Douglas Hofstadter Is a Strange Loop

Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop

I've begun reading Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I Am a Strange Loop. It takes up where his classic book Gödel, Escher, Bach left off almost 30 years ago — I talked about it in several earlier posts, most recently with "Brains and Thoughts." In Strange Loop, as in GEB, Hofstadter lays out a theory of how our brains work to produce a sense of self or "I."

In his introduction to the new book, Hofstadter restates the "overarching goal" of the former book: "to relate the concept of a human self and the mystery of consciousness to [Austrian mathematician/logician Kurt] Gödel's stunning discovery of a majestic wraparound self-referential structure (a 'strange loop,' as I later came to call it) in the very midst of a formidable bastion from which self-reference had been strictly banished by its audacious architects" (p. xiii).

The "formidable bastion" Hofstadter refers to was devised by mathematician/philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell made an attempt to exorcise self-reference from the formal-logical system that he hoped to show could be made the basis of all mathematics: set theory. For that to happen, mathematical sets that contain themselves — as in "the set of all non-empty sets (including this one)" — had to be eliminated. They were seen by Russell as seeds of logical inconsistency. Banning them from set theory was, Hofstadter says, a counterproductive move which stripped Russell's Principia Mathematica, written with Alfred North Whitehead, of practical utility.


Gödel proved that formal systems of logic like Russell's either must harbor logical inconsistency, or else be "incomplete": unable to represent in symbolic fashion all knowable truths about themselves.

In accomplishing his remarkable proof of this insight Gödel found a way to arrange (see I Am a Strange Loop, p. xiii) for the "miraculous manufacture of self-reference out of a substrate of meaningless symbols."

Translation: formal systems of logic do nothing more than define "meaningless symbols" that can be combined in certain ways to make up symbol strings. Strictly speaking these strings, although they can often be mapped to statements in everyday language, are entirely devoid of meaning.

In a formal system there are also rules by which new symbol strings can be properly generated from existing, equally meaningless symbol strings.

In the proof of his so-called "Incompleteness Theorem," Gödel showed how these ordinarily semantically vacuous symbol strings could be co-opted to represent meaningful statements of truth ... truths about the very formal systems within which they exist.

By analogy, Hofstadter maintains, our "I"-ness likewise represents "the miraculous appearance of selves and souls in substrates consisting of inanimate matter" (p. xiii). Here, the substrate is not meaningless symbols but the physical material of the human brain. Hofstadter hopes to show how Gödelian self-reference might account for the arising, within that substrate, of the epiphenomenon of the self that we each call "I."


My initial problem with what Hofstadter is saying about the origin of our self-awareness is that he conflates that property of the human mind with "consciousness," and thus with "soul" itself.

As I discussed in a series of posts starting with "Quickening to Qualia, or Taking Consciousness Seriously" and ending with "The Mind's Enigmas," there are legitimate philosophical reasons for disagreeing with Hofstadter in his assumption that everything about the mind is physical — everything, that is, including the fact that we humans seem to be ineffably conscious.

In other words, we have subjective experiences. Philosophers of mind refer to the things we experience consciously and subjectively as "qualia" or "raw sensations." Why do we have these raw sensations of "what it is like" to (for instance) see the color red?

David J. Chalmers's The Conscious Mind

Such philosophers of mind as David J. Chalmers, author of The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, argue persuasively that our conscious awareness plays zero role in causing actual behavior on our parts. Everything we do, we would also do if we were "zombies" lacking consciousness entirely. Consciousness is accordingly not physical at all, to Chalmers. It supervenes on the physical, but it is wholly mental — "mind" and "matter" are to this extent different.

That's not to say that Chalmers thinks consciousness equates to soul, in the religious or theological sense of the word. As far as I can tell, he does not believe in God or the soul.

So a good question is, what are people like myself who believe in a God-given soul to make of Hofstadter's (or Chalmers') view of the mind?


Here's one possibility. Suppose we start from the notion that a soul is conferred upon each of us by virtue of the fact that God sees us from the first moment of our conception — and as he does so, he sees us as "Thou," not "It."

By "Thou," I mean what Martin Buber was getting at in I and Thou, the seminal work of philosophy in which he posits an "I-Thou" dialogue between man and God. No dialogue can happen unless each participant confers upon the other the status of "Thou" rather than "It." To see another as "It" is to treat that other as a thing, an object. In contrast, the ideal served by the Judeo-Christian belief in a God who is a person and not just a being is to treat the other — God himself, another human person — as we would wish to be treated, i.e., as "Thou."

For me to confer "Thouness" upon you, first I have to impute consciousness or sentience to you. I know that I have conscious experiences, and I assume you do too. It is that assumption which unlocks the door to conferring "Thouness."


Hofstadter, for instance, talks in Strange Loop of how he became a vegetarian. It all had to do with musings, which he started as a teenager, about what it means to have a self, or be an "I." In the course of thinking about the human self or soul, he became convinced that animals have souls, too — albeit, in some sense, "smaller" ones than we have. He posits a hierarchy of "interiority" or "souledness" such that mammals have "larger" amounts of it than chickens and other birds ... whose mini-souls are in turn larger than those of, say, mosquitoes. Over the course of several years he came to believe that to swat a mosquito is not wrong, but to eat a chicken is.

In the language of "Thouness," Hofstadter decided that he would confer the status of "Thou" rather than "It" on all animals that we customarily eat as meat — which meant he could no longer countenance eating them.


To have a soul is, then, to qualify as "Thou." If "soul" and "spirit" are the same, then God has a soul — the Holy Spirit — and is to be seen as "Thou." God sees each of us as "Thou"; ergo, we each have a soul. Maybe it's as simple as that — however hard it may be for us to keep this truth in mind as we go about our daily business.

If that's right, then the fact that each of us is conscious — has an interior sense of self, has subjective experiences, has sentience — makes us think of every other person as equally conscious. That is an essential prerequisite of our ability to confer "Thouness" on anyone who would otherwise be seen as "It."

Ruby Slippers

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In "O for Order," as I continued my ongoing discussion of Pope Benedict XVI's book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, I postulated that our society's capacity for ethical awareness is gradually producing a new moral "order for free" in the wake of the demise of old-fashioned taboos.

Very recently there has been a decline in the number of abortions being performed, in the amount of drug abuse that occurs, and in the rate of teen pregnancy, I said. Given that the erstwhile strictures on society's moral behavior have loosened considerably over the last several decades, why?

I suggested the reason has to do with evolution. Not biological evolution per se, but the way in which various types of complex-adaptive, self-organizing systems evolve. Among these types of systems are species, ecosystems, cultures, technologies, economies, financial markets ... and, I would suggest, the ways in which societies come to grips with their moral, ethical understandings.

All such dynamical systems, argues biologist Stuart Kauffman in his book At Home in the Universe, have the capacity to evolve by virtue of hovering mathematically at or near the "edge of chaos" — a unique dynamical locale where both novelty and stability are to be expected. "Chaos" itself has the ability to produce novelty but not stability; the two distinct regimes of dynamical "order" yield stability but not novelty. Only the "edge of chaos" offers sanctuary to the processes of graceful change we call evolution.

Stuff happens ... and when it does, chaos often ensues. But complex-adaptive systems are self-righting, and as they make their way back out of the regime of chaotic instability to the vaunted domain that has been dubbed the edge of chaos, which is equally the edge of order, their ability to self-organize produces new order for free — "for free," because the new order is not imposed on the system by any force or contrivance that exists outside or above the system.


The new moral order that is evolving in our society is not, I would claim, a matter of necessarily seeking different moral ends, but rather of having different moral means.

Take abortion. Those who support a "woman's right to choose" nevertheless want abortion to become (albeit safe and legal) rare. Of late, abortion indeed seems to have grown (slightly) less frequent than it was just a few years ago, as it remains safe and legal. Why?

That trend is probably due to a confluence of causes, I would say:

• Various new laws have chipped away at the ease with which women — for example, teens living with their parents — obtain abortions.
• Sexual mores have shifted in favor of serial monogamy, albeit not full-fledged pre-marital chastity.
• There are now "morning after" birth control pills.
• Women can now take birth control pills that suppress their monthly periods, a desirable goal in itself from the point of view of many women. The pills also protect against pregnancy.
• Advice columnists in newspapers now give hard-headed, practical advice about sexual relationships that no parish priest was ever equipped to give.
• Schools teach condom use.
• TV shows portray getting pregnant when you aren't in a stable relationship as not necessarily a wonderful thing to have happen.
• Women are not as starry-eyed as they once were about "Mr. Right."
• Religious and secular institutions with a pro-life agenda have learned how to pursue it more effectively.
  
• And so on.

There are also countervailing tendencies, to be sure, such as boyfriends, parents, and job requirements that pressure women to terminate unwanted pregnancies. But now there is increasingly a reaction against such pressures on the part of not only pro-lifers but also feminists who resent all forms of coercion exacted upon women.

All in all, the situation is evolving. As it does, abortion becomes rarer ... even though there are (a) fewer formal legal forces exerted upon women contemplating abortion, as there were before Roe v. Wade; (b) fewer informal taboos that remain in widespread effect against premarital sex, pregnancy outside marriage, or the illegitimacy of children.


What does any of this have to do with the pope's book? Well, the pope argues that the rise in the West, over the last several centuries, of the notion that we as individuals are, or ought to be, radically free to express ourselves as we see fit, without having to kowtow to external authorities or taboos, has put us in a self-contradictory situation. As more and more of us gain more and more "power to choose," in the guise of newly minted human "rights," those newfound "rights" endlessly trump other people's and institutions' existing rights — to the point, ultimately, of constricting freedom itself. Lost in the struggle, he believes, is our basic respect for the lives and dignity of other human persons.

I see his point, of course, since in the short term there is an apparent deficit of respect for life and dignity abroad in the land. But I would argue that in the long term, moral "order for free" will in fact emerge and rectify that situation. Indeed, it is already happening.

And so, an analogy. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her fellow travelers on the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City expect the great wizard who rules the Land of Oz mostly by the force of bluster and intimidation to grant whatever it is that would turn each one's individual world into a seeming paradise. Dorothy wants to go home to Kansas. The Scarecrow wants a brain. The Tin Man, a heart. The Cowardly Lion, courage.

As the story unfolds, it becomes quickly apparent that the Great Wizard of Oz is actually a humbug who lacks the power to grant anything. The wizard, I take it, is a stand-in for all external, top-down sources of authority: governments, churches, and those less-visible bastions of behavioral governance which sociologists catalog.

Accordingly, the wizard, who is actually a soft-hearted charlatan whose hot-air balloon descended quite by accident into Oz, confers empowering symbols of braininess, compassion, and courage on Dorothy's friends, and they each come to believe in the qualities they had all along.

As for Dorothy, after the wizard's plan to carry her back to Kansas in his resurrected balloon misfires, the Good Witch Glinda reveals that the ruby slippers Dorothy has inherited from the killed Wicked Witch of the East have the unsuspected ability to transport her home. I take "home" to represent (among other things) the graceful stability we associate with life on earth. The ruby slippers betoken (again, among other things) the power of living organisms — ruby is the color of blood — to, by virtue of their self-organized complexity, produce order for free from within themselves.


The Wizard of Oz is a paean to self-determination in the absence of external coercion, hard (as with formal laws) or soft (as with informal taboos). It is a tribute to the ability of complex systems such as Dorothy represents to right themselves after a catastrophe such as the cyclone that blew Dorothy's house from Kansas to Oz. It is an affirmation that good things can "magically" happen even when everyday logic would suggest otherwise.

When Pope Benedict makes in his book what otherwise would seem to be a logically compelling case that our radical bias toward more and more individual liberty today violates life's sanctity and dignity, and ultimately undermines liberty itself, I think he reckons without the capacity of self-organizing systems to produce (moral) order for free, as they gracefully evolve. I think he overlooks, as Dorothy did, the power of our cultural ruby slippers to transport us out of moral chaos and back to paradise.

O for Order

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In "M for Maturity" I continued my discussion of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. The Holy Father's recent book (written while he was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) makes a case for re-anchoring Western culture in two essentially Christian values: the inviolability of human life and the furtherance of human dignity.

Pope Benedict believes that those values were shunted aside in the wake of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe, supplanted by a commitment to the idea of the radical self-determination of the individual man or woman, in the name of liberty. According to Benedict, placing unfettered self-expression at the absolute center of our moral order relativizes everything else, including life and dignity, to the detriment of all.

In "F for Freedom" I contrasted the idea of absolute freedom with the longstanding Catholic call to chastity — sexual chastity. I showed how the recent movie "V for Vendetta" seems to typify the stresses in our culture. It presents us with a stark choice between freedom and the traditional sexual morality the pope would urge upon us in the name of chastity. I tried to suggest that "V for Vendetta's" attitudes are so much in the ascendant in our society today that any call for re-Christianization that has a return to old-style chastity as its hidden agenda — as I believe the pope's message does — is doomed to fail.

In "C for Chastity" I extended such remarks to show that chastity, as recommended to us by the Church, is more than just a matter of sexuality. It is a refusal to allow ourselves to be controlled by our own "unbridled restlessness" in any venue of life. I asked, "Is there any way we can be good Christians without a return to chastity as the Church traditionally defines it?" I pointed out the difficulty of having us go back to acting chastely in concert as a society, being publicly and overtly chaste together, so as to avoid the pitfall of chastity itself becoming just another option on the list of choices for radical individual self-expression.

In "M for Maturity" I intimated that our society is presently coming out of a stage of cultural "adolescence" in which top-down controls on our individual moral behavior are being supplanted by bottom-up self-control. The culture is maturing. Abortions are down. Drug abuse is down. Teen pregnancy is down. Gradually, we are learning to control ourselves in the absence of top-down, external taboos.

Now, in this post, I would like to suggest that this maturation is an example of "order for free."

Stuart Kauffman's At Home in the Universe

By "order for free" I mean roughly what biologist Stuart Kauffman meant by it in his book At Home in the Universe. The book is about evolution. Not just biological evolution, mind you — though that's a big part of it. There are also cultural, technological, and economic forms of evolution, says Kauffman, and they have a number of characteristics in common.

One of these characteristics is for some changes which emerge naturally in any sort of complex, dynamically self-altering system to be weeded out and others to prosper. Darwin called this process "natural selection."

But Kauffman proposes another common characteristic of such evolving systems: "self-organization." Self-organization is the tendency for complex dynamic systems to produce "order for free."

Kauffman shows how there may well be "laws of self-organization and complexity" by dint of which, in the realm of biological evolution, the living forms which selection chooses among are generated in the first place. These candidate forms of life which natural selection chooses from are examples of order for free.

These same proposed laws of self-organization and complexity, Kauffman, shows, might well govern evolutionary processes at all higher levels of biological organization: species, ecosystems, right up to what biologists call the "evolution of co-evolution" — the way in which species play off against one another as they evolve itself evolves. Self-organization could accordingly be appropriately called the "handmaiden" of natural selection.


Many different types of self-organizing systems seem to share yet another characteristic, that of gravitating to a conceptual — nay, mathematical — locale called the "edge of chaos." This, Kauffman shows, is a "place" where novelty can arise and not be immediately expunged, as it would be in the regime of true mathematical chaos.

On the other hand, there is also the mathematical regime that corresponds to static order ... or, actually, two orderly regimes. In one, nothing ever changes, period. In the second, there are sterile, cyclical changes, but never anything new under the sun.

The edge of chaos is where dynamic "order for free" arises. Systems whose constituent members are connected, but not too connected, produce both novelty and stability. There is a natural balance between bottom-up emergence and top-down control. In the latter, the system spontaneously develops what might be termed a form of self-control, and its activity accordingly tends to resist the destructive forces of the chaotic regime.

Should there be an external, exogenous disturbance to the system's ongoing activity, pushing the system over into the chaotic regime, the self-organizing system tends automatically to gravitate back out of chaos and regain its original poise at the edge of chaos. From there, it goes on producing new "order for free."


Life on earth seems to be such a self-organizing system, says Kauffman. So, too, are human culture, human technology, and human economic activity. My thought is that human moral consciousness is likewise capable of being self-organizing in such a way as to produce order for free.

If so, it evolves. And if it evolves, it organizes its history into eras. Just as the history of biological evolution has eras dominated by different kinds of fossils, the history of moral evolution has its own eras and extinctions.

For example, it can be profoundly hoped that we will soon arrive at an era in which war is a thing of the past.

Notice, as a likely example of the possible emergence of moral order for free, that war is largely absent today from the continent of Europe, whose soil was once so blood-soaked. Notice, also, that Europe is the very seat of the post-Enlightenment values which Pope Benedict tends to look so askance at in his book.

It isn't terribly clear how Europeans have managed to stop slaughtering one another. As recently as two years prior to my birth in 1947, the bloodshed of World War II came to an end. Since then there has been the overarching menace of the Cold War, then the wars and uprisings in the Balkans and parts of the former Soviet Union. But even with Cold War tensions no longer in play, most of Europe has remained peaceful. Who would have thought it, given the continent's bloody history?

Maybe it's a case of order for free ... moral order, since whether or not to wage war is at bottom a moral choice.


If order for free can replace bellicosity with peace, can it replace licentiousness with chastity? By "chastity" here I mean not a bunch of rules of behavior we find impressed upon us from the outside — from the top down, as it were — by the church and/or the secular culture, but a bottom-up orientation toward the avoidance of sexual (or any other kind of) excess.

If, as I say, abortions are down, drug abuse is down, teen pregnancy is down, and so on, are we on the verge of a new moral era? Is "order for free" at work in the way it is going to turn out to be oriented?

(To be continued in my next post ... )

M for Maturity

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In my previous post, C for Chastity, I talked about the concept of chastity in relation to one of the themes of Pope Benedict XVI's recent book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures: freedom. Specifically, the modern understanding of freedom as a matter of individual, radically unfettered self-expression seems to the pope incompatible with the traditional Christian view of the inviolability of human life and dignity, since the latter has always been vouchsafed by tenets of chastity.

Traditionally, chastity has meant primarily sexual chastity, though it extends into the realm of any sort of self-abnegating behavior that defeats what has been called our "unbridled restlessness." We have long been taught rules, most of them taboos, as guidelines to ensure chastity. But, more and more, the dictates of radical individual liberty have overthrown the taboos.

The pope would, I am sure, like us to start acting in concert and being publicly and overtly chaste together ... which would change the culture drastically.


But the culture has already changed drastically, in the opposite direction, during my lifetime of close to 60 years and counting.

After fulminating about lost chastity in the previous post, it dawned on me yesterday that we have turned a corner. Where there was once a system of external restraints in place to keep us on the straight and narrow — the Church was a big part of that system — there is now (and has been for a long time) an ongoing revolt against that. It has become the primary business of our culture today to throw over the old external restraints on how we are going to behave.

We're going through a cultural adolescence, in other words. Adolescence is the period of life when, as individuals, we break the shackles of parental control and learn to control ourselves. Like as not, we make mistakes, sometimes big ones. We do things we later regret. We tend to run wild.

But we come out the other side as adults who can take full charge of their own affairs, morally and practically.

That's what's happening in our cultural adolescence. Every time some celebrity acts up or acts out in full public view, filling the tabloids with gossip fodder, the culture pricks up its ears in much the same way as teenagers do when a schoolmate gets caught by the principal breaking the rules. It's how we learn about actions and their consequences, and right and wrong, and justice.

Later, when we are no longer being told what to do and what not to do, we'll need to know those things.


We've been going through our cultural adolescence for some time now — at least since the advent of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s. In fact, it was while I was listening to rock by Paul McCartney on my iPod that it struck me that the complaints I have about how we behave today — crude, rude, and lewd, rather than chaste and demure — are mostly about the extreme, highly publicized excesses of behavior people are prone to these days. Most of us behave pretty well, most of the time. So why haven't we actually gone to hell in a handbasket, I asked myself.

Because, I answered, there is some sort of bottom-up morality forming. That is, once top-down, external strictures on personal behavior are effectively overthrown, people have been finding ways and means of keeping their tendencies toward behavioral excess at bay.

One of the ways we do this is by vicariously experiencing the excesses of others, whether real or fictional or musical. This is why so many rock and rap lyrics are raunchy. Why so many movies and TV shows are over-the-top. Why we have such a low, mean, tabloid-y culture. Why the news on TV emphasizes drive-by shootings and other sensationalist gore.

This is also why there are so many mistakes being made by us average people. I consider such things as abortion and drug dependency to be (whatever else they are) moral mistakes. Just as teens make mistakes en route to maturity, members of an adolescent culture do so as well.

But the culture is maturing. Abortions are down. Drug abuse is down. Teen pregnancy is down. Gradually, we are learning to control ourselves in the absence of top-down, external taboos.

(To be continued in "O for Order" ... )

C for Chastity

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

In my previous post, F for Freedom, I talked about one of the themes of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures: freedom. Specifically, is the modern understanding of freedom as a matter of individual, radically unfettered self-expression compatible with the traditional Christian view of the inviolability of human life and dignity?

That comes down to, I suggested, a question of chastity. Although the pope doesn't say so outright in his book, it's clear he feels our dignity is best served by self-imposed chastity and not by radically free self-expression.

Of course, the word "chastity" conjures up images of sexual self-restraint, primarily. In the Catholic lexicon — and I say this as a Catholic — chastity is actually more than that.

Fr. Ron Rolheiser's The Shattered Lantern

"To be chaste means to experience things, all things, respectfully and to drink them in only when we are ready for them. ... Unbridled restlessness makes us unhealthily impatient for experience ... Greed and impatience push us toward irresponsible experience," writes Ronald Rolheiser, a Catholic priest, in The Shattered Lantern: Rediscovering a Felt Presence of God.

As I intimated in my prior post, when you combine the exigencies of "want to" and "now," you have a recipe for what Rolheiser calls "unbridled restlessness," the enemy of chastity. It doesn't really matter whether the urge for immediate gratification involves sex or not.

Still, self-indulgent sex is a biggie in our culture; we call it "hooking up." That's why it comes as no surprise that the Catholic Church opposes sex outside the confines of heterosexual marriage. It even opposes sex within marriage if one partner is using the other merely for personal gratification ... or even if both partners are treating each other as objects.


I ask myself all sorts of questions about the topic of sexual chastity as it is viewed within Christianity, and I find I can't answer a lot of them.

I don't really understand, for example, why homosexual relations are considered "objectively disordered" by the Church. Clearly, the pope's rhetoric in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures and elsewhere, combined with other things I have heard and read, implies that homosexual behavior is wrong because it is unchaste, which means he thinks it the handmaid of gratification and not of love. But is that true, always and everywhere? Is homosexual sex necessarily any more unchaste than married, heterosexual sex?

Also, I don't really understand why the Church finds fault with "artificial" means of birth control. The so-called "rhythm method" is permitted as "natural," but condoms and pills are prohibited as "unnatural." With the former, sex has to be avoided on certain days of the month, which may, I suppose, strengthen a couple's ability to postpone gratification in the name of chastity. Is that the not-so-hidden agenda here?


I also ask myself a lot of hard-to-answer questions about chastity in general, in the context of our popular culture today. The culture is not known for promoting abnegation and self-mastery, to say the least.

It seems rather to push us right up to the edge of truly "bad" behavior. Occasionally, some of us go way beyond the edge. When that happens publicly to a star of Hollywood or sports or the mass media, we talk about it for months.

Then there's the fictional "bad" behavior we see all the time on TV or movie screens. It used to be only the villain of the piece who misbehaved. Now the hero can too.

In fact, the popular culture seems to have turned into a giant sociological laboratory in which we're continually asking ourselves, "How far can we go?"

My question is, "Is this so bad?"


Let me put that question another way: "Is there any way we can be good Christians without a return to chastity as the Church traditionally defines it?"

(I'll sidestep the question as it applies to Jews, Muslims, and members of other religions. I have a hard enough time dealing with it in the Christian context.)

One might think that the answer to the question in that form is simple: if an individual freely opts to be a practicing Christian and accordingly chaste, there is no conflict. But, clearly, the pope urges a culture that promotes chastity not individually but communally ... chastity being the antithesis to the mandate of radically free self-expression which he finds at the core of secular values today.

In other words, if self-expression is to be reined in, in the name of what will it be done? Life and dignity. How would it be done? Manifestly, by opting not to express our freedom in certain ways. But if that is not going to turn back into just another way of expressing our radical freedom of choice as individuals, we would have to act in concert and be publicly and overtly chaste together ... which would change the culture drastically.

(To be continued in "M for Maturity" ... )

F for Freedom

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

One of the themes of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is freedom. There are in Western culture today two competing notions of it. According to one notion of human liberty, each one of us ought to be free to express "who we are" in any way we see fit, as long as it does not trample on another individual's equal right to free self-expression.

That is not the pope's notion of freedom. His notion is that we are free only to the extent that exercising our freedoms does not take the life of, or violate the essential dignity of, a human person — including ourselves.

Most of the time, our untrammeled, individualistic self-expression is not circumscribed by the pope's twin criteria of the inviolability of life and the sanctity of personal dignity. But there are times when the two points of view diverge.

One of these times is when a woman considers having an abortion. If her "freedom to choose" gets exercised, her fetus's life gets snuffed out.

Other situations in which the pope would find a divergence are those involving questions of chastity. A woman considering an abortion has not necessarily been unchaste, since her gestating infant may well have been conceived within the confines of holy wedlock. But other hot-button issues surrounding church teaching today are often questions of chastity.

Sex without marriage. Sex between people of the same gender. Using contraceptive devices such as condoms and technologies such as birth control pills. These are three hotly debated topics that divide the pope's notion of freedom from the secular view that all of the above are fine as long as they are acts of individual self-expression that hurt no one. In the pope's view they are all offenses against life, dignity, and chastity.


I personally struggle with such questions myself. For instance, last night I squirmed as I watched the recent excellent movie "V for Vendetta."

Though it occurs in the year 2020, it's set in a 1984-like British dystopia in which an all-powerful High Chancellor and his minions have stripped the people of all real freedom in the name of "peace," "order," and, yes, "faith." One masked man, "V," strikes a blow for freedom by blowing up the courtrooms of the Old Bailey — now symbols of injustice — and pirating the television airwaves to broadcast a call-to-arms to the oppressed. In exactly one year, on the November 5th anniversary of Guy Fawkes Day, the people are asked by "V" to rise up and incinerate the Houses of Parliament, and thereby the dictatorship.

Great stuff ... except that the plot makes clear that the filmmakers' stance with regard to freedom is centered around what the pope would assail as offensive to life, dignity, and chastity.

One of the movie's more sympathetic characters, played by Stephen Fry, takes in the story's heroine, Natalie Portman, "V's" sometime henchwoman, when she is on the run from the police. He is actually her boss at the un-BBC of the day, and as much of a dissident as one can be under the circumstances of the oppression. As such, he has his secrets. One of them is that he reads the Koran for its beautiful poetry — the Koran having been banned by the government because it supposedly underwrote 9/11-type terrorism.

Another of his secrets is that the people he would like to love and be intimate with are not permitted to him — a veiled reference, one assumes, to his homosexuality.

Portman is eventually put in prison and finds, concealed in a rat's hole in her cell, the life story of another prisoner, written stealthily on toilet paper. This testament of her female predecessor tells of how she and her equally female lover had been sharing an idyllic life together for three sweet years when the government murdered her partner and incarcerated her. Their lesbian relationship was, it seems, impermissible under the law.

So we would seem to have, ostensibly, a stark choice between freedom, on the one hand, and what the pope would call the call to chastity. If we choose chastity — no sex outside heterosexual marriage, and so forth — we ipso facto lose all freedom.

Put another way, if we circumscribe sexual freedoms in any way, we are on a slippery slope to complete tyranny. That would seem to be the subtext of "V for Vendetta."


The question is, is it true?

It would arguably be true if, as the filmmakers (who also made the "Matrix" series) seem to feel, any restriction, self-imposed or otherwise, on our radical freedom of self-expression is tantamount to tyranny. Certainly the dictates of chastity qualify here, for chastity calls us to observe self-imposed limits on how we express "who we are."

That is, they do so under the assumption that we "are" whatever it is that we want to do, and have the power to do, now. If we want to "hook up" now, and if we have the power to keep from making babies when we do so, fine.

The pope would say that the exigencies of "want to" and "now" enslave us, expunge our true selves from our very own view. Our true selves are ordered to life, dignity, and chastity, not "want to" or "now." The true tyrant in all of this controversy over freedom is at work inside us, the pope would say. The true tyrant is the one who would conceal from us who we really "are."

(To be continued in "C for Chastity" ... )

Consciousness and Faith

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is a book that packs a lot of wisdom into a few short pages. One of the nuggets can be found on pages 108-109, in a section titled "Faith is anchored in what Jesus and the saints see."

This section occurs in the "What Does It Mean To Believe?" part of the pope's book, a discourse on how religious faith, like the faith we customarily place in those experts who inform us about otherwise unsuspected facts in the natural world, depends ultimately on what others see. Though I have never seen an electron, I take on faith that others have done so at least indirectly, as a result of doing experiments or pursuant to the working out of mathematical laws of nature which fall flat if electrons are not real.

Along these same lines, the pope points out that Christ has "seen" the Father, as had Abraham before him. Moses saw, not God's face, but at least "his back" (Exodus 33:23). The saints, both those who have been canonized and those who are hidden, have likewise "seen" God. Our Judeo-Christian faith — not to mention all of its theology — are firnly anchored in that sort of direct "seeing."

But, the pope says, the sort of "seeing" he is talking about, done by the few as the ultimate basis of faith for us in the multitudes, is one that can also be called "experience." For example, the pope says this about the "hidden" saints, those who have never been canonized by the Church, but are nonetheless saints:

There are always hidden saints, too, who receive in their communion with Jesus a ray of his splendor, a concrete and real experience of God. (p. 108)

Moreover,

Without this reference point, without the deep anchoring in such an experience [as that of the saints], [the theologian's] work becomes detached from reality ... it degenerates into an empty intellectual game ... . (p. 109)

In a series of recent posts, I have taken up the question of why our minds are conscious: why they have, as they do, the capacity for subjective experience. In particular, in I Am a Camera I said the human mind's consciousness exists to feed the immortal soul with the "qualia" of our subjective experiences. The soul (acting as a metaphysical "camera") records and carries those experiences of a lifetime into the afterlife, so that we can remain who we always were after we die.

Qualia: they are what philosophers of mind call, to take one example, the sensation or feeling of "redness" which we experience when we see a red tricycle. That particular "quale" (the singular of "qualia") is accordingly the answer to the question, what is it "like" to see something red?

Some philosophers of mind hold that consciousness and the qualia it houses are immaterial; they go beyond anything physical that is found in the brain or the body. If so, I argued, maybe we are conscious as an adjunct to the eternal life of an equally immaterial soul.


But the pope's book offers an even simpler religious explanation for consciousness: its presence in the human makeup is what enabled the patriarchs, the saints, and Jesus himself to "see" God, and thus to provide the rest of us with the anchor point for our faith!

Icy-Heart Syndrome

Welcome to the first in a series of blog posts which I'll call "Taking Sin Seriously."

I have decided to do just that — take sin seriously as a topic for this blog which I mostly intend as a call to human solidarity — because one good definition for sin is whatever blocks person-to person unity or impedes it from happening.

Another definition for sin is what I call "icy-heart syndrome." When I sin — when I do what I shouldn't do or fail to do what I should do — it is always in some way connected to the fact that my heart has (yes, again!) turned cold as ice. That makes me see other people — people such as you — as utilitarian objects, not as persons. At that point I just can't help myself: I tend to use you and discard you as I see fit.

Of course, that is a metaphor, an analogy, a bit of poetic license. What's really going on when I sin is that my ego is taking control of my vision, yet again.

OK, OK, that's another (mixed) metaphor, another analogy, another schematization. "My ego"? "My vision"? What do I mean by those? How is it that the former takes control of the latter? And why is that bad?


Let me answer by extending the analogy. My ego is like the lens of a nearsighted eye. Using it and it alone, I see clearly only that which is right in front of my own nose: my individual gratifications and my seeming best interests. Everything else is out of focus, including your gratifications, your needs, and your interests.

In fact, your very face as another human person, just like me, is a bit of a blur to my ego-lensed nearsightedness. I can't really see you as you are. I see you as but an object to be used or discarded as I see fit.

Extending the analogy yet further, what I seek in terms of my relationship with God is, in fact, a contact lens that will make my distance vision what it ought to be: 20-20.

When that contact lens is right where it should be, I can see your face as God sees it. When that happens, I know you as a person and not as an object. My icy heart melts. My sinfulness is, for the moment, held at bay.


The trouble is, this contact lens slips. It slides off center from one moment to the next, and thereby places the axis of my vision back under the control of my nearsighted ego once again. I can no longer see your true face, and my heart turns back to ice toward you.

Plus, having 20-20 distance vision, even for one fleeting moment, is not really comfortable. For starters, with it I can see all the way to Darfur, to rape and genocide which I feel powerless to do anything about.

For another thing, when the lens is where it should be, I can for one brief, painful instant see myself clearly in the mirror, and I don't much like the vain, callous, no-count wretch I see there: the one who is in the very next heartbeat going to permit the contact lens to slip aside and who will at that moment feel nothing but relief.

Life's Inviolability at the Center of Morality

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

I have finished reading Pope Benedict XVI's recent book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. It's a small one, but a great one. To me, the axis around which the whole thought of the book pivots is that of the inviolability of human life.

It it thus a book which even nonbelievers can seek sustenance in.

In fact, the book is aimed more at atheists and agnostics than at believers. The Holy Father argues that atheism contains a fatal flaw: in opposing religious dogmatism, it is itself dogmatic. Agnosticism likewise stumbles over the impossibility of carrying out in practice its theory that one can and should sidestep the question of God's existence as undecidable. When push comes to shove — as it does at every instant of our waking life, the pope points out — we have to decide on moral commitments that, ultimately, find their roots only in God's self-revelation.

Take the notion of the inviolability of human life. Under most circumstances, it sounds good to even the most confirmed non-believer ears, the assertion that no human life ought to be taken by human hands. But without God in the philosophical picture, the principle slips through our fingers like a soap bubble, squirting out in the general direction of a supposed "right" of individuals to free self-expression and personal autonomy. This is the basic "right" which we enshrine today in our secular, post-Enlightenment Western culture.

Thus, when the "right to life" of a human fetus impacts upon the "right to privacy" of a pregnant woman contemplating abortion, the latter wins.


The secular governmental program of "rights" protection quickly becomes much like spin-balancing a tire. In spin-balancing a wheel with a tire on it, the wheel is mounted on a machine that rotates it at high speed. If it wobbles, the machine is stopped and a weight is hammered into the rim. Spun again, the wheel may still wobble ... calling for another weight to be hammered in. Eventually, after enough weights, maybe no more wobble.

Unless, that is, the wheel was originally mounted off center on the machine. Then there's no amount of weight whose judicious application can de-wobble it.

In human culture, when the once-axial idea of an inviolable life given by God to each person, no matter how puny and weak, squirts over into the secular domain, we find ourselves placing individual autonomy rights in the middle of our moral order ... not guarantees of life's sanctity and inviolability.

The wheel of the culture — and the hub of its guiding moral philosophy — is accordingly mounted off center. The neverending secular program of adding weight after weight to society's moral hub to try to get the cultural rim in proper balance becomes a lost cause.


Building our moral house on the foundation of radically free individual self-expression is building it on quicksand. The chimera of "I'm OK, You're OK!" all too quickly turns into "I'm suing you and, what's more, I'm going to slime your name all over the Internet, you self-serving snake!"

You can't balance out self-serving with more self-serving. An ethos of serving others is the only way to spin-balance society. But service to others can only be grounded in seeing their lives as being as sacrosanct as our own ... seeing other persons through the eyes of God, as it were. Ignoring God's affirming gaze, said in scripture to be cast upon us all without exception, gives us no reliable basis for squelching self-serving attitudes and taking the wobble out of our secular culture.


This is why the pope invites nonbelievers to opt to live their life as if God exists. For them to make God a postulate of their moral lives — not necessarily a provable fact, simply a starting point for moral discourse and action — would help get our culture back on center.

I invite all nonbelievers to think deeply about this.

The Crisis in Our Culture

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Pope Benedict XVI's recent book Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is one that should not be missed. As I said in my previous post, it is a radical riposte to post-Enlightenment thinking which, for the foundational Christian insistence on the personal dignity of man, made in God's image, substitutes the absolute liberty of the individual to express himself freely ... as long as doing so mortally offends no other individual or group.

Unfortunately, that Enlightenment postulate contains its own internal contradiction. There is ultimately no way in which such radical freedom of our individual, personal self-expression doesn't run aground on the angry sensibilities of others who despise what we say. We in modern society, accordingly, devise laws to protect us vessels of radical freedom from each other's "hateful" expression. Laws then unavoidably proliferate to enshrine offended citizens' claimed needs for further protection, and state powers grow at the expense of liberty! Thus, the contradiction.

The Christian postulate, that human dignity itself lies at the root of all morality and justice, is grounded in the belief that God made everything, including man, upon which event he beheld his creation, finding "it was very good" (Genesis 1:31, quoted on p. 71). The key word is "behold": God sees us, includes us in his gaze, however small and weak we may be. Therein lies our unimpeachable claim to personal dignity.

And therein lies the personal moral responsibility we each have to use our own eyes in a way that validates the like claim to dignity of every other human person ... rather that to close our eyes to him or her and to treat that other human person as an object to be utilized and/or disposed of at our pleasure.


Secularists who prefer the Enlightenment credo to the Judeo-Christian one are not ogres who are snarlingly, universally blind to others' dignities. Unless and until, that is, the fact that they have put the individual freedom mandate they inherit from the Enlightenment at the center of their value system — in place of the erstwhile religious mandate to publicly circumscribe our own freedoms in deference the claims others make on us — forces them to choose the former credo over the latter, if only not to make liars of themselves.

This, the pope observes, is what happens when abortion rights are said to be within the province of a woman's private discretion, as a radically free individual. When a "privacy" justification for abortion rights is asserted in today's society, it necessarily forces all of us to avert our eyes from the unseen fetus, hidden away in a womb. And we are only too willing to look away, for when we decline to envision that the fetus has a face and eyes of its own, we avoid the cognitive dissonance that would otherwise spring from our instinctive readiness to accord a being with human face and human eyes some sort of claim to inviolability, if we but look upon that face and into those eyes.

The pope thinks our culture is in crisis because we accept abortion-on-demand's legality in the name of radical individual liberty. I find, somewhat to my own surprise, that I agree with him.


Throughout my life, including the last twenty years of it, during which I have called myself a Christian, I have nurtured a strong bias toward accepting unquestioningly the Enlightenment prescription of radical individual liberty. It is this very prescription which the pope says is a distortion of the Christian ethos that gave birth to it.

I have no intention here of giving a full account of the history of my libertarian assumptions, but my attitude in the 1960s toward the War in Vietnam gives you its essential flavor. If I am going to be completely honest with myself, I have to admit that perhaps the major reason I opposed that war as a late-teen and then a twenty-something had to do with the indignation I felt at the thought of being drafted and forced to fight in it.

The question, for me, was more than one of whether the war was right or wrong. It was a question of, "How dare they not ask me whether I think it's a right and just war, before they draft me?"

In other words, my assumption that my own liberty trumped any and all claims that my society made upon me — my assumption that I had no civic responsibility to serve — was something that I never called into question. And to avoid calling it into question, my psychological strategy was to call the war immoral on its very face.

Now, that particular war may indeed have been immoral and unjust ... but so too, I now see, was my assumption that the dictates of radical individaul liberty mandated my right to opt out, at my own personal discretion, from fighting in it.


For me to follow the pope and honor what he says in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, I'll have to scrap that attitude. It's admittedly tricky to do, for there are indeed Christian justifications for pacifism and nonviolence, ones the pope would respect. And there are indeed Christian criteria for a war's being just, according to which the Vietnam conflict may not have passed muster.

Yet, the pope seems to suggest, when one argues against a war from Enlightenment-enshrined considerations of personal liberty alone, one is building one's house on moral quicksand. Hmmm ... tricky, indeed, to see that the moral conclusion may be the same — this war is a bad war, for example — but the justifications for that conclusion are nevertheless flawed and need to be jettisoned.

Yet this is what the pope is telling secularists. No matter how much religion and secularism (he calls the latter "laicism") may agree on a great many grand moral pronouncements, ultimately what matters is how you get to those pronouncements. Just as the end never justifies the means, the conclusion never justifies the arguments. If a system of argumentation — a philosophy — is flawed and contains an internal inconsistency, at some point morality itself becomes mutilated.

The Self-Contradictions of Liberty

Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Today I finally got hold of a copy of Pope Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, a book I originally mentioned in Reason and Love. Written just before its author, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, was elected pope, it argues that Europe and the West are experiencing a cultural crisis for a very deep-seated reason: we Westerners have bought into a crippled, incompletely rational philosophy that has an internal contradiction at its core.

At the root of the philosophy that grew out of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe, a stance that continues to dominate our Western culture today, is the value we call liberty. Personal liberty as a value and a right was originally derived from the Christian idea of the intrinsic dignity of the human person created in God's image. But the scientific version of rationalism which flourished in the wake of the Enlightenment cut the umbilical cord between such values and an erstwhile belief in God. Liberty became its own supreme good.

The pope shows how that seemingly progressive idea has carried the seed of its own self-cannibalization. Protecting the right of man to liberty inevitably leads to the prohibition of discrimination — see pp. 34-35 — which equally inevitably leads to a reverse discrimination wherein we lose, say, the liberty loudly to proclaim ideas resented by legally protected groups.

There are many manifestations of this that can be listed, among them:

• Women, as possessors of abortion rights, are protected from hearing the speech of anti-abortion protesters on the way into an abortion clinic, by keeping the protesters at a certain distance away from the woman's path.
• Meanwhile, as the pope himself mentions (p. 35), the rights to life and liberty of the human fetus about to be aborted get lost in the shuffle.
• A church that calls homosexuality "objectively disordered" and claims that it, as a church obedient to divine revelation, "does not have the right to confer priestly ordination on women" is, according to the pope's book, relegated to the status of an institution whose tenets are deemed entirely private matters of merely subjective belief — which, I think the pope would agree, is equivalent to designating them "not even wrong" at the level of our publicly shared culture.
• On many progressive college campuses, "politically incorrect" speech is simply not tolerated, and can be grounds for dismissal.
• We in the U.S. now feel we need special laws against "hate crimes" in which, for example, assaults aggravated by hateful, discriminatory motivations on the part of the perpetrator draw longer jail sentences. How does a jury know the perp's inner motivations? Well, if the perp has spoken out against homosexuality and slugs a gay guy in a bar fight, presumably it was a hate crime. The onus is on the assailant to show that it wasn't.

I'm not trying to say that hate is OK, or that laws should change, or that controversial positions taken by the Catholic Church are unassailable. The overarching point that the pope is making, and that I agree with, is that liberty, unmoored from the Christian religious values which engendered it, ties itself in knots. It then needs ever more knots in order to balance out the first knots. The compensating knots need to be tied — by an increasingly powerful state! — at the cost, ultimately, of handcuffing liberty itself.

This is the logical flaw in the hard diamond of Enlightenment thought, to the extent that its science-only version of rationality disenfranchises the Christian religion and associated moral understandings which originally gave rise to secularism's most cherished values.


To the Enlightenment axiom that personal liberty can serve as the indisputable source of all else we need to believe in, morally and ethically, the pope juxtaposes Christianity's foundational assumption: human life itself is sacred; it belongs to God. Liberty, though itself a worthy value, derives from the dignity of the human person who is made in God's image, and whose life comes as a gift from God.

That idea is the only true basis for morality, for justice, for a rationality that is not crippled and incomplete ... and, yes, for liberty.

Prominent Evangelical Theologian Returns to Catholic Church

A recent Catholic News Service article, "Prominent Evangelical Theologian Returns to Catholic Church," is of great interest to me. According to the article, Francis J. Beckwith, one of the most prominent Evangelical scholars in America, has returned to his childhood roots and re-entered into full communion with the Roman Catholic Church. His switch, accompanied by the conversion of his wife, has involved his resignation as president of the Evangelical Theological Society. That resignation is documented in this post he made to Right Reason, the "weblog for conservative philosophers." That post also contains a wealth of comments from others about Mr. Beckwith's change of church affiliation, both pro and con.

I happen to be a Catholic who converted from Protestantism of the Episcopalian/High Anglican variety after spending my early years mostly unchurched. My lapsed parents' backgrounds were Southern Baptist on my mother's side and Methodist on my father's. When I finally felt called to worship God at about age 40, I found my way to an Episcopal congregation, thanks to the help of a friend. Later, another friend introduced me to Catholicism — or, re-introduced me, since I had learned much about the faith as a student at Georgetown in the '60's — at a time when I had become personally dissatisfied with Anglicanism. I underwent the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults and was confirmed as a Roman Catholic in 1995.

I now, to some inner surprise, find my religious journey has left me bewildered by some of the matters raised by Mr. Beckwith and others, in the wake of his conversion.


Mr. Beckwith writes in his blog post:

... I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power to account for both all the biblical texts on justification as well as the church’s historical understanding of salvation prior to the Reformation all the way back to the ancient church of the first few centuries. Moreover, much of what I have taken for granted as a Protestant—e.g., the catholic creeds, the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian understanding of man, and the canon of Scripture—is the result of a Church that made judgments about these matters and on which non-Catholics, including Evangelicals, have declared and grounded their Christian orthodoxy in a world hostile to it. Given these considerations, I thought it wise for me to err on the side of the Church with historical and theological continuity with the first generations of Christians that followed Christ’s Apostles.

To be quite honest, I don't follow all of that. The prose is a bit turgid ... and the basic Protestant-Catholic controversy over justification — God's act of declaring or making a sinner righteous before God — is one I simply don't think deserves all the ink it has been given over the centuries since the Protestant Reformation.

Of course, I get why justification is crucial in Christianity. It's a no-brainer, the idea that God and sin can't share the same "space" in heaven, so the fact that each of us humans is a sinner, even post-Crucifixion, has to be offset or overcome somehow.

I also understand that Martin Luther believed in sola fide, justification by faith alone, when in 1517 he challenged (per Wikipedia) "the Roman Catholic practice of indulgences for penance, and for that reason it [sola fide] is called the material cause of the Protestant Reformation, while the doctrine of sola scriptura is considered the formal cause."

Sola scriptura as a Protestant doctrine basically holds that Sacred Scripture — the Holy Bible — does not need interpreting by church teaching that takes place in the context of Sacred Tradition.


Sacred Tradition is the continuing, post-biblical elaboration of Christian understanding and doctrine reflected in the dogma of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches — Christian churches that adhere to the apostolic succession (the unbroken line of bishops beginning with the original apostles). It is the apostolic succession which is said to justify those churches in so extending Christian dogma from time to time.

The Catholic Church, for example, treats as dogma the ideas of papal infallibility, the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the Mother of God — i.e., Christ — and Mary's bodily Assumption into heaven. Admittedly, that any of those three items ought to be taken as indisputable articles of faith is not obvious from reading the Bible alone. Without the elaboration of Christian understanding that is embodied in the Sacred Tradition, it would be hard to credit them.

When Mr. Beckwith writes in his blog piece:

There is a conversation in [the Evangelical Theological Society] that must take place, a conversation about the relationship between Evangelicalism and what is called the “Great Tradition,” a tradition from which all Christians can trace their spiritual and ecclesiastical paternity. It is a conversation that I welcome, and it is one in which I hope to be a participant ...

... the "Great Tradition" he refers to is that same "Sacred Tradition." I gather he feels, uncontroversially, that this tradition is rooted in the writings of the early Church Fathers. Those writings are to him a source of valid authority and purportedly show him that "the early church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible."


Today, the Catholic News Service article says, the official Catholic view of justification, as expressed in a 1999 joint declaration with Lutherans, is this:

By grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while calling us to good works.

Such a formulation seems to contradict what I imagine to be an erroneous, if widespread, understanding of the Catholic position: that virtuous works can supposedly get us into heaven.

As Mr. Beckwith would have it (per the CNS article):

... "Protestants often misunderstand" what the [Catholic] church is trying to convey in its teachings on the need to be virtuous. "The Catholic Church frames the Christian life as one in which you must exercise virtue — not because virtue saves you, but because that's the way God's grace is manifested," he said.

"Grace" is theo-speak for the notion that what God does to save us is unearned and unmerited: done out of the goodness of his heart, as it were. When we receive the free gift of salvation based on faith, it is only natural that we should respond by feeling called to perform "good works." This is what the Catholic Church actually teaches.

According to the Wikipedia sola fide article:

Protestants have historically summarized their view with the formula: "Justification is by faith alone, but not by the faith that is alone [that is, not by a supposed faith that has no accompanying works]."

It accordingly seems to me that there isn't a dime's worth of difference here! Catholics and Protestants actually believe the same thing!


True, that doesn't defuse the issues surrounding the Protestant sola scriptura outlook, which boils down to the question of whether any Church, Catholic or otherwise, has teaching authority beyond what the Bible "says," all by itself. I freely admit that that sounds to me as if it is but a purely formal controversy — as long as what the Church teaches is in harmony with what sola scriptura advocates substantively hold, anyway.

Is there anything about crediting the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption that leaves any of us in a different place, in terms of how we lead a properly Christian life? If so, my Protestant friends, I'd like to know what it is.


Or, take the disagreement over the true nature of the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Whether, or how, Christ is "really" present "in" the Eucharistic elements seems to me less important than that they bring us all to share one table with the Lord. For us to fall out over the precise nature of the items on the menu has to be just plain wrong.

The fault, I recognize, is on both (or all) sides. For reasons I don't understand, we Catholics feel that anything short of the full traditional doctrine of transubstantiation — the bread and wine at the Mass are changed into Christ's body and blood: the Real Presence — puts us on the slippery slope to perdition. But the marks of receiving Holy Communion — in the Catechism of the Catholic Church they include "preserving, increasing, and renewing the life of grace received at Baptism"; "growth in Christian life"; "cleansing us from past sins and preserving us from future sins"; and "strengthening our charity" — would seem to me to be in effect, even if the communicant has no idea of the Real Presence. Ergo, if we fall out over a philosophical dispute concerning the "substance" of the Eucharist, what can be said about our Christian charity in the first place?


As I talked about in Reason and Love, the well-known Catholic writer George Weigel has it that "the reason of God, the Logos through whom all things were made, calls us beyond reason to love" (see this article by Mr. Weigel). That notion echoes what Pope Benedict XVI has been saying, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and as pope. Says Mr. Weigel:

[The "scandal" of the Cross] is not a scandal against reason; it is a scandal beyond reason. Creation, Joseph Ratzinger once wrote, displays the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love.”

I think the principle of "not against reason, but beyond reason" offers a way out of the disputes that formally divide Protestants and Catholics.

Take, for example, Mr. Beckwith's saying in his blog post:

... I began reading the Early Church Fathers as well as some of the more sophisticated works on justification by Catholic authors. I became convinced that the Early Church is more Catholic than Protestant and that the Catholic view of justification, correctly understood, is biblically and historically defensible. Even though I also believe that the Reformed view is biblically and historically defensible, I think the Catholic view has more explanatory power ...

What jumps out at me here is that Mr. Beckwith thinks the Reformed (Protestant) view of justification is "biblically and historically defensible," and so is the Catholic view. They're both defensible to human reason. In other words, neither is "against reason."

Accordingly, I think it ought to be possible for us Catholics and our Protestant friends to learn to debate in amity which of our two distinctive views "has more explanatory power," or whatever ... but debate it only after we have broken bread together, as we share in the “exaggerated infinity of God’s love," a love that we all agree lies "beyond reason."

An Ever-So-Desperate Need

I woke up on this Memorial Day 2007 to thoughts in which I pondered the mystery of why some people believe vociferously in God, some aver equally adamantly that there is no God ... and some seem to have little interest in the question.

That's when it hit me, once again: the reason why, about twenty years ago, I moved abruptly from the third column to the first.

It was in 1985 that my mother died, soon followed by my father in 1988. After my first loss, I began to be beset with mysterious symptoms of psychosomatic illness. Just before the second, I found I suddenly believed in God.

Today, I recognize that underneath all my rational arguments for such a belief in God lies a usually only barely conscious, yet ever-so-desperate need to see my mother and father again. If there is no God, then there is no heaven. If no heaven, there are no souls that survive earthly death ... and Mom and Dad would be forever lost to me. No reunion would be possible. I need to believe that isn't so.


In fact, this concern of mine to be reunited with my loved ones is so strong, it dwarfs any concern I have for my own salvation ... except, of course, for the logic which says that my own soul would have to survive, if I am to meet theirs again. I don't think my parents' souls went to hell, either of them, but I am conscious today of the thought that if by some chance they went down rather than up, I'd gladly follow them into the brimstone, rather than spend the rest of eternity separate from them.

This is a day in which countless bereaved mothers, fathers, wives, husbands, children, and loved ones mourn the fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan, or of other wars such as Vietnam and WWII, and realize how desperately they miss them, and will always miss them. This is a day when a lot of people will know they believe in God.

Brute Facts, Alchemy, and Belief in God

I have been spending a fair amount of time recently looking into philosophy, especially the philosophy of mind I discussed in Whither the "Magic" of Mind? and, before that, in a whole host of other posts. One of the phrases I find many of today's philosophers using with some frequency is "brute fact."

A brute fact, in the way in which I read the term, is one which cannot be further explained: it just is. In the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, the definition "a terminus of a series of explanations which is not itself further explicable" is given. A brute fact is accordingly one that, though it may help explain other facts, is not itself susceptible of its own explanation.

For example, some physicists refer to the strength of the gravitational force in our universe as a brute fact, a just-so story that cannot be derived from other physical facts or laws. Science amounts to a hunt for systematic ways to explain what goes on in the world, accounts that can be validated experimentally and empirically, so when a scientist says X is a brute fact, what is being implied is that the hunt ends there, with X.

On the other hand, many scientists hold out hope that there is a Theory of Everything — perhaps some version of superstring theory — from which the strength of the universe's gravitational force just "falls out," as other supposed brute facts (e.g., Planck's constant describing the size of quanta in quantum mechanics) also would do.

But then the Theory of Everything would itself become a brute fact, lacking more basic explanation. Implicit in explanation-seeking science is the contradictory notion that there is an end to explicability, and it lies within the radius of the physical, material world.


At the same time, there is a preference for having everything explained as elegantly as possible, which means by making as few explanatory assumptions as one can. If two facts can be derived from one law as opposed to two separate laws, prefer the one law. This is Occam's Razor at work: "All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one."

There may be a physical Theory of Everything which we will validate someday. It may account for a whole passel of cosmic constants — strength of gravity, Planck's constant, etc. — that (according to certain interpretations of the Anthropic Principle) make ours a universe "fine-tuned for life." Even so, wouldn't there be certain other brute facts it doesn't account for?

I'm thinking of the existence of consciousness, the moral order in the universe, and the sheer rational coherence of the cosmos.

That consciousness transcends the mere physical is a subject I took up at great length in Whither the "Magic" of Mind? and its predecessors. That the world has a set moral order was one of the topics of the item I posted immediately before this one, Ethos Optional?. I have taken up the subject of the rationality of the mind of God and of his created world in To Reason Is Divine and Free Will and Divine Coherence, among others. But I feel I have yet more to say about rationality here. The big question is, why should we not take the sheer rationality of the cosmos as a brute fact, and nothing more, rather than (as I myself take it) as a sign that there is a God?

Rebecca Stott's Ghostwalk

I am presently reading a fascinating novel, Ghostwalk by Rebecca Stott. It concerns a modern-day writer delving into the details of Isaac Newton's biography revolving around an interest in alchemy. Alchemy was at one time a pseudo-scientific inquiry into something supposedly hidden and esoteric in nature. Per Stott (pp. 65-66):

Alchemists, like our scientists today, were trying to uncover nature's secrets, her patterns and processes, trying to work our how the five elements — earth, fire, water, space, air — transmuted into and out of each other under various astrological conditions to make up all forms of matter. They believed that everything, even those things that seemed inert, was actually teeming with spirits and that therefore everything could be raised or provoked into fuller form. They believed that all matter was on the move, moving into and out of everything else, waxing into or waning away from fullness so that lead fell short of gold, just as mortal man fell short of immortality. Under a certain pattern of stars and through fire, any matter (like lead) or spirit (like the human soul) might be "healed" or "killed" or "perfected" or "transmuted" into a greater state. A blossoming would take place. It had a rare beauty, this secret hybrid art made up of magic, chemistry, philosophy, hermetic thought, sacred geometry, and cosmology, a beauty in that passion to make things bloom into a fuller being.

A world in which the "philosopher's stone" could turn base metals to gold and the "elixir of life" could make us immortal would be a decidedly less rational, less coherent one that we actually live in. You might be able to flip a copper penny up through the right sort of air and have it come down a gold doubloon, or a perfected formula for Gatorade might ward off death forever.


In Christian thought, historically, such a world simply does not exist ... but not because it is inconceivable that it might exist. Ours might indeed have been an alchemical universe. But it isn't.

If our rational world were suddenly to become a world of magic, instead of what it is, such an upheaval would generally be thought of, in the long history of the thinking of the church, as the devil's work — for, in our rational world, God limits magic to his own miracles. Stott, for her part, mentions as being among these "the wine into blood, the burning bush, Lazarus raised from the dead" (p. 66). One might also mention Christ's resurrection.

Accordingly, the rationality of the world — the fact that alchemy is not really in the cards for us — would seem to be more than a brute fact. It needs to be taken seriously. It needs explanation. When a scientist skirts this issue by making of the world's rationality a just-so story — "It just so happens that there is no magic in the order of things" — it smacks of a willful blindness to other conceivable orders and to the Creator-Sustainer who holds them at bay.

Suppose I am right, and the rational order of things stands next to the existence of human consciousness and the existence of a moral order in the universe as not brute facts but facts deserving of further explanation. Occam's Razor would seem to dictate that explaining them all with recourse to one single assumption — that there is a God — makes perfect sense.

Ethos Optional?

In a recent article called "The End of the Anglican Communion," Catholic conservative George Weigel writes of the stresses that today threaten to tear apart the Anglican Communion: the worldwide group of churches that historically look to the Church of England as their center of gravity. The Episcopal Church in America is the branch of Anglicanism we hallow here. Since the national Episcopal church has recently ordained a gay bishop, for that and other related reasons many local Episcopal congregations are considering affiliating with an evangelizing African bishop, outside the Episcopal Church USA, rather than sticking with a homegrown hierarchy who seem to them to have abandoned all vestiges of traditional Christian morality.

Mr. Weigel writes of

... an Anglican [i.e., Episcopal] church, St. Luke’s, a few blocks up Old Georgetown Road from my parish in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. [that] recently posted a large sign on the church lawn: “No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, you are welcome at our table.”

Mr. Weigel takes this ecclesiastical open-door policy as a token of something he rues: "the Episcopal Church USA's determination to bless same-sex unions and ordain practicing homosexuals to priestly and episcopal ministry." I further assume that, to the extent that the no-matter-who-you-are proclamation at St. Luke's includes women who have had or are contemplating an abortion, Mr. Weigel objects to that as well.

I assume he objects, that is, not to the love-the-sinner aspects of such a policy — you can't seriously call yourself a Christian if you don't profess Christian love toward all people without regard to sin — but to what could be an implicit tolerate-the-sin attitude that may seem to go along with it.

Or, is there an effort being made in the Episcopal Church USA simply to redefine the sin out of existence?


Actually, there is a third possibility: to take cognizance of the fact that our society has become one which lacks a guiding ethos all of us can share.

I don't know whether I am using the word "ethos" the way social scientists do, but to me an ethos is a set of rules of moral conduct, written or unwritten, official or unofficial, stated or unstated. All members of the society simply know what these rules are — whether they are written, overtly stated, and officially promulgated, or they are unwritten, unofficial, and never stated as such, right out loud — and agree that they are the rules.

Furthermore, most members of an ethos-based society tend to follow the rules, and expect others to do the same.


It doesn't work that way here any more. While it is true that many in our society continue to observe the old moral and ethical rules, few now expect others to do the same. So, while many of us still think homosexuality is wrong, far fewer people consider that moral opinion binding on anyone besides themselves. Ditto, the old rule against having an abortion ... or, for that matter, against getting pregnant out of wedlock, or having extramarital sex, etc., etc., etc.

So let me suggest that our ethos is no longer an ethos at all, if there is no longer any reasonable assumption on the part of each person that everyone else in the society needs to, or will, adhere to the stated or unstated rules. An ethos-optional society is no different from a society that doesn't have, or never had, an ethos at all.


Christian churches, Catholic, Anglican, Protestant, or otherwise, have a well-deserved reputation for being, or intending to be, ethos preservers. George Weigel is an ethos preserver. And so, as a Catholic, am I ... except that I worry that we ethos preservers and supporters are spitting into a gale-force wind.

More, I worry that perhaps the number one reason why church pews are empty today is that so many are put off by an institution, the Christian church, that promulgates an ethos they no longer feel any general obligation toward upholding. They may still personally believe in God, they themselves may live lives as chaste and pure as any professing Christian achieves, but they may feel it downright hypocritical to join a church that asks yet more: belief in a communally shared, universal system of absolute right and wrong.


By "absolute" morality I do not mean to imply that there are no contexts in moral choice. In most contexts, for example, the dictum "thou shall not kill" applies, but there is such a thing as self-defense, or just war. Still, the commandment against killing other persons is, or so I believe, absolute and universal ... that is, once the given situational context has been factored in in a way that itself stands up to objective ethical scrutiny.

Today, however, one gets the feeling that not committing murders is something we, most of us in this society, opt to abide by; we are, in doing so, not binding ourselves to any old-fashioned set of general, absolute moral codes or rules. We accordingly exercise our "radical freedom" in deciding to, yes, live by certain ancient but no-longer-absolute rules. If someone else takes the opposite tack and is in fact a murderer, we today oppose that (to the extent we can) solely out of a pragmatic understanding that murderers, if not stopped, may eventually threaten us and those we love.


But gone is the belief that something is right or wrong simply because it is. For each of the old rules, today there is a hyper-pragmatic attitude which says, in effect, I don't care what you do with your life with respect to that particular rule unless and until it impacts on my life and that of (say) my children, so if you want to look at porn on the Internet, fine ... as long as I have some way of making sure my kids don't see it.

What happened, then, to our erstwhile belief in absolute (albeit situational) rules of morality? Inasmuch as it's hard to imagine traditional Christian religion without them — an I'm-OK-you're-OK God, I ask you? A no-fault deity with a "whatever" attitude? — it's no wonder George Weigel thinks the no-matter-who-you-are welcome posted at St. Luke's Episcopal is tossing religion's baby out with the bathwater.