On the Eternity of Hell and God's Love

Hell. How can you still be Catholic when you have to believe in hell?

How can you believe that a good and loving God could condemn anyone, no matter how bad, to an eternity of torment? How does that make sense?

It's a good question, and a long-standing one. I think the answer comes from the nature of humans and the nature of God.

You see, human beings are more than just animals, more than just haunted meatsacks, or whatever the dismissive term for us is these days. We're greater than we seem, greater than we often act. In fact, as C.S. Lewis pointed out masterfully in The Weight of Glory, human beings are potential gods or monsters, potential heavenly beings or potential monsters. We are matter and spirit, body and soul. We are persons who will live forever, no matter what, no matter who we are. Once created, always existing--why?

What makes human beings immortal?

Well, there have been a number of theories down through the ages, a number of different ways of addressing what happens to us after we die. I'm going to dismiss the atheist contention that it's night and silence for us upon death, the argument that once the biological machinery ceases ticking over, then it's curtains for the strange combination of electric impulses and chemical reactions that make me who I am. I'm going to dismiss that because it's such a minority view in terms of human history that it barely warrants a mention by the numbers. Across the ages and cultures, you have some notion of an afterlife, some notion of a part of us that endures beyond the grave--even if we may face dissolution and destruction at the hands of gods or devils past that point--that we really ought to be able to take the existence of some sort of soul as well established,

But what is it that makes us immortal?

Well, we are made in the image and likeness of God, originally. God breathed life into us, and with that breath of earthly life also came divine life, at the outset. Since that time, Adam and Eve took a bite out of a forbidden fruit, and so we lost that original inspiration, that original inbreathing of divine life, only to be regained through Baptism, Holy Communion, and retained through Confession and Anointing of the Sick. But we've never lost the image of God.

We are persons. And all persons are immortal.

All persons, divine, human, or angelic (including fallen angels) have spiritual souls. All persons, once created, will never pass out of existence again, though some will experience the "second death," whatever that will entail. The Last Judgment seems a dismal prospect for the goats; but as best we know, people who have once come into existence will never pass away fully and finally.

That means that beatitude for the blessed will last forever, and damnation for the damned will last forever.

But why must it be so?

Fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that God is not Harvey Weinstein. That is, God respects human free will. He is a gentleman, and will take no as the refusal for a relationship that it is. He comes to us, sacred Scripture tells us repeatedly, like a bridegroom seeking His bride; like a lover seeking His beloved. He comes to us, in other words, pursuing a love affair with the created order, a union that marriage only resembles in a shadowy, distant sort of way.

Marriage is the union of two lovers; the union God is pursuing with us is the union between Love Itself and--well, us.

But of course, true love seeks freely willed, freely chosen love. Love Itself must be met with love, or else it will go away. God created us free in order to allow our love to be free. So there is the option to say no to Him.

Now, during our lifetimes, we may be saying yes and no to Him at different points along the way; just as in an ordinary relationship, sometimes things can get rocky. Couples break up, get back together, and go through all sorts of ups and downs together. But with God, there comes the time of a definite choice, where all the lesser choices of a lifetime culminate, or are overcome by grace.

That is to say, one day we die.

There are a few options for last minute interventions, of course--Our Lady can step in, as St. Alphonsus Liguori details in story after story in The Glories of Mary. Jesus comes to the soul in its final moments three times, as St. Faustina details in her Diary (1496; see also 1698). But at a certain point, our destiny is fixed--for spirits, such choices are all or nothing affairs. Human spiritual souls will experience this, just as it was for the angels and the demons at the time of their testing.

And then--well, we remain in our choices forever after. We choose either the company of God, His angels and His saints, or we choose the company of those who cannot stand company, those for whom the existence of others is a burden and a bore, whose egos reign supreme, whose vices have overtaken them and swallowed any goodness in them. We choose God and an afterlife of radical self-giving and receiving love, or we choose ourselves and an afterlife of radical selfishness, of closed mindedness, closed heartedness, closed soul.

If we choose ourselves rather than loving ourselves and opening ourselves up to God and His beloved creation, we choose to become the Dead Sea, salt, stagnant, and blocked off, rather than the Sea of Galilee, receiving new water and giving out water. We choose to become misers, neither spending nor receiving, neither welcoming others nor seeking out the true good for ourselves. We choose hell--as C.S. Lewis pointed out, the gates of hell would of course be locked from the inside, would be furiously closed off against anything outside of hell's control, blocking out light, life, and the unwanted, intolerable intrusion of other people, other ways of being, other ways of living.

But must it be forever?

Yes--because God is love, and God is eternal. God creates and sustains all that is through His love. You exist right now because of God's love, because God knows and loves you, remembers you and pours out His heart to you, shares His being with you, and calls you good.

You exist from moment to moment because God chooses you. God loves you. God calls you worthy.

And God can never stop loving His creation. It's not in His nature. He is love, not hate; wisdom, not forgetfullness. God is eternal life and love, and so He holds His beloved fellow people in existence for all eternity.

As Diane Duane puts it so well in the Young Wizards Series, nothing that is loved is ever lost.

So even the devils in hell are loved by God. He must, or else they would cease to exist. He loves us so much that He sustains us even in our furious rejection of Him, even in our sins. He loves us and remembers us even as we lash out against Him, even as we doubt His existence, forget our obligations to Him, fail to show Him gratitude, and do evil against God and neighbor. God loves us so much that He lets us choose freely what to do. He loves us so much that there are consequences to our choices, even eternal consequences.

And He can never stop loving us, because that would demand that God ceases to be God.

That is to say, He can never stop sustaining us; He can never stop holding us in existence, even if we have rejected Him, even if we have chosen life without Love, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, and Being--life without God.

He can never stop loving us into existence, even if we have chosen hell.

That is how eternal damnation and divine love make sense in my head, at least.

Summer Reading List

In the spirit of the Fourth of July weekend, full of beaches and vacation days as well as patriotic commemoration, I thought I'd share my own version of the perennially popular summer reading lists.

Here they are, in no particular order:

• Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis--This is one of the great introductions to the heart of the Christian thing. Lewis writes with the brilliance of the professor that he was, but also with the depth of insight and unexpected communion with the Holy Spirit of the holy, of the saint. Live this, and you'll be far closer to living a holy life than you were before.
• How Can You Still Be Catholic? 50 Answers to a Good Question by, well, me--shamefaced self-promotion here, But really, I did write this book in response to Facebook questions, and I deliberately kept the answers short to make it an easy, user-friendly read. So I hope both Catholics and non-Catholics might find it accessible enough even for beach reading!
• The Father Brown short stories by G.K. Chesterton--I was strongly tempted to recommend The Everlasting Man, but that's not exactly beach reading. The Father Brown short stories, on the other hand, are among some of the outstanding examples of the Golden Age of detective fiction, as well as containing a great deal of Chesterton's wit and wisdom.
• No Turning Back by Fr. Donald Calloway, MIC--One of those conversion stories that proves that Catholics don't make converts; the Holy Spirit does, and in collaboration with Our Lady. It's a story of grace more powerful than addiction, of hope past all hope, and it's written to be a readable by everyone.
• The 'One Thing' is Three, by Fr. Michael Gaitley, MIC--A self-indulgent recommendation; I really loved this book when I first read it. This is in many ways the heart of Catholic theology and belief in one incredibly readable package. And trust me--most readers will be rather astounded at what they find. Rather larger than one might expect for beach reading, but well worth your time.
• Anything and everything by Pope Benedict XVI. Much of it, I grant, not really light enough for the beach, but his interview books are fascinating; great glimpses into the mind of one of the most brilliant men to have ever been elected to the papacy.

 Take, read!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Defend the Church

Long ago, in a band room far, far away ...

We were living in Astoria, Oregon, at the time. Dad was stationed out there at the Coast Guard Air Station, and my sister and I were in the local public schools.

Now, Oregon is a funny place. People there tend to be absolutely liberal or absolutely conservative. It felt as though there really was no moderate middle, only the indifferent. The perfect illustration of this came in the run up to the Iraq war, when protesters took to the streets of Astoria every Friday at 5 p.m. Outside the courthouse, there were the people on the left, protesting against going to war, standing there with their flags and their tie dye and their signs that read "Honk if you support us."

Not four blocks away, on a concrete Island in the middle of the highway, there stood the pro-war protesters, in their plaid, with their flags and their signs that said, "Honk if you support us."

So every Friday at 5, downtown Astoria became bedlam, because everybody was honking and everybody was protesting and nobody was sure who was honking for what side.

This sort of polarization extended to religion, as well. You didn't really have mainline Christians. Everybody was either non-denominational evangelical, or Mormon, or Catholic, or secular liberal, or agnostic, or atheist, or indifferent, or Wiccan, or whatever else was starkly defined in floodlights with vivid colors.

Outstanding among the religious students was one in particular named Art.

He was Protestant, and proud of it; I think he carried his Bible everywhere, and was willing to pull it out at the drop of a hat. I think it was obvious to everyone that Art was going to become a minister someday. He was serious about his religion and serious about his evangelization. He started Bible studies and prayer groups, sang Christian songs at school assemblies with his sister and brought Jason Evert and his then-girlfriend Crystalina (now his wife) to speak at the school on chastity, abstinence, and the importance of waiting till marriage. (It wasn't till years later that I discovered that the Everts were Catholic, graduates from Franciscan University of Steubenville, and great proponents of St. John Paul II's theology of the body.)

Art may well have attracted some amount of ridicule for his witness--it's almost unavoidable these days--but he had one great defense against it all: He really did practice what he preached. I remember him being held in a fairly high regard by the school at large, simply because he was reliably kind, good-natured, hard working, and, while a passionate preacher, was also good to people.

Art played trombone in pep band; I played trumpet. I don't remember how the conversation started one morning in the bandroom before school, but Art and I got to talking about religion. He knew I was Catholic somehow--it was a small town, and people tended to know each other's business, but he may also have simply asked me. I don't remember. He started saying something about how unbiblical Catholic teaching and practices were; I retorted that they were plenty biblical, and that certainly there was Scripture to back them up.

He said, "Oh, really? Show me! Where's Confession in the Bible?"

Now, I had no idea at the time. I'd read children's Bibles growing up, and spent some time trying to plow straight through a King James Version given me by someone on my dad's side of the family for First Communion or something like that, but I'd never really gone in depth into the New Testament. I didn't know what I was talking about ... except that I knew that the Church had a greater legacy of saints and scholarship than most people knew, and I knew that if some of the common Protestant challenges were really as devastating as most Protestants seemed to think, there wouldn't be a Catholic Church left at all, anymore. Further, the Catholic Church I'd grown up in didn't match most people's mutterings and fears.

So I said, "I know it's in there! I don't know where, but let me look it up at home tonight and I'll show you tomorrow!"

Art agreed. So that night, I pulled out the teen study Bible that I'd been given at some point and started flipping around, hoping for something to make this easy, so that I would be right. Thankfully, they had an index. Thankfully, it made it easy.

The next day, I went to talk to Art at band. He saw me coming, pulled out his Bible, and looked at me expectantly. I paused. I'd forgotten quite which way around the citation was.

The first set of numbers led nowhere, some totally irrelevant Scripture. I said, "Try them the other way around!" And we found it:

[Jesus] said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” (Jn 20:21-23)

Art knelt staring at his Bible for a moment. A mutual friend who'd been standing by started saying, "Well, that doesn't prove anything! That doesn't demonstrate any support for Confession!" And Art looked up and said a little sharply, "No, it does. He's right--it's there." And then he looked at me and said, "You're the first Catholic I've met who's ever bothered to defend their faith to me."

And I was left reeling.

"Bothered"? I was the first Catholic who'd ever "bothered" to defend their faith to him?

I was proud, of course, but also a little stunned. Art had been out to make a convert out of me, and I was sure he'd set out to save many Catholic souls from the clutches of Rome before. And I was the first one to ever defend the faith to him? Ever?

That stuck with me. That led me to begin to read, to seek out answers to the questions that the culture and other Christians had for us. Art introduced me to C.S. Lewis' nonfiction writings, thus putting me even further into his debt. I discovered internet apologetics a little bit later and decided to put the faith to the test. What were the best objections people had, and what were the answers?

All of this has culminated, in a certain sense, with my first book, How Can You Still Be Catholic? 50 Answers to a Good Question, to be released by Marian Press on July 21, 2017. In a certain sense, I owe it all to Art. He set me on the path to find answers, and also inadvertently helped me discover that there are answers available to be found. The Catholic Church has immense resources of scholarship and sanctity, of historical truth and fantastic works of fiction, all in the service of Christ, all in some way inspired by the Spirit of Jesus. And much of what I've learned, I've aimed to share in this book.

So there it is: my origin story as a Catholic apologist. Time will tell if I'm any good at it. Heaven knows the faith is better than I am!

#howcanyoustillbecatholic #hcysbc

Screwtape is Not Amused

This is what it looks like when the tempters allow the patients to get away. Excerpts:

... I had a hard time getting to the Holy Hour and Benediction. All day the day before I experienced the most dreadful spiritual crisis I have been through since I converted to the Catholic Church. My mind was deluged with negative thoughts, to the point that I began to wonder if I even was Catholic or had a right to enter any Church.

Then, at mass that evening, I prayed and prayed and it let up.

Later that night, I got hit with a sudden and rather violent gastrointestinal thing.

It was at that point that I finally recognized old scratch.

The next day, I thought about skipping the whole Benediction. I felt so terrible, and now I was tormented with thoughts that I might meet a particular person there who had hurt me in the past and who I dread ever seeing again.

I prayed, and knew that I needed to go.

I told a friend of mine that all this made me feel as if the devil thought that if Rebecca Hamilton showed up at this Benediction he would be cast back into hell. I told her that if other people were getting a dose of what I was getting, I feared that the church might be empty.

But, despite all this, I went.

And what I experienced was the Presence and Love of Christ...

For those who have no idea what I'm referring to, behold a bit of awesome.

The Secret of Notre Dame, Patroness of the United States of America

George Weigel on how Catholic thought offers authentic intellectual underpinnings for the best of America. Excerpts:

...The nineteenth-century U.S. bishops and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for American democracy Russell Shaw now views skeptically (and, yes, they did go over the top on occasion) did get one crucial point right: the American founders “built better than they knew,” i.e., the founders designed a democratic republic for which they couldn’t provide a durable moral and philosophical defense. But the long-despised (and now despised-again) Catholics could: Catholics could (and can) give a robust, compelling account of American democracy and its commitments to ordered liberty.

Mid–twentieth-century Catholic scholars like historian Theodore Maynard and theologian John Courtney Murray picked up this theme and made it central to their reading of U.S. Catholic history. Murray presciently warned that, if Catholicism didn’t fill the cultural vacuum being created by a dying mainline Protestantism, the “noble, many-storied mansion of democracy [may] be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”

That is the argument the U.S. bishops have mounted in their challenge to the Obama administration’s demolition of civil society through the HHS mandate on contraceptives and abortifacients: What is the nature of American democracy and the fundamental freedoms government is created to protect? Who are the true patriots: the men and women who can give an account of freedom’s moral character, an account capable of sustaining a genuine democracy against a rising dictatorship of relativism, “in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged”?

The argument today isn’t about assimilation. The argument today is about who “gets” America.

This seems much like C. S. Lewis's differentiation in That Hideous Strength. Excerpts:

"It all began," he said, "when we discovered that that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it – it will do as well as another. And then...gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting."

"What haunting?" asked Camilla.

"How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell; a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney – and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites. But what they call hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain."

...This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There's no special privilege for England – no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.

The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China – why, then it will be spring.

Americanism versus patriotism; assimilation versus new evangelization; the slavers and occupiers versus the United States of America.  Our sins and our potential, a potential which will be actualized when we say to the Truth at the heart of reality, "Thy will be done."  Here's one of the Catholic patriots of the modern day calling us to remember under whose patronage the United States of America (and the rest of the Americas) has been placed:

Red Wedding, Song of Ice and Fire, and Blood-Colored Glasses Lie

just as much as rose-colored glasses.

**Language and Spoiler Alerts!**

Why I couldn't get into A Game of Thrones. (**SERIOUS SPOILERS AHEAD!**)

..."So - when you eliminate just about every character that I care about, then continue to kill anyone with any sense of moral compass with such vengeance so as to punish them for even thinking that principles mattered, allow the wretched and evil to win over and over again and gain more power, and basically remove any and all hope of anything good ever happening (because how can I enjoy a show when every character I liked is now dead,) why is it exactly that I should continue watching?" wrote Tony...

Truly hilarious Twitter commentary as well (language and general despair alert.  Oh, and spoilers).  And this is a gem.  Excerpts:

A plane on route to the San Francisco International Airport tonight had to make an emergency landing when passengers watching pirated versions of the HBO series Game of Thrones began hyperventilating, screaming hysterically, and violently damaging their tray tables. The situation turned more volatile when an airline stewardess unintentionally spoiled the ending of the episode for the captain, after which he stormed out of the cockpit shouting obscenities, forcing his co-pilot to land the plane on his own...

“This chick next to me just started freaking out” says Martin Lodge, 39. “She was sobbing and kept saying ‘why, why, why’. At first, I thought maybe her boyfriend had just broken up with her by email or something, but then I heard this guy at the back of the plane yell ‘no way! no f**king way!’ and I knew something was going on. But what really tripped me out was the lady behind me. She started laughing!”

That lady was Angelica George, 32, who says she would have given anything to have had a video camera. “This was one of the most hysterical things I’ve ever seen. I’m a huge Game of Thrones fan and I’ve read the books, so I know exactly what happened in tonight’s episode. I just couldn’t help but laugh at their reactions, especially when the captain ran into the cabin shouting “f**k you George RR Martin!”

After landing, the plane was unloaded quickly and the affected passengers and captain were rushed to a nearby emergency room where they were treated with oxygen, heat blankets, and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Rocky Road Ice Cream.

There is no word yet on their condition...

Anyway, humor aside.  I posted about the whole "slaughter everyone with a conscience; bad guys full speed ahead" problem with the series.  A friend commented:

How like life...GRRM likes to make a mockery of the noble class, who proclaim chivalry and honor but snuff it out wherever they see it. He reminds me of a plebian Cormac McCarthy in a way.

And yet proclaiming that there are no more good guys is no way to generate new good guys. Resigning yourself to the prevalence of vice today is no way to become virtuous yourself. The response of St. Benedict to the collapse of the Roman civilization was heroic sanctity, and he and his helped save civilization. I refuse to accept the counsels of despair. The day we all accept them is the day we collectively commit civilizational suicide. Only in hope is there life, and realism.

The response:

Yet it's not about vice TODAY it's about vice in history--a critical look at the kings and lords of medieval Europe.

An utterly unrealistic one. What role--I mean a real, substantive role--has religion played in Game of Thrones? Where're the great saints, bending history around themselves--Thomas Becket, Catherine of Siena, Benedict of Nursia, Francis of Assisi, Dominic, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More, Margaret of Scotland, Elizabeth of Hungary, and so on and on and on? Where are the people who won't be bought or bent, and why aren't their triumphs included, as well as their deaths? Because there really have been such people in every century. Bad men haven't always had their way, and sometimes good is so powerful that it shall never be forgotten. Criticize the sins of the Europeans all you want, but unless you at least nod to their saints, you are being as unrealistic as the person who wears rose-colored glasses.

The response:

It's a point, though I suspect secular figures who won't be bent are more common in life as well as art.

It would take a lot of time and effort to prove either way, but I'd bet that, given the prevalence of religion across times and cultures before the modern age, you'd be hard pressed to muster enough folk unmotivated by any religious impulse to make that a really provable point. That debate is irrelevant, though, because it reinforces the underlying problem with the Song of Ice and Fire: namely, he seems to not have room in his world for people who will not bend before temptation or evil, for grace and goodness that wins, rather than simply being eradicated by the ruthless. He's not writing a realistic saga. It's not even Machiavellian--it's barely even modern realpolitik. It's certainly ahistorical and antithetical to human nature. He may be demonstrating John Wright's point about the challenge some writers face when attempting to write realistic human beings. Excerpts:

...[W]hy are my favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Gene Wolfe, Mike Flynn, G.K. Chesterton, all members of this monstrous Syriac cult known as Christianity? I do like my freethinker authors just fine, but Bob Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke seem to have trouble with realism in characterization, both with their invented people, and with their invented societies.

Don’t get me wrong, I love their books, love and reread them many times, but the people who don’t believe in souls don’t seem to be able to portray their characters three-dimensionally and solidly, that is, as if their characters had souls.

Or as if the world were only this:

And this:

And never this:

The Thesis of Harry Potter

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the theme of Harry Potter!  Or, well, one of the many, many themes...anyway!

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.― C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Do I have proof that this is actually what Rowling had in mind? No, not really...oh, wait!

The Tales of Beedle the Bard:  "The Warlock's Hairy Heart "
Synopsis:  This dark, "gothic" tale tells of a young warlock who removes his own heart by terrible Dark Arts to protect himself from the foolishness of love. When he meets a witch who he wants to win for himself, his folly results in the both of their deaths.

Now, I would have to say that the ultimate thesis is love is stronger than death. But Lewis's quote is certainly another aspect of that overriding theme.

Joy In Suffering

Jennifer Fulwiler has a book recommendation for you.  Excerpts:

...Would you believe that Dan’s father went on to experience profound joy in his life, thanks to his relationship with God? Using his father’s story as a launching point, Dan spends the rest of the book pondering that most pressing of human questions:

How do we find joy when our earthly circumstances are miserable?

And — here’s what I loved — he first takes a hard look at what joy is. This is an important question for those of us whose default state is a spiritual dry spell, who don’t often have emotionally powerful experiences of God. For a long time I thought that that mean that I just wouldn’t get to experience the whole “Christian joy” thing, but I’ve slowly come to understand something that Dan hits home in his book: that joy is not the same thing as a surface-level emotion; that it’s possible to have all sorts of mental or physical tribulations on the surface, yet still have true joy deep within your heart...

NPR's Top 100 Teen Books

Even though a number of them are far from merely teen books (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and anything by Madeleine L'Engle, for instance).  But still.... 

Neil Gaiman's Creative Godfathers

Ahem.  Hat tip Leo Partible.  Excerpts:

There are authors with whom one has a personal relationship and authors with whom one does not. There are the ones who change your life and the ones who don’t. That’s just the way of it...

Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction.

Christ Descended Into Hell

on Holy Saturday.  Excerpts:

What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.

Screwtape Says

through the mouth of Dr. Peter Kreeft.

War With the World, the Flesh, the Devil

The Anchoress on how it should be done.  Excerpts:

...Well, combating the world “as it is” requires us to teach and admonish, not with the tactics of the world, but “in wisdom made holy” through the love of Christ. If we do that correctly we will — like the early Christians — attract others, and thus assist the Holy Spirit in the turning of the world toward the light.

If we do it incorrectly, we will only repel those who are perhaps in the greatest need to come to know the love of Christ and his salvation. And then we will have to deal with a turned-off, tuned-out world whose heels are stubbornly dug-in to the darkness.

Worse, we will have to answer to Christ as to why we trusted the worldly way of confrontation — the way of anger and distrust and scored points and power — over His way, and the way of His saints, the way of patience, humility and love.

Bl. Pope John Paul II famously said that we Catholics must look at the world clearly and see it “as it is” before we can help to form it into something more perfect-in-Christ.

To do that, we to pray, certainly, and we need more than prayer, but we are not sure what that might be...

A few great models for thia: G. K. Chesterton, St. Philip Neri, and C. S. Lewis.

Books for Life

A reading list from a friend, posted by another friend.

This is a list that a friend gave me. Enjoy:

1. The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham
2. The Moon and the Sixpence by Somerset Maugham
3. That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis
4. Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
5. Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
6. Any other book by Tom Robbins (except Villa Incognito)
7. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
8. Lila by Robert Pirsig
9. The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
10. Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Its Attainment by Rudolf Steiner
11. Airborne by William F. Buckley
12. The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis
13. The Inner Chapters by Chuang Zi
14. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
15. The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
16. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
17. Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
18. Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
19. Earth House Hold by Gary Snyder
20. Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
21. Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy
22. My Big TOE by Thomas Campbell
23. Meditations on the Tarot by "Anonymous" (Valentine Tomberg)
24. Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow
25. What is Necessary in these Urgent Times by Rudolf Steiner
26. Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
27. Consolation of the Heart of Jesus by Fr. Michael Gaitley
28. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

Wishing God Away

Huh.  Excerpts follow:

In his brilliant book on natural law, What We Can’t Not Know, J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas at Austin cites two highly intelligent men who deny the natural law but also perceive exactly why they do so. They are representative of a huge class of less percipient (or perhaps less honest or simply more discreet) persons.

I will quote all of what Budziszewski quotes, despite the length, because these examples are telling. The first is Harvard population biologist Richard Lewontin, a self-proclaimed atheist, writing in the New York Review of Books (“Billions and Billions of Demons”) in January 1997:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.

The second example is the philosopher Thomas Nagel in his book The Last Word, published by Oxford University Press in 1996, commenting on his own fear of religion:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe be like that…. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world.

The same thing shows up in C. S. Lewis's Surprised By Joy--the western atheists, living in relative prosperity, success, and peace, just want to be left alone to enjoy it, untroubled by cosmic warfare, God and angels versus the demons of hell with humans as the prize, infinite bliss awaiting if we only say yes...

The problem, as I think Lewis said, is not that we want too much from life, but that we're satisfied with so absurdly little.

Deep Magic

otherwise known as the Logos, rules the universe.  Excerpts:

...For the thoroughgoing atheist, the problem of suffering might eventually be solved by means of technology and an ingenious rearrangement of political systems.

But the Christian knows that it takes blood.

I wrote a few months ago on my favorite things about being a Catholic. One of them was that we can offer up our sufferings for the good of others. This seems to me not so much an addendum to the spiritual life as the very heart of it. The fact that voluntary suffering is spiritually efficacious is no less than a spiritual law, in almost exactly the same sense that gravity is a physical law.

That is to say, it’s not a rule in the same sense that soccer has rules. It’s descriptive rather than prescriptive. It is the way the world works. If we are surprised that the spiritual world should have rules, it is because we have forgotten that the spiritual world is no less real, no less objective, than the physical world. More so, if anything.

Seeing things in this light has helped me gain a better understanding of the Redemption...

Why Images Matter

from that teacher of tempters, that marvel of malice...no, not Screwtape himself, but rather Slubgrip.  Excerpts:

...the fact that the miserable mongrels believe what they see means that if we control what they see, we control what they believe. This is why, from the beginning, we have been more interested in images than ideas. Let the philosophers and priests meddle with their minds. If we control what they look at we will control them.

What they see is invariably linked with their desire. It's simple. If they see something pretty they want it for themselves. They want to own it. They want to consume it. They want to become one with whatever it is. Therefore, the way to distract them from the enemy is to put before them multiple images of impossibly beautiful and desirable things...

Actually, speaking of Screwtape, there's been an audio production made of the book, with Screwtape voiced by no less an actor than Andy Serkis.