How Dominicans say, "Merry Christmas!"

"Here's a book I thought you'd like."

As a Christmas present to Disputations readers, I will give out a copy of each book published by Zaccheus Press.



The books are

• Union with God: Letters of Spiritual Direction by Blessed Columba Marmion
• Christ, the Life of the Soul, by Blessed Columba Marmion
• Our Lady and the Church, by Hugo Rahner, SJ
• A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist, by Abbot Vonier
• Hammer and Fire, by Raphael Simon, OCSO

Please check out the descriptions of the books. If any of them interest you -- I particularly recommend Our Lady and the Church and A Key to the Doctrine of the Eucharist -- send me an email listing your interests in order. I'll choose five emails at random on or about Christmas Eve and arrange for delivery.

And of course if you want to give one of these books as a present to someone else, please do.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Josephology in six minutes

Fr. Basil Cole, OP, gives a brief talk on video about the role of St. Joseph in the Incarnation and our redemption.

Link | John da Fiesole
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νυν καιρος ευποσδεκτος

Every day, we make countless choices, and each choice we make either draws us closer to God or drives us farther away from Him.

Though, strictly speaking, we don't make countless choices. Our choices are, in principle, countable; we simply don't count them.

And actually, our choices aren't merely countable in principle, they are counted in fact, by God. And it certainly sounds like we get to go over each of them with Him at the Last Judgment; I sort of hope that will be mostly a matter of formality and ritual.

Nowadays, we tend to have a Newtonian concept of time, as something that moves forward in evenly spaced ticks, measured by some object like an hourglass or a caesium oscillator. But we could also think of time as something that ticks along with each of our free choices. That's not something we can measure, as a practical matter, but it's certainly more relevant to our own lives than the fact that yet another 9,192,631,770 cycles of Caesium-133 radiation have been detected at NIST.

So the sequence of our choices produces our personal moral chronology, what we're up to at each moral instant.

But

Thus says the LORD: In a time of favor I answer you, on the day of salvation I help you.

And St. Paul proclaims,

Behold, now is a very acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.

The difference between our personal "moral instant" and the "now" that is a very acceptable time is the old chronos-kairos distinction. It's not an either/or distinction, though. A moral instant and the acceptable time can coincide within a person; when this happens, we can say the chronos or marked or counted time is graced with God's eternal kairos.

We speak of Advent as a time when we prepare for the coming of Christ, both in our hearts at Christmas and at the end of time. But all of these times -- Advent 2006, Christmas 2006, the Second Coming -- are all perceived as points in a chronology, as sets of moral instants. What St. Paul tells us is that the moral instant of Incarnation -0004 means that any or all of our own moral instants can coincide with the acceptable kairos.

Yes, Christ will come again, in some future instant. But He is also here now; God's present is in contact with all of our instants. Whether we want that contact to be realized in our persons, whether we want our instant -- this instant, the one you're spending reading this sentence -- to be graced with God's eternal kairos, is the choice that will characterize this instant in the record of our moral chronology.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Seasonal significance

I've been struck this season by how sacramental Advent is.

As St. Thomas writes:

...a sacrament is a sign that is both a reminder of the past, i.e. the passion of Christ; and an indication of that which is effected in us by Christ's passion, i.e. grace; and a prognostic, that is, a foretelling of future glory.

Each sacrament unites those three points in time: Christ's death on the Cross; the current moment; and the Last Day. We speak in particular of the Eucharist making present Christ's sacrifice on the altar, but we should always recall it as a pledge of future glory as well.

In a similar way, Advent makes present to us the past and the future. The past, in the form of the promises of a Messiah, culminating in the journey to Bethlehem and echoed in the ministry of St. John the Baptist. The future, as we look forward to the Messiah's return.

And the present? What are the graces that indicate of that which is effected in us, by Christ's passion, in terms of these preparations? Answering that question, you might say, is what Advent is for.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The Feast of the Immaculate Condamasus I, Pope

It looks like the post I had planned for last Friday will have to wait until next year. A shame, too; it was crackerjack.

But time marches on, and such missed opportunities are normal. "Normal" in the statistical sense, I conjecture, with most of our three score and ten Solemnities of the Immaculate Conception being average, with a few exceptional and a few exceptionally bad.

I'm not sure what it is, exactly, that is usually average but sometimes exceptional. Maybe something like "openness to God" or "disposition toward contemplation." Something, in any case, that you'd like to have a lot of.

Having a lot of pretty much anything all the time doesn't come to us naturally. From our daily cycle of sleep and wakefulness to the arc of our whole lifespan, we change according to more or less regular patterns -- normal patterns, even.

You might say -- though you probably wouldn't, so I will -- that the point of living through a whole series of liturgical years is to move the average up, so that this decade's exceptional become next decade's (God grant it) average.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The solution

I woke up this morning with the answer to all life's problems running through my head:

A life of charity, fed by prayer and fasting.

The charity in question is the full concentration, greatest of the three things that endures, infused theological virtue: God's own love acting through you. A life of charity is one best described by the constant stream of acts of charity performed. Prayer draws one toward God; fasting pushes away what is not God.

Worth noting is that this solution is a solvent, not a magic potion. You apply it to your problem, and it works on it, but there's no guarantee of an instant clean-up.

Link | John da Fiesole
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You're not one of them

Amy Welborn writes, about armchair Crusaders:

And...if the Pope had starting preaching in the Blue Mosque...who would have suffered? The Pope? Of course not. You know who would have suffered, and you're not one of them.

For $8.95 a month, people can sit on their butts in the safety of their home and tap out for all the Internet to see their anger that popes and bishops do not live according to their own paltry fantasies.

Is it the Spirit of the Most High speaking through them? Test the spirit and find out.

Link | John da Fiesole
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A disproportionate response

The claim has been made (never mind the context) that, from the teaching of Veritatis Splendor, it follows that the following two statements cannot both be true of the same act:

1. The act is intrinsically evil.
2. The act is specified as a "disproportionate" instance of a more general act.

Very briefly, the argument goes something like this:

VS 80 says intrinsically evil acts "are such always and per se, in other words, on account of their very object, and quite apart from the ulterior intentions of the one acting and the circumstances."

But whether an act is "disproportionate" necessarily depends on the circumstances, and possibly on the intentions also.

Therefore, no act specified by being a disproportionate type of a more general act can be intrinsically evil.

Or, even more briefly: The object of an act cannot be specified by it being disproportionate.

I don't buy this argument.

First, I will admit that I can't see that Veritatis Splendor adds much to the Catholic moral tradition, to which the encyclical often refers. Well, there's a certain level of additional Magisterial authority being placed behind the Church's moral tradition, and the specific condemnation of teleological and proportionalist theories contrary to the tradition, but I think the blessed John Paul II was simply restating and applying the tradition, not developing it.

In VS 78, for example, he refers to "the insightful analysis, still valid today, made by Saint Thomas" about what makes a human act good or evil. So I think I can get away with using St. Thomas to refute the non-VS-related version of the argument -- viz, that the object of an act cannot be specified by it being disproportionate.

To that end, here are couple of quotations from ST I-II 18, "The good and evil of human acts, in general," the question containing the article referred to in the footnote on that statement from VS 78:

Although external things are good in themselves, nevertheless they have not always a due proportion to this or that action. And so, inasmuch as they are considered as objects of such actions, they have not the quality of goodness. [a. 2, ad 1.]

External things lacking a due proportion can be considered as objects of actions. More directly against the idea that being "disproportionate" cannot specify the object of an act:

A circumstance is sometimes taken as the essential difference of the object, as compared to reason; and then it can specify a moral act. And it must needs be so whenever a circumstance transforms an action from good to evil; for a circumstance would not make an action evil, except through being repugnant to reason. [a. 5, ad 4]

Since, then, St. Thomas allows that a circumstance can specify an act's object, and Pope John Paul II allows that St. Thomas's analysis is still valid today, an intrinsically evil act can, in fact, be defined as a more general act performed in a disproportionate manner.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Just for fun

From Happy Catholic, a list of books recommended by Fr. Raymond A. Schroth, S.J., in his own book, Dante to Dead Man Walking: One Reader's Journey Through the Christian Classics. Underlined books I've read; italicized I intent to read; struck-through I intend not to; and otherwise, otherwise.

1. The Book of Genesis
2. The Book of Job
3. The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel by Robert Alter
4. The Gospel According to St. Luke
5. The Gospel According to St. John
6. The Confessions of St. Augustine: Some day! Maybe.
7. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri: I should reread this and finish the whole Comedy. Some day!
8. Butler's Lives of the Saints by Michael Walsh: Not really a cover-to-cover kind of read, is it?
9. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis
10. The Idea of a University by Ven. John Henry Newman: the sort of thing it's good to have read, if not all that gripping to read
11. Walden by Henry David Thoreau: I checked this book out of the library when I was working one summer during college. My officemate said, "Why would you want to read that?" I've never been able to answer that question.
12. The Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln
13. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
14. The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux: After I read St. Teresa.
15. Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams
16. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
17. Dubliners by James Joyce: Everybody likes "The Dead." I remember "Araby" more, and I've seen the movie version of "The Dead."
18. Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset: Great stuff! Come on, Granada, and serialize it. I'm partway through The Master of Hestviken, which Undset (a Dominican tertiary, though not until after she wrote Kristin Lavransdatter) considered her best work.
19. Therese by Francois Mauriac
20. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather: I probably own this, in one of those pretentious editions made to be seen but not read.
21. Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly
22. Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography by Albert Schweitzer: Life's too short to read everything, and I read a children's biography of him in seventh grade.
23. The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos: What did I call this? Something like, "Proust for busy Catholics." That's not meant as a compliment.
24. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
25. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia by Rebecca West
26. Brideshead Revisisted by Evelyn Waugh: I read this some years after seeing the TV series with Jeremy Irons. I kept waiting for it to be different. It never did.
27. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alex Paton
28. The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton: I've warmly recommended this several times, but the negative comments at Happy Catholic make me wonder whether it's been too long since I've read it.
29. Letters and Papers from Prison by Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Maybe, but I'm not going to go looking for it.
30. The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day
31. The Family of Man by Edward Steichen
32. Divine Milieu by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.: I started this, having picked up a used copy for a buck. I won't ever recoup my losses.
33. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.: Excellent, particularly the first part.
34. Morte D'Urban by J. F. Powers: I've got a copy of a collection of his stories, which I also haven't read yet.
35. The Other America by Michael Harrington
36. The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis
37. The Historic Reality of Christian Culture: A Way to the Renewal of Human Life by Christopher Dawson: I'm open to reading Dawson. Just haven't yet.
38. The Edge of Sadness by Edwin O'Connor
39. Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
40. Everything That Rises Must Converge, "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor
41. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley
42. Silence by Shusaku Endo: Own it. Started it. Misplaced it.
43. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation by Gustavo Gutierrez: I just can't think of a reason I'd need or want to read this.
44. The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell
45. The Love of Jesus and the Love of Neighbor by Karl Rahner, S.J.
46. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza: Oh, hell no.
47. Black Robe by Brian Moore: Saw the movie. My parents saw the movie, too, on my recommendation, though I think all I said was it was very nicely filmed. (Not a good date movie.)
48. Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States by Helen Prejean: I don't think I'll ever need to read this, and I can't imagine reading it if I didn't need to.
49. The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd: Excellent treatment of a notoriously difficult figure to peg. Whether Ackroyd pegged him correctly, I guess we'll find out some day.
50. All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time by Robert Ellsberg

Link | John da Fiesole
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Happy Andrewmas!

I assume you've already had your morning porridge. If you haven't yet figured out which whisky to toast the Patron Saint of Scotland with tonight, may I recommend Laphroiag 15 Y.O.?

Link | John da Fiesole
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Statics and dynamics

No, really, this isn't another post in the torture debate. I'm simply pointing out a distinction that might, incidentally, be of critical importance to that debate.

The distinction is between a moral taxonomy -- the classification of objective acts according to their morality, and of the moral effects intent and circumstances can have on these classes of objective acts -- and a moral casuistry -- the determination of the moral character of a specific instance of a moral act, including its object, intent, and circumstances.

While casuistry requires some sort of moral taxonomy, it doesn't come free with the taxonomy. And working on the one while you think you're working on the other can lead to big problems. (Of course, I'm not keen on casuistry anyway, but that's another matter.)

Link | John da Fiesole
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Lectio secula

Touching on the idea of a parallel between the interaction of theological musing and consequent contemplation and the interaction of the reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation of lectio divina, Br. Jerome, OSB, writes in a reflection on the Rule of St. Benedict:

This is just my own opinion, but I am inclined to think that the Dominican concept of contemplation comes closest to our own, largely because of their love of study. Study, for the Dominican, is often very similar to lectio in the Benedictine scheme of things. Why? Because the Dominican seeks Truth, and Jesus said: "I am the Truth." A Dominican could be reading virtually anything and still know that every bit of real, objective truth garnered from that reading would be yet another shard, no matter how small, in the infinite mosaic of the face of Christ. That is a mosaic none of us shall ever complete in this life, but oh, how much more familiar He shall seem to us when we meet Him because of it!

Maybe I'm just prejudiced, but I think that a Dominican education, such as I had, is a wonderful preparation for Benedictine life.

And, on the other hand, a Benedictine education seems to have stood St. Thomas in good stead for Dominican life.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Not the end of the line

I am, believe it or not, becoming more aware of the need for theological musing to be treated as a useful good, as a means to a greater end, rather than as an end in itself. It's a bit tricky, since contemplating God is a good end in itself (the end, in fact, but we're not there yet), and theological musing and contemplating God can swirl together, somewhat like the various stages of lectio divina.

So, for example, the theological musing, "The Father's will needn't necessarily have been the Passion," shouldn't be the end of a line of reasoning. The moral isn't that God could work our salvation in just about any old way, like a magician who can, depending on what he feels like doing, produce the missing card from his pocket or a book on the shelf or the envelope he handed to the volunteer at the beginning of the trick.

Instead, we might continue along these lines: The fact that the Father did will the Passion reveals (or at least hints at) a whole chain or set or design of absolutely free choices. The potential alternate universe in which we (though, as Zippy points out, in another universe "we" aren't us, since we're in fact in this universe) are saved by Jesus picking up a pin isn't something to think about for its own sake, but for what it tells us about God's actual designs for this universe (or, along somewhat different lines, about God's omnipotence).

I'd say it isn't that God could have saved you-as-you-actually-are, as you are actually to be saved, by some means other than Christ's free sacrifice. That idea may well be literal nonsense. Rather, it's that God did save you-as-you-actually-are, as you are actually to be saved, by means of Christ's free sacrifice -- and He didn't have to.

That combination of absolute freedom and the actual choice made is meal enough to chew over forever.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Which acceptation applies?

Lee comments on the post below:

"But the Father's will needn't necessarily have been the Passion."

How do we know this? I think we don't really. I've heard it said that God could have willed to save us in any number of ways, but I wonder if that is really true. In other words, it seems at least possible that His nature plus the nature of our perilous situation *required* the Incarnation, Passion and death of His Son- that if He was going to save us at all, it HAD to be done in that way in His view. Do we really know enough of the inner life of God, of how His mind works, to so confidently say that He did not have to do it in this way? I know theologians say that any theandric action offered for our salvation would have been enough. To me that has always seemed to be talking very considerably beyond our knowledge of God. If Divine Revelation is silent on the subject- and I think it is- then we simply do not know and cannot reason our way to such a confident declaration. Or so it seems to me. Of course, I submit to whatever the Church pronounces on the topic, but it hasn't been defined, has it?

I don't know offhand exactly what has been pronounced or defined, with what authority, on this question.

I would say, though, that once you add something like "plus the nature of our perilous situation," you're already beyond that first acceptation (is that a great word or what?) of "necessary" -- viz, "anything which of its nature cannot be otherwise" -- applied to God.

And I think, though what do I know, the "any theandric action offered for our salvation would have been enough" argument can be understood as a direct corollary of Divine omnipotence and transcendence. Creation quite simply cannot impose the necessity of compulsion on the God Who created it.

At the same time, though, it seems to me that any other theandric action would have had different effects; if we had been saved by Jesus picking up a pin, for example, then we most likely wouldn't have crucifixes in our churches. So the Father's willing the Son's Passion was necessary from presupposing the end of our being saved in the particulars of history.

I'd say God has revealed enough about Himself and our relation to Him that we can know He could have saved us through other means. It strike me as plausible that the salvation obtained through other means would not be identical to the salvation obtained through Christ's passion and death, in which case the specific Gospel actually preached can only have been preached by a Son Who had to die.

At the same time, the notion that God's very nature necessitates our salvation according to the specific Gospel actually preached seems contrary to the de fide declaration of God's absolute freedom.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The Pierced King

On the road to Emmaus, Jesus tells Cleopas and his companion:

"Oh, how foolish you are! How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and enter into his glory?"

Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the scriptures.

His teaching, of course, caused their hearts to burn within them, though it evidently didn't cause them to record his teaching in any detail. So we're left with the question, "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer?"

St. Thomas begins his answer (which, in a word, is, "Yes") with the observation that "there are several acceptations of the word 'necessary'":

1. "anything which of its nature cannot be otherwise"; neither Divine nor human nature, of itself, made Jesus' passion necessary.
2. "the necessity of compulsion", when some outside cause acts upon a thing; nothing can act upon the Divine nature, which is literally impassible, and in His human nature Jesus willingly chose to suffer.
3. " necessary from presupposing [an] end"; this is the necessity St. Thomas sees, "and this can be accepted in three ways":
   1. on our part, the end being our salvation
   2. on Jesus' part, the end being His glory (here St. Thomas quotes the above verse from Luke)
   3. on God's part, who willed our salvation and Christ's glory through His passion

Now, St. Thomas goes on to argue that "speaking simply and absolutely, it was possible for God to deliver mankind otherwise than by the Passion of Christ." The Passion was necessary because it was the Father's will, but the Father's will needn't necessarily have been the Passion. It's a necessity that has its origin, as all things do, in the Father's will.

But I think we can also speak of the necessity of the Passion presupposing the end of Jesus' disciples following Him (following Jesus being, in turn, the means to the end of our salvation). Which brings me, at long last, to Christ the Pierced King.



That He is our king means we must do His will. But doing His will means suffering, sometimes martyrdom. In His love for His people, Jesus cannot will us to do what He Himself did not will Himself to do; that would be to treat us as merely useful objects for effecting His will, rather than as beloved subjects.

If Christ is to be King, then He must be pierced for those who belong to His kingdom. His passion and His kingship are inseparable. Without the former, He would be merely an unloving despot; without the latter, He would be merely an exemplar of virtue. With both, He is True God from True God.

And He is coming.

Link | John da Fiesole
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There is no such thing as a free movie

But there are such things as a movie you don't have to buy a ticket to see.

There will be free screenings of The Nativity Story in 30 cities around the country next Tuesday evening. Some theaters will have room even if everyone who's reserved a free ticket comes, so they're opening those up to everyone who shows up (up to theater capacity, of course).

If you're interested, I'd recommend contacting the promoters to see whether the place you'd go has unclaimed tickets. If so, show up early and you might get in.

NOTE: I don't know any more than you do about the movie itself.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Beaten to the punch

Dominicans should have been all over this idea, but the laurels go to St. Francis. Nuts.

Or, I should say, nuts.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Pro Orantibus, Deo Gratias

On this day dedicated to remembering cloistered religious life, I would like to thank God for those sisters who have supported me and my family with their prayers, in particular the Summit Dominicans and the Mt. Thabor Dominicans.

Speaking of the latter, if you're anywhere near Ortonville, Michigan, this Saturday, the nuns there are celebrating the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Order with a Mass of Thanksgiving offered by Msgr. John Zenz, Moderator of the Dominican Curia.

Link | John da Fiesole
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The scope is always eternity

Part of what I'm getting at, with my concern about viewing Catholicism through an apologetical lens, is that it can lead to confusing the map for the territory. We don't have faith in the Church's systematized doctrines; we have faith in the Church's Founder. Believing a doctrine is an act of faith in Christ.

If we make the system of beliefs the object of faith, then we're arguing for a falsehood. That's a tough sell, even to people like systems.

But not everyone likes systems, and probably no one likes an arbitrary system that imposes suffering on them. Steven Riddle, writing against what he calls "Catholic Manicheeism," suggests that saying, "It's the law, get over it,"

may be true, but it is not inclined to helping the human and humane person get over it. It is this fundamental insensitivity to a major part of human life that I find problematic.

The LORD our God, the LORD is one. From this divine simplicity comes the unity of our Faith. To focus in on one small point may be necessary, but it can't be done outside the context of the whole of the Faith in God Who is Love.

(I like the image of coming to know the Faith as studying a multi-faceted gem. We can look at one facet only in relation with those it touches, and as we look at more and more of the gem we find the facets disappear; what we are holding is really a perfectly smooth pearl.)

If, in a discussion with another, we give the impression that the scope of the matter at hand is only this one point, then even if we win the argument with sound proofs, we are teaching at best a half-truth. Winning such an argument may only make things worse.

Link | John da Fiesole
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Better a millstone, a rope, and a deep lake

Than, in defending the Faith, to make it seem petty.

Link | John da Fiesole
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An invitation

If you are, or want to be, someone who is totally captivated by Jesus Christ who is First Truth, someone on fire for the Gospel, someone with zeal for the salvation of souls, you're welcome to explore a vocation with the Dominicans.

Link | John da Fiesole
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