First, do no harm

"Don't canonize me yet," St. Francis of Assisi told his admirers. "I'm perfectly capable of fathering a child."

I don't know whether they believed him, but sexual immorality has always been high on the list of things that interfere with an apostolate. My guess is, if you asked people why this is the case, overall they'd overstate the importance of how much humans love sex and understate the importance of how much we love truth.

A Christian apostle is a sign of Christ, the One Who sends the apostle on his mission. This is true whether or not the apostle wants it to be, whether or not he even realizes it's true.

Humans love truth, so we hate falsehood, so we hate someone who represents himself as a sign of Christ but whose life does not signify Him. Christians, perhaps, hate such false signs all the more in that they are false, not merely to someone admirable, but to Truth Himself.

One conversation that seems to occur whenever a new scandal arises involves the charge of hypocrisy. "What a hypocrite!" some say, while others tease at the definition of the term to see whether it applies in this case. Let me suggest that the sincere charges of hypocrisy indicate, not the misapplication of a specific term, but the imprecisely expressed recognition of this failure to signify what one ought to signify. Saying, "But he isn't a hypocrite as such," is really beside the point when no one really means he is a hypocrite as such.

If moral scandal -- the turning away from Christ caused by another's sin -- that comes with the tabloid scandal -- public reports of the sins of a Christian apostle -- is motivated by hatred of falsehood, anyone involved in preaching the Gospel ought to make clear that he himself recognizes he is to some extent a false sign of Christ, that for example he is perfectly capable of fathering a child. The apostle necessarily signifies Christ; his choice is whether to be an imperfect sign or a false sign.

It's often remarked that, the holier a person becomes, the more aware he is of his own sins. Less often is it remarked that we are aware of how aware the saints are of their own sins. We know this because they have told others of their awareness, and telling others serves not only to instruct us on how sinful we must be, but to make of the saints' lives a true, because admittedly imperfect, sign of Christ.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Dies Irae

Anger is an ever-present factor of human interaction. If you don't understand anger, you don't understand a lot of what goes on between people, including between Catholics discussing their Church.

Since I don't understand anger, I'm looking at what St. Thomas has to say about it, both as an irascible passion (considered in itself, its causes, and its effects) and as a capital vice.

Anger is a peculiar phenomenon. As St. Thomas puts it, "it is a passion somewhat made up of contrary passions;" it's the one passion that has no contrary passion, but as a vice it does have a contrary, which doesn't have a one-word name but amounts to not being angry when you should be angry (that lacking anger is a vice is explained just after anger is shown to be a capital vice).

What may be immediately useful in all this is the distinction between species of anger made by Aristotle, St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. John Damascene. The three species are "choleric," "sullen," and "ill-tempered" -- or equivalently, "wrath," "ill-will" and "rancor." In St. John Damascene's words:

When anger arises and begins to be roused, it is called rage [or choler] .... [Ill-will]implies that the bile endures, that is to say, that the memory of the wrong abides.... Rancor, on the other hand, implies watching for a suitable moment for revenge....

St. Thomas corresponds these three kinds of anger to three things that give increase to anger. The choleric man is easily moved to anger; the passion of anger because of an excess of bile (okay, we can tighten up the biology), the vice in response to any slight cause. The sullen or ill-willed man is moved by an inflicted injury that remains in his memory -- for too long, if his anger is sinful. The ill-tempered or rancorous man has a stubborn desire for vengeance that lasts until they have inflicted punishment.

I think these three kinds of anger can all be discerned and distinguished in the heated arguments that characterize so much of on-line Catholic discussion. Some people are easily moved to anger that quickly dissipates; perhaps most everyone is, if they're having a bad day. Others feed their sense of personal injury with angry words, and still others are clearly aiming to inflict injury on their opponents.

The difference between ill-will and rancor, between anger is turned inward and anger turned outward, may not always be easy to detect, but I think I have encountered people who are clearly rancorous, who are habitually angry and habitually trying to bring down their enemies, yet who show no sign of acting out of memory of some grievance against themselves or others.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A hermeneutical key to pneumatological hermeneutics

It has become a cliche to complain about this or that action by this or that bishop as being "contrary to the spirit of Vatican II." It has even become a cliche to complain about these complaints. "The spirit of Vatican II" is both a battle cry and a badge of shame.

But it wasn't till I was reading Teófilo's response to a statement by Fr. Joseph O'Leary (whose blog happens to be titled "The Spirit of Vatican II") that the irreducible source of this conflict became apparent to me:

Fr. O'Leary: "John Paul II thus bypassed and reached over the heads of the educated baby boomers, influenced by Vatican II...."

Teófilo: "... and our generation was not influenced by Vatican II? We can't read its documents?"

What I realized -- an obvious insight in hindsight -- is that, for some people, the term "Vatican II" refers to experiences during a fixed period of time, while for others it refers to a set of documents.

So Teófilo is talking past Fr. O'Leary by asking questions about reading documents. For Fr. O'Leary, "Vatican II" isn't only -- and likely enough not even principally -- about what documents say. The "spirit" he speaks of isn't a poor paraphrase of the documents; it's not like the "spirit of the law" contrasted with the "letter of the law." It's a Zeitgeist, not an, um, Wortgeist. The conciliar documents are a record of that Zeitgeist, from this perspective, but not the only record, and in fact, the memories of the Zeitgeist, whether original or transferred to a later generation, are seen as just as authoritative as the documents, indeed the context in which the documents are to be read.

So when anti-"spirit of Vatican II" folks write cuttingly, "Read the documents! You won't find what those 'spirit of Vatican II' folks are saying in the documents!," the "spirit of Vatican II" folks may well reply, "Exactly!"

To make the distinction clear, perhaps we should begin speaking of the Council Event, whose full ecclesio-ontological dimensions cannot be grounded within brute fundamentalist literalism that, taken to its logical conclusions, is itself a denial of the chrono-physio-spiritual reality of Church.

Link | John da Fiesole
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What interferes with the preaching mission?

In a comment below, TSO makes a suggestion along a line of thought I haven't much considered:

It seems to publically identify oneself with a [political] party or ideology is to some extent compromise the mission, at least if you are a member of a religious order.

I don't publicly identify myself with a party or ideology because I don't privately identify myself with a party of ideology. Now that I think of it, though, I'm not at all confident I'd do well identifying the party affiliation (if any) of the Third Order (much less First Order) Dominicans I know. (The party affiliation of the Second Order seems generally to be Ice Cream.)

If anyone else has any thoughts about what doors open or close with respect to apostolic works as a result of a person belonging to a political party or identifying with an ideological camp, I'd love to hear them.

And here's a question to the Reader: To what extent does the American phenomenon of belonging to a political party without a strong sense of association with that party (e.g., how many members of either major party have ever attended a party meeting?) affect the American perspective on one's religious affiliation?

Link | John da Fiesole
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Holy hypocrisy

Immediately following the description of St. Dominic's tears for sinners comes a description of a somewhat different habit:

If it chanced that after the fatigues of along journey he had to lodge with secular persons, he would first quench his thirst at some handy spring, fearing to draw attention to any excess in drinking from his intense thirst, due to his wearisome traveling on foot. This he was always most careful to avoid, not only in drinking, but in everything else besides.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking that if this fellow weren't the canonized founder of my Order, I'd be knocking him as a hypocrite, or at least as no respecter of truth.

Or you may be thinking this is mighty rich, considering how he got his start as a preacher: his bishop, Diego de Acebes, recognized that making headway in preaching against the Albigensian heresy required travel on foot and begging, to match the austerity of the heresiarchs.

But St. Dominic seems to have had a very clear understanding both of the strength of the Truth and the fragility of man. The Order he founded manifests that trust in the power of Truth -- in fact, of faith in He Who is Truth -- to save those who encounter Him.

At the same time, though, St. Dominic was aware of how easily men invent excuses to avoid seeing the truth, and of the consequent necessity for preachers to provide no opportunity for excuses to develop. Anything that might distract a person's attention from the Gospel, even something as natural as a very thirsty traveler, was to be avoided if at all possible.

What serves the preaching mission? What interferes with it? Answer these questions, and you understand St. Dominic and his spiritual children. Live the answers, and you are his spiritual child.

Link | John da Fiesole
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"We all belong to Iraq"

An interview with Fr. Yousif Thomas Mirkis, OP, who lives in Baghdad. (Link via DomLife.)

We [Christians] are not only 2 to 3 percent of the population. We have between 30 and 40 percent of the high [college] diplomas. Twenty percent of doctors in Iraq are Christian, 30 percent of engineers and architects. And we can have another role in this society....

If you mix religion with our constitution, we will have a headache for 100 years....

What can the American church do? Pray for us. Not only the Church, but all Iraqis who suffer too much. We need to take some rest....

We need wise people who can think not only how to preserve the constitution with Muslim influence, but how to preserve Iraqis from death. From death and despair. We are psychologically in a very bad situation. Every Iraqi needs a psychologist to help him get rid of the trauma. Families are suffering from big traumas. The economic situation makes big traumas.

Don't forget us.... The needs are material and psychological, spiritual....

The man on the street is really poor. He is looking for bread. He is looking out for the life of his family. And he is very tired.

I recently read about a woman who prayed every day that the Pope would have a good night's sleep. Perhaps, for starters, a good night's sleep is what Iraqis need us to pray for on their behalf.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Babelfish beauty

Hernan Gonzalez has posted a list of 250 beautiful Spanish words. If asked, Babelfish will translate them. An eclectic sampling:

Spanish	English
abedul	birch
agua	water
almohada	pillow
cuaderno	notebook
encrucijada	crossroads
humo	smoke
naranja	orange
pincel	brush
remolino	eddy
terciopelo	velvet
variopinto	many-colored

On a related note, Fray Nelson (who is always worth reading) has been writing (in Spanish) about the Irish Republican Army. Babelfish obligingly translates "IRA" as "WRATH."

Link | John da Fiesole
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Sufficient unto the day

Oh boy! Oh boy!

Link | John da Fiesole
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Bred in the bone

It's been years since the last time I read a science fiction novel, and even when I was reading science fiction regularly, I tended toward the lighter entertainments of the genre.

So when a review copy of Robert Charles Wilson's Spin came my way a few weeks ago, I was somewhat surprised to find that it was... well, a novel, about characters and their relationships and how they respond to events, rather than a sixty thousand word "What if?"

Though the "What if?" is pretty cool, from the perspective of someone who doesn't read much science fiction: What if one day Earth were enveloped by some sort of temporal distortion such that, for every second that passed on Earth, 3.7 years passed in the universe at large? So every month as experienced on Earth, the solar system aged about ten million years. And what would happen in forty or fifty years, when the Sun died and took Earth with it, temporal distortion or no?

As a character-driven novel, the real question isn't what happens to mankind as a whole, but what happens to the major characters, how they react to the Spin (the name for whatever it is that happened to Earth) and to each other. That probably makes it a better novel, in terms of its focus and scope.

At the same time, the smaller scope means the novel only incidentally addresses the larger cultural and anthropological questions an end of the world scenario raises, and when it does address them it tends toward superficiality and plot advancement. What makes it a better novel artistically makes it a less important novel culturally.

I am, of course, tuned to look for how religion is treated, but in Spin Wilson is only concerned with how religion directly affects his characters. One of the main characters gets involved in various kooky end-times pseudo-Christian cults, while the rest are either utterly indifferent or actively hostile toward religion. As a result, not a word is written about how non-kooks might have reacted to the Spin.

And again, within the scope of the novel, it makes sense for ordinary, non-plot-advancing religion to be invisible. But again, and even beyond questions of verisimilitude, it makes what Wilson says about humanity in general (rather than the particular characters the novel is mostly concerned with) much less convincing or relevant.

Well, convincing or relevant to us religious people, at least. But suppose he had, for example, written in the Vatican's reaction to the Spin? Would it have been convincing, the sort of thing the Vatican might say in such circumstances? It seems doubtful that anything made up would sound convincing to both those who think the Vatican can say wise things about science and those who think it can't.

And personally, I prefer an author to leave religion out of his book rather than put it in in a dismissive way. (Kooky end-times pseudo-Christian cultists may well really hate this book.) If it's a choice between ignoring religion and turning a novel into a work of apologetics (perhaps for atheism), ignoring religion may well be the way to go.

But no good novel can ignore all religious themes, and of course the end of the world takes on a religious dimension, willy nilly, when it's coming in a few decades rather than a few billion years. Faith -- in God, in science, in others -- is a major theme of Spin, which is good anthropology if not good theology. And in the end, faith is for the most part rewarded. Of course, to say it's "rewarded" is to imply there's Something giving the reward, which may be more than Wilson intends, but there are some things that are true -- such as happy endings -- and what the truth implies can't be false.

Labels: Reviews

Link | John da Fiesole
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Love and loyalty

Oh, and before this washes back to the ephemeral sea of old comments, Talmida writes about the relationship between love and obedience:

I don't know if I'm too late to contribute to this line of discussion, but it strongly reminds me of trying to understand the Hebrew word hhesed, which is variously translated as lovingkindness, kindness, love, mercy.

I read a Rabbi who said that the true meaning of the word on God's part was loyalty to the Covenant. Not "God will show his love" or "God will be merciful" but rather "God will be faithful to the Covenant, will uphold His end of the deal."

And God's end of the deal is that He will be our God. "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" (or the Lord is our God, the Lord alone).

This is the reply that Jesus gives in Mark when asked what the greatest commandment is. Before telling us to love God & neighbour, Jesus recites this statement of faith reminding us of the Covenant with Abraham. In essence, the greatest commandment is the Covenant.

The terms of the Covenant with God are the Torah, the Law. And the 2 commandments of Love that Jesus teaches sum up the Law.

When Jesus commands us to Love, could we not substitute Be Faithful to the Covenant (and the obedience to the Law that that implies)?

The point that the Greatest Commandment begins with the Shema Yisrael is worth exploring, I think, even for us presumptive monotheists. And how far does faithfulness to His Covenant get us to God's lovingkindness, or even to "God is Love"?

Link | John da Fiesole
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What will become of sinners?

In the Legend of Saint Dominic, it is recorded of him that,

So wonderfully tender-hearted was he touching the sins and miseries of men, that when he came near any city or town from where he could overlook it, he would burst into tears at the thought of the miseries of mankind, of the sins committed therein, and of the numbers who were going down into hell.

That's a wonderful mark of piety -- for a saint dead nearly eight centuries. How, though, if it were your Pentecostal neighbor, distracting your backyard nap with loud rooftop cries of, "O Lord, what will become of sinners?"

It's a paradox: holier-than-thou people who are, in fact, holier than thou. Is it possible we like them even less than holier-than-thou people who aren't?

Of course, St. Dominic himself wasn't holier-than-thou in the sense we usually mean. He did his crying and his sighing out of earshot of the sinners over whom he cried and sighed, while still on the road or at night while the other brothers were (usually) asleep.

But our Christian faith enables the fast-knit friend of Christ to worry over the fate of sinners without denying that he himself is a sinner. First, there is genuine cause to worry over their fate; damnation is a real possibility. But also, the more one turns to God, the more one is aware of how far short of human perfection one is; a true friend of Christ necessarily knows he is a sinner. On top of that, though, a true friend of Christ has a sure and certain hope of his own salvation, a hope that rests not in his own actions (that would be presumption) but on Christ's promise of eternal life. And this promise is given to everyone who comes to faith in Christ, which in principle -- and purely through the grace of God -- can be everyone to whom Christ is preached.

St. Dominic's prayer for those sinners, the ones he sees from afar, comes only after his prayer for the sinner he sees in the mirror. And the answer to his prayer for the sinner in the mirror is what both compels him to pray for the sinners far off and gives him hope that what will become of them is what will become of him, that they too will become friends of Christ and children of the Father.

Link | John da Fiesole
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More things stay the same

If someone went back in time to AD 1273, looked up Friar Thomas Aquinas, and told him all about life in these United States in AD 2005, the good friar might well reply, "Yes, I wrote a book about that."

TSO calls attention to a couple of posts at Crux Magazine. The first one suggests that "we have reached the end of not only shame but the private experience thereof." The second makes "the observation that illegitimate sex also appears to coincide with a desire to eat."

In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas links gluttony and lust (along with drunkenness) as vices opposed to [the subjective parts of] the virtue of temperance. Little surprise, then, that the intemperate person should be both glutton and lecher, particularly in a society with an overabundance of food and fornication.

Furthermore, shamefacedness is listed as an integral part of temperance (though not, properly speaking, a virtue, since avoiding shame is not particularly difficult for virtuous people). Shamefacedness is not a notable feature of American popular culture. St. Thomas identifies three kinds of people who lack shame: "those who are steeped in sin... the old and the virtuous." Which kind of person American popular culture is by and for is left as an exercise to the reader.

(Sorry, I just gotta like his throwing "the old" in there; his reasoning is that their appetite for intemperance is easily curbed.)

So St. Thomas would likely regard this culture as marked by intemperance. Any particular reason we might be particularly intemperate? Perhaps there is:

...sins of intemperance are said to be childish. For the sin of intemperance is one of unchecked concupiscence, which is likened to a child in three ways.

The three ways are in acting on unreasonable desires; in becoming more self-willed if given free rein; and in the remedy, which is restraint.

A society of childish persons, of persons who don't grow up, is an intemperate society.

Link | John da Fiesole
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We aren't about us

Die Fledermaus: I love a woman who dresses in stainless steel.

Jet Valkyrie: You make me sick to my stomach.

Die Fledermaus: Oh, it's always about you, isn't it?

-- "The Tick Vs. The Tick"

My conviction is growing that we'd be better off if we put more effort into seeing that it really isn't about us.

I know, I know, it's very difficult. We're so very wonderful, how can it not be about us? Besides, isn't the Christian Gospel that God loved us so much He had to become one of us, and that He died to save us?

What I'm thinking is, no, not really.

I mean, who says the Christian faith is summed up by John 3:16? Might it not be at least as true to say it's summed up by John 17:4-5:

I glorified You on earth by accomplishing the work that You gave Me to do. Now glorify Me, Father, with You, with the glory that I had with You before the world began.

Do we not think of ourselves as the heroes of Divine Revelation? Yes, Jesus is the hero, but He's one of us, and the heroic thing He did was to save us. As the curtain falls, we are settling into the enjoyment of heaven, while God looks on benevolently.

To hear us tell it, the king's wedding feast is being held in honor of the guests.

But eternal life isn't about us. Creation isn't about us. Even our own salvation isn't about us. We aren't about us.

It's about God. About the Triune God, without whose inter-Personal relationships there could be no personal relationship between God and man.

Consider the source and summit of the Christian life. We speak of the Eucharist as a liturgy we participate in, or a sacrament we receive. In fact, though, the Divine Liturgy is Christ's prayer to the Father, specifically His sacrifice on the Cross. Our involvement amounts to being allowed to join in Christ's prayer and sacrifice, and our joining in adds nothing to Christ's actions. To be sure, Christ gives the Blessed Sacrament is given to His Church, but only because He gives Himself to His Father.

We have an understandably anthrocentric perspective on all this, and perhaps it couldn't be otherwise. Scripture is written from that perspective, but then, it was written by men; and if the subject isn't us, we aren't likely to pay much attention, assuming we can understand it at all. Moreover, the Incarnation means that the anthrocentric perspective is not pure illusion; there is a genuine condescension on God's part in the Son becoming man, which produces a genuine truth to the man-eyed view of God's actions in the world.

But that genuine truth remains a derived truth; the primary truth lies not in Christ's humanity, but in His Divinity. I have a growing suspicion that in recognizing this within our hearts, in making God's perspective our own -- in coming to see that, though we are the narrators of our own stories, we are not the central character -- lies tremendous potential for growth in holiness and wisdom.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Lousy choices

I hate hate hate discussions like this. I hate the thought of fellow Catholics, not merely blithely endorsing evil when they find the benefits sufficiently appealing, but positively irate that anyone dare suggest consequentialism is immoral when they don't want it to be.

But that's life among American Catholics in early August.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Whether doubt is a virtue

Objection 1. It would seem that doubt is a virtue. For I have doubts, and I am virtuous. Therefore, doubt is a virtue.

Objection 2. Further, people who don't have doubts are obnoxious. But being obnoxious is contrary to the virtue of charity. Therefore, doubt is a virtue.

Objection 3. Further, by doubting a man comes to accept and understand his faith more deeply. Since the fruits of doubt are good, doubt itself must be a virtue.

On the contrary, the Apostle writes, "For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, which is moved and carried about by the wind. Therefore let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord." [Jas. 1:6-7] Therefore doubt is not a virtue.

I answer that, doubt is contrary to faith, and whatever is contrary to a virtue cannot itself be a virtue.

But not all forms of doubt are so opposed to faith as to be vices. A man may doubt out of ignorance, as being unsure of something because he does not know that someone trustworthy has affirmed it, and this in itself is not sinful, if he cannot be blamed for his ignorance. Or a man may doubt out of a lack of clarity, as being unsure of the meaning of what a trustworthy person has affirmed, or out of an error in reasoning, as when he fails to see that a particular consequence necessarily follows from what he believes; in neither case is his doubt a sin in itself.

If, however, a man doubts through deliberately turning his will away from attending to the intellectual principle by which an object of faith is to be accepted, this may be accounted blindness of mind and a sin, as the Doctor writes. Further, a man may doubt through obstinately refusing to assent to that which is proposed as an article of faith, which is an act of unbelief and a sin.

Reply to Objection 1. Yeah, and so's my big toe.

Reply to Objection 2. Trust me, they'd be obnoxious even if they doubted.

Reply to Objection 3. The withholding of assent that is the act of doubt can be done in two ways. First, as an exercise of the intellect, whereby the content of faith is examined by asking such questions as, "What if it were not so?" This exercise is done with the purpose of deepening faith, and is not doubt properly so-called.

The second way, which is doubt proper, is to withhold assent unconditionally. This act terminates in a state in which the actor has less faith than before, and can in no way be held to cause an increase in faith. It may be that, subsequently, the man will grow in faith, but such growth requires other causes and cannot be regarded as the end for which the man doubts. If the man winds up with a greater faith than before he doubted, this is to be regarded as God bringing good out of evil, not of a virtuous means producing good fruit.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Not just a good idea

Hernan Gonzalez has some disquieting words for advocates of sciencism who equate magic and religion:

Nevertheless, in the sense in that these people use the word "magic", they can well say that it is more compatible with modern science than with religion. The affinity can be seen historically (there was more interest in magic in the Renaissance than in the Middle Ages), and in fact, science and magic are two attempts to manipulate, to dominate the world; (and the "rationality" of modern science is very debatable; in the end, as can be shown, its justification resides in only this: it works). Under this aspect, magic is nearer modern science than religion.... The position of the magician is "we see what service the divinity (and its intermediaries, the cosmic forces) can give man", the one of the priest is "we see what service man can give to the divinity". For that reason magic is against religion.

He goes on to quote a scene from Graham Greens's The Aim of the Adventure The End of the Affair, in which a priest allows that a little superstition is good because it gives people the notion that this world is not everything.

So perhaps the state of adventures is not cut and dried. Still, I'm reminded of Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Fans of technology love quoting that, but I doubt they've chased down all that it implies.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A couple of links

The Hagiography Circle is a marvelous site. For supplicants, devotees, sainthood geeks, and those for whom reading about sanctity figures prominently in their practice of it. (Via Moniales OP.)

At last! The Infant Samuel at Prayer, made available to 21st Century mantles everywhere!

I could see that she was looking for something to break as a relief to her surging emotions ... and courteously drew her attention to a terra-cotta figure of the Infant Samuel at Prayer. She thanked me briefly and hurled it against the opposite wall.
P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

The one regret is that the Infant Samuel is not represented as unambiguously possessing golden curls.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Love vs. obedience

In a comment below, Andrew disputes my argument that we can and ought to distinguish between love and obedience as the foundation of the moral order:

It strikes me that, in fact, we ought not make a distinction between love and obedience for this reason. The love to which we are exhorted in the Scriptures is a certain sort of love - agape - which is essentially self-giving love. It is essentially submissive to the will (and needs, when it is directed towards human beings rather than towards God) of the beloved. As St. Paul says, love does not seek its own. Thus we need make no distinction between "love your neighbor" and "serve your neighbor." Just so, we need make no distinction between "Love the Lord your God," and "Obey God," for to love one's neighbor is to seek his good, and to love God is to seek His good. It just so happens that to seek the Good for God is identical with seeking to do His will.

If we make no distinction between "Love God" and "Obey God," then we are incapable of loving God.

We're pretty good, as Catholics, at recognizing that love isn't just an emotion. "'Love' is a verb," as the saying goes.

But love isn't just an action; it's not fundamentally a matter of doing the other's will. It is primarily a matter of being in a relationship of love with the other.

Again, the virtue of charity is friendship with God, friendship in the traditional and profound sense. Friendship can't be commanded. It must be freely given, or it is pretense. A master can't command his servant to be his friend; he can only invite him.

And yet, isn't the first and greatest commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength"?

Yes, and this is further proof that love is the foundation of the moral order! If obedience were the formal cause of this commandment, it would either be impossible to keep or it would refer to some watered-down notion of imperfect love, the kind of love, which is only a matter of doing, that can be commanded. But watered-down, imperfect things don't come from God.

If, on the other hand, love is the formal cause of this commandment, then it is to be understood that our own perfection lies in our perfect love for God. It is love, inviting us to be perfect and instructing us how to become perfect, expressed in the form of a commandment.

Why does God express His invitations as commandments? An incomplete answer: Our relationship with God is one of creature to Creator, of servant to Master, of child to Father. In all of these relationships, when the greater's wish is the lesser's command. When a father says, "I want you to love me," a child ought to hear, "Love me." Not, as I've tried to explain above, as though that is what the father directly commands, but as what their relationship requires of the child, given the father's desire.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Love and obedience

In the post below, I mentioned parenthetically that a key question is, Do we obey out of love, or love out of obedience?

There are a couple of ways of understanding this question. One is to take it as a question about us, about what you and I and the other people actually do. This is probably the natural interpretation, given the way the question is phrased.

Another way, though, is to understand it as a question about love and obedience, about which (if either) is the foundation of the moral order. It's this understanding that, to my mind, makes it a key question.

It may not seem all that important. After all, we ought to both love and obey God, and the Gospels make it clear that we can't properly do one without the other.

But what we believe about the foundation of the moral order amounts to what we believe about the foundation of our relationship with God, which amounts to what we believe about our fundamental nature -- and God's nature as well.

If obedience were the foundation of the moral order, then our relationship with God would be fundamentally one of lawgiver-lawkeeper. Whatever love there may be between God and ourselves would be a non-essential addition to this fundamental relationship. We would necessarily remain apart from God, kept at a distance by the law that exists between us. God would mediate Himself through His commandments. This mediation, and this distance, would persist after the Last Judgment, since it would be the foundation of our relationship with God. Whatever He is in Himself, He would be Revealed to us as a legislator; we could never draw closer to him than the stone tablets He sends down the mountain to us.

Furthermore, the lawgiver-lawkeeper relationship would be the light by which we understand our relationships with each other. The more commandments I give others, the more God-like I become. Which commandments I should give to become more God-like would be hard to say, since there wouldn't be much in the way of a necessary connection between God's nature and His commandments.

And where commandments are silent? Where they are incomplete or not spelled out or don't give complete guidance? There morality, depending on obedience for its foundation, could not exist.

Now yes, the first and greatest commandment is to love God, so doesn't the case of obedience being the foundation of the moral order turn into the case of love being its foundation in one easy step?

No. You don't have one foundation on top of another; avoiding that is sort of the whole point of talking about foundations.

More substantially, love is fundamentally not a matter of obedience. The Greatest Commandment notwithstanding, you can't command others to love, because love cannot be commanded. In St. Thomas's formulation, the theological virtue of charity is friendship with God, and while God can command us to act like His friends, He cannot command us to be His friends.

Among the other consequences of wrongly believing that obedience is the foundation of the moral order, then, is an inadequate understanding of love as purely a matter of action and not of will, as a matter of doing and not of being.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A thing of beauty

There are lots of interesting bits in the talk "Morality and Culture: Beyond Kant and Jansenius," by Tracy Rowland. Among them:

• Kantian and Jansenist morality, though very different (and in some ways opposite) in detail, "share the property of making duty and obedience to the will of a legislator... the driving force behind moral action." This as opposed to love. (A key question: Do we obey out of love, or love out of obedience?)
• "Jansenism is notoriously difficult to define." I, however, have found it's quite easy to use. This, however, gives me pause: "Cardinal Giovanni Bona (1609-74) suggested that a Jansenist is a Catholic who did not like Jesuits."
• There are "experiences which mediate to the person an insight or vision of the glory of God and the beauty or splendor of creation. In the absence of such experiences the person lacks an understanding of the form or forms of goodness and is left with, at best, a coherent framework of laws whose credibility is based on its logical consistency for those who have the patience and inclination to study them; or more commonly, a collection of principles mutually inconsistent, tacitly cobbled together from rival moral traditions, whose credibility is based on their common acceptability within the dominant institutions of any given culture."
  This notion would explain Catholics who hold to "moralism" -- "described by David Schindler as the position whereby moral truth is either a matter of arbitrariness or (mechanical) imposition from without, or both" -- as people who have not experienced the glory of God or the beauty of creation. Which, in turn, indicates moralism's antidote.
  Well, in fact Rowland gives eight requirements to overcome moralism, though I wasn't convinced they're all requirements strictly speaking.
• According to Michael Hanby, "In the [Trinitarian account of the will], voluntas is the site of our erotic participation in an anterior gift, and it is at once self-moved and moved by the beauty of that gift."
  The idea of being moved by beauty contains, I hypothesize, the seed to resolving the predestination-free will paradox. We think of God's actions as analogous to a chess game played against a predictable opponent: "If I move my pawn here, there's no way he'll resist taking it."
  But God as Mover is preceded by God as Being, which is to say God as Beauty. His will might in some ways be better thought of simply as His presence, which being beautiful draws the human will to Him.

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The Few. The Proud. The Joyous.

This image comes from Dom Bettinelli's gallery of late-Nineteenth Century anti-Catholic propaganda:



Now, I ask you: Viewed today, does this strike you as better suited for anti-Catholic propaganda, or for diocesan vocation literature?

Well, okay, maybe a Pious and Overly-Devotional diocese. But I don't think many people today will be scandalized at the idea of Catholic priests getting together for a drink and a laugh. (Though the thought of them wearing cassocks while doing so may make many self-styled "progressive Catholics" about as cheery as these late-Nineteenth Century pillars of Protestant rectitude.)

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Is "nearly" "not" or nothing?

Stop me if you've heard this one:

Once there was a demure young woman. So demure was she, in fact, that when a suitor first came to call, she sat on one end of the couch and made him sit on the other end. Each day he called on her, he could sit half as far from her as he had the last time.

A young mathematician called on her one day. When she explained the seating arrangements, he thought to himself, "It will take an infinite number of visits before our hands will meet," and did not return a second time.

He was surprised, then, to read in the paper a few months later that the woman was engaged to one of his acquaintances. He called the man up and said, "Didn't she make you start at the far end of the couch, then sit half the distance of your previous visit each time?"

"Yes, she did."

"But that series requires an infinite number of visits before it converges to zero. You can't have even held her hand yet!"

"Look, you're a mathematician, and your reasoning is flawless. But I'm an engineer. I only had to get close enough."

Life is not as formal as mathematics. As an educator and an intellectual, John Henry Cardinal Newman found this problematic:

Boys are always more or less inaccurate, and too many, or rather the majority, remain boys all their lives. When, for instance, I hear speakers at public meetings declaiming about "large and enlightened views," or about "freedom of conscience," or about "the Gospel," or any other popular subject of the day, I am far from denying that some among them know what they are talking about; but it would be satisfactory, in a particular case, to be sure of the fact....

There's no getting around the fact that we use language in a vague way. At the same time, there's no denying that, as a rule, we get close enough to each other's meanings in the ordinary exchanges of daily life.

One of the ways we do this is by being able to recognize how formally others are speaking, and adjusting our interpretations accordingly. "I'll call around 3" is a lot more vague than, "I'll call around 3:05." The precision of "3:05" implies a greater precision in the imprecise "around."

If we're going to successfully adjust our interpretations, though, we need to be able to adjust them properly; less tautologically, we need to be aware of the correct interpretation from among all possible interpretations.

Consider the statement, "We're almost there." I'd guess that most times, for most purposes, the correct interpretation of "almost" is "very nearly but not exactly or entirely."

Sometimes, though, the interpretation that needs to be given to "almost" is simply "not." If you're ready to jump out of an airplane, and they're almost done with the safety check, your take-away is that they aren't done with the safety check. If the new software database is almost compatible with the old software database, then it's not compatible.

People aren't always prepared to recognize this. We talk of "glass half empty" vs. "glass half full;" what happened to "glass not empty" and "glass not full"?

To understand the "first order meaning" of a statement like "we're almost there" as "we're not there" is something that may not occur to some people. It's a concept related to analogy, in which to say something is like another is to say it is also unlike another, and sometimes it's more important to understand how two analogous things are unlike.

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The topic I was going to write about today

Since bloggers choose what to write about, we are basically free to choose our own antagonists. Which means we're also free to choose not to have antagonists. So why do we choose to have antagonists?

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Everything in its place

In a comment below, TSO writes:

Did [St. Thomas's] gift of great intellect (surely predisposing him to appreciate reason) color his doctrine? Or did his doctrine color his behavior and nurture his intellect (i.e. give him the desire and industriousness necessary to write something like the Summa)? Maybe some of both though it's probably unfair to speculate.

The way I'd put it -- and I put it in a post rather than a comment both to increase the chance of correction and because this beats the topic I was going to write about today -- is that St. Thomas's great intellect certainly colored the way he expressed his doctrine. A reader can be excused if he gets the incorrect impression that the intellect is the be-all and end-all of St. Thomas's doctrine. The Angelic Doctor gave a lot of theological avenues only the briefest of sketches. If you were to say there are whole boulevards of which the best that can be said is that his intellect-centric perspective didn't brick them off entirely, I wouldn't dismiss you without a hearing.

At the same time, it was his intellectual vision that allowed St. Thomas to see where the human intellect fits in relation to God and creation. And if a thing fits in relation to other things, if it has a place, then it necessarily has boundaries, and there are places where it is not.

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An exercise for the reader

I had a discussion about Catholic intellectuals with someone, and as sometimes happens I wound up more confused than I started. I blame grammar, as "Catholic" and "intellectual" function as both adjectives and nouns.

We could say that an intellectual is a person who traffics in ideas, as compared with a grocer, who traffics in groceries.

A "Catholic grocer," then, would be a person who traffics in groceries and who is Catholic. In other words, "Catholic grocers" is the intersection of "Catholics" and "grocers."

More strictly, "Catholic grocer" could mean a person who traffics in groceries in a manner consistent with the Catholic faith; in this case, "Catholic" modifies the way in which the traffic in groceries is conducted.

Similarly for "Catholic intellectual," there is a broad meaning ("Catholics who traffic in ideas") and a narrow meaning ("Catholics who traffic in ideas in a Catholic manner").

There seems to be plenty of stuff in being a grocer that can't really be modified by being Catholic. A grocer order his goods, stocks his shelves, prices his merchandise, receives payments, keeps his books, and so on. These can be done in accord with the Catholic faith, but they are essentially natural, material acts.

What is the stuff in being an intellectual that can't really be modified by being Catholic? An intellectual marshals facts, weighs evidence, pronounces judgment, scribbles hastily on napkins, and looks around for someone to buy the next round.

But the measure of an intellectual is the content of his ideas. Can a Catholic intellectual have an idea, immaterial as it is, that is not thoroughly permeated with the Catholic faith in a way at all analogous to the way a Catholic grocer can have a loaf of bread that is not thoroughly permeated with the Catholic faith? I mean, a loaf of bread justly baked is the same in a Catholic store as in a Buddhist store. Can an idea that is the same in a Catholic mind as in a Buddhist mind be said to be Catholic?

And if it's the case that the content of the ideas of Catholic intellectuals are thoroughly Catholic, then might it even be the case, somehow, that the content of the stores of Catholic grocers are thoroughly Catholic? Does that actually mean anything, and if so, what?

On another tack: The term "Catholic intellectual" suggests that being an intellectual is more fundamental than being Catholic. (Cf. "intellectual Catholic.") Is the risk that a Catholic intellectual would put being an intellectual ahead of being Catholic in the event of a perceived conflict qualitatively different than the risk that a Catholic grocer would put being a grocer ahead of being Catholic?

Oh, and finally: Who do you think of as Catholic intellectuals? When I started to write down a list, I couldn't much distinguish it from a list of "well-known Catholics who write in complete sentences."

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There are worse things than being wrong

Being uncharitable, for one.

As St. Thomas puts it:

He who interprets doubtful matters for the best, may happen to be deceived more often than not; yet it is better to err frequently through thinking well of a wicked man, than to err less frequently through having an evil opinion of a good man, because in the latter case an injury is inflicted, but not in the former.

St. Thomas goes on to distinguish being wrong about things and being wrong about people. The former is worse for you than the latter, since being wrong about an evil person reflects more on the person than on your own intellect.

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A word of understanding

I love Matthew 13:51:

[Jesus asked His disciples,] "Do you understand all these things?" They answered, "Yes."

Finally, the disciples managed the correct answer.

Chapter 13 begins with the parable of the sower, which Jesus tells the crowd then explains to the disciples. Next is the parable of the weeds, which, once behind closed doors, the disciples ask to be explained. After His explanation, Jesus tells them the parables of the buried treasure, the pearl of great price, and the net thrown into the sea.

So, after having to have explained two longer parables to them, the disciples are told three short ones and asked if they understand them.

"Yes."

Jesus takes them at their word (an uncomfortable thought, perhaps, for Christians who pray liturgically; "Didn't you say you wanted My Father's will done on earth as it is in heaven?") instead of pressing the point. I wonder, though, how deep their understanding -- an echo of Solomon's request for "an understanding heart" -- at that time went. A pearl of great price? Understandable. A pearl beyond price, bought at a price beyond price? Not so much.

We can think in terms of a treasure worth a bajillion dollars, obtained at the cost of a thousand dollars. But if we truly understand the kingdom of heaven, we understand that it is not worth a bajillion dollars; it's worth more than everything.

Being a disciple of Christ isn't simply worth more than what must be given up. If that were the case, the economics could in principle shift around and something else wind up worth more than the kingdom of heaven. Pearls have no intrinsic value; if the market collapses after the merchant buys the pearl of great price, he's out of luck. And if someone just doesn't care for pearls, he won't be convinced to buy it, no matter what it's worth.

This is what we need to understand about the kingdom of heaven. It isn't simply the greatest good according to some accidental ordering of goods; it isn't the good you get to by moving from lesser good to greater good until you reach a global maximum; it's not the limit of all created goods. The kingdom of heaven is the sharing in the Divine Life of the Trinity, and that is a good beyond all goods, a good so good calling it "good" is almost a lie.

Do we understand this? "Yes," we say. But how do we live?

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Trick questions

If the LORD appeared to me in a dream at night and said, "Ask something of Me and I will give it to you," I'm not sure what I would say. A hundred million dollars, maybe, or telekinesis.

If I were feeling particularly pious, though, I'd probably say something like, "Whatever is Your will to give me," and feel mighty proud at my humility.

Solomon, as you know, didn't ask for superpowers, or even the life of his enemies. But neither did he try to pull an Ahaz and say, "I will not ask. I will not tempt the LORD." He succumbed to neither false modesty nor false ignorance; he knew he needed an understanding heart to judge God's people and to distinguish right from wrong, and he asked for it.

Notice how Solomon begins his request: "O LORD, my God, you have made me, your servant, king to succeed my father David." Solomon has enough understanding to know that it was God Who made him, "a mere youth," king. God wants him to be king, so it follows that asking for something to help him be a good king is not presumption, but a cooperation in God's plan. Faith and reason come together to make Solomon a co-creator of the history of God's people.

It's a pattern repeated again and again in Scripture, and throughout the history of the Church. We are God's servants, but not His inert and passive tools. There is no virtue in refusing to will anything on our own out of a misguided fear of willing something contrary to God's will. His designs are deeper than ours, but they are not wholly opaque. God has revealed more to us than that He cannot be fully known.

We might compare Solomon's answer to that of St. Thomas, who, according to legend, responded to Jesus' question of, "What should be your reward?," with, "Nothing but You, Lord." Such nonisity would seem to be in contradiction to Solomon's request for a particular useful good. In Solomon's case, though, he was just beginning to serve as king of God's people. St. Thomas, on the other hand, was a few months from death; he was asked, not what gift he wanted, but what reward.

The example of Solomon suggests that we aren't necessarily wholly blind about God's will for us personally, and that we shouldn't be reluctant to ask for what we need to carry it out. At the same time, the example of St. Thomas reminds us of the final end God wills for us, an end which we ought to prefer over all the useful goods we might use on the way.

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Not to be dogmatic or anything

But it remains true that "Holy Mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason; ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made."

I suppose you could argue that the consideration of created things can lead to certain knowledge of God as source and end of all things without discerning any design in creation. I don't think I'd want to have to argue that, but it beats arguing that Holy Mother Church is wrong.

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Argument by design

For two weeks, I've been trying to figure out what all the fuss is about. The closest I can come is this Q&A:

When Cardinal Schönborn says that purpose and design can be clearly discerned in the natural world, would you agree?

Not scientifically. As a scientist, I cannot draw this conclusion.

But Cardinal Schönborn isn't a scientist; he's a theologian. And I think the lesson to be drawn from this fact is, not that he doesn't know what he's talking about, but that he's probably not talking scientifically.

Talking non-scientifically is not per se bad.

And to me, Cardinal Schönborn seems to be saying that purpose and design can be clearly discerned in the natural world, and that to deny this is ideology, not science.

What he does not seem to me to be saying is that purpose and design can be clearly demonstrated scientifically. But the distinction between clear discernment and scientific demonstration is only irrelevant if science is the only means of discernment, and the claim that science is the only means of discernment is ideology, not science.

So to me, the question becomes, can purpose and design be clearly discerned in the natural world? The only way I can understand the terms "purpose," "design," "clearly," and "discerned" leads me to agree with the Cardinal that the answer is yes.

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The Illustrated Life

This is one picture that absolutely requires a caption. And, along with the rest of them, it gets a bookmark. A gift to the Web from the Estimabilissime Cyntra.

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Home-grown politicians

From the Maryland Catholic Conference:

In the fall, The Maryland Catholic Conference will sponsor a series of candidate-training workshops for Maryland Catholics considering involvement in electoral politics. We're looking for women and men who might consider elective office as a kind of ministry, an opportunity to merge an interest in politics with Gospel-driven, faith-illuminated values. We're also looking for Catholics who'd like to work for candidates who exhibit those values. Please consider joining us at one of the workshops.

In the past several years, Catholics who've been involved in our Legislative Advocacy Network have shared with us their interest in running for office. While many of them appear eminently qualified for elective public service, scarce few have campaign experience. Happily for us, persons with extensive, high-level experience in the two major parities offered their training services.

Training will be strictly non-partisan -- party affiliation doesn't matter. What does matter is that workshop participants abide Church teaching and see the connection between that teaching and the issues being considered in the debate of public-policy issues.

As I expect you know, we do not (we cannot) directly or indirectly endorse candidates for public office. And so we will insist that prospective candidates agree not to advertise their workshop involvement in any campaign materials.

This strikes me as a fabulous idea with the potential to go very, very wrong.

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The unnamed vice

I was poking about, trying to find hints for something constructive to say about Genesis 6:7 -- "So the LORD said: 'I will wipe out from the earth the men whom I have created... for I am sorry that I made them." -- when I came across this objection and reply to the Summa Theologica article, "Whether drunkenness is a sin":

Objection 1. It would seem that drunkenness is not a sin. For every sin has a corresponding contrary sin, thus timidity is opposed to daring, and presumption to pusillanimity. But no sin is opposed to drunkenness. Therefore drunkenness is not a sin.

Reply to Objection 1. As the Philosopher says (Ethic. iii, 11), insensibility which is opposed to temperance "is not very common," so that like its species which are opposed to the species of intemperance it has no name. Hence the vice opposed to drunkenness is unnamed; and yet if a man were knowingly to abstain from wine to the extent of molesting nature grievously, he would not be free from sin.

I mean, come on. Knowingly to abstain from wine to the extent of molesting nature grievously.

Would such a concept ever so much as cross the mind of a Carmelite? Doubtful. Is this what Legionnaires of Christ talk about amongst themselves? I don't think so. Do Sulpicians hash such matters over with Vincentians? Nuh-uh.



Now all I need is to come up with a name for this vice and a pretence for mentioning it at the next Dominican Third Order Chapter meeting. (Which is next Tuesday evening, by the way, if you're interested and within driving range of Silver Spring, MD.)

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Hopeless

Since all I can say about this article's implication that private devotions are presumptively anti-Christian is that the author has a profoundly un-Catholic "either/or" perspective, I direct you to Fr. Tucker's reasoned response.

Of the many errors of the piece, the one I will correct here is this: When you see a Eucharistic procession, the proper response is not to wonder why people would want to return to a time when the Church was neatly divided between the ordained and the merely baptized, and whether they could possibly be as fully, consciously, and actively Christian as you are. The proper response is to kneel.

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What did God flood, and when did He flood it?

I'm afraid I have a particularly squishy position on the historicity of the Great Flood of Genesis 6-8. I'm basically okay with most every proposal, from retroactive interpretation of a particular bad flood in a single valley as God's judgment upon the evils of men all the way up to the full fifteen cubits over the tallest mountain and the waters prevailing upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.

I mean, I wasn't there, was I?

To understand -- or even, astonishing thought, pray -- the Scriptural story, though, we need to take it on its own terms, apart from speculation about the historical basis and textual evolution through which is may have passed.

The question is, what are its own terms?

Answering the question literally, and using the NAB, the terms include (leaving out the engineering and meteorological details):

"no desire that [man's] heart conceived was ever anything but evil"

God said of man, "I am sorry that I made them"

"But Noah found favor with the LORD... Noah, a good man and blameless in that age,
... walked with God...."

the flood would "destroy everywhere all creatures in which there is the breath of life"

Noah "carried out all the commands that God gave him"; he "alone in this age" was "found to be truly just"

And, perhaps most importantly, God's covenant with Noah:

God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them: "... Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did the green plants...
"For your own lifeblood, too, I will demand an accounting: from every animal I will demand it, and from man in regard to his fellow man I will demand an accounting for human life. If anyone sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; For in the image of God has man been made.
"Be fertile, then, and multiply; abound on earth and subdue it."
God said to Noah and to his sons with him: "See, I am now establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you: all the birds, and the various tame and wild animals that were with you and came out of the ark. I will establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all bodily creatures be destroyed by the waters of a flood; there shall not be another flood to devastate the earth."

At a minimum, I suppose, the Christian ought to affirm as a matter of objective fact that all humans have a share in the covenant recorded in Genesis 9, a "blessing of fruitfulness despite man's sin."

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A Flood of questions

I recently scored a review copy of The Preservationist, a novel by David Maine. It's what you might call an imaginative retelling of the story of Noe and the Flood. Surprisingly, for a book not published via iUniverse's FastTrack option, it actually takes the Biblical account seriously.

Well, "seriously" may not be the mot juste; there's a lot of humor in the book. You might say "faithfully," but there's also a lot of irreverence. But it's irreverence from some of the characters, not the author. Maybe the way to put it is that the novel treats the story of as though it were actually true.

So there really is a Noe, who really is six hundred years old; he really does speak with God; he really does build an ark (his son Cham designs and maintains it); he (or rather, his daughters-in-law) really do get all the animals of the world on-board; there really is a world-wide flood, and a dove with an olive twig, and a rainbow, and a shameful incidence of drunkenness, and a plan to repopulate the world. And all along the way, coincidences and miracles occur that prove God is with Noe and his family in their work.

It's refreshing, really.

Of course, it's also a novel written in the early 21st Century, so what gets added to the Douay Rheims version (hence "Noe" rather than "Noah") is a certain male feminist sensibility. The daughters-in-law are all smarter and wiser than the men in the book; they philosophize and theologize in more or less modern ways, and so come off as more sympathetic characters than the what-you-see-is-what-you-get men. Even Noe, God's ever-faithful servant, is content to know and do God's will without going too far down the path of why.

Unless we bleach the story of the Flood of all meaning beyond the kindergarten Sunday School level, it raises a lot of questions I suspect most of us have never bothered to ask. Principally: why would God destroy His creation in this way? There's one passage in which Bera, Sem's wife, reports the answers of all those on the ark:

Father:-Because He wishes to cleanse the world of sin and punish the unbelievers.
Mother:-Because He can.
Sem:-Because He wants to encourage us to do better.
Cham:-Because He's got no respect for His own creation.
Ilya [Cham's wife]:- Because, like most males, He loves destruction for its own sake.
Japheth...:-Because He's the boss and don't you forget it.
Mirn [Japheth's wife]:-Because He wants to see what we'll do.
None of these answers is satisfactory, but my own (because there is no limit to the suffering He makes available to us, for reasons only He understands) is no more so.

I don't know why David Maine chose the story of the Flood, of all the mysteries of God proposed to man through the Douay Rheims Bible, as the basis for a novel. (I also don't know why he chose that translation, unless it was simply to use the archaic "Noe.") But I'm all for raising theological questions in entertaining ways, and I suppose the Flood Story is universal enough that it can ask the questions without being rejected up front. And if you read the answers the character give to, "Why did He do it?", you see that they are pretty much as relevant when the "it" is what happens on any given day as when it's the end of all flesh.

As it happens, the publisher has put together a reading group guide to the novel, which is basically a set of nine discussion questions. Most of them look at the literary aspects of the novel -- e.g., "How does the book's structure contribute to its pacing and emotional resonance?" -- which I'd bring up if this were a full-blown book review. But it does include this question, the answers to which in reading groups around the country (pardon my parochialism, but other countries would have other publishers) might be very interesting:

According to Father James Martin, a Catholic priest quoted in USA Today, the current trend of Bible-oriented books is "theology lite... some is nourishing, most of it isn't. But it's easily digested and makes few demands." Is that a fair criticism?

Labels: Reviews

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