All the world's a sunny day...

"A Decadent Christianity and One of Its Own Children"

Moses and the Burning Bush, by Marc Chagall

from The Priority of Christ, by Fr. Robert Barron (pp 12-16):

There have in recent years been numerous accounts of the etiology of modernity. Jürgen Habermas, Hans Urs von Balthasar, John Milbank, Colin Gunton, and Louis Dupré, among many others, have offered explanations of the transition from the premodern to the modern. I subscribe to the proposal that liberal modernity can best be seen as an energetic reaction to a particular and problematic version of nominalist Christianity. Early modernity saw itself as a salutary response to oppressive and obscurantist strains in Christian culture, but since it was reacting to a corruption of true Christianity, it itself became similarly distorted and exaggerated. As a result, the two systems settled into a centuries-long and terribly unproductive warfare. Even when the two attempted a reconciliation (as in all forms of liberal Christianity in the past two centuries), the results were less than satisfactory, precisely because each party was itself a sort of caricature.

The trouble began with Duns Scotus’s option for a univocal conception of being in contradistinction to Thomas Aquinas’s analogical understanding. For Thomas, God, as the sheer act of to-be itself (ipsum esse subsistens), is that through which all creatures exist. What follows epistemologically from this metaphysical claim is that the meaning of “to-be,” in reference to God and creatures, must be analogical, with God as primary analogue and created things as secondary. In accord with this intuition, Aquinas maintained consistently throughout his career that God is inescapably mysterious to the human intellect, since our frame of reference remains the creaturely mode of existence, which bears only an analogical resemblance to the divine mode of being. We may say that God exists, but we’re not quite sure what we mean when we say it; the “cash value” of the claim that God exists is that there is a finally mysterious source of the to-be of finite things.

In an effort to make the to-be of God more immediately intelligible, Duns Scotus proposed a univocal conception of existence, according to which God and creatures belong to the same basic metaphysical category, the genus of being. Though God is infinite and therefore quantitatively superior to any creature or collectivity of creatures, there is nevertheless no qualitative difference, in the metaphysical sense, between the supreme being, God, and finite beings. Whereas Aquinas insisted that God is categorizable in no genus whatsoever, Scotus held that God and creatures do belong together to a logical category that, in a real sense, transcends and includes them. The implications of this shift are enormous and, to my mind, almost entirely negative. If the analogical conception of being is rejected, creatures are no longer seen as participating in the divine to-be; instead, God and creatures are appreciated as existing side by side, as beings of varying types and degrees of intensity. Furthermore, unanchored from their shared participation in God, no longer grounded in a common source, creatures lose their essential connectedness to one another. Isolated and self-contained individuals (God the supreme being and the many creatures) are now what is most basically real.

Scotus’s intuition was confirmed a generation later by his Franciscan successor William of Occam. Congruent with his nominalism, which denied ontological density to the unifying features of being, Occam held that there is nothing real outside of disconnected individual things illas partes absolutas nulla res est. As for Scotus so for Occam, God and creatures are set side by side, joined only through a convention of logic that assigns them to the category of “beings.” A consequence of this conception is that God and finite things have to be rivals, since their individualities are contrastive and mutually exclusive. Just as a chair is itself precisely in the measure that it is no other creaturely thing, so God is himself only inasmuch as he stands over and against the world he has made, and vice versa. Whereas in Aquinas’s participation metaphysics the created universe is constituted by its rapport with God, on Occam’s reading it must realize itself through disassociation from a competitive supreme being. A further concomitant of this individualistic ontology is voluntarism. Since the metaphysically dense and natural link between God and creatures has been attenuated, any connection between the divine and the nondivine has to be through will. God’s relation with his rational creatures is therefore primarily legalistic and arbitrary. This understanding of divine power influenced Occam’s conception of the human will as well. Finite freedom is, for him, absolute spontaneity, an action prompted by nothing either interior or exterior to the subject. Accordingly, human power is a distant mirror of divine power: both are self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational. The most obvious practical consequence of this nominalist and voluntarist metaphysics is that divine and human freedom find themselves pitted against one another, God imposing himself arbitrarily on a necessarily reluctant and resentful humanity.

Both Martin Luther and John Calvin were formed according to the principles of late-medieval nominalism, and one does not have to look far to see evidence of that formation in their writings. A distant and majestic God who chooses, apparently in complete arbitrariness, that some be saved and others be damned is on clear display in Calvin’s Institutes, and a God whose power effectively trumps the freedom and integrity of the human will is readily apparent in Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will. Was the Reformation, at least to some degree, a radical ratification of the breakdown of an analogical conception of being?

From at least the time of Étienne Gilson, a number of scholars have acknowledged the important relationship between early modernity and medieval culture. I follow Colin Gunton and John Milbank’s suggestion that the modern can be viewed as a sharp reaction to precisely the elements in late-medieval Christianity that I have been highlighting. Many of the early modern philosophers called for a Heraclitean revolt of the many individuals against the Parmenidean imposition of divine demands, especially as those were made concrete in the church and in traditional culture. Martha Nussbaum, one of the most articulate contemporary defenders of the liberal/modern perspective, says that liberalism is essentially the valorization of the prerogatives of the individual subject, more precisely, an affirmation of that subject’s right to choose, even the meaning of his or her own life. What is the enemy of this freedom? For many of the fathers of modernity, it is nothing other than those traditional institutions (supported by the voluntarist conception of God) that bind the will and quash individual initiative and imagination.

We can see this paradigmatically in Descartes’s affirmation of the epistemological primordiality and meaning-creating capacity of the cogito. Dupré has remarked that subjectivism as such is not a distinctive quality of the modern, for no one was more subjective than Plato, Plotinus, or Augustine. Rather, it is the claim that the subject is itself the ground and measure of meaning and value. This is what we find in René Descartes’s insistence that all sense experience, all received ideas and traditions, and the very existence of God be brought before the bar of subjectivity for adjudication and evaluation. And we can see it, too, in Immanuel Kant’s claim that the moral life is grounded neither in the objectivity of nature nor in any hetereonomous law, but rather in the self-legislation of the categorical imperative. It is furthermore apparent in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conviction that the only legitimate form of government is a democracy so pure that obedience to law is coincident with obedience to self. It comes to perhaps clearest expression in Friedrich Nietzsche’s uncompromising elevation of the prerogatives of the will (a perfect mirror of the voluntarist divine will in Occam) and the concomitant need of that heroic will to put the competitive God to death.

Lest all of this seem too abstractly philosophical, the modern preference for the freedom of the individual is no more baldly and forcibly defended than in the U.S.Supreme Court’s judgment in the case of Casey v. Planned Parenthood : “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” This judicial formulation is an almost perfect exemplification of Jean-Paul Sartre’s archetypically modern dictum that existence (concrete freedom) precedes essence (meaning and value).

In all of this modern assertiveness, we see the reaction of the many against the one, of individuals against the tyranny of institutions and of that threatening Other lurking, acknowledged explicitly or not, behind them. In my judgment, this tension is the finally unproductive warfare between the grandmother and the Misfit [in Flannery O'Connors short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"], between a not very convincing form of Christianity and the opponent to whom it naturally gave rise. Modernity and decadent Christianity are enemies in one sense, but in another sense, they are deeply connected to one another and mirror one another. In most of the disputes between Christianity and modernity, we have advocates of the prerogatives of the voluntarist God facing down advocates of the voluntarist self. A central argument of this book amounts to “a plague on both your houses,” for I am convinced that both need to be saved, precisely by that person who throws everything off, including and especially the competitive understanding of God and the world that produced the conflict between them in the first place.

Nizhny Novgorod Burning bush.jpg Неопалимая Купина. Nizhny Novgorod, The Virgin of the Burning Bush.

St. Peregrine Laziosi, patron of cancer patients, pray for us!

Peregrine was born in Forli, Italy, around 1265. At that time, Forli was governed by the Pope as part of the Papal States, and Peregrine grew up in a family that was actively involved in the opposition, or anti-papal party. Because of anti-papal activity, the city was under the church penalty of interdict, meaning that Mass and the Sacraments could not be celebrated there. St. Philip Benizi, Prior General of the Servants of Mary, went to Forli to preach reconciliation. Young Peregrine, very intense in his political fervor, not only heckled Philip during his preaching, but, in fact, struck him. Philip, instead of responding with anger and violence to the attack, turned and forgave Peregrine.

This encounter with Philip is said to have dramatically changed Peregrine. He began channeling his energy into good works and eventually joined the Servants of Mary in Siena, Italy. He returned to Forli, where he spent the rest of his life, dedicating himself to the sick, the poor, and those on the fringes of society. He also imposed on himself the penance of standing whenever it was not necessary to sit. This led to varicose veins, which later deteriorated into an open sore on his leg, and was eventually diagnosed as cancer.

Peregrine's leg wound became so serious that the local surgeon decided to amputate the leg. The night before the surgery, Peregrine prayed before the image of the crucified Christ, and when he awoke, the wound was healed and his leg saved. He lived another 20 years, dying on May 1, 1345, and the age of about 80. Peregrine was canonized on December 27, 1726, and has been named the Patron Saint of those suffering from cancer.

A Prayer to St. Peregrine for Sick Relatives and Friends

O great St. Peregrine, you have been called "The Mighty", the "The Wonder Worker" because of the numerous miracles which you obtained from God for those who have turned to you in their need. For so many years you bore in your own flesh this cancerous disease that destroys the very fiber of our being. You turned to God when the power of human beings could do no more, and you were favored with the vision of Jesus coming down from His cross to heal your affliction. I now ask God to heal these sick persons whom I entrust to you:

(Here mention their names)

Aided by your powerful intercession, I shall sing with Mary a hymn of gratitude to God for His great goodness and mercy.

Amen.

Ours is the Church of the saints

from The Heroic Face of Innocence, "Joan, Heretic and Saint," by Georges Bernanos:

"Who does not long for the strength to set out on so glorious an adventure? For sanctity is an adventure; it is indeed the only adventure. Those who have once realized this have found their way to the very heart of the Catholic faith; they have felt in their mortal flesh the shuddering of another terror than the terror of death: the shudder of supernatural hope. Our Church is the Church of the saints. But who worries about the saints? We want them to be old, full of experience and worldly wisdom; and most of them are children. And childhood is alone against everyone. The know-alls shrug their shoulders and smile: what saint ever had much to say for the Churchmen? But what have the Churchmen got to do with it? What contact with the most heroic among mankind has Mr. So-and-so, who is convinced that the Kingdom of Heaven can be won like a seat in the French Academy, by treating everyone tactfully? God did not make the Church for the prosperity of the saints, but that she might hand down their memory; He made her that the world might not lose, with the divine miracle, a torrent of honor and poetry. What saints have the other churches? Ours is the Church of the saints. Whom would you entrust with the charge of this flock of angels? History alone, if left to itself, would have crushed them with its harsh, restricted realism and its summary methods. Our Catholic tradition, without harming them, sweeps them into the full flood of its universal rhythm. They are all there -- St. Benedict with his raven, St. Francis with his lute and his Provençal songs, Joan with her sword, Vincent with his shabby soutane -- and the newcomer, so strange, so hidden, invoked by contractors and simoniacs, and smiling her incomprehensible smile -- Teresa of the Child Jesus. Would one have wished them, during their lifetime, to be kept in glass cases, addressed in rounded periods, knelt to, honored with incense? Such things are all right for Canons. But the saints lived and suffered like us. They bore the full weight of their load, and many of them, without relinquishing it, lay down under it to die. Those of us who dare not yet take to ourselves what was holy and divine in their example, can at least find in it a lesson in heroism and honor. But is there one among us who would not blush to stop short so soon and leave them to follow the endless stretch of road alone? Is there one who could wish to spend his life pondering the problem of evil rather than dashing forward? Who will refuse to liberate the earth? Our Church is the Church of the saints. The whole vast machinery of wisdom, strength, supple discipline, glory and majesty, is of itself nothing unless it is animated by love. Yet the lukewarm turn to it only for a guarantee against the risks of the divine. No matter! The smallest little boy in the catechism class knows that the blessing of all the Churchmen put together can only bring peace to those who are ready to receive it -- the souls of good will. No rite can dispense us from loving. Our Church is the Church of the saints. Nowhere else could one even imagine the adventure -- an adventure so human! -- of a little heroine who one day passed quietly from the stake of the Inquisition to Paradise, under the noses of a hundred and fifty theologians. "If we have reached the point" (wrote Joan's judges to the Pope) "where sorceresses who prophesy falsely in the name of God, like a certain female taken prisoner within the diocese of Beauvais, are better received by the thoughtless populace than are their pastors and doctors, then all is lost: religion will perish, faith will fail, the Church will be trodden underfoot, and the iniquity of Satan will prevail throughout the earth!" ... And behold, rather less than five centuries later, the image of the sorceress was exposed for veneration in St. Peter's in Rome -- painted, it is true, as a warrior, and without tabard or divided skirt! -- while a hundred feet below her, Joan might have seen, lying prostrated, the tiny figure of a man in white, who was the Pope himself. Our Church is the Church of the saints. From the Pope down to the little altar-boy drinking the wine left over from the cruets, everyone knows that there are not many famous preachers in the Calendar -- not many priest-diplomatists. The only people to question this are the respectable believers with stomachs and gold chains, who think that the saints are in far too much of a hurry, and who would like to go to Heaven with decent deliberation, just as they walk up to the church-wardens' pew, with the parish priest for company. Our Church is the Church of the saints. We may respect the Commissariat Service, the Provost Marshal, the staff officers and the cartographers, but our hearts are with the men on ahead; our hearts are with those who get killed. There is not one of us shouldering his burden -- his country, his job, his family -- not one of us with our grief-worn faces and our roughened hands, with the unending boredom of our daily life, of daily bread to be fought for, and the honor of our homes to be defended -- there is not one who will ever have enough theology to become even a Canon. But we have enough to become saints. We can leave it to others to administer the Kingdom of God in peace. We have our hands full already, wresting each hour from the day, one by one, with vast labor -- each hour of the interminable day, until that looked-for hour, that unique hour, when God will deign to breathe upon His exhausted creature. O radiant Death, O true dawn! Let others look to the spiritual side of things, argue about it, legislate about it; it is the temporal that we hold in both our hands: we hold in both hands the temporal Kingdom of God. We hold the temporal heritage of the saints. For there were blessed along with us the corn and the wine, the stone of our thresholds and the roof where the dove build her nest; with us were blessed our poor beds full of dreams and forgetfulness; the highroad down which the country carts go squeaking; the young men with their pitiless laughter, and the maidens weeping at the fountain's brink. And ever since then -- ever since God Himself has visited us -- is there anything in this world which our saints should not have taken back: is there anything at all which they cannot give?"