Monastery of the Holy Cross

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Celebrating Saint Athanasius and Nicaea

Today is the feast of Saint Athanasius, the great champion of the teaching of the First Council of Nicea. He was made bishop of Alexandria shortly after his attendance at the Council, but he spent much of his episcopacy in exile for his opposition to Arius, whose theology enjoyed a favorable reception among the governors of the empire. He was a stalwart supporter of the early monastic movement in Egypt, writing the biography of Saint Anthony the Great. In turn, the monks could be counted upon to support Nicene orthodoxy.

Here is a selection from my homily last Sunday:

This year we are celebrating the 1700th anniversary of the First Council of Nicea, the first ecumenical council. This council was convoked by the first Christian Emperor Constantine, and brought together nearly all of the bishops of the Church in the year 325. The principal item on the agenda was the teaching of a priest from the diocese of Alexandria in Egypt, whose name was Arius. Arius taught that Jesus was a man who was adopted by God. This was not an easy argument to make, given that Jesus says things in John’s gospel like, “Glorify me, Father, in your own presence with the glory which I had with you before the world was made.” John’s gospel also famously begins with the lines, “In the beginning was the Word…and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh.”

So as I say, it seems like Arius’s teaching would be a non-starter. And yet, it was quite popular, and the problem raised by Arius continued to plague the Church in different forms for many centuries. In fact, Arianism, the doctrine that Jesus is a man, not consubstantial with the Father, but adopted in some way as God’s Son, is a perennial temptation. This is because our reason, our rationality tends to say that two different things can’t also be the same, right? If I have an apple, I don’t say that it is also an orange; the two concepts are distinct. And so to say that Jesus is man, and also God at the same time, seems to be irrational. And Arius and his followers were simply ironing out problems with revelation by subjecting it to human reason, as it was understood at the time. Jesus can’t be both the uncreated God and a human creature.

What the Council of Nicea challenges us to do is to force our reason beyond its normal limits and to accept that, in fact, Jesus is consubstantial with the Father. In a few moments, we will say this, that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father, in what is often known as the Nicene Creed, the statement of belief produced by the bishops at the First Council of Nicea. The Church honors the great achievement of the Council by reciting these words at the liturgy. But this word “consubstantial” itself was controversial. It’s not a word that appears in Scripture, though Saint Paul hints at the idea frequently in his letters. Jesus not only has a human nature, but He is also by nature God, of the same substance as the Father.

What happens when we allow our reason to be suspended, and to take on faith that Jesus is God and man, is that our understanding of God and creation changes. God actually become more transcendent—or perhaps we would more accurately say that, because of the Incarnation, we now understand what it means to say that God is utterly transcendent.

As a side note, this is why the English translation of the Creed changed fifteen years ago. We used to say that Jesus Christ is “one in being with the Father.” But this seems to imply that the idea of “Being” comes before the idea of God. In fact, God’s transcendence, as we understand it from the mystery of the Incarnation, means that we can’t really speak of the concept of Being outside of God. God Himself is the Existence, the eternal Being, in which we partake.

The fact that Jesus is described as both God and man in the Scriptures forces us to stretch our reasoning abilities to account for what appears at first as a paradox. We can believe this truth even if we don’t fully understand it, even if we still have certain doubts about its proper meaning.

Homily for Easter Sunday

Catholic filmmaker Mel Gibson recently announced that he would begin filming the sequel to his most famous movie, The Passion of the Christ. The new film is set to be released next year, and the current working title is The Resurrection of the Christ, and it apparently will chronicle what happens after Jesus rises from the dead and appears to the women and the apostles.

On the Joe Rogan podcast, Gibson explained, “It’s the story of the Resurrection; It’s a nonlinear story. It took my brother, Randall Wallace, and me about six or seven years to finish the script. We’ve worked with historians. All the apostles died, but nobody dies for a lie; they die for the truth. I wanted to show that. Who rose three days after being killed in public? Certainly not Buddha.”

It is interesting to me that Gibson implies that the Resurrection is unique. And he has historians who are corroborating this conviction that he has. If he were working alongside his fellow filmmakers instead, he might come to a different conclusion. In Hollywood, resurrection seems to happen all the time. In the past thirty years, we’ve been treated to—or subjected to, depending on your cinematic tastes—films entitled Alien Resurrection, Halloween: Resurrection, Mechanic Resurrection (I kid you not), The Mummy: Resurrection, Birdemic 2: The Resurrection, and perhaps most surprisingly, four separate releases of movies simply called Resurrection. I could go on and on. From this small sampling, it would seem that people are being resurrected all the time. A cynic might suspect that an effort being made to downplay the uniqueness of the specific Resurrection that we are celebrating today.

It should also be noted that several of these movies are in the horror genre, which is to say that the mechanics, aliens and mummies rising from the dead (and to be honest with you, I’m not sure what it means to have a mummy rise from the dead), that these characters returning to life is something that puts them back into this same world that we thought that they had left for good.

So it appears that the notion of resurrection is commonplace today, and is almost certainly not good news. I presume that these resurrected aliens and mechanics and mummies will head back to the grave at some point. What I’m getting is this: we are so accustomed to the idea of resurrection that we might be in danger of domesticating its revolutionary meaning. It might come as a surprise to discover that the people of Jesus’s own day were rather unfamiliar with the concept. In the year 52 A.D., Saint Paul preached one of his most famous sermons in the city of Athens. In it, he announced that God raised Jesus from the dead. How do the sophisticated, philosophical Greeks respond? They scoff at him. “Sure! Come back another day and tell us more about this crazy idea.” Resurrection certainly was unique at that time. Even unthinkable.

Now, from this perspective, I want to point out something very interesting about the gospel from last night’s vigil and this gospel reading this morning. Here it is: Jesus does not appear at all. It’s amazing that, of all the Sundays and feast days of the Church, the only time Jesus doesn’t appear in the gospel reading is a few times in Advent, when He is not yet born, and then on Easter Sunday. What could this apparent absence mean for us?

First of all, it means this: the Resurrection is emphatically not simply a return of Jesus to the old life He had in this world. It’s not a resuscitation. He has somehow passed into the higher realms, and yet maintains contact with us, as if he were, for example, God. He challenges us to seek Him out, to follow Him. This is, in essence what Saint Paul was saying in today’s second reading—”seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.”

The absence of a visible Jesus in this morning’s gospel is also a sign of just how new and baffling the actual resurrection was and is. There’s another very telling detail in the stories of the resurrection. The Apostles never seem to have questioned that Jesus life is now an eternal life—they do eventually see Him again in the flesh. But he is strangely changed. He is often completely unrecognizable at first. He’s a stranger on the road, a gardener, a man taking a walk on the sea shore at dawn. He is present, but He is present in a new and transfigured form. This is the opposite of the mundane understanding of resurrection trafficked by our contemporary culture. This isn’t more of the same. It is an elevation of human nature into the realm of the divine.

And, my brothers and sisters, we have been made partakers of this resurrection, even though we are still alive in the flesh. In baptism, we were united mysteriously to Christ in His death and Resurrection. This baptism, the promises of which we are going to renew in just a moment, conforms us to Christ, and it is what makes it possible for us to follow Him toward the hidden heavenly realms. Let’s look at the second reading again. Saint Paul says “If then you were raised with Christ, seek what is above, where Christ is.” Paul is speaking of the Resurrection that we were given when we were baptized, the light of Christ that now dwells mysteriously in our hearts, if we care to search for it.

Paul continues, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” So not only is Christ invisible to us in the gospels this morning, but our own new life is a hidden one, one that we must seek out to experience it. How do we seek it out: through prayer, through attentive participation at the liturgy, through the efforts we make to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and imprisoned. What we discover then, is that all of Jesus Christ’s teachings were not about making this a better world, but a map, an instruction manual on how to find God, to seek what is above while still in the flesh below. At the center of this is His presence in the Holy Eucharist, where He is visible only to the eyes of faith.

In today’s first reading, Saint Peter says that Jesus was not visible to everyone after the Resurrection. He appeared only to those who ate and drank with Him. Saint Peter is referring to us. We are the ones who now eat and drink with the Lord, and this means that we seek the things that are above not merely for ourselves, but to be able to report back to a world that labors, in so many ways, under the shadow of death: “Christ is risen indeed! He shall wipe away every tear from your eyes, and death shall be no more!”

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 2)

My second paradox is closely related to the first.

When the Son of Man is lifted up, he draws all to Himself [John 12: 32]. In John’s Gospel especially, it is the moment of Christ’s death on the Cross, His “lifting up,” that is the moment of Jesus’s glorification. Herein lies the paradox: how can glory emanate from the face that is hardly recognizable as human because of His wounds, His exhaustion, and the utterly shameful nature of death by Crucifixion?

While this paradox has been commented upon by many theologians, I first remember encountering a form of it in an essay by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, in a book entitled On the Way to Jesus Christ. He observes, in the Liturgy of the Hours, two antiphons attached to the same Psalm 45 (44 in the Latin numbering) at Evening Prayer on Monday of Week Two. The Church has always taken this Psalm to refer to the marriage of Christ the Bridegroom and the Church His Bride. During the Second Week of Lent, the Church attaches to this Psalm the antiphon, “You are the fairest of the children of men and graciousness is poured upon your lips.” Jesus’s beauty is therefore emphasized, but especially the “inner beauty of his words,” as Cardinal Ratzinger puts it. He is the perfect man.

But this changes during Holy Week, when the antiphon is now a text taken from the prophet Isaiah: “He had neither beauty nor majesty, nothing to attract our eyes [Isaiah 53: 2].”

To make sense of this contrast, Ratzinger points out that it cannot be a contradiction, since both antiphons derive from the same Holy Spirit, who has spoken through the prophets. Invoking the English poet John Keats, he points out that the aphorism, “Beauty is truth and truth beauty” forces us to a critical evaluation of what we consider beautiful. We must accept that true beauty must somehow involve “wounds, pain, and even the obscure mystery of death and that this can only be found in accepting pain, not in ignoring it.”

Thus in the suffering Christ we see the beauty of our God accepting our pain in love, transforming it into life. We see a man, driven by a fervent love, freely willing to endure all manner of human violence and hatred in loving obedience to the Father. He loves His own to the very end and goes to any length to rescue us and to show us how lovable we are, even in our frequent unloveliness. That this is a kind of beauty can be inferred by its effects on us: it causes a kind of “compunction,” a breaking open of our hearts, often connected with tears, partly of joy, partly of pain.

Cardinal Ratzinger’s essay is primarily a reflection on Christian aesthetics, a topic to which he often returned in his occasional essays. He recognizes certain premonitions in Plato’s aesthetics (especially in the Phaedrus and Symposium), in the pagan philosopher’s belief that beauty wounds the beholder (which is to say, it causes a kind of compunction) and thus awakens in us a thirst for a deeper truth, something beyond superficial notions of beauty.

I would add that a similar premonition in the Greek pagan world can be found in the poets. As the great Alasdair MacIntyre observed, Homer’s Iliad demonstrates, subtly, how one can win a war by losing it. By this he means that the reader, in the end, tends to sympathize more with the vanquished Hector, even when his “appearance was so marred beyond human semblance [Isaiah 52: 14],” by the disgraceful treatment of his body by Achilles. There seems to be greater glory in the moral goodness and inner nobility of Hector than in the acknowledged excellence of Achilles. Why is this? We could speculate at length, but we see Hector dying for love of his city, versus Achilles fighting as a kind of hireling, a soldier of fortune. In the end, what redeems the character of Achilles, as is the case in all Greek tragedy, is our knowledge of his doomed mortality, not his perfections as a manly warrior.

[I note in passing that in this analysis, I part ways with important aspects of Nietzsche’s interpretation of Greek culture.]

What the pagans were not fully able to grasp (and indeed was anyone able to do it, except in prophecy by the Holy Spirit?) was that this inverted glory would be fully vindicated by God in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of God’s Son. The final beauty, for which the Christian hopes in the Iliad, is the vision of Hector and Achilles, like Saint Stephen and Saint Paul, reconciled by the death of Christ, and now, as friends, adoring the one, true God of us all. Until this final vision, all earthly beauty is provisional, existing in a tension between the intimation of God’s glory and the realism of human cruelty and suffering.

Two Paradoxes for Holy Week (Part 1)

Owing to my interest in sacred music and liturgy in general, I’ve been asked to join a few groups on Facebook. Recently, in one of these, I was quite amused by a long debate that had broken out. On one side was a Catholic liturgist, a very learned man whose writings I greatly esteem. In the opposing corner was an Orthodox believer, about whom I know little. The dispute was about the relative amount of rejoicing and lamenting to be found in the Lenten liturgies of the East and West. The Orthodox writer insisted that Western liturgies focused more on sin and penance, whereas the Byzantine liturgies were brighter, focusing on the joy of God’s salvation, and so on.

There are indeed many joyful texts in the Byzantine liturgies for Lent. But there are also long passages in which the faithful accuse themselves of every imaginable sin, of being the worst of all sinners, hard of heart. There are claims for continually weeping over sin. In this, I tended to side with my acquaintance, the Latin liturgist, who made just this argument.

What amused me, though, was the very idea that penance and the joy of Lent could be separated at all. This apparent paradox is easily understood if we attend to the theology of the liturgy. “While we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son. [Romans 5: 10]” We do not weep for our sins hoping that God will save us if we attain the minimum required amount of contrition. Rather, we are already saved, despite the fact that we couldn’t possibly merit salvation. And it is this realization of God’s patience, His loving pursuit of us in our unloveliness, that gives rise to true penthos, or compunction. It is the response of the faithful on Pentecost. When they realized that they had conspired to put to death God’s Son, “they were cut to the heart [Acts 2: 37].” But did they therefore despair? No! They repented and were baptized, becoming followers of the Apostles.

It is well attested of many saints that, as they grew in holiness and nearness to God, they felt less worthy of friendship with God. The brighter the light in which we find ourselves, the more we see our imperfections. Yet it is God’s very nearness and purity, an experience, at root, of awe and bliss, that gives rise to this insight about ourselves. The closer we come to God in the liturgy and in prayer and in asceticism, the more we see how our sins keep us from fully experiencing the joy of life in Christ. And so we weep for our sins precisely because we are drawing near to God’s selfless, regenerating love. It is what theologian Khaled Anatolios calls “doxological contrition,” and which he holds to be the central meaning of salvation.

As I never tire of mentioning, Saint Benedict, who was extremely realistic about human failings and vices, mentions joy twice in his short chapter on the observance of Lent.

What is being described is the theological virtue of hope. Hope is the great forgotten theological virtue, and so perhaps it is no surprise that this Facebook disagreement went unresolved. For hope to be hope, we must hold in tension the fact that we remain sinners in need of salvation, and that somehow salvation has already been accomplished. In fact, until the eschaton, we are necessarily saved, not with final assurance, but “in hope [Romans 8:24]”: in such a way that we must continually work out our salvation in “fear and trembling [Philippians 2: 12].”

The faith of a child

Many years ago, when I was a young adult and attending a family event at my grandparents’, I had an amusing “discussion” with my four- or five-year-old cousin. He had just discovered the word “why” and was asking me an endless stream of questions. “The sky is blue. Why?” When I gave whatever answer seemed suitable for his age, he repeated what I said, and then added, “Why?” I found the exchange rather enjoyable, at least for awhile. I can’t quite remember, but I expect that the conversation ended at the point that I decided to say, “Just because,”…and that was good enough for him. An adult said so.

Faith is the virtue of allowing God to propose to us ideas and plans of action for which the question, “Why?” is more or less irrelevant, at least for the moment. To a child, what I understand about the color of the sky (electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency causing corresponding events in the cones of my eye and brain) is well beyond his cognitive ability at that age. Imagine how much more God knows—He Who knows everything that ever was or will be—than even the most intelligent human. It is clear that sometimes when we ask God, “Why?” He can only respond, “Just because; trust me!”

“Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” May we have that serene and childlike trust in our heavenly Father that Jesus did.

Scholia on Genesis: Genesis 12:7

“The Lord appeared to Abram.”

Why does the Lord appear to Abram and not Noah, when we are told that Noah also was just? We will discover that Abram goes beyond justice when he pleads for Sodom and Gomorrah, whereas Noah made no apparent effort to save others besides his family from the Flood. That is to say, in wrath, he remembered mercy [Hab. 3: 2]. Since he accurately conveyed this quality of God, he also was found worthy to be the source of blessings for all the families of the earth.

The Light of Christ in an Earthen Vessel: in Memory of Thomas Levergood, 1962-2021

I met Thomas at a graduate student party at the University of Chicago in 1994. I’ve never forgotten his first two questions to me. He began with, “Aren’t you the cantor at St. Thomas [the Apostle parish]?” When I replied in the affirmative, he immediately followed that up with, “Have you ever thought of being a priest?” I hadn’t…

“Le Barberousse” [Redbeard] as he was fondly known by Hyde Park francophones.

So began an intense three-year period of our friendship, during which we toured around virtually every men’s religious community in the Archdiocese and spoke, often with greater zeal than discernment, about the mystical life, Church history, founding our own monastery, etc. I had never before had such intellectually gratifying discussions about faith. Our great shared passion was mysticism, though as we walked this path together, he tended toward the Carmelite tradition and I toward the Desert Fathers. He and I would end up working at the monastery I eventually joined, helping out with cleaning the guesthouse and maintaining the grounds. It was during this time that he conceived the idea for a “Catholic think tank” at the university. Just before I entered monastic life, I was able to help out at some of the first meetings of what would become the Lumen Christi Institute.

As anyone who knew Thomas can attest, his was a most fecund mind. Some years later, I visited him at Calvert House, at what was serving as his office for Lumen Christi. He told me that some corporate leadership guru had given him advice to engage in “one act of creative destruction at the beginning of each day.” I think that the idea was to avoid procrastination by characterizing a difficult phone call as a challenge rather than as an existential crisis. The advice struck me as slightly absurd on his lips. He needed little encouragement for initiating new projects! The difficulty was always about finding adequate help. Thanks be to God, he managed, through many years of dogged work and with much competent assistance, to build up an impressive group of board members and staff who will carry on his vision.

Lumen Christi came to be so identified with Thomas that it is easy to forget just how multitalented he was. When we met, he was, among other things, contemplating becoming a poet, becoming a priest, and running political campaigns. Lest we forget, he was ostensibly working on a PhD. as a student in the prestigious Committee on Social Thought, that quirkiest program at the quirky university that he and I both loved. Most of his ideas were serious, but his imagination allowed for plenty of oddball humor, too. He once suggested that I compose a country song cycle on the ecumenical councils and even offered a melody for “Good Pope Leo and His Tome.”

Friends of Thomas will also attest that he was a complex person. His impressive resume made it easy to overlook the many obstacles he encountered throughout life. If mysticism had been our shared passion in the early years, I believe that the Incarnation became the firmer foundation for our shared reflections as we grew older. Age has a way of bringing home the limitations of our bodily existence, all the better, one hopes, to hand the reins to Christ.

These memories have been flooding my mind in recent weeks as, during his final illness, Thomas and I were able to spend more time together than we had in many years. My first thought, on hearing that he had died yesterday was that Christ had chosen the Feast of the Transfiguration as the day to call him home. It was a mystery that Thomas greatly revered. This is the day on which we are dazzled by the Uncreated Light somehow–improbably–shining through our lowly human body. What a triumphant hope this breeds in those who know its secret! Our frail human nature is absolutely no obstacle to the purifying and transforming Light of Christ. May God in His mercy send the angels to receive him, that his eyes may be opened anew to the deifying light. Rest in peace.

Remember Beauty: God Is Near

Beauty is an epiphany. Encountering someone or something beautiful opens a sudden abyss before me. The arrestingly beautiful object arrives as an answer to a question I had not thought to ask. And yet the answer is not the end, but the door into a cascade of mysteries. In other words, the right kind of aesthetic experience is theological.

Our first experiences of the beautiful are always embodied. They are encounters with real objects: sunsets, the Milky Way, Lake Michigan, forests, cardinals, orchids. Artists use their inspiration and ingenuity to craft beauty in artifacts: paintings, music, cathedrals, gardens, vestments. By a process of abstraction, we can think of ideas as beautiful. For example, I find a number of mathematical equations strikingly beautiful. But this “disembodied” version of beauty is always analogous to the embodied version of beauty.

So we are presented with an important paradox involving beauty. It is, on the one hand, theological and mysterious. At the same time, beauty is embodied and real. I opened by saying that beauty is an epiphany. An epiphany happens when a material object reveals a spiritual meaning. We see the object, and then we also see “beyond” it to significance. Beautiful objects are bridges between the material world and the infinite.

The Fibonacci sequence present in the interior of a sunflower.

For several reasons, I am planning a series of posts on beauty, particularly beautiful music. The goal is not to distract, but to model ways in which we can redirect our focus from the virtual to the real. This idea began with a request from a friend who was encouraging me to write more after my posts of April and May. Then, last week, a pastor from a non-denominational church addressed the brothers on various topics relating to his ministry in a neighborhood that faces challenges of poverty and violence. The two of us briefly discussed the role of anxiety in outbreaks of violence, and he urged me to write more on this topic. I will do that, and one way into this topic is through what the ancient monks called natural contemplation, and what I might call “beauty and the real.”

Beauty is often thought to be a luxury of a leisured wealthy class, irrelevant, say, to a community dealing with with poverty. To me, this sidelining of beauty is a major mistake. Beauty is a patrimony, even a right, of all human beings. More importantly, the loss of beauty produces anxiety and despair, the very ingredients that continue the cycle of violence and poverty.  

Now let me tie a few things together. The visiting pastor shared a number of very helpful insights. He noted that the uptick in violence in Chicago has been fueled, in no small part, by the increase in social media use during the coronavirus lockdown. A key source of harm of the lockdown has been the retreat by larger and larger groups from the real into the virtual.

The Garden of the Phoenix in Chicago’s Jackson Park, a gift of the people of Osaka, Japan.

Remembering beauty can help to bring us back to the real, to ground us. Moreover, beauty can reawaken in us a desire for a genuine life of the spirit. Beauty reminds us that we are made for a life that transcends insipid materiality. Beauty awakens hope, a very important theological virtue for us to cultivate at the moment.

In follow-up posts, I am going to be speaking more about “natural contemplation.” This practice, seemingly forgotten in recent centuries, consists in the habit of seeing things as God intended them to be seen. Since all things were created through God’s Word, all things reveal God, if we learn to view them properly. This would further imply that all things that exist are beautiful at some level, and that the experience of beauty can be a reliable indicator of God’s nearness and the soundness of our best intuitions. Once again, the created world needn’t be reduced to pedestrian materiality, but should instead, through faith and hope, be elevated and “sacramentalized.”

For today, I would invite each of my readers to take time to notice beautiful things around us. Take a few moments to contemplate the beautiful persons you’ve known and the beautiful experiences that you have had. Perhaps you could go further and think about the eternal beauty that the faithful believe awaits us in heaven, a beauty that breaks through even now when we gather to pray and celebrate God in the holy liturgy.

Jesus first manifested His glory by the gift of fine wine at Cana.

Reason and Faith

I was a big science fiction fan as a kid. I read everything I could find by Isaac Asimov, and I memorized episodes of Star Trek. In high school, I subscribed to Asimov magazine, and it was from reading the short stories and novellas therein that I came to the realization that the Golden Age of science fiction was long gone. So I was somewhat prepared to be cynical when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted my senior year.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”–Isaac Asimov

On the whole, I enjoyed the show, but a comparison between the two Star Treks at the time confirmed for me that the adventure, mystery, and humanity of the original was losing out to militarism, expertise, and a kind of bureaucratic stuffiness in the new series. Later seasons managed to fix many of the glaring problems of the early seasons, but I had lost interest by then, and was devoting my creative energies to music and Shakespeare.

One episode summarized the problems for me. All I can remember about it was that some kind of tear had opened up in the space-time continuum (!), and if the Starship Enterprise couldn’t get there and knit it up somehow, that reality would cease to exist. No pressure! Beneath the surface of this implausible plot device, it would appear that human beings have become responsible for literally everything. 

And isn’t this how we all feel sometimes? We are urged to feel simultaneously responsible for:

Reducing global temperatures
Every questionable thing the President says or Tweets
Making sure people in Michigan don’t die of COVID-19
Figuring out how to get our two-year-olds into Stanford
Ending terrorism (or evil itself, if George W. Bush is to be heeded)
Getting the bishops to be more disciplined
Making sure no kids anywhere get bullied
Donating to groups fighting cancer, Alzheimers, et al
Ending poverty
Murder Hornets

Now I assume that, most of the time, our conscious minds understand that we can’t do everything. But the cumulative effect of the impulse to solve every problem is chronic anxiety. As I wrote in the previous post, this is, in fact, a recipe for irrationality. To assume responsibility for all of the world’s problems is fundamentally unreasonable, but we rarely permit ourselves to admit this squarely. The result is a worldview with a large, false supposition built in.

According to family systems therapy, stress is not produced by overwork. Rather, overwork is one symptom of stress that has its roots in being overly responsible. Our present stressed-out overfunctioning is further fueled by a simplistic notion that our American political system is a democracy. It’s not, in fact. We live in a representative democracy, more formally called a republic. The reason I point this out is that a flat ideology of “democracy,” suggests that we are all responsible for everything in our country, and that the only way to address this responsibility is through constant monitoring of the news and constant argument. And it’s exhausting!

What if we’re not responsible for all that other stuff? Who might be? What if we felt that, behind it all, the maintenance of the space-time continuum was God’s prerogative and not ours? I often find that God raises up ingenious and courageous helpers at fortuitous moments. These helpers see the same problems I see, but have the intelligence, experience, and resources that I lack. It’s always possible, too, that a problem can’t be solved immediately. I will return to that possibility below.

“We feel that we must disagree with those prophets of doom who are always forecasting disaster.”–Pope Saint John XXIII

Pope Saint John XXIII offered this prayer each night before bed: “Well Lord, it’s your Church, you take care of it; I’m going to sleep.” Similarly, when Napoleon Bonaparte confronted Cardinal Consalvi and threatened to destroy the Catholic Church, the Cardinal’s response was, “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

These are quotes by men of deep faith, but they are also clear-eyed realists. There’s nothing childish about this faith. It’s an acknowledgement that there are powers at work in the world well beyond what we can touch. Our task is to figure out our assignment and then resolve to stay at our posts. The pagan heroes of old understood that fate was not something that they could determine. It was, however, theirs either to reject or to accept nobly and graciously. By accepting fate, heroes also accepted the relatively confined spheres of action in which it is enacted. Beowulf died slaying the dragon that was threatening his native Geatland (southern Sweden), but the dragon never was a serious threat to the lands of most other contemporary peoples. Peruvian dragons were, presumably, for Peruvian heroes to deal with. And in heaven, the great band of dragon-slayers will have its own special space at the bar where they will hang out and share stories from every corner of the globe.

Realism is central to thinking rationally about our options for acting. Hyper-responsibility inclines us either to grandiose, impossible projects, or to paralysis. Bipolar disorder happens when someone oscillates between these two unrealistic options. Some choose to escape this oscillation by a strategic retreat into chronic complaint. None of these approaches are reasonable, nor are they mature. Hidden fears are continuing to contaminate our thinking.

Faith is a gift from God. This gift frees us from fear, and it frees us to risk the good even when we might suffer for it. In our present climate, I suspect that many of us are tempted to choose lesser goods because, in a highly polarized environment, we fear failure, rejection, and ostracization. If we remember that our Leader leads by way of the Cross, we can let go of the notion that the suffering we experience is a sign of God’s rejection or our failure. Nor is it our responsibility even to change those who cause us suffering, any more than Christ felt it important to win over Pilate and the Sanhedrin.

Faith is often presented as the opposite of reason, but this is a mistake. The opposite of reason is reactive fear. Faith is the friend of reason. In fact, it is the precondition for the full flowering of reason.

Fear and Reason

Fear is a part of our bodily constitution. It comes with being a member of the animal family. In evolutionary terms, it has served us and our fellow animals well. Fear rapidly mobilizes our energies to face down danger or to flee from it. Both reactions give us a better chance of surviving immediate danger. This means that natural selection has favored the cultivation of the fear-response in us.

“Nothing resembles an angry cat…more than an angry cat.”–Anthony Storr, “Aggression” The breakdown of distinctions caused by fear, anger, and violence makes reasoning impossible.

For us rational animals, however, fear also presents specific dangers of its own. When I was in high school, my family had a beautiful but terrifying dog, a black Labrador/German Shepherd mix. She was a great guard-dog for a single-mother family, but her attack instincts were sometimes, let’s say, inappropriate. Once, when one of my mother’s piano students came for her lesson and rang the doorbell, our dog shattered the glass of the front door in warding off this thirteen-year-old girl student. Our dog frequently would get very upset about the presence of my male friends, though once she decided you were safe, she was as devoted afterward as she had been suspicious before. The difficulty for us is that there were few things that we could say to our dog to convince her that her responses were irrational. This is why Aristotle refers to humans as rational animals; among the members of the animal kingdom, we have learned how to temper the fear response by muting it, thinking through the situation, and then deciding whether fear is warranted. If it is, we have a larger repertoire of responses than fight or flight. We can make a plan that takes into account potential long-term effects of any hypothetical actions. Dogs, intelligent as they are, lack most of what makes this possible for humans.

In Catholic moral theology, we speak of the “age of reason.” Very young children do not yet have the full faculty of reason, and, as a result, tend to act on the promptings of feelings. One of the responsibilities of parents is to respond to the emotions of children in such a way as to facilitate the emergence of reason in the child. As parents know, the ongoing achievement of rationality is directly linked to an ability to manage one’s emotions, especially fear. Maturity is marked by rational reflection and reason-based decision making. Immaturity is marked by impulsivity and emotional reactivity. Another shorthand way to summarize this would be to say that the mature adult tends to respond to life, whereas the immature person tends to react.

When we permit ourselves to react, or even to overreact, we move in the direction of immaturity and even infantilization at times. Adult temper tantrums are no different than kid temper tantrums.

Mature persons are not therefore unfeeling, however. We will still have the immediate bodily responses to typical stimuli: fear, joy, anger, hunger, and sexual arousal. What will change about us is that we will know how to anticipate the trajectory of these feelings. We will know how to step back from immediate engagement, especially from those emotions that are most likely to lead to trouble if acted upon. The stimulus and its initial emotional response, in other words, will just become more information. That first impulse of fear, or perhaps more often, a sense of something being not quite right, is often a signal. Perhaps we need to pay attention to our surroundings a bit more perceptively in order to judge correctly what is going on. Some of us are better at making these detections in personal relationships, accurately reading body language, for example, to gauge what is being left unsaid. Others tend to excel in situational awareness, the ability to spot potential dangers before they arise, and to sense the presence of danger by knowing how to interpret inconsistencies in large-scale spatial arrangements. This is a good, mature use of initial emotional responses or “gut feelings.”

All of the above helps to explain some difficulties facing us as we try to make prudential responses to the pandemic. The worst-case scenarios present significant dangers to our whole way of life. As I wrote earlier, fear is not an unreasonable response to a number of possible futures. But if we allow fear to become chronic, if we continually marinate ourselves in the scariest projections, we run the risk of making our response less mature and less rational. In point of fact, we have, as we all know, lots of time to decide how to deal with the pandemic. We are not faced with a saber-toothed tiger ready to devour our children, a danger that requires a decisive, forceful response.

The quarantine that most of us are experiencing ratchets up chronic fear in another way. Every fellow human being is to be treated indefinitely as a potential vector and danger. That means that grocery shopping has suddenly been transformed into a dangerous activity. Every single action that requires us to come into proximity with someone else, we are told, is dangerous. This itself seems like a recipe for chronic fear and, therefore, unfortunately, immature responses to the actual threat.

George Orwell warned about the dangers of a breakdown in trust between fellow citizens, and the relation of this breakdown to the breakdown of reason.

This situation is clearly unsustainable and poses, in my view, much more dangerous long-term consequences. If we continue to treat all social interactions as fearful, we run the very real risk of infantilizing ourselves and making rational discourse impossible. When reason is not an available option, we are left only with power and force. Totalitarian governments know this, and so the cultivation of fear is an ineliminable feature of all dictatorships. Mind you, I am not saying that we are living in such an environment—yet. But at the very least, it seems important to me to treat the resumption of social interactions as a necessary goal, and to find ways to discuss with others in our extended families, neighborhoods, and workplaces, goals for making this happen as safely as possible. This will work most effectively if, in our personal lives, we are taking steps to cultivate our own rationality and maturity by reflecting regularly on what kind of information we really need (rather than letting hyperlinks lead us by the nose into what an anonymous person wants you to read, perhaps for motives of advertising revenue) to make informed decisions, and finding ways to identify the sources of fear and to assess them as we would any other threat.

Last of all, we should aim to hold before our minds eye the examples of heroes whose lives we wish to imitate. This is one reason that I urge our monks to read the lives of the saints frequently, and to make friends with them. The saint is a person of “heroic virtue,” and therefore, courage. In my next post, I would like to share with you my thoughts about why the saints are also models of rationality.  

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