Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus, on Undocumented Immigrants

But, of course, there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country. Not long ago I was speaking at a convention in the Southwest. The person sitting next to me at dinner was trying to persuade me that we should “send them back.” I asked him to look around the ballroom where about a thousand people were being served by hundreds of waiters and busboys, all of them, so far as I could see, Latino, and probably a large percentage of them here illegally. The same immigrant preponderance would likely obtain among the kitchen workers, the truck drivers who delivered the food, and those who had gathered and prepared it for shipping. My tablemate was unmoved.

Here in New York, in my daily walk to Immaculate Conception and to this magazine’s office, I pass dozens of businesses, along with construction sites, hospitals, and nannies caring for children, all reflecting the city’s dependence upon Hispanic immigration. They are here because immigrants are, as the president says, doing the work that Americans don’t want to do. To which some, including much of organized labor, say that, if so many immigrants weren’t here, Americans would do the same work, at higher wages and with benefits. I rather doubt it. In times of prosperity, such as the present, unemployment among American citizens is practically non-existent. (The official and very low unemployment figure includes a majority of people who are voluntarily between jobs or simply taking time off from work.) Very few Americans are lining up to wash dishes, mop floors, or deliver pizza. The economy and everyday life of New York and other cities would grind to a near halt in the absence of Hispanic immigrants. Not to mention what would happen to the vast agricultural enterprises of California and other states.

It is hard to argue with Andrew Ferguson, who writes: “Restricting that flow of willing workers would cause an economic calamity that no federal official will seriously contemplate. Nor would anyone in a position of responsibility pretend it is plausible to round up the 11 million illegal immigrants who are already in the U.S., ship them back to their homelands and then seal the border against their otherwise inevitable return.”

Richard J. Neuhaus, "On The Other Side of the Gates". First Things March 2006.

Historical Note - The Catholic Neocons of the 1990's-early 2000's on Donald J. Trump

Documenting for personal sake Fr. Richard J. Neuhaus (1936-2009), George Weigel, Michael Novak (1933-2017) and William F. Buckley (1925-2008) of the National Review insofar as where they had stood on the topic of Donald Trump.

Father Richard John Neuhaus passed on January 8, 2009. Reflecting on Neuhaus' death in 2021, Fr. Raymond de Souza noted:

Father Richard’s engagement in political activism never led him to messianic politics. He died after Barack Obama’s election but before his inauguration, and long before the current president came down the escalator at Trump Tower. He was suspicious of the messianic dimension of Obama’s candidacy and would have been troubled by those who regarded Donald Trump as having some kind of messianic anointing.

Father Richard would have been dismayed at the apocalyptic tone of politics today. The future of the republic does not hang on a presidential election, let alone a senate election in Georgia. Elections have consequences, sometimes, grave consequences, but electoral politics does not heal a corrupt culture.

“Moral progress is far from being self-evident,” Father Richard wrote. “We should at least be open to the possibility that we are today witnessing not moral progress but a dramatic moral regression.”

George Weigel in 2016 joined the likes of Robert P. George, Robert Royal, Ryan Anderson, Francis Beckwith, Eduardo Echeverria, Gerard Bradley, John P. Hittinger in "An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics" (National Review), asserting that

... there are candidates for the Republican nomination who are far more likely than Mr. Trump to address these concerns, and who do not exhibit his vulgarity, oafishness, shocking ignorance, and — we do not hesitate to use the word — demagoguery.

Mr. Trump’s record and his campaign show us no promise of greatness; they promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture. We urge our fellow Catholics and all our fellow citizens to reject his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination by supporting a genuinely reformist candidate.

Due credit for taking a stand against the tide. Weigel would go on to add that Trump "is an immoral man both in his public life and in his private life. And then it is not credible in the management of power. As I can not vote for Clinton, so I will never vote for him."

Michael Novak broke with Weigel and the authors of "An Appeal to our Fellow Catholics", expressing his relief after Trump's first election that Hillary would never be president (Silver-Linings for Never-Trumpers First Things 11/15/16). For an explication of Novak's own perspective I would refer to the excellent survey Michael Novak’s ‘Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics’ in the Trump Era, by Jesse Russel. (American Spectator January 5, 2019).

Michael Novak passed in 2017, and even so, I wonder whether he would have continued in his guarded support for Trump -- especially on or after Trump's refusal to concede the election of 2020, his trafficing in outright falsehoods and conspiracy theories contesting the election, his vocal encouragement of those who staged an attempted coup on the nation's capitol on January 6, 2021 -- and his current promise as president-elect to pardon those currently convicted for doing so.

William F. Buckley -- a Catholic conservative, howbeit not of the "neocon" persuasion -- made his displeasure known in a sharply critical editorial on Trump's narcissism and demagoguery in an article for Cigar Aficionado:

... So there we have the one problem--the encouragement given to demagogues by undiscriminating voters. The procedure here is to attract support to finance a campaign. But does the term demagogue fit in other circumstances? What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn't merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary's serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today's lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America.

But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents--midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War--had little to do with a bottom line.

... the interpretation of world and history is a fundamental process without which human beings cannot grasp reality at all. There can be no perception of reality without an interpretive model. More than that: when people open their mouths and do not just put out animalistic sounds such as groaning and growling but use concepts, they are already interpreting their reality. Every language presumes an overarching interpretation of the world and is itself such an interpretation.

Those who assign interpretation to the realm of the arbitrary call into question every field of scholarship, including the natural sciences. Still more, they question the value of every human discourse, because whenever we speak and construct sentences we are interpreting the reality that surrounds us. The same is true of Jesus of Nazareth, and of him above all. He is unthinkable without Israel, the people of God, in whose tradition he lived, and he can therefore be adequately understood only in faith and out of the believing memory of the people of God. An understanding of Jesus demands the foundation that is Israel, that is the church. If we do not hold to the church’s interpretive tradition and seek its genuine realm of experience again and again, then sooner or later the image of Jesus will disintegrate before us. Interpretation of him will become a matter of taste or at least be determined by the momentary horizon of the interpreter. We see this clearly in the many images of Jesus produced in the last several decades, each according to a shifting fashion. They show very little of the Jesus of the gospels but a great deal of the spirit of those who produce them.

So we see Jesus as an opium for the soul and as a political revolutionary. Here he is as the archetype of the unconscious, there a pop star. He appears as the first feminist and as the faithful advocate of bourgeois morality. Jesus is used by those who want to see nothing change in the church, and he is used as a weapon against the church. He is instrumentalized over and over again to confirm people’s own desires and dreams. At present he must above all stand for the legitimation of universal tolerance, which is no longer interested in truth and therefore threatens to slide off into arbitrariness.

Gerhard Lohfink , Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965

Among scholars of modern Jewish-Catholic relations, John Connelly's book From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 has rightly gained wide attention. Connelly, professor of History at the University of California Berkeley, drew on bulletins, journals, and books issued from the thirties to the sixties and sources stored in ar-chives at Seton Hall University (John Oesterreicher’s papers) and in Munich (Karl Thieme’s papers), Vienna, and Washing-ton. The book explores, through a chronological approach, the shift that occurred in Catholic attitudes toward the Jews and the move away from a long tradition of Catholic anti-Judaism and antisemitism toward new, more positive views. Connelly reconstructs this fundamental change, tracing an in-ternational network of protagonists who contributed, before and during the Second Vatican Council, to ideas that shaped the Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate on non-Christian religions (particularly chapter 4, on the Jews). He mainly focused on groups of Catholics who, since the thirties and in opposition to Nazism, had developed new reflections on Christian-Jewish relations in Europe and the United States. Among them, Connelly devoted his attention particularly to converts to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism (primarily Johannes M. [John] Oesterreicher, but also Gregory Baum, Leo Rudloff, and Paul Démann).

Connelly's thesis is precisely that without the contribution of these converts, the Church could not have arrived at a reconsideration of its position in relation to the Jewish world.Although the phenomenon of conversions is being considered with growing interest by scholars (not only those studying the modern age), many focus on biographies, and the historical narrative of networks connecting the converts, clergy, and intellectuals is still limited. One of the most convincing parts of the book is the analysis of the major role some converts played in pushing to change Catholic teachings about Jews and Judaism. Following this process, Connelly compellingly illustrates their contributions. He defines them as “border-crossers”: “The great majority of Catholics who wrote on the race question [about whether Jews were a race and not able to become Catholics] were Jewish converts, and virtually every figure of note in the Catholic battle against antisemitism was a convert....the irony of conversion, of crossing a border supposedly with no return, is that one never entirely leaves the point of origin. And the scandal of racism was that those expecting security in the new Catholic homes were told that they remained alien, ‘in fact’ ra Jewish” (pp. 63-64). This connotation of the converts as people living along cultural and religious borders between communities is thoroughly examined in the book.

The book begins with a stunning survey of the racist views of prominent early twentieth-century Catholics, among them leading theologians, many denying that even baptism could fully make Jews into Catholics. The author then analyzes some Christian voicesagainst first racism and then against Nazi persecution of the Jews. In particular, Connelly describes a memorandum prepared by Thieme, Oesterreicher, and Waldemar Gurian in 1937, in an effort to obtain an official pronouncement by the Holy See against antisemitism and in favor of the Jews.Approaching the decade before the Second Vatican Council, Connelly highlights the personal "journey" accomplished by some of these converts in a process of rediscovery of the Jewish origins of the Church (p. 189). Thisspirit inspired the foundation by Oesterreicher of the Institute for Judeo-Christian studies at Seton Hall University in 1953, and especially the influential Apeldoorn initiative beginning in 1958 to rethink Christian theologies of Judaism (and Christian read-ings of Scripture) before the Council. In the last chapter of the book, Connelly sums up some of the main revisions of the conversionist attitude that for centuries had marked the behavior of Catholic institutions and congregations toward Jews. Starting from a mission intended to get Jews to convert to Catholicism, Oesterreicher, Thieme, and others moved the Church toward a mission of self-redefinition and ressourcement, with new attitudes toward the Jews and to the Church’s own Jewish roots.

-- Maria Chiara Rioli Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations.

~ *** ~

While not academically trained, I've read my fair share of books on Jewish-Christian relations and Catholic-Jewish dialogue over the decade. None of them come close to the achievement of Connelly's, which I imagine will be a resource for years to come. Though published in , I'm happy to have discovered and to have read it.

When discussing Catholic resistance to National Socialism and protection of the Jews, it is my impression that Catholics tend to get particularly defensive, focusing their attention on notable figures who distinguished themselves by speaking out in defense of, or actively protecting, the Jewish people. The antagonists in their scenario tend to be the Nazis, depicted as chiefly secular, atheist, pagan or anti-Christian (which they were to a large extent). Lost in this perspective, however, is a clear and deserved recognition of just how deeply entrenched antisemitism -- both of a racial and religious variety -- was among parishioners and clergy within the Catholic Church itself (to be clear, the Catholic Church in Europe is the focus here). Under such circumstances, it is not at all suprising that those few who struggled to come to arrive at better relations with the Jewish people were often met with ecclesiastical roadblocks and outright opposition from the clergy on multiple levels within the Church. Connelly's intensive historical research into this era of the Church under National Socialism is worth the price of the volume alone as a reference resource.

Connelly makes a notable observation that

“From the 1840s until 1965, virtually every activist and thinker who worked for Catholic-Jewish reconciliation was not originally Catholic. Most were born Jewish. Without converts, the Catholic Church would not have found a new language to speak to the Jews after the Holocaust.”

Catholics are probably acquainted to some degree (even nominally) with Jacques Maritain and Deitrich von Hildebrand (both recognized as early opponents to anti-semitism, howbeit moving on to other matters post-war). This book does an IMMENSE service in featuring the intellectual biographies of Johannes (later John) Oesterreicher, a Jewish convert and priest, and Karl Thieme, a convert from Luthernism, and the instrumental roles both played in countering antisemitism within the Church during National Socialism and later, in laying the theological groundwork for the drafting of Vatican II's Nostra Aetate.

Expectedly, Connelly arrives at the hope and conclusion that the Catholic Church -- in embracing its "elder brothers and sisters" -- ought to categorically forsake its mission to convert the Jews as a people. This was the ultimate conclusion of Karl Thieme, and to a degree Osterreicher as well in the last years of his life (who while never turning away individual requests for baptism, admittedly did not have any great success in his early efforts to convert Jews in the United States). One can't help but observe the irony in that if Jews like Osterreicher had never been permitted to convert in the first place, it would be questionable whether the Church would have arrived at the place it occupies now in its relations with the Jewish people.

Reviews and Discussion

• Review: From Enemy to Brother. The revolution in Catholic teaching on the Jews 1933-1965 by John S. Conway. Contemporary Church History Quarterly 19:4 (December 2013).
• Catholics and Jews: The Great Change, by Garry Wills. The New York Review
• Jacob and Esau, by Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. First Things January 2013. I concur with Healy's observation:

  Connelly argues that Oesterreicher “abandoned his missionary approach . . . for ecumenism,” that "his goal at the beginning was the opposite of what became the end point." The end point is "not one of Jews becoming Christians, or anything but Jews."

  The irony of Connelly’s narrative is that it is only because of the gifts of converts that the Catholic Church has renounced (he believes) the missionary hope that others will enter the Church. But the final irony is more paradoxical. Connelly is writing as a historian and, for the most part, he seeks to avoid direct engagement with theological debates. It is, however, impossible to reflect on the histori>cal setting and the significance of Nostra Aetate without touching on one of the thorniest questions confronting the Church. How can we hold together the universality of Christ’s saving work and God’s perduring election of the Jewish people?" [read the rest]

• Building on "Nostra Aetate" - 50 Years of Christian-Jewish Dialogue, by Cardinal Kurt Koch. Address delivered by Cardinal Koch at the Angelicum University in Rome under the auspices of the John Paul II Center for Interreligious Dialogue. (05/06/12).
• ‘What Our Church Has Inflicted on Judaism’: An Exchange on Catholic-Jewish Dialogue, Stephen Englund. (Part of Getting Past Supersessionism: An Exchange on Catholic-Jewish Dialogue).Commonweal 02/10/14.
• Selected Works of John M. Oesterreicher Seton Hall University. [Archive] / see also co-authored theological articles.
• To Evangelize, or Not to Evangelize? Against The Grain 03/21/05.

Hannah Arendt on Pope John XXIII

... In the midst of our century this man had decided to take literally, and not symbolically, every article of faith he had ever been taught. He really wanted "to be crushed, despised, neglected for the love of Jesus." He had disciplined himself and his ambition until he really cared “nothing for the judgments of the world, even the ecclesiastical world.” At the age of twenty-one, he had made up his mind: “Even if I were to be Pope…I should still have to stand before the divine judge, and what should I be worth then? Not much.” And at the end of his life, in the Spiritual Testament to his family, he could confidently write that "the Angel of Death will take me, as I trust, to paradise." The enormous strength of this faith was nowhere more manifest than in the "scandals" it innocently caused....

***

It is with respect to his work in Turkey, where, during the war, he came into contact with Jewish organizations (and, in one instance, prevented the Turkish government from shipping back to Germany some hundred Jewish children who had escaped from Nazi-occupied Europe) that he later raised one of the very rare serious reproaches against himself—for all “examinations of conscience” notwithstanding, he was not at all given to self-criticism. “Could I not,” he wrote, “should I not, have done more, have made a more decided effort and gone against the inclinations of my nature? Did the search for calm and peace, which I considered to be more in harmony with the Lord’s spirit, not perhaps mask a certain unwillingness to take up the sword?” At this time, however, he had permitted himself but one outburst. Upon the outbreak of the war with Russia, he was approached by the German Ambassador, Franz von Papen, who asked him to use his influence in Rome for outspoken support of Germany by the Pope. “And what shall I say about the millions of Jews your countrymen are murdering in Poland and in Germany?” This was in 1941, when the great massacre had just begun. ...

Excerpts from The Christian Pope, by Hannah Arendt. (Reviewing Journal of a Soul, by Pope John XXIII, translated by Dorothy White). New York Review of Books June 17, 1965.

Samuel Schuijer 1873 - 1942

Interesting, these little "rabbit holes" the internet can put you on. Reading the introduction to "Loving the Torah More Than God: Toward a Catholic Appreciation of Judaism" -- provocative title, just started. I suppose I'll have a review at some point -- author Frans Jozef van Beeck mentions the following dedication:

Of the passages omitted in the present text, the most sigificant was the dedication of the lectures to the memory of my first violin teacher, the late Samuel Schuyer. I wish to repeat it here. Samuel Schuyer was born in The Hague, on September 9, 1873, into a family of musicians. He received his training in violin, bassoon, and theory at the Royal Conservatory in his native city. After an early career that involves positions as principal bassoonist in a variety of places as well as a European tour as a bassoon soloist, he became first assistant concertmaster at the French Opera in The Hague, and subsequently concertmaster at the Opera of Ghent, in Belgium. After a short stay in Paris, he returned to The Hague, where he became a very active violinist and teacher, and occasionally also a composer. He was sixty nine years old when in late 1942, he was taken from his apartment and transported to the transit camp at Westerbork. On December 8, 1942 he was put on the train to Auschwitz, where he was killed on the day of his arrival. May he live in peace.

On a whim and, wanting to find out more about this Samuel Schuyer, I Googled and discovered this fascinating biography and account of the musician containing a horrifying detail of his demise -- one can imagine no worse form of physical torture for an accomplished musician:

Het Vaderland reported regularly on new compositions by Schuijer and performances of his work until 1939. Then it becomes silent. The last official document is the death certificate showing that he perished in Auschwitz. A daughter of a former Schuijer piano student wrote to the Leo Smit Foundation: "My mother told me about the tragic fate of her respected piano teacher, who had suffered extreme torture in Auschwitz. We were told that both his hands were cut off."

as well as a remarkable tale of his discovery and the recovery of his music:

On December 11, 1942, Samuel Schuijer was murdered in Auschwitz. His home and music school had been plundered by the Nazis. With the loss of his life and destruction of his belongings, all traces of this significant Dutch musician seemed to be erased. But a group of children in The Hague found a box containing music manuscripts, waiting for the garbage truck. They took their treasure home and it became the first step in rediscovering a lost fragment of Dutch music history.

For which very reason, you can now listen to a composition by him:

Related

• Samuel Schuijer Leo Smit Foundation.
• Forbidden Music Regained - a Project of the Leo Smit Foundation - "Based in Amsterdam, the Leo Smit Foundation is a knowledge centre open to anyone who wants to know more about composers who were persecuted in the Second World War. Because of their situation their work has sunk into oblivion, yet in many cases they were the musical leaders of their time. The Leo Smit Foundation is dedicated to the discovery and research of these composers and to the publication of their works."
• Suppressed Composers in the Netherlands: Forbidden Music in the Second World War by Carine Alders (Editor), Eleonore Pameijer (Editor). Toccata Press (May 7, 2024) 356 pgs.
• Archives Diary: A Tribute to Frans Jozef Van Beeck, S.J. John J Burns Library.

Open to me the gates of repentance, O Giver of Life,
For my spirit rises early to pray toward thy holy temple,
Bearing the temple of my body all defiled;
But in thy compassion, purify me by the loving kindness of thy mercy.
Lead me on the paths of salvation, O Mother of God,
For I have profaned my soul with shameful sins, and have wasted my life in laziness.
But by your intercessions, deliver me from all impurity.
When I think of the many evil things I have done, wretch that I am,
I tremble at the fearful day of judgment.
But trusting in thy loving kindness, like David I cry to thee:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy.

Orthodox Christian hymn from Great Lent

_____________________________________________

(Dipping into Alexander Schmemann's Great Lent: Journey to Pascha as part of this season's Lenten reading)

Thomas Merton on Teilhard de Chardin's romanticization of evolution and the atom bomb

Inasmuch as I myself appreciate the thought of Thomas Merton and his role in my own spiritual evolution, I was compelled to research further Merton's own thoughts on Teilhard, who seems to be "of two minds" about Teilhard de Chardin -- commenting positively on some aspects of Teilhard's thought but also critical as well. Richard W. Kropf explores Merton's thought on Teilhard in his paper, Crying with a Live Grief: The Mysticism of Thomas Merton and Teilhard Compared.

In Merton's review of De Lubac's The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, Teilhard's Gamble (Commonweal 10/27/67), Merton reproaches Teilhard for what he perceives as his naive and overly grandiose faith in human evolution and technological progress:

Teilhard gambles on God’s need for man, since without man God’s creative plan cannot be fulfilled. Without man, God’s face cannot be fully manifest in his evolving creation. Man has an inescapable inner need to be the locus of the divine epiphany, because in him the universe has at last become conscious of itself. And "the universe by structural necessity cannot disappoint the consciousness it produces." [...]

[The Teilhardian man] is a " pilgrim of the future," and he refuses to be diverted from his pilgrimage even by the H-bomb which Teilhard found very inspiring: it was only a manifestation of the spirit and the " dawn of a Christic neo-energy."

Clearly, the Teilhardian wager is as much a gamble as Pascal’s. Perhaps it is more of a gamble. Pascal’s existential thinking confines itself to the area of individual freedom, and the individual can decide his own spiritual destiny! Teilhard has hocked everything and bet it on the whole human species. He has done so at a moment when the odds seem somewhat long against the kind of runaway win he anticipates. Teilhard does not seem to notice the wounds of mendacity and hatred which have been inexorably deepened in man by his practice of technological warfare, totalitarianism and genocide. Certainly we can sympathize with the admirable innocence of his hope. But is it as he believes, and as de Lubac concurs, a completely valid extrapolation of Bible eschatology? Is Teilhard so convinced that he be right, that he obstinately refuses to see any possibility of losing? At times, the Teilhardian synthesis seems to demand nothing short of blind faith in predetermined evolutionary success: the Noosphere is here, the super-consciousness is dawning and—this de Lubac neglected to add—the armies of Mao marching on Peking in 1951 were seen by Teilhard as the vanguard of a new humanity. Everything is already in the bag. You can’t lose: " It would be easier to halt the turning of the earth than it would be to prevent the totalization of mankind."

In "The Plague of Camus: A Commentary and Introduction", Merton indulges the question of whether the existentialist Albert Camus would not have turned away from Christianity had he read the works of Teilhard:

Camus would have heartily agreed with Teilhard’s love of man and with his aspiration toward human unity. But it is rather doubtful whether he would have been able to accept the evolutionary and historical scheme of Teilhardian soteriology. To be precise, it is likely that Camus would have had a certain amount of trouble with the systematic progress of the world toward " hominization" and " christification" by virtue of laws im­manent in matter and in history.

The point cannot be adequately discussed here, but anyone who wants to investigate it further had better read Camus’ book on Revolt (L’Homme révolté), which he wrote after The Plague and which he thought out at the same time as The Plague. This study of revolt, which precipitated the break between Camus and the Marxists (especially with Sartre), is a severe critique of Hegelian and post-Hegelian doctrines which seek the salvation and progress of man in the "laws of history."

Camus was suspicious of the way in which totalitarians of both the left and the right consistently appealed to evolution to justify their hope of inevitable progress toward a new era of the superman. In particular, he protested vigorously against their tendency to sacrifice man as he is now, in the present, for man as he is supposed to be, according to the doctrine of race or party, at some indefinite time in the future. In Camus’ eyes, this too easily justified the sadism and opportunism of people who are always prepared to align themselves on the side of the executioners against the victims. In other words, a certain superficial type of eschatological hopefulness, based on evolution, made it easy to ignore the extermination camps, the pogroms, the genocide, the napalm, the H-bombs that so conveniently favored the survival of the fittest, got rid of those who no longer had a right to exist, and prepared the way for the epiphany of superman.

At this point, it must be admitted that one of the most serious criticisms of Teilhard bears precisely on this point: an optimism which tends to look at existential evil and suffering through the small end of the telescope. It is unfortunately true that Teilhard, like many other Christians, regarded the dead and wounded of Hiroshima with a certain equanimity as inevitable by-products of scientific and evolutionary progress. He was much more impressed with the magnificent scientific achievement of the atomic physicists than he was with the consequences of dropping the bomb. It must be added immediately that the physicists themselves did not all see things exactly as he did. The concern of a Niels Bohr and his dogged struggle to prevent the atomic arms race put Bohr with Rieux and Tarrou in the category of "Sisyphean" heroes that are entirely congenial to Camus. After the Bikini test, Teilhard exclaimed that the new bombs "show a humanity which is at peace both internally and externally." And he added beatifically, "they announce the coming of the spirit on earth." (L'Avenir de l'homme) [...]

No matter how much we may respect the integrity and the nobility of this dedicated Jesuit, we have to admit here that at least in one respect he resembles his confrere Paneloux. True, they are at opposite extremes of optimism and pessimism; but they do concur in attaching more importance to an abstract idea, a mystique, a system, than to man in his existential and fallible reality here and now. This is precisely what Camus considers to be the great temptation. Lured by an ideology or a mystique, one goes over to the side of the executioners, while arguing that in so doing one is promoting the cause of life.

There is no question whatever that Teilhard believes in the "new man", the homo progressivus, the new evolutionary leap that is now being taken (he thinks) beyond homo sapiens. Science certainly gives us a basis for hope in this development, and perhaps Camus needed to have more hope in the future of man than he actually seems to have had. Perhaps Camus was too inclined to doubt and hesitate. Perhaps his "modesty" tended too much to desperation. Perhaps there was much he could have learned from Teilhard. But it is not likely that he would purely and simply have agreed with Teilhard’s statement in Peking, in 1945, that the victorious armies of Mao Tse-tung represented "the humanity of tomorrow" and "the generating forces and the elements of planetization," while the bourgeois European world represented nothing but the garbage (le déchet) of history. No doubt there may be good reason to think that a "new humanity" will arise out of the emerging Third World. Let us hope that it will. But Camus would not be so naïve as to identify this "new humanity" with a particular brand of Marxism, or to pin his hopes on a party which announced its own glorious future as a dogma of faith.

Source: The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New Directions Publishing, 1985), 214-217. Tip of the hat due to the blog Real Physics for reposting Merton's insightful essay in full).

• Regarding Teilhard's romanticized view of nuclear testing, see: A Symbolic Meditation on Hiroshima at 75: Divine-Human Transfiguration and Transhuman Disfiguration, by Christian Roy (The Symbolic World 08/06/20);

  What truly troubled [Bernard] Charbonneau however was the willingness of many supposedly high-minded humanitarians to celebrate — as immanent spiritual epiphany and ultimate eschatological fulfillment — globalized modern technology’s Activation of Energy. This was the title of a book about the spiritual life inherent in atomic particles by the worst culprit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). This Jesuit evolutionary thinker posthumously became fashionable well beyond an initial coterie of progressive Catholics. He remains a kind of patron saint of transhumanism as its pre-war initiator. But at the height of his fame, Charbonneau’s first published book was devoted to debunking Teilhard de Chardin, Prophet of a Totalitarian Era (1963).

  The inherent inhumanity of Teilhard’s technophile theodicy was evident in “A Few Reflections on the Spiritual Impact of the Atomic Bomb” (1946) for the journal of French Jesuits, that failed to even directly mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki or their human toll. They focussed instead on the Trinity and Bikini research and testing facilities as harbingers of world peace, through global unanimity in the concerted effort to consolidate mastery of the energy at the heart of matter, portraying this as the divine fulfillment of man’s destiny and the goal of evolution.

  Teilhard’s text is replete with inverted symbolic echoes of the Transfiguration, and especially of its defining role in the hesychastic practice of the prayer of the heart...

• Teilhard's reflections on the Bikini Atoll tests are reproduced in full here: Quelques réflexions sur le retentissement spirituel de la bombe atomique" ["Teilhard de Chardin, Some reflections on the spiritual impact of the atomic bomb, 1946"], in Etudes, 79th Year, Vol. 250, July-August 1946.

On the resurgence of Teilhard de Chardin

If there ever was a theology very much in vogue and appealing to hipsters, "new-agers", the young and the fashionable, it was that of Teilhard de Chardin -- whose theological vision served as aesthetic inspiration for jazz, folk folk and classical albums; the basis for a science fiction novels, and also a chief influence on Salvador Dali's artistic incorporation of religious iconography. Recently, Teilhard's name popped up in popular discussions of eugenics, transhumanism and artificial intelligence, with the philosopher Eric Steindhart praising Teilhard as "one of the first to articulate transhumanist themes".

The mystical theology of Teilhard de Chardin has been alluded to time and again in the works of recent popes -- implicitly by Pope Saint John Paul II, in his encyclical Ecclesia Eucharistica: "the Eucharist is always in some way celebrated on the altar of the world. It unites heaven and earth. It embraces and permeates all creation". Chardin exercised an influence on Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as well, who referenced him numerous times in his book Spirit of the Liturgy as well as his speeches and homilies.

Thus it comes as little surprise that we find Pope Francis -- especially with his (pre)occupation with ecology -- carrying the Teilhardian banner, or that under his pontificate the Pontifical Council of Culture would request the repeal of the Holy Office's 1962 Monitum (warning) -- or even that a petition was recently circulated to declare Teilhard de Chardin a "Doctor of the Church."

Nor is it suprising that with every instance of a papal quotation, his supporters seem to reassert themselves, rushing to zealously proclaim on social media that he is being "REHABILITATED" in their desire to exonerate a polarizing theologian whose work, arguably, should still and nonetheless be approached with no small amount of caution.

Teilhard's defenders include the esteemed Henri de Lubac, who remarked "We need not concern ourselves with a number of detractors of Teilhard, in whom emotion has blunted intelligence." and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, who naively mused that "it is very likely that within fifty years all the trivial, verbal disputes about the meaning of Teilhard's "unfortunate" vocabulary will have died away, Teilhard will appear like John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila, as the spiritual genius of the twentieth century."

On the other hand, those De Lubac ridiculed with "blunted intelligence" include the likes of Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Cardinal de Journet, and Dietrich von Hildebrand -- all of whom in my humble opinion, were justifiably hesitant and properly cautious over the philosophical implications of Teilhard's theology, when carried to its ultimate conclusions.

* * *

Via the web, here's a compilation of related material as I dig a little deeper into said debate:

The Monitum on Teilhard de Chardin

• Monitum on the Writings of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, SJ Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. 06/30/62.
• Letter to [Pope Francis] to waive the Monitum on Teilhard's Works". Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture. 11/17/17.
• PETITION: Declare Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J., a Doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Daryl Domning.

Teilhard de Chardin - Rehabilitated?

• Is Teilhard de Chardin being rehabilitated? And who is that, anyway?, by Luke Coppen. The Pillar 09/04/23.

• Pope cites Teilhardian vision of the cosmos as a 'living host', by John Allen Jr. National Catholic Reporter 07/28/09. Allen observes that regarding Teilhard "Benedict has sometimes seemed to be of two minds himself," at times agreeing with his cosmic vision, but also "complained that Gaudium et Spes [...] played down the reality of sin because of an overly 'French,' and specifically 'Teilhardian,' influence."

• When a Jesuit Evolutionist and a Religious Existentialist Cross Paths; (Or) Why Won't the New Humanity Emerge Already?, J. Scott Jackson. DET (Die Evangelischen Theologen) 06/23/16. On the debate bretween Teilhard de Chardin and the Catholic existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel. See also: The Marcel-Teilhard Debate Michael J. Latzer. New Blackfriars Vol. 82, No. 961 (March 2001), pp. 132-137.

Commentary on Teilhard de Chardin and his critics by Peter Kwasniewski.

• Teilhard’s Pseudo-Scientific Inversion of Christianity: Five Recent Writers. Tradition & Sanity 09/21/23. "Two Jesuits, two metaphysicians, and a Franciscan friar deconstructing the would-be cosmologist of a new faith."
• Gilson, Maritain, Tresmontant, Journet, and von Hildebrand on Teilhard de Chardin. Tradition & Sanity 09/14/23 "You wouldn’t necessarily know it from Vatican News, but Chardin was roundly criticized by fellow Catholic intellectuals."
• Teilhard de Chardin: A Key to Understanding Our Jesuit Pope. Tradition & Sanity 09/07/23. "Francis has proved an admirable disciple of his modernist forerunner."

A prominent critic of Teilhard de Chardin online is Dr. John P. Slattery, Director of the Carl G. Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law at Duquesne University.

• PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN’S LEGACY OF EUGENICS AND RACISM CAN’T BE IGNORED Religion Dispatches 05/21/18.
• Dangerous Tendencies of Cosmic Theology: The Untold Legacy of Teilhard de Chardin by John P. Slattery. Philosophy and Theology Vol. 29: No. 1. pp. 69-82, according to whom "from the 1920s until his death in 1955, Teilhard de Chardin unequivocally supported racist eugenic practices, praised the possibilities of the Nazi experiments, and looked down upon those who he deemed 'imperfect' humans."
• Teilhard de Chardin, racism and eugenics: An exchange - John P. Slattery | Juan V. Fernández de la Gala. America 08/09/23.
• Trashing Teilhard: How Not to Read a Great Religious Thinker, by John F. Haught. America 02/12/19. In which Haut responds to Slattery's article in Philosophy & Theology.
• Teilhard & Eugenics: A Response to John Haught Commonweal 03/12/19, in which Slattery concludes:

  ... it is hard to deny that Teilhard’s clear and consistent support of eugenics-related philosophies can be tied to core principles of his mature thought, especially his arguments combining physical and spiritual evolutionary development.

  I do think there is a way forward for Teilhardian research, in addition to further investigation of his ties to eugenics. I would welcome a renewed focus on Teilhard’s early mystical writings. But his support of eugenics and the related doctrine of human inequality force us to reject or readjust some interpretations of his ideas. It would be irresponsible to ignore even a tangential connection between Teilhard’s arguments and eugenics, especially at a time when CRISPR technology and widespread DNA sequencing have revived eugenics-related conversations.

  Christian theology demands, in its beautiful paradox, that we find holiness not in the strength but in the suffering of the world, and that the path to God is found by prioritizing the broken, the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, and the oppressed. I firmly believe there is a place for Teilhard in the Christian theological tradition, but there is absolutely no room for eugenics.

Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination: Volume I

Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination: Volume 1: The Modern Redefinition of Tongues
by Philip E. Blosser (Author), Charles A. Sullivan (Author).

In three carefully researched volumes, this ground-breaking study examines the gift of tongues through 2,000 years of church history. Starting in the present and working back in time, these volumes consider (1) the modern redefinition of "tongues" as a private prayer language; (2) the church's perennial understanding of "tongues" as ordinary human languages; and (3) the Corinthian "tongues," which, in light of Jewish liturgical tradition, turn out to have been a foreign liturgical language (Hebrew or Aramaic) requiring bilingual interpreters. In the first volume, the authors establish that modern glossolalia, far from being a supernatural gift enjoyed by certain believers since the time of Pentecost and undergoing a resurgence in modern times, has no precedent in church life prior to the nineteenth century. They discuss why German theologians, responding to the Irvingite revival, coined the term "glossolalia" in the 1830s; why Pentecostals between 1906-8 quietly began redefining "tongues" to mean a heavenly language unintelligible to human beings but pleasing to God, instead of foreign languages useful for evangelism; why Protestant cessationists believed miraculous tongues had ceased; and why interpolated idioms like "unknown tongues" in Protestant Bibles were aimed originally at Rome's use of Latin.

Reviews & Discussion

• Book Review: Blosser & Sullivan's Speaking in Tongues: A Critical Historical Examination. Unam Sanctamcatholicam 09/03/23.
• The Modern Redefinition of Tongues feat. Philip Blosser & Charles Sullivan YouTube 09/03/23.

Ronald Reagan on Hans Urs von Balthasar

On June 15, 1989, former President Ronald Reagan was inducted into the prestigious French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, his second honor during a weeklong European tour -- one day after receiving an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in London.

Apparently in receiving such an honor, it is customary of the current recipient devotes his speech to the recognition of his predecessor. In this particular case, said predecessor was none other than Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar(!!!). The complete text of Reagan's tribute to Hans Urs von Balthasar can be found in the appendix of the book Dividing or Strengthening? Five Ways of Christianity by Harry E. Winter, O.M.I., and is available online here.

• WORLD : Reagan Honored 2nd Time on Tour Los Angeles Times 06/15/1989.

Remembering Paul Johnson (1928-2023)

Remembering Paul Johnson

• Paul Johnson, Prolific Historian Prized by Conservatives, Dies at 94 New York Times 01/12/23.
• Paul Johnson, prolific journalist and historian who started on the Left but became a champion of the Right – obituary The Telegraph 01/12/23.
• Paul Johnson, friend of Israel and the Jews, dies at 94 The Jewish Chronicle 01/15/23.
• On the Writer Paul Johnson (1928–2023 National Review:

  William F. Buckley Jr. wrote that Johnson was liable to be underrated, or taken for granted, because he was so routinely excellent. “His performances are unvaryingly (boringly?) extraordinary,” he wrote. WFB went on to say that Johnson had had “as productive a literary-analytical career as any in modern times.” And he said that in 1994, when Johnson had about 20 more writing years in him.

• Remembering Paul Johnson, the Historian of Human Dignity, by Hans Zeiger. Public Discourse 01/23/23. Underlying Paul Johnson’s historical writing was the sense that people possess an innate dignity. To Johnson, history was the story of people—flawed, creative, reasoning, exceptional—with the capacity for incredible achievement. People, he thought, were made with a purpose, and that meant history has a purpose.
• Knowledge and Verve: Remembering Paul Johnson, by Theodore Dalrymple. City Journal 1/13/23:
  Johnson liked nothing more than to infuriate by means of iconoclastic polemic. His book Intellectuals (1988) provided potted biographies of such revered figures as Rousseau, Marx, and Tolstoy, demonstrating what rotters they all were in their personal lives. This was not exactly an exercise in scientific method, but it was good fun and gave pleasure to those who distrust intellectual gurus. It also gave rise to insinuations that Johnson himself did not always quite live up to the moral ideals that he so fiercely propounded in public.

  He coined striking phrases—Hitler’s views, for example, were “the syphilis of antisemitism in its tertiary phase”—and he could never be accused of mealy-mouthedness. His views, though somewhat changeable, were expressed with vigor approaching dogmatism, though they were always well-informed. You knew where you stood with him.

  It is customary to say of remarkable men that we shall not see their like again. Whatever may be the case with other remarkable men, this is likely to be true of Paul Johnson. It is unlikely that anyone will tackle so huge a range of subjects again with such knowledge and verve.

• The World of Paul Johnson Book and Film Globe 06/01/23. "The late historian didn’t have a lot of friends on the left, but his popular histories help explain the present day."
• Paul Johnson: A Great Man of Letters The Catholic Herald 01/01/23:

  ... He had his undeniable faults, of which irascibility was just one, but he was also exemplary in his hard work (few people could write so quickly and eloquently), his diligence (the reading undertaken for his work and his range of reference was remarkable); his loyalty to his friends and his devotion to his children and grandchildren. His son Daniel is a prominent Catholic journalist (and writes in this edition). He was a Defender of the Faith; there are few of his calibre now.

  At his funeral, the opening hymn was, unexpectedly, “To Be a Pilgrim”, the words for which are based on John Bunyan, the anti-Catholic Puritan. It might seem a curious choice until we consider the words: “Hobgoblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit/ He knows he at the end shall life inherit”. That summed Paul Johnson up: may it be so for him.

• Paul Johnson and the fate of conservatism, by Dominic Green. 06/19/23:

  ... Johnson did as much as any writer to spread the ideal Western civilization, and especially Judeo-Christian civilization, in the U.S. These ideas have little purchase in Britain. Johnson’s son Daniel is one of their few advocates, and he, too, finds more receptive audiences abroad. Like Roger Scruton, Paul Johnson found that Americans supposedly a frivolous and unthinking people, are more interested in ideas than the British are. It is telling that Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush in 2006, but he was not appointed a Companion of the British Empire until 2013.

... the majority of students do not see writing as a worthwhile skill to cultivate—just like I, sitting with my coffee and book, rereading Moby-Dick, do not consider it worthwhile to learn, say, video editing. They have no interest in exploring nuance in tone and rhythm; they will forever roll their eyes at me when I try to communicate the subtle difference, when writing an appositive phrase, between using commas, parentheses, or (the connoisseur’s choice) the em dash.

Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence. After all, what is a cover letter? Its primary purpose isn’t to communicate “I already know how to do this job” (because of course I don’t) but rather “I am competent and trustworthy and can clearly express to you why I would be a good candidate for this job.” What is a written exam? Its primary signal isn’t “I memorized a bunch of information” but rather “I can express that information clearly in writing.” Many teachers have reacted to ChatGPT by imagining how to give writing assignments now—maybe they should be written out by hand, or given only in class—but that seems to me shortsighted. The question isn’t “How will we get around this?” but rather “Is this still worth doing?”

I believe my most essential tasks, as a teacher, are helping my students think critically, disagree respectfully, argue carefully and flexibly, and understand their mind and the world around them. Unconventional, improvisatory, expressive, meta-cognitive writing can be an extraordinary vehicle for those things. But if most contemporary writing pedagogy is necessarily focused on helping students master the basics, what happens when a computer can do it for us? Is this moment more like the invention of the calculator, saving me from the tedium of long division, or more like the invention of the player piano, robbing us of what can be communicated only through human emotion?

The End of High School English, by Daniel Herman. The Atlantic 12/09/22.

A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) - A Help or Hindrance to the Artist? -- Musings on Midjourney

As somebody who's (at least somewhat) creatively/artistically inclined, I find myself absolutely stunned by the recent advancements made in AI-rendered art. However, I admit to being conflicted and of two minds over such.

Half of me has that giddy mindset of a "kid-in-a-candy-store", especially when I experiment with Midjourney -- for the unfamiliar, "an independent research lab that produces a proprietary artificial intelligence program that creates images from textual descriptions" -- or see what others can come up with.

In its current state, which is still very much in its infancy (MidJourney beta only being released in 2022), AI-generated art gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "the imagination is the limit", having the ability to render whatever the user wants, based on a unique prompt. Admittedly there is some level of SKILL required in utilizing the prompts, learning what particular kind and combination of prompts achieves the desired result. But in any case, the images that Midjourney produces -- spanning practically every genre and style and medium -- are absolutely, completely mind-boggling. See, for example, the regular postings to the Official MidJourney Facebook page.

But there's another part of me that is tentative, even fearful, for the potential impact it can have on artists and photographers and illustrators. What does it mean, for instance, when you can render a painted image in a matter of MINUTES, that would take a human literally days or weeks to produce on their own, using skills they have spent the bulk of their lives honing and cultivating as a craft?

What are the implications ... when I read that the first portrait created using artificial intelligence sold at auction in 2018 for $432,500; and that only this year, a Midjourney AI-generated painting won first place in the Colorado State Fair?

According to Kevin Roose, A.I.-generated art is already transforming creative work, both positively and not necessarily so. Some artists are less concerned than others about the impact AI may have on their careers, as in the example of an interior designer who has figured out how to use AI to streamlining their work, fleshing out prospective ideas for office-renovation in real-time. On the other hand you have stories like this:

"Initially, Mr. Waldoch planned to hire human artists to illustrate each day’s rhyming word pair. But when he saw the cost — between $50 and $60 per image, plus time for rounds of feedback and edits — he decided to try using A.I. instead. He plugged word pairs into Midjourney and DreamStudio, an app based on Stable Diffusion, and tweaked the results until they looked right. Total cost: a few minutes of work, plus a few cents.

“I typed in ‘carrot parrot,’ and it spit back a perfect image of a parrot made of carrots,” he said. “That was the immediate ‘aha’ moment.”

Mr. Waldoch said he didn’t feel guilty about using A.I. instead of hiring human artists, because human artists were too expensive to make the game worthwhile."

On the other hand, David Holz, the founders of Midjourney, was interviewed by Forbes and was largely dismissive of the idea that AI-generated art would have a negative impact on artists themselves:

... think that some people will try to cut artists out. They will try to make something similar at a lower cost, and I think they will fail in the market. I think the market will go towards higher quality, more creativity, and vastly more sophisticated, diverse and deep content. And the people who actually are able to use like the artists and use the tools to do that are the ones who are going to win.

These technologies actually create a much deeper appreciation and literacy in the visual medium. You might actually have the demand, outstrip the ability to produce at that level, and then maybe you'll actually be raising the salaries of artists. It could be weird, but that's what's going to happen. The pace of that demand increase for both quality and diversity will lead to some wonderful and unexpected projects getting made.

A generation of students graduated art schools, many of them heavily in debt, counting on relatively well-paid jobs in entertainment production, videogame production, commercial art and so on. How does the emergence of AI text-to-image platforms impact their future?

I think some people will try to cut costs, and some people will try to expand ambitions. I think the people who expand ambitions will still be paying all those same salaries, and the people who try to cut costs, I think will fail.

Of similar concern are the copyright and privacy issues involved. Take this story of fantasy artist Greg Rutkowski, who found his own original work quickly overtaken and overwhelmed online by AI-generated replications:

Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn’t his.

The article goes on to describe the experience of others -- illustrators, photographers, models, actors and actresses, directors, cinematographers" -- who are grappling with the fact that their work is being fed into the 5.8 billion dataset used by AI. It is currently the case that artists don’t have the choice to opt in to the database or have their work removed.

Anyway ... no offense intended in this post to those who use Midjourney and are demonstrably very adept at guiding it to producing what they desire. I honestly remain very much enthralled by its potential and entertainment value.

But lurking in the back of my mind are the questions and the issues raised in these articles as well.

The democratic ideal springs from the ideas of liberty, equality, majority rule through free elections, protection of the rights of minorities, and freedom to subscribe to multiple loyalties in matters of religion, economics, and politics rather than to a total loyalty to the state. The spirit of democracy is the idea of importance and worth in the individual, and faith in the kind of world where the individual can achieve as much of his potential as possible.

Great dangers always accompany great opportunities. The possibility of destruction is always implicit in the act of creation. Thus the greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself. From the beginning the weakness as well as the strength of the democratic ideal has been the people. People cannot be free unless they are willing to sacrifice some of their interests to guarantee the freedom of others. The price of democracy is the ongoing pursuit of the common good by all of the people. One hundred and thirty-five years ago Tocqueville gravely warned that unless individual citizens were regularly involved in the action of governing themselves, self-government would pass from the scene. Citizen participation is the animating spirit and force in a society predicated on voluntarism.

We are not here concerned with people who profess the democratic faith but yearn for the dark security of dependency where they can be spared the burden of decisions. Reluctant to grow up, or incapable of doing so, they want to remain children and be cared for by others. Those who can, should be encouraged to grow; for the others, the fault lies not in the system but in themselves.

Here we are desperately concerned with the vast mass of our people who, thwarted through lack of interest or opportunity, or both, do not participate in the endless responsibilities of citizenship and are resigned to lives determined by others. To lose your "identity" as a citizen of democracy is but a step from losing your identity as a person. People react to this frustration by not acting at all. The separation of the people from the routine daily functions of citizenship is heartbreak in a democracy.

It is a grave situation when a people resign their citizenship or when a resident of a great city, though he may desire to take a hand, lacks the means to participate. That citizen sinks further into apathy, anonymity, and depersonalization. The result is that he comes to depend on public authority and a state of civic-sclerosis sets in. From time to time there have been external enemies at our gates; there has always been the enemy within, the hidden and malignant inertia that foreshadows more certain destruction to our life and future than any nuclear warhead. There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man's faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.

Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Newly Published in Thomist Studies: "The Thomist Tradition: Avoiding Scylla and Charybdis", by Dr. Donald G. Boland

The Thomist Tradition: Avoiding Scylla and Charybdis
by Dr. Donald G Boland.

As with every great philosopher and theologian, the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, though perhaps the clearest expressed of all, has inevitably been subject to a variety of interpretations. There is one interpretation that leans to a naturalist/rationalist (secularist) interpretation of his thought. That one is well-recognized today. There is, however, another interpretation so strongly opposed to this extreme that it tends to fall into the other error of supernaturalism/ fideism. In this book, hopefully following not only the thought of St. Thomas but also his method, I have tried only to draw particular attention to this latter error.

“Dr. Donald Boland offers us a penetrating critical reading of Tracey Rowland’s Culture and Thomist Tradition after Vatican II (2003), showing us that Thomism today is faced with an equal and opposite danger to the well-known error of a naturalist, rationalist or secularist interpretation of the Angelic Doctor’s thought. Today’s danger is closer to being a sort of muddled fideist or supernaturalist interpretation influenced by the confusing ideas of nouvelle theologians such as Henri de Lubac. Boland offers a wide-ranging and well-informed assessment.” – Dr. Philip Blosser, Professor of Philosophy, Sacred Heart Major Seminary

“In this engaging polemic, Donald Boland effectively reminds us that, as St. Thomas keenly understood, faith has no greater friend than reason. This reminder is sorely needed as some Thomists today have lurched to fideism (even supernaturalism) in their zeal to avert rationalism. Written in an idiom that suits the here and now, Boland shows how the perennial philosophy lives to instruct another generation.” – Dr. Curtis Hancock, Professor of Philosophy, Rockhurst University

Related

• Episode 66: Cynthia Toolin-Wilson interviews Donald Boland on his book The Thomist Tradition, Part 1 (September 18, 2020) [Podcast]
• Episode 68: Cynthia Toolin-Wilson interviews Donald Boland on his book The Thomist Tradition, Part 2 (September 24, 2020)

The best way to win souls is not by actions that have as their purpose to win those souls, but by actions that have no other purpose than to bear witness to the truth, and bear witness to this truth with the full and overflowing measure of love. Perhaps it is possible to find here the exact distinction between proselytism, which could be defined as an activity of spiritual conquest on a patient (actio transiens) and the true apostolate, which could be defined as the service of souls, and the awakening of souls to the truth, by the superabundance of activity that comes from union with the truth (actio immanens). In the latter case the animating form is love; in the former case it is a subliminated instinct of imperialism.

- Jacques Maritain, from The Story of Two Souls: The Correspondence of Jacques Maritain and Julien Green, ed. Henry Bars. (Fordham University Press, 1988).

Here and There

• Christopher Hitchens Wasn’t Great, by Meir Y. Soloveichik. Commentary February 2022:

  ... what are we to make about statements that are contrary to all obvious evidence—evidence that even rudimentary research would reveal? Are Hitchens’s assertions against obvious evidence not evidence itself that his assaults are expressions of deliberate dishonesty?

  Some admirers of Hitchens on the right concede how troubling this is. Former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson said he had always known that, on religion, “Hitch could be unfair—willfully so—and quite capable of presenting as fresh and new arguments that had grown stale a century ago.” Robinson added, “What I hadn’t quite realized, though, was that Hitch was also deeply ignorant—in particular, that in discussing the scriptures Hitch simply had no idea what he was talking about.” Robinson’s admiration for Hitchens, as he wrote in 2011, stems from the fact that Hitchens “held his head up for a flag of all the free.” Similarly, Continetti concludes that the lesson of Hitchens’s life is that “freedom needs champions.” Indeed it does, but Hitchens’s comments about faith illustrate that he learned the wrong lessons from a 20th century marked by battles between liberty and tyranny.

  His penchant for intentionally eliding evidence was reflected in his description of faith as “the origin of all dictatorship.” These were words written by a man who had witnessed a century marked by militantly atheist Communist dictatorships that murdered more members of humanity than any faith community in history. His brother, Peter, has powerfully pointed out that Hitchens’s religion writings were recycled talking points of the very regimes he claimed to oppose.

• The Return of the Manuals, by John Brungardt. Thomistica 06/26/21 (reviewing R.E. Houser's Logic as a Liberal Art: An Introduction to Rhetoric and Reasoning and Michael J. Dodd's The One Creator God in Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology):

  In past unenlightened ages, it was a trope—and then a cliché—to denigrate a philosophical or theological view as bearing too much a resemblance to the “schoolmen” or the “scholastics.” In the last century, and even in this one, if you wish to dismiss summarily the mode or content of a book, simply call it a “manual” or its author a “manualist.” Surely you know the kind: those “Neo-Scholastic” manuals, written in a cramped Latin parceled out into enumerated paragraphs, all crested with a “nihil obstat” and appropriate "imprimatur."

  However, there is a lot about manuals that is simply a myth that needs to be quashed. This is because, as in any age in literate human history, there were good and bad books for students. Manuals overlapped with both. Furthermore, their use and abuse coincided with teachers both good and bad, and was incidentally tied to academic and ecclesial politics that either no longer apply or which now train their focus on other controversies. Blaming “the manualists” for the tribulations of philosophical and theological education partly overlaps with—and is about as accurate as—personally blaming Christian Wolff for the limitations of early Neo-Scholastic philosophy.

• Scheler vs. Nietzsche on Ressentiment Part 1 / Part 2. "The philosopher Max Scheler (1874-1928) wrote a striking book titled Ressentiment, in which he explains this feeling in dialogue with Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900). I read passages of both philosophers and comment on them to bring out the meaning of Ressentiment and where the two men agree and disagree. Both philosophers saw Ressentiment not only as a struggle for individuals, but as a growing sociological/cultural phenomenon, and perhaps their work can shed some light on our times."

• Sagan's Pale Blue Dot vs. The Christ Child Just Thomism 12/25/21:

  Sagan’s silence arises from his own awareness that the summum bonum is intrinsically and infinitely meaningful, and human love participates in it, notwithstanding the evident insignificance of human life. When we preserve both the truths that he says and leaves unsaid, therefore, what we get is not Sagan but Pascal. Human life is the paradoxical union of utter insignificance and infinite meaning, and our basic stance to life is both abject humility grounded in a true awareness of our nothingness and confidence that we exist to possess a good greater than the common good of the whole physical and angelic natural order. ...

• Was Vatican II a Bad Seed? ChurchLife Journal July 29, 2020 - John Cavadini responds to the latest screed from Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who "reduces Vatican II to a seedbed of contemporary error animated by the spirit of "Masonry."

• Radioactive - a 6-part biographical podcast on Father Charles Coughlin from The Tablet. See also: 1996 C-Span interview with Don Warren, author of Radio Priest: Charles Coughlin, The Father of Hate Radio, which I read some time ago.

• Ashley K. Fernandes, associate director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities at The Ohio State University, asks: Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis? The Tablet 12/10/20.

• The Raven is an "open access online magazine"

  ... of original philosophy written for intellectually curious readers with or without academic training in the discipline. It aims to revive an essayistic style of philosophy that was more common in academic venues as recently as thirty years ago but has gradually disappeared — that is, to publish contributions to the “literature” that deserve to be called literature.

• Discerning the Real John Ehrett reviews David Schindler's The Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integralism University Bookman. 06/27/01:

  ... Schindler’s critique of contemporary integralism (from within the Catholic tradition) is probably the best one on offer anywhere. For Schindler, leading integralist Edmund Waldstein’s foundational definition of integralism—which centers on the subordination of the “temporal power” to the “spiritual power”—erroneously confuses the contingent historical forms of medieval Christendom for an enduring theological principle. Specifically, the definition treats the Catholic Church and temporal state as entities subsisting on the same ontological “level” and so in some sense vying for control of the same monopoly on coercive power. Schindler insists that this mischaracterizes the essentially analogical relation between church and state: the Church is relevant to all of life, and the political order is relevant to all of life. The temporal order is not neutral or second-order ground, but ought to be understood as “theological” through and through, with the Church serving as an enduring witness to transcendent truth.

  Agree with his arguments or not, virtually no one engaged in debates over “liberalism” has thought as deeply as Schindler about the fundamental metaphysical questions involved, and yet it’s those questions that must be addressed for any conversation to meaningfully progress.

• Remembering Michael Novak’s “Democratic Capitalism”, Bradley J. Birzer. The Imaginative Conservative 09/27/21.

For Fun ...

• A Library the Internet Can’t Get Enough Of - New York Times 01/15/22.
• How Different Cartoonists Draw Water – Part II, by Ben Towle. In this post -- a continuation of an ealier 2008 post -- Ben Towle gives a fascinating tour of various comic artist's creative depictions of the element of water in their strips.

A bit of humor from Jacques Maritain (Reflections on America, 1958), commenting on the faux-optimism that is often mandated in the American workplace. Perhaps not so apropos in this day and age, where dourness prevails (what with the pandemic and all), but nonetheless elicited a chuckle:

The yearning to make life tolerable is best revealed, it seems to me, in the American smile. You meet on American streets smiling faces, which plunge you into a stream of quite general and anonymous good feeling. Of course, there is an immense part of illusion, of ritually accepted illusion, in the universal benignancy thus displayed.

I had a dentist in a small town whose nurses were so well trained that you were dazzled by their radiant smiles and their unshakeable optimism. Finally you came to think, in a kind of daydream, that the fact of dying in the midst of these happy smiles and the angel wings of these white, immaculate uniforms, would be a pure pleasure, a moment of no consequence. Relax, take it easy, it's nothing. Thereafter, you would enjoy the cleanness and happiness of the funeral home, and the chattering of your friends around your embalmed corpse.

l left this dentist, in order to protect within my mind the Christian idea of death.

Hans Boersma on George Orwell's 1984

Reading 1984 is medicine for souls like mine that have, perhaps unwittingly, accommodated to the militant secularism that engulfs today’s world—whether the conformity takes the shape of sipping hot chocolate in a Gothic apse or some other form. Here are some reasons why we might read 1984 as an act of penance. Among the salutary reminders that Orwell’s classic novel offers are the following:

• The past is not the object of our own construction. Totalitarian regimes attempt to alter the past, changing lies into truths by means of newspeak and doublethink. “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
• Language is closely tied to our most basic beliefs. Change or eliminate vocabulary, and you change the cultural mindset: “In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.”
• We dare not give up on objective reality. After much torture and self-examination, Winston, the protagonist, genuinely admits that two plus two make five. A key axiom, which our culture is in danger of eradicating, is Orwell’s conviction that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
• Nominalism has totalitarianism as its logical end point. If universals do not exist, we are thrown back upon ourselves, which means that truth equals power. As Winston’s interrogator puts it: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Even our inmost thoughts and convictions are subject to totalitarian control. Winston doesn’t initially believe this (“the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable”), but in the end, he submits every aspect of his will and intellect to the Party’s control.

-- Hans Boersma, First Things 12/31/21.

A Catholic Physician's perspective On COVID-19 Vaccines & Treatments

• A Physician’s Open Letter to Fellow-Catholics on COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatments: Part I: A review the history and data on mRNA vaccines. National Catholic Register 12/28/21.
• A Catholic Physician’s Response to FAQs on COVID-19 Vaccines and Treatments: Part II: A look at COVID-19 vaccine immunity, safety and morality National Catholic Register 12/30/21.

I am sure I am sounding like an old codger, but the one common thread with many of these interactions has been the youth of the interlocutors. Usually in their early twenties, sporting the shaved on the sides/long on the top hairstyle common amongst young men today, imbued with flaming machismo that is so ridiculous as to make them into little more than a Trad caricature. Many of them unemployed, living at home, or otherwise at the very bottom rung of the social ladder. Threads with young trad women are seldom any better.

I do not want to make this about youth; but at the same time, I cannot deny the pattern I have seen of late, and it's extremely depressing. Besides the evident lack of charity, it seems like a raw ignorance of what being a Traditional Catholic is even about. For many of these people Tradition seems to be primarily a social movement to "smash Western liberalism"; sometimes they say as much plainly. Obviously the entire ethos of Traditional Catholicism is opposed to the prevailing social mentality, but it would be profoundly wrong to view the Faith as essentially a contrarian social movement, even if it does oppose the modern zeitgeist.

When Trads Choose Barabbas Ut Unum Sanctum 05/09/21.

Happy 94th Birthday Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI!

Happy 94th birthday to Pope Emritus -- there are many things one might say in appreciation of Benedict XVI; in addition to his steadfast faith, spiritual wisdom and theological vision, I've long appreciated him as a fellow lover (and adoptee of) many a cat in his life.

The ultimate Catholic coronavirus vaccine morality explainer

The ultimate Catholic coronavirus vaccine morality explainer, by Michael Deem. The Pillar:

Since Covid-19 vaccines began to be discussed, Catholics have raised concerns about the moral and ethical aspects of taking them. While the Vatican and the USCCB have weighed in on the subject, a lot of Catholics still have questions.

To answer those questions, The Pillar brings you The Ultimate Catholic Coronavirus Morality Explainer.

Victor Ambrus (1935-2021)

Chances are if you ran across children’s book or YA editions of timeless classics like Moby Dick, The Iliad, The Oddysey, Don Quixote, King Arthur, The Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, J.R.R. Tolkien, English, Irish and Hungarian military history, as well as stories from The Bible — you may well have encountered the gorgeous, unique and unmistakeable illustrations of Victor Ambrus (1935-2021), who passed away last Wednesday (February 10th).

"... back in 1956, [Victor Ambrus] took part in the Hungarian Uprising. After escaping from a building with his fellow students when it came under fire from the Soviets, he eventually decided to leave his native Hungary and moved to England. After arriving in London, he continued his artistic dream and began to study at the Royal College of Art.

Whilst studying at the RCA, Victor embarked upon his first job as an illustrator, at just 20 years old. This first assignment was to illustrate the History of Britain for the Reader's Digest. This started his career as a historical illustrator, which has lead to him illustrating almost 300 books." -- Time Team

Related

• All about the fine quality black line: An interview with Victor Ambrus Playing by the Book
• Victor Ambrus interviewed by Julia Eccleshare Books for Keeps

Catholic Philosophy Classics - Getting a new life with Cluny Media

I've been updating various sites devoted to some favorite intellectual giants in Catholic though (a few of those who played a part in my own formation and conversion).

In the course of updating my page on the French Thomist Etienne Gilson, I discovered (much to my delight) that a Rhode Island publishing house called Cluny Media had fulfilled a personal wish of seeing a number of Gilson's old (outdated, and thus prohibitively expensive) books now back in print.

According to Cluny Media, "our publishing philosophy is simple":

A book, from cover to cover, should be an artifact, a work of art. Because our business is primarily to take the old and make it new, this philosophy demands a particular, careful process. Unlike the facsimile "republications" of other, similarly motivated publishers, Cluny editions are restorations. The restorative spirit especially animates the production and design elements of the publishing process.

You can read more about their publishing process and a brief history of their founding here.

Among their list of republished authors -- Georges Bernanos, Louis Bouyer, Paul Claudel, Jean Daniélou, Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Romano Guardini, Charles Journet, Jacques Maritain,. François Mauriac, John Henry Newman, Charles Péguy, Josef Pieper, Hugo Rahner, Joseph Ratzinger, Fulton Sheen and Sigrid Undset (among others).

p.s. I see that Sohrab Amari made a similar discovery, while looking for a book on Jean Danielou and has a nice profile of Cluny Media in First Things.

p.s.s. Sign up for their email list and receive a promotion code for a discount (+ free shipping on orders over $25).