The Wrong Book at the Right Time
Published on November 27th, 2010.
Men sometimes talk of a book as having changed the world. The talk is usually exaggerated, and even off the mark. More often a book of great effect is but the exposition, the putting into clear form, of ideas already widely received. Often, again, a book gets great historical standing as a cause, when it is no more than the registration of some institutions already founded and bound to continue with equal vigor whether the book had been compiled or no.
But in the case of this book of John Calvin’s (to use the English form of the name) we come as near as we can anywhere in history to a piece of writing which was itself an agent, and a single agent.
Even here we must not exaggerate. The effect of the book was principally due to its coming when it did: it exactly supplied what was needed; it cast the Reformation into a mold at a moment when the movement was still fluid, while the crucible was still boiling. The same book produced today would have no such effect. The same book produced in the thirteenth century would have had a great effect, but not the same effect.
Nevertheless it is true that the Institute of John Calvin did far more to stamp, mold and render permanent the thing which we have known for more than three hundred years as “Protestantism” (the ethical mood which has been of such powerful effect upon the history of our race) than any other factors of the Reformation; and that truth is an excellent proof that the mind of man lives by doctrine, and that clear thought is the master of mere emotion. Until that book appeared the Reformation had, for now twenty years, lived upon Protest against, and indignation with, the later abuses of the Church. Its doctrines had been various and confused, its course devious: an eddy.
What Calvin did was to produce a church, a creed, a discipline, which could be set over against what had been for all these centuries (and what still is) the native church, creed, and discipline of Christian civilization. For John Calvin it was who produced, down to its details with the rapidity of genius, and with the tenacity of genius, a new thing.
True, great bodies of Europeans broke away permanently from unity, yet would not wholly follow Calvin. Such was the Lutheran mass; such, of course, were the bulk of English Protestants to be; and even among those who were profoundly influenced by the “fundamental brain-work” of this man, whole groups–such as the Independents of the seventeenth century–refused to conform to the rigid framework he had established.
Yet it remains true that Calvinism is the core of Protestantism to this day; that the effects on character which the Protestant culture continues to admire are essentially the effects of Calvinism; that the whole world of anti-Catholic thought, even today when it has lost the doctrines of Calvinism, is in its most intimate ideals molded on the Calvinistic model.
–
Hilaire Belloc, How the Reformation Happened (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1975 [1928]), 76-7.
Filled under Belloc, Hilaire. No Comments.
The Real Face of Arianism
Published on November 27th, 2010.
That the life of the Church was one fierce conflict throughout the first three centuries is a commonplace; but that conflict did not cease with Constantine; it continued in other forms. It continued without ceasing for century after century. Almost exactly coincident with the great movement of conversion about 320-330, whereby people began to come by swarms into the official religion (which had hitherto counted, perhaps, not more than a tenth or an eighth of the whole population), the very nature of the Faith was threatened by the Arian perversion.
It is so remote from us that we do not realize it; and ever since the eighteenth century, especially in England under the influence of Gibbon’s essentially unhistorical mind (and Gibbon was but the pupil of Voltaire), it has been the fashion to laugh at the Arian affair as though it were an almost incomprehensible and certainly ridiculous dialectical quarrel: hair splitting and word-juggling.
It was enormously more than that. It was a whole perverted aspect of the Catholic Church, affecting a great body of the hierarchy, established like a parasite within the organism, and threatening to starve and ultimately destroy its life. For Arianism was essentially the rationalizing spirit–that is, the inability to see that there are things beyond reason. It was not a wholehearted rejection of Catholicism, but it was the beginning of one; and in this it closely resembled one side of the Protestant movement in the sixteenth century. It was the spirit that asked of the Mysteries, “How can such things be?”
–
Hilaire Belloc, How the Reformation Happened (Rockford, IL: Tan Books and Publishers, 1975 [1928]), 10-11.
Filled under Belloc, Hilaire. No Comments.
Excluded Middle
Published on November 15th, 2010.
And thus again I was led on to examine more attentively what I doubt no was in my thoughts long before, viz. the concatenation of arguments by which the mind ascends from its first to its final religious idea; and I came to the conclusion that there was no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other. And I hold this still: I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God; and if I am asked why I believe in a God, I answer that it is because I believe in myself, for I feel it impossible to believe in my own existence (and of that fact I am quite sure) without believing also in the existence of Him, who lives as a Personal, All-seeing, All-judging Being in my conscience.
–
John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, & Six Sermons, edited, annotated, and introduced by Frank Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 291.
Filled under Newman, John Henry Cardinal. No Comments.
Move Forward or Fall Back
Published on November 14th, 2010.
“What keeps me yet is what has kept me long; a fear that I am under a delusion; but the conviction remains firm under all circumstances, in all frames of mind. And this most serious feeling is growing on me; viz. that the reasons for which I believe as much as our system teaches, must lead me to believe more, and that not to believe more is to fall back into scepticism.”
–
John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, & Six Sermons, edited, annotated, and introduced by Frank Turner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 314.
[From a letter of 1844, written while Newman was still in the Anglican Church.]
Filled under Newman, John Henry Cardinal. No Comments.
Grounding the Ivory Tower
Published on November 13th, 2010.
One danger confronting philosophers is that they may forget that their enquiries begin from and extend the enquiries of plain persons and that they are exercising their philosophical skills on behalf of those same plain persons. Philosophers have their own craft, but, like the practitioners of other crafts, such as fishing crews and construction workers, they can practice it for the common good–or they can fail to do so. If they do practice it for the common good, then they will take the trouble to engage in sustained conversation with plain persons, so as not to lose sight of the relationship between their enquiries, no matter how sophisticated, and the questions initially posed by plain persons. Yet, insofar as they include those who are not professional philosophers in their enquiries, they will make those plain persons painfully aware, if they were not already, that there are rival and incompatible answers to their questions and that philosophical enquiry is therefore a source of conflict.
–
Alisdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), 10-11.
Filled under MacIntyre. No Comments.
Protestant Authority
Published on October 23rd, 2010.
For any religious authority ultimately lodged in the will of fallible human beings, whether in councils or in a single man, is contrary to the central thesis of Protestantism that every man not only has access to God without any necessity of human mediation but is also finally responsible to him directly. However much, therefore, anyone may sometimes long for someone to speak finally and authoritatively to his soul, troubled by the confusion of its uncertainties, he must realize that the end of Protestantism has come at that moment when final religious authority is lodged in the decision or will of any man or group of men. The Roman type of authority is impossible to reconcile with the essential freedom of Protestant Christianity.
–
Eugene Blake, “The Character of Religious Authority in Protestantism,” The Journal of Religious Thought (1948), 16.
Filled under et. al.. No Comments.
The Necessity of Authority
Published on October 1st, 2010.
In the Church, whose very existence depends on the faithful transmission of the word of God, authority is particularly important. Unless held in check by firm authoritative structures, human willfulness and ignorance could easily corrupt or distort the deposit of faith, sacraments, and ministry. The vagaries of public opinion beat against the Church like storms. It is not difficult, therefore, to see why the Lord equipped the Church with a hierarchical form of government, perpetuating itself by co-option.
–
Avery Cardinal Dulles, “Authority in the Church,” in Civilizing Authority, Patrick McKinley Brennan, ed. (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 52.
Filled under Dulles, Avery. No Comments.
The Battle for Beauty
Published on August 9th, 2010.
A sacramentalist metaphysics is uncongenial to, if not simply impossible within, our present intellectual environment, which, at the extremes, tends to cut one of two ways. On the one hand, we find the rejection of metaphysics and meaning in the nihilism of the postmodern void, a view that denies any claim to inherent meaning or signification in the things of the world. On the other hand, we find a lean, minimalist metaphysics designed to support the reductionist practices of science and the market economy that sells the technologies science spawns, a view that objectifies and commodifies the things of this world. Neither tendency can imagine the physical world as a realm of creatures, of symbols, sacraments or “cop[ies] of an invisible world.”
It is not clear how beauty fits into either view, except as the object of capricious and market-driven desire. On the first view, beauty, like everything else, is meaningless, if not perhaps distasteful: the attempt to use a pretty ornament to hide a violent and chaotic world. The second view banishes all value, including aesthetic value, from objective reality, leaving us with a world populated by desiring machines. Neither view can give desire an object worthy of our most profound sense of longing. Instead, we are faced with desires that result from accidents of evolutionary forces, guided, if by anything, by self-interest expressed quite often in violence. Such groundless and purposeless desires are prey to the manipulations of propaganda and advertising, mere tools of the marketplace–our longing aimed now toward the dubious beauty of the surgically altered bodies presented in film and television. Beauty’s ability to survive in this toxic mix is uncertain. Lewis the dinosaur, and those who have followed him in his concern for sacrament and beauty and even God, point us to a better hope.
–
Michael Muth, “Beastly Metaphysics: The Beasts of Narnia and Lewis’s Reclamation of Medieval Sacramental Metaphysics,” in David Baggett, Gary Habermas and Jerry Walls, eds., C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008), 244.
Filled under et. al.. No Comments.
Christianity: the Great Assimilator
Published on July 8th, 2010.
“The phenomenon, admitted on all hands, is this:—That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connexion of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it,—’These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:’ we, on the contrary, prefer to say, ‘these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.’ That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world; and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there. She began in Chaldea, and then sojourned among the Canannites, and went down into Egypt, and thence passed into Arabia, till she rested in her own land. Next she encountered the merchants of Tyre, and the wisdom of the East country, and the luxury of Sheba. Then she was carried away to Babylon, and wandered to the schools of Greece. And wherever she went, in trouble or in triumph, still she was a living spirit, the mind and voice of the Most High; ’sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions;’ claiming to herself what they said rightly, correcting their errors, supplying their defects, completing their beginnings, expanding their surmises, and thus gradually by means of them enlarging the range and refining the sense of her own teaching. So far then from her creed being of doubtful credit because it resembles foreign theologies, we even hold that one special way in which Providence has imparted divine knowledge to us has been by enabling her to draw and collect it together out of the world, and, in this sense, as in others, to ’suck the milk of the Gentiles and to suck the breast of kings.’
“How far in fact this process has gone, is a question of history; and we believe it has before now been grossly exaggerated and misrepresented by those who, like Mr. Milman, have thought that its existence told against Catholic doctrine; but so little antecedent difficulty have we in the matter, that we could readily grant, unless it were a question of fact not of theory, that Balaam was an Eastern sage, or a Sibyl was inspired, or Solomon learnt of the sons of Mahol, or Moses was a scholar of the Egyptian hierophants. We are not distressed to be told that the doctrine of the angelic host came from Babylon, while we know that they did sing at the Nativity; nor that the vision of a Mediator is in Philo, if in very deed He died for us on Calvary. Nor are we afraid to allow, that, even after His coming, the Church has been a treasure-house, giving forth things old and new, casting the gold of fresh tributaries into her refiner’s fire, or stamping upon her own, as time required it, a deeper impress of her Master’s image.
“The distinction between these two theories is broad and obvious. The advocates of the one imply that Revelation was a single, entire, solitary act, or nearly so, introducing a certain message; whereas we, who maintain the other, consider that Divine teaching has been in fact, what the analogy of nature would lead us to expect, ‘at sundry times and in divers manners,’ various, complex, progressive, and supplemental of itself. We consider the Christian doctrine, when analyzed, to appear, like the human frame, ‘fearfully and wonderfully made;’ but they think it some one tenet or certain principles given out at one time in their fulness, without gradual enlargement before Christ’s coming or elucidation afterwards. They cast off all that they also find in Pharisee or heathen; we conceive that the Church, like Aaron’s rod, devours the serpent of the magicians. They are ever hunting for a fabulous primitive simplicity; we repose in Catholic fulness. They seek what never has been found; we accept and use what even they acknowledge to be a substance. They are driven to maintain, on their part, that the Church’s doctrine was never pure; we say that it can never be corrupt. We consider that a divine promise keeps the Church Catholic from doctrinal corruption; but on what promise, or on what encouragement, they are seeking for their visionary purity does not appear.”
–
John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 380-2.
Filled under Newman, John Henry Cardinal. No Comments.
Love they Neighbor
Published on June 28th, 2010.
If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God. But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be “devout” and to perform my “religious duties”, then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely “proper”, but loveless. Only my readiness too encounter my neighbour and to show him love makes me sensitive to God as well.
–
Pope Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter DEUS CARITAS EST, Part I, Par. 18.
Filled under Benedict XVI. No Comments.