Getting to the Point

I experience the fact that [God] exists because I run up against him, and if ever it were I that had fashioned him, I should certainly have made quite a different job of it. As it is, I am obliged to accommodate myself to him. I am obliged to take him just as he is.

No, I never made him, in my image. I am the one who finally has to come down to doing things his way. And there’s the rub that makes me know I am in contact with the real: when I feel, that is, something which resists me, that I have no control of, and that, on the contrary, I must finally end up by adapting myself to, making way, giving up, against my will, all the while dragging my feet.

Jean Danielou, The Scandal of the Truth

Reflection – I’m going through some of my old files from my academic thesis and pulling out interesting quotes here and there. One thing that struck me around the Synod and the discussion surrounding it was the general need to ‘up our game’ intellectually a bit in the Church. I don’t mean to sound patronizing, as I firmly believe people are quite capable of being intelligent and thoughtful, but so much of what I read in the Catholic blogosphere during that time simply did not manifest that, much.

So I’m going a wee bit intellectual on the blog for a few days anyhow. It’s also good to remember some of these absolutely first rate theologians from the 20^th century who have to greater or lesser degrees been forgotten today (because, after all, they wrote their books more than ten minutes ago, and so cannot possibly have anything relevant to say, right?).

Danielou, for example, is fantastic, and as you can see from this passage, very readable. God is the One, here, who resists us, who thwarts us, who is Not Us, and to Whom we have to adapt ourselves, not have Him adapt Himself to us. It strikes me that this is more than a little relevant in the discussions around marriage and family life, human sexual expression and openness to life.

‘Do what comes naturally’ is the cry of our times. The right thing to do is the thing you feel most strongly like doing; such is our understanding of the natural law, commonly. Of course this is an incoherent position, as there is no shortage of people for whom what comes naturally is torturing animals, having sex with children, raping women… and nobody (except the perpetrators, I suppose) believes these things to be ‘the right thing to do.’

‘Do what comes naturally… ummm… unless you are hurting someone by doing so.’ That seems to be a way out of that particular quandary. But while that may work for us (sort of) as a rough and ready ethos for daily life, as a matter of strict logic, it won’t do. Philosophically, we have introduced a condition for moral action without any warrant or rationale. Why not hurt others? A sociopath will argue that there is no rational basis for that condition. We can simply say it and insist on it irrationally, but we are cheating by so doing.

The truth is, all the ways of trying to forge a human ethic without God and a moral law/natural law coming from Him founder on this precise point or arbitrariness. Utilitarianism, consequentialism, proportionalism—all of these fail to satisfy the question of the persistent five-year-old child: but why? It is only when we hit up against this Other, this One who made all that is, who is the source and sovereign Master of all that is, who gives it (and us) structure, meaning, purpose, and who thus has in our regard that most dreaded and despised word of our time.

Who has Authority, in short. We don’t like this, but this really is the only way to advance any kind of coherent ethical vision of life short of ‘do whatever the hell you please, and if what pleases you is to torture and kill me, please know that I am heavily armed.’ Without God, all things are permissible—Nietzsche and Dostoevsky really did have it right, after all. And we have to be clear that it really is ‘all things’ – not just the things that we enjoy doing or approve of or think we have a right to do.

But once we acknowledge this Authority, then ‘doing what feels right’ goes right out the window. The law of nature, the natural law, behaving in a way that is consistent with the structure and purpose of our humanity, means conforming our behavior to Him, not conforming all of reality to our own preferences.

It seems to me that in the Church we have placed so much stress on a sort of ‘feel good’ Christianity, advanced very strongly the (quite true) thesis that God wants us to be happy that we have failed to teach people that happiness comes on the other side of death to self and being crucified with Christ. 

And we are reaping the fruit of that poor and one-sided teaching in the present inability of so many people to conceive of the notion that God may want them to sacrifice their natural preferences and inclinations for a greater good.

Trusting another means taking one’s stand on someone else’s intelligence and embracing as true what one has not decided for one’s self… it implies a recognition by the mind of its own limits, an acceptance of dependence, a surrender of my absolute sovereignty…

The rejection of the truth comes down to the choice of self affirmation and rejection of affirmation of God… acknowledging what is, submitting to the real, means acknowledging something that I have not decided for myself and therefore already saying yes to God…

What we get now is instead of acknowledgment of a sovereign Law by which all will be judged, individuals and society, is the arbitrary decision of one particular will, which decrees good and evil, and against which there is no longer any appeal… here at the end of the line the perverse roots of the rejection of truth are stripped bare. The will to power appears in all its inexorableness.

Jean Danielou, The Scandal of Truth

Reflection – The theme of our summer program this week has been ‘Show Me God: Finding God in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness’. We have had a variety of presentations along these lines, many of them leaning rather heavily in the direction of the latter two of the transcendentals, beauty and goodness. We have had some good teachings on the nature of truth, as well, but I have noticed over the years, not particularly in Madonna House but in the world at large, a tendency to shy away from the word truth or the notion of truth.

Relativism of one sort or another seems to be the operative system for many today. It doesn’t make huge amounts of sense, of course. How can it be absolutely asserted as true that there is no such thing as truth? How can we say it is certainly true that we cannot know for certain what is true? The whole thing collapses under its weight before it gets off the ground.

No, it fails as an intellectual system, miserably and utterly. But it succeeds, or seems to succeed, as a sociological system, as a way of ensuring social harmony and peace. You have your truth and I have my truth and it’s OK because there is no actual truth or nobody knows what it is and so everybody dance! Clap along if you know that happiness is the truth! Whatever that means. Who cares – it has a good beat!

All of this put me in mind of this very fine book by Danielou published in the 1960s. It has lost none of its relevance today. Truth does scandalize us; that is, it is an obstacle we trip over (the original meaning of the word scandal), something awkward, in the way, something we would like to do away with so we can do as we please, go as we please.

The rage on the political left in the aftermath of the Hobby Lobby case in the US is instructive in this regard. For one thing, it puts a lie to the claim that relativism is the path to social peace and harmony, and lays bare the inherently totalitarian and dictatorial nature of relativism.

One group holds that it is true that there is an absolute right to free contraception (a strange claim, in my mind, one I have never seen really argued for, but assumed as a dogma, I guess). Some in society believe that contraception, or at least some forms of contraception, are morally evil, and while having no interest in coercing other people from committing those evil acts, do not want to actually be cooperating in them by paying the bill for them. 

Now in a genuinely tolerant society, it would be a no-brainer to work out some accommodation whereby if the government really believed that the first group was justified in its claim, it could meet their ‘right’ without violating the beliefs and conscience of the second group. And, to their credit, Congress in the 1992 RFRA, and the Supreme Court in its interpretation of that law and its present application to the current matter of Hobby Lobby, etc., came to that very conclusion.

And… all hell broke loose among the first group. Strange, that. Apparently it is not acceptable to work out some compromise that respects everyone’s beliefs and lets everyone alone. The second group—people who sincerely believe they would be doing a grave evil if they paid for these products—must be forced to capitulate, must have their consciences crushed, obliterated, wiped out.

And so the will to power shows itself. When there is no greater truth—even the simple truth that people should be allowed to follow their consciences so long as doing so does not harm the social fabric—then what is left is not freedom but rather a naked power struggle in which whoever has the upper hand can ruthlessly suppress those who are in a weaker position.

Well, all I can say to those who are fine with that is, watch out. Those who live by the sword will die by the sword, and today’s winners may not be tomorrow’s. If might is right is the only relevant principle, then nobody’s rights are secure, not in the least.

Staying on the human level, without speaking here yet of the testimony of the Gospel directly, we must say that testimony is a way of reaching certitude, a way as valid, in its order, as scientific demonstrations and experiments are in their order. Moreover, this is the only one which affords access to one certain order of reality.

This order of reality is nothing less than the order of persons. Now, if the universe of persons has infinite ascendancy over the order of the natural world, we must declare that the higher we go in the hierarchy of beings, the more does testimony, and not experimentation, become the means of knowledge.

Jean Danielou, The Scandal of the Truth

Reflection – I realize as I begin to write this blog post that once again the media is at its mischief profoundly distorting Pope Francis’ clear, crystalline and deeply Catholic words in his recent interview with America magazine. I think I might sit this round out—I really don’t have a great appetite for controversy, it turns out—and simply say to anyone disturbed by recent blaring headlines to read the interview itself, and not the media spin on it.

The time is long past when any thoughtful, careful Catholic should think to trust what the secular press writes about us. They don’t know what they’re talking about, and are deeply skewed in their perceptions by their own biases and presuppositions. Go to the source, and find out what the Pope actually said, not what the New York Times or whoever says he said. If my blog posts this past week showed nothing else, surely they showed that.

Meanwhile, I want to get back to a more reflective, philosophical tone for a little while on the blog. I have lots of good stuff on my files from my STL thesis research that I haven’t shared yet. This guy, for example, Danielou, and his book on truth and the problem of truth in the modern world.

He is challenging here the notion that truth can only be gotten from scientific experimentation under laboratory conditions, the reductive approach to knowledge that is a product of the (so-called) Enlightenment, and which rules out a priori any chance of metaphysics, the knowledge of God or the knowledge of first and final causes of things. All we can know is what we can measure experimentally, and that is the end of the matter of knowledge.

As Danielou points out, this excludes quite a bit more (in one way of looking at it) than God and metaphysics. It also excludes knowing whether one’s spouse really loves you, whether a friend is a true friend, whether anyone actually has done anything they say they have done—the whole world of personal relationships. If knowledge is only that measured by accurate instruments in laboratory conditions, then we know nothing about one another in our personal beings.

‘Faith is an island in the setting sun, but proof, yeah, proof is the bottom line for everyone,’ Paul Simon sang back in the day. There are real consequences to this shaking of our knowledge of one another. A hardness enters in, a cynicism, a suspicion. When ‘testimony’ is inherently suspect, when that post-modern weariness of competing narratives and the hermeneutics of suspicion becomes a living reality in a person, what emerges is not increased certainty and a surer foundation for life, but alienation, isolation, an atomized humanity where real communion is impossible.

We simply have to take one another’s word for things, and make some kind of leap of faith with each other. Danielou makes the very good point here, so often neglected in our modern day, that this is not some kind of second-rate knowledge. The real stuff is what you get dissecting frogs in the lab, and all this taking one another on faith is a poor cousin barely deserving the name knowledge. There is no scientific experiment that can prove the genuineness of the bond of love of husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend. There is no way forward to a knowledge of persons and what is inside them but the acceptance of their testimony about themselves.

Ultimately, if we get stubborn about it and insist on the scientific mode of knowledge as the only real one, we are forced to reject the notion of personhood and the self as ultimately insignificant epi-phenomena. The reality of things is the physical, the biological, what can be measured. The person, self-awareness, freedom, reason, emotions, love, hate, dreams for the future, memory of the past—all of that is ultimately either illusory or certainly irrelevant. We are just, in the materialistic notion, hunks of meat animated for a time by electro-chemical impulses that have a shelf life.