Further Evidence for God the Father

Because moms don't often make jokes this bad.  God has an awesomely awkward sense of humor.  Excerpts:

…In between these musings, [Peter Kreeft] also told me of the most spectacular conversion he ever saw: a former student who had been an atheist (ex-Catholic). He was brilliant, got A's in his sleep, had a photographic memory and was as rich as Midas cuz daddy was a heart surgeon. He got into drugs and alcohol, but could handle it and so graduated with a med degree and got a red convertible from dad to celebrate.

On the night of his graduation, he drove to a bridge with the full intention of taking it at 100 MPH and committing suicide for the simple reason that he had everything and his life was completely empty and meaningless. Speeding toward the bridge, he suddenly saw, looming up in front of him, a giant purple hippopotamus. (He swore he was stone cold sober.) Stopping the car, the kid said "Who are you?" and the hippo replied, "I'm God and I want you to do what I say."

The kid agreed and the substance of the command was "Repent. Believe in Jesus Christ. Go to Bible school, become a pastor, save souls." The kid asked, "Why are you a purple hippopotamus?" and God replied, "Because you were so far gone this was necessary to get your attention." The kid obeyed, went to Bible School, became a pastor, and helped inner city kids get off drugs and alcohol. One of Peter's students knew somebody he helped, and that's how word got back to Peter that this brilliant former atheist was now a pastor. Peter met him and got the whole story first hand. A lulu of a conversion story proving yet again that God is weird and that he loves you and has no concern for his own dignity when it comes to emptying himself for our salvation...

This is what happens when the Being whose aesthetic preferences encompass the kiwi, the dodo bird, and, well, me, is put in charge of the cosmos. And why the Devil in his pride thought God ridiculously undignified, and fell.

Peter Kreeft, Prayer, and Patience and Perseverance

Yeeps. My problems exactly, all in one paragraph. Excerpts

Patience and perseverance are two aspects of the same virtue, which is fidelity, or faithfulness. We sometimes mistakenly think of patience and perseverance as opposites because we think of patience as resignation and perseverance as stubbornness – as if patience were almost despair and perseverance were almost pride. In the same way, we mistakenly think of holy humility and holy ambition as opposites, when in fact they are two complementary aspects of the Godlike soul. God is both humble and ambitious, “easy to please but hard to satisfy”. He is simultaneously patient and persevering, gentle and persistent, like water wearing away rock. The strongest forces in the universe , both physical and spiritual, always have that Godlike Character. It is only because our minds are fallen and broken in two that we break this character in two and use two contrasting words for it.--Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners, (Ignatius, 2000), pg. 121

Gandalf, Galadriel, and Cosmic Battle

There are moments in The Hobbit where it suddenly becomes starkly clear that Peter Jackson really gets certain of Tolkien's influences, such as the gathering of the White Council at Rivendell.

Stratford Caldecott writes:

...There is a second way in which the Virgin Mary is present, and that is through her reflections in certain feminine characters, specifically Galadriel and Elbereth.19 Galadriel is one of the pivotal elvish characters: Bearer of one of the three Rings and preserver of the land of Lothlorien, Tolkien himself calls her “unstained” (a word that Catholics normally only use of the Virgin Mary), adding that “she had committed no evil deeds.”20 In another letter he wrote: “I think it is true that I owe much of this character to Christian and Catholic teaching and imagination about Mary.”21

Yet the workings and reworkings of his manuscript reveal an ambiguity, or an evolution, for in earlier drafts Galadriel was a leader in the rebellion of the Elves against the Valar, the world’s angelic guardians. From this rebellion Tolkien obviously later felt the need to absolve her. In the Unfinished Tales, we find a chapter containing the “History of Galadriel and Celeborn,” in which Christopher Tolkien records the “late and partly illegible note” that is “the last writing of my father’s on the subject . . . set down in the last month of his life.” In this revised history, which he intended to incorporate in the next version of The Silmarillion, Galadriel is not at all involved in the rebellion of the Elves but indeed opposed it, and was caught up in the departure from Aman to Middle-earth through no fault of her own. Thus she was morally as well as “physically” equipped to be the elvish leader in Middle-earth of resistance to Sauron. We see here, I think, the pressure of the Marian archetype in Tolkien’s imagination on the development of the character of Galadriel.

Not quite “immaculate” (without sin), then, in the official version, but to the Hobbits in The Lord of the Rings, and even to the Dwarf Gimli (who asks for the parting gift of a hair from her head, which he intends to enshrine within imperishable crystal), Galadriel is nevertheless a vision of wisdom, beauty, and grace, of light untarnished.

Galadriel, however, remains an earthly figure. In Roman Catholic devotion and dogma, Mary, having been assumed into heaven at the end of her earthly life, has long been venerated as Queen of Heaven and “Star of the Sea.” We find this cosmic aspect of the Marian archetype expressed in the person of Galadriel’s own heavenly patroness, Elbereth, Queen of the Stars, who plays the role in Tolkien’s legendarium of transmitting light from the heavenly places. It is to Elbereth that the Elves sing the following invocation:

Snow-white! Snow-white! O Lady clear!
O Queen beyond the Western seas!
O light to us that wander here
Amid the world of woven trees!
O Elbereth! Gilthoniel!
We still remember, we who dwell
In this far land beneath the trees,
Thy Starlight on the Western seas.

Tolkien would have been familiar with one of the most popular Catholic hymns from his childhood, the tone and mood of which are markedly close to those of Tolkien’s song to Elbereth:22

Hail, Queen of Heaven, the ocean star,
Guide of the wand’rer here below:
Thrown on life’s surge, we claim thy care—
Save us from peril and from woe.
Mother of Christ, star of the sea,
Pray for the wanderer, pray for me...

Gandalf--well, perhaps a comparison will make it clear. This is Gandalf striking the Balrog as it falls in the opening of the Two Towers.

Thia is a traditional Catholic icon of Saint Michael.

The imagery and teaching on St. Michael follows in large part from several key passages of Scripture.

“Do not fear, Daniel,” he continued; “from the first day you made up your mind to acquire understanding and humble yourself before God, your prayer was heard. Because of it I started out, but the prince of the kingdom of Persia stood in my way for twenty-one days, until finally Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and came to make you understand what shall happen to your people in the last days; for there is yet a vision concerning those days.” Daniel 10:12-14

So he said, “Do you know why I have come to you? Soon I will return to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I go, the prince of Greece will come; but first I will tell you what is written in the Book of Truth. (No one supports me against them except Michael, your prince." Daniel 10:20-21

“At that time Michael, the great prince who protects your people, will arise. There will be a time of distress such as has not happened from the beginning of nations until then. But at that time your people—everyone whose name is found written in the book—will be delivered." Daniel 12:12

"But even the archangel Michael, when he was disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not himself dare to condemn him for slander but said, “The Lord rebuke you!” Jude 1:9

A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was with child and wailed aloud in pain as she labored to give birth. Then another sign appeared in the sky; it was a huge red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and on its heads were seven diadems. Its tail swept away a third of the stars in the sky and hurled them down to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth. She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod. Her child was caught up to God and his throne. The woman herself fled into the desert where she had a place prepared by God, that there she might be taken care of for twelve hundred and sixty days.

Then war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels battled against the dragon. The dragon and its angels fought back, 8but they did not prevail and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

“Now have salvation and power come, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Anointed. For the accuser of our brothers is cast out, who accuses them before our God day and night. They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; love for life did not deter them from death. Therefore, rejoice, you heavens, and you who dwell in them. But woe to you, earth and sea, for the Devil has come down to you in great fury, for he knows he has but a short time.”  Revelation 12:1-12

From St. Louis de Montfort's True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Excerpts:

...Every day, from one end of the earth to the other, in the highest heaven and in the lowest abyss, all things preach, all things proclaim the wondrous Virgin Mary. The nine choirs of angels, men and women of every age, rank and religion, both good and evil, even the very devils themselves are compelled by the force of truth, willingly or unwillingly, to call her blessed.

According to St. Bonaventure, all the angels in heaven unceasingly call out to her: "Holy, holy, holy Mary, Virgin Mother of God." They greet her countless times each day with the angelic greeting, "Hail, Mary", while prostrating themselves before her, begging her as a favour to honour them with one of her requests. According to St. Augustine, even St. Michael, though prince of all the heavenly court, is the most eager of all the angels to honour her and lead others to honour her. At all times he awaits the privilege of going at her word to the aid of one of her servants...

Happy Year of Faith!

Want a way to celebrate?  Read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  Father Erlenbush explains how. 

Screwtape Says

through the mouth of Dr. Peter Kreeft.

"We Are In A War" Said Kreeft

Another analysis of the culture by Peter Kreeft, philosophical popularizer extraordinaire.  Excerpts:

What is the problem?

The problem is to "fight the good fight".

Fight? What fight? Are we at war?

Yes, we are at war. And if you aren't aware of that yet, the most important task this chapter can do for you is to alert you to that fact.

The enemy is not people. The enemy is not humans, but dehumanization: the spectacular and unmistakable social, cultural, and above all moral decline and decay that our society has been suffering for decades.

A generation ago, the five most bothersome problems complained about in polled American high schools were:

• disrespect for property
• laziness; not doing homework
• talking and not paying attention in class
• throwing spitballs
• leaving doors and windows open

Does this sound like another world? It is. The same poll was retaken a few years ago. The five leading problems in those same high schools now are:

• fear of violent death; guns and knives in school
• rape
• drugs
• abortion
• getting pregnant

The streets are not safe. The schools are not safe. The society is not safe. Not safe physically and not safe morally...

How to Win the Culture War--By Peter Kreeft

Well worth reposting, though that article prompted one of the first posts on this blog.  Still timely--perhaps even more so than when he first wrote it.  Excerpts:

To win any war, the three most necessary things to know are: (1) that you are at war, (2) who your enemy is, and (3) what weapons or strategies can defeat him.

You cannot win a war (1) if you simply sew peace banners on a battlefield, (2) if you fight civil wars against your allies, or (3) if you use the wrong weapons.

Here is a three point checklist for the culture wars...

If you don’t know that our entire civilization is in crisis, I hope you had a nice vacation on the moon.

Many minds do seem moonstruck, however, blissfully unaware of the crisis—especially the “intellectuals,” who are supposed to be the most on top of current events. I was dumbfounded to read a cover article in Time devoted to the question: Why is everything getting better? Why is life so good today? Why does everybody feel so satisfied about the quality of life? Time never questioned the assumption, it just wondered why the music on the Titanic sounded so nice.

It turned out, on reading the article, that every single aspect of life that was mentioned, every single reason for life getting better, was economic. People are richer. End of discussion.

Perhaps Time is just Playboy with clothes on. For one kind of playboy, the world is one great big whorehouse. For another kind, it’s one great big piggy bank. For both, things are getting better and better.

There is a scientific refutation of the Pig Philosophy: the statistical fact that suicide, the most in-your-face index of unhappiness, is directly proportionate to wealth. The richer you are, the richer your family is, and the richer your country is, the more likely it is that you will find life so good that you will choose to blow your brains apart.

Suicide among pre-adults has increased 5000% since the “happy days” of the ’50s. If suicide, especially among the coming generation, is not an index of crisis, nothing is.

Night is falling. What Chuck Colson has labeled “a new Dark Ages” is looming. And its Brave New World proved to be only a Cowardly Old Dream. We can see this now, at the end of “the century of genocide” that was christened “the Christian century” at its birth...

Read the whole thing. Print it out, pass it around. Absolutely vital.

Two Roads in the World

Peter Kreeft did an excellent job with Making Choices: Practical Wisdom for Everyday Moral Decisions.  Fantastic book.  One great line on Christianity:

The Church is a lot like Alcoholics Anonymous.  The very first thing you have to admit and never forget in AA is "I am an alcoholic."  A Christian is one who knows he is a sinaholic, and he has accepted God's cure.  The stupidest of all reasons for not going to church is one of the commonest ones: "I'm not good enough."  The only qualification is to be bad enough.  Does anyone refuse to go to the hospital because they're not healthy enough?

A Brief Criticism of Modernity

by the eminent scientifiction author John C Wright.  Excerpts:

...The modern educated man, having never read Kant, perhaps having never heard of him, cannot even discuss the topic of Kantian metaphysics, nor say why Kant holds all prior metaphysics to be in error: nor can I clearly explain (unless my listener is very patient, and I have abundant free time) why I deem Kant to be in error.

Let me attempt in brief, and without being too technical. Kant’s error is a paradox. If you believe the metaphysical axiom that only Empirical knowledge is true knowledge, then all metaphyiscal axioms, including this one, are not true knowledge. And if it is not true knowledge, you cannot account for believing it.

This paradox can be resolved only two ways: either accept this (and all) metaphysical axioms as blind and arbitrary acts of the will (This is the Nietzsche solution, and that way leads madness); or accept that this (and all) metaphysical axioms are contingent assumptions like the rules of a chess game, merely inventions for the pleasure and convenience of man, but having nothing to do with reality (this is the logical positivist solution, and that way lies another type of madness).

Since a schoolboy can poke holes in the paradoxes and errors that either one of the two paths to madness maintain, I need not do so here. Just take a look at the post-modern and post-rational, post-ethical world around you.

The real solution to the paradox, of course, is to reason that if the axiom leads to an absurd conclusion, instead of assuming the absurdity is the truth, assume the axiom is wrong...

Abortion is Wrong Because Apples Is Apples!

So saith Peter Kreeft in this piece.  Excerpts:

...I will try to prove the simple, common-sensical reasonableness of the pro-life case by a sort of Socratic logic. My conclusion is that Roe v. Wade must be overturned, and my fundamental reason for this is not only because of what abortion is but because we all know what abortion is.

This is obviously a controversial conclusion, and initially unacceptable to all pro-choicers. So, my starting point must be noncontroversial. It is this: We know what an apple is. I will try to persuade you that if we know what an apple is, Roe v. Wade must be overthrown, and that if you want to defend Roe, you will probably want to deny that we know what an apple is...

Mere Catholicism

Very cool!  Peter Kreeft wrote a basic primer on the Catholic faith for the Knights of Columbus.

Spencer vs. Kreeft

on Islam.  A fascinating match up:

(h/t Marcus Sheavius)

Two Big Lies and A Smokescreen

One of the names on any round-up of the people contributing to turning the tide must be Peter Kreeft. He's especially well known for his analyses of the culture, culture wars, and where we go from here. Exhibit A:

Night is falling. What Chuck Colson has labeled "a new Dark Ages" is looming. And its Brave New World proved to be only a Cowardly Old Dream. We can see this now, at the end of "the century of genocide" that was christened "the Christian century" at its birth.

We've had prophets who warned us: Kierkegaard, 150 years ago, in The Present Age; and Spengler, 100 years ago, in The Decline of the West; and Aldous Huxley, seventy years ago, in Brave New World; and C. S. Lewis, forty years ago, in The Abolition of Man; and above all our popes: Leo XIII and Pius IX and Pius X and above all John Paul the Great, the greatest man in the world, the greatest man of the worst century. He had even more chutzpah than Ronald Reagan, who dared to call Them "the evil empire:" He called Us "the culture of death." That's our culture, and his, including Italy, with the lowest birth rate in the world, and Poland, which now wants to share in the rest of the West's abortion holocaust.


If the God of life does not respond to this culture of death with judgment, God is not God. If God does not honor the blood of the hundreds of millions of innocent victims then the God of the Bible, the God of Israel, the God of orphans and widows, the Defender of the defenseless, is a man-made myth, a fairy tale.

He goes on to offer hope and make the best diagnosis of the problems and solutions of the modern age available. But the question the above quote raises is: why have we ignored so many different voices speaking with authority and telling truth for so long? Several reasons present themselves. First, the long and fruitful efforts of Antonio Gramsci and Paulo Freire, among others, have taken deep root in the Western subconscious. Even those frequently considered conservative have swallowed whole the fundamental lies of the Communist ideology.

1. Possessing power which others do not have/being in a position of authority/having more money/talent/having more makes you an oppressor. Those with less than you are the oppressed.

2. Anything the oppressed do to achieve parity with the "oppressors" is legitimate because they would not need to take action to achieve parity if they had not been oppressed in the first place.

Since any redistribution of the wealth/power/authority/etc. undertaken within this model will almost always occur in the context of unjust acts (the French Revolution followed by the Terror, the Communist take over of Russia followed by show trials and seizure of wealth, the Chinese Communists followed by the long reign of Mao, etc.), a new oppressed class emerges and the cycle begins anew.

Communism is a road into a traffic circle with no outlet. The cycle of violence, begun in the name of ending oppression, does not permit the possibility of ever ending oppression, injustice, and violence, but rather sets in motion a process which may only end with the sort of forgiveness practiced and taught by Christ. Along the way, though, the adherents to these two lies will put in motion the sorts of obfuscation and distortion predicted so accurately by George Orwell. And hence our current state of confusion and fear.

The easiest way to hide the lack of morality consequent on accepting the two lies is to deny the existence of morality at all--or at least, the existence of objective morality. The dictatorship of relativism decried by Pope Benedict is in part a reaction to the deep self assurance of the high modernity, evident even unto our present day in statements of relativism as dogmatic truth, i.e. "There is no such thing as absolute truth". This intellectual self assurance held (and holds) confidently the idea that man's mind may attain a knowledge of truth by the application of reason to the workings of the natural world and man himself. Frequently, such a mind dismisses all religion and belief in the spirit world as mere ridiculous superstition, a viewpoint especially evident in the Sherlock Holmes canon and other literature contemporary to that time.

Ayn Rand and her followers remain prominent adherents to such a view, as do those who take Robert Heinlein and other such logical positivists as intellectual leaders. Taken as a whole, these admirers of the high modern intellectual assurance usually presume that a complete scientific understanding of and explanation for all phenomena within the realm of man's experience is only a matter of time. Partially in a natural reaction to such an evisceratingly anti-spiritual worldview, partly in reaction to the associations of such a view with eugenics, imperialism, colonialism, and slavery arising from the common origin of that method of viewing the world and these evils in the 1800s, and partly because it is so much easier to "win" an argument when one has blunted the force of reason, many people avoid such a belief, preferring instead the false hopes of boundless tolerance, endless comity, and an end to conflict, by denying mankind the ability to know what is right and true. Indeed, they deny that anything is right and true, or that righteousness and truth exist at all.

In the absence, then, of boundaries, we see the coming death of human rights, and law, and science, and anything that depends upon the intelligibility of the universe and the existence of truth--a point laid out by John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor. Absent truth, there can be no morality. Absent morality, there can be no justice--for without a standard of law, any court or authority can only be an arbitrary one. Absent justice, the world devolves into an all against all struggle for survival.

So we have the two key lies of the Communist ideology, which are actually the lies humans (and possibly the devils as well) tell themselves when they seek to excuse monstrosity. In order to avoid the accusations or the realization of monstrosity, they deny the existence of any objective, universal standard by which to measure their actions--but in so doing, they unleash hell upon the world. In this, we have another of the key reasons for Rand's continuing popularity--she saw this trend and excoriated it--as well as an explanation for why modern movements are so hard to fight. Whether they be liberal or conservative, jihadi or communist, they embrace obfuscation, justified by the two lies listed above. The only answer? Truth, repeated so that the great lie may not drown it out.