Tridentine Community News - Fall talks at the OCLMA; St. Bonventure Monastery Chapel Reconstruction; Cathedral Choir Academy of Detroit; Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

"I will go in unto the Altar of God
To God, Who giveth joy to my youth"
Tridentine Community News by Alex Begin (September 2, 2018):

September 2, 2018 – Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Fall Talks at the OCLMA

The Oakland County Latin Mass Association will be resuming its series of talks at receptions following the 9:45 AM Sunday High Mass at the Academy of the Sacred Heart Chapel in Bloomfield Hills. Two talks have been scheduled thus far: Sunday, October 14: Dr. Phil Blosser, Professor of Philosophy at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary, will speak about Conscience. Dr. Blosser’s translation of an important text by German philosopher Hendrik G. Stoker, Conscience: Phenomena and Theories, was published earlier this year by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Sunday, December 16: Dr. Elizabeth Salas, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Detroit’s Sacred Heart Major Seminary and a member of the OCLMA, will present Theological Virtues of St. John of the Cross. The personal interests of Dr. Salas are personalism, the philosophical thought of St. John Paul II, mysticism, and ethics. Dr. Salas’s publications include Person and Gift According to Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, and with her husband, Victor Salas, Hervaeus Natalis and Dietrich von Hildebrand: the Roots of Realist Phenomenology in Scholasticism.

St. Bonaventure Monastery Chapel Reconstruction

The August 5, 2018 edition of this column reported that the St. Bonaventure Monastery Chapel at the Solanus Center had been reordered to a more traditional arrangement of High Altar, freestanding altar, nave, and organ in the choir loft. Little did we know that this was only the first stage of a planned restoration.

On August 22, the Solanus Center announced that their chapel will be closed until approximately December 1, 2018 for major reconstruction. “The renovations of the chapel will be historically inspired from the time Bl. Solanus was the porter of the monastery.” Encouraging words.

It’s worth reminding our readers that other branches of the Capuchins are rediscovering tradition. For example, the Capuchin-run National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi in San Francisco has become a regular site for Holy Masses in the Extraordinary Form, including one from our own Prayer Pilgrimages Bus Tour in 2017.

Cathedral Choir Academy of Detroit

A promising new initiative has been announced that is a first for metro Detroit: A new diocesan children’s choir to be based at Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, to be called the Cathedral Choir Academy of Detroit. It will be led by Susan Lindquist, formerly the children’s choir director at Our Lady of Good Counsel Parish in Plymouth, Michigan. From the Archdiocese’s announcement:

“The mission of Cathedral Choir Academy of Detroit is to provide an experience in which choristers encounter Christ through sacred music, grow in faith aspiring to musical excellence, and give witness to the Word Incarnate.

In residence at the Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Detroit, The Cathedral Choir Academy serves both urban and suburban youth of all faiths, grades 3 – 9. Committed to the belief that all children can learn to sing well, the program welcomes everyone.

With the primary goal of leading the sung worship at Mass, the program will foster a deeper understanding and appreciation of sacred music and its function in Catholic worship. Repertoire is inclusive of all styles and periods. With the implementation of a Kodaly curriculum, choristers will develop their vocal potential and learn to read and write music fluently. Striving for musical excellence and artistry in performance, the choirs also sing in concert throughout the Archdiocese of Detroit.

Invited into affiliation with the Sistine Chapel Choir, the Cathedral Choir Academy of Detroit is a comprehensive after school choral music program offering two levels of instruction; the Cathedral Descant Choir and the Cathedral Children’s Choir. The Cathedral Descant Choir (CDC) is a training choir through which choristers learn the basic skills of choir membership and choral ensemble singing. No audition is required for the CDC.

The Cathedral Children’s Choir (CCC) is a treble ensemble striving for the highest level of artistry in performance and musicianship. While continuing to develop their vocal potential, choristers will learn more advanced music reading skills and sing two and three part treble music.”

It is unclear how traditional the repertoire of this choir is intended to be. Globally, the trend is for children’s choirs to learn Gregorian Chant and the more popular Latin pieces. More information is available at: http://cathedral.aod.org/music/choirs/cathedral-choir-academy-of-detroit/

Tridentine Masses This Coming Week

• Tue. 09/04 7:00 PM: High Requiem Mass at Holy Name of Mary, Windsor (Daily Mass for the Dead)
• Fri. 09/07 7:00 PM: High Mass at Old St. Mary’s (Votive Mass for the Unity of the Church) – Celebrant: Fr. Joe Tuskiewicz. The St. Benedict Choir will sing Missa Brevis by Palestrina. Reception after Mass.
• Sat. 09/08 8:30 AM: Low Mass at Miles Christi (Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary)
• Sat. 09/08 9:00 AM: High Mass at Orchard Lake Seminary Shrine Chapel (Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary) – Celebrant: Fr. Louis Madey – Note different Mass time vs. earlier announcement
• Sun. 09/09: No Mass at OCLMA/Academy of the Sacred Heart

[Comments? Please e-mail tridnews@detroitlatinmass.org. Previous columns are available at http://www.detroitlatinmass.org. This edition of Tridentine Community News, with minor editions, is from the St. Albertus (Detroit), Academy of the Sacred Heart (Bloomfield Hills), and St. Alphonsus and Holy Name of Mary Churches (Windsor) bulletin inserts for September 2, 2018. Hat tip to Alex Begin, author of the column.]

Montesquieu: "The Catholic religion will destroy the Protestant religion and then the Catholics will become Protestants."

Fr. Eduard Perrone, "A Pastor's Descant" (Assumption Grotto News, May 27, 2018):

Many, Many years back, I would say in the 1970s, I read something that so shocked me that I never forgot it, and from time to time would quote it in my teaching. Admitting the possibility of the memory's paraphrasing it a bit, it asserted: 'Protestantism has within it the germ of its own destruction. But by the time it destroys itself Catholicism will have become Protestant.' I wish I had noted who said that but I had not -- a fact I greatly regretted. The statement The statement shook me greatly as I had been -- even way back then -- witnessing both the disintegration of Protestantism and the temporizing of much of the religion in which I had been reared. I knew then, and I still affirm that the Catholic Church cannot ever be extinguished. Yet there is no divine guarantee that the true faith will be preserved intact everywhere until time's end. The prophecy of doom contained in that forbidding dictum may not have been entirely accurate but it contained a truth that experience could not deny Something was going wrong with the Catholic Church.

During the past week I was overjoyed after so many years, to have alighted upon that quotation once again, at least substantially. It reads somewhat variously fro the form preserved in my memory but conveys essentially its core. "The Catholic religion will destroy the Protestant religion, and then the Catholics will become Protestants." The source cited is the (Baron de) Montesquieu in a work of his titled, Spirit of the Laws (1748-50). This writing was condemned by the Church and put on her Index of Forbidden Books, yet it proved to be very influential in forming American political theory.

My purpose here is not to advance the writings of this or any other philosopher but to refer to Montesquieu's frightening prediction as an impetus for us to remain solidly grounded in the true Catholic faith which admits of no compromise with error. The Author of the Church and of her doctrines is none other than the Son of God, He who can neither deceive nor be deceived. And where this bears particular relevance is in the affirmation of profession of the Creed.

There's a corrosive tendency in our anti-intellectual times to denigrate creedal formulas (by which I mean here the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds as the prime examples). A vaguely formulated biblical creed (essentially a protestant postulate) is admired as presented as the ideal, for it shrinks from making apodictic [indisputably certain] affirmations of belief. In order to bring down the whole edifice of the Catholic Church, one need not begin at the periphery, dismantling brick by brick, but only to dislodge its foundation of stones. Such are the articles of faith enshrined in the various Creeds of the Catholic Church, first and foremost being those articles that refer to God Himself. "I believe in one God" is not an idle opening statement having little or no bearing on what follows. It is rather that without which nothing else can be asserted as true. From the "unity" of God (that is, the one God) follows the trinity of God (His threeness), and from there all the rest: the incarnation, redemption, the Church, the scaraments, grace, eternal life.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the liturgically ideal day for the priest to assert and explain to the people the foundational beliefs of the Church in the whole truth about God. That most parish priests will probably avoid delivering a dogmatic sermon for this day is as sure as the aforementioned dire prediction of Montesquieu, for many priests lead their charges away from that indispensable doctrine which alone identifies them as Catholics. An amorphous belief in Jesus, or in "the bible" is regarded as all-sufficient, even though nothing can be therein asserted as positively binding beyond barebones statements. It is this minimalism, this reductionism which is uprooting the Catholic religion from the minds of men and leaving them, at best, as Protestants.

Today when you stand up to sing or recite the Credo (Creed), do it with confidence and with an awareness of being a faithful witness to the whole edifice of that Catholic truth in which you have been baptized as Christians. It is, may I say, your moment of glory, of greatness. And, while I'm at it, I'd like to propose thatyou revive the age-old Catholic devotional practice of reciting the Creed with your daily morning prayers. Such starts the day off with that solid affirmation of truth that will steady the course of the rest of your day.

"This is our faith: it is the faith of the Church. We are proud to profess it in Christ Jesus our Lord" (from the Rite of Baptism).

Fr. Perrone

An important footnote: Next Sunday is Corpus Christi Sunday (either a replication, in the Tridentine calendar, or a transfer in the new calendar), a feast which more properly belongs to this Thursday. The Latin Tridentine Mass net Sunday will not be at the 9:30 but at noon where it will be followed by the Eucharistic Procession, that splendid demonstration of Catholic belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Our fearsome ushers will be at the ready to offer you, for a nominal price, a light lunch after the Procession (weather permitting).

Translation project completed: Book to be published

H. G. Stoker, Conscience: Phenomena and Theories, translated by Philip E. Blosser (University of Notre Dame Press, March, 2018)

I have been waiting long to see this project to completion -- a translation of a book by H. G. Stoker, possibly the most exhaustive study of conscience in any language -- and from a perspective informed by phenomenology and the traditions of Christianity. It's more expensive than I would like, but it's not overly technical and should interest a wide audience -- anyone interested in conscience, its psychology, religious and moral significance, how it 'works,' historical theories about it (from ancient Greece, through Medieval thinkers to the likes of Kant, Nietzsche, Cardinal Newman, and F.J.J. Buytendijk), terms used for it in multiple languages, it's development, reliability, and whether it is primarily intellectual, intuitive, volitional, or emotional. The book will go on sale the end of March.

For more details, see the promo page over at the University of Notre Dame Press (Here)

Conscience: Phenomena and Theories was first published in German in 1925 as a dissertation by Hendrik G. Stoker under the title Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien. It was received with acclaim by philosophers at the time, including Stoker’s dissertation mentor Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Spielberg, as quite possibly the single most comprehensive philosophical treatment of conscience and as a major contribution in the phenomenological tradition.

When an Oxford Don goes rogue and comes out in support of traditional marriage and family values

I understand Oxford Don Richard Swinburne created quite a stir when he addressed the Midwest meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers last fall. "The difficulty," according to The Editors of First Things, was that in the course of exploring these topics, Swinburne characterized homosexuality as a “disability” and a condition that, while sometimes “to a considerable extent reversible,” in many instances is “incurable,” given the present state of medical research.

The Editors continue:

Given the current state of public life and the stringency of academic moral codes in favor of diversity and tolerance, it will be no surprise to our readers that the president of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Michael Rea, subsequently expressed his “regret regarding the hurt caused by” Swinburne’s paper, suggesting that Swinburne’s ideas were inconsistent with the Society’s “values of diversity and inclusion.”

Rea’s message has triggered a reaction on the other side. So far the situation has been commented on by Joseph Shaw, Edward Feser, and Rod Dreher, along with eighty-seven philosophers who signed a letter of protest against the principles implied in Rea’s apology. We at First Things were curious about the paper that prompted all the to-do, and so we asked Professor Swinburne whether he would be willing to let us make his paper available. He has generously agreed.

You can read it here [PDF download].

Here is a video of Swinburne's live presentation:

Principles of Catholic moral & political reasoning

Boniface, "Guest Post: Critiquing the 'Non-Negotiable' Distinction" (Unam Sanctam Catholicam, October 28, 2016) - a look at an assortment of voting positions and the reasoning behind them from a doctrinally-informed Catholic position.

Liturgy and Beauty: An Essay

Note: What follows is an essay based on a presentation I delivered recently to the Oakland County Latin Mass Association at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield Hills, MI, on October 16, 2016. It is posted here temporarily at the request of some in the audience and for the benefit of anyone else interested in the presentation who could not attend it. The material in it is drawn from research done for a course in aesthetics I used to teach at Lenoir-Rhyne University in North Carolina, and is distilled here, often with little more than a passing suggestion as to how to 'connect the dots' mentioned; but hopefully it will be sufficiently accessible to tickle the reader's fancy and suggest some fruitful ways of thinking about things like liturgy and beauty.

Liturgy and Beauty
(©All rights reserved)

by Philip Blosser
C. S. Lewis somewhere distinguishes two different attitudes we may entertain while assisting at liturgy: that of the reverent participant, and that of the detached critic. An attitude of reverence typically allows us to be drawn spontaneously into liturgical worship without undue distraction. The attitude of the critic, however, interferes with worshiping God. The critic is seriously hindered from even finding God at Mass.

The German Catholic author and critic, Martin Mosebach, laments that the jarring liturgical innovations of recent decades have been largely responsible for provoking this kind of a critical attitude among the faithful. Today, he says, we ask questions like:

What is absolutely indispensable for genuine liturgy? When are the celebrant’s whims tolerable, and when do they become unacceptable? We have got used to accepting the liturgy on the basis of minimum requirements, whereas the criteria ought to be maximal. And finally, we have started to evaluate liturgy – a monstrous act! We sit in the pews and ask ourselves, was that Holy Mass, or wasn’t it? I go to church to see God and come away like a theatre critic.¹

One of the most significant factors behind these unfortunate developments, I would argue, is the loss of what I would call ‘liturgical fittingness” – a fittingness, or aptness, or harmony between the external forms of liturgy and the act of worship these forms are meant to express – a fittingness between the art, architecture, vestments, postures, gestures, and actions involved in the liturgy, on the one hand, and the attitudes of reverence, honor, majesty, and adoration due to God as our sovereign Creator and Savior, on the other. Further, I contend, such fittingness is at the heart of what we traditionally call beauty.

Beauty…. What is ‘beauty’? Building on centuries of earlier reflection on the subject, St. Thomas Aquinas answers this question by first observing that beauty is that which pleases upon being seen (id quod visum placet). Certainly that sounds right. Beauty delights us. It enthralls us. It can elevate our souls and fill us with ineffable longing for that which is eternal.

But if this were all that could be said about beauty, we would have a problem. For, if beauty were no more than that which pleases us, it would be purely subjective. It would amount to saying that what makes something beautiful is the fact that we happen to like it. Certainly there are many who would agree with this view. We see it the philistine relativist who says: “Different strokes for different folks.” But relativism about beauty seems to have been an ingrained prejudice even before the advent of postmodern relativism. For example, we find this view affirmed in the old adage, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Or in the maxim De gustibus non est disputandum (“There is no disputing about taste”).

But if this were true, it would mean that we couldn’t dispute matters of taste and beauty, which is clearly not true. It would mean that fans of the “recent liturgical unpleasantness” of the last half-century were beyond criticism in their preferences. It would mean, for example, that they couldn’t be criticized for claiming that Marty Haugen’s hymns (I use the term loosely) are every bit as ‘beautiful’ as Palestrina’s motets, simply because they happen to like Marty Haugen’s wares, just as some philistines prefer Twinkies or Hostess Cupcakes to fine French or Italian cuisine. (A good book on recent Catholic hymnody is Thomas Day's Why Catholics Can't Sing: Catholic Culture and the Triumph of Bad Taste [New York: Crossroad, 1990].)

But thankfully St. Thomas doesn’t stop here. He goes on to say that beauty is characterized by three more properties: (1) Integritas – by which he means integrity, wholeness, completeness, perfection, or what we’ll call unity; (2) Claritas – by which he means clarity, splendor, brilliance, radiance, or what we’ll call brightness; and (3) Consonantia – by which he means a certain consonance, harmony, an apt fitting together, or what we’ll call fittingness. (By ‘fittingness’ here we mean not only the harmony between the parts of a work of art, but also the harmony between the work of art and the values it seeks to express, or, in the case of liturgy, the values appropriate to the worship of God.)

Now what is remarkable about these last three characteristics of beauty is that, unlike the first one mentioned by St. Thomas – namely, that which pleases us, or that which we just happen to like – these last three characteristics are objective. They are properties of the object we’re talking about, rather than of our subjective responses. This is what allows us to say that just as truth is the proper object of right knowing, and good is the proper object of right willing, so beauty is the proper object of right admiration. Knowing the truth assumes that we are able to distinguish between reality and illusion, like the difference between what really happened in the Spanish Inquisition and the revisionist falsehoods attributed to it in popular mythology. Willing the good assumes that we are able to distinguish between real and merely apparent goods, like the difference between growing in virtue and growing in popularity. Admiring the beautiful assumes that we are able to distinguish between what deserves to be called beautiful, like Michelangelo’s Pieta, and what doesn’t but merely happens to please us, like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans.

But how can we know what should be judged beautiful and what shouldn’t? St. Thomas already points us toward the answer by listing three objective characteristics that all beautiful things have: unity, brightness, and fittingness. These suggest that our judgments about beauty needn’t be arbitrary, but can be based on objective qualities that a work of art or music or liturgy may have.

Take fittingness. One of the easiest ways of understanding how fittingness works is through metaphor and simile. “My face was red as a beet.” “He had a voice like a foghorn.” “He has guts.” “This is a ticklish problem.” “This is a dark day in American politics.” “The hours dragged on.” “I felt like a dishrag after that.” “His face clouded over.” “She was wearing a loud perfume.” “Harod is a fox.”

The point of interest here is how our meaning spans the gulf between Harod and the fox, for example. Literally it isn’t true that Harod is a fox. Harod is a person. But figuratively we know what the metaphor means, because Harod is sly and cunning like a fox. So the equation is apt. It fits. It is fitting. The way we see this isn’t through intellectual analysis but through imaginative synthesis. We intuitively grasp the fittingness of the putting these two things together.

We also can illustrate fittingness by matching various nursery rhymes with different ways of walking: For example, “Fee, fi, fo fum” goes together with stomping like a heavy-footed giant, whereas “Hi diddle diddle” goes together with light-footed leaping or prancing. We see the same principle in how we call orange a ‘warm’ color or blue a ‘cool’ color; or in the study that showed that most people associate Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the color purple or burgundy, but almost never with yellow or green;² or in the remarkable phenomenon synesthesia, first noted by Goethe in the 19th century, who noted that music sometimes produced various color impressions in certain people;³ or the fact that tones a seventh apart are almost always associated with restlessness, while tones an octave apart are associated with rest or tranquility.

In one experiment, people were asked to list corresponding terms under the paired terms ‘ping’ and ‘pong’, and the vast majority came up with the following correlations: light/heavy, small/large; ice cream/warm pea soup; pretty girl/matron; trumpet sound/cello sound; Mozart’s music/Beethoven’s music; Matisse’s paintings/Rembrandt’s paintings.⁴ Likewise, when asked to compare two lines, one sharp and jagged with another soft and undulating, the terms most often correlated with this lines were ‘restlessness’ and ‘tranquility.’

So what’s going on here? First, to test whether such judgments of ‘fittingness’ are arbitrary or culturally relative, a researcher named C.E. Osgood in the 1960s administered tests to English-speaking Americans, Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, Navajos, and Japanese subjects. He found approximately 90% agreement on comparisons that were considered ‘fitting.’⁵ Furthermore, there’s plenty of evidence to show that joy and hope are almost universally associated with short upward sloping lines, bright colors, and the major key in music, while sadness and despair are associated with long downward sloping lines, dark shades of gray and black, the minor key in music.

Second, a puzzling feature about such comparisons is what serves as the standard of comparison. For example, when we compare two athletes to see which can run the fastest, no question arises as to the commons standard of comparison, which is obviously speed. But when we ask why most people say that loud is more like large than it is like small, what is the standard of comparison? They’re comparing a sound with a size; and they’re saying one kind of sound is more like (or more fittingly expresses) one size than another. How strange! But what Osgood’s study shows is that several relevant factors emerge, such as potency and activity. Loud is more like large than small with respect to potency; whereas fast is more like hot than cold, and a jagged line is more like restlessness than tranquility, with respect to activity.⁶

What does this tell us? First of all, it tells us that judgments about beauty can have an objective basis. They can be based on qualities that are found in works of art, music, architecture, liturgy, and so on. In other words, such judgments don’t have to be simply arbitrary. They can reference certain characteristics like unity, brightness, and fittingness found in such works of art.

Second, this also tells us that there are certain objective characteristics in a liturgy that make it beautiful because they are fitting with respect to such qualities as reverence, holiness, majesty, and awe. Church architecture that is fitting to such qualities will exhibit characteristics of permanence, unity and verticality, as Michael Rose has shown.⁷ Vestments, postures, gestures, and actions will likewise fittingly reflect these qualities. It’s true that soldiers in the field may celebrate Mass with muddied boots in the jungles of Vietnam or in the sand-swept wastes of Afghanistan with nothing more than the hood of a jeep to serve as an altar. But even there, they attempt to salvage whatever bits of beauty and dignity they can: a white altar cloth is laid; the soldiers kneel, etc. The exception thus proves the rule: what is most apt and most fitting for divine worship is clean shoes, clean vestments, and a church with a high altar and incense and a vaulted ceiling that bespeaks transcendence and awe. What is never fitting at Mass is comportment, dress, postures, gestures, music and ambience that bespeak the carefree nonchalance of a beach party. In the presence of our Lord and Savior, our Creator and our King, what is called for is a studied solemnity, reserve, decorum, and postures, gestures, music and ambience befitting transcendence, awe, reverence and honor.

Once I was at St. Josephat for a Monday evening low Mass nearly a decade ago, and there I noticed that one thing I really like about the extraordinary form is that nothing in it distracts us from the focus of the liturgy upon our Lord. On the contrary, everything – each part of the liturgy, every carefully-prescribed gesture of the servers and priest, their ad orientem disposition, their attentiveness and reverence toward the altar and the Tabernacle and crucifix at its center, and even the silence – seem to conspire to draw our attention toward the Lord. Not one gesture by priest or servers draws attention to itself, saying "Here, look at me!" but rather draws attention to what is going on at the altar in this great mystery of Redemption. Even the long reverent silences of the Canon, far from reducing us to passive spectators, conduces to concentrate our attentiveness to what is transpiring, and so to promote – in the truest sense – our active participation in the liturgy. Here is fittingness. Here is beauty, ever ancient, ever new.

Notes:

1. Martin Mosebach, The Heresy of Formlessness (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), p. 25. [back]
2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), p. 97. [back]
3. Lawrence E. Marks, “On Colored-Hearing Synesthesia: Cross-modal Translation of Sensory Dimensions,” Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 83, No. 3 (1975), pp. 303-331; Theodore F. Karwoski and H.S. Ogbert, “Color Music” in Psychological Monographs, Vol. 50 (1938), pp. 1-60; M. Collins, “a Case of Synesthesia,” in Journal of General Psychology, Vol. 2 (1929), pp. 12-27; Lorrin A. Riggs and Theodore Karwoski, “Synesthesia,” in British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 25 (1934), pp. 29-41. [back]
4. Ernst H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), pp. 370-371. My list of terms is taken from the modified schematic based on Gombrich offered by Wolterstorff, Art in Action, p. 97. [back]
5. “Cross-Cultural Generality of Visual-Verbal Synesthetic Tendencies,” in J.G. Snider and C.E. Osgood, eds, Semantic Differential Technique (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), pp. 561-584. [back]
6. C.E. Osgood, “Generality of Affective Meaning Systems” in American Psychology, 17 (1962), pp. 19-21; but cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action, pp. 108-110, for a critique of Osgood’s psychologistic attempt to explain these patterns, not as direct similarities among the various qualities of reality, but as similarities of affective responses to those qualities. [back]
7. Michael Rose, “The Three Natural Laws of Catholic Church Architecture,” New Oxford Review (September 2009), pp. 28-34; cf. Michael Rose, Ugly as Sin: Why They Changed Our Churches from Sacred Places to Meeting Spaces and How We can Change Them Back Again (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2001). [back]

The Binding force of Tradition ~ Fr Ripperger

Advisory: This is a substantial lecture with considerable philosophical & theological detail:


[Hat tip to J.E.]

Francis Schaeffer listened to Pink Floyd? Timothy Leary, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards read or studied with him??

A terrific article in many, many ways. Please do yourself a favor if you are the least bit interested in Christian intellectual culture, and read Jake Meador's "Francis Schaeffer and Christian Intellectualism" (Mere Orthodoxy, August 18, 2016).

The piece sets the stage by tolling the death knell of public Christian intellectual culture round about 1960. Like this:

In his recent essay on Christian intellectualism, Alan Jacobs dates the high point of the public Christian intellectual in America as being in the late 1940s. Citing the influence of thinkers like CS Lewis, WH Auden, and Reinhold Niebuhr, Jacobs argues that the movement began to fade in the 1950s and, by the 1960s, was largely a spent force. By that time Lewis, Auden, and Niebuhr were no longer as relevant in contemporary debates and the next generation had not yet emerged. By the time that generation of leaders did, Jacobs argues, the culture had moved past them and they had become more conversant in the intramural discussions happening in conservative religious circles rather than the broader cultural conversation.

... In dating the decline of the Christian intellectual, Jacobs cites, amongst other things, the evidence offered by major media coverage of prominent public Christians. He notes that both Lewis and Niebuhr made the cover of Time in the late 1940s with Lewis appearing on it in 1947 and Niebuhr doing the same in 1948. What’s funny about this is that Francis Schaeffer, who has been hailed by some as Lewis’s only equal amongst orthodox Christian apologists in the 20th century, also makes a prominent appearance in Time ... but in 1960....

Time‘s description of Schaeffer, however, tells us something about how things had changed during the 12 years between Niebuhr’s cover and Schaeffer’s. In 1960, Time presents Schaeffer as a missionary to the intellectuals, which he no doubt was. But this assumes that Christianity needs missionaries to the intellectuals because the intellectuals are no longer Christian. What had been conflict within the intellectual community 13 years before when they reported on CS Lewis has become an attempt to witness to the intellectual community by 1960. This suggests, in one sense, that Jacobs is right—the Christian public intellectual is dead by 1960, which is why Schaeffer was needed.

But it also raises a separate question: If that intellectual is dead, why is Schaeffer being covered by Time in the first place?Further, why does he have well-known figures from the various counter-cultures as well as popular icons of the era beating down his door to study with him at L’Abri? Timothy Leary, Eric Clapton, and Keith Richards are just three examples of prominent 1960s figures who read or studied with Schaeffer. There are others....

Read more >>

[Hat tip to JM]

Huzzah! Shattered glass!

One brick through the pane glass window of established scientific wisdom ...

Dwight Garner, "Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Kingdom of Speech’ Takes Aim at Darwin and Chomsky" (New York Times, August 30, 2016)

... and another brick though the stained glass window of much of the ruling class of the Catholic Church ...

Edited by Daniel M. Clough, Genesis According to the Saints (Loretto Publications, 2016).

Brilliant!

[Hat tip to JM]

"The Language of Love in Qur'ān and Gospel"

Gordon Nickel, "The Language of Love in Qur'ān and Gospel" (Academia) - thorough, scholarly, helpful:

"This study [demonstrates] that there are indeed significant differences between the materials on love in the Qur'ān and Gospel, both in language and theology. It is not simply a matter of different meanings being expressed by the scriptural terminology of love in New Testament Greek and Qur'ānic Arabic. Rather, the difference extends to the characterization of relationships which are envisioned to exist among God and people."

[Hat tip to E.E.]

The Natural Laws of Sex

What 'social justice' is and isn't

Writing about social justice on his website, The Underground Thomist, J. Budziszewski says:

It is a trifle for the upper strata to promote sexual liberation; those who have money can shield themselves (to degree, and for a while) from at least some of the consequences of loose sexuality. The working classes do not have that luxury. In a country like this one, serial cohabitation and childbearing outside of marriage contribute more to poverty, dependency, and inequality than a million greedy capitalists do.

Do you to really want to raise up the poor? Then do as the English Methodists did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: First live the Commandments. Then go among the people and preach them. Start with the ones about marriage and family.

I do not say this is all you should do, but if you won’t even do so much as this, then the rest of your social justice talk is hypocritical. You may as well admit that it is all about you.

R.R. Reno chimes in on the same theme in his "While We're At It" department of the June/July issue of First Things, where he writes:

The mention of social justice reminds me again of the wise observation Michael Novak made during a talk about his new book, Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is, coauthored with Paul Adams. Justice is a virtue, not a state of affairs, and therefore social justice is a habit of pursuing justice in ways that are "social." It's a commitment to involve others in political engagement and problem-solving. A leader committed to social justice does with rather than doing for.

Fr. Z's calculation of the world's creation off by approx. 123 million years

In a recent post, entitled "Happy Birthday Universe!" (Fr. Z's Blog, April 27, 2016), Fr. Z writes:

On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe [was] created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler ....

He goes on to relate a great many fascinating details about the life and times of Kepler, including the fact that he is sometimes considered the founder of modern science. In his concluding sentence, however, Fr. Z writes:

As for Kepler’s calculation about the universe’s birthday, scientists in the 20th century developed the Big Bang theory, which showed that his calculations were off by about 13.7 billion years.

Now please forgive me, but I take a fiendish delight in responding to such statistics by pointing out glaring errors when I find them. In his case, as any astro-physicist worth his salt knows, the figure cited above is off by a little over 100 million years. The exact figure can be inferred from the epiriometrics of the brilliant research scientist, A.D. Sokal, in his landmark essay, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" (1995), from which we can conclusively show that Fr. Z's figure is off by 123,857,487 years. The critical calculation is:


In light of which we are compelled to conclude that the Big Bang (and, omnia sint paribus, the creation of the world) occurred approximately 13.8 billion years ago, not 13.7 billion -- or, to be exact, 13,823,857,487 years ago at precisely 3:26 in the afternoon, Eastern Standard Time (anachronistically assuming Greenwich Mean Time existed then). I believe it was raining that afternoon.

In the interests of fair disclosure, my 'fiendish delight' in pointing out such errors stems from my studied skepticism regarding the philosophical conclusions inferred by scientists from their empiriometric and empirioschematic calculations, which are often presumptively taken for reality itself, as amply demonstrated by the physicist Anthony Rizzi in his book, The Science Before Science: A Guide to Thinking in the 21st Century, and by the Gifford Lecturer and Templeton Prize winning physicist, Stanley Jaki, in Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth. My skepticism also extends to the metaphysical claims either stated or implied in "The Grand Evolutionary Story" reiterated ad nauseam by contemporary textbooks of biology, parts of which Alvin Plantinga famously called "pure arrogant bluster."

So thank you, Fr. Z, for allowing me at your expense to skewer a bit of contemporary 'scientific bluster' with a bit of playful bluster of my own. I suppose you could claim that you covered yourself by the insertion of the cautionary term 'about' since 13.8 billion is 'about' 13.7 billion; and that might be true. Then again, would we really have any conclusive way of knowing whether we weren't off by 6-11 billion years, give or take a few hundred million? Or we could just take Stephen Hawking's word for it that it all happened "about 15 billion years ago."

THE RISE & FALL OF THE THOMISTIC RENEWAL

The New Oxford Review just published an excellent two-part article by D.Q. McInerny, professor of philosophy at Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary in Denton, Nebraska.  For anyone interested, both parts are published with the permission of the publisher on my other blog, Philosophia Perennis:

1. THE RISE & FALL OF THE THOMISTIC RENEWAL — PART I: "The Revivification of Sound Christian Philosophy" (July 7, 2015)
2. THE RISE & FALL OF THE THOMISTIC RENEWAL — PART II: "A Revival Cut Short" (July 7, 2015)

Canonist Peters on the fatal flaw in Scalia's dissent

Edward Peters, "Antonin Scalia as the measure of how far we have to go" (In the Light of the Law, June 29, 2015):

But here’s the problem: Scalia’s dissenting opinion, while correctly arguing that Congress, and not the Courts, is the law-making branch of government in America, opens with this line: “The law can recognize as marriage whatever sexual attachments and living arrangements it wishes … It is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage.”

While Scalia's dissent is brilliant in many ways, but while his personal sentiments are clearly Catholic, his legal reasoning displays the fatal flaw juridical positivism. What does this mean? In a nutshell, it means that law has no basis other than what is posited by human legislation. In other words, the basis of human law in natural law is no longer assumed.

Let me illustrate using an example from C.S. Lewis:

EVERY ONE HAS HEARD people quarreling. Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important from listening to the kinds of things they say. They say things like this: "How’d you like it if anyone did the same to you?"--‘That’s my seat, I was there first"--"Leave him alone, he isn’t doing you any harm"--"Why should you shove in first?"--"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"--"Come on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.

Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of orange, or that some thing has turned up which lets him off keeping his promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behavior or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarreling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about the rules of football.

This is about the most concise illustration and explanation of natural law I can think of. The only justice of the Supreme Court who still shows any evidence of adhering to natural law as a foundation for human law is Clarence Thomas. (Interestingly, Joe Biden opposed Robert Bork's nomination to the SCOTUS because he DIDN'T believe in natural law, then opposed Clarence Thomas' nomination because he DID believe in it, which tells us something about the character of Catholic politicians these days.)

The very best introduction to the contemporary crisis in jurisprudence is Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition,which ought to serve our times as the equivalent of William Blanckstone's Commentaries on the Law of England for his time.

Related: Ann Barnhardt, "On Scalia’s Dissent" (Judica me, June 26, 2015).

Cornelio Fabro (1911 – 1995)

Cornelio Fabro: Philosopher of Esse and of Freedom

Cornelio Fabro (1911 – 1995) is among the most important philosophers of the 20th century because of his studies of the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas and for his vast knowledge of modern philosophy and classical Christian realism from the perspective of Kierkegaard's metaphysical existentialism.

The goal of the Cornelio Fabro Cultural Project is to place the entire intellectual production of this Italian philosopher at the disposition of all, in both printed and digital form, including audio, video, and texts. The Complete Works will be translated into English and Spanish, and the most important volumes into other languages as well.


"The birth of freedom has been the only and essential task, the intensive point of my
journey which is still in motion, because the life of the spirit does not allow breaks... Truth,
therefore, in freedom, and freedom for the truth." C.F.[Hat tip to Prof. Mark Latkovic]

Easter Reflection: Were the Apostles Deceived? ... Deceivers?

Let's come clean with the alternatives: Blaise Pascal writes in his Pensees, No. 322,

The Apostles were either deceived or deceivers. Either supposition is difficult, for it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the dead.

While Jesus was with them he could sustain them, but afterwards, if he did not appear to them, who did make them act?

Former Notre Dame Philosophy Professor, Thomas V. Morris comments, in his book, Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life (Eerdmans):

If what the apostles reported about Jesus was false, then either they believed it and so were themselves deceived or they knew it was false and so were just deceivers. How plausible is either of these alternatives?

First, consider the claim that the followers of Jesus were themselves deceived, wrongly believing in his miracles and resurrection when no such things had ever actually happened. On this supposition they were themselves just mistaken. But there is something interesting about the concept of a mistake. I can be walking down the street and think I see an old friend approaching but on getting closer realize that I have made a mistake. I can mistakenly believe that today is Saturday when it's Friday. I can make some pretty big mistakes. We call can. But a mistake can only be so big. I cannot mistakenly think I see exactly 419 pink and purple elephants outside my office window, suspended in mid-air. I can't mistakenly think I have twelve arms.

Consider the claim that dismisses the literal interpretation of the resurrection, substituting for it the fuzzy intellectual abstraction that would have us believe that in one sense, a spiritual sense (or in a sense in which we can admit of a spiritually transformed body), Christ is risen, but in another sense Jesus' bones may still be moldering in some Palestinian grave. This is the sort of interpretation that is embraced by urbane contemporary sophisticates who would find the simple notion that Jesus could have arisen, bones and all, from the grave, as impossible to believe as that one sees exactly 419 pink and purple elephants outside his window, or that he has twelve arms. The point, however, is that the biblical Resurrection, like the Cross of Christ, is something scandalous -- something unbelievable in ordinary terms. One can't just mistakenly believe something like that. Morris continues:

The apostles reported detailed encounters with the risen Christ sometime after his death and burial. Would it have made much sense for loved ones to respond to such reports by saying, "Calm down, dear. It was just your imagination"? Pascal says that it is not possible to imagine that a man has risen from the dead. That's too extreme to be a mistake. And there were no cultural expectations in first-century Judaism that a single man might be raised from the grave by God into a new, yet recognizable, form of life. Hallucination is not plausible. Repeated, convergent mass hallucinations are even less plausible, much less plausible. Pascal finds this suggestion absolutely incredible, strictly speaking.

So what of the other possibility? If the testimony of the apostles is false, and it is utterly implausible to think of all of them as deceived by appearances concerning such extraordinary events, then the other possibility, as Pascal points out, is that they never believed for a minute these stories they told about Jesus but were themselves just deceivers. How credible is this supposition?

In another passage in his Pensees, No. 310, Pascal writes:

Proofs of Jesus Christ. The hypothesis that the Apostles were knaves is quite absurd. Follow it out to the end and imagine these twelve men meeting after Jesus' death and conspiring to say that he had risen from the dead. This means attacking all the powers that be. The human heart is singularly susceptible to fickleness, to change, to promises, to bribery. One of them had only to deny his story under these inducements, or still more because of possible imprisonment, tortures and death, and they would all have been lost. Follow that out.

Morris comments:

Lying is hard work. When you tell a lie, you don't have reality to back you up. When you tell a lot of lies, one building on the next, you get yourself in an even worse fix. Such deceit requires extraordinary powers of memory as well as imagination. Most of us have a hard enough time remembering things that have actually happened. And when we forget, we can usually rely upon the fact that the truth leaves traces of itself behind -- footprints, documents, memory impressions in other people's minds. But when we concoct an alternate reality, a history contrary to what really has happened, we have only our own memories to rely on concerning what we said happened.

A conspiracy of lies is even more fragile. This is from the beginning an exceedingly odd sort of agreement - a number of different people get together, concoct a story, and agree to lie about it, each promising not to break and tell the truth. It is crucial to their agreement that they're all liars, but how in the world can you trust liars to keep their end of an agreement? Any supposition that the apostles of Christ met after his death and entered into this sort of agreement is especially hard to swallow. Here a number of ordinary men from walks of life in which the truth mattered, who had just spent an extended period of time with a charismatic leader whom most non-Christians recognize as one of the greatest moral teachers in history, are supposed to have met together after the death of their leader and, to further his work, agreed to tell outrageous lies about him? This is just too bizarre. And worse, Pascal points out, from these lies they would have had little to gain and much to lose, as circumstances developed. Only one of them need have cracked and the whole conspiracy would have unraveled. And each of them, knowing that each of the others was lying against the grain of his own personality, would surely have suspected that one of the others would crack, and so would have been all the more prepared himself to tell the truth and cut his losses, distancing himself from the others in times of increasing pressure and persecution. Further, recall that we are talking about a message that itself emphasized the importance of walking in the truth. The hypothesis that the followers of Christ were just deceivers is just too out of step with everything we know about them, about their circumstances, about their message, and about human psychology.

The citations from Thomas V. Morris's Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life are from pp. 173-176 of that volume. The quotations from Pascal's Pensees are also from Morris's book.

Also highly recommended:

• Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal's Pensees -- Edited, Outlined, and Explained by Peter Kreeft (Ignatius Press)

Roger Scruton & Pergolesi's Stabat Mater

I do not, like Roger Scruton, believe that beauty can substitute for religion, nor is my interest in posting his video due to his thesis about "why beauty matters," although he does make some salient points. Rather, I am posting it because, as I have told my students, his discussion (beginning around 52:40) accompanied by his playing of Giovanni Pergolesi's Stabat Mater on the piano, serves as an engaging introduction to this piece, which is particularly appropriate for Lent. I hope to post a couple of other performances of Pergolesi's piece, which was written just weeks before his death from tuberculosis on March 16, 1736, at the age of 26. Inspirational.

Why Beauty Matters ∇ Roger Scruton BBC from Vue Fine Art & Design on Vimeo.

Principles of Catholic Theology and Careful Readers

Just a brief aerogram today from Guy Noir in Rome, where he was apparently luncheoning with some friends among the papal paparazzi last Saturday. Always the Socratic gadfly, seizing upon every possible means of prodding me and provoking me to THINK, he scrawls out (in a remarkably florid John Handcock-esque hand) the URL to the mighty War Against Being blog of James Larson, and, with the words: "I believe this is depressingly right," refers to the following title and excerpted quote: "The Synod on the Family, Joseph Ratzinger, And the Destruction of the Catholic Mind" (WAB, January 22, 2015):

If that bishop possesses a mind which has fallen prey to the denial of substantiality inherent in Modern Physics, and if he is also an evolutionist: then, despite the fact that the good instincts he has inherited from the past may indeed have led him to vote correctly, he is not at all established in those foundational principles which are necessary for truly “thinking with the Church”. His orthodoxy, his conservativism, in other words, is built on sand, and is eventually bound to crumble – if not in himself personally before his death, then in his spiritual children. He may believe in the indissolubility of marriage, but he has no substantial basis for so believing. He may believe in the concepts of mortal sin and sanctifying grace, but these beliefs fly directly in the face of his being in bed with Science and Evolutionary Theory. He has feet of sand.

To which Noir adds a bit of text in Saxon Runes in mockery of my ignorance of them ...

... which he then "generously" condescends to translate for me as follows:

"... Which explains the ongoing tragedy that we witness unfolding in the well-meaning but impossibly-conflicted papacies of the last six popes. Meanwhile we witness the incredible spectacle of Ignatius Press adding more bricks to its literary memorial to Vatican II.(And I do mean bricks: peruse Fr. De Lubac's Paradoxes or More Paradoxes for confirmation; also note his biggest fan of late is John Milbank)."

Well enough. I never found Milbank rewarding enough to read anyway. I liked de Lubac's The Drama of Atheist Humanism,which shed some interesting new light on Auguste Comte and Ludwig Feuerbach, but I remain in two minds about some of his other work. My head hurts.

[Disclaimer: Rules 7-9]

Interesting conference on Husserl's transcendental turn: "The Great Phenomenological Schism"

Call for papers: "The Great Phenomenological Schism: Reactions to Husserl's Transcendental Idealism" (Philosophia Perennis, February 6, 2015). Venue is Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico City, June 3-6th, 2015. Submission deadline is Feb. 20th.