The Great "Perhaps"

"It may be appropriate at this point to cite a Jewish story told by Martin Buber; it presents in concrete form the above-mentioned dilemma of being a man.

An adherent of the Enlightenment [writes Buber], a very learned man, who had heard of the Rabbi of Berditchev, paid a visit to him in order to argue, as was his custom, with him too and to shatter his old-fashioned proofs of the truth of his faith. When he entered the Rabbi’s room he found him walking up and down with a book in his hand, wrapped in thought. The Rabbi paid no attention to the new arrival. Suddenly he stopped, looked at him fleetingly and said, “But perhaps it is true after all”. The scholar tried in vain to collect himself—his knees trembled, so terrible was the Rabbi to behold and so terrible his simple utterance to hear. But Rabbi Levi Jizchak now turned to face him and spoke quite calmly: “My son, the great scholars of the Torah with whom you have argued wasted their words on you; as you departed you laughed at them. They were unable to lay God and his Kingdom on the table before you, and nor can I. But think, my son, perhaps it is true.” The exponent of the Enlightenment opposed him with all his strength; but this terrible “perhaps,” which echoed back at him time after time broke his resistance.

Here we have, I believe—in however strange a guise—a very precise description of the situation of man confronted with the question of God. No one can lay God and is Kingdom on the table before another man; even the believer cannot do it for himself. But however strongly unbelief may feel itself thereby justified it cannot forget the eerie feeling induced by the words, “Yet perhaps it is true.” The “perhaps” is the unavoidable temptation which it cannot elude, the temptation in which it too, in the very act of rejection, has to experience the unrejectability of belief. In other words, both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide away from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt, for the other through doubt and in the form of doubt. It is the basic pattern of man’s destiny only to be allowed to find the finality of his existence in this unceasing rivalry between doubt and belief, temptation and certainty. Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction; it opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one it is his share in the fate of the unbeliever, for the other the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him."

- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction To Christianity

My Journey of Faith: Part One

Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan spoke of conversion as a wholly unrestricted state or moment of being in love. To Lonergan, the convert, at the moment of conversion, is "a subject held, grasped, possessed, owned through a total and so an other-worldly love." Conversion experiences are not merely moments that dapple our lives, but even the processes of falling in love again and again.

Stories of conversion are the heavenly romances of our faith. The Old Testament speaks more to us of people answering God's call, the New Testament tells us of this, in addition to Paul's dramatic conversion. The stories of the saints, especially St. Augustine's conversion story, as well as more modern Christians, like John Henry Newman, C.S. Lewis, and numerous others, continue to share with us the power of love to surround and transform our very being. I'm going to begin my story at my very beginning. I hope that someone, if only in some small way, might be encouraged or helped by it, as I am encouraged reading the stories of others.

Before I was born, my mother prayed for the privelege of having a child. I'm not exactly sure of her exact words, but the story she tells is that she even prayed for my face to have certain characteristics... That the life in my grandmother's eyes would be in mine, that I would have a face like my granddad's, and so on. My mother, in these prayers, promised to dedicate me to God should she be so lucky that they be granted.

Whether by chance or providence, when I was born in the wee hours of a Late-May Saturday in 1983, the sparkle of my grandmother's eyes, and my granddad's nose and jawline were mine, just as my mother had prayed. And I was dedicated to God.

I was Christened at Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Vandalia, Illinois, not long after I was born, but it was my mother who took the responsibility of attending church most seriously. My father, having grown up quite poor, felt uncomfortable in church, among people he viewed as cut from a different, wealthier cloth than he. My mother, however, despite not coming from much means herself, did not, and made certain that as I, and later my brothers, grew up, we were involved in the life of our small country church.

As far as raising me to be Christian, by the time I have memories of church and prayer, my parents had done an outstanding job - my prayers to God, as far back as I can remember praying, were conversational prayers. I didn't have a living great-grandpa, but I figured that God must be something like that, but stronger, and a whole lot older. When I imagined God it was always as the Father, alternately appearing as an elderly, bearded man (similar to Santa Claus), or as Michael Landon, after I had watched enough "Highway to Heaven." When my grandparents died, I asked God to care for them and to tell them I said "hi."

My creed, until age 9, written as I approximate I may have articulated it, were I that age:

I believe in God the Father, who made everything (even dinosaurs!).

I believe the stories in the Bible are true and that it is God's word, and God knows everything (he's smarter than Dad)!

I believe in Jesus, His Son, who loves everyone.

His mommy was Mary and her husband was Joseph

We celebrate his birthday at Christmas and give gifts like the three wise men did.

Jesus had twelve disciples and taught good things and did miracles.

Jesus died on a cross and came back to life three days later

So that good Christian people can go to Heaven,

We celebrate this on Easter.

He went back up to heaven but will come back again someday.

People should be baptized, and then they can take communion.

I believe in the Holy Ghost

I believe that the Devil and Sin are bad.

My parents divorced when I was nine. My grandfather had just passed a way a year earlier. We stopped going to church because my mom feared being shunned, judged, or treated with intolerance; perhaps she felt ashamed, or feared the gossip mill would smear her name in our small town. I realized that when my parents promised me that they'd love each other forever, it was a lie. I also knew by this time that Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy were also lies. I didn't understand what was going on, I knew it wasn't my fault, but I at that point learned that my parents were fallible in ways that could hurt me.

It was a horrible couple of years that I came through alright, despite developing a keen suspicion of authority. Nevertheless, I kept praying. It surprises me that the existence God never crossed my mind as something that may have also been a lie. In retrospect, I'm not certain why I didn't doubt, except perhaps that God, to me, even at that time, was just as real as the ground beneath me or the sky above me - a fundamental fact of the universe that seemed silly to deny.

...It wasn't really until I was fourteen that I had to begin to ask questions of my faith.

More to come.

Recommended Listening - Audrey Assad

Audrey Assad is a convert to Catholicism (like me!), and a wonderful musician making her way up in the CCM world. This song has grabbed me by the heart this weekend:

Fr. Robert Barron on Renewing and Reforming Theology

Simulacra and Sacramentality

An excerpt from my undergraduate thesis, and I thought that occurred to me on a re-reading:

The Presence of Simulacra

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth that conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”

--Ecclesiastes

Art cannot transcend artifice. Although art mimics reality, anything that is representative as real is still understood as to be a facsimile. Plato holds that appearance of reality can never truly merge with reality (Ibid 159). However, it would seem that the world that has fostered the growth of postmodern thought is not functioning within Plato’s belief. American culture even seems to thrive upon the suspension of belief that lets us live within a fantasy world similar to a television show. Almost any appearance of reality can easily be accepted as authentic reality in our society, for enough time, at least, to justify our shiny new convertible. Over time, these justifications and ideas become our reality, our values shift and adapt to this new reality that was once just an image on a billboard or in a magazine, or some statue in a plaza.

Film and cinema have also blurred the lines between the real and the imitation, being mediums that can show us both pictures of reality and images of fantasy that to the viewer may appear one and the same if the frame of reference is skewed or removed.

Photography, which I will discuss further in the next chapter, started as a means to record and study the real, and the content of a photograph was considered “real” and “true” by its viewer.

“Thus perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity.”

Baudrillard fears the aforementioned tendency for an image to oppose what he terms an “intelligible mediation of the Real.” (Baudrillard, Simulations, 10.) A critic of postmodern art, Baudrillard warns of absolute reality being reduced in some way to a mere visual signifier that speaks to it’s own existence. If that which gives order to representation is reduced to representation (which is then subjectively perceived), Baudrillard argues that the entire system of order and the rubric upon which interpretation stands now falls away to a simulacrum – a representation that does not refer to reality, but another imitation.

The simulacrum, a meta-representation, then, has the power to subvert the object. However, it also possesses the power to convey meaning, perhaps even adding meaning to the signified by virtue of its own existence as a simulacrum. In the film Waking Life, Caveh Zahedi and Daniel Jewell discuss what Andre’ Bazin calls the “Holy Moment,” a moment of awareness that acknowledges the divine presence within the other. As they converse, however, they are actually on a movie screen, their conversation a film being watched by Wiley, the main character within Waking Life. So the film that we watch, in essence is the simulacrum, an object that gives reference to a reference to this conversation between Zahedi and Jewell. However, instead of being inert, we find that the simulacrum, the film that we are viewing, is actually the vehicle for meaning (Waking Life).

So here we have at least one example where simulacra can convey meaning that seems valid. Because of this instance, which I consider to be a positive use of simulacra, I am inclined to apply Baudrillard’s warning subjectively, as would seem suitable, given that his arguments are placed within the framework of postmodernism that visual culture theory works from.

Despite a willingness to apply scrutiny with subjectivity, one must continue to be conscious of the presence of simulacra, as without an awareness of their occurrences within our culture, Baudrillard’s “collapse of meaning” may be more likely to occur.

Food for thought:

A true sacrament is that which actually participates in what it represents in a real way... not merely symbolic. If we lose our sense of sacramentality, then our rituals become simulacra, and Baudrillard's "collapse of meaning" becomes a real danger to our faith and praxis.

St. Catherine on Dominican Preaching

Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., lectures on St. Catherine of Siena and Dominican Preaching:

On Natural Law: A Synopsis

My final paper under Fr. Michael Carey, O.P., was a brief synopsis of Natural Law in Aquinas. Here it is:

Natural Law: A Foundational Understanding for Calls to Goodness

The current climate of American Catholicism, perhaps even Western Catholicism in general, has changed greatly in the last century. Global war, secularization, scandal, and a slide into moral relativism has tested and reshaped the faith of Western culture, to such a degree that one might wonder what future a traditional Christian morality might hope to have. Yet, in a culture that might be considered post-modern or even post-Christian, the task of evangelization remains with us, the survival of the faith depends on it. It is in the interest of this survival that the issue of natural law comes to the fore of Catholic thought in the public arena. It seems that it is no longer enough, in dialogue with those both outside and within the faith, for faithful American Catholics to appeal only to the Gospel message and the teachings of the Church - much of the wider world does not see such things as reasonable, and thereby rejects them. We must start with something more basic: natural law - the idea that we all share some common morality, and at least in this, there may be some common ground on which we may start the difficult process of transforming lives and transforming culture. In current debates about the dignity of the human person, abortion, biotechnology, and war, natural law has been invoked in an attempt to offer what Catholics and many non-catholic ethicists believe to be a philosophically reasonable and theologically correct understanding of right action. To employ this knowledge, however, we must correctly ascertain what it is that we, as faithful Catholics, believe this to be, at least foundationally. Where does natural law come from? What does it consist of? And what does this mean, practically?

The most current, though not the most complete, understanding of natural law can be seen at work in the encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor:

The primary and decisive element for moral judgment is the object of the human act, which establishes whether it is capable of being ordered to the good and to the ultimate end, which is God. This capability is grasped by reason in the very being of man, considered in his integral truth, and therefore in his natural inclinations, his motivations and his finalities, which always have a spiritual dimension as well. It is precisely these which are the contents of the natural law and hence that ordered complex of "personal goods" which serve the "good of the person": the good which is the person himself and his perfection. These are the goods safeguarded by the commandments, which, according to Saint Thomas, contain the whole natural law.[1]

John Paul II here asserts a teleological worldview in which actions might have a quality of moral goodness related to their contribution toward the end pursued in the aforementioned worldview, in this case, God. In fact, before moving forward, it is necessary to clarify that Thomas's understanding and also the dominant Catholic understanding of natural law, and indeed law in general, is that they are underpinned and surrounded by affirmation that God is the eternal source, sustainer, and end of all things.[2] To say that God is the eternal source of all things (and therefore the source of law) is to say that God, as reasonable creator and ruler of the universe, governs all things with divine reason, which can then be said to be the law of creation.[3] Because this is the case, creatures participate in this law, the eternal law, insofar as they are subject to it. But being rational creatures, humans are governed in a specific fashion, not as recipients of continual directives, but as reasonable beings that can use this very reason to order their own acts according to their reasonable assessment of good and evil. This reasonable participation in God's eternal law is natural law.[4]

Aside from the existence of God as source and sustainer, we have also the notion of God as end pursued, or merely, that each thing pursues its natural purpose (which Christians understand to be God), an idea famously espoused by Aristotle, and reconciled to Christian thought quite smartly by St. Thomas Aquinas. The teleological worldview at work in the theory of natural law maintains that objects' essences might be better known by their purposes, and might be judged to be good to a degree that it fulfills its essence.[5] For example, the essence of a knife is to cut, and a knife that cuts well is said to be a good or excellent knife. Likewise, an animal's purpose seems to be its own flourishing, which includes things which one might consider under one banner of health and reproduction: movement, perception, taking nutrition, and propagation.[6] Humans, as social animals with reason and free will, must in addition to health and propagation, exercise free will in achieving their end as they reason it.[7]

Thus, the essence of a human might be stated as consisting of life, procreation, knowledge, and socialibility. If something's quality of goodness might be judged on the degree to which it exemplifies its essence, as previously stated, then a human may be said to be good to the extent that it is social, knowledgeable, fruitful, and healthy, and a human act might be said to be good to the extent that it contributes to the improvement of one or all of these qualities.[8] Conversely, something that contributes to the diminishing of these qualities or to the abolition of these can be said to be the opposite of good, that is, evil. And it is this very knowledge, the response to the question "Is this good for myself and/or others?" that is known by natural law.[9]

St. Thomas Aquinas codifies the basic, universal rule of natural law in what he names "the first principle," stated as "Do and pursue good and avoid evil." From this first principle, he states, humans use reason to deduce or infer any number of secondary principles that "will be based upon it, presuppose it, be less common than it."[10] The aforementioned Decalogue, containing the whole natural law, is such that it is a collection of these secondary principles - deductions that flow naturally from the axiom that one should "do and pursue good and avoid evil."[11] This first generation of deductions from the first principles is asserted to be true by virtue of reason. However, further deductions, precepts, or judgments made from secondary principles are admittedly, not universal to all.[12] How then, outside of very formal circumstances, can we use natural law at all?

We can say that conscience, in fact, is natural law in practical application, affirming our reason's participation in eternal law:

. . . [W]hereas the natural law discloses the objective and universal demands of the moral good, conscience is the application of the law to a particular case; this application of the law thus becomes an inner dictate for the individual, a summons to do what is good in this particular situation. Conscience thus formulates moral obligation in the light of the natural law: it is the obligation to do what the individual, through the workings of his conscience, knows to be a good he is called to do here and now. The universality of the law and its obligation are acknowledged, not suppressed, once reason has established the law's application in concrete present circumstances. The judgment of conscience states "in an ultimate way" whether a certain particular kind of behavior is in conformity with the law; it formulates the proximate norm of the morality of a voluntary act, “applying the objective law to a particular case.”[13]

Conscience understood thusly, as our moral judgment that takes as its measure natural law, can also then be said to be our own reaction to our own participation in eternal law; and it is precisely this reaction, this judgment that ethicists, moral theologians and especially the Magisterium hope to change and form when they speak out against abortion, war, the death penalty, and certain biotechnologies on the basis of natural law and its first principle. For Catholics in particular, these exhortations are calls to conform our consciences to the teachings of the Church, which we trust echo eternal law, God's divine wisdom. For our wider, secular culture, exhortations from natural law are earnest admonitions to change the way we think about a particular issue in a way in keeping with something many will find common to all: human reason and the desire to do good over evil. The common ground we are able establish in the invocation of natural law becomes a renewed chance to reach those of a reasonable mind but a hardened heart, a new field on which we may continue our work of transforming our world into a world that seeks more of the Good than it did the day before, and truly seeks to be delivered from evil.

---

[1] John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor (06 August 1993), 79.

[2] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 91, a. 1.

[3] McInerny, Ralph, Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice. (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 110.

[4] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 91, a. 2

[5] Timmons, Mark, Moral Theory: An Introduction. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001), 68.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 73.

[9] McInerny, Ralph, Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice. (Washington, D.C: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 110.

[10] Ibid., 125.

[11] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 100, a. 1.

[12] Ibid., q. 94, a. 4.

[13] John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Veritatis Splendor (06 August 1993), 59.