Edward Feser's Journey from Atheism to Catholic Faith

The road from atheism

As most of my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the 1990s, give or take.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism.  I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition.  A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

 

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14.  Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good.  Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.  Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that.  Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends. 

 

But I was still a theist for a time, though that wouldn’t survive my undergrad years.  Kierkegaard was my first real philosophical passion, and his individualistic brand of religiosity greatly appealed to me.  But the individualistic irreligion of Nietzsche would come to appeal to me more, and for a time he was my hero, with Walter Kaufmann a close second.  (I still confess an affection for Kaufmann.  Nietzsche, not so much.)  Analytic philosophy would, before long, bring my youthful atheism down to earth.  For the young Nietzschean the loss of religion is a grand, civilizational crisis, and calls for an equally grand response on the part of a grand individual like himself.  For the skeptical analytic philosopher it’s just a matter of rejecting some bad arguments, something one does quickly and early in one’s philosophical education before getting on to the really interesting stuff.  And that became my “settled” atheist position while in grad school.  Atheism was like belief in a spherical earth -- something everyone in possession of the relevant facts knows to be true, and therefore not worth getting too worked up over or devoting too much philosophical attention to.

But it takes some reading and thinking to get to that point.  Kaufmann’s books were among my favorites, serious as they were on the “existential” side of disbelief without the ultimately impractical pomposity of Nietzsche.  Naturally I took it for granted that Hume, Kant, et al. had identified the main problems with the traditional proofs of God’s existence long ago.  On issues of concern to a contemporary analytic philosopher, J. L. Mackie was the man, and I regarded his book The Miracle of Theism as a solid piece of philosophical work.  I still do.  I later came to realize that he doesn’t get Aquinas or some other things right.  (I discuss what he says about Aquinas in Aquinas.)  But the book is intellectually serious, which is more than can be said for anything written by a “New Atheist.”  Antony Flew’s challenge to the intelligibility of various religious assertions may have seemed like dated “ordinary language” philosophy to some, but I was convinced there was something to it.  Kai Nielsen was the “go to” guy on issues of morality and religion.  Michael Martin’s Atheism: A Philosophical Justification was a doorstop of a book, and a useful compendium of arguments.  I used to wonder with a little embarrassment whether my landlord, who was religious but a nice guy, could see that big word “ATHEISM” on its spine -- sitting there sort of like a middle finger on the bookshelf behind me -- when he’d come to collect the rent.  But if so he never raised an eyebrow or said a word about it.

The argument from evil was never the main rationale for my atheism; indeed, the problem of suffering has only gotten really interesting to me since I returned to the Catholic Church.  (Not because the existence of suffering poses a challenge to the truth of classical theism -- for reasons I’ve given elsewhere, I think it poses no such challenge at all -- but because the role various specific instances of suffering actually play in divine providence is often really quite mysterious.)  To be sure, like any other atheist I might have cited the problem of suffering when rattling off the reasons why theism couldn’t be true, but it wasn’t what primarily impressed me philosophically.  What really impressed me was the evidentialist challenge to religious belief.  If God really exists there should be solid arguments to that effect, and there just aren’t, or so I then supposed.  Indeed, that there were no such arguments seemed to me something which would itself be an instance of evil if God existed, and this was an aspect of the problem of evil that seemed really novel and interesting.  

I see from a look at my old school papers that I was expressing this idea in a couple of essays written for different courses in 1992.  (I think that when J. L. Schellenberg’s book Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason appeared in 1993 I was both gratified that someone was saying something to that effect in print, and annoyed that it wasn’t me.)  Attempts to sidestep the evidentialist challenge, like Alvin Plantinga’s, did not convince me, and still don’t.  My Master’s thesis was a defense of “evidentialism” against critics like Plantinga.  I haven’t read it in years, but I imagine that, apart from its atheism and a detail here or there, I’d still agree with it.  

I was also greatly impressed by the sheer implausibility of attributing humanlike characteristics to something as rarefied as the cause of the world.  J. C. A. Gaskin’s The Quest for Eternity had a fascinating section on the question of whether a centre of consciousness could coherently be attributed to God, a problem I found compelling.  Moreover, the very idea of attributing moral virtues (or for that matter moral vices) to God seemed to make no sense, given that the conditions that made talk of kindness, courage, etc. intelligible in human life could not apply to Him.  Even if something otherwise like God did exist, I thought, He would be “beyond good and evil” -- He would not be the sort of thing one could attribute moral characteristics to, and thus wouldn’t be the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  (Richard Swinburne’s attempt to show otherwise did not work, as I argued in another school paper.)  The Euthyphro problem, which also had a big impact on me, only reinforced the conclusion that you couldn’t tie morality to God in the way that (as I then assumed) the monotheistic religions required.

Those were, I think, the main components of my mature atheism: the conviction that theists could neither meet nor evade the evidentialist challenge; and the view that there could be, in any event, no coherent notion of a cause of the world with the relevant humanlike attributes.  What is remarkable is how much of the basis I then had for these judgments I still find compelling.  As I would come to realize only years later, the conception of God I then found so implausible was essentially a modern, parochial, and overly anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception, and not the classical theism to which the greatest theistic philosophers had always been committed.  And as my longtime readers know, I still find theistic personalism objectionable.  The fideism that I found (and still find) so appalling was, as I would also come to see only later, no part of the mainstream classical theist tradition either.  And while the stock objections raised by atheists against the traditional arguments for God’s existence are often aimed at caricatures, some of them do have at least some force against some of the arguments of modern philosophers of religion.  But they do not have force against the key arguments of the classical theist tradition.

 

It is this classical tradition -- the tradition of Aristotelians, Neo-Platonists, and Thomists and other Scholastics -- that I had little knowledge of then.  To be sure, I had read the usual selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Anselm that pretty much every philosophy student reads -- several of Plato’s dialogues, the Five Ways, chapter 2 of the Proslogium, and so forth.  Indeed, I read a lot more than that.  I’d read the entire Proslogium of Anselm, as well as the Monologium, the Cur Deus Homo, and the exchange with Gaunilo, early in my undergraduate years.  I’d read Aquinas’s De Ente et Essentia and De Principiis Naturae, big chunks of Plotinus’s Enneads, Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, Augustine’s Concerning the Teacher, and Bonaventure’s The Mind’s Road to God.  I’d read Russell’s History of Western Philosophy -- hardly an unbiased source, to be sure -- but also a bit of Gilson.  All while becoming an atheist during my undergrad years.  And I still didn’t understand the classical tradition.

Why not?  Because to read something is not necessarily to understand it.  Partly, of course, because when you’re young, you always understand less than you think you do.  But mainly because, to understand someone, it’s not enough to sit there tapping your foot while he talks.  You’ve got to listen, rather than merely waiting for a pause so that you can insert the response you’d already formulated before he even opened his mouth.  And when you’re a young man who thinks he’s got the religious question all figured out, you’re in little mood to listen -- especially if you’ve fallen in love with one side of the question, the side that’s new and sexy because it’s not what you grew up believing.  Zeal of the deconverted, and all that.

You’re pretty much just going through the motions at that point.  And if, while in that mindset, what you’re reading from the other side are seemingly archaic works, written in a forbidding jargon, presenting arguments and ideas no one defends anymore (or at least no one in the “mainstream”), your understanding is bound to be superficial and inaccurate.  You’ll take whatever happens to strike you as the main themes, read into them what you’re familiar with from modern writers, and ignore the unfamiliar bits as irrelevant.  “This part sounds like what Leibniz or Plantinga says, but Hume and Mackie already showed what’s wrong with that; I don’t even know what the hell this other part means, but no one today seems to be saying that sort of thing anyway, so who cares…”  Read it, read into it, dismiss it, move on.  How far can you go wrong?

 

Very, very far.   It took me the better part of a decade to see that, and what prepared the way were some developments in my philosophical thinking that seemingly had nothing to do with religion.  The first of them had to do instead with the philosophy of language and logic.  Late in my undergrad years at Cal State Fullerton I took a seminar in logic and language in which the theme was the relationship between sentences and what they express.  (Propositions?  Meanings?  Thoughts?  That’s the question.)  Similar themes would be treated in courses I took in grad school, at first at Claremont and later at UC Santa Barbara.  Certain arguments stood out.  There was Alonzo Church’s translation argument, and, above all, Frege’s wonderful essay “The Thought.”  Outside of class I discovered Karl Popper’s World 3 concept, and the work of Jerrold Katz.  The upshot of these arguments was that the propositional content of sentences could not be reduced to or otherwise explained in terms of the utterances of sentences themselves, or behavioral dispositions, or psychological states, or conventions, or functions from possible worlds, or anything else a materialist might be willing to countenance.  As the arguments sank in over the course of months and years, I came to see that existing naturalistic accounts of language and meaning were no good.  

Not that that led me to give up naturalism, at least not initially.  A more nuanced, skeptical naturalism was my preferred approach -- what else was there, right?  My studies in the philosophy of mind reinforced this tendency.  At first, and like so many undergraduate philosophy majors, I took the materialist line for granted.  Mental activity was just brain activity.  What could be more obvious?  But reading John Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind destroyed this illusion, and convinced me that the standard materialist theories were all hopeless.  That Searle was himself a naturalist no doubt made this easier to accept.  Indeed, Searle became another hero of mine.  He was smart, funny, gave perfectly organized public lectures on complex topics without notes, and said whatever he thought whether or not it was fashionable.  And he wrote so beautifully, eschewing the needless formalisms that give a veneer of pseudo-rigor and “professionalism” to the writings of too many analytic philosophers.  “That is how I want to write!” I decided.  

 

Brilliant as he was as a critic, though, Searle’s own approach to the mind-body problem -- “biological naturalism” -- never convinced me.  It struck me (and seemingly everyone else but Searle himself) as a riff on property dualism.  But there was another major influence on my thinking in the philosophy of mind in those days, Michael Lockwood’s fascinating book Mind, Brain and the Quantum.  Lockwood was also a naturalist of sorts, and yet he too was critical of some of the standard materialist moves.  Most importantly, though, Lockwood’s book introduced me to Bertrand Russell’s later views on these issues, which would have a major influence on my thinking ever afterward.  Russell emphasized that physics really gives us very little knowledge of the material world.  In particular, it gives us knowledge of its abstract structure, of what can be captured in equations and the like.  But it gives us no knowledge of the intrinsic nature of matter, of the concrete reality that fleshes out the abstract structure.  Introspection, by contrast, gives us direct knowledge of our thoughts and experiences.  The upshot is that it is matter, and not mind, that is the really problematic side of the mind-body problem.  

This was truly revolutionary, and it reinforced the conclusion that contemporary materialism was shallow and dogmatic.  And that Lockwood and Russell were themselves naturalists made it once again easy to accept the message.  I got hold of whatever I could find on these neglected views of Russell’s -- Russell’s The Analysis of Matter and various essays and book chapters, Lockwood’s other writings on the topic, some terrific neglected essays by Grover Maxwell, some related arguments from John Foster and Howard Robinson.  David Chalmers and Galen Strawson were also starting to take an interest in Russell around that time.  But once again I found myself agreeing more with the criticisms than with the positive proposals.  Russell took the view that what fleshes out the structure described by physics were sense data (more or less what contemporary writers call qualia).  This might seem to entail a kind of panpsychism, the view that mental properties are everywhere in nature.  Russell avoided this bizarre result by arguing that sense data could exist apart from a conscious subject which was aware of them, and Lockwood took the same line.  I wasn’t convinced, and one of my earliest published articles was a criticism of Lockwood’s arguments on this subject (an article to which Lockwood very graciously replied).  Chalmers and Strawson, meanwhile, were flirting with the idea of just accepting the panpsychist tendency of Russell’s positive views, but that seemed crazy to me.

 

My preferred solution was to take the negative, critical side of the Russellian position -- the view that physics gives us knowledge only of the abstract structure of matter -- and push a similar line toward the mind itself.  All our knowledge, both of the external world described by physics and of the internal world of conscious experience and thought, was knowledge only of structure, of the relations between elements but not of their intrinsic nature.  I would discover that Rudolf Carnap had taken something in the ballpark of this position, but the main influence on my thinking here was, of all people, the economist and political philosopher F. A. Hayek.  The libertarianism I was then attracted to had already led me to take an interest in Hayek.  When I found out that he had written a book on the mind-body problem, and that it took a position like Russell’s only more radical, it seemed like kismet.  Hayek’s The Sensory Order and some of his related essays would come to be the major influences on my positive views.  

 

But they were inchoate, since Hayek was not a philosopher by profession.  That gave me something to do.  Working out Hayek’s position in a more systematic way than he had done would be the project of my doctoral dissertation, “Russell, Hayek, and the Mind-Body Problem.”  (Both here and in the earlier Master’s thesis link, by the way, Google books overstates the page count.  I wasn’t that long-winded!)  This was, to be sure, a very eccentric topic for a dissertation.  Russell’s views were marginal at the time, and are still not widely accepted.  Probably very few philosophers of mind even know who Hayek is, and fewer still care.  But I thought their views were both true and interesting, and that was that.  (If you want advice on how to climb the career ladder in academic philosophy, I’m not the guy to ask.  But you knew that already.)  

 

Spelling out the Hayekian position in a satisfactory way was very difficult.  Lockwood had presented Russell’s position as a kind of mind-brain identity theory in reverse: It’s not that the mind turns out to be the brain, but that the brain turns out to be the mind.  More precisely, visual and tactile perceptions of the brain of the sort a neurosurgeon might have do not tell us what the brain is really like, but present us only with a representation of the brain.  It is actually introspection of our own mental states that tells us the inner nature of the matter that makes up the brain.  It seemed to me that Hayek’s position amounted to something like functionalism in reverse:  It’s not that the mind turns out to be a kind of causal network of the sort that might be instantiated in the brain, or a computer, or some other material system -- understood naively, i.e. taking our perceptual experience of these physical systems as accurate representations of their intrinsic nature.  Rather, introspection of our mental states and their relations is actually a kind of direct awareness of the inner nature of causation itself.  We shouldn’t reduce mind to causal relations; rather we should inflate our notion of causation and see in it the mental properties we know from introspection.

 

So I then argued, and wrote up the results both in the dissertation and in another article.  But the views were weird, required a great deal of abstractive effort even to understand, and one had to care about Hayek even to try, which almost no philosophers of mind do.  To be sure, Searle was interested in Hayek in a general way -- when Steven Postrel and I interviewed him for Reason, and when I talked to him about Hayek on other occasions, he even expressed interest in The Sensory Order in particular -- but this interest never manifested itself in his published work.  Chalmers very kindly gave me lots of feedback on the Hayekian spin on Russell that I was trying to develop, and pushed me to clarify the underlying metaphysics.  But his own tendency was, as I have said, to explore (at least tentatively) the panpsychist reading of Russell.

 

And yet my own development of Hayek might itself seem ultimately to have flirted with panpsychism.  For if introspection of our mental states gives us awareness of the inner nature of causation, doesn’t that imply that causation itself -- including causation in the world outside the brain -- is in some sense mental?  This certainly went beyond anything Hayek himself had said.  In my later thinking about Hayek’s position (of which I would give a more adequate exposition in my Cambridge Companion to Hayek article on Hayek’s philosophy of mind), I would retreat from this reading and emphasize instead the idea that introspection and perception give us only representations of the inner and outer worlds, and not their intrinsic nature.

This, for reasons I spell out in the article just referred to, offers a possible solution to the problem that qualia pose for naturalism.  But because the view presupposes the notion of representation, it does not account for intentionality.  Here my inclinations went in more of a “mysterian” direction.  I had long been fascinated by Colin McGinn’s arguments to the effect that there was a perfectly naturalistic explanation of consciousness, but one we may be incapable in principle of understanding given the limitations on our cognitive faculties.  I thought we could say more about consciousness than McGinn thought we probably could, but I also came to think that his mysterian approach was correct vis-à-vis the intentional content of our mental states.  Lockwood and Hayek said things that lent plausibility to this.  

 

I would later largely abandon the Hayekian position altogether, because it presupposes an indirect realist account of perception that I would eventually reject.  (That took some time.  The influence of indirect realism is clearly evident in my book Philosophy of Mind.)  But I had come to some conclusions in the philosophy of mind that would persist.  First, as Russell had argued, physics, which materialists take to be the gold standard of our knowledge of the material world, in fact doesn’t give us knowledge of the intrinsic nature of matter in the first place.  The usual materialist theories were not even clearly thought out, much less correct.  Second, a complete naturalistic explanation of intentionality is impossible.  

 

But I was still a naturalist.  It was also while still a naturalist that I first started to take a serious interest in Aristotelianism, though at the time that interest had to do with ethics rather than metaphysics.   Even before I became an atheist I had been introduced to the Aristotelian idea that what is good for us is determined by our nature, and that our nature is what it is whether or not we think of it as having come from God.  After becoming an atheist, then, I became drawn to ethicists like Philippa Foot, who defended a broadly Aristotelian approach to the subject from a secular point of view.  Her book Virtues and Vices and Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue were the big influences on my thinking about ethical theory during my atheist years.  

 

One consequence of this was that I always took teleology seriously, because it was so clearly evident a feature of ordinary practical reasoning.  (How did I reconcile this with naturalism?  I’m not sure I then saw the conflict all that clearly.  But in any event I thought that teleological notions could be fitted into a naturalistic framework in the standard, broadly Darwinian way -- the function of a thing is to be cashed out in terms of the reason why it was selected, etc.  I only later came to see that teleology ultimately had to be a bottom level feature of the world rather than a derivative one.)

After Virtue also taught me another important lesson -- that a set of concepts could become hopelessly confused and lead to paradox when yanked from the original context which gave them their intelligibility.  MacIntyre argued that this is what had happened to the key concepts of modern moral theory, removed as they had been from the pre-modern framework that was their original home.  I would later come to see that the same thing is true in metaphysics -- that the metaphysical categories contemporary philosophers make casual use of (causation, substance, essence, mind, matter, and so forth) have been grotesquely distorted in modern philosophy, pulled as they have been from the classical (and especially Aristotelian-Scholastic) framework in which they had been so carefully refined.  As I argue in The Last Superstition, many of the so-called “traditional” problems of philosophy are really just artifacts of the anti-Scholastic revolution of the moderns.  They flow from highly contentious and historically contingent metaphysical assumptions, and do not reflect anything about the nature of philosophical reflection per se.  And the standard moves of modern atheist argumentation typically presuppose these same assumptions.  But I wouldn’t see that for years.

I was on my way to seeing it, however.  Several crucial background elements were in place by the late 90s.  Fregean and related arguments had gotten me to take very seriously the idea that something like Platonic realism might be true.  (I would later see that Aristotelian realism was in fact the right way to go, but the basic anti-naturalistic move had been made.)  The arguments of Searle and others had shown that existing versions of materialism were no good.  Russellian arguments had shown that modern science and philosophy had no clear idea of what matter was in the first place.  Whatever it was supposed to be, though, it seemed it was not something to which one could assimilate mind, at least not if one wanted to avoid panpsychism.  Naturalism came to seem mysterious at best.  Meanwhile, Aristotelian ideas had a certain plausibility.  All that was needed was some systematic alternative to naturalism.

 

Then, in the late 90s, while still a grad student, I was given an opportunity to teach a philosophy of religion course, followed by several opportunities to teach “intro to philosophy” courses.  In the latter, I wanted to focus on topics that would be of interest to undergrads who might have no general interest in philosophy.  Since everyone had some interest in religion (even if only, in some cases, a hostile interest), arguments for God’s existence seemed a good topic for at least part of the course.  Naturally, that was a topic for the philosophy of religion course too.  So, I had a reason to revisit the subject after having given it relatively little thought for many years.

 

At first I taught the material the way so many professors do: Here are the arguments; here are the obvious fallacies they commit; let’s move on.  I never came across like Richard Dawkins, but I no doubt did come across like Nigel Warburton (say): politely dismissive.  And, as I gradually came to see, totally ill-informed.  The “line ‘em up, then shoot ‘em down” approach was boring, and the arguments seemed obviously stupid.  Yet the people who had presented them historically were obviously not stupid.  So, it seemed to me that it would be interesting to try to give the arguments a run for their money, and to try to make it understandable to the students why anyone would ever have accepted them.

 

So I started to read and think more about them.  I came to find William Rowe’s approach to the Leibnizian sort of cosmological argument interesting and pedagogically useful.  He didn’t seem to accept the argument, but he made it clear that asking “What caused God?”, “How do we know the universe had a beginning?”, etc. weren’t really serious objections.  He also made it clear that the thrust of the argument had to do with what was a straightforward and undeniably serious philosophical question:  Should we regard the world as ultimately explicable or not?  If not, then the argument fails.  But if so, then it does seem to make it plausible that something like God, or at least the God of the philosophers, must exist.  And it didn’t seem silly to wonder whether there might be such an explanation.  Richard Taylor’s clear, punchy chapter on natural theology in his little book Metaphysics made the same point, and made for a useful selection for the students to read.  

Naturally, I had already long been aware of this sort of argument.  The difference was that when I had first thought about it years before I was approaching it as someone who had had a religious background and wanted to see whether there was any argument for God’s existence that was really persuasive.  Russell’s retort to Copleston, to the effect that we can always insist that the universe is just there and that’s that, had then seemed to me sufficient to show that the argument was simply not compelling.  We’re just not rationally forced to accept it.  I had, as it were, put the argument on trial and it had been unable to establish its innocence to my satisfaction.  But now I was approaching it as a naturalist who was trying to give my students a reason to see the argument as something at least worth thinking about for a class period or two.  I was playing defense attorney rather than prosecution, but a defense attorney with the confidence of someone who didn’t have a stake in his client’s acquittal.  Already being a confirmed naturalist, I could be dispassionate rather than argumentative, and could treat the whole thing as a philosophical exercise.  

 

And from that point of view it started to seem that Russell’s reply, while it had rhetorical power, was perhaps not quite airtight philosophically.  Sure, you could always say that there’s no ultimate explanation.  And maybe there’s no way to prove otherwise.  But is it really true?  Is it really even more plausible to think that than to think that there is an explanation?  Guys like Rowe and Taylor, by no means religious fanatics or apologists but just philosophers entertaining a deep question, seemed to take the question pretty seriously.  Interesting, I thought.  Though for the time being, “interesting” -- rather than correct or persuasive -- was all I found it.  

 

Then there was Aquinas.  At the high tide of my undergrad Brash Young Atheist stage, I had taken a class on medieval philosophy with the late John Cronquist, an atheist professor at Cal State Fullerton who was absolutely contemptuous of Christianity.  Campus apologists of the Protestant stripe were a frequent target of his ire, though he had a choice quip or two about Catholicism as well.  He was one of the smartest and most well-read people I have ever known -- the kind of guy you find intellectually intimidating and hope not to get in an argument with -- and I liked him very much.  One of the odd and interesting things about that course, though, was how respectfully Cronquist treated some of the medievals, especially Aquinas.  He said that compared to them, contemporary pop apologists were “like a pimple on the ass of an athlete.”  (I remember him dramatically pointing to his own posterior as he said this, for emphasis.)  He obviously didn’t buy the Scholastic system for a moment, but he treated the material as worth taking a semester to try to understand.  And he said a couple of things that stood out.  First, for reasons I don’t recall him elaborating on much, he seemed to think that the Third Way in particular might have something to be said for it.  Second, he said that the mind-body problem, which he seemed to think was terribly vexing, really boiled down to the problem of universals.  For years I would wonder what he meant by that.  (I now think it must have had to do with the way our grasp of abstract concepts features in Aristotelian arguments for the immateriality of the intellect.) 

 

At the time I filed these remarks away as curiosities (just as I had then regarded the material we covered in the class as mere curiosities).  But I think his example made it easier for me, years later, to take a second look at Aquinas as I prepared course material.  I look back at my first lectures on the Five Ways with extreme embarrassment.  If you’d heard them, you’d have thought I was cribbing from an advance copy of The God Delusion, if not in tone then at least in the substance of my criticisms.  But that started slowly to change as I read more about the arguments and began to work the material into my lectures.  A good friend of mine, who had also gone from Catholicism to atheism and was a fellow grad student, was familiar with William Lane Craig’s book The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz, and seemed to find it useful in preparing his own lectures on the subject.  Our discussions of the arguments were very helpful.  Furthermore, Atheism and Theism by J. J. C. Smart and John Haldane had recently appeared, with Haldane defending, and Smart treating respectfully, some old-fashioned Thomistic arguments for the existence of God.  Such materials opened up a new world.  The way I and so many other philosophers tended to read the Five Ways was, as I gradually came to realize, laughably off base.  

 

The immediate effect was that I found a way to teach the Five Ways without seeming like I was putting fish in a barrel for the students to shoot at.  I still didn’t agree with the arguments, but at least teaching them was getting interesting.  I recall one class period when, having done my best to try to defend some argument (the First Way, I think) against various objections, I finally stated whatever it was I thought at the time was a difficulty that hadn’t been satisfactorily answered.  One of my smartest students expressed relief: She had been worried for a moment that there might be a good argument for God’s existence after all!  (Anyone who thinks wishful thinking is all on the side of religious people is fooling himself.)  

 

None of this undermined my commitment to naturalism for some time.  I published my first several journal articles while still in grad school, and two of them were criticisms of the doctrine of the Trinity.  (I’m now a staunch Trinitarian, of course.  But once again, it turns out that I still more or less agree with the arguments I then presented.  The versions of Trinitarianism I then attacked are, I continue to think, wrong.  But Trinitarianism itself is true.)  

 

But the language of act and potency, per se and per accidens causal series and the like started to enter my lectures on Aquinas, and before long, my thinking.  It was all very strange.  Aquinas’s arguments had a certain power when all of this metaphysical background was taken account of.  And there was a certain plausibility to the metaphysics.  There were reasons for distinguishing between actuality and potentiality, the different kinds of causal series, and so forth.   Yet no one seemed to talk that way anymore -- or, again, at least no one “mainstream.”  Could there really be anything to it all if contemporary philosophers weren’t saying anything about it?  And yet, precisely because they weren’t talking about it, they weren’t refuting it either.  Indeed, when they did say anything about Aquinas’s arguments at all, most of them showed only that they couldn’t even be bothered to get him right, much less show why he was mistaken.  Arguments from current philosophical fashion are bad enough.  But when most philosophers not only do not accept a certain view, but demonstrate that they don’t even understand what it is, things can start to smell very fishy indeed.

 

And so they did.  I already knew from the lay of the land in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind that the standard naturalist approaches had no solid intellectual foundation, and themselves rested as much on fashion as on anything else.  Even writers like Searle, who I admired greatly and whose naturalism I shared, had no plausible positive alternative.  McGinn-style mysterianism started to seem like a dodge, especially given that certain arguments (like the Platonic realist ones) seemed to show that matter simply is not in fact all that there is, not merely that we can’t know how it can be all that there is.  Some secular writers were even toying with Aristotelian ideas anyway.  The only reason for not taking Aquinas and similar thinkers seriously seemed to be that most other academic philosophers weren’t taking them seriously.  And yet as I had come to learn, many of them didn’t even understand Aquinas and Co. in the first place, and their own naturalism was riddled with problems.  Against Aquinas, for naturalism -- the case increasingly seemed to come down to the consensus of the profession.  And what exactly was that worth?  

 

It isn’t worth a damn thing, of course.  Careerists might not see that, nor might a young man more excited by the “question what your parents taught you” side of philosophy than all that “objective pursuit of truth” stuff.  But a grownup will see it, and a philosopher had sure as hell better see it.  

 

I don’t know exactly when everything clicked.  There was no single event, but a gradual transformation.  As I taught and thought about the arguments for God’s existence, and in particular the cosmological argument, I went from thinking “These arguments are no good” to thinking “These arguments are a little better than they are given credit for” and then to “These arguments are actually kind of interesting.”  Eventually it hit me: “Oh my goodness, these arguments are right after all!”  By the summer of 2001 I would find myself trying to argue my wife’s skeptical physicist brother-in-law into philosophical theism on the train the four of us were taking through eastern Europe.

 

There’s more to the story than that, of course.  In particular, it would take an essay of its own to explain why I returned to the Catholic Church, specifically, as I would by the end of 2001.  But I can already hear some readers protesting at what I have said.  I don’t mean the New Atheist types, always on the hunt for some ad hominem nugget that will excuse them from having to take the actual arguments of the other side seriously.  (God Himself could come down from on high and put before such people an airtight ontological proof of His existence while parting the Red Sea, and they’d still insist that what really motivated these arguments was a desire to rationalize His moral prejudices.  And that their own continued disbelief was just a matter of, you know, following the evidence where it leads.)  

 

No, I’m talking about a certain kind of religious believer, the type who’s always going on about how faith is really a matter of the heart rather than the head, that no one’s ever been argued into religion, etc.  It will be said by such a believer that my change of view was too rationalistic, too cerebral, too bloodless, too focused on a theoretical knowledge of the God of the philosophers rather than a personal response to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

 

But the dichotomy is a false one, and the implied conception of the relationship between faith and reason not only foolish but heterodox.  As to the heterodoxy and foolishness of fideism, and the correct understanding of the relationship of faith and reason, I have addressed that set of issues in a previous post.  As to the “heart versus head” stuff, it seems to me to rest on an erroneous bifurcation of human nature.  Man is a unity, his rationality and animality, intellect and passions, theoretical and moral lives all ultimately oriented toward the same end.  That is why even a pagan like Aristotle knew that our happiness lay in “the contemplation and service of God,” whose existence he knew of via philosophical argumentation.  That is why Plotinus could know that we “forget the father, God” because of “self-will.”  While the pagan may have no access to the supernatural end that only grace makes possible, he is still capable of a natural knowledge of God, and will naturally tend to love what he knows.  

 

As Plotinus’s remark indicates, that does not mean that the will does not have a role to play.  But that is true wherever reason leads us to a conclusion we might not like, not merely in matters of religion.  And once you have allowed yourself to see the truth that reason leads you to, what reason apprehends is (given the convertibility of the transcendentals) as good and beautiful as it is real.  If you find yourself intellectually convinced that there is a divine Uncaused Cause who sustains the world and you in being at every instant, and don’t find this conclusion extremely strange and moving, something that leads you to a kind of reverence, then I daresay you haven’t understood it.  Of course, there are those whose heads and hearts are so out of sync that they cannot follow both at the same time.  But we shouldn’t mistake this pathology for an insight into human nature.

 

Speaking for myself, anyway, I can say this much.  When I was an undergrad I came across the saying that learning a little philosophy leads you away from God, but learning a lot of philosophy leads you back.  As a young man who had learned a little philosophy, I scoffed.  But in later years and at least in my own case, I would come to see that it’s true.

Roger Scruton on Anglicanism: 'My tribal religion'

Michael Duggan, "Roger Scruton: ‘My tribal religion’" (Catholic Herald, October 8, 2015):

An eccentric priest, a single mother and French vineyards offered Roger Scruton ‘a glowing exit sign’ from the Church of England to Rome. So why did he never take it?

Roger Scruton is not a Catholic. But he might have been. “I’ve always been drawn to the Catholic Church because of its respect for tradition, for the apostolic continuity it represents and for its attempts to imbue ordinary life with sacraments,” he told me when we spoke last week. “All of this came across very strongly to me with the Church as I came to know it in the south of France and Italy when I was a young man. It’s not quite the same now, I know.”

...

He told me: “There are two reasons why I held back from joining the Catholic Church. One is that it requires a bigger leap of faith than I’ve been able to achieve. And the other is that, because I’m divorced, I couldn’t possibly get married a second time in the Catholic Church.

“But I could get a blessing for my second marriage from the Church of England. I was brought up as an Anglican and I’ve always liked the idea of the kind of compromises on which the Anglican Church has thrived.”

Sad. He's written very many things which I have found exceptionally insightful. His primer on modern philosophy is exceptional; his essay on beauty remarkable. A very bright, perceptive mind, almost like C.S. Lewis, whose reasons for not converting were probably more cultural than anything (although he had some issues he didn't quite fathom, like the B.V.M.).

[Hat tip to JM]

A conservative Presbyterian responds to Catholic modernism via ... Boniface

D. G. Hart, "What A Call with Integrity Sounds Like" (Old Life, May 30, 2015).

Hart points out that some (former Presbyterian) Catholic converts who have been trying to reach out the Presbyterians like himself miss the central dynamic of modern Christianity because they keep insisting "that Protestantism and Roman Catholicism represent two distinct paradigms while not recognizing the two paradigms that exist on both sides of the Tiber — one anti-modernist and one indifferent to modernism and its effects."

And as an example of the anti-modernist Catholic paradigm, they cite Boniface, "Shepherds of the Whole World" (Unam Sanctam Catholicam, May 29, 2015).

Very telling ...

[Hat tip to JM]

Which is the nursemaid and which the mother, the RC Church or the Evangelical denomination?

The great Thomas Howard is one of those Catholic converts who I admire because he doesn't make the cornerstone of his Catholic identity a broadside attack on his own Evangelical background. Yes, the Catholic Church offers the fullness of the Faith in her Sacred Tradition, Magisterium, and 2000 years of fathomless resources. But he would defend to the end the invaluable role Evangelicalism played in his own development as a spiritual nursemaid.

In one way, you would almost have to have "been there" to understand why. But short of talking to Tom Howard yourself, about a good a glimpse into why as you're likely to get is offered by Tim Callies in "The Most Important Thing My Parents Did" (Challies.com, April 9, 2015).

Now if only those managing the stores over at Catholic Inc. [TM] could back off from pushing Care Bears, Jellycats, Pillow Pets, and Barney and Friends long enough to allow their customers to begin to re-discover that their spiritual offerings go a tad beyond feel-good fuzzy plush toys, we might have a fighting chance to stave off complete bankruptcy. As things stand, Latin America is quickly becoming a show case for how Pentecostals and other Evangelicals are harvesting a bumper crop of Protestant converts from the nursemaid of contemporary Catholicism -- or should I say "Catholic Inc. [TM]"?

If my mother were still living and I were to write a Mother's Day tribute to her, what I would say about her (along with my father) would probably be something very similar to what Tim Challies says.

What's right with this? What's wrong with this?

Matthew Milliner, "All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Evangelicalism" (First Things, May 1, 2015). ["Here's one to make Raider Fan a bit ill."] Seriously, though, what's right as well as wrong with this?

[Hat tip to JM]

Why Francis is not a fan of Benedict's Anglican Ordinariate

Sandro Magister, "Ecumenism Behind Closed Doors" (www.chiesa, February 2, 2015): "While Benedict XVI made it easier for Anglicans in disagreement with the “liberal” direction of their Church to enter into the Catholic Church, Francis is not, he prefers that they remain where they are. The revelations of two Anglican friends of the pope." An interesting and revealing study.

[Hat tip to Sir A.S.]

"How My Parish Youth Group Helped Me Leave the Catholic Faith"

Jennifer Fitz (Patheos, January 8, 2015):

How do you really get kids to leave the faith and commit mortal sins? Our parish used the “everything’s fine” method:

• Run an active youth group with lots of activities and good attendance.
• Make sure your leaders are real friendly and well-meaning.
• Teach enough of the faith that everyone is sure the kids are getting good Christian formation.

Then you have to do a few things ... Read more >>

"I came to the Church through the Traditional Latin Mass"

James Kalb, "What the Traditional Mass Means to Me" (Crisis,  December 4, 2014). [Note: the article that follows was sent to me by my correspondent, Guy Noir, and carries his emphases, as well as an asterisk appending a comment by him at the end.] 

 I came to the Church through the Traditional Latin Mass.

I would have converted anyway. It was becoming more and more obvious that the Church was where I belonged, and it seemed pointlessly obstinate and even artificial to remain apart from her. But the Traditional Mass made the situation clearer, because it made it more obvious what the Church is.

It is easy for present-day Americans to get that point wrong. The Catechism and the Second Vatican Council say that the Mass is “the source and summit of the Christian life.” The claim seems odd to most of us today. Americans usually think religion has to do with spirituality, which we see as personal and rather vague, with moral commitment, whether defined as “family values” or as “social justice,” or with joining a community of mutual concern, acceptance, and support. Even if we accept in theory that the religion to which we claim to adhere is something much more definite, it goes against the grain to treat the definite part as more than decorative. After all, doctrine divides, and we’re all pragmatists, so why emphasize that side of things?

If you look at religion that way a worship service becomes something like a lecture, pep rally, self-help meeting, or social get-together. Other people do those things at least as well as Catholics, so why bother with Catholicism? Why not go with something even more modern and American than the New Mass as presented in the average suburban parish? Why not do praise and worship at a megachurch?

The Traditional Mass made it clear that the Mass is something different from all that.

Discerning the Church

Our undercover correspondent we keep on retainer in an Atlantic seaboard city that knows how to keep it's secrets, Guy Noir - Private Eye, writes:

John Thayer Jenson over at Called to Communion posted this fine comment:

I remember saying to my wife once, when [we] were in via, that I had felt my life as a Christian, which only started when I was 27, had been like a man walking through a fog – occasionally glimpsing some Shape appearing through the mists, and then disappearing – and wanting to know more about It – then one day things cleared more than usual and I realised that what I had seen all along was the Catholic Church.

It made me think of David Mills recent piece in NOR, "The Whole House" (New Oxford Review, October, 2014):

Some Catholics speak of sharing their faith with others as if being a Catholic were secondary and relatively unimportant, as if by being or becoming any sort of Christian a person has arrived home. I’ve heard this from Catholics of all sorts, often in reaction to something I’ve written on apologetics. Catholics have told me they would not even think about discussing Catholicism with their evangelical friends, whose faith they believe to be complete as is. I have been told twice, once by a very conservative priest, to beware of “Catholic chauvinism” because I’d suggested that, all things considered, being a Catholic is better than not being a Catholic. A goodly number of Catholics have disparaged even the idea of arguing for the Church, explaining that Catholics should witness by the way we live and that arguments will only drive people away. Some have even suggested that the Church “forbids us to proselytize,” defining the word very broadly.

... But the Catholic must still, when he can, tell his Protestant friends that they should complete their faith by entering the Catholic Church. They are in sight of home but are not home.

In the preface to Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis described the Church as a house with various rooms occupied by different traditions, including Catholicism. It’s not that good an image, even from his point of view, but it does give us one way of understanding our relation to our Protestant friends. Lewis would not have accepted this reimagining of his metaphor, but Catholics, who know that the Church isn’t merely one denomination among others, will know that the Catholic Church is the house, and the rooms are occupied by the various rites within the Church. To enter the house, one must be a member of the family. Friends may set up homes in the yard. They are within the pale, the relation the Church calls “real but imperfect communion.” Read more >>

[Hat tip to G.N.]

The problem with "Not" having a "personal relationship" with Jesus

Dr. Jay Boyd recently raised some concerns about what it means for Catholics to adopt this language in his article, "The Problem with a Personal Relationship with Jesus" (Homiletic and Pastoral Review, July 10, 2014).

Now Dr. Carole Brown has written a complementary piece entitled "The Problem with 'Not' Having a Personal Relationship with Jesus" (Homiletic and Pastoral Review, August 11, 2014).

The issue as discussed in these two pieces is detailed and complex, involving the question of personalist philosophy as it has become enshrined in magisterial documents since the pontificate of St. John Paul II, in particular.

But the issue can, I think, be put rather simply. What should a "personal relationship with Jesus" NOT mean for a Catholic? It should not mean a subjective relationship experienced as subsisting in isolation apart from the Church, her sacrament, and teaching.

What MAY a "personal relationship with Jesus" mean for a Catholic? Many things. (1) It can mean a subjectively experienced relationship that is more than sacramental, as for example when one makes a spiritual communion with Christ (without cutting ourselves off from the sacramental life of the Church). This is something incumbent upon all Catholics to cultivate as part of their response to St. Paul's injunction to "pray without ceasing" (1 Thes. 5:17). (2) It can also mean a sacramental relationship with Jesus, particularly when receiving the Eucharist. The Church stresses the objective component in this relationship, the fact that one receives Jesus whether one has any subjective experience of this or not. Another dimension of this is the relationship of being incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ via baptism, even while one is yet an infant and oblivious of what is happening. This is nonetheless a "personal relationship with Jesus." Still another dimension of this is the relationship of Old Testament "saints" to Jesus, not through any awareness of the historical Jesus, but through the "sacraments" of the Old Covenant, by which they were also incorporated into the mystical Body of Christ. (Yes, their salvation was through no other than Christ and a "personal relationship with Him," though mediated Levitical sacrifices anticipating the sacrifice of Christ.)

When all is said and done, however, the important thing for those of us who are adults is our response to the truth of God's revelation in Christ and through the Church. This is why the claims of the Gospel obtain also for the contemporary Jew. We are all called to communion with Christ through the Church and her Gospel. And those of us who are Catholic are called by our Lord through His Church to a conscious (and conscientious) response to a life of conversion and amendment of life -- in short, discipleship. This means that we cannot remain sacramentalized infants, much less sacramentalized pagans. We need to respond in faith, aware of all the levels and dimensions of our personal relationship with Jesus that we've received through our baptism and incorporation into His mystical Body.

We're not saved by information about Jesus that we know. Even infants and the Children of Israel in the Old Testament with no knowledge of Jesus are not excluded from the redemptive work of Christ. But for those of us living today who are beyond our minor years, knowing information about Jesus can play a decisive role in our acquisition of a personal relationship with Jesus of which we are consciously aware, a role, in fact, in our salvation.

[Hat tip to JM]

Fascinating: Evelyn Waugh Face To Face BBC Interview

Quite stiff, awkward, a bit difficult; but if you love Waugh, fascinating. Some things about his conversion beginning around 15:30ff. And what he says about Protestants and "heathens" around 27:30ff. is positively endearing.

"Why Do People Become Catholic?"

R.R. Reno, "Why Do People Become Catholic? Eight Reasons" (First Things, June 11, 2014), recounts a recent talk by John Beaumont, author of The Mississippi Flows Into the Tiber: A Guide to Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church(Fidelity Press, 2014). The book, says Reno, is a wonderful compilation of convert stories that includes a few folks associated with this fine magazine. The author, in his talk, recounted a number of them. He ended with an arresting question: "Why do people convert to Catholicism?" (Should that be an "arresting question"?) While there are obviously many answers, the author summarized eight reasons, to which Reno here adds his own comments. The eight reasons are: (1) visibility, (2) universality, (3) endurance, (4) authority, (5) beauty, (6) hierarchy, (7) saints, and (8) moral witness.

Reno concludes by saying:

I see no reason why Protestants can’t find many of these qualities in their own churches. I don’t think its triumphalist of me—or at least not perniciously so—to say as a Catholic convert I’m thankful to have found them in mine.

A bit defensive? Why should a Catholic editor of a Catholic magazine have to justify (apologize for?) his review of reasons for embracing the Catholic Faith? Just a detail, perhaps; and maybe I'm missing something.

Guy Noir, our underground correspondent who sent me the link to this article, comments:

Jokingly I might answer, "Why do people become Catholic? I really couldn't say?!"

My actual posted comment, which I suspect you will only partially agree with, is below. Someone else mentioned Truth, which is a better retort. I'd agree with that myself.

I recall telling my Catholic-not-Christian friend I'd converted. Here retort, "What on earth? Why would ANYONE do that?!" Ha-ha.

COMMENT:

I have to agree with James here. Beauty? Authority? Modern Catholics really simply can't with straight face claim much high ground, since from Vatican II forward the quarterbacks have led something of a debacle. But the bothersome, inescapable reality is also "What else is there?" Evangelicalism, Protestantism.... these also have integrity [and their members have been the equivalent of spiritual Navy Seals when it comes to rescuing Biblical scholarship and preaching], but if you trace lifelines back to the Fathers, you can't help but realize the Church remains like the rock in the road. For me, Wilfrid Ward summarizing Newman hit the nail home on the importance of the Catholic Church -- an uncomfortable importance that, like it or not, seems to remain amidst all the namby-pambying...

"It was[Newman's] judgment [that the] one great work of the Catholic Church [was] to supply an antidote to the impressionableness of human nature, to the changeableness of its moods, and to keep permanently alive that religious atmosphere which in practice was necessary to supplement the reason of man, which was in these matters so liable to be misled. The agnostic or naturalistic atmosphere of modern society, which so easily affects each man's view of life, includes the prevalence of maxims identical with those of the ancient Epicureans. But so far as it acts on the more intellectual in these latter days, Newman seems to trace it largely to the effect on their imagination of the fruitful results of the sciences – physical science first of all, but also, in their measure, historical and critical science. Here were tangible and certain results, extending our knowledge of this visible world, which is so unquestionably real; while theologizing was concerned with a cloudland, which only in certain moods seemed to have any real existence at all. The great antidote to this attitude of mind was the counter-effect of the [Catholic] Church as – to use his own forcible phrase – “the concrete representative of things invisible” – the visible assembly which has ever taken for granted and positively asserted the reality of the unseen world [and the testimony of the Bible], and has been the fruitful instrument of a moral civilization which has depended on this assumption." --Last Lectures 27.

[Hat tip to GN]

The experience of converts who were Catholic and weren't enjoying it

However uncomfortable this video might make some of us feel, I think those of us who are converts to the Catholic Faith (at least most of us) will have to admit that there is some truth in it. Some have put the problem in terms of "false advertising," others in terms of a discrepancy between "word" and "deed."

I personally know, and doubtless many of you do as well, converts who made the arduous journey swimming upstream often at great personal cost, only to be disappointed by what they experienced in AmChurch. I personally sponsored some twenty individuals who were received into the Church via RCIA since my own conversion, and of these I know of three who have lapses or reverted to their erstwhile Protestant communions. And I know still others, often individuals of sound mind and theological substance who have also ceased to practice the Faith.

It would be easy to dismiss them by saying that they never really understood or believed the Catholic Faith, but I am acquainted with cases in which this could not possibly have been the case -- instances in which the convert wrestled with the issues, even producing pages and pages of written critical analyses critical of Protestant notions like justification by faith alone and sola fide, and working out their understanding of Catholic doctrines of Church authority, soteriology, Mariology, the intercession of saints, etc. I am still in contact (still "friends" with) several of these individuals, and it breaks my heart to see them where they are, and yet I also have to admit: there is a problem with what they encountered in today's Catholic Church.

"Ecumenism in a Time of Cancer"

Casey Chalk, "Ecumenism in a Time of Cancer" (Called to Communion, December 23, 2013).

Irish brothers return to Church via ChurchMilitant.TV

Here are the alternatives:

(1) "Business as usual": you see something like this as a bizarre anomaly, a fluke. After all, the Catholic hierarchy is still intact. There are church buildings around with Sunday liturgies. There are bishops, like the bishop of the diocese of Ireland in which these two brothers live. So it's business as usual. Keep on keeping on. Ireland has a rich Catholic heritage, though parish numbers have fallen off a bit. But there are still examples here and there of changed lives, like these guys. So those "minding the store" in the Church must have things under control. They know what they're doing. And we have Christ's promises that the doors of Hell will not prevail against the Church.

(2) "Crisis": you see something like this is the norm. Kids are lucky today if they grow up knowing who Jesus was and is, let alone the most elementary content of the Gospel. The church buildings around, the hierarchy, the priests and bishops, represent signs of a rapidly disappearing world. All of these things represent a world which is ending, as Archibald Macleish says, whose "metaphor has died," a world of "emblems for the soul's consent that speak the meanings men will never know, but man-imagined images can show," a world which "perishes when those images, though seen, no longer mean."

For my part, I make no secret of what I see around me. We have no divine promise that the Church in America will survive, or, for that matter, that the Church in the West will survive, or that geographical Rome as the official headquarters of the Catholic Church will survive. We have entered a new Dark Ages, the darker because Enlightened western man thinks he already knows what the Gospel is, and has seen through its empty promises by the light of reason. The truth, however, as G. K. Chesterton put it, is that "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried." And the more ignorant post-Christian western man becomes of the actual content of the Faith, the more adamantly he sets his face against it.

See to it that every member of your family knows The Faith (not his faith, whatever that may happen to be, but THE Faith). Their spiritual survival in the darkness ahead will depend on it. And if God has given you the gift of faith in Him, always give thanks for this grace with which He has gifted you. This is no small thing. It is everything.

Et tu, Joseph?

Too often have I head of Catholic priests who have advised prospective converts that they could do more good by remaining in their own churches than by converting to the Catholic Church. Too often, I say! Scott Hahn had a priest tell him this in Milwaukee before his conversion, as I recall. I have heard it said in other contexts. And now we hear from a Vatican Radio article in German that Sigrid Spath was told the same thing by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. I can't believe it! Here's the quotation in translation from New Catholic, "She wanted to convert. She listened to Cardinal Ratzinger and died a Lutheran" (RC, February 3, 2014):

It was also Cardinal Ratzinger who, according to her own testimony, advised Sigrid Spath to remain a Protestant, and not to convert to the Catholic Church, as she had considered in a moment of crisis. She could do more for both churches if she remained a Protestant, said the Cardinal. (emphasis added)

Oy, vey!

The endnote that led to my conversion is now online

Imagine that: an endnote. Yep, that's how it started. Back in the fall semester of 1987 when I was teaching a course in the history and philosophy of law at Lenoir-Rhyne University and using as a the main text Harold Berman's Law and Revolution, The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) [now online, amazingly, as a PDF file]. One of my earliest philosophy professors, H. E. Runner at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, had mentioned the book to me in conversation when I was in grad school at Duquesne University. He said that a former student of his, John Witte, Jr., who served as an assistant to Berman at Harvard Law School and subsequently went with him to Emory University's Center for the Study of Law and Religion, had a substantial hand in writing the Introduction to Berman's volume. I reviewed the book for the Duquesne Law Review in the Fall issue of 1985, comparing it in importance to William Blakstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766). It is an amazingly insightful and illuminating book.

How could an endnote in a book lead me to convert to the Catholic Faith? Well, it wasn't quite as simple as that; but that's how it began. The endnote was the catalyst, let us say. I had long been exposed to Catholic ideas. In third grade, when my Protestant missionary parents brought us back from Japan to Indiana on a one-year furlough, there was a neighbor boy who was Catholic. He taught me that one shouldn't say "I love" this or that, but use "I love" only for God. A small thing, but an example that made me think. In Japan I knew kids who attended Catholic schools like St. Mary's in Tokyo. Unlike many Protestants, my parents, to their credit, never made any sort of issue of people being Catholic or of Catholicism as such; whereas I knew many Evangelical and Fundamentalist mission groups that had all sorts of anti-Catholic literature.

In high school we had a wonderful, C. S. Lewis-like literature teacher, Mr. Howard Blair, who taught us Dante's Divine Comedy along with other classics from western history. He was always a supremely wise, patient, gentle, and liberal-minded man in the best sense of that term, and to this day I still visit him when I'm in Philadelphia and he stops to visit me for several days when he drives to Detroit every summer. I think it was he who also inspired my first reading of St. Augustine's Confessions, though I can't say how much of it I really absorbed in those high school years.

In college, I read more Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas at Calvin College; and then, for my last two years, I attended the Jesuit institution, Sophia University in Tokyo, where I not only read more Catholic classics, but had some very good Jesuit professors (there were still some in those days, you know, as there are still if you look hard enough)!

All of this was superlatively interesting academically, but it never even occurred to me to think about becoming a Catholic. Why? Because it wasn't what William James would have called a "living" or "forced" option. It wasn't a "living" option because it was "avoidable" and didn't even present itself as an "option" in any conscious way. The reason probably had something to do with my Protestant nominalist view of the Church at the time. The "Church" didn't refer to any definite historical organization, but rather to a somewhat nebulous reality associated with the spiritual Body of Christ, which embraced authentic "believers" from various "denominations." The particular place you attended "services" on Sundays wasn't all that important, as long as your "relationship with Jesus" was on track. That was the general Protestant attitude.

So what was it about this endnote that set the ball rolling? What was it that aroused my curiosity and got me enquiring into the roots of the Christian Faith? Some of the background conditions that helped set the stage very likely had something to do with a feeling of displacement. Here I was, an "American" of Swiss Anabaptist ancestry born in China, raised in Japan, educated in Pennsylvania after a year in Switzerland, teaching near the Baptist buckle of the Bible Belt at a Lutheran institution in the tobacco-chewing yahoo American South, wondering how to "do church" as a family. We tried different places, but I always felt like an outsider, haunted by that sense of homelessness that Heidegger calls Heimatlosigkeit.

I was too deeply read in the Reformed tradition to ever feel much at home among the Baptists or Methodists, as much as I appreciated their irrepressible friendliness. As much as I loved the philosophically-rich Dutch Reformed tradition (Kuyper, Dooyeweerd, Vollenhoven), there were no such circles where we lived, and there was such doctrinaire hair-splitting factionalism among the four-walls-and-a-sermon Presbyterians that my father-in-law called them the "split P's" and "frozen chosen." The Lutherans had good music and Psalmnody, but I could never buy into the Lutheran Law-Gospel dualism, "two kingdom" theory, or the simul iustus et peccator theology of paradox. The Anglicans or Episcopalians had great liturgy but didn't give a rip what you blieved as long as you could "get mystical." All of which had me wondering more and more what the common denominator of American "denominational" Christianity was.

So what sparked my enquiry into the Catholic Faith was this endnote? Yep, a note referenced in chapter five of Berman's book -- a chapter entitled "Canon Law: The First Modern Western Legal System." In the endnote itself, which begins on page 604, the author refers to two works by Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150­-1350 (Leiden, 1972), and The Foundations of the Conciliar Theory (Cambridge, 1955), and says that, according to Tierney, when the theory of papal infallibility emerged at the end of the thirteenth century, "it was advanced as a limitation on papal authority: it meant that the infallible utterances of prior popes could not be reformed by the pope in power at any given moment."

That was it. It wasn't so much anything about Tierney's theory itself, but the mere fact that this description of papal infallibility turned everything I had thought I knew about papal infallibility totally upside down. I thought that papal infallibility was advanced as a positive power by which the pope could posit new doctrines with the authority of God behind him. Instead it was here claimed that it was a negative power, restraining the pope by binding him to an infallible, irreformable tradition.

Why did any of this matter? Because it made me doubt the reliability of the textus receptus with which I had been working -- the secular and largely Protestant "textbook tradition" on the meaning of the such things as the "Reformation," "Church history," along with the Crusades and Inquisition that I assumed were reliable "pegs" in my historical template. In any case, it started me reading. In fact, the trickle of books I started reading broke like a damn, and I soon found myself getting up an hour early each morning at 5:00 AM just to devote to my enquiry into Church history and the claims of the Catholic Church. It was a deeply upsetting and uprooting journey, if also ultimately a gratifying one.

As C. S. Lewis says somewhere, a man who wishes to remain a sound atheist (or, we could add, an undisturbed Protestant) cannot be too careful of his reading. Again, G. K. Chesterton somewhere refers to the three stages of conversion as patronizing, discovering, and running from the Church in terror. I must confess that the terror was real. I made sure to cover my bases and spent probably more time than I needed re-reading the Protestant Reformers, like Calvin's Institutes and Debate with Jacopo Sadoleto, Luther's Commentary on Romans, Bondage of the Will, Pagan Servitude of the Church, Chemnitz's Examination of the Council of Trent, etc. (and even Loraine Boettner's muck-raking Roman Catholicism!), before coming back to those who led me into the Church, converts like Louis Bouyer, Ronald Knox, Cardinal Newman, etc. (not to mention contemporary contacts like Jimmy Akin, Scott Hahn, and Karl Keating), and then delving more deeply into established Catholic writers themselves, such as Karl Adams, Josef Pieper, Ludwig Ott, Garrigou-Lagrange, St. Francis de Sales, St. Louis de Montfort, St. Alphonsus de Ligouri, St. John of the Cross, etc.

That, at any rate, is how the long story of my otherwise not particularly original journey into the Catholic Church began, with that endnote in that book on law that can now be found online here (PDF). Caveat emptor! You can never be too careful of your reading!

Another great Lutheran conversion story -- Jennifer Ferrara

This is an older conversion story but one I particularly enjoy, since it references people, places, and things in the Lutheran world in which I, though never Lutheran, used to teach. Just six years after I was received into the Catholic Church, while I was teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne University -- a Lutheran (ELCA) institution -- the following piece appeared by Jennifer Mehl Ferrara, "Becoming Catholic: Making It Hard" (First Things, January, 1999), which expressed many of the same sentiments I experienced at the time. (Don't fret: if you click on the "Read more" link at the bottom, the story ends on a positive note):

In its section on music, the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes St. Augustine: “How I wept, deeply moved by your hymns, songs, and the voices that echoed through your Church! What emotion I experienced in them! Those sounds flowed into my ears, distilling the truth in my heart. A feeling of devotion surged within me, and tears streamed down my face—tears that did me good.” As a former Lutheran pastor who is now Roman Catholic, I am sorry to say Augustine’s wonderful words do not describe my experience with worship in the Church. Though at times I have been on the verge of tears, that was due to feelings of despair and not devotion. Far from drawing me into the Church, the manner in which the Mass is celebrated in most parishes constituted, in the end, the greatest stumbling block to my conversion.

My trek to Rome began in earnest the day I read in Lutheran Forum Pastor Leonard Klein’s condemnation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s practice of funding abortions: “Real churches do not kill babies.” Prior to this point, I had never seriously considered becoming Roman Catholic. After all, I was a fourth-generation Lutheran pastor—happy to be a pastor and steeped in the traditions, theology, and ethos of Lutheranism.

Yet, as I read Klein’s editorial, I was like a person coming to terms with the terminal illness of a loved one: I saw that my church body had fallen captive to “the culture of death” and that I had no choice but to leave. I had for some time ceased to view Lutheranism as a necessary “corrective” to Catholicism and, for years, had viewed the Roman Catholic Magisterium, and especially this Pope, as the keeper of the faith for all of Christendom. Therefore, for me, the only true option was to become Roman Catholic.

I began to read—papal encyclicals, Vatican II documents, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, theologians such as Louis Bouyer, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. I conversed with other Protestant pastors who had become Catholic and with priests who had grown up in the faith—all were eager evangelizers. The more I read and talked, the more convinced I became of the truth of the Catholic Church’s teachings and doctrine.

I had now arrived at the doorstep of Lumen Gentium 14: “Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by God through Jesus Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in her could not be saved.” Even if I was willing to take a chance with my own soul, I had three small children to consider and that concentrates the mind. At this stage, I was a reluctant convert still wrestling with giving up my ordination, but I took comfort in C. S. Lewis’ insight: “The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.” God’s compulsion was operating through my conscience and driving me into the arms of the Church. I now set out with hopes of experiencing the teachings and beliefs of the Church through Catholic worship—the Truth made manifest, if you will.

The first thing I noticed upon entering the lobby of our local Catholic parish, St. Mary’s, was the absence of a coat rack. Catholics, unlike Lutherans, worship with their coats on, which gives the impression they are making an obligatory pit stop. After Mass, most do not linger to talk but instead race to be the first out of the parking lot. Obviously, becoming Catholic was going to require a few adjustments, including giving up that Protestant feeling of belonging to a close-knit community.

The sanctuary of St. Mary’s is devoid of statues, and the pews are arranged in a semi-circle. We chose to sit in the side pews, and I soon discovered the problem with this configuration: I spent most of Mass staring at the parishioners across from me—observing their dress, their mannerisms, their parenting skills. This became an especially great temptation during the homily, which lasted twenty minutes and was delivered without manuscript or notes. My father, who for part of his career taught homiletics, warned me: “If you are going to preach without a manuscript, you actually have to be much better prepared.” Many priests don’t seem to know that rule.

I might have put up with the preaching, but the music was another matter altogether. This parish had well over a thousand members, so I could not understand why it did not have a choir. Instead, we were led in song by a large, well-dressed, perfectly coifed woman who stood at the lectern and sang with great emotion off-key into a microphone. The alternative to the song leader was the intensely earnest folk group with their three guitar chords. My first call as a pastor had been to a small rural parish with an average attendance of ninety and a choir of five. It boggled my mind to think the music and singing in that parish was superior to what I was now experiencing.

One Sunday, after singing the words to “Here I Am Lord” (I, the Lord of sea and sky. . . . My hand shall save. . . .), I turned to my husband and said, “Why are we always pretending to be God in these contemporary Catholic hymns? It strikes me as a bit presumptuous.” I then began to notice the inordinate number of references to “I,” “me,” and “my” in the hymns I was being asked to sing. (As I later read in Thomas Day’s Why Catholics Can’t Sing, the music “oozes with an indecent narcissism.”) Before long, I was standing arms crossed refusing to sing at all.