Category Archives: Catholicism

Matters relating to Catholicism in particular

It’s Lent

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It’s Ash Wednesday morning. Lent has officially begun.

As is usual at this time of year, lots of Catholic bloggers are giving up blogging and reading blogs for Lent, usually because they think they’ve let it get a little out of hand. That is, they are giving up something that they think may have become a problem for them. The thing to remember is that blogging and blog-reading are good things—the problem is when we become excessively attached to them.

All this is by way of saying that although I expect to continue blogging through Lent, I am planning to give up reading blogs for Lent. (Except, possibly, on Sundays; Sundays are feast days, even in Lent.)

See you after Easter!

What does it mean to be “Spiritual”, Part IV

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I’m continuing to respond to Lindsay’s comment on Part II of this series.

At one point Lindsay says,

The body can sin, when the Ego is what is driving the “bus” but the Ego is not the true nature of the person themselves. I don’t believe that God makes junk. The soul is perfect, but an intellect that identifies itself with the Ego will miss the mark again and again.

Here Lindsay is drawing a distinction between the Ego on the one hand, and the Intellect, the Soul, and the Person on the other. Here’s what I draw from this passage:

  • The Ego is not the true nature of the person.
  • When the Ego is given free rein, the person cannot help but sin again and again.
  • The Soul is perfect, and cannot sin, except that the Ego gets in the way.

The difficulty is that I’m not sure quite what Lindsay means by the Ego. I don’t think in Freudian categories, and I’m not at all sure the Lindsay using the word in the Freudian sense anyway. So what follows is pure conjecture on my part.

She might mean my conscious self, that is, the I that can say, “I think, therefore I am.” Alternatively, she might mean ego in the colloquial sense, i.e., arrogance and selfishness.

If she means the latter, then yes, when Ego is driving the bus, everything goes wrong. If she means the former, which is, I think, more likely, then I’m puzzled. I mean, there’s only me in here. I am a conscious agent, responsible for my actions, which I choose. I am, sadly, afflicted by a tendency to sin, and by a plethora of vices and bad habits, including a hearty serving of selfishness garnished with a dollop of arrogance. But if you get rid of that “I”, there’s nothing left of me to be moved to either vice or virtue.

I can’t allow a distinction between the “I” and the Soul, either. The soul is the form of the body: when the soul departs the body is so much meat. In one sense, everything I do is spiritual, in that my soul is involved in even the slightest movement of my little finger. But, per St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, my Intellect and Will are wholly spiritual, aspects or functions of my soul, and though I hope they are perfectible they are most assuredly not perfect as I write. (Your mileage may vary, I suppose.)

I agree that the “Ego is not the true nature of the person”, but probably not in the way that Lindsay means. I am I; it is my nature to be human. In fact, it is my nature to have an I, to have an intellect, to be rational, to have a body, to need to eat, and so on. It is not my nature to be a sinner; sin is deeply unnatural, a perversion of what we are meant to be.

Pope Benedict points out over and over again in his writings that what God wants of every creature is that it be fully itself, that it be entirely true to its God-given nature. It is in this sense that the very stones cry out with praise for God: they are most perfectly and entirely stones, just as God made them. It is our task, with Christ’s help, to be most perfectly and entirely human. It is precisely this that we fall short of when we sin. And what it means to be perfectly and entirely human is to attain our true and final end, that which will crown our lives with true happiness: union with God in the body of Christ Jesus, with Christ himself as our head, a union of love in which we become one with God while remaining wholly and completely ourselves, and wholly human.

What does it mean to be “Spiritual”, Part III

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In an extended comment on Part II of this series, Lindsay gives her (I believe it’s “her”; if not, I apologize) understanding of the Intellect, the Will, and organized religion.

It’s immediately clear that Lindsay and I have very different views on the matter, a conclusion supported by a quick survey of her blog. I’ve no intention of giving her comment a righteous fisking; that’s not my way, and anyway it seems inhospitable after I specifically asked for comments of this kind. Nevertheless, she provides considerable fodder for contemplation, and it would be a shame to waste it.

Let’s begin with the low-hanging fruit. Lindsay says, speaking of organized religion:

I think religion teaches you that the body is evil and the person is innately sinful.

Many people think this, but it is certainly not what the Catholic Church teaches. Nothing created by God is innately, that is, naturally evil. It is true that we are sinful, but this is not part of our nature; it is more like a chronic illness that limits both our growth and the growth of those around us. It is the nature of an acorn to grow into a glorious oak tree; but a tree that is blighted cannot do so. It is our nature to grow into union with God as members of the body of Christ Jesus, but sin blights us, and, in a manner of speaking, poisons the soil around us as well. We need Christ’s healing to be free of this.

As for the body in particular being evil: according to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the marital act is a sacred image of the love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Trinity, and of Christ’s love for his bride, the Church. (The whole of scripture is shot through with this kind of imagery.) Casual sex is not sinful because sex is sinful, or because the body is evil; it’s sinful because it profanes something holy.

It’s true that scripture occasionally opposes the Spirit and the Flesh, as in “the Spirit is willing, but the Flesh is weak”: we do have a tendency to sin, and to do things we know we should not, and in fact choose not to do. Anyone who has struggled with a besetting sin knows how true St. Paul’s words are, that I do not do what I wish to do, but that which I do not wish to do, I do.

Lindsay also says (I’ve corrected typos),

WILL is not will-power (because that is the intellect rationalizing a desire, the Will is the part of you that instructs in desire and I don’t mean that as anything sinful, but if someone checked into themselves with honesty and no judgment and asked, “what is it that I feel to do right now?” the answer might be, to go for a walk, take a nap, have a drink of water, pray, or even: “I want that piece of chocolate cake.” The Will when intact and functioning properly does not instruct you towards destructive ends. Maybe your body really needs the high magnesium content in the chocolate and by not acquiescing, you are depriving your body of a nutrient it currently needs.

I believe that what Lindsay is here calling the “will” is in fact what St. Thomas Aquinas would call the “appetite”; or, at least, she’s conflating the two. And here we strike a major point of disagreement. Lindsay appears to me to be saying that we only desire that which is good for us, when the will, or appetite, is intact and functioning properly–that our desires are, in fact, a good guide as to what we should do. There are a number of points to be made, here. What is good for us? What does it mean for our will and appetite to be intact and functioning properly?

It is certainly true that we only desire what is good–that is, what we sense to be good (the appetite) or understand to be good (the intellect). No man seeks evil purely for its own sake. But I know from my own experience that this apparent good is often illusory, or, at least, extremely limited. Chocolate cake is good; but too much chocolate cake is bad. My understanding of what is good is also limited; there is much that I don’t know, and some of what I know is wrong. My appetite frequently wants more than is good for me (I’m not speaking solely of food, here). And then, sin darkens the intellect.

If I were in a perfect state, which is to say, if I were Christ, things would be simpler. My appetites would be properly ordered; my understanding of what is good would be correct; and what I willed, that I would do. I’m not him. Christ leads me in this direction, but it is not a speedy process.

Part IV

What does it mean to be “Spiritual”, Part II

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A week or so ago, I posed the following question:

When you hear someone say that they are “spiritual”, what does that convey to you? And if you have ever said something like, “I’m not religious but I’m spiritual,” what did you mean by it?

Of the five comments I received, none were from people who would currently describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious. I’m not sure what that means. Possibly, no such people read my blog. Possibly they do, but, not being religious, felt no need to respond. Perhaps they were afraid of being held up to ridicule, which a reasonable concern, I suppose, but far from my intent.

One commenter, now a Catholic, says she used to describe herself as spiritual but not religious. I was glad to see this, because it’s the only comment that gives an inward view. She says:

It meant that I believed in things other than this material world, including deities, non-human spirits, and souls of dead humans. I also believed that I had a great inner, spiritual power.

But I was never beholden to anything or anybody, including deities. I had no special love or devotion to any of them. That would have been “religion,” and I just saw as an unnecessary restriction. I just wanted to do my own thing.

Now, the second half of this matches the outward view of the other commenters. I’m more interested in the first half. What Heather meant by “spiritual” was, effectively, the following two things:

  • She believed in a supernatural reality.
  • She believed she had a “great inner, spiritual power.”

I don’t know what power Heather had in mind; but according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas she was right on both counts. There is a supernatural reality beyond this material world we see, and we do each have a great inner, spiritual power. In fact, we have two such powers.

Before I tell you what they are, let’s ponder the word “spiritual” for a minute. “Spiritual”: having to do with the spirit. If I possess a spiritual power, then it must be either a power over spirits, or a power that derives from my own spirit, that is, from my soul. An “inner spiritual power” certainly sounds more like that latter than the former, so let’s go with that. What kind of power can derive from my soul?

The ancients and the medievals didn’t think of the human mind as a single unified thing, as we do. They spoke of the mind as being divided into the Sense, the Imagination, the Appetite, the Intellect, the Will, and Memory. The Sense is simply our ability to sense things: not merely our Five Senses, but our emotions as well. The Imagination is our ability to recreate images, or “phantasms”, that is, to bring into mind from our Memory images of things we’ve previously sensed, and to create new images from them. The Appetite is that faculty we have of desiring those things we sense: that chocolate cake, for example. These faculties we share with the animals: your dog or cat can sense and remember and imagine and desire. The can opener turns on; the cat senses it, remembers, imagines food, desires it, and runs into the kitchen.

The Intellect and the Will, on the other hand, derive not from our bodies but our souls. Men and women have rational souls that exceed the “sensitive” souls of the beasts by being immortal, and by having Intellect and Will.

Intellect is our power of understanding, of conceptualizing. Contemplate, for a moment, the smallest house in Paris in the year before you were born, to use an example I ran into the other day. That’s an extremely clear concept; and no matter what year you were born you can easily see that in the previous year there were many houses in Paris and some one of them must have been the smallest. And yet, although you can conceive of this house, you can’t form an accurate picture of it. In so conceiving, you are using your Intellect rather than your Imagination.

The Will is our power of choosing from among the various goods present to our Imagination and Intellect. Unlike the beasts, we need not pursue that which is desirable to our senses. We can choose. We can recognize that the chocolate cake is good, and that it would be better in the long run to leave it alone.

So, two spiritual powers: the Intellect and the Will. And so what does it mean to be “spiritual”?

To know what is good, and to act accordingly.

Part III

An Introduction to Philosophy, by Jacques Maritain

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I’ve been working through this volume, little by little, for quite some time now, and I finally finished during my lunch break today. I say “finished”; what I mean is, I’ve read the whole book. I’ve no doubt that I’ll return to it again in the future, as I certainly haven’t absorbed all Maritain has to say.

Maritain’s book is, as the title suggests, an introduction to philosophy; but the book is by no means a survey of the history of philosophical thought.
Maritain was a follower of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, and this is an introduction done from an explicitly Thomistic point of view. It is, in fact, an introduction to Thomism; other schools of philosophy (other than the Greek predecessors of Plato and Aristotle, who are described in some detail) are mentioned only in discussions of the errors avoided by Aristotle and Aquinas.

If you’re looking for a broad overview of philosophical thought, consequently, this is not the book for you. On the other hand, reading such a broad overview is often like reading a movie review by a reviewer who doesn’t reveal his biases. For my money, give me an author who tells me what he thinks is true, and why he thinks it is true. I might not agree with him, but I’ll learn more from him that way. Maritain is this kind of author.

And, of course, as my current goal is to learn more about Thomism, this is exactly the kind of book I was looking for.

Next up is a book recommended by the no-longer-anonymous James Chastek at Just Thomism, Foundations of Thomistic Philosophy, by A.D. Sertillanges, OP. The book is out-of-print, but I managed to find a copy at Amazon.

Speaking of which, another advantage of the Kindle: I was able to buy a nice Kindle edition of the Blackfriars translation of the Summa Theologiae for just a few books; the print edition is five big volumes and costs around $150, if I recall correctly. I can carry my copy around with me in its entirety–and it’s searchable. Woohoo!

What did He know, and when did He know it

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Some exegetes are fond of playing the game “What did Jesus know, and when did He know it.” One place I’ve often seen this is Mark 7:24–30, in which a non-Jewish woman comes to Jesus asking for help for her daughter. Jesus explains that he has been sent to the Jews and asks, shockingly, if he should throw what is holy to dogs? The woman says that even dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table, after which Jesus commends her for her faith, and does what she asks.

Some exegetes take this as a learning experience for Jesus. He thought he was called only to the Jews; but here a foreign woman talks him around, and shows him something new. Now, this is clearly nonsense. Jesus is the Son of God–the Second Person of the Trinity–incarnate. He knew very clearly who he was, and what he was doing. God is the grand author, whose manuscript is history, and I think it’s fair to say that He staged the whole incident for our benefit.

The Fifth Joyful Mystery is the occasion when Jesus, as a young lad of twelve, goes missing for three days and is found, finally, in the Temple, bemusing the priests and scribes with his precocity. And personally, I’ve always found “mystery” to be the right tag. Why was it, alone of the incidents of Jesus’ youth, included in the Gospel? I think I’ve got a piece of the answer, and it has to do with the matter I mentioned above, and with today’s feast day, that of Mary, Mother of God.

Today’s feast was instituted as the result of a controversy in the early church. Mary had long been called the “Mother of God”; but Nestorius said that this title was invalid: Mary, a human being, could not possibly be the mother of the Second Person of the Trinity. Eventually this was resolved by a doctrined called, impressively, the Hypostatic Union: that Jesus Christ was one person possessed of two natures: a fully divine nature, that of the Second Person of the Trinity, and a fully human nature. The key phrase here is “one person”. Mary was undeniably the mother of Jesus’ human nature; and as Jesus is one person, fully God and fully Man, it is reasonable to call here the Mother of God.

In short, Jesus is not simply a good man, touch in some special way by the Diety. Nor was Jesus’ body a sort of mask worn by God. Jesus is God Incarnate, true God and true Man. And that’s why it makes no sense to play the game of “What did Jesus know and when did He know it?” He was God. As an adult, He knew certainly knew what he was about. But on the other hand, surely His human nature was capable of learning, and indeed needed to learn? In his human nature, he surely wasn’t possessed of the secrets of the universe as an infant lying in a manger. In human terms, he certainly did need to come to terms with who He was, to grow into Himself, as it were.

And this is precisely the importance of the day when Mary and Joseph found Jesus in the Temple, and He asked them, in wonder, “Did you not know that I would be in my Father’s house?” It was obvious to Him; the surprise was (and this shows His humanity) that it wasn’t obvious to Mary and Joseph. Even then, as a boy of twelve, He knew His Father in heaven, and was about His Father’s work.

Wednesday Books

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Here’s a couple of more books I’ve been spending time with recently.

The Fathers, by Pope Benedict XVI. Every Wednesday, Pope Benedict gives a “General Audience,” at which he does some teaching. He spent most of 2007 and the beginning of 2008 on the lives and teaching of the Apostolic Fathers: that is, on the great teachers of the Church from the time just after the Apostles up until St. Augustine of Hippo. He covers 26 of the Fathers, including St. Clement of Rome, St. Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Origen, Tertullian, St. John Chrysostom, and of course Augustine himself.

As such, the book is similar in format to his The Apostles, which also started its life as a series of Wednesday talks; however, I enjoyed it considerably more. Note that I didn’t read it straight through; instead, I kept it in the backpack I take when I leave the house, and read it a chapter or two at a time. The only problem is, now I need to go look up the writings of each of these guys and get the whole story.

Highly recommended; and I love the painting of St. Jerome and St. Augustine on the cover. Carlo Crivelli rocks.

Benedict XVI: An Intimate Portrait, by Peter Seewald.
On two separate occasions, Seewald spent a period of two or three days closeted with the then Cardinal Ratzinger; the result of these extended interviews is captured in two remarkable and outstanding books, Salt of the Earth and God and the World, both I which I’ve devoured. When I saw this book at the bookstore last weekend, consequently, I snapped it up, and devoured it over the last several days. The bad news is, it’s not as good as the two books of interviews; which is to say that it’s merely good rather than excellent. And much of the purely biographical information is available in Cardinal Ratzinger’s own book, Milestones. Nevertheless, it’s a fascinating portrait–and a portrait not only of our current Pope, but of his theological adversaries, like Hans Küng, and of Seewald himself. When Seewald was first assigned to interview Ratzinger (for an extended magazine article; the books came later) he was an atheist and a communist with no reason to say anything good about the man the German press had dubbed the “panzerkardinal”. By the time of the interview sessions for God and the World, Seewald had quietly become Catholic. It was interesting to read how it happened.

Some Books

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Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, it’s actually time for some book-blogging. Here are just a few of the things I’ve been reading over the last month or so.

Halting State, by Charles Stross. Stross has a number of moods; this particular book is most like his The Atrocity Archive without the supernatural aspect, that is, it’s a thriller about organized cybercrime, counter-terrorism, distributed espionage, and massively-multiplayer on-line games. It begins with an unprecedented crime–a robbery of a bank in a virtual world by armed orcs–and goes on from there. There are geeks, cops, and spooks galore, and the whole thing is a lot of fun. It isn’t primarily a comic novel…but if you understand why the line “They’re tunneling TCP/IP over AD&D!” had me rolling on the floor, then this is definitely a book for you.

The Merchants’ War, by Charles Stross. Here’s another of Stross’s moods: the fourth book of his series The Merchant Princes. For those who came in late, the series concerns one Miriam Beckstein, an investigative reporter who discovers (early in the first book) that there are parallel worlds, that there is regular contact between them, that she’s not really from here, and that her new relatives have significant expectations as to how she is going to lead her life. It’s a series about intrigue, politics, interdimensional economics, and alternate history, and it just keeps getting better. The only downside is that every volume ends with a major cliffhanger…and then, of course, you have to wait for a year to find out what happens. I won’t say more, as the books naturally follow closely one upon the other, and I don’t want to spoil the earlier volumes. (Start with The Family Trade; and if it leaves you a little cold, don’t let that bother you. The later volumes are worth it.)

Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air, by Diana Wynne Jones. We got these on the strength of Hayao Miyazaki’s movie version of Howl’s Moving Castle, and read ’em aloud to our kids. I liked Miyazaki’s movie (I gather Jones likes it as well), but I have to say that Jones’ novel makes a whole lot more sense, especially toward the end. Castle in the Air involves Howl and Sophie as well, though they are not the primary characters. There’s a third novel, House of Many Ways, which was published last June; we’ve not gotten it yet. Bottom-line: charming fantasy, and the kids all loved them.

East of the Sun, West of the Moon, by John Ringo. This is the latest in the series that began with There Will Be Dragons. That book was a fun outing marred only by Ringo’s need to share his sexual tastes and philosophy with the rest of us. Each successive book has been a little weaker than its predecessor, and this one was, frankly, a major disappointment. Too little plot, too little fun, too much sexual silliness. I really didn’t need to hear any more about rape fantasies, rape victims, or overcoming rape-trauma, thank you very much, or hear about all of the ladies who’d really like to sleep with the hero. I’ll take a gander at the next volume in the series, if any (there are some outstanding plot threads that were not addressed here that I’m curious about) but I don’t know whether I’ll buy it or not.

Yours, Jack, by C.S. Lewis. Lewis had a prolific correspondence, much of which has been published previously; this book is intended to be a selection of that correspondence devoted to matters of spiritual direction, that is, to helping others to grow in the spiritual life. I’m not entirely sold on that label, as I suspect that Lewis would have been the last to consider himself a spiritual director; indeed, he often pleads incompetence and suggests that his correspondents take up some question with their own spiritual directors (or “directeurs“, as he calls them). And many of the letters involve matters of doctrine or apologetics rather than any kind of spiritual direction. Nevertheless, it was an intriguing book to read, giving as it does a more personal flavor to the material I’ve seen in his books. And it was fascinating to watch Lewis grow and mature over the course of his life.

I would not advise sitting down and reading it straight through; I bought it in July, and read it a few letters at a time as the opportunity (ahem) presented itself over the next four months. There’s nothing astonishing or new here, but I enjoyed it, and it gave me food for thought.

Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Heaven, by Peter Kreeft. It’s a challenging subject; but so, as Kreeft points out in the introduction, is God Himself:

But that hasn’t stopped us from writing millions of books and billions of words about God. Many of those words are silly and stupid. Most of them are secondhand platitudes. But some are helpful and enlightening. And a few are even awesomely wise and wonderful. Perhaps the same is true of our word about Heaven. And perhaps all four kinds of words are found in this book.

I don’t know that I thought any of it “awesomely wise and wonderful.” But I did find it helpful and enlightening on a number of axes, and particularly on the relationship between time and eternity. Time is due to change; God is unchanging, and hence eternal, timeless. Some have therefore said that Heaven is utterly timeless. And yet, as the Apostles’ Creed tells us, we must believe in the Resurrection of the Body. We will, ultimately, have bodies in heaven; they will be both similar to and different from the bodies we have now. But the possession of bodies implies the ability to change, which implies some experience of passing time. And yet, it must be greater, larger, richer than our experience of time now.

Many things there are that are a mystery, that are too deep and wonderful for me to understand. Kreeft has touched on these, and it’s clearly necessary to take much of what he says with a grain of salt. I suspect him (through no fault of his own) of saying things that are ultimately true, and yet misleading, just as any description of something we’ve not yet experienced can be exactly true and completely precise, and yet not communicate the essence of the experience. (How can you describe a chocolate chip cookie?)