Hart on atheism

It might be that the “New Atheist” phenomenon has fizzled out by now — I haven’t heard much from those quarters since the untimely death of Christopher Hitchens — but if you’ve a lingering interest in such matters let me recommend this lecture by David Bentley Hart. He offers an appraisal of the leading “New Atheists” (Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris), but does us the service of viewing them in a broader historical and cultural context. He wishes they were more like the old atheists (pre-eminently, Nietzsche), and, in a nice ironic reversal, sees them as textbook examples of Nietzsche’s detested “last men”.

The lecture was apparently delivered some time ago — reference is made to Hitchens in the present tense — but it only recently made its way onto YouTube. Some of the content, including an amusing foray into the world of enthymemes, also appeared in Hart’s 2010 essay “Believe It Or Not”. The “video” below is actually just audio ornamented with a photograph. Highly recommended nonetheless.

Laird: Into the Silent Land

Into the Silent Land
A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation
Martin Laird
(Oxford, 2006)
154 p.

In this short but substantial book, Martin Laird gives a practical introduction to Christian contemplative prayer. It is a difficult, because profound, subject, and an adequate treatment calls for humility and fidelity and, not least, personal experience. Insofar as I can judge, Laird is a faithful guide. He draws widely on the Christian tradition of prayer, from the Church Fathers, the Carmelite mystics, spiritual masters east and west, and from contemporary writers such as Simone Weil. Despite his academic credentials (Laird is a professor at Villanova University) he wears his learning lightly and the tone of the book is personal and pastoral.

The purpose of contemplative prayer is to dispose one to encounter God. I phrase it this way intentionally: contemplation is not a technique with a guaranteed outcome, but a practice that prepares one for a personal encounter that comes at a time and in a manner not of one’s own choosing. Laird uses the image of the sailor: there is nothing he can do to make the wind blow, but there are skills he can develop to take advantage when it does, and the Christian contemplative tradition is substantially about developing this receptive attitude.  For it is an illusion, says Laird, to think that we are separated from God; in Him we live and move and have our being, but we are not aware of this. Contemplation is about slowly “excavating the present moment” in order to become aware of and receptive to God’s loving presence.

The principal contemplative practice is the cultivation of an intentional silence, a silence of body and mind. In a sense, it is quite simple: “Preserve a loving attentiveness to God with no desire to feel or understand any particular thing concerning God,” says St. John of the Cross. But inevitably there are difficulties, and chief among them are distractions — wandering thoughts, worries, day-dreams, and so on, which prevent the mind being quiet and attentive. Laird is particularly helpful in describing how to deal with such problems. He describes controlled breathing exercises (which remind me of non-Christian meditative practices, but which he plausibly argues is a neglected part of our own tradition too) and, most importantly, the “prayer word” which is repeated quietly, over and over, as a way of maintaining focus. The most common “prayer word” in the Christian tradition is the Jesus Prayer — more common in the East than the West, it is true — but it is a personal choice. (I myself lean on fragments of Psalm 46:10 and Ezekiel 36:26, or something from St. Augustine.) Laird gives quite a lot of attention to psychological aspects of contemplative prayer — to the abandonment of false personae, encounters with old emotional wounds, and other stages of spiritual maturation that are typically encountered in a dedicated contemplative practice.

This book has been for me an encouragement. The contemplative tradition has always attracted me, and I know that it is my path, but I have not been diligent in walking it. At some level I am afraid of delving too deep and dredging up a spiritual crisis of some sort; this has happened before, and it rendered me largely unfit for anything else. These days I have more or less all-consuming family responsibilities and I haven’t the luxury of being unfit. Hence my hesitation. But this book has made me reconsider my situation. Perhaps it cannot hurt to take up the Jesus Prayer again and see what happens. It’s a baby step, but one in the right direction.

[St. Augustine]
The third commandment enjoins quietness of heart, tranquility of mind. This is holiness. Because here is the Spirit of God. This is what a true holiday means, quietness and rest. Unquiet people recoil from the Holy Spirit. They love quarreling. They love argument. In their restlessness they do not allow the silence of the Lord’s Sabbath to enter their lives. Against such restlessness we are offered a kind of Sabbath in the heart. As if God were saying ‘stop being so restless, quieten the uproar in your minds. Let go of the idle fantasies that fly around in your head.’ God is saying, ‘Be still and see that I am God.” (Ps 46) But you refuse to be still. You are like the Egyptians tormented by gnats. These tiniest of flies, always restless, flying about aimlessly, swarm at your eyes, giving no rest. They are back as soon as you drive them off. Just like the futile fantasies that swarm in our minds. Keep the commandment. Beware of this plague.

Christmas isn’t Christmas, and other surprises

Finding silliness in religion-related journalism is almost as easy as finding silliness in science-related journalism, but, even so, this half-baked article from The Telegraph qualifies as an unusually egregious example. The article is occasioned by the publication of Pope Benedict XVI’s third volume on the life of Christ, which is devoted to the infancy narratives in the Gospels.

The Telegraph is aghast at the scandalous revelations that have dripped from the pen of the pontiff! To wit:

“The calculation of the beginning of our calendar – based on the birth of Jesus – was made by Dionysius Exiguus, who made a mistake in his calculations by several years,” the Pope writes in the book, which went on sale around the world with an initial print run of a million copies.

“The actual date of Jesus’s birth was several years before.”

[...]

“Christ’s birth date is not the only controversy raised by the Pope in his new book – he also said that contrary to the traditional Nativity scene, there were no oxen, donkeys or other animals at Jesus’s birth.”

[...]

“The idea that Christ was born on Dec 25 also has no basis in historical fact.”

To an audience ignorant of Christian history I can see that this might be somewhat surprising, but that any of it has the authentic whiff of scandal is ridiculous. The folks at Get Religion have written a good commentary, which I recommend.

The same Telegraph article repeats the old story about the date of Christmas being related to pagan festivals. As I always do when this comes up, I will recommend a good article by William Tighe that was published a few years ago in Touchstone; it deserves wide exposure. (I notice the Get Religion commentary also links to it, which is great.)

*

Apparently not picking up on the absurdity of the Telegraph article, our very own National Post has piled on with an opinion column (by Kelly McParland) proposing that the Pope’s book provides the Church with an “excuse” to move her celebration of Christmas from December 25 to some other date when it won’t interfere with everyone else’s celebration of … something or other.

If this is a good idea, then I have another: we should move the date of New Years out of deference to those who do not observe the Western calendar but who love to stay up late singing “Auld Lang Syne” ten days or so after the winter solstice.

Scruton the Anglican

Today’s confirmation of a new Archbishop of Canterbury has reminded me that Roger Scruton has a forthcoming book entitled Our Church: A Personal History of the Church of England. Knowing what I know of Scruton I’d be surprised to find him going to bat for even one of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and this interview seems to bear that expectation out. Scruton is a convert to Anglicanism, but he is also a Kantian, and so he believes that his attitude toward noumenal claims, including most religious claims, must be agnostic. His intention in the book is apparently instead to defend the historic place of the Anglican Church in English culture, to praise the beauty of its rituals and the quiet persistence of its wisdom, and to argue that nothing is likely to replace it.

It would be easy to satirize this kind of thing: stuffy Englishman likes his organ music and his beautiful churches, but doesn’t linger over all that business about sin and salvation. Such criticism has a place — though given that the aim of the criticism ought to be to encourage deeper engagement with the substantive claims of the faith, I doubt that satire is the most effective means. I will admit that I am myself sometimes tempted to cast a withering look upon this “cultural Christianity”, yet if I succomb to this temptation I lack charity. Why should I object when someone, especially someone as thoughtful as Scruton, though unable to assent to the Church’s doctrines nonetheless seeks shelter under her wings? Doctrine is important, unquestionably, but sometimes people connect with the faith through the chest rather than through the head.

It seems to me that Pope Benedict, by promoting certain liturgical traditions within the Church — I am thinking here of the special provisions he has made for the (so-called) Tridentine liturgy and the Anglican liturgy — is acknowledging that, quite apart from doctrinal questions, aesthetics carry real and legitimate weight, and that love for a particular liturgical tradition deserves respect, for it is largely by means of liturgy that we encounter the faith, and through the faith God. And so a man like Scruton, who loves to play the organ for his congregation, and who appreciates the eloquence of the Book of Common Prayer, and who seeks out, week after week, the restful poise of the Anglican liturgy, may in fact be more than a mere dabbler. In charity we should welcome him warmly, as good hosts.

At the end of the interview, when asked to play a favourite hymn on the organ, he chooses “Come Down, O Love Divine”, which I recall is someone else’s favourite hymn too. Let’s hear it again:

The end of the affair?

You may have heard about the “Jesus’ Wife” papyrus fragment which made waves in the news a few weeks ago. Briefly: Karen King, of Harvard Divinity School, submitted an article to the Harvard Theological Review claiming probable authenticity for a newly revealed (and privately owned) papyrus fragment which includes a phrase in which Jesus uses the phrase “my wife”. The papyrus is claimed to be of fourth-century origin, and the text is claimed to be of second-century origin. Harvard Theological Review‘s agreement to publish the findings was contingent on independent confirmation of the authenticity of the fragment.

I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to the story at the time. No-one, not even Dr. King, who believes the fragment is likely authentic, claims that the fragment is evidence that Jesus actually had a wife, but only that at least one second-century author may have believed this. (As has been pointed out, the fragmentary nature of the text makes it difficult to rule out the possibility, for instance, that this literary Jesus was not using “wife” in a sense similar to that in which the New Testament Jesus speaks of himself as “bridegroom”.) It seemed a matter for specialists to sort out, without any apparent bearing on our understanding of the historical Jesus or the authenticity of the Gospels.

But the attention the fragment received in the media suggested that not everyone understood that. It is interesting, therefore, to revisit the question of the fragment’s authenticity, to see how things are shaping up.

Interestingly, the evidence is mounting that the fragment is a modern forgery. First, apparently the great majority of the phrases on the fragment occur in a known Coptic version of the Gospel of Thomas, a version from Nag Hammadi known as Codex II. The phrases have been pieced together, as a kind of pastiche, and in a manner which apparently introduced grammatical errors that are evident to an expert in Coptic. This strongly suggests that we are not dealing with an independent composition, and casts doubt on its claimed historical provenance. As Marc Goodacre, an expert on the Gospel of Thomas, puts it:

As I see it, there are two options here. Either the author of the Jesus fragment got hold of Codex II before it went into the jar in Nag Hammadi in the late fourth century to be buried for 1500 years, or s/he got hold of it after it came out of the jar in 1945. While we cannot rule out the possibility that s/he got hold of Codex II before it went into the jar, it is much more likely that the author got hold of it in the modern period with its multiple reproductions, in print and internet, of that one witness.

(In fairness, there is a third possibility: perhaps the author of the fragment worked from another copy of the Codex II version of the Gospel of Thomas, now lost. This could have occurred after the Nag Hammadi scrolls were buried.)

Second, just today it was revealed that the fragment reproduces a typographical error found in an online version of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas. A single character is missing in both documents. Now, it is not totally beyond possibility that an ancient scribe might have omitted a character that a modern scholar, working independently, also omitted, but it is unlikely. To my mind this is fairly convincing evidence that the fragment has been forged at a date sometime in the past 15 years. (The online version went live in 1997.)

Experts are still awaiting the results of spectroscopic studies of the ink on the fragment. If the ink contains synthetic chemicals, it will show decisively that the text is modern; if not, the test is indecisive as to date.

In the meantime, this story showcases some fascinating literary detective work.

When I consider the heavens…

Our good friend, Adam Hincks, S.J., has an article in the Jesuit weekly America in which he reflects on the relationship between contemporary cosmology and Christian faith:

Through much of Western history, it was thought that the motions of the heavens were regular and unchanging. The Christian notion that the cosmos had a beginning in time had to be accepted as an article of faith. With the advent of the Big Bang theory, it might seem that science corroborates revelation, but it is not that simple.

The article is temporarily available to non-subscribers. Read the whole thing.

(Hat-tip: Ibo et Non Redibo)

O’Brien: Theophilos

Theophilos
Michael D. O’Brien
(Ignatius, 2010)
450 p.

It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.

It is a good premise for a novel: tell the story of the early Church through the eyes of Theophilos, the otherwise-unknown man to whom St. Luke addressed his Gospel. Who was he? How did the new Faith appear to him? Why did Luke write to him? And what became of him? All good questions, and Michael D. O’Brien imagines us into a possible set of answers.

In his telling, Theophilos is Luke’s adoptive father, a Cretan with a classical education and a love of philosophy. A physician by trade, he has brought Luke up to follow in his footsteps, and is dismayed when he sees him falling in with a Jewish sect devoted to Christos. At Luke’s invitation, he journeys to Galilee and Jerusalem to meet his friends and others who knew Jesus during his boyhood and ministry.

All this takes place in around the year 65, when there are still men and women alive who knew Jesus as a boy, growing up in Nazareth. There are some who remember him simply as “the carpenter’s son”, and regard the story about Resurrection as a fancy. Others are believers. Theophilos meets several people who are themselves represented in the Gospels, being those whom Jesus healed, or to whom he spoke.

Generally speaking, O’Brien does a good job of bringing the reader into that first-century world in which Christianity was still nascent and strange. There are a few instances in which the development of doctrine seems to have been accelerated, but for the most part he succeeds in drawing a convincing portrait of how the Faith may have appeared to its first adherents. Interestingly, he brings in several elements most associated today with charismatic and Pentecostal Christianity, in addition to the solid Catholic core.

The central thrust of the story concerns how Theophilos’ investigations affect his relationship to the new religion. I’ll not say too much about this for fear of spoiling things, but I will register a mild complaint, or, if that is too strong, a concern. I have read all of O’Brien’s novels (saving the most recent), and I admire his writing, but I believe that he does have a tendency to over-dramatize the spiritual life, chiefly, it seems to me, through what I will call externalization. When portraying a spiritual crisis, he tends to rely on certain external devices — voices, visions, things said in italics — rather than on the pain-staking (and admittedly extremely difficult) task of showing the subtle action of grace in the soul. For me, the voices and visions are a let-down because I have never experienced anything like that, at least not as overtly as they are presented in O’Brien’s work. Of course, there is no particular reason why the nature of my spiritual experience should be normative for writers, but I believe that my experience is not all that different from most people’s. Perhaps I am wrong about that. In any case, I would prefer to see something more subtle.

Having said that, I must also say that O’Brien is a very fine writer. He has a gift for dialogue, a good ear, well-developed characters, and he always writes with a seriousness of purpose that befits his themes. If there were greater justice in the fishbowl of Canadian literature, he would be having chats with Ms. Reisman, and his house would be as big as Mr. Martel’s. But such justice is eschatological.

Fermor: A Time to Keep Silence

A Time to Keep Silence
Patrick Leigh Fermor
(Penguin, 1988) [1957]
95 p.

When Patrick Leigh Fermor arrived at Fontenelle Abbey, it was not his first encounter with Christian monastics; we infer from his sun-drenched memories of “pouring out raki, cracking walnuts, singing mountain songs, stripping and assembling pistols…” that he had previously sojourned among monks of the Eastern tradition. Those earlier experiences set him up for a rough surprise that first evening, for he discovered a rather different ambiance: the monks filing into the chapel for Vespers were, he wrote, “exact echoes of Mrs Radcliffe’s villainous monastics and of the miscreants of Protestant anti-popish literature.” He sat back in a kind of dumbfounded disappointment:

As I sat at Vespers watching them, now cowled, now uncovered, according to the progress of the liturgy, they appeared preternaturally pale, some of them nearly green. The bone-structure of their faces lay nearly always close beneath the surface… [Here,] in the Abbey’s boreal shadows, there was never a smile or a frown. No seismic shock of hilarity or anger or fear could ever, I felt, have disturbed the tranquil geography of those monastic features. Their eyelids were always downcast; and, if now and then they were raised, no treacherous glint appeared, nothing but a sedulously cultivated calmness, withdrawal and mansuetude and occasionally an expression of remote and burned-out melancholy… I had a sensation of the temperature of life falling to zero.

Fermor retreated to his simple room that night in the monastery’s guest house with a sense of dismay bordering on disgust. And there, in the great silence, alone with his thoughts, he “suffered what Pascal declared to be the cause of all human evils”. It was a difficult beginning.

Yet is was only a beginning, and a good deal of the pleasure of this fine book is in seeing these first impressions slowly overturned, greater familiarity breeding respect, understanding, and admiration. Fermor was and remained — so far as I know, and for the purposes of this book — an unbeliever, and so in a real and significant sense he could see and experience monasticism only from the outside. This was a limitation. Yet, as observers go, one could look long and fail to find one as perceptive and generous.

The book is divided into three sections, the first devoted to his experiences at Fontenelle Abbey (as above), the second with his journey from the great Benedictine house of Solesmes to the Trappist motherhouse at La Grande Trappe, and the third with his explorations of the abandoned rock monasteries of Cappadocia, in modern Turkey. (Of these last I knew nothing prior to reading this book, and I was fascinated. Scrambling to learn more, I made the sad but predictable discovery that these wild outposts of ancient monastic life have today been converted into tourist sites.) The narrative is a mixture of history, personal observations, portraits of individual monks, and reflections upon the monastic way of life. Fermor came to admire certain aspects of monasticism: its practical self-sufficiency, its integrity, its total commitment to an ideal, its sheer durability. But mostly, I felt, his good opinion was due to his regard for individual monks whom he came to know well. They were men who could look him in the eye, with all that that entails. With the passing of time, he quietly reversed his original judgment, so that he could write, from the deep silence of La Grande Trappe:

All — and I profoundly believe this to be true — is quiet and peaceful, and the privacy of the individual silences is bridged by an authentic and brotherly love.

Fermor is regarded by some as one of our great prose writers, and there is much in this slim volume to support such a judgment. Even those of us who already know and love monastics and monasticism can enjoy the book for its literary beauty. For those who have not been exposed to monasticism, on the other hand, or for those for whom it seems especially strange or foreign, this book would make a fine introduction. It compares favourably with books which, arguably, serve a similar purpose, such as Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain or Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk.

**

[Stability]
Their values have remained stable while those of the world have passed through kaleidoscopic changes. It is curious to hear, from the outside world in the throes of its yearly metamorphoses, cries of derision levelled at the monastic life. How shallow, whatever views may be held concerning the fundamental truth or falsity of the Christian religion, are these accusations of hypocrisy, sloth, selfishness and escapism! The life of monks passes in a state of white-hot conviction and striving to which there is never a holiday; and no living man, after all, is in a position to declare their premises true or false. They have foresworn the pleasures and rewards of a world whose values they consider meaningless; and they alone have as a body confronted the terrifying problem of eternity, abandoning everything to help their fellow-men and themselves to meet it.

[Spiritual warfare]
In mediaeval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be inexpungable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, especial targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism. Piety has always been singled out for the hardest onslaught of hellish aggression. The empty slopes of the wilderness became the lists for an unprecedented single combat, lasting forty days and nights, between the leaders of either faction; when the Thebaid filled up with hermits, their presence at once attracted a detachment of demons, and round the solitary pillar of St. Symeon the Stylite, the Powers of Darkness assembled and spun like swarming wasps.

New Mass translation open thread

I know that quite a few of the people who read this blog are Catholics, so I’d like to throw out a question. Today, English speaking Catholics throughout the world began using a new translation of the Mass. What are your thoughts on it? How did your parish prepare for the change? Did your priest explain the rationale for the new translation well or poorly? What do you think of the new music for the Mass being used in your parish?

I’ll start: our parish has approached things without much fuss. A notice in the bulletin ran for a few weeks, saying, more or less, “The translation we have been using for the past forty years was produced in a hurry, and it was always expected that it would be replaced with something better. Now it is.” Pew cards, courtesy the Canadian Bishops, appeared last week with the Order of Mass printed on them, the congregation’s parts in bold print. All in all, this was a minimalist approach, but I think it was done tactfully and without causing confusion.

Our parish sings the Mass Ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, etc.) in a Gregorian setting (that is, in Latin), and that will not be changing. There are no plans, as far as I know, to introduce any new music for the new translation.

My own opinion is that this new translation is a change for the better. For a good discussion of its merits, I recommend Anthony Esolen’s article Restoring the Words.

(Maclin Horton gave me the idea for this post.)

Polygamy in the news

There is a Mormon community in British Columbia, called Bountiful, in which polygamy has been practiced for decades, despite the practice being illegal in Canada. In recent years there have been some charges laid, and some court challenges to those charges. The argument, I believe, is that the current laws consitute infringements of religious freedom.

Yesterday Chief Justice Robert Bauman, of the British Columbia Supreme Court, wrote an opinion that upheld the constitutionality of the ban on polygamy. He was asked to investigate the question by the B.C. government, and though his decision is apparently not binding on anyone, it presumably carries some weight. He argued that although the ban does infringe certain rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, such as freedom of religion and autonomy, those infringements he judged ‘reasonable’ in the interest of protecting women and children from exploitation. That, it seems to me, makes it a rather soft ruling, but a welcome one nonetheless.

What interests me most about this story is the response to the ruling from various quarters. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which appears to be a more or less typical far-left advocacy group (or perhaps a far-right advocacy group; the topology of the political spectrum often makes it difficult to distinguish the two), is apparently disappointed; they think the ban on polygamy should be overturned. I am a little surprised.

Meanwhile, The Slop & Pail, one of Canada’s premiere daily newspapers, has run an article on the story that contains a few more surprises. First, the headline would seem to indicate that the paper also thinks the ban on polygamy should go. Perhaps I am naive, but my eyebrows went up. The author of the article interviewed three law professors from the Toronto area. Each one of them had something interesting to say.

Bruce Ryder, of Osgoode Hall, had the mildest complaint about the ruling. Judge Bauman, he said, “placed an ideological and constitutionally dubious premise at the heart of his opinion – namely, that the state can punish other family forms for the purpose of promoting monogamous marriage.” Evidently he thinks that a ban on polygamy — which must necessarily invoke the power of the state to promote monogamous marriage — rests on “ideological and constitutionally dubious” reasoning. That already helps us understand which way he thinks the wind is blowing.

Prof. Alan Young didn’t have much to say about this particular ruling, but he made some inspiring remarks about the enduring importance of law and legal process. “Balancing societal interests versus individual interests is intrinsically a very subjective process. [...] It makes anything appealable and it makes anything defensible.” I know that makes me want to be a lawyer. And he added, just to show that he’s thought hard about the relationships between moral reasoning, personal action, and political community, “There are very few core values in society, and values are changing all the time.” Although I expect that he believes his own brand of moral relativism is pretty secure.

But the best remarks came from Prof. Brenda Cossman. “The decision is built on a house of cards,” she said. “You can’t just say that marriage is better than non-marriage. What happened to swingers? What happened to people who are adulterous? His continuous assertion about the harm that polygamy does to monogamous marriage is deeply problematic.” Honestly, I don’t think I could make this stuff up.

All that simply to say this: if the comments from these law professors are really representative of the quality of the moral and legal reasoning coming out of our top law schools, it seems to me that we’re in for a bad time.