Wow…

The “you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me” news story of the day:

Idaho Teacher Sells Advertising Space on Tests

Thomistic Distinctions

The medieval canon lawyers placed the natural law in divine revelation as testified to in the two Testaments of Scripture. Thomas Aquinas, while not denying the position of the canonists, placed the natural law in creation itself. Aquinas distinguishes between the divine law found in Holy Scripture, and the natural law found in creation. This distinction is an important one. By placing the natural law in Scripture, its reach is limited to a particular time and place. However, if the natural law is placed within creation itself, this particular imprint of God on the human person is and has been available to the whole human race in every age.

Note, then, that whereas for the canonists the Scriptures are the first location of the natural law, for Thomas, of course, without denying the ultimate origin of the ius naturale in God, the order of nature has been distinguished from revelation, and, so far as we are concerned, is the first locus of the natural law. We might say that the canonists’ conception was more dominantly theological or undifferentiated, and in this sense we can see that Thomas’s view allows for a universe in which a natural order has sufficient integrity to be read by man without immediate recourse to revelation.

Far from unlinking natural law from the God of revelation, however, Thomas’s distinction between divine law and the natural law brings to full articulation an idea that had long been developing, namely that the path to holiness revealed in Scripture is not a positivistic decree only fideists can accept, but has a purchase on the inner rational structure of human nature. Thomas’s account of the relation between natural and divine law, it seems to me, reveals its deepest meaning when read against the background of his doctrine, rediscovered in our day by Henri de Lubac, that nature, as such, desires a fullness that it can attain only within the context of gracious elevation to the visio beatifica.

– Glenn W. Olsen, “Natural Law: The First Grace,” Communio XXXV (Fall 2008)

Poetry for Vespers

To Heaven

Good and great God, can I not think of Thee
But it must straight my melancholy be?
Is it interpreted in me disease
That, laden with my sins, I seek for ease?
O, be Thou witness, that the reins dost know
And hearts of all, if I be sad for show,
And judge me after; if I dare pretend
To aught but grace or aim at other end.
As Thou art all, so be Thou all to me,
First, midst, and last, converted One, and Three!
My faith, my hope, my love; and in this state
My judge, my witness, and my advocate!
Where have I been this while exiled from Thee?
And whither rap’t, now Thou but stoop’st to me?
Dwell, dwell here still. O, being everywhere,
How can I doubt to find Thee ever here?
I know my state, both full of shame and scorn,
Conceived in sin, and unto labour borne,
Standing with fear, and must with horror fall,
And destined unto judgment, after all.
I feel my griefs too, and there scarce is ground
Upon my flesh t’ inflict another wound.
Yet dare I not complain, or wish for death
With holy Paul, lest it be thought the breath
Of discontent; or that these prayers be
For weariness of life, not love of Thee.

– Ben Jonson (1573-1637)

Participation in the Eternal Law

How is the natural law linked to the eternal law of God? The latter is the source of the former. Read the previous post for some context pertaining to what follows.

The eternal law is identical with God’s creative wisdom and providential governance of the world, which are as radically interior to the world and everything in it as they are transcendent of that world. In this sense, then, everything in the world is an expression of God’s eternal law – his creative wisdom – and finds its true or complete identity only in that law and wisdom…

As Ratzinger points out, the consequence is that the world – created being – is saturated with divine reason, indeed is constituted by divine reason. According to this view, the world can never be understood as simply pre-rational (as not yet participating in, and embodying, logos) because its internal order shares in divine reason. Indeed, it is in itself an expression of divine reason.

The result is that the world is not simply matter with certain physical properties that confronts human reason as object. Rather, the world in all of its physicality is itself saturated with meaning for its highest fulfillment in specifically human being. When the mind engages being, in other words, it is engaging what is primordially rational.

– David S. Crawford, “Natural Law and the Body,” Communio XXXV (Fall 2008). Emphasis original.

“The world… is in itself an expression of divine reason.” “[T]he world in all of its physicality is itself saturated with meaning…” “When the mind engages being… it is engaging what is primordially rational.” Chew on that for a while.

Re-thinking Divine Reason

Here’s some food for thought, courtesy of the latest issue of Communio (XXXV, Fall 2008).

All that is exists because it was thought by God. Therefore all creation can be seen as ontologically bearing that mark of divine reason; all creation meaning what is material and what is immaterial (e.g. reason, intellect, nous, etc.). In the context of natural law and the phenomenon of conscience, man participates in the divine reason by way of the memory (anamnesis) implanted in him at his beginning. In this way when man thinks (as a created being), he re-thinks the divine reason of which he is a part.

It follows from this traditional view that that human thinking is the re-thinking of being itself. Man can re-think the logos, the meaning of being, because his own logos, his own reason, is logos in the one logos, thought of the original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs his being.

– Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, quoted in the Communio XXXV essay by David S. Crawford entitled “Natural Law and the Body.”

Guitar Hero

The obviously very creative David Crowder Band. The song is “…neverending…”

Gotta love that Mario button!

Never ending
Always
You will never end
Because
You’re always
Never ending

You were
There before
There was beginning
Always
You were
You are never ending

Here you are now
With us here
We are found
In You

And this makes all the difference
This changes everything
Making our whole existence
Worth something so we sing

La, la, la …

And You make all the difference
Yeah, You change everything
You make our whole existence
Worth something so we sing

La, la, la …

The Uniqueness of Man

I have no problem with the theory of evolution. God could have created our bodies in an evolutionary way as well as any other way. The existence of the soul united to our bodies is a totally different matter. However, if we focus on the biological, we have much in common with our primate friends; but this is saying much more than is often supposed. It is quite the logical leap to say that because man’s body has evolved from the animals, that he is also one of the animals. Man also has the ability to reason, and this is what primarily separates him from the beasts. G. K. Chesterton also noted that what separates man from beast is man’s penchant for dogma – “Man can be defined as an animal that makes dogmas.” There is so much that separates man from animal: the propensity to worship, the desire to paint chapel ceilings, the romantic instinct to compose poetry, the soaring spirit that composes symphonies, and so on. There is indeed a missing link, but as Chesterton also noted, “If there were a missing link in a real chain, it would not be a chain at all.” As I said, I have no problem with the theory of evolution, but the conclusions sometimes drawn from this theory suffer from an astonishing amount of fuzzy thinking. To think that man is only a beast requires a myopic focus on the biological, but what else are we to expect from a culture that puts such a shallow focus on the body. Chesterton paints the picture far better than I could, so I will get out of the way and let him speak.

From the final chapter of Orthodoxy (GKC Collected Works, Vol. 1, Ignatius, 1986):

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in rococo style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel’s-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

Confronting Death

In Chapter IV of Eschatology, Joseph Ratzinger follows, in broad outlines, how death has been understood from ancient Israel to the Christian century. Ratzinger begins the chapter by noting how death is not being confronted in our world. We wish to ignore death, and if we must die (as if we have a choice) we wish it to come quickly without warning. We are scared to death of death. As such, we come up with ways to trivialize it in order to lessen its sting. Death may be joked about or it may be the object of entertainment; but it may never be discussed seriously. Thus we are left with a confused understanding of death in society. On the one hand we wish to ignore death so as to not think about it, but on the other hand we wish to speak about it as freely as we would tea. It is as if the pink elephant is in the room and we have chosen to acknowledge it, but not as a pink elephant. Instead we point to the pink elephant and talk about it as if it were a nice piece of furniture. Death is an uncomfortable subject, but the consequences of ignoring it are profound.

In the last analysis, of course, the covert aim of this reduction of death to the status of an object is just the same as the bourgeois taboo on the subject. Death is to be deprived of its character as a place where the metaphysical breaks through. Death is rendered banal, so as to quell the unsettling question which arises from it. Schleiermacher once spoke of birth and death as “hewed out perspectives” through which man peer into the infinite. But the infinite calls his ordinary life-style into question. And therefore, understandably, humankind puts it to the ban. The repression of death is so much easier when death has been naturalized. Death must become so object-like, so ordinary, so public that no remnant of the metaphysical question is left within it.

The metaphysical question, of course, is one that regards our life and how we live it; but more acutely is it a question of what it means to exist in this life. If we know one thing with certainty it is that death takes us away from this life. This being so, the natural question is – what does this life mean? If we ignore death, we ignore its meaning. If we ignore the meaning of death it is unlikely that we will ever contemplate the meaning of life.

Yet as Christians we know that we are not to fear death, much less ignore it. In fact, the Lenten season can be seen as a contemplation of death – the suffering and death of Our Lord, as well as the dying to ourselves that takes place in our Lenten penances. These 40 days, we journey with the Lord as he approaches the Cross to suffer and die for our sins, but we know that death does not have the final word. During the Easter season we will celebrate the glorious victory of Our Lord over death. In light of His resurrection, we know that through death comes life. The lives of the martyrs have also taught us as much. They are able to joyfully face death because they have found true meaning in this life which entails a powerful hope for the life to come. Death has no power over the martyr. If we are truely living our lives cruciform, in the manner of Christ, we are all martyrs. It is when we pick up our cross daily to follow Christ that we find true happiness. This is the paradox that is at the very heart of Christianity. It is only in death that we find life.

More Ratzinger

In the last post I provided a brief passage from Joseph Ratzinger’s 1977 work, Eschatology, regarding his approach to exegesis (which I collapsed into historical method). As I noted Ratzinger views history as something alive, not something discrete to be studied like scientific datum. The present cannot be viewed without reference to the past, just as the past cannot be interpreted without taking into account the present, including all subsequent history. Here is more of the same from Ratzinger, but this time with a little more gusto.

The word of Jesus only persists as something heard and received by the Church. After all, it can scarcely enter the historical arena save by being heard and, once heard, assimilated. But all hearing, and so all tradition, is also interpretation…

Accordingly, the Gospel does not confront the Church as a self-enclosed Ding-an-sich [thing in itself]. Herein lies the fundamental methodological error of trying to reconstruct the ipsissima vox Jesu [the very voice of Jesus] as a yardstick for Church and New Testament alike. Realizing this should not turn us into sceptics, even though we are touching here on the limits of historical knowledge. Jesus’ message becomes intellegible for us through the echo effect it has created in history. In this echo, the intrinsic potential of that message, with its various strata and configurations, still resounds. Through its resonance we learn more about the real than we shall ever do from free-floating critical reconstructions…

Only as the actual course of history unfolds does reality fill the [literary] schema [of the gospels] with content and shed light on the meaning and interrelatedness of its various aspects. The fundamental and all-important hermeneutical insight here is that subsequent history belongs intrinsically to the inner momentum of the text itself. That is: it does not simply provide retrospective commentary on the text. Rather, through the appearing of the reality which was still to come, the full dimensions of the word carried by the text come to light. For this reason, the interpretation of these texts must, by its very nature, incomplete. For this reason also, a generation later, John could penetrate in authoritative fashion the depth of the word, and understand what was meant by it with greater purity than could his predecessors. For this reason, once again, his [John's] own message is not simply a subsequent adaptation of the word to a changed situation, but reproduces the inner movement of the word itself. For this reason, finally, that kind of reconstruction which confines itself to the text in its earliest form and permits interpretation only on that basis is fundamentally out of order… Only through the harvest of historical experience does the word gradually gain its full meaning, and the schema fill itself with reality. In contrast, by insisting on definitive conclusions drawn from the most primitive wording the exegete can reconstruct, one condemns oneself to idling with an empty schematism. And so the reader himself is taken up into the adventure of the word. He can understand it only as a participator, not as a spectator.

As a point of clarification, in the preceding text Ratzinger is bringing up John – as in the Evangelist, John – because of the way John’s gospel is more theologically “robust” than that of the synoptic gospels. Instead of seeing John as re-interpreting the message of Jesus because of a new (and unexpected) situation in the Church (i.e. the end of time had not come), Ratzinger prefers to see John as a continuation of his predecessors and the message of Jesus itself. It was only in time that the full import of the words of Christ began to take hold in the Church. Ratzinger would argue that this is why the other Evangelists do not have the theological understanding of John. It took time for the word to grow in the Church – we could even say that it is growing still. As Ratzinger writes elsewhere, all four gospels must be read “as a choir of four,” no one pited against the others.

Ratzinger on Historical Method

For some reason, I know not why, I am fascinated by the question of historical knowledge. So what exactly can we “know” from the study of history? I often think that many of us have too bold an epistemology when it comes to history. I was happy to read that Joseph Ratzinger, once Cardinal and now Pope, in the opening pages of his 1977 work Eschatology, lays out his thoughts on the historical method as it relates to exegesis. In typical Catholic fashion he takes a view of history that is more incarnational in nature. Rather than seeing the past as a set of datum to be studied and analyzed, Ratzinger sees the past as part of the present. History is never just history; it is a living history. In Eschatology (Catholic University of America Press, 2007), Ratzinger writes:

It is according to this nonhistorical model of the natural sciences that exegetical results are very largely assessed today. They are thought of as a sum of fixed results, a body of knowledge with immaculate credentials, acquired in such a fashion that it has left behind its own history as a mere prehistory, and is now at our disposal like a set of mathematical measurements. The measuring of the human spirit, however, differs from the quantification of the physical world. To follow the history of exegesis over the last hundred years is to become aware that it reflects the whole spiritual history of that period. Here the observer speaks of the observed only through speaking of himself: the object becomes eloquent only in this indirect refraction. Now this does not mean that at the end of the day all we know is ourselves. Rather are we faced at this point with a kind of knowledge familiar to us from philosophy. (Not that the two are identical, nevertheless, they have a family resemblance.) The “results” of the history of philosophy do not consist in a catalogue of formulae which can be totted up into a final sum. Instead, they are series of raids on the deep places of being, carried out according to the possibilities of their own time. The history in which these explorations were made remains a living history, not a dead prehistory. As philosophizing continues, Plato, Aristotle, Thomas do not become prehistory: they remain the originating figures of an enduring approach to the Ground of what is. In their way of thought, and its access to the Origin, a certain aspect of reality, a dimension of being, is caught as in a mirror. None of them is philsophy or the philosopher.It is the multivalent message of the entire history, and its overall critical evaluation, that truth is disclosed and with it the possibility of fresh knowledge. Something analogous is true of such a foundational text as the Bible. Here, too, and especially where the heart of the scriptural message is concerned, there is no such thing as a definitive acquisition of scholarship: no interpretation from the past is ever completely old hat if in its time it turned to the text in true openess. Unfortunately, historical reason’s criticism of itself is still in its infancy. But one thing is certain: to employ in this domain the pardigm of knowledge characteristic of the natural sciences is fallacious. Only by listening to the whole history of interpretation can the present be purified by criticism and so brought into a position of genuine encounter with the text concerned.