The League of Bearded Catholics

Nature and Nature's God

Long story short: I've been overwhelmed with work the last several weeks and so apologize yet again for the appalling lack of beardful bloggage. All this apologizing is doing wonders for my humilty, though. I'm getting humbler and humbler, and am now probably more humble than most people I know.

I offer, then, this mediatation on our experience of God in nature, and how I think that may be different from natural science. This is lifted from an ongoing thread at the Christian Pipe Smokers forum;

 

Nature moves one toward belief in God and is reasonably used to support belief in God, but seen narrowly as a strictly scientific question, it lacks the kind of certainty that science seeks. The finite things of the world can not adequately prove the existence of an infinite God, as if you could write it down in an equation... "X+YxZ = God"

Philosophically, one can work out that an unmoved mover must exist, but that is more like pure reason, not a matter of testable scientific hypotheses, because there is no scientific proof even that reason means anything. Science is again, too small to address such questions. Science is contingent on reason and on the relaibility of our sense experiences.

Of course, the tragedy of the modern age is that science has been divorced from the kind of philosophical/metaphysical grounding that would make it really fruitful for the happiness and betterment of mankind. We "progress" scientifically, but are no better for it, and no happier.
I think that when St. Paul said "...since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." it's pretty unlikely he was thinking about science . The presence and glory of God are manifest in nature, even for those (perhaps especially for those) with little or no scientific understanding of what they are seeing.

I look at the universe and see it less as a mechanism and much more as a work of art. Science can tell us nothing about the meaning of the Pieta , or of Beethoven's Ode to Joy , or whether The Lord of the Rings movies do justice to the books. These are human experiences that are simply opaque to science.

I think the experience of the presence of God in nature is of this kind of character, and is beyond the (comparatively) narrow, dull certainties of a laboratory or supercomputer.

Discoveries of natural science can certainly multiply these opportunities to see God in nature (look at the photos from the Hubble telescope, or from electron microscopes), but I don't believe a scientist has any advantage in that regard over an aborigine watching the sun set.

A Culture Against Culture - Continued Ramblings

This got too long for the combox.

Reader Artaban writes (in response to this post),

"I would argue there was a common religion--insofar as it was Judeo-Christian."

There was certainly a greater commonality of outlook, though I think both Jews and Christians would agree that "Judeo-Christian" is not a religion, but a kind of cultural penumbra. It was the culture that flowed from Christianity with its Jewish roots, but it was not The Thing itself.

There were always those who were agreeable enough with the moral assumptions and outlook of the Faith, but who also did not hold that faith themselves. They coasted, more or less, on the philosophical momentum of Christendom, with little complaint.

But there was no *official* provision made to maintain this Judeo-Christian cultural prominence. I think the founders assumed that it would continue, but they made no real provision to assure that it would. For instance, though the Ten Commandments are enshrined in stone on the great frieze atop the steps of the Supreme Court, they are nowhere in our founding documents.

This is not to say that a Christian basis for law and government would require that any individual profess the Christian faith. It is just a matter of stating plainly, "The laws of our land are based on the Ten Commandments and on Christian principles of natural law. You need not believe or practice any religion, but you will follow the law." I don't think any reasonable person could have much of a problem with that, just as any reasonable person would abide by the laws and customs of a foreign country when visiting (unless they flat-out contradicted one's own fundamental morals, or positively compelled one to do evil).

The founders were so skittish, so anxious about the effects of organized religion (most especially anything like the Catholic Church) on the state, that they insulated the Republic from any such direct religious influence. I don't think they could have imagined the full-frontal assault on religion that has taken place in the last century. The primacy of Christian thought was so secure, in their minds, that they believed they could get by without explicitly favoring it. They were counting on its continued influence. George Washington said, "Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

But no official measures were taken to preserve religious principle. It was assumed. The elephant in our national living room.

It was Sola Scriptura, Enlightenment thinking. Every man his own magisterium. What could go wrong?

So... now we are reduced to battling it out among our various tribes, seeing who can get the upper hand politically from season to season, seeing who can sway the masses a little one way or the other. Morality by referendum, and principles that change with the weather.

Steamed Rice

Anne Rice is angry;

"In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control... In the name of ... Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen." - Anne Rice, via Twitter

Sounds a lot like "Non Serviam!!", from here. I don't know anything about Anne Rice, haven't read her books. I know there was a stir a while back when she deigned to re-enter the Church and grace us all with her presence. I'm always very cautious abour celebrity conversions and Mizz Rice illustrates one reason why.

People are flighty. They'll say and do things for all kinds of reasons at the drop of a hat... make vows, join the army, redecorate the living room. Celebrities seem even more than ususally restless and ungrounded, always - very publically - embracing this movement or that guru or endorsing some new miracle health lifestyle.

Oh, Anne, Anne... whence the righteous indignation? You sound for all the world like the naive and disillusioned victim of a bait-and-switch con. Had you no idea at all what Christianity was before you signed on? Were the Ten Commandments something you had just never come across, the way some people - by a kind of miracle of chance - have never had a hamburger?

Being a Christian means turning from your own will and embracing the will of God, especially in the teaching of Christ, which has been around for, well... a while now. It strikes me as more than a little disingenuous for you to walk out of the front door of the Church and cry, "I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that the Pope refuses to endorse gay marriage!"

That would be like me storming out of a PETA rally, protesting, "Why, I had no idea this was such a narrow-minded organization! They refused to hear my presentation on the benefits of eating hamburgers!".

At least she has the decency to leave, which is more than can be said for dissidents like Call to Action, who insist that, of course, they are the real Catholics... because they have the courage to reject everything even remotely associated with Catholicism. Anne Rice is sane enough, still, to see the contradiction.

Perhaps she will go and have herself de-baptized.

Anne Rice's real problem may be simply that she holds - has held her entire life - a narrow and naive picture of God as, well, a Tame Lion;

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness ... by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness -- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven -- a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all". - C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Addendum: The Curt Jester apparently has a similar take. Read Committed to My Own Personal Version of Christ.

While The Internet Monk and his readers find in the occasion cause for much introspective hand-wringing. Meh.

P.S. - I've edited the above, slightly. The original was too snarky.

And Speaking of Pagans...

Mark Shea has this post regarding the mystery of why liberal religious types reject both the holiness of the ancient Christian faith and the fun of the ancient paganism, preferring a watered down humanism wearing religious garb and playing church.

In it, he posts this poem by Chesterton, which is simply too good not to reproduce here;

THE SONG OF THE STRANGE ASCETIC

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have praised the purple vine,
My slaves should dig the vineyards,
And I would drink the wine.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And his slaves grow lean and grey,
That he may drink some tepid milk
Exactly twice a day.

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have crowned Neaera's curls,
And filled my life with love affairs,
My house with dancing girls;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced.

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have sent my armies forth,
And dragged behind my chariots
The Chieftains of the North.
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And he drives the dreary quill,
To lend the poor that funny cash
That makes them poorer still.

If I had been a Heathen,
I'd have piled my pyre on high,
And in a great red whirlwind
Gone roaring to the sky;
But Higgins is a Heathen,
And a richer man than I:
And they put him in an oven,
Just as if he were a pie.

Now who that runs can read it,
The riddle that I write,
Of why this poor old sinner,
Should sin without delight-
But I, I cannot read it
(Although I run and run),
Of them that do not have the faith,
And will not have the fun.

G.K. Chesterton from - Wine, Water & Song - 1913

On Black Metal, and Why It's Funny... and Cussing

Okay, I made the mistake this morning of picking up a Black Metal CD (that's music) and reading the lyric sheet. I then (wisely, or no) fired this off on Facebook;

Timothy Jones... Thinks Black Metal is hilarious. For a bunch of supposed Neo-Pagans (*snerk*), they sure talk about Jesus alot. They're obsessed with Christianity. Don't like my religion? Fine. Sleep in on Sunday, or play World of Warcraft if you can work up sufficient mental energy. The infantile fixation on my religion I find very funny.

Also, the badass Black Metal lyrics (you know, they're all going to drink blood from the skulls of the vanquished, yadda, yadda...) are incredibly ironic coming from what appear to be such pasty faced youngsters. Get some sun, boys. You wouldn't know a warrior if he walked out of the VFW and kicked your scrawny ass up between your shoulder blades.

Okay, I said "ass". Looks like time for a post on swearing, too. Over at Jimmy Akin's blog, a commenter noted that alot of French Canadian swear words are based on Catholic sacraments and other holy things. Makes sense in a dark sort of way, kind of like the way these Black Metal dudes just can't get Jesus out of their minds. To swear really effectively, you have to have something to swear by, or swear on. There are the perenially obvious scatological references, of course, and sexual words, but the shock of these things is just the idea of dragging them out of private thought and into the open air of conversation. The shock of real swearing - cursing - is quite different and involves a different kind and degree of profanation, which assumes the existence o something really holy that can be profaned.

And that is what gives these Black Metal and Death Metal and Whatever-Metal lyrics the only power they have; the profanation of something powerfully sacred. Without the Sacred Things to tear down and rail against, they simply have nothing at all to say. What potency their music has is smuggled in from the archetypal image of God.

Without the Mona Lisa, Salvador Dali's painting is just some facial hair floating in the air. Without the energy and genius of a small army of architects and engineers, the 9-11 terrorists would have had no Twin Towers to knock down, and no planes to fly into them. Their only power is stolen from the inspired work of others. They, like Satan, can only destroy, and without anything to destroy, they have nothing to do. They are absolutely dependent on the life and creativity of God for their raw materials.

What Is Authentic Catholic Culture, Anyhow?

When The League was started a few months ago, I included in the blog masthead the subtitle, "A raucous celebration of authentic Catholic culture".

Now, because your humble blogmaster has been so cruelly hampered by the demands of real life, we have not been so raucous yet as I hope for us to be. But today I'm pondering more exactly what it was I meant by the words "authentic Catholic culture".

I am an adult convert, of very limited learning, and so my progress toward an authentic Catholic culture in my own life has been a kind of lurching forward in fits and starts. I had absolutely no template to follow from friends or family, and living as I do in the Bible Belt, there is little of Catholic cultural influence to be detected. In that sense, I envy both cradle Catholics and those who live in areas of the country where there is a more visible Catholic history.

When I started reading Chesterton, several years ago, I began to get the sense of what a living Catholic culture might look like, or ought to look like. Not that it would be easy to put into a few words.

I mention all this because it might appear to the casual visitor that my idea of Authentic Catholic Culture™ is simply a kind of idealized fantasy of British culture a century ago, with a Christian gloss. That might be somewhat excusable, given that the Four Patrons of The League are all British writers from the last century... but it would be incorrect.

Here are some reasons why the Four Patrons - Tolkien, Lewis, Belloc and Chesterton - are so pivotal, I think;

For one thing, I am an American, and our heritage in the United States is English to a large degree, so it's natural that we would find familiar territory in the writing of the Big Four. English is our native tongue (as much it may pain the English to be reminded of that) and these are some of the most affective and influential Christian writers who ever communicated in the English language. Not that you can't find many better or more important writers in English, or more holy Christians to study. These Christian men were not just at home in the English tongue, but knew how to wring the most out of it in ways that might be opaque to those not born to the language. Many modern readers in English might find Chesterton nearly opaque, anyway, as our culture and his grow further apart.

In addition, because of their relative position in history and their classical learning, the Big Four were in a sort of unique position to witness the great cultural shift that occurred from the Medieval world to the Modern world, and to describe with great clarity how the fruit of modernism - existential despair, hubris, the industrial age - ripened and then began to rot. There was, in England at the end of the nineteenth century, still a great deal of the Old World - of Medieval Christendom - preserved in the culture. This is not true of the United States, which was founded on Enlightenment principles and which breathed the very air of the Reformation and modernism. Quite literally, the New World.

Chesterton, in particular, saw this great upheaval - this slow-motion tidal wave - and perceived its true nature, narrating the changes with astonishing clarity. The New World was not only antagonistic to Christianity, but to the organic paganism that Christianity had largely supplanted and in fact, to anything that had up until that time been conceived of as human. Modernism is simply opposed to humanity by any previously and commonly accepted definition of the word.

Tolkien translated this vision into a monumental work of artistic imagination that brought these truths to an audience that might never otherwise have picked up a book of theology or religion.

The plain-spoken Lewis made the observations and arguments lucid and accessible to a wider scope of modern readers. Chesterton is simply brilliant, and anyone willing to read him enough to grow familiar with his style will be rewarded many times over for their work, but Lewis expounded these truths in everyday language, for which many people are grateful. Not everyone gets Chesterton's poetic sensibility, Belloc's rhetorical fire, or Tolkien's fantastic vision. If not for Lewis, I might never have read Chesterton. He served as a gateway to all the rest (though I had read The Hobbit before I read anything by Lewis. I was familiar with LOTR, but not very aware of its Christian themes). As a knuckle-headed twenty-something, Chesterton would have been pretty deep wading.

By virtue of their place and time - their particular vantage point of culture, language and history - the Four Patrons are able to give modern readers - most especially native English speaking Westerners - a true account of the arc of history, especially as it concerns the root causes of the accelerating decay of Western civilization.

Though an authentic Catholic culture could be found in any sort of society (it favors peasant culture, I think), we in the modern West will naturally be more concerned about what an authentic Western Catholic culture should look like. It's no good me trying to be an authentically African Catholic or Chinese Catholic. Their own ideas of Authentic Catholic Culture will be for them to work out. It would be fascinating to sit down and winnow out the common grains, though.

Finally, Chesterton/Belloc and Lewis/Tolkien are two great examples of the kind of male friendship which encompasses all that is essentially and vitally human, from the ground up, celebrating all the goodness of the Creator and His created world, baptizing every aspect of human endeavour and relationship in the the light of the Incarnation, and resurrecting every nobly exuberant impulse of genuine pagan gratitude.

Between our astringent Puritan religious roots and our bleak, post-modern industrial culture, we could use a bracing blast of baptised, resurrected and purified Pagan joy;

'Tho times be hard and fortunes tough,
The ways be foul and the weather rough;
We are of stout south country stock
Who cannot have strong ale enough

Hilaire Belloc - from Sussex Drinking Song

 

 In fact, though we commonly hear how Catholicism is the true flowering or living fulfillment of the Old Testament Jewish faith, it is just as much the living fulfillment and effluorescence of all that was good and true in every kind of honest and ancient paganism. What's tragically funny is that what is now called the New Paganism turns out to be either the lifeless embalming of, or else a parody of, the more noble Old Paganism. The real vitality of the old Paganism is preserved now only within the Church.

That's confirmed in Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, somewhere, I'm sure of it. I'll look it up.

Pope-Slapped!

By posting this picture from an anti-Catholic protest in Germany, the folks at Irreligion.org totally pay the highest possible compliment to the Pope without realizing it. I don't recommend you visit the site, but credit where credit is due... the dinosaur just needs a beard, though.

On a forum where I hang out, Christian Pipe Smokers, a member has coined the term "Pope-slapped", which is a fun term for (as near as I can gather) "receiving a papal smack-down".

It was meant, I think, in a playfully pejorative way, as the one who coined it is definitely not a Catholic, or even very sympathetic with Catholic practices.

The press has lately noted with some genuine astonishment the fact that the late Pope John Paul II "whipped" himself, or as ABC News sort-of more accurately phrased it, he made use of an "ancient ritual of self-flagellation". The word "ritual" is not really helpful or correct in this case, methinks. Flagellation is an ancient practice, not so much a ritual.

The press, and others, are surprised to find that the Pope in fact "Pope-slapped" himself. They are surprised for a couple of reasons, I suppose.

For one, John Paul II was often thought to be a kind of post-modern, media-savvy pope, popular with the kids... with his baby face and gentle smile, he was sort of harmless and fuzzy as popes go, though the secular opinion makers somehow contrived to be continually shocked and disappointed that he remained stubbornly Catholic. In the modern mind, images of private self-flagellation and warm public smiles and waves are not easily juxtaposed. Cuddly father figures who ski and play soccer just don't whip themselves over dusty old concepts like Sin and Penance. His baby face concealed an Inner Beard of apparently impressive proportions.

And then there is the practice, itself. Flagellation involves two concepts absolutely alien to contemporary thinking; a living, ancient tradition, and self-mortification. The modern West has been all about moving forward and leaving behind - dropping like a hot rock - anything too reminiscent of the past. Traditions are things you throw off.  This sort of thing was supposed to have died out with the Inquisition and the Crusades and Galileo and (oh, where's a handy cliche when you need one?)... did I mention the Crusades? Truthfully, the practice goes back way past the Middle Ages to the Desert Fathers, at least.

Self-denial and discipline are also unpopular ideas. Oh, you can sell any sort of diet plan, but the ones that sell best seem to be the ones that promise to make an end-run around the slow and arduous spiritual process of training in Moderation. The exercise programs and their varied machines all hint at miraculous results in "20 minutes, three times a week". The idea of physical disipline for the sake of spiritual health is generally seen as nonsense talk, except for a few New-Age health spa types, and bring Sin into it and they are amused at best and positively affronted at worst . Even most Christians don't get the concept of actual, you know, penance.

The Church, the ancient and living Church, when seen clearly is a lot like seeing a real, honest-to-Pete dinosaur - say a Triceratops - walking around in Manhattan... a thing that (by all natural indicators) ought to be not only dead, but long extinct. Finding a fresh Triceratops carcass would be a nearly unfathomable mystery, but seeing a living specimen, walking - to hear it and smell it, to feel the pavement shake - that would hardly fit into one's brain.

And yet, that is what the Church is. Her critics even love to call her a dinosaur, and talk about her stone-age doctrines, but they are thrown into deep confusion when the dinosaur seems to move and breathe ("Just out the corner of my eye... was that? Naw... couldn't be..."). It doesn't fit into their heads. When the modern world imagines a popular and loveable public figure whipping himself over his sins, they feel the breath of the dinosaur on their very faces for a moment. It's disconcerting.

Over the last several decades, some in the Church (those more infected with the modern virus) have talked about The Dinosaur Effect as a kind of scandal or an embarrassment. It shocks and confuses people, they say, makes them uncomfortable. They have proposed hiding the dinosaur, dressing it as a more popular and less threatening animal, maybe, like a Panda or (that's it!) a Dolphin (people love dolphins... they poll very high). The spectacle of the Church as a living, breathing, ancient and impossible creature with eyes and scales and teeth makes them wring their hands.

But a huge fake panda or dolphin people can probably see in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. The Church is meant, in some sense, to be gawked at, to make jaws drop, even if in a kind of horror, as people might look at a dinosaur in Manhattan. We are commanded to love our neighbors, not to make them love us.

"Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man." - Luke 6:22