Friday, January 27, A.D. 2012

The Pro-Life Cause, Orthodoxy, and Hope

Following the prolife theme of this week’s posts, I recommend that you read Matushka Frederica Mathewes-Green’s address, “The Pro-Life Cause, Orthodoxy, and Hope.” Matushka Frederica speaks of her own transformation from an abortion rights supporting feminist to a supporter of the prolife movement, and she lists some interesting selections from the fathers concerning abortion. Here are segments of her speech:

You may be surprised to learn that abortion was common in the ancient Roman Empire. The methods were more dangerous than today (I should say, more dangerous to the mother; every abortion is lethally dangerous to the child). But those methods were nevertheless used by women who wanted to conceal sexual activity, or who were forced to have abortions by their husbands and lovers.

The ancient, pagan world was a harsh one. Not only were children aborted before birth, but a newborn child was not officially received into a family until its father picked it up and held it. If the father didn’t want the child he simply refused to take it up, and the child was legally abandoned. This was called “exposing” an infant; it would be placed in some public place, and the social fiction was that someone else might pick it up and care for it. Sometimes people did take in these babies, and rear them to be sold as slaves or put on the street as prostitutes. But, often enough, no one took the child before it was found by dogs or other animals, or died of exposure and starvation.

And this was legal. It was a harsh world. Christians stood out as different, in that world. They were different in seeing every human being as worthy of dignity, whether free or slave, male or female, Jew or Gentile (as St. Paul said in Galatians 3:21). One of the big differences between Christians and pagans was that Christians did not have abortions. From the earliest years, the Church Fathers spoke against abortion. Let me read you some of their statements.

This is from the Didache, a work which was written about the same time as the Gospels: “You shall not murder a child by abortion.”

The Letter of Barnabas, written about the same time, repeats those words. “You shall love your neighbor more than your own life. You shall not murder a child by abortion.” Note the connection he makes there. This is not about sexual morality, it’s about loving your neighbor, who in this case is a helpless child.

The Letter to Diognetus, probably written around 125, describes to a nonbeliever what Christians are like. He writes, “They marry, as do all others; they beget children, but they do not abort fetuses.”

The Apocalypse of Peter says that, in heaven, aborted children are cared for by an angel named Temlakos. He writes, “The children shall be given over to the caretaking angel Temlakos, and those who slew the children will be punished forever, for this is God’s will.”

Matushka Frederica continues:

Yet, even though the early Christians refused to participate in abortion, a terrible rumor circulated about them in those days. You know that, in the centuries when Christianity was illegal, some parts of our faith were kept secret and not shared outside the community of believers. For example, the Holy Mystery of the Eucharist was something only baptized Christians knew about, and it was never spoken about to nonbelievers. We still say, in the pre-communion prayer of St. John Chrysostom, “I will not speak of your mystery to your enemies.”

Yet rumors started to circulate that Christians were cannibals. There was a story going around that in Christian worship a baby was put inside a sack of flour and beaten to death, and then eaten. Well, if you thought people in your neighborhood were doing that as part of a religious ritual, you’d want to see them executed too. And you can see how the rumor is a mixed-up version of our belief that Christ came to earth as a child, and that he gives us his Body and Blood in the Eucharist. So, many of the early Christians were martyred because they were thought to be child-killers and cannibals, and some early writers protest it’s a lie, Christians do no such thing, while it’s pagans who commit abortion and expose newborns.

Minucius Felix wrote, around 200 AD, “I would like to meet the person who says …that we [Christians] are brought into the faith by means of the slaughter and blood of an infant. Do you think that it can be possible for such a tender little body to receive such fatal wounds? Is it possible for anyone to pour forth the new blood of a little child, scarcely come into existence? Nobody is capable of believing this—except the person who would do it. Yes, I see that you expose your newborn children to wild beasts and to birds, and at other times crush them to death. There are some women who drink medicines that extinguish the life of a child while it is still inside their body, and thus murder their own relative before they bring it forth.”

Tertulllian says that for Christians, “Since murder has been once and for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb. …To interfere with a birth is merely an earlier way of killing a person. It doesn’t matter whether you take away a life that has been born, or destroy one that is coming to birth.” (Apology 9:8) Elsewhere he wrote, “We hold that life begins with conception, and that the soul also begins at conception; life has its commencement at the same moment and place that the soul does.” (Apology 27)

St. John Chrysostom wrote, “Do you condemn the gifts of God, and fight against His laws? Childlessness is seen as a curse, but you seek it as though it were a blessing. Do you make the chamber of birth a place of slaughter? Do you teach the woman who is formed to give life to perpetuate killing instead?” (Homilies on Romans 24)

St. Basil puts medicines that cause abortion in the same category as other kinds of killing. He writes, “The man or woman is a murderer who gives a potion, if the person that takes it dies from it. So also are they who uses a medicine to procure abortion; and so are those robbers who kill on the highway.”

Matushka further shows how our Orthodox appreciation for pre-natal life has scriptural and festal sources. She quotes the story of the Visitation in the Gospel of Luke, wherein Elizabeth exclaims at Mary’s visit,  “Why do I deserve such honor, that the mother of my Lord would come to me? For when the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy.”

Moreover, we celebrate not only the birthdays of Mary, John, and Jesus—September 8, June 24, and December 25, respectively—but also their conceptions—December 9 (a day later than the December 8 celebration for the Latins), September 23, and March 25, respectively. Christians have always been a people of and for life . . . and life more abundant.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, January 27, A.D. 2012
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Friday, August 26, A.D. 2011

Believe

“And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

This past spring, I had a conversation with a fellow on the train as the Cardinal Line coursed through the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He was a lapsed Episcopalian, which I considered rather redundant. We had a pleasant talk about religion wherein he mentioned doctrines that troubled him and I defended them in ways that made them less objectionable to him. I then wanted to share something about the Christian religion that I found problematic, but as I began to speak, I discovered an appropriate rejoinder. It was an odd experience. Am I an apologist in spite of myself?

I had wanted to complain about the repeated injunctions in the scriptures to believe. My skeptical side has always disliked these passages, finding them inexplicable and even embarrassing. I do not want to believe; I want to understand. Moreover, I want solid reasons to accompany that understanding. Exhortations to belief struck me as a fraud’s gimmick to sucker in folks. I never judged the evangelists as snake oil peddlers, but certain passages in the bible made me uncomfortable. Paul and Silas preach, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” John writes, “He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.” Mark writes, “Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.” There are scores upon scores of such examples, and they are targets for skeptics who care not for blind belief. I am sympathetic to them.

As I was relaying these objections to my fellow Amtrak passenger, a simple explanation came. My interlocutor never knew that my objections were not rhetorical. This unforeseen answer reminded me an earlier objection that I had about the anthropomorphism in the scriptures’ depiction of a wrathful, vindictive God. When that thought bothered me, I happened to come across some patristic texts that addressed the problem, though I do not remember which. The basic idea was that the scriptures are written for men—for their edification and for their salvation. Hence, the inspired texts speak to men at their level. Portrayals of a wrathful, jealous God do not depict God as he is but rather address us pastorally. Most of us have had loving fathers who corrected us. Fathers employ anger, disappointment, approval, sadness, and joy in pedagogy, and we grow up with an intimate recognition of these emotional tools. Holy writ taps into our human psychology to instruct us in the ways of the Lord. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but it is not the end of it.

Similarly, it occurred to me that the recurring invitations in the bible to believe may also be pastoral. Rather than seedy priestcraft, the call to believe is like a physician’s request that a patient trust him. Unless the patient believes that the physician is able to help him, he will not likely follow the doctor’s advice. Trust necessarily precedes the assistance that the physician may offer. Likewise, Christ the Healer offers us medicine, but we must first accept that it is medicine rather than poison. We must have faith in the physician. This is so obvious to me now, and it is likely a commonplace thought among Christians, but I never realized it before. One must believe before one knows in almost any discipline, since one must trust his teacher before he attains knowledge. How much more necessary is trust when we are dealing not with mere knowledge but with salvation?

Posted by Joseph on Friday, August 26, A.D. 2011
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Friday, August 19, A.D. 2011

Mount Tabor

I wish those on the old calendar a blessed feast of the Transfiguration, as well as a happy birthday to my sister.

The gospels do not specify upon which mountain the Transfiguration occurred, though Christian tradition holds that it was Mount Tabor. Christians have made pilgrimages to the mount since antiquity, though the Mohammedans demolished all Christian edifices in the thirteenth century. Centuries later, the Ottomans allowed first the Franciscans and then the Orthodox to rebuild monasteries and temples on Mount Tabor. The site BibleWalks has pictures and information, and there is another page for the Orthodox Monastery of Saint Elijah.

Interestingly and coincidentally, my sister’s namesake has a historical connection to Mount Tabor, as recounted in the fourth chapter of the Book of Judges.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, August 19, A.D. 2011
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Friday, August 12, A.D. 2011

The Problem with Isaac

When I first encountered the simple medieval procedure for testing the truth of revealed religion, I was thrilled. It only works negatively, though; so, it has its limits. The basic argument is that there is divinely revealed truth that is inaccessible to human reason on its own and there is divinely revealed truth that is accessible to human reason on its own. A revelatory tradition that teaches doctrines that conflict with what human reason is able to know is not trustworthy, and a revelatory tradition that teaches doctrines that accord with what human reason is able to know has not disqualified itself. This process does not assure the truthfulness of a revelatory tradition, but it does winnow out falsehood.

Yet, there are many problems with this procedure, including the frailty of human reason as manifested in most men. It is pleasant to think that human beings can easily overcome controversy through rational dialogue, but such dialectical ascent evades the bulk of mankind. Even the wisest find answers to the truly important questions difficult or indiscernible. Hence, the schoolmen argue for authority and divine revelation as assistance to the weak human mind. However, one must choose his authorities wisely; for we know that the world is full of liars and sowers of confusion. Therein, one sees the circular problem. How does the ignorant man wisely choose an authority to follow in order to spare him from his ignorance? In the end, each individual must make that choice, though the beneficial consequence of that choice is really required to make it.

The issue is quite practical. If we wish to serve God, how do we know whom to serve when, in our ignorance, we do not know who is telling the truth about ultimate matters? In the book of Genesis, we read the striking story of Abraham’s planned sacrifice of Isaac. The account serves to demonstrate Abraham’s faith and devotion, but a skeptical reader might think that Abraham was a naive dupe who happened, fortunately, to follow the true Lord (that hypothetical reader must not be too skeptical). For God’s command should have been repugnant to Abraham. Were he to have followed the aforementioned scholastic advice, he would have asked God to leave him. The pious man replies that Abraham trusted God more than he trusted his own sense of right and wrong, but that is precisely the problem. How does one discern messages from God from those of other sources without relying on one’s own wisdom?

Perhaps, Abraham developed enough trust in the Lord, gained from the many years during which he served God before he was asked to sacrifice his son, that he would obey despite the ostensibly heinous request. One might ask what the value of trust is if it is to be continuously questioned. Nonetheless, would not Abraham have good reason to suspect that the Adversary was attempting to lead him to evil under the guise of God? However, maybe one cannot mistake evil for God once one knows God.

These sorts of questions lead me to think that we have been blessed with more spiritual faculties than simply discursive or analytic reason. As I have written before, I think that we might have something like a faculty of faith. If the peasant can commune with God as well as the philosopher, perhaps our principal organ for dealing with the divine is not our mind. Abraham’s fidelity and righteousness might have resulted from his superior employment of this faculty.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, August 12, A.D. 2011
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Thursday, August 11, A.D. 2011

Anti-Christian Bigotry

Yesterday, I commended the Israelis for performing Wagner in “Jews at Bayreuth.” Today, however, I have nothing but scorn for the Jerusalem Post‘s anti-Christian screed, “A Christian scholar on ‘why antisemitism, why the Holocaust?’” David Turner reviews William Nicholls’ Christian Antisemitism: A History of Hate as a pretext for attacking Christianity, proving once again that hate—a profound, blistering, ignorant hate—has a home in the hearts of many religions. Unfortunately, Turner cannot really be blamed for not knowing that the “Anglican” Nicholls, who serves as his glimpse into Christianity, hates the gospel as much as Turner. How perverse is it that Nicholl’s namesake was an Anglican divine who wrote—approvingly—of the Book of Common Prayer?

Turner’s-by-Nicholl’s major point is that Christianity is anti-Semitic because of an insecurity complex. That Jews persist strikes terror into Christians because their unbelief calls Jesus’ claims into question. The most frustrating aspects to interreligious dialogue are that people generally know very little about other people’s religions and that people generally do not even try to understand religions on their own terms. Such is obvious in this case for the Jew Turner and the heathen Nicholls, though one would think that a biblically literate Jew would know better. Was Abraham “insecure” when he noticed immoral paganism in his travels? Was Moses “insecure” when the pharaoh’s heart hardened? Were he and the judges “insecure” when the people continually rebelled? Were the Jews after the division of the kingdom “insecure” because many, perhaps most, of their brethren forsook the temple cult in Jerusalem? Were the prophets “insecure” because of idolatrous kings? I always thought that they preached God’s messages to errant and fallen people; I never considered that their prophesies resulted from “insecurity” about some of their listeners’ failing to heed God’s words.

The entire history of the Abrahamic tradition is about obedience and disobedience to God’s commands. From the garden on, we are shown again and again that some people follow God and others reject God. It is one of the most basic themes in the scriptures. Why, then, would Christians be especially “insecure” that some Jews rejected Christ? Indeed, this rejection of God’s dispensation has been the standard course in human history. Consider Noah’s project, or Job’s friends, or the Hebrews scores upon scores of times. There would have been no prophets if God’s revelations had not continuously been rejected. The new covenant of the gospel, like the previous covenants, was an occasion of disobedience for many men. It is surprising to me, even given ecumenical obstacles, that a rabbinical Jew would fail to notice this.

Curiously, Turner notes, “But Nicholls’ reserves his harshest criticism for Martin Luther, a father of his own reformed church.” From the outside, we might say that Luther was a father of the Anglican religion, but many Anglicans would reject this. It is not an important point, though it further shows Turner’s ignorance of Christian history. And that is a mighty ignorance, tracing, as it does, the holocaust to the gospel:

What is to be done? Even assuming that Christianity would want to repent its two thousand years of Jew-hatred resulting most recently in what is not likely to be the West’s final effort at a Final Solution to its Jewish Problem: Is reform even possible? According to Professor Nicholls the likelihood is negligible. On page 168 he writes, “Christian anti-Judaism is not a later distortion of an originally pure religion. It is embedded in the foundation documents of the faith.”

I deal with the history a bit in “Those Jews” and elsewhere, but no such reasoning can be done with a man whose bigotry refuses to see a religion as anything but a tribal enemy.

Turner also exhibits the revolting rabbinical tic of thinking that only the Jews are clean and that everyone else is an unclean savage:

What, for example, would the Matthew gospel be without its dramatic rendition of the trial of Jesus: of Pilate “washing his hands” (a typically Jewish, not Pagan, custom!); of the Jews self-condemned forever as deicides.

Does he not realize that the idea of the sacred is universally connected with the idea of purity and that other people have been civilized and have believed in spiritual and bodily hygiene for ages? Christians and rabbinical Jews alike inherited this bizarre ignorance of pagans that, thousands of years later, they blithely maintain. Educated Christians seem to move past this idiocy, but rabbinical Jews with learning stubbornly seem to hold onto it. Their attachment to their chosen status is so strong, they appear to get “insecure” by the thought that other nations might wash themselves, cultivate virtue, and excel in intellectual pursuits. But then, what can be done? Hebrew chauvinism is not a later distortion of an originally pure religion. It is embedded in the foundation documents of the faith.

Turner claims that the gospel of John has Jesus refer to the Jews as Satanic:

The John gospel repeatedly describes the Jews as satanic: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do, (John 8:44).” From there it is a short step to characterizing the Jews as antichrists. John associates the Jews with Satan many more times than all three other canonical gospels combined.

Turner forgets, I suppose, that almost every agent in the gospels is Jewish, from the Theotokos to Caiaphas. Pick any prophet’s chastisements in the Hebrew scriptures, and one would interpret them as Jew hatred using the same hermeneutics.

The golden calf prize for asininity, one kil’ayim of a metaphor, goes to this statement:

And assuming a wave of remorse, a universal need to express penance, what then would remain of Christianity if indeed it did agree to do so? According to Nicholls, “Once all the anti-Jewish elements have been removed from Christianity, what is left turns out to be Judaism (p. 431).”

Turner cannot be blamed for Nicholl’s apostate remark, but he is a fool for using someone like him as his source for Christianity. I assume that his mistake was not done in bad faith. A sane man cannot be expected to understand the insanity that Nicholl’s represents. Turner then goes on to speak of Rome’s changes toward rabbinical Jews, about which I am ignorant. I would not be surprised if Rome had muddled its theological waters, but Christians must be clear that Jesus Christ is not the Lord of the goyim only but of all mankind, first to the Jew, and then to the Greek. Yet, it is this very univeralism that horrifies the rabbinical community, and they readily associate evangelism with the genocide of the holocaust. Even Christian Jews often have this mentality. Maybe, it’s that special status “insecurity.” We wouldn’t want the dogs to get any of God’s crumbs, would we?

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, August 11, A.D. 2011
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Friday, July 1, A.D. 2011

A New Family

I would like to wish every proper fortune and blessing for my brother and soon to be sister-in-law on their wedding. The expert on nuptial counsels for the past two millennia has been Saint Paul. From his letter to the Ephesians:

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise,
Redeeming the time, because the days are evil.
Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.
And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit;
Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ;
Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.
Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;
That he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word,
That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.
So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.
For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church:
For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones.
For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.
This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.
Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband.

You may also profit from reading Saint John Chrysostom’s related homily on marriage.

May you have a happy life together, full of joy and good deeds!

Posted by Joseph on Friday, July 1, A.D. 2011
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Friday, June 17, A.D. 2011

The Birth of the Church

Nearing the end of this Pentecostal week, I wanted to address the Church’s beginning. Sometimes, you notice parochial signs or bumper stickers that list the foundation of the Church in A.D. 33 (more likely A.D. 30, but who knows?). As far as I can tell, dating the foundation of the Church to Pentecost is a Western idea, though one can find it among Orthodox Christians in America. When, then, did the Church begin? It certainly did not start in Los Angeles, California sometime in the 1970’s, or in Boston or Utah in the nineteenth century. It predates the Great Schism. The Church was alive and strong with the first of the ecumenical councils at Nicea, as its nascence came before the first ecclesial council in Jerusalem about which we read in the Acts of the Apostles. Then, we have the tradition that founds the Church at Pentecost, with the tongues of fire. Yet, in the Gospel of John, we read that Jesus met the disciples before his Ascension:

Then the same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.
And when he had so said, he shewed unto them his hands and his side. Then were the disciples glad, when they saw the LORD.
Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.
And when he had said this, he breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost:
Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted unto them; and whose soever sins ye retain, they are retained.

Indeed, the Lord commanded the Great Commission afterward, but before the Pentecost, and yet are we to think that there was no Church to receive the order? So, perhaps, we can trace the Church to the death and resurrection of Christ? Christians are the Paschal people, after all. However, before the Passion, Peter addressed Jesus as Lord on Mount Tabor, and, as Paul writes, “No one can know Jesus as Lord except by the revelation of the Holy Spirit.” Wasn’t the Church present when Peter, James, and John witnessed the Transfiguration?

The Church is Israel, matured and blossomed, and its saints lived long before the coming of the Messiah in time and space. The Church exists before the temple, and it exists before Aaron and the Kohanic priesthood. For the people of God had already assembled to receive the law from Moses. As the Church is Israel, maybe we should date the Church to Jacob and his children, but what about Abraham? Wasn’t the sacrifice of Isaac a great milestone in the history of God’s economy with man? Perhaps, we should go back to Noah, when universal laws were given for all nations. Yet, certain men before Noah were righteous and communed with God. Consider what such piety did for Abel. So, it seems sensible to start at the beginning, with the Church’s coming to be in time with the creation of Adam. Yet, time itself is an image of the eternal, and from all eternity the Body of Christ exists for the mind of God. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes,

According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love:
Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will,
To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.
In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace;
Wherein he hath abounded toward us in all wisdom and prudence;
Having made known unto us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure which he hath purposed in himself:
That in the dispensation of the fulness of times he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth; even in him:
In whom also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestinated according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will:
That we should be to the praise of his glory, who first trusted in Christ.
In whom ye also trusted, after that ye heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye believed, ye were sealed with that holy Spirit of promise,
Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.

Think again whether Pentecost is truly the Church’s birthday. I contend that it might be better to consider Pentecost as the Church’s Bar Mitzvah.

Posted by Joseph on Friday, June 17, A.D. 2011
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Thursday, June 2, A.D. 2011

The Watchtower on Ascension Day

Happy Feast of the Ascension!

On this holy day, I offer a delightful post from Perry Robinson on his Energetic Procession site: “The Open Door.” Robinson recounts a morning meeting with some visiting Jehovah’s Witnesses who had knocked on his door. The story is a fine example of grassroots apologetics.

Oddly enough, I owe some of my theological development to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. In my early teen years, I participated in local Baptist missionary efforts wherein I had the chance to see youth pastors and other “soul winners” engage all sorts of folks on religious matters. We sometimes happened upon Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Russelites were surprisingly receptive to having a religious discussion with strangers in their living rooms. One evening, my youth pastor and I visited the home of a Jehovah’s Witness elder. The Baptist and the J.W. had a lengthy doctrinal debate, replete with scores of references to holy writ. It was evident to me that both men were extraordinarily familiar with their scriptures, but they continued to argue past each other because they interpreted the same texts so differently. It was on that rather chilly winter night that I realized how utterly indefensible sola scriptura really was. My proclivities for Protestantism waned quickly afterward.

It is funny how groups as disparate as the Jesuits, Reformed Jewish rabbis, and Jehovah’s Witnesses played important roles in my conversion to Orthodoxy. Providence uses all available tools.

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, June 2, A.D. 2011
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Friday, March 4, A.D. 2011

Kristor Poses Evil Problems

Kristor has responded to my “Before Choice” post:

I should like to clarify first that I do not think that Lucifer’s Fall was unconditioned, or arbitrary, or even blind. It was not wholly ignorant, for Lucifer was acquainted with goodness (in just the same way that the goodness of apples was quite familiar to Eve, before she took and ate the forbidden fruit). When he took a sinful course, he must have apprehended the good that was potential in it. Its defects must not have appeared to him as such, or he would never have taken it. Before he Fell, he was ignorant of evils, but knowledgeable about goods. This is the only way we can construe him as a rational being; and the same goes for Adam, and Eve. If we do not assume that they were ignorant of evil, then we are forced to the conclusion that their behavior in choosing it was purely arbitrary – just what you are rightly concerned to avoid.

We must remember that for creatures the middle term between absolute indeterminacy and complete predetermination is not excluded. There is such a thing as partial predetermination. So, behavior can be orderly without being wholly preordained. If it were not so, there would be no such things as creaturely decisions, or actions, or therefore sins.

As to the unintelligibility of evil, I think we are both indicating the same reality with different gestures.

The image of the boy writing badly, even with the master orthographer’s hand to guide him, is like my image of the baby thrashing on the changing table. The errant movements of the baby or the boy are not chaotic, or unconditioned, or arbitrary, or irrational, or unintended, or wickedly motivated, or even inherently evil; they are merely errant, and error may wreak either good or ill.

Now, whether we name the original factor of that error “ignorance,” as I do,  or refuse to name it, as you do,  either way we indicate a species of ultimately unintelligible evil, by using what is to gesture toward that which is not, and which cannot therefore be referred to directly (“ignorance” is in- “not” + gnarus “aware”). Whether by saying, “no-thing,” or by saying nothing, we both refer to the same unintelligible darkness. And there is no way to make sense of that darkness; no way to come up with an explanation for an innocent adversion thereto, that will enable us to understand how Lucifer could have come to a fully informed, rational conclusion ex ante that, mutatis mutandis, it was a good idea to sin. We agree that he could not have done so: you emphasize that to do so is impossible, in any case; I agree, and emphasize that he could not therefore have had the equipment to do so.

But this introduces a deeper problem. Consider first that ignorance is a defect of being, for ignorance is lack of information – is, i.e., formlessness; that same formlessness endemic to unconditioned prime matter: tohu wabohu, formless and void, as Genesis has it. And a thing is unintelligible in itself to the extent that it is deficiently formed – that, i.e., it is less than fully formed. But how could tohu wabohu ever have come to pass? Or, how could any tiny bit of formlessness have come to pass? How could there be a defect of form anywhere? If God exists, how can anything that is be less than perfectly formed, according to its nature? For, to be at all is to be informed by God; and to be informed by God at all is to be informed by him through and through.

Put another way: given God’s infinity, and the consequent utter pervasion everywhere of his uncreate Light, how can there be darkness anywhere, of any kind? The Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. But, how could there ever have been any darkness in the first place, given the eternal presence everywhere of that Light?

So we see that the Problem of the Fall is just a special case of the Problem of Evil. Given the possibility that he might do evil, and given the fact that, as you say, there is no way to understand evil in itself, we can see how Lucifer might have done it without fully understanding what he was getting himself into (is it even possible, metaphysically, for a creature ever to understand fully what he is getting himself into, beforehand?). We see how it could happen, even though it doesn’t make any sense, and can’t make any sense. Fine. But if God exists, how could there be even a possibility of doing evil? If God exists, how could there be such a thing as unintelligibility or ignorance, anywhere?

God cannot prevent non-god. Being as such cannot prevent non-being. Indeed, being entails the possibility of non-being: if there is a thing, then there is an alternative to that thing, while if there is no thing at all, then there is no alternative thereto, either. If there are no numbers at all, then there is no 0. But if there is 1, then there is 0 (I know, I know: 0 is not nothing; the analogy to the numbers is metaphorical, rather than strict). Thus the question why there is something rather than nothing is nonsense; unless there were something, there could not even be nothing. But given that there is something, then necessarily there is the possibility of something else; and the alternative to being as such is non-being. Thus the mere fact of God’s existence entails the possibility of non-existence.  God cannot, then, create a world that is not subject to the risk of evil, just as he cannot create a stone that he cannot lift. NB that it is not a defect in God that he cannot actualize nonsense. Thus evil is not a defect in his coding. We do not say that a coder is guilty of writing bad code because his program does not do something that the very logic of the programming language disallows.

The risk of creaturely evil, then, is entailed by the existence of God; and this would be so, even were there no creatures. So, the option of evil was necessarily open to Lucifer ab initio; it was not an extra added feature that God threw into the mix. And since evil was metaphysically unintelligible to Lucifer prior to his sin, he could intend evil in a non-arbitrary way without having any rhyme or reason to rationalize his decision: in that decision was no pattern, no logic or order, but rather the absence thereof. That being the case, there is no explanation for what he did. All we can say of Lucifer’s sin is that he could do it, and he did do it.

The problem of the fall is indeed part the larger problem of evil, and I confess that I do not know how to approach the unapproachable, unintelligible puzzles thereof. Insofar as we can lay the groundwork for an understanding of evil, I am anxious that we do not betray a few basic principles—namely, that God is good, that evil has no being of its own, and that evil is not a necessary constitutive aspect of reality. People may think that the “unintelligible, uncaused, uncausing” approach to the problem is a dereliction of philosophical duty, but I subscribe to it, as unsatisfying as it is to our minds that naturally seek to understand, because it holds an “apeironic” space where I cannot see a rational explanation. It is a parenthesis of ignorance, and while that troubles me, I see no way to resolve it. To use the imagery of groundwork, again, I would rather have somewhat disjointed architecture due to the refusal to build upon bad and unstable land than the construction of an impressive edifice upon a rickety foundation. I judge modernity to be the latter, and to keep its consequent building from toppling over constantly requires ever new methods in rigging supports. Ultimately, collapse will occur, and each brilliant, novel support beam is merely a delay of the inevitable. In mentioning this, I am not stating that Kristor’s approach warrants the same fate; I just do not know how do you solve a problem like evil (I would much rather spend time bothering with less burdensome quandaries, like Maria Rainer).

As an aside, I think that we ought to distinguish between non-being and nothing as I argue in “Imperfection”:

A cantankerous metaphysician might claim, following old Parmenides, that the world is really a confused mixture of being and non-being. Things asserted to be are not just as they are. If you make any positive statements about anything formal or particular, you simultaneous and implicitly assert that they are not many other things. The even is not odd, and the pear is not an apple. Each being is not everything else. Hence, reality demands both being and non-being. From the Eleatic to Plato’s Sophist to today, we can see how such a statement makes sense.

Yet, I claim that non-being in the sense of negation within the matrix of reality is not the same as nothingness—evil or anti-being—which is the negation of being as such. God is the source of being and non-being, but we ought not to claim that God is the source of nothingness. That would indicate that God’s act of creation is paralleled, Hindu-style, with God’s act of destruction—and not creative destruction, by the way. Such a cosmic view makes good and evil equal forces from their transcendent source beyond good and evil, the dualism of which annihilates all of our ethical views where we privilege being over nothingness.

As with my different levels of imperfection, I risk irritating some folks due to my “Christianist” tendencies; yet I think that these two meanings of non-being and nothing are distinct. Negation has an intelligible role in affirmation. Similarly, what the Aristotelians call potentiality is an intelligible sort of non-being. Even the concept of pure non-being, as in pure potentiality or Aristotelian “prime matter,” ought not to pose a problem for us. Its unintelligibility results from its formlessness, but its particular kind of formlessness has meaning and a role in the cosmic whole. For I suppose that I am another happy parricide against the venerable Parmenides. The world is a hierarchy of being, and such an order requires the more intelligible and the less intelligible. Pure possibility, perhaps תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ from Genesis, may be a requisite for the world of becoming—the counterpart to pure being, which I take to be the energies of God. For formlessness is a necessary condition of creation—of being’s manifesting its image in time and space in a necessarily imperfect world. I distinguish such imperfection, and its unintelligibility, from evil and its unintelligibility . . . condemning myself to be a little bit more Bonaventuran and a little less Plotinean than Platonic purists would like.

Here are the previous posts for this thread:

“Orthodoxy and Evolution”

“Kristor on the Fall”

“Evil Christians”

“Unde Malum”

“Kristor Promotes Ignorance”

“Kristor Elucidates the Darkness”

“Before Choice”

Posted by Joseph on Friday, March 4, A.D. 2011
Orthodoxy • Patristics • Scripture • Non-Chalcedonianism • Protestantism • Roman Catholicism • (0) Comments • Permalink

Tuesday, March 1, A.D. 2011

Before Choice

Forgiveness Sunday approaches, when we commemorate the exile of our race from paradise. It is timely, then, to consider the fall. Several posts from the past two weeks have examined this unfortunate marring of creation, and I am grateful to Kristor for his offered insight. Indeed, Arimathea has been having its own Kristorfest, which sounds like a real tradition. Imagine pious, young women dancing on the midsummer feast of Saint John in a Scandinavian village. That does sound appealing. Anyway, Kristor holds that the fall can be traced to ignorance (“Kristor on the Fall”), and I object to his thesis by arguing that all attempts to give an account of evil are mistaken; for evil is unintelligible because it has no being of its own (“Unde Malum”). Evil is a parasite of being, and there is no reason for it. To provide an account for evil is to make it intelligible, which is to make it good and therefore not evil. Kristor responds by noting that creatures of limited understanding could not know the wages of sin before sinning, and thus the fall was a result of ignorance (“Kristor Promotes Ignorance” and “Kristor Elucidates the Darkness”). He moreover argues that one cannot sincerely assert as true that which one knows is false, which would have been the case in the fall if we do not attribute it to ignorance. If I follow Kristor’s argument, I think that he means that Adam’s act of disobedience in choosing another good beside God had to be the result of ignorance. For unfallen Adam could not have intentionally asserted a metaphysical falsehood–that is, that the self is to be preferred over God.

Kristor freely gives many gems. I already mentioned my joy at his connecting God’s redemption of fallen creatures to God’s creation of the world ex nihilo. I also found Kristor’s analysis of sin quite useful:

But I don’t think that this sort of understanding amounts to comprehension of evil in its essence, there being no such thing out there to comprehend. It amounts only to recognition of a shared misadventure. In that sense, only, do we “understand a mistake due to ignorance.”

“A shared misadventure”–perspicacious! Kristor’s explanation of the Platonic doctrine of recollection is one of the best summary descriptions that I have seen. Like a true disciple, he exhibits that synoptic vision of the master. Furthermore, Kristor’s connecting recollection with the discursive nature of human reason is very insightful.

Nonetheless, I still reject his overall thesis for the same reasons that I presented in “Unde Malum.” Evil is unintelligible, and efforts to uncover the causes of evil cannot succeed. I do not dismiss Kristor’s arguments, but I think that they apply on a level epiphenomenal to the inscrutable moment of evil. I do not like the term epiphenomenal here, but I do not know how to describe it better. Let me lay some preliminary stonework to the explicative outhouse that I wish to build.

I agree with Nietzsche’s observation that there is no “self,” but rather a multitude of selves populate our psyche. We see the same insight in the Platonic dialogues, where Socrates describes the soul as a complex structure of rational, thumotic, and appetitive forces. I think that such comports with experience. One of my favorite images in the Republic depicts the soul as the little, rational man, the thumotic lion, and the many headed beast, each head of which represents a different appetite. Our experience of our soul is not of a simple unity but of an often tumultuous crowd, the various elements of which pull us in different directions. One of our goals in life is to cultivate virtue and harmony of soul such that the little rational man is able to rule the entire soul. We ought to subject our passions to our nobler, rational selves. This multiplicity of the soul relates to one of the great insights of the Republic–that man, or at least fallen man, has a contradictory nature such that earthly fulfillment is impossible. To satisfy one part of the soul is to starve or to cripple another part of the soul. As such, we must prioritize and regulate ourselves accordingly.

I was discussing this multitudinous aspect of the soul recently with my friend Andrew, which then led to a discussion of the will. Andrew stated that the Western conception of the will as its own unified faculty originates in Augustine’s writings. For the pre-Augustinian ancients, the will is a complexity of deliberative and appetitive drives, the strongest of which wins and determines our choices. Nietzsche makes similar points when he notes that what we call the self is that strongest or most dominant part of the soul with which we identify ourselves. That favored part becomes the “real me,” though this ego changes as we develop, and we are rarely aware of this transition. I think that this makes sense, and it reflects my own experience, as well.

I find this complex understanding of the self and consequently of the will a superior alternative to the commonplace understanding of the will as an absolute, independent, undetermined faculty of choice. Such a view makes the will unintelligible and creates moral difficulties that appear unresolvable. For if the will is so absolutely independent, then whether it chooses one thing or another seems utterly arbitrary. If it is truly arbitrary, then the actions of agents–who are normally seen as moral agents–become unintelligible. There is no rational account for why such a disconnected will would choose this rather than that. When a religious tradition makes God such a disconnected will, then good and evil and all of reality become unintelligible–the undecipherable product of unintelligent and unintelligible caprice. More modest problems result from seeing men in such a way. For how are certain choices “good” and praiseworthy while other choices are “bad” and blameworthy if the act of choosing itself is separate from other considerations. These choices become good or bad after the fact, which appears to me to be an oddly basic form of consequentialism.

In contrast, let us see the human soul as a multitude of forces that aim for various objects according to their nature. In a virtuous, good soul, there is an order where, in Socratic terms, each element does its proper job and where the internal rule of the soul follows the true hierarchy of goods. In such a soul, there is no unintelligible choosing. Rather, the soul, as a collective of ends and desires, is ruled by its highest deliberative faculties that choose based upon knowledge of the good and, as we exist in a particular time and place, of circumstances. Such a virtuous soul could still be mistaken, given limited knowledge, but the mistakes would not be moral errors.

This model of the soul and of the will is also useful for understanding human freedom. We are not blank slates that create our own goods. Rather, rational souls differ from subrational souls due to the presence of the rational faculty in them. Both men and beasts seek the good by nature, but for men, the seeking of the good occurs through reason. Some people commonly think that freedom of the will means that we can choose whatever in the sense of the unconditioned, undetermined will previously mentioned. Were that true, then evil choosing would only be evil in its consequences; the act of choice itself would be morally neutral. I find such unacceptable. Instead, man is determined by reason just as a bee is determined by instinct. Both men and bees sometimes err, however. Men fail in their reason, and bees fail through a corruption of instinct. The rational aspect of the failure in the former we consider a moral failing, whereas we attribute no such sin to the latter. Why? If we judge so because we “chose” not to follow reason, then why did we choose so? It seems that such bad choices follow from a disorder in the soul. We can see how such disorder occurs in the life of man. Aristotle’s ethical observations aptly detail the formation of virtue and deformation of vice in the human soul, where upbringing and choices have enormous consequences for our characters. Such failings ultimately follow from the fall. I fully agree with Kristor when he notes that evil anywhere taints everything. We participate in each other’s sin locally and cosmically, further distorting the order of the world and of our souls. Man is the microcosm, and our sinful soul mirrors the tarnished creation.

If we look at the original act of the fall, we cannot trace back to any problematic moral dominoes that serve to corrupt Adam (to say nothing of the angels, the psychic order of which is unknown to us–unless we attribute Adam’s fall to that malevolent influence). It is concerning this moment that Kristor writes of evil:

. . . if a thing is absolutely unintelligible to us, is it not metaphysically impossible for us to know anything about it? And does not that metaphysical ignorance suffice to provide for the possibility that we might turn toward it, without knowing what we were doing?

According to Kristor’s argument, unfallen man, in his state of ignorance, blindly chose B instead of A, thereby condemning our race to perdition. I disagree, and I would like to explain better my earlier statement,

That any unfallen creature would turn away from its source and prefer the lower to the higher seems to follow another trajectory than trying the unknown because it is unknown. For the choice is not an arbitrary one, as between unknown paths. Rather, it is the deliberate rejection of the source of being for nothingness.

The various parts of our soul have their objects by nature. They are not undetermined or unconditioned; as I previously noted, I reject that conception of human freedom. I do not think that we are wills wandering blind in the darkness of an unknown world. Rather, to use a geeky image, I think that we are “programmed” souls, though our code becomes increasingly corrupt as a result of bad input and the consequent processing mistakes. It is impious to hold that Adam would originally have had bad code. For his malfunctioning and corrupted code could be attributed to bad design (God’s fault as the initial code writer), viral input (Satan’s fault), or, my position, nothing . . . the fall is unintelligible.

Furthermore, though evil is corrosive and worsens the disorder in the human soul, we still see men at times revert to their proper functioning. This is perhaps related to Kristor’s observation, “Now notice that at its very inception from God, every occasion of existence is innocent.” We should expect such; the soul by nature seeks its ends. It is the disorder that should trouble us. For man is not an independent fact of existence; he relies on God for everything. Our choosing is not free in the sense that we write our own stories. Rather, we are like schoolboys who write with the Lord’s hand on ours, unable to move the pen on our own. God animates our hand so that we write. It is truly God’s writing, and it is truly our own writing, though in a derivative sense. Mysteriously, however, we have the power, though it is not a positive but a negative power, to thwart our master’s guidance, which then distorts our orthography. We continue to leave a line of ink only because God continues to move our hand, but the inelegant scribbles are the unintelligible results of our unintelligible uncooperation.

I think that this image helps to resolve the Augustinian and Pelagian knots that other models of human nature make. We are because God is (or rather because God manifests being). We do because God does. We are free in the sense that God provides us with reason so that we allow him to move us. That we may prove recalcitrant creatures is unanswerable. It is not that we inexplicably choose B (to disobey God) instead of A (to obey God). Rather, there is no choice at all. There is no assertion, metaphysical or otherwise. What we perceive as sinful choice, along with all the profound moral insight and analysis relevant to that choice, from Socrates to MacIntyre, is epiphenomenal to this prior mystery of the soul. Such is what I meant when I wrote that the choice to turn from the source of being to nothingness is not arbitrary. We are by nature oriented toward being. To direct ourselves in any other direction defies our own nature. Lucifer’s rebellion would have been an unintelligible act of violence, and so for every subsequent act of affirming nihilism. The regularity of it and our familiarity with it dull the shock, but evil still horrifies and disorients us. It is the blackness that cannot be seen.

Here are the previous posts for this thread:

“Orthodoxy and Evolution”

“Kristor on the Fall”

“Evil Christians”

“Unde Malum”

“Kristor Promotes Ignorance”

“Kristor Elucidates the Darkness”

Update: My interlocutor responds in “Kristor Poses Evil Problems.”

Posted by Joseph on Tuesday, March 1, A.D. 2011
Orthodoxy • Patristics • Scripture • Non-Chalcedonianism • Protestantism • Roman Catholicism • (0) Comments • Permalink