gospel.
If we consider that the word 'repent' has an existence apart from the word 'sin' then we need to know what it means. The Greek original of which it is a translation is metanoia which literally means change ones mind. Since, however, the ancient Greeks meant something much more by the concept of Mind than modern English speakers do the literal translation does not help us much. I think that we would have a clearer grasp of the command if we took it to mean something like 'completely reorient yourself and your direction of travel.'

The answer to the question 'repent of what?' then becomes 'of everything.' This is why our Lord would think that one who repents would therefore believe in the gospel because if we orient the focus of our being and activity away from the material realm of the senses then it can only be towards the spiritual realm which He names the kingdom of God. Of course the demand to repent of everything is the most radical of all possible demands and prompts the supplementary question why? It is easy enough to assess what we would lose from such a change of direction but it is less clear what it is that we would gain. Indeed the why question is one of the underlying assumptions of the Atheist Bus Campaign slogan "There's probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." The assumption here being that enjoying life is the thing we would lose and worrying is the thing which we would gain if we respond to Jesus' invitation.

There is actually some truth in this if we accept the idea that the object of repentance is always 'of your sins' because then we would spend all our time worrying about how good or bad we are at adapting our external behaviour to a more or less rigid set of rules many of which seem arbitrary to ourselves and even more so to our neighbours. However if we go with the idea that it means a reorientation of everything then it knocks two of the slogans ideas on the head. Firstly, a life directed primarily to the things of the spirit enables us to affirm that actually, yes, there is a God. Secondly, we discover that worry is far less of a factor in the spirit filled life than it is in the materialist one and that if its characteristic isn't enjoyment that is only because its characteristic is joy. What I am doing here of course is making an assertion. The only way to find out if it is a true assertion is to try it for yourself. Repent and be made anew.

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What is Man? Part 2

Lord, what is man that you take notice of him;
    the son of man, that you think of him?
Psalms 144:3

Look into this mirror every day, O queen, spouse of Jesus Christ, And continually examine your face in it.... that mirror suspended upon the wood of the cross
St Clare of Assisi- Fourth Letter to Blessed Agnes of Prague

In Part One I suggested that by gazing into the mirror of Christ Crucified we can see answers to the question What is Man? (male and female) because Jesus is an icon of what a human should be like and because His situation is emblematic of the human condition. I proposed that 'Man is loved and lovable' is one conclusion we can deduce and that 'Man is a sinner' is another.

The Crucifixion is something voluntarily endured by our Lord because it is the efficient means for redeeming fallen humanity. We can deduce from this that, insofar as He is representative of us, that we can add 'Man is a lover,' that is one who loves, to our list of essential human qualities. However, although we can say that Man is loved and lovable unconditionally we must qualify the truth that Man is a lover with the fact that he is also a sinner. This means that every expression of love or feeling of it is, at least potentially, tainted by sin which is produced by disordered affection for or attachment to certain inferior goods at the expense of Good as such.

The idea, recently expressed, that 'love wins' is unreservedly A Good Thing is something I have challenged on my other blog. For our purposes I would say that love translated into intention and act always has to be evaluated in the light of how it fulfils its purpose. What this purpose is might be more easily be discussed if we consider that another conclusion we can draw from the mirror of Christ Crucified is that 'Man is dependent.'

An archaic meaning of the word dependent is 'hanging down' so Jesus is literally dependent upon the Cross. More generally though it is true to say that humans are wholly reliant on the objects of the universe. They need air to breathe, food to eat, materials for homes and clothes and so on. More than that before our Lord was in a position to say 'it is finished' and complete His mission through death He first had to address the needs of His mother and the beloved disciple, placing them into each others care.(John 19:26-27) It might be said that a sub-category of 'Man is dependent' could be rendered as 'Man is necessarily social.' That is, humans depend not only upon things but upon each other. Or, to be more personal I depend upon others and others depend upon me. This applies even to hermits or misanthropes since our present state of being incorporates our entire personal history and human life begins as dependent from the moment of conception in the womb of another person. Also what we do now may intentionally or unintentionally have an impact on another person in the future.

These things taken together, Man as lover, sinner and dependent, have implications. For people on the Left this is a fairly uncontentious statement when it applies to the environment, where humans are called to be stewards and to put curbs and restraints upon their appetites in order to prevent the destruction of things and its incident impact upon humans. However, it becomes contentious when applied to societies and individual people. For the Right the reverse is true, they are often happy to despoil the planet but insist upon particularly strict form of outward behaviour and morality. As a Catholic I would say a plague on both your houses, we must protect both the planetary and the human ecology. As Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI put it-
 "The book of nature is one and indivisible; it includes not only the environment but also individual, family and social ethics. Our duties towards the environment flow from our duties towards the person, considered both individually and in relation to others"
(World Day of Peace 2010)

In Part 1 I suggested that divorce and homosexuality are taken as test cases, modernist thinking see's affirming them as being necessary to their project of maximising human happiness through maximising human independence. But, since we are dependent creatures independence necessarily has its limits. In relation to God we cannot be independent, in relation to each other we should not be independent. This is not to say that there is not a place for human privacy, for solitary communion with God and with our own souls. Christ Crucified was alone and, for the most part silent so we can deduce another human feature to be 'Man is an individual.' Again, though, this is a qualified truth which needs to be considered together with the truth's of dependence and sinfulness. Given these truth's maximising independence under the illusion that autonomy is either achievable or desirable is simply going against the grain of what human nature actually is. That we may, or many of us anyway, may want this license to behave as we will is a sign of our sinfulness, not of our inborn thirst to be free from the constraints of obligation which love when not disordered by sin places upon us.

The Catholic arguments, then, against divorce and homosexuality proceed from the assumption that these are lesser goods which disordered affection places above Good as such which we should be pursuing. The family, open to new life, nurturing and caring for existing life, centred upon the married couple is the basic human unit which is divinely designed to meet human needs and allow for the most optimum flourishing of the human spirit. All human life, even celibate life, is ordered around the family to support it by deeds, sacraments and prayers. Anything which seeks to dissolve this unit institutionally or legally is an enemy to real human freedom because it strikes at the roots of real human nature.

Of course, because of the ever present reality of human sinfulness many human families fall well short of their potential and can sometimes become the source of real suffering, torment and cruelty. 'Man is a creature who suffers' is another vision we see in the mirror of Christ Crucified. Suffering and sorrow is an inescapable part of the human condition, no structures or reconstruction of society will end that because all of them, each of them, will be corrupted by the sinfulness of the humans who run them if not in the beginning then certainly by the end. The most we can do is create the best possible structures, inculcate the best possible values in our children and young people and offer fervent prayers to our merciful God. Structures which uphold the family but which minimise the suffering caused by dysfunctional families or by disordered sexual desires through offering protection against violence, bullying and unjust discrimination offer better possibilities for humans to fulfil their potential as people who are loved and lovable, sinners and lovers, dependent and individual, capable of suffering than those which sweep away all these truths and replace them with the falsehood that humans are autonomous individuals and that individual love, unpredictable and changeable, should always win.


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The painting is Crucifixion (Escorial) by Rogier Van der Weyden

What is Man? Part 1

                                                     Crucifixion- Alonso Cano


Lord, what is man that you take notice of him;
    the son of man, that you think of him?
Psalms 144:3

Look into this mirror every day, O queen, spouse of Jesus Christ, And continually examine your face in it.... that mirror suspended upon the wood of the cross
St Clare of Assisi- Fourth Letter to Blessed Agnes of Prague

We tend to think that the enquiry What is Man? (meaning female and male) is a philosophical question. The psalmist reminds us that it is also a theological one. In order to understand the relationship between humans and God it is necessary to understand the nature of each participant in that relationship. One significant difference between the two disciplines is that theology unlike philosophy regards the contents of divine revelation, such as scripture, to be part of the data it needs to consider. It appears to me, nonetheless, that since the time of the 'Enlightenment' Western philosophers have implicitly accepted that the propositions which theologians have advanced in answer to the question should form part of their philosophical first assumptions regarding Man. As Western societies become post-Christian, however, this is decreasingly the case. It is my contention that the more philosophers confine their considerations to merely human sources and propositions then the more inhuman their philosophies become so that a Culture of Death increasingly emerges.

This sounds counter-intuitive to everyone who isn't hard-core religious. Surely, the argument would go, nowadays we are more accepting of things like divorce and homosexuality? This must prove that philosophies have become more human by being less judgemental. Against this I would contend that these changes proceed not so much from compassion towards our fellow humans as from indifference about them. People can do what they like whether it makes them happy or not because freedom, conceived of as autonomy, not happiness is the major concern of human philosophy. We are permissive about others only because we wish others to be permissive about ourselves. Doing what we wish has priority over doing what is right because (a) that way we need acknowledge no external constraints upon our freedom and (b) there is no consensus about what is right. Against this I hope to demonstrate that the Christian answer to What is Man? provides the basic assumptions which we require to form a philosophy which is truly human in the sense of guiding humans to fulfil their essential natures as creatures whose purpose is not to be autonomous pleasure-seekers but to give of themselves in loving service to others.

For Christians, I think, the best place to start is not the beginning if by beginning we mean- 'Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness' (Genesis 1:26) This is because the icon of God implied here is not Adam as archetypal Man but-  'in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them'. That is humanity as a whole is a reflection of God and each individual is only imperfectly such. In the figure of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Mary, however we see what it means to be Man and what it means to be God distilled into a single person. Thus we can avoid abstractions and come quickly to concrete definitions and propositions by fixing our gaze upon Him. More than that, St Clare (like many of the women who have taught the universal Church) showed great wisdom when she suggested that it is Christ Crucified who reveals ourselves to ourselves most fully. He does so, I would suggest, in two ways: as He is in Himself we get a positive vision of what Man is or should be and through Him as He is situationally we can make inferences about Man.

                   

                            The Death of St Clare- Master of Heiligenkreuz

One aspect of our Lord's Passion is that it was voluntarily undertaken for the sake of liberating humans from bondage to corruption and death. We can infer from this that, since this liberation is offered to each human ever conceived, Man is loved with an extreme, self-sacrificial love. That is, every human person is the object of an infinite love. Further to that we may add that since it can be said of God that not only is He Love but He is also Reason (as mentioned in my post Why Be Moral?) this love is a rational love. Which means that it can be posited of Man that he is lovable. If we pair these things then one part of the answer to What is Man? becomes Man, individually and collectively, is loved and lovable from the moment of conception through to the moment of natural death and at every single point in between. If we accept this proposition then we must conclude that human life is a sacred thing just because it is human and for no other reason.

We can see here a contrast with post-Christian philosophies which could be summed up in relation to the social issues I mentioned earlier. A Christian philosophy would propose that we love divorced persons and homosexual persons. A post-Christian one proposes that we love divorce and homosexuality. The difference outcome flows from the different reasoning process. If the priority is to ensure the maximum independence of each person from every other person then almost anything which dissolves bonds, particularly the strong bonds which family creates, is welcomed. If, however, the aim is to simply love what is sacred, because it is loved and lovable, then a desire to strengthen not weaken bonds emerges. It might no doubt be argued that divorce and same sex partnerships are different ways for love to express itself and that in any event Catholicism has not in practice shown much love for divorced persons or homosexual persons. The latter point is only valid insofar as one reads it to mean that Catholics have not always displayed this love, philosophies are not always well served by their followers. The former point is covered by the next thing which is revealed about Man in the mirror of Christ Crucified.

The proximate cause of the Passion was human sin. It seems anachronistic to talk about sin in this era since the non-Christian population is largely divided into those who know what the word means but don't accept the concept and those who have no real idea what the concept actually is. So to say that another part of the answer to What is Man? would be 'Man is a sinner' requires some explanation. The Catechism defines sin thus- "Sin is an offence against reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and neighbour caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the nature of man and injures human solidarity" Another way of putting it is that it is an exercise in radical autonomy, a putting of the desire of the self for some gratification ahead of all other considerations. Essentially sin is the practical application of a post-Christian philosophy stripped of its moral compass. The concept of solidarity is not one that is often adverted to in contemporary discourse because accepting it places one under the obligation of considering other persons before oneself. It has been used in the language of some political movements like socialism or nationalism but the Catholic understanding of it is a much deeper thing and it encompasses a network of relationships. Sin is that which intrinsically disturbs such relationships. Insofar as divorce and homosexual acts have those tendencies then they do not tend to human happiness and cannot be approved. These are issues which I hope to explore more fully in Part 2.


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Why Be Moral?

Surely the righteous shall give thanks to your name;
    the upright shall live in your presence.
Psalms 140:13

 If you consider that he is righteous, you also know that everyone who acts in righteousness is begotten by him
1 John 2:29

Before answering the Why question a philosopher would ask the What questions- what is morality? what is a moral life? After answering the What and Why they would likely then proceed to the How questions- how can I live ethically? how can human societies be collectively moral? This helps explain why philosophy books tend to be quite big and not very popular. They seem to spend a lot of time proving what the reader already knows to be true or attempting to disprove what the reader thinks of as 'common sense.' Religion appears to offer a way of short-cutting all this tedious playing with words. All religions have associated moralities and within the Abrahamic religions these have the sanction of divine revelation. Morality is what revelation says it is, obedience to God is the only acceptable response to revelation and within the content of that revelation, either in the form of scripture or divinely mandated authority, is all the guidance required for individuals and societies to live out the moral life in practice.

There is no real doubt that if this is an accurate summary of religious belief then many of the criticisms levelled at religion by New Atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens (God grant him rest) and the current Richard Dawkins (God keep him on Twitter) are well merited. Such a rigid structure which requires no moral judgement on the part of believers but merely an acceptance of the first principles of faith would lend them and their belief system to being manipulated in the service of anyone who could pervert the interpretation of revelation to suit their own purposes, as Islamic State and Boko Haram appear to have done with Islam. There are, however, a number of things which could be said about this critique. Firstly, any moral code which has been reduced to a written set of rules is liable to be misadministered by the kind of unimaginative epigones that rise to the top of an established bureaucracy. This will typically result in injustices and absurdities regardless of the original source of the code because the letter and not the spirit is the deciding principle in decision making. Stalinism is the classic secular example of this but even the much vaunted Western Liberalism is vulnerable to the same defect. Secondly, Catholic thought proposes two crucial considerations which must always be borne in mind by those seeking to apply the moral rules derived from revelation. These are the principle of reason and a living relationship with the divine source of revelation.

In an Address to scientists at Regensburg early in his papacy Pope Benedict XVI looked closely at the role of reason in religion. One of his key points was that part of the definition of God provided by the scriptures is that God is Reason in the same sort of way that we say God is Love. He focussed on the prologue to the Gospel account of St John 'in the beginning was the word' where what we translate as 'word' is Logos in the original Greek. He said 'God acts...with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason' One of the implications of this is that God cannot act irrationally, this is, as it were, a check on His omnipotence. And what He cannot do He cannot command. Therefore all moral codes which are derived or claim to be derived from divine revelation must past the test of reason. Moreover humans, being endowed by God with reasoning powers, are obliged to apply that test to everything which they encounter including revelation itself. A mechanical obedience to authority of whatever kind is of no merit, however meritorious the authority may be and however outwardly virtuous the physical act may appear to be. Right action always requires to be accompanied by right intention and the latter cannot be formed without the conscious and deliberate use of reason.

The Regensburg Address gave rise to a storm of controversy because a quotation used by the Holy Father from Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus was maliciously or ignorantly attributed to Benedict himself. The emperor had said "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Although Muslims were wrong to suppose that this was intended as a modern commentary by the Pope it might be argued that some of the other words used by His Holiness should have given them pause for thought- 'for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.' Speaking about theological speculations by both Christians and Muslims he added that they might lead to  'the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.' The Catholic Church has decisively rejected such speculations and the image of a God always in harmony with reason forms part of her infallible Magisterium. This cannot, however, be said for Islam or, indeed, for Judaism or the Christianity of the Reformation if only because there is no body with the authority to say it. Thus these religions remain vulnerable to dissident groups who will use the image of a capricious God as the basis for a moral code which demands obedience unmediated by reason from its followers.

                                            St Thomas Before the Cross- Sassetta


God should have more than a walk-on part in the life of His faithful people. That is, each person should have a living relationship with Him and this exchange of love should lie at the heart of their decision-making processes. The Apostle John suggests that those who live righteously are begotten by the Righteous One. I think that means more than asking What Would Jesus Do when we are faced with morally significant choices. It means that we should allow ourselves to be possessed by our Lord in such a fashion that He lives in us (and we in Him.) Thus it should be the case that He acts through us and that in a sense our moral choices are literally His. This is a difficult programme to fulfil of course but at the least when we are charged with making especially significant ethical decisions we should have recourse to prayer, meditation, study of Scripture and the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist. We give Him an opportunity to speak clearly within our very hearts and then we pause to listen to what He might say. In that sense I would interpret the psalmist words 'the upright shall live in your presence' as meaning that we only come to life as upright persons when we are in His presence. Apart from Him we can do nothing (John 15:5) Therefore it must be our aim to be as fully clothed with Christ as is possible in our daily journey because only so can we be fully alive to Him and, through us, He can be alive to those whom we encounter who will be affected by our moral actions. His choices are always morally good and where there is no difference between His choices and ours then we can be sure that we are living a moral life.

It is important to stress that any one of the three strands, revelation, reason, relationship, used independently of the other two is potentially dangerous. Revelation can be radically misunderstood, reason can be based on faulty assumptions, relationship can be illusory (atheists would argue that it always is.) Therefore the three must be woven together and all of them must lie behind any moral act we take individually or corporately. A further danger flows from the situation where revelation is understood to consist of nothing more than a written text. Here everything rests on private judgement so a person can believe that they have accurately and reasonably interpreted the text and that God has personally OK'd their interpretation. They can then go on to persuade others to agree with them and set in chain a movement grounded perhaps upon irrational and immoral premises. Against this there requires to be an authoritative source for interpreting revelation in the light of reason. It might be argued that this source itself can fall prey to irrationality or delusion and teach unreason as reason. Here the Catholic idea of infallibility presents itself not, as is generally thought, as an expansion of Papal power but a limitation upon it. An infallible teaching cannot be abrogated or negated therefore Popes are bound by precedent and cannot issue instructions which contradict previous ones. The moral codes present in the Church today are present in them for all time.

If we answer the question 'why be moral?' by saying 'because Jesus is moral' then we are correct but insufficiently so. Behind this answer is the question 'why is Jesus moral?' To which the answer might be that morality is always reasonable and God is reason and Jesus is God. Christianity proposes a morality which is, I think, of a much higher standard than can be proposed by unaided reason alone. That is, it is reason taken to a superlative level, revelation and relationship are the two wings upon which we can rise up to the level of a divine morality which is divine reason. It is not a rejection of reason or an alternative to it, it is the perfection of reason. So the question 'why be moral?' becomes the question 'why be perfect?' to which the answer this time really is 'So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect' (Matthew 5:48)


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The Devil is Dead?

                                            St Wolfgang and the devil - Michael Pacher


Be sober, and watch: for your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about, seeking whom he may devour: Whom resist steadfast in the faith, knowing that the same afflictions are accomplished in your brethren which are in the world.
1 Peter 5:8-9

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains
Jean-Jacques Rousseau 

The philosopher Nietzsche was somewhat premature in his announcement  "Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that GOD IS DEAD!" (Thus Spake Zarathurstra- Prologue) Despite several centuries of continuous assault belief in God is still buoyant even in Western Europe where the atheist campaign began and where it has been most successful. The associated attack on organised religion, specifically Christianity, has had more effect but still the Christian Church and the ecclesial communities of the Reformation remain stubbornly alive and kicking in Europe whilst expanding elsewhere in much of the world. By contrast there has been no real parallel assault on belief in the devil yet such belief has withered on the vine and even among Christians there are many who do not take the idea seriously.

Various factors no doubt contribute to this decline in satanic credibility but I will focus on one. The answer to the question 'what is Man?' (meaning female and male) has changed over the past six centuries or so and with this altered understanding of ourselves has come an altered conception of the forces that influence us. The rediscovery of classical sources during the Renaissance led the humanists of that epoch to recast human nature as being essentially good, that is, not fatally tainted by Original Sin in the way that had been understood since the time of St Augustine. The Enlightenment added to this the notion that Man was essentially rational, that is, governed by Reason. Man being good by nature and rational in motivation could, therefore, be relied upon to make sound moral choices unless external environmental factors caused them to act contrary to their nature and to reason.

To the obvious objection that Man everywhere behaved in cruel, selfish and immoral ways Enlightenment thinkers echoed Rousseau that the cause for this was to be found in the chains which bound Man, ignorance, poverty, tyranny and so on. If those chains were once removed through a restructuring of society and the banishment of ignorant superstitions (by which they meant primarily the Catholic faith) then Man born free would everywhere actually be free since there would be no impediment to them acting upon their naturally good and rational impulses. In this schema room could be found for God, conceived as an idealised form or collective expression of perfected Man, but not for the devil since Man's wicked actions could be explained as the product of environmental factors.

Every world changing idea is true to some extent, otherwise it would have no persuasive power. Here Renaissance humanism supercharged with Enlightenment deification of human rationality has several good things going for it. It is certainly true that humans are good-natured by design, that they are capable of governing themselves by Reason and that environmental factors play a major role in the moral and intellectual decisions which they make. The flaw in the argument consists of the fact that St Augustine was right, Man is tainted by Original Sin. The essential nature of Man is wounded and vulnerable to concupiscence independently of whatever their external environment may be. Once could recast this philosophically and say that because of his intense internal life of thought and emotion Man, alone in visible Creation, is capable of putting himself out of harmony with the cosmos and all around him through paying heed to his random thoughts and feelings ahead of anything else. Or, to say the same thing the other way round, Man requires to make a conscious and deliberate effort to put himself into harmony with the cosmos.It follows from this that we cannot bank on Man's essential goodness flourishing because it is subject to temptations from within that no restructured society can fully eliminate nor can we rely on Reason always conquering desire, lust or fear because the mere presence of the rational principle in Man is not the same as its sovereignty.

                                           The Good and Evil Angels- William Blake

It might, perhaps, be argued that modern thought has simply replaced one external agent, the devil, with another, the social environment and that while we have evidence for the latter we have none for the former. However, the Church has never accepted the validity of the argument 'the devil made me do it' The devil only has the power over us which we permit him to have. He is also called 'the tempter' and that because his power is a persuasive one, if we did not provide him with the materials to work with, our selfishness, greed, fear, ambition, desire and so on then he would have nothing with which to tempt us. Our fallen nature is the source of our propensity to sin and the more we deny that fallen-ness, the more we insist on our own perfectibility, then the less able we become to see the temptations that assail us without and within.

When we accept the universal and humanly unalterable nature of Man's vulnerability to temptation then reason will lead us on to recognise the need for a universal redemption from that bondage to sin. And universal redemption requires a universal Redeemer made to known to all through a universal revelation. And who better as Redeemer than one like us, tempted in all points by Satan yet triumphant over him, subject to the ultimate victory of sin and corruption which is death yet yet conquering over it? The same revelation which assures us that Jesus is our Saviour and Lord tells us too of our enemy the devil and if we accept the one then we must accept the other.

Of course there are many who accept neither. For those I have this thought. If the slogan of a century ago was Nietzsche's 'God is Dead' today it is Christopher Hitchens 'God is not Great.' The obvious answer to the first was 'God lives', the slightly less obvious answer to the second is 'Man is not Good' The problem of human wickedness is not solvable by human means alone. The chains which bind Man are not external to him, he generates them himself and will always generate them because he is always tempted to disharmony with the cosmos. If you defeat Christianity, if you destroy organised religion in the world there will still be one thing preventing you from creating the perfect society. The devil will be sitting on your back.

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G. K. Chesterton & the Square Circle

 For John the Baptist came neither eating food nor drinking wine, and you said, ‘He is possessed by a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking and you said, ‘Look, he is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is vindicated by all her children.”
Luke 7:33-35

Not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.
Orthodoxy Chapter VI by G. K. Chesterton

Writing about Chesterton is quite a tricky business. For most of the world's population if they have heard of him at all it is only as the author of the Father Brown detective stories. However for many Catholics, especially in the English speaking world, he is a towering figure, a great writer, controversialist and apologist. If I were to write uncritically about him many of the readers of this blog would think 'what's Catholic Scot on about?' If critically many devoted Catholics would think 'burn the witch.' So I am going, paradoxically, to do both although you will have to stick with me to the end to see how I do it.

Paradox is a big thing with GK, it is his favourite literally device. He routinely confounds expectations by taking an idea in directions you do not expect it to go. Although once you become familiar with his style your expectations change so the effect of the paradox loses some of its power to surprise. Indeed so relentless is his use of the device that you begin to long for him to do something else just for the sake of variety. I find the thing so wearing that I think I can honestly say that I have only thoroughly enjoyed two of his books The Innocence of Father Brown and Orthodoxy. There is arguably a third The Paradoxes of Mr Pond that I started to enjoy once I realised that intentionally or otherwise GK was parodying himself. All his other books contain lots of good stuff but are so continuously paradoxical that it tires me out to read them. It would be unfair to say that Chesterton was a one trick pony but if he had in actual fact been a pony there is no doubt that he would only have had one trick.

Orthodoxy is a defence of the Christian faith and the Christian Church, although many of its references are dated most of its underlying arguments are robust and still have a contemporary feel to them. From the first time that I read it Chapter VI most impressed itself upon me and stuck in my memory. You will scarcely be surprised to learn that it is called The Paradoxes of Christianity. The strength of the chapter lies in two things, it exposes the inconsistency of the critics and it shows the consistency of the Church. As far as criticism goes Chesterton draws our attention to something which we might lose sight of in the heat of day to day controversy, namely that the Church can never reform itself in such a way as to satisfy those who attack it. This is not least because those attacking it do so from all angles at once so if it trims her sails to the North then it will be accused of bias against the South and vice versa.

To take a couple of examples. The refrain that the Church should not meddle in politics is constantly heard. Especially the Church should never use it position to influence politicians or public servants. Many of those left-wing and liberal figures who are most vociferous on this point also furiously condemned the Church at the time of the US led invasion of Iraq for not excommunicating politicians and military personnel involved in the operation. That is, the Church both uses her power too much and not enough. Similarly liberal critics assert that the Church is too cosy with the powerful elites and always takes sides against the poor and dispossessed, even the outspokenness of an Oscar Romero or a Pope Francis does not still the criticism since their lone voices are set against an institutional bias in favour of the bourgeoisie. Those same critics also often go on to assert that atheists are smarter, better educated and more successful than believers. Which is to say that the critics form part of the elite which they affect to despise and the bulk of the Catholic faithful form part of the wretched of the earth whom they affect to care about.

                              St Francis strips himself of all his fathers wealth- Benozzo Gozzoli

The second part of the chapter goes on to the more complex business of explaining why the rationalists, or secularists as we might call them nowadays, although comprehensively wrong do have a glimmering of an insight. That is to say that the Church does hold flagrantly contradictory things in a creative tension. G.K. explains himself in this typically Chestertonian passage-
It is constantly assured, especially in our Tolstoyan tendencies, that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the Church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved.
In a sense the Catholic Church is a continuation of Jesus Christ by other means. As our Lord was both fully human and fully Divine at the same time without intermingling or confusion so the Church at all times seeks to keep in balance the fullness of human nature physical as well as spiritual, militant as well as meek, extroverted and introverted at the same time. The balance is not achieved by blending two things to make them one non-thing but by allowing each of them full expression  under the banner of Christ. The expression of St Augustine love and do what you will is a true summary of the Catholic creed. Governed by love you can will to be a hermit or run a railway station either will can be, if properly used, a full living out of the Christian faith.

The tendency of mediocrity, or common sense if you prefer, is either to seek a compromise by eliminating the extravagances of a St Francis or a St Joan or to effect the total victory of one tendency, humility say or pride, over another. Catholicism in finding room for both extremes and for moderation is a flagrant violator of common sense. You might think it something of a miracle if such an institution as the Church were to survive for as many as two centuries let alone two millennia carrying as it does such a weight of contradictions. And of course it is a miracle properly speaking. But because mediocrity has this almost innate tendency of thought and feeling and because, lets face it, almost all of us are mediocre then however much we may notionally accept the perspective of the Church we invariably fall into the complacent trap of not reflecting upon it and tut-tutting at the extravagances of some of our co-religionists.

And it is in this that Chesterton comes into his own. By his incessant use of paradox he continually unbalances us. Since it is only when we are off balance that we realise the importance of remaining upright G.K. serves to remind us that Christian balance, a holding of opposites in tension, is a thing to be striven for as a living reality within our own lives not a dead object to be admired at from a distance. Chesterton's continuous use of a single literary device irritates because it is meant to irritate, to make us wake up, to think a little, to react. By unbalancing his work, making it seem one trick only, he creates balance in his readers and thus G. K. Chesterton squares the circle.


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Dark Epiphany

                                         Elijah Fed by the Ravens- Jusepe de Ribera

How long, Lord? Will you utterly forget me?
    How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I carry sorrow in my soul,
    grief in my heart day after day?
Psalm 13:1-2

Want a New Years' Resolution ? Shed the pseudo-comfort of religion and grow into your own humanity.
Rational Minority ‏@MelaninAtheist  Dec 29

The Twelfth day of Christmas, January 6, has traditionally seen the Latin Church celebrate the visit of the Magi to the baby Jesus with His Mother and the Eastern Orthodox Church celebrate the Baptism of our Lord in the Jordan. Both celebrations are referred to as the Feast of the Epiphany because they represent moments of sudden understanding, a realisation that a manifestation of the power and wonder of God was somehow incarnate in the person of Mary's Son. For Orthodox and Catholic Christians such epiphanies are regularly recreated on a miniature scale through the Sacraments and above all through the Eucharist. Nonetheless for most hours out of the 24 the faithful have no such experiences. Conventional wisdom suggests that it is through serving our neighbours, above all the weak and vulnerable ones, or admiring the beauties of nature that we can most clearly perceive the presence of God hidden within that which surrounds us outside of the liturgies of the Church. So conventional indeed is the wisdom that I daresay you could find several thousand homilies, sermons, books, blogs or other media describing it. To this I have nothing to add, or indeed to subtract, the wisdom is a sound one.

There is another way of experiencing God however, a way which the Psalms often vividly express. this is the way of desolation, the experience of abandonment. That it is an authentic variety of religious experience we can see not only from the content of these ancient works themselves but also from the enduring way that generation after generation of believers, Christian and Jewish, have turned to them and made theme their own. If we assume that the @MelaninAtheist hypothesis is that the sole or dominant reason that people hold to a religious faith is because it offers them a form of comfort then this recurring desert experience of abandonment tends to disprove it. That most Christians most of the time experience desolation in their faith lives is not true but neither is it true that most of the time they experience comfort from it either. I would argue that all Christians are likely to feel that God has turned away from them at least some of the time and many of them feel it a great deal of the time.

If @MelaninAtheist is correct and the primary reason to cling to faith is that it gives a warm glow of falsely generated comfort then why continue to hold fast to it when it does no such thing? After all, in the West at least, the thought that God is not present to us because He doesn't exist will not be slow in obtruding itself into our thoughts. To persist in faith when its pulse is feeble, in hope when it seems vain and in loving that which does not respond is surely the opposite of being comforted. Of course, it might be argued that religion attracts masochists but it is a peculiar thing this Christian faith which attracts both the comfort-loving and the pain-loving at one and the same time with one and the same message.

The grim persistence of believers through the Dark Night of the Soul experience can I think be understood in light of the word 'abandonment.' It suggests that a prior relationship existed, that it was valued and nurturing but that it has now seemed to come to an abrupt end as the result of an arbitrary decision of the other party to it. The sense of misery and loss that the Christian feels is a product of the intensity of the relationship now apparently ended. But, it is not a simple bereavement for hope does not fully depart that at some point the relationship will resume and that any amount of suffering is worth enduring if only it will bring about that consummation. The perspective of  @MelaninAtheist is reversed for the person of faith will feel that it would be a pseudo-comfort to tell themselves 'there is no God' and that the affliction of God's absence is preferable to the fairy tale of God's non-existence.

                                             Elijah in the Desert by Washington Allston

What we might call the school of @MelaninAtheist might however be helpful in suggesting why it is that such periods of darkness are experienced by Christians. It is the 'imaginary friend' hypothesis, that is that God does not exist but believers create one to suit their image. This is half true, it is perfectly possible, indeed it is common, for people to believe in the One True God and yet to be idolaters at the same time. For the God they worship is not God as He is in Himself but a God largely of their own fantasy. The philosopher Simone Weil remarked Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life. It is not simply in relation to faith that we are dominated by our imaginings but essentially all our relationships are clouded with what we think, but do not know, about others and what we think, but falsely, about ourselves and the same principle extends to our practical view of the world we inhabit. It is rare for reality, the thing in itself, to break through, mostly what the thing or person means to us is what we choose it to mean. Indeed, there is a school of philosophy which argues that there is no 'thing in itself' but that all meanings are subjective, that is, imaginary.

Professor Weil also remarked  Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass. The desert experience of Christians is a time of stripping away. What they have imagined about God is now seen to be false. What they have imagined about themselves, their courage, steadfastness, enthusiasm &c. is also seen to be false. The dark epiphany of the long night is the realisation that beyond imagination, almost beyond hope, the God who really is has never, in truth abandoned them, He has been present as Himself only and not as the believers fantasm of Him and He can only be perceived as such when the believer is present to herself as herself and not as her overblown self-image.

So Christians can make their own the New Year wish of @MelaninAtheist, believers should indeed shed the pseudo-comfort of their religion and grow into their full humanity through the purest of possible relationships between themselves and God the Father through Jesus Christ the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.

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Unbelief & the Lust Loving Giant

                          The Prophet Nathan Rebuking King David by Angelica Kauffman

If only you would listen to his voice today,
do not be stubborn like your ancestors were at Meribah,
as on that day at Massah, in the wilderness,
where your ancestors tested me.
They tested me,
    even though they had seen my awesome deeds.
Psalms 95:7-9


The dragon—the prince of the abyss—rises in arms against those who keep attention on their heart, as one whose ‘strength is in his loins, and his force is in the navel of his belly’. He sends the lust-loving giant of forgetfulness against them with his clouds of fiery arrows, stirs up lust in them like some turbulent sea, makes it foam and burn in them and causes their confusion by flooding them with torrents of insatiable passions.
St Gregory of Sinai, 

When I exchange opinions, it cannot be called an intelligent debate, with some of the fashionably militant New Atheists I am often told 'of course you don't really believe this stuff.' What they mean, I suppose, is that I actually deep down accept the truth of their positivism and scientism but for some perverse reason of my own refuse to acknowledge that fact. Interestingly enough a common thread running through the Christian Scriptures is precisely the reverse proposition. The Israelites deep down know the truth about God but except for brief periods refuse to accept it; or at any rate accept it enough to base their entire life upon it.

In the Old Testament it is the book of Exodus where this phenomenon is most clearly manifested. The Children of Israel see the Red Sea parted, the manna falling from heaven, water springing from hard rocks and much, much more besides yet every new sign of God's power is followed by a new manifestation of distrust or disbelief in Him. So much so that of all the adults who left Egypt only two make it to the Promised Land all the others, even the great Moses, die in the wilderness because either they have rebelled outright or because their faith has wavered at times despite all the overwhelming mass of evidence in favour of trusting in the Lord. In the Gospels the pattern is repeated, from the outright oppositions of the pharisees and the high priestly party to the complete failure of even the Apostles to understand Him Jesus is ever cast as a figure always to some extent alone because no amount of evidence seems to convince anyone to cast themselves fully upon Him without the slightest reserve. Arguably the only recorded exceptions being Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus, who successively say Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died (John 11:21,32) and even more strikingly our Lady who simply said They have no wine (John 2:3)

The interesting psycho-spiritual question in all this is why would or why do people refuse to belief something which they know to be true? The most common reasons advanced in Scripture are that people 'harden their hearts' or that they are 'stiff-necked.' Although this seems like unpromising material to work with these analyses are more sophisticated than you might suppose. The heart is conceived of as the seat of emotion and feeling. To harden it is to shield it from an emotional appeal to which a person feels susceptible but to which they do not wish to yield. The stiff neck is a proud one that will not bend to the yoke, that is, one who desires only to go their own way regardless of any benefits that might accrue from going along a way chosen by another. Another fairly clear cut reason is illustrated by St John-
Some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, “What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation
(John 11:46-48)
The same event which prompted Martha and Mary to display unlimited trust in the power and love of Jesus led the Sanhedrin to draw the opposite conclusion. They perhaps recognised the extraordinary nature of one who could even raise the dead but they recognised still more the power of Rome and, like their ancestors of the Exodus, feared man more than they trusted God.

To have faith is to commit a bold action. This is not the same as to accept a philosophical notion. An idea may suggest to you that you should modify your life in this or that way so that you may live in a fashion consonant with your belief. But this is always negotiable; an idea is what you interpret it to be and, moreover, to serve the greater good you can fail to observe it yourself for the purpose of bringing about a change which will make it easier for others to observe it. Evil may sometimes be done that good can come from it. Faith is not of this nature. Its demands are absolute, it is non-negotiable and, as far as Christianity is concerned, it forbids doing evil under any circumstances whatsoever. So, people may refuse to accept a faith which their heart tells them is true or may be true because seeing the implications of it they are unwilling to surrender to them. St Augustine famously prayed Lord give me chastity and continence....but not yet. This is the kind of hesitancy which lies behind much heart hardening and neck stiffening.

It is perhaps obvious that those who greatly desire to commit great wickednesses will refuse faith but most people are not so far gone. The moral ambitions of unbelievers are not notably less altruistic or kind than those of believers. The crucial difference lies in the self image of of a person. The Christian aims to make their own the prayer of Jesus not my will but your will be done (Luke 22:42) the unbeliever aims to make their own will as perfect as they can. Or, to put it another way, in a discussion I once pointed out that the opening word of the Rule of Benedict is Listen to which the response of the antagonists of faith was that it should be Think. The core dispute between believers and unbelievers concealed under many forms is always about authority or autonomy. Do we accept our littleness and trust ourselves to One who can be trusted or do we consider ourselves to be captains of our own ship and masters of our own destiny even though, after all, we can never be confident that some shattering event wholly beyond our power will not change everything for us over the course of the next five minutes?

                                          The Conversion of St Augustine by Fra Angelico

If the moral ambitions of unbelievers are on the whole on a par with those of Christians the same can also for the most part be said of moral outcomes. Which brings us to the lust loving giant of forgetfulness (at last! I hear you cry.) Here forgetfulness does not mean the same thing as forgetting. It is not a failure of memory but a casting of a veil over it. Sometimes when a person is about to commit a particularly gross sin they will turn a picture of Jesus to face the wall or put a statue of our Lady into a drawer. Forgetfulness is the psychological mechanism which does the same thing internally that the hiding away does externally. There is no illusion of righteousness, the sin is known to be a sin, but under the sting of temptation the door which leads our thoughts towards the helps promised by faith, through prayer, Scripture, the sacraments and the support of the believing community, is closed. We know that we can be helped to stop doing whatever it is that we are about to do yet we do not seek that help because we fear that it might be successful.

Instead of refusing to believe what they know to be true a Christian often enough will refuse to do what they know to be right. By holding to faith they can look forward to the luxury of repentance and reconciliation and by submitting to forgetfulness they can also enjoy the pleasure of present sin. At this point belief has indeed been reduced to a notional acceptance of an abstract idea, it has ceased to be a living force and become for the time being just a collection of dead words.

Refusing to believe and refusing to act are not two separate refusals proceeding from two different sources. They constitute a single act of the will, an assertion of the right to be autonomous. It is asserted that what we do with ourselves is our own concern and our own choice and this freedom is our highest good. Such is the modern Western credo. And it is false. In the face of demands upon us from external sources the highest good consists not in resisting them but in submitting to them provided we can do so without sin. The stability of society depends in no small part on spouses submitting to each others needs, parents submitting to their children's needs, children submitting to their parents. Societies which break that pattern via abortion, contraception, divorce and a cult of youth commit demographic suicide. And the family is but an imperfect model of the relationship which should subsist between believers and their God.

The demands of faith are not so great as some of the demands of the world. An athlete seeking Olympic gold, a supermodel seeking a perfect waif like figure, a businesswoman seeking her first million all make greater sacrifices than any that the Church would impose or counsel for Christians. Yet the unbeliever who baulks at offering so much as an hour a week to God will offer seventy times as much to greed, or ambition or sex. The difference being that one has the appearance of being internally generated and voluntary and the other of being external and compulsory. Ultimately the refusal of belief, or the refusal of believers to obey, comes not so much from a deeply thought through review of all the available arguments and evidences leading to an objective assessment calmly arrived at. No, it proceeds from a fear of submitting, that is, a hardening of the heart and a stiffening of the neck, a refusal to trust in the only One who can be trusted where we cannot trust even ourselves.

To return to my exchange of opinions with the atheists. If I thought that they were right then I would agree with them. Why wouldn't I? What thing that the world values would I lose by abandoning an unpopular and restrictive faith? On the other hand, if they, deep down, thought that I might be right how many causes they would have for refusing to believe. Which then, do you think, is the more likely: Christian apologists are secretly convinced of the truths of atheism or militant atheists greatly fear being persuaded of the truths of Christianity?


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