The Tyranny of the Banal: On the Renewal of Catholic Moral Theology (Renewal: Conversations in Catholic Theology) 9781978700819, 9781978700826, 1978700814

Table of contents :
Cover
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction
Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal
The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning
Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens
Dying and the Tyranny of Despair
Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire
The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life
Selected Bibliography of Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The Tyranny of the Banal

Renewal CONVERSATIONS IN CATHOLIC THEOLOGY

Series Editors

Lewis Ayres, University of Durham, UK Medi Ann Volpe, University of Durham, UK This series seeks to extend theological conversations begun at the Second Vatican Council, for Roman Catholic and ecumenical readers alike, providing historical context for changes given by the Council, exploring discussions that have flowed from it, and offering new works in a constructive mode, all in the spirit of renewal and continuity. Editors seek works in systematic, historical, and liturgical theology, and theological ethics. Titles in the series The Tyranny of the Banal: On the Renewal of Catholic Moral Theology, by David Deane

The Tyranny of the Banal On the Renewal of Catholic Moral Theology David Deane

L E X I N G T O N B O O K S / F O RT R E S S A C A D E M I C

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-9787-0081-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-9787-0082-6 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Acknowledgments

As I wrote this book, I was aware of support from many people. I am blessed to work among wonderfully supportive colleagues at Atlantic School of Theology. Rev. Dr. Rob Fennell and Professor Daniel Driver read and discussed early sections and I am grateful to them, especially. My gratitude also goes to Brenda Munro and Pine Hill Divinity Hall for their support in providing research assistants for this book, not least Nicole Snook and Rev. Kym Burke. Significant thanks are also owed to Jenna Young, Stephanie Potter, and Brandon Rabideau for their research work. This book could not have been written by a theologian isolated from the challenges facing the Catholic Church in the modern West. I am blessed to be working in a supportive Archdiocese where the work of theologians is utilized to the fullest. I am very grateful to Archbishop Brian Dunn and his team. Thanks too are due to the Patrick Power Trust for their support. This book is an answer to questions asked in the New Evangelization program at AST, and this program would not be possible without them. I am grateful to Lexington/Fortress Academic for their patience and to Professor Lewis Ayres, whose advice was and is so important to me. Sincere love and thanks to my family. My parents, Marian and Henry, raised me in the faith, and my wife, Jennifer, nurtures me in it. My children Sophia, Chora, and Áine love me, whether this book is any good or not. I really am the luckiest man. If this book is ambitious, it is because of the freedom that the support of my school, my church, and most of all my family affords me. They will all still laugh at me and accept me, whether my self-important attempt to help renew Catholic moral theology succeeds or fails. I am grateful to God for them, and for everything else, too.

v

Contents

Acknowledgments v Introduction ix Chapter 1‌‌‌: Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal



1

Chapter 2: The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning Chapter 3: Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens Chapter 4‌‌‌‌: Dying and the Tyranny of Despair



117

Chapter 5‌‌‌: Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited Index



71





Chapter 6‌‌‌: The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

33



161 205 243

259

About the Author



271

vii

Introduction

In a 2016 census, 78 percent of Irish people self-identified as Catholic. In a 2018 referendum on abortion, an overwhelming majority of these same Irish Catholics voted against the Catholic understanding of abortion in order to liberalize abortion laws in Ireland. This is just one example of the fact that Catholic teaching on morality, especially concerning contested issues such as abortion and sexuality, is failing. Similarly, in the United States, 82 percent of Catholics disagree with Church teaching on contraception. These statistics tell us something that we didn’t really need statistics to tell us—Catholic teaching on morality fails to convince. It does not merely fail to convince those in wider secular society, it fails to convince Catholics. Why is this? The most obvious answer is that traditional Catholic positions, at least concerning contentious issues like abortion, sexuality, and euthanasia, are unconvincing. Many scholarly approaches in moral theology proceed on the basis of this assumption. Because of this, they seek to update Church teaching to make it cohere with the intellectual idioms of the twenty-first century.1 At the risk of oversimplifying these approaches, they often hold that Catholic positions are predicated upon unscientific, pre-modern accounts, such as we find in Aquinas or Augustine. Such approaches are untenable today, they argue, and so we need to offer moral positions more in keeping with contemporary intellectual norms.2 Despite this being the most obvious answer to why Catholic positions are failing to be convincing, there are two reasons why this position itself is unconvincing. First, we find things convincing not simply because of elements internal to argumentation, but also on elements external to it. The culture in which our moral arguments emerge shapes how they’re expressed and received. The assumptive world that our culture establishes creates thresholds3 that inform (and, for some, determine) our beliefs. Most critiques of traditional Catholic moral positions pay far too little attention to this as well as to the dominant cultural pressure to reject Catholic positions and, instead, conform to thresholds that are culturally hegemonic. Upton Sinclair ix

x

Introduction

famously said, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on him not understanding it.”4 This principle impacts the likelihood of people being convinced by Catholic moral theology today. Why would someone believe, for example, that a sexual act between two men is immoral when this belief would cost them social standing, friends, and influence? Believing it would make people assume you are an ignorant, ill-informed bigot. It would lead to people assuming derisory things about your level of education. Believing it would be to swim against the stream of ideology promoted by Google, Apple, and Amazon, it would be to transgress against the “doodles” that adorn our search pages, and the watch faces that celebrate Pride month—it would be to accept the status of “stranger” while crossing the rainbow-colored crosswalks that we traverse daily. It would be to risk relationship with one’s colleagues in academia and to identify with closed-minded, often psychologically damaged villains in Hollywood movies and tv shows. On social media it would be to be seen to be against #love, which #wins and so to be on the side of #h8, which #loses. Why would any sane person support Catholic theological positions when this is the cost? Because of these elements, before assuming that the unpopularity of traditional Catholic positions on abortion, sexuality, and euthanasia is because they are unconvincing, we need to be more attentive to the hegemonic cultural power that helps render Catholic positions unconvincing. Most engagements with traditional Catholic moral theology aren’t attentive to them, nor explicitly engage them in their analysis. Such shortcomings will not be found in this book. Second, and more significantly, Catholic positions are unconvincing because the expressions of these positions, offered by both critics and defenders, are themselves unsatisfactory. While both attackers and defenders express the traditional moral maxims held by Augustine or Aquinas—for example, that sex apart from sacramental marriage is immoral—they both, far too often, fail to explore the dogmatic foundational grammar upon which such a position in Augustine or Aquinas was based. While modern moral theology, ethics, and “bio-ethics” is increasingly separate and distinct from Trinitarian theology, for example, the moral theology of pre-moderns is not. Because of this, when Catholic moral positions are offered and assessed in modern contexts, they are too often shorn of the theological apparatus—without which they lack coherence. Defenders of traditional Catholic positions frequently advance them without this rationale as, from their perspective, being Church teaching, the positions need no defense. Attackers reject them on various grounds, but also, as we see in the work of Keenan and Farley, they do so while abstracting it from the dogmatic setting in which it functioned in the tradition. In both the defenders and attackers, the kind of legalistic or deontological lenses that

Introduction

xi

frame how we understand the moral life in modernity obscures the ontological lens that is necessary to make sense of the Catholic understanding. As I will show in this book, both modern critics and defenders of Catholic positions too often assume a modern, legalist, or deontological lens and in so doing miss the ontological grammar for the moral life we find in figures like Augustine and Aquinas. Engaging moral theology within the setting of dogmatic theology is the second central aim of this book. In sum, there are two reasons that drive my hesitancy to assume that traditional Catholic moral positions are unconvincing (despite the failure of Catholic moral theology to convince people in the modern West). First, the assumption that Catholic moral thought is unconvincing is aided by culturally hegemonic power. This is a fact that we pay far too little attention to. And second, the Catholic positions that so many find unconvincing are often wholly inadequate expressions of the traditional Catholic positions themselves. Because of these two things, before we can accept that traditional Catholic approaches are unconvincing, we need to (i) challenge the hegemonic grammar that renders them untenable and (ii) reconnect them with the ontological grammar on which they were based. These are the two moves I seek to make in this book. THE STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK I seek to make these two moves in three interwoven sections. In the first section, I will spend two chapters distinguishing the ontology and epistemology that drives Catholic moral theory from those driving hegemonic perspectives in the modern West. The hegemonic perspectives, I illustrate, are parasitic upon the Catholic ones. Where they grow, the catholic Christian5 perspectives shrink. Thus, in section one, I begin to critique this parasitic ontology and epistemology and, instead, propose catholic Christian alternatives. This critique involves showing the epistemological moves central to modern thought and detailing the pathologies central to them. By doing this I seek to loosen their hold. They are like cement in which Catholic thought cannot take root. Showing the inherent pathologies can begin to break up this cement. If this is successful then the alternative ontology, a Trinitarian one central to catholic Christianity (which I introduce in chapter 2), can take root. This Trinitarian ontology is detailed not only to contrast with the analysis offered in chapter 1. It is also detailed as it is the basis of the moral catholic positions engaged in the following chapters. The first section of the book, then, shows two opposing ontologies, which represent the “engines” that propel moral positions,

xii

Introduction

both those hegemonic within the secular W ‌‌‌est, and those central to catholic Christianity. The second section focuses on three contested moral spaces—abortion, sex, and dying—in which these two ontological and epistemological “engines” propel competing approaches. For the Catholic positions to have life (a) hegemonic positions must be critiqued and (b) Catholic positions must be reconnected with the foundational ontology and epistemology that made them coherent and beautiful. This critique and reconnection is my task in each of these three chapters. The final section consists in one chapter, which seeks to answer two questions that the first five have inevitably produced. Namely, (1) “If the parasitic grammar is so problematic and the catholic Christian one so coherent, then how has the former come to dominate to such an extent that the latter is almost dead?” and (2) “What can be done to help resuscitate and renew the Catholic perspective?” CARTHAGE It is important to note here, at the outset, that the critique which represents one of the two core moves in this book (alongside the renewal of an ontological grammar for Catholic moral positions) is not a critique of “Modernity” or “the Secular” per se. It is a critique of a grammar often found within such discourses. Neither modernity nor secularity are dependent upon this grammar. Ontologically, the grammar I critique reduces the real to the material. Epistemologically, it reduces reason to operation in relation to the quantifiable and verifiable. Through these two elements, it serves as the flip side of catholic Christianity’s coin. Where it is visible, the catholic Christian moral grammar will become invisible. Like Carthage and Rome, where one grows, the other shrinks, where one lives the other will die. If I was reading this, I would assume that the book I was beginning was about to offer a battle between “Christendom” and Modern Secularism. And if I liked such projects, I would grab my popcorn and settle in, or, if I didn’t, I’d raise my eyebrows and throw this book away, muttering something about the toxicity of “nostalgia.” But, despite my “Carthage” rhetoric, this book is not about anything so broad as “society,” politics, or even culture. I am interested, instead, in two distinct ways of understanding reason and the real, and the strands of ontological and epistemological “genetic code” that shapes cultures of moral reasoning. One strand fueled a catholic Christian approach to the moral life, and the other strand deprives this approach of the intellectual foundations it needs to exist. This latter strand has fuelled a rapidly replicating secular culture of moral theory. It is abundant in the ecosystem of the

Introduction

xiii

modern West. In part because of this abundance, in part because of its own failures, the Catholic strand is close to extinction. My focus is precisely on these strands, rather than the ecosystems they help shape. Because of this, it is not modernity, nor “the secular,” nor any modern Western ecosystem, that I am critiquing per se. A modernity, even a secular modernity, can be imagined in which the elements that I identify as central to a pathological grammar are not sacrosanct.6 In such a modernity, truly diverse “others,” not least catholic Christians and Muslims, could abide. Rather than an attack on modernity or “the Secular,” this book attempts to begin the deconstruction of a particular grammar, a precise set of ontological and epistemological assumptions, which represent one dispensable strand of secular modernity. The hold of this specific strand—not of secularity itself, modernity, or anything so grand— must be loosened, if a catholic Christian understanding of the moral life is to be reinvigorated. CHAPTER OUTLINE I begin the book with a story about how two grammars drive core aspects of moral theory in the modern West. The first grammar is my focus in chapter 1 and has roots in the Enlightenment as well as the late medieval philosophical moves that informed it. In the quest for certainty, it reduces the operation of reason to things measurable and verifiable. Because of this it promotes an effective materialism (matter being that which is most measurable) and clumps non-material things (like God, flying spaghetti monsters, and the good) together in the space outside of reason. This, I show in chapter 1, has had problematic consequences. It is insufficient as a grammar for signifying the real and has fueled the reduction of personhood to attributes—an engine of nineteenth- and twentieth-century horrors. Thus, for both intellectual and ethical reasons, its hold needs to be loosened. In addition to such epistemological and cultural pathologies (and thus its inadequacy on its own terms) the renewal of a catholic Christian grammar for thinking about abortion, sex, and dying depends on the hold of this grammar being loosened. The other element necessary for the renewal of the culture of Catholic moral theology—the re-connecting of Catholic moral positions to the ontological grammar that gave them life—begins in chapter 2. Here I argue that to understand the kind of moral grammar we see driving traditional Catholic positions in the later chapters, we need to understand how the Christian doctrine of God informs catholic Christian moral theology. This chapter proceeds as a simple unpacking of creedal faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and shows how this grammar norms the moral life—the

xiv

Introduction

space in which people receive this Holy Spirit, conforming them to the Son, in whom they can be united to the Father. Traditionally understood, catholic Christian moral theology is the study of how people, in embodied actions, can accept the self-giving of the Holy Spirit, or reject it. Eating, praying, or having sex, are practices in which we can say “yes” to God’s self-giving (thereby embodying union with the Holy Spirit) or say “no” to it. The moral life, as understood by the figures as different as Augustine and Aquinas, is never based in an arid legalism or disembodied Gnosticism but precisely in this kind of ontological understanding. The book seeks to illustrate this, first detailing the doctrinal foundations for this moral grammar in chapter 2 and then showing these foundations as the basis for the positions that figures like Augustine and Aquinas occupy in the contested spaces I explore in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 bring the grammars introduced in the first section into the most contested spaces of the twenty-first century—debates surrounding abortion (chapter 3), sex and sexuality (chapter 4) and euthanasia (chapter 5). In all three, the two main goals of this book—a deconstruction of the hold secular moral categories have and the reconnection of Catholic positions to the Trinitarian grammar in which they emerged—are the main focus. But they also engage the books subtheme, which is an illustration that the hold of public space on the Christian moral imagination is problematic. This is not as significant a factor in the collapse of the Catholic moral imagination as the ascent of secular moral reasoning and the divorce of Catholic positions from their foundation in the doctrine of the Trinity, but it is a factor. This is illustrated most clearly in chapter 3, on abortion and chapter 4, on the end of life. In public spaces—for example political space, legislative space, or the spaces of social media—Christians quickly relinquish a Christian grammar in order to convince others and “win” debates. They appeal to rights language or use images that draw on epistemological models dominant in modernity. One problem with this, I show, is that traditional Christian opposition to abortion is based on specifically theological grammars, not least those drawing heavily on “the soul” as a theological category. Using Aquinas, I show how a model of the person, predicated upon a robust account of the soul, determines much pre-modern opposition to abortion. As such, the very things that make the Catholic understanding of the immorality of abortion coherent are sacrificed in the vain attempt to “win” debates. Therefore, even if the aim of “winning” is successful, it comes increasingly at the cost of forgetting the theological basis for Christian opposition to abortion. Thus, Christians become more established as members of modernist political tribes, while becoming increasingly less Christian in their thinking. It is understandable that Christians would strive to win these debates by abandoning Christian moral reasoning. In the Irish referendum on abortion

Introduction

xv

in June 2018, Christians could not expect a Christian grammar to convince a population who were either not Christian or, more likely, were Christian but to whom a properly Christian grammar would be alien. Further, not least due to the horrors of sexual abuse and ecclesial cover up of such abuse, the Catholic Church is toxic to broad sections of the population. Thus, in pragmatic terms, the decision by primate of Ireland, Archbishop Eamon Martin, to frame abortion as “not a Catholic issue”7 is easy to understand. Easy to understand but, nonetheless, misguided and deeply problematic. Deeply problematic, first of all, because it is not true. While some may assume that the immorality of abortion is evident on the grounds of secular reason alone, polls and referenda, such as the one in Ireland, show that this is false. Further, it is a strategy that fuels a forgetting. This forgetting is evident, as I show, in the fact that much modern Christian opposition to abortion is shorn of the traditional grammar, which opposition to abortion, prior to modernity, was based on. The grammar that grounds opposition to abortion in, for example, Aquinas, cannot be found in most modern Catholic texts. To be sure, the moral maxims—that abortion from conception is gravely immoral—are maintained. But the rationale for such maxims has been largely forgotten. In contrast to this, chapter 3, on abortion, like the two that follow it, attempts to re-connect the Catholic understanding of abortion to the theological categories that fuelled this understanding. The only chapter of the three on contested moral spaces that does not address the tension between the “public” and the tradition specific, is chapter 5, on sex and sexuality. Here the focus is exclusively on restoring the links between Catholic theology on sex and sexuality to the Trinitarian grammar that norms all Catholic theology. The result is a theology which maintains the precepts and prohibitions we find throughout the tradition, but goes behind such precepts and prohibitions to unveil the beauty and coherence that underpins them. Augustine is a key dialog partner, not least because whether you are a critic of Catholic positions or a defender, all agree that Augustine is a key driver. This is not to say that Augustine represents a full or complete expression of what becomes the Catholic position, but the reading of Augustine’s treatments of marriage in isolation from the overall shape of his theology distorts them. As chapter 3 sought to deconstruct the hold political grammars have on the issue of abortion, chapter 5 seeks to deconstruct the hold that widely shared narratives (not least those of natural science) have on how we understand the end, or goal, of life. Such grammars, I argue, fail hopelessly to engage with death and dying and instead seek only to sequester it from our view. In contrast, by reconnecting Catholic perspectives on dying to a Trinitarian grammar, I illustrate how such perspectives alone can offer resistance to the

xvi

Introduction

tyranny of the banal, established through narratives that are hegemonic in the twenty-first century. Chapter 6 concludes the book by responding to two questions that, if my argument prior to this has been successful, will have emerged. I hope, by this stage, to have shown something of the beauty and coherence of the traditional catholic Christian positions while problematizing and illustrating the insufficiency of dominant perspectives. The first question which should hopefully emerge is “how has the catholic Christian grammar, seen in chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5, been so easily overrun by the grammar explored in chapter 1 and seen as the shadow side in chapters 3, 4, and 5?” The second is—“how can the catholic Christian moral grammar be more fecund and grow from the radically etiolated state it is in?” Chapter 6 seeks to begin the task of answering these questions. It explores the way that things we do with our body, not least in the Mass, shape how we think and act. It explores how thresholds shape belief, and how potent the formation of each single person is toward the pollination of our moral imagination. The renewal of this culture of moral theology cannot be achieved solely by the kinds of intellectual moves this book begins. It requires embodied actions and, hence, a focus on specific forms of liturgical practice. As such, this book aims to be a piece of a much broader renewal. It establishes foundations for thinking about the moral life in coherently Catholic ways. But the renewal of Catholic positions can not occur without a renewal of how we understand and participate in the Mass. The statistics I mentioned at the start of this introduction, statistics that show a lack of belief in Catholic moral positions, is mapped by an increasing lack of belief in the real presence in the eucharist.8 These collapses coincide and mirror each other. This final chapter shows how the loss of what I call a “transubstantive grammar” plays a key role in the collapse of the Catholic moral imagination. Because of this the renewal of the Catholic moral imagination can not be envisioned without reference to the practices, especially the liturgical practices, that norm the Christian life. BIG C SMALL C My focus is on Roman Catholic moral theology. But the moral theology and the Trinitarian grammar that drives it predate the reformation. Much of what I discuss in this book is not simply Roman Catholic. To acknowledge this, I use “catholic Christian” to refer to theological positions that are clearly representative of orthodox Christian positions, but I use “Catholic” to refer to positions held today by the Roman Catholic church but which are frequently rejected in other Christian denominations. My hope is that this book may, some day, be in the service of a broader renewal, that of catholic Christianity.

Introduction

xvii

NOTES 1. For example, Margaret Farley, who, in her Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (London: Continuum, 2006) seeks, pace Augustine, Aquinas and traditional approaches, to ground an approach to sex and sexuality in modern notions of Justice. 2. For example, see Uta Ranke Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith, trans. Peter Heinegg (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994). 3. See Mark Granovetter, “Threshold Models of Collective Behaviour,” in The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 83, no. 6 (May 1978): 420–1443. 4. Upton Sinclair and James Gregory, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked (California: University of California Press, 1994). 5. Later in this introduction I will describe how I use terms such as “Catholic” and “catholic Christian” in this book. 6. As Charles Taylor has argued for. 7. Charles Collins, “Irish primate urges No on abortion vote, says not a ‘Catholic’ issue,” May 19, 2018, accessed June 18, 2018, https:​//​cruxnow​.com​/church​-in​-uk​ -and​-ireland​/2018​/05​/19​/irish​-primate​-urges​-no​-on​-abortion​-referendum​-says​-its​-not​ -a​-catholic​-issue​/ 8. https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2019​/08​/FT​_19​.08​.05​_ Transubstantiation​_Topline​.pdf

Chapter 1‌‌‌

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

In all the times I’ve visited my doctor, she has never once told me that I have nice teeth or complimented me on my handwriting. Although I might have good teeth and nice handwriting, her task is to identify problems that need to be fixed. Because of this, she talks to me about my weight, chides me for not getting enough sleep, and once had the temerity to tell me that the albumin levels in my liver were too low. So too, in this chapter, my focus will not be on the good teeth or exceptional handwriting of Western modernity.1 We can’t deny the many wonderful things commensurate with the last few centuries, not least a lessening of the patriarchy and misogyny that was far too evident in the Christian past. But, like my doctor, my focus in this chapter is not on the good things that do not need attention, it is on the problems that do need attention. I want to highlight these problems because they are the “engine” that drives hegemonic moral positions in our contemporary Western social orders. In order to call into question these hegemonic positions and propose Christian ones, I need to show why they are so problematic. This is the goal of this chapter. I will do so by showing (1) That they fail to achieve the goal their originators set out for them. Kant is a key figure in this chapter, and I will show that the measures he takes in order to safeguard reason and morality, in fact, condemns both. (2) I will show how these problems impede Western social orders from navigating differences thereby ensuring the ongoing oppression of otherness, and (3) I will show that they helped fuel some of the horrors we have seen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is important to note that I am not juxtaposing modernity, as a whole, with Christian moral thought. I am suggesting that core elements in the genetic code of modernity—for example, a reduction of the real to the phenomenal and a reduction of reason to the measurable—are wholly parasitic upon Christian moral theology. Where they abide, Christian moral perspectives die. Hence the renewal of Christian moral theology, which this book calls for, 1

2

Chapter 1

requires that the hegemony of these ideas ends. Not modernity as a whole, but these specific epistemological elements, are Carthage to the Christian moral imagination’s Rome. Rome and Carthage were expanding spheres of influence in the Mediterranean and as Carthage grew, Rome shrank. As Rome grew, Carthage shrank. They were diametrically opposed, and, for Cato, for Rome to continue to exist, Carthage must be destroyed. So too the epistemological problems in the “genetic code” of modernity must be destroyed in order for Christian moral theology to continue to be. This chapter attempts this with reference to moves made by Kant2 (among others) who (1) binds reason to certitude as its telos and (2) rejects noumena as epistemologically meaningless. The first move, I will show, effectively ghettoizes reason, reducing its operation to things that are quantifiable and measurable. The second move makes the relativism we see in Nietzsche, inevitable; a relativism that is becoming increasingly hegemonic in the twenty-first century. Ironically, Kant makes these moves in the very hopes of saving reason and morality from relativism (which he sees anticipated in the work of Hume) but by these very moves, like a figure in Greek tragedy, he makes certain the very fate he seeks to avoid. THE BINDING OF REASON Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason lays down principles that come to represent the grammar for how we think about knowledge and “the real” in modernity. His goal is to safeguard reason itself and to establish it on a firm foundation. To achieve this, he moves the focus from the real, about which we cannot be certain, to cognition of the real via the senses. For Kant, we must bracket the ontological reality, which we cannot be certain about, and instead work with the phenomenological data open to all, that is, the fact that people have an experience of something. Working in this empirical space, Kant is in harmony with Hume, with whose commitment to solid mathematical foundations and suspicion of metaphysics Kant is wholly in sympathy. But while Kant echoes Hume, Hume has far less confidence than Kant in the salvageability of reason. In section iv of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,3 Hume argues that “demonstrative reasoning,” which proceeds in a logically necessary fashion through the relation between ideas, is less common than we might assume. While we use language to describe the processes by which water becomes ice, this is not a “scientific discovery” per se, arrived at through “demonstrative reasoning,” it is simply a naming of what we have experienced. This naming is not a rational discovery, but a simple labeling. We take refuge in allocating

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

3

a kind supernatural quality to reasoning, claiming that it has unlocked the truths of nature, but, more often, our knowledge simply names what we have experienced. Reason, for Hume, is largely passive in naming this experience. If reason is subordinate to experience, and if we all have different experiences, then knowledge is personal. Being bound to our experiences, it is bound to individuals, who “know” the world differently. Reason, for Hume, cannot mediate between people if each person’s knowledge is determined by individual experiences of reality. This, Hume notes, is a problem for those who would seek to rationally reflect on things less obvious than the transformation of water into ice— things such as the moral life. While we can all observe how water becomes ice, and therefore our shared experience of this phenomenon leads to shared conclusions, the experiences that provide the basis for moral inquiry are far more diverse. Apart from some truths established through the relations of ideas,4 for Hume we are determined to “know” only what we have experienced. What we have experienced may not be true, being only “our experience,” wholly distinct from that of others. Hence morality is necessarily as individual as experience. And thus, for Hume, The most perfect philosophy of the natural kind only staves off our ignorance a little longer: as perhaps the most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of it. Thus, the observation of human blindness and weakness is the result of all philosophy, and meets us at every turn, in spite of our endeavours to elude or avoid it.5

Kant follows Hume in accepting the experiential basis of all human knowledge. But Kant avoids the slide into perspectivism seemingly inevitable on the basis of Hume’s empiricism. This is because the process of knowing, in Kant’s understanding, is governed by inherent transcendental limits. These limits are as operative on our deliberations about God or morality as they are while witnessing the transformation of water into ice, and this ubiquity is the key to Kant’s salvaging of reason. While reason, for Kant, is subject to experience, we do not all experience the world in different ways because our experience of the world is filtered through limits that govern what we can experience.6 As these limits are universal, there is a commonality in all human experience. On account of this, as long as we work with phenomenological data that is open to all—phenomenological data filtered through the limits that determine all experience—then we can avoid the iron cages of personal perspectives that shadow Hume’s thought. Kant’s attempt to save reason from relativism is based in this insight. It is the achievement that George Grant, echoing Nietzsche,7 calls Kant’s “great delay”8 (the “delay” being the delay of an outright relativism). If (a)

4

Chapter 1

knowledge is the fruit of perception (b) perception represents marks on a blank slate, and (c) everyone’s marks are different, then (d) everyone will come to very different perspectives about the real, not to mention morality. This is relativism, and this is what Kant wants to avoid, not least in the area of morality. By shifting the focus from ontological realities to human perception of phenomena, filtered through shared transcendental limits, Kant aims to preserve reason itself. KANT’S “GREAT DELAY” Reality external to perception is, Kant concedes, something we must be agnostic about. We cannot know reality, but we can know how the human mind perceives it. For example, what a tree is in itself is not at issue. What matters is how thinking subjects, determined by transcendental limits, experience a tree. Working with phenomenological data—the tree that is available to our senses—we can proceed to speak to each other about the tree and how we should treat it. This experiential data, not the reality that is independent of it, becomes the de facto “real” within this Kantian model. As such, a real world is saved by Kant, not the real world, in itself, but the mark which this real world makes on human consciousness. Experience, not the reality independent of experience, becomes the object of human knowledge and the basis for human discourse. Most importantly, for Kant, it provides a solid foundation through which reason can proceed towards “its highest goal,” which is “certainty and clarity.”9 These moves, from his Critique of Pure Reason, are made in the service of moving reason to certitude. While most would agree that rational certitude is a good thing, binding reason to certitude as its primary goal represents a significant break with preceding tradition. For pre-modern voices, such as Aquinas and Ibn Sīnā, while some rational reflection may lead to certainty, other forms of rational inquiry will not. Crucially, the failure of such forms of inquiry to arrive at certainty does not deprive them of the status “rational.” For example, for Aquinas, we must reflect on the moral coherence of such things as waging a war, even though we can never know with certainty whether we are correct. This does not mean that reason is not central to such deliberations and that reason can’t decide between more or less likely options. For Aquinas, we must reflect rationally and proceed virtuously to come to knowledge, based on reason, irrespective of whether this knowledge is “certain.” In stark contrast, Kant sees reason and knowledge (wissen) as proceeding on the basis of things about which we can be certain, it is only the possibility of certainty that distinguishes it from believing (glauben) and opining (meinen), and, as he writes in the Critique or Pure Reason, “in this

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

5

kind of inquiry it is in no way allowed to hold opinions.”10 In this passage he echoes Hume, who famously writes, If we take in our hand any volume of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.11

Similarly, for Kant, when coming to understand the fundamental nature of reason, “anything that even looks like a hypothesis is a forbidden commodity.”12 As noted above, this Kantian model of reason, fixated on the quest for certainty, is not a model that is “invented” or comes into being with the Enlightenment, nor any supposed scientific “revolution.” Rational knowledge based on evidence, observation, quantifiability, and verifiability is also seen as “good knowledge” long before Kant (and indeed Galileo). We can find this approach to knowledge in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, where he claims we have such knowledge about, “natural substances: e.g., fire, earth, water, air and all the other simple bodies; next, plants and their parts, and animals and the parts of animals; and finally the sensible universe and its parts.”13 Nor does this affirmation of experience-based logic aiming at certainty “die out” in the Middle Ages. In Ibn-Sīnā’s commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle, we see a comprehensive treatment of the different forms of knowledge of which verifiable knowledge leading to certitude is but one.14 But, for Aquinas and Ibn-Sīnā—and this makes all the difference—forms of knowledge that are not certain are also tolerated. Reason is understood as a governing principle of diverse forms of inquiry, some of which may lead to certainty, some of which do not. Some are predicated upon sensory data, some are not. In contrast, as the approach shared by Hume and Kant demonstrates, the Enlightenment begins to reduce inquiries that cannot lead to certitude to the status of “faith.” Faith, which, in the Enlightenment (in contrast to, say Paul, Augustine, or Aquinas) means “belief” in the unknowable, now comes to be contrasted with rational knowledge. In the Enlightenment, faith is not seen as another, less certain, form of reason and knowledge (as it is for Aquinas and Ibn-Sīnā). In the Enlightenment faith begins to be seen as the other of reason and knowledge. It becomes seen as the opposite of reason and knowledge and thus, following Hume, should be cast to the flames in the quest for certainty alone as the arbiter of what is worthy of the term “knowledge.” A significant problem with this model is that if large sections of reality are not knowable with certainty, then Kant is limiting reason to a small part of reality. Worse, if the real is more than that which can be known with certainty, then a reduction of the real to that about which we can be certain surrenders

6

Chapter 1

swathes of reality to the realm of the irrational. About this vast section of reality (in which, as I will show contra Kant, morality resides) the perspective of the scholar, the intoxicated, and the bigot all have the equal status of “opinion.” In contrast to Aquinas’ sophisticated taxonomy of knowledge, seeing a plurality of forms of knowledge predicated upon different forms of reason with differing degrees of certainty, Kant, in binding reason to certitude, establishes a binary between reason, covering a portion of the real, and literal non-sense—a blanket, unnuanced conflagration of all the rest. While the epistemological shift commensurate with the Enlightenment is commonly held as being among the most positive shifts in intellectual history, it amounts, epistemologically, to a shift from a nuanced taxonomy of reason, capable of distinguishing modes and methods of enquiry specific to diverse aspects of the real, to a crass dichotomy between certainty and irrationality. Ontologically it reduced the real to the sliver of what actually is, the sliver that submits to certitude. The rest of what is, resistant to domination by such forms of inquiry, is reduced to the status of fancy, its hold on reality becomes wafer thin. KANT CONTRA KANT Kant does accept that the real is more than that about which we can be certain. For Kant, however, because we cannot rationally engage this vast section of the real (rationality being sealed in the straitjacket of that experienceable within transcendental limits) we must simply be silent about it. This leads to something Kant does not seem to foresee. Subsequent generations quickly move from a Kantian acknowledgment of the unknowability of the thatwhich-cannot-be-known-with-certainty, to an agnosticism about it. Later generations still move on to an outright atheism, in which God, universal moral laws, and flying spaghetti monsters are all understood as having the same ontological status based on the same logic. They are understood as ontologically not because Kant has laid the groundwork for their being epistemologically not, or, more precisely, in the epistemologically irrelevant category of “that which cannot be known with certainty.” While Kant could not have conceived of God, universal moral laws, and flying spaghetti monsters as similar, he inadvertently makes possible their sharing a category—the category of that which cannot be known through sensory data, and thus—that about which we cannot be certain. This necessarily follows from establishing a binary between that about which we can be certain and everything else, which must be “consigned to the flames” of irrationality. With Kant and Hume, instead of plural forms of knowledge and reason, we have certainty about a sliver of the real and an in vitro relativism about all else.

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

7

The renewal of Christian moral theology that this book calls for cannot occur without a problematizing of this core epistemological model that reduces theological reason to the level of nonsense. The chapters that follow will show the operation of these Kantian foundations in fuelling the secular positions that are increasingly hegemonic in the West. As such, for the Christian positions to stand a chance of being convincing, these Kantian foundations must be problematized. In what follows I hope to begin this process. My argument will be a pragmatic one, showing, first, how Kant’s moves actually represent the very end of reason and coherent moral philosophy,15 and, second, how this approach to reason fuels some of the horrors of racism and genocide that we have seen in the twentieth century. In divorcing Reason and Faith, Kant believes he is in fact safeguarding faith and the other principles (God, freedom, and immortality) that he helps transform into illusions. Faith, Kant rightly understands, is vital for holding that morality is anything more than mere ideas held within prevailing, but passing, cultures. Ironically, it is because faith in God, as a transcendent basis for morality,16 is so important for Kant, that he seeks to banish reflection on God from the realm of reason. For Kant, if God abides within this realm of reason, then God will fail the test of what passes as rational and so be exposed as an illusion. As he writes, I cannot even assume God, freedom and immorality for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reason unless I simultaneously deprive speculative reason of its pretension to extravagant insights; because in order to attain such insights, speculative reason would have to help itself to principles that in fact reach only to objects of possible experience, then they would always actually transform it into an appearance.17

For Kant, if we acknowledge that reason is predicated upon experience, and that we must move toward certainty on the basis of quantifiability and verifiability, then we must, if we submit God to this model of reason, become atheists, because God cannot be known by this model of reason. Because God, for Kant, is necessary to ensure that morality refers to a real beyond mere passing perspectives, we must exclude God from rational inquiry and simply “believe.” As Kant writes, “I must, therefore, abolish knowledge, to make room for belief,” which, for Kant, is crucial, because unbelief “conflicts with morality.”18 As outlined thus far, the moves Kant makes can be summarized thus, (i) reason should lead to certainty as its goal; therefore, (ii) reason should begin with universally accessible experience processed through universal transcendental categories but (iii) God is not a “phenomenon,” that is, an object of human experience, and thus reflection on God cannot lead to certain

8

Chapter 1

knowledge.19 Therefore, (iv) if God is subjected to the criteria for rational belief, God will fail to pass the criteria and we will not believe. But (v) God is needed to ground morality, otherwise moral maxims are just “thoughts” that could be otherwise (relativism) and, thus, we should (vi) not subject God to rational inquiry but, instead, simply believe.20 That these Kantian moves establish a binary between reason and faith was not due to any change in how faith was understood, but due to a radical change in how reason was understood. Charles Taylor’s question, “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500, in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?”21 can be answered succinctly with reference to these moves. We don’t believe, today, because a particular understanding of reason (reduced to that which is measurable) has become increasingly hegemonic, and this understanding of reason renders faith in God irrational. For Kant, this reduction of that-in-relation-to-which-reason-can-operate is wholly necessary in order to safeguard reason itself, but his attempt fails.22 It also fails to safeguard morality, as Nietzsche and many others will refuse to be forced into “irrational” belief in God, even if such belief, as Kant holds, is necessary for morality. Nietzsche is happy to pay the price of rejecting “Good and Evil” rather than affirm the reality of God without having the rational grounds on which to do so. Faith, as a merely pragmatic good, is not, for Nietzsche, worth the self-deception.23 Kant sought to defend reason, God, and morality, but the very moves he made to defend them became the very basis for their dissolution in the Western imagination. Secular social orders, as we shall see, necessarily struggle with questions of morality because they are the progeny of these moves that Kant makes. Kant’s impoverished definition of reason exposes faith in God as irrational, yet Kantian morality is dependent on this belief in order to stem its slide into relativism. Thus, for Kant, we must believe in transcendent things—God, human rights, etc.—but reason cannot see beyond transcendental limits and thus, such things, being transcendent, are rendered irrational. The spectre Kant bequeaths is a modernity in which (apart from coercive force) there is nothing but the mere will-to-believe-otherwise between order and chaos. Unlike all religious belief, this belief is wholly content-less and held without any credible pretense of rationality. It is a belief that one must believe in something that is irrational and most likely false, simply because nihilism is the alternative to such a belief. It is belief that is spectacularly unworthy of belief and, in many ways, the sacred truths of the now (not least human rights) hang perilously by the thread of this flimsy “faith.”

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

9

THE BINDING OF REASON AND THE END OF MORALITY A comprehensive genealogy of how such Kantian moves have become ubiquitous is not within the scope of this book, but in this section I will touch on some contemporary expressions of this unnecessary reduction in the understanding of reason in order to show just how pervasive these moves are. Kant’s approach, as well as being incapable of engaging the real, fuels a social order in which a coherent discussion about moral issues is impossible. I will illustrate this by highlighting a core contradiction in a discourse that shares a notion of reason as certitude but, unlike Kant, tries to hold that a coherent model of morality is possible despite this. This discourse is that of “New Atheism,” popular in the early years of the twenty-first century and still, in more moderate forms, retaining significant sway in public discourse. Many New Atheists today are just as committed to salvaging reason as Kant was in his time.24 It is this laudable defense of reason (albeit understood in an even more reductionist and impoverished way than in Kant) as much as any antagonism toward God, that underpins many of their claims. The New Atheists of late modernity are the fruits of a circular logic in which a particular model of reason establishes the real as “that which submits to this form of rational enquiry.” In turn, this notion of the real “proves” the validity of this model of reason, as it is this model of reason which has disclosed the real, thereby proving the validity of its approach. As such, a model of reason is bound tight to a model of the real as quantifiable and the verifiable. If the real is more than this, then the inadequacy of this etiolated model of reason is exposed. The modern approach to rationality must be an error if the real is more than that which will submit to certitude.25 If God is real, more, if God, as will be explored in chapter 2, is the most real, that which it is to be, then this model of reason is a very poor tool for engaging reality. It may be useful for lots of things, such as helping us live longer lives, building weapons or flying to really faraway places. But, as a tool for engaging reality, it’s pretty blunt and far less helpful than most other models. All proponents of these modernist approaches to reason must assail any declaration that the real is more than the material, the quantifiable or the verifiable, because, if it is, then the model of reason on which the reduction of the real to the material stands must be condemned. At its best these approaches are very poor and, at their worst, they are a contributory factor in a radical distortion of our perception of reality. Where New Atheists differ from Kant is that many new atheists seem to hold that a meaningful model of morality can be maintained without appeals to the transcendent. As we’ve seen, Kant divorces the world from

10

Chapter 1

the transcendent but knows that without appeals to the transcendent, morality falls foul of relativism. It falls foul of relativism as either (a) The “good” or “justice” exists independently of the human mind or (b) they are simply the product of this mind. There is no option (c). If it is the product of our minds then it is the product of something shaped by social context, taste, power relations, self-interest, and so on. Thus, it speaks primarily not to something beyond the mind—“good” or “justice”—but to the social conditions that shape the mind leading to this or that theory of what “good” or “justice” is. Either justice is grounded in something real but extraneous to the human mind (the divine) or it is coughed up by social conditions. This is true of instances we abhor, such as the 1930s German conflation of justiz with antisemitism, or those we admire, such as our own conflation of justice with the rights of previously marginalized voices. Kant knows that if an ethical theory is just an acquired taste, no different from a taste for trendy foods or clothes, then it cannot be sufficient to bring about a just society. It can be clung to for a time, but it will pass. And even while it is clung to it will surely be transgressed from easily, given that “the clinger” knows, deep down, that it is no truer than the proposition “shirt X is nicer than shirt Y.” To be sure it will be followed, not least when the follower gains social capital, kudos, respect, feelings of self-worth, and so on, by following it, but it is wholly incapable of changing action when it does not lead to such things. As Kant writes, “Thus, without a God and without a world, invisible to us now, but hoped for, the glorious ideas of morality are, indeed, objects of approbation and of admiration, but cannot be the springs of purpose and action. . . . Thus, without a God and a world that is now not visible to us but hoped for, the majestic ideas of morality are, to be sure, objects of approbation and of admiration, but not incentives for resolve and realization.”26 In stark contrast to Nietzsche, who followed reason down the rabbit hole, New Atheists often fall foul of what Nietzsche called “The English Disease.”27 By this Nietzsche means those who assume that without faith in God one could proceed as before with regard to moral order. For Nietzsche, either there is something other than our thought or there is not; either good is ontologically real and not a taste that differs from culture to culture, person to person; or it is not. If it is not ontologically real, then the holder of a moral belief can only hold it with the vigor one holds their accent, knowing that their pronunciation is neither “true nor false,” but simply a culturally determined intonation. As Nietzsche writes, When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

11

concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.28

Nietzsche is rarely more “Kantian” than in his position here, which acknowledges that either there is a moral good that is, independent of human perspectives, or “the good” is simply a human perspective, shaped according to the mores of this or that society, this or that peer group, this or that person. Nietzsche, of course, is willing to accept that it is simply a perspective, and surrender morality in any traditional sense. Kant is not. Kant believes he has safeguarded God from the challenges of reason by ghettoizing faith in favor of a model of reason in which God cannot be disproven. This is Kant at his most pious. Yes, Kant has ghettoized faith, but he has done so in order to establish a model of pure reason, and this model of pure reason can never be used to disprove God. In fact, as long as this model of reason reigns, for Kant, faith in God is always possible. As he writes in a key passage, When I hear that an uncommon mind has demonstrated away the freedom of the human will, the hope of a future life and the existence of God, I am eager to read the book, for I expect that his talent will advance my insights. I am completely certain in advance that he will not have accomplished any of this, not because I believe myself already to be in possession of incontrovertible proofs of these important propositions, but rather because the transcendental critique, which has revealed to me the entire stock of our pure reasons, has completely convinced me that just as pure reason is entirely inadequate for affirmative assertions in this field, even less will it know what to do in order to be able to assert something negative about these questions. For where would the supposed free-thinker derive his knowledge that, there is, e.g., no highest being? This proposition lies outside the field of possible human experience and therefore also beyond the boundaries of all human insight.29

This is Kant’s great gamble. Recoiling from the nihil, Kant births the modern world. A world in which God can neither be proved or disproved. Yes, God can no longer be rationally believed in, but God can still be believed in and, with this God, the possibility of morality. Kant and Nietzsche both agree on the role the divine plays in the establishment of moral thought. Kant maintains faith and preserves the concept of good as more than “taste,” Nietzsche rejects it and holds that “good” and “evil” refer only to tastes. Free of the philosophical nuance of either Nietzsche or Kant, Richard Dawkins embodies the position that Nietzsche decries. He agrees that God can neither be proved nor disproved but, on balance he holds God wholly unworthy of belief. Yet, unlike Kant and Nietzsche, he holds that a coherent morality—something other than social convention and the ruse of our will-to-power—is still possible within a reduction of the real to the material.

12

Chapter 1

It is a position that is strangely common in our social order. We will speak about good or justice, seemingly unaware of the fact that unless these things are real apart from the human mind, they remain products of the human mind—that is, simply “ideas,” thoughts, in accordance with the social mores of this or that age. As Dawkins writes, We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism—something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.30

Dawkins holds that while we may be hardwired by our genes toward struggle and competition, we alone among animal species can combat such genetic orientation. But the person who makes these decisions about what should combat these selfish genes is itself nothing other than the product of these selfish genes.31 As such, the “resistance” of selfish genes would itself be an expression of selfish genes. As Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and countless others have argued, the morality that would emerge from this articulation of “altruistic principles” would itself be a ruse of power. It would unconsciously seek to advance the genetic replication of the organism that is its source as it proceeds from a body that is hardwired to advance its capacity for genetic replication in the world. Thus, seeking genetic replication, we would likely find ideas that facilitated us being accepted in peer groups to be ethically coherent. It is because of this that children on either side of the West Bank develop very different notions about what constitutes “justice.” It is because of this that corporations in 1950’s America strove to affirm their commitment to “American values” while Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and more have firm affirmative stances on, for example, the morality of LGBTQ+ sex. Despite what he says in the passage above, Dawkins, surely, must know this.32 While I was a graduate student, I worked with young people from Northern Ireland who had been involved in sectarian conflict. One of the exercises we did with them was to look at parades. Parade season in Northern Ireland is a point of conflict as, on March 17th—St. Patrick’s Day—there is a “Green” Nationalist (traditionally largely Catholic) parade, while on July 12th there is an “Orange” Unionist (traditionally Protestant) parade, celebrating the battle of the Boyne. The July 12th “Orange” parades are massive points of conflict. We showed the different groups of youths, one from a nationalist Catholic (“green”) background and one from a unionist Protestant

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

13

(“orange”) background, pictures of the parades and asked them to describe what they were seeing. The Nationalist youths described “happy,” “joyous” faces on March 17th and “triumphalist,” “threatening” faces on July 12th. The Unionist youths described the faces from the July 12th march as “celebratory” and “happy” while the faces on March 17th were experienced as “aggressive” and “threatening.” It was only afterwards that we told them that they were the same faces, Photoshopped into each parade. They were experiencing the same faces as “happy” or “threatening,” depending on the colors they were wearing and the parades they were marching in. This reminds us that our experience of the world is not “raw,” it is edited. Kant held it was edited in accordance with universal transcendental limits— limits that were shared by all thinking things. But after Darwin it seems clear that it is edited in a way which, in fact, undermines, and ultimately overcomes, Kant’s strategy. It is edited in accordance with our need to maximize our potential for genetic replication. We will hear our own child’s voice and see their face amid a crowd, editing the stream of sensory data in keeping with evolved traits. Seeking relationship and support within social groupings, we soak up ideas that supplement these goals. Diverse social groupings—we need only think of a high school with different cliques of students—shape different experiences of the world and different beliefs about it. These beliefs over time evolve as we seek to function within different social groupings. In every instance our tendency to see the world in ways shaped by our context is a genetically acquired trait that facilitates genetic replication. Kant was right, we experience the world in a way determined by a priori categories, but these categories lead to us experiencing the world more in keeping with Hume than Kant. While the reality of natural selection undermines the “purity” of Kant’s a priori transcendental categories, it also means that Dawkins’ hope of responding in opposition to our “selfish genes” is wildly misplaced. That we can overcome our biological configuration to hold to a model of justice or fairness represents the hope for ethics in today’s world. But, of course, our very attempts to respond to our selfish genes necessarily reflect these selfish genes. The concepts of “the good” or “the just” that we develop are always already shaped by our need to function within a distinctive community. Thus, the “altruism” Dawkins speaks of as opposing our genetic orientation would, in subtle, subconscious ways, merely reflect this genetic orientation and be, as Nietzsche well knew, an unconscious ruse of will-to-power. We might think of the young people of Belfast above, whose notions of justice and fairness reflect, rather than rebel against, their interests as a biological entity shaped by a need to work within a social framework. When these young people go to university, many of their perspectives will evolve, and just as well! Universities too can be difficult places to thrive within for those

14

Chapter 1

whose views are seen as ethically dubious. Are they “learning,” or are they simply coming to think in ways shaped by their new community? Their dress will change, often their accents will shift, is it possible that the ethical precepts they will come to hold are changing and shifting for the same reasons? Our society wants to laud major national and multinational companies for marching fearlessly in Gay Pride parades. But, of course, they weren’t quite as visible in their support of the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s. Marching in these parades in 1980 may have reflected a counter cultural ethical position. The social capital they preserved by not marching in 1980 can be attained by marching in 2021. The action seems not so much fueled by an ethical choice as by desire for social capital. Nietzsche is surely right to hold that, apart from the good or the just being absolute and external to human constructs, the primary basis for ethical positions can only be the ruse of our subconscious desire for affirmation within the peer group we subconsciously desire to operate within. If he is, then Dawkins’ dream of ethical positions that conflict with our selfish genes is an illusion, and a spectacularly irrational one at that. Instead, these ethical positions are constructs of an embodied human person who is an amalgam of biological processes and therefore will, in fact, reflect the genes that structure our body. This is the fact that renders Dawkins’ claim in the gobbet above absurd. Dawkins’ struggles are not unique. They are in keeping with the ethical malaise modernity has bequeathed to us. It is a malaise achieved by simultaneously noting (with Kant) that without God or a “universal,”33 ethical propositions become “tastes” shaped by our social contexts while also (again with Kant) reducing reason to that which renders faith in God irrational. Morality, in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, hangs on God, but reason, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, makes faith in God wholly irrational. Therefore, when we, subjects of Kantian modernity, try to develop a coherent moral framework within a modern epistemological grammar, we end up flailing like a fish on land, trying desperately to access what isn’t there. While we may think that helping the socially disadvantaged is just, we know that in Nazi Germany the proposition that, in order to establish justice after the treaty of Versailles, anti-Semitic laws should be established—was held as just, good, and true by people just like us with just the same passion. Without something external to ourselves to point to, we must admit that each of these ideas is nothing more than a product of a culture—an epiphenomenon of social circumstances. In themselves, they are no more true or false than the maxim, “it is morally good that we should cut the big end from our boiled eggs.” The New Atheists have refused the basis for morality being anything other than a social construct and yet hope to somehow present moral sentiments as something other than passing fashion. Like Kant, once they have locked themselves into an unnecessarily limited model of reason, they can simply

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

15

flail in parodic attempts to offer models of ethics as something other than a subconscious ruse of power. This is the legacy the Enlightenment approach to reason has bequeathed to us. Thus far, I have sought to do two things. First, I have introduced a Kantian move which reduces reason to one particular form of reason. This, as we shall see in future chapters, undermines attempts to speak rationally about moral issues about which we cannot be certain. The success of Kantian modernity has encouraged Christian moral theologians to comply with Kantian and quasi-Kantian forms of moral reasoning that are at odds with those we find in Abrahamic religious traditions. In their compliance, Christian moral theologians have offered a moral perspective that has failed to convince Christians, never mind secularists. Therefore, the renewal I am attempting in this book requires that the straitjacket of this modern, Kantian, approach be loosened. And this is the second thing I have sought to do up to this point. I have begun to show how the Kantian moves, so intrinsic to modernity, necessarily undermine hopes of a coherent moral framework that can shape action within social orders. These moves, so damaging to Christian moral theory, are, I have begun to show, equally damaging to any other moral theory, even that inherent within the “New Atheism.” Kant’s gambit should be seen, then, as an unnecessary move which, rather than safeguard reason and morality, condemns both. Now I aim to show how this approach also has a disastrous impact on contemporary Western societies’ attempts to engage otherness. In doing so, I hope to illustrate the social problems that stem from this binding of reason to certitude. “Carthage” is not just parasitic upon Rome, it is a menace that shadows our age and guarantees that Western secularity will oppress otherness with disastrous social consequences. THE BINDING OF REASON AND THE OPPRESSION OF OTHERNESS While hegemonic in the modern West, the understanding of reason and the real that we inherit from the Enlightenment is a minority position globally, both historically and now. Its minority status contributes to the inability of Western liberal democracies to negotiate differences, as this Kantian model is at odds with those found in other cultures. Western cultures routinely fail to note that their model of reason and reality is not obvious to all and can be contested. This failure, as I will show, shadows Western cultures’ capacity to embrace diversity and welcome actual otherness within Western polities. The modern nation-states that were taking form during, and immediately after, the Enlightenment were developing in dialog with the Kantian ideas

16

Chapter 1

outlined thus far. Like Kant, these social orders were separating the private, religious, and “faith-based” from the public, rational, and universal. God, by definition, was beyond the transcendental categories. Therefore, God could not be discussed rationally by people who supposedly held only sensible human experience in common. According to nation states taking form after the Enlightenment, in the “public sphere” one must reason and work with things of experience that are open to all. Faith must be left outside the walls that guard this public space. The French republic’s Cult of Reason is an extreme example, but the establishment of public space as a space in which thinking subjects reflect rationally on a real—a “real” that this model of reason has reduced to that which is measurable and quantifiable—is common to all modern nation states. As Ernst Cassirer emphasized, the Enlightenment was a story that proceeded from this epistemological revolution. While Cassirer is right to see the social and political forms of modernity proceeding from an epistemological foundation, Bruce Mazlih and others are right to note that Cassirer paid too little attention to the social and political trajectories that fueled this story. It is not simply the coherence of the philosophical moves we see with Kant and Hume, but fears of religion and the dangers associated with it, that enabled the embrace of Kantian moves as foundational for modern states. It embraced them in light of a story about who we (Western civilization) are and what we have surpassed to arrive and become who we are. This story juxtaposed a “dark” past with an enlightened now, a past of barbarism and superstition opposed by a “now” marked by civility and reason.34 As William Cavanaugh,35 Talal Asad, and others have shown, religion has lurked as the “irrational other” within secular social orders, secular social orders that forget that the seemingly rational principles on which, say, our legal systems are based, are themselves dependent on very distinctive, modern, Western, notions of the real.36 The de facto reduction of the real to the material is not simply a philosophical concept governing what we find believable, but flows from the fundamental story of “progress” we tell ourselves in the modern West.37 While modern Western legal frameworks prioritize material things, those things that can be measured and quantified and which comprise “reality” within a post enlightenment rationality, it was not always thus. In medieval Irish law, for example, a person who wounded another immaterially (e.g., their honor) could be punished by a physical (all too material) beating under the law.38 This, of course, is not something moderns like you or I would condone! The fact illustrates, however, that for these pre-moderns, non-material pain was “real”—at least as real as physical pain. In pre-modern legal codes, reality was not reduced to the material.

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

17

Contrast this with a secular nation-state such as contemporary France. In France, blasphemy against the prophet of Islam is tolerated by law; whereas, of course, if a Muslim was to punch a person who so blasphemed, they would be punishable under law. Again, you and I would probably see this as perfectly rational. But note what’s happening. The physical, which is measurable and quantifiable, is “real” for us, while the non-physical is less so. The punch, verifiable and demonstrable, “counts.” The punch is phenomenological data, epistemologically valid within the Kantian model. The pain the Muslim feels at the mocking of the Prophet—a pain that is invisible—is not. The former, within the “enlightened West,” is real, the latter far less so. Despite this, I have Muslim friends and colleagues who tell me that they would rather be punched in the face than hear the prophet of Islam mocked. They tell me, and I believe them, that someone mocking the prophet of Islam causes them more pain than a punch in the face. For them, their pain is just as real, if not more real, than if they were beaten physically. This helps explain why in contemporary France many Muslims feel that their government is protecting the rights of anyone who wants to do violence to them and cause them pain (pain in excess of being beaten up). This same government, they note, will imprison them if they take retributive action against these people, even if their retribution is less painful, less violent, and/ or less damaging. As long as the pain, violence, and damage are material, and thus verifiable and quantifiable, it is, for us moderns, real. If it is not, it is not recognized under law. The government, which thinks it is enforcing perfectly rational laws, is enforcing laws that are rational only on the basis of a particular model of reason which reduces the real to the material. Note, the distinction between a religion and an ideology is largely a Western post-enlightenment distinction. After the Enlightenment, we distinguish something as either private and faith-based, like a religion, or something public and rational, like socialism or capitalism. But this distinction is a product of the epistemological moves previously discussed. Thus, it is limited to the cultures that have accepted these moves. It is alien to Islamic thought in which some people do the Christian din while others do the capitalist or communist din. These din are religio in the classical sense, they are ties that bind, ordering principles, modes of being in the world. Therefore, Muslims in secular France experience the moves made by the government as nothing less than the persecution of one religio, or din, by another. Only the inability to see models of reason that have become axiomatic in the secular West as culturally embedded and inherently anti-religious blinds us to this fact. This reduction of the real to the material is an extreme minority position globally and was largely unheard of before the modern West. Nonetheless it has become so hegemonic that we Westerners cannot even countenance an alternative. This philosophical distinction is not simply academic. In fact, because

18

Chapter 1

of our inability to acknowledge and negotiate it, France and other European countries are on a knife-edge. I am not, of course, advocating the legalization of physical violence. I am showing how a reduced model of reason and “the real” makes truly diverse social orders impossible in the modern West. Immigrants must, in effect, become modern Western subjects if they are to function within a political space in which the moves I have been discussing are hegemonic. And the modern Western subject is secular, even if they retain a manic religiosity “in private.”39 In outlining the (largely Kantian) epistemological engine that drives hegemonic positions in the modern West it is important to note that the dominance of this epistemological framework is not due to its persuasiveness, but because, as many Muslims in France are realizing, full citizenship of secular nation states requires adherence to them. Muslims, Christians, and more do not need to be persuaded by long dormant Kantian epistemological moves, but they do need to act as if they were persuaded by them. They must, under law, act as if the real was the material and the meta-material was—like das ding in sich—moot. If Western nation states are serious about welcoming diversity, then the binding of reason must be loosened. This does not mean a rejection of certitude as a goal of reason, nor does it mean failing to privilege rational processes based on measurability and quantifiability. It simply means that the pre-modern understanding of diverse forms of reason, operative in relation to differing aspects of the real, must be given space within our social orders. Such space brings with it the necessary corollary that the real is more than that which submits to measurability, quantifiability, and certitude. As such, the Western nation states that are the children of the Enlightenment are at a crossroads. They can either, as many are inclined to, double down on the Western approach and force all others to conform in order to function within our borders, or it can loosen the binding on reason in order to allow plural voices a space. Unless our public discourse can acknowledge this, it will necessarily enshrine the colonialism that has marked Western secular states in modernity because of both the epistemological foundations I have been discussing and the ontological ones I will focus on more specifically in this next section. THE MORAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE REJECTION OF THE REAL In this concluding section I will discuss how Kant migrates an earlier (nominalist) epistemological approach to the realm of moral inquiry. In doing so

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

19

he inadvertently condemns coherent moral reasoning in public discourse by bracketing ontological reality in favor of an economy of signs signifying our experience. I will show how this (i) necessitates an entirely distinct focus for moral inquiry, moving away from focus on ontological realities toward a legalist deontological focus and (ii) enables some of the greatest horrors of our era. As with my moves thus far I (i) aim to show that it is an error and (ii) aim to show that we must, for practical reasons, too, reject it. For Kant, “The noumenon, i.e., a thing which must be cogitated not as an object of sense, but as a thing in itself,” cannot be known by the senses and thus, “is not a special intelligible object for our understanding.”40 Unlike Berkeley, Kant is happy to accord reality to such things, but we cannot know them as noumena, that is, as they are “in themselves.” We can only know them as phenomena, that is, in so much as they can be perceived by us. Take, for example, a tree. We can perceive a tree. It is a phenomenon, accessible to the senses. For Kant it is not (in any epistemologically meaningful sense) anything more than this. While it may be a thing in itself, beyond what we can perceive, this “noumenological” aspect—what it is independently of perception—is epistemologically irrelevant.41 In such an approach the ontologically real is bracketed and robbed of its relevance. Instead, all that matters are perceptions which, filtered through the a priori categories of the mind, become the intellectual content that functions as “the real.” Kant did not invent this approach, as it builds on nominalist currents that preceded him by at least three centuries. But while such trajectories were warded off by Aquinas and others, with Kant they, in a distinct form, come to hegemonic prominence in the post Enlightenment West. The triumph of the bracketing of reality in favor of signification (nominalism) or signified perceptions (Kant) is such that we fail to see just how destructive it is. To get a sense of this, we need to remind ourselves of the alternative, which we find in figures such as Aquinas. Aquinas held that predicates of God were real and that persons could participate in them. Goodness, for example, most properly, refers to the goodness of God. It is ontologically real. Most of our goodness is, for Aquinas, analogous to this. Ontologically our goodness is not goodness itself. But we can also, through the self-giving of the Holy Spirit, participate in goodness through the real presence of the Holy Spirit (goodness) as the formal cause of actions. As such a specific act, which has the Holy Spirit as its formal cause, can be a good act in that, ontologically, goodness (the Holy Spirit) is present in it as its formal cause. This is what makes an act truly good, for Aquinas. To call an act morally good can be to refer to it as good either analogically (analogous to goodness itself) or, as in an act of faith, hope, or love, formally. Note, though, that in neither case is Aquinas calling an act good on the basis of coherence between the action and a moral maxim or law. No, for Aquinas

20

Chapter 1

the ontological status of the act in itself determines its morality. Either it has goodness in it, or it doesn’t. It may or may not cohere with this or that moral law, but its goodness is as real as the level of magnesium in an object. Either there is magnesium in an object or there is not. Either there is goodness as the formal cause of a moral act or there is not. This is the focus for Aquinas (and countless others) outside the modern West. The term “goodness” does not signify coherence between an act and a moral maxim, it speaks to either the analogical relation of the human act to goodness itself, or the ontological presence of goodness in the act through the activity of the Holy Spirit (as in the theological virtues). Goodness is ontologically real, for Aquinas, apart from any expression of it in nature. He never held that there was an ontologically real “purple” or “cat” or “chair,” outside of iterations of them in nature—ontological realities that served as the basis for objects in the world being purple, or a cat, or a chair (through their participation in such “universals”). The idea that participation in such universals was the basis for the identity of things was savagely critiqued by Bacon, Ockham, Scotus, and others. Rather for Ockham, things in the world are what they are, not through participation, but because they are named—“cat,” “beautiful,” “purple,” etc.42 While Aquinas would have agreed that there is no universal “purple” or “cat,” predicates of God, in contrast, are ontologically real, independently of our naming. Beauty, for example, is not simply “in the eye of the beholder” because, for Aquinas, it is a predicate of God. God is beautiful. God is beauty itself. As such, “beauty” may refer to human tastes (and here he would agree with nominalists) but, most properly, it refers to the beauty that is God. This beauty is something that can be participated in through God’s gracious self-giving as the Son in the Spirit. Thus, charity is beautiful as the Holy Spirit is ontologically present in the doer as the formal cause of the charitable act. The Holy Spirit is beautiful, ontologically, and an act fueled by the Holy Spirit’s presence is beautiful, ontologically. The Holy Spirit is really present to it. Thus, whether something is or isn’t beautiful is not a matter of opinion. It is not “in the eye of the beholder.” Like magnesium, either beauty is present in something, or it isn’t. God, and that of God, is beautiful. We can never know for certain, but the fact of our uncertainty is irrelevant to the ontological reality of beauty. As we have seen, when reason is reduced to that which has a chance of reaching the goal of certainty, the ontological status of that about which we cannot be certain is put under erasure. This is what happens with nominalism, and later Kant, as the ontological reality of goodness, or justice, is, within these epistemological models, inevitably eroded by virtue of our incapacity to know what is good or just with certainty.

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

21

With nominalism, the baby of divine predicates such as goodness, beauty, and justice, is thrown out with the bathwater of false universals (“cat,” “purple,” etc.). For nominalists all things in the world are simply things we name as such (the term nominalism stemming from the Latin nomin meaning “to name”). Beauty is simply that which we’ve decided to name beauty—it is in the eye of the beholder. It is a sign, a designation. Beauty would cease to be were there nobody to name it. In rejecting the quasi platonic notion of universals, nominalism also rejects the ontology dominant for a millennium and expressed in Aquinas where (i) divine predicates are independent of our capacity to know and name them and (ii) beauty, goodness, and other divine predicates can be participated in by people through the gracious operation of the Holy Spirit. Through such nominalist shifts, the conceptual—the realm of signs— begins to take precedence over the ontological, as the grammar for understanding the moral life.43 Kant’s moves build on and reify these strands, which were bolstered before him, as Brad Gregory has shown,44 in the Reformation. Rather than being the thing in itself, “the real” becomes our perception of that which is, as this is, within Kant’s understanding, the closest we can come to certainty about the real. Aquinas could never be certain about whether any given act had the Holy Spirit as its formal cause. In contrast, we can be much more certain about whether act X coheres with moral precept Y. And this, inevitably, becomes the modern strategy for moral reasoning. With Kant, fealty to moral laws (concepts) rather than ontological states (reality) determine the moral rightness of an act. As we will see in later chapters, where morality is gauged by virtue of coherence between the act and a moral precept (even if established in the Bible or Church teaching) it is in keeping with this turn, solidified in Kant, rather than Christian moral theology. The problems with Kant’s approach are evident in his famous essay, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795). While the goal of the moral life within pre-modernity is the ontological shaping of persons toward being good things, the goal for Kant is to get people who are not good to act as if they were. In the former there is ontological transformation of persons, in the latter this is foreclosed upon as people remain in a state of (for Kant) utter depravity. Any ontological transformation, any conformation to Christ by the Spirit, is surrendered. In fact, in Kant’s famous essay on Perpetual Peace, it is precisely because of their depravity that they can be induced to act in coherence with moral maxims. In Perpetual Peace he writes, “many say a republic would have to be a nation of angels, because men with their selfish inclinations are not capable of a constitution of such sublime form,” “but,” he adds, “precisely with these inclinations nature comes to the aid of the general will.”45 Kant’s argument is that, being weak, we are apt to do whatever we want and not what moral laws dictate. But, also because we’re weak, we don’t

22

Chapter 1

want to suffer. Because of this, if we can arrange the laws of a state to punish us when we transgress the law, we will keep the law—precisely because we’re weak. For Kant, it is only a question of a good organization of the state (which does lie in man’s power), whereby the powers of each selfish inclination are so arranged in opposition that one moderates or destroys the ruinous effect of the other. The consequence for reason is the same as if none of them existed, and man is forced to be a good citizen even if not a morally good person.46

The significance of this in terms of my core point is explicit in the last line. The goal is not, as it had been for Aquinas, to help shape good people, that is, people infused with the goodness that comes from the presence of God. The goal for Kant is to get people who are determined by selfish inclinations to act as if they were good (by virtue of coercive law). If they do so they will be named “good.” But, in reality, they’re not good, there is no moral goodness in their actions. As in his epistemology, the ontologically real—the ontological status of the person and their act—is irrelevant. All that matters is the congruence between the act and a moral precept laid down. After Kant, public discourse is understood as operating only in relation to data that is “public.” As established earlier, the only data that is acceptable under this model is data that is measurable or quantifiable. Because of this, public discourse after Kant necessarily forecloses on the good as an ontological reality that can shape conversations about morality. Goodness in itself and justice in itself are foreclosed upon as meaningful categories as they cannot meet the newly established, and entirely impoverished, model of reason. As will be seen in succeeding chapters, public discourse can only, then, be an agonistic struggle between competing models, each trying to coerce others to live as if they agreed with them. This is the modern strategy par excellence and is the one Kant offers in Perpetual Peace. He has no alternative. Kant holds that God, as principle, is necessary for the possibility of ethics, but also refuses any coherent model of God as active agent shaping the moral life in ways that permit rational discourse. There is no Holy Spirit that can dwell within the person, shaping and conforming us to Christ through our acceptance of this Holy Spirit in embodied (moral) acts. While water can be in a glass, a mug, or a bucket, it remains water. It can freeze in the cold or evaporate in the heat. But only if something from outside itself is added to it can it become ontologically transformed. So too a selfish person can be a communist or a capitalist, an anarchist or a puritan within the different social vessels we find ourselves in, but unless infused with something ontologically other to themself, they would remain selfish. Ontological

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

23

transformation requires the active agency of something external to it in order to be transformed. Water requires the addition of wine, for example, to be ontologically changed. Otherwise, it is the same thing, ontologically, albeit in different vessels or forms. If God is not present as an active agent, as for Kant and the Enlightenment more generally He isn’t, then there is nothing external to the human person that can enable actual ontological transformation. There is no intelligent agent who adds the cream of ontological otherness to the coffee of human nature. For Kant, the coffee of selfish human nature remains, ontologically, what it is. It can be labeled “good” by virtue of its coherence to precept X or Y, but it remains precisely what it is. By bracketing God, “the good” becomes, not a reality that people can participate in, but a moral law they must adhere to. It becomes a maxim that people must, for Kant and other Enlightenment figures such as Hume, Mill, and Bentham, be forced to act in accordance with. As Kant writes, the problem is, given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions.47

As with his epistemological moves to save reason, here too Kant is a tragic figure where the moves he makes in moral philosophy to avoid the fate he fears, only makes this fate more certain. It leads to a legalism that has two huge problems: (1) As we see with things like the 2008 economic collapse, it does not work. We legislate in the financial space, but in a rapidly changing world, we can’t legislate coherently enough. The laws designed to corral unethical people to act as if they were ethical cannot do so. In so many of our spaces, economic, political, and online—legislation cannot overcome lack of virtue. The punishment that Kant holds as prohibitive cannot be a sufficient deterrent when the chances of being caught, as in online spaces, is low. Our legislation cannot keep pace with cultural and technological advances, and so the Kantian hope of using coercive legislation simply will not work. And, (2) more troublingly, Kant assumes that these laws, which will be applied to control citizens and make them act ethically, are established on the basis of universal reason. But what if he is wrong? What if laws do not, as Kant hoped, reflect universal reason but, rather, this or that passing perspective, this or that power interest? What if, as I have argued earlier, Kantian modernity cannot resist the critiques of Nietzsche and others,48 who illustrate that the moral precepts that would be established reflect, not an absolute universal rationality, but the contextual perspectives of this or that social order? The philosophical rejection of this approach which we see with Nietzsche,

24

Chapter 1

or, later, with Foucault, seem now, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, to have broad acceptance. More and more of us now agree with Nietzsche that, if the good is simply that named “good,” then the question is “Who gets to name it thus?” “What constellation of social power establishes this or that model as ‘good’?” If Nietzsche is right then the kind of moral moves Kant makes establishes a particularly threatening consequence. It raises the spectre that the modern nation-state, designed to fulfill the functions Kant speaks of in Perpetual Peace, in fact, enforces only the values of particular constellations of power. Legislation, which incarcerates racial minorities in grotesquely inflated rates, cannot, surely, be based on universal moral principles? In the twenty-first century more and more people are seeing what Nietzsche saw in the nineteenth and Foucault in the twentieth, that is, that theWestern secular nation state project requires the belief in legislation being based on universal reason, when, instead, it is based on this or that constellation of power. At times this may be economic power, at times social capital. But while Kant imagines a state establishing laws based on universal reason coercing citizens to cohere with them, this State itself represents a seizing of power by a group who hold as rational things which reflect, not universal reason (as if such a thing could exist), but a ruse of power. As such, totalitarianism—the forcing of people through the laws of a State to live in ways in opposition to their beliefs—may not be a deviation from the best principles of modern liberal democracy, it may, rather, proceed inexorably from the very logic on which such modern Western, secular liberal democracies are based. Rather than being an aberration, as attention to Kant shows, the epistemology that is hegemonic in the modern West drives an ethics that guarantees totalitarianism. This move toward legalism, and via legalism to totalitarianism, necessarily follows from the rejection of the thing in itself in favor of the concept. Within such an approach, signs are the functional real, not das ding in sich. Thus, not the ontological reality of a person embodying the good, but a moral maxim, represents the object of moral inquiry. While Kant holds that such maxims can be established on the basis of universal rationality, he seems incapable, as I showed earlier, of avoiding the Nietzschean critique that such maxims reflect power (economic, democratic, etc.) within the State that produces the maxims. This brings with it a totalitarian tendency, either hard49 or soft.50 This tendency is not a deviation from the epistemological ideals embedded within the genealogy of secular nation states, but, rather, it proceeds inexorably from it. This moral grammar is not simply Carthage to Christianity’s Rome, it is the basis for pathologies in modern nation States. I will conclude this chapter by focusing on one final aspect of these Kantian moves. It is the aspect that will

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

25

be seen to be most determinative of the positions that are hegemonic in our social order. It is also the aspect that has led to the worst horrors of our age. MODERN MORAL REASONING AND THE HORRORS OF MODERNITY The bracketing of the thing in itself reduces a thing to its visible, measurable, attributes. We might think, for example, of how Hildegard encounters tree in contrast to Kant. For Hildegard both the tree’s noumenological and phenomenological aspects are epistemologically important. The tree is what we perceive (its phenomenological appearance), but it is also what it is in itself (its noumenological isness). For Hildegard the tree is in relationship to God outside of our field of vision. This gives it a meaning that is not reducible to us. It gives it a surplus that we cannot possess or own. In keeping with Genesis, Hildegard feels that she has stewardship over the tree; she needs to care for it, protect it, and use it well, as a gift from God. In contrast, with Kant, its isness in itself is of no epistemological concern. It is reduced to pure phenomena. As such, as with all nominalisms, it is what it is for me. The human mind perceives it and establishes what it is. What it is is not an ontological reality, it is, rather, something named, by us—a sign rather than an ontological reality. It ceases to be “in itself” and becomes only something pro me—for me. As such, it becomes a utility, in that its reality is reduced to its status vis-à-vis my understanding of it. It may be something that inspires my aesthetic appreciation, as in the romantic tradition, or of more mundane use, as in the utilitarian tradition, but in either case, in modernity, it becomes a subject of human determination, subordinate to human ends. As such, it becomes a commodity relative to its prior status as having an isness that transcends its phenomenological giveness. It is no longer a sign that speaks to God’s relationship with the world, it no longer has a reality beyond my senses, it is what I (and others) perceive it to be and has no meaning beyond our purposes. This reduction of the real to the phenomenological commodifies it. Religious people, in half-remembered nostalgia for a world most have forgotten ever existed, seek to resist this by such acts as saying Grace before meals or fasting during Lent or Ramadan. Such acts seek to see the enchantedness of food as a gift from God. It seeks to imagine food as something we are not owners of, or even entitled to, but as a gift. Cut off from the epistemology and ontology that made such acts coherent, the commodification of the real is not a strange and curious development within modernity, it is a necessary corollary of modernity itself. It is predicated upon and necessitated by the very epistemology that is manifest in Kant, Hume and more.

26

Chapter 1

Augustine, in The City of God, asks whether what are called “quasi-human” people are properly worthy of dignity and respect. He is referring, in the main, to mythical things such as “a race who have two feet but only one leg, and are of marvellous swiftness, though they do not bend the knee: they are called ‘Skiopodes,’ because in the hot weather they lie down on their backs and shade themselves with their feet,” but also real people Augustine had never encountered, such as, he writes, those who “are called Pygmies, form the Greek word pygmé.”51 To understand whether such creatures are properly human, within the epistemological conditions established in modernity, study would commence. Such creatures would be examined using methods open to the senses and, based on their appearance and other attributes, an evaluation would be made. Augustine, however, takes no such approach. They are not “objects,” Augustine notes, but are in relationship to God. Therefore, God becomes the determinative factor in knowing their dignity, not the attributes of the persons. As Augustine writes, “God is the Creator of all; He knows best where and when and what is, or was, best for Him to create, since He deliberately fashioned the beauty of the whole out of both the similarity and dissimilarity of its parts.”52 Augustine attempts to look from the “God’s eye” perspective in relation to which things are what they are. He continues, “The trouble with a person who does not see the whole is that he is offended by the ugliness of a part because he does not know its context or relation to the whole.”53 Augustine, in effect, warns of the consequences of seeing without reference to the God who is the basis of the real. He warns of the very moves that become normative with the bracketing of the thing in itself and the reduction of it to its appearance. For Augustine, God, “who sees all,” sees “the beauty of the whole” which necessitates diversity. Thus, Augustine concludes that they are worthy of dignity and respect despite their attributes that are very different from his. Not because of their attributes, or indeed his own, are people worthy of dignity, they are worthy of dignity within this model because God loves them. Because these “creatures” are not reducible to their attributes, they are cherished. Their isness is predicated upon God’s self-giving to them, which grants them (literal) beauty and dignity. In light of this, the following fact warrants consideration. In all the texts written before the late medieval period, texts by white Christians about black Christians, black Christians about white Christians, northern European Christians about Muslims, and Muslims about Franks, there is not one clear example of someone suggesting that person A is less than person B by virtue of the color of the skin. Let me restate this. Before the late medieval period skin color was not seen as determinative of a person’s worth and dignity. Given the ubiquity of racist texts in the last few hundred years, this striking fact is of immense significance.

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

27

Charles Taylor famously asks why belief in God was a given before modernity but is increasingly the exception today. It is a question that enables analysis of our era. But another question provides just as good, or perhaps an even better, lens for understanding the epistemological and ontological shifts associated with the modern Western project—“Why do texts claiming superiority based on skin color and similar attributes feature heavily in modernity but are entirely absent before then?” While prejudice, misogyny, cultural “racism,” and more were prevalent before the renaissance, the kind of racism that comes to dominate modernity could not be thought. It could not be thought because the condition for thinking it—the reduction of the real to phenomenological appearance—was not present before the late medieval / early modern period. Only in the modern West do we have epistemological and ethical categories that reduce the real to the measurable, reduced personhood to “public data”—verifiable attributes. Only then are persons reduced to demonstrable attributes, like skin color, skull shape, and genetic inheritance. The “Enlightenment” represents a revolution that gives us the modern West. And we, modern Westerners, celebrate it as our origin story, our foundation myth. The Romans celebrated theirs—the rape of the Sabine women—which shows that participants in a culture are often not best placed to assess the merit of the origin story. But this chapter has aimed to show, not just the logical flaws in the epistemology and ethics Kant and others are establishing, it has aimed to show the horrors it has led to. With Kant, the noumena must be bracketed and the invisible relationship with God must be discarded. This reduces reality to attributes. But people are part of this reality, and people too become reduced to attributes. From here we can have racist images comparing different facial structures as indicating different intellectual and moral characters. A famous example from Harper’s Weekly in 189954 shows an altogether modern, phenomenological basis for an account of “superior races.” The persons in the image depicted are reduced to their appearance with the “Irish-Iberian,” similar to the “Negro” and both distinct from and inferior to the “Anglo-Teutonic.” This taxonomically establishes superior and inferior races. As with totalitarianism, this should not be seen as an aberration, a strange anomaly in the post Enlightenment West. No, this is logically necessitated by the epistemological and ontological foundations laid down in the modern West. While the pre-modern, of course, has prejudice, misogyny, antisemitism etc., the particular horror we see in this image requires the epistemological moves we see in Kantian modernity in order to be. Similarly, as Irven Resnick shows in his fascinating study, Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages,55 the early modern period brings with it new and horrific shifts in antisemitism. Before, persecution was predicated upon what we would today consider religious issues. Jewishness was seen a faith.

28

Chapter 1

With the epistemological shifts in the late medieval period, Resnick shows that Jewishness becomes associated with physiological aspects, predilection toward certain diseases, and so on. Jewishness is not a set of commitments associated with a human being ontologically coherent with other human beings. Jewishness is now understood as being “racial” in the sense of being predicated upon verifiable attributes and inherent tendencies. It is this notion that fuels the Shoah. My point is not that antisemitism is a late medieval and modern development. But the epistemological shifts detailed in this chapter establish the idea that an entire race is biologically determined as inferior or superior. Antisemitism is always horrific, it is horrific that a Jewish person would have to convert to avoid brutalization in medieval pogroms. But it matters that within modern antisemitism it is not a question of faith, conversion, or action, rather quantifiable attributes and “blood lines” establish racial inferiority and this principle drives the horrors of the Holocaust. This chapter has argued that with Kant and other Enlightenment figures a quest for certainty bequeaths to modernity an etiolated model of reason and the real. This model of reason requires that the mind work with phenomena and ignore any ontological surplus that may be beyond this. This fuels a model of the real which is reduced to phenomena that are measurable and quantifiable. This chapter has explored the consequences of this model of reason and the real in terms of moral inquiry as well as the social problems we inherit as subjects of this model. It has done so in order to lessen the hold the establishing epistemology has on us. In the following chapters this epistemology will be seen to determine hegemonic moral positions which deprive Christian moral position of persuasiveness. This chapter, as well as identifying this “engine,” has sought to show that fealty to this model comes at a cost. It is a cost that our secular Western democracies seem committed to keep paying. In the next chapter, I will contrast this model of reason and the real with the one that grounds Christian thought. To this end, I will show how the Doctrine of God, as the most Real, is the engine that drives Christian thought in the moral spaces I will explore. The triumph of the moves I have discussed in this chapter is so complete that Christians understand reason and the real in ways that are often more in keeping with them, than with the Christian doctrine of God. As such, the renewal of Christian moral theology this book calls for requires not just problematizing the approach I’ve discussed in this chapter, it requires re-invigorating the accounts I will discuss in the next.

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

29

NOTES 1. By “modernity,” I mean a set of intellectual and social conditions associated with, and proceeding from, the Enlightenment. 2. While these moves feature in the epistemology and moral philosophy of many others, Kant represents a particularly clear expression of them. 3. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 4. Here, Hume means basic logical implications. For example, if A is heavier than B and B is heavier than C, then we know “through the relation of ideas” that A is heavier than C. 5. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 22. 6. We can’t experience outside of time, for example. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 84. 8. George Grant, Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4: 1970–1988, eds. Arthur Davis and Henry Roper (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009). 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 102. 10. Ibid., 102. 11. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed, Peter Millican (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 120. Which is not to say that Kant shares Hume’s theological skepticism. Kant will attempt to ground faith in God in something distinct from the theology that preceded him. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 102. 13. Aristotle, Metaphysics, VIII.10. Ch. X. 14. Ismail M. Dahiyat, Avicenna’s Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974). 15. Ironically, the very things that Kant hoped his approach would preserve. 16. Via the antinomy of Practical Reason. 17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 117. 18. Ibid. 19. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 32. 20. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 240. 21. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007): 25. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Reprinted from the Ed. of 1777. ed. On Cover: The Religion of Science Library, No. 45. Chicago: Open Court Pub, 1900. 22. Safeguarded, not least from Hume, as Kant famously wrote, “I freely admit that it was the remembrance of David Hume which, many years ago, first interrupted

30

Chapter 1

my dogmatic slumber and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy a completely different direction.” Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 4. 23. Of course, it is only the reduced model Reason Kant established that forced the ever-uncompromising Nietzsche into such a rejection. 24. See, for example, Richard Dawkins, “Postmodernism Disrobed,” in Nature 394, no. 6689 (July 1998): 141–143. 25. Either certitude attained or certitude on its way. Either that which is proved by science or that which, in time, will be. 26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 681. 27. Nietzsche associates it particularly with George Eliot. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/ The Anti-Christ (New York: Penguin Books, 1990): 79–80. 29. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 650. 30. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 200–201. 31. See David Deane, “Nietzsche’s Atheism,” Religion and the New Atheism, (St. Peter’s Press, 2015) and David Deane, Nietzsche and Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006): 43–76. 32. Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind.” In Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind. Edited by Bo Dahlbom (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993): 1–28. 33. As in the “universal” declaration on human rights. 34. Jacob Burckhardt represents a classic example in his The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Random House, 2000). 35. Cavanaugh’s focus is on the way the “wars of religion” are leveraged by post enlightenment nation states to support the notion that the state alone can save us from the barbarism that irrational Religion unleashes. He shows that the wars which followed on from the Reformation may not have been primarily, “wars of religion” at all. After all, this supposed “Catholic versus Protestant” struggle was marked by key battles where, on one side, there were Catholics and Protestants, and on the other, Catholics and Protestants. 36. See, Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 37. More properly, thoughts about the material rather than the material in itself, which, as noumena, is bracketed in favor of phenomena. This will be explored in what follows. 38. Both in Brehon law and the legal system that replaced it. 39. This point is brilliantly made in Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Emmaus Academic, 2017). 40. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 351.

Carthage: The Tyranny of the Banal

31

41. Ibid. 42. The term nominalism coming from the Latin “nomin” meaning “to name.” 43. I illustrate this in chapter 3. 44. Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 45. In which he laments, “the attachment of savages to their lawless freedom, preferring ceaseless combat to subjection to a lawful constraint which they might establish.” 46.Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, Library of Liberal Arts, no. 54 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957): 30. 47. Ibid. 48. Such as Sartre. 49. As in Nazi Germany. 50. As in social orders in which social status is lost or attained by fealty to moral maxims, or some forms of state funding require that, “the organization’s core mandate respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, color, mental or physical disability, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.” 51. Augustine, City of God, ed. Vernon J. Bourke and trans. Gerald G. Walsh; Demetrius B. Zema; Grace Monahan; and Danial J. Honan (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1958): 365. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. https:​//​commons​.wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/File:​Scientific​_racism​_irish​.jpg 55. Irven M. Resnick, Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012).

Chapter 2

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning “Carthago Delenda Est” —Cato the Elder

As we saw in the last chapter, Kant held that because of shared transcendental limits we experience the real in similar ways. While we may reflect on these experiences differently, reason can mediate between our reflections. Because of this, reasonable moral debate is possible. Modern liberal societies, as Michael Gillespie,1 Louis Dupré,2 Brad Gregory,3 and others have shown, are indebted to this notion. Because of it, “dialog” has become totemic. But most people living in our liberal social orders know that, at least in relation to contested moral issues, we don’t experience reality in similar ways. We can have reasoned dialog about whether it is moral to sit on a chair, but such reasonable dialog becomes impossible if one person experiences the object as a chair and the other person experiences it as Queen Elizabeth II. Disgraced comedian Louis C.K. used this awareness as the basis for the opening monologue of his 2017 Netflix special. Louis C.K. likes to be edgy and make his audience uncomfortable. Therefore, he began with perhaps the most edge-inducing topic of all—abortion. His words, while utterly distasteful, are revealing as they are based on an awareness that different sections of his audience would experience the same material reality, in this case, unborn babies, differently. He began, I think abortion is exactly like taking a shit, 100 percent the exact same thing . . . Or . . . it isn’t. It is, or it isn’t. It’s either taking a shit . . . or . . . it’s killing a baby. Only one of those two things. It’s no other things. So, if you didn’t like to hear it’s like taking a shit, then it’s killing a baby. That’s the only other one you get to have. Which means you should be holding a sign . . . in front of a place. People hate abortion protesters. “They’re so shrill and awful.” But they think babies are being murdered!!! What are they supposed to be (saying)? “Well, hmmm . . . that’s not cool. I don’t wanna be a dick about it, though. I don’t wanna ruin their day as they murder several babies all the time.” I don’t think it’s killing a baby, though. I mean, it’s a little like killing a baby. It’s a 100 percent killing a baby. It’s totally killing a whole baby. . . . 33

34

Chapter 2

Louis C.K. oscillated back and forth, toying with his audience’s expectations and comfort levels. For some, the object in question, the fetus, was insignificant matter. For others, the unborn baby was a human person. Some felt anger when he said the latter but laughed while he said the former. His “bit” worked on the basis of the fact that the same biological entity is experienced in entirely different ways. Louis C.K.’s piece wasn’t, in my opinion, exceptionally funny. But it was instructive. As soon as we hear or read it, electrical and chemical processes occur in our brains. When the audience heard it, and when you read it, thoughts and feelings happened. For many Catholics, the first line was hugely offensive. For others, it was far less so. Emotions run high. We struggle to believe that others really experience an unborn differently, “there must be something wrong with them, right?” Well, perhaps not, we experience reality differently, and this truth shadows the secular Western social orders that figures like Kant helped birth. In the contested spaces that I am exploring in this book, my focus is on bodies—unborn bodies, the bodies of sexual partners, the bodies of the dying. The epistemological “engine” I discussed in the last chapter determines how such bodies are experienced by an increasing majority in our liberal, secular, societies. In this chapter, I will discuss an alternative “engine,” which leads us to experience bodies in a very different way. This is the “engine” that is the catholic Christian doctrine of God. Reality, for catholic Christians, is God, God is the most real, He who is, necessarily. Other “reality” is less real than God, it is not necessarily, but contingently—contingent upon God’s will. While the understanding of reality we saw in the last chapter drives secular positions on abortion, sexuality and so on, this understanding of reality—the catholic Christian doctrine of God—will be seen to drive Catholic positions on abortion, sexuality and so on. These engines don’t just provide a rational basis for our logical positions on things, they determine how we actually experience them. Novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco4 used a delightful example from Marco Polo to show the power such “engines” have on us. He references the following passage from Marco Polo, which is worth citing in full, There are wild elephants in the country, and numerous unicorns, which are very nearly as big. They have hair like that of a buffalo, feet like those of an elephant, and a horn in the middle of the forehead, which is black and very thick. They do no mischief, however, with the horn, but with the tongue alone; for this is covered all over with long and strong prickles [and when savage with any one they crush him under their knees and then rasp him with their tongue]. The head resembles that of a wild boar, and they carry it ever bent towards the ground. They delight much to abide in mire and mud. ’Tis a passing ugly beast to look

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

35

upon, and is not in the least like that which our stories tell of as being caught in the lap of a virgin; in fact, ’tis altogether different from what we fancied.5

What Marco Polo encountered, clearly, was a Rhinoceros. But he didn’t have any concept—“Rhinoceros”—in his head. Unicorns? Yes, of course. Everyone knew Unicorns existed. And so, his experience was processed through the conceptual framework of “Unicorn” rather than “Rhinoceros.” But what Eco doesn’t note, however, is even more interesting. Eco’s point is to show how “engines”—“worldviews,” “conceptual frameworks”—shape how we process sensory data, like the experience of the Rhinoceros, which Marco Polo called a Unicorn. The example, however, shows even more than Eco acknowledged, it shows us that the very sensory data that Marco Polo took in, his basic experience of the creature was already edited before it reached his consciousness. It was not simply edited in the “processing” when it was called “Unicorn.” Rather, the conceptual framework caused it to be edited as the signals passed from the eyes into the brain. When he wrote the passage above, Marco Polo was in Sumatra, and, in describing a Rhinoceros with “hair like that of a buffalo,” he is describing the only Rhinoceros on the island of Sumatra—the Sumatran Rhinoceros. The Sumatran Rhinoceros, however, has two horns, not one. Yet in this passage (and elsewhere) Marco Polo refers to only one. It is possible, of course, that he didn’t get a good look at the Rhino, but he did get close enough to describe its tongue. Getting close enough to describe the tongue he would have been close enough to see the second horn, but, in the excitement of seeing a live Unicorn, that particular crumb of experiential data didn’t make it to the brain. The second horn of the Sumatran Rhinoceros went unnoticed by Marco Polo, a second horn which was in competition with the concept Unicorn, and the concept determined what his eyes saw. The engine “unicorn” competed with his experience of the second horn. And the engine won. This shows us that our model of the real does not simply shape, as Kant believed, how we process our experience, it shapes the experience itself. For Kant, we work with phenomena, but the phenomena themselves are filtered through our engines. The classic modern approach to ethical debate is to bracket one’s “private” beliefs and rationally dialog about commonly held public experience. But our experience of the real is already shaped by these beliefs. As I will show in the following chapters, Christians have worked to succeed in such “public” spaces and thereby altered the logic of their moral stances in order to appeal to supposedly commonly held goods. This may have been understandable as Christians strove to gain acceptance and maintain power in Western secular nation states. But it has meant committing to

36

Chapter 2

a rationally indefensible model of the real, while also reframing Christian moral positions in less beautiful and coherent ways. This book tries to undo some of this damage. The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the model of the real on which catholic Christian moral positions have traditionally been based. Reconnecting with this model of the real can make Catholic moral positions more coherent and convincing for Catholics. For those who aim to engage non-Catholics, for those who strive to make their moral positions less loathed, they must engage, not at the level of debating ethical propositions in public fora, but, instead, on the level of these foundational “engines.” Instead of pretending we all experience the real in the same way and then trying to debate whether it is moral to sit on this object (which to some is a chair and to others is Queen Elizabeth II) they need to explain why they see this object the way they do, while also calling into question and problematizing the engine that drives the hegemonic position. Because of this I sought, in chapter 1, to identify the genetic strands within modern secularism which serve as Carthage to catholic Christianity’s Rome.6 In this chapter, I hope to illustrate the model of the real which, in the following chapters, will be seen to provide the foundation for catholic Christian moral positions. The goal is to both (i) illustrate this understanding of the real and (ii) lay foundations that will enable me to offer a catholic Christian moral theology in the contested spaces to come in chapters 3, 4, and 5. To speak of the real, for Christians, is to speak, first, of God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Rather than focus on the doctrine of the Trinity in this or that foundational thinker within catholic Christian theology, I aim to keep non specialists in the conversation by working more generally. Despite this, the influence of Augustine and Aquinas will be very evident in what follows. “I BELIEVE IN GOD, THE FATHER ALMIGHTY” The Doctrine of God is at the core of the catholic Christian understanding of reality. God, within catholic Christianity, is real. This statement seems trite. But it is clear that, for both Augustine and Aquinas, this does not mean that God is a thing, like rocks, trees, or tables. Because God, who is most real, is not real in the same way as existing things like rocks, trees, and tables, the reality of matter is immeasurably subordinate to the reality of God. Existence (which is a predicate of rocks, books, and computer screens) and isness (which is predicate of God) are different. When Aquinas, writes “Deus Est” he is writing “God is.” We translate it “God exists,” but existence, at least for us today, implies things, things that we can see, touch, smell, or taste. Existing things necessarily submit to perception and reason. They necessarily have materiality. Isness does not. All that is is a relationship between isness

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

37

(God) and existence (things that we can see all around us). God does not exist in the sense that trees, and grass, and people, and cars exist. God is. Trees and cars and grass exist. People, for catholic Christians, are distinct from other creatures, in that they are made for relationship with God in a distinctive way. This is testified to in Genesis and demonstrated fully and finally in the incarnation. People are creatures made in God’s image and likeness and porous to God’s self giving in a unique way. They can receive the Spirit leading to the presence of the Son dwelling in their “mortal bodies” (Rom: 8:11) in and through whom they are one with the Father. Thus, while they exist, they can be to an ever-greater extent, based on how much they participate in God. God is. We exist, but we can be one with isness to the extent that God, the Son, through the self-giving of the Holy Spirit, gives Himself to us and is accepted by us. We exist, but we can be more or less. Our isness increases and decreases based upon the reality of God’s isness united to us through God’s self-giving to us in and as the Holy Spirit. For Aquinas (ST I: Q.104, Art.1), as for Church Fathers,7 God is the most real, that which is necessarily and that which it is, to be. All else has its reality only in relation to God. In secular modernity we might say “It’s as real as this . . .” and point to a rock or some concrete. But for Catholic Christians, rocks and concrete are significantly less real than God. In his Summa Theologica (ST I: Q.4, Art. 1) Aquinas offers a discussion of God centered on God’s self-disclosure to Moses as “I am.” God, for Aquinas, is He Who IS. “Tell them ‘I am’ sent me to you,” (Ex 3:14). For Aquinas, this did not subordinate God to existence as we know it, but instead established the world as ontologically subject to and dependent upon God’s reality. For Aquinas, God is that which it is to be. Again, this does not mean that we begin with our understanding of existence and then posit this of God univocally. For the Fathers, Hildegard, Aquinas and more, it works in the opposite direction. God is but to say that God is is not to attribute isness univocally of God and existing things such as grass, trees, or butterflies. God is real and therefore existing things can be more or less real through participation in the reality that is God, a participation made possible through the self-giving of God, the Holy Spirit, to mortal bodies (Rom 8:11). It is a little like the relationship between heat and hot things.8 Hot things are hot by virtue of the presence of heat in them. So too things that are real are said to be real to the extent that God, who is, is in them as the basis for their being. The precise nature of this participation is understood differently by different figures. Augustine in his De Natura Boni Contra Manichaeos distinguishes two forms of goodness, one from God and one of God. This distinction, stressed in 410, is perhaps in slight tension with less clear distinctions, say, in De Trinitate viii where God is “the good of every good.” Erigena

38

Chapter 2

and, I would argue, Catherine of Sienna, are more brazen in asserting God (the Holy Spirit) as the good in all goods, stressing participation very strongly whereas Aquinas, as often, seems to mediate between the two positions is a very nuanced way when he writes, Everything is therefore called good from the divine goodness, as from the first exemplary, effective, and final principle of all goodness. Nevertheless, everything is called good by reason of the similitude of the divine goodness belonging to it, which is formally its own goodness, whereby it is denominated good. And so, of all things there is one goodness, and yet many goodnesses. (ST I: Q.6, Art. 4)

Aquinas, rightly, takes great pains to avoid any notion of God infusing human nature with His nature, altering the nature of the person and creating a bizarre hybrid. But he is also clear, as we see in the above quotation, in speaking of the good that we can participate in through God’s self-giving to us. It’s primarily used analogically in the Summa, but it is also a term we use fittingly with reference to God, the Holy Spirit, who dwells in our souls as the formal cause of caritas and other theological virtues. This, as Jack Mahoney brilliantly explains,9 is more frequently found in his scriptural exegesis. The Holy Spirit—goodness itself—is the formal cause of moral actions and present in them as goodness itself. This understanding is the fuel in the engine of catholic Christian moral reasoning. This ontological foundation for the real beyond the material means that the real can never be equated with phenomenological data. Therefore, the measurable cannot, for Christians, exhaust the real. In contrast, as we saw in chapter 1, when the real is reduced to the measurable, then “dignity” or “rights” must be located within something measurable. For Peter Singer, self-consciousness—an attribute that may be gained and lost—is understood to be at the core of a human’s right to life.10 Without such self-consciousness, a person loses their worth and can even lose their status as a person. This position saturates the ambient public conversation as can be seen in the use of the painfully insensitive, but instructive, term “vegetable” to refer to a person who has lost sufficient self-awareness. As this ugly term illustrates, a person who has lost self-consciousness has lost, not simply rights, but their very status as a human being. While they may look like a human being, weigh what they did before, and have organs that beat and pump blood as before, in losing intellectual attributes they lose their status as a human to such an extent that the term “vegetable” has been used to describe them.11 In a more recent, politically correct, era the term “vegetable” would never be used in academic debate, but, as often is the case, the underlying ideology, which holds that

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

39

a person’s personhood is predicated upon intellectual attributes to such an extent that their very personhood can be lost, is still hegemonic. In contrast, within catholic Christianity, people, not least the unborn and the very old, have dignity, not based upon their attributes, but based upon the fact that God loves them and gives Himself to them in relationship. Their dignity cannot be earned or lost. Their dignity is based on God’s love for them, and so it is constant. They have dignity simply by virtue of the fact that God loves them, a love present within them through God’s Holy Spirit. For Augustine, The Spirit of God dwells in the soul, and through the soul in the body, so that even our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, whom we have received from God. You see, the Spirit comes to our souls, because the love of God has been poured forth in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Rom 5:5)12

God is worthy of reverence and God is with and in people through the Holy Spirit. Because of this, people are worthy of reverence and dignity. If God was heat, they would be warm through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and we could warm ourselves by them.13 This is the basis of the dignity of humans, in particular, but also of all creation. All of creation has a mysterious dignity based upon God’s relationship with it—a dignity that can neither be earned nor lost, achieved nor squandered. It is this and this alone, which, for Christians, stops the isness of material things being collapsed into a weighing of attributes. While humans have responsibility for the created order, it can never be reduced to us. Creation, too, is, by virtue of God’s will, and thus creation has a relationship with God beyond our perception. This is the basis of creation’s mysteriousness and its isness can never be collapsed into our perception of its utilitarian worth.14 Within a properly Christian model, creation can never become a commodity. As discussed in chapter 1, the commodification of matter, which occurs when the isness of matter is reduced to human perception, has impacted humanity with horrific regularity in secular modernity. When the criterion for human dignity is based on attributes that can be gained or lost, the question lurks—what about those persons who do not possess such attributes? Genocide in the twentieth century was frequently accompanied by the assumption that Jewish people, disabled people, Hutus, LGBT people, or Tutsis lacked attributes commensurate with humanity and thus, in various contexts, they had their very right to life refused. The goal here is to note the catholic Christian understanding of the real and to begin to see how it informs catholic Christian moral theology. At its core is a relationship between the God who is, and creation, to which God gives

40

Chapter 2

Himself. This ontological model grounds catholic Christian moral theology. Within this model, God is never univocally contained in, or continuous with, creation, but neither is God isolated from it. The God who is can be participated in within time and space as a precursor to a more saturated union eternally. This participation is possible through God’s will for union with us, as the Son, through the Holy Spirit—a union we can accept in embodied, moral, acts. This will for union is testified to in the Hebrew Bible, demonstrated in the self-giving of God the Son, and known by the faithful in their sanctification by the Holy Spirit. This is the ontological foundation for Catholic moral theology. This theology can be expressed in maxims or laws, canons or principles, but such expressions build on, and should never mask, this ontological, and relational, foundation. When they do, Christians will argue over what this or that text says rather than reason (informed, of course, by texts) from theological first principles. In catholic Christianity, the relationship between the Christian God and the moral actions of people is not simply the relationship between lawgiver and the abiders of those laws. God is not best understood as a transcendent lawgiver, which we find in many modern concepts of God (such as in Nietzsche and Kant). While moral actions in modernity have been typically understood vis-à-vis adherence to “rules,” such “rules” are merely codifications of how persons in moral spaces can accept union with God. Union with God is the governing logic, and when this logic is forgotten or masked the process becomes a simulacrum of Christian moral reasoning. This does not mean that moral legislation—letter, spirit, and all—is not correct! Simply that, were I to ask my daughters why they don’t kill each other I would hope they would give an answer other than “because it is illegal.” The law that they should not kill each other is a good one. But, if the reason that they refrain from killing each other is fealty to the law then they have ceased to be Christian moral subjects. Their acts—not killing each other—are identical to the acts they would perform if they were Christian. But this surface, measurable, sameness masks a profound ontological and epistemological difference. Someday, I hope my daughters will speak about how loving actions can represent the participation of the person in the God who is love, while acts of hatred reject this participation. Even if not, I hope their actions are based in love, rather than hate masquerading as love in order to avoid punishment by law. So too, to understand why catholic Christians pray or even have sex in certain ways is not to understand the relationship between these catholic Christians and a set of laws, rather it is to understand the relationship between these catholic Christians and the God who gives Godself to persons for relationship with them. A focus on law as the lens through which moral actions are best understood, even among those subjects of modern secular thinking who use “Church teaching”

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

41

as a set of laws or constitution, is largely out of sync with the fundamental grammar of catholic Christian thought. It betrays the Babylonian captivity of the catholic Christian imagination to modern legalistic ethical grammars, such as we find in the Kantian tradition discussed in chapter 1. So far in this chapter, I have (a) introduced the position that God, as the real, represents the starting point for catholic Christian thought, (b) touched on some of the corollaries of this, and (c) highlighted that this “foundation” is not as “lawgiver,” as it has come to be understood within a modernity dominated by ethical models predicted upon maxims or laws. Before proceeding to the Christological and then pneumatological basis for catholic Christian understanding of the real, I need to offer a more comprehensive sense of the mechanics of participation in God’s life. In the contested spaces that follow in chapters 3, 4, and 5, it will be seen that good acts are acts accepting this participation and illicit acts are acts which refuse it, in favor of some other telos. Hence in setting down foundations I need to offer a better sense of what such participation looks like. I will illustrate this, first, with reference to the proposition that God is good. GOD IS GOOD The catholic Christian tradition takes Mark 10:18—“no one is good except God alone”—quite literally, and this fact drives Catholic moral theology. Augustine writes, “This good and that good; but take away this and that, and see good itself if you can; so you will see God, who is good not by another good, but is the good of every good.”15 God, for Augustine, is the direct referent of the word “good,” “the good of every good.” So, too, for Aquinas “God alone is good essentially” (ST I: Q.6, Art. 4), and “the supreme good simply” (ST I: Q.6, Art. 2). Aquinas will nuance this, avoiding the univocal appellation of the term to God’s goodness and human goodness (ST I: Q.6, Art.4), many things are “good” only by analogy and subject to what Kierkegaard called the infinite qualitative distinction between the temporal and the eternal. This is the good that is innate to (even fallen) humans and Aquinas holds that we can “build houses and vineyards” in caring for ourselves and our families and thereby performing good acts that are natural to all humans.16 “Good” here functions analogically. These acts are not acts made possible through the active presence of God. But as the quotations above makes clear, there are also good acts, which come not from cardinal virtues (things we can do by nature, without the active operation of the Holy Spirit) but from theological virtues, that is, good acts that are possible due to the gift of17 the Holy Spirit (such as faith, hope, or love). This is the sense in which Augustine speaks of it above. Here

42

Chapter 2

“good” is not simply a term used to describe an act analogically. It speaks to the ontological presence of God, who is good, in the act. Such acts are called good in the same way that we call magnesium “magnesium.” To say something has magnesium in it is to speak about the ontological reality of magnesium in an object. Magnesium is not simply a concept in the mind of the experiencer. The stuff we call “magnesium” is present and would be present without anyone to experience it. So too the goodness in an act which proceeds from the real presence of the Holy Spirit, who is good, is good, irrespective of how it is experienced by this or that person, this or that culture, this or that legal framework. Objects have more or less magnesium and similarly God, who is goodness itself, can be present to varying degrees as the formal cause of human acts. In this sense the goodness of something, like the magnesium level in something, can speak to the presence of God in something. Because of this, actions, for catholic Christians, are not good, essentially, by virtue of their cohering with deontological moral maxims. They are truly good, if they are truly good, by virtue of the presence of God, who is good, as their formal cause.18 Because God is good, to speak of the moral life, for catholic Christians, is to speak of a relationship between an existing thing (us) and the real (God) and how the latter (God) can weave the former (us) into His life. This is the moral grammar of catholic Christianity, it is not legalist, it is relational, it is ontological, but not “works based,” in the sense that our works do not earn the favor of a distant deity. Rather embodied actions accept the self-giving of God the Holy Spirit to us, enabling us to participate in and represent the Son, Jesus Christ. God offers Himself ceaselessly to us. The consequence of accepting this offer is nothing less than the real transformation of our being by God through accepting God (the Holy Spirit’s) presence within us. It is a relationship that ebbs and flows, not by virtue of God ebbing and flowing, as God’s self-giving is constant, but by virtue of the ebbs and flows of our acceptance and rejection of God. These ebbs and flows comprise the topography of the moral life. The catholic Christian insistence that God is alone essentially good stands at the core of the catholic Christian understanding of reality. When Catholic moral theology is driven by this model of reality, when it is driven by this “engine,” then it is identifiable as Catholic moral theology. Catholic theology sees the moral life as a space in which men and woman accept union with God, who is goodness itself, in their actions. The following chapters will detail how this happens in concrete spaces in relation to contested moral issues. Thus far it is clear that the moral life does not center, in itself, on rules, rather it centers on God, who is the good, and people, who can accept or reject union with God in the embodied acts that punctuate our economic, sexual and liturgical lives. This rejection or acceptance enables the term

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

43

“good” to be applied to human action as an ontological reality. It does so because it refers to the ontological presence or absence of the good, who is, most properly, God. This basic model of life is central to classical Christianity but is less common in recent centuries. As theologians as diverse as Catherine Pickstock,19 James Smith,20 and Kevin Vanhoozer21 have argued, modern theology tends to either dichotomize God and creation or conflate God and creation. It tends to see God as a distant law giver, ontologically absent from the world, or conflate God with human justice or other acts designated as “good” by this or that passing society. In contrast, the model we are working with focuses on a Triune and thereby a relational God. Before further describing the “engine” for Catholic moral reasoning by turning to the second person of the Trinity (as both the epistemological and ontological content of our knowledge of God), I will conclude this section by briefly focusing on this relationality. Doing so will help us understand the process by which this God, who is real, and who is goodness itself, can give Himself, as reality and goodness, to people and be accepted by such people in their moral acts. RELATIONSHIP AND THE TRIUNE GOD God, for Christians, is triune. God exists in intra-Trinitarian relationship. Within this intra-Trinitarian relationship, the triune Persons are not sealed off from one other. While material things cannot occupy the same space (we might think of a rock and a table clashing when we crack them together) for catholic Christianity the intra-Trinitarian Persons can mutually intra-penetrate. The technical term for this is perichoresis, a process, through which the intra-Trinitarian persons can partake, ontologically, in each other’s life in a kind of dance.22 This is crucial for how we understand the moral life and of course, how we understand the nature of God. God is not hard and sealed off like a rock or a table. Rather God can give Himself to Himself (the Father to the Son, the Spirit to the Father, and so on), and also to us. Because we are made in the image and likeness of God, we too are not hard and sealed off, but are porous to God’s self-giving. We know we are porous. For example, a child growing up in Beirut will think differently and act differently than a child growing up in Berlin. We are shaped by our contexts and by each other. Our actions, our thinking and so on changes based on our context. So, too, we are porous to viruses, sunlight and countless other elements from our environment. More importantly, we are not hard and sealed off from God. God can give Godself to us, shaping us, forming us, changing us. This is the basis for the catholic Christian understanding of Salvation, that,by the power of the Holy Spirit we can be shaped

44

Chapter 2

and conformed to Jesus Christ. This “porousness” is vital to remember for the moral theology that follows in chapters 3, 4, and 5, as life is understood as the space through which a porous self can embrace the self-giving of God to us, an embrace for which we were made. A bad analogy, but one that can help to illustrate the radicality of what I’m suggesting, is the way we are changed by something like the streptococcus bacteria. It is invisible but it enters us and brings about changes in our bodies, changes in how we feel and act. It does not become “us” and we don’t become “it” but it dwells within us and changes us. The analogy is poor for many reasons, bacteria is material, God is not. Nor, in the moral life, does God enter us without our acceptance, an acceptance expressed in moral acts. But such analogies can help us overcome the ephemeral and nonrelational models of the moral that that have dominated moral theology for too long. Models wherein we read in the Bible that God wants us to do something, we do it, and God is pleased with us. The dichotomy between God and the world is preserved in such a model and with it, the tyranny of the banal. A better analogy is one we find in Basil of Caesarea, in his anti-Eunomian writings.23 Basil speaks about us like a sword in the furnace. The orange heat of the furnace glows through us when we are in the furnace, heated by God’s self-giving, shaped and infused by God’s love. Take us out of the furnace and we’ll quite quickly grow back cold again. The steel will return to a dull, banal form. But in the furnace, fueled by the heat of the furnace, we partake in its heat; we partake in its orange-ness, and can mediate this heat to others. The key here is that if we are to understand catholic Christian moral theology, we must understand the moral life as being marked by ontological relationship with God rather than simply fealty to God’s precepts. The latter comes easier to us in an era in which the epistemological (the philosophy of consciousness) has come to dominate the ontological (“the philosophy of B/ being). It is because of this that Revelation—God’s self-disclosure, tends to be understood in the modern era in purely epistemological terms, that is, as a disclosure of information. Revelation comes from the Latin “revelare” which means, “to remove the veil.” We might imagine (erroneously) a magician taking away a handkerchief and saying “Ta-da!” when he reveals a rabbit. The audience will see the rabbit, and an epistemological encounter—coming to perceive the rabbit and know its presence—has occurred. In contrast, the veil removed in God’s self-disclosure is more akin to the veil of the temple, the veil that separates the Holy of Holies from us. The veil is removed, allowing not simply a sight, but an ontological encounter with God. The veil is removed, God flows into us, shaping us, altering us, transforming us. Coming to know God, the God who is, gives reality, goodness, beauty, and love to us through God’s presence as God is goodness, beauty, and love itself.

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

45

We have seen, then, that before we can speak about what a good action is, we need to speak about what the good is. In keeping with this, we have seen that, for Christians, to speak of what the good is, is to speak of God. Further, it is to inquire into the real presence of God in God’s porous creation, a presence we are made to enjoy. Thus, when looking at abortion, sexuality, euthanasia, and so on, catholic Christian moral theology asks, “What actions are actions that accept God’s self-giving as the Spirit in a mirroring of the Son?” In such acceptance we do not simply mirror and act like Jesus (“What would Jesus do?”), we participate in him, becoming one body with him in the Spirit. A such we must ask, “In what actions are we saying ‘yes’ to God’s self-gift to us, and in what actions are we saying ‘no’?” These questions fuel the topography of catholic Christian theology and will be central to the moral theology we will begin in chapter 3. If marriage, sex, prayer, and so on are toward the end of all life, an end which is participation in God’s triune life, then how must they be in order for this participation to be realized? To answer such questions is to consider the form and nature of morality as an embodied relationship with God. It is to consider who and what God is and what God wills. For Christians, the primary focus in beginning to answer such questions is God’s full and wholly sufficient self-disclosure in the person and work of Jesus Christ, and it is to Christ that we now turn. “I BELIEVE IN JESUS CHRIST, HIS ONLY SON, OUR LORD. . . .” If God is reality and goodness itself and therefore is the foundation for catholic Christian moral theology, how do we come to know who and what God is? For catholic Christians, to know God is to know Jesus Christ, as Jesus Christ is God’s full and final self-revelation. As true God, Jesus Christ reveals who and what God is. As true human, Jesus Christ reveals who we are and who we are intended to be. Without this knowledge of what is good (God) and what we are intended to be, we can not know how to be moral. Therefore, knowledge of God in Jesus Christ is, for catholic Christians, key to understanding how we are called to be (and, therefore, what a good act is). Knowing God in Jesus Christ has, traditionally, had two forms. One is epistemological. It comes from gaining information about who God is and what God wills from attention to Jesus Christ. The other is ontological, it is a form of knowledge made possible only in relationship. Relationship with Jesus Christ shapes a person through the indwelling of the Trinity within them. This transformation leads to knowledge of God as, ontologically transformed by this relationship, we experience the world, goodness, beauty, and so on, differently. These, then are the two elements I want to speak about in

46

Chapter 2

this section. I want to explore, first, how deductive knowledge of God can be attained through attention to Jesus Christ. This deductive knowledge can help us establish principals for moral action in the world, based upon appreciation for the example shown in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Second, I want to explore the epistemological content we can gain from relational knowledge of God in the Son, wherein through the Son we come to know God through participation in the life of the Trinity. Having seen, in the first section, how God qua God serves as the ontological foundation for the moral life, we will now see how knowledge of God happens in Christ. Finally, we will turn to the Holy Spirit in exploring the “mechanics” of the moral life. DEDUCTIVE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD THROUGH THE SON For catholic Christians, God reveals Himself in and as the man, Jesus. To say, “God is . . .” as in “God is a God of Love, God is a God of the poor, or God is a God who wills X,” is to say so with reference to the life, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus. As Karl Barth notes24 God reveals Godself fully in the man Jesus. Because of this we know more precise things, which drives, for example, Catholic social teaching, such as the fact that if God reveals Himself in the man Jesus, then God reveals Himself in union with the poor, as Jesus is one with the poor throughout the gospels. In Matthew 25, Jesus breaks with the traditional parabolic structure of his proclamations to speak in the first person—“I was hungry . . . I was thirsty . . . I was naked . . .” For Barth, this can mean nothing less than a self-identification of God with the poor, with the lowly and the marginalized.25 Jesus said, “I was hungry,” and He was hungry, in the desert. He said, “I was thirsty,” and He was thirsty, on the Cross. He said, “I was naked,” and of course, on the Cross He was naked, and the soldiers played dice for his clothes. Jesus Christ was speaking in the first person and in him God identified, more, bound himself, to the broken, the poor, and the imprisoned, in and as the man Jesus. This is, of course, much more radical than a simple divine edict to care for the lowly. Rather, God’s being is bound to the lowly in and as the man Jesus. Because of this to relate to the lowly is also, and at once, to relate to the God who has, in Jesus Christ, bound Himself to them. When we encounter Michelangelo’s Pieta, the sculpture of the Holy Mother with her dead Son draped across her lap, we are struck, first and foremost, with empathy for a grieving Mother. We are struck too with compassion for the broken, limp, and lifeless body of the man on her lap. And yet, as catholic Christian doctrine proclaims, boldly and unapologetically, this man, this broken man, this broken body, is none other than true God. In Jesus,

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

47

God is not simply the Holy of Holies—distant and apart. Nor is God seen as limited to traditional omnipotence. In the Pieta, God is not simply human, but a dead human—not simply a man, but an imprisoned, crucified, broken, lifeless man. As such, Jesus’ proclamation of the Good News to the poor is a proclamation that makes ontological claims about who the poor are, who God is, and how these two things relate, not as a dichotomously opposed pair, but as an interwoven couple. Again, we should note that this is far more radical than, for example, Karl Marx, in which self-interest alone serves as the reason that the bourgeoisie should cease exploiting the proletariat. In contrast, for Christians the poor are not loved and served out of self-interest, nor out of a sense of duty. Rather, the poor are loved and served because this is where, and indeed in whom, God reveals Himself. Because of the man Jesus, to serve God is now to serve the poor, lowly, and marginalized. They are bound to God in Christ, they are one with God, and God the Son is not ontologically removed from them. God can be loved in and as the poor and the broken, as God, in and as Jesus Christ, is poor, and is broken. Because God is Jesus Christ and because Jesus Christ is one with the poor, God, is not not the poor. We may know through a proliferation of intellectual systems that the poor ought be cared for. Marx will proclaim this, Liberal philosophers such as John Rawls will proclaim care for the lowly out of a sense of fairness. In contrast, what we encounter in Jesus Christ is altogether more radical. It is not a sense of duty that propels our consideration of the poor, rather it is that, in Jesus Christ, we have, in a sense, an active deification of the lowly, the marginalized, the outsider, and of the weak.26 This is an example of how in Jesus Christ we come to deduce things about who God is and what God wills. This deduction stands as the engine for Catholic moral theology. It represents a different “engine” from the one addressed in chapter 1. It—the truth revealed in Jesus Christ—represents a radical alteration of “the real world” in which we live. God is the most high. God has bound Himself to the most low in Jesus Christ. Thus, while it seems to the senses that the powerful, rich, and famous are at the top, and the poor, broken, and rejected are at the bottom, this is a mirage. What we have seen in Jesus Christ shows, clearly, that this is not so. This juxtaposition between our cultural encounters and reality made visible in Jesus Christ matters. Children often grow up wanting to be “successful,” which typically means a desire to be wealthy, famous, or revered. This seems to echo the basic Darwinian principles that have shaped all organic life. Our economic systems flow from such basic principles. And yet, in Jesus Christ, God binds Himself from all eternity to the lowly such that the real world shown in Jesus Christ is a world in which the last are first and the first are last. The real world, even if not mirrored by the existing one, is a place in which

48

Chapter 2

the prayers of Mary in the Magnificat are concretized, the poor and lowly are raised up, and the rich and mighty are sent away empty. Therefore, while the “real world” may seem to be a world shaped by the logic of Darwinism, the kingdom should be visible through the haze. Because God is most high, the sight of the last as first, of down as up, should be visible as the real through this cultural veneer of “reality.” The Christian moral life in part, consists in pushing this reality ever more into existence. The contrast between experiential frameworks is clear in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. Here there is a radical juxtaposition between the Darwinian world and the kingdom of God. In the existing world the rich man is at the top and Lazarus is at the bottom, waiting for crumbs to fall from the rich man’s table. But in the Kingdom, the world made real in and as the man Jesus, Lazarus is on high with Abraham while the rich man is below, begging for drops from Lazarus’ finger to cool his own burning tongue. The drops mirroring the crumbs in a perfect reversal. This reversal Barth, playfully echoing Nietzsche, calls “the transvaluation of all values.”27 Because of this, the “real world” in which catholic Christians live and on the basis of which catholic Christians reason to their moral positions, looks, from a conventional Darwinian sense, “upside down.” This is the epistemological consequence of the ontological gift of God (the Father) as God (the Son) through God (the Holy Spirit) to the world. Because of who Jesus Christ is and what Jesus Christ does, the world must be seen differently and the tyranny of capitalist practices, erroneously seen as “natural” and rational, is loosened. But from the perspective of these practices, the catholic Christian position, with its incessant bleating about the vulnerable, whether in the streets, the womb, or hospital beds, seems like the product of a different world. And, in a sense, they’re right. The key point here is that once the real is understood as primarily referring to God, and deductive knowledge of God is garnered from reflection on the life, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus, the real begins to look very different. Catholic Christian positions are predicated upon this very distinctive understanding of the real. They proceed from the principle that, for catholic Christians, Jesus Christ is true God and true man and thus both theologically and anthropologically normative. What this means is that when we seek to know who God is we look first and foremost to Jesus Christ. So, too, when we seek to understand what the true human is, we look first to the man, Jesus Christ. When we turn to the moral life in the chapters that follow, we will see that it is Jesus Christ who illustrates how we ought be. Jesus Christ, in His life, His words, His deeds, is the basis for our knowledge of God, but also of humanity. To understand a computer, we would not examine a broken computer, a collection of disparate components that cannot function as a computer due

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

49

to missing parts. We would look to a complete, functioning, computer to see how it operates and what it really is. So, too, anthropologically, to understand the human condition is to look first to the compassion, love, and faithfulness of the man Jesus—the truly functioning human rather than the broken humans that we are shown to be in distinction from Jesus. We would look to the one human who is wholly one with the Holy Spirit, a oneness which human beings are for. To this point, I have treated knowledge in a very conventional way: knowledge as a series of deductions, beliefs, or positions which follow from concrete data, i.e, God’s self-expression in the man Jesus. This is a conventional, deductive form of knowledge that, as we have seen in the first chapter, has come to represent the primary mode of knowing in modernity. As we also saw, such modern modes are predicated on a spatial distance between the perceiver and the object perceived. We stand at a spatial distance from the object, and we note its height, its color, its texture, and so on. Through this process and by virtue of this spatial distance, across which the eye can see, we seek to come to sure knowledge of the object. In Christ; however, knowledge of the Father becomes possible in ways that transcend this. ONTOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE OF GOD THROUGH THE SON Knowledge of the Father through the Son includes deductive knowledge as we have seen above, but it also moves far beyond it. With reference to this point it is instructive that the verb “to know” (‫ )לדעת‬is used biblically when speaking of sexual relations between Adam and Eve (Gen: 4:1). Adam “knew” Eve and she bore him a child. Knowledge here is an intimate, erotic relationship between knower and known. This is a more theologically vibrant model of knowledge than the modern one, predicated upon spatial distance between the knower and the object which is known. It is not in opposition to the modern one, but it goes far beyond it. Whereas, in modernity, a relationship between the knower and that which is known threatens knowledge—we may think here of testimony on behalf of a loved one in a court of law, which would be shadowed by the very relationship—in much pre-modern thought relationship was seen as fundamentally necessary for knowledge. Knowledge is a transformative, creative, even, as with ‫לדעת‬, an erotic encounter. It is not bound to the acquisition of facts, rather it is an encounter that shapes and transforms the perceiver. In keeping with this, Michel Foucault notes a strange development. While, in the classical period texts were largely unsigned, in the early Christian period an obsession develops about the authorship of texts. Not only are texts

50

Chapter 2

signed, but also many are given signatures that are false.28 Why? Well, those who ascribed the signature, “Paul” to letters that Paul did not write were attempting to give authority to the texts. They were attempting to “authorize” those texts by linking them to Paul. This was because Paul’s life illustrated relationship with Christ. Paul’s life testified to the fact that he had relational knowledge of Jesus Christ. His life gave “evidence” for change that can only come from relationship with Christ. Thus, texts about Christ bearing the signature “Paul” would have authority, as texts about fire would have authority when written by someone whose body was marked by the scars from being burned. Such a person would have knowledge of fire qualitatively different from any scientific assertions about fire based upon empirical data alone. The transformation in Paul’s life served as “scars” testifying to his relationship with Christ. Paul “boasts” in Christ (2 Cor 11:16–32) and this boasting is a boasting about the presence of Christ in Paul, which Paul claims to be the basis, the only basis, for the actions Paul is newly capable of. His “boasting” is an admission of his utter inability to do what he does. He gives up life, as he knows it, for Christ.29 He risks, he is imprisoned, and he ultimately dies by virtue of his relationship with Jesus Christ—a relationship that radically transformed his life. As we see through Paul’s “boasting” and as the early Christians in general believed (as is seen in Foucault) the transformation in Paul’s life was seen as the “evidence” of Paul’s knowledge of Jesus. As scar tissue evinces the injury that caused it so too, Paul’s life evinces his relationship with Christ. The actions that he manifests are not possible for Saul of Tarsus, but are instead only possible for Paul, who no longer lives apart from Christ.30 His faith is not simply an assent to certain epistemological propositions. It is a mode-of-being, made possible through a relationship in which Christ lives within Paul and transforms his body (Gal 7:16). In chapter 1, we explored epistemologies of spatial distance. In a sense, this form of knowledge is the precise inverse, as it is predicated on an annihilation of the space between Paul and the object of knowledge (God). Knowledge in this context was not threatened by relationship rather it was predicated on it. For Aquinas, knowledge of God is a relationship between the knower and the known before it is propositional. As he writes, “the created intellect cannot see the essence of God, unless God by His grace unites Himself to the created intellect” (ST I: Q.12, Art. 4).31 Knowledge of God involves a relationship with God, a relationship made possible by God’s gracious self-giving to us in Jesus Christ. While we come to know God deductively from apprehension of the life, teaching, death, and resurrection of the man Jesus, knowledge of God as embodied knowledge involves a relationship with God that marks our actions and transforms our life. The latter makes possible the former. In the modern world, our attempts to transgress the space between knower and known are attempts by the conscious subject to use intellectual

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

51

resources to come to know the inert object as much as possible. We are active, and the object of our knowledge is passive as we attempt to assess, evaluate, know, and understand it across a spatial distance transgressed by our eyes. The subject, within Kantian epistemology, is active, the object, inert. In contrast, for Aquinas, God in Christ gives Himself to our intellect “as an object made intelligible to it” (ST I: Q.12, Art. 4). God, in and as Christ, transgresses the space between Himself and the conscious subject by His self-giving to the subject through the Holy Spirit. Because of this for Aquinas God does not simply unite himself with us metaphorically. So too for Augustine who writes, “The Spirit of God dwells in the soul, and through the soul in the body, so that even our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit.”32 For Paul, “When the Spirit of He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead dwells in your mortal body then you shall have eternal life” (Rom 8:11). The Spirit comes to live in our “mortal” bodies, for Paul, and Augustine, Aquinas and catholic Christianity is faithful to this. This indwelling of the Spirit is the sine qua non for knowledge of Christ (1 Cor 12:3). Paul comes to know Christ, not through intellectual reflection, but through Christ’s self-giving to Paul in the Spirit. Knowledge here is a relationship that ontologically transforms the knower by the self-giving of the known to it. In direct contrast with the Kantian approach, in this, Pauline, model—God is active and we, the knowing subject, are relatively inert. An ontological union, not an epistemological mastery, is the goal of knowledge of God. For Aquinas, Theology—the science of the knowledge of God—has this ontological oneness, rather than epistemological mastery, as its goal (ST I: Q.2, Art.7). As we have seen, we come to know God epistemologically through reflection on Christ’s life, death, teaching, and resurrection. Yet, more significantly, we come to know the Father from the inside out, through our participation in, and confirmation to Christ.33 Our knowledge of God, then, properly understood is not ours; rather, it is our participation in the Son’s knowledge of the Father. Thus, it is a participation in God’s own knowledge of Himself. This participation requires contemplation which, for Augustine, is not an arid epistemological process, but rather a spatial one.34 For Augustine, our contemplation of the Son, who is an icon of the Father, leads inexorably to our participation in the self-giving of the Father through the Son. Contemplation of the Son is a movement of our mind through the Son to the Father. Note again, unlike an exegesis of Matthew 25, this does not lead deductively to a proposition X or Y. Rather, and more scandalously, it speaks to the actual participation by human beings in God’s life. By virtue of the incarnation, God is no longer an object to be perceived and interpreted across a spatial distance. Rather, in the incarnation, God transgresses that spatial distance and weaves

52

Chapter 2

us ever more fully into His life. Contemplation of the Son, therefore, is an active embrace of God’s ontological movement to us in and as Christ. Thus far, we have seen that for catholic Christians to speak about the real is to speak about God. We have seen that this God, who is real and who is God, is known as and in Jesus Christ. The moral life, however, is not a series of actions in fealty to what we know about God and what God wills. It is a process of accepting union with this self-giving God in concrete moral actions. To understand the mechanics of how this works is to turn to pneumatology—the theology of the Holy Spirit. The Father is the Good, the Son reveals the Father, and the Spirit enables us to accept union with the Father in and through the Son. Because of this I will now offer an overview of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit with a focus on how the Holy Spirit functions vis-à-vis the moral life. While the doctrine of the Holy Spirit speaks to far more than this (as, indeed, Christology goes far beyond the focus we’ve touched on, and the Doctrine of God goes far beyond God’s functioning as Goodness itself) a focus on the Holy Spirit in terms of the moral life will illustrate the mechanics that I need to establish in order to illustrate the foundations for the moral theology that follows. This illustration will focus on how the Holy Spirit functions in terms of the theological virtues; faith, hope and love, in order to clarify these mechanics. I will begin by speaking about the Holy Spirit and/as love. From here, I aim to build on the identification of the Holy Spirit with the theological virtues by looking at the annunciation as an illustration of faith where the Holy Spirit is identifiable as the source and content of faith. The explicit focus then shifts to hope in an exploration of Paul’s hope for his own transformation, his hope for social transformation, and his brazen hope in the face of death. Finally, I hope to further illustrate these mechanics with a focus on prayers of petition before I conclude with an appreciation of the radical social consequences of the identification of faith, hope, and love with the Holy Spirit who binds us into the one body of Christ. Such social and spiritual mechanics will be crucial in terms of the following chapters. “AND IN THE HOLY SPIRIT” If the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is, as I will suggest, central to a coherent articulation of catholic Christian moral thought, then it is not surprising that such moral thought has been unraveling in a period in which the role of the Holy Spirit has been radically etiolated in general Christian discourse.35 The reasons for this are many and complex:36 a radical distinction between time and eternity, a materialism which struggles to conceive of anything meta-material as real, a rampant “naturalism” in religion mapping the scientific revolution’s

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

53

focus on the development of “pure nature” as a theological category, and so on.37 The decline in focus on the role of the Holy Spirit in transgressing the space between God and us has had significant consequences for our capacity to imagine the moral life in ways coherent with traditional Christianity. In its place a more modern and pharisaic preoccupation with legalistic “oughts” has taken hold wherein morally good actions are seen as actions conforming to moral laws.38 As explored earlier, within this more modern approach “good” does not refer to anything ontological, but merely the conformity of the act to the law that expresses the idea of what a good or right action is. Kohlburg’s stages of moral development are representative here.39 As Carol Gilligan has noted, Kohlburg sees right moral action as determined by a deontological moral maxim that can never take into account context, gender identity, and so on.40 From reasons for action such as “I will do this so I won’t get hurt” or “I will do this so I will benefit” in earlier stages, we “progress” toward “I will do this in the service of the Universal good” in the ultimate stage. So too, Christians have deduced deontological laws from scripture or the life of Christ and spoken of morality as acting in coherence with these laws or maxims. This model is not wholly incorrect. As we saw earlier, Scripture and the life of Christ should inform the Christian. God has will, and human action in harmony with this will is good. Yet, in their highest expression, actions are good because of the presence of the good (God) in them as their formal cause, rather than because they are actions, ontologically apart from God, which happen to cohere with the maxim “God wills X.” “Good” refers explicitly to the ontological content of the act and only implicitly to the coherence of the act with God’s will. The difference between the two is significant. The idea that “good” refers not to ontological reality, but only to the coherence between actions and moral maxims, acquiesces in an understanding of the world as ontologically Godless. It imagines the moral life lived within a creation from which God is ontologically absent. Whether this God is revered by Christians, or is the arid principle of deism, doesn’t really matter. In both models God is “up there in heaven” or is some “wholly other” first principle. In both cases, ontologically, the world is clean of the presence of God. In both nature is inert and banal. We can subjugate it through reason in order to understand it and use it to our advantage. Nature is the willing spouse of science alone. Such an approach is, in an ontological sense, wholly secular. Calling the God of such a model “Lord” or “creator” or “the Father of Jesus” doesn’t alter this fact. There are secular approaches that hold right action as conformity with “the greatest good for the greatest number” or essentially secular approaches that see right action as conformity with a biblical passage in which an ontologically distant God tells us to do, or not do, this or that. This ontological divorce may be overcome after life as a reward for right ethical action in life. The hegemony of the secular; however, is never

54

Chapter 2

challenged as time is understood as that marked by the ontological absence of God. Secularity in moral philosophy is not best defined by the source of the legalism, but by the understanding, shared by both modern approaches, that the world is essentially devoid of the real presence of God. But it is precisely this premise that is refused by Christianity as an incarnational religion. I will proceed to demonstrate this with reference to Luke’s account of the annunciation and the Pauline corpus in the next two sections.41 Here the maxim that stands over so much of the chapters to follow is established—that the gift of the Holy Spirit is not a gift from the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit herself is the content of this gift.42 THE HOLY SPIRIT AND LOVE Theologians from Augustine, to Bonaventure, to Luther, who sought to rightly affirm God’s otherness from the world, did so to avoid any conflation of God with the world. Luther rightly raged against the ontological conflation of God with all the Church does, as earlier Christians, not least missionaries in northern Europe, raged against the naming of a tree, a well, or the sun, as “God”; practices which many Church Fathers referred to as “paganism.”43 Such an approach names all as God while in catholic Christianity, God is not reducible to the world and is infinitely different from it. But, through the incarnation, this wholly other God gives Himself ontologically to the world. A proper resistance to both conflation and dichotomization can be seen in Augustine when he notes that the Holy Spirit is the divine person who is the formal cause of faith, hope, and love. For Augustine, God is love, but more properly the Holy Spirit Herself is love. As he writes, “there is among the gifts of God none greater than love, and there is no greater gift of God than the Holy Spirit, what follows more naturally than that He [the Holy Spirit] is Himself love, who is called both God and of God?”44 Frequently in De Trinitate, Augustine will speak about God as love and the Holy Spirit as that personally signified by the word “Love.”45 The Holy Spirit is, for Augustine, the love between the Father and the Son, which proceeds from the Father and the Son to us, as he writes, “the Holy Spirit is properly called by name of love, although in the universal sense both the Father and the Son are Love.”46 So too for Gregory the Great, “The Holy Spirit himself is love.”47 and Aquinas follows Augustine completely. For Aquinas, love refers to God (in the essential sense), but “If taken personally it is the proper name of the Holy Spirit; as Word is the proper name of the Son.” From that, we can glimpse something of the mechanics that underpin Augustine’s rhetoric in his famous sermon on 1 John 4:4–12, when he writes,

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

55

human actions can only be understood by their root in love. All kinds of actions might appear good without proceeding from the root of love. Remember, thorns also have flowers: some actions seem truly savage, but are done for the sake of discipline motivated by love. Once and for all, I give you this one short command: love, and do what you will. If you hold your peace, hold your peace out of love. If you cry out, cry out in love. If you correct someone, correct them out of love. If you spare them, spare them out of love. Let the root of love be in you: nothing can spring from it but good.48

While Augustine the preacher is all rhetorical flourish, his logic is quite formal. Here, that underlying logic is predicated upon the fact that God (most properly the Holy Spirit) is the root of love and is love itself. Augustine relies on organic images such when speaking of how our expression of love is fueled by God’s self gift as love. “Root and branch” images are common as are images of fountains and the water flowing from it.49 Genuine actions of love are actions borne of the ontological presence of God. The moral life for catholic Christians depends for its coherence entirely upon this model. From the love that is the formal cause of the action, to the love represented in the action, God, as love, flows as “the veins” of the act. God is love, God is the ontological content we call love. This love of the Father for the Son is at once love for all, as all creation comes into being through the Son and all humanity is represented in Him. This love is the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father to, and through, the Son and incorporates us into God’s life. If our actions proceed from God then they are good, ontologically. If they are pharisaic fealty to laws for self-aggrandizement, they cannot be good, even if they are correct.50 To be good, they must have the good (God) in them as their source and content and Augustine, the master rhetorician, delights in this tautology. Love is the Spirit that proceeds (ontologically) from the relationship between the Father and the Son. This love is processive and flows to all humanity. The Father and the Spirit cannot love the Son without also loving all humanity, because we are bound to the Son, we are made in His image and likeness, and we are woven into the Triune life through the Son in the incarnation. Because of creation and incarnation, the Trinity cannot be a procession of love, nor, even, can the Son be loved by the Father, without the active, expressive, self-giving love of the Father for humanity. Hence there can be no clear line between the Father’s love for the Son and the Father’s love for humanity. The Spirit who is Herself this love proceeds to and through us as surely as she proceeds from the Father to the Son. This is not a decision by God; this is who God is. As Thomas Aquinas writes, “as a tree flowers by its flowering and by its flower . . . the Father loves the Son by the Holy [Spirit], as by the person proceeding, and by Love itself”51 (ST I: Q.37. Art.2).

56

Chapter 2

Given that our discussion has moved from the Holy Spirit to love without changing the object being discussed, we can see how a decline in a coherent doctrine of the Holy Spirit in Christianity would render impossible a coherent doctrine of love, not least in the sense of the moral issues we will be discussing in chapter 5. “Love,” as a theological virtue, is a gift of the Holy Spirit and speaks to the real the presence of the Holy Spirit. This theological principle does not work in isolation from the Christology discussed in the last section. Augustine and Aquinas take the principle of inseparable operation for granted.52 For both, while it is fitting to speak of one person of the Trinity as the active agent, we should know that all three persons are active. While the Father is the person who is the creator, He creates through his Word (Gen 1:3) and the Spirit hovers over the waters of creation (Gen 1:2). As we saw in the last section, Christ is given by the Father and the Holy Spirit is never apart from or opposed to the Son. To see the Son is to see the Spirit and to see the Son is to see by virtue of the Spirit. It is the Spirit that is the basis for seeing the man Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of the living God. The Spirit directs our gaze to the Son. And so, because of the presence of love (the Holy Spirit) we look to the Son and see what love is. We may not be as certain in our understanding as we may be in our understanding of gravity, but we will, for Augustine and Aquinas, certainly have plenty to go on in our attempts to live the moral life. We will see a radical form of love, a self-giving for others and God to the point of annihilation. We see an acceptance of servitude in love of God and others. We will see things that confront us, repel us, shock us, and we will be called to practice fortitude, faith, and hope, in our acceptance of this in our embodied action in the world. When we look on the Son through the Spirit, we look on love through love. And when we see the Son we see how we are called to be if we are to love. THE HOLY SPIRIT AND FAITH The Annunciation53 features frequently in patristic examples of this inseparable operation. It does so because there are few better examples of the “mechanism” for participation in the life of the Trinity—which is the model for moral theology. Brief attention to it here will play a significant role in demonstrating this model. It was customary for Jewish girls at the time to be betrothed at twelve or in their early teens and so Mary, due to her being betrothed to Joseph, must have been a very young girl. In a rabidly patriarchal and often misogynistic society she was utterly vulnerable. She risked being put to death for adultery. Despite this fear, Luke’s account holds that Mary said “yes” to the angel of God’s request, saying, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

57

me according to your word” (Lk 1:38). This “fiat” of Mary is a moment traditionally seen as inaugurating the Church. It is a “yes” to the Holy Spirit that leads to the presence of Christ within her body.54 This is what morally good actions, at their highest, are—a yes to the Holy Spirit accepting the presence of Christ within us, conforming us to Him. The blessed Mother’s fiat, despite the potential consequences, is an act of faith and hope in love of God. It is an act that is commensurate with the presence of the Holy Spirit (“full of grace”) that alters the body of Mary such that Christ comes to be within her in a very real sense. At the annunciation we see the incarnational God and also how we are called to respond to this self-giving God. Mary’s fiat represents a “yes” to the Holy Spirit who is sent by the Father and the result of this acceptance of the Holy Spirit is the real presence of Christ within. It is not a gift of magical powers from a distant God, nor a blessing, in the sense of an affirmation of us by a distant deity. It is the self-giving of God to us as the Son through the Spirit. The annunciation frames the incarnation as a self-giving of God to us in a very real, ontological, even biological, way. In giving herself totally to God, in risking all, Mary, full of grace (the Holy Spirit) is—like all bodies that are full of the Spirit—Christoform. The Holy Mother mirrors the total self-giving of the Son to the Father in faith, hope, and love. She is one with the Son in the Spirit. Note, “in the Spirit” in no way qualifies or reduces the ontological or biological objectivity of her oneness—after all, she is feeding him, via the placenta, through her blood stream. This biological reality should be remembered if our thinking about the Spirit becomes ephemeral. Our oneness with the Son though the Spirit is very real. The rightful honoring of Mary’s manifestation of the theological virtues and her unique relationship with Christ should not lead to her being put on a pedestal to such an extent that she ceases to be a role model for the Church as an embodiment of the Christian life. For example, we may assume that the faith she reveals is utterly removed from ours. After all, accepting an angel saying that the Holy Spirit will cause her to conceive the Son of God is a very distinctive leap of faith. Yes, her faith is radical, but our own faith may not be all that different. This radicality helps us appreciate the core point here, that faith requires the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is not an intellectual assent. It is not belief, even though belief is one of the expressions of faith. Faith is an ontological reality that comes from the real presence of the Holy Spirit. To see this, we need to acknowledge just how radical our faith in Jesus Christ is. Christians look on Michelangelo’s Pieta, that broken, dead, limp, lifeless body draped across his mother’s lap and believe that this is what God is like. This is shocking. This God is not in keeping with the cultural concept “God” that predates it. Zeus seems worthy of the designation—God, even YHWH in a burning bush, high, lofty, powerful, mysterious, holy, otherworldly, these

58

Chapter 2

are worthy referents for the term “God.” But surely not a broken, dead, lifeless body draped across his mother’s lap? For you to say that this figure is God is a shocking statement. Even more so when we remember that Jesus is from Galilee, an outpost of Judea, itself an outpost of the Roman Empire. Not simply a backwater province, but the town this backwater province looks down on itself as a backwater. Jesus would have had an accent that would be seen as uneducated or backward. He would have sounded to the people outside Galilee the way a “redneck” or “thug” might sound today. Moreover, during his life he was considered a glutton and a drunkard (Mt 11:19) and spent time hanging out with prostitutes. He was condemned as a criminal—this backward-accentedthirty-three-year-old-virgin—and died the gruesome death of a failure, being mocked, tormented, and abused, abandoned by all but a handful of grieving women. The scandal must never be forgotten that, for Christians, this man, who sounded like that, who acted like that, who died like that, is God. Without appreciation of how scandalous this is, we cannot appreciate the work of the Holy Spirit as the source of this faith in us. Jesus does not fit the cultural category “God,” but, and here the boundaries of what is rational are stretched, rather than say “he is not God,” Christians actually change the definition of the term “God” to say that he is God.55 In your head, you have a concept “Pony.” You’re looking at this text, on a paper page, or an electronic device. What would it take for you to change your definition of “Pony” to say that the thing, this paper/device, which you are looking at, is a Pony? If you were to say that this thing you’re looking at is a Pony, you would rightly be sent for medical testing and would probably not be able to return to your home until you stopped calling it a Pony. People would rightly think that you were ill. They may think you had some virus in your mind that was making you conflate this thing you’re looking at with a Pony.56 And yet, in a sense, as a Christian, you do exactly this. You change that which is connoted by the term “God” in order to conflate God with the broken, dead body of the Galilean peasant. Rather than say this man is not what is connoted by the term “God,” you change the definition of God to make it fit him. You worship a man with an accent that connotes uneducated ignorance, who spent his time eating and drinking with slaves, lepers, and prostitutes and live your life in His service. I do, too. We are educated people. We have high IQs, degrees from the best and oldest universities in the world. We’ve been given prizes and awards for academic achievement. And yet, we do something not all that different from changing the definition of “Pony” in order to call the thing you are looking at right now “a Pony.” We must surely conclude that we have a virus of the mind. We call this virus of the mind “faith.” It is a gift that testifies to the real presence of the Holy Spirit active

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

59

in us. The beautiful and life-changing realization that the Man Jesus is God is not rational. You can’t get to this realization by yourself. You hold this faith because, and only because, the Holy Spirit is active within you. This faith indicates the presence of the Holy Spirit in us as surely as the presence of VCA-IgG antibodies indicates the presence of the Epstein Barr virus in someone with mononucleosis. Faith is an ontological reality that is represented by a distinctive mode of being in the world. It is not a statement and can not be reduced to belief. It is as real as a pregnant belly. And so, Mary’s faith and our faith are less different than we may assume. Both are very unlikely, very dramatic, and very embodied. Moreover, we are one with her in the Holy Spirit who is Herself one. We are not separate and sealed off from Mary and our faith is that same “virus” infecting the body and mind, that same opening of the eyes, that same Holy Spirit who is the cause, form, and content of hers. The Holy Spirit unites with matter and dramatically shapes persons in the world. This fact is central to understanding catholic Christian moral theology in light of the challenges that follow. Because it is so important to understand the theological virtues, Love, Faith, and Hope, as ontological realities rather than simple states of mind, because the “pull” of modern thinking is so strong, and our temptation is to recoil from the intimacy of this union with God in the moral life and abide, instead, in a model which sees actions pleasing or displeasing a distant deity, I will conclude this chapter with a discussion of Hope as a theological virtue. My goal, again, is to illustrate the embodied nature of hope as an acceptance of the real presence of the Triune God, in the Son, through the Spirit, in our bodies. THE HOLY SPIRIT AND HOPE In his letters Paul constantly looks to speak of his own life as an illustration of this soteriological process. In Romans, for example, we have a very clear sense of how the Holy Spirit enables coherent moral action. In Romans 7, Paul identifies himself as one in thrall to sin. The form this takes for Paul is illicit desire: a “war within his members” wherein he is orientated by fallen human drives in ways that are toward his own self-assertion and away from christoformity. Paul, in the lineage of Adam, sees his desires as being “according to the flesh.” While he is made to be one with God, the desires of his own body are opposed to his rightful end (Rom 7:15). He cannot be as Christ through his own will. He cannot, by his own efforts, do the good he sees in Christ (giving all to the poor, living completely for God and others), and in fact, his body’s desires are opposed to this. This is why the law, for Paul, cannot work. Paul scandalously claims in Galatians and (in a more qualified fashion) Romans that the law is insufficient. It is not insufficient due

60

Chapter 2

to any deficiency in the law itself, but, because of a fundamental deficiency in Paul instead. Because Paul is orientated by disordered desires he, like the Pharisees, will use the law to assert himself over and against others. He will use the law to assert himself over others, being more “Holy” or “clean.” While wholly good, the law will itself be drawn into the service of Paul’s disordered desire like any other system. It can not bring about change in the world when Paul remains “of the flesh,” that is, in thrall to desires to assert himself, to attain more than he needs to compete with others and so on. The transformation that Paul feels is needed, a transformation that will make Paul more like Christ, can not be achieved through a simple act of Paul’s willpower. He can no more will himself to be Christ than he can will himself to be a horse or a carrot and for precisely the same reason—he is not Christ, no more than he is a horse or a carrot.57 He cannot become Christ through his own will; he can only be christified by Christ, who is outside Paul, giving Himself to Paul through the procession of the Holy Spirit. This christification is the solution to the rhetorical question he uses toward the conclusion of Romans 7, “Who will save me from this body of death!” (Rom 7:24). The answer is God who saves Paul through Jesus Christ (Rom 7:25). While Paul’s body is orientated toward violence, it is Christ who is the cheek turning one, who represents an alternative to the logic of violence. While Paul is orientated to acquire possessions, it is Christ who gives all and directs us to the lilies of the field (Mt 6:28). Such peacefulness, such letting go, is natural to Christ, but not to Paul. Paul can come to be peaceful and let go only through conformity to the peaceful one—Jesus Christ. Romans 7 and 8 represent a nuanced exploration of this hope, albeit within a rhetorical form that is essentially what Paul would have preached and proclaimed. His juxtaposition of flesh (sarx) and spirit (pneuma) is used to distinguish between formal causes, ontological engines that drive distinct forms of action. Is the Spirit or “the Flesh” the engine driving the action? This is the question that seeks to know the ontological reality of the action, that is, whether it is good or not. This should not be taken, as it too commonly is in modernity, as a denigration of the body in favor of an ephemeral otherworldliness. Saul, patristic shorthand for the man in need of the Holy Spirit, is comprised of flesh. Paul, patristic shorthand for the man infused by the Holy Spirit, is also comprised of flesh. But the flesh of Paul is animated by the Holy Spirit flowing through his flesh like the sap in a plant or tree. As he writes in Romans 8:11, “When the Spirit of He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead comes to dwell in your mortal body, then you shall have eternal life.” The Spirit does not enter us after death. She dwells in our “mortal body.” This is a statement that refuses any body/spirit or time/eternity dualism. Rather, “the flesh” (Rom 8:5) is a term that connotes biological self-assertion, assertion of the self apart from or in opposition to God. Life according to

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

61

the Spirit is equally embodied, it is as physical as life according to the flesh is, but the Holy Spirit infuses the body.58 Grace, as the axiom goes, does not annihilate nature, but perfects it. Paul claims, for many reasons, that his life illustrates this transformation of his nature by the Spirit. It is “his pitch,” in that it is his way of expressing the good news. He supports it with personal testimony of what he holds as foundational theological principles. He gives up everything and follows God. He proclaims the good news. He risks his life in the service of God and others. Ultimately, he is impoverished, scarred, and imprisoned, and dies after giving everything for God and the world. These actions are, his letters encourage us to believe, no more in keeping with Saul than tasting like a banana is in keeping with being an apple.59 It is not in a banana’s nature to taste like an apple and it is not in Saul’s nature to do the radical good we see in Paul. Such things are natural to Christ, not Saul, and Paul tells us that it is Christ in him that is the active agent. He has been christified (Gal 2:20). Christ is the kingdom, Paul is one with Christ. The kingdom, as with Stephen at his death, is visible in Paul’s life and death. This hope is claimed by Paul to be the only hope as no set of laws, no system, even “the law” can ever bring change as people are ontologically the same in whatever top-down system they are put in. As such, like water in different containers, there may be a different look to a person within this or that political system, but there is no ontological change. Capitalism and communism bring nothing more than a different arrangement of ontological sameness. But real change can occur as Paul becomes more Christ than Saul. For Paul, this is hope itself—this is the good news (Col 1:23). His approach is maintained in the early Church, as we see in Ignatius of Antioch’s epistle to the Romans. Ignatius writes, “I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of Christ.” One of the reasons martyrdom is so significant for the early church is that, for them, it “proves” that their hope is real. Ignatius is becoming one with Christ in giving his life for others in an act of martyrdom. He is becoming, as his text suggests, eucharistic bread. They do not assume that such transformation is possible simply by their own effort. But through the Holy Spirit they can become conformed to Christ to such an extent that Christ and his kingdom becomes visible in their acts. Ignatius is confident that he will “rise again emancipated in Him.” A hope he holds with confidence as “I learned not to desire anything worldly or vain.” This is a radical transformation and demonstrates to the early Christians that their hope is not in vain. Christ has been offered as a cure for the selfishness of fallen humanity. And Ignatius and the martyrs have clearly been cured. As Tertullian, himself a passionate advocate of Christian pacifism, writes in chapter 40 of his Apologeticus pro Christianis, “the blood of the martyrs is seed.”60 It

62

Chapter 2

demonstrates the truth that when the Holy Spirit of the Father dwells in mortal bodies these bodies are healed, that is, saved. The goal in highlighting this Pauline and early Christian theology is to help us move away from the ephemeral forms of thinking about the Holy Spirit that have plagued modern Pneumatology.61 To express the moral theology central to catholic Christianity is to express how human actions can accept the Holy Spirit thus becoming one with Christ and thereby being united to the God (the most real). This is key to explicating the catholic Christian foundations for moral theology, which has been our goal throughout this chapter. With Paul, Ignatius, and others, the injustices and problems in the world cannot be overcome through laws. They can only be overcome by ontological change. This is the catholic Christian alternative to the models of reason and the real explored in the first chapter. If laws can bring about the good, if laws are sufficient to bring about what Christians call the Kingdom of God, then Christianity is wrong, and no apologetic skill can overcome that. But, if the kingdom of God, if the good that Christians hope is possible on earth, requires the ontological transformation of persons, then secularism is wrong, and its hegemony cannot make it right. The Christian hope we see in Paul and the early church is communal, not just personal, it changes the world, not simply individuals. In Romans 12, Paul shows how. As he writes, “For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Rom 12:4). Like many other often repeated passages in the Bible, we can forget just how radical this is. Without theological rigor the image we may take away from this is that the Holy Spirit is animating the person such that Christ comes to dwell within us individually. This, though, would be a grotesque heresy as we would be subordinating God’s ontological integrity to our own. God being splintered while we remain whole. It is easy to imagine that the Holy Spirit, like the flames at Pentecost, is broken into shards, with each person receiving one. It is natural for us to think of ourself as one, singular and sealed off, even if it fuels the heresy of subordinating the oneness of God, ontologically, to the bodily integrity of ourselves. Daniel Dennett notes how significant our bodily integrity is in our understanding of the self, using an unusual, but effective example.62 Dennett notes that right now you have no trouble swallowing the saliva in your mouth. Nor would you have any trouble drinking from a perfectly clean glass. But if you spit your saliva into that glass, Dennett suggests, you would, understandably, but wholly irrationally, be loath to consume it. The saliva has crossed the Rubicon of our bodies and has thereby become “not us.” Dennett argues that this is a useful and evolutionary acquired perspective. We think of ourselves as sealed off bodies. Perhaps because of this, we find ourselves imagining that we are one and whole, but Christ and

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

63

the Holy Spirit, somehow are fragmented or cloned in each of us. We think of ourselves as temples of the Holy Spirit, whole buildings with structural integrity in which God as millions of little divine sparks, squats. Paul, with complete theological coherence, however, asks us to imagine things very differently. He asks us to reject our evolutionary acquired instincts. God is whole. As such the presence of the Spirit in us means that we are not structurally discrete; rather, we are part of each other, within the one body of Christ. God is one, God is not fragmented; therefore, Christ is not a member of our body, we are members of His body. We are “one body in Christ” and therefore we are, “individually members one of another.” We are united with each other, as we are each part of one whole body—Christ. As such, the call to love one another as we love ourselves (Mk 12:31) and the call to love one another as Christ loves us (Jn 15:12) are not different edicts. We love due to the love of the Holy Spirit within us and because the Holy Spirit is within us we are not not each other. This is the dangerous and beautiful communal consequences of ontological transformation by Christ. From this perspective the early Christian communities’ disinterest in private property and social standing becomes easier to account for. In a very formal literal sense, they were not not each other. As such the famed sharing in the early Christian community is based on an ontological awareness that if they were all parts of one body of Christ then they were not not each other. If one is hungry, then Christ is hungry (Mt 25) and as the hungry and Christ are not bodily other than me, this hunger is a concrete issue for me, too. While we find it difficult, perhaps even impossible to read “body” in Romans 12 in a non-metaphorical way, reading it in a non-metaphorical way is theologically necessitated by all we have said thus far. Paul’s image forces us to think about someone cold as we would a limb of our own being cold. It would be wholly irrational to say, “I’m warm, my lower half is really cold, but I’m warm.” Instead, we would, of course, seek to cover up our lower half and, so too, in fidelity to the understanding that permeates early Christianity, we seek to cover up the cold members of the body we are also a part of. If we have cancer in a lung we would never think, “I’m fine, my left lung has cancer, but that, alas, is the left lung’s problem.” So, too, it would be similarly irrational to see the illness of another person as “their problem.” This radicality of early Christianity is based in a theology that confronts our basic biological driven epistemological limitations and seeks to overcome them. Liturgy in the early Church, as I will show in the next chapter, can be read as precisely a training of the self to live into this reality. It is a set of embodied practices that seek to confront and transcend our individualism in favor of our participation alongside male and female, slave and free, and Jew and Greek in a body in which, by the power of the Holy Spirit, we are not not each other.

64

Chapter 2

CONCLUSION We could not have engaged the positions in moral theology that follow without first having seen that, for catholic Christians, we are not individuals, but part of a body that is more than us. We are not sealed off from God, but are only who we are in, and through, this relationship. Everything that follows, the catholic Christian positions on how we treat the vulnerable, on how we have sex, and on how we die, are simply an attempt to answer the question, “How do we say, ‘yes’ to God’s self-giving to us in our embodied actions?” This chapter, then, has sought to provide the foundations for the moral theology which follows. It has sought to (1) illustrate an understanding of the real at odds with that seen in chapter 1. (2) Illustrate the radicality of the Christian understanding. To this end I have sought to emphasize the traditional doctrine of God, which resists both the conflation of God with the world, and the dichotomization of God and the world. These are hallmarks of liberal and conservative Christianity respectively and they have served Christian theology ill. (3) Re-invigorate a catholic Christian theology of the Holy Spirit which has been radically etiolated in modern Christianity. To this end, I emphasized the operation of the Spirit on human bodies, an operation intrinsic to catholic Christian moral theology. (4) Reconnect moral theology with these dogmatic foundations. Everything in the moral theology that follows will be grounded in the Trinitarian perspectives that this chapter has introduced. NOTES 1. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 2. Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 3. Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 4. Umberto Eco, Serendipities, Language and Lunacy (Boston: Mariner Books, 1999): Chapter 3. 5. Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa, The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian: Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East, Vol. 2, ed. and trans. Henry Yule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 227. 6. Or vice versa. 7. For example, see Augustine’s Confessions, book 7, chapter 5. 8. Of course, as with all, even far better, analogies seeking to help the mind imagine something of God’s relationship with the world, it is far more unlike this than like this.

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

65

9. Jack Mahoney, The Holy Spirit and Moral Action in Thomas Aquinas (Lexington / Fortress Academic, 2021). 10. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979): 48–71. 11. This painful term far precedes the coining of the term “vegetative state,” which has its first use in the relatively recent article by Bryan Jennet and Fred Plum, “Persistent vegetative state after brain damage,” in The Lancet 1, no. 7753 (April 1972): 734–737. 12. Sermon 161 in Augustine, Daniel Edward Doyle, and Edmund Hill, Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part III, Homilies (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007): 215. 13. Of course, there is a massive distinction of degree. Even animal life, as Augustine holds, can maintain something of God’s beauty, as “in the body of an ape the good of beauty is present although in less degree.” Augustine, Concerning the Nature of Good Against The Manichaens (De Natura Boni Contra Manichaeos): Chapter 15. 14. I would argue, as John Milbank and countless others have, that utilitarian approaches to the natural order are commensurate with the loss of this classically Christian perspective. Thus, such approaches become hegemonic in modernity, as this classically Christian perspective, both among Christians and post Christian secularists, was lost. For an account of this that time and space here prohibits please see John Milbank, “Materialism and Transcendence,” Theology and the Political: The New Debate (May 2005): 393–426. 15. Augustine, On The Trinity: Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts In History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews and trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 42. 16. “Yet because human nature is not altogether corrupted by sin, so as to be shorn of every natural good, even in the state of corrupted nature it can, by virtue of its natural endowments, work some particular good, as to build dwellings, plant vineyards, and the like.” ST 1:2, Q109 Art.2. 17. Not simply “from” the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is itself the content of the gift. 18. As Augustine writes, “It is certain that we will, when we will. But God brings it about that we will something good . . . It is certain that we act, when we act. But God brings it about that we act by furnishing our will with efficacious strength.” Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, Cambridge Texts in History of Philosophy, ed. Peter King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 168. 19. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 20. James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2009). 21. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, 18 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 22. The root of perichoresis echoes in such terms as choral or choreography.

66

Chapter 2

23. Basil Of Caesarea, Against Eunomius, Fathers of the Church Patristic Series, V.122, trans. Mark Delcogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011). 24. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Vol. 4, Pt. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958): 167–170. 25. Ibid. 26. For an exploration of this point in relation to the work of Karl Barth see Eberhard Jüngel’s excellent essay in, Eberhard Jüngel and Garrett E. Paul, Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986): 13. 27. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, Vol. 4, Pt. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958): 169. 28. Michel Foucault, “What is an Author,” in Michael Foucault, Paul Rabinow and Rogers D. Spotswood Collection, The Foucault Reader, First Edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984). 29. And, indeed literally. 30. Of course, the names Saul and Paul speak only to the name Saul/Paul within different cultural and linguistic settings and do not biblically mark an ontological shift from the man Saul to the “new being” Paul. Rhetorically though it can serve as a device to illustrate the transformation. 31. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Cambridge: Blackfriars/New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). For Colin Gunton, “No Other Foundation: One Englishman’s Reading of Church Dogmatics Chapter V,” in Theology Through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003): 50–69. Chapter 4 Barth’s approach echoes such a position. 32. Augustine, Daniel Edward Doyle, and Edmund Hill, Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part Iii, Homilies (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007): 240. 33. As Pope Francis writes in his encyclical Lumen Fidei. “The great medieval theologians and teachers rightly held that theology, as a science of faith, is a participation in God’s own knowledge of himself.” 34. Lewis Ayres, Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010): 150ff. 35. Eugene F. Rogers, After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005). 36. I will explore some of these reasons and posit some steps forward, in my final chapter. 37. John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri De Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2005). 38. The Gospels offer a very pejorative picture of the Pharisees and one which may echo more an early Christian antipathy (as we see in Paul’s analysis of the law in Romans and Galatians) rather than the historically accurate picture. 39. Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, First Edition (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

67

40. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 41. John of Damascus’ On the Divine Images remains the quintessential expression of this point. John of Damascus and David Anderson, On the Divine Images: Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980). 42. Syriac Fathers (Ephrem for example) use the female pronoun and I will be referring to the Holy Spirit using the female pronoun here, as much of my theology of the Holy Spirit that follows is indebted to their theology. The other primary influence for the pneumatology to follow, Augustine, as with all the Latin Fathers, refers to the Holy Spirit with the male pronoun. St Jerome’s reflection in his commentary on Isaiah 40.9 (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 73, p. 459) governs “the policy” here, noting that “‘Spirit’ in Hebrew is feminine, Greek neuter and in our language (Latin) male,” concluding with the axiom “in divinitate enim nullus est sexus” (“in the divine there is no gender”). 43. Augustine of course speaks of paganism primarily with reference to Roman cultic practices, such as in the Augustine, City of God, ed. Vernon J. Bourke and trans. Gerald G. Walsh; Demetrius B. Zema; Grace Monahan; and Danial J. Honan (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1958). His focus is on the religious and cultic expressions whereas references to Paganism by Origen, for example, focuses on the underlying theory through which all power is named as divine. This is problematic for Origen as God is the formal cause of love but not the formal cause of pedophilia in the same way that the sun is the efficient cause of heat on the skin and not the efficient cause of frostbite. The naming of nature as God deifies genocide as well as peacefulness, pedophilia as well as love. And this, if God is the God revealed in Jesus Christ, is clearly not the case. 44. Again, it warrants attention the way “of God” functions for Augustine. In contrast to “from God” “of God” connotes God’s substance proceeding out from Godself. While we can never be this substance this substance in/as the Holy Spirit can unify God with us in Her self-giving. 45. Augustine, On The Trinity: Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts In History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews and trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 5–7. 46. Augustine, On The Trinity: Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts In History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews and trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 202. 47. Homily XXX in Pentecost. 48. See, too, how Aquinas follows this in ST I: Q.37, Art. 2, where he proceeds to follow Augustine in speaking about the Spirit as the love between the Father and Son proceeding out to and incorporating us. 49. For example, see Augustine, On Faith and the Creed 17 (New York: New City Press, 2005): 166–167. 50. This is not to say that “Church teaching” is something that can be ignored in favor of a presumed love (which may, precisely not be love). Rather “Church teaching” aims to identify what love is and what actions re-present and participate in love.

68

Chapter 2

In Augustine’s famous “Love and do what you will” sermon he is at pains to identify chastisement as love. In making the core point I am, far less elegantly, trying to make above, he juxtaposes conventional models of love with love itself and conventional models of fealty to laws with the actual participation in the good. The twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives juxtaposing love and law, tolerance and tightness, liberation and restriction make us very ill suited to work with this core foundation for catholic Christian moral theology, which simply doesn’t submit to these either/ors. 51. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Cambridge: Blackfriars/New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). Aquinas goes on in Q. 38 to defend the filioque and this theology is, of course, a driver of the insistence on the filioque. It may well be possible to support this theology of procession of love (the Holy Spirit) to humanity (through the Son) without the filioque but Augustine and Aquinas see the issue of the filioque as central to it (Augustine assumes it and Aquinas defends it). 52. If the Son acts the Spirit is also acting and vice versa. 53. Ambrose Of Milan, Exposition of the Holy Gospel According to Saint Luke: With, Fragments on the Prophecy of Esaias, trans. Theodosia Tomkinson (Etna, California: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1998) and Leo the Great, Sermon 19. (CCC 773): 1, no. ii, and Jerome Sermon 40. 54. As the Catechism of the Catholic Christian Church notes the “‘Marian’ dimension of the Church precedes the ‘Petrine’” (773). Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994): 170. 55. Or, at the very least, expand. 56. Richard Dawkins, “Viruses of the Mind,” in Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, ed. Bo Dahlbom (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993): 1–28. 57. Of course, Paul, made in the image and likeness of Christ as his “form” has the capacity, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, of becoming all that he is intended to be, and thus to re-present and participate Christ. Christ is the end for which he is made and is thus far more possible an end for Paul than a horse or a carrot. 58. Although also metaphysical as the union that occurs in the body continues after the body ceases to exist (27). This axiom is often attributed to Aquinas, who does write it and expound on it (ST I:1 Q8 Art.2) but it features again and again in countless Christian writers all through Christian history, before and after St Thomas. 59. Unlike apples and bananas, Paul has capacities that prepare him for the full flowering that comes through the Spirit. To be sure he does not, before “the Spirit of Him that raised Christ Jesus from the dead dwells within [his] mortal body” give up every possession to the lowly but no doubt, he shows generosity, he does not love God and others to the point of prison and death, but, no doubt, he been brave. Perhaps a more accurate analogy would be a tree prior to and after bearing fruit but here we may lose sight of the fact that sun and rain are ontologically necessary for this and they are not properties of the tree, but external to it. 60. There is an inscription from much later than Paul and Ignatius but probably around 200, during the life of Tertullian, which may resonate with the lives of contemporary Western Christians, as we are somewhat removed from the kind of persecution Tertullian and Ignatius are writing about. It is carved on a plaster wall near the Palatine hill that probably once made up part of a dormitory for tribunes. It features

The Foundations for Catholic Moral Reasoning

69

a crucified figure with the head of an ass beneath which a young male figure stands raising his hand in a gesture of worship. The inscription underneath (in crude Greek) reads, “Alexamenos worships his God.” It seems probable that this, one of the earliest representations of the crucifixion, was the mocking of one tribune, Alexamenos, by another or others. 61. Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., After The Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West, Radical Traditions (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005). 62. Daniel Dennett, “The Origin of Selves,” in Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues (London: MacMillan, 1991): 163–173.

Chapter 3

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

I have argued that debates in contested moral spaces flow inexorably from ontological and epistemological “engines.” Once foundational models of knowing and “the real” are accepted, moral positions proceed rationally from such foundations. Differing ontologies and epistemologies make coherent debate on moral issues impossible. Because of this, I have argued that catholic Christian attempts to offer a moral imagination at odds with those that are increasingly hegemonic in the secular West, must also problematize the ontological foundations from which this hegemonic perspective proceeds. In this chapter, I hope to offer an exploration of the Catholic theology on abortion, in part through a juxtaposition with, and problematizing of, the foundational ontology and epistemology that fuels the dominant position. This is one aim of this chapter. The main focus of this book is the re-invigoration of the moral positions themselves by restoring them to the dogmatic (primarily trinitarian) foundations on which they are based. Disconnected from such foundations, as they have been too often in modernity, they lose their coherence, beauty, and radicality. My second aim in this chapter is to reconnect Catholic opposition to abortion with its doctrinal foundations. With these two moves, this chapter is in line with the rest of the book. In this chapter, however, there is a third element. If the Catholic position is, as I argue, coherent, then, the question emerges, how has it been almost entirely vanquished by the dominant secular, liberal, position? In this chapter, I seek to tell something of this story. I will show how early modern Catholic moral theology broke from its dogmatic foundations and became a largely deontological, legalist discourse. Through this, as I will show, it paved the way for the dominant approaches which replaced it. I will begin by introducing the catholic Christian rejection of abortion, which relies on a theology of the soul. I will then show how early modern 71

72

Chapter 3

Catholic theology broke with this by developing a legalist, deontological emphasis, which simultaneously silenced the trinitarian lens and fueled the emergent secular perspectives—perspectives that would find more complete expression in the enlightenment. From here, I will show how the dominant position on abortion in the modern West is fueled by a “totemization of choice,” which proceeds in a logically necessary fashion from the kind of epistemology and ontological moves I discussed in chapter 1. Finally, I will speak to a Catholic position on abortion in contrast to this, a position restored to the theology of the soul and its relationship to the Holy Spirit, which is its rightful foundation. The beginning of the chapter grounds Catholic opposition to abortion within its dogmatic, largely Trinitarian home. The second section speaks about how this perspective was lost. The third section offers a philosophical genealogy for, examines, and calls into question the dominant “prochoice” perspective. The final section, returning to themes introduced at the outset, seeks to show the coherence and beauty of the Catholic perspective. WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE SOUL? The doctrinal “engine” for classical Christian opposition to abortion is the understanding of God’s self-giving to the human person, through the Holy Spirit. This self-giving, within the tradition, precedes birth. Showing this with reference to Aquinas is my primary goal in this first section of this chapter. While chapter 2 looked at the giver—God, in this chapter, I will focus on what figures such as Augustine and Aquinas understood as necessary for the reception of this self-giving—the human soul. Although understood in different ways in patristic, medieval, and early modern theology, “the soul” saturates Christian accounts of how we receive God’s self-giving in and as the Holy Spirit. For understandable reasons, the soul, as a theological category, has received much less attention in recent centuries. First, within a theological culture at once informed by and suspicious of modern dualisms, focus on the soul seems to denigrate the material. This leaves Christianity exposed to Marxist critiques, which claim that Christianity negates the material now in favor of an other-worldly, spiritual, realm to come. Second, the ubiquity of focus on the soul within medieval Christian thought makes it suspicious to both liberals and conservatives alike. For liberals it represents a pre-modern “mythological” world view in desperate need of demythologization, for conservatives, because its ubiquity in Platonic and Aristotelian theological currents smacks of the hijacking of biblical truths by Hellenistic philosophical categories. Finally, the soul as a theological category has received less focus in recent centuries because it is, quite simply, difficult to speak about

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

73

coherently. Human existence, like all organic things, is subject to observation and measurement, and while we’re somewhat comfortable speaking about God’s meta-materiality, how can we speak about something human yet wholly inaccessible to the senses? In attempting to do so are we not committing to speaking, literally, non-sense? For such reasons, the soul, as a theological category, has fallen into disrepair. This, however, has had massive implications for moral theology. While the soul is an imprecisely defined theological category, even in Aquinas, it is the conditio sine qua non for receiving God’s self-giving and thus stood at the epicenter of pre-modern moral theology. It also grounded much Christian opposition to abortion, and so the loss of theology of the soul has had significant impact on the Catholic theology of abortion. In order to rectify this, I will begin by looking at Aquinas’ theology of the soul and show how this informs the understanding of the immorality of abortion maintained by Christian figures in pre-modernity. From here, I will show how this doctrinal grammar is etiolated in later scholastic, and early modern, Christian thought. This is a key part of the chapter because the process we see here reveals a lot about how the decline in Catholic moral theology has happened. Critics of the traditional position base their arguments on different “engines” but the response to this critique, and the reassertion of the traditional Catholic position, also draws on these engines rather than identifying and critiquing them. The moral maxim “Abortion is wrong” is maintained but ceases to be bound to a dogmatic grammar. This cessation not only separates Christian opposition to abortion from the doctrinal engine that gives it coherence, it also, I will illustrate, facilitates a developing moral culture that leads to what I will call “the fetishization of choice.” These early modern moves reify a moral grammar more in keeping with the legalism and deontology of Kant than the Trinitarian logic of Aquinas. This helps shape a Catholic moral culture wholly incapable of offering an alternative to the secular one, which I discussed in chapter 1. Within a moral grammar shorn of any notion of the good as ontologically real, “choice” alone, necessarily, becomes the operative grammar. Finally, I conclude this chapter by returning to some of the pre-modern grammars I explore at the outset of this chapter and offering a moral theology of abortion informed by them. ABORTION AND THE SOUL The earliest Christian communities were, within the Greco-Roman context they emerged, unusually vocal about the immorality of abortion. The Didache forbids both abortion and infanticide.1 Later texts such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Epistle of Barnabas, which are based on the Didache, naturally

74

Chapter 3

follow the Didache’s prohibition. JT Noonan2 argues, with some persuasiveness, that the linking of the use of medicines (pharmakeia), that are forbidden in these texts, alongside, and with reference to, abortion, mirrors the Roman legal rejection of the use of pharmakeia to procure abortions without the father of the child’s consent. Because of the linkage of abortion to pharmakeia, he argues that the injunctions against pharmakeia in Galatians 5:20 and Revelation 9:21 should be seen to be bound to their use as abortifacients. Even if Noonan is wrong, it remains the case that the texts from the earliest Christian communities manifest a culturally unusual stridency in their critique of abortion. Early Church Fathers write about abortion as a distinguishing feature of Christianity. This is the sense in which it is addressed in both Tertullian, and Athenagoras, who asks, “How can we kill anyone when we are those who say that all who use abortifacients are murderers and will account to God for their abortions as for the killing of people?”3 Note, here, that there is not, in the early Church, any distinguishing of abortion and murder. A distinction between abortion and murder only becomes important when, after the conversion of Constantine, Christians become actively more involved in legislation. It is at only at this point that abortion, still opposed as utterly immoral, is distinguished from murder when the abortion occurs prior to “ensoulment.” The question of “ensoulment” does not, for Augustine or, much later, Aquinas, effect the morality of abortion,4 but it does affect how the act is understood for legal purposes. Attention to “ensoulment” is important here for documenting the development of Christian foci in the period between the Fathers and the modernity but, also, as it provides a window into the theology of the soul. So much Catholic moral theology draws on the theology of the soul and no renewal of Catholic moral theology can take place without a coherent way of understanding it. AUGUSTINE AND AQUINAS ON THE SOUL Augustine and Aquinas (ST I: Q.76) understand the relation of the body to the soul in similar but distinct ways. Despite diversity of emphases (ST I: Q.90, Art. 4)5 they both speak of the soul in relation to two elements (a) the material body and (b) God’s will. Qua materiality, for Aquinas, the body’s development facilitates the emergence of the soul. It is, for Aquinas, “produced” by the body as the form of the body. It is the substantial isness of a body, it is the individual body’s identity. As such it is the Henryness of Henry, or the Marianness of Marian. In treating of this in Question 76 of the Prima Pars, Aquinas follows Aristotle and Avicenna closely, and reads Augustine (De Trin. vi, 6 and De Orig. Animae iii, 15) (ST I: Q.90, Art. 1) as being consistent

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

75

with them. He diverges in emphasis from Aristotle and moves closer to Augustine in a manner that is significant when he looks at the generation of the soul qua God’s will—the second lens through which he explores the generation of the soul. In ST 1: Q.90, Art. 3 and 4, Aquinas establishes that the soul, which is the form of the body and thus, in a sense, produced by and bound to the body, is created by God. Because of this Aquinas avoids any naturalism that might hold the soul as a material byproduct of the body’s development. Both he and Augustine take pains to emphasize that the soul is non-spatial as a way of making this point. This is important as, while we may infer that the soul is present when the unborn child manifests attributes typical of personhood, such as movement or will, it cannot be simply bound to such physical properties, as the production of the soul, while generated by the body, is not formally caused by the body as an inevitable by-product,6 but is a deliberate, willed, creation of God. For Aquinas the soul has what might be understood as stages of development.7 The nutritive soul is present form conception, when it is replaced by the sensitive soul and finally the intellectual soul. For Aquinas, we don’t know at what stage the soul becomes present. If we must suggest a stage we can use motion, for example, as a good indication that an intellectual soul is present, because there must be, for Aquinas, a personal identity who is doing the moving. This does not, for Aquinas, mean that the intellectual soul is not present prior to such movement, and the nutritive and sensitive soul certainly is present. As we shall see, this is one of the ways in which Aquinas establishes positions that are misused by later, less subtle, minds. Crucially, while Aquinas will guess that the intellectual soul is present at 408–909 days based on an Aristotelian understanding of the soul as bound to physical properties,10 his emphasis on the soul as not simply occasioned by the body but created by God, locates the isness of the person in relation to God, rather than being bound to these physical attributes. In treating of the generation of the soul qua God, Aquinas emphasizes that the soul is the principal of relationship between the body and God, that is, the condition that enables the relationship between the person and God to be. This is the telos of the soul. While much of Aquinas’ treatment of the soul is bound to thirteenth-century intellectual idioms, two points are of note here. (1) The soul emerges as the identity of the person and is thus “produced” by the body but (2) The soul is created by God and is to the extent that it is in relationship with God. The soul is therefore a dialectic between God and the person, bound to the person and the source of the person’s porousness to God. This is important as, by maintaining a balance in these two stresses, Aquinas avoids an illicit either/or such that either (a) The soul is only a product of the body in the way heat is produced by the friction of rubbing our hands together

76

Chapter 3

or (b) The soul is placed by God in a body as in an insignificant vessel. The former would lean toward materialism while the latter would risk dualism. The former would see personhood as predicated on attributes, while the latter would risk a gnostic rejection of the material. Instead, for Aquinas, the soul is both bound to bodily development for its unique isness but also willed into being by God as the condition necessary for the relationship between the embodied creature and God. It is not simply an intellectual state11 and therefore ensoulment is not bound to the development of intellectual attributes in the baby in the womb. As the form of the body, the soul’s development is informed by bodily developments, but is not formally caused by such developments. These words I am writing on the screen in front of me are formed through the depression of keys on the keyboard I am typing on. While the keys are a condicio sine qua non for the words to be, it is clear that I am writing them. The generation of the soul is bound to the physical reality of the body as its sine qua non, but is nonetheless created by an intentional will—God’s. So too, the words on the page or screen you are looking at are bound for their being, like all things made by humans, to material things. Without the page or screen or the sound waves that let them be, words cannot be. Like all human made things they have no metamaterial reality. In contrast, the soul’s isness, while produced by and interwoven with the materiality of the body, is not bound, for reasons that I will explain, to the body. Because of this it can share in eternity after the decay of the material body. The way it shares in eternity is important to note because it illustrates the nature of the relationship between the person and God through the soul—a relationship that begins in the womb, for Aquinas. For Aquinas, the soul is the form, not of the eternal God, but of the material body. As such, it is for death. It is like words, bound to a materiality that enables them to be as graphic marks on matter, discernable to the eye12 or sound waves flowing into the ears. Without the matter that enables them to be, they cannot be. So too, the soul qua the body can not be apart from the body. But this is not the end of the story. The soul, which is bound to a body that is for death, can be bound to, and infused with, that which is not for death—God. THE SOUL AS THE SITE OF THE PRESENCE OF THE SPIRIT Before we can see why the destruction of such a body and soul in the womb is morally wrong, we need to know more about what the soul does. This is because, for Aquinas, the soul is the space in the human person in which the Holy Spirit abides. Aquinas follows Augustine in rejecting any notion that the

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

77

soul is of God’s substance as a “divine spark” as he writes, “Augustine (De Orig. Animae iii, 15) mentions certain opinions which he calls ‘exceedingly and evidently perverse, and contrary to the Catholic Faith,’ among which the first is the opinion that ‘God made the soul not out of nothing, but from Himself’” (ST I: Q.90, Art. 1). The soul is not part of God, but it can be the part of the human person in which, because of God’s self giving to us, God abides. This self-giving of God (the Father) by the God who is love (the Spirit) leads to the presence of God (the Son) within the person. This presence alone is the basis of eternal life, as through it the soul becomes bound to that which is eternal. As Paul writes, “When the Spirit of He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead dwells in your mortal body then you shall have eternal life” (Rom 8:11). Aquinas is wholly faithful to this. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the soul, leading to the presence of Christ within us and establishing us as members of his body, binds our identity, which is for death, to that which is for eternity. To use the very problematic but partially instructive analogy of cream and coffee13 from chapter 2; the coffee of human personhood is for death with no right whatsoever to eternal life. God is eternal, and the cream of the Holy Spirit infusing our soul establishes eternity as the future of the person by infusing the person’s isness (which is for death) with the Holy Spirit (which is not for death). It does so, not due to the person’s properties but due to God’s. Thus, we can participate in eternal life, not through our own properties or merits, but through God’s grace. For Aquinas, we are body and soul, and ours is a personal identity informed by bodily materiality, with bodily uniqueness, distinct experiences, unique physical properties and biologically established gifts and impediments; but we are also this very distinct thing, loved by God into infused relationship with him. The soul, produced by the body as its form and bound to the body for its generation, is who we are. It is not an identity apart from the material body, but, rather, through and because of the material body. But it is an identity that is unlike animal (ST I: Q.75, Art. 3) or vegetable nature, which, for Aquinas, is bound wholly to the physicality of the creature and impervious to God’s self-giving.14 Human personhood is willed by God to be in relationship with God and in keeping with this the human soul, for Aquinas, is porous to the self-giving of God. The human can actively will to accept God’s self-giving in acts of service to the poor, in prayer, and more. Through such intentional acts the soul can be infused with God’s self-giving as love, the Holy Spirit, accepted in a consummation of this relationship in prayer and charity. Eternal life is the consequence of the person’s infusion by the presence of the eternal God. The form of this infusion is most typically the acceptance of God’s self-giving by the person in embodied actions.

78

Chapter 3

Crucially however (in terms of abortion) for Aquinas, the soul, even prior to it being a “rational soul” capable of such intentional acceptance, represents a locus of God’s love and self-giving. The soul is the basis for God’s self-giving to us. In the unborn, it is porous to God’s self-giving even prior to conscious acceptance of God’s self-giving. As Aquinas writes, “The embryo has first of all a soul which is merely sensitive, and when this is removed, it is supplanted by a more perfect soul, which is both sensitive and intellectual” (ST I: Q.76, Art.3). As such, the embryo, prior to any capacity to accept union with God, is nonetheless in union with God due to the reality of the “sensitive” soul within it. Identity evolves and distinct forms of relationship with God become possible, but this relationship, made possible through the soul, is instantiated prior to the acquisition of mature identity. The soul, which is both rational and sensitive in the more mature child, is, in the identity of the embryonic child, sensitive alone. As such, it is receptive of God’s love prior to its capacity to share that love with others. Relationship with God of the form that changes and transforms the world awaits human volition, but it is nonetheless wholly real, prior to this volition, in the unborn person due to the presence of the soul within them. For Aquinas, the relationship with God, which grants a person its dignity and personhood, is not predicated on human attributes but rather God’s love. In the Holy Spirit, this love rests in the soul of the unborn. Their dignity is not based on their attributes, but on the dignity of God, who abides in their soul through the Holy Spirit. Through the soul, the self-giving God is received by the unborn child. The Holy Spirit comes to dwell in its mortal body (Rom 8:11). The child cannot run nor jump nor think nor even live, outside the womb, but its destruction is literally an act of violence against God the Holy Spirit who dwells within its mortal body. There are important stages in the relationship between the person and God that are many years away—intellectual faith, embodied acts of charity, and so on—but, in another sense, the person is never more who they are than when they are in the womb, in that the embryo has the capacity to be loved by God prior to any intellectual capacity to accept this love in the fullness of faith and love God back. The embryonic person is a person who can do nothing except be loved by God and simply be as the passive recipient of God’s love. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jer 1:15) and the child knows God too, prior to the rational soul, as the skin knows the sun’s warmth. The unborn are receptive of God’s self-giving to the person in the womb. As such the embryonic soul is relational, not intellectual, it is sensitive, not rational. The person in the womb is an object of God’s love and, because of this, and not because of any attributes they may possess, they have dignity. She or he has dignity as she or he is a person in whom God’s love (literally— the Holy Spirit) abides.

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

79

This relationship is passive, rather than active. The tyranny of original sin is still present in the unborn as their bodies are subject to its power. They do not have the capacity to commit mortal sin, of course, and therefore they never act in accordance with this power, but the inherent biological tendencies are still determinative. The form of relationship that comes with baptism, where a conscious “yes” from the family and Church liberates the child from the tyranny of original sin, yet awaits. The relationship within the womb is not the sanctifying relationship of two parties, God and the person, who accepts the indwelling of the Trinity in the soul.15 This indwelling of the Trinity as, Garrigou-LaGrange writes is possible “by sanctifying grace, by infused virtues, by the seven gifts” which the unborn, as of yet, are not in receipt of. But as the soul is loved by God, as this love of God for the human person moves out from God, in and as the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit comes to rest on the soul of the unborn as this love. This is, perhaps better understood as a “union” rather than a relationship. It is not the relationship inaugurated with baptism, it is, instead, a union. It not instantiated through a human “yes” to the Holy Spirit, accepting the Spirit into our souls leading to sanctifying grace, it is a union in which God is active and we are passive. It does not lead to sanctifying grace, and does not remove the damage of actual sin,16 it is “one way” love, the love of God for the unborn. In, and as, this love the Holy Spirit rests on the soul of the unborn, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you. And before you were born I consecrated you” (Jer 1:5). As this makes clear, the classical Christian grammar of God’s self-giving to us through the soul grounds human dignity in God, not in rights or attributes. God’s love of the unborn makes abortion, for classical Christianity, immoral. This logic, central to the classical Christian opposition to abortion, is, as we see in Aquinas, predicated on the theological category of the soul. In the next section of this chapter, I will discuss the loss of this understanding and its role in informing an alternative moral grammar, one which, in late modernity, has become hegemonic. The ontological relationship wherein God gives himself as the Holy Spirit to the developing person17 is always kept in focus, for Aquinas and the patristic theological culture he is informed by, as the determinative grammar governing the enquiry. It is this lens—the ontological one—that distinguishes a theological culture, which includes Augustine and Aquinas, for all their differences, from many aspects of the later, modern, theological culture. Augustine and Aquinas work from theological categories to moral and legal implications. As I will now illustrate, in modernity, legality determines theological and moral argumentation to the point that the ontological reality on which such “laws” are based becomes etiolated and, in time, largely forgotten. Law in early modern moral theology, as I will show, becomes the

80

Chapter 3

significatory substitute for ontological reality in a manner that makes thinkable the kinds of Kantian moves I explored in chapter 1. HOW RENAISSANCE CATHOLICISM UNDERMINED CATHOLIC MORAL THEOLOGY Augustine and Aquinas work from an account of God’s self-giving to persons, which establishes abortion as morally wrong because it is a destruction of a person loved by, and in relationship with, God. Further it is an explicit act of violence against the Holy Spirit, who, as the form of God’s self-giving, rests in the soul of the unborn. In a later ecclesial context this fact that abortion is wrong is taken as given. After all, it has been established in the Fathers, in Aquinas, and proclaimed in papal documents and canons. Because of this the moral conversation shifts to a second order analysis working from the fact of Church prohibition of abortion rather than remaining attentive to the ontological realities that render abortion sinful. That abortion is wrong is clear in the late medieval context. Why abortion is wrong starts to become less so, as the grammar that underpins Augustine and Aquinas begins to fade from memory. An engineer does not need to be an expert in all aspects of physics, they can use physics in their work proceeding from the “facts” that have been ascertained by others. Engineering and physics are different disciplines. But similarly, I would argue, many moral theologians in the early modern period are only nominally sharing a discipline with Aquinas and Augustine. They are working within a grammar whose questions are, “What is lawful?” or “What is Church teaching?” rather than “What is happening ontologically?” which is the basis for why something is Church teaching or not. In this section, I will show the fact that abortion is wrong, begins to obscure the reasons why abortion is wrong. Using Martín de Azpilcueta18 and Thomas Sanchez, I will offer illustrations of an early modern approach in which the focus shifts from the ontological reality of God’s self-giving to the unborn person to the question of under which conditions abortion meets the definition of murder. There is very little, if anything, at odds with the Fathers or Aquinas in this period in terms of the “conclusions.” Very few acts, if any, that would be held as immoral by Augustine and Aquinas are held as moral by Sanchez and de Azpilcueta. But in de Azpilcueta and others we see a significant shift in focus, a change in the culture of moral theology and the understanding of what grammar comes to determine whether an act is good or not. Rather than focus on the grammar that renders an action morally illicit or otherwise, the focus is on actions that either contradict or cohere with the unquestioned injunction against abortion.

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

81

Fealty to moral laws begin to determine the “goodness” of an act to an extent that obscures why these moral laws are moral laws. In this section, I will show this process with moral theologians like Sanchez and de Azpilcueta, but I will also show how the papal rejection of the “findings” of such theologians actually reify their problematic theological grammar. They do so by virtue of critiquing the propositions their theological approach leads to, while never opposing, but actually sharing in, their deontological, legalist approach. The result is a culture of Catholic moral theology cut off from the ontological grammar that is its source. Cut off from this source, it withers into legalism. Both casuistry and ecclesial rejections of casuistry, as I will show, are representative of this legalist grammar. In this, early modern moral theology contributes to a legalist modern ethical culture marked by deontological ethics and utilitarianism, categories that rob the Christian position on abortion of its coherence. This section of the chapter, then, aims to (i) show such a culture coming into being and (ii) show how it makes classical Christian understandings of abortion increasingly unconvincing. My conclusion will be that only by articulating an opposition to abortion predicated upon an ontological grammar (introduced with reference to Augustine and Aquinas above) can the Christian position be internally convincing. This I undertake in my final section. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHAT IS AND WHAT IS19 What is needed is a forensic genealogy of moral thought that carefully illustrates the development of this problematic theological culture. This culture moves slowly. One hundred thousand photocopies from an original image may share the same outline as the original image. Yet, to someone without the original, the 100,000th copy may not call to mind the same thing the original did as the distortions and etiolations lead to a different experience of the image. This is a problem when working from tradition in moral theology. While a theological principle may look like the theological principle found through the tradition, and while it retains the basic shape, it may still communicate something quite different from the original. If it aims to simply hold fast to the moral maxim, without constant attention to the ontological understandings that represent the basis for the moral maxim, then it is not participating in the tradition. It is subject to the tradition, but by failing to share in the ontological grammar it is not participating in it. Sanchez and de Azpilcueta are subjects of the tradition of Catholic moral theology, but they are not participants in the tradition of Catholic moral theology. Their goal is to be seen to be faithful to the traditional maxim, to repeat it, but shorn of

82

Chapter 3

the foundational logic which gives such maxims life and coherence, they are liable to fail a theological Turing Test. The forgetting of the “engine” that drives the moral precepts is also pathological for a theological culture as it leads to later attempts to justify the precepts using the moral grammar of a later age in place of the original one. The foundations for the precepts are forgotten or misunderstood, and attempts are made to rationally defend them to a culture no longer satisfied to simply take the precepts as binding on the basis of inherent authority alone. LEGALISM VERSUS GOODNESS In chapter 2, I explored the understanding of God as goodness itself. While human good, apart from God, may only analogically relate to goodness itself, through God’s self-giving, human persons can participate in goodness. In such light, exchanging the kiss of peace is good only analogically, in so much as it is an act of human goodness, utterly inadequate to God’s goodness. But as Augustine makes clear in Sermon 227, the signs and sacraments of the Christian liturgy (including the kiss of peace) represent moments wherein, “If you receive them well, you are yourselves what you receive.”20 As such, the peace in the kiss of peace is not a human construction of peace, but peace itself, received by persons in the act itself. For Augustine, we must not, “attribute it to your own powers, your own merits, your own efforts” rather the peace present is peace itself, the body itself, which the members come to re-present by participating in. This understanding proceeds on the basis that the peace of Christ is not simply non-violence—the peace of the United Nations, or the pax Romana—this is the peace of Christ and as such it is to turn and say, in effect, “If you’re hungry I will feed you, if you strike me I will not strike you back.” For Augustine, as he repeats in Sermon 227, such acts, even the lifting up of “our hearts to the Lord” during the consecration, are not possible for the human person qua material nature alone but made possible through God’s self-giving to us that we accept in the act. How can the peace of Christ be offered by creatures hardwired toward retaliation or retreat?21 When we are struck, adrenaline courses through our body, causing a fight or flight response. Our natural response is therefore at odds with remaining and loving our enemy. But remaining and loving our enemy is necessary in order for the peace that is exchanged to be the peace of Christ. If this peace of Christ is exchanged, it is only due to the presence of Christ within us through the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the condition for the possibility of this peace, peace itself, to be made real in time. The point is that for Augustine it is the ontological reality of a moral act which alone, rather than any seeming coherence between the act and a law,

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

83

renders the act good. An act can be truly good, analogically “good,” or, indeed, evil. These designations for Augustine refer to the ontological reality of what’s happening, the real presence or otherwise of good in the act, rather than the deontological fealty of the act to a moral maxim. It may seem like a small difference but instead of this ontological lens, let’s say we begin with the belief that passing the peace is good because we are told it’s good, forgetting about the ontological reality that governs whether it is, in fact, good or not. Or say we turned the other cheek in fealty to the passage in scripture, never thinking about why such an act, ontologically, was good. All being well, there is no consequence resulting from this shift in lens from the ontological to the legal. The problems emerge, however, when we look to build on it without reference to the core ontology, that is, when we look to make “copies from the copies.” Working only from the legal precept that turning the other cheek is necessary for the peace to be Christ’s peace would lead to false corollaries. For example, given that turning the other cheek is “a good” we may seek opportunities to turn the other cheek and try to entice people to slap us. Or let’s say we were to forgo justice in order to garner as much opportunity for cheek turning as possible. In both instances, we are fulfilling the legal precepts. We are turning the other cheek. But neither would be re-presentations of Christ and thus neither act would be morally good. They may look “good” but only because we have forgotten the ontological grammar that establishes what is good. An act of cheek turning in order to establish myself as honored in my social order is an act in the service of selfaggrandizement. Even though it involves turning the other cheek, it does so not on the basis of the presence of Christ but precisely on the basis of the all too material will-to-power, which only the presence of Christ mitigates. It is this type of action that Christ savagely critiques in Matthew 23:1–26. The one act proceeds from a desire towards self-aggrandizement and is fueled by this will-to-power, the other proceeds only on the basis of the presence of Christ making possible the overcoming of such will-to-power through grace. Note, the two acts of cheek turning are visually indistinguishable. Materially, they are identical. No one could know that they are different. And yet one, from an ontological lens, is good, as the good, God, is ontologically the formal source of the action, and the other is not. EARLY MODERN CATHOLIC ETHICS As I will now illustrate, the legalist lens, shorn from the ontological one, comes to govern aspects of early modern Catholic moral theology. Within this theological culture the principle of double effect, which in Aquinas is never divorced from the ontological reality, takes on a life of its own. For

84

Chapter 3

example, Martin de Azpilcueta,22 working from a legalist understanding that for abortion to be immoral it must be the abortion of a knowingly ensouled baby, begins by establishing that abortion is not immoral when the doctor assumes the baby hasn’t fully formed, even if it has. The doctor is “in the clear” as he didn’t trigger the definition required for the act to be murder. The emphasis here is not on morality, it is on legality, without reference to the underlying moral grammar. Similarly, the emphasis for the influential late sixteenth-century Jesuit, Thomas Sanchez,23 is on what is legal, rather than what is good. He begins, for example, by stating that abortion, even a direct conscious act of abortion (as opposed to an act which seeks to save the life of the mother and which results in the loss of the child) is moral in order to save the life of the mother. He does so based on an Aristotelian rather than Thomist understanding of the relation of actuality and potentiality and thus “ranks” the value of the lives. From here, borrowing from the “laws” governing Just War theory, he establishes conditions in which abortion is moral. Sanchez works out from legal categories without reference to ontological categories and so reasons that, given the priority of actual over potential life,24 a potential threat to the life of the mother makes abortion the lesser of two evils. And what about, Sanchez asks, when this threat comes from an angry father or uncle who may endanger the life of the mother in their anger? Surely, this makes abortion the lesser of two evils and therefore, moral? And, for Sanchez, as the shame of scandal is in some ways worse than death, then should abortion, at least prior to full ensoulment, not be lawful in order to avoid scandal?25 While the stretching reasoning will take our attention, my focus is on the culture of moral theology that is visible in this reasoning. Figures like de Azpilcueta and Sanchez are working one step removed from the ontological. They are working with what is legal, not what is good. The Church’s prohibitions are what they are, and they are working with these prohibitions without reference to the dogmatic theology that drives them. In so doing the law—the copy— becomes the object of moral enquiry. Abstracted from dogmatic theology and working with the law alone, reasons, which would be clearly illicit when seen in light of the ontological reality, seem less illicit. While it is not the focus here, this is the theological culture that leads to Catholic complicity in colonialism. The papal bull Sublimus Deus in 1537 argued on the basis of theological anthropology that indigenous populations were in no way inferior and were not under any circumstances to be deprived of their freedom or property. This was fueled by a theological anthropology which held all humans to have the same capacity to hear the word of God. This approach was represented by Bartolomé de las Casas at the council of Valladolid who argued, using patristic reasoning (with Augustine and Chrysostom to the fore) in keeping with this logic. But his logic was, increasingly, anachronistic. A new humanism was more practical and less dependent on such faith based presuppositions,

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

85

and while the approach of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and others did not win a conclusive victory at the Valladolid debate, the capacity for such second order reasoning to find “work arounds” for difficult theological obstacles were well received by the Conquistadors and those who followed them. I mention this for two reasons, first, to show that what we see in de Azpilcueta and Sanchez was part of a much broader shift in moral theology within renaissance Catholicism, and second, to oppose any trite notion that the kind of casuistry we see in this culture was benign, and aimed solely to loosen outdated theological structures. It is impossible to understand or account for Catholic complicitly in the brutalizing of indigenous peoples without attention to this emergent, and soon to be dominant, culture of moral theology. For both de Azpilcueta and Sanchez the notion of “good” as an ontological reality, a real presence—like the Holy Spirit in a body at prayer or magnesium in leafy greens—is lost, in the service of an ethical architectonic that can produce moral maxims. Here “good” refers to the moral maxim’s coherence to the architectonic, not to the ontological reality of God’s presence in persons. Thus, for doctors aborting babies or conquistadors enslaving people, the question is, under what circumstances can the action be seen to be compliant with the moral precept? This question was then, and is now, the enemy of Catholic moral theology. In many “orthodox” Catholic treatments of Sanchez, he is presented as a dissenting voice that is quickly corrected by Alphonsus Liguori and the Louvain critiques of moral laxity by Pope Innocent XI,26 or, as someone who was rejected by the Church and had no real impact on “official” Catholic theology, analogous to “dissident” theologians from the late twentieth century.27 But both these assumptions are naïve. Rome’s rejection of the moves Sanchez and others were making in regards to abortion, utilizes, and never critiques, the very theological grammar used by Sanchez and de Azpilcueta. The Church rightly attacked the positions Sanchez’s form of reasoning led to, but failed to properly attack the form of reasoning itself. Closer examination of Sanchez’s work will help me demonstrate this. Sanchez knows that homicide is a problem. He holds that full personhood emerges in the womb. He knows, therefore that abortion is a problem as it is the killing of a fully formed person—homicide. But, lacking the theological grammar of the soul (which we find before him) he struggles to understand why abortion is a moral problem prior to ensoulment.28 The position he finds himself in is that he knows, and is subject to, the Church’s law and tradition, which holds that abortion is morally wrong from conception, but he needs to find a reason why. If ensoulment does not happen until later in the pregnancy, and therefore aborting a baby prior to ensoulment is not homicide, then why is abortion wrong? He is a good son of the Church, he knows the

86

Chapter 3

rule, that abortion is wrong from conception, be he doesn’t intellectually understand why. The answer Sanchez develops depends on his Ignatian logic. He writes of the need to control sexual desire and that virtue demands this. He also holds that we need encouragement to subject our desire to control. Contraception, for Sanchez, is wrong, because it denies this encouragement.29 Contraception liberates sexual desire from pregnancy and therefore takes away a crucial aid in our capacity to control our sexual desire. This is something Sanchez is sure of. And this is the premise that shapes his answer to the question of why abortion is wrong prior to ensoulement. It is wrong because it is, for Sanchez, essentially contraception and thus removes the “pressure” to control our sexual desire. The Church holds that abortion is wrong at every stage of pregnancy and Sanchez accounts for this by seeing abortion post-ensoulement as homicide, and prior to ensoulment as a form of contraception. He does not think in terms of God’s relationship with the unborn child, nor is he thinking in terms of God giving Himself to creation. Such grammars are not found, as the theological culture that was predicated upon such understandings is no longer dominant. Its premises and “rules” are still dominant, but its way of thinking is not. Sanchez, lacking the theological grammar of God’s selfgiving to the world, can only see abortion pre-ensoulment as problematic vis-à-vis contraception. This solves Sanchez’s problem of understanding why abortion is always wrong. For him it, like all forms of contraception, makes the shaping of the self in the virtues more difficult due to greater access to sex which is prone to becoming an idol. But no one could argue that contraception is more problematic than a mother risking her life, even from Sanchez’s “angry uncle” fearing the consequences of social scandal. It makes perfect sense to Sanchez that while morally illicit, contraception (abortion pre-ensoulment) is not as grave a problem as the risk of the threat of violence at the hands of an angry uncle. Because of this abortion is seen by Sanchez as permissible when there is a threat to the Mother’s life, even from enraged family members who, theoretically, may seek to injure her.30 In this, Sanchez is simply following the legal maxims to their logical conclusions. He does not “get” the underlying logic for why abortion is morally problematic and has lost contact with trinitarian grammar that fueled it. The foundations for the Christian opposition to abortion are lost but he maintains the opposition31 and strives to build new foundations underneath them. Thus, abortion as contraception, and contraception as a facilitator of sexual vice becomes, in the Ignatian culture of Sanchez, the foundational grammar that “justifies” the consistent Christian opposition to early stage abortion. His reason is solid, his conformity to the moral premise that abortion is wrong from conception, is maintained, but, as Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange well notes,

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

87

“even a small error regarding first ideas and first principles has incalculable consequences.”32 The kinds of precepts that de Azpilcueta and Sanchez’s theology leads to—that abortion is justified to avoid scandal, or to save a mother from a potentially enraged relative­—are clearly out of step with Catholic thought. Pope’s such as Sixtus V and Innocent XI condemned them. But while condemning the precepts, they failed, as I will show, to condemn the underlying rationality. In doing so, I will argue, they actually solidify, rather than reject, the theological grammar that fuels de Azpilcueta and Sanchez. Under an ontological lens, contraception and abortion are obviously completely different things, but shorn of this lens they can fall under similar taxonomical categories. In a curious prefiguring of the kinds of Kantian moves we saw in chapter 1, both Sanchez and (I will argue) the papacy are largely blind to the “ontological” lens and, instead, conflate early stage abortion and contraception due to their phenomenological congruence. For all parties, abortion and contraception both involve women’s bodies, “potions,” and impediments to child birth in the service of “lust.” Without the Thomistic or Augustinian grammar, it would have been difficult for Sanchez or his papal opponents to explain why early stage abortion is gravely wrong. Within a legalistic moral culture that increasingly anticipates the secular, Kantian moral culture, it is almost impossible. But the phenomenological congruences associated with lust and depravity, and the facilitation of such things by contraception/abortion, sufficed to enable them to justify maintaining the traditional opposition to early stage abortion without need of the underpinning logic. This is shown in the fact that the issue of contraception is raised again and again in the very short Apostolic Constitution “Effraenatam” (1588) of Pope Sixtus V, which is directed against abortionists. It is not self-evident that a short apostolic constitution against abortion would ever broach the subject of contraception, yet, because of this prevailing grammar, the text returns to it again and again. “Who will not condemn,” it reads “to a most grave punishment the crimes of those who with poisons, potions and evil actions sterilize women or impede that they conceive or give birth by pernicious medicines and drugs?” Here contraception is seen as almost identical with abortion, both bound together within a moral rationale that echoed, while seeking to oppose, Sanchez. It continues, “We absolutely establish and decree that the same33 punishments34 are to be applied to those who give to women sterilizing potions, medicine and poisons in order to impede conception of the fetus and upon those who make and prepare such potions, medicine and poisons.” The injunction reaffirms the rule but does so while conflating contraception and abortion as bound together in the same “genus.” While Effraenatam is a relatively insignificant papal text, the 1679 Papal Bull, “Sanctissimus Dominus,” promulgated under Pope Innocent XI, was

88

Chapter 3

massively influential. It contained condemnations of 65 moral propositions representative of a growing “laxity” in moral theology that was associated with Sanchez and others. In relation to abortion, two of the anathematized propositions are direct attempts to reject the form of “moral laxity” Sanchez was seen to be facilitating. Proposition 34, which anathematizes the proposition, “It is lawful to procure abortion before ensoulment of the fetus lest a girl, detected as pregnant, be killed or defamed.” And proposition 35, which anathematizes the position that, “It seems probable that the fetus (as long as it is in the uterus) lacks a rational soul and begins first to have one when it is born; and consequently it must be said that no abortion is a homicide.” Note two things, first, in rejecting Sanchez et al. about scandal and defamation it is not concerned with theology, rather its focus remains bound to what is lawful. In Sanctissimus Dominus what is of primary concern is what is lawful, not what is moral. Second, the framing of proposition 35 avoids a conversation about the ontological reality of the unborn. It rejects the idea that “no abortion is a homicide,” but Sanchez, de Azpilcueta and other “casuists” would wholly agree. For them abortion is a homicide at a certain stage but is not at others and thus they too would anathematize the proposition that “no abortion is a homicide.” As such, it is not explicitly a correction of Sanchez, in that proposition 35 neither engages nor corrects positions associated with the moral laxity of casuistry. Instead, in the absence of the theologically potent understanding of why abortion at all stages is morally illicit, Sanctissimus Dominus, consistent with the much maligned Effraenatam35 simply denies the denial of abortion as homicide. It does not aim to engage and overthrow a problematic theological culture, it simply wants to enshrine in law positions that Catholics must adhere to. With this it opts for a reaffirmation of the law, while failing to restore the position of the theological logic that gave it coherence. It treats the symptom without ever engaging the cause. Within the life of the Church there is good reason for legal injunctions. The injunctions of Effraenatam and Sanctissimus Dominus—if you do this, you will be excommunicated—are understandable and clear. But the grasping for rationale, in Effraenatam especially, mirrors the grammar of Sanchez in illustrating a clear shift away from the earlier rationale. Sanchez and others follow a flawed set of theological categories to their logical consequence. They, like the analogs who support Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, such as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, divorce the ontological grammar, which is ignored or forgotten, from the prohibitions, and then working only with the prohibitions, tease out “workarounds.” The logical conclusions wrought by this paradigmatic shift are upheld by Sanchez, as, earlier, that were by de Azpilcueta. The papacy, following Liguori, notes the need for a correction. But instead of rejecting the theological culture that leads to the logical outcomes offered by Sanchez, it rejects the outcomes while reifying the very

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

89

theological culture that lead to them. The position that “abortion is wrong” is maintained but in the absence of the underlying rationale it is upheld through legal injunction alone, and rationally defended (in so much as it can be without the doctrinal logic) by the linking of abortion to lust and fornication.36 As such, while attempting to reject a theological culture embodied by Sanchez, the Church comes to further enshrine this theological culture. In so doing, it paves the way for a modernity in which Catholicism increasingly mirrors a logic that leads to moral propositions37 while denying the moral propositions themselves.38 This is one key reason why Catholic moral theology has failed so badly in modernity. Catholics share a logic that leads to anti-Catholic positions, but blindly refuse these positions in a spirit of blind heroic faith. Others—“dissident theologians”—follow the logic to their natural conclusions and refuse the orthodox Catholic positions. This did not start in the twentieth century. It was clear in the seventeenth century when the papacy enshrined the modus operandi of Catholicism in modernity. It rejected the logical conclusions of a modern moral grammar in favor of the “right answers” as established by tradition. What it needed to do was to defend these “right answers” by reconnecting them to the theological grammar which made them coherent, but this is not what Effraenatam and Sanctissimus Dominus did. Instead Rome mirrored the logic of Sanchez while rejecting his conclusions. It re-affirmed traditional teaching, but without reference to the self-giving God who enchants the material. In so doing, it shared a logic with the secular banal while rejecting the propositions that flow coherently from it. A reform of the underlying Catholic theology, not an anathematizing of the 65 propositions, was needed. What was needed was the rejection of a calcified and barren theological culture and a reinvigoration of the doctrinal foundations that traditional moral propositions were predicated upon. Rather than reform the theological culture, re-emphasizing a properly trinitarian account of God’s transformative self-giving to material things (not least unborn babies) the Church rejected only the logical deductions of a theological culture that lacked such an account. In so doing, it reified this culture and established itself, within modernity, as “the other” of reason. In this, it became exactly what secular modernity39 saw catholic Christianity as being—a set of outdated illusions. It became so as throughout modernity it repeated this reflexive move again and again. It rejected rational deductions that were based on a flawed model of God’s relationship with the world, while never rejecting and out-narrating this flawed model itself. Instead, the Church, in many moral spaces, came to effectively share the core model of the real with modernity and then, illogically, refuse the findings of such a model.40

90

Chapter 3

THE LOGOS OF ABORTION: PERSONHOOD AND CHOICE The goal of the last two sections has been to document developments in early modernity that lead to a culture of moral theology within the Church that was ill-suited to respond to the moral culture of modernity. If, as I claimed in the introduction, Catholic moral theology is unconvincing, the story I just told helps explain why. Rather than contest the kind of moral culture that was emerging in early modernity, the Church, inadvertently, reified it. It did so by striving only to defend the traditional propositions without binding them to the theological grammar on which they were founded. In the remainder of this chapter, I aim to do the opposite. My goal is to call into question the dominant position and propose a Catholic alternative, based on the dogmatic foundations that give it life. I began the chapter by introducing the theology of the soul that stands as the engine of much Catholic opposition to abortion. This Thomistic account was grounded in the theological foundations that I explored in chapter 2. In the final section of this chapter, I will complete this binding of the theology against abortion to this foundational grammar. Before then, my goal is to explore and call into question the dominant grammar. In chapter 1, I discussed many of the foundations of secular modernity, and my goal in the upcoming section is to show how the dominant approach to abortion in the secular West is predicated upon these understandings. I aim not just to document it, but to call it into question. If the trinitarian understanding of God and God’s self giving to the world is lost, what, then has become the logos governing the morality of abortion within the secular and its Christian analog? The answer that I will offer in this section, is “choice,” that is, an intentional choosing by a person. I will focus specifically on an illustration of how and why “choice” emerges, within late modern capitalism, as the “truth” of late (or post) modernity. I will argue that the relativism modernity leads to fuels a context in which choice is totemized as the one “true” thing. For late modern secularists, and their liberal Christian analogs, we are determined by culture and biology, but this culture and biology is unique. This uniqueness is instantiated in the choosing done by this unique person. It is unsurprising, then, that the more theologically minded participants within the logos of the secular41 speak of the choice to have an abortion as “sacramental.”

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

91

THE SPECTRE OF RELATIVISM AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN MORAL THEORY As we saw in chapter 1, Kant tried to salvage reason by putting it on the sure footing of certitude and verifiability. Reason, for Kant, must work only from phenomena. Kant holds in his second critique42 that noumena, things in themselves, must be bracketed, as they can’t be known with certainty. Things in themselves cannot be seen but as long as we work only with phenomena— things which submit to human perception and can be seen—we can, for Kant, reason together. Within this climate, the traditional Christian position on the unborn becomes untenable because the traditional Christian position on the unborn proceeds on the basis of noumenological realities, unavailable to the quantifiability or measurement.43 The soul, the Holy Spirit, and their relation, is not visible to us. It is not measurable or quantifiable. It is not “data,” and, within the logic of modernity, it loses its status as “real.” While Aquinas will suggest that full personhood is present with locomotion, and thus, for legal purposes, abortion after this point meets the definition of homicide, the immorality of abortion is clear prior to this due to the relationship between God and the unborn in their “sensitive soul.” This relationship with God is outside of our ken and therefore is meaningless within the Kantian grammar that comes to dominate in modernity. While this Kantian strand is only one strand within modernity, the core move of bracketing the noumena is shared more universally within the secular. But, as I discussed in chapter 1, and as philosophers such as Richard Rorty,44 and theologians like John Milbank and Conor Cunningham,45 have shown, relativism is the inevitable consequence of such Kantian moves. In what follows, I will show how relativism proceeds from this refusal to hold noumena as epistemologically relevant, before detailing how the totemization of choice, which fuels the dominant position on the morality abortion, is bound to the spectre of relativism. For Kant, thinking has as its object, phenomena. We can’t be sure if we accurately perceive objects, but all our perceptions are processed through universal transcendental categories. The “real” within Kantian modernity involves an unknowable46 material realm, and a realm of mental states that serve as the de facto real. Much nineteenth- and twentieth-century theology (from Schleiermacher to Küng) offers an example of the hegemony of this approach as, in such theology, the object under investigation is not what is (God) but the human experience of what is. So too in secular modernity the real in itself is bracketed and, instead, human experiences of the real becomes the de facto “real.” These experiences, one step removed from the real, become, epistemologically, all that is. The real is bracketed and the

92

Chapter 3

experience becomes the “object” of enquiry. For any theology in thrall to such epistemological norms (such as we find in Schleiermacher and his successors), religious doctrine is nothing more than expressions of experiences of “the divine.” Kant’s hope that universal a priori limits in the mind lead to a sufficiently shared human experience becomes increasingly untenable as, at least from Nietzsche on47 it becomes clear that while experiences may inform concepts, concepts themselves, shape and often determine experience. The very experiences we have48 are themselves determined by context, culture, and narratives. “What” Nietzsche asks, as will Camus and Sartre, “is freedom, when every experience is shaped by internal biological forces and external cultural categories?” For Kant, the self is a unified collectivity of experiences. “I” am what I have experienced. But what if these experiences are the product of cultural conditioning such that “I” am a social construct, cut off from reality and enslaved to the cultural conditions that determine my experiences and so produce “me.” In responding to this question, twentieth-century existentialist thought comes to re-invigorate, albeit in a different manner,49 the approach we see in the enlightenment. Let me explain. For Descartes, even his existence is difficult to establish with certainty. Reason fails so often, Descartes notes, even in “the simplest matters of geometry.” He realized that, “the very same thoughts which we experience when awake may also be experienced when we are asleep, while there is at that time not one of them true.”50 How then can we know anything, Descartes wonders, even whether, in fact, we exist? He famously answers this question with, “I think, therefore I am,” which, for Descartes “was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the Skeptics capable of shaking it,” thus he concludes “that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.”51 While everything is open to doubt, the fact that there is something, someone, doubting, is not in doubt. Thus, the very fact of the human person, as a res cogitans (“thinking thing”) becomes “the first principle of philosophy” in the Cartesian tradition. The person “I” becomes the one solid thing from which everything else can proceed. Kant will continue this with his focus on the human subject as a unified collectivity of vorstellungen (perceptions). The existence of the self is an a priori truth, for Kant. It must be, as without a perceiver, we cannot have perceptions. Rightly or wrongly, we are perceiving stuff, therefore there must be a perceiver—I—in order for this to happen. This Kant will call “the soul.” Of course, his use of the term is very different from that of Aquinas.52 Aquinas grounds it ontologically. Kant ground it epistemologically. As Kant writes, “I, as thinking, am an object of inner sense, and am called ‘soul.’”53 For Aquinas, as we have seen, the soul is central. But it is central, for Aquinas, precisely as

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

93

the condition for the possibility of relationship with God which grants isness and beauty and dignity. For Kant, it is central as the foundational principle of a reality that does not need God. It is central as the basis for perceptions and thoughts. While isness for Aquinas is established only in God, it is established in Descartes and Kant as the thinking thing, the I, the person who is, in order for perceptions to be. The ontological ground we find in Aquinas is swapped for an epistemological ground in Descartes and Kant. The epistemological grammar replaces the ontological one as primary. This, as I will discuss in what follows, is crucial, as to be becomes to be perceivable and perception requires data. Data, then, measurable and quantifiable, become further enshrined as the operative real. With this, phenomenological attributes, not noumenalogical relationship with God, comes to define personhood, and crucially, determines how we should treat such persons. But before then, I want to show how this reduction of the real to the “I” as experiencer, necessarily leads, in the twentieth century, to the reduction of the real to the “I” as chooser. Experiences can be false, and determined by cultural conditions, but the “I” is still present in choices that are, even within this tyranny, the closest we can come to freedom. IDIOCENTRISM Western modernity is idiocentric, in that it places the human—or, better, the individual—at the center. This is a reversal of what we find before it. For example, for Aquinas, God is. God is the most real and the starting point for all. For Descartes and Kant, the ontological real cannot be known. All that can be known is the existence of an individual “thinking thing” that perceives. There is no knowable reality apart from the thoughts of this thinking thing. Humanity shifts from being subject to the real and participatory in all that is, to being that which establishes the real. “Man” becomes, not measured by God, but himself “the measure of all things.” For Kant and Descartes, this is a foundation solid enough to resist the specter of relativism and to ground concepts of justice. Such hopes, however, are rejected by Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre and many more, for reasons illustrated in chapter 1. While there is an “I” who experiences, this “I” experiences something as good or bad, right or wrong, on the basis of cultural determinism. Because there must be something experiencing, the “I” is established, as that Res Cogitans or “thinking thing.” But in that these experiences and this thinking is determined by cultural conditions, the “I” is a product produced by culture. We are churned out by the interaction between our body and our time and so what, then, are we? A product whose

94

Chapter 3

thinking, even whose most deeply held beliefs, are the result of our culture and would be wholly different were we born in a different time. Kant and Descartes fuel the confidence of Western modernity by establishing “man” as “the measure of all things.” But as modernity wears on, the person becomes understood in far more humble ways, less the arbiter of the real as the product of culture, not free, not rational, and simply at the whim of cultural power. For Camus and Sartre, however, while there is nothing beyond the play of contexts and forces, there still remains a self who can choose. While universal reason may be a myth no less fanciful than the Garden of Eden, individual choices may be internally rational. For example, I may desire milk, and it is perfectly rational to choose to walk to the store with the end of buying milk. Such choices, for Camus, are the Everest of rationality. This is, Camus notes, absurd,54 but it is no less significant for that. The self, for Sartre and Camus, is a constellation of desires and choices, but the specificity, which ruptures the Kantian hope for Universal Reason, becomes, not a scandal but, instead, something to be celebrated. Yes, as a constellation of desires and choices, rational and otherwise, we are absurd, but the person can choose to accept this absurdity or engage in what Sartre and de Beauvoir called “mauvaise foi.”55 Accepting the absurdity of minor but nonetheless real freedom involves celebrating the choices that ground the acting self. It is a form of personhood and choice which, while trivial relative to the Enlightenment’s goals, is nonetheless a real active expression of an individual “I.” There are no good or evil choices as such, but there is choice toward this or that end, chosen by the person as the goal they seek to live toward. It is important to see this as consistent with, and indeed the necessary destination of, the earlier attempts to ground the self as the unified collectivity of Res or Vorstellungen. Descartes and Kant establish the thinking person as that which is. Their thinking can be just or unjust, rational or irrational. In contrast, for Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre there is neither good nor evil, nor indeed, rational or irrational qua “Reason itself,” but there is a choosing thing, which can choose rationally qua this or that specific end. It is an end “I” have chosen as the end I wish to pursue. It is limited and perhaps, absurd, but it is an instantiation of a self. Not a self as a wholly autonomous rational agent, as in Kant, but as a culturally determined, but nonetheless unique, choosing thing. Not a res cogitans, but a res eligans. The enlightenment project, grounded in Descartes and Kant’s “thinking thing” is maintained in late modernity through Sartre and de Beauvoir’s “choosing thing.” While its authors were highly critical of capitalism, this understanding of the person facilitates a world in which online debates over the merits of iPhone or Android are conducted with the passion we once saw in debates between Luther and Erasmus. While the former seem, to my generation, trivial, the self is established within this late-modern condition as a constellation

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

95

of choices. The choosers are becoming who they are, or who they want to be, by virtue of the shoes they wear and the phones they carry. Kant and Descartes reduce the real to the thinking thing, which holds out the hope of a universal form of human subjectivity via Kant’s transcendental limits. The post-Nietzschean awareness that this can not save us from the spectre of relativism reduces this further, from the real, to thought (which can attain rational models of universal justice), to choice (which while not capable of operating outside of one’s own context, nevertheless is an expression of the self). The real is reduced to the thinking thing, which is reduced to the choosing thing. In existentialism, a symbiotic process develops in which the person is a thinking or choosing thing and the exercise of such choices represent the expression of personhood. This expression is idiosyncratic, even absurd, but is also the principle of personhood itself. Because it is the very principle of personhood the only truly “wicked” or immoral thing would be to impede a person making choices. Within this grammar, this would be to impede someone from being a person. This is why debates about what actions are morally good—debates that make sense within older discourses—run aground in the twenty-first century, when someone is likely to reply to such debates by claiming “you’re denying that I exist.” This statement seems obviously false, but within the logic of late modernity it makes perfect sense. If “I” am my choices, then, when you suggest that my choices are invalid or immoral you are denying my existence. By so doing, the person who questions choices is denying the existence of their dialog partner because their dialog partner understandings themselves as their choices. In so doing, the person who questions is, in so much as the word has currency within late modern moral discourse, “evil.” In a culture in which to be human is to choose, to impede choice is to be anti-human. From the clerical and political oppressors raged against in 1968, to the Soviet “Evil Empire,” to the Islamic fundamentalist Other, to the haters and bigots who oppose gay marriage or a woman’s right to choose, to those who would hold gender as bound to biology, in a context where to be is to choose, evil is embodied as an opposition to choice. America is the “City on a Hill” because in America anyone can be anything they choose to be, or so the story goes. The good is seen as freedom, a freedom whose practical expression is to be able to choose in a manner prohibited by totalitarian others, be they Stalinist, Islamic, Catholic, or Nazi. Rejected perspectives are referred to as “fascist” where “fascist” signifies an impeding of ones freedom to choose. While existentialist thought seems out of step with the genetic code established in early modernity and explored in chapter 1, it is in fact its natural successor. While twenty-first-century capitalism and bourgeois liberalism seem alien to the once counter cultural ideas of Sartre and de Beauvoir, they are their anythingbut-counter-cultural contemporary expression.

96

Chapter 3

I do not mean to suggest that this grammar is the product of “the left.” The genealogy I’m offering and the critique I will proceed to offer is not a contribution to the tired wholly secular and modernist right vs left debates. This grammar is hegemonic modernity. Last November, my daughter came home from school and told me about how Canadian soldiers died in the First World War to protect “our freedom.” While it may not have been forefront in the minds of Canadian soldiers at Passchendaele, they must, it seems, have been fighting for Canadian “freedom.” While the literature and discourse of the time saw it as war against “the hun” and his empire building, or, at best, a war to protect small nations like Belgium, my children learn that those who gave their lives at the Somme or Verdun did so in the service of the seemingly abstract principle of “freedom.” This is because their suffering and sacrifice must be bound to a good worthy of such grotesque and heroic sacrifice, and in our culture, only freedom is such a good. This same logic justifies “our fighting men and women overseas” carrying out drone attacks in Pakistani villages “to preserve our freedom.” The West, for at least 100 years, has fought its wars on the basis, that “we” fight to preserve freedom but “they”—Nazis, Russians, Jihadists, and so on, fight to assail it. On September 20, 2001, President Bush spoke about the 9/11 attacks as an attack on freedom56 and justified military action on this basis. Within such popular discourse the totem of “freedom” becomes the operative grammar such that all other stories are told in light of it. It justifies our wars in the present and becomes the operative logic for the wars of the past, irrespective of the actual historical facts. We retell premodern history too, in order to offer a telling that coheres with such narratives. For example, in a bizarre anachronism, the medieval William Wallace is reimaged by Mel Gibson as infused with such post-enlightenment sensibilities that he heroically dies with the word “freedom” being shouted with his dying breath. ABORTION, FREEDOM, AND THE APORIA OF CHOICE It is intolerable to reject abortion as morally permissible not least because to do so transgresses against the totemization of choice (which I have discussed) and the fetishization of “freedom” (which I will proceed to discuss). Choice and freedom are tropes ingrained in the bedrock of the urbanized capitalist societies that have emerged in late modernity.57 In this section, I aim to call into question “freedom” as it functions in our social order. My first goal is to further understand the logic that makes abortion seem morally coherent. Many Christians, not least in the United States, have joined the modernist, secular battle on the side of the right, and therefore uncritically embraced a problematic notion of freedom. This is regrettable as it robs Christians of any

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

97

traditional logic for problematizing abortion and encourages them to attempt to problematize it from within the logic of the secular West. My second goal therefore, is to problematize the totemic status “freedom” in our social order. As David Bentley Hart has noted, “Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom—conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will—is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth.”58 While George Bush decried “those who hate freedom” after 9/11, the fact is that nobody hates freedom. Too often, the modern West assumes that the concept of freedom is largely uncontested. But this is naïve. No so called “enemy” of freedom actually thought they were opposed to freedom. As Stalin wrote, It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed hungry person. True freedom can only be where there is no exploitation and oppression of one person by another; where there is not unemployment, and where a person is not living in fear of losing his job, his home and his bread. Only in such a society personal and any other freedom can exist for real and not on paper.59

Such “real freedom” was a goal that, for Stalin, required seeking the social and economic conditions necessary for freedom. This commitment to freedom, for Stalin, required five-year plans that, in effect, killed millions of Russian people through famine as their agricultural way of life was choked in the service of social and economic reorganization. Kant, Aquinas, Stalin, Hitler, and Gandhi all agree that all humans crave freedom. But models of freedom differ wildly. For Aquinas, freedom is not so much a choice or a social condition, it is an ontological state. Freedom involves ontological transformation, and processes in the service of this were seen as liberating. Typically, Christian and Islamic notions of freedom see it as possible only with and in God (freedom being commensurate with an ontological state made possible through the transformation of the self). Because of this, for Islamic women such as Nadiya Takolia, wearing a veil offers freedom from the social enslavement of being seen in a certain way. For Takolia, it frees her from becoming a commodity, which is not simply liberation from men but also freedom from the complicity of one’s own drives in the commodification of our own sexuality. As she writes, “[the hijab] is me telling the world that my femininity is not available for public consumption. I am taking control of it, and I don’t want to be part of a system that reduces and demeans women. Behind this exterior I am a person—and it is this person for which I want to be known.”60 As such

98

Chapter 3

while veiling carries connotations of repression, for some61 Muslim women it is worn in the service of freedom. As Sarah Coakley62 notes, we in the West subject our bodies to flagellation in order to be “healthy.” Coakley asks if doing so expresses only a desire to be free from illness or if under the veil of health we adopt pharisaic practices in order to be desirable to others, putting forward our body as a commodity in the marketplace of desire? Is it possible that we feel good when we are fit, in part, because we enjoy the feeling of being sexually desirable, something inculcated in us through natural selection? Is there an irony in seeing an Islamic woman behind a veil as a symbol of repression in contrast to the freedom of a West, in which men and women pay surgeons to take a knife and cut people’s flesh open in order to make them look a particular way? My point is not about veiling. It is to note that there is, in the modern West, an idiosyncratic model of freedom that, if Catholicism and Islam are correct, serves to deepen our enslavement to desires. The totemic status freedom has encourages the illusion that choice, every choice, is in the service of freedom and is thereby an expression of personhood. This is the legacy of Camus and Sartre. However, for those who believe that freedom is not simply choice but an ontological reality, some choices bring freedom closer while some enslave. While the statement that “choice is the basis of freedom” may seem like the kind of mantra Orwell derided, it is based on a philosophical framework in which there is an intentional refusal to see any choice as inferior to another because there is no telos that would render one choice superior to another in terms of a move toward an absolute good. When there is nothing to be moving toward, no good in itself, no freedom in itself, all choice is necessarily enshrined as sacred.63 Thus, while we defer to “freedom” as a totem, we do not have a coherent concept of freedom, what we have is simply a reification of choice. Only from such a lens can paying a man to cut through your flesh to be attractive be considered “freedom” while veiling to avoid commodification is considered repression. Given the significance of choice, not of choice toward any particular end, established as ontologically good, but of choice as an end in itself, such key counter cultural figures as Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir have helped set down the philosophical conditions in which capitalism has become a primary mode of being human, rather than merely a logic of exchange. CAPITALISM AS WELTANSCHAUUNG Within such a grammar, the choice between an iPhone or an Android is not simply a choice about which product will most concretely cohere with our utilitarian ends, it is a choice in which one expresses one’s humanity as a

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

99

choosing thing. As Kant inadvertently facilitates the emergence of relativism, so too an existentialist logic facilitates the fetishizing of choice, which, in the twenty-first century, fuels an all-consuming global capitalism. This is not simply a choosing at the level of fast food, technology, or coffee. As Slavoj Žižek64 shows, consumer choice within cultural capitalism establishes the self as an ethical agent. Do we decide to shop at an organic, local, store or at Walmart? Do we drive a Prius or an SUV, or, better yet, do we cycle? Do we have anything to do with Ye65 or do we banish him from our brands and platforms? Through such choices we become who we are, and, ideally, become who we are as a person of value, an evidently good person, who has purchased a fair-trade coffee before cycling back home. This purchase tells us and others that we are intelligent, thoughtful, and care about others and our environment. Such choices enable us to feel good, to be seen as good, and to express an identity through the choice we are making. As Žižek writes, “When we are shown scenes of starving children in Africa, with a call for us to do something to help them, the underlying ideological message is something like: ‘Don’t think, don’t politicize, forget about the true causes of their poverty, just act, contribute money so that you will not have to think!’”66 Injustice is ingrained in the very bedrock of our capitalist social order. The computer I am typing on and the phone in my pocket are only affordable to me because the workers who made it were paid so little for their labor, and because the mines from which the materials were mined were located in countries whose environmental health can be readily purchased. The same goes for the machines in the local hospitals that, at various times, have kept my children alive. Various options are open to me in response to this, I can seek to overthrow the system, I can opt out of the hospital machines or computers. But the market also gives me another option. I can buy a product that will ensure the continuation of the system but will enable me to feel that I have done my bit “for justice.” I will buy a red version of the iPhone so that some of the profits go to an AIDS charity. I can buy fair trade coffee or environmentally friendly products and thereby signify, to myself and, hopefully, others, that I am part of the solution and not the problem. I can refuse to have anything to do with brands associated with Kanye West and thereby establish myself as righteous and good. Part of the solution, not part of the problem. Capitalism works with the hegemony of choice to encourage my illusion that I can oppose it. But this choosing itself is a choosing to resist it by participating in it. My opposition to capitalism becomes expressed in my purchasing of “alternatives.” Therefore, I consume to express my anger at consumption. Capitalism is not simply a means of economic exchange in opposition to alternatives such as socialism. If it was simply this, it would be benign, or by some accounts, positive. Capitalism in the twenty-first century

100

Chapter 3

is the social reality instantiated by the totemization of choice. Global capitalism is the name for the expression of billions of res eligens who become what they are, righteous or hateful, woke or deplorable, through their economic choices. Like Dante’s she-wolf, we are possessed of a manic desire to choose in order to be something apart from capitalist culture, but every choice further fixes us within it. THE SACRAMENTALITY OF CHOICE Given our social order in which freedom and choice are totemic, it is not surprising that (1) The mother, due to being far more a choosing thing than any unborn child, will always carry a moral weight far beyond what a baby may possess and (2) due to the hegemonic status of choice as the ultimate good within secular capitalism, abortion becomes seen as “a sacrament.” As Carter Heyward writes,67 “A woman’s choice to terminate a pregnancy should be recognized for what it is—a serious moral choice with roots in the sacred character of moral agency; the ability to choose on behalf of what we believe to be right or best in a concrete situation.”68 Again, for Heyward, “the sacred character of moral agency” is “the ability to choose on behalf of what we believe to be right or best in a concrete situation.” Choice, here, becomes far more than the only expression of freedom, as it is for secular existentialists. Here for Episcopalian priest and theologian Carter Heyward, it is acknowledged as “sacred.” In this, Heyward unwittingly becomes a high-priest of capitalist civil religion. There is nothing apart from choice, and the highest expression of this choice is surely the choice of a mother to bring a child into being or, to refuse to let it live. Modern secular capitalism could have no more sacred expression than this choice. In this choice, the “freedom to choose” is most fully present, and it is thereby something celebrated by so many within the liturgy of twenty-first-century capitalism. As such, the totemization of choice, which is central to both the military actions (in response to “those who hate freedom”) and the capitalism with which the secular West is synonymous, represents the logos of abortion. The passion of pro-choice culture is an epiphenomenon of this culture. But like the choice to buy Apple’s “Product Red” or fair trade coffee, it can only reify, never problematize the hegemonic power and violence of global capitalism. Within such a culture, abortion is not simply rational, but as Carter Heyward rightly claims, “sacramental” because it is the perfect expression of choice— the Godlike choice to allow a person to be, or to snuff them out. The worst form of Catholic response, as we saw with Sanctissimus Dominus, would be to reject the more dominant pro-choice position while also embodying the logos of the position that is being rejected. In contrast,

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

101

in my final section I will seek to offer an alternative to the hegemonic position within the secular by re-invigorating the theological categories from our Christian past. This is, to be sure, unconvincing within the grammar of modern debate. But the goal is precisely not to debate. The goal is not to “win.” The goal is, as it is throughout this book, twofold (i) to call into question the underlying logic that renders the hegemonic positions rational. This I have sought to do in this section by showing how abortion is fueled by the logos of late capitalism. The consequences of this logos are clear and do not need to be rehearsed here. Environmental crisis, global instability, and inequality are its epiphenomena. This illustration, I hope, can serve to give pause, to call into question, to problematize the logos of abortion. This problematization can then (ii) create space in which the alternative may, possibly, be heard. This alternative is not designed to “win” over a legislative assembly. It is not concerned with legality. It is concerned with morality. It is not designed to participate in the agonistic “public space” in which, based on no longer tenable understandings of reason, sides compete to force others by law to live as if they agreed with the victorious side. It seeks to offer an alternative to this space and an alternative understanding of the unborn person within it. THE THEOLOGICAL ALTERNATIVE The culture of moral theology in the early modern Church was unable to effectively oppose the fetishization of choice that emerges from the “engine” explored in chapter 1. Rejecting the findings of the theological grammar of Sanchez et al, without explicitly engaging and rejecting the grammar itself, helped reify it. In doing so, the Church committed to rejecting the logical findings of an approach to morality, while never opposing and, in fact, mirroring it. In this concluding section of this chapter, I will offer a theology of abortion that is connected to trinitarian theology, in contrast to the perspectives we saw in the last chapter. It will also be offered in contrast to many recent and contemporary “pro-life” positions. It will do so as these positions continue the pathology of Catholic moral theology in the past five hundred years, in that they reject the conclusions of the logic of choice explored above while using the same logic themselves. They (1) implicitly accept the Kantian fallacy that different positions can “compete” rationally in the public space and (2) focus, not on why, within the logic of catholic Christianity, abortion is immoral, but why, within the legislative order of this or that nation, abortion should be illegal. Legislation, not morality, again, is the determining grammar. In order to oppose abortion within this grammar, Christian participants concede ontological and epistemological normativity to the secular. This is a core pathology within modern Catholic moral thought, both liberal

102

Chapter 3

and conservative. This is not to suggest that there is no point of contrast. Christians and secularists can highlight inherent contradictions in each other’s narratives, or flag historical problems that emerge from ontology A or B, but the conversation necessarily takes place at this foundational level. It takes place at the level of the “engine,” not the moral propositions these engines lead to. Beyond such foundational focus, any conversation is as productive as conversation about the moral status of an object that one person sees as a person, infused by the Holy Spirit and the other person sees as a clump of cells, of moral status akin to a daffodil or turnip. AGAINST ATTRIBUTES While a theological alternative must be constructive, showing the beauty and (internal) coherence of the Catholic position, it must also be deconstructive, highlighting the pathologies endemic in the societal foundations that enable abortion to be seen as morally good. I have begun this deconstruction by showing the cultural basis for the fetishization of choice and will now continue by showing what happens when a core pathology in the genetic code of modernity—the bracketing of noumena—saturates moral reasoning. The bracketing of noumena reduces a thing to its appearance and thereby to its empirically verifiable attributes. The ubiquity of this move in the moral culture of modernity means that both sides in the abortion debate work to establish attributes commensurate with “life” or “personhood” and hold that these attributes determine the legality or morality of abortion. For Peter Singer,69 for example, mere membership in the human species does not establish the right to life of the unborn. Rather, lacking attributes such as sentience, the unborn do not have such rights. With methodological similarity, pro-life slogans emphasize attributes through such phrases as “Abortion stops a beating heart,” ascribing personhood to the unborn on the basis of this attribute. The problem is that when personhood, dignity and value are bound to attributes, we de facto endorse a philosophical grammar that is inherent in some of the worst horrors of modernity. This sounds like an extreme claim, from which most readers will reflexively recoil. I make it on the basis that as soon as we agree, explicitly or implicitly, that personhood or dignity is predicated upon attributes, then we agree, explicitly or implicitly, that those lacking such attributes lack personhood or dignity. Therefore, while we may oppose the killing of one group of people by another, we cede that, theoretically at least, a person lacking an attribute commensurate with personhood could lose the rights associated with personhood. Thus, while we may “draw the line” differently from the line being drawn by those committing genocide, the principle—that lacking certain attributes a person lacks rights to life—is

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

103

held in common with those committing genocide, even if we differ on where this line might be drawn. The idea that seeming persons X were not, in fact, persons, due to lacking certain attributes has occurred time and again in the last hundred years, from Armenia, to the Balkans, to Manchuria, through the Shoah, Cambodia, the Balkans again, and Rwanda. I am aware this topic is emotive, but my goal is not to persuade by virtue of emotivism. The principle is that when personhood is determined first and foremost by attributes, then people will decide that so called person X, lacking attribute Y, thereby lacks the attributes necessary for personhood and thus lacks dignity, even the right to life. This has happened time and again and in each occasion this principle is evident. Germany under National Socialism represented a clear, but far from unique, example of this. As Lutz Kaelber70 and others have shown, children with a disability were increasingly seen, under National Socialism, as lacking the attributes commensurate with personhood. Because of this they could be euthanized. This fueled a policy of infanticide from as early as 1939 where the state demanded that children born with illness had their birth reported to officials, who would then assess whether the children should be euthanized or not.71 While this was initially only for children under three, by 1941 doctors needed to report all children under sixteen who suffered from a list of illnesses72 to the state, which would then decide, in many cases, to euthanize them. This program inexorably spread to all adults suffering from these illnesses, but also to healthy adults whose status as human was “undermined” because of their race. As Vera Laska,73 Johannes Lang, and others have shown, in the camps Romani and Jews were declared to be “non-human.”74 The pain of the Shoah, or genocides in Rwanda or the Balkans, is such that reason itself is shadowed by their emotional power, and thus reference to these horrors are offered far too frequently in the service of moral argument. But the emotional power is not the engine of my argument here. I bring them up as a clear illustration of the fact that when attributes are commensurate with human dignity, then culture A or B will decide that seeming human X lacks humanity by virtue of Y. This happened in Nazi Germany, it happened in Rwanda, and it happens in most wars explicitly or implicitly.75 Rather than attempt to work within this logic, the Christian response must be to resist the binding of personhood to attributes, even if such binding seemingly serves a rhetorical role in “winning” an abortion debate. Traditional Catholic moral positions on abortion “won” against Sanchez and his like, but did so by enshrining the method of Sanchez et al, thereby while condemning its theology to increasing irrelevance, to such an extent that the idea that abortion is a grave sin is increasingly uncommon. Therefore, any Christian attempt to “win” a debate by further enshrining the logic of the secular is simply repeating this perennial pathology. Instead, the Catholic response must refuse to

104

Chapter 3

accept attribute-based models and, instead, highlight the horrors associated with this, secular, taxonomy of personhood. Of course, while never determining personhood, attributes do play in second order moral reasoning. Aquinas and more will, for example, use attributes to determine the moral categorization of an act of abortion. Prior to the presence of the rational soul Aquinas is not willing to allow that abortions are homicide. But this is not to suggest that the unborn, with only a sensitive, not rational, soul, are not worthy of dignity and life. For Aquinas, attributes help refine our understanding of isness, but in modernity, by virtue of the epistemological processes I explored in chapter 1, they come to define it. Only the absolute definitions of late modernity bring the equation of full humanity with certain intellectual traits and the willingness to terminate the lives of these “less than full humans.” The traditional Christian approach, as we saw with Augustine in chapter 2, is opposed to this. As we saw, this approach holds that humans have dignity because God gives himself to them in love (the Holy Spirit). It is not because of their attributes or traits but because of God’s self-giving to them that they have dignity. Note that this love is not, for Augustine, a “feeling” in a distant deity for a human being, isolated in time. God’s love proceeds, from himself, as himself. It is an ontological self-giving from a God whose love is nothing less than Godself—the Holy Spirit. As Augustine writes “if Sacred Scripture proclaims: ‘God is love,’ as also that love is of God, and acts in us that we may remain in God and He in us . . . then the Spirit Himself is the God who is love.”76 God’s love is thus not simply an affection or feeling, residing in God. God’s love is nothing less than the Holy Spirit who is given to persons. God’s love refuses any dichotomization of God and the world, and with this self gift establishes the dignity of all persons as the intended objects of God’s self giving. Because of this, the person can neither lose their dignity nor earn it. This is not something that can be proven. But neither can the proposition that a person has dignity or a “right” to life, based on this or that attribute be proven. It is no less a statement of faith than modern notions of dignity or rights but, unlike modern notions, it can establish a universal dignity that can be neither lost nor gained. In contrast, non-theological notions inevitably produce social orders willing to deny to person X the right to life based upon their lacking attribute Y, be they Jewish, Tutsi, or unborn. Of course, the history of Christian complicity in cruelty shadows my attempt to argue for the superiority of a theological basis over non-theological ones. But I am distinguishing here between flaws in the application of a model and flaws in the model itself. A broken phone may fail to make calls, but a piece of toast will never make calls. While Christians may have failed in the application of theological principles, theoretically, the dignity of all, based on God’s absolute love irrespective of attributes, works. The reduction

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

105

of rights to material (culturally determined) attributes necessarily concedes the loss of rights through either loss of attributes or a shift in the cultural determination of which attributes are commensurate with dignity. Hence, it doesn’t work. The classical theological position such that human life is in relationship with God from conception establishes human dignity apart from human attributes. It locates dignity, not in personal attributes within the human being that vary and change, but in God, who does not. The Christian identification of abortion as immoral rests primarily on the fact that abortion represents the destruction of a child of God, loved by God and known by God, as the skin knows the sun, and in whom, as this love from God, God is present as the Holy Spirit. As the tyranny of choice emerges from the epistemological and ontological moves we saw in chapter 1, the Christian position proceeds from the affirmation of God as the real. This forces a perspective that locates the meaning of matter in God’s self-giving to it. And when this matter is infused with the soul, even the vegetative and sensitive souls77 in the days and weeks after conception, God’s self-giving to it is concrete. Thus, once the catholic Christian theology outlined in chapter 2 is affirmed, the dignity of the unborn is necessarily affirmed also. This catholic Christian position on abortion resists the hegemonic moves that render matter banal and acknowledges that we are not the masters of creation, but that God is. In contrast, an act of abortion rejects a commitment to live in God’s world in the clearest possible way, that is, through an act of violence against a child loved by God and in whom God, the Holy Spirit, is. Abortion establishes our cultural framework for right and wrong, good and evil, rational and irrational, as paramount, and God’s love as subordinate. It does so because it subordinates God’s love for the unborn, which grants the unborn dignity, to a logic which dictates that because of circumstance X or Y it is better for this life to be destroyed. While abortion, for Carter-Hayward is sacramental, abortion within the catholic Christian perspective is the perfect inverse of a sacrament. It is literally destroying the real presence of God (the Holy Spirit) who is present in the body of the child. It does so in order to instantiate and reify the hegemony of our logic and order, in rejection of God’s. It is a tangible act that rejects God’s self-giving in the same way that receiving the Eucharist is a tangible act that accepts God’s self-giving. It is a sign of our mastery over creation in opposition to God. It thereby serves as an instrument for establishing this or that logos as Lord in place of the God who is. Therefore, it is the perfect anti-sacrament within the banal liturgy of hegemonic capitalism. God’s love, not personal attributes, establishes dignity, and God loves human persons. For this logic to include the unborn, the unborn must, of course, be persons. They are thus, within catholic Christianity (as we saw at

106

Chapter 3

the outset of this chapter), by virtue of the reality of the soul, not any soul, but a human soul, the form of a human body. The soul is the principle of personhood, the isness of each organic entity. The human soul, uniquely for Augustine and Aquinas, represents the capacity for the union between people and the God who gives himself to them. “The life of the body is the soul; the life of the [human] soul is God.”78 Augustine writes, and for Augustine this must not be understood in an ephemeral way. For Augustine, “The Spirit of God dwells in the soul, and through the soul in the body, so that even our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, whom we have received from God.”79 This concrete dwelling of God in the soul is the basis of catholic Christian opposition to abortion, as has been discussed earlier and will be again, as the focus of the next and final section of this chapter. But before then it is important to note that this is supplemented, not least in Augustine and Aquinas, with an understanding of the person which sees it as being comprised of both actuality and potentiality. The person, as they are in themselves, cannot be understood without reference to this relationship between actuality and potentiality. Before concluding with a final grounding of Catholic theology of abortion in God’s relationship with the person through the soul, a brief discussion of the relationship between actuality and potentiality in the unborn person is necessary. THE FIRST DAYS AND WEEKS: ACTUALITY AND POTENTIALITY For Benedict XVI, [the unborn child] is not an accumulation of biological material but rather of a new living being, dynamic and marvelously ordered, a new individual of the human species. This is what Jesus was in Mary’s womb; this is what we all were in our mother’s womb. We may say with Tertullian, an ancient Christian writer: “the one who will be a man is one already” (Apologeticum IX, 8), there is no reason not to consider him a person from conception.80

The theology that Benedict draws on in this homily has a complex lineage. Material creation, for Aquinas, is usually a composite of what it is, in actuality, and what it is, potentially. This potentiality is not at odds with its nature. I am not potentially a Pterodactyl. My potentiality, as an even older man, is intrinsic to what I am. As Aquinas writes, “the potentiality of matter is nothing else but its essence” (ST I: Q. 77, Art.1). He is echoed by the first of the 24 Thomistic Theses, which the Motu Proprio of June 29, 1914, by Pius X prescribed—“Potency and Act divide being in such a way that whatever is, is

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

107

either pure act, or of necessity it is composed of potency and act as primary and intrinsic principles.” God is pure act, we are comprised of potency and actuality as primary and intrinsic principles. We cannot understand ourselves without reference to both our actuality and our potentiality. Two of Aquinas’ core theological habits are at work in his theology (1) an acknowledgment of the primacy of God and (2) good common sense. Both merit unpacking in order to see the role the theology of actuality and potentiality plays in this issue. In relation to (1) actuality and potentiality are not dichotomized, for Aquinas, because God is eternal and the separation between actuality and potentiality is a limitation of time. In God, there is neither past, present, nor future, thus, actuality and potentiality can not be dichotomized from the “God’s eye” lens, i.e., what truly is, actuality and potentiality are not dichotomized. As Aquinas acknowledges, this is incomprehensible, but that has no bearing on its status as a theological maxim that faithful Christian theology should take into account (ST I: Q. 14, Art. 13). As he writes, “God sees all things in His eternity, which, being simple, is present to all time, and embraces all time” (ST I: Q. 57, Art. 3). As such, the “me” that God knows is not simply me now, but my past and future also. All of me, past present and future, is one in God’s eternity. As such my isness is not reducible to my actuality. If it were, then my isness, bound in a small sliver of temporality, would be more real than God’s isness. Time would be the real, and God’s eternity the abstraction. My actuality in time would have more reality than my totality in God’s eternal sight. God’s isness would be less than, or inferior to, mine, mine would be the “real” God’s the illusion. Rather, as God’s isness is most real then, most properly, I am not simply my actuality but also my potentiality, actuality in my current existence, potentiality in the fullness of my isness. Because of this, Aquinas agrees with Pope Benedict that the unborn child is not simply what they are “as an accumulation of biological material,”81 but also their potentiality, which is intrinsic to their isness. The fact that personhood incorporates both actuality and potentiality also evokes another core tenet of Aquinas’ theology—simple common sense. We all, on some level, realize that people are not reducible to their actuality. For example, imagine you hear about the death of Sarah, an 111-year-old woman. You will be sad as befits your reaction to any loss of life. But now imagine you hear about the death of Sarah, an 11-year-old girl. Your sadness, I suspect, would be sharper. And yet in terms of actuality, they would have both lost the exact same thing. They have both lost life, their existence, their actuality. Despite this, you would be more sad about the 11 year old because you know, instinctively, that while they have both lost the same in terms of actuality, the 11 year old has lost so much more in terms of potentiality. This potentiality is not irrelevant to who she is—as your grief reminds you. This is one of the reasons why the death of children is so tragic—we know on

108

Chapter 3

some level that their personhood is comprised of both actuality and potentiality and, in terms of potentiality, their loss is far greater than the loss the 111-year-old woman has endured. In terms of abortion, we must note that while the child qua actuality is a person, to varying extents, in the womb, they are a person, to the fullest possible extent, qua potentiality. To say otherwise, from the Christian perspective, is to deny common sense. And worse, it is to refuse to acknowledge the Lordship of God in whom all is actuality and potentiality. It is to refuse God as Lord of all and, instead, establish our perspective, holding tight to a sliver of time as hegemonic. In addition to being an assault on a person loved by God, and an assault on the Holy Spirit as this love, abortion is a grave sin as it rejects the lordship God in whom all actuality and potentiality resides. As such, the Christian perspective, which locates human dignity beyond attributes, can never lose sight of the humanity of the unborn. To do so would be hubris. It would be to subordinate God’s love to a prevailing and passing metric as the basis for dignity or “rights.” It would be to subordinate God’s eternity to human temporality as the metric of what is. This catholic Christian grammar of actuality and potentiality informs the Christian position on abortion in the first days and weeks. In this, the unborn, loved by God (in ontological interrelationship through the soul) is comprised of personhood by virtue of embodying both actuality and potentiality. THE SOUL IN THE UNBORN CHILD At the outset of this chapter, I offered a reading of Aquinas on the soul that illustrated the immorality of abortion. In the last section I have focused on the immorality of abortion even in the earliest stages, showing how a Christian perspective, restored to the doctrinal grammar from which it emerges, contrasts with an increasingly hegemonic secular perspective. I will conclude this chapter by returning to a discussion of the soul. This is important as I have attempted to show the logic of abortion in the modern West as proceeding from an understanding of matter as banal leading to the fetishizing of choice. The catholic Christian position against abortion stands or falls with its capacity to speak coherently about God’s relationship with matter. This relationship is not simply the benevolent love from a distant deity, but the real self-giving of God, as the Holy Spirit, to persons. To speak coherently of this requires a reinvigoration of a theological grammar of the soul. The soul is as real to the Fathers or Hildegard as oxygen is to me. They cannot imagine a comprehensive account of what is without reference to it. For Hildegard, the soul is to the body what the sap is to a tree,82 it can be known by God who, in the soul, can course through our body. It is, for Hildegard,

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

109

as it is for Aquinas, mysterious, in that it is non-spatial, non-material, and yet generated by the body to which it is bound. It is also, as in Aquinas, the basis for the ontological union between God and the person. Thus, the soul, while a reality, is also a concept that enables a coherent imagining of God’s relationship to the world. Without it we can only imagine the real in terms of materialism or dualism. Either the material is all that is, or, as in early modern Protestantism and Catholicism, God is distinct from a material world within a de facto dualism in which God watches over the world prior to eschatological union. The soul as concept represents the grammar for refusing such dualism or dichotomization and instead offers a grammar for speaking about God’s incarnational self-giving to persons here and now. It is no coincidence that dualism and dichotomization have become hegemonic as the concept of the soul has become more ephemeral and etiolated. This etiolation is both visible in, and encouraged by, the curious absence of discourse about the soul in many pro-life campaigns. The precedence “a beating heart,” or phenomenologically verifiable images of unborn children, has within pro-life discourse, points to modernity’s hegemony. It may be that the anti-abortion movement does indeed see the person in ways more in keeping with Hildegard or Aquinas and is simply attempting to use images and language that “works” to convince the secular. But in so doing, the very problem that renders Christian positions untenable is reinforced. We cannot coherently hold the position on abortion held by pre-modern catholic Christianity without holding the understandings of the person on which such positions were based. And this means that we need to develop coherent ways of speaking about the soul and not pretending that the material, the measurable, and the quantifiable, exhaust the real. I do not mean that we need to have an understanding of the soul that meets the modern models of knowledge based on verifiability and demonstrability. As I showed, Aquinas does not have such a precise understanding of the soul. Rather he has grammars (qua the body and qua God) for speaking about the soul, grammars that enable a model of the soul to emerge through the use of images and analogies. These grammars, as with Hildegard before him and the Fathers before her, shape minds that can imagine and “see” the relationship between God and the person. This “seeing” is both an evangelical and apologetic imperative in the twenty-first century. Discourse about the unborn child can contribute to the establishment of such a grammar. Aquinas emphasizes the reality of the soul as bound to the developing embryonic body rather than deposited into a broken material self by a gnostic deity. In this he is sometimes held to be Aristotelian, but there is nothing of Aquinas in this regard that wasn’t there long before him. As Hildegard writes, “at the divinely appointed time the infant in the maternal womb receives the spirit, and shows by the movements of its body that it

110

Chapter 3

lives, just as the earth opens and brings forth the flowers of its use when the dew falls on it.”83 Aquinas does not deviate from this. The moment of full ensoulment is unknown, but its presence is visible in embryonic movement. Prior to the ensoulment consistent with a willing self, the receptive soul is in relationship with God and so abortion is grotesquely immoral at any stage. But for Aquinas and Hildegard it takes on a homicidal fervor with the presence of the intellectual soul. God’s self-giving is received most fully in the “rational soul,” the isness, the identity of the person, wherein the person can accept and embody God’s self-giving in concrete acts. But this self-giving is received prior to the presence of the rational soul by virtue of the vegetative and sensitive soul in the embryo (ST I, Q 188, Art., 2) which receives God’s love. The relationship between God and the unborn child begins before the fullness of the rational soul, it begins from God’s grace which enables conception itself and establishes the reality of the sensitive soul. The sensitive soul is wholly receptive of God’s actual self-giving as and in the Holy Spirit. Its destruction can not be seen within catholic Christianity as anything other than a refusal of this. Because abortion is, as I have argued, the “sacrament” of a materialism which establishes only consumer choice as true, the cherishing of the unborn84 must be seen as a revolutionary act par excellence for catholic Christianity today. It is thus because it refuses the tyranny of the banal. It refuses the lie that life is reducible to the material. It proclaims that God loves and that God’s love is the basis for the beauty and goodness of all that God loves. The unborn are blessed by this love whether as the object of God’s love (as in the embryo) or in their relationship to God as their identity grows in the womb. As they grow in the womb they move from something loved by God to something in whom, for Hildegard, the Holy Spirit flows through the soul, which flows through their body “like sap.” The unborn are signs of what really is—a material world that does not necessarily have a “right” to God’s love, but which receives it, not because of who they are, but because of who God is. God loves us, the vulnerable us, the weak us, the unconscious us, and this love is good. It is the sacramental presence of God in the world; a love visible in a blind eyed unborn baby, or as we shall see in chapter 5, a still, sleeping, elderly body, vital only through the presence of God within. NOTES 1. Which was widely practiced, especially with female infants. See Gwen Hunnicutt and Gary LaFree, “Reassessing the Structural Covariates of Cross-National Infant Homicide Victimization,” in Homicide Studies, 12, no. 1 (2008): 46–66.

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

111

2. John T. Noonan, “Abortion and the Catholic Church: A Summary History,” in Natural Law Forum, 126 (January 1967): 85–131. 3. Athenagoras of Athens, A Plea for the Christians 35.4. 4. In the sense of whether it is moral or immoral. 5. Aquinas, for example, affirms Augustine’s linking of the soul to the body as its form but is critical of what he sees as Augustine’s contradictory position that the soul is produced at creation prior to bodies (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae) (Cambridge: Blackfriars/New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–1973). 6. Like heat when we rub our hands together or sweat when we run. 7. For example, ST 1, Q 118 Art. 2. 8. For men. 9. For women. He follows Aristotle completely in Aristotle’s patriarchal understanding of male and female embryonic generation. 10. Thomas Aquinas, On Love and Charity: Readings from the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Thomas Aquinas In Translation), trans. Peter A. Kwasniewski, Thomas Bolin, and Joseph Bolin (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008): 3:5:2. 11. “Intellectual” here in the sense of mental attributes rather than in a more formally Thomistic understanding. 12. Or the mind in the case of braille. 13. It’s problematic due to the “intermingling,” as highlighted in chapter 2, Basil’s analogy of the sword in the furnace is technically immeasurably better. I’m not using it here as the image of the coffee can be instructive in pushing through a wall that stops us seeing the relationship between the person and God in the soul necessary for seeing the relationship with God being alive far before birth. 14. It is impervious as it lacks the capacity to accept God’s self-giving as the Holy Spirit in intentional willed moral actions. Crucially the basis for this capacity is established prior to birth, that is, prior to the capacity to choose, through God’s prevenient grace, that is the self-giving of God to the person from conception. This grace enables a later conscious acceptance of God’s will to relationship. This acceptance is the grammar of the moral life. While turnips and sheep are loved by God and worthy of love and dignity from us, they never get to live this moral life in such a way as to receive union with the Holy Spirit sufficient for eternal union with God. Turnips and Sheep simply can’t say yes to the love of the poor commensurate with christoformity. 15. “God, by sanctifying grace, by infused virtues, by the seven gifts, becomes really present in a new and higher manner, as object experimentally knowable, which the just soul can enjoy, which it at times knows actually. God is not like a loved friend who is absent, but He is really present.” Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought (Aeterna Press, 2016) chapter 21. 16. Which the unborn, in any case, cannot be guilty of. 17. The question of ensoulment in recent moral theology (which usually fails to echo the medieval taxonomy of different stages of the soul in the embryo) is often understood to determine whether abortion is moral or immoral. This is incorrect. While Aquinas, Augustine, and Jerome all see the question of ensoulment as important in deciding whether abortion is homicide or not, abortion is gravely immoral

112

Chapter 3

for all, whether it should be seen under the law as homicide or not. For a very fine engagement with such moral theology, see, John Haldane and Patrick Lee, “Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion and the Value of Life,” in Philosophy, Vol. 78, No. 304 (April 2003): 255–278. 18. Navarrus, Enchiridion seu Manuale Confessariorium et poenitentiarum, 3 OPERA (Lyons, 1509) c. 25, n. 60–64, “The Sins of Physicians and Surgeons,” 4. 19. This problematic phrasing intends to highlight just how difficult it is to acknowledge, along with Augustine and Aquinas, that two visibly identical acts, which are also identical in their materiality, may be ontologically very different. 20. Augustine, Sermons 111/6 (184–229Z) on the Liturgical Seasons, The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, trans. Edmund Hill and ed. John E. Rotelle (New Rochelle, NY: New City Press, 1993): 254. 21. More commonly, fight or flight. 22. For a discussion of the cultural context for de Azpilcueta’s thinking on this issue, see N. Davidson, “Theology, Nature and the Law,” In: T. Dean and K. J. P. Lowe (1994) eds., Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 74–98. 23. Thomas Sanchez, Disputationum De Sancto Matramonis Sacramento (Venice, 1737): 2.22.17. 24. This, as will become clear, is based on a problematic and non-theological understanding of actuality and potentiality. 25. See M. Therese Lysaught, Joseph J. Kotva, Jr., Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey. eds., On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, Third Edition (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012): 676. 26. John T. Noonan, “Abortion and the Catholic Church: A Summary History,” in Natural Law Forum, 126 (January 1967): 85–131. 27. See Donald DeMarco, “The Roman Catholic Church and Abortion: An Historical Perspective,” in The Homiletic & Pastoral Review, Ignatius Press (July 1984): 59–66. 28. Sanchez understand ensoulment in terms of what Aquinas holds as the intellectual soul—the fully formed person (who is therefore subject to homicide). 29. Thomas Sanchez, Disputationum De Sancto Matramonis Sacramento (Venice, 1737): 9.17.15. 30. Thomas Sanchez, Disputationum De Sancto Matramonis Sacramento (Venice, 1737): 9.20.9. Interestingly, he will answer that abortion is not lawful to avoid scandal, but his logic here is again based on the fruitlessness of avoiding scandal by committing to practices that will inculcate vice in the person (through encouraging lust) and thus facilitate greater scandal down the road. 31. Copies of the copies. 32. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, “Where is the New Theology Leading Us?” Trans. Suzanne M. Rinzi (Catholic Family News Reprint series): 4. 33. The same as for abortion. 34. Excommunication. 35. John T. Noonan, “Abortion and the Catholic Church: A Summary History,” in Natural Law Forum, 126 (January 1967): 110.

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

113

36. For a sophisticated discussion of this, see Zubin Mistry, Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c. 500–900 (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 2015): p. 45ff. 37. In that it often shares some fundamental epistemology and ontology with secular modernity. In fact, one could argue that a core trajectory of much twentiethcentury theology, such as in Rahner, Küng, Schillebeeckx, Lonergan, and more, was the attempt to find common foundations with secular (often Kantian) modernity. 38. To be sure, the theologians named in the preceding note may not reject the inevitable conclusions that the foundational engine leads to, but Rome, as of 2022, still does. But the question remains as to whether some prelates hold the Catholic positions because they’re Catholic positions, despite not seeing them as rational, or coherent. 39. We may think of Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Kant, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and many more. 40. With slightly less intellectual dishonesty, Catholic liberalism has attempted to change Church teaching in order to cohere with the secular epistemology and ontology with which it explicitly or implicitly agrees. 41. I discuss Carter Heyward as an example of this in what follows. 42. An extensive reading of Kant’s second critique was offered in chapter 1. 43. Note, of course, as I will discuss later, how modern Christian positions understandably strive to work within such a Kantian grammar, highlighting phenomena through images and statistics which seek to illustrate the baby’s attributes sufficient for them to have rights within secular rationality. 44. Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost,” in Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 69, no. 19 (October 1972): 649–665. 45. See Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002). 46. With certainty. 47. Rorty locates this in Hegel. 48. As discussed in chapter 1. 49. As I will argue, the move is from “I think, therefore I am” to “I choose, therefore I am.” 50. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Third Edition, trans. Donald A. Cress (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1998). 51. Ibid. 52. Or the Fathers. 53. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 412. 54. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien, (Penguin Classics, 2000). 55. This “bad faith” is the refusal to accept this absurdity and, instead, proceed pretending that there is a universal rationality or grand metanarrative that holds. see Terry Keefe, “Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Satre on Mauvaise Foi,” in French Studies, Volume XXXIV, Issue 3, July 1980, p. 300–314 56. “They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.” Washington

114

Chapter 3

Post, “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation,” accessed October 2022, http:​ //​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wpsrv​/nation​/specials​/attacked​/transcripts​/bushaddress​ _092001​.html. 57. See Thomas M. Franck, “Is Personal Freedom a Western Value?” American Journal of International Law 91, no. 4 (1997): 593–627. 58. David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (London: Yale University Press, 2010): 105. 59. See the March 1, 1938, interview between Joseph Stalin and Roy Howard in, Joseph Stalin, Collected Works, Vol. 14 (London: Red Star Press Ltd., 1978). 60. Nadiya Takolia, “The Hijab Has Liberated Me from Society’s Expectations of Women,” The Guardian, accessed January 2018, https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/ commentisfree​/2012​/may​/28​/hijab​-society​-women​-religious​-political 61. Of course, not all. 62. Sarah Coakley, “The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation and God,” in Modern Theology 16 (2000): 61−73. 63. Usually “as long as it doesn’t hurt others.” Although, from the Nietzschean perspective this is a final lingering hold of bourgeois decadent convention. The grip of this convention, which has no rationality beyond its totemic power, is, as we can see, also slipping. 64. Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009). 65. Formerly known as Kanye West. 66. Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times (London: Verso, 2011): 4. 67. Agreeing with Florence Kennedy’s statement that, “If men could get pregnant abortion would be a sacrament.” 68. Carter Heyward, “Abortion a Moral Choice,” in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1986): 42–45. 69. See Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979): 106–126. 70. Lutz Kaelber and Raimond Reiter, eds., Kinder und Kinderfachabteilungen im Nationalsozialismus. Gedenken und Forschung (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011). 71. Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie”im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Fischer S. Verlag GmbH, 1983): 80. 72. Klee, whose “Euthanasie”im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” is still the definitive text, lists among the proscribed ailments: “idiocy and mongolism,” “malformations of all kinds, particularly the absence of limbs, severe midline defects of the head and spine” and “paralysis, including cerebral palsy,” Ernst Klee, “Euthanasie”im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens” (Fischer S. Verlag GmbH, 1983): 80. 73. Vera Laska, ed., “Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses,” in Contributions in Women’s Studies, no. 37 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983). 74. Johannes Lang “Holocaust Genocide Studies,” Oxford Journals, 24 (2) (2010): 225–246.

Abortion and the Tyranny of the Res Eligens

115

75. Note the use of nicknames in warfare to dehumanize and thus facilitate killing: “kraut,” “jap,” “gook,” and so on. This enables persons to become depersoned in order to overcome the basic human inhibition against killing. 76. Augustine, On the Trinity: Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts In History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews and trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 208. 77. “Souls” here doesn’t mean plural, rather I’m trying to be faithful to Aquinas’ notion of the vegetive soul being replaced by the sensitive soul, which incorporates it (ST I, Q 118 Art. 2). 78. Sermon 161 in Augustine, Daniel Edward Doyle, and Edmund Hill, Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part III, Homilies (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007): 480. 79. Ibid., 481. 80. Celebration of First Vespers of the First Sunday of Advent for Unborn Life, Homily of his Holiness Benedict XVI, Vatican Basilica, Saturday, November 27, 2010. 81. Ibid. 82. Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, trans. Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1990): 124. 83. Ibid., 119. 84. And the very old and sick as I will show in the following chapter.

Chapter 4‌‌‌‌

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

Throughout this book, my goal is to show the foundational logic on which Catholic moral positions have been based. The coherency of Catholic positions are dependent on the understanding of the human person and the goal (or “end”) of life from which they flow. Without these understandings, the traditional Catholic positions seem irrational. I have been arguing that only by reconnecting them with this foundational theology can Catholics once again see the coherence and beauty in them. This is one core element of this book—to illustrate the coherency and beauty of the Catholic approaches by reconnecting them with their doctrinal foundations. Conversations about morality, however, often take place in public spaces rather than within specific traditions. By “public spaces,” I mean spaces in which participants attempt to win arguments with strangers without shared foundational understandings or authorities. Such spaces include the political space (as a space for moral debate) and social media. The price of admission to these public spaces often includes relinquishing one’s foundational logic, as strangers cannot be convinced by appeals to tradition-specific authorities. Thus “others”—Muslims, indigenous communities, as well as many Catholics of a traditional mindset—begin to surrender their distinctiveness in the very attempt to “win over” normative voices. A similar process has been documented by Gayatri Spivak1 among others. In colonial contexts, in order to critique power using language recognized as rational by that power, one must adopt the rationality and language of the oppressor. If you don’t, then the dominant power won’t accept your perspectives as rational or admissible. Hence, one is further colonized in the very act of resistance, as in order to resist in a way understandable by the hegemonic power, one must surrender one’s foundational grammar and adopt the grammar of the oppressor. In our universities, we enshrine the logic and grammar of the modern West. Others, in order to succeed within this space, must learn this language and put aside their indigenous grammars. For example, no matter how much a Muslim student may believe that Saladin won the battle of Hattin because it 117

118

Chapter 4

was the will of Allah, in offering reasons for his victory in a Western university the student would be wise to refrain from mentioning this. In our universities, divine providence carries little if any explanatory weight. Others, who may believe that God’s will determines many historical events, must subordinate this position to reasons that we in the Western academy hold as more convincing, based upon our epistemological grammar. In the modern West, Catholic positions in the public space seek to find a voice within a context shaped by secular liberalism, a context informed by the epistemology I discussed in chapter 1. Catholics, in order to persuade within this space, must adopt the grammar operative within secular liberalism, laying to one side, at the risk of forgetting, their own. Here, of course, I’m imagining a Catholic who is schooled in the grammar of Catholic thought.2 But most baptized and Mass going Catholics are far more subject to the grammar of secular liberalism than they are to the weird and alien grammar that grounds Catholic positions. We are shaped in online spaces, by television news, comedy, advertising, polite conversation, within which the grammar of secular liberalism is largely normative. It is perhaps because of this that studies show the children of immigrants to the US quickly abandoning the religion of their parents in favor of the hegemonic paradigms3 that increasingly serve as a solvent of religious faith. The public space, as a space for moral conversations, is thus a space in which Catholics both intentionally and unconsciously surrender a specifically Catholic grammar: intentionally, in order to “persuade” in the public space; unconsciously, as the ambient grammar in the public space, which shapes the self, is one clearly distinct from, and often oppositional to, the Catholic one. Christians have been slow to see public space (as the site for moral conversations) as problematic, not least as they have enjoyed a privileged position within it in the modern West. This privileged position gave Christians advantages in the political sphere4 as well as the social capital commensurate with being trusted and affirmed within the social order. These privileges are not easy to surrender. Perhaps with a view to retaining such status within public space, much Catholic moral theology,5 both liberal and conservative, has sought to promote Catholic perspectives within this space by embracing the public realm as a shared space for conversation and the negotiation of differences.6 This approach has not served Catholic moral theology well. It has coincided with a collapse in Catholics’ understanding of the basic grammar of Catholic moral thought. Further, the attempts have been in vain as they have not succeeded in making Catholic positions persuasive within wider society. Catholics positions, not least in the contested spaces explored in this book, are not simply seen as wrong, they are seen as bigoted and hate filled.

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

119

Because of this, in addition to the two goals of this book—to call into question hegemonic moral understandings and propose a Catholic moral theology renewed by grounding it in its Trinitarian foundations—this chapter has a third goal. This goal is to problematize “public space” as a space for Catholic moral enquiry. The topic of this chapter is the moral theology of dying. We all want “a good death.” How we understand the end of life—dying, is informed by how we understand the “end” or purpose of life. Therefore, this chapter seeks to locate a Catholic theology of dying in relation to the Catholic understanding of the “end” or goal of life. This is in keeping with the constructive aspect of this book. There is also the deconstructive aspect. Catholic moral theology can not be renewed by highlighting its beauty and coherence alone because the hold that culturally hegemonic positions have in the modern West is so strong. In Galatians and Romans, Paul does not simply speak about who Jesus Christ is and how he can save, he also needs to loosen the hold that the Law has on his hearers. One could argue that this pattern, deconstructing before constructing, is central to catholic Christian theology on the whole. Augustine calls into question dominant perspectives, the Fathers respond to heresy in order to express the beauty and coherence of orthodoxy, Aquinas begins each question with arguments to the contrary of his position before proceeding to demonstrate the problems in them, and so on. The approach that we are following in this book is not original. Therefore, before locating a theology of dying within the trinitarian grammar I am using throughout this book, I seek to call into question and problematize the approach to “the end of life” that seems predominant in the modern West. In this chapter, however, this problematization serves a dual function. In addition to loosening the hold it has on us, I aim to show why Catholic attempts to conduct moral reasoning in this space are in error. WHAT IS THE END OF LIFE? Our understanding of what a good death looks like is predicated on our understanding of what human persons are, and what the end, or goal, of life is. But what is the understanding of the human person and the end or goal of life in the twenty-first-century West? Is there one? While many people don’t explicitly ask “what is the goal of life?,” we have assumptions about the goal of end of life that are informed by ideas and images within our ambient culture. These perspectives, alongside the natural sciences, play a key role in shaping how we understand the human person and the nature of life.

120

Chapter 4

Our ambient culture is dominated by advertising. Every time we consume media or open a web page, we are bombarded with advertising. Advertising shows images of what a good life looks like and aims to inculcate mimetic desire in the viewer who, in the attempt to partake in that good life, buys the product that will help them get there. So too Netflix’s viewing numbers shows the massive popularity of nature documentary series such as the BBC’s Planet Earth or Blue Planet. Such aspects of our ambient culture, implicitly and explicitly, express an understanding of what life and its goal is. In both, that goal is broadly Darwinian. We may think of a product in traditional advertising, a car, coffee machine, or phone. The commodities are placed within the context of an attractive life, a life that connotes social power, perhaps wealth, perhaps attractiveness, perhaps high ethical standing, but in every instance a life commensurate with high social capital. Social capital— one’s “standing” or reputation—brings with it an increase in one’s desirability, and therefore it increases one’s opportunity for genetic replication. This, at least, is the lens we are encouraged to view all life through in the spectacularly successful “nature show” genre. Recent forms of this genre, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, are among the most watched shows ever, garnering tens of millions of watchers.7 It’s also the lens offered by the most widely read academics in the world today, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Susan Blackmore, Stephen Pinker, Jordan Peterson,8 and others, who all offer perspectives on what the goal of life is informed by, and predicated on, the natural sciences. These voices explicitly, and the ambient culture implicitly, help shape the “assumptive world” of the twenty-first-century West as a broadly Darwinian assumptive world. The term “assumptive world” was used by sociologist Alfred Schütz,9 to describe the normative expectations that shape people’s experience of the world. In the middle ages, such normative expectations may have involved the reality of the non-material, or the reality of good and evil. These functioned as what Gregory Bateson10 would later see as “first-order frames of reference.” These are the primary, usually unexamined, assumptions that frame human experience. They, in turn, imply “second-order” understandings that proceed from and are usually coherent with these first-order frames. The first-order assumptions that God is real shape second-order assumptions about God’s presence in the world, and so on. In the first half of this chapter, I want to highlight a disconnect between first-order Darwinian assumptions, which are the closest we have to a set of shared assumptions about the goal of life, and our second-order assumptions. I will proceed to illustrate fully what I mean by “Darwininan assumptions,” but in general I mean the idea that we have evolved as organisms through a process in which biological elements that increased our capacity for genetic replication were preserved and often amplified. Therefore, the person we are is a person whose biology

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

121

has hardwired them for genetic replication. This—genetic replication—is the goal, or “end” of life, and this goal informs our thought and actions. But these first-order assumptions lead to second-order corollaries, which, I will show, we try to ignore. Our assumptive world leads to first-order frames of reference, but we must ignore the second-order frames of reference that flow from them if we are to retain the possibility of ethics and reason. I began looking at this process in chapter 1 and will go deeper here for two reasons. First, in keeping with the deconstructive goal of this book, I want to contrast the assumptive world that drives dominant perspectives in our social order with Christian ones, highlighting the relative inadequacy of the former. But second, I want to illustrate the “public space” that this clash between the first-order frames of reference and second-order frames that naturally proceed from them, leads to. This is the public space we inhabit, and it is not one that should shape catholic Christian moral reasoning. Unlike many ambient cultures informed by Platonism, Aristotelianism, or other religious worldviews like Judaism and Islam, the assumptive world of the modern West, I will argue, is not fit for the purpose of shared moral reasoning. The “crisis” in our society, which we all bemoan, wherein tribes (often on the right and left) revile and despise each other, wherein little or no meaningful conversation is possible, and where all descends into a sinister battle for power, is not a curious and lamentable development, it is logically necessitated by the epistemological foundations in the modern West. It is not an anomaly. This is the world we, as the modern West, are. OUR ASSUMPTIVE WORLD In this section I want to illustrate what a “Darwinian” assumptive world looks like. I will then, in the following sections, proceed to show the incoherence between the first- and second-order frames of reference that proceed from this. Genes have no more intentionality than a fridge. But, as we can reverse engineer a fridge and make a good guess such that its “end” is making, or keeping, things cold, so too we can work out what a gene’s “goal” is. Richard Dawkins discusses this strategy in River out of Eden when he looks at “God’s Utility Function.”11 If there was a God, Dawkins holds, when we reverse engineer creatures we should be able to discern God’s goal in creating them. An antelope is a constellation of a variety of genetic orientations which don’t have any “agenda,” they simply are because they have been passed on. The antelope, like all organic life, is “for” the replication of the genes that have comprised it toward this end. Its attributes, such as running fast, or alertness, are the result of genes that lead to these attributes being passed on. Genes

122

Chapter 4

that led to slowness, or being unobservant, led to antelopes who were killed before they could pass these genes on, so they died out. When we look at the antelope, we don’t see genes, but what it is a constellation of genetic material that has made it what it is. So too, from the Darwinian perspective, with human beings. We are not as singular as our consciousness assumes. We are a constellation of genes that exist because they have been able to replicate. One such gene in humans is the gene for Huntington’s disease, a disease usually diagnosed in a person’s 30s or 40s. Life expectancy after diagnosis is 10–20 years from diagnosis, meaning that people who carry this gene will die from it in their 40s to 60s. The gene doesn’t usually “switch on” when the person is younger. If it, did then the person would die in childhood or early teens, and thus die prior to passing it on. Because of this, the gene would die out through lack of replication. Instead, it “waits,” like a foreign body, within the person, until after the age by which we have usually passed on our DNA. But it is not a foreign body. It is as much “us” as any other gene. We are a constellation of such genes. Some of them will lead to attributes that will keep us alive, like speed or cautiousness in the antelope, and some of them might kill us, like the gene for Huntington’s. All exist because they have been capable of replication, and this, not even our survival (as we can see from the gene for Huntington’s) is their goal, or end. While some genes lead to us having blue eyes, running fast, or having sharp teeth, other genes will predispose us to cancer or obesity. We are not “for” cancer or speed, we are a constellation of genes. And these genes, in that they are “for” anything, are for replication. This, for Dawkins, Pinker, Dennett, Blackmore, Attenborough, and most natural scientists, is the “why” we can discern when we reverse engineer creation. It is central to the Darwinian understanding of the end, as in goal, of life. This Darwinian understanding, since the 1950s, has been focused less on organisms than on the genes that comprise them. It has led to the basic understanding of organic life, including humans, as a constellation of genes which have evolved toward the “end” of replication. The organism, whether it’s a wasp, an apple, or Pope Leo IX, is that produced by this evolutionary process. For Daniel Dennett,12 our consciousness is an epiphenomenon—a surface impression of a free, singular, rational self that is simply a creation of biological processes. What we call the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain. This is difficult to show clearly in humans due to the sheer complexity of our brains, but it may be more visible in other animals. Take, for example, the curious behavior of a dominant lion (or lions within a coalition) when he gains access to a pride of females. Often the male lion will seek out and kill the cubs that are not his progeny. This may serve the interest of bringing the lioness into heat, or it may simply assist the progeny of this lion by reducing the competition from cubs of other lions. But both of these “reasons” for

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

123

the lion’s actions, while violent and unsettling, are “intelligent.” Of course, such intelligence is no more intelligent than a smartphone acting in ways established by its programmed software. The lion, we must assume, is not making a highly sophisticated analysis of what engenders fertility in females, nor is he assessing the statistical likelihood of his progeny’s survival. Rather he is acting in accordance with a genetic program that has shaped him with desires. He is acting on desires hardwired in him. His survival, that is, the survival of the genes that comprise him, is in part due to the same predilections being at work in his antecedents. He is acting on the basis of a “program” that is shaping his actions in the word. His desires are the result of a genetic program manifesting as the rational and intelligent act of wiping out the progeny of other lions to advance the opportunities for his descendants. From a Darwinian perspective, desires have their ultimate cause in our genetic program. This program may be filtered through life experience and so the desires will differ from animal to animal, and indeed person to person, but what they are is, at root, the play of biological forces. Desires are the expression of a biological process, and, so too, reason itself. This is easier to see in lions than in humans, and even more visible in smaller animals with smaller brains than with lions. Richard Dawkins uses the example of digger wasps. As colonial animals, digger wasps will check inside their colony when returning with food. They will leave the food at the entrance and go inside, ensuring that “the coast is clear.” Again, this is a rational and even prudent move. But if someone moves the food slightly to the left or right then the digger wasp will return, replace it in the proper place, and check again. The digger wasp will keep doing this until it dies of exhaustion or starvation. As Dawkins writes, “The wasp behaves like a washing machine that has been set back at an early stage in its program and doesn’t ‘know’ that it has already washed those clothes forty times.”13 Reason or prudence, in such animals, is little more than the conditioned reflex of an automaton. Within this Darwinian view of life, the organism, whether lion or wasp, is an extremely complicated “machine.” It is a machine designed for genetic replication. Not, it should be noted, “survival.” Once we assume that the Darwinian view of life is predicated upon survival then we cannot understand the behavior of songbirds who will attract predators when singing, or will sing so loudly for so long that they can die in the effort. Their genetic program, as with the example of Huntington’s disease above, doesn’t not “care” about their survival. They are not for survival, they are for replication, and so the songbird seeks to mate even at the risk of their life (like Romeo and Juliet). Without appeals to “something else,” such as God, the very best we can do in developing an understanding of humans is as an extremely complicated version of other animals such as lions and digger wasps. Without God, we are determined by nothing other than same processes

124

Chapter 4

filtered through the social conditions (cultures) they give rise to. Our desires and even intelligence (like the “rational act” of checking inside a colony or wiping out competitors) within this model, are the effect of genes, whose chances of replication are maximized through such desires and intelligent acts. Genes fuel desires, desires fuel acts. Of course, this fairly deterministic picture is distasteful and thus it is often noted that the human intellect supplies another level for rational analysis, and some suggest this enables us to “master” our biological orientations. And this is true, we may use reason to resist urges to act in “brute” ways. For example, while we are not biologically hardwired for monogamy,14 we can still, in the interests of social order, curtail and shape our desire. But the self who does this curtailing is itself the product of a genetic process. The rationale by which we decide to act or not act is a rationale that has itself been shaped by evolution to enhance our capacity to function within our social order. If the capacity to curb desire in the service of monogamy was genetically disastrous, then monogamy would not be as popular as it is. It is not disastrous and male curbing of sexual desire in the service of monogamy is, in fact, genetically necessary, It is necessary as for millennia access to genetic replication was predicated upon marriage, which required a capacity to govern male sexual desire. A complete inability to do this would mean loss of male access to the marital state and a corresponding reduction in the access of such males to genetic replication. You and I are the products of people who, in the service of genetic replication, have been able to curb their desire for genetic replication. If they couldn’t, they would not have genetically reproduced at all. As such, as I will discuss in the following section, rational subjugation of genetic orientations are no less determined by the genetic orientations themselves. When we assess the risk in acting on urges and curtail them in our own interests, such curtailing is no less a product of a self-shaped by natural selection than the initial urges are. Similarly, while Peter Corning15 and others race to show the biological basis for co-operation, their work is less a cause of hope than it might, at first, seem. Chimps will, it’s true, band together to form groups, but these groups are most often raiding parties that assail and kill other chimp troops. Co-operation, as the human history of violence and war shows, is ethically indistinct from any other act with its roots in our will to replication. Our forbearers who were not able to form communities for mutual benefit, usually tribal, over and against competing packs, were less apt to pass on their DNA. Similarly, within this secular materialist version, the “good” feelings of protection and care in a human mother: such feelings were selected by the evolutionary process. Mothers who had such traits even to a small degree would keep progeny close, protecting them from predators and other risks. Mothers without such traits would not. As such, within the kind of atheistic

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

125

Darwinism that Dawkins, Attenborough, Pinker, Dennett, and countless others offer, mothers love their babies today because the babies of mothers who didn’t never grew up to pass on their DNA. The progeny of such mothers (and fathers) were more apt to die. The progeny of parents more inclined to hunt the positive feelings commensurate with keeping progeny close would be more apt to survive, grow to maturity and, in turn, have their own offspring to protect. This offspring would carry these desires and thus care and compassion was selected. This same care and compassion, of course, leads to desires to protect and advance our offspring, spending vast sums on their education while other children starve to give our bundles of DNA “an advantage.” But, in any case, without anything extrinsic to matter, why would a human mother’s love be any different from that of a turkey hen?16 Or why would a co-operating community be any different from a troop of chimpanzees? They are comprised of the same materials and shaped by the same forces of natural selection. Yes, we can use our brains to note and reflect on these processes and shape our action accordingly, but this reasoning itself proceeds from a biological process that is as much the result of natural selection than the urge it is curtailing. In the second half of this chapter, I will be offering an alternative account to the one we find in this Darwinian assumptive world, but it will be one that incorporates many of the assumptions it holds. The catholic Christian approach does not deny the processes that the Darwinian perspective highlights, it simply sees the human being as being capable of ontological transformation by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, the biological realities that for our assumptive world (and the first-order frames of reference it leads to) do not have the final word. They do not have the final word because real, tangible, ontological transformation is possible. When the Spirit of He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead dwells in our mortal bodies (Rom 8:11) then the hold of selfish genes can be ruptured. Without this, this Darwinian picture leads to intolerable corollaries, which I will proceed to show. These corollaries inform second-order frames of reference, which are inevitable without the ontological transformation offered by God. Our society thus commits to an act of sheer self-contradiction by maintaining this Darwinian lens, rejecting the logic of theological transformation, and yet proceeding as if the rational consequences of the Darwinian logic did not follow. Let me explain. THE TRUTH WE MUST DENY Surprisingly, the idea that we are shaped by biological forces which seek their own maximization long predates the discovery of DNA. For Nietzsche, writing before the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, everything is

126

Chapter 4

comprised of what he calls, “wills to power.” By this he means a plurality of drives that seek to “become more.” These drives are operative within organic bodies. His understanding of will to power is informed by the embryology of Wilhelm Roux, whom Nietzsche focuses on more and more after 1883.17 For Roux, each cell within the embryo competes with others for replication and this struggle determines skin tone, hair color and more, as “red-haired cells” “compete” with, say, blonde-haired cells for food and space. A human is the result of these cellular struggles. “Power” is a nuanced term for Nietzsche and refers to that which the struggle within the cells is toward. Organic entities, even cells for Nietzsche, seek to “become more.” They seek food, space, opposition, replication.18 As the smallest form of life seeks such ends, the larger organic entities they comprise do too. Whether sunflowers yearning for the sun or puppies play fighting in training for future “success,” organisms express genetic programs. As the constellation of such organic material, we humans too, like all other animals seek to become more also. The form this takes in humans is diverse, but it usually involves seeking to increase in status or standing within social orders, to gain popularity or influence. These social orders are not simply large ones, like the secular liberalism of Western states, but are smaller, like the overlapping but largely discrete groupings that comprise school yards. We subconsciously identify with such social groupings and seek affirmation within them. Nietzsche teased out the corollaries of this fundamental ontology with a bravery and freedom lacking in the past century. While “neo-Darwinists” recoil from where such logic might lead, and, in effect, lie, Nietzsche did not. For Nietzsche, our aesthetics and ethics are informed by our desire for acceptance, our need for affirmation and assent within our “tribe.” Our aesthetics and ethics are that which emerge from the relationship between biological nature and social context. Let me use an example. Take two young men in their late teens, Tadion and Myzel. Tadion has tattoos and looks, to Myzel at least, to be physically threatening. Tadion finds this look appealing when he looks in the mirror. He posts pictures of himself and his friends on Facebook copying poses he has seen in pictures of gang members. He posts “memes” on Instagram that express how little he cares, and how threatening he is to those who cross him. He claims in such posts that no logic, apart from getting rich, appeals to him. He finds expensive jewelry attractive. In contrast, Myzel favors a “preppy look.” He finds expensive jewelry garish to him. He supports social causes, environmental and economic justice, and his Facebook profile features pictures of him working for Habitat for Humanity and marching in a pride parade. He is passionate about these causes. For Nietzsche, Tadion and Myzel are both seeking to succeed within their context. In the former context dressing like Myzel would cost Tadion social

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

127

capital, and in the latter context Tadion would be seen as ethically suspect for coveting wealth, and so his social capital would plummet. For Nietzsche, both their aesthetics and their worldview are determined by their need to “succeed” within their context. It is not conscious; what they find appealing when they look in the mirror and the ethical worldview they find rational is what healthy organisms designed to succeed within their social subgroups would find appealing and rational. They are desiring and acting in similar ways even though, from the outside, they may seem like opposites. They are desiring and acting as they are because they are the organic expression of a plurality of organic forces that seek replication. For Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore,19 Tadion and Myzel have evolved to soak up the “memes” from their context. “Memes” in this sense are pieces of information, akin to a virus in that they spread from person to person horizontally. They are not passed on vertically through the generations like genes, they spread across social contexts as “cultural genes” or memes. Instead of being organic, they are conceptual, thus they are thus a metaphor for units that comprise things like perspectives, accents, beliefs, and so on. As Dennett writes in a famous passage, The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is in itself an artefact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for Memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance prolixity and replication: native Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate minds. What Memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages.20

For Susan Blackmore, we have evolved as “meme machines.” This is why my accent as an Irish person is different from my wife’s, as an American, but also why my accent, as an emigrant, is different from my friends and family back home. It has evolved, been softened by my cultural context as I seek to be understood and accepted within my new space. Our perspectives, for Blackmore, are shaped by our context. Children need to gain acceptance from their parents, thus as a child they largely mirror the perspectives of their parents. When, a little older, they need to appeal to a very different peer group and they will soak up other “memes.” Their perspective will change, not least when they go to university. It could be that fourteen-year-olds are simply more intelligent than their parents and that is why they no longer accept their parent’s worldview, and they get more intelligent again when they hit university before having their radicalism tempered as they age. But it seems likely that it may not simply be a movement from ignorance to insight, but, rather,

128

Chapter 4

from one social context to another. So too Tadion and Myzel. Does Myzel’s taste in clothes come from being closer to a “platonic form of beauty” than Tadion’s? Does Tadion like heavy gold chains and use homophobic slurs because he is more intelligent than Myzel? Or is it possible that they both are being shaped by their context to speak, desire, and think different things? Could it be that if you were in Tadion’s context, you would think, desire, and act like Tadion, and in Myzel’s you would think, desire, and act like Myzel? Nietzsche believes so, as do Blackmore and Dennett. If they are right then the things we desire, think, and say stem from context and perspective rather than being “true in themselves.” The evidence from the natural sciences, the closest our society has to a shared understanding of “life,” suggests that Blackmore and Dennett, and, indeed, Nietzsche before them, are right. The desire of Tadion for massive wealth or the desire of Myzel to help the poor and disadvantaged are, for Nietzsche, nothing more than expressions of a will to gain social capital (affirmation, kudos) within their social context. Neither, therefore, are good or evil, they simply are expressions of the desire of an evolved organism to function within their context. And this, from belief in the morality of slavery, to concern for the environment, from racism to social justice, is all any belief, within the logic of secular naturalism, can be. There is no God, for Nietzsche or Dennett, to establish good and evil as ontological realities outside of the human mind. And if they are products of the human mind, they are products that exist by virtue of the context that Myzel or Tadion or you or I find ourselves within. For Nietzsche, aesthetic appreciation is nothing more than an indication of our will to power. If there is no beauty “in itself” what else could it be? For Nietzsche, “Nothing is so conditional, let us say circumscribed as our feeling for the beautiful.”21 In aesthetic judgment, “species cannot do otherwise than affirm itself alone in this manner. Its deepest instincts, that of Self-preservation and self-aggrandizement is still visible in such sublimated forms.”22 For Nietzsche, we crave power, we yearn to be the person affirmed by others, loved by others, wanted by others. Our aesthetic appreciation reflects what we see as worthy of affirmation, respect, and status within our peer group. Thus Tadion appreciates gold chains and posing a physical threat, Myzel appreciates being ethically “sound” and socially conscious. In each case, these things are steps in the ladder of social capital, affirmation, and status. Neither know it, but both, from a solely secular Darwinism, are simply machines for replication working coherently within different environments. They both want power, status, affirmation. She who finds a Ferrari beautiful, and she who sees beauty in a Sonata subconsciously see such things as synonymous with what they yearn to be—admired, respected, and desired within a social context that they have, subconsciously, identified as theirs.

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

129

Why did French aristocrats find alabaster faces attractive at a time when, within an agrarian society, everyone but the aristocrats had tanned skin? Was it that alabaster white faces connoted wealth and power (and thus attractiveness) as such people could never have worked a day in the fields in their life? Perhaps this explains why, after the industrial revolution when the poor move into factories and adopt the pasty white faces that were once the purview of the elites, the same elites come to yearn for the tanned faces of those with the wealth and time to take holidays on the Riviera? The point is that the values we hold, from a naturalist perspective, are themselves the result of our biological nature working within our social context. What we consider beautiful will evolve with that which connotes social capital within our peer group. Thus, while capitalists may advertise their wealth in possessions, university professors will advertise their commitment to diversity, social justice, and intellectual sophistication, often with a hint of self-deprecation thrown in for good measure. Both bow-tied Wall Street banker and fair-trade-cottoned professor are acting just like the other, and indeed, like our digger wasps from earlier on in this chapter. We rage against this perspective and deny it. In countless conversations in university halls, I have heard it dismissed. It is dismissed with three words. The first two are always the same “that’s just.” The third changes, sometimes “behaviorism,” sometimes “positivism,” sometimes “naturalism.” The implication is that there is a thing, “positivism” for example, and that all right-thinking people know this is false. This perspective is “positivism,” therefore it is false. Yet no coherent arguments that refute it are forthcoming. And if these professors are not going to offer a theological analysis, no coherent argument is possible. If we commit to a secular materialism, then this logic, as Nietzsche well knew, is the truth. And yet it is a truth that our secular order veils. It must veil it. If not, what are our public debates about moral issues? If not, we will admit they secular moral claims are just the wailing of tribes from the right or the left, no more capable of convincing the other by “Reason” than Tadion is of seeing himself in preppy clothes in the mirror and thinking “yes, this looks great” before heading out? The closest we have to a shared understanding of life in our Western social orders is a broad Darwinism. And this, without any theological supplement to bolster it, leads to “truths” that deny the possibility of a coherent ethical framework. Central among these truths is the fact that we think and desire the way we do because we are the result of a process in which the genes that have garnered replication through various means get to comprise “us.” This is the closest secular materialism, the rational and political grammar of our public lives, has to a truth, but it is a truth we cannot acknowledge as a truth. And so, we veil it. We pretend that our perspectives are somehow more than perspectives even while we acknowledge that there is nothing more than

130

Chapter 4

perspectives. If we don’t, then so much of our social grammar crumbles. Not just in public debate, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert, late-night talk-show hosts and on and on would be far less funny if we acknowledged that those they ridicule are acting as rationally as Rawls—given the biological, social, and cultural realities that comprise them. But we don’t. We need to assume that they are suffering from an intellectual or moral failing in order to laugh. And our laugh is what binds us to our tribe, the tribe of the enlightened and progressive, the “woke.” We laugh not just because it’s funny, we laugh as a social rite establishing a community of the elect, the non-backward, intelligent, socially conscious, and ethically sound elect. Public entertainment, debate on Twitter, and politics all proceed fueled by enlightenment assumptions, but these assumptions would be eroded were we to follow our assumptive world to its natural conclusions. In the second half of this chapter, I will tease out the understanding of dying that becomes assumptive in our social order. It is one in which aging is seen, largely, as left over life to live, and dying as essentially meaningless. My focus now, however, in the final section of the first half of this chapter, is on showing why catholic Christians are unwise to seek to convince within this incoherent social space. The West has always drawn on the notion of a space for shared reasoning, where that is in Greece or Rome, Washington or Berlin. Shared assumptions make possible such spaces wherein the goal is to shape legislation. This classical notion of citizenship remerges with force in the American and French revolutions. Citizens have a say and a voice in this debate. They contribute to the collective shaping of a social order. And I am not arguing that this approach is one Catholics should shun. The hegemony of secular capitalism, however, has led to political division being increasingly about moral issues, not least the moral issues that we are addressing in this book, issues like abortion, gender and sexuality, euthanasia, not to mention issues like help for the poor and economic refugees. This has immense implications for Christian identity. As we saw in the last chapter, increasingly as Christians have worked to “win” a debate on abortion, they have forgotten a coherently Christian answer to the question “Why is abortion wrong?” As we work to win arguments as citizens, we forget who were are as cells within the body of Christ. The cost of “victory” in the public space, when the public space is marked by the incoherence and self-deception I have illustrated above, is the reification of one’s status as a secular subject and the dissolving as one’s isness as a part of Christ’s body. The struggle to gain control of legislation surrounding euthanasia coincides with an increasing forgetting by Christians of how to die. These two things—the struggle to win debates in a disordered public space, and a forgetting of catholic Christian theological grammar—are interrelated.

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

131

PUBLIC SPACE AND THE CATHOLIC MORAL IMAGINATION The participation of Christians in the struggle to shape public policy on moral issues is understandable and even laudable. Health care professionals do not want to be forced to kill people, and so they struggle for the right not to. It is crucial, however, that we understand what this is and what it is not. It is not a participation in a coherent moral conversation. It is a heroic act seeking to participate in an agonistic struggle to save the jobs of health care workers. And, as in many acts of heroism, what is at risk and frequently damaged are the “heroes” themselves. This damaging of the participants is the cost of admission to the battle of public debate. It is damaging because one must accept the lie of autonomous reason, independent of specific culture, context, and the operation of the Holy Spirit. This acceptance assumes that the human mind, without relationship with God, can move beyond the inherent biological limitations (discussed above) that bind it. It is damaging as it forces the acceptance of this heresy and the attempt to convince others using arguments drawing on shared assumptions that we know do not exist. As virtuous acts shape the self in virtue, vice too shapes the self and these acts shape selves. There is surely a relationship between the use of modern ethical frameworks in the attempt to “win” debates in the public space and the forgetting of the catholic Christian moral frameworks intrinsic to the Catholic imagination. The practice of “fighting” in modern, secular, public spaces shapes participants as modern secular selves. As such, the acts of self-sacrifice perpetuated by participants in this agonistic struggle is analogous to Christian soldiers in premodern warfare. Unlike in modernity, all war in premodernity was understood, by classical Christian tradition, as sinful. This is the case in Augustine, as it is for Aquinas and Luther. War is sinful and those who partake in it are damaged by it, they commit sin and are formed by the vice that accompanies the waging of war. It is because of this that soldiers returning, for example, from the crusades needed to do penance before being admitted to the Eucharist, in some instances one year of penance for every person they killed.23 This need for penance after the crusades followed such ordinances as the Ermenfrid Penitential24 which included penitentials for those who had not actually struck a man, but, nonetheless, had willed to do so. Such men were to do three days’ penance, while those who were “prompted merely by personal gain” in their soldiering were held responsible as for “common homicide.” The Ermenfrid Penitential offers a window into how war was understood. The Bishops of Normandy after the Battle of Hastings were working with a papally sanctioned “just war.” The war was just in that, the logic went, it avoided a great

132

Chapter 4

evil happening. The soldiers were acting heroically, like our culture warriors above. But like our culture warriors above, they were understood to be damaging themselves in service that was heroic because it was self-sacrificing. It was a sacrifice, not of limbs or even lives, but because it was accepting damage to the soul. The battle to shape the laws of a nation state are no less agonistic than war. It involves non-physical violence but, as I have been arguing, it involves the pitting of force against force. The result hoped for is coercion, coercing doctors to poison people to death or coercing people to not end their life in the form they choose under threat of legal punishment. As an agonistic struggle, with the end of coercing the vanquished, it is at best an incoherent and at worst a sinful enterprise. It may be, for those who support the notion of Just War, justifiable. But only within the kind of very refined circumstances the Ermenfrid penitential imagines. The Catholic participant needs to constantly examine their soul, strive to avoid hate, work to avoid self-assertion, guard against pride and pharisaic self-righteousness, and so on. And even then, there is no way around it—it is formative of participants who, in the conducting of this “debate,” practice seeing the nation state as all powerful. Participants pretend that legality governs morality. Participants pretend, in contrast to their faith, that the good can be seen apart from relationship with God. Such a sacrificing of one’s own well-being on behalf of others may be akin to a “just war”—an active brutalising of one’s self in order to protect the vulnerable. This is, at best, what it is. What it is not is the normative form of expressing one’s ecclesial identity. The normative form is tending to the sick, witnessing to how to die, and helping others imagine aging and dying in coherently Christian ways. The normative form is the proclamation of the good news that old age is as dramatic, romantic, and as beautiful a stage of life as any other, if not more. The normative form is seeking to spread this good news and foster relationships between people and God wherein they too can come to age and die in ways that accept the end for which they are. The normative form involves actions coherent with our identity as a cell within the body of Christ rather than the illicitly assumed identity as a citizen bound, by social contract, to an invented,25 unreal,26 nation state. Because of this, while participation in ethical debate in the public space is, perhaps, justifiable, Catholics must never see it as the space for moral conversation. My goal in the first half of this chapter has been loosen the hold the public space has on the Catholic moral imagination. I have tried to do this by showing (1) That moral conversation in the public space cannot be a forum for rational dialog leading to consensus; (2) That it cannot because the closest we come to a shared understanding of life is the Darwinian one and this, if taken to its logical conclusion, undermines any attempt to speak coherently on morality. Therefore (3) rather than focus on agonistic debates within this

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

133

public space, Catholics need, instead, to focus on offering an alternative understanding of aging and dying that can help Christians, and encourage others, to die in ways that realize the end of life. While catholic Christians have been struggling to retain privilege within public space, the understandings and ontological relationships necessary to see life and death in coherently Christian ways have been fading. In the remainder of this chapter, I will take the opposite approach and, eschewing any supposed shared foundations, offer an understanding of dying embedded solely within a catholic Christian understanding of the end of life. I will do so by (a) outlining a Catholic account of the end or goal of life, (b) showing how this end or goal is different from but can incorporate some of the insights of the Darwinian model, and (c) showing how this understanding of life frames how we understand dying and death. THE END OF LIFE WITHIN CATHOLIC THOUGHT My goal in this section is to offer an alternative view of life, one that grounds the Catholic understanding of death and dying. It is an approach that can incorporate the Darwinian grammar engaged above, without ever falling foul of corollaries that are inevitable within a non-theological account of reality. It can do so because the Catholic model is not in opposition to the propulsions inherent in organic life, but neither does it see life as determined by material orientations alone. Through our relationship with the Holy Spirit, our bodies, while comprised of “selfish genes,” can be transformed. This transformation graces nature beyond the limitations and enslavements commensurate with the Darwinian lens unpacked above. Most specifically, I aim to illustrate the catholic understanding of death and dying, which is based on an understanding of life neither opposed to, nor shackled by, the Darwinian reality thus far engaged. I will show (1) What the end of life is for Catholics, (2) How is this end to be achieved and, (3) How dying helps us achieve this end. HAPPINESS AS THE END OF LIFE In the first five questions of the Prima Secundæ Partis, Aquinas offers an understanding of the end of life that informs, and in many cases determines, Catholic approaches ever since.27 In it he offers an account that shows the relationship between contingent28 ends and the ultimate end of life. Happiness, in life and, ultimately, in the beatific vision, links the two. In life, for Aquinas, we naturally seek things that bring us happiness, but in order for things to bring real ontological happiness (as opposed to a simulacrum of happiness)

134

Chapter 4

they must participate in the happiness that is in God. God is Himself true happiness. As he writes, “God is happiness by His Essence: for He is happy not by acquisition or participation of something else, but by His Essence” (ST I:II: Q.3, Art. 1). The happiness we enjoy in life is not this in itself, but a participation in this through the indwelling of this (God the Holy Spirit) in us. The happiness of rest, of love, the happiness in our family and friends, is a participation within time, for Aquinas, in that which is fully participated in only in eternity. Rightly ordered, our temporal, created, contingent, desires are for things that are coherent with this. They are temporal, material, desires for ends that are coherent with the eternal, immaterial, end, for which we are. The created ends in time, the happinesses we can achieve in time is coherent with happiness itself, true happiness, that is, God. As Aquinas writes, In the first sense, then, man’s last end is the uncreated good, namely, God, Who alone by His infinite goodness can perfectly satisfy man’s will. But in the second way, man’s last end is something created, existing in him, and this is nothing else than the attainment or enjoyment of the last end. Now the last end is called happiness. If, therefore, we consider man’s happiness in its cause or object, then it is something uncreated; but if we consider it as to the very essence of happiness, then it is something created. (ST I:II: Q3, Art.1)

Therefore, happiness refers first to God and second to the participation in God by created things. The sun’s energy is present, both in the sun itself, and the energy photosynthesizing plants. Happiness is fully itself in the uncreated God, but is also this same happiness in created things, shaping human action in the way plants produce glucose from the energy of the sun. God’s happiness is unrefined, undiluted, uncreated; our happiness is by virtue of God’s happiness, and is something refined from this happiness. Happiness is an ontological reality, not a perspective. It is real as goodness, as love, that is—it is as real as God. Our desires in time are for ends that, although we may not be aware of it, are foretastes of this ultimate end. In relating the happiness in life with the happiness in the end of all life (God), Aquinas is careful not to conflate them univocally. It for Aquinas, as the heat on a summer’s day compared to the heat of the sun. But it is nonetheless the same heat ontologically. To be sure, there is no “intermingling” such that our nature is part human, part God. God is God, and we are not. But God, the triune life, is operative within our mortal bodies, and happiness, real happiness, is not possible without this real presence God—happiness itself. For Aquinas, we are usually blind to the truth that our desiring love, goodness, peace, joy, etc., is a desire for God, re-presented in things that participate in God. We desire things within time and seek delight (ST I:II: Q.4, Art.1) as an immediate end. In this Aquinas mirrors the Darwinian perspective earlier.

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

135

A puppy delights in things that are in the service of conditioning him as a creature more capable of genetic replication. This “end” is not at the forefront of a pup’s mind when it pulls delightedly on a sock. Similarly, we desire ends such as love or justice, unaware of what we really desire. From the Thomistic perspective, we are desiring God. In both Darwinian and Thomistic lenses, contingent ends can be coherent or incoherent with our ultimate end. For example, Nietzsche has particular disdain for the priestly type who becomes celibate in order to (unconsciously) attain power and status in their community. This gives the priest status and standing, maximizing their opportunity for power (genetic replication in Darwinian terms). But in celibacy the priest effectively castrates themselves, eschewing genetic replication. Following a genetic program, the steps taken by the ascetic (in the service of the program) turns against the program itself. It is a dead end, a false move in which, for Nietzsche, the will-to-power takes up arms against itself. It’s like drinking sea water while dying of thirst. We need water to keep our body healthy. Most often, we drink because we feel thirst. Our delight in quenching our thirst is in the service of a whole host of physiologically important ends. However, these ends are not at the forefront of our minds and such ignorance may lead to us drinking salt water, or contaminated water. So, too, for Thomas, because our vision is obscured by original sin, we yearn for happiness in worldly things, wealth, power, justice, affirmation, social capital, blind to whether they re-present the God who is our end or not. For Aquinas, our desire is ultimately for God but, stumbling blindly, we can mistake power in the world for the omnipotent God. We pursue contingent ends unaware of the underlying program or telos by which we’re orientated. We delight, for Aquinas, in wealth (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.1), honor (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.2), fame (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.3), power (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.4). These can be ends we seek. But the goodness of these ends is contingent upon their participation in the ultimate end. If these contingent ends are not participatory in our ultimate end, and Aquinas shows how all are not, then the pursuit of them is irrational and usually immoral. Let’s say we want to garner vitamin D from having our skin warmed by the light of the sun. Going outside into daylight is rational as it is a contingent end coherent with our ultimate end of gaining vitamin D by being infused by the light of the sun. Were we to remain inside and bask in the light of a lightbulb, while we would be exposing our skin to light and thereby doing something similar to basking in the sun, we would be acting irrationally as this light cannot be a source of vitamin D. We would be mistaking a contingent end, being in the light, for our ultimate end, garnering vitamin D. And if vitamin D was what “the good” is, then we would be lacking infusion by the good through staying indoors. Similarly, wealth, honor, fame, and power cannot be our ultimate end, for Aquinas, and actual

136

Chapter 4

happiness cannot, for Aquinas, be found in them. Wealth, even when coherent and not a vice, is always, for Aquinas, toward another end—shelter, food, and so on, and so wealth cannot be the end of life as it is in the service of other ends (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.1). The end of life cannot be honor, for Aquinas, as honor is an accolade given and not an attribute possessed, as such it is not ontologically real (unlike happiness which ontologically is in God) (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.2). Similarly, fame is an epistemologically suspect phenomenon and is in itself meaningless, thus our delight in it is not a delight in that which is in itself and so fame cannot be an ultimate end (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.3).29 For Aquinas, while happiness is the most perfect good, power is the most imperfect (ST I:II: Q. 2, Art.4). In rejecting power as an end of man, Aquinas holds that power is not an end, but, as potentia, it can be directed toward good, or to evil. In itself, therefore, human power, abstracted from its expression, is nothing in itself.30 While power, for Nietzsche, is self-assertion, while genes, for Dawkins, are always selfish, for Aquinas the power that drives human desire is itself pure latency. It can just as easily find expression in harmony to the end which is God, love, and goodness as it can in self-assertion over the other. This key point distinguishes Aquinas, and his theological account of life, from Nietzsche, or Richard Dawkins, with their nontheological accounts. For Dawkins and Nietzsche, there is nothing other than struggle as nothing is ever at rest. All is a striving to become more, a will to power, to replication. For Aquinas, the selfish gene narrative cannot be hegemonic as God is calling all into peaceful union with Him. Thus, any latent desire can be drawn into God, revealed in the peaceful one, Jesus, in whom we can be through the selfgiving of God the Holy Spirit. The will to power, for Nietzsche, the genetic fuse for Dawkins, is, for Aquinas, nothing in itself, it is awaiting actualization and expression. It yearns for God. Therefore, it can become something other than itself, infused by the Holy Spirit. In contrast, Dawkins claims that our goals can compete with our selfish genes and be morally better than what they “direct” us toward. But if there is nothing other than selfish genes, then every expression is an expression of them. The brain, the mind comprised of them gives thoughts, which is an expression of them. These thoughts can be rational (and therefore competitive) or irrational (and therefore inconsistent with genetic replication). But there can be no good, or evil. No good act, and no evil one. As he writes, “DNA neither cares nor knows, it just is, and we dance to its music”31 as Nietzsche writes, “The world is will-to-power and nothing else besides, and you yourself are will-to-power and nothing else besides” (WP 1067). In contrast, for Aquinas power, potentia is not something in itself (genetic orientation or will-to-power) that finds expression on our thoughts and actions. it is nothing in itself but and our thoughts and actions can, infused by God, be a participation in goodness itself, happiness itself, power itself.

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

137

This does not mean that goodness is its inevitable end. Desire, potent and awaiting expression, is a yearning, without knowing it, for union with God. But it can alight on something that shines a brief resemblance to the God who is love, happiness, and goodness. But for Aquinas, God is good as really as zinc is zinc, and imbibing massive amounts of magnesium does not gain us zinc. So, too, power, wealth, fame and honor, for Aquinas do not achieve the end of life, union with God, and so no amount of them an achieve the end for which we are. Our disordered gaze can alight on them but only because of our disorder. As such, it is simply an error, from the Thomistic perspective, if a person decides that wealth or fame or any end, even replication itself, is the end of life. Such things cannot, for Aquinas, make us happy. They can give us fleeting simulacrums of happiness—pleasure—before leaving us emptier than before as our desire has not been sated. Our desire for such things, for Aquinas, are simply disordered desires. In other animals, excitement can muddle desire more obviously. Cattle can become sexually aroused when a farmer enters a field with food, an overexcited pet dog can mimic mating with the leg of a returning owner. So, too, human desire can lack coherence. It is not always rational nor good. It lurches out for an end, but through a glass darkly. It can look up and see fame or power rather than the glory of God who loves the lowly. But any seeming happiness we derive from power, or wealth, or fame, is not real, for Aquinas. It is not real in a literal sense, in that happiness, for Aquinas, is reality—God. As such happiness has “content” and is not a fleeting affectation. In contrast, power is no thing in itself. It is latent, the potency before an act or the exercise of an act but not, in itself, anything. Thus, we can no more sate our desire with it than we could fill our bellies with a motif. The potency of the drive to find happiness in God explains the potency of drives for other things (wealth, power, fame, affirmation) that are not God and often opposed to Him. They are both the same desire, the same yearning. Disordered desire is immensely powerful because it is desire for God, masked and mutated. We are born with desire; this desire is our Ariadne’s thread32 that helps us find what we were made to find (God). And so, when this desire alights on false idols, it grips us. We know love in the gaze of our beloved, in whom we see the care and compassion that is of God. But our bodies can conflate the happiness of love with the sensations that accompanied the moment in which we came to know it. If this happens, in the absence of our beloved,33 we can spend our life trying to recreate the scenario. Therefore, we can lurch from person to person seeking to mine from them that glimpse of God’s love we had with our beloved. But this is something that the others we seek to mine it from do not possess. We become like the She-Wolf in Dante’s Inferno34 who carries “every craving within her leanness.” She is possessed of a ravenous hunger and yet every time she eats she gets hungrier. Like her, if

138

Chapter 4

we seek happiness, that is God, in things that are not ontologically God, then we cannot be sated by them. Delight is an “accident”35 (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.6)36 of happiness, happiness may be substantially present, or not. And so we easily conflate the substantial happiness we find in the gaze of our beloved with the delight that accompanies it. This delight can be recreated in encounters with other lovers. It abides in the sexual accompaniments of love rather than the happiness that comes in and only in love itself. We crave the love we knew in the gaze of our beloved but stumble around subconsciously seeking the delight that once accompanied it. The love of the beloved is participatory in God, the delight in the sensory pleasure that accompanies it is not. Therefore it can never truly satisfy us. As Aquinas writes, It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; if it did not it wouldn’t be the last end, as something else would remain to be desired . . . Hence it is evident that nothing can lull man’s will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation. Thus God alone can satisfy the will of man. (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.8)

God alone can sate, or as Aquinas more winsomely writes, only God can “lull” (quietare) our appetites. And so sexual delight, in the quest for the love that is God, represented in our beloved, cannot sate us. It is like drinking salt water to quench a raging thirst. HOW IS HAPPINESS, THE END OF LIFE, TO BE REALIZED? The end of life, for Catholics, is union with God. This is happiness itself. This is what we are for. We are one with this happiness fully after death. In life it is tasted partially in ways coherent with this end. But how do we attain this union with God in life? I need, in this section, to address this question prior to concluding this chapter by showing how, in our dying, we can attain it in very distinctive and dramatic ways. As highlighted in the preceding section, in the first five questions of the Prima Secundæ Partis, Aquinas establishes the parameters for the understanding of the moral life that he offers in the remainder of the Prima Secundæ Partis. Questions 1 through 4 establish that the person moves toward God through time, desiring temporal goods that are participatory in the eternal good. In articles 5 and 7 of question 5, Aquinas maintains a balance between the kind of dichotomization of time and eternity we see in modern

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

139

conservativism, and the unsophisticated conflation of time and eternity we see in modern liberalism. He does this by maintaining two things in harmony (1) That we need God’s help in attaining the end for which we are (Art. 5) and (2) that human action is important as attaining the end is an embodied ontological reality (Art. 7). With these two emphases—God’s self-giving and human acceptance of God’s self-giving—Aquinas sketches how we realize the end for which we are. These two emphases are ground in the theological virtues, which speak to God’s ontological self-giving to us, and the cardinal virtues, in which we practice virtues that shape our selves toward natural goods. The theological and cardinal virtues are the ways in which the end of life is accepted, and it is in terms of them that I will discuss the process of dying in the final section. In article 5 of ST I:II: Q.5, Aquinas holds that happiness is attainable “imperfectly” in life through the virtues. His focus here is on the cardinal virtues. By this he means that goodness is achievable “imperfectly” through our natural attributes alone. This goodness is analogous to, but not ontologically one with, God, who alone is good. It is goodness proper to human nature. The cardinal virtues are ground in natural orientations to justice, fortitude, and so on. We can mirror the good through our own activity. For example, Christ is the just one, he is the fortitudinous one. He is the human whom we are called to be. We can become like Christ through the practice of virtues such as justice and fortitude and in so doing we become just and fortitudinous things. Justice is not an abstract principle. It is a reality practiced by just people. It is the expression of natural ends in human nature. We desire justice. Justice makes us happy. When we see a lack of fairness, especially when we are the victims of such unfairness, we feel at least dis-ease, most probably anger. The establishment of justice brings us happiness. We are made this way. We desire this happiness and we have within us the will and intelligence to enable us to practice justice. By just practices we are formed, over time, as just things. A community made up of such just things is a just community. Justice for Aquinas is not a law or abstract principle as it becomes in modernity, it is an embodied reality. We are formed as just things in the way we are formed as muscle bound things by lifting weights. Cardinal virtues are natural ends of the human person as we are hardwired for them. If I give my 15-year-old daughter $20 but my 14- and 9-year-old daughters only $5 each, then my younger daughters will be outraged as their innate sense of justice will have been transgressed. Only when they get another $15 (or move on from the sense of injustice, as they are capable of through the virtue of forbearance) will they know happiness again. It is good that they feel this way and expressing their dismay at injustice is a morally good act. This is natural to them and is something they share with non-human primates.37

140

Chapter 4

Similarly, I was diagnosed with cancer a few years ago. For forty-eight hours, I was in turmoil, racked with worry and fear. And then my body started to cope in a way similar to how a cut starts to heal over. The fear grew duller, practical thoughts became more numerous, the nightmare scenarios didn’t traumatize me like they did during the first forty-eight hours. This was a natural bodily process. It was forbearance, a natural attribute. A cardinal virtue, which can be practiced (and many have to a far greater degree than me). But the point is that it is in us, it is natural to us, we can practice it and be more forbearant, or we can be wholly unschooled in it and therefore be less forbearant, but it is part of us, naturally, like our bodies’ tendency to heal cuts. We have inherent limitations which keep us from the glory that is not ours by right but by grace. Neither my young daughters nor the chimpanzees they share a sense of fairness with, know that, at times, even fairness is transgressed in justice itself. The Gospel is replete with examples of this, Matthew 5:40, Luke 16:19–31, and more. Justice itself, which is in God, is not something we can know by natural attributes alone. For example, is it just that if someone sues us for our shirt, we give them our cloak too? Is it fair that the kingdom of God is a hierarchy in which the last are first, and the first last? Is it fair that the prodigal Son is welcomed by the father while the probity of the elder son gives him no advantage? Is the agonizing death of God on the cross for my sins, fair? Justice, as we know it innately, justice as fairness, is “imperfect.” It is good to be sure, but it cannot know the strangeness commensurate with justice itself as revealed in Jesus Christ. MARK 10:17–31 IS A PARTICULARLY POTENT EXAMPLE OF THIS ‌‌‌‌‌‌‌ As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.’” He said to him, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.” Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Note here that only God is good. God is the ontological referent of the term “good.” Good is not simply a concept or fealty to law, good is God alone. The man has kept every commandment, he has followed every precept of justice,

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

141

every moral maxim. He is far more ethical than I am. Jesus loves him and invites him to relationship with him by giving all to the poor. The man can’t accept the offer, it “shocks”38 him. While the virtues we practice in accordance with our innate logic and capacity are good, they are imperfect relative to the “shocking” goodness that is God’s alone. This goodness can only come from participation in God, accepting union with the Son through the indwelling of goodness itself, God the Holy Spirit. It is an ontological reality rather than an act in harmony with a moral law. This is the primary distinction between theological virtues and cardinal virtues. Cardinal virtues are innate capacities in us. Theological virtues are made possible only through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.39 We need ontological transformation to practice the theological virtues—faith, hope, and caritas. We can practice a form of justice, forbearance, fortitude, and temperance just as we are. To have faith that the crucified carpenter from Nazareth is the second person of the most Holy requires the presence of the Holy Spirit. It is thus an active participation in goodness itself. It is ontological participation in goodness through the self-giving of goodness (God) to us in and as the Holy Spirit. In contrast, the cardinal virtues are good analogously. This is not, of course, to denigrate the cardinal virtues. The danger with any denigration of the cardinal virtues is that such a denigration may encourage a gnostic denigration of matter. In such Gnosticism, matter and human embodied action is considered worthless, with only the conscious acceptance of relationship with Christ granting decency to a depraved creation. Aquinas, of course, does not denigrate the cardinal virtues, common to “the pagans” and Christians. Simply, for Aquinas, the goodness within such temperance, prudence, justice and fortitude is, relative to the goodness of God, imperfect. But, crucially, for Aquinas the establishment of union with this perfect goodness is embodied. There is no dualism in the traditional Catholic perspective. The theological virtues, while flowing form the operation of the Holy Spirit, are, nonetheless embodied, just like cardinal virtues. The self-giving of God the Holy Spirit is accepted in embodied action. The acceptance is itself an action. The rich man in the passage above is not asked “Do you accept me as your personal Lord and Savior?” If he was, the story, I suspect, would have ended differently, with a simple “sure!” Rather, Christ asks the rich young man to accept him in an embodied action, giving all he has to the poor. Such an act accepts union with Christ. It accepts Christ not least as it would re-present Christ, who gives all he has to the poor. It is an acceptance of heat by becoming hot and thereby accepting oneness with heat itself. It is an ontological “yes,” becoming one with the Christ who is caritas. And while the rich man wants relationship with Christ, and would probably acknowledge Jesus as his lord and savior in a heartbeat, he will not ontologically accept union with Christ who is caritas itself. He will not act in ontological acceptance and embodiment of

142

Chapter 4

Christ. This is crucial as he clearly “believes” in Christ, he is a just and good man, but will not, in his embodied action, re-present and thereby participate in Christ. So too Jesus asks Peter three times “Do you love me?” (John 21:17) and each time Peter answers, Jesus gives him a “work”—“feed my lambs,” “tend my sheep,” “feed my sheep.” Peter’s word needs to become embodied as Christoformity is an embodied reality as much as a thought or feeling. Christ asks him to become like him, just as he asked the rich man. The difference between the rich man, who was ethically sound, and Peter who had already failed Christ when the cock crowed, is that Peter is willing to act in acceptance of the union with Christ that he craves. These two emphases, then, frame how the end of life is understood by Aquinas in articles 5 and 7 of question 5 in the Prima Secundæ Partis. They are God’s self-giving, which is the source of the theological virtues, faith, hope, and love, and our embodied action, which accepts this self-giving. I will now suggest how these two emphases frame aging and dying as moments that are among the most beautiful, romantic, and dramatic stages of life. In aging and dying, we have unique opportunities to achieve the end of human life, by practicing cardinal virtues and accepting union with God in the theological virtues. DYING AND/AS THE END OF LIFE The 2009 Disney Pixar movie Up received near universal acclaim40 and two Academy Awards. At the forefront of the praise was its favorable depiction of aging, something almost unique in popular culture. In Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films,41 Keith Booker described the montage that tells the tale of their relationship as a “masterpiece of its own kind.” The montage begins with dramatic music and celebration as the couple marry and try for children, but quietens as they age and grows faint and sombre as illness sets in. Despite a conscious attempt to offer something distinct from the cultural denigration of aging, it nonetheless sees life on a bell curve, with aging being a sad and sombre decline. Even when doing the best we can to look favorably on age, we still see it as a decline, an etiolation of life. Our tendency to see life on a bell curve, moving up from childhood to adulthood, but starting a decline as we age, is based in many of ideologies dominant in the modern West. From the Darwinian perspective, the elderly have passed their “best before” date in terms of fertility. They are no longer key “players” in the game of genetic replication. To be sure, they can assist by helping raise bundles of DNA, but this is a lesser role. So, too, our capitalist culture focuses on generating desire for commodities in those with

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

143

disposable income. Pensioners are a less significant market for many products, and so do not feature in advertising. TV shows reflect, in many cases, advertisers’ agendas and so are themselves designed to appeal to a market to which advertising sell. Therefore, they primarily feature people within the advertisers demographic, people “purchasing a life,” rather than older people. The capitalist logic, like the Darwinian one, sees aging as decline from what the human person, at their best, ought be. It veils aging from our sight, or at least our TV screens, and encourages us to think of it with regret and sadness. This perspective is fueled in part by our cult of “health,” which incorporates notions of bodily beauty and physical fitness in establishing the youthful body as the proper form of the human. Because of this, the aging body must be seen as ugly, or at best “beautiful” in a virtue signaling “ethically sound” way. Perhaps most potently, the notion of “progress,” which possibly the core motif of the post-enlightenment West, sees us as having moved away from the racism, sexism, and homophobia of the past. As younger people are assumed to be more progressive, more inclusive, more tolerant, older people are assumed to be more stained by a past marked by racism and intolerance. According to William Von Hippel, the intolerance of the elderly is not simply due to growing up in less tolerant times but is, in fact, a neurological impairment, as he claims, We know older adults grew up in more prejudiced times, so many people have just assumed that they didn’t change with the times. But our results suggest that many older people want to change, they want to be more tolerant, but they have lost a cognitive ability that would help them be more tolerant.42

The elderly are not just more bigoted and intolerant, that is, in the modern West, more wicked and evil, they are necessarily so because, “our results suggest” their brains won’t allow them to move with the times and become more tolerant! This “research” reflects a more widespread ageism, which holds that the intolerant past still lives and walks among us in the form of the elderly, lingering on in our brave new world like so many confederate flags. For all these reasons, the elderly are, at best, pitied, and at worst reviled, but in all cases hidden from view in our twenty-first-century secular capitalist context. The Catholic understanding of life laid out thus far, and indeed, in this book as a whole, leaves no room for such an understanding. In fact, understandings that see “life” as focused on getting married, buying a house, getting a job, having children, and so on, are understandings, from the Catholic perspective, that have conflated contingent ends with the ultimate end of life. Things like marriage and children are good, of course. But they are good relative to the end of life, a good they facilitate. When we see them as ends in themselves we fall into the trap of seeing life after these ends as “leftover life” in which

144

Chapter 4

the goal and purpose of life has either been achieved or, if not, in which the possibility of achieving it is ebbing away. As I have illustrated thus far, from the Catholic point of view, the goal of life is union with God. This union is accepted in embodied acts in which Christ is re-presented. Because of this, at the very least, aging, illness, and dying represent contexts as significant as any in life, and, quite probably, they represent the most significant contexts in life. Hence, from the Catholic perspective there is no bell curve, and if there was it would see dying, for reasons I will go on to illustrate, as the apex. I will illustrate this briefly under four headings offering concepts toward a Catholic understanding of dying, an understanding that cannot but see choosing to die prior to “natural death” as anything other than immoral. The headings are (i) The dying person is unified with Christ, (ii) The dying person gifts us their vulnerability, (iii) The dying person practices the virtues, (iv) The dying are revolutionaries against the tyranny of the banal. This is not, of course, an essay in bio-ethics and my focus is not on identifying what measures contradict “natural death” and what do not. This chapter is not, as the first half should have made clear, in the service of legislation. It is, instead, in the service of renewing a Catholic moral theology which can help us imagine dying and natural death in better ways. By “natural death,” I mean a death in which death is not hastened as an end or goal. It should be noted that maintaining the functioning of organs can represent a conflation of a contingent end (the beating of a heart) with the ultimate end of life. The Catholic approach is not, of course, to maintain organic functioning as an end in itself. This is one “pillar”43 of the Catholic approach in terms of bioethics. The other pillar, of course, is that no attempt should be made to cause death in the person as an end.44 Medical intervention that can lead to death can be made if its goal is clearly not to cause death. For example, a ninety-year-old person could be given medication that would cause death through kidney failure thirty years hence in order to maintain cardiac function now. The goal in such an instance would be the maintaining of cardiac function, not the killing of the person through the destruction of their kidneys. Again, however, such issues risk portraying the issue as one which can be legislated, thereby removing the moral imagination and moral responsibility from the ill, their medical team, and their friends and family. This ought not be the case. We are moral agents; each moment represents a space for acceptance or rejection of God’s self-giving. The goal is not to remove us from such moments by legislation but to furnish the theological imagination and the conscience with insights that can help us in doing, re-presenting, and participating in the good during the end of life.

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

145

THE DYING PERSON IS UNIFIED WITH CHRIST Union with Christ, as we have seen, is established as an ontological reality. It is not a nominal union, an agreement or even a covenant. It is an ontological union wherein the person comes to accept union with the self-giving God, as Christ, through the Holy Spirit. The source of this union is the cross. On the Cross we see not an accident of history, but God’s self-giving to us. We see a God who gives Himself to us in an act of self-surrender. It is an erotic act of love. God gives without remainder. His arms are open to embrace us. Also and at once there is the consummation of the relationship between humanity and God. This relationship is consummated as the human Jesus gives Himself fully and without remainder to God. His arms are open accepting the Father’s embrace. The cross, in all its grotesque beauty, represents this dual self-giving, of God to us, in Christ, and of us to God, in Christ, who is both the God who gives Himself to humanity and the human who gives humanity to God. This utter centrality of the cross to the Christian theological imagination brings with it a risk. We must never conflate the contingent end of suffering with the ultimate end of union with God. This would see a fetishizing or totemization of suffering. As above, when we distinguished the substantial love in the beloved with the delights that accompany this love, we should never fail to see the substantial love of Christ by fixating instead on the instrumental suffering on the cross. On the cross, we see a moment of category shattering beauty and horror, love and violence, of Eros and death, and we can mistakenly see the pain in the passion of Christ, abstracted from God’s self-giving to us, as a kind of alchemy that saves. There is no intrinsic alchemy in suffering. In itself, the suffering of Jesus no more brings about salvation that any other pain or any other broken body does. It is not suffering itself, but suffering for, which saves us. Christ dies for us, to give us God’s love, to give God humanity, to give himself totally and without remainder, in the face of horror, His love. The cross reveals that God’s self-giving to us is such that there is no space, none, in which the saving peace and love of God cannot be found. By filling the most gruesome aspect of the world with His love, he colonizes all creation with His presence. No space, no matter how lonely, or wounded, no matter how painful or sorrowful is separate from the God who gives Himself to us in the crucifixion. The suffering we see on the cross shows that there is no space that God cannot reach. The cross represents the nadir of suffering. Jesus is tortured, brutalized, and killed. Crucifixion, as a form of state terror, does not just torture and kill, it aims at utter humiliation and so sexual abuse was frequently involved.45 It aimed to humiliate and destroy all hope as a pure expression

146

Chapter 4

of power. As well as the Son, the Father endures what to any human parent would be the most imaginable agony, looking on as His child is brutalized and killed as His son asks, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46, Mark 15:34). And yet God is present in this space. In this space, a space designed to refuse all hope and establish the hegemony of material power and violence, we see Hope itself. We see the triumph of God in the face of the nihil. This truth is made clear in countless hospital beds on which people die. In this light, Euthanasia is morally wrong, not least because it refuses the truth that there is no hopeless or loveless space. MAID surrenders the space of dying to nothingness and recoils in fear from it. It holds that rather than our pain providing a space to re-present and participate in God, the pain we fear is beyond God’s love. MAID thus refuses to believe what the cross shows—that nowhere is beyond God’s self-giving love. We fail all the time as parts of a Church established in Peter, who himself fails spectacularly. To choose to die rather than give oneself to God and receive God’s self-giving to us in this suffering of dying is a failure of cardinal virtues such as fortitude and forbearance, but worse, it is a failure of theological virtues such as faith and hope. It surrenders space to despair. Faith and Hope are the gifts of the Holy Spirit and hence this despair is nothing less than a sin against the Holy Spirit, it is a refusal of Her self-giving, a refusal of oneness with God. This oneness with God is attained by us in our dying by mirroring Christ in His. This mirroring involves dying with faith, lament, and hope, it involves dying while in intimate relationship with the Father. We know that we will die. We know that “life” as a beating heart, living and existing in the world, is a passing thing. This knowledge should enable us to look to God and see who He is, and who we are, quite clearly. While we know intellectually that life is a passing thing, when we are dying it is something we can come to know intimately with our whole body. We can come to know the dying Jesus, the suffering Jesus, as we too in our bodies suffer and die. As such, through dying, we can come to know ontologically what we now know intellectually. This knowing, as we have explored in chapter 2, is a relational knowing, in which we come to re-present and thereby participate in Christ. Thus, in our dying we can come to know, re-present and participate in Christ in a way that is impossible in every moment of life that leads up to that moment. Because of this, dying itself is a space in which we receive hope and faith, that is, we receive the Holy Spirit. This reception, as with all receptions of the Holy Spirit, conform us to Christ, the hopeful and faithful one. This conformation to Christ enables us to know the Father, as if from the inside out, as the Son and the Father are one. This is the erotic Everest of life and is what a good death, from the Catholic perspective, looks like. “Good” here is not a descriptive term in the sense that we have a concept “good,” and designate a

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

147

death good by virtue of its approximation to that concept. We do this all the time. Many will call a death through MAID, drugged and placid, a “good” death because we, in our ignorance, conflate goodness with sentiment. But good, as we know, is what it is, it is a real thing. It is God’s presence and is either there or not. While all hope for a peaceful and painless death, a painful death, when God is one with the person and known by the person in their dying, would be a good death. Similarly, a painfree death, absent from the God who alone is good, would, literally, not be a good death. Again, this is not to totemize suffering. The hope is that we die peacefully, without pain and with God. But the fact remains that such elements veil rather than reveal the goodness that is either present in our dying or is not. Because of this truth, dying represents the consummation of life. It is not the bleak “opposite of life” that should be sequestered from our view so that we can carry on consuming and spending as if the now was eternal. It is the culmination of life, the most dramatic and significant part of life. It is a consummation that is refused in choosing to die at the hands of a doctor or agency. Such an act is, in effect, a refusing to die. Choosing to have one’s life ended accepts death, but it does not accept dying. It refuses dying. Thereby it represents one last attempt by the modern person to subjugate death by dying “on our terms.” It represents an utterly Adamic act46 as, having lost faith in God’s Lordship over death, we seek to establish our own personal lordship over dying. As dying represents a space to become one with Christ, “physician assisted dying” represents a refusal of this oneness. The dying establish oneness with Christ in their re-presentation of the faith, hope, lament, and love present during the dying of Jesus. They know Christ from the inside out by knowing the fear He felt, the pain He suffered, the hope He had, in their dying. They know, in knowing this, what it would be to go through this voluntarily, in sheer love of them. Thus, they know Christ’s love, intimately, in their dying. This does not even require them to be fully conscious, they know it in their cells and in the half-conscious moments as they journey with Christ along the Via Dolorosa. This knowledge of Christ is oneness with him in that it comes solely from union with the suffering Christ. Such oneness is rejected by a decision to be dead, which is also and at once a refusal of dying. Dying as a part of life, as a key stage in our journey to God, is refused in choosing to be dead at the hands of a doctor, rather than dying in the hands of Christ. MAID is a refusal of the gift of life itself, as dying is not simply a part of life but is intrinsic to life. In this light, “physician assisted dying” rejects Genesis 1:31, when God’s looking on creation and sees that “it is very good” (Gen 1:31). It rejects this and says “no” to it. As such, it is a refusal of God’s creation, and a final attempt by a truly modern subject to establish mastery over it.

148

Chapter 4

THE DYING PERSON GIFTS US THEIR VULNERABILITY My mother in law, whom I love and admire, does not want to become a burden on her family. In this, I would suggest that this otherwise intelligent and perceptive woman has had her moral imagination shaped by modern categories of individuality and personal autonomy in ways at odds with a properly Christian understanding of how to age and die. For Christians, we are for union with God. This, not wealth, nor comfort, nor any other contingent end, is the ultimate end of life. Only in this can we have happiness. We attain this end through our re-presenting Christ. Happiness is inherent in God. Christ is one with the Father and so in Christ we come to partake in the happiness that is in God alone. Christ is the compassionate one and so we come to participate in Christ through embodying compassion, which has its source in Christ and abides in us through the Holy Spirit. Not wanting to be a burden is, in one sense, not wanting to offer others an opportunity to practice compassion. It is denying others an opportunity to love the vulnerable and needy, to care for those they love, and to tend to them. The telos of life for Christians is union with God, but frequently our goal is a construct that owes more to our secular culture. We imagine a particular physical appearance, a particular career, a particular attribute, as representing that which we want to be. Frequently, our imagined telos turns parasitic on our now, as our body is condemned in contrast to that which we want to be. It causes us guilt and self-loathing as we fall so far short of that we aspire to be. But this forgets that we, in our clumsy corporeality, are people possessing all the dignity a creature can ever possess. We are who we are and are loved by God. This love, a self-gift of God to us as love (the Holy Spirit), is the basis for our dignity. It is not something established by virtue of us possessing attributes deemed worthy in our social order. God loves us in our vulnerability. Therefore, my mother in law, no matter how ill and old, will be someone of true dignity and beauty, loved by God who is present in her. The aged, stooped, Parkinson’s ravaged, John Paul II was as loved by God as much as he was as a handsome young man overflowing with gifts. In being publicly who he was as this stooped, Parkinson’s-ravaged figure, John Paul II showed us a human being with the fullness of dignity. To some, he might have seemed decrepit as his mental and physical attributes withered away, but he knew that he was never more human than he was at that point, a creature loved wholly by God as he was. He witnessed to us what it was to be human and in so doing offered a gesture of resistance to a capitalist logic that refuses the dignity of bodies like his. Dying was, in many ways, the most effective strike John Paul ever made against “the culture of death.” He showed what

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

149

life was by being vulnerable, withering in the eyes of the world but billowing inside with the presence of God. He showed us how to die. He proudly embodied feebleness and in so doing showed us all who we are, as corporeal creatures loved by God. To be a vulnerable body of failing flesh is to have the utmost dignity as dignity is not determined by the logic of Darwinism but by God’s love for the person. Further, this vulnerability makes possible a gift to loved ones of our need for care. It is a difficult gift to give. Modernity is the era of human subordination of the natural. It is the establishment of the rational autonomous subject as sovereign. Because of this we resist being cared for, we resist needing the compassion of another as a condition for living. And yet the end (goal) of people’s lives is established through being able to care and show such compassion. As such to be vulnerable, to give the needs of our sustenance, our hygiene, and so on to another, is an act of utter charity. Were she to gift us her aging and dying and precisely become “a burden” to us, my mother in law would be giving us an opportunity to practices the virtues and know Christ in and through her. Parents want to give their children gifts. They wish to be able to help with cars, houses, education. But so strange is our culture that the elderly often resist giving us their vulnerability as the most important gift. Their vulnerability can enable us to practice care and compassion and, knowing Christ in it, achieve salvation. Relative to this gift, no other gifts matter. But as my mother in law’s commitment to “not be a burden” shows, it is a difficult gift to give. It would be to embrace a seeming humiliation, that mirrors the humiliation assumed by God on the cross. It would mirror Christ who, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,  but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant” (Phil 2:5–6). He humbled himself so that others may have life. The elderly can, in a revolutionary act, do likewise and give their loved ones the gift of their vulnerability. Or, they could refuse this, refuse to fall too far below the form of human being honored by our social order, and end their life prior to entering this stage, marked by the thrilling romance of relationship with God. The latter is not just a refusal of our union with God, it is a refusal to facilitate the union with God of our loved ones. As such it is an immoral act. It is an immoral act that impedes our loved ones attaining the end of life. Their love of us, in our vulnerability and suffering, with all the messiness that accompanies it, is not simple. It is a love possible through their participation in God’s love of us. It is a love made possible by their “yes” to the Holy Spirit in their care for, and compassion toward, us. As such the vulnerability of the dying gives loved ones the opportunity to partake in the triune life in a dynamic and beautiful way. While parents give gifts to their children all through life, no gift can be as beautiful or significant as this one. Euthanasia robs them of this gift.

150

Chapter 4

THE DYING PERSON PRACTICES THE VIRTUES In Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death,47 Phillip Mellor and Chris Shilling offer an overview of the bracketing of dying in modernity. They illustrate the ways in which, within modernity, dying is effectively removed from our view. Modernity brings with it a faith in technology to control the organic and with it a cessation of suffering.48 It seeks to achieve this through technological control of the material. And modernity has had some success in bringing the organic to heel. Death, however, resists this, and denies the capacity of technology to control the organic and cease suffering. Because of this, it stands as a testimony to nature’s refusal to be tamed by instrumentalist reason and therefore must be hidden from view or veiled. For Catherine Pickstock, our attempts to abolish control in modernity are resisted by death, which refuses to submit to our technological attempts to subdue the organic. Hence, modernity, for Pickstock is marked by necrophobia that, in our neurotic expression of it, leads us striving to make all life “plastic,” inert, controllable. Famously, Max Weber saw Protestantism as marked by a desire to establish oneself through the acquisition of capital and commodities. Uncertain of God’s favor, if we can acquire things, we can suspect that we may be elect. Thus, capitalism is fueled by a neurosis, wherein, disconnected from the eternal, we put down material things here and now in a pathetic striving for solidity. This process is echoed, for Pickstock by what a process through which modernity’s necrophobia finds expression as an effective necrophilia.49 We recoil from the reality of death by seeking to make things sanitized, inert, and manageable. We resist the organic, we resist life, which is marked by uncontrollable forces and death. In so doing, however, we strive to make the organic inert, we strive to make life “dead”—manageable, controllable, wholly material. This is, for Pickstock, Mellor, Shilling, and more,50 a hallmark of our modern incapacity to engage death. It is a modern incapacity at odds with premodern approaches, which can be glimpsed in Ars Moriendi51 traditions and texts, which outline models for dying well. It is easy to understand why such engagement is increasingly difficult within late modernity. Within premodern Christianity there is a clear understanding of the end or goal of life. This clear understanding makes possible an understanding of actions that are coherent with this end as rational and good. Within the secular, such notions of the good are less explicit. Therefore, a good death is increasingly seen as an easy death, a death that is quick or painless. It is because of this that “physician assisted dying” represents the closest the secular can come to account of a good death. In a context in which our panicked necrophobia is expressed as necrophilia, it is fitting that we imagine a good death as one in which we are actively killed.

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

151

In contrast, the premodern approach we explored in the last section sees dying as a part of life. Life is a space in which virtues are practiced, shaping us as virtuous things. Dying, as a core part of this life, is also understood as a space for practicing the virtues. The Ars Moriendi texts detail the virtues we practice in dying. The texts bind virtues and vices, the practice of the former enabling us to avoid falling foul of the latter. Some of these virtues and vices sound curious to the modern reader. For example, greed in clinging to life too rabidly can be avoided only if we practice the virtue of temperance in letting go. Similarly, the Ars notes the vice of pride, which the dying may feel in terms of how well they are practicing the virtues in dying. Thus, we need to die while practicing the virtue of humility. Perhaps most curious to modern ears is how challenging the demands on the dying are. Secular modernity tends to divorce dying, and even old age, from real life. It gives it, as in the movie Up, the soft somber tones rather than the lively dynamic beat of “real” adulthood. The Ars tradition never sees the old and dying in this morose light. On the contrary, the drama of aging and dying gives added animation to the moral vibrancy of the stage. The “big stage” is not marriage, or children, or career, as it is for us. The big stage for the Christian premodern mind is dying. In dying, the veil between us and the end for which we are becomes cobweb thin. Questions such as, “Has our preparation made us capable of dying well? Can we die in a way as to help attain the union with God for which we are?” Are at the fore. Because of this, more than ever, the dying must practice virtues and accept their embodiment of justice, temperance, fortitude, and forbearance. The dying are, hopefully, surrounded by others. They are, in dying with fortitude and forbearance, showing these others, young and old, how to die. In doing so, they do not simply practice fortitude and attain this virtue, they help others, who will die, have fortitude too. In this their fortitude is charitable. Amplified by the enormity of the moral moment, the cardinal virtue of fortitude becomes infused with the theological virtue of caritas. In love of others, family, health care workers, loved ones, the dying show that death is a part of life and a pathway to eternity. In so doing they preach with their frail bodies, and inspire others to the heights they are attaining in their fortitude. Such inspiration is an evangelical witness to nurses, doctors, and family members. To be sure, this seems like a lot to place on the shoulders or the dying, but there is no compartmentalization of life in the Christian approach, the infirm are not hidden from view—a grim reminder of the triumph of despair. They are front and center in the romance of life, and in their dying they become that for which they are made. In doing so they inspire others to a dying less ordinary. While technology’s triumph over the organic is exposed as a lie by the truth of death, the brave, charitable death of the Christian testifies to the truth that death is not the enemy. It testifies that dying is a passage to more. This

152

Chapter 4

refigures life, not as a plastic, necrophiliac space of capitalism, but instead, as an organic process in relation to happiness (God) one the way toward eternal happiness (God). The Ars Moriendi remind the reader that we practice cardinal virtues in dying because dying is not a sequestered space, sealed off from life, but is a core aspect of life. If life is for union with God, we are rarely more alive then when we are dying. Death is not, for Christians, the nihil, that which, as Hopkins wrote, “blots black out.” It is not the end of life rendering all the hope and faith of life in vain. It is the passage from life to life, it is continuous with life, not its negation. The Holy Spirit, as hope and faith, rests on us in dying, a resting that must, for the Ars Moriendi texts, be accepted. If hope and faith are not accepted, feelings of despair and abandonment by God will characterize our dying. Again, it should be noted, that the morally good acts of accepting faith and hope in our dying are not acts that win for us the favor of a distant God. God’s favor is constant. Rather they are acts that accept union with this God in the Holy Spirit. As such, in our dying we realize in a very distinct way the end or goal of life. We attain union with God the Holy Spirit in dying, as we attain union with God the Father in death. As practicing the cardinal virtues in dying allows us to reach the full flourishing of human personhood, practicing the theological virtues prefigures the supernatural union which our dying is a pathway to. THE DYING ARE REVOLUTIONARIES AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF THE BANAL Christian death, in so much as it re-presents the death of Jesus Christ, is a revolutionary act. Jesus’ death is a revolutionary act against hegemonic temporal power and death itself, as the other of life. Death’s dominion is refused in Christ’s death, a single death that changes the nature of all death forever. Death is seemingly hegemonic. We all die. Death represents the end of all and thus, seemingly, the end of hope, love and joy. Death looms over all living things as a total and utter power. It, seemingly, brooks no resistance. And yet Jesus is the firstborn of a new creation. Death cannot hold him. The resurrection is nothing less than a overthrow of what seems to be the most hegemonic of all powers. In it, the one absolute truth, as understood through measurability and demonstrability, is refused. With it the tyranny of death is overthrown. Jesus’ death is also a refusal of hegemonic temporal power. Jesus is not put to death for his threat to the power of death, he is put to death as a threat to the power of empire. The two revolutionary significations are interwoven. The power empire holds is itself predicated upon the totality of death. We are

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

153

held by empire because of fear. We fear death, first, and because we fear death we cling to things, our homes, our wealth, our goods that offer a foothold in time. And because we cling to such things, we will acquiesce with hegemonic power in order to retain them. Jesus represents a brazen rejection of this. Christ subordinates every power to the power of God, thus loosening the grip such power has on us. Luke 12 expresses the revolutionary significance of this. Jesus invokes his followers to resist power by letting go (Luke 12:22ff). This letting go is made possible through the fear of God, “I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him!” (Luke 12:4–6). Here, Jesus offers a refrain “fear the Lord” that we hear time and again in the Old Testament. This fear of the Lord is not so much the enslavement of the heart and mind to God but the liberation of the heart and mind from all temporal powers. Jesus is subordinating temporal power, even the power of the Roman empire, to the power of God. Once we acknowledge the sovereignty of God as sole, the hold temporal power has on us dissolves. Jesus’ exhortations to his followers to be strong in the face of persecution proceeds from the truth that God is Lord, and this truth alone liberates us to resist oppression in the now. The only thing worthy of fear is the God whose love for us is so total that he would die for us. Thus, we are liberated through a “fear” that establishes that we have nothing to fear. Losing our possessions and even our life is not determinative because God is, and because of this death, literally, has no dominion. One of the pathologies of modern Christianity stems from Marx convincing us that an emphasis on heaven detracts from the here and now. For Marx, as for Feuerbach before him, an emphasis on God and heaven meant that we would endure all forms of oppression in the here and now in favor of a “sugar candy mountain” to come. If Marx were right, then opposition to the most oppressive powers in his time would come from those with the least faith in God. But the opposite is true. Take, for example, the revolutionary resistance to slavery offered by people like Nat Turner and John Brown. In Turner and Brown, we see that heroic all-risking resistance to slavery came from those most focused on heaven and the Lordship of God. Turner, a slave, was possessed of a radical faith and, inspired by Christ, led a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. This revolution was on the basis of the witness of Jesus Christ and the fact that death, which Turner knew was his fate, was not the end. Sure of heaven, the radical preacher Turner led a revolt of his fellow slaves against the evil of the Antebellum. His faith in God gave him the courage to fight against injustice. Similarly, the Civil War was sparked not least by John Brown, who, like Turner, was fueled by faith alone to rise up. Brown’s logic is clear in his speech from the courtroom after sentence was passed. In it, he

154

Chapter 4

says that he is willing to “forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice” in faithfulness to God. Citing Hebrews 13:3, he claimed to be simply following God’s word in being bound to “them that are in bonds.” Turner and Brown were two of the most radical revolutionaries of Marx’s time. They acted for justice in the face of almost certain death. Marx somehow managed to claim, in the face of such evidence, that faith in the heaven was an “opiate” that encouraged people to meekly submit to injustice. All the while, whether in the Antebellum South or colonies like Catholic Ireland or Islamic North Africa, religious revolutionaries were becoming martyrs in a faith-fueled fight against tyranny. In their actions, moderns like Turner and Brown echoed the world altering actions of early Christians. To understand the sharing of possessions, or courage in the face of persecution, intrinsic to early Christianity, is to understand the power of freedom from the tyranny of death. The resurrection loosens the pathological hold of time on early Christian bodies. In orthodox Christianity,52 this does not lead to an indifference to people in need in the here and now. Rather it frees early Christians from the stranglehold of fear that impedes genuine radicality. Rodney Stark’s The Rise of Christianity53 offers sociological examples of this theological principle. In it, Stark, an agnostic, seeks to give sociological reasons for Christianity’s rise. One of these reasons centers on the epidemics that killed up to a third of Rome’s population in 165, and a further third in 251. Both times, Christians stayed in Rome caring for the sick and dying in their community. Because of this, Christians survived the plague in greater numbers than those in other communities. Thus, the percentage of the Roman population that was made up of Christians increased with each plague. Moreover, Christians, through surviving in greater numbers, developed antibodies that increased their life expectancy. Like other sociological factors (such as increased participation by women, rejection of the practice of infanticide, and so on), this behavior during epidemics led to the very rapid growth of Christianity. But the sociological evidence doesn’t speak to the theological principles that underpinned them. To find the theological basis for such concrete practical action is to look to the resurrection, which led to a dramatic shift in how death was understood. Death’s dominion was overcome, and this led to a courage in the face of death. Only such courage explains the refusal to submit to persecution by Rome. While the numbers of Christian martyrs may not have been as huge as many assume,54 no one doubts the fact that huge numbers of Christians went to a brutal death rather than submit to empire. Faith in the resurrection fueled such acts, as well as such acts as staying in urban areas during an epidemic, tending to the sick and dying. It is a courage that in tragic (we might think of the Münster rebellion of 1525) and inspirational (we might think of Nat

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

155

Turner’s rebellion in 1831) ways continued through Christian history. Marx, quite simply, was wrong. While such heroic acts may seem uncommon, every Christian is challenged to refuse the tyranny of death. It is a refusal that sees radical action in the world and radical action in dying as coupled. We die refusing to see death as the end. We die witnessing to the joy that comes in the resurrection. This joyful death is a revolutionary activity that all Christians are called to. We help liberate those we leave behind only in so much as we can die with this hope and freedom. This liberation is a liberation from the tyranny of the banal, through which unjust systems ensnare us in the exigencies of life. It is a proclamation to those we leave behind that dying in Christ is a refusal of the tyranny of death. And if death has no dominion, then the petty tyrannies of unjust systems can have no dominion either. They hold us because we are afraid to lose our foothold in time, our possessions, our wealth, and our social status. And so we acquiesce. But if only God is sovereign, if time is flimsy relative to the eternity to which we are called, then we are free to live a life less ordinary. Our dying is a testimony to this. It is a participation in Christ’s death and resurrection and, as such, is a call to those witnessing, as Christ’s dying and resurrection was to the early Christians, to live radically. This chapter has argued that we need to imagine dying in coherently Christian ways. This imagining is impeded, I have argued, by the localizing of our moral imaginations in “public space.” I have argued that public space is space in which, in order to persuade strangers, we consciously and unconsciously “forget” how to die. In response to this, I have offered a critique of “public space.” I have claimed that, because the closest we have to a shared understanding of life is the Darwinian one, we cannot have a coherent moral conversation in public space. In fact, all we can have is an agonistic struggle aimed at condemning others to live under our legislation. The price we pay for entry into this public space is the abandoning of a coherently Christian model of how to die. This is, I have suggested, too high a price to pay. In response, I have begun to sketch a coherently Christian understanding of dying and death in this final section. This response has centered on strategies for seeing dying in terms of virtues, cardinal and theological, through which we can attain the end of life. It has aimed at seeing aging and dying as the dramatic, revolutionary, and even romantic stage of life that it is. Renewing such an understanding, rather than grappling for legislative control, is, I have argued, vital if we are to renew a moral theology of dying for the twentyfirst century.

156

Chapter 4

NOTES 1. Rosalind Morris and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 2. Traditional approaches to the study of religion which focus on “insiders” and “outsiders” are representative of this spatial perspective (See Russell McCutcheon, The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader (Bloomsbury Academic, 1999). But such approaches are insufficiently appreciative of the sheer cultural power of twenty-first-century secular liberalism (see Geroge D. Chryssides and Stephen E. Gregg, The Insider/Outsider Debate: New Perspectives in the Study of Religion [Sheffield: Equinox Publishing, 2017]). 3. PEW Research Center website, “Muslims in America: Immigrants and those born in U.S. see life differently in many ways” (April 17, 2018). Accessed May 20, 2018. http:​//​www​.pewforum​.org​/essay​/muslims​-in​-america​-immigrants​-and​-those​ -born​-in​-u​-s​-see​-life​-differently​-in​-many​-ways​/ 4. Amandine Barb, “‘An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms’: Religion, Civic Belonging and Collective Identity in the United States.” In: European Journal of American Studies, 1, no. 1 (2011) [online: ejas.revues.org/8865], 6:1, 1–18. 5. See chapter 4 of Charles Curran, Catholic Moral Theology in the United States. A History (Georgetown University Press, 2008). 6. This is in keeping with the great promise of modernity. But it is a promise that has been unfulfilled. If one person thinks a banana is a weapon and another person thinks that it’s a vehicle, then no coherent conversation about what a banana is for and how it should be treated is possible. If person A thinks an unborn baby is a person and person B a clump of cells no different than a mole on one’s skin, then person A and person B cannot have a coherent discussion about how this “thing” should be treated. 7. https:​//​documentarytelevision​.com​/uk​/david​-attenboroughs​-lasting​-power​-uk​ -natural​-history​-ratings​-snapshot​-2018​-22​/ 8. Albeit in a way not informed by the kind of Darwinian lenses frequently seen in Blackmore, Dawkins, and Dennett. 9. See Alfred Schütz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die versethende Soziologie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhkamp, 1993). 10. See Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972). 11. See Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden (London: Oxford, 1993), chapter 4. 12. See Daniel Dennett, “‘Filling In’ Versus Finding Out: A Ubiquitous Confusion in Cognitive Science.” In Cognition: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, Eds. Herbert L. Pick, Paulus Willem van den Broek and David C. Knill (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992): 33–49. 13. Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden (London: Oxford, 1993): 67. 14. David Barash and Judith Lipton, The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People (New York: Henry Holt, 2002). 15. See P. A. Corning, “The Co-Operative Gene: On the Role of Synergy in Evolution,” in Evolutionary Theory 11 (1996): 183–207; Robert Alexrod, The Evolution of

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

157

Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 2006), Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour (Harvard University Press, 1999). 16. As Richard Dawkins notes, Turkey hens were often thought to be extremely maternal creatures. The reason? They will attack anything that comes close to their chicks showing an immense disregard for their own safety. The mechanism by which Turkey hens “decide” what represented a predatorial threat and what didn’t was discovered by the Austrian zoologist Wolfgang Schleidt. He discovered it when he witnessed a turkey hen savagely kill each one of her chicks in turn. The reason? She was deaf. She could not hear her chicks making the noise that distinguished them from predators and as Dawkins writes, “She was protecting her own children against themselves, and she massacred them all.” Richard Dawkins, River out of Eden (London: Oxford, 1993): 25. 17. See Wolfgang Müller-Lauter’s seminal text Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy. International Nietzsche Studies (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999): 122ff. 18. “The protoplasm stretches out its pseudopodia seeking something that resists it—not from hunger, but from will-to-power,” Nietzsche, Nachlass June–July 1885, 37. 19. Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 20. Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown & Co. 1991). 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” in Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ (New York: Penguin Books, 1990): 19. 22. Ibid. 23. See Bernard J. Verkamp, The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times (Scranton, IL: University of Scranton Press, 2006): 6. 24. Herbert Edward John Cowdrey, “Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion and the Penitential Ordinance following the Battle of Hastings,” in The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 20(2) (1969): 225–242‌‌‌‌‌‌‌. 25. By this, I mean that nation states are established through lines drawn on maps binding together people whose identity is colonized by this drawing. These lines are not innate or organic. “Canada,” the “USA,” “Ireland” used not be and now they are. As such, they were invented. 26. By this, I mean that they have no ontological reality, there is land which is divided in accordance with ideas or concepts. Nation states represent the mastery of nature by the mind and the subordination of the real to the conceptual. They are the sociopolitical expression of modernity and were signs, long before the environmental catastrophe, of the commodification of the material. 27. For example, both the catechism of Trent and the 1992 Catechism follow closely to the basic shape of Aquinas’ approach, as, of course, does the “Baltimore Catechism.” 28. That is, ends or goals that are contingent for their coherence on their relation to the ultimate end. Heading north past the school is an end contingent for its rationality

158

Chapter 4

on the destination I’m looking to go to being in the north. Getting to the destination is the ultimate end, walking past the school a contingent end, that is “on the way” north. 29. As Aquinas writes, “if [fame] is true, it must be on account of good existing in the man himself: and hence it presupposes perfect or inchoate happiness. But if [fame] is false, it does not harmonize with the reality: and thus good does not exist in him who is looked upon as famous. Hence it follows that fame can nowise make man happy.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Cambridge: Blackfriars/New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 30. In contrast God’s power, for Aquinas, is God’s goodness (ST I:II: Q.2, Art.4), thus it is not power in a form comparable to human power. God’s power is not toward this or that end, it is goodness itself. 31. Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 133. 32. Theseus finds his way out of the labyrinth in which he has slain the minotaur because of a ball of thread given to him by Ariadne. 33. Through death, separation, or break-up. 34. Dante Alighieri, Inferno: A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 2004). 35. We will unpack this term in the final chapter, when we look at transubstantiation. But as the eucharistic bread is present accidentally, whether substantially it is bread, or the body of Christ, so too for Aquinas delight is present accidentally whether or not happiness is substantially present. 36. “We must therefore consider that every delight is a proper accident resulting from happiness, or from some part of happiness; since the reason that a man is delighted is that he has some fitting good, either in reality, or in hope, or at least in memory. Now a fitting good, if indeed it be the perfect good, is precisely man’s happiness: and if it is imperfect, it is a share of happiness, either proximate, or remote, or at least apparent. Therefore, it is evident that neither is delight, which results from the perfect good, the very essence of happiness, but something resulting therefrom as its proper accident.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Cambridge: Blackfriars/ New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). 37. Sarah F. Brosnan, “Justice-and Fairness-Related Behaviors in Nonhuman Primates,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. Supplement 2 (June 18, 2013): 10416–10423. 38. “ὁ δὲ στυγνάσας ἐπὶ τῷ λόγῳ ἀπῆλθεν λυπούμενος, ἦν γὰρ ἔχων κτήματα πολλά” 39. I do not offer a thorough exposition of the theological virtues here as I have already done so in chapter 2. 40. A 98-percent favorable rating on Rotten Tomatoes. 41. M. Keith Booker, Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2010). 42. See Brandon D. Stewart, William von Hippel, and Gabriel A. Radvansky, “Age, Race, and Implicit Prejudice: Using Process Dissociation to Separate the Underlying Components,” in Psychological Science, Vol. 20 (2009): 164–168. 43. As the catechism (2278ff) clearly states “Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected

Dying and the Tyranny of Despair

159

outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of ‘over-zealous’ treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. . . . Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed as either an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged.” Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994). 44. As the Catechism (2277ff) clearly states “Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable. Thus, an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded.” Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994). 45. See David Tombs, “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse,” in Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53 (Autumn 1999): 89–109. 46. In the sense that it mirrors Adam’s act of disobedience in Eden. 47. Phillip A. Mellor and Chris Shilling, “Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death,” in Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 411–431. 48. See Martin Leet, “The Politics of Suffering: Progress, Modernity and the Adolescent Crisis,” in Australian Journal of Political Science 37, no. 1 (2002): 7–20. 49. Catherine Pickstock, “Necrophilia: The Middle of Modernity a Study of Death, Signs, and the Eucharist,” in Modern Theology 12, no. 4 (1996): 435–458. 50. For examples see Arthur Frank, “For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review,” in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage Publishing, 1991): 36–102, and chapter 5 of Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford University Press, 1991). 51. The ars moriendi (the art of dying) are texts from the fifteenth century that detail the process of dying and how to die well. David William Atkinson, The English Ars Moriendi, Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Texts, Vol. 5 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992). 52. Unlike some Gnostic strains. 53. Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Considers History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006). 54. See Candida R. Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014).

Chapter 5‌‌‌

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

I write this a week after Giorgia Meloni has been elected prime minister of Italy. Meloni, according to much of the media coverage that I’ve seen, is a fascist. Whether she is, in fact, a fascist, is not relevant to my mentioning her here. I bring her up because the reason many commentators have been calling her a fascist is relevant to this chapter. In a recent podcast with NYU Professor Dr. Scott Galloway, Kara Swisher noted that Meloni has “displayed extreme points of view” and illustrated these extreme points of view by quoting Meloni as saying “yes to natural families, no to LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to culture of life, no to the abyss of death.” In response, Galloway was succinct, saying, “she’s a fascist.” This is relevant because the beliefs that led to Meloni being labeled a fascist are wholly in keeping with the those of recent Popes, from Pope John Paul II to Pope Francis. Pope Francis has compared “gender theory” to “nuclear war” in its capacity to “restore the tower of Babel and destroy creation.”1 Similarly, the “culture of life” language that Meloni uses comes straight from Pope John Paul II in Evangelium Vitae, where he explores “the deep roots of the struggle between the ‘culture of life’ and ‘the culture of death’” (EV 21). For Pope John Paul II, when the culture of life is threatened, “The State is no longer the ‘common home’ where all can live together on the basis of principles of fundamental equality, but is transformed into a tyrant State, which arrogates to itself the right to dispose of the life of the weakest and most defenceless members, from the unborn child to the elderly.” Again, my point is not about whether Meloni is a fascist. I suspect that many of her policies would be wholly rejected by Pope Francis and Pope John Paul II. My point is that when commentators identify the “extreme points of view,” which are the basis for their belief that “she’s a fascist,” they cite positions on sexuality and gender theory that are, in fact, Catholic positions. In our culture, Catholic positions on sex and sexuality are seen as 161

162

Chapter 5

so “extreme” that one of the most damaging names one could be called— “fascist”—is applied to people who hold them. In the context of this book, this is relevant for two reasons. First, it shows the extent of the challenge facing Catholic moral theology. To accept the Catholic position such that same-sex sexual acts are “intrinsically disordered”2 is to accept pariah status. If Catholic positions on sex and gender are seen as fascist, then to accept them is to face social ostracism. Second, it illustrates the popular perception of the Catholic position. This perception is based, not just on the Catholic positions themselves, but on what is assumed to be the reason for these positions. Let’s say a man was punched in the face in the street or significant numbers of people had their bank accounts frozen. Our reflex would be to condemn the person who punched him or the state that froze those people’s assets. But when a fascist is punched in the face, or the people whose bank accounts were frozen are understood to be fascists, then the public response is different. Public disgust depends not simply on the thing, but the reason for the thing. So too, while the Catholic positions themselves will remain at odds with the dominant ones in our social order, the assumption that the Catholic positions are bigoted, hate filled, or “fascist,” is fueled by what people assume to be the incoherent and ridiculous reasons for these Catholic positions. This chapter aims to uncover a more nuanced and sophisticated logic behind the Catholic positions. The increasing disgust at Catholic moral theology in the area of sex and sexuality is based, in part, on the assumptions people have about why Catholics believe what they do about sex and sexuality. Both supporters and, especially, opponents of the Catholic positions have encouraged a public perception of the Catholic position that encourages these assumptions. Many of the most widely read Catholic theologians of the last century have been virulent opponents of the Catholic position on sex and sexuality, and have portrayed these positions as being based on slavish fealty to isolated lines of scripture,3 psychologically disturbed Church Fathers,4 or outdated and scientifically unacceptable accounts of nature.5 For example, Rosemary Radford Ruether, one of the most prolific and best-known Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, held that “The Catholic Church has a serious problem with women and with sexuality” and that “Denigration of sexuality and of women is deeply embedded in Christian, especially Catholic, spirituality and practice.”6 This understanding of Catholic thought was not taken for granted in the middle part of the last century but, in part thanks to the work of such significant theologians, it is increasingly taken for granted in the Western world today. A less measured example is Uta Ranke-Heinemann, whose unnuanced but very successful book Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, was one of those rare books written by an academic that garnered wide cultural appeal. Ranke-Heinemann attacks the

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

163

Catholic Church’s “disturbing history of misogyny” and “nonsensical hatred of marriage and the body,”7 while emphasizing its “virginity-mania.”8 At the time, her book received mixed reviews, with the New York Times finding the scholarship tainted by ideology9 while the Observer, Boston Globe, and San Francisco Chronicle were more positive. Now, thirty years later, her perspective would find more ubiquitous support from all quarters. Both Radford-Ruether and Ranke-Heinemann agree that scripture enshrines a hatred of the body (for example, Paul’s attack on “the flesh” in Romans 7), a hatred amplified by the Church Fathers and imbued with Gnostic fervor by Augustine, a psychologically damaged man who, according to Ranke-Heinemann, “fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure into a systematic unity.”10 For Radford-Ruether, “Augustine taught that all sexual relations were degrading to the spiritual self, but that this was forgiven or allowed if the couple despised sexual pleasure and only engaged in sex for procreation.”11 This position has come to dominate generally held assumptions on the Catholic theology of sex and sexuality. While labeling them “fascist” says more about contemporary media than the positions themselves, it is still easy to see why a position, for example, labeling all gay sex as sinful, is culturally reprehensible, or why the prohibition against contraception is seen as an outdated and trite piece of superstition. Therefore, even if the labeling of such positions as “fascist” is absurd, the Catholic positions, as understood by the intellectual culture, are still clearly reprobate. This chapter will respond to this. The Catholic positions on sexuality and contraception are clear, but the logic behind the Catholic positions has not been engaged with sufficient nuance, even by brilliant theological minds such as Radford-Ruether’s. This is a significant part of the problem. I don’t like having a needle pushed into my arm. If I understand that the reason for it is to administer life-saving medication, then I accept it and won’t demonize the person impaling me. If, however, I think it’s an act of violence against people who hate Irishmen, or due to their silly superstitious beliefs, then I will see it as an evil act. So too, understanding the reasoning behind the Catholic positions on sex and sexuality matters and it, as I will argue in this chapter, has not been sufficiently understood. My hope is, first (as throughout the book) that restoring Catholic moral precepts to their theological foundations can reconnect them to the source that gave them life. Second, that such a renewal can help Catholics appreciate some of the coherence and, indeed, beauty of the Catholic theology of sex and sexuality, a beauty and coherence that can come to the fore when the positions are seen in terms of their theological foundations. The Catholic account has been read without sophistication and nuance, and this chapter seeks to remedy that by offering the Catholic position accompanied by the doctrinal architectonic in which it stands. Despite what is often claimed, it is

164

Chapter 5

not that a literal reading of biblical passage X forces the Church Fathers to hold same-sex sexual desire as disordered. It is not the belief that procreation per se is the sole justification for sexual acts which drives Aquinas and others to reject contraception. Rather, as I will show in this chapter, both critics and defenders of the Catholic position usually fail to see that a sophisticated Trinitarian grammar grounds the traditional catholic Christian position on sex and sexuality. Explicating the Catholic position on sex and sexuality with reference to this Trinitarian grammar is the main goal of this chapter. I will begin by outlining the basic parameters that govern the morality of acts from a Catholic perspective. From here, I will, in dialog with Augustine, explore some of the obstacles to good sexual acts before, in the second half of this chapter, exploring what good sex is from the Catholic perspective. HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT GOOD SEX IS? If we are asking “is this object good?” we are asking a question that can only make sense in terms of what an object is for. For example, a knife is for cutting. The question of whether a given knife is good depends on whether that knife can cut well or not. If a knife is for cutting bread into slices and this knife is too blunt to do so, then this knife is not a good knife. As we will see for both Augustine and Aquinas, the same holds true for people. Once we know what a person is for, then we can make a coherent assessment about whether this or that person is good. The Catholic understanding is that life represents a space for relationship with, and transformation by, the Triune God. Each action, as a moral act, must be understood in this light. Each act can bring union with God closer or further away. To assess which is to assess each act vis a vis its teleological end— union with God. We know this because the “blueprint” of the true human12 is visible in Jesus Christ. While both Aquinas and Augustine speak about the imago Dei with reference to all three Triune persons,13 Christ represents the clearest illustration of what the human person is intended to be. The Nicene pronouncement of Jesus as true human and true God establishes Jesus, not simply as theologically normative—true God, but also as anthropologically normative—true human. Jesus is the form of human that we are intended to be. To seek to be Christ-like is to seek to be in union with the Father in the Holy Spirit. This union, for Catholics, is that for which we are intended. It is the goal, end, or telos of human life. This principle grounds and norms all properly Catholic moral inquiries. The goodness of an act is understandable only in light of the end of all human life—union with God, and whether such an act moves us closer to, or further

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

165

from, this union. Therefore, if we are to ask what a “good” sexual act is, we are really asking questions like, “How is the process of ontological transformation toward union with God being realized in the sexual act under consideration?” or “In this act, is the person responding to God’s call to be one with Him by power of the Holy Spirit in conformity to the Son?” These questions—attempting to discern the correlation of a sexual act with the ultimate end of human life—are similar to asking “Does it cut bread well?” of a knife whose end is to cut bread well. If the aim of a game of chess is to checkmate the opposing king, the question that governs whether a move is prudent is, “to what extent does this move facilitate or obstruct this end?” As the aim of life is union with God, the question governing how sex is understood is, “to what extent does this sexual act facilitate the conformation of the person to Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit?” or, negatively, “to what extent does it obstruct this end?” This can seem a little forensic and at odds with the lived reality of sexual acts. The fact remains, however, that any analysis of sexual acts that is not grounded in an awareness of the end (goal, telos) of human life and the prudential ordering of each act vis a vis that end is not an analysis that can be called “Catholic” with intellectual integrity. When we come to Augustine within the main sections of this chapter, we’ll see a more embodied approach, removed from the kind of Thomist idioms I’m employing. But this same grammar norms Augustine’s thinking as it norms Thomas’ and, indeed, the Catechism. In all three, the Catholic position on such acts is based, not on a legalistic analysis of whether such actions cohere with some moral law, or a slavish fealty to this or that gobbet of scripture, but on an ontological analysis of the acts themselves, asking what, ontologically, is being established or rejected through them. Meaningful analysis is impossible if we pay insufficient attention to the foundations, or grammar, that ground moral positions. To understand the Catholic position is to understand it in relation to the doctrinal grammar in which it stands. One of the challenges we have today, within Catholicism as well as in moral discourse more generally, is that we argue about positions (that same-sex sexual acts are immoral, for example) while assuming that we share foundations which establish the truth or falsehood of our position. More often than not, we don’t. Let’s say someone thought the object of chess was to annihilate all the pawns in an expression of oligarchic political principles. Then sacrificing all your pawns in a pawn-littered “bloodbath” at the outset of the game would make perfect sense and be wholly rational. From this vantage point, the Catholic position, carefully developing pieces toward the ultimate end of checkmating the king, would seem wholly wrongheaded. And if the presence of pawns was synonymous with a degenerate society, then the Catholic moves would not simply be considered stupid, but also wicked and

166

Chapter 5

immoral. This is what is happening today in relation to questions of sex and sexuality. Some of the ire we see in hegemonic opposition to Catholic perspectives flows from an alternative understanding of the nature of the real, the good, and the goal of life. Increasingly, nominally Catholic enquiry, too, has forgotten or misunderstands the kinds of foundations that, in every section of this book, I’m seeking to highlight as being those on which the Catholic positions, traditionally, are built. CONTINGENT VERSUS ULTIMATE ENDS One of the most influential books on sexuality by a Catholic author in recent decades is Margaret Farley’s Just Love.14 Farley’s approach is to assess sexual acts vis a vis justice. For Farley, justice is the telos used to establish the moral veracity of sexual acts. Farley’s approach is typical of twenty-first and especially twentieth-century rejections of Catholic positions, which first locate Catholic positions in a fixation on procreation—without considering the foundational grammar that gives procreation its privileged status—and then rejects it, offering instead alternative ends, such as individual and social “well-being.”15 It should be noted that some ends of sexual acts, such as procreation, expressing love, enhancing faith, establishing friendship, delighting in the gift from a loved one, and so on, are very relevant. But, it is important to note that in traditional Catholic thought,16 such ends are contingent, not ultimate. They depend for their relevance upon their relationship to union with God, which is the ultimate end of human life. These other ends, even justice, are secondary. Whether gratification or procreation or justice or pleasure are factors in moral analysis of sexual acts depends on the extent to which they move the person toward or away from this ultimate goal of union with God. For example, procreation, friendship, and so on are goods because they mediate the good, God, who is the ultimate semantic content of the term “the good.” But let’s say that forced procreation to breed a future war machine became a law. This is a bizarre example, but it helps raise an important question, “Would procreative sex between married couples in such cases be ‘good’?” If two married people willingly partook in a government scheme to produce progeny for a war machine, would their sex be morally good by virtue of the fact that it took place in marriage and was open to procreation? The answer is “No.” It would not be good because the procreative act, as we shall see in what follows, depends for its goodness on it being a re-presentation of and participation in the triune God’s self-giving love. This act, in the service of a state-driven war machine, while ostensibly the same procreative act, would actually be a parodic mimicry of the self-giving creative love of

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

167

God. As such, while goods may emerge from the act (such as new life), the act itself is not good, and no goods that may emerge from it can make it so. While bizarre, the question helps clarify something often (if not usually) forgotten in discussions of Catholic moral theology. Procreation is a contingent, and not an ultimate, end, and thus its “status” as determinative of a moral action is predicated upon the relationship of procreation to the ultimate end of re-presenting and participating in the creative, life giving, God. This point, as we shall see, will distinguish the Catholic position proper from the Catholic position as often understood by both many detractors and many defenders. Defenders, and particularly attackers of Catholic theology of sex and sexuality, fixate on procreation without asking why procreation has such status. In doing so, they mistake a contingent end for the ultimate end. The ultimate end alone (union with God) determines the goodness of a contingent end. It is not good in itself, independently of this ultimate end. Critics of the Catholic position (and some defenders) fail to appreciate this. Another curious example will emphasize and clarify what is at stake here. Let’s take the end of “happiness”—one of the ends championed by Farley as central to a framework for assessing sexual acts. Let’s say someone finds happiness in torturing people—is their happiness good? For the Catholic, this question is to ask, “Is the presence of God as real in their happiness as it is in the happiness we find in love, creation, or justice?”17 And the answer, of course, is “no.” God, for Aquinas, is the ultimate end, the eudaimonic happiness we seek as our end (ST I:II: Q.3, Art. 8). Our joy in faith, hope, and love, is joy that comes from the presence of this end (the Holy Spirit) in/as faith, hope, and love. God is substantially present as the eudaimonic happiness in such happiness. The happiness a sadistic prison guard might feel in the tortured face of their victim is not, by this reckoning, happiness at all. Rather it is a parodic mimicking of happiness, experienced as happiness by a self whose desire is woefully disordered. Happiness is only a good end when it is, ontologically, happiness, that is, when it is the product of relationship with God, which is the ontological determinant of happiness. We naturally ask, “Who decides which happiness is real? Who are you to say the torturer’s happiness is not as real as someone else’s happiness in the safe and peaceful sleep of their child?” And the answer is that we cannot know, for certain, the ontological nature of the torturer’s happiness, no more than I can know, without scientific examination, if the laptop I’m typing on right now has magnesium in it. But the first point to stress is that, if there is magnesium in it, there is magnesium in it. And the fact that I do not know whether there is magnesium in it or not neither adds nor removes the magnesium. My ignorance is utterly irrelevant to the presence of magnesium. So too my lack of absolute certainty about the presence of God in the happiness of the torturer, or this or that sexual actor, is irrelevant to the ontological

168

Chapter 5

presence of God in this happiness or not. Such uncertainty is largely irrelevant. What is relevant for Catholics is the foundational grammar that holds that happiness refers to an ontological reality as opposed to a human assertion, and that this ontological reality is established through relationship with God. In contrast, the curious triumph of idealism, discussed in chapter 1, fuels the belief that lack of certainty undermines the ontological reality of that about which we’re uncertain. But Schrodinger’s Cat—let’s call him “Steve” to emphasize his existence—Steve is either alive or Steve is dead. Our uncertainty does not establish a third state wherein Steve is both alive and dead. Steve, in fact, is one or the other. Epistemological uncertainty does not undermine ontological reality, at least in magnesium, the moral status of torturers, and cats named Steve. The beatific vision of God is ultimate happiness (ST I:II: Q.3, Art.8), it is a participation in God who is happiness itself. If God is who God is revealed to be in Christ, then this act of torture does not re-present this God. If God is the happiness in happiness, then the sensation the torturer is feeling is not happiness. It may look and feel like it, in the same way that a substance could be made to look and feel like magnesium. But if there is no magnesium in it, there is no magnesium in it. So too, if God is good, and the happiness of the torturer in torture is opposed to God, then this happiness is not simply not good but it is, in fact, opposed to good. Aquinas holds that we should act toward the end of happiness. The torturer could reply that in torturing he is doing precisely this. But for Aquinas, this happiness is not happiness, it is a parodic mimicry of it. The torturer’s desire is disordered. His nature leads him to seek the happiness that ontologically re-presents God. Yet he confuses happiness, which iconically re-presents God, with the idol of the sensations he derives from his torture. Similarly, the married couple reproducing in the service of the State’s war machine are not giving themselves completely to the other in faithfulness to the God of creation. If they were, then their procreative act could re-present and participate in the total self-giving of God, the Father to the Son and the Son to the Father. But, acting in service of a state’s war machine, their self-giving is not to the other as a creative icon of the Triune life, but to the State. Their procreative act thus is conformed to, and re-presents this State and not the God who is the ontological reality that is necessary for the act to be good. So much Catholic moral theology, both critical of and supportive of the traditional Catholic positions, isolates contingent ends, such as procreation, from ultimate ends. This is a point that is infrequently noted in the discussion of Catholic theology of sex and sexuality. Contingent ends, even procreation, are subordinate to the ultimate end of the Christian life, and depends on their coherence with these ultimate ends for their goodness.

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

169

While this constructive principle is essential for a coherent exploration of the Catholic theology of sex, locating this theology in relation to more dominant discourses requires highlighting a very significant deconstructive aspect. As the bizarre example of the torturer shows, human desire for the happiness that is oneness with God is subject to disorder. My gorging on Cheetos may make my disordered self feel “happy,” but this says more about my disorder than the capacity of Cheetos18 to re-present and participate in the Triune life. My desire for food, objects, sex, and more is subject to disorder. This is a sine qua non for any coherently Catholic consideration of desire. For catholic Christians, my desire has a telos because we have a telos— union with God. And it can be disordered such that we desire things that lead us away from this telos and wound us. There are points of contact that enable conversation between Catholic positions and those hegemonic within secular societies. But there are also impasses that, from the start, make such conversation impossible. A refusal to acknowledge that human desire can be disordered represents one such impasse. If person A refuses to acknowledge the possibility that, say, an SS torturer who delights in their task may have disordered desire, then the foundational grammars that inform the Catholic position and person A are too alien to allow a coherent conversation to take place. SEXUAL DESIRE AS SUBJECT TO DISORDER Having set down the foundational parameters that frame the inquiries that key figures in the catholic Christian position, such as Augustine and Aquinas, partake in, my goal is now to illustrate the topography of the classical Augustinian position on sex and sexuality and detail the theological grammar that gives rise to it. For Augustine, we are made for God and our heart seeks God.19 This seeking takes the form of desire. Desire alights upon icons of God, that is, material things in which God becomes visible. As Augustine writes, “‘Him we love; He made these things and is not far distant.’ For He did not create and then depart; the things derived from Him have their being in Him.”20 We desire God through and in such things. This desire is an especially powerful force; it is a magnetic drive that draws us to our source. Yet the power of the force is no less effective on us when that to which we are drawn is not a coherent icon of God. Erotic desire, which ought draw us into union with God (who alone can alone sate our erotic longing) can also draw us away from God. As desire shapes and conforms us to the God we desire, so, too, desire directed to objects we commodify for our own gratification, mutates us.21 It is because of this that sexual desire is a core focus of theological reflection for Augustine.

170

Chapter 5

In his understanding of the significance of desire, Augustine is, as usual, Pauline. As Augustine writes, referencing Romans 7, “Even if a man ‘delights in God’s law in the inner man’ what will he do with ‘the other law’ in his members fighting against the law of his mind and bringing him into captivity under the law of sin which is in his members?” Paul, in Romans, laments the fact that our desires are not ordered toward the good end. He laments that he wills to do the very things he ought not do. Like most Christians, I relate to this. Too often, I want to spend money on myself, on possessions I don’t need, while many are living in poverty. My desire is directed toward commodities rather than God who, in Christ, is clearly visible in the poor. As such, my desire is disordered. In chapter 29 of book 1 of On Marriage and Concupiscence, Augustine writes of this disordered desire, “this law of sin which dwells in our members,” in terms of “concupiscence.” He speaks of concupiscence as (1) A force acting on the will, but (2) a force that is not determinative after regeneration.22 It is not itself an ontological entity, instead it functions as a draw or pull on something that is ontologically real. Once the person is in relationship with the Holy Spirit, this draw, or pull, can be combated by the pneumatological pull on desire toward its rightful end. The pangs of covetousness are always at hand, Augustine notes in book 1 of On Marriage and Concupiscence, but in relationship with the Holy Spirit Augustine claims that a person need not surrender to them.23 These two elements, the power of concupiscence to misdirect desire and the power of the Holy Spirit to shape desire toward its ultimate end, interplay throughout Augustine’s writing and preaching about sexual desire. CONCUPISCENCE For Augustine, as for Aquinas later, we are not equipped with a plurality of desires, some for good and some for ill. All our desires are good, in themselves, but they unravel under the pull of concupiscence. Desire can suffer, like cells become frayed or skin wrinkles, the fate of all organic things. But in themselves, these innate natural desires are good. For example, we might think of my love for my children. This love is natural and good. In it, I know and relate to the God who is Father of the Son.24 This desire orients me to good actions, care, nourishment, and support of my children and so on. But it can very easily become disordered. For example, each Christmas my love for my children has a tendency to become misguided and I spend far too much money on gifts for them. A small failing perhaps, but in a world where children are starving from hunger, money extravagantly spent on toys for my daughters is a real problem. I have a desire, in this case to make my daughters happy, because I love them. This desire is good. It is natural. But I’m

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

171

bombarded with images telling me that children need this doll to be happy, this toy, that event. And these images are far more plentiful and obvious than the image of God in Christ, readily visible on the face of the child living in poverty. My desire is susceptible to disorder. It is shaped, in fact, misshaped, by the context I live in. My desire to love God, seen in the joyful, vulnerable, innocent faces of my children, blinds me to the face of God in the poor, hungry, and impoverished children all around. Thus, the desire to give my children delight, which is itself good and toward the good end, hardens and cracks in the light of a consumerism that bakes my will. And this hardening, cracking, and fraying of good desire is precisely what is connoted by the term “concupiscence” for Augustine. It is the “weathering” of desire, the fraying of desire and ultimately the disordering of the desire. My desire to care for my children frays into a desire to spend too much on them in a world marked by the hunger and poverty of other children. For Augustine, concupiscence is not sin, rather it is that which acts like a bio-gravitational pull on human desire and thereby encourages sin. It facilitates sin as it is a pull toward self-assertion and gratification, and away from God. While Augustine’s theology of concupiscence has been controversial from the beginning and is increasingly assailed as the root of all ills by Ranke-Heinemann and others, it emerges, like much of Augustine’s theology, from his lived experience and concrete pastoral concerns.25 As such, it is marked by a common-sense approach, which is strikingly obvious in Augustine’s preaching, but slightly more veiled in his more formal theology. It needs to be seen as a theology which is driven by awareness of the revelation of Jesus Christ as true human, and Augustine’s own lived reality, which he interprets in light of such sacred doctrine. In the Confessions, Augustine’s desires, even for singing the psalms, are examined in light of this capacity for disorder due to concupiscence.26 In chapter 10 of the Confessions, Augustine focuses on sound, smell, and food as examples of the disorder that desire is subject to. Desire for food is, from the Christian perspective, good. It is desire to enjoy the fruits of creation, to gratefully receive the gifts from a loving God. Furthermore, it sustains life, which, God tells us in Genesis, is good. As such, food is an icon of the God for whom we are. The God who is its source is visible through it. We, naturally, are thankful and pray when we eat to acknowledge this. God is visible in His creation and can be loved and thanked through the creation which is His gift to us and which we delight in. But this seeming desire can also be “the deceptive desire for pleasure demanding service.”27 My relationship to food is not always marked by a theologically coherent logic.28 Food, which should be an icon, becomes, too often, an idol.29 As the icon is permeable, the idol is solid. As the icon is transparent, allowing for a glimpse of God who is its source; the idol absorbs our gaze completely.30 The

172

Chapter 5

icon allows visibility of God and encourages prayer, gratitude, and joy. When I see food as an idol, however, I simply seek to mine it for my own gratification. I consume it for the sake of consumption alone, neither from hunger, nor delight, nor gratitude. As Augustine writes of approaches to food such as mine, “What brings them to the table is the lust of the flesh, not the need of restoring the tissues.”31 It is an example whose banality is typical of the unspectacular daily reality of the moral life, but I’m thinking here about the time I’ve spent, sitting on a sofa eating chips, far past fullness. In so many ethical analyses, we assume the massive moment, to wage war or not, to take a life or not. More often, the moral life is lived in moments far less heroic, where the self is shaped far away from the gaze of others. Through an Augustinian lens, the self, and, through it, the world, is forged in the mundane encounter between a middle-aged person on a sofa and a large bag of chips. Far too often, for me, food becomes an idol through which the God, who is its source, and the hungry who, unlike me, need such food, remain invisible. It is banal to me, and I am enchanted neither by delight nor gratitude. It is simply mundane and consumed to gratify my desire for food as an end in itself. It is banal, and rather than me consuming it, its banality consumes me. The nature of concupiscence is clear in such moments. My desire for food is good in itself and can facilitate my relationship with God and others. It can school me in gratitude, delight, friendship, and compassion. As such, it can facilitate my conformation to Christ, that is, my salvation. And yet somehow, at some stage, my desire for food has, I assure you, become disordered. Too often, my desire is directed at food, not for satiety nor delight nor gratitude nor fellowship, but as an end in itself, that is, for the endorphins and serotonin that my consumption of food releases. My health suffers, my appreciation of creation suffers, the hungry, whose hunger is caused by greed like mine, suffer. My action that causes this suffering is not in response to some God-given illicit desire, it is in response to good desire for food, which has frayed into disorder. When the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2357) refers to samesex sexual desire as disordered, it is this understanding of desire and its capacity for fraying that informs it. To summarize—for Augustine (a) Desire is good. It is part of a good person created by a good God. (b) People have this desire because God is the end of all human life and so we crave God. (c) Desire, like my desire for food, can become disordered. Instead of being directed toward an icon of God, it can be directed toward an object as an end in itself. This establishes the object as an idol—something that competes with God. (d) We are formed—diminished or augmented—through such relationships with icons of God, or idols obscuring God. In acting on desires we are conformed to Christ or frayed into something other. As Augustine writes in his Enchiridion, “All of nature, therefore,

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

173

is good, since the Creator of all nature is supremely good. But nature is not supremely and immutably good as is the Creator of it. Thus, the good in created things can be diminished and augmented.” (e) “Concupiscence” is the term Augustine uses to speak of the diminishing of good desire, the fraying of desire such that it alights upon ends other than and opposed to our union with God. DISORDERED SEXUAL DESIRE AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF THE REAL Augustine knew, from firsthand experience, how sexual desire could lead to the commodification of another person, seeing them only as utility. In Confessions, he portrays his relationship with his concubine as a loving and faithful one. It lasted for fifteen years. Roman culture, as Peter Brown well notes, saw concubinage as a wholly respectable outlet for male sexual desire.32 The male would utilize the female partner to avoid the more damaging aspects of youthful desire until a suitable marriage partner was found, whereupon others, often prostitutes, would fulfill the role of mediating male desire. Augustine found his concubine “in the state of my wandering desire.”33 He had genuine love for her, and when they parted, he was badly hurt: When they took from my side her with whom I had slept for so long, my heart was torn at the place where it stuck to her, and the wound was bleeding. . . . My heart, which clung to her, was broken and wounded and dropping blood . . . nor was the wound healed which had been made. . . . It burned, it hurt intensely, and then it festered and became more chilling and desperate.34

They had a son, Adeodatus, and, Augustine makes clear, in stark contrast to norms for male–female relationships in Roman culture, they had a genuine friendship. Yet the relationship was marked by an utter contrast in power. Augustine had complete rights to her body. He was using her while marriage and lifelong partnership were things he would never countenance with such a socially unsuitable partner.35 She was not so much a person as a commodity. It is significant that Augustine, although writing of her often with extreme passion (as in the quote above), never once mentions her name. She is depersonalized in Confessions as she was depersonalized in the relationship Augustine shared with her. She was a commodity, her body mined for Augustine’s needs, “It was a sweet thing to be loved, and more sweet still when I was able to enjoy the body of a woman”36 and her soul, Augustine tells us, was mined for his need to find romantic love.37

174

Chapter 5

Augustine would later see that these desires, which “alighted” on his concubine, were desires for love and relationship. As such, they were a natural innate good, a good inherent in the imago Dei, and related to the longing for God, who is love. “Human nature,” for Augustine, “is something social, and has for a great and natural good, the power also of friendship; on this account God willed to create all men out of one, in order that they might be held in their society not only by likeness of kind, but also by bond of kindred.”38 We are created to know God, as love, in relationship with one another. This, for Augustine, is the basis of “the first natural bond of human society, man and wife.”39 For Augustine, the human being is made envisioning a union of male and female, as he writes, “Nor did God create these each by himself, and join them together as alien by birth: but He created the one out of the other, setting a sign also of the power of the union in the side,40 whence she was drawn.”41 The whole envisioned in creation is comprised from both the body from whom the rib was taken and the body made from this rib. As such, Augustine’s desire for love and relationship, which alighted on his lover, was natural and good. It was a desire to be whole, to know God as love, in love, through another. Yet, he knew, personally, intimately, that his desire had become disordered, gravitationally pulled toward serving his own needs. It had frayed into desire for gratifying himself rather than knowing God and realizing that good for which he was intended. As he writes, “I was not a lover of marriage but a slave of lust.”42 Desire seeks God, in whom the heart can rest, yet Augustine sought to sate this desire in sexual expression by utilizing a person as a tool for this sating. The person, rather than being a partner in becoming fully human, became, for Augustine, a commodity. Augustine tells us that she suffered43 and this experience of her suffering, as a direct result of Augustine’s disordered desire, was formative for him. He saw that when the gaze, which ought to see God through the other, sees the other only as a tool for gratification, the relationship mutates the self rather than coheres it to Christ. As he writes, “The good which you love is from Him. But it is only as related to Him that it is good and sweet. Otherwise, it will justly become bitter; for all that comes from Him is unjustly loved if He has been abandoned.”44 This insight was based on Augustine’s personal erotic experience45 and it is the maxim that came to stand over all his theology of sex and marriage. Augustine knew from scripture, tradition, and his own lived experience the power of concupiscence on sexual desire. Between Confessions and On Marriage and Concupiscence, the question that emerged for Augustine is, “Is the impact of concupiscence on sexual desire such a powerful pull that we will always seek to mine another person for gratification?”46 His answer, which is “no,” will have just as much significance for the Christian understanding of sex and sexuality as his ethnographically inspired awareness of

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

175

the pain disordered desire can bring. In On Marriage and Concupiscence, Augustine offers an alternative in the form of a sacramental union, which refuses to surrender to any fatalism in the face of the power of concupiscence. But without this, without the explicit activity of the Holy Spirit accepted into the life of a couple through the embodied “yes” that is sacramental marriage, sexual desire will lead people away from, rather than toward, union with God. Without the operation of the Spirit within a sacramental marriage, sex is sealed off from the Triune life, who alone can enable it to be what it can be. Marriage represents the couple’s commitment to see each other and act vis a vis each other with the shared goal of union with God. Sacramental marriage situates ends within the couple’s relationship (sex, children, support, care, tolerance, justice, etc.) in relation to the couple’s ultimate end of union with God. Without this, we conflate things within married life with the end, rather than being means to the ultimate end. Without the affirmation of the role of the Spirit that sacramental marriage represents, the window to a sunset absorbs our gaze and the window itself, not the sunset, becomes our focus. By focusing on the window, we fail to see the sunset. The icon that we should see through becomes an idol absorbing our gaze. It is not that the mining of another is a harmless pastime, within the Augustinian understanding, alongside the ultimate end of male/female erotic relationships. He doesn’t hold that sacramental marriage is a pathway to the good, while seeing using another person for sexual or emotional gratification as a morally neutral thing. Rather, focusing on the window and failing to see the sunset are inextricably linked.47 Failing to see the sunset happens because we focus on the window. Sex for gratification is not a harmless addition to sex for participation in the Triune life, no more than parodic mimicries of the Eucharist would be harmless additions to actual Communion. We are shaped by receiving Communion. We are shaped by our brain noting that this seemingly banal thing is, in fact, the most glorious thing there is. This creates a suspicion of all appearances, which, as Flannery O’Connor describes, re-enchants the world.48 Practices of receiving wafers in faux Masses are not in addition to real Masses—they are parasitic upon real Masses because they train us to see the material as banal. They enshrine and reify a disenchanted materiality rather than actively enchant the created order. The things we do shape and form us. And, so too for Augustine, sex for gratification, reducing the person to a tool, disenchants the person and the world. It blinds us from seeing what love and sex can be because we fixate on using it for what it ought not be. I cannot eat healthily in thanks to God on Sunday and assume that gorging on vast amounts of fast food is a harmless alternative practice. Gorging shapes me, literally, and a healthy meal does not heal the body damaged by such gorging. Further, the self shaped by gorging has established

176

Chapter 5

patterns, habits, and chemical addictions that makes proper eating ever more unlikely. It is not a harmless parallel track. This is at the core of Augustine’s “suspicion” of sex outside its Triune functioning, which will be explored in the following section.49 It is something that Augustine did not simply know through scripture and sacred doctrine. He knew it intimately. When he desired the body of his partner, he subconsciously desired love and relationship with another, in whom he could come to know God as love itself. But failing to realize this, his desire instead was for her body alone. It was for the sign, and not the thing it signified. It was for her body as a commodity—as a tool for the gratification of his urges. In this commodification, her personhood was nullified, and her name, in testimony to this, is eternally unknown to readers of the Confessions. What did she desire? If it was Augustine alone, this was a desire that would always remain unfulfilled. Through the actualization of his desire, Augustine was refusing her personhood and, through this, refusing the opportunity that desire offered, that is, the formation of the self in self-giving toward Christ. While clumsy readings such as Ranke-Heinemann’s can conflate Augustine’s rhetoric with “a deep hatred of the body,”50 sexual desire, for Augustine and for Christians since, requires attention, reflection, and formation, if it is to realize its goal, which is nothing less than relationship with God. It is to this goal that I now turn. GOOD SEX Writing about Augustine’s theology of the Holy Spirit, Joseph Ratzinger noted “The gift of God is God himself. . . . He is the only gift adequate to the divinity. God gives as God nothing other than God, giving himself and with himself everything.”51 This principle stands over all the moral theology in this book, and will be at the forefront in what follows. The self-giving of God to us, as and in the Holy Spirit, establishes the ontological presence of real goodness—God—in us. In what follows, I will argue that sexual acts can be acts that accept the Holy Spirit enabling our conformation to Christ. They are good acts in so much as this happens. They can be such because the creativity and sacramentality that enables their expression is due to the agency of the Holy Spirit and, as such, goodness is ontologically present as their formal cause. Creativity and sacramentality have been the lenses through which good sex has been seen in Catholic tradition. The rejection of contraception and same-sex sexual acts, which leads to the denigration of Catholic thought as bigoted and hate-filled, is not a totemic prohibition based on snippets of scripture or outdated theological taboos. Rather the coherence and beauty of creativity and sacramentality within Catholic theology of sexuality unveils such things as derelict in contrast to them.

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

177

What follows will be an exposition of the centrality of creativity and sacramentality within the Catholic understanding of sex and sexuality; an exposition that will also allow me to make clear why contraception (primarily in the section on creativity) and same-sex sexual acts (primarily in the section on sacramentality) are morally problematic. CREATIVITY It is easy to see why procreation serves as a useful shorthand for both proponents and critics of the Catholic perspective, but by fixating on procreation as the final end both proponents and critics veil the Catholic perspective because in so doing they conflate a contingent end, with the ultimate end of all human acts. In contrast, a focus on Eros helps to unpack the underlying grammar that drives Catholic thought. It incorporates procreation, establishing it, rightly, as a contingent end in good sex, but exploring Eros offers a window into the underlying grammar of good sex. Eros is a property of God, and when human sexual acts are by virtue of the real presence of God’s Eros, then they have goodness within them. Because of this, I will proceed by exploring Eros as a property of God’s love, then show how this form of love, in God, is inherently creative, before finally illustrating how human erotic acts depend, for their goodness, on representation of, and participation in God’s Eros. As Pope Benedict makes clear in chapter 9 of Deus Caritas Est, it is God’s erotic, no less than agapeic, love, that is at the heart of God’s saving action in the world. In God’s erotic love we see, as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite,52 notes, “Eros coming out of God and dying on the cross.”53 For Denys, “the Beautiful” and “the Good” are names of God, and Eros is nothing less than “a capacity to effect a unity, an alliance, and a particular comingling in the Beautiful and the Good.”54 For Denys, Eros is a form of love which has its origin in the self-giving, incarnational, God. As an aspect of God, it necessarily transcends language. Phonic or graphic signs cannot exhaust eros and so eros must be embodied, acted out, for Denys, rather than stated. The Father’s love for the Son is inherently creative. It drives the eternal begetting of the Son. The Love of the Son for the Father, too, is creative, and the Spirit proceeds, as in Augustine, as the love between the Spirit and the Father. This dynamism and creativity are central to who God is. It is central to the incarnation as the erotic love within the Trinity always moves out, to be given. The Trinity does not need to create, but it is inherently good, inherently creative, and creation itself is marked by this Eros which is a core aspect of its cause. It is here that figures like Denys, and Augustine break with the Neo-Platonist logic that their thought can echo. For Denys, the love beyond expression (as

178

Chapter 5

thought or idea) must become embodied. It cannot stay in any neo-platonic realm of idea. It is dynamic and creative, and the Word’s becoming flesh is not a late event in God’s triune life. No, the Triune God is always the incarnational God. It is this mystery that Revelations 5:8 and elsewhere point to. There is a sense in which Christ is “the lamb who was slain from the foundations of the world.” Incarnation and redemption speak to a creative, loving, saving activity of God which is fully and finally expressed on Golgotha. Because of this, Eros within Christian thinkers like Denys and Augustine (like their late modern interpreters, such as Von Balthasar and Pope Benedict) can never remain within neo-Platonic categories, in that Eros is never a principle or concept, because, as an aspect of the Triune God, Eros is never not being made flesh. As such, God’s Eros is creative, dynamic, and moves out to creation and therefore matter. Hence, Eros is a form of love that binds love to creation and embodies it as the soul is the form of the body. As Pope Benedict claims in Deus Caritas Est, “it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love—eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur.” Here, Benedict is wholly in keeping with Denys, who calls Eros “a capacity to effect a unity.” The unity it aims at is of body and soul, God, and the world and, as we shall see in what follows, woman and man. If Eros is the principle for unity in creation, it is only because it is the principle of unity, first, in God. The Triune persons love each other in an erotic fashion, that is, as a love that is expressed in a self giving. For Denys, the Son and Spirit proceed out from and return to the Father, and creation itself is a form of this erotic love. God’s love is expressed in a Word that eternally gives life and incarnates as the Son. It is a movement of God to us. It is the engine of God’s work in the economy of salvation. Hans Urs Von Balthasar writes of “a divine ekstasis”55 in which “God is drawn out of Himself by Eros into creation, revelation, and Incarnation.”56 For Von Balthasar, God’s love is always creative precisely because it is erotic. Von Balthasar, and indeed Pope Benedict, mirrors the lofty and at times difficult language we see in earlier thinkers such as Gregory of Nyssa.57 But this patristic logic builds on the simpler, spousal language for humanity’s relationship with God that is found throughout scripture—a relationship Augustine echoes when he writes, “First He came to the virgin’s womb where the human creation was married to Him, so that mortal flesh should not forever be mortal. Coming forth ‘as a bridegroom from his marriage bed he bounded like a giant to run his course’” (Ps. 18. 6).58 The Father’s love proceeds, in, and as the Son, to creation, through the Spirit. For Augustine, “if the Sacred Scripture proclaims: ‘God is love,’ as also that love is of God, and acts in us

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

179

that we remain in God and He in us, and that we know this, because He has given us His Spirit, then the Spirit Himself is God, who is love.”59 Eros is inherent within God’s triune life. It is central to the love of the Triune persons as a love that moves out, that is creative, that is always in the process of being embodied and expressed. As always, the precise point of contact between the self-giving God and creation is the Holy Spirit. The processive love, from the Father, as the Son, is nothing less than the Holy Spirit itself. For Augustine, the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son and operating abroad in creation, is the perfect expression of God’s erotic love. In the Holy Spirit, God proceeds from God, and more, comes to dwell in us. As all human acts are properly good by their correspondence to God, who is goodness itself, God’s Eros is the basis for any potential goodness in human eros. This is what drives early Christian investigations of the good of human erotic love and can be glimpsed even in the “how to” that Augustine offers in On Marriage and Concupsience.60 God’s Eros is the basis for the goodness of human eros, but it is only in focused attention to the nature of God’s Eros that we can see what kind of human erotic activity can most properly correspond to, and participate in, God’s Eros. Erotic love is part of God’s triune self, and attention to the life of the Trinity can help us see more clearly what God’s erotic love is like. This is central to the morality of erotic acts, as the goodness of our erotic acts is predicated upon their status as representative of God’s Eros. Why? Because God is good and we can not represent God’s Eros through our own efforts, no more than a stone can be polished into gold. God, as has been unpacked in chapter 2, is the ultimate referent of “good.” And so, we can only re-present God’s eros when God is present in us as the referent of the term “good.” Whether that is as brazen as it is in Peter Lombard or as circumspect as it is in Gregory of Nyssa,61 the catholic Christian tradition is united in holding that acts are essentially good62 in that the good is present to them, either in them (Lombard) or as their formal cause (Gregory of Nyssa). The form of Eros we see in God, as we shall see, is proper to God, but impossible to us in our fallen state. Thus, if we manifest it we do so only by virtue of the agency of God’s Eros, either present in ours, or causative of ours. Only the real presence of God makes such Eros really present. What is seen in God is only possible for us through conformation to Christ (to whom it is natural) by the Holy Spirit. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection shows that God’s self-giving to God (within the Triune life) is total. The Father does not withhold himself from the Son, and the Son’s self-giving to the Father (and, at once God’s self-giving to creation) is total. Crucially, the self-giving of the Son on the cross is a self-giving to the point of his utter annihilation. This point is stressed throughout the tradition, but rarely as clearly as in Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo. We owe God everything. Consistently, in the

180

Chapter 5

Hebrew Bible and the Greek Old Testament, the question is asked, do we love God for God’s sake?63 Not for gain, or out of fear, but for God’s sake? For Anselm, God is due everything, and yet humans fail and have always failed to give God what He is due—everything, without remainder. It is only the God-Man, Jesus, who gives everything to God, without remainder. This is why Jesus’ feeling of forsakenness is so important. Jesus does not give all to God as a strategy or plan. Jesus’ suffering is not a temporary inconvenience, a brief wincing on the way to glory. He gives all to God while, in His human nature, experiencing utter forsakenness. He cries out “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.” Both Mark and Matthew cite the Aramaic, both emphasizing the significance, and invoking Psalm 22, which Jesus quotes. His arms are outstretched on the cross and He gives everything to the Father in an act of pure love. In this, for Anselm, God is finally given, by a human, the love that God is due. The cross, therefore, is not simply the setting for the culmination of salvation history and the instantiation of salvation itself, it is a window into the life of the Trinity. The Son, who is sent from the Father, gives His Spirit to the Father (Matt 27:50). This is a love so creative that new life, eternal life for humanity, is brought into being by virtue of it. All who partake in this new life through baptism receive a name, as Saul becomes Paul, because as they are born again through the infinite fecundity of Christ’s erotic love on the cross. This is the clearest expression of Eros. This is Eros itself, God’s Eros. It is good. And it is the full and final referent of the word “good” in erotic acts. For erotic acts to be good, they must be so by virtue of the presence of this erotic God in them or as their formal cause. To see what good sex looks like is to answer two questions, (1) How is it possible that human erotic acts could have God’s goodness in them as their formal cause? And (2) What form does it take in human sexual activity? GOD’S EROS AND OURS The answer to the first question is obvious. It is possible only through the activity of the Holy Spirit. Only through the activity of the Holy Spirit can we give ourselves to another in love, that is, all of ourselves, as Christ does, withholding nothing. As Augustine, writing on marriage notes, “even our outer selves have been sanctified through regeneration, and have received the hope of future incorruption, on which account our body is justly designated as ‘the temple of God.’ ‘Your bodies,’ says the apostle, ‘are the temples of the Holy Ghost’ which is in you, and which you have from God.”64 The hegemony of concupiscence, a hegemony which, as discussed, Augustine knew only too well, is overcome by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit,

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

181

who is God, who is the purest form of erotic love, can, for Augustine, dwell in our mortal bodies. This does not mean, of course, that our human nature is permeated and annihilated by God. Concupiscence, as Augustine is clear, “still remains until our entire infirmity be healed by the advancing renewal of our inner man, day by day, when at last our outward man shall be clothed with incorruption,”65 but the real presence of the Holy Spirit can still abide in our bodies and as the formal cause of our actions. This is the basis for their moral goodness and this is why human acts can be truly erotic, in that, they can have Eros within them—by virtue of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As the clearest expression of human Eros, sexual moments are moments of encounter with the Holy Spirit. In erotic desire, we yearn for the other. We yearn for their good and happiness. We yearn to be one with them, to give ourselves totally to them. As an erotic desire, our words cannot exhaust such Eros. It must become flesh. The body acts. The body gives itself in love of the other, desiring the good of the other, and delighting in the good of the other. It is not a commodification of the other, a mining of the other for endorphins or pleasure.66 The other becomes an icon of God, who is faith, hope, love, and goodness, and we give ourselves to God in and through them. We give ourselves wholly, without remainder. Crucially, we can not withhold our potency or fertility, and give ourselves totally. We can not give ourselves totally while consciously withholding something so intrinsic to our humanity. Our self-giving must be total and aimed at the one good—the good of the couple being conformed to God’s triune life—the end of all human life. It does this as it proceeds from a response to the urging of the Spirit—who is love itself. Love is the propulsive force, it comes from God (the Holy Spirit) and moves toward God (the Father) as the ultimate end, through God (the Son) whom we represent in the total gift of ourselves to the other without remainder. The Son is led by the Spirit all through the New Testament, the Spirit who is love itself. Note, the Greek term, however, is not always what is connoted by the translation, “led.” Rather, the Spirit, as in Mark 1:12 “drove” Jesus into the wilderness. The Greek ekballei is a term that connotes, not a gentle leading, but an aggressive pressure. If the Holy Spirit is love, and the Holy Spirit drives Jesus. This love is active, creative, and urgent; As such, it is erotic. The Son is driven by erotic love to give Himself totally without remainder to the Father. The erotic act of the cross consummates the love between the Father and the Son, and gives new life to all humanity. Human Eros can re-present this when it, too, is a complete self-giving to the other, driven by the erotic love that is a gift of the Holy Spirit. This is how human sex, in certain forms, can be an erotic act that participates in intra-Triune Eros. And through it, too, new life can occur.67 It must be a response to and normed by the love that is the Holy Spirit, and it must be a complete and total gift of oneself without remainder. To do otherwise is to fail to mirror the erotic love of Christ. It is an

182

Chapter 5

all too human ruse, rather than a christoform self gift made possible through the work of the Holy Spirit. In all of human history, has there been a “higher” estimation of erotic love, including human sex, than that we see have here in such figures as Von Balthasar and Benedict XVI, Pseudo-Dionysius and, even, Augustine? For the catholic Christian tradition in which they participate, human erotic acts, when they are a total self-giving of one to the other, can re-present intraTriune erotic love to such an extent that they participate in intra-Triune love. This is the unimaginable good that human sexuality can partake in. It can partake in the goal of all life, which is the re-presentation of, and participation in, the Triune life. We have explored this kind of total self-giving all through this book. We saw it in the erotic act in which the blessed Mother gives herself without remainder to God, and the result is the new life in her womb. We saw it in the erotic act of Saul on the road to Damascus and the result is a life so new that requires another name—Paul. Most importantly, it marks the erotic act in which the Son gives Himself totally without remainder to the Father on the cross and the result is new life poured out for all. Sexual acts can represent and participate in this union with God and new life, and they too can lead to the new life that is the hallmark of Triune Eros. It is no coincidence, then, that such acts, glimpsing the goal of all life, are a source of delight. As Pope Pius XII noted, “in the [generative] function, spouses should experience pleasure and enjoyment of body and spirit. Therefore, the spouses do nothing evil in seeking this pleasure and enjoyment. They accept what the Creator has intended for them.”68 But, in favor of sexually gluttonous ends, the temptation is, of course, to hijack such pleasure for an end distinct from the goal of all human life. To use it, not for oneness with the Triune life, which can accept the Holy Spirit, but for the release of endorphins and serotonin alone. For Benedict XVI and Von Balthasar, we are living in God’s world, in which, though erotic acts—self-giving “yeses” mirroring that of the Blessed Virgin—the ecstasy of life in a world less ordinary, can be lived. Contraception, however, within such Catholic thought, represents a refusal of this in favor of a utilization of God’s erotic creation for mundane ends. It is an explicit act of making something—which is intended to weave the couple into God’s triune life—mundane. It makes it mundane by ripping it from its end and setting it in the service of another end, that is distinct from this end. It is so because it is a refusal to give all of ourselves and, instead, withhold our fertility and potency. In so doing, we withhold the fullness of our humanity. We give not as God does but, instead, refusing to partake in God’s Triune self-giving to us, with all its uncertainty and hope, we leverage the pleasures of sex for our own ends.

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

183

It becomes impossible to call such acts good. Why? Because goodness refers to God. Sex can re-present and participate in God, not least Christ’s erotic self giving on this cross. This act can mirror the God of creation and is open to participation in creation. If a person can give themselves totally to the other without remainder, it is only possible through the presence of the Holy Spirit. We are too desirous of our own end, our own pleasures, endorphins, and dopamine to do this apart from God. But through God, who is good, our acts can be good. Contraceptive sex is a conscious refusal of this representation and participation. It is a clear decision to refuse this and instead use sexual pleasure for ends other than the goal of all human life, other than the participation in the Trinity that good sex can be. From the Catholic perspective, such sex looks into the procession of God through creation, a procession that seeks to incorporate us in married erotic love, but then looks away from it, consciously choosing a path more ordinary. This conscious choice is a rejection of union with God, and therefore, is de facto, sinful. It rejects the open-ended superfluity of the Holy Spirit, who brings with Herself the potential of new life. Not a baby, the new life of Christ within us, our new life in the Trinity, in earth and in heaven. Contraceptive sex is problematic, then, not because it does not lead to pregnancy, but because it does not lead to life.69 Critique of this Catholic position is common, although usually unsophisticated. For example, Margret Farley’s attempted refutation of this approach is predicated upon the understanding that, from the Catholic position, anyone who used contraception would be a selfish person and this is not her experience of many couples who use contraception. As she writes, The claim is made that employing contraceptive technology to prevent pregnancy means that . . . it is a love that refuses to give or receive the “total gift” of self. This description and claim, however, cannot stand in the face of the reported experience of countless married persons. The counter descriptions from these spouses constitute genuine testimony from persons who by their whole lives bear witness to a high degree of unselfishness—whether in raising the children they have or in serving the church and society in other ways.70

Farley’s understanding is hobbled by two unnuanced ideas. First, she seems to imply that a selfless person is incapable of a selfish act. Because people are selfless in act X or Y (“raising the children they have or in serving the Church and society”) they cannot be selfish in act A or B. This is of, course, false. A person’s selflessness in act A does not indicate an inability to act selfishly in act B. Second, and more importantly, she fails to appreciate the miracle that complete self-giving to the other without remainder represents. There is an immense distinction between the commonplace unselfishness that marks human life and the self-giving that mirrors Christ’s self-giving on the cross.

184

Chapter 5

To have one’s reflexive erotic desire saturated by selflessness such that the good of the other exhausts it is rare in human beings, and when it happens, it is, literally, supernatural. It is supernatural, within the Catholic tradition, because only God’s self-giving as the Holy Spirit, accepted in the couple’s “I do” in marriage, makes it possible. This acceptance is consummated in the “yes” to God’s will that is the complete self-giving for the other in the erotic act. This self-giving is as ontologically distinct from decency of daily life as the Eucharist is from sharing pizza with friends. A more nuanced rejection of this classical position would be to acknowledge the distinctive good of complete embodied self-giving, but to also hold contraceptive sex as good vis a vis other ends: ends that are not “union with God” but are compatible with the end of union with the Triune God. These ends may include unity between persons, happiness, the compassionate sharing of pleasure, and so on. The difficulty here, however, is that such contingent ends, when sought as a conscious alternative to the ultimate end, are necessarily opposed to this ultimate end, as they are based on an active refusal of the ultimate end. This active refusal is morally problematic. As an explicit “no” to the ultimate end, these contingent ends cannot, in such instances, be coherent with this end because they are what they are as a precise rejection of that end.71 In contraception, there is an active attempt to take a gift for realizing the erotic glory that is the goal of all human life and, instead, use it for alternative ends. It is an act in which we say, “our will be done,” not “your will be done.” Again, the problem with contraception is not its rejection of pregnancy; the problem with contraception is in its rejection of life, life itself, the Holy Spirit. The Catholic position on contraception proceeds from this logic and is dependent on it. It is not on the basis of an understanding of sex as debased,72 but instead on an understanding of all life, including sex, as charged with the glory of God. The goal of my treatment here is systematic and moral, not pastoral. But as the pastoral may inform moral analysis (as in the citation from Farley above), it needs to be noted again how practical the doctors of the Church, such as Augustine, are. They lived in a world in which, like now, the vast majority of Catholics willfully utilized Eros for access to endorphins and serotonin. Their parishioners did not find it any easier to avoid fornication than we do. The fathers of the Church were pastors, and were sensitive to this. They sought to work with people who were journeying toward a sexual life more reflective of God’s Eros. This aspect is often lost sight of by a modern culture that is inherently legalist. From such a perspective, the position that “person X sins in having contraceptive sex” is intolerable, because the assumption is that person X would be held as reprobate within such an understanding. But such an understanding is based on the legalistic ethical models that fuel modern

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

185

consciousness, not the embodied pastorally aware models that we find in Augustine. Every Christian fails and every Christian has moments when we accept God’s self-giving and know God in transubstantiating ways. Every Christian knows such moments, but nonetheless fails again. Life is comprised of millions of moments in which we relate to God, sometimes saturated with the Spirit, and sometimes, sadly, in fearful rejection of the beauty the Holy Spirit offers. This is a reality Augustine knew. In Sermon 51,73 we see Augustine at his most episcopal, that is, at his most pastoral. It is an early fifth-century sermon that feels almost contemporary, not least because he laments the low attendance at Mass as it’s neither Christmas nor Easter. He teases his congregation because many missed Church to attend the games that were in town. Unlike most modern sermons, however, he speaks about what sex is for and proclaims to the congregation the reality of what human sex should be. But, he also adds, But if [the married couple] can’t manage it let them demand the debt,74 but don’t let them go beyond their debtors. Both the woman and the man may relieve their weakness with each other. Don’t let him go to another woman, don’t let her go to another man (that’s where adultery gets its name from, as much as to say ad alterum, to another). Even if they go beyond the limits of the matrimonial bargain, don’t let them go beyond the limits of the matrimonial bed.75 Is it really not a sin, to demand the debt from your marriage partner more than is required for the procreation of children? It is indeed a sin, but it is a venial sin. . . . Don’t impose upon yourselves beyond your strength, lest by refraining from each other you lapse into adulterous liaisons.76

This is Augustine, the man who, seemingly, “fused Christianity together with hatred of sex and pleasure.”77 This is the Augustine, who is “the father of a fifteen-hundred-year-long anxiety about sex and an enduring hostility to it” and who “dramatizes the fear of sexual pleasure, equating pleasure with perdition in such a way that anyone who tries to follow his train of thought will have the sense of being trapped in a nightmare.”78 This sermon exposes the hyperbolic clumsiness of such claims. If the claims are defensible, their defense is that they come from a culture in which deontological approaches to seek to dominate morality. They come from a culture in which those who fall short of moral laws are canceled and held as reprobate. In light of this, their error is somewhat understandable in that they assume of Augustine and the pre-moderns what is true of us, today—that we despise and cancel those who do not conform to what we hold as moral law. The sermon shows a very different Augustine. Augustine names sin for what it is, but also understands, appreciates, and journeys compassionately with his congregants who, like him, are striving to

186

Chapter 5

accept the union with God we are called to. While the binary rationality that is endemic to modernity ostracizes and condemns those who are ethically flawed (as contemporary left/right debates, not least in the United States, illustrates), Augustine knows that God’s love calls him to more, but does so in a way that never ostracizes those struggling and stumbling toward this end. To be sure, in Sermon 51, he would be criticized by liberals for seeing sexual desire as uncontrollable and he would be criticized by conservatives for advocating a smaller sin in order to avoid a larger one. But this is what he does. He is clear about fornication as sinful, but he suggests that in some instances it may hold more serious transgressions at bay. Sermon 51 is a lofty appreciation of what sex is, coupled with, and never binaurally opposed to, a pastoral vision that cares for and journeys with women and men. While the phariseeism of modernity assumes that we must either affirm immoral act X as moral, or persecute and declare reprobate people guilty of it, Augustine and the tradition of the Church are participants in a different moral culture. Their approach is communitarian, each encouraging the other to a life less ordinary while journeying together as all fall short. SACRAMENTALITY While marriage represents the “end” of many Hollywood movies and Disney fairy tales, from the Catholic point of view it is a beginning of a process, a process which, like all sacraments, has christification as its goal. As a sacrament, marriage is a “sign” and an “instrument.”79 A sign of what and an instrument for what? Marriage is a sign of faith, hope, and love, and it is a sign of God’s will for creation. It is a sign of faith, hope, and love because two people refuse the tyranny of the banal and commit their lives to each other in all their uncertainty. They have no idea what will happen. They make a lifelong commitment, in sickness and in health, with no idea if their partner will, within days, develop a lifelong physical or mental illness that will radically alter their lives and change them (in terms of attributes) from the person standing beside them at the altar. Marriage is a commitment to not reduce their partner to attributes, but instead, to love them forever as God loves them. As such, it is a sign of faith, hope, and love. It is also, as Matthew 19:4–6 makes clear, a sign of God’s plan for creation. In becoming one flesh, woman and a man re-present the original human of Genesis 5:2. It is only when the one flesh is divided (Gen 2:21–24) that there are two genders, two parts of a whole. The male, Adam, is not the original creation as he is the result of the alteration of this original human, through the

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

187

removal of a rib. Eve, too, is not the original Adamah, as she is formed from this rib. Only together is the Adamah reconfigured and made whole. In Catholic tradition, different figures emphasize different aspects of this curious truth. Gregory of Nyssa,80 famously, holds that the division of genders anticipates the Fall. Aquinas81 explicitly rejects this, while Augustine82 is, perhaps, closer to Gregory. But all hold the original human as a prefigurment of the Christ. Christ is the second Adam, Christ in whom there is “neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28). Christ is the human God intends, and Christ is the restoration of this human. Conformation to Christ is the goal of all other humans and marriage, in binding together two parts of a whole, is one path to conformation to Christ. For Augustine, “human nature is complete in both sexes.”83 Gregory and Clement of Alexandria84 hold the original Adamah prior to the division of the sexes prefigures the Christ.85 For Gregory, the creation in Genesis 2 is “a departure from the Prototype: for in Christ Jesus, as the apostle says, there is neither male nor female.”86 The “prototype” is in the form of Christ, as Michelangelo brilliantly illustrates in the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo used the same model, the same face with the same body, for Adam in the creation scene, that he used for Christ in the Last Judgement scene behind the altar. Following Paul, Christ is, for Michelangelo, the second Adam, and the original human, Adam, is the type of Him that is to come. For Aquinas, friendship and procreation necessitate the two becoming one flesh for life, unlike other animals (I: Q. 92, Art.1). This is intended from the very beginning of creation, for Aquinas, and couples presenting themselves for marriage are a sign of this. This is why marriage, for Catholics, is more than an exigency, it is a sign of God’s plan for creation. Creation is to be gathered into Christ, and male female couples complete the union. It is a union that, as Jesus notes in the Gospels, is inscribed in Genesis from the very beginning. Jesus own proclamation on marriage in Matthew 19 draws on this passage from Genesis. It is worth citing: But for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man.  Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.” Therefore, a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

In Matthew 19:4–6, Jesus proclaims, “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this

188

Chapter 5

reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’ So they are no longer two, but one.” Because Jesus says it, the Catholic tradition has always understood marriage as signifying the complementary nature of the sexes established in Genesis 1 and 2. Sexual activity is the most explicit expression of “one flesh” within marriage. Scripture and tradition anoint male–female union as a telos of creation and a trajectory toward the Triune life. It is because of this that marriage is not a simple exigency of nature but is, for Catholics, a sacrament. Jesus’ reference to “one flesh” shows that sex is a core aspect of marriage. It is especially central to the instrumental aspect of the sacrament of marriage. As Aquinas writes, “The distinction of sexes and the difference of members will be for the restoration of the perfection of human nature” (Supp Q.81, Art. 4). Marriage, then, and the sexual act as its formal expression, is a sign, but is also an instrument for the conformation of persons to Christ. This will be the focus of the remainder of the chapter. THE SEXUAL ACT AS CENTRAL TO THE INSTRUMENTALITY OF THE SACRAMENT OF MARRIAGE The Holy Spirit wills to give Herself to us. In marriage, a woman and a man accept this self-giving as a couple. All people are for christification, and in marriage two people express a desire to be christified, not as individuals, but as a couple. As the Adamah in Genesis 2 is one, prior to the division into male and female, and as in Christ there is neither male nor female (Gal 3:28) women and men seek to become christified by refiguring the whole—male and female, as one flesh. This refiguring occurs through christoform acts of self-giving. All such acts accept the Holy Spirit, without whose presence they are not possible. This acceptance shapes the self in union with Christ as surely as it weaves the two into one body in Christ. Marriage is as instrument as it provides space in which acts that accept of the Holy Spirit can and must happen. As Aristotle knew and Aquinas emphasized, morality is, in part, habitual (II: Q.55, Art.1). In the same way that a person who jogs daily will respond to a flight of stairs with a slower heart rate than someone who doesn’t, so, too, someone who practices forbearance will embody such forbearance naturally when faced with moral movements. In marriage, virtues must be practiced, or the marriage will die. Either the couple practice justice, tolerance, and so on—and thereby become just, tolerant things—or they will destroy the relationship. Either the relationship makes us just, tolerant things or it will end. Marriage is an instrument for transformation not least because either it

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

189

changes us, or we kill it. As such, in this very basic, prosaic way, the sacrament of marriage is an instrument for transformation. Otherwise, the lifelong relationship frays into misery. The most radical form of transformation of participants in marriage toward Christ is achieved in acts that accept the Holy Spirit. The ontological presence of the Holy Spirit christifies and makes possible the Christ-like acts of the couple. These acts are not simply “unselfish,” but are acts that tug at the very limits of human capacities. In it is this sense that, fueled by the Holy Spirit, the couple aim to give themselves to each other totally, in love for the good of each other. This self-giving is always erotic. It is the form of complete self giving in the sexual act that we spoke of earlier. It is only possible as God, in marriage, is established as the end of marriage. Seeing God through the icon of the other, the self-giving to the other is also and at once a selfgiving to God. It is a self-giving inspired by the Holy Spirit and as such it is a participation in the Spirit’s erotic self-giving to the Father. Because of this, creation—the act of the erotic God—is possible. It is possible as human selfgiving to each other and God is not apart from, but ontologically participatory in, the Triune persons’ creative love of each other. This is, from the Catholic perspective, good sex. It is a participation in good—the Holy Spirit, as good—the Son who is re-presented via the Spirit, for good—the Creator who is loved through the other. It is in a participation in the Spirit and the Son’s love of the Father. As such, it is an erotic participation in intra-Triune Eros. Loving like this, to this extent, even knowing that this is what love ought look like, is possible only through the Holy Spirit who is accepted in the “I do” of sacramental marriage. This “I do” is a commitment of the marriage to God, for God. Only as such is God placed clearly and consciously as the telos of marriage. Only as such is the marriage and all the goods in it consciously placed in the service of the ultimate end of union with God. Marriage is established in creation for the creation of humanity. The Sacrament of marriage is established in creation itself for the conformation of a couple to Christ, who is the true human, the original human, the one we are to become in faithfulness to God. This is the Catholic understanding of marriage, in the Fathers, doctors, and the Catechism. To say it is not because the majority of baptized Catholics may not know it, or agree with it, is like saying that the Catholic position on the Eucharist does not see it as the real presence of Christ because the majority of baptized Catholics, according to recent surveys, may not know it or agree with it.87 It would be intellectually dishonest. It is theology that is sophisticated, and at times even mystical, as all sacraments are. And it is the Catholic theology of sex, which is a precise, specific, and beautiful expression of all that marriage, as a sacrament, aims for. Sexuality outside of this end of good and beauty is, from the Catholic perspective, like gorging on food for pleasure alone. It not only fails to lead

190

Chapter 5

to conformation to God, but it damages the person gorging and, often, others too. Sex is either an icon of God or it is an idol. And in sex outside of marriage, same-sex sexual acts, masturbation, and so on, sex functions as an idol as an end it itself, divorced from the end that has been detailed above. Now, this does not, as we saw Augustine arguing in the last section, mean that such acts are always mortal sins, but they are, necessarily within this Catholic lens, morally problematic. A danger with such a high, lofty, understanding of marriage is that it may imply that those who do not seek to follow such a path into the Triune life are somehow deficient. This would be an error. It is important to emphasize again that this path, manifest in the couple who re-presents the whole human Christ, and participate in God’s Triune life as a couple, is not the destiny of humanity.88 It is the path chosen by specific humans as one specific means to christification. While it is good and beautiful, so too are countless other paths. In marriage people seek to be conformed to Christ as a couple, while in many other paths—we might think of holy orders—people are conformed to Christ as an individual. While I hope I have shown something of the nuance and sophistication of the traditional position, the Catholic theology of sex is still open to the accusations of being hate filled. Because, after all, is it not violent to suggest that people who do not, or can not, have sex in this way should seek other paths to union with God and refrain from sexual activity? Is this not a barbaric request, denying who they are? The fact that suggesting that someone doesn’t have sex unless this sex can help them conform to Christ is seen as denying who they are is interesting. If someone suggested that I ate in ways that allowed me to approach food as an icon of God and the hungry, we wouldn’t, I don’t think, see it as a denial of who I am? I have disordered desire for food. If my doctor says I shouldn’t act on this, is she denying who I am? When she says that I shouldn’t sit on the couch gorging cheese puffs, is she opposing God, who made me “just the way I am,” with my insatiable desire for junk food? Most people would not agree that the analogy holds, as, in the modern West, a curious thing has developed. In the modern West, our sexual desire has come to be seen as “who I am,” in ways that our other desires, even as inherent as our desire for food, is not. In various ways, this perspective can be found in Darwinism, Freudianism, Nietzscheanism, hedonism. But these perspectives are at odds with Christianity, which does not reduce us to our sexual selves no more than it reduces us to our dietary selves. The idea that someone could live a happy and fulfilled life without sex is not a controversial one within Christianity. Sex is more central to identity in the modern West than ever before. Who did Caesar or Alexander have sex with? Were they defined by these sexual acts? Did Alexander see himself as “straight” or “gay”? Did

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

191

Kant, or Newton? It’s very likely that these categories didn’t exist for them. Whether they were sexually active with people of different genders, as likely was Alexander, or no one at all, as likely were Newton and Kant, they were not their sexual desire. They didn’t see heterosexual or homosexual—largely nineteenth-century inventions89—as categories. In contrast, after Freud and Darwin, we are increasingly reduced to our sexual desires. But this is not the Catholic position. Seeing the Catholic position which I have laid out as pathological is further encouraged by the conflation of love with sex within popular culture. This is, perhaps, inevitable within secularism as, without God, love is reduced to human expressions of love. Without God there is no semantic content of the word “love” other than as a human construct. And so love, within our culture, most frequently refers to romantic love, which has sexual identity and expression as implicit within it. In this context, sex and love have become so interwoven such that the latter is a synonym of the former. In school, my children learn that sexuality is about who people are inclined to “love,” rather than who people are most likely to want to have sex with. We saw in chapter 1 how reason has been narrowed to a sliver of the rational. So too in the modern West, love is increasingly reduced to a sliver of love, romantic love, which has sexual expression as its grammar. Because of this, to suggest that a person proceed toward a union with God in a non-sexual way is, within this curious, antonymic reality of today, to suggest a person somehow be set apart from either their “true selves,” or from love. Hence, the Catholic suggestion that many people—priests, those attracted only to members of the same-sex,90 religious brothers and sisters—have a vocation to participation in the Triune life other than as a married couple, is seen as hateful. But, from the Catholic perspective, people are naturally equipped to participate in the Triune life in a plurality of ways. Within an ecosystem, plants that receive sunlight and rain produce different fruits in accordance with their nature.91 So, too, people who receive the Son and the Spirit produce fruits in accordance with their inherent traits. These fruits are not hierarchical in the sense that all partake in union with God through reception of the Son and Spirit, but the forms this partaking takes are in accordance with gifts. As different plants in an ecosystem produce different fruits in accordance with what they are, so too people produce fruits in keeping with who they are. The fruits of the celibate are different from, and in no way subordinate to, the fruits of erotic self-giving through which married people are shaped, via relationship, toward a distinctive kind of christoformity. For most within the tradition, they are superior to the married path. Within the naturalism and romanticism of modernity, sexual relationships are seen as the truth of human being in the world. But this is at odds with the Catholic perspective, which sees this trajectory as one among many. Because the secular often reduces a person to their sexual self,

192

Chapter 5

the suggestion that a person should not have sex is increasingly see as brutalizing of that person. This is incomprehensible for the Catholic imagination, however, as within the Christian understanding, persons are not reduced to their sexual self. The Catholic understanding of sex and sexuality presented in this chapter is that erotic desire can, through the operation of the Holy Spirit, accepted in marriage, lead to a re-presentation of intra-triune Eros such that the couple can participate in the Triune life. This path to participation in the Triune life is one among many. It is a path wherein the goal of re-presenting the very Eros that we see in creation itself can be realized. Sexual desire, without this possibility, without this expressed agency of the Holy Spirit toward this possibility, cannot avoid fixating on a series of contingent ends. These ends, such as pleasure, happiness, support, and so on, are not ends in themselves. There are only good qua the ultimate end. The support a married couple may give each other in accumulating vast sums of wealth is not necessarily a good thing by virtue of it being “support.” It is good qua its end. Within Catholic thought, all sexual acts outside of marriage, heterosexual and homosexual, cannot re-present intra-Triune Eros sufficiently to participate in intra-Triune Eros. They cannot for two main reasons, both predicated upon the creativity and sacramentality previously discussed. (1) Representation must re-present sufficiently for it to represent at all. The letter “L” does not represent “H” because, despite moderate similarity, the representation is not sufficient. Creative Eros, reconfiguring the whole of Genesis 1, reconfiguring the Christ whom this whole prefigures, is not re-presented in acts that are taxonomically classified alongside, but are ontologically distinct from, acts that do. These acts neither re-figure the whole, spoken of by Christ, nor re-present the openness to creativity that accompanies the fullness of Eros in creation, incarnation, and salvation. Thus, taxonomical similarity disguises ontological difference, (2) Representation of actual Eros within Catholic thought can only happen due to the presence of that re-presented in the act itself. Thus, an act of compassion re-presents Christ due to the presence of Christ in the act by virtue of the presence of the Holy Spirit. As previously discussed, the Holy Spirit is accepted in embodied acts. She does not superimpose herself onto an unwitting “victim.” She is accepted with a “yes.” The sacrament of marriage, as discussed above, is this “yes,” wherein a couple accepts, in hope and love, a distinct path. A path where, by being shaped by cardinal and theological virtues, the couple may come to participate in the Triune life. This “yes” is mirrored in the “yeses” that punctuate the erotic life of marriage. The question will be asked, “why then could a same-sex couple not say ‘yes’ to the Holy Spirit in marriage and thus come to the total self-giving in and through the spirit that enables sexual acts to represent the triune life?” As discussed above, within Catholic theology this cannot happen because

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

193

Marriage, as a sacrament, is a sign and an instrument. It is a sign of the logic of creation where the human person, male and female, was created, re-formed in Jesus Christ and is re-iterated in every marriage. The male and female Adamah, as Michelangelo brilliantly portrays on the Sistine chapel following (1 Cor 15:45) is restored in a human union predicated upon gender complementarity. In marriage, the male and female seek to restore the pre-fallen Adamah who itself prefigures the Christ who is beyond male and female (Gal 3.28). In doing so, they partake in the openness to creation that accompanies complete and total self-giving. The fecundity their eros is open to is not merely analogical to the life-giving creativity that accompanies intra-trinitarian Eros, it is participant in it. This fecundity is not possible within contraceptive or non-complementary unions. Such people are not deficient nor in any way incapable of partaking in the fullness of salvation. There are, in every such person, countless other forms of desire active within them that represent modes of accepting God’s self-giving. Thomas Aquinas’ path to the Triune life was not through the particular path of marriage. I have no idea about St. Thomas’ sexual desire nor who, if anyone, it focused upon. The suggestion that a priest, nun, a member of the LGBT+ community, or Thomas Aquinas is somehow “less” by virtue of desires and attributes that lead to full participation in the Triune life in ways other than sacramental marriage, is absurd. As stressed from the outset of this chapter, every desire, within Catholic theology, needs to be discerned in terms of the role it plays in accepting God’s self-giving, that is, its role in our realization of the end for which we are. Every Christian must be chaste, refusing to act on desires for wealth, self-assertion, revenge, more food than we need in a world marked by hunger, too many showers in a world threatened by environmental disaster. Chastity is ubiquitous in the moral life. Chastity represents a commitment to live in harmony with God’s will and to control our desire toward this end. Chasity acknowledges the Lordship of God, rather than the Lordship of my desire. It does not reject human selfhood but accepts the full flowering of the human toward our ultimate end. If erotic desire is not commensurate with the re-presentation of God’s Eros, then it must either be shaped toward doing so (as with a married couple) or subordinated to desires that will enable our re-presentation of God in other areas. This is important, not least because the attempted replication of the married path in those who do not have desire to re-present the creative union of the adamah distracts from and impedes the embrace of God’s self-giving in many other ways. If one cannot seek to represent Christ with another, re-establishing the human, male and female, of Genesis, whom Christ restores fully and finally, then to devote one’s life to this is a loss. Let’s take Thomas Aquinas,

194

Chapter 5

whose gifts enabled him to re-present Christ the teacher, who could accept the Holy Spirit in the intellectual life and know and represent Christ through this. Let’s say he lived in a culture in which singing or athletics, were seen as the primary ways of being one with God. Aquinas would have spent his life trying to do something he was bad at and, in so doing, failed to be sanctified for the good of himself and countless others. If the pictures are accurate, it is likely that Thomas Aquinas was not a fast runner. Running was not his path, perhaps singing, or compassion, or leadership, or countless other paths were not his paths either. To devote his life to them, against his nature, would have been to fail in the attempt, and to distract him from being himself. The same holds true for people who do not have the natural inclinations for marriage. Such people, like Thomas Aquinas and countless others, can know God in other ways more in keeping with who they are. To be colonized by a culture which holds romantic love as the end of all life such that we act in opposition to who we truly are—a person made to know and love God—is a tragedy. If all humans were intended for participating in the Triune life through marriage, it would seem a cruel and painful reality that some people do not have desires consistent with this end. But all humans are not for this end. Love is possible without it, as is friendship and countless modes of life in which the person can accept and be woven into God’s life for their transformation and the transformation of the world. These paths are not lesser paths. They may, in a world shaped by the ubiquity of sexual romance as the telos of life in television, music, and film, seem so. But from the Catholic perspective they are not. It was not the path for Aquinas, Hildegard, nor any of the doctors of the Church whose thought this book aims to invoke. Their path was seen by much traditional Christianity as a higher path, the path of marriage and sexual union the more mundane and, indeed, lesser path. While Christians today strive to see married sexual unions as very worthy paths, we must note that in the banality of the late modern West, these unions are understood as the sole, ubiquitous telos of all human life. Because of this, the Catholic position, with a more dramatic and diverse understanding of human teloi, is seen as violent in that it suggests that not all people should proceed on paths involving sexual union and marriage. In this, the catholic Christian perspective is held as suspicious precisely because of its embrace of diversity. The monolithic understanding of sexual relationships as the ubiquitous goal of all human life is, ironically, the very logic behind seeing the Catholic position, which embraces diversity, as oppressive. My goal in this chapter has been to ground the traditional Catholic understanding of sex and sexuality in the theological grammar that fueled it. My hope is that reconnecting it to this theological grammar can serve a number of purposes. (1) It can nuance an instrumentalist or legalist reading of the Catholic approach, whether by proponents or detractors. It is not that a literal

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

195

reading of a line in Leviticus or an instrumentalist understanding of natural law condemns Catholics to follow unreasonable moral laws in opposition to Reason. Once the Catholic understanding of God and the person, and how they relate, is accepted, the Catholic position on sex and sexuality flows, as I hope to have shown, rationally. (2) This understanding will not, of course, convince detractors. Hopefully, however, I have shown something of its sophistication as well as the pastoral sensitivity we see in figures such as Augustine—something far too rarely acknowledged. Finally, (3) I hope that by restoring the Catholic understanding to the grammar of the operation of the Holy Spirit, on which it is dependent, Catholics may have recourse to a theological framework that is more coherent and, in some ways, more beautiful than that which is more frequently offered. The renewal of Catholic moral theology requires the renewal of its understanding of sex and sexuality. This renewal, I hope to have shown, cannot occur without reconnecting it to the Trinitarian grammar from which it flowed. NOTES 1. Andrea Tornielli and Giacomo Galazzi, This Economy Kills: Pope Francis on Capitalism and Social Justice (Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 2015): 224. 2. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, citing Persona Humana 8, states, “Tradition has always declared that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered.’” Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994): 480. 3. See Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1990): 41. 4. See Oscar Salinas, “The Psychological Roots of St. Augustine’s Theories of Good and Evil.” In Biography 15, no. 4 (1992): 348–370. 5. See Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006): 139. 6. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Women, Sexuality, Ecology, and the Church,” in Conscience (Washington, D.C.), Spring/Summer 14 (1993) (1–2): 8. 7. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1990): 6. 8. Ranke-Heinemann, Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith, trans. Peter Heinegg (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994): 193. 9. Jason Berry, “One Angry Catholic,” The New York Times, December 30, 1990. 10. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1990): 75.

196

Chapter 5

11. Rosemary Radford Reuther, “Women, Sexuality, Ecology, and the Church,” in Conscience (Washington, D.C.), Spring/Summer 14 (1993) (1–2): 9. 12. The council of Nicaea holds that Jesus is true God and true man. Chalcedon clarifies that these two natures are not mixed. As such, Jesus, as discussed in chapter 2, is both theologically and anthropologically normative. To know God, we look to Christ, but similarly, to know the true human as God wills us to be, is to look to Christ. This understanding of Christ as “true human” is the driving principle of much theological anthropology. 13. Augustine in De Trinitatae 7, 5, and 6, Aquinas, citing Augustine in ST 1: 93:5. 14. Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum Academic, 2006). 15. Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (New York: Continuum Academic, 2006): 15. 16. For example, ST I:II, Q.1–5. 17. For an understanding of the reality of God as substantially present in ontologically good acts, see chapter 2. 18. Even bacon-flavored Cheetos. 19. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 3. 20. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 63. 21. Commodification, in this sense, refers to the establishment of a thing as something whose meaning can be established by the commodifier. For example, trees and people are what they are in relation to God. The “other,” be it a tree or a person, has a mysterious relationship to God that I can never know. They are what they are to me, but they are more that this and have a dignity based upon this relationship with God, which I can never ignore. I must be in relation to them with the respect that this dignity requires. To commodify them is to ignore this relationship of them to God and see them wholly in terms of their meaning or usefulness to me. The tree becomes firewood or shelter alone, the person becomes a source of sexual gratification, or comfort, or emotional support alone. They are severed from what they are in themselves and are understood only in terms of how they appear to me. This violence is endemic in modernity, not least as it proceeds from the epistemological foundations of modernity wherein the noumena of a thing is bracketed and only its phenomenological appearance is epistemologically significant. This move, coupled with the relativism it inevitably leads to, also leads to the commodification of the real. And, in terms of the current section, most specifically people who are reduced to their attributes pro me. 22. By which he means baptism. Therefore, it is a powerful force that draws on desire but, after baptism, this pressure on desire does not necessarily overwhelm human capacity to resist it. 23. citing Sirach 18:30. 24. In the sense of participatory knowledge, which we looked at in chapter 2. 25. For example, see Sermon 51 in Augustine and Daniel Edward Doyle, Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part Iii, Homilies, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007): 63–75.

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

197

26. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 207–208. 27. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 205. 28. The analogy between desire for food and sex is not mine, but Augustine’s. He writes, “For, what food is to the health of man, intercourse is to the health of the race, and both are not without carnal pleasure, which, however, when modified and put to its natural use with a controlling temperance, cannot be wrong. However . . . what unlawful food is in the excessive indulgence of the stomach and palate, this is unlawful intercourse. . . .” Augustine, Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999): 32. 29. As Augustine notes, Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 205. 30. Such understandings of the icon and idol are, of course, indebted to Jean Luc Marion. 31. St Augustine, Sermons (148–183) on the New Testament. Vol. III/5. Trans. Edmund Hill, O.P. (New Rochelle, New York: New City Press, 1992): 35. 32. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1967). 33. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 53. 34. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 132–33. 35. We shall later see the utterly radical reciprocity of Augustine’s understanding of marriage which is in direct contrast to the emotional violence of his relationship in Carthage. 36. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine: A New Translation by Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963): 51. 37. As he writes “I came to Carthage, and all around me in my ears were the activities of impure loves. I was not yet in love, but I loved the idea of love.” Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine: A New Translation by Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963): 52: 38. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, Father of the Church, trans. Charles T. Wilcox, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Boston, MA: St. Paul Editions, 1961): 1. 39. Ibid. 40. It is no coincidence that Augustine refers to his lover as being “torn from my side” when she was taken from him. 41. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, Charles T. Wilcox, ed. Roy J. Deferrari (Boston, MA: St. Paul Editions, 1961): 1. 42. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 109. 43. She returned to Africa “vowing that she would never go with another man.” Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 109.

198

Chapter 5

44. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 63–64. 45. Echoes of this lesson are audible again and again in his sermons. For example, when he tells his congregation about the role of the husband, as head of the household, caring for and helping his wife find union with God the guilt at his damaging of his concubine, rather than working with her toward the salvation that all people are for, is palpable beneath the surface; see Sermon 9 in Augustine and Daniel Edward Doyle, Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part III, Homilies, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007): 25–44. “Those who don’t want to be faithful in chastity to their wives—and there are thousands of such men—don’t want me to say these things. . . .” 46. Of course, two modern responses to this question are outside of Augustine’s capacity to countenance. One is the naïve one which denies the validity of the question and fails to see the way in which we are prone to commodify others sexually, as utilities to gain physical or emotional highs. This is alien to Augustine. It is not part of his theological tradition and simply doesn’t cohere with his lived experience. The second response is the modern one which holds commodification and utilization as fine as long as both parties give their “enthusiastic consent.” Here the parties, from an Augustinian position, have an intentional union which solidifies them in a culture of commodification and resists union with God. They commit to the disordered desire to mine each other as commodities but hold that the commodities mined—sexual gratification for sexual gratification—sexual gratification for emotional support—and so on, can represent a fair and just exchange. This approach is valued within the “low bar” ethical criteria of late modernity. It can serve to avoid illegality and criminality. Augustine has a higher bar. While both parties are satisfied by the arrangement, it is an arrangement that, from Augustine’s perspective, confirms both in a state of seeing each other as commodities. It solidifies both as miners of the other in seeking ends each have decided are worthwhile. But for Augustine the end of human acts is a re-presentation of God to such an extent that these acts can accept participation in God. Hence the relationship which seeks more mundane ends mirrors a middle-aged man gorging on a legally purchased large bag of chips. While the act is legal, the end the man seeks is an end that seals him off from God and the hungry. It imprisons him in banality. The natural good, food, like sex, can lead people to know and relate to God. But in a relationship which seeks only the fair exchange of commodities, sex becomes an idol, miring participants in the banality of contingent ends. 47. Augustine discusses this failing to see God as the source through fixating on the beautiful things that represent Him in Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 63ff. 48. See “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The girl and their mother are coming home from Mass. The child has been a model of disunity and prejudice throughout despite being “a temple of the Holy Ghost.” She fails to see the presence of God in the world and others. While there is no resolution, there is still some hope that she may change and acquire the ability to see the world differently as O’Connor concludes, “Her mother let the conversation drop and the child’s round face was lost in thought. She turned it toward the window and looked out over a stretch of pasture land that rose

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

199

and fell with a gathering greenness until it touched the dark woods. The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay of road hanging over the trees.” 49. For Reuther and Ranke-Heinemann, and indeed in the popular imagination Augustine is the principal architect of problematic approaches to sex in Christianity. This treatment may seem to support that in many critics. It is important, for a fuller picture, to note just how practical and pastoral Augustine’s treatment of sex in his sermons. His sermons are full of encouragement to glory coupled with understanding for the weakness of the human person. As bishop he knows and accepts that humans will have sex for gratification. This is venial sin for Augustine; it is understandable, common, and forgivable. It is not good and is an impediment to the glory that humans are for, but Augustine in countless sermons, not least sermon 51, is practical and altogether earthy in his understanding of how husbands and wives work collectively to gradually help each other’s movement to the divine life we are called to embody. The fact is that Augustine, whose subtlety and grasp of how time can accept Eternity’s self-giving to it causes him to see what sex can be, also holds that sex for gratification is no more problematic than the second cookie I had after lunch. This is not to say that it is unimportant and should not be worked on, after all, how many of Augustine’s detractors will devote massive parts of their life to reforming and extirpating the effects of such cookies with a vigor in the gym and through diets that would make any puritan tip their hats? But Augustine’s treatment of the topic in his sermons is infused with a practicality and pastoral sensitivity wholly at odds with the popular perception of him. 50. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1990): 75. 51. Joseph Ratzinger, “The Holy Spirit as Communio: Concerning the Relationship of Pneumatology and Spirituality in Augustine,” In International Catholic Review: Communio 25(2) (1998): 324–339. 52. Hereafter Denys. 53. Denys, Div. Nom., IV, 13. 709B. Colm Luibheid’s translation, in Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1987). 54. “What it signifies is a capacity to effect a unity, an alliance, and a particular comingling in the Beautiful and the Good. It is a capacity which preexists through the Beautiful and the Good. It is dealt out from the Beautiful and the Good through the Beautiful and the Good. It binds the things of the same order in a mutually regarding union. It moves superior to provide for subordinate, and it stirs the subordinate in a return toward the superior.” Denys, Div. Nom., IV 12 709D (“Beautiful” and “Good” being Divine names). 55. Ecstasy. 56. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1983): 122. 57. For example, see From Glory to Glory, Texts from Gregory of Nyssa’s Mystical Writings, introd. Jean Danielou, transl. H. Musurillo (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, reprint 1979): 247.

200

Chapter 5

58. Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 64. 59. Augustine, On the Trinity: Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts In History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans, Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 208. 60. This is not to suggest that the fullness of the Catholic position on sex and sexuality can be found in Augustine. Later Church thinkers and especially documents, such as the Catechism 1643–1654, are far more positive about the good of the sexual act than Augustine, who holds sex as inferior to chastity even within marriage. But without seeing the theological foundations at work in the Church Fathers, we can not see them in the tradition that continues on from them. 61. For Gregory, God’s love animates ours in the way air animates water, there is, of course, no hint of mingling of natures, as he writes, “Air is not retained in water when it is dragged down by some weighty body and left in the depth of the water, but rises quickly to its kindred element” Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium III, Gregorii Nysseni Opera, 2:131–132. 62. As opposed to good solely by analogy. All good acts are good by analogy in that the goodness of acts performed by a human is infinitely less good than goodness itself, that is the goodness of God. But some acts are solely analogical, in that there is not active goodness (God) operative in the act, while the term “good” can be applied to other acts directly in speaking of the real presence of good (God, the Holy Spirit) as their formal cause. 63. For a superb engagement with this theme in scripture, see chapter 7 of David Ford’s Christian Wisdom: Desiring God and Learning in Love (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 64. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, eds. Philip Schaff and Benjamin Warfield, trans. Robert Wallis and Peter Holms (Created Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2015): book 1, chapter 20. 65. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, eds. Philip Schaff and Benjamin Warfield, trans. Robert Wallis and Peter Holms, (Created Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2015): book 1, chapter 29. 66. Augustine’s former relationship is never too far below the surface of his On Marriage and Concupiscence. And contrary to popular perception, it is his own guilt he stresses more than his former lover. For example, “For, if a man lives with a woman for a time, until he finds another worthy either of his high station in life or his wealth, whom he can marry as his equal, in his very soul he is an adulterer,” similarly his noting in the Confessions that his concubine vowed never to be with another man is surely not too far from the surface when he writes, "does not plan to marry and is prepared to refrain absolutely from such an act, surely I could not easily bring myself to call her an adulteress” Augustine, Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999): 15. 67. Which is not, of course, to say that complete self givings of one’s whole self, fertility/potency and all, to the other for the sake of the other, which does not lead to new life, is thereby illicit. The erotic act is always Christoform when it is complete in

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

201

its self giving and open to the outcomes that accompanies complementary self giving irrespective of what those outcomes are. 68. Pius XII, Discourse, October 29, 1951. 69. This distinction is important as too often the two are conflated and the contingent end of pregnancy is mistaken for the ultimate end of life. This leads to the suggestion by critics of the Catholic position that sex between infertile people must always be sinful as it can not lead to pregnancy. We represent Christ’s peacefulness by acts of peace, re-presenting Christ’s peace in an act of peace that is possible to us only because of the presence of Christ, through the Holy Spirit, in us. So too we represent the total self giving of the Triune persons when we give ourselves totally to the other an act not possible without the explicit operation of the Holy Spirit. This self giving does not depend on the outcome of pregnancy in order for it to be good. Contraception, however, is an explicit rejection of this total self giving, withholding our wholeness. 70. Margaret Farley, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics (London: Continuum, 2006): 287. 71. Augustine discusses this in chapter 17 of book 1 of Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, eds. Philip Schaff and Benjamin Warfield, trans. Robert Wallis and Peter Holms (Created Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2015). Sex without the explicit end of procreation is a minor, venial, issue for Augustine. But the conscious planned decision to use sex for ends other than union with God is seen by Augustine as a very significant sin. Contraception and abortion are treated of by Augustine in this chapter as examples of this, as he writes, “Sometimes this lustful cruelty, or, cruel lust, leads to such extravagant methods as the use of drugs to secure infertility; or else, if this fails, to destroying the conceived seed prior to birth, so that it would perish rather than receive vitality; or if living in the womb, killing it before it was born.” Such acts are not venial for Augustine precisely because they are a clear and conscious “No” to God’s will for human sexuality, instead using it exclusively for ends other than God’s. 72. Although Augustine, at times, comes close to this. The Catholic position is part of tradition of moral enquiry in which Augustine, as we have seen, plays a key role. In this issue, however, his emphasis represents one pole of the Catholic theology of sex. 73. Augustine and Daniel Edward Doyle, Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part Iii, Homilies, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007): 63–75. 74. Of sex. 75. Sex for its intended end. 76. Augustine and Daniel Edward Doyle, Essential Sermons, The Works of Saint Augustine, Part Iii, Homilies, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007): 72. 77. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1990): 75.

202

Chapter 5

78. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1990): 78. 79. “The seven sacraments,” the Catechism writes, “are the signs and instruments by which the Holy Spirit spreads the grace of Christ the head throughout the Church which is his Body” (CCC 774). 80. For a good reading of Gregory here, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988): 294–295. 81. ST I: Q. 93, Art. 4 82. Augustine, On the Trinity: Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts in History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 88. 83. Augustine, On the Trinity: Books 8–15, Cambridge Texts in History of Philosophy, ed. Gareth B. Matthews, trans. Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 89. 84. Clement of Alexandria, Le pédagogue, Book 1, trans. Marguerite Harl, in Sources Chrétienes, Vol. 70, Paris Editions du Cerf, (1960): IV, 1, 3, 128. 85. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, ed. Philip Schaff (Aeterna Press, 2015): 16:7. 86. Ibid. 87. According to a 2019 study by the Pew forum, 31 percent of Catholics believed that the elements “actually become the body and blood of Christ” whereas 69 percent believed that “they are symbols of the body and blood of Christ.” 88. This is not claiming that there is marriage in the resurrection. Simply that the path into the Triune life in its fullness is a path taken by a couple as a couple. With Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae (Cambridge: Blackfriars/New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964): Supp. 81 article 4; Augustine, Summa Theologica: Supplement to the Third Part, ed. Anythony Uyl, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Woodstock, ON: Devoted Publishing, 2018), we can speculate that the fullness of participation in God (a) transcends the vicissitudes of life, including procreation and marriage, as marriage is a sign of the fullness but not the fullness itself and (b) that, as this union with God that is “the end” our identity (as a core element is our relationship with God) is participatory in this union, thus our gender, relationships and so on are not annihilated but perfected in this complete union. As Thomas writes, “At the resurrection human nature will be restored not only in the self-same species but also in the self same individual: and consequently we must observe in the resurrection what is requisite not only to the specific but also to the individual nature.” The relationship with one’s family is a core part of one’s individual nature, as opposed to one’s specific nature—by which Aquinas means “human nature.” As such one’s participation in the resurrection is not simply as a human but is as an individual human, “Charli” who has spouse and parents and children. 89. Which is not to say, of course, that people didn’t have sex with the opposite, and same, sex before the nineteenth century. Simply that we have no record of the belief that a man, for example, could only be attracted to other men. Similarly, studies have

Sexuality and the Tyranny of Disordered Desire

203

shown that Christian culture, seeing sexual desire as subject to change and disorder, never had a sense that a person was biologically impeded from developing sexual desire for others of the same sex. Romans 1 holds that after failing to remain in right relationship with God, human desire became twisted toward same-sex sexual desire. Sexual desire has always been seen to be in flux, capable of distortion and reform, until very recently, when it has increasingly been linked to the core of the self—“who I am.” 90. While the conversation is focused on this, it is worth noting that the idea that men, for example, could be attracted only to other men is very modern. For an exploration of the development of hetro and homosexuality as exclusive categories, see Robert Beachy, “The German Invention of Homosexuality.” Journal of Modern History 82, no. 4 (2010): 801–838. 91. This image is Hildegard’s.

Chapter 6‌‌‌

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

The term “Transubstantiation” refers to a particular way of speaking about the manner in which the Eucharistic bread becomes the body of Christ. It speaks to the changing (trans) of the isness (substance) of the Eucharistic elements in God’s self-giving to matter. As such, it refers, most specifically, to a technical grammar for speaking about the Mass. But this Eucharistic grammar fueled an understanding of how God transforms all material things. I have been arguing for the renewal of a culture of moral theology, but this culture was itself part of a broader theological culture that had the Eucharist at its center. It was a theological culture that saw the Mass as the form of God’s self-giving to matter and time, a self-giving that enabled the goal of human life—union with God. Moral theology proceeded as an investigation into how we (as material things in time) could, through embodied actions (just like in the Mass) accept God’s self-giving. In this sense, the Mass was axiomatic. It represented the “fact” that union with God in time was possible. Further, it illustrated the nature of God’s relationship with time and matter. It illustrated it by refusing any conflation of God with matter (the elements were not already one with God prior to God’s self-giving) while celebrating God’s refusal to be dichotomous to matter. In so doing, the Mass (i) represented the “proof” that union with God was possible in time, (ii) proclaimed that this union was God’s will, and (iii) held that human actions (in the consecration, in the preparation of the self for reception of communion etc.) were not irrelevant to this union. The Eucharist was the most saturated point of contact between God, on the one hand, and time and matter on the other; further, it offered an entry into the incarnation itself as the consummation of God’s relationship with his creation. But it was not antithetical to the rest of the Christian life. Rather, it was the form of the Christian life. The Mass was not isolated from, but was a key part of, a theological culture that saw union with God in time, as possible. It demonstrated the truths 205

206

Chapter 6

of this culture and trained people in its logic through liturgical participation. It was the wellspring of the assumptive world of catholic Christianity. Because of the Mass, the moral life could never be thought of just as a set of actions in fealty to a divine law in the hopes of winning the favor of this deity posthumously. Union with God, a union consummated at the altar, could be tasted in time. This union, the goal of all human life, was not localized elsewhere (in heaven). While its consummation may be eschatological, in an eternity tasted at the altar, it was clear that it was not localized eschatologically. Because of this, as I have argued in this book, prayer, charity, justice, sex, dying, and more, become moral spaces of ultimate soteriological significance. Not as spaces in which posthumous union could be earned, but as spaces in which this union could be tasted. Such an understanding of the moral life shaped how the Mass was understood, and the Mass, in turn, shaped how the moral life was understood. Because of this interwovenness of the Eucharist and the moral life, a comprehensive understanding of the decline of this culture of moral theology and how it can be renewed, cannot be possible without attention to the Mass. In keeping with this, in this final chapter I want to look both back and forward. Back, to show how the loss of a Eucharistic grammar fueled the etiolation of this culture of moral theology. Forward, in suggesting that the renewal of this culture of moral theology, argued for throughout this book, can be driven by the renewal of this Eucharistic grammar. Thus, two themes will interweave in this chapter. In one, I want to offer a clear and coherent account of transubstantiation as we find it in Aquinas. The goal here is to offer a clear exposition of how the Mass was understood. While there are accounts other than the one we find in Aquinas (a) Aquinas’ interpretation explicitly aims to cohere with tradition before him and (b) it has had a massive impact on Catholic understanding of the Mass ever since. There may be alternative terms twenty-first-century Catholics could employ to express what Aquinas’ language of substance and accidents expresses. But I want to show that what is signified by his terminology is crucial, both for how we understand the Mass and how we understand the moral life in general. The loss of this understanding, I will illustrate, etiolates an appreciation for how the Mass functions and, because of this, undermines the culture of moral theology the Mass made possible. I will show that seemingly small shifts,1 which often seek to affirm the real presence, do so through the use of a matter/spirit dualism, which Aquinas’ language, while imperfect, avoids. These “small shifts,” I argue, are driven by, but also exacerbate, the understanding of matter and time as banal realities, divorced from the ontological presence of God. In so doing, the moral life becomes less understood as the site of erotic encounter with the Triune life and more as the space in which posthumous divine favor is earned.

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

207

The other theme is less significant but still important. Sure, it might be argued, a belief in transubstantiation would resist the understanding that matter is inert, bereft of the presence of God—but how can anyone believe in transubstantiation today? As this chapter is looking at the Mass as a practical means of renewing a grammar of moral theology this question must be addressed. Thus, this chapter begins by asking “why is the kind of emphasis we see in Aquinas seemingly easy to accept in the thirteenth century and before but becomes more difficult prior to the reformation and is extremely difficult to accept for Catholics today?” My goal is to show that the fact that it is difficult to accept is not because, as traditional accounts would have it, that we are enlightened and rational, and premoderns were not. Rather I hope to suggest that sociological and cultural factors play a significant role, interwoven with the kind of epistemological hegemony I explored in chapter 1. Because of this, I will argue, renewing a transubstantive logic is difficult, but wholly possible. It requires a loosening of the hegemonic bonds of this epistemology, but with such loosening the threshold prohibiting our seeing the Mass in transubstantive ways grows ever more permeable. CAN WE BELIEVE IN TRANSUBSTANTIATION TODAY? We usually discern what is the case on the basis of the evidence. The clearest evidence is that which can be known by our senses. If, time and again, I see hot water melting an ice cube, I will conclude that hot water melts ice cubes. The fact that empirical evidence is the surest basis of knowledge does not, of course, disprove things that can not be known with certainty. Our inclination, nonetheless, is to believe things on the basis of the evidence of our senses and to disbelieve things that contradict such evidence. Therefore, our inclination is to believe that the bread at the Mass remains—both in what it appears to be and what it is in itself—bread. In modernity, we increasingly restrict knowledge to what can be proven on the basis of demonstration and measurement, and so modernity is an era in which transubstantiation becomes increasingly difficult to accept. Despite this, we moderns are not as different from pre-moderns as we often assume. It is not that people in the past did not take the evidence of the senses as the surest2 mode of knowing. They did, and only those who have never read Augustine or Aquinas, Avicenna or Averroes could suggest otherwise.3 For Aquinas, “It is natural to man to attain to the intelligible through sensible things, because our knowledge originates from sense” (ST I: Q.1, Art. 9). As we saw in chapter 1, modernity is commensurate less with the discovery of knowledge based upon empirical evidence (which was there beforehand) than a growing reluctance to attribute the term “real” to anything that cannot be

208

Chapter 6

measured or verified. As the material is that which can best be measured and verified, modernity brings with it the increasing exhaustion of the real by the material. This binding of the real to the material evolves over time and many scholars, in different ways, have traced the genealogy of this process.4 But premoderns also saw the evidence of the senses, observation, measurement, experiment, and verifiability as the surest form of knowledge. It is not that they did not base knowledge in experience, it is that modern Western rationality, increasingly sure of itself, rejects all other forms of knowledge. This process of shrinking that worthy of the term knowledge gathers force in the renaissance and is driven by forces within, as well as outside Christianity. Brad Gregory5 notes that the Reformation plays an important role in a genealogy where this form of knowledge becomes the exclusive form of knowledge, reducing all else to the status of fancy. In the early modern period, the reformers rejected transubstantiation and offered instead increasingly “demythologized”6 accounts of the Mass. These accounts were offered against the backdrop of developments in early modern epistemological culture and were more acceptable to people for whom the real is not in excess of its phenomenological appearance. The reformers have no problem, of course, with the miracles of Christ. Such miracles are at odds with an account of what is possible given what we know about the material world. But while an emerging materialist grammar was capable of disenchanting the material world and harrying the supernatural off to an eschatological realm, it had not yet taken the citadel of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The Reformation, for Weber and Gregory, brings with it a reduction of the sacred to the time of Jesus Christ,7 as an island of enchantment in a sea of banality. A few centuries later, this ever-increasing understanding of matter and time as banal comes to threaten the time of Jesus, too, as liberal Protestant tradition (as well as modern Catholic theologians such as Hans Küng) seek also to demythologize Christ’s miracles and the resurrection. The basic story scholars like Bultmann or Küng tell is one central to our self-understanding as moderns. It claims that, in the past, people believed all manner of bizarre “supernatural” things. Premoderns (alongside those in Africa and other places not yet products of the European enlightenment) believed such silly and dangerous things because of their mythological worldview and their ignorance about the natural world. But then, this all-too-trite story goes, we Europeans had The Enlightenment, discovered science, and now that we know how the world works, believing in miracles or transubstantiation becomes impossible. Because of this, we need to see past the “mythological” accounts of scripture to what really happened. It is in this light that the resurrection, for Küng, became the experience of hope made possible through Jesus. This hope was filtered through the mythological worldview of the pre-rational followers of

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

209

Jesus, leading to the language of “bodily resurrection.” Modern Christians, Küng argued, must see past their mythological language of the empty tomb, which is no longer believable, and instead connect with the very human hope that social change is possible despite death.8 As such, late modern liberal Catholicism, like the liberal Protestantism that preceded it, continued the erosion of “enchanted”9 matter and time that began in the early modern period. While early modern theologians reduce the supernatural to the ancient past, late modern theologians increasingly disenchant the life and death of Jesus itself. As such, a trajectory in which the real is reduced to the material begins to lead, with the reformation, to the refusal of things like the real presence (in some reformed trajectories). This trajectory proceeds to erode a belief in the miracles of scripture, in moderns such as Küng, and now, the decline in Christian faith in the West seems to indicate that it is, inevitably, eroding faith in the creator God. It is like a piece of paper being burned back to nothingness. From an enchanted world infused with the glory of the incarnate God, the early modern period burns away the notion of the material as enchanted leaving only the “miraculous” time of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. This, too, gets burned away for modernists, leaving only a distant deity behind a wholly disenchanted creation. A creator who, in the postmodern West, is himself now smoldering, and with him, as Nietzsche triumphantly notes, the very notion of morality as anything more than a product of imagination.10 This process is the backdrop against which any discussion of the believability in transubstantiation must take place, both in terms of what renders it untenable and in terms of the possibility of renewing such a theological grammar. But while such epistemological trajectories offer the clearest and most “tellable” version of the Western decline of faith, they are far from the full story. Yes, figures as diverse as Milbank, Gregory, Chomsky, Singer, and Weber all tell the story of the erosion of belief in the metamaterial in terms of such epistemological shifts. And, for Pinker, Chomsky, Singer, and countless others, Christian thought, with its belief in things like transubstantiation and resurrection, is pre-rational ignorance that is no longer tenable after the enlightenment and “the age of science.” As Pinker writes, “Science, in the broadest sense, is making belief in God obsolete, and we are the better for it.”11 But while such epistemological trajectories are crucial, the process through which people find X or Y believable or not is not based purely, or even primarily, on such factors. Sociologists such as Gregory Bateson12 and Erving Goffman13 have explored the radical plurality of factors that shape why we believe what we believe, and such explorations undermine the extremely simplistic accounts we find in Pinker. While my primary focus in what follows will be on an epistemological trajectory in a conventional manner, it’s also important to consider additional factors to get a sense of (a) why

210

Chapter 6

the belief in transubstantiation has become increasingly impossible, and (b) whether (and, if so, how) such belief can become possible again. THRESHOLDS OF BELIEF In Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, The Tipping Point, he explores the work of sociologist Mark Granovetter on the social frameworks that inform belief and actions. Granovetter shows14 that what we believe is often shaped by thresholds that render our beliefs believable or not. These thresholds are established socially rather than rationally. In fact, Gladwell, following Granovetter (but wholly consistent with the earlier work of figures such as Bateson, Goffman, and Alfred Schütz) discusses how we will often reject something that is wholly rational in favor of working within the threshold of community expectations. Granovetter’s interest is, primarily, in how moral actions are shaped and determined by the actions of others. We might think, for example, of a riot. What are the conditions under which someone in a riot would think it morally acceptable to throw a brick through a window? For Granovetter, the answer is—“it depends on how many others do it.” Some people have “low thresholds”—if one person does it, they will jump on board; but for others, it would take a huge majority of rioters doing it to establish this threshold. But in all, thresholds, Granovetter shows, rather than reason alone, determines beliefs, in this case, whether it is ok to throw a brick through a window. We will have different thresholds, but we all have thresholds, and these thresholds are the primary determinant of beliefs. Sometimes thresholds lead to people believing and acting wholly at odds with reason and evidence. A sports fan, Gladwell often discusses the work of economist David Romer who, in 2006, published data15 (that has since been corroborated by other statistical models16), which shows NFL teams would win more games by never punting but instead “going for it” on fourth down every time. What is interesting, to Gladwell, is that despite this evidence, teams don’t go for it every time. Rather, for Gladwell, they are determined by a threshold of social expectations. Despite all the data, which shows that the elimination of punting would lead to winning an extra game each year, teams don’t do it. They don’t do it because the uniformity, wherein all other teams punt, establishes a threshold they will not cross. Gladwell doesn’t mention an even more dramatic sporting example. In 1918, Red Sox manager Ed Barrow watched as pitcher Babe Ruth hit home runs in spring training at a prodigious and hitherto unseen rate. His bench coach and pretty much everyone with eyes campaigned to have Ruth made an everyday player from where he would change the game of baseball forever. The accepted logic, however, was that a pitcher, especially a left-handed pitcher, was a more valuable commodity

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

211

than a hitter. And so, as Leigh Montville notes, “Barrow’s argument always was that he would be ‘the laughingstock of the league’ if he switched his best pitcher to an everyday player.”17 Within “the assumptive world” of 1918 major league managers, a pitcher was more valuable than a hitter. Barrow was watching the greatest hitter who ever lived, someone who would go on to twice hit more home runs than every other team in the league, and yet the shared assumptions of the time were so powerful that he refused what his own eyes told him. Fear of being “a laughingstock” and going against convention, fear of becoming an outsider trumped all evidence and so he resisted putting Ruth in the lineup every day. If we are to ask why in 1223 the real presence of the substantial Christ in the Eucharist was obvious, while in 2023 its absence is obvious, we need to take the power of thresholds of belief into account. We need to take it into account because the story told by Bultmann, Hans Küng, and countless other twentieth-century theologians doesn’t hold up. It’s far too simple to say that we don’t believe in things like transubstantiation today because we are rational and premoderns were not. Augustine, for example, is wholly aware that miracles, which are common in the gospels and the apostolic age, are alien to the lived reality of his age.18 While the position “people used to be silly and believed X, therefore they could believe Y. We are no longer silly, thus we can no longer believe Y” is very satisfying, it is also nonsense. It is not that bread in Thomas Aquinas’ time was understood as becoming, ontologically, a fox one minute and a cart the next and so it was a small leap to imagine that it becomes the body of Christ. In this sense, what happens at the Mass was no less strange in the thirteenth century than it is today. There are epistemological factors, but it is far too simple to reduce them to our modern culture basing beliefs on Reason and the premodern one being irrational. What was different is that, in the thirteenth century, many more people believed that the material did not exhaust the real. There was a “threshold,” for Granovetter, “an assumptive world” for Schütz, which informed their belief. A different assumptive world is operative today. This assumptive world forbids seeing through the bread to the body in precisely the same way that the assumptive world of premodernity encouraged it. It is because of that that, according to a Georgetown University study, as far back as 2008, 43 percent of Mass-going Catholics agreed with the statement, “The bread and wine are symbols of Jesus, but Jesus is not really present.”19 A Pew research forum in 2019 showed that 69 percent of Catholics held that the bread and wine, “are symbols of the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”20 Therefore, we can safely assume that a vast majority of those in society as a whole reject it. It is simply a fact that this establishes a strongly prohibitive threshold. This threshold is more ubiquitous and prohibitive than the threshold of expectation that was so powerful it could stop Red Sox

212

Chapter 6

manager Ed Barrow putting Babe Ruth into the lineup every day, even when his very livelihood depended on the success it could have brought. This threshold of cultural expectation—the shame and embarrassment of holding to a position seen as ignorant or ridiculous—is a powerful element impeding belief. If we are to ask why a smaller percentage of Westerners believe in transubstantiation in 2023 than in 1223, one of the most important answers would be a seemingly tautological one—because a smaller percentage of Westerners believe in transubstantiation in 2023 than in 1223. The smaller percentage, rather than any specific “fact” that we have discovered, establishes a threshold and this threshold makes transubstantiation harder to believe in. In one sense, this is encouraging. It is encouraging because there is no insurmountable basis for rejecting transubstantiation by virtue of epistemological advances. It is not like believing that witches caused typhoid in 1223 and not believing that witches caused typhoid in 2023. While countless people in 1223 would have rejected the idea that witches caused typhoid, even more people today would reject it, and rightly so. We see typhoid bacteria at work under a microscope and trace carefully its material properties. There are epistemological advances that will lead to more people today rejecting the idea that witches cause typhoid. But substance, by definition,21 is not material. Thus, advances in exploring the material do not inform how we understand the substance of a thing, whether it is bread or The Body. To be sure, many will reduce the real to the material, and thereby foreclose on the possibility that the isness or substance of a thing transcends the material. While this cannot be proven, it is a holdable faith-based position. But it is a position that, as I have shown throughout this book, has led to horrors and is, at best, no more rational than the alternative perspective. Further, the overwhelming majority of people in the world today, and the teeming majority of people who have ever lived, hold that there is that which is beyond our methods of physical enquiry. As such, while the material, physical, operation of typhoid can be known through a microscope, unavailable in 1223, the substantial nature of God cannot. Advances made by many sciences in the study of matter does not determine how we understand non-material reality, whether that is the moral evil of racism or genocide, or the moral good of caring for the poor and needy. Thus, shifts in belief about typhoid from 1223 to 2023 cannot be analogous to shifts in belief about the Eucharist. The narrative of enlightenment that claims “people X believed Y because they were not as intelligent as us” is far too trite to explain the shifts we see in the early modern period. There is no empirical evidence for transubstantiation now, and there was no empirical evidence for transubstantiation then. We value empirical evidence now, they valued it then. Yet we reject the notion of the real presence, while they accepted it. Thus, the question becomes less

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

213

what reasons do moderns have for rejecting transubstantiation, than what causes us to reject some things we have no empirical evidence for, while we accept others? There is no reason, if the real is that which is established through hard evidence, for us to believe in transubstantiation. But if we believe in things that are not established through empirical evidence, then we don’t actually require that belief should be limited to things about which there is empirical evidence. The vast majority of people today will hold to many things we have no evidence for. For example, we believe that historical events happened a certain way based on the word of historians alone; we believe that genocide and pedophilia are morally wrong without having any basis for holding that “morally wrong” is an objectively meaningful term; we believe in all kinds of equality without unpacking precisely what we mean and so on, and all without the rational scaffolding upon which we would want a belief to be supported. Like premoderns such as Aquinas, we believe that as many of our beliefs as possible should be based on hard evidence, that is, “proof” (in so much as it can exist) but we also believe that there are things, like the existence of “good,” the immorality of slavery and pedophilia, many forms of equality and so on, that are true despite lacking the kind of metrics some decry religious truth claims for lacking. I have offered this exploration at the outset as a way of establishing optimism about the task of renewal. First, I have tried to show that the Enlightenment narrative of the move from irrational to rational does not condemn the attempt to renew a transubstantive logic of the Mass and the goods that this will lead to. Second, I have suggested that while we must acknowledge that the assumptive world of twenty-first-century Westerners is resistant to this renewal, this assumptive world can be challenged. Because of this, I will proceed to argue that we can challenge it by showing how and why it emerged, and the problems that its emergence led to. It so doing, we can begin to loosen its grip and make it more porous. The sociological evidence shows the exponential power of thresholds, but it also shows the impact which the loosening of these thresholds can have. For every person, for every parish, that begins to see the world through a transubstantive logic, it becomes exponentially easier for others to see the world thus. After the 1918 season, a poll of Major League managers still felt that Ruth should be used as a pitcher, but after he had been allowed to hit (not least through his own agitation) in the later part of the 1918 season, this number was far less than it would have been at the end of the 1917 season. And when Ruth went to the Yankees for the 1920 season, the threshold, while still present, was weaker still. Because of this weakening, the Yankees were able to resist the, now smaller, majority and put him in the lineup. If this threshold was as powerful as it was before,

214

Chapter 6

they could not have done this. The evidence of their eyes would have gone on being ignored and baseball history would have been very different. As such, what follows may be seen to be an attempt to weaken the threshold and make a transubstantive understanding of the Mass, and with it, life, more believable. I aim to do this first by defending a Thomistic understanding of the Mass and, second, exploring how this understanding of the Mass was lost, why it was lost, and what the problematic consequences of this loss were. My focus will be on how trajectories from the reformation reify many of the categories that make transubstantiation untenable for us today. The distinction between substance and accidents in the medieval period gives way to a dualism between the material and the spiritual in early modern accounts of the Eucharist. This dualism, I will argue, plays a very significant role in establishing the modern secular—that notion, unimaginable in premodernity (and still unimaginable outside the modern West) that there is “banal” space, space that is ontologically Godless and subject only to the interaction between material forces. The developing tyranny of this banality flows from the identification of the Eucharistic elements themselves as banal. Through this banalization, what was understood as the font of God’s presence in the world is established as ontologically bereft of the real presence of God, and this cannot fail to fuel the establishment of all material space as ontologically Godless. While my focus will be on reformers, the story could also be told with reference to shifts within Roman Catholicism, too. In post-reformation Christian culture, each side defines itself through a vilification of the other. This has the impact of mutating each theological culture. In opposing the other “side,” each “side” in ‌‌‌‌Western Christianity moves further away from their own starting position. This polemical equivalent of compound interest means that each side moves to the extremes in relation to the other. In such compounding, reformed Christianity comes to support a banality of matter because it “de-emphasizes” the Eucharist while Roman Catholicism’s “anti-Protestant” emphasis on the Eucharist establishes it alone as the locus of God’s real presence in time. Thus, while the banality of the Mass establishes the banality of all matter within some Reformed thought, the Roman Catholic position also surrenders the material to the banal by, increasingly, localizing the ontological presence of God in the Eucharist alone. As such, both sides help ground the banality of the material by increasingly polarized positions on the Eucharist. Hence, what follows, while critical of reformed rejection of transubstantiation, does not mean to suggest that the reformation alone establishes the modern tyranny of the banal. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the tendency was to celebrate the “fact” that the reformation brought the brave new world of modernity into being, while, in the late twenty and twenty-first centuries, the reformation is critiqued for this very same reason. In contrast to both, while I will be critical

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

215

of some reformed trajectories in rejecting the understanding that Aquinas offers, in doing so (a) I am seeing them as part of a series of intellectual developments that predate them, and (b) I acknowledge that the malaise I associate with these trajectories is also present within much modern Catholicism. I will begin by seeking to explicate the Thomistic understanding of transubstantiation. This aims at clarifying what “transubstantiation” means. In my second section, I will discuss the loss of this understanding in the reformation that, I argue, helps render both matter and time banal. Finally, I will conclude by drawing on the work of Catherine Pickstock and others in discussing how a renewed understanding of liturgy, based on the grammar of transubstantiation, can provide resistance to the tyranny of the banal. SUBSTANCE AND ACCIDENTS Aquinas wrote the Summa for beginners in the study of theology and sought to spell out with great clarity what he took to be the consistent teaching of the Church. To seek clarity meant, for him, to avail of contemporary idioms (mainly drawn from Aristotelianism) understandable to peers. One of the first tasks for those who look to draw on Aquinas’ approach to transubstantiation today, is to do like he did by “unpacking” his idioms for a contemporary context. This involves unpacking the terms “substance” and “accident” because these terms are central to his account of transubstantiation. Let me start with “accident.” We had a dog named “Mac.” Mac was white with curly hair, a cross between a poodle and a terrier. He would regularly get his hair cut when it encroached on his eyes and this would take about two inches off his whole presence. But he was no less Mac when this hair was cut. Similarly, Mac was once hit by a car and the vet removed a leg. Even with three legs, Mac was still Mac. This was because, Aquinas would suggest, his hair and his leg are not essential to his identity. Mac’s identity, his “Macness,” remains, even if his hair, legs, eyes, ears, or tail were lost. Thus, these things, for Aquinas, are “accidental” to Mac’s identity—that is, his “Macness.” They are how we perceive, recognize, and identify Mac but who he is, his “isness,” is not reducible to them. After Mac died, his physical elements were all present, all his organs were as before, everything material was there, but Mac’s “Macness” was not. Mac was gone. Because of this, for Aquinas, Mac cannot be reduced to his physical properties. His isness cannot be conflated with them. Instead, they are, for Aquinas, “accidents” of Mac’s “Macness.” Thus, unlike our common usage today, “accident,” in this sense, refers to something non-essential to the isness of something, it refers to that which, if removed, does not remove the isness of a thing. “Accidents,” for Aquinas, are things

216

Chapter 6

incidental to our isness, they are happenstances of our existence relative to our isness, which is not reducible to them. In contrast, substance is more central to the isness of a thing. It is that which makes a thing what it is. I am accidentally my arms and legs and hair but my “substance,” for Aquinas, is intrinsic to what I am. This immediately poses a challenge for the modern reader as we think of substance as material. In so doing, we have fallen foul of what Basil of Caesarea would have held as “the utmost insanity” when he writes, “But touch can distinguish between hardness and softness, between hot and cold, and such things, none of which anyone would call substance—unless he had been carried away to the utmost insanity!”22 For Basil, like Aquinas, the substantial nature of a thing is that which makes a thing what it is. It is what a thing is in itself. Thus, it is not to be conflated with material things available to the senses as things available to the senses can change while the substantial isness of the thing remains. Your materiality is part of your isness but your isness is not reducible to it. Your kidneys, lungs, liver, and even your heart could be transplanted for a different kidney, liver, or heart, without you losing your isness. This is not to say that one’s materiality is irrelevant to who one is. As we saw in chapter 3, the soul, that is the substantial self, is produced by the body and is the form of the body. It is informed by the body, but it is not reducible to the body. This is not a dualism, seeing body and soul in dichotomous opposition. The latter is informed by the former. Thus, for Catholics, biology is not irrelevant to gender. But one’s identity is not exhausted by biology. Materiality and isness cannot be conflated for Aquinas. Accident and substance are not the same, the former is “accidental” qua the latter. It matters, it informs, it shapes one’s isness, but one’s isness is not reducible to it. Your material self may well be fully present at the point of your death and yet your isness, the Sophianess of Sophia, or the Choraness of Chora, ceases to be. Created things, then, for Aquinas, are comprised of material things which inform but are not essential to their isness—accidents—and what they are in themselves, beyond the conflagration of material—their substance. Transubstantiation speaks to the change, not of the accidents, but of the substance. It speaks to the change, not of the materiality of the bread but of what the bread is, in itself. Aquinas documents this grammar of substance and accidents in question 75 of the third part of the Summa. He spells out that the bread remains bread in terms of its accidents, “It is evident to sense that all the accidents of the bread and wine remain after the consecration. And this is reasonably done by Divine Providence. First of all, because it is not customary, but horrible, for men to eat human flesh, and to drink blood” (ST III: Q. 75, Art. 5). For

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

217

Aquinas, it is changed, instead, in its substance. This is its isness, which is now Christ, who gives himself to us through the bread (ST III: Q. 75, Art. 3). The bread remains according to its accidents, its materiality, look, weight, in fact, all of its phenomenological properties remain. But it has changed in terms of its substance, what it is in itself. This substance is not dichotomous to materiality, it incorporates the material, but is far beyond it. Christ has bound himself substantially to the materiality of the bread, the fruit of creation and the work of human hands. In so doing, the materiality of creation is not annihilated, but it can substantially receive God’s self-giving. The accidents do not determine the substance, but they are affirmed, glorified, and become instrumental in the union between God and the world that all creation groans for. In contrast to notions of constansubstantiality, the substance of the bread does not abide alongside, or with, Christ’s real presence, for Aquinas. It is the bread’s materiality that receives God’s self-giving as the Son through the Spirit. As Aquinas writes, Christ’s body cannot begin to be in this sacrament except by change of the substance of bread into himself. But what is changed into another thing no longer remains after such change. Hence the conclusion is that, saving the truth of this sacrament, the substance of the bread cannot remain after the consecration. (III: Q.75, Art.3)

While the accidents remain, the substance is Christ, as God gives himself, as the Son, through the Spirit, to the created order for union with us. Within accounts that emphasize constubstantiality the material order is not changed and bound to God. It remains as is but serves as the vehicle through which the encounter between Christ and people can happen. It is a catalyst. But for Aquinas, the material order is actually infused by the substance of God, as Christ, through the Spirit. It remains what it is accidentally, its material properties abide, but it is infused with the real substantial presence of God. This drawing of creation into Godself is the basis for the erotic union between us and Christ as the altar. It may be argued that this is less favorable to creation than “consubstantial” approaches as the substance of the bread is no more in the self-giving of Christ. Is this not, such arguments would ask, establishing a hierarchy between humans who substantially remain and are infused with God’s self-giving as the Son through the Spirit, and bread, which cannot be so infused but is embraced only in its materiality? And the answer, from the Thomistic perspective, is “yes, yes, it is affirming this hierarchy.” The human soul can receive God’s self-giving in ways that bread cannot. Aquinas, unsurprisingly, does not anticipate any push back on this. For him, humans can say “yes” to this self-giving of God as the Son through the Spirit, or “no.” Bread, rocks,

218

Chapter 6

and digger wasps, cannot. Thus, there is a qualitative difference between the human person and bread. We can be infused, substantially, by God in such a way that our substantial isness is changed but not annihilated. God does not force himself onto us. God gives himself and humans, in a God given freedom modeled at the annunciation, can accept this self-giving or refuse it. Bread cannot. Christians know this through experience. I believe I have received the Holy Spirit at baptism. I accept the Holy Spirit in moral moments when I do the will of God and accept union with Him. But I also reject the Holy Spirit in many other moral moments. Moments when I spend money on things I don’t need rather than give it to the poor, for example. As such I know that while I am infused with the presence of God, I, substantially, remain, such that I, in my fallen humanity, can refuse God’s self-giving. And, sadly, I often do. I reject union with God as well as accept it. Thus, I know that while substantially “the Spirit of He who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in my mortal body” (Rom 8:11) it does not substantially replace the “me,” who, too often, wills other than God and refuses union with God despite His ceaseless self-giving. In this, I know I am different from bread and rocks and wasps. Bread does not stand at the entrance to Best Buy with money to spend and a homeless person in need at the doorway. Bread does not decide to say “yes” to the Holy Spirit in giving to Christ in/as the poor, accepting union with the Spirit or say “no,” refusing this self-giving God and proceeding in to Best Buy to gratify the self. And so, while the manner of God’s embrace of matter in the bread is a joyful affirmation of the enchantedness of all material creation, this union is qualitatively different from the union with us humans. Following on from this, it is important to note two things that are relevant to Luther’s critique of Aquinas (which I will discuss in the following section) (1) Aquinas is not using language to define as we would in modernity, but to depict in such a way as to form a person toward “seeing” what is happening in the Mass and in creation more generally, and (2) This language acknowledges the incomprehensibility of God and of God’s self-giving to matter. In relation to (1) Aquinas’ goal, as always in matters pertaining to sacred mysteries, is threefold (ST I: Q. 1, Art. 8) (i) To be faithful to scripture and tradition (ii) To show that the doctrine which we hold is “fitting,” that is, coherent with the rest of faith and beautiful in itself and (iii) to defend it against impugners, in this instance, Beranger of Tours (ST III: Q. 75. Art.1). While he strives for clarity and uses the technical (Aristotelian) language of the academy, it is important to distinguish what he is doing from modern scientific notions of “definition.” Instead, he operates here, as always, between an appreciation of the incomprehensibility of God and awareness of the danger of error if we fail to use language to shape our thoughts in keeping with God’s self-disclosure. Moderns can struggle to share an intellectual space with Aquinas because most of our intellectual inquiries are focused on things that can be known

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

219

with certitude. There is certain knowledge that we can express in definitive propositions and there is error, by which we tend to mean definitive propositions that are erroneous. For Aquinas, we cannot speak of the Eucharist using a language of mastery such that our language for what’s happening exhausts what’s happening. Despite this, we can resist error by working to speak consistently with what is rather than in ways that are inconsistent with what is. This is how Aquinas understands the relationship between a theological grammar such as the one he offers, and sacred mysteries, such as the Trinity. In relation to (2) what God is, that is, what the substance of God is, for Aquinas, is wholly incomprehensible. In fact, even our human isness, or substance, is incomprehensible because, as we saw in chapter 3, for Aquinas the soul is not simply occasioned by the body but is also created by God. Hence, we can’t know “substance” in the way we can know something material, which we can dissect and explore under a microscope. We can know things about God’s nature only because they are revealed to us by God. Thus, we can speak about God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, for Aquinas, because God has revealed Himself as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Hence, while the isness of God is incomprehensible, our language about God, when faithful to God’s self-disclosure, can be fitting, and language that contradicts God’s self-disclosure is in error. But naming some language as erroneous does not imply mastery of, or certitude about, sacred mysteries. For Aquinas, rather, “error” is language that impedes our thinking about, and therefore relationship with, God. Theological discourse at its best operates in these spaces, attentive to God’s self-disclosure, and manifesting moral goods such as humility and care for others. Theology is a moral act, responsive to God’s self-giving as the Father, Son, and Spirit, and faithful in language to this self-giving. Aquinas in ST III Q. 75 is circumspect, never transgressing divine incomprehensibility. Thus, the “substance” language that Aquinas uses is used because he holds it to be fitting. But it is not a technical definition as subjects of a later epistemological culture would understand it. It is a term that speaks to something mysterious, such as the youness of you. This substantial youness is related to matter, but not reducible to matter, as while all your matter is present after your death, while every organ looks and weighs the same, you, your youness, is gone. This youness, for Aquinas, is your substance and the matter, which remains after your death, is your accidents. Persons are material things and their isness is related to and, as we saw in chapter 3, occasioned by, their materiality. But these material things also have mystery and intrinsic isness beyond their accidents. This is not simply the logic of the Eucharist for Aquinas and traditional Catholicism, it is the logic of the real, bread, trees, rivers, horses, and all. Creation itself is not reducible to its accidents. To be sure a tree’s metamaterial substance is not divine, in contrast to the consecrated host, but it is

220

Chapter 6

in receptive relationship to God and its being is dependent on Him. Because of this, the real is mysterious and, in a sense, enchanted by relationship with, and the presence of, God, whose substance is wholly incomprehensible. LUTHER’S NON-PERMEABLE MEMBRANE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES Before the modern West, the material was not understood as exhausting the real. Therefore, the isness of a person was not reducible to the aspects of them that submit to dissection and observation. Within such a theological culture it is unsurprising that few areas of Christian theology are as consistently shared among Fathers—such as Ambrose,23 Chrysostom,24 Theodore of Mopsuestia,25 Irenaeus26 Cyril of Jerusalem,27 Ignatius of Antioch,28 Jerome,29 Augustine,30 and many others—as the doctrine of the real presence. Luther, of course, is part of this theological culture and is committed to it. But for him, transubstantiation, as a grammar for speaking about the real presence, represents the second of the Roman Church’s “Babylonian Captivity” of the Lord’s Supper. His critique of transubstantiation focuses on two main areas (1) Its functioning within a broader theological culture indebted to Aristotle and (2) The fact that its language of “accidents,” implies, for Luther, that the bread is not real. The theological culture informed by Aristotle is problematic, for Luther, as it is unnecessarily complicated, seeks to define things which should be left simply to faith, and opposes the plain sense of scripture, in relation to the “Thomistic, that is, the Aristotelian Church,” Luther writes, The Church, however, kept the right faith for more than twelve centuries, nor did the holy Fathers ever or anywhere make mention of this transubstantiation (a portentous word and dream indeed), until the counterfeit Aristotelian philosophy began to make its inroads on the Church within these last three hundred years, during which many other erroneous conclusions have also been arrived at, such as:—that the Divine essence is neither generated nor generates; that the soul is the substantial form of the human body; and other like assertions, which are made absolutely without reason or cause.31

This encroachment of scholasticism as a methodological movement is perhaps the primary source of Luther’s ire when he writes directly on transubstantiation in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520). He does not think of himself as breaking massively with Aquinas substantively, but he abhors Aquinas’ terminology and the fact that is alien and problematic to the simple faith of the uneducated. He does not offer a critique of the idea that the

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

221

soul is the substantial form of the body, but he includes it alongside Origen’s allegorical reading of scripture, not so much as part of a syllabus of errors but as illustrations of a theological culture that has moved away from the plain sense of scripture. While he holds allegorical readings, transubstantiation, and more to be erroneous, his primary problem is not so much that they are erroneous as that they are unnecessary. As he writes, Whereas we are making Aristotle and human teachings the censors of such sublime and divine matters, why do we not rather cast away these curious inquiries; and simply adhere to the words of Christ, willing to be ignorant of what is done in this sacrament, and content to know that the real body of Christ is present in it by virtue of the words of consecration? Is it necessary to comprehend altogether the manner of the Divine working?32

Luther does not find the doctrine of transubstantiation anathema in 1520. It is simply unnecessary and part of a problematic theological culture that pushes what is implied by scripture to breaking point. He disagrees with transubstantiation, but accepts others who do not, he gives his “consent then that whoever chooses to hold either opinion should do so.”33 His substantive issue is to “remove scruples of conscience, so that no man may fear being guilty of heresy, if he believes that real bread and real wine are present on the altar.”34 And this is precisely what, for Luther, the language of transubstantiation does. Because the bread remains in its accidents but not in its substance, the bread, for Luther, is no longer real. While for Luther, “there is real bread and real wine, in which is the real flesh and real blood of Christ,”35 transubstantiation, in his reading, implies that the bread after the consecration is not real, being only accidents and, as he writes, “why should not Christ be able to include His body within the substance of bread, as well as within the accidents?”36 For Luther, the bread should not be spoken of as bread if its substance has been changed. If one does, one is denying the reality of the bread. An example he uses helps illustrate how he is imagining this. For Luther, Christ is believed to have been born of the inviolate womb of his mother. Let them [the papists] say here too that the flesh of the Virgin was meanwhile annihilated, or as they would more aptly say, transubstantiated, so that Christ, after being enfolded in its accidents, finally come forth through the accidents!37

The analogy is crucial if we are to see how Luther understands the Eucharist in 1520 and why he rejects the language of transubstantiation. Luther is imagining that Christ proceeds to us through the bread in the way he enters the world through Mary’s womb. For him both are bound in that they are vessels that enable the transmission of Christ. But, for Aquinas, the Eucharistic bread is entirely different from the womb of the virgin. The bread is never simply

222

Chapter 6

a catalyst or vessel for the transmission of Christ. For Aquinas, the Father gives himself to matter as the Son through the Spirit in the bread. The bread is not the vehicle for the transmission for Christ, like a glass from which we drink a liquid. It becomes one with Christ, its material accidents receiving Christ’s substance. There are two different understandings of the Eucharist, and with it, the incarnation, here. Luther sees the Eucharistic bread facilitating the encounter with God as a catalyst. Aquinas sees bread, like creation, incorporated instrumentally into the Triune life, for our full incorporation into the Triune life. It is not a catalyst. Its materiality, that is, its accidents, receive union with the substance of Christ. In Luther’s model, nature is the space in which one can spiritually encounter God. It is the vessel or space in which God can be encountered. God is a thing within the space of the natural order. God haunts creation, rather than being “in it” by virtue of his self-giving to the world in Christ. For Aquinas, the bread can be transubstantiated by the Holy Spirit in receiving the real presence of Christ. To be sure, the bread’s relationship with God in Christ is not like our relationship with God. Our substantial isness is bound to Christ and through Christ, it comes to union with the Father. The language of substance and accidents are wholly unneeded by Luther because there is no actual ontological union of Christ with the matter of the bread. Christ somehow abides alongside the substance of the bread, which abides alongside the materiality (accidents) of the bread. This is, for Luther, a “real presence” but it is far more ephemeral than Aquinas’ model, an ephemerality that necessarily makes the presence of God in Creation more ephemeral. The bread is a thing in which the thing of Christ can be, for Luther. The bread mediates God, but it is not incorporated into his self-giving. In contrast, scandalously, in transubstantiation, the matter of creation is bound to the substance of Christ and through this binding our substance can become one with him. The bread is incorporated into Christ’s self giving. It is not simply a vessel, it is capable of being transformed, more, transubstantiated by God’s self giving. It can become one with God in receipt of God’s self giving to it. This distinction in how the bread is being understood has immense significance for how our relationship with God, and, indeed, our salvation is understood. Luther’s analogy of the virgin’s womb shows how alien he is to Aquinas on this subject. To receive the womb of Mary after the birth of Christ would not be to receive Christ. To receive the consecrated bread, for Aquinas, is to receive Christ. The latter has been transubstantiated, the former has not. Mary’s individual isness is never reduced at the annunciation, rather it is affirmed. She has an intelligent soul, for Aquinas, she can say “yes”—give her fiat—to God. The bread cannot. The bread is the fruit of creation, a creation which joyously serves God’s will for union with humanity. Mary willingly accepts God’s self-giving and is infused with the Holy Spirit in a

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

223

radical representation of the form of our union with Christ in the Spirit. But to encounter the Blessed Mother is not have a direct, substantial, encounter with Christ alone. She is present too, still able to say “yes” or “no” to God’s self-giving. The bread can not. Thus, its isness is altered in a way that Mary’s is not. The bread is transubstantiated and therefore communion is not communion with bread, but communion with Christ. Communion for Aquinas is not to have a spiritual encounter with Christ made possible by bread, which is itself not ontologically transformed. It is to have an ontological communion with Christ because we can commune with the substance of Christ through the accidents of the bread. There are no longer two things which are dichotomous. There is an ontological union. The dichotomy of the two things, the bread and the body, time and eternity, the world and God, is ontologically overcome by God’s gracious self giving. This is not the case for Luther. The language of transubstantiation is necessary for Aquinas because communion is an encounter with the real presence of Christ through elements that are ontologically impacted. It is not necessary for Luther because this is not how he understands the supper. For him the bread remains and is only the space in which the real presence can be encountered. There is no ontologically change in the bread (transubstantiation) as the analogy to Christ’s birth from the womb of the virgin shows. As he writes, “in the sacrament, it is not necessary to the presence of the real body and real blood, that the bread and wine should be transubstantiated, so that Christ may be contained beneath the accidents.”38 But, crucially, within such an understanding creation is unaltered in the Mass. It remains as it was. Christ haunts creation in Luther’s model, Christ binds himself to it, ontologically, in Aquinas’ model. The banal is not, to be sure, established by such Lutheran moves, which are only slightly distinct from those of Aquinas. But creation is only a vessel, a box, within Luther’s model. If the utter rejection of the material as banal still awaits, Luther, in refusing the ontological transformation of creation in the Mass, represents a significant step toward this. There is no transgression of the membrane between God and creation, for Luther. For Aquinas, as the soul is the substantial form of the body, so too the substantial form of the consecrated host is Christ. Its materiality is infused with God’s self-giving. The membrane is porous is the service of facilitating the participation of human persons in God’s Triune life. In Luther, the material is not porous to God’s self-giving. This is the crucial distinction, which will proceed to have massive implications. It should be clear how a non-permeable membrane furnishes a model of the moral life that is at odds with the models I have proposed in this book. Paul is ontologically transformed when “the Spirit of he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead dwells in his moral body” (Rom 8:11). This indwelling of the Spirit changes Paul such he can desire and act in ways he was hitherto incapable of.

224

Chapter 6

He is not a banal vessel for the Spirit. He is changed and becomes capable of different things. A vessel is ontologically unaltered by that it contains. Saul is ontologically altered. He is not bound to the Spirit in such a way that he is reckoned righteous by God and thereby earns an eternal reward. Rather, he is ontologically transformed and partakes in that reward of union with God, in time, as a foretaste of a fuller union to come. The membrane between creation and God is porous to God’s self-giving, as the Spirit, in Paul’s theology. It is porous too for Aquinas, as the bread’s materiality receives the substance of Christ, who becomes the form of its material body. Luther felt that his rhetoric in The Babylonian Captivity clearly preserved a coherent model of the real presence. Subsequent events in reformed notions of “the supper,” however, indicate that he was naïve. Luther’s theology of the Eucharist evolves through the mid and late 1520s in response to trajectories within the Swiss Reformation. These trajectories, for Luther, deny the real presence and isolate God eschatologically. In three key works in 1525 (Wider die himmlischen Propheten von Bildern und Sakrament), 1526 (Sermon von dem Sakrament des Leibes und Blutes Christi, wider die Schwarmgeister), and 1527 (Dass diese Worte Christi ‘Das ist mem Leib’ noch fest stehen, wider die Schwarmgeister), Luther responds to what he holds as rejections of the real presence. He does so in a manner that strives to be consistent with the positions he set down in the Babylonian Captivity of 1520 but also rejecting the increasing banalization of the bread that he sees emerging. He tries to do so by defending the presence of Christ, not simply in the Eucharist, but everywhere. The communication of attributes is a reflexive principle in Luther’s thought, a theological habit he uses time and again for thinking through theological problems. He uses it between 1525 and 1527 to argue that the omnipresence of the Father equals the omnipresence of Christ. If Christ is really present everywhere, then Christ is really present in the Eucharistic elements. Luther’s doctrine of ubiquity39 comes to represent the primary grammar through which he defends the real presence in the Eucharist (and the world) against Zwinglian currents. It is a commitment to a presence of Christ, however, which fails in two ways. First, it “doubles down” on the vessel model from Babylonian Captivity and so the presence is ontologically insignificant for the created order in which the presence (as God, and thereby, the Son) abides. Salvation is not the transformation (through and for us) of this order, and is utterly alien to notions of theosis or deification that we find in the Church Fathers. While God may be glimpsable as a thing within it, God does not give Himself to us, as the Son through the Spirit in a meaningful way. God remains ontologically dichotomous, even if this God affirms our justification in faith—an abstract reckoning by God, rather than an ontological self-gift of God.

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

225

Second, Luther’s attempts fail as they lack the kind of intellectual apparatus that make God’s presence thinkable. While Luther pushes back against Zwingli, Carlstadt, and Oecolampadius throughout the 1520s, he has rejected any grammar that would enable him to preserve a non-ephemeral account of the real presence. Thus, he stresses that God is present everywhere and through the communication of attributes, Christ is too, but there is no coherent understanding of the form this takes. There is no substantial binding to matter, as in Aquinas. If we are to imagine how Luther is understanding the presence of Christ in these writings we may imagine Christ occupying creation as a person occupies a house. This occupation in no way speaks to the ontological transformation of the house by the infusion of the person into the house. Paul’s model of the Spirit indwelling in bodies, is seen as habitation by Luther, whereas for many Fathers, Aquinas, and Hildegard (who uses the analogy of the sap in a tree) it is more visceral and ontologically transformative of the person by the Holy Spirit. My habitation of a house cannot lead the house to act in ways beyond the natural, fallen limits of the house. Theological virtues become impossible to imagine, even the gifts of the Spirit become unthinkable, affirmable, as a blind act of “faith” but not thinkable. The Holy Spirit’s presence transforms us, leading to faith, hope, and love—things that course through us as neurochemical realities. The Spirit makes me ontologically different, the membrane of my selfhood does not keep Her at bay. In contrast, for Luther God is everywhere, but there is no permeable membrane through which God can, through the Spirit, infuse and transform material things like us. Here in the 1520s for Luther, the real presence is advanced as a statement of faith, an unimaginable truth which must be believed in fealty to scripture. Luther’s simple faith, “willing to be ignorant of what is done in this sacrament, and content to know that the real body of Christ is present in it by virtue of the words of consecration?”40— for all its rhetorical clout—renders the divine presence ephemeral. It is an affirmation of divine omnipresence as a statement of faith, but it signifies nothing but itself. There is no intellectual content that can help us imagine how it happens. This imagining is crucial if we are to imagine the moral life. But, for Luther, our encounter with God is not marked by a permeable membrane, which is the basis of moral and liturgical theology for much of Christian history. God’s omnipresence becomes a maxim to be believed, but it signifies nothing. So too morality becomes a series of maxims, laws from God that may or may not make sense, but that must be upheld. Without the imaginative architecture, however, some will make sense for non-theological reasons (thou shalt not kill) but others less so (thou shalt not covet) and with only the totemic power of the maxim to maintain moral principles, many fall away. Luther’s defense of the real presence offers no resistance to what will become the stereophonic nightmare of modern Christianity, a conservativism

226

Chapter 6

which sees God in heaven, dichotomous to the world, and a liberalism which names clumps of world “God.” No coherent grammar is offered that enables the imagining of God’s ontological transformative relationship with the world and, lacking this grammar, the moral imagination calcifies. Luther’s rejection of transubstantiation is maintained in article 28 of the 39 articles of the Church of England. This article holds that “Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ; but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture.” Some of the language here invites speculation that the authors conflated “substance” with what Aquinas understands as “accident.” Cranmer seems to do this, for example, when he writes, “Christ in his human nature substantially, really, corporally, naturally and sensibly, is present with his Father in heaven”41 and therefore “Christ’s natural body is not in the sacrament, really, substantially and corporally.”42 Note how “substance” in these examples is linked to terms such as “corporally,” “naturally,” and “sensibly.” Cranmer seems to be understanding substance in the modern sense, that is, materially. And he dichotomizes this with “spiritually.” Again, substance is not, for Aquinas, matter, but neither is it dichotomous to matter, being related to it as the soul is the form of the body. Matter is relevant to substance, but substance is never reducible to matter. And within the language of Aquinas’ Eucharistic theology the accidents are the matter, the substance is the isness. The idea of Christ being present according to his material accidents is also repugnant to Aquinas, who writes, “It is evident to sense that all the accidents of the bread and wine remain after the consecration. And this is reasonably done by Divine providence. First of all, because it is not customary, but horrible, for men to eat human flesh, and to drink blood” (ST III: Q. 75, Art. 5). In direct contrast to such a grotesque possibility, article 28 holds, “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Slipper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner” (my italics). Such a move is predicated on Cranmer’s surprising conflation of substance and accident, a conflation which testifies to the early modern shift wherein “substance” and, indeed, “reality” (as in Cranmer’s “substantially, really, corporally, naturally and sensibly”) are understood as sensible and material. If Luther represents a very early gesture toward the reduction of the real to the material, and the assertion of creation as Godless and banal, with Cranmer it is starting to take shape. His significant shift has a twin trajectory. First, it helps establishes the material and sensible as the real, and second it localizes God apart from this material “real.” As such this has far more in common with the secularity of late modernity which abides in a banal material, reality than with earlier Christian thought, discussed throughout this book, which sees God as real and granting reality through His self-giving to creation. Cranmer is an early modern subject interpreting Christian tradition through this emerging modern lens. His moves

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

227

make the Eucharist intelligible to this culture, but at the cost of surrendering to the ontological errors that are taking hold. Shockingly, he is reading “substance” as connoting materiality and sensibility rather than being precisely what is not available to the senses, nor reducible to the material. The intellectual culture has shifted. Substance, which once was substantial precisely because it was not material (and therefore ontologically flimsy and passing), is now being understood precisely as material, the material being now seen as the most solid, the most real. There are countless ways of imagining the shift from the pre-modern to the modern, but few are as dramatic as this reversal in how reality is being understood. And this shift, it seems, leads Cranmer to wholly misread Aquinas. In one sense, the distinction is small. Both Luther and the 39 articles stress the real presence. But note again, as with Luther, what is happening with Cranmer’s language. Here “spiritual” is used as a dualistic alternative to matter. The encounter with Christ is not through the material, but precisely in a “spiritual manner” understood as in opposition to the material, as a material understanding would be “repugnant.” Here, the matter is not the means through which we unite with the substance of Christ, rather it is refused through an emphasis on “the spiritual.” The “spiritual fashion” is not through and in matter (as substance is in material accidents) but functions in opposition to matter. The space between Luther and the 39 articles on one hand and Aquinas on the other is, in one sense, a small distinction of ways of understanding the real presence all affirm. But it amounts to a seismic shift, from seeing divine substance in material accidents to holding God’s presence as spiritual and opposed to matter. God is being localized apart from creation that, in God’s absence, is being seen as banal. This move migrates the encounter with God to the spiritual or, later, the mental realm, as faith becomes less a mode of being infused by and in relationship to the Holy Spirit, than a mental assent or belief. In contrast, for Aquinas, things have a substance outside of our capacity to perceive and through the materiality of the bread the substance of Christ is received. Recoiling from cannibalistic implications, the reformed emphasis sees the material as, at best, ontologically irrelevant to union with Christ (Luther), and at worst, as dichotomous to it (Cranmer). It occurs—in clear distinction to any language that invokes the material—“after an heavenly and spiritual manner.” In so doing, it advances a matter/spirit dualism that is simply not there in Aquinas. “Substance,” in fact, precisely refuses to surrender the isness of matter to banality, whereas a spirit/matter dualism does precisely this. It dichotomizes spirit and matter holding the latter to be banal qua the spiritual and “heavenly.” “Substance,” instead, precisely refuses to surrender the material world to the banal. Christ gives himself substantially to us through the materiality of the bread, which he binds himself to, drawing it,

228

Chapter 6

the fruit of creation and the work of human hands, into himself. The language of the 39 articles both reflects and reifies a new model of the real in which the material is surrendered to a banality that can only, at best, signify a God spiritually present, but ontologically absent. This is not, of course, the intent of the language of the 39 articles. But in opposing matter and spirit, when the language of substance precisely related them, it is the result. MAKING TIME BANAL This instantiation of matter as banal is one aspect of the early modern rejection of a transubstantive grammar. This is related to, and exacerbated by, the establishment of time also as banal. The Mass sees the now as participant in the life and death of Jesus. In the early modern period, this understanding is assailed by figures as diverse as Zwingli and Cranmer in a way that effectively refuses the ontological participation of contemporary time in the time of Christ. As I will show, this happens, in part, due to the idea that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross is sealed off from the Mass (as a sacrifice). This temporal localization of Christ’s sacrifice will be my focus in this section. Again, we will see that while an understanding of the Eucharist is largely shared among most reformers and Aquinas, specific reformed emphases in opposition to the Mass have massive consequences. My focus will be on the belief, held most passionately in Zwingli, that the Mass as a sacrifice is erroneous and indeed, “blasphemous.”43 In the second Helvetic confession (1562), we see a more advanced stage in the trajectory I have shown Luther and the 39 articles participating in. In relation to the Supper, the Helvetic confession holds, There is also a spiritual eating of Christ’s body; not such that we think that thereby the food itself is to be changed into spirit, but whereby the body and blood of the Lord, while remaining in their own essence and property, are spiritually communicated to us, certainly not in a corporeal but in a spiritual way, by the Holy Spirit, who applies and bestows upon us these things which have been prepared for us by the sacrifice of the Lord’s body and blood for us.44

Here again, we see the resistance to materiality and corporeality, and the emphasis on a “spiritual way” in contrast to it. But we also see that it is the “sacrifice of the Lord’s body and blood” (as we shall see, on Golgotha), which makes possible the spiritual gifts that are communicated to us by the eating of bread and wine, “certainly not in a corporeal but in a spiritual way.” This logic, as I will illustrate, localizes “enchanted time” in the life of Jesus.

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

229

Within a reformed understanding, shared by both Zwingli and Calvin, the contemporary Christian relates to the incarnation not through ontological participation but, “memory,” as Calvin writes, “The observations which we have already made respecting the sacrament, abundantly show that . . . [it was instituted] to be frequently celebrated by all Christians that they might often call to mind the sufferings of Christ; the recollection of which would sustain and strengthen their faith, would incite them to sing praises to God”45 (my italics). We see here the beginnings of something very modern. The relationship with the incarnation, something sealed within time, is established through an activity of the mind—memory. The supper becomes a memorial facilitating the imagination. The Eucharist becomes worship, a wholly human expression that is in memorial of a long distant event. This event of Christ’s passion is sealed in time, a foreclosed, sacred, time, in juxtaposition to a banal now, which is wholly subordinate to the laws of matter. Instead of ontological relationship in time, the relationship between those in time, and God in eternity, is increasingly ephemeral, being established through memory rather than ontological transformation. Central to both Calvin and Luther is the rejection of the Mass as a sacrifice. This rejection is significant in terms of the notion of time which is developing. For Luther, “It is quite certain that Christ cannot be sacrificed over and above the one single time he sacrificed himself.”46 And to suggest otherwise, for Luther, represents, “the greatest blasphemy and abomination ever known on the earth.”47 For Luther, the idea that the Eucharist is a sacrifice is not found in the early Church48 but is instantiated by the medieval Thomist / Aristotelian culture that he decries. It sees the Mass, for Luther, as for Calvin and Cranmer, as a re-sacrificing of Christ. Aquinas, of course, does not hold, no more than Luther does, that the Eucharist is a re-sacrificing of Christ. Neither Luther nor Calvin seem to be very attentive readers of Aquinas, and so they (especially Luther) reject something that he, at least, never supported. Rather, for Aquinas (citing Ambrose) “‘there is but one victim,’ namely that which Christ offered, and which we offer, ‘and not many victims’ because Christ was offered but once: and this latter sacrifice49 is the pattern of the former. For, just as what is offered everywhere is one body, and not many bodies, so also is it but one sacrifice” (III: Q. 83, Art. 1). Aquinas holds, with Luther and Calvin, that the sacrifice on Golgotha is a single event and the Mass does not re-sacrifice Christ. But, unlike the reformers, he holds, nonetheless, that the Mass is a sacrifice. How can he hold that there is one sacrifice on Golgotha and yet that each Mass is a sacrifice? For Aquinas, God is an unchanging God. Thus, incarnation is not simply something that happens within time but is something intrinsic to God in eternity. God is an incarnational God. God’s self-giving to the world50 is not a

230

Chapter 6

surprising or unexpected event in God’s history. This is simply who God is in himself. He is in mutual relationship, the self-giving of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to each other. In this self-giving, God reaches out from himself as the Son through the Spirit to give himself to created matter. This is who God is. It is not something God decides to do that is “out of character.” God is. This is an eternal isness, outside of time. God is not the forgiving God one day, an unforgiving God, the next, an incarnational God one day a gnostic, distant deity the next. As such, what we see on Golgotha is an event in time open to perception by the senses. But is also and at once a window into who God is, constantly, in eternity. From one lens, it is a temporal event, from the other it is an eternal reality. In itself is both at once, something God does in time, something God is in eternity. Because of this, while the Mass is distinct from Golgotha in time, it is one with this sacrificial self-giving of God to the world, eternally. The linear line of human perception in time touches the eternal singularity of the incarnational God. Golgotha and the Mass are such points of contact. What is distinct and plural in human perception is one and single in God’s isness. God, who in God’s eternity is incarnational, reaching out from himself to us, is a God who sacrifices his otherness. God is He who eternally, always and at once, offers Himself to us. The moments in linear time in which we see this, creation, incarnation, crucifixion, are not separate acts, they are a single actuality, the incarnational self-giving God. They are separate moments in linear time wherein we see this eternal truth. God does not “go back” to being a non-incarnational God outside of these incarnational moments in which God sacrifices His otherness to us and, as Paul writes, “takes the form of a slave.” This is who God is in Himself. These moments in time—creation, incarnation, the cross, the Mass, are moments in which the veil that obscures our view of this incarnational, self-giving (and thus sacrificial) God becomes thin. While these moments in time are separate, they are each a seeing of the one God who is none other than this self-giving incarnational God. Thus, the Mass is no more ontologically dichotomous to the cross than the Christ on the cross is ontologically dichotomous to the Father. They are all moments in linear time in which we see a God who was, is, and always will be an incarnational God. The Mass is not another Golgotha, rather Golgotha is not not the Mass. It seems to be other to it from the perspective of time, but this seeming is false, however, from the lens of God’s eternity. While they are separate in linear time, they are one in God. It is the one sacrifice, still, always. Because of this, for Aquinas, the Eucharist is the sacrament of the incarnation par excellance. It is that in which material creation bends to God’s self-giving. The Eucharist is the sacrament in which matter is not simply

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

231

subject to the transformative power of God but comes to actually participate in the incarnation. As Aquinas writes, A sacrament is so termed because it contains something sacred. Now a thing can be styled sacred from two causes; either absolutely, or in relation to something else. The difference between the Eucharist and other sacraments having sensible matter is that whereas the Eucharist contains something which is sacred absolutely, namely, Christ’s own body; the baptismal water contains something which is sacred in relation to something else, namely, the sanctifying power: and the same holds good of chrism and such like. Consequently, the sacrament of the Eucharist is completed in the very consecration of the matter, whereas the other sacraments are completed in the application of the matter for the sanctifying of the individual. (III: Q. 73)

While the efficacy of the baptismal waters is established by God who is not wholly one with the material accidents of the baptismal waters, God is one with creation in the Eucharist. Thus, the Eucharist is a participation in eternity, a taste of eternity, and an infusion by eternity. This is what Luther and the reformers miss. Their critique is not of the Eucharist as a participation in the incarnational sacrifice of an eternal God, but of the Eucharist as a re-sacrificing of Christ again and again, in addition to the sacrifice on Golgotha. But what they are critiquing is never assumed by Aquinas nor the tradition he represents. There is no sense in which the Mass, as understood by Aquinas or the Catholic Church, is a re-sacrificing. The pro-Nicene maxim of inseparable operation51 holds that all three persons are active simultaneously in any activity of God. Thus, at the incarnation the Spirit comes out from the father and hovers over the womb of the virgin, the result being the presence of Christ within her womb. All three persons are active and yet it is most fitting to speak of the Son and not the Father in the womb of the virgin. So, too, God creates through his Word and his Spirit passes over the waters. But while the Spirit and the Son (Word) are active, creation is most fittingly said to be the work of the Father. Similarly, while all three persons are active in sacraments, the Holy Spirit is the operative agent in baptism, the Spirit’s power being the potency that facilitates the gravitational pull on the human life that begins in those waters. In the Eucharist, however, Christ is the operative agent and is thus by His complete self-giving without remainder. Christ is He in whom God binds himself to matter, fully and finally. Thus, the incorporation of matter into the life of God for the good of us and the world is the essence of the sacrament as this is the essence of Christ. As Justin Martyr notes, “For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as

232

Chapter 6

we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by Him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nourished, is both the flesh and blood of our incarnated Jesus.”52 The sacrament is not apart from Christ. Any notion of it being “additional Golgothas” is as objectionable to Aquinas as it is to Luther. But unlike Luther, it is a sacrifice for Aquinas because God in His self-giving to creation is sacrificial of His otherness. Although Golgotha is a bloody sacrifice and the Mass is an “awesome and unbloody sacrifice,” they are as ontologically dichotomous as Christ is from himself. The recoiling from this logic in holding that present time is bound to Golgotha only by memory effectively localizes the incarnation in the life of Jesus. This is problematic both theologically and soteriologically. Theologically, in that it posits change in God, such that God becomes an incarnational God at a set time and after this “career” goes back to being a non-incarnational God. Soteriologically as it localizes soteriologically significant time in the past, thus divorcing us from it. It is because of this localization of soteriologically significant time that memory becomes the core trope for understanding the Lord’s supper for Calvin. This is, of course, not erroneous. Memory is a Eucharistic trope in scripture (Luke 22:19, 1 Cor 11:24–25) and the Fathers (Chrysostom’s Divine Liturgy for example). It is based on Jesus’ words, “τοῦτο ποιεῖτε εἰς τὴν ἐμὴν ἀνάμνησιν.”53 But as Robert Wilken notes, ἀνάμνησιν means to “recall by making present.”54 Hence, rather than pertaining to “memory” as we commonly use it, it is not an intellectual enterprise, but a form of making ontologically present something signified. As Frank Senn writes of ἀνάμνησιν, “This Greek word is practically untranslatable in English. ‘Memorial,’ ‘commemoration,’ ‘remembrance’ all suggest a recollection of the past, whereas anamnesis means making present an object or person from the past.” The reformation is both the product of, and the driver of, the epistemological trajectory of modernity. As Cranmer sees substance as material, matter becoming the most real in modernity, Calvin sees ἀνάμνησιν as memory while failing to appreciate the ontological re-presentation that anamnesis actually entails. This appears a slight shift but has massive consequences as the language of memory, seeing the Eucharist as a memorial, locates Christ in the past and thus the real presence as absent from the world today. The remembering community is thereby ontologically Godless even if wholly faithful (where faith is understood as belief or action). The space in which they live is bereft of the real presence of God who may be symbolized or remembered in a context that is, by virtue of this ontological absence, banal and distinct from the reality of God. As such the worshipping congregation in Calvin’s Geneva is the archetype of modernity as depicted in chapter 1. It is wholly secular, where “secular” is understood as space ontologically

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

233

divorced from the presence of God. Thus, it must be subject wholly to the laws of matter (science) and the power of the state, whose role is to order this matter according to the will of the distant God. Ironically, the theocracy that was Calvin’s Geneva, and the post-revolution French republic committed to sécularité, shared a self-understanding, in that God was seen as ontologically absent to both, even while both states sought to be ordered in accordance with the will of the supreme being. Moral actions in both can only be fealty to laws—divine or secular. In neither is there a grammar for the ontological union of persons with God in embodied actions accepting God’s self-giving. The moral grammar seen through this book in figures such as Augustine and Aquinas is wholly surrendered by such a logic. Its renewal cannot be imagined apart from a renewal of a transubstantive grammar for the Eucharist, which is sacrificed by these early modern moves. In Aquinas, the now is participatory in God’s eternity through the Mass. In Calvin, the now is removed from this eternity and can only remember the point of contact between God and the world in Jesus Christ as a past event. Hence, creation itself is surrendered to being within banal time and abandoned to the play of material forces. This surrender of time to banality must be seen, as Brad Gregory55 has seen it, as the conditio sine qua non for the understanding of creation as commodity. A material order without God must necessarily be an order in which only the play of material force abides.56 Hence, the ascent of the sciences as the method of enquiry that alone brings genuine knowledge, as the sciences can measure and document this play of forces. As such, the rejection of transubstantiation by the reformers fuels the context which will make faith in transubstantiation ever more difficult. It contributes, alongside the later philosophical developments seen in chapter 1, to an ever-increasing threshold that makes faith in the transformation of matter by God inconceivable. This is clearest in the Eucharist but visible in the modern moral theologies, Protestant and Catholic, which mirror the Kantian and Hegelian grammars of secular modernity rather than the Christian moral grammars of the past. The secularization of time and matter is an epistemologically violent process that constricts the blood that gave life to a culture of moral theology. The renewal argued for in this book cannot occur without restoring this blood flow from the Eucharist to a culture of moral theology. In my short final section, I will begin to explore how a liturgical renewal can fuel the kind of renewal within moral theology I have been arguing for. RENEWING A TRANSUBSTANTIVE GRAMMAR The denigration of the matter and time participates in, and accentuates, problematic trajectories that fuel the disenchanted saeculum of modernity.57 In this

234

Chapter 6

final section, I will touch very briefly on how the Mass, understood in terms of a transubstantive logic, resists this surrender of matter and time to laws of state and science alone. We approach the table and see a wafer. We see something banal. We see something that, according to its attributes of weight, color, and taste is as close to nothing as it can manage to be. And yet we approach in the knowledge that this seemingly banal thing, is, in fact, the most enchanted thing in the universe. It is nothing less than the body of Christ. It is the presence of God in time in what seems to be the nadir of banality. As Catherine Pickstock58 argues, this practice of seeing the banal, while knowing that within it is the most enchanted reality imaginable, creates a mistrust of all appearance. It creates a mistrust of appearances’ seeming banality, as seemingly banal appearances, like the bread, can, through the gracious self-giving of the real to it, participate in God. This generates, Pickstock claims, a suspicion of all appearances. A person who receives the Eucharist is trained to be suspicious of things which seem to be banal. Instead, they are trained to see them in relationship to God, who gives to them a dignity beyond what can be seen. It is not that the banal makes possible a glimpse of the divine, it is that the banal is transubstantiated by the divine and, because of this, the hegemony of banality is overthrown. No seemingly banal thing can be trusted to be, in fact, banal. God’s activity is not simply elsewhere, it is in the elements, not hypostatically bound to them, but transubstantiating them. It doesn’t leave them banal things, consubstantial with the sacred, they themselves are rendered sacred. Within such a logic, in every Mass, we train our minds to see the real as more than appearance, the material as more than banal. This is a practice which shapes us and resists the reduction of the real to the material and the reduction of dignity to attributes, a reduction which, I have shown, plagues modern moral theory in each of the contested spaces I have explored. Time and again the modern world has been scarred by attribute-based models of dignity, where a person is reduced to properties they hold that can be observed. And so, people’s dignity is bound to race, status, gender, or other attributes. Modern epistemology, as I showed in chapter 1, helps condemn us to this reduction of things to observable attributes. Receiving the Eucharist, however, trains the recipient to resist this. It trains them because they approach the altar knowing that the measurable and demonstrable attributes of the wafer is a useless aid to knowing what it is. The dignity of the Eucharist are in no way connected to the observable attributes of the wafer. In so doing, a proper eucharistic practice wages war on the reduction of dignity to attributes. Because of this, this practice of the Mass, seen through a transubstantive logic, can help renew the kind of moral imagination this book has called for. If an attribute-based model of dignity is

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

235

the disease that this book has argued that it is, then the Mass, understood in a transubstantive way, is the most perfect treatment for it. The Eucharist is also and at once a moment of resistance against the capitalism, which, as I showed in chapter 1, is what it has become through the reduction of creation to the status of commodity. With Kant, we must bracket the thing in itself. We must foreclose on the noumenal, (which, in the Eucharist is the substance) and work only with the phenomenal appearance of a thing. Hence, within this Kantian economy, a thing is only what it is for me, that is, that which it is perceived to be. There being nothing beyond perceptions to give it a dignity or mystery outside of our naming of it. It is thus reduced to a commodity—what it is for me. For example, a tree may be perceived as firewood, as shelter, as artistic inspiration, or more, but what it is in each case is what it is perceived to be in terms of its relation to the perceiver. It cannot be otherwise as there is no “in itself,” no remainder beyond human perception, to ground an isness in anything other than utility. Perception, within Kantian modernity, exhausts the isness of things. Thus, things, as I showed in chapter 1, are inevitably commodified as they are what they are by virtue of their perception by thinking subjects, “others” who situate trees and fields and animals in relation to their own needs and desires. The Eucharist, but only understood in terms of a transubstantive logic, rejects this reduction of the real and schools selves in the resistance of it. The consecrated wafer is not what it is in its appearance, it is precisely not what it is pro me. It is precisely not what it is perceived to be. Hence, it can never be reduced to a commodity as its isness is independent of me. It is not what it is as phenomena, it is what it is, exclusively, as noumena. The mistrust of appearances established through the Eucharist can serve to restore, to all seemingly banal objects, a mysteriousness, which means that they cannot be simply reduced to pro me.59 The real cannot be reduced to a commodity as my perception, as the arbiter of the real, has been exposed as wholly unreliable by virtue of our fallacious misimpression of the Eucharistic element, the bread, as banal. That which gives itself to us as appearance then, whether they’re trees and people or bread and wine, become inscribed with a dignity that refuses commodification through the training of the mind in this Eucharistic hermeneutics of suspicion. It is this understanding of God’s self-giving to matter that has provided the basis of each of my attempts to renew Catholic moral theology in the contested spaces explored in this book. The loss of this culture of moral theology was informed by the loss of a transubstantive logic. I am not claiming that a culture of moral theology can be renewed simply by renewing such a logic. This renewal requires more. Nonetheless the promotion of such a transubstantive logic can assist in this process. Such promotion would run counter the grain of much twentieth-century Catholic Theology of the eucharist. Schillebeeckx, for example,

236

Chapter 6

works to resist precisely the kind of approach that I am looking to renew. For Schillebeeckx, the ontological transubstantiation central to the tradition is no longer coherent for modern subjects.60 His approach is echoed by Rahner and many more who seek to move away from any sense that there is ontological change in the Eucharistic elements. Instead, the emphasis is on a change in what things mean. As Rahner writes in support of these modern emphases the more recent approaches suggest the following considerations . . . the substance, essence, meaning and purpose of the bread are identical but the meaning of a thing can be changed without detriment to its matter. The meaning of the bread has been changed through the consecration. Something which formerly served profane use now becomes the dwelling place and the symbol of Christ who is present and gives himself to his own. (my italics)61

My approach is the exact opposite of this. This chapter in particular, but also this book as a whole, should be seen as an attempt to undo some of the damage the culture of late modern Catholic theology did. The approach of figures like Rahner and Schillebeeckx acquiesced in establishing the tyranny of the banal. In contrast, invigorated by a transubstantive grammar, the practice of communion can actually help resist the commodification of the real through the ongoing training of the receiving self. “Seeing” the real presence of Christ, substantially, in the bread refuses the surrender of bread, wine, or any organic matter to a commodity because it is what it is in a relationship to God, a relationship outside of our field of vision. Because of this, the practice of the Eucharist, understood through a transubstantive logic, offers resistance against the desire to elevate ourselves over and against the other. As 1 Corinthians 10:16–17 makes clear, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” For Paul, the body of Christ is not simply a metaphor. It is a reality at the altar and the basis for the Church as the body of Christ, in which all are one. In the Eucharist, we become one because the body of Christ is not subordinate to our personhood. Rather we, who are ontologically subordinate to Christ, are consumed by the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Thus, we become one body. It is not that Christ, with whom we become one in the Eucharist, is fragmented into shards, each shard of Christ sealed up within each person who receives the Eucharist. Rather, Christ is one and thus the phenomenological appearance of individuals walking away from the altar masks the noumenological reality of their oneness in Christ’s body. They can only remain fully individuals if they have ripped a part of Christ from themselves and consumed Him. If they have been consumed by the one Body, who is not

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

237

broken into shards, then they become part of His body. Thus, all who walk back from the altar have become parts of one body, they are not isolated from each other, they are, truly, one. From this perspective, it makes no more sense to say that “Michelle is hungry but I am fine” than it does to say, “my belly is hungry, but I am fine.” Each person is ontologically one with the other as all are consumed by the one body of Christ at the altar. This is not, within a transubstantive logic, a conceptual or figurative oneness. It is not symbolic, as Rahner has it in the citation above, or as the vast majority of Catholics, according to the surveys cited earlier, hold. It is not symbolic, it is substantial. Hence, the Mass, properly understood through a transubstantive logic, represents a practice of resisting illicit hierarchy and disparity as the king, prostitute, thief, and criminal are one body in the bread and one blood in the cup. The bread becomes Christ’s body and this body consumes our bodies at the altar, thus we become one substance with it. Therefore, we are bound together all participatory in Christ’s substance. To deny this is to deny the oneness of Christ. In being consumed at the altar, we become not not each other. We become one body, substantially. The moral ramifications of this are clear, and have been stressed throughout this book. Without the understanding that Christ is substantially present, this ontological challenging of individualism and disunity is lost. Without the substantial presence of Christ, about which Rahner is so squeamish, the bread signifies a Christ who is ontologically absent, an absence only “overcome” by the work of an individual mind to remember him. Christ therefore (and what could be more modern?) becomes only thought, only idea. But if the bread is not ontologically altered, then neither can the person who receives it be ontologically altered as they are communing, ontologically, with bread alone.62 The body incorporates and breaks down food, we subordinate it to our biological needs. The body dissolves matter. Thus, we cannot be substantially changed as there is no isness present that is capable of not being dissolved by us. But if the Eucharist is not simply material accidents but substantially Christ, then our isness is confronted with another isness, which ours is ontologically subordinate to. Moreover, we are, for catholic Christians, made for oneness with this isness and we yearn, as Augustine notes,63 to be one with it. This isness is corporate, it is more than us and in coming to commune with Christ we come to commune with others who are in Christ. Thus, in terms of resisting the individualism that fuels capitalism, as well as in resisting the hegemony of appearances that fuels the tyranny of the banal, the renewal of a transubstantive logic is central to renewing the culture of moral theology I have explored in this book. A transubstantive account of the Eucharist establishes the conceptual form that the moral life takes,

238

Chapter 6

as embodied action accepting God’s self-giving. Further, equipped with a transubstantive logic and aware of its ramifications, women and men who approach the altar can be schooled in their cells to imagine the world and the moral life in more coherently Christian ways. Apart from this approach Catholic moral theology has floundered, it has been reduced to maxims which are unconvincing to the vast majority of Catholics and almost all non Catholics. Because of this, the renewal of Catholic theology must be informed by the renewal of the Eucharist as “the source and summit” of the Catholic faith. This book has been in the service of this renewal. Catholic moral theology, as I have noted through this book, is failing. In the contested spaces, Catholic positions fail to convince Catholics, never mind those within the broader cultures. I have identified two, interwoven reasons for this. First, the hegemony of secular perspectives, fueled by a distinctive set of epistemological assumptions. Catholic theology has failed to coherently problematize these assumptions. Instead, it has too often sought, as I have shown, to work within them and, in the curious attempt to retain a Constantinian power within nation states, compete in public spaces on the basis of these assumptions. In this book, I have aimed to show that these practices have served Catholic theology ill. I have aimed to call these epistemological (largely Kantian) assumptions into question. I have argued consistently that, instead of working with these assumptions, Catholic moral theology needs to renew its relationship with the Trinitarian ontology on which its propositions were originally based. This ontology involves an understanding of a God who gives himself, as the Son, through the Spirit, to us, and this self-giving has its purest and most saturated expression in the Eucharist. NOTES 1. I will discuss moves in the early Reformation, in particular Luther, and the 39 articles’ rejection of the language of transubstantiation. 2. Although not exclusive. 3. Their number is legion. 4. As in John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), Conor Cunningham’s Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Taylor & Francis, 2002), and Brad Gregory’s, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012). 5. Following Max Weber. 6. As I will show in what follows, this “demythologization” is not a rejection, for Luther, of the real presence. It is, rather, an unintended demythologization by establishing a terminological matter/spirit dualism that surrenders matter to banality.

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

239

7. For a contesting of this traditional account see Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed.” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497–528. 8. See Hans Küng, On Being a Christian, trans. Edward Quinn (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1976): 344. 9. To use Weber’s term. 10. As discussed in chapter 1. 11. See Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?, John Templeton Foundation, accessed November 2022, https:​//​www​.scribd​.com​/document​/3281099​/Science​-and​ -God. 12. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: EP Dutton, 1979): 25. 13. Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1974): 99. 14. Mark Granovetter, “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” in American Journal of Sociology, vol. 83, no. 6 (1978): 1420–1443. 15. David Rome, “Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football,” in Journal of Political Economy, vol. 114, no. 2 (2006): 340–365. 16. Brian Burke, “A New Study on Fourth Downs: Go for It,” New York Times, accessed March 2018, https:​//​fifthdown​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2009​/09​/17​/a​-new​-study​ -on​-fourth​-downs​-go​-for​-it​/​?​_r​=0. 17. Leigh Montville, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth (New York: Broadway Books, 2007): 68. 18. Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dodds (New York: Random House, 1950): 819–833. 19. Center for Applied Research, “Belief In the Real Presence,” accessed March 2018, http:​//​cara​.georgetown​.edu​/masseucharist​.pdf​#page​=16. 20. https:​//​www​.pewresearch​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2019​/08​/FT​_19​.08​.05​_ Transubstantiation​_Topline​.pdf. 21. As this chapter will go on to show, substance, within Catholic theology, refers to the isness of a thing beyond its accidents, that is, beyond (but not dichotomous to) its material properties. 22. Basil of Caesarea, Against Eunomius, Fathers of the Church Patristic Series, V.122, trans. Mark Delcogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011): 110. 23. “My bread is ordinary. But that bread is bread before the words of the Sacraments; where the consecration has entered in, the bread becomes the flesh of Christ. And let us add this: How can what is bread be the Body of Christ? By the consecration. The consecration takes place by certain words; but whose words? Those of the Lord Jesus. Like all the rest of the things said beforehand, they are said by the priest; praises are referred to God, prayer of petition is offered for the people, for kings, for other persons; but when the time comes for the confection of the venerable Sacrament, then the priest uses not his own words but the words of Christ. Therefore it is the word of Christ that confects this Sacrament. . . . Before it be consecrated it is bread; but where the words of Christ come in, it is the Body of Christ. Finally, hear

240

Chapter 6

Him saying: “All of you take and eat of this; for this is My Body” (St. Ambrose of Milan, The Sacraments 4, 4, 14; 4, 5, 23). And before the words of Christ the chalice is full of wine and water; but where the words of Christ have been operative it is made the Blood of Christ, which redeems the people. See William Jurgens, trans., The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 2 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979): 176. 24. “Christ is present. The One [Christ] who prepared that [Holy Thursday] table is the very One who now prepares this [altar] table. For it is not a man who makes the sacrificial gifts become the Body and Blood of Christ, but He that was crucified for us, Christ Himself. The priest stands there carrying out the action, but the power and the grace is of God, ‘This is my body,’ he says. This statement transforms the gifts.” See “Homilies on Treachery of Judas 1, 6” in William Jurgens, trans., The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 2 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979): 104–105. 25. “He did not say, ‘This is the symbol of My Body, and this, of My Blood,’ but ‘This is My Body and My Blood,’ teaching us not to look upon the nature of what is set before us, but that it is transformed by means of the Eucharistic action into Flesh and Blood.” Commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Lord’s Prayer and on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist, trans. Alphonse Mingana (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2009): 75. 26. “But what consistency is there in those who hold that the bread over which thanks have been given is the body of their Lord, and the cup his blood, if they do not acknowledge that He is the Son of the Creator. . . . For as the bread from the earth, receiving the invocation of God, is no longer common bread but the Eucharist, consisting of two elements, earthly and heavenly” (4:18:4). William A. Jurgens, trans., The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970): 95. 27. “For just as the bread and the wine of the Eucharist before the holy invocation of the adorable Trinity were simple bread and wine, but the invocation having been made, the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine the Blood of Christ” (Catechetical Lectures 19 [Mystagogic 1], 7). In William A. Jurgens, trans., The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 1 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970): 359. 28. “[Heretics] abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in his goodness, raised up again.” Letter to the Smyrnaeans 7:1, Ignatius, Jack N. Sparks and Robert Grant, The Letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch (Elk Grove, CA: St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology, 1998). 29. “After the type had been fulfilled by the passover celebration and He had eaten the flesh of the lamb with His Apostles, He takes bread which strengthens the heart of man, and goes on to the true Sacrament of the passover, so that just as Melchisedech, the priest of the Most High God, in prefiguring Him, made bread and wine an offering, He too makes Himself manifest in the reality of His own Body and Blood.” St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, Trans, Thomas Scheck (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008): 297. 30. “That Bread which you see on the altar, having been sanctified by the word of God is the body of Christ. That chalice, or rather, what is in that chalice, having been

The Mass and the Renewal of the Moral Life

241

sanctified by the word of God is the blood of Christ. Through that bread and wine the Lord Christ willed to commend his body and blood, which he poured out for us for the forgiveness of sin” (St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 227). See William Jurgens, trans., The Faith of the Early Fathers, Vol. 3 (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979): 30. 31. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 158. 32. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 159. 33. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 156. 34. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 156. 35. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 156. 36. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 158. 37. Martin Luther, Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970): 148. 38. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 161. 39. For a good account see Yngve Brilioth’s classic text, Eucharistic Faith and Practice: Evangelical and Catholic (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1961): 104. 40. Martin Luther, The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther, ed., Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim (London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883): 159. 41. Thomas Cranmer, An Answer Unto A Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation, Devised By Stephen Gardiner, Doctor of Law, Late Bishop of Winchester, Against the True and Godly Doctrine of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, First Edition (Cambridge: University Press, 1844): 47. 42. Ibid. 43. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion Volume XXI, ed., John T. McNeill, trans., Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960). 44. Ibid. 45. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: Volume II, trans. John Allen (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1843): 579.

242

Chapter 6

46. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961): 143. 47. Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III, ed. Robert H. Fischer (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961): 146. 48. As J. N. D. Kelly writes, “It was natural for early Christians to think of the Eucharist as a sacrifice. The fulfillment of prophecy demanded a solemn Christian offering, and the rite itself was wrapped in the sacrificial atmosphere with which our Lord invested the Last Supper. The words of institution, ‘Do this’ (touto poieite), must have been charged with sacrificial overtones for second-century ears; Justin, at any rate, understood them to mean, ‘Offer this.’” J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1977): 196–197. 49. The Mass. 50. “Christ, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6–8). 51. See Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 46. 52. Justin Martyr, First Apology, 66. 53. “Do this in memory (ἀνάμνησιν) of me.” 54. Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking The Face Of God (London: Yale University Press, 2003): 34. 55. Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012): 235–297. 56. As there is nothing else but material forces. 57. These trajectories proceed within Roman Catholicism after the Reformation too in a distinct but parallel way. 58. Catherine Pickstock, After Writing on the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 59. This is what is lost in many strands of modern Catholicism, which has tended to accept the tyranny of the banal apart from the Eucharist. While the Eucharist should open up the possibility of God throughout the created order (albeit in less saturated forms) the anti-reformation attempt to emphasize the Eucharist risks a localization of the presence of God in the consecrated host. 60. Edward Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist (New York: Burns and Oates, 2005). 61. Karl Radner, ed., Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi (New York: Seabury Press, 1975): 1754. 62. Even if communing with Christ in “an heavenly or spiritual manner.” 63. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds rest in You.” Augustine, Confessions, Oxford World Classics, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 3.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Alexrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Alighieri, Dante. Inferno: A Verse Translation by Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Bantam Books, 2004. Ambrose of Milan. Exposition of the Holy Gospel According to Saint Luke: With, Fragments on the Prophecy of Esaias. Translated by Theodosia Tomkinson. Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 1998. Aquinas, Thomas. An Exposition of the On the Hebdomads of Boethius. Translated by Janice L. Schultz and Edward A. Synan. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2001. ———. Catena aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels Collected out of the Works of the Fathers, 4 vol. 1841; reprint Saint Austin Press, 1997. ———. Commentary on Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians and the Letter to the Philippians. Translated by F. R. Larcher and Michael Duffy, Aquinas Scripture series, vol. 3. Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1969. ———. Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Part I (Chapters 1–7). Translated by James A. Weisheipl and Fabian R. Larcher, Aquinas Scripture Series, vol. 4. Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1980. ———. Compendium of Theology. Translated by Richard J. Regan. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Latin text: Compendium theologiae ad fratrem Raynaldum, Leonine, vol. 42. Edited by G. de Grandpré (1979). ———. Disputed Questions on Virtue. Edited and translated by Jeffrey Hause and Claudia Eisen Murphy. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010. ———. On Evil. Translated by Richard J. Regan. Edited by Brian Davies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. On Love and Charity: Readings from the Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, Translated by Peter A. Kwasniewski, Thomas Bolin, and Joseph Bolin. Thomas Aquinas in Translation series. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008.

243

244

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

———. On the Truth of the Catholic Faith. Translated by Anton C. Pegis (Bk. 1), J. F. Anderson (Bk. 2), and Vernon J. Bourke (Bk. 3), C. J. O’Neill (Bk. 4) 1955; reprint. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. ———. Questions on the Soul. Translated by James H. Robb, Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation 27. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984. ———. Saint Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by C. I. Litzinger, 2 vols. Chicago: 1964; reprint Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books, 1993. ———. Summa Theologiae. Cambridge: Blackfriars/New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–1973. ———. Summa Theologica: Supplement to the Third Part. Edited by Anthony Uyl. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Woodstock, ON: Devoted Publishing, 2018. ———. The Literal Exposition on Job: A Scriptural Commentary Concerning Providence, Classics in Religious Studies 7. Translated by A. Damico. Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1989. Aristotle. Metaphysics. VIII.10. Ch. X. (needs bibliography). Asad, Tala. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Atkinson, David William. The English Ars Moriendi. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Augustine. Confessions. Oxford World Classics. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ———. City of God. Edited by Vernon J. Bourke. Translated by Gerald G. Walsh, Demetrius B. Zema, Grace Monahan, and Danial J. Honan. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1958. ———. Concerning the Nature of Good against the Manichaens (De Natura Boni Contra Manichaeos).‌‌ ———. Enchridion. Translated by Ernest Evans. S.P.C.K, 1953. ———. On Faith and the Creed 17. New York: New City Press, 2005. ———. On the Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings. Cambridge Texts in History of Philosophy. Edith by Peter King. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. On Marriage and Concupiscence. Edited by Philip Schaff and Benjamin Warfield. Translated by Robert Wallis and Peter Holms. CreatedSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015. ———. On The Good of Marriage. Fathers of the Church. Translated by Charles T. Wilcox. Edited by Roy J. Deferrari. Boston, MA: St. Paul Editions, 1961. ———. On The Trinity: Books 8–15. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Edited by Gareth B. Matthews and translated by Stephen McKenna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Sermons 111/6 (184–229Z) on the Liturgical Seasons. The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Translated by Edmund Hilll and edited by John E. Rotelle. New Rochelle, NY: New City Press, 1993.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

245

Augustine and Daniel Edward Doyle. Essential Sermons. The Works of Saint Augustine, Part Iii, Homilies. Translated by Edmund Hill. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2007. Ayres, Lewis. Augustine and the Trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Explorations in Theology. Volume I. Translated by A. V. Littledale and Alexander Dru. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989. ———. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume I: Seeing the Form. Edited by Jospeh Fessio and John Riches. Translated by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982. ———. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume III: Studies in Theological Lay Styles. Translated by Andrew Louth et al. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986. ———. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Volume V: The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age. Edited by John Riches. Translated by Oliver Davies et al. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991. ———. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume. VII: The New Covenant. Translated by Brian McNeil. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989. ———. Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Volume V: The Last Act. Translated by G. Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998. Barash, David, and Judith Lipton. The Myth of Monogamy: Fidelity and Infidelity in Animals and People. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. Barb, Amandine. “An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms: Religion, Civic Belonging and Collective Identity in the United States,” in European Journal of American studies [online: ejas.revues.org/8865], 6:1, 1–18. Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Reconciliation. Volume 4. Part 2. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958. Basil of Caesarea. Against Eunomius. Fathers of the Church Patristic Series, V.122. Translated by Mark Delcogliano and Andrew Radde-Gallwitz. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New York: EP Dutton, 1979. ———. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine Books, 1972. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Beckwith, Francis J., and Norman L. Geisler. Matters of Life and Death: Calm Answers to Tough Questions about Abortion and Euthanasia. Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1991. Bell, Daniel M., Jr. Liberation Theology after the End of History: The Refusal to Cease Suffering. London: Routledge, 2001. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Understanding, Book 3. Blackmore, Susan. The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

246

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

———. “The Power of Memes.” Scientific American, 283, no. 4 (October 2000): 52–61. Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour. Harvard University Press, 1999. Bonner, Gerald. St. Augustine of Hippo: His Life and Controversies. 3rd ed. Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2002. Booker, M. Keith. Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films. Prager, 2010. Bouyer, Louis. Eucharist: Theology and Spirituality of the Eucharistic Prayer. Translated by Charles U. Quinn. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968. Brilioth, Yngve. Eucharistic Faith and Practice: Evangelical and Catholic. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1961. Brosnan, Sarah F. “Justice- and Fairness-Related Behaviors in Nonhuman Primates.” In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. Supplement 2 (June 18, 2013): 10416–10423. Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967. ———. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Revised Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ———. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Bulgakov, Sergius. A Bulgakov Anthology: Sergius Bulgakov 1871–1944. Translated by Natalie Duddington and James Pain. Edited by James Pain and Nicolas Zernov. London: SPCK, 1976. ———. “From Marxism to Sophiology.” In Religion in Life 1, no. 4 (1937): 361–368. ———. Philosophy of Economy: The World as Household. Translated and edited by Catherine Evtuhov. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. Sophia, the Wisdom of God: An Outline of Sophiology. Translated by Patrick Thompson, O. Fielding Clarke, and Xenia Braikevitc. Revised edition. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1993. ———. The Bride of the Lamb. Translated by Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids, MI and Edinburgh, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company and T&T Clark, 2002. ———. The Holy Grail and the Eucharist. Translated by Boris Jakim. Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Books, 1997. ———. Unfading Light: Contemplations and Speculations. Translated and edited by Thomas Allan Smith. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012. Burke, Brian. “A New Study on Fourth Downs: Go for It.” New York Times, accessed March 2018, https:​//​fifthdown​.blogs​.nytimes​.com​/2009​/09​/17​/a​-new​-study​-on​ -fourth​-downs​-go​-for​-it​/​?​_r​=0. Cahill, Lisa Sowle. “On Richard McCormick: Reason and Faith in Post-Vatican II Catholic Ethics.” In Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, 78–105. Edited by Allen Verhey and Stephen E. Lammers. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1987. ———. Theological Bioethics: Participation, Justice, and Change. Moral Traditions Series. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2005.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

247

Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion: Volume II. Translated by John Allen. Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1843. ———. Institutes of the Christian Religion Volume XXI. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. The Library of Christian Classics. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994. Cavanaugh, William. The Myth of Religious Violence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. Theopolitical Imagination: Christian Practices of Space and Time. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003. ———. Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998. Center for Applied Research, “Belief in the Real Presence,” accessed March 2018, http:​//​cara​.georgetown​.edu​/masseucharist​.pdf​#page​=16. Chadwick, Henry. Augustine of Hippo: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Chryssides, George, and Stephen Gregg, eds. The Insider/Outsider debate: New Perspectives in the Study of Religion. Equinox Publishing, 2017. Clement of Alexandria. Le pedagogue. Book 1. Translated by Marguerite Harl. In Sources Chrétienes. Vol. 70. Paris Editions du Cerf. (1960): IV, 1, 3, 128. Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender. Oxford, Blackwell, 2002. ———. Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford, Blackwell, 2003. ———. “The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation and God.” In Modern Theology 16 (2000): 61−73. ———. The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender and the Quest for God. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2015. Collins, Charles. “Irish Primate Urges No on Abortion Vote, Says Not a ‘Catholic’ Issue.” May 19, 2018. Accessed June 18, 2018. https:​//​cruxnow​.com​/church​-in​-uk​ -and​-ireland​/2018​/05​/19​/irish​-primate​-urges​-no​-on​-abortion​-referendum​-says​-its​ -not​-a​-catholic​-issue. Corning, P. A. “The Co-Operative Gene: On the Role of Synergy in Evolution.” In Evolutionary Theory 11 (1996): 183–207. Cowdrey, Herbert Edward John. “Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion and the Penitential Ordinance Following the Battle of Hastings.” In Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 20(2) (1969): 225–242. Cranmer, Thomas. An Answer Unto a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation, Devised by Stephen Gardiner, Doctor of Law, Late Bishop of Winchester, Against the True and Godly Doctrine of the Most Holy Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Jesus Christ. First Edition. Cambridge: University Press, 1844. Croken, Robert. Luther’s First Front: Eucharist as Sacrifice. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1990.

248

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

Cunningham, Conor. Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology. London: Taylor & Francis, 2002. Curran, Charles. Catholic Moral Theology in the United States. A History. Georgetown University Press, 2008. Dahiyat, Ismail. Avicenna’s Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. Dawkins, Richard. “Postmodernism Disrobed.” In Nature 394, no. 6689 (July 1998): 141–143. ———. River out of Eden. London: Oxford, 1993. ———. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. ———. “Viruses of the Mind.” In Dennett and His Critics: Demystifying Mind, 1–28. Edited by Bo Dahlbom. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993. Deane, Deane, “Nietzsche’s Atheism.” Religion and the New Atheism. St. Peter’s Press, 2015. ———. Nietzsche and Theology. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. de Lubac, Henri. A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984. ———. Augustinianism and Modern Theology. New York: Crossroad, 2000. ———. Catholicism, Christ and the Common Destiny of Man. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988. ———. Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages. Faith in Reason: Philosophical Enquiries. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. ———. Scripture in the Tradition. New York: Crossroad, 2000.

———. The Motherhood of the Church. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982. ———. The Splendor of the Church. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986.

———. Theology in History. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996. DeMarco, Donald. “The Roman Catholic Church and Abortion: An Historical Perspective.” In The Homiletic & Pastoral Review, 59–66. Ignatius Press (July 1984). Dennett, Daniel. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 328ff. Washington, DC: C-Span, 2006. ———. Consciousness Explained. New York: Little, Brown & Co., 1991. ———. “‘Filling In’ Versus Finding Out: A Ubiquitous Confusion in Cognitive Science.” In Cognition: Conceptual and Methodological Issues, 33–49. Edited by Herbert L. Pick, Paulus Willem van den Broek, and David C. Knill. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992. ———. “The Origin of Selves.” In Self & Identity: Contemporary Philosophical Issues, 163–173. London: MacMillan, 1991. Descartes, Rene. Discourse on Method. Third Edition. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1998. Desmond, William. The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 56. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

249

———. Is There a Sabbath for Thought?: Between Religion and Philosophy. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy No. 45. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. Dodaro, Robert, and George Lawless, eds. Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner. New York: Routledge. 2000. ———. Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dupré, Louis. The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Eco, Umberto. Serendipities, Language and Lunacy. Boston: Mariner Books, 1999. Emery, Giles. The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. Translated by Francesca Murphy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Trinity in Aquinas (Ypsilanti, MI: Sapientia Press, 2003) [French: La Trinité créatrice (Paris: Vrin, 1995)]. Farley, Margaret. Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics. London: Continuum, 2006. Fassler, Margot E., and Rebecca A. Baltzer, eds. The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional Developments, Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Fincham, Kenneth. Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. Jesus: Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology. New York: Continuum, 1994. Florensky, Pavel. The Pillar and Ground of Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Foucault, Michael, Paul Rabinow, and Rogers D. Spotswood Collection. The Foucault Reader. First Edition. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Fox, Rory. Time and Eternity in Mid-Thirteenth Century Thought. Oxford Theological Monographs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Frank, Arthur. For a Sociology of the Body: An Analytical Review. Edited by M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, and B. Turner. The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory. London: Sage Publishing, 1991. Franks, Christopher A. He Became Poor: The Poverty of Christ and Aquinas’s Economic Teachings. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009. Friedman, Russell. Medieval Trinitarian Thought from Aquinas to Ockham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Giddens, Anthony. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press, 1991. Gillespie, Michael Allen. The Theological Origins of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

250

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

Granovetter, Mark. “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior.” In American Journal of Sociology. vol. 83, no. 6 (May 1978): 1420–1443. Grant, George. Collected Works of George Grant: Volume 4: 1970–1988. Edited by Arthur Davis and Henry Roper. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. Gregory of Nyssa. On the Making of Man. Edited by Philip Schaff. Aeterna Press, 2015. Gregory, Brad. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. Gunton, Colin. “No Other Foundation: One Englishman’s Reading of Church Dogmatics Chapter V.” In Theology Through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995, 50–69. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2003. Haldane, John, and Patrick Lee. “Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion and the Value of Life.” In Philosophy, vol. 78, no. 304 (April 2003): 255–278. Hanby, Michael. Augustine and Modernity. London: Routledge, 2003. Harmless, William, ed. Augustine in His Own Words. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Harrison, Carol. “Augustine.” In The Early Christian World, vol. 2, 1205–1227. Edited by Philip Esler. New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. Augustine: Christian Truth and Fractured Humanity (Christian Theology in Context). New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hart, David Bentley. Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. London: Yale University Press, 2010. Healy, Nicholas. Thomas Aquinas: Theologian of the Christian Life. Great Theologians series. Aldershot/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Hemming, Laurence Paul, ed. Radical Orthodoxy? A Catholic Enquiry. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2000. Heyward, Carter. “Abortion a Moral Choice.” In Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 9, no. 1 (1986): 42–45. Hildegard of Bingen. Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, Volume I. Translated and edited by Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. ———. Scivias. Translated by Mother Columba Hart and Jane Bishop. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1990. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hunnicutt, Gwen and Gary LaFree. “Reassessing the Structural Covariates of Cross-National Infant Homicide Victimization.” In Homicide Studies, 12, no. 1 (2008): 46–66. Hütter, Reinhard. Dust Bound for Heaven: Explorations in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. Ignatius, Jack, N. Sparks, and Robert Grant. The Letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch. Elk Grove, CA: St. Athanasius Academy of Orthodox Theology, 1998. Jenkins, John I. CSC. Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Jennet, Bryan, and Fred Plum. “Persistent Vegetative State after Brain Damage.” In The Lancet 1, no. 7753 (April 1972): 734–737.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

251

John of Damascus and David Anderson. On the Divine Images: Three Apologies against Those Who Attack the Divine Images. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980. Johnson, Maxwell E., ed. Issues in Eucharistic Praying in East and West: Essays in Liturgical and Theological Analysis. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011. Jones, Cheslyn, Geoffrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold, and Paul Bradshaw, eds. The Study of Liturgy. Revised edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Jordan, Mark. Rewritten Theology: Aquinas after His Readers. Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Jüngel, Eberhard, and Garrett E. Paul. Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986. Jungmann, Joseph. The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development, 2 vol. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1986; reprint of 1955 edition. ———. The Mass of the Roman Rite: Its Origins and Development. Translated by Francis A. Brunner. Reprint of 1956 edition: Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1986. Jurgens, William A., trans. The Faith of the Early Fathers. Vol. 1. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1970. ———. The Faith of the Early Fathers. Vol. 2. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979. ———. The Faith of the Early Fathers. Vol. 3. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1979. Kaelber, Lutz, and Raimond Reiter, eds. Kinder und Kinderfachabteilungen im Nationalsozialismus. Gedenken und Forschung. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2011. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Perpetual Peace. Library of Liberal Arts, no. 54. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957. ———. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science. Translated by Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. London: Adam & Charles Black, 1977. Kenny, Anthony. Aquinas. Past Masters. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. ———. Aquinas on Being. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Aquinas on Mind. London: Routledge, 1993. ———. The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980. Kerr, Fergus. After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. ———, ed. Contemplating Aquinas: On the Varieties of Interpretation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Kilmartin, Edward. The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology, Edited by Robert J. Daly. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press [A Pueblo Book], 1999. Klauser, Theodor. A Short History of the Western Liturgy: An Account and Some Reflections. 2nd ed. Translated by John Halliburton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

252

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

Klee, Ernst. “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Die “Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens.” Fischer S. Verlag GmbH, 1983. Kohlberg, Lawrence. Essays on Moral Development. First Edition. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981. Kretzmann, Norman. The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kreztmann, Norman, and Elenore Stump, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Küng, Hans. On Being a Christian. Translated by Edward Quinn. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1976. Küng, Hans, and Walter Jens. Dying with Dignity: A Plea for Personal Responsibility. New York: Continuum, 1996. Lang, Johannes. “Holocaust Genocide Studies.” Oxford Journals 24 (2) (2010): 225–246. Laska, Vera, ed. “Women in the Resistance and in the Holocaust: The Voices of Eyewitnesses.” In Contributions in Women’s Studies, no. 37. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Leet, Martin. “The Politics of Suffering: Progress, Modernity and the Adolescent Crisis.” Australian Journal of Political Science 37, no. 1 (2002/03/01 2002): 7–20. Leget, Carol. Living with God: Thomas Aquinas on the Relationship between Life on Earth and “Life” After Death. Leuven: Peeters, 1997. Leon-Dufour, Xavier. Sharing the Eucharistic Bread: The Witness of the New Testament. Translated by Matthew O’Connell. New York: Paulist Press, 1986. Levering, Matthew. Sacrifice and Community: Jewish Offering and Christian Eucharist. Illuminations: Theory & Religion. Edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock & Graham Ward. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. ———. Scripture and Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology. Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Levering, Matthew, and Michael Dauphinais. Reading Romans with St. Thomas Aquinas. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Lisska, Anthony J. Aquinas’ Theory of Natural Law: An Analytical Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: William Tegg, 1870. Lombardo, Nicholas E. The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Long, D. Stephen. Divine Economy: Theology and the Market. London: Routledge, 2000. [Atherton, John. Theology 104.820 (2001); Finn, Daniel Rush. Christian Century (March 2002); Meeks, M. Douglas. JAAR 70.4 (2002); Oslington, Paul. Markets and Morality 4.1 (2001); Rothchild, Jonathan. Journal of Religion 82.4 (2002).]‌‌ Lowe, Elizabeth. The Contested Theological Authority of Thomas Aquinas: The Controversies Between Hervaeus Natalis and Durandus of St. Pourcain, 1307– 1323. Studies in Medieval History and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

253

Luibheid, Colm. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works. New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1987. Luther, Martin. Luther’s Works Volume 37: Word and Sacrament III. Edited by Robert H. Fischer. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1961. ———. The Principals of the Reformation or the Ninety-Five Theses and Three Primary Works of Martin Luther. Edited by Henry Wace and C. A. Buchheim. London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd., 1883. ———. Three Treatises. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970. Lysaught, M. Therese, Joseph J. Kotva, Jr., Stephen E. Lammers, and Allen Verhey, eds. On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics. 3rd edition. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2012. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. London: Duckworth, 1981. ———. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. London: Duckworth, 1990. ———. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth, 1988. Maguire, Daniel. Death by Choice. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1974. Maloney, Francis J., and Xavier Leon-Dufour. A Body Broken for a Broken People: Eucharist in the New Testament. Revised edition. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1997. Marion, Jean-Luc. Cartesian Questions: Method and Metaphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ———. God without Being: Hors-Texte. Religion and Postmodernism. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Martyr, Justin. First Apology.‌‌ Mazza, Enrico. The Celebration of the Eucharist: The Origin of the Rite and the Development of Its Interpretation. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1999. McCabe, Herbert. God and Evil in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. New York: Continuum, 2010. ———. On Aquinas. New York: Continuum, 2008. McCord Adams, Marilyn. Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. McCutcheon, Russell. The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Religion: A Reader. Bloomsbury Academic, 1999. McInery, Ralph M. A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Press, 1990. ———, ed. and trans. Aquinas Against the Averroists: On There Being Only One Intellect. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1993. ———. Praeambuli fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Meilaender, Gilbert. Bioethics: A Primer for Christians. 2nd edition. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996, 2005. Mellor, Philip A., and Chris Shilling. “Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death.” Iin Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 411–431.

254

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

Milbank, John. Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. London: Routledge, 2003. [Oliver, Simon. TLS 5250 (2003).] ———. “Materialism and Transcendence.” In Theology and the Political: The New Debate (May 2005): 393–426. ———. The Suspended Middle: Henri De Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2005. ———. Theology and Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. Milbank, John, and Catherine Pickstock. Truth in Aquinas. London: Routledge, 2001. ———. Truth in Aquinas. Radical Orthodoxy. New York: Routledge, 2000. Milbank, John, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds. Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology. London: Routledge, 1999. Miner, Robert. Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae: 1a2ae 22–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Mistry, Zubin. Abortion in the Early Middle Ages, c. 500–900. Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval Press, 2015. Montville, Leigh. The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth. New York: Broadway Books, 2007. Morris, Rosalind, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang. Nietzsche: His Philosophy of Contradictions and the Contradictions of His Philosophy. International Nietzsche Studies. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Navarrus. Enchiridion seu Manuale Confessariorium et poenitentiarum. 3 OPERA (Lyons, 1509) c. 25, n. 60–64, “The Sins of Physicians and Surgeons,” 4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are. Translated by Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Nachlass June–July 1885, 37. ———. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Maudemarie Clarke and Alan J. Swenson. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. ———. Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ. New York: Penguin Books, 1990. Noonan, John T. “Abortion and the Catholic Church: A Summary History.” In Natural Law Forum, 126 (January 1967): 85–131. ———. Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. O’Donnell James J. Augustine: A New Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. O’Meara, Thomas. Thomas Aquinas Theologian. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Pew Research Center. “Muslims in America: Immigrants and Those Born in U.S. See Life Differently in Many Ways” (April 17, 2018). Accessed May 20, 2018. Pickstock, Catherine. After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. ———. “Necrophilia: The Middle of Modernity a Study of Death, Signs, and the Eucharist.” Modern Theology 12, no. 4 (1996): 435–458. Pius XII, Discourse, October 29, 1951.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

255

Polo, Marco, and Rustichello da Pisa. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, the Venetian: Concerning the Kingdoms and Marvels of the East. Vol. 2. Edited and translated by Henry Yule Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pseudo Dionysius the Areopagite. The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Translated by John D. Jones. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1999. Rahner, Karl, ed. Encyclopedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi. New York: Seabury Press, 1975. Ranke-Heinemann, Uta. Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven: Women, Sexuality and the Catholic Church. Translated by Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday Publishing, 1990. ———. Putting Away Childish Things: The Virgin Birth, the Empty Tomb, and Other Fairy Tales You Don’t Need to Believe to Have a Living Faith. Translated by Peter Heinegg. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994. Ratzinger, Joseph. “The Holy Spirit as Communio: Concerning the Relationship of Pneumatology and Spirituality in Augustine.” In International Catholic Review: Communio 25(2) (1998): 324–339. Resnick, Irven. Marks of Distinction: Christian Perceptions of Jews in the High Middle Ages. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012. Reuther, Rosemary Radford. “Women, Sexuality, Ecology, and the Church.” In Conscience (Washington, DC), Spring/Summer 14, 1993, (1–2): 6–11. Rist, John. Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rogers, Eugene F. After the Spirit: A Constructive Pneumatology from Resources Outside the Modern West. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2005. Rombs, Ronnie J. Augustine and the Fall of the Soul: Beyond O’Connell & His Critics. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Rome, David. “Do Firms Maximize? Evidence from Professional Football.” In Journal of Political Economy. Vol. 114, no. 2 (2006): 340–365. Rorty, Richard. “The World Well Lost.” In Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 69, no. 19 (October 1972): 649–665. Rowland, Tracy. Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II. London: Routledge, 2003. Sanchez, Thomas. Disputationum De Sancto Matramonis Sacramento (Venice, 1737). Satre, Jean-Paul. Essays in Existentialism. Edited by Wade Baskin. New York: Citadel Press, 1993. Schillebeeckx, Edward. The Eucharist. New York: Burns and Oates, 2005. Schreiner, Susan E. Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Schütz, Alfred. Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt: Eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziologie. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. Scribd website, Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?, John Templeton Foundation, accessed March 2018, https:​//​www​.scribd​.com​/document​/3281099​/ Science​-and​-God. Sinclair, Upton, and James Gregory. I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked. California: University of California Press, 1994.

256

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Smith, James K. A. Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009. ———. Speech and Theology: The Language and Logic of Incarnation. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Somerville, Margaret, and Nuala Kenny. Rediscovering the Art of Dying: How Jesus’ Experiences and Our Stories Reveal a New Vision of Compassionate Care. Toronto: Novalis Press, 2017. Stalin, Joseph. Collected Works. Vol. 14. London: Red Star Press Ltd., 1978. Stanley-Becker, Isaac. “Facebook, Google Limit Ads in Effort to Prevent Interference in Irish Abortion Referendum” (Washington Post, May 9, 2018). Accessed May 16, 2018. https:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/world​/facebook​-bans​-foreign​-ads​-in​-effort​ -to​-limit​-interference​-in​-irelands​-abortion​-referendum​/2018​/05​/08​/b1e47d7c​-52c4​ -11e8​-a6d4​-ca1d035642ce​_story​.html. Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Considers History. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006. Stewart, Brandon D., William von Hippel, and Gabriel A. Radvansky. “Age, Race, and Implicit Prejudice: Using Process Dissociation to Separate the Underlying Components,” in Psychological Science, Vol. 20 (2009): 164–168. Stock, Brian. Augustine’s Inner Dialogue: The Philosophical Soliloquy in Late Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Augustine Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Takolia, Nadiya. “The Hijab Has Liberated Me from Society’s Expectations of Women.” The Guardian. Accessed January 2018. https:​//​www​.theguardian​.com​/ commentisfree​/2012​/may​/28​/hijab​-society​-women​-religious​-political. Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007. Te Velde, Rudi A. Aquinas on God: The “Divine Science” of the Summa Theologiae. Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology. Hants, England: Ashgate, 2006. The Washington Post. “Text: President Bush Addresses the Nation.” Accessed January 2018. http:​//​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/wpsrv​/nation​/specials​/attacked​/ transcripts​/bushaddress​_092001​.html. Time.com website, “An Audiologist Explains Why You Hear ‘Yanny’ or ‘Laurel,’” May 16, 2018. Accessed May 16, 2018. http:​//​time​.com​/5279069​/yanny​-laurel​ -explanation​/. Tombs, David. “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53 (Autumn 1999): 89–109. Turner, Denys. Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Van Nieuwenhove, Rik, and Joseph Wawrykow, eds. The Theology of Thomas Aquinas. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Remythologizing Theology: Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship. Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine, 18. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Selected Bibliography of Works Cited

257

Verkamp, Bernard J. The Moral Treatment of Returning Warriors in Early Medieval and Modern Times. Scranton, IL: University of Scranton Press, 2006. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. Vol. 1. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1983. Walsham, Alexandra. “The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed.” The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497–528. Ward, Graham. Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. Cities of God. London: Routledge, 2000. ———. The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. Warwykow, Joseph, ed. The Westminster Handbook to Thomas Aquinas. Westminster: John Knox, 2005. Wei, Ian. Intellectual Culture in Medieval Paris: Theologians and the University, c. 1100–1330. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Weinandy, Thomas, Daniel Keating, and John P. Yocum, eds. Aquinas on Doctrine: A Critical Introduction. London / New York: T&T Clark, 2004. ———., eds. Aquinas on Scripture: An Introduction to His Biblical Commentaries. London / New York: T&T Clark, 2005. Wilken, Robert Louis. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. London: Yale University Press, 2003. Williams, Rowan. Eucharistic Sacrifice: The Roots of a Metaphor. Grove Liturgical Study 31. Bramcote: Grove Press Limited, 1982. Young, Frances. The Use of Sacrificial Ideas in Greek Christian Writers from the New Testament to John Chrysostom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London: Verso, 2009. ———. Living in the End Times. London: Verso, 2011.

Index

abortion, x, xi, xii, xiii, 33–34, 71, 112n30; actuality and, 106–8; attributes and, 102–6; early modern Catholic ethics and, 83–89; freedom and, 96–98; idiocentrism and, 93–96; laws, vii; legalism versus goodness, 82–83; logos of, 90; potentiality and, 106–8; relativism and, 91–93; renaissance Catholicism and, 80–81; sacramentality of choice and, 100– 101; self-giving and, 72–73, 77–79; theological alternative and, 101–2. See also the soul absurdity, 94, 113n55 abuse, sexual, xiii accidents, 215–20, 226 actions: embodied, xii, 42, 141, 142, 192; good, 45; loving, 40; moral, 40, 53, 164; right moral, 53 actuality, 84, 106–8 Adamah, 187, 193 Adam and Eve, 49, 186–87 Adeodatus, 173 advertising, 120 aesthetics, 126, 127 aging body, 143 agnosticism, 6 altruism, 12, 13 Amazon, viii, 12

ambient culture, 120 Ambrose, 220, 229 anamnesis, 232 animal life, 65n13 the Annunciation, 56–57 Anselm, 179–80 Antebellum, 153–54 anthropology, theological, 84 anti-Semitism, 10, 14, 27–28 Apocalypse of Peter, 73 Apologeticus pro Christianis (Tertullian), 62 Apple, viii, 12 Aquinas, Thomas, viii, 4–6, 79–80, 104, 141–42, 194, 206–7, 215, 229; Doctrine of God and, 36–37; double effect and, 83; filioque and, 68n51; goodness and, 19–20, 22, 41; happiness and, 133–34, 136–39; on human nature, 202n88; knowledge of God and, 50–51; love and, 54–56; Luther and, 218, 222; on marriage, 188, 193; personhood and, 91; on potentiality, 106–7; on sacrament, 231; on the soul, 74–76, 77–78, 109; substance and, 216–18, 227; Summa Theologica, 37–38, 216; war and, 131 Aristotelianism, 121, 215 259

260

Index

Aristotle, 5, 188 Ars Moriendi, 150–52 Asad, Talal, 16 assumptive world, 120, 121–25 atheism, 6; New Atheism, 9–10, 14–15 Athenagoras, 74 Attenborough, David, 120, 124 attributes, 102–6 Augustine, xiii, 51, 65n18, 106, 163–65, 198n46, 207, 237; on beauty, 65n13; The City of God, 26; concubinage and, 173–74; concupiscence and, 171–73; Confessions, 171, 173, 174; De Natura Boni Contra Manichaeos, 38; De Trinitate, 38, 54; Doctrine of God and, 36; on food, 172; on goodness, 38; on Holy Spirit, 39; love and, 54–55, 68n50; on marriage, 180; On Marriage and Concupiscence, 170, 174, 179, 200n66, 201n71; on paganism, 67n43; Sermon 51, 186; Sermon 227, 82; sex and, 169–70, 185; on the soul, 74–76, 77–78, 109; war and, 131 authorship, of texts, 50 automation, 123 autonomy, 148 Averroes, 207 Avicenna, 74, 207 Azpilcueta, Martín de, 80–81, 84–85, 87–88 The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Luther), 220, 224 Bacon, Francis, 20 bacteria, streptococcus, 44 bad faith, 113n45 Balkans, 103 baptism, 79, 196n22, 218 Barrow, Ed, 210–12 Barth, Karl, 46, 48 Basil of Caesarea, 44, 111n13, 216 Bateson, Gregory, 120, 209, 210 Battle of Hastings, 131 battle of Hattin, 117–18

BBC, 120 beauty, 21, 93, 110, 119, 128–29; Augustine on, 65n13; Holy Spirit and, 20; self-giving and, 20 Beauvoir, Simone de, 94, 95 behaviorism, 129 Belgium, 96 beliefs, 35–36; thresholds of, 210–15; in transubstantiation, 207–15 believing (glauben), 4 Benedict XVI (Pope), 106, 107, 177–78, 182 Bentham, Jeremy, 23 Beranger of Tours, 218 Berkeley, George, 19 binding of reason, 2–4; end of morality and, 9–15; oppression of otherness and, 15–18 bio-ethics, viii biology, 90, 120, 216 Bishops of Normandy, 131 Black Lives Matter movement, 24 Blackmore, Susan, 120, 122, 127, 128 Blue Planet (documentary series), 120 bodies, 34, 75, 237; aging, 143; hatred of, 163, 176; isness of, 74 bodily integrity, 62 bodily resurrection, 209 body/spirit dualism, 61 Booker, Keith, 142 Boston Globe, 163 bourgeoisie, 47 Brown, John, 153–54 Brown, Peter, 173 Bultmann, Rudolf, 208, 211 Bush, George W., 96 Calvin, John, 229, 232–33 Cambodia, 103 Camus, Albert, 92, 94, 98 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 31n42 capital, social, 14, 118, 126, 128 capitalism, 61, 94, 95, 98–100, 129, 150; Eucharist and, 235; hegemonic,

Index

105; individualism and, 237; late, 101; secular, 130 cardinal virtues, 139–40, 141 caritas, 38, 141, 151 Carlstadt, 225 Carthage, x–xi, 2, 15, 25, 36 Casas, Bartolomé de las, 84 Cassirer, Ernst, 16 casuistry, 81, 85, 88 Catechism, 158n43, 159n44, 165, 172, 200n60 Cato, 2 Cavanaugh, William, 16, 30n35 celibacy, 135 certainty, 4, 5, 6, 20, 92, 168 chastity, 193 cheek turning, 83 children, death of, 107–8 chimps, 124 choice, 90, 96, 98–99, 105; fetishization of, 73; sacramentality of, 100–101; totemization of, 72, 100 Chomsky, Noam, 209 Christendom, x Christoform, 57, 59, 201n67 Christology, 52, 56 Chrysostom, 220 Church Fathers, 37, 74, 162, 164 Church of England, 226 Church teaching, 68n50 citizenship, 130; in nation states, 18 The City of God (Augustine), 26 Civil War, 153 C.K., Louis, 33–34 Coakley, Sarah, 98 coercive laws, 22 Colbert, Stephen, 130 colonialism, 18, 84, 88, 117 commodification, 196n21; of matter, 39; personhood and, 176; of the real, 173–76 common sense, 107 Communion, 175 communism, 61 concubinage, 173–74

261

concupiscence, 170–73, 174–75, 180–81 Confessions (Augustine), 171, 173, 174 consciousness: as epiphenomenon, 122; self-consciousness, 38 conservatism, 139, 225–26 Constantine, 74 consummation, 206 contemplation, 51–52 contingent ends, 166–69 contraception, vii, 86, 87, 163, 177, 184 co-operation, 124, 125 core elements, 1 1 Corinthians 10: 16–17, 236 Corning, Peter, 124 council of Nicaea, 196n12 council of Valladolid, 84–85 Cranmer, Thomas, 226, 227, 228, 232 cream and coffee (analogy), 23, 77 creation, 219, 222–23, 233; dignity and, 39; material, 106; unity in, 178 creativity, sex and, 177–80 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 2, 4, 14 the cross, 145 crucifixion, 145 cruelty, 104 Cult of Reason, 16 cultural determination, 105 cultural expectation, 212 cultural genes, 127 culture, 90; ambient, 120; of death, 148; of moral theology, xi Cunningham, Connor, 91 Cur Deus Homo (Anselm), 179 Cyril of Jerusalem, 220 Dante, 100, 137 Darwin, Charles, 13 Darwinian assumptions, 120 Darwinism, 47–48, 124, 128–29, 133, 149, 190 Dawkins, Richard, 11–14, 120– 22, 124, 136 death. See dying

262

Index

debates, 94, 131, 132; engines and, 71; ethical, 35; reasonable moral, 33; Valladolid, 85; winning, xii deductive knowledge, of God, 46–49 definition, language for, 218 deification, 47, 224 deism, 53 delight, 138, 182 demonstrative reasoning, 2 De Natura Boni Contra Manichaeos (Augustine), 38 Dennett, Daniel, 62–63, 120, 122, 124, 127–28 Denys, 177, 178 deontological lens, viii Descartes, Rene, 92–95 desires, 123; disordered, 137; erotic, 169, 181, 192, 193; for food, 172; happiness and, 134; plurality of, 170; weathering of, 171. See also sexual desire De Trinitate (Augustine), 38, 54 Deus Caritas Est, 177, 178 development, stages of, 75 dichotomization, 109 Didache, 73 digger wasps, 123, 129 dignity, 78, 93, 102, 104, 108, 148; creation and, 39; of Eucharist, 234; rights and, 38 Dionysius the Areopagite, 177 Disney, 142, 186 Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films (Booker), 142 disorder, sexual desire and, 169–70, 173–76 disordered desire, 137 diversity, 15, 18, 26 divine law, 206 divine providence, 118 divine spark, 77 DNA, 122, 124, 125, 136 doctrinal grammar, 165 Doctrine of God, 28, 36–41, 52 dogmatic foundations, 71

dogmatic grammar, 73 double effect, 83 dualism, 76, 109, 214; body/spirit, 61; matter/spirit, 206, 239n6; time/ eternity, 61 Dupré, Louis, 33 dying, x, xi, 117–18; assumptive world and, 121–25; within Catholic thought, 133; as end of life, 142–44; good death, 119, 146, 150; happiness and, 133–40; modernity and, 150; natural death, 144; public space and, 131–33; as revolutionaries, 152–55; technology and, 150–51; understanding of, 119–21; union with Christ and, 145–47; virtues and, 150–52; vulnerability and, 148–49 early modern Catholic ethics, 83–89 Eco, Umberto, 34–35 Effraenatam, 87–89 ekballei, 181 the elderly, 142–43 Eliot, George, 30n37 Elizabeth II (Queen), 33, 36 embodied actions, xii, 42, 141, 142, 192 embodied knowledge, 51 embryology, 126 embryonic person, 78 emotivism, 103 empirical evidence, 213 end of life. See dying engineering, 80 engines, ix–x, 1, 18, 28, 36, 42, 43, 47, 82; debates and, 71; Eco on, 34–35 the English Disease, 10 Enlightenment, xi, 5, 15–19, 23, 27, 94, 208 enlightenment, narrative of, 212 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume), 2 ensoulment, 74, 76, 85, 111n17 epiphenomenon, consciousness as, 122 Epistle of Barnabas, 73 Erasmus, Desiderius, 94

Index

Ermenfrid Penitential, 131 Eros, 177–79, 180–86, 192 erotic desire, 169, 181, 192, 193 eternal, temporal versus, 41 eternal goods, 138 ethical debate, 35 ethics, 22, 81, 126; bio-ethics, viii; early modern, 83–89 Eucharist, xiv, 158n35, 205, 214, 221, 227, 242n59; capitalism and, 235; dignity of, 234; as sacrament, 230–31 eucharistic grammar, 206 Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (Ranke-Heinemann), 162–63 euthanasia, xii, 130, 146, 149 evil, 11, 95, 128, 136 Evil Empire, 95 existence, isness and, 37 existentialism, 95 experience: human, 91; knowledge and, 3 external elements, of argumentation, vii Facebook, 12 faith, 5, 7, 141, 154; bad, 113n45; Holy Spirit and, 56–59; Kant and, 11; marriage and, 186; Nietzsche and, 8 the Fall, 187 false idols, 137 Farley, Margaret, viii, 166, 167, 183, 184 fascism, 95, 161, 162, 163 fetishization of choice, 73 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 153 filioque, 68n51 first order assumptions, 120 flagellation, 98 food, 171–72, 175, 197n28 forbearance, 139–41, 151, 188 fornication, 89 fortitude, 56, 139, 141, 146, 151 Foucault, Michel, 24, 50 France, 16, 17, 18 Francis (Pope), 161 freedom, 95, 96–98

263

Freud, Sigmund, 12 Freudianism, 190 friendship, 166, 173–74, 187, 194 Galatians 5:20, 74 Galilee, 58 Galileo, 5 Galloway, Scott, 161 Garrigou-LaGrange, Reginald, 79, 86 Gay Pride parades, 14 genders, division of, 186–87 gender theory, 161 genes, 121, 122, 124; cultural, 127; selfish, 12, 13, 125, 133, 136 Genesis, 25, 171; 1, 188; 2, 187, 188; 5:2, 186 genetic program, 123 genetic replication, 120–21, 122, 126, 135 genocide, 7, 39–40, 102 Georgetown University, 211 Germany, 103 Gibson, Mel, 96 Gillespie, Michael, 33 Gilligan, Carol, 53 Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan, 85, 88 Gladwell, Malcolm, 210 glauben (believing), 4 Gnosticism, xii God, 123; deductive knowledge of, 46–49; Doctrine of God, 28, 36–41, 52; goodness of, 41–43, 140–41; love and, 39–40, 45–46; oneness with, 146; ontological knowledge of, 49–52; relationship with, 43–45, 78, 79, 92; self-disclosure of, 44; triune, 43–45; union with, 40, 137, 138, 145–49; utility function of, 121. See also self-giving, of God and the Holy Spirit; specific topics Goffman, Erving, 209 Golgotha, 228–31, 232 good action, 45 good death, 119, 146, 150

264

Index

good/goodness, 10–11, 20, 22, 23, 110, 128, 139; Augustine on, 38; Eros and, 179; of God, 41–43, 140–41; legalism versus, 82–83; self-giving and, 19, 82, 176 goods, eternal and temporal, 138 good sex, 164–66, 176–77, 183 Google, viii, 12 Gospels, 67n38 grammar, x–xi, 80; doctrinal, 165; dogmatic, 73; eucharistic, 206; moral, 79; transubstantive, 233–38; Trinitarian, xii, xiii, xiv Granovetter, Mark, 210, 211 Grant, George, 3 gratification, sex for, 175, 199n49 great delay, 3, 4–6 Greek Old Testament, 179 “Green” Nationalist parade, 12–13 Gregory, Brad, 21, 33, 208, 209 Gregory of Nyssa, 178, 179, 187, 200n61 Gregory the Great, 54 happiness, 133–40; justice and, 139; sex and, 167–68 Harper’s Weekly, 27 Hart, David Bentley, 97 health, cult of, 143 health care professionals, 131 Hebrew Bible, 40, 179 Hebrews 13:3, 154 hedonism, 190 hegemonic capitalism, 105 hegemonic modernity, 96 Helvetic confession, 228 heroism, 131, 132, 155 Heyward, Carter, 100, 105 hijab, 97–98 Hildegard, 25, 37, 108–10, 194, 225 Holocaust, 28 Holy Mother, 57 Holy Spirit, 22, 53, 67n42, 78–79, 146, 218; Augustine on, 39; beauty and, 20; caritas and, 38; faith and, 56–59;

goodness and, 19–20, 38; hope and, 59–64; love and, 52, 54–56; marriage and, 189; Paul and, 58–61; peace of Christ and, 82. See also self-giving, of God and the Holy Spirit homicide, 85, 86, 88, 91, 104, 110, 111n17 homosexuality, viii, 177, 203n90 honor, 135, 136 hope, 59–64, 141, 146; marriage and, 186 Hopkins, 152 human experience, 91 human nature, 202n88 human subjectivity, 95 Hume, David, 2, 3, 5, 6, 13, 23, 29n22 humiliation, 149 Huntington’s disease, 122, 123 Ibn Sīnā, 4, 5 identity, 78 idiocentrism, 93–96 Ignatius of Antioch, 61, 69n60, 220 imago Dei, 164 immigrants, 18 individualism, 237 individuality, 148 industrial revolution, 129 infanticide, 73, 103 injustice, 99 Innocent XI (Pope), 85, 87 inseparable operation, 56, 231 insiders, 156n2 intellectual soul, 75 intellectual state, 76 intermingling, 111n13, 134 internal elements, of argumentation, vii Ireland, vii, xii–xiii, 12, 16 Irenaeus, 220 irrationality, 6 irrational other, 16 Islam, 17, 18, 95, 97–98, 117, 121 isness, 25, 36, 93, 130, 230, 235, 237; attributes and, 104; of body, 74; existence and, 37; of matter, 39;

Index

personhood and, 106; potentiality and, 107; rational soul and, 110; self-giving and, 26, 37; the soul and, 75–76; substance and, 205, 215– 17, 219, 222 Jennet, Bryan, 65n11 Jerome, 220 Jesus Christ, 45–46, 58, 119; death of, 152–53; union with, 145–47 Jewishness, 28 Jews, 103 1 John 4: 4–12, 55 John Paul II (Pope), 148–49, 161 Judaism, 121 justice, 10, 93, 140; happiness and, 139; injustice, 99; sexuality and, 166 Just Love (Farley), 166 just war theory, 84, 131–32 Kaelber, Lutz, 103 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 3, 7–8, 27, 40, 73, 80, 87, 92–95; Critique of Pure Reason, 2, 4, 14; faith and, 11; great delay of, 4–6; legalism and, 23–24; New Atheism and, 9; Perpetual Peace, 21–22, 24; phenomena and, 35; reason and, 91; rejection of the real and, 19–25; relativism and, 99 Keenan, viii Kelly, J. N. D., 242n48 Kennedy, Florence, 114n67 Kierkegaard, 41 Kingdom of God, 62 knowledge: deductive, 46–49; embodied, 51; experience and, 3; ontological, 49–52; rational, 5; wissen, 4 Kohlburg, Lawrence, 53 Küng, Hans, 208–9, 211 Lang, Johannes, 103 Laska, Vera, 103 late capitalism, 101 late modernity, 9

265

laws, 41, 79, 84, 132; abortion, vii; against blasphemy, 17; coercive, 22; divine, 206; moral, 6, 20–23 laxity, moral, 85, 88 legalism, 73; goodness versus, 82–83; Kant and, 23–24 legislation, 23–24, 101 Leo IX (Pope), 122 LGBTQ+: community, 14; homosexuality, viii, 177, 203n90; sex, 12 liberalism, 95, 113n40, 139, 226; secular, 118, 126 liberal social orders, 33 light, 135 Liguori, Alphonsus, 85, 88 lions, 122–23 locomotion, 91 logos, 100–101; of abortion, 90 Lombard, Peter, 179 Louis C.K., 33–34 love, 68n50, 194; God and, 39–40, 45–46; Holy Spirit and, 52, 54–56; sex and, 191 loving actions, 40 Luke 12, 153 Luke 16:19–31, 140 lust, 89 Luther, Martin, 94, 131, 218, 220–28, 229 magnesium, 20, 42, 137, 167, 168 Maher, Bill, 130 Mahoney, Jack, 38 MAID, 146–47 Manchuria, 103 Marco Polo, 34–35 Mark, 180; 1:12, 181; 10:17–31, 140– 42; 10:18, 41 Marks of Distinction (Resnick), 27–28 marriage, 175, 184, 187; Aquinas on, 188, 193; Augustine on, 180; faith and, 186; Holy Spirit and, 189; hope and, 186; self-giving and,

266

188–89, 191, 193; sex and, 188–95; virtues and, 189 Martin, Eamon (Bishop), xiii Martyr, Justin, 231 martyrs, 154 Marx, Karl, 12, 47, 153–55 Marxism, 72 Mary, 57, 59, 222–23 Mass, xiv, 205–6; belief in transubstantiation and, 207–10; Luther and, 220–28; substance and accidents, 215–20; thresholds of belief and, 210–15; time as banal, 228–33; transubstantive grammar and, 233–38 material creation, 106 materialism, xi, 76, 110; secular, 129 materiality, 216 matter, 232; commodification of, 39; isness of, 39 matter/spirit dualism, 206, 239n6 Matthew, 180; 5:40, 140; 19, 187–88; 19: 4–6, 186; 23: 1–26, 83; 25, 46, 51 mature identity, 78 mauvaise foi, 94 Mazlih, Bruce, 16 meinen (opining), 4 Mellor, Phillip, 150 Meloni, Giorgia, 161 memes, 126–27 memory, 229, 232 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 5 Michelangelo, 46–47, 58, 193 Microsoft, 12 Milbank, John, 65n14, 91, 209 Mill, John Stuart, 23 modernity, x–xi, 1, 16, 29n1, 49, 71, 156n6, 192, 232; dying and, 150; genetic code of, 2; hegemonic, 96; horrors of, 25–28; late, 9; moral actions in, 40; premodernity, 214; secular, 89; transubstantiation and, 207; vulnerability and, 149

Index

Modernity, Self-Identity and the Sequestration of Death (Mellor and Shilling), 150 modern moral theory, 91–93 modern secularism, x monogamy, 124 Montville, Leigh, 211 moral actions, 40, 164; right, 53 moral arguments, vii moral development, 53 moral enquiry, 84 moral grammar, 79 moral imagination, 131–33 morality, 3; end of, 9–15; faith and, 7 moral laws, 6, 20–23 moral laxity, 85, 88 moral reasoning, 104; modern, 25–28 moral spaces, 71 moral theology, vii–ix, 40, 42, 73, 79, 205; core elements of, 1; culture of, xi; Renaissance Catholicism and, 80–81; renewal of, 7 moral theory, modern, 91–93 moral thought, 81, 118 Motu Proprio, 106 Münster rebellion (1525), 154 murder, 74. See also homicide Muslims, xi, 17, 18 National Socialism, 103 nation states, 157n25, 157n26; citizenship in, 18 natural death, 144 naturalism, 53, 192; secular, 128 natural selection, 13 natural substances, 5 Nazi Germany, 14 necrophilia, 150 necrophobia, 150 neo-Darwinism, 126 Netflix, 120 New Atheism, 9–10, 14–15 New Testament, 181 New York Times, 163 Nicaea, council of, 196n12

Index

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 13, 24, 48, 92–94, 125–28, 135, 209; faith and, 8; New Atheism and, 10; relativism and, 2, 3; social capital and, 14 Nietzscheanism, 190 nihil, 11, 146, 152 9/11 terrorist attacks, 96, 97 nominalism, 19, 20, 21, 31n42 Noonan, JT, 74 nostalgia, x, 25 noumena, 2, 19, 91, 102 Observer, 163 Ockham, William of, 20 Oecolampadius, 225 Old Testament, 179 On Marriage and Concupiscence (Augustine), 170, 174, 179, 200n66, 201n71 ontological knowledge, 49–52 ontological lens, ix opining (meinen), 4 opinion, 6 oppression, of otherness, 15–18 optimism, 213 “Orange” Unionist parade, 12–13 Origen, 67n43, 221 original sin, 79 orthodoxy, 119 Orwell, George, 98 otherness, oppression of, 15–18 outsiders, 156n2 paganism, 54, 67n43 parades, 12–13; Gay Pride, 14 patristic reasoning, 84 Paul (Saint), 5, 63, 69n60, 119, 170, 182, 223, 225, 230, 236; authorship of, 50; Holy Spirit and, 58–61; on spirit, 77 pax Romana, 82 peace of Christ, 82–83 perceptions (vorstellungen), 92–93 perichoresis, 43, 66n22 Perpetual Peace (Kant), 21–22, 24

267

personhood, xi, 39, 75, 77, 85, 94–95, 98, 102–4; Aquinas and, 91; commodification and, 176; common sense and, 107; isness and, 106 perspectivism, 3 Peterson, Jordan, 120 pharmakeia, 74 phenomena, 35, 91 physics, 80 Pickstock, Catherine, 43, 150, 234 Pieta (Michelangelo), 46–47, 58 Pinker, Stephen, 120, 122, 124, 209 Pius X (Pope), 106 Pius XII (Pope), 182 Pixar, 142 Planet Earth (documentary series), 120 Platonism, 121 pleasure, 137, 171, 182 Plum, Fred, 65n11 pneumatology, 62 political sphere, 118 porousness, 43–44 positivism, 129 potentiality, 84, 106–8 power, 128; opportunity for, 135; rejecting, 136; will-to-power, 83, 125, 135, 136 premodernity, 214 pride, 151 Prima Pars, 74 Prima Secundæ Partis, 133, 138, 142 procreation, 166, 167, 187 progress, 143 proletariat, 47 proposition thirty-four, 88 Protestantism, 109, 150, 209 prudence, 123 Psalm 22, 180 public discourse, 9, 18, 19, 22 public spaces, xii, 36, 101, 117–19, 121, 130–33, 155 public sphere, 16 racism, 7, 27

268

Index

Radford-Reuther, Rosemary, 162–63, 199n49 Rahner, Karl, 236, 237 Ranke-Heinemann, Uta, 162–63, 176, 199n49 rationality, 9, 87, 94 rational knowledge, 5 rational soul, 78, 110 Rawls, John, 47, 130 real freedom, 97 reason, 92, 94, 101, 123, 195; Cult of Reason, 16; demonstrative reasoning, 2; faith and, 7; Kant and, 91; modern moral reasoning, 25–28; moral reasoning, 104; patristic reasoning, 84. See also binding of reason Reformation, 21, 30n35, 208 rejection of the real, moral implications of, 19–25 relativism, 6, 8, 10; abortion and, 91–93; Kant and, 99; Nietzsche and, 2, 3 renaissance Catholicism, 80–81 renewal, 213 Res Cogitans, 93 Resnick, Irven, 27–28 Revelations, 44; 5:8, 178; 9:21, 74 revolutionaries, the dying as, 152–55 Rich Man and Lazarus (parable), 48 right answers, 89 right moral actions, 53 rights, 38 The Rise of Christianity (Stark), 154 River out of Eden (Dawkins), 121 Roman Catholic Church, xiv, 214 Romani, 103 Romans: 7, 59–60, 170; 8:11, 61; 12, 62, 63 romanticism, 192 Rome, x, 2, 15, 25, 36, 154, 173 Romer, David, 210 Rorty, Richard, 91 Roux, Wilhelm, 126 rules, 40 Ruth, Babe, 210–13 Rwanda, 103

sacrament, Eucharist as, 230–31 sacramentality: of choice, 100–101; sex and, 176, 186–88 sacramental union, 175 sacrifice, 229 St. Patrick’s Day, 12 salvation, 44, 224 Sanchez, Thomas, 80–81, 84–89, 103, 112n30 Sanctissimus Dominus, 87–89, 100 San Francisco Chronicle, 163 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 92, 94, 95, 98 Saul of Tarsus, 50, 61, 224 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 235–36 Schleidt, Wolfgang, 157n16 Schrodinger’s Cat, 168 Schütz, Alfred, 120, 210, 211 science, 209, 212 Scotus, Duns, 20 second order assumptions, 120–21 secular capitalism, 130 sécularité, 233 secularity, x, xi, 54 secular liberalism, 118, 126 secular materialism, 129 secular modernity, 89 secular naturalism, 128 secular social orders, 8 self-aggrandizement, 128 self-assertion, 136 self-consciousness, 38 self-disclosure, of God, 44 self-giving, of God and the Holy Spirit, 38, 45, 50–52, 57, 104–5, 111n14, 139; abortion and the soul and, 72–73, 77–79; beauty and, 20; embodied actions and, xii, 42, 141, 142; goodness and, 19, 82, 176; isness and, 26, 37; marriage and, 188–89, 191, 193; porousness and, 43–44; rational soul and, 110; transubstantiation and, 205, 217–19, 222–24; union with God and, 145 self-identification, as Catholic, vii self-interest, 47

Index

selfish genes, 12, 13, 125, 133, 136 selfishness, 23, 183 selflessness, 183–84 self-preservation, 128 Senn, Frank, 232 sensory data, processing of, 35 Sermon 51 (Augustine), 186 Sermon 227 (Augustine), 82 sex and sexuality, viii, x, xi, xii, xiii, 34, 41, 161–64; concupiscence and, 170–73, 174–75, 180–81; contingent versus ultimate ends, 166–69; creativity and, 177–80; Eros and, 180–86; good, 164–66, 176–77, 183; for gratification, 175, 199n49; happiness and, 167–68; LGBTQ+, 12, 14; marriage and, 188–95; sacramentality and, 186–88 sexual abuse, xiii sexual delight, 138 sexual desire, 86, 124, 164, 203n89; disorder and, 169–70, 173–76 Shilling, Chris, 150 Shoah, 28 Sinclair, Upton, vii Singer, Peter, 38, 102, 209 Sistine chapel, 193 Sixtus V (Pope), 87 slavery, 153 small shifts, 206 Smith, James, 43 social capital, 14, 118, 126, 128 social change, 209 social expectations, 210 socialism, 99, 103 social media, 117 social orders, 12, 15, 31n42, 118, 124, 129; capitalist, 99; freedom in, 97; liberal, 33; secular, 8; western, 1, 34 social status, 31n42 the soul: Augustine and Aquinas on, 74–76, 77–78; ensoulment, 74, 76, 85, 111n17; intellectual soul, 75; isness and, 75–76; rational soul, 78, 110; self-giving and, 72–73, 77–79;

269

as site of presence of the spirit, 76–80; in unborn child, 108–10 the spirit: body/spirit dualism, 61; matter/spirit dualism, 206, 239n6; soul as site of presence as, 76–80. See also Holy Spirit Spivak, Gayatri, 117 sports, 210 Stalin, Joseph, 97 Stark, Rodney, 154 Stewart, Jon, 130 streptococcus bacteria, 44 subjectivity, human, 95 Sublimus Deus, 84 substance, 212, 215–20, 222, 226, 227, 232 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 37–38, 216 supernatural, beliefs in, 208 Swisher, Kara, 161 Swiss Reformation, 224 Takolia, Nadiya, 97 Taylor, Charles, 8, 27 technology, dying and, 150–51 telos, 2, 41, 75, 148, 165, 169, 188 temperance, 141, 151 temporal, eternal versus, 41 temporal goods, 138 Tertullian, 62, 69n60, 74 texts, authorship of, 50 Theodore of Mopsuestia, 220 theological anthropology, 84 theological imagination, 145 theological virtues, 141 theosis, 224 time, as banal, 228–33 time/eternity dualism, 61 The Tipping Point (Gladwell), 210 totalitarianism, 24 totemization of choice, 72, 100 transubstantiation, 158n35, 202n87; belief in, 207–15; Luther and, 220–28; modernity and, 207; selfgiving and, 205, 217–19, 222–24;

270

thresholds of belief in, 210–15; time as banal, 228–33 transubstantive grammar, 233–38 Treaty of Versailles, 14 Trinitarian grammar, xii, xiii, xiv Trinitarianism, 89 Trinitarian ontology, ix Trinity, 56, 79 triune God, 43–45 turkeys, 157n16 Turner, Nat, 153–55 24 Thomistic Theses, 106 typhoid, 212 ultimate ends, 166–69 unborn child, the soul in, 108–10 union: with God, 40, 137, 138, 145–49; with Jesus Christ, 145–47; sacramental, 175 unity, in creation, 178 unselfishness, 183–84 Up (film), 142, 151 utilitarianism, 81 Valladolid, council of, 84–85 value, 102 Vanhoozer, Kevin, 43 “vegetable,” 38–39 vegetative state, 38–39, 65n11, 77 veils, women wearing, 97–98

Index

Via Dolorosa, 147 virtues: cardinal, 139–40, 141; dying and, 150–52; marriage and, 189; theological, 141 vitamin D, 135 Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, 178, 182 Von Hippel, William, 143 vorstellungen (perceptions), 92–93 vulnerability, 148–49 Wallace, William, 96 war: Aquinas and, 131; Augustine and, 131; Civil War, 153; just war theory, 84, 131–32; of religion, 30n35 water, 22–23 wealth, 135, 136 weathering, of desire, 171 Weber, Max, 150, 208, 209 West, Kanye, 99 western social order, 1, 34 will-to-power, 83, 125, 135, 136 wissen (knowledge), 4 women, wearing veils, 97–98 Yankees, 213 youness, 219 zinc, 137 Žižek, Slavoj, 99 Zwingli, Ulrich, 225, 228, 229

About the Author

David Deane is associate professor of theology at the Atlantic School of Theology. He holds a PhD in Theology from Trinity College, the University of Dublin, and is a former research fellow of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. His books include Nietzsche and Theology: Nietzschean Thought in Christological Anthropology and (with Nuala Kenny) Still Unhealed: Treating the Pathology in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis. He lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, with his wife Jennifer, and daughters, Sophia, Chora, and Áine.

271