Articles under Moral Theology

Emotivism: a Prelude

August 21, 2015

Christians are called to conversion, to become different kinds of persons, a different kind of community. The liturgy is the place where we learn what sort of persons we are to be. I’ve given a number of theological reasons for this in recent weeks. I’d like now to turn to some other considerations.

First of all, what are we being converted from? The typical answer would be, “Sin.” And this is correct. But there is actually something more, something subtler that the gospel reveals. Baptism was frequently referred to in the early church as “Enlightenment.” So not only did baptism bring forgiveness of sins and sanctifying grace, but it brought about a change of thinking, a revelation, light and clarity where there had been darkness and obscurity, sight where there had been blindness.

The typical blind person in the gospels is, revealingly, the Pharisee. The Pharisees, it should be noted, were generally held to be models of virtue by the Jews of the day, and with good reason. They followed the Torah, kept ritually clean, tithed, looked after the poor, and all the rest. And yet, the Lord refers to more than one of them as blind. From this we can see that “sin”–understood as transgressions of specific laws–is not sufficient as an explanation of the worldview that we are meant to turn away from.

Gamaliel, a teacher of the law, held in honor by all the people (Acts 5: 34)

Saint Paul exemplifies this situation. He says in his own words that by the standards of the law, his younger self–a Pharisee–was blameless. What changed? We are apt to say something like, “He realized that he needed to be saved by faith instead of the law.” Now this gets us closer. But recall the question we are asking: from what sort of life are we being converted? This can’t be a rejection of the law, since those who do not keep it and prevent others from keeping it are least in the kingdom.

In Chapter 7 of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Paul makes some suggestive (though difficult) remarks. He writes about “sinful passions.” This word “passion” comes to play a big part in monastic spirituality and later throughout the Church (though with somewhat less emphasis). Passions are not the same as feelings. Simple movements of emotion are a natural part of our bodily structure. A feeling becomes a passion when we distort it by liking it beyond reasonable measure, seeking it out, treasuring it, allowing it to bend our minds. This is the source of blinding. When we are under the spell of a passion, we no longer think straight. We all know this in some obvious cases. All one has to do is listen to talk radio or read internet comment threads to discover that anger renders people narrow and illogical. We all have known persons (perhaps ourselves) who, enticed by an attractive person, leave all caution and good sense to the wind.

The law itself can have this effect. Paul was so good at the law that he took pride in fulfilling its prescriptions, and this pride became a debilitating passion in him. So much so that he failed to see that he was acting against God when he was persecuting the early Christian sect. A wiser Pharisee, Paul’s own teacher Gamaliel showed better sense when he urged that Sanhedrin to leave the Christians alone, lest they “even be found opposing God [see Acts 5: 33-40].” Young Saul thought he knew better than Gamaliel and even convinced the Sanhedrin to go against Gamaliel’s sound advice [see Acts 22: 3-5].

Now to our peculiar danger: according to Alasdair MacIntyre, our Western culture is an emotivist culture, and has been for some time. What is emotivism? I will use one of the next posts to give a fuller answer to that question, but here’s an attempt at a short answer. An emotivist is not as interested in truth as he or she is in effectiveness. And to oversimplify more, an emotivist wants to put in effect whatever he or she feels to be good. If MacIntyre is correct, we have wandered into an institutionalized blindness, for we have placed the passions in the driver’s seat, unaware that our arguments are not rational (an emotivist only pretends to be rational because an argument that appears to be rational is more effective than one that is naked nonsense).

MacIntyre

If the above is true, our conversion today needs to be away from emotivism toward genuine Truth and virtue. This is the spiritual analog to the argument put forward by MacIntyre over thirty years ago in After Virtue. It is worth noting that the traditional spiritual triad of the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways begin with the healing of behavior (purgative) and then of the mind (illuminative). For reasons that I hope to show in my coming post on emotivism, the problem with emotivism is precisely that it disposes us to willfulness and blindness, the opponents of virtue and truth. This can be true even when we have the outward appearance of a devout life of prayer and service. Emotivism hampers our ability to present the gospel to others, since it disposes us to hear the gospel in terms of effectiveness (and effectiveness in terms of realizing personal desire, not effectively achieving actual justice or compassion), rather than in terms of truth.

There is a lot to unpack here. Please send any questions you have to me, and I will try to clarify anything that you are having difficulty understanding. I will try to go slowly, as this is an important topic and worth the time it takes to master it.

Living the Divine Life

July 30, 2015

We must become different kinds of persons.

The liturgy is the primary place where this happens. And this is why the liturgy first disorients in order to re-orient us as new kinds of persons.

What kind of persons are we to become?

If I may coin a term, we must become eschatological persons.

The eschaton is the end-time, the goal of history, the eternal life in communion with the Holy Trinity that we hope for. A person who is eschatological lives already with one foot in this reality.

Let me unpack a bit of this today.

Becoming a different kind of person really is a matter of kind and not degree. The aim is not to become better at some set of behaviors that we already possess, to be nicer, more generous or happier. Becoming a different kind of person involves receiving and cultivating capacities that my old self did not possess. Let me use music again as an analogy. At age seventeen, when I first heard the album Close to the Edge by the band Yes, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the music. As a result, I judged it inferior to the music I liked at the time, mostly variations on blue-eyed soul and the later New Wave bands of the mid-1980’s. The album was on one side of a cassette tape, and I liked the music on the other side. So rather than rewind, I began flipping the tape over and playing Close to the Edge without listening very closely (I used to listen while practicing basketball and while running). After a few such passive listenings, I suddenly realized that I was actually able to identify recurring themes, and I began to have a sense for how the very energetic opening section was constructed musically. After some months, I had a capacity that I did not have before, a capacity to understand this difficult kind of music. I wasn’t necessarily a better listener, or a more discriminating listener. Rather, my ears had changed, my mind and heart had changed. Close to the Edge became one of my favorite albums.

Now conversion to Christ is analogous, though stronger. In my example, one might argue that in fact, I already had the capacity to understand Close to the Edge, but it was latent and needed actualization, to use Aristotle’s term. By contrast, when we are initiated into the “things handed down to us,” the Christian faith, we really do become new creations. By grace, we receive a share in the divine nature. Therefore we receive potentialities and capacities that we did not have before baptism [it is perhaps important to note that all human beings have the capacity to receive this divine life; but the divine life is not present in the same intimate way before baptism].

What are these new capacities? We would normally group them under the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, fortitude, piety, and fear of the Lord.

Here’s the trick, though. Since these virtues and gifts are proper to the divine nature and not our own, their exercise should, at first and perhaps for prolonged periods of time, feel unfamiliar, perhaps even strange and uncomfortable. We might not even recognize what it feels like to walk by faith, to act in charity or live in hope, even when this is actually happening, just as we aren’t usually aware of our breathing until we pay attention. We can become accustomed to the divine nature at work in us through self-denial (which reduces the distractions of the flesh to allow us more freedom in the Spirit), and through prayer. The work of asceticism and prayer is the work of owning this new self, making it who we really are.

The liturgy is the primary place where we are acclimated to the divine life. There we co-operate with our high priest and Head, Jesus Christ, to offer worship to the Father in the Spirit. We are immersed in the divine life, and it appears to us, as it were, through the senses. The visible, audible, and tactile signs of the liturgy really do communicate God’s loving, enveloping, and suffusing presence. The liturgy conforms and accustoms us to the divine nature, to the life of heaven, the eternal life to which we aspire, the celestial commonwealth that is our true abiding homeland.

But the liturgy will often feel unfamiliar, strange, perhaps even a bit irritating at times for the same reason that the divine life is at first unfamiliar. It is not ours; we didn’t invent it based on some already-existing human capacities that we discerned. The liturgy is a gift from God, attuned to and ordered for the human person, to be sure, but not of the human person.

An image by David Jones. He worked out a very sophisticated theory of art and liturgy based on the ‘gratuitous’ nature of a gift and the ‘utile’ nature of instruments.

This is why efforts at liturgical reform that are based in rationalism, trying to help the liturgy “make more sense,” are misguided at best. We only begin to understand the deepest logic of the liturgy when we have become totally transparent to the Divine Will, when our minds have been truly renewed in Christ. And unfortunately, there is some reason to think that, in the West, we have been truncating and rationalizing our liturgical observances for some time, probably coinciding to some measure in the rise of the centralized, monarchical papacy during the high middle ages. Which is to say since the end of the Benedictine centuries (ahem). As active religious life became more the norm and the papal curia became more involved in the standardization of the liturgy throughout Europe, the usual drift has been toward simplification, utility, and so on. The last thing the liturgy can be is utile (David Jones’s wonderful term) or useful. It is divine, and God has no need of spaceships or our worship for that matter. The liturgy is a gratuitous gift to His creatures, a bridge between the creaturely and the Creator. In a utilitarian world, this will be profoundly uncomfortable for many of us (what if Mass started to take two hours? Would we stick it out?). All the fuss about candles, processions, maniples, altar cloths…I agree that this can be irritating, and the liturgical traditionalists sometimes can be their own worst enemies. Perhaps because the tendency even for a traditionalist is to find a water-tight reason why you need this or that thing, to make it make sense, rather than allowing the profound uncanniness of liturgy to break down our human agendas and replace them with the divine.

The liturgy is not utile. It does exist for any end in this creation, which is also why it is eschatological. I hope to have more to say on this point in future posts.

Becoming a Different Kind of Person

July 28, 2015

When God singles out a person for a special task, He often changes his or her name. Abraham, Sarah, and Israel in the Old Testament, and Peter in the New take on a different identity when God calls them forth. Von Balthasar has this lovely reflection on this phenomenon:

Hans Urs von Balthasar, 1905-1988. Pope Saint John Paul II intended to create him as a cardinal, but he died prior to the ceremony.

Simon the fisherman could have explored every region of his ego prior to his encounter with Christ, but he would not have found “Peter” there….Then Christ confronts him with [his mission], unyielding, demanding obedience, and it will be the fulfillment of everything that, in Simon, vainly sought a “form” that would be ultimately valid before God and eternity. —Prayer

God can confront each of us with a mission that we ourselves could not have predicted or discerned by “casting round our comfortless” interior, exploring every region of our ego. This is a radical idea. Our more typical notion of authenticity is based precisely in seeking for clues in the corners of our inner psychological Simons. Simon needed the man Jesus of Nazareth to say to him, “Come, follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men.” Otherwise, he would never have become Peter. He needed to be “made” by Christ anew, and the old man, the fallen man Simon, had to die so that this Peter, who is capable of things that Simon would never have imagined himself capable of, might begin to flower and put forth fruit.

Wax on; wax off….The Karate Kid can’t understand the utility of waxing cars until he becomes proficient at it. He must make an act of trust in mysterious Mr. Miyagi.

I wrote yesterday that in order to become proficient in a tradition, one must undergo a kind of conversion. One must become a different kind of person. And this conversion depends on an act of faith in a teacher, who may ask me to do things that I don’t understand. Obedience need not be “blind,” but will be more effective when it is accompanied by love and devotion to the teacher. After all, what we are seeking is not only self-fulfillment, but sympathy with the master. “It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher [Matthew 10: 25].” The goal of Christian conversion is to mature into our “Christ-self,” to become members of Christ, to put on Christ, and this requires us to be called out of ourselves.

Most dedicated Christian know all of this. Where it becomes truly demanding is when we recognize that the calling really must come from outside, and therefore may well be more authentic when opposed to our inclinations and preferences. When we think of discerning God’s will, is it not the case that we often equate God’s voice with some interior conviction? Obedience to another person is a real undoing of the self, because it prevents us from confusing our own wishful thinking with God’s plans. And it comports with the notion that we must become different kinds of persons, rather than simply developing what we ourselves identify as our latent talents. “Consent merits punishment; constraint wins a crown,” Saint Benedict teaches [RB 7: 33]. He is quoting from the acts of the martyr Anastastia. In this connection we see how even allowing for obedience under unjust circumstances can be more fruitful than following our own inner light, for this docility allows God to act and conforms us more closely to Christ Himself.

The Beauty of Tradition

July 27, 2015

Think for yourself!

By the time I was a highschooler, this mantra was assumed wisdom. The Vietnam War and Watergate had accelerated the questioning of authority. “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” was quietly being replaced with, “Don’t trust any claim you can’t verify with your own eyes.” At least that was the ideal.

In such an environment, tradition often appeared to me as a surrender, a lazy forfeiting of one’s duty to discover the truth for oneself.

Thucydides

I began to think differently about tradition when I began my education as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where students go to grapple with Great Books. My first exposure to Plato and the Greek historian Thucydides demonstrated to me that others’ observations on the world might at times be superior to my own in their power to explain and organize experience. In many ways, Plato played a parallel role in my life to the role he played for St. Augustine, broadening my mind to a consideration of the non-material aspects of the world, to a critical engagement with what it means to think at all.

Bruce Tammen, receiving an award from his mentor Weston Noble at Luther College

But the utility, and indeed, beauty of tradition really hit home in my studies of music. Under Bruce Tammen, I began to learn the craft of choral conducting. What constitutes a good vocal sound? The proper formation of a vowel and articulation of a consonant? How does the interpretation of Brahms differ from the interpretation of Rachmaninoff? Answers to these sorts of questions were inevitably personal. We would do things the way Robert Shaw did them, or based on Weston Noble’s experience. When question arose about the execution of Bach, Helmuth Rilling did the talking. These were three men under whom Bruce had sung. But their insights were also grounded in personal recollections of great figures of the previous generations, notably Toscanini in Shaw’s case. Similarly, when Bruce and I would discuss art song (especially French chansons), a passion that we share, standards were grounded in the advice and experiences of older contemporaries like Elly Ameling, Gérard Souzay and Dalton Baldwin, who in turn knew people who knew Fauré, Poulenc and others. Charles Rosen, a faculty member at the U of C until his recent death, has similar observations in his copious writings about piano performance, how his early study was grounded in the sensibilities and techniques of famous turn-of-the-century pianists, notably Josef Hofmann, who cribbed from Anton Rubenstein and Franz Liszt.

Easley Blackwood at the piano in his apartment and stacks of scores in the background.

Then I began studying composition with Easley Blackwood. His way of speaking about right and wrong in composition was akin to Bruce’s reasoning when it came to choral and art song performance. Why treat variation on a theme in such-and-such a way? Because that’s what Tchaikovsky would have done, according to Nadia Boulanger, who had heard it from Stravinsky (Easley studied under Boulanger and Olivier Messaien in Paris). My first exercises were to write a few short piano pieces in the style of Chopin. I wasn’t allowed to get fancy yet. I had to change the way I wrote and heard music, in order to align my taste with that of established masters of the craft. And Easley would be the judge of whether I was succeeding.

Both of these experiences required me to become a different kind of person than I had been before exposure to this tradition-based manner of learning. In order to learn certain things, I had first to dispose myself to be able to have certain kinds of aesthetic experiences. This requires that one trust one’s teacher, and assume that the teacher has your good in mind rather than self-aggrandizement. One guarantee of the teacher’s purpose is his own deference to certified masters of the past, as well as the general recognition of the quality of his work in the present by other established master-craftsmen.

From this perspective, tradition no longer appears as an irrational block of customary observances that abrogate one’s critical faculties. In fact, a genuine grappling with tradition ought to sharpen one’s critical faculties by constantly calling out the narrowness of one’s own previous education, upbringing and exposure. Not everyone has the opportunity to enter into a truly critical engagement with a tradition like the Western classical music tradition, but even for the amateur, a willingness to trust the insights of such a tradition will make one more reasonable rather than less. And all traditions ought to function in this way.

Lady Fortuna and her wheel. We all have our turn.

Human life being what it is, imperfect and prone to the fickleness of Lady Fortuna, traditions do get tangled, fall into dysfunction and disrepair and all the rest. But this is not a good reason to forswear all tradition. Yet it is one of the myths of the post-Enlightenment Western world that we should not ever trust traditions. Is it any wonder that we struggle to carry on anything like a rational debate in public life?

A corollary follows, with a stronger bearing on the purpose of this blog. Christianity, and within in it, monasticism, is a tradition. And to understand what the Church teaches requires from the disciple an act of faith that the Tradition and those charged with teaching it have the disciple’s good in mind. It also requires the disciple to become a different kind of person, which is to say, that we must undergo a conversion of life to enter more and more deeply into the truths that the Church means to convey to us. It will require us to leave behind the narrowness of our education, exposure and upbringing (especially that which took place “in the flesh”) so that we “may comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ [Ephesians 3: 18].”

Update, July 28: It just happens that yesterday Classical Minnesota Public Radio did a big piece on Weston Noble, who, I realize, is not a household name outside of American Lutheran college choral aficionados. Here’s a link, if you are interested in learning more about him.

Obergefell v. Hodges: Second Thoughts

June 30, 2015

In my “first thoughts,” I suggested that Christians interested in upholding the Church’s view of marriage might be better off letting go of a language of rights, since rights divide a coercive power from a class of victims. Turning this around we can also say that appealing to rights is a way of claiming the mantle of a victim and casting the Other as a victimizer. Either way, I think that it is clear that any sense of a genuine common good is undermined, subtly, by naked appeals to rights. Catholic social teaching depends on a clear sense of a common good, and a disciplined determination to live by it.

from Georges Rouault, Miserere

Here is where quite a bit of “Benedict Option” language also seems counterproductive, probably unintentionally. It sets the Opting party against the world. The language of separation tends toward a language of rejection. Now of course there are many attitudes in today’s dominant culture that a disciple of Jesus Christ must reject, and sometimes this rejection calls for disengagement from particular social structures. Repentance and conversion require new ways of living, and this means that behaviors must change. Conversion might require me to stop going to bars, or to movies, to the Freemason meetings, to my mistress’s apartment, and even to my place of employment. But the point of this is not to say, “Too bad for you, I’m outta here.” Rather, the penitent is aiming at identifying personal behaviors that are harmful and eliminating them.

If we actually believe in a common good, one of the best things that any one of us can do for others is to live a truly penitent and evangelical life. For when any one of us begins to live more vibrantly in Christ, all will benefit. Right?

And the inverse holds as well. When someone lives in contradiction to the truth, all suffer in some way.

Here is where I get to the Supreme Court ruling from three days ago. It is important to understand that what I am going to write needs to be read from a position of weakness (see my last post for an explanation).

This week’s Collect reads, in part:

grant, we pray,
that we may not be wrapped in the darkness of error
but always be seen to stand in the bright light of truth.

The bright light of truth! What a gift to know the Truth Who sets us free.

How deeply do we believe in the truth of the Church’s revelation? One of the dangerous habits of mind generated by our cultural emotivism is the assumption that any supposed statement of truth is in fact a statement of personal preference. From this perspective, all claims to truth are actually strategic claims, manipulating the hearer to feel obliged to accept what’s being stated. In other words, emotivism makes us all nihilists to some extent, perhaps a larger extent than we realize.

This conclusion, that many of us are closet nihilists, seems to me borne out by the fear, anger, and anxiety that I’ve encountered over the years when contemporary mores are discussed among Catholics. When, aided by the Church’s teaching, we identify actions as good or bad and we identify statements as true or false, how we happen to feel about the action or judgment makes no difference. Jesus Christ rose from the dead, and nothing changes about that if I happen to feel overjoyed about it or flatly unemotional. When we communicate the truth of the Faith, there is a tendency to add zest or urgency to our statements of truth by smiling, showing enthusiasm or worry or whatever. We act as if the Truth needs some goosing up, that it doesn’t stand on its own. But if the truth can’t stand on its own, it’s probably not true. [Digression: I personally see this as a weakness in the otherwise entertaining opinions penned by Justice Scalia.]

The other problem with emoting too much in discussions of truth is that the focus tends to be on ourselves and our feelings too much of the time. Thus many conservative responses to Obergefell v. Hodges that I’ve seen have focused on the dangers to Christians in the coming extension of the Culture War. Mind you, I think that these dangers are real, but again this reality isn’t going to be altered by me fulminating about it.

St. John Chrysostom, patron of preachers, champion of St. Paul

But the curious things about the Supreme Court ruling is this: if the resulting deformation of marriage really is about a false understanding of the nature of marriage, then the Court’s ruling will also harm precisely the persons that it is intended to help. This is just an inference from everything I’ve said so far. How will it hurt them? I have no clear idea at the moment. Nor do I wish to cook up a prophecy about what sort of harm is coming. But if this is true, then my concern should also be for my fellow Americans, providentially given to me by God for our mutual salvation, who embrace this new reality, even when they have the for the best possible intentions. Again, I would not attempt to walk up to a gay couple and baldly assert this and use it as grounds for them to renounce their marriage. I merely raise the issue to point out that it is possible to broaden our thinking about the situation in such a way as to keep from falling into the same adversarial stances that typify American public debates.

And even if it should come about that we suffer in some way for our beliefs, even this is more harmful, from the standpoint of faith, to the aggressor than to the victim. Here’s Saint John Chrysostom, the Golden-Tongued Wonder.

This is more than any one thing the cause of all our evils, that we do not so much as know at all who is the injured, and who the injurious person.

In focusing on the potential harm coming to those who oppose the redefinition of marriage, that is, to one segment of our world, we are liable to lose sight of the harm that we are all suffering together. Thus Pope Francis, “When our hearts are authentically open to universal communion, this sense of fraternity excludes nothing and no one.” [Laudato si, 92]

Obergefell v. Hodges: First Thought

June 27, 2015

When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States, they made liberal use of the concept of rights. They famously held that such rights were “self-evident,” and were an endowment from the “Creator.” This assertion made perfect sense in 1776 when Western civilization had been Christian for a thousand or more years. But historically speaking, there is a problem here. If human equality and the existence of a Creator are really self-evident truths, then what are we to make of societies that recognize neither? The confident assertion of self-evidence is connected to the general immodesty of the Enlightenment,

Unmasking Emotivism

June 26, 2015

Thanks to Ariadne’s thread, Theseus was able to escape the labyrinth after slaying the Minotaur. In the Middle Ages, the Church saw Theseus as a type of Christ, descending into the dissolution of hell, slaying death, and leading the lost souls from darkness to light.

“[I]t’s time for the LGBT community to start moving beyond genetic predisposition as a tool for gaining mainstream acceptance of gay rights. . . .For decades now, it’s been the most powerful argument in the LGBT arsenal: that we were “born this way.” . . .Still, as compelling as these arguments are, they may have outgrown their usefulness”

I begin with a quote from dancer and writer Brandon Ambrosino,

Who’s MacIntyre? Why Virtue?

June 21, 2015

Seven or eight years ago, I was invited by a group of priests of the Marquette (Michigan) diocese to give a series of talks on music and morality. They were very receptive to my approach and suggested that I might set down my thoughts in a book. Hence the memoir I mentioned in the previous post. I chose the memoir format because music and morality are so difficult to write about in the abstract. And indeed, I more recently gave a similar talk at the University of Virginia’s St. Anselm Institute and faced some tough questions which, to be honest,

Discontinuity in Benedictine History

June 2, 2015

In the preface to After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre makes a curious admission:

Ever since the days when I was privileged to be a contributor to that most remarkable journal The New Reasoner, I had been preoccupied with the question of the basis for the moral rejection of Stalinism.

Wait–what’s there to be preoccupied with here? Rejecting Stalinism should be easy, shouldn’t it? Could there be anything simpler, less risky, than soundly denouncing Stalinism? What could he possibly mean?

The Benedict Option: Why No Benedictines?

June 1, 2015

Have you heard of the “Benedict Option?” If not, you may hear a lot more about it soon. Rod Dreher is working on a new book that will presumably help to explain the concept that he coined. But even before the book comes out, important blogosphere voices have been engaging in spirited discussion of it.

Sacro speco–the holy cave where young Benedict of Nursia went to escape the corrupting influence of Roman university life

What is it?