John Derbyshire Threw Down the Glove (Part I)

John Derbyshire asks for evidence that Jesus Christ was born of the “overshadowing Holy Spirit” and a virgin, as the Christian creed affirms. Not exactly the kind of evidence that Mr. Derbyshire likes best. But evidence is of many types. For instance, there are a very few scientific experiments that I have performed on my own, so that I have personal empirical evidence for them. However, most knowledge in the many fields of science is far beyond my comprehension and personal experience, with the result that I can only “know” through science by way of belief. This belief rests on my trust of the scientific community and its word. Once in a great while, researchers have lied, or their reported findings have not proven to be replicable by others. Much more often, earlier scientific propositions are rejected, to be replaced by better ones as the surrounding scientific field benefits by new discoveries and better methods. In No One Sees God, I limited myself chiefly to the kind of evidence that is available to reason apart from revelation. After all, even Jewish and Christian revelation has as its presupposition that the human reason to which it is addressed has its own integrity and vigor. Questions about the “Mother of God,” however, belong to the special field of “evidences for the truth of the Christian faith.” That is the subject of many, many books, but not of No One Sees God. The task I set for myself there was much more limited and modest.

Since my good friend John (and NRO colleague) has thrown the glove down, however, the only honorable thing for me to do is attempt to meet his challenge. I offer two comments that at least place the claim that Mary is the Mother of God, Jesus Christ, in its proper context. First, the actual account of Mary’s conception comes directly from her, as given in testimony to the physician Luke, a close disciple of the Apostles and the author of one of the four Gospels.

Second, Mary’s account that Jesus is both “born of a woman” and “conceived by the Holy Spirit” powerfully suggest the humility of the Almighty. He was willing to stoop down from His majesty and omnipotence to present Himself to human beings in all the limitations of the human body, psyche, hazards of “this vale of tears,” in short, the whole otherwise insignificant human condition. When I can get back to a computer—I write this from Belmont, North Carolina—I would like to elaborate on these two comments.

Read John Derbyshire's original post here.

Published in National Review Online September 24, 2008

God as Beneficent Father? A reply to Heather Mac Donald

During our hour-long Templeton Conversation at the Harvard Club (September 17), Heather kept coming back to this question: “What is the evidence for your statement that God is a loving, beneficent father?” I do not think I answered her well, so let me try again. There are two lines of reply. One is from reason alone, the other from Jewish and Christian faith. Plato and Aristotle were led to believe that contemplating the Divine is the greatest of all forms of happiness, since in that union of mind with Mind, human minds rest in union with the greatest of all Goods (drawing toward itself all lesser goods), and the most luminous of all Sources of the intelligibility found in all things, and of the intelligences that grasp it.

They argued that the existence of contingent things raises the reflective mind to the Source of all existents: self-subsisting Being, immaterial, unchanging, more like “spirit” and “mind” than like any changeable, material, dependent thing.

They reasoned that the existence of things that can perish implies a sturdier “necessary” form of existence, which persists through the coming and going of contingent, material existents.

Finally, they observed the abundant (not to say overwhelming) beauty of earth and starry sky, sparkling oceans, and flames in the fireplace. They observed the virtue and goodness of some men, even heroic virtue, and great deeds. These observations led them to thoughts of the “immortals” and the endurance of good over evil, of being over nothingness, of beauty over ugliness. To be sure, this is just a tipping of the balance, since evils and tragedies remain superabundant. But enough to give thanks to the Divine, and to see the natural world as, on balance, tipped toward benevolence rather than malice.

Not all women and men of reason agree with the ancients in this way of addressing the problem of evil. Philosophers only rarely agree on important points. For the Greeks (and Romans like Cicero and Seneca), the practical imperative was: Trust human inquiry, human liberty, and the prevalence (or at least the lasting beauty) of nobility of character.

The other way of coming to a conviction of the ultimate “fatherly benevolence” comes from Jewish and Christian faith, not unaided reason. Therefore, it was not the proper focus of No One Sees God. Heather’s question, therefore, asks for a reasoned defense for trusting in the Jewish and Christian God—that is, for placing one’s faith in Him. No fully developed adult should place this trust without giving reasons. For the supposition that the living Source of all things (knowable through reason alone) can address human beings through “revelation”— words—is that human beings are capable of hearing and observing, gaining insight, making judgments about what is true and what is false, and of giving a reasoned account of each step in their journey toward faith.

Yet as I wrote many times in No One Sees God, a reasoned defense of the Christian faith (and in my case specifically Catholic) must await another book. No One Sees God is about the God known by reason alone. It is not about what we learn about God through faith.

Judaism itself offers crucial lessons for all humankind (the Creator of all, who calls all to truthfulness and good will). Christianity adds its own “good news” to what humans know through reason. Both Judaism and Christianity have as their presupposition the divine predilection for addressing humans through “the evidence of their own minds” (Thomas Jefferson).

I have gained the impression through e-mail exchanges with Heather and through our one and only face-to-face conversation, that she might well accept a deist conception of God. What she cannot accept is the Christian conception of a “benevolent father.” Because

Jewish-Christian revelation depends for its reception on the reliability of human intelligence to reach at least a rudimentary knowledge of God, finding a way to this rudimentary knowledge through reason is an important exercise for Jews and Christians. Also, since dialogue is most fruitful when participants are willing to meet each other “where they are,” that ancient form of theism (through reason alone) is what No One Sees God aims for at the moment, a modest and limited goal. But that goal, illuminating the road toward the reality of God as grasped by reason alone, is ambitious enough. In recent generations, it has been largely neglected.

A recent Pew poll of over 30,000 respondents reports that over one-half of agnostics actually believe in such a God (but not the Jewish-Christian God), and one-fifth of all atheists do the same. Many unbelievers, then, join Aristotle and Plato in following the evidence where it takes them: to knowledge of the Source of all that is, was, and imperishably will be.

Published in The Catholic Thing September 23, 2008

Is Notre Dame Back?

South Bend, Ind. — You had to be there. So much rain came down overnight and on into the morning that people were speculating that the Notre Dame/Michigan game on September 13 would have to be cancelled — an unheard-of possibility in football. The fear was the predicted thunderstorms stirred up by the remains of one hurricane’s “tropical storm” residue, in addition to the westerly rains. The sky was unbroken gray and darker for almost two humid days. I kept telling my worried son (who comes north from San Antonio, where he works with USAA the military insurance — and now mortgage — company, along with my two dear grandchildren Emily and Stephen, for one Notre Dame game a year): “Rich, this is Our Lady’s school. At three o’clock, a half hour before game time, the clouds will part, the sun will break through, and a vision of Our Lady will appear, on her diadem in diamonds the words ‘For Life’ and unfurling from her right hand a blue banner announcing ‘ND–My Guys,’ and from her left hand a long mauve banner inscribed in gold: ‘Sarah!’”

Well, most who heard me repeat this thought it cute, but at 2:57 P.M., to be exact, the clouds did part and the sun shone through, while the rain ceased. Everyone saw this, and I said: “Didn’t I tell you?” I think no one else saw Our Lady appear, just as I had said, but in my mind’s eye, I did. Of course, not everyone I made my prediction to was taken with Sarah, only a few were. How could they see the Sarah banner? (Notre Dame’s faculty seems very much a part of the old Left, labor union anti-Republican to the bone, the Left’s version of “social justice” virtually unchallenged.)

As it happened, the storm blew past to the north — over Michigan — for almost two hours, and Notre Dame stadium enjoyed a pleasant afternoon.

Actually, very pleasant.

In the first five minutes, Notre Dame scored three touchdowns — two, I think, in a 1:47 time of possession. Poor Michigan kept fumbling, just as Notre Dame had two years ago. It was 21-0 after five minutes. It sure seemed that Notre Dame was back.

Through the next 55 minutes, though, Notre Dame scored only 14 more points, and Michigan 17. Michigan racked up more yards both on the ground and in the air. To hold an angry and spirited Michigan to 17 points was a pretty good day’s defense for Notre Dame, and after all they really did halt Michigan cold for the last two quarters.

But Notre Dame’s offence still isn’t back yet. There were splendid flashes of brilliance, both in the speed of the wide receivers under long passes, and a couple of exciting breakaway runs under a roar of cheers, “Hughes, Hughes, Hughes!” — which to the unpracticed ear at first sounds like a series of “Boos!”

It was so good to win. To feel that 2007 has been forgotten. Sophomores and freshmen turned in a superlative afternoon.

Michigan State next weekend, with its great ground attack, might well jolt this team back from cloud nine. The good news is that the game is up in Spartan country. Notre Dame usually wins there, Michigan State winning at Notre Dame. The other good news is that these young kids on the new Notre Dame really want to win, and the veterans maybe more so.

I did like the vision of Our Lady I saw, just as three P.M. struck, even if nobody else did.

Published in National Review Online September 15, 2008

Empathizing with Atheists

After all the activity on NRO’s “The Corner” following my September 17 conversation with Heather Mac Donald about atheism and theism, a raft of e-mails came my way, about one-third of them from self-described atheists. These sturdy atheists taught me some things of which I had been insufficiently aware. One said he hated being told by Christians, sometimes standing uninvited at his own door, that his atheism was inadequate, even inferior. Another found the smugness and condescension of believers “insufferable,” and told me I should not have used that word of atheists until I had experienced the “insufferable” Christian version myself.

As it happens, just this morning two kind-looking ladies came to my door, and after wishing me a beautiful day, asked to leave with me a copy of The Watchtower (accepting which would probably place me on a “revisit” list). Several times in the past our home has had similar visits, not always as pleasant as today’s. I tried to be as polite and firm as I could, and give the ladies a smiling “God bless you” as I sent them away.

I can see how this would be annoying to an atheist. It sometimes bothers me. On the other hand, these were two nice women earnestly doing something difficult, in order to show their own inner fire to obey the imperative: “Go and teach all nations.”

These recent e-mails further made me think how difficult it must be to live in a country which is over 80-percent Christian in population, and annoyingly Christian in public life, with a faith sometimes unavoidable even inside one’s own front door.

All of us have met Christians who are in fact smug, condescending, insufferably certain that their own brand of the faith is superior to ours. Not a few tell Catholics that our faith is a corruption that will doom us to hell. We Catholics have also met some of our own faith so narrow-minded that they view us with barely controlled contempt. Some are narrow-minded in a traditionalist way, others in a “progressive” way. Point is, there are internal divisions, too.

But few of us belong to a minority as small as the small sect of atheists.

My informants also try to show me how “insufferable” are references to atheists as a small “sect.” They do not feel theirs is a sect. They think theirs is the “reality-based community.” Several take pains to insist that atheism is not an “opinion,” but a fact. They do not “question” it, they say, because it is just a solid fact. Not a fantasy, like Christian faith or Bugs Bunny.

It appears that they get their idea of what a “fact” is from the following sequence: They observe data discernible to the five senses, and then formulate an insight that unifies these observations in an intelligible way, and then, third, verify the insight against further evidence from the senses. They come to “facts” — real, solid, existential things, not fantasies — through this “verification principle.”

But philosophers have shown that this “verification principle” is not itself empirically verifiable. It needs to be argued for, not merely asserted. Each operation in the process — observe, gain insight, verify — is subject to many meanings, and understood in different ways by different philosophies. My atheist correspondents too easily pass over the epistemological and metaphysical difficulties in their choice of method (or at least in their descriptions of that method).

For instance, proving a negative has long been thought to be, if not impossible, at least unreliable. Necessarily, then, atheism is a belief, not a fact. It may be a belief with (as atheists think) a very high degree of probability, even though we theists judge it to have a low degree of probability. By contrast, agnosticism seems to be a more tenable commitment than atheism. Problem is, in action one must act as if God does not exist (etsi deus non daretur), or as if He does. In action one must make a commitment that one cannot quite make on purely intellectual grounds. It is by our deeds that we show what we most deeply believe.

One implication of this finding, interestingly enough, is that there are many who call themselves believers, whose actions show that their heart is committed elsewhere. Their deeds are out of line with their words. Similarly, there seem to be persons calling themselves atheists whose actions seem more in line with Jewish and Christian (and natural law) norms than their words do. For such reasons, wisdom seems to suggest that final judgment on any one of us is beyond our poor capacities. It is best left to an undeceivable Judge, to Whom our hearts and consciences and intentions are transparent.

Thus, what some atheists present as “fact” is actually a “belief,” a commitment to a certain way of viewing the world. Sometimes (not always) that way is a simple-minded materialism. They will accept as evidence only material things, as detected through the five senses. For them, beyond material things nothing else is real. However, this affirmation of theirs is not a statement subject to empirical test. It is a choice of one procedural rule rather than others.

Thus, some atheists seem to be evading the complexities behind their own narrow beliefs — and don’t want to think about them. They are more comfortable in a world of touch, sight, hearing, taste, scent. To stay solely in that world may be to understand themselves much too narrowly.

To many of us, for instance, it seems that acts of insight and judgment are far more vivid, valuable, and even pleasurable — we are exhilarated by the eros of inquiry — than are acts of our senses, delightful as these sometimes are. Do we not often arise from hours of reading, thinking, or writing, having been intensely captivated by insights and judgments, to find that our bodies are stiff and sore, perhaps too cold or too hot, hungry, thirsty? For many, insight, judging, and loving are penetrating human experiences more precious than the activities of the senses. Because of their preferability, the range of their activities, and their sublimity, these activities have often been thought of as a human being’s “spirited” acts, the acts of the human spirit.

Human beings seem to be best understood as either inspirited bodies or embodied spirits — a unity at the core of our being. Without the distinctive refinements of human brain cells and neurons, we lose our capacities for insight, judgment, love. But without exercising our capacities for insight, judgment, and love, our bodies fall far short of our human potential, often in a way so unworthy of ourselves that to others, we become objects of scorn: “You pig!”

That is why to make a mistake in understanding oneself is almost certain to lead to mistakes in coming to an understanding of God. A materialist will be looking where no evidence of God can possibly be found. His choice of method predetermines his failure.

Just as it helps believers to understand that atheists can be irritated by condescension from believers, it may help atheists to see that insisting that their own convictions are unquestionable “facts,” while those of others may be airily dismissed, undermines their claim to being fair-minded. If we are to have a dialogue based on mutual respect, we will all have to change our ways.

Meanwhile, the threat to our lives and liberties posed by a worldwide pseudo-religious totalitarian movement demands that all those who love liberty stop being divided against ourselves. True enough, we each have reasons for our own convictions, but we do well to respect the convictions of all others willing to fight alongside us against the common threat. In this great work, we will have to learn a new skill in civil conversation concerning matters of fundamental differences in philosophy and religion. These differences can no longer be ignored as if they did not exist, and were not of any serious importance. Manifestly, they are.

In previous generations, Americans have tacitly agreed that pluralism is best protected by remaining silent about profound differences in conviction. Today, pluralism needs a new set of protections: civil, reasoned conversation about much that divides us, so that fears of one another might be diminished, and enduring respect for one another come to flower.

Published in National Review Online September 23, 2008

Four Great Gifts Italy Has Given America

Now that another several hundred thousand Americans have come back from spending part of their summer in Italy, they may be in a special mood to reflect on what we owe to the great Italian cities: four contributions in particular - a sense of civic beauty; bold and creative individuals; the Stoic ethic of ancient and medieval Rome; and the crucial social role of civic and religious associations. 1. The Italian sense of civic beauty is without peer. What other region of the world can match the profusion of beautiful vistas in Italy’s hilltop cities; magnificent public buildings (such as the City Hall in Siena); sacred spaces (the great churches of Florence); majestic open piazzas from Venice to Rome to Palermo; and virtually every village church in Umbria? All Italy seems to have been designed to lift our spirits with vibrant color, stunning statuary, soaring facades, and tall bell towers.

Moreover, Italy taught America that living spaces need beauty as the heart needs love and the lungs need air. How can a people become noble if they see around them no art idealizing nobility of soul? The effect of post-modernism has been to dehumanize our living spaces, to subtract from our vision the human moral struggle, the human drama. Held down by rusty wires, the wings of the human spirit cannot take flight.

2. The ideal of the bold and creative individual. Great individual personalities of Florentine history – Dante Alighieri, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Filippo Brunelleschi, Luca della Robbia – have indelibly marked American ideals of beauty and majesty. These men of singular accomplishment are the offspring of St. Paul. For Paul learned in inner pain that to follow Christ’s call he had to break from tribe and family, to become a distinctive, possibly solitary individual in order to follow his conscience, thus to join a new, eternal community. What is distinctive about Christianity is not that it is a community, but that it is a unique kind of community. For one thing, it includes the whole human family, not one race, nation, or tribe. Its most distinctive feature is that each individual must “choose” to cling to Christ, and thus to enter into this new kind of community. This Pauline insight spread the sails of autobiography (as in St. Augustine). It inspired the striking individuality of Florentines in virtually every field.

3. The humanistic ethic of ancient and medieval Rome is emblazoned on the ceilings of many palaces, churches, and public halls in Florence, in figures symbolizing nobility of soul; magnanimity; industry; pietas; the honor of self-sacrifice on behalf of the city; honesty; reliability; equanimity; prudence; temperance; self-mastery. Roman civilization was built upon several central human virtues. But Christian Florence added new notes:

In contrast to Renaissance courtly architecture with its intimidating Roman grandeur worthy of great princes and empires, fifteenth-century Florentine churches, chapels, and private palaces employed a small-scale Roman architectural language affirming the dignity of individual citizens and the republican horizontal rhetoric of ordinary citizens as equals before the law (Robert W. Baldwin).

Beneath his statue of David, Donatello inscribed: “Kingdoms fall through luxury, cities rise through virtues. Behold the neck of pride severed by the hand of humility.” So distinct in its aesthetic emphasis on virtue was Florence that Leonardo Bruni, one of the first modern historians, wrote in his Panegyric on Florence (1404):

If the glory, nobility, virtue, grandeur, and magnificence of the parents can also make the sons outstanding, no people in the entire world can be as worthy of dignity as are the Florentines, for they are born from such parents who surpass by a long way all mortals in every sort of glory.

4. Civic associations. Few cultures are more strongly rooted than Italy’s in the extended family and local voluntary associations of the city and the Church. Thus, Florence and her sister cities are the source of a crucial institution of Western freedom – the civic association, such as the confraternities of this saint and that, guilds, foundations to care for the upkeep of a nearby bridge or stretch of road, organizations to help the ill and teach the young. It was not the Italian state, nor even the city council, that took care of citizens’ many needs; rather it was the full galaxy of local associations. It was by the principle of association, not by state command or collectivism, that medieval Catholics built up civil society, and expressed the social nature of humankind. This principle binds together the Christian notions of the individual person and the free society.

In the Christian tradition, the terms “person” and “community” define one another. The true community is one that seeks the full development of each person within it. The fully developed person is one who, in gratitude for its gifts and ennobling traditions, does what he can to build up his community. This mutual interdefinition is not unrelated to the Christian mystery of the godhead: Communio divinarum personarum. The Trinity is, in a sense, the very model of Christian community: the distinctiveness of each Person, the Communion in which all are one. A similar metaphor lies in the liturgy of the Eucharist: out of many grains, one bread; out of many grapes, one wine.

These two inspirations blaze out from the most precious riches of Florence – the distinctiveness of each person (and each work of genius) and the communitarian concerns of the city that nourishes such individuals. Both of these inspirations are visible in every public place, civic and ecclesiastical, in Florence. From such inspirations as these the early Americans learned the art of association, as Tocqueville called it, “the first law of democracy.”

Published in The Catholic Thing August 26, 2008

Cousin Bob

Often enough, we used to get each other's mail. Once on an airplane, I overheard two nuns behind me talking about what a scowl Michael Novak wore on Crossfire every week — he must be a very angry man. I felt like turning around and saying: "Sorry, you mean Robert Novak. I'm Michael Novak. We call each other cousins. Just to pull your leg, he calls himself the Prince of Darkness. In the Hebrew translation, I am the Angel of Light." But of course I didn't turn around, and I didn't say anything. I was honored. We aren't really cousins, Bob and I. Brothers is more like it. But not brothers in the flesh, rather, in affections. I have always loved the guy, especially when he is playing the bad Robert. He sometimes affects being cynical. That was, I have always thought, a protection against his own deep love for this country, and for the honorable profession of politics. He is a stern moralist, not a cynic. He was not taught by nuns, but somewhere he mastered the art of the slap across the wrist in disapproval. He works so darn hard. He was until his illness always on the go — and more often than always (if that is possible), on the telephone. Tirelessly on the telephone. No reporter in our time works harder.

One Christmas eve, I spotted him coming into a church that was then the parish of neither of us. There was a lot of time before midnight mass, so I left my seat to cross over and walk up to his aisle, to give him and his dear wife a greeting. "Merry Christmas, cousin," I said. "Same to you, cousin." He wore the big smile one often saw on his face, when he wasn't playing bad guy.

Once, at a program we both spoke for in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, I heard him tell a classroom of young people why he converted, and how. He didn't initiate this, he was asked. He told the same story he tells in his book, about accompanying his wife to mass and taking personally a question asked by the priest, Monsignor Vaghi (at whose new parish we were both in Christmas Eve attendance). It was a simple question, as all profound things are, about judgment in the light of eternity. It made him look at himself, he said.

We didn't see each other all that often; I don't think we ever did socially. But I find myself thinking of him a lot, sometimes every day. Of course, his work has been ubiquitous. It reminds me of him often.

I have to say, too, that I really love his book, Prince of Darkness. It is a truly good and honest Washington book, wonderfully written in that dry, factual way that sentimental detectives affect in crime novels. Full of details. Full of revelations. He poured a lot of himself into it. It is his best writing ever, and serves as an introduction not only to a dedicated, surprisingly intimate man, but also to the rapidly changing era he worked so hard to understand and to report. The new details in the first chapter — on the Pflame affair — are worth half-a-dozen typical, lazy Washington books written from old columns.

Well, I just heard that Bob at this moment is undergoing surgery for his tumor. When he gets to read this, I just wanted him to know that he was being prayed for minute by minute, and that much affection and gratitude were flowing his way.

Published in National Review Online August 16, 2008

Catholics for Obama?

Not long before he was elected pope (overwhelmingly), Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger sent a public rebuke to the U.S. bishops. He reminded them that the question of abortion must be judged in a far different category from war and capital punishment. War is a question of practical wisdom, he observed, about which prudent Catholics may form opposing practical judgments. Same with capital punishment, which for centuries was rated by the church as just and sometimes necessary. By contrast abortion, Ratzinger wrote, is “intrinsically evil” and “always and everywhere” to be opposed. Many Catholics on the left wing of the Democratic party have never accepted this rebuke. The most some of them will concede is that abortion is a “profound moral question.” Cardinal Ratzinger’s point is that that question was long ago answered: Abortion is intrinsically evil. Never to be cooperated with.

There are other Catholic leftists who are quite anti-abortion. Too often, these wiggle mightily to avoid so strong a condemnation of abortion that they must leave the Democratic party, or, at least, refuse to vote for a politician who cooperates with the evil of abortion. They want, for instance, to vote for Barack Obama, even to campaign vigorously for him.

Well, the Catholic ethic is an ethic of prudence, not an ethic of doctrinaire consistency. It is not an ethic whose rules are those of arithmetic or geometry. Rather, it takes into account all the important matters that bear upon such a decision as which political candidate to support or to vote for. It pays careful attention to each person and each peculiar angle of each rare situation. Catholic ethics is more like a many-seamed garment, with intelligently designed curves and angles, than like a seamless garment, constructed geometrically. It is meant to fit the whole range of human realities.

But it also recognizes that prudence can never be used as a cover for committing an intrinsic evil, such as the killing that occurs in abortion. Typically, one candidate takes a secular stance on abortion: “personally opposed, but not willing to legislate my morality on this issue.” On other issues important to Catholic leftists, however, this candidate may be perfectly willing to legislate his morality, and theirs. Americans are the most moralistic people in the world. Everything we touch tends to be discussed as a moral issue. Except abortion — many want to turn abortion into anything but a moral issue.

Despite the fact that Cardinal Ratzinger, not to mention John Paul II, forcefully reminded Catholics of their duty not to cooperate with the evil of abortion, many Catholic leftists continue to cite the same American bishops who were rebuked by the cardinal and the pope. Why, moreover, do these leftists argue from “the consistent ethic of life”? Under the flag of “consistency” they are able to put virtually every issue dear to them on the scales. The result is to downgrade the real, distinctive, sui generis evil of abortions, which are now performed at a rate of about 1.1 million a year. They put equal emphasis on capital punishment and the “unjust war in Iraq” — the very thing Cardinal Ratzinger said they cannot in good conscience do.

Thus, Catholic leftists need the “consistent ethic” argument to make any case at all in their support of a pro-abortion candidate. Conversely, they must also argue from an “ethic of prudence” in order to justify their peculiar calculation that abortion is not as important as war, capital punishment, and their (highly debatable) claims about the “common good.” Even in its logical form, their reasoning is a tangled mess: “Yes” to a consistent ethic of life when they need it, “No” when they don’t.

In the particular case of Barack Obama, their case is an even greater mess. Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, frustrated the will of the U.S. Congress by refusing to sign legislation outlawing partial-birth abortion. Even though this procedure means — just before a full delivery — puncturing the head of the infant so that the brains may be suctioned out, Obama, as an assemblyman in Illinois, took the same position here as the Clintons did: in favor of this grim procedure.

Worse still, Obama strongly spoke out in opposition to legislation to disallow abortionists from putting to death infants who survived a first attempt at abortion. At the federal level, this legislation was called the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, protecting the human infant born alive despite a vigorous attempt to kill her in the womb.

There are many pretty words that politicians, some Republicans and some Democrats, use to mask their actual practice in regard to abortion. They call it “a profound moral issue,” and they say they seek to make abortions “safe, legal, and rare” — a particularly adroit example of rhetorically pleasing everybody. In actual practice, though, they manage to keep abortions going just as before.

Senators would never allow themselves such disgraceful compromise if they were speaking about slavery. In the case of slavery, being “pro-choice” is not moral, as Sen. Douglas learned to his sorrow from candidate Lincoln. An irreducible natural right is at stake.

Of course, the Republican party was the anti-slavery party. And, alas, the Democrats of recent times have allowed the Republican party to become the anti-abortion party. For the Democrats, that is a disgrace. As a result, many Catholics have reluctantly had to change parties — or at least to change their voting habits. As a violation of natural right, abortion is even more extreme than slavery.

***

Of course, the abortion question does not affect all Catholics equally. Catholics go on calling themselves “Catholic” long after they have ceased receiving the sacraments or darkening a church door. But abortion does affect some large minority of Catholics to the core of their being.

No matter if the propaganda in the press and the cinema mostly favors the pro-abortion side, many Catholics are so close to births and birthing, and so highly value each newborn child, that they will never be led to believe that abortion is anything but intrinsically evil. It’s just plain wrong. There is never any excuse for it (well, virtually never).

Whenever Catholics hear the phrase “consistent ethic of life,” they look for the coercion and self-deception implied in it. It is a made-for-all-purposes excuse. It does not describe the ethics of prudence taught by Thomas Aquinas and favored for many centuries by the Church, and by the Lord Jesus himself.

In addition, those who call the Iraq war “unjust” are entitled to their opinion, but they have no serious Catholic authority. Neither the pope nor the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith nor the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, even when some of them opposed it as imprudent, have ever called the Iraq war unjust.

The other reason for supporting Obama that some Catholic leftists put forward is that very little in reducing abortions has been accomplished by the Republican party in the years since President Reagan. Is that claim true?

Well, President Bush did sign the two acts of legislation that Obama opposed in their state forms, the ban on partial-birth abortion and the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. These acts do not seriously alter the number of annual abortions. But they do establish in law the fundamental principle of the natural rights of infants in the womb. They treat these human individuals as worthy of respect and they defend their rights to live and breathe and continue growing into adults.

Two formidable obstacles have prevented Republican presidents from going farther. The first is heavy resistance from most Democrats (who until recently were driving pro-life Democrats out of party leadership) and some Republicans (country-club Republicans, mostly). The second is furious resistance from the liberal judiciary (mostly country-club liberals) at almost every higher level.

It is mind-twisting for reasonable people to discern how leftist Democrats think Obama will change his abortion stripes, and then go farther than President George W. Bush (boo! hiss!) in promoting a culture of life. Most of those who will vote for Obama do not think Obama is pro-life. Why should a few leftist Catholics?

During the legislative debate in the House, Democrats decided overwhelmingly to just go ahead and vote for the “Born Alive” act. They wanted to repress all debate, lest that issue educate the public dramatically on what real abortions are like. Abortion is best approved of in the dark, not in the light of day, where full and open debate might turn the public against it.

On more and more refrigerators across America, photos of brothers and sisters in mommy’s womb from just a few weeks after conception are already encouraging children more and more to find abortion abhorrent. The young easily identify with their siblings with tiny fingers and toes in the womb, and perceive with dark dread what it would be like if they had been aborted. Children after 1973 are prevented from feeling that they are gifts of God by the large figure blocking that sun — their mother, with the power to have turned thumbs down on their very existence. Children do not feel that they depend on the will of God but on the will of their mother.

I wish Democrats had not ceded the anti-abortion position to Republicans. I hope that those Catholics among them look again at Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria Speech of 1854, brought to our attention in Lewis E. Lehrman’s brilliant new book, Lincoln at Peoria. And I urge my old friends on the Catholic Left to be careful what they wish for, in wishing for Obama. And to make better arguments for doing so.

And, please, to hurry the Democratic party back to natural-rights principles.

Published in National Review Online August 8, 2008

The Flag in the Lapel

Now we know why Obama took the American flag off his lapel. On July 24, in Berlin, he told us. The American flag is too small to contain him. He is not comfortable being an American citizen, only fully comfortable as a citizen of the world. But “citizen of the world” is a utopian, unreal, angelic, inhuman term, an abstraction of the sort that leads to immense bloodshed as human irregularities are hacked off and angularity is loudly planed away. I agree with Pete Wehner’s observation on Commentary's website that one can be a citizen of the United States, but not -- in anything like the same sense -- of the world. One can enjoy the natural rights protected by the U.S. Constitution, but will not find such rights protected globally, not even in France, as Byron York pointed out last month and again on Friday.

The Berlin speech also explains why Obama is more likely to praise an “ideal” America than the real America. He is bewitched by abstractions and lofty ideals. That is how he touches the secret chords of the heart of so many millions, the teenage romanticism of a world without different real interests, without the clashes of culture, the force of political arguments about who gets what, when, and how.

This conflict between global citizenship and pledging allegiance solely to the flag of the United States and the Republic for which it stands, suggests that we go back again to Senator Obama’s ambivalence about the flag in his lapel.

Obama himself said he wore a flag in his lapel after September 11, 2001, but then did not wear it for several years. Why? On reflection, he judged that wearing a flag in the lapel would be an inadequate symbol of patriotism (HT: Byron York, July 1). That Obama did not wear his flag in his lapel is true. Obama not only was not wearing it, but had a policy statement about why he was not wearing it.

Real patriotism, he clarified, is loving the ideals of a country and dissenting from policies not in line with those ideals.

Here Obama points to a huge divide between left-wingers and ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans do not love a mere “ideal” out in never-never land. They love the land, the soil, the mountains, the plains, the history, the bloody battles, the mistakes, the rises and falls, the real human history of an altogether human people, the particular, imperfect people of the United States. Left-wingers, by contrast, are continually judging the real country harshly. They often judge it so harshly that their attitudes toward their leaders, their neighbors and the real country as a whole sometimes seem almost like hatred for the country itself.

But the United States is still, blessedly, largely a center-right country in this respect. Obama’s stated positions about why he took the flag out of his lapel, and what he means by patriotism, slightly incline a large number to vote against him. Therefore we can count on Obama showing up on more and more stages so thick with American flags you would think you were at a Ronald Reagan rally – and with the stars and stripes starkly visible on the left lapel of his neat, dark suit. That flag will certainly appear in his lapel a great many more times until the first Tuesday in November. A center-right country will demand it.

As for me, I have been wearing a flag in my lapel since September 11, 2001, and with special care ever since American forces took the war to the place whence it emanated, Afghanistan. As long as brave Americans were willing to accept, if necessary, wounds or death on our behalf, I felt a duty to be faithful to them: “This flag’s for them!” And will stay in my lapel until they are out of harm’s way.

Everyone knows silly bravado when he sees it. So let me lay some out. Since Osama bin Laden is out to harm Americans all he can, it seems only right that we should wear a flag to make it easy for him to find us. It would be disgraceful to cower.

Published in National Review Online July 30, 2008

The Shocking Turnaround on Humanae Vitae

I doubt if more laughter has been expended on any point of Catholic teaching than on Pope Paul VI’s letter Humanae Vitae of late July 1968, exactly forty years ago. The much-mocked Pope Paul predicted that “artificial methods” of birth control would end up being personally corrupting and socially destructive. But suddenly something right before our eyes began to be noticed. Mirabile dictu! A host of empirical findings has confirmed the predictions of Pope Paul VI. No one has brought these findings forward as systematically as Mary Eberstadt, in her powerful article “The Vindication of Humanae Vitae” in the most recent First Things. But George Weigel’s book The Courage to be Catholic (2002) got the re-thinking going.

Pope Paul VI made three predictions in 1968: that artificial methods of birth control would make marital infidelity much easier, and steadily lower general moral standards. Further, “a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.” (He did not predict that women might begin to respect themselves less, and to treat sex more cheaply.)

Third, the severing of sex from procreation would tempt governments to regulate childbearing, even through coercion: “Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone.” He implied that abortion itself would come to be regarded as the ultimate “contraceptive, and become increasingly common – even coerced.

In general, Pope Paul VI pictured sexuality in philosophical and ethical terms of a certain severity. Husband and wife should work toward “complete mastery” of their physical drives, in order to honor each other the more for doing so. Most couples can in fact do this some of the time, and some most of the time, but few can do it all the time. Looked at merely philosophically, it is a very hard teaching.

Nonetheless, the pope predicted that the lessening of self-control in marriage would spread outwards to the whole of society. Even political regimes would suffer. We would see a slowly growing inability of citizens to trust one another, let alone their government. (Recall Tocqueville’s contrast between the strong marriage bond in the United States and that in the licentious France of 1835.)

In the long years after 1968, many abuses took root in the church. Most of the Catholic West drifted away from Humanae Vitae. In all these years, I recall hearing only one sermon that presented a succinct argument against the corrosive effects of contraception, and offered a special vision of Catholic marital life.

Worse, far worse, many Catholic priests habituated themselves to rarely or never speaking of self-mastery. Most became reluctant to talk about sexuality at all, let alone chastity. In this darkness, a few granted themselves the same leniency their silence granted lay persons. A few brought intense public shame on the Church.

Forty years after Humanae Vitae, Eberstadt and Weigel conclude that it is no longer as easy as it was in 1968 to say that Pope Paul VI was spreading unrealistic pessimism.

There are, to be sure, intrepid philosophers – among them the late G.E.M. (Elizabeth) Anscombe – who present strictly philosophical arguments for the Church’s most ridiculed and resisted teaching. But since human “nature” has lost its fine balance in matters of sexuality, the real muscle in this now unusual vision of marriage lies in prompting philosophy to seek support from theology.

Soon after John Paul II was elected pope in 1978, he stressed the unbreakable unity of body and soul in human persons. We do not merely “have” bodies, which “belong” to us. We are inspirited bodies – looked at the other way, embodied spirits. Body and spirit are perfectly one, not two.

In this way, John Paul II stepped up from philosophy into the horizon of faith: The body of each human person is a temple of the Holy Spirit – that is, of the triune God, the God Who reveals His own identity as a Community of divine Persons. One Communion, each Person distinct. Therefore, we ought to reverence our bodies as the dwelling place of this divine Communion.

That is why Christianity among all the world religions insists that our inspirited bodies, not merely our disembodied souls, shall rise and be with God after death. This is not a religion ashamed of the human body, but one which honors it as a fit dwelling place for God.

Another theological borrowing is that it is as man and woman together that humans most vividly reflect the image of God – the image of that communion which is the inner life of God. It is not man alone; it is not woman alone; it is their communion as one. That is a major reason why monogamous marriage is honored above all other human friendships – the noblest of all friendships, as Thomas Aquinas once wrote of it. (Another reason is that in such a communion the two persons achieve equal respect, their differences intact.)

Obviously, the Catholic way of regarding sexuality is not attractive to everybody. Obviously, too, many Catholics are not living up to it.

Still, the sudden break-up of the ice blocking an honest reading of Paul VI, and the liberated flow of fresh critical thinking, offer grounds for believing that the disparagement of Humanae Vitae is beginning to diminish.

The God Who gave us our sexuality had a great sense of humor, Mary Eberstadt reminds us. To see all the delicious ironies, however, one must first grasp what the whole thing is aiming at. That’s the road Humanae Vitae put us on.

Published in The Catholic Thing on July 29, 2008

Reconciling Evil with Faith

The New Yorker (of all magazines) gave a good number of pages early last month to a quite brilliant book reviewer, James Wood, for a long essay on why he could no longer be a Christian. Stories like his are widespread. They usually cite the natural evils that too often crash upon humans — in China a stupefying earthquake, in Burma a cyclone, elsewhere tsunami, or tornado, disease, flood, or cruel slow-working famine. They then add the evils that humans inflict upon other humans. Virtually every family in America has suffered from painful evils, often bitterly and almost overpoweringly so: A promising young nephew in a major university killed in an auto crash; a wife, husband, or sister wasted slowly and painfully by cancer or some other affliction — drug or alcohol addiction; the Alzheimer's disease of an unrecognizing spouse; nightmares from brutalities suffered under distant dictatorial regimes.

One of the oldest accusations against God in the Bible and in every generation since has been that there is too much evil in this world for there to be a good God. The pain is so intense. The irrationality and seeming cruelty at times seem unendurable.

Of course, ceasing to be a Jew or a Christian does not wipe these evils away. They continue. They roar on. The rejection of God does not diminish evil in the world by a whit. In fact, the turn of Russia and Germany from more or less Christian regimes to boastfully atheist regimes did not lessen, but increased, the number of humans who have horribly suffered, by nearly 100 million. Even under atheist interpretations of science, the vast suffering under ferocious competition for survival, for a vastly longer era than was known, far exceeds the evils earlier generations knew.

An unusually religious friend of my daughter volunteered for a year's work among the poor of Haiti. Within weeks, she was so dismayed by the inexplicable suffering of the poor, and their defenselessness, that she abandoned her faith. It demanded too much of her.

This noble young woman's loss of faith did not lessen the poverty and pain of those she worked with. Besides, the reasons for the overwhelming poverty she encountered were not God-made but man-made. (After all, Haiti is by nature a very rich nation.) The secrets of how humans can create wealth have raised up the poor of many countries; somehow, the secrets passed Haiti by. One remedy the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did add, moreover, is to touch the heart of this compassionate young woman and many others like her, to bring remedial help and, in some cases, knowledge of how to produce economic transformation.

Faith for those who suffer

However that might be, those who suffer most from injustice and oppression seem to find more consolation and dignity in the Jewish/Christian faith than in any other worldview (even socialism). Judaism and Christianity seem very good religions for those who suffer because they bestow on them justice and dignity. The realistic point of Judaism and Christianity is that suffering is a normal part of every human life. Lamentations are a native language. But evil does not mean that God loves us less, or that all is lost, or that good does not win out in the end.

In fact, the poor also delight in the beauties of God's creation. On balance, even with their acute suffering, the poor also feel blessed. They sense the rapture of sunlight flashing across lake or ocean, and soft breezes at sunset, and the great starry sky.

For Christianity, the interpretive key to this world is the cross — the cross on which the Son of God died. For Judaism, it is the long, long exile and pain of the Jewish people. If God has so treated his only son, and also his own people, why should anyone else expect Easy Street? Suffering seeks everybody out. Death certainly does, Christian or not, atheist or not.

Worse, the world seen by evolutionary biology alone is even more rife with suffering, yet rather more merciless. That world is characterized by raw chance, accident and the death of about 90% of all species that have ever lived. Perhaps earthquakes, tsunami, tornado, disease and famine derive from chance, and signify nothing.

Nonetheless, the most disturbing evils are the ones deliberately created by free human beings — the sadistic guards at Dachau, Germany, who took pleasure in humiliating, clubbing and shoving to the earth those they bullied; and, last month, those two pitiable women in Compton, Calif. — a mother and her lover — who were recently found torturing the 5-year-old son of one of them by hanging him up with wires over the door, stabbing into his young body lit cigarettes, and starving him and beating him for months.

These shocking brutalities rock the shallow faith of those whose beliefs are rooted in sentiment and inheritance, rather than in reasoned argument. Many Christians are poorly educated in their religion; their formal schooling teaches them nothing about it. Some seem to think that the point of prayer is to be given everything one asks — or at least the important things. Such an expectation would turn God into a servant of their will.

When Jesus said: "Ask and you shall receive," he did not mean you will get what you pray for, any more than he did that night in the garden of Gethsemane, where he prayed that God would spare him from the agony of the flogging and the crucifixion he would suffer the next day. Jesus meant you will be kept above raging waters by the will of God, and given enough light and strength to transmute the evil you experience into good.

A world of chance?

Rebellion against a suffering world and the God whose great work of art it is is very common. When very sorely tried, many Jews and Christians such as the Psalmist (who again and again lamented the long exile and humiliations endured by his people) and Job (whose faith God tested by adding one affliction after another) have also wanted to throw off God, but a counter-question kept nagging them: Would a conviction that our sufferings are meaningless, and due to blind chance, ease the pain of the poor and the unjustly tortured? Raging against the night seems to be an evasion of reality.

Sustained public conversation about these matters — long, intelligent conversation — can help to diminish mutual misconceptions about the terms of this argument. That conversation could be critical for the future of liberty on this planet. Whether our lives are meaningless, or not, is not a trivial question.

Michael Novak's newest book, No One Sees God, will be published in August. He is also author of The Experience of Nothingness, Belief and Unbelief, and The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism.

Published in The New Yorker July 21, 2008