The Use of Religious Studies

Nothing is less certain over time than the certainties of successive generations. Each generation tends to be wrong in a different way. Between the end of World War II and 1971, when I published Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Introduction to Religious Studies, many great secular universities neglected the living realities of religion, believing that religion would soon vanish from history, i.e., the “secularization hypothesis.” Its proponents didn’t anticipate the decline in the self-confidence of secularism after 1975, partly from the rise of post-modernism and other such attacks (feminism and some black studies advocates, too) upon human reason, and partly from the very real upsurge of religious energy in many places around the world. Europe, indeed, became more secular, but in the United States a broad religious awakening was gathering force. The civil rights movement led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and the anti-Vietnam War movement often found themselves using churches for their meetings and religious leaders as sponsors of training sessions and seminars. The growing sense of the inner emptiness of modern secular culture drove a significant number of secular Jews into a reinvestigation of Jewish orthodoxy and tradition, and many Catholics and Protestants drifted back towards religious engagement. By 1971, departments of religious studies were beginning to open at secular universities, and journalists seemed to write more and more stories about the internal and external dramas of religious awakening. The secularization hypothesis seemed to have gotten things exactly backwards. Secularism, its inner vitality played out, was beginning to decline, while religion was turning out to be far more dramatic. The belated turn towards religious studies revealed realities of intense interest to investigators.

Religion even seemed to have become in a way the center of the action. On the negative side, the orange flames and brown-black smoke at the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, shocked even some of the most distinguished secularization proponents in Europe. For the first time, some recognized that their small secular world was only an island in a vast turbulent sea of highly differentiated religious energy. The rapid growth of Christianity in coercively secular China, and vastly more so in Africa, slowly came to be acknowledged.

Even in Europe, intellectuals who consider themselves secular (like Jurgen Habermas in Germany, and Marcello Pera in Italy, both of whom have been in serious dialogue with Benedict XVI) have stated publicly that many Enlightenment ideals such as “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality” owe their origins to Jewish and Christian aspirations, as do “compassion” and “solidarity.” The dream of a merely “secular” world was an illusion.

Initially, this new branch of investigation, “Religious Studies,” was created to do two things. First, these new departments would teach about all religions, not one only, and even about unbelief itself, as one choice among many for seeing and living life. Second, their subject matter and methods would differ from those of the schools of divinity and traditional courses in theology that had appeared here and there since the earliest days of the founding of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other early universities. The new point of view would shift from one strong, enduring tradition, to learning to “cross over” (intellectually) from one tradition to another, for purposes of enriching students’ comprehension of each.

For example, Jewish students would gain some understanding of the way Christians of different varieties approach life’s big questions; Christian students would gain a better comprehension of how Jews read the Bible, and divide into secular and religious; departments would also deal with how unbelievers cope with questions of evil, suffering, loss, and personal moral fault. Today, re-reading my short book some thirty-eight years later, I find that the tools it presents for identifying one’s standpoint and horizon, and the horizons of others, are still highly useful: “standpoint” and “horizon” themselves need defining, as do terms such as experiencing, imagining, understanding, judging, and deciding to act. The same goes for grasping the twists and turns of narrative or “story” in each of our lives. At age thirty, though we are much the same person we were at twenty, in some ways we will have changed quite a lot – in our standpoint, in our horizon, and perhaps in our habits. I have certainly experienced such changes, along with such continuities, over the past four decades.

“Religious Studies” is not the deepest way to study religious vitality. “Theology” is deepest, and the theology of a specific tradition at that because, at the end of the day, there is no generic religion, but a set of particular faiths that engage in reasoned reflection on their own religious traditions, together with respectful reasoning about other major traditions. It is an always incomplete exercise and some have criticized it because it may suggest that all traditions are equally true – or false. But properly understood, it is an inescapable part of the modern world that we be aware both of ourselves and of our relations with others, and here as in much else, we should not let the best become the enemy of the good.

(c) 2009 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org

Published in The Catholic Thing January 15, 2009

How to Ready Oneself to Pray

I am not very good at prayer, although I try to be praying all the time, like breathing. (In fact, I have at times asked God — when I am too ill or too tired to think in words — to take my breathing as a prayer.) It is an inner conversation, wordless often, marked just by attentiveness. Every detail of every event is speaking. It comes forth from the creative insight of God. When I want to ready myself to think about God, I place myself quietly and humbly in His presence. I try to shut out other thoughts, and then quietly think about the most beautiful and ennobling and stunning things I have seen in life — all my favorite things. There are two views in the Alps — in Grindelwald and in Bressanone — that I have especially loved. The peacefulness of an ocean on a quiet day, the blue water barely rippling, never fails to move my heart. And the sunsets — in Iowa, in Wyoming, on the seacoast of Delaware — and that most peculiar green sunset on the plain above Mexico City where the sun drops over the edge of the plain before it disappears behind the earth, so that the light during that interval is eerie and prolonged and unforgettable.

I think then of favorite music of mine, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Vivaldi, Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, the most beautiful of all, written after the sudden death of his much loved daughter. I think of favorite paintings from the Pitti and the Uffizi, and the convent walls painted by Fra Angelico. And sculptors. And poets. And philosophers and other writers whose work has thrilled me. (One of my most unforgettable moments as a young man was reading Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry; it was so beautiful I had to get up and take a long walk down to the lake, almost speechless in silent wonder.) For several years, every Easter I have read one of Dostoevsky’s long novels, followed in later years by War and Peace and Anna Karenina. I think of God as the Creator of all these great minds and artists. I wonder how much greater than they is God’s own mind and sense of beauty. I would love to share in contemplation of such works and such persons for all eternity. And all the more so in His beauty.

Then I think of the loves I have known. Close friends, childhood buddies, grandparents, uncles and aunts and cousins, my three brothers and one sister, my dear parents — and then Karen, whose name means what she is, Clara, the clear light of my life — and our solid, noble, and strong children and grandchildren. All these loves make me think that God’s love is more than the sum of these, of a different order entirely, and yet the source of all of them. “Where there is caritas and amor,” the old hymn goes, “there God is.” That is my favorite hymn.

Jesus asks us not only to be just to our enemies, not only to be merciful, not only to forgive. He asks us to resist evil, yes, and to be like steel against unjust aggressors — to defeat them thoroughly — but also, in the end, to be able to see that even our enemies are also children of the one Creator. When all the evil has been drained out of their aggression, we need to be ready to welcome them back into the human community.

The United States and our allies did this rather nicely, I have always thought, in regard to Germany and Japan after World War II. If there is ever to be even a simulacrum of a brotherly world — all right, at least a relatively tranquil world — even one based upon fear of greater power, reaching out in tests of amity and voluntary cooperation is a necessity of human life in our time. Here is one point at which I think Christianity has led the way. It once united all Europe in a common civilization. It has suffused the secular humanism of compassion and solidarity and individual freedom. It is helping to shape one global civilization, with respect for individual liberty, as well as for human solidarity.

If I had to pick out one human experience that for me seems most godlike — the best, the highest that I know — I would choose the experience of choosing to love Karen, and to be loved by her in return. Second would come acts of insight — those little bursts of fire that come when we are puzzling things through. In many ways, these two experiences are related, but saying how that is so would delay us too long right here. Suffice it to say that those are my choices for the best in life — the achievement of mutual love, and the firing off of insight after insight in pursuit of understanding. That eros of understanding is almost as powerful (in some ways more so) than the eros of love; yet the latter is primary, and is profoundly influential upon understanding. Understanding keeps love from erring badly, but in the dark, love often leads the way for understanding.

Adapted from Michael Novak’s latest book No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

(c) 2008 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org

Published in The Catholic Thing November 18, 2008

Do Atheists Reject Without Understanding?

May I offer a friendly suggestion, simply as a possibility to be explored? It may be that the ideas of God presented by atheists are so incredible that their own reputation for good sense is discounted. Whatever the reason, atheists — even when they are given control of all levels of education and free rein for proselytizing — have been unsuccessful in persuading others of their view of life. Could it be that atheists’ ideas of God are so far off that they injure the credibility of their testimony? Consider five common but misleading ways of speaking about God.

[1] God as an object of scientific discovery. He is something like a new planet, or a previously unrecognized form of energy. Just another object to be examined.

[2] God is a gap-filler in scientific theories and philosophies of science. A little like a utility infielder, God is played in whatever position he is needed, wherever the existing explanations do not suffice. Evolving explanations make God less and less necessary.

[3] God as an end to infinitely-regressing explanations. He is the answer to the question, “Where did the world come from?” An Indian sage once whimsically replaced God in this role with a giant turtle that holds the world up, lest the world plunge endlessly down into nothingness. Thus, some think of God as the plug preventing infinite regress. For others, the sage’s point is more subtle: to suppose that there is one more turtle to hold up the turtle that holds up the world, ad infinitum all the way down, is ridiculous. The bottom turtle stands on nothing at all. Absurd!

[4] God as super-man. He knows and can do more than any ordinary human being. Yet he is to be judged by the same standards as humans are judged. If he is a “father,” then he should be held to the same standards as other fathers. If he is a “creator,” then we should note the things we think he has botched up, and review his work critically, as we would review the work of any other artist.

[5] God is the object of a personal ecstatic experience, which gives its subject evidence that can scarcely be transmitted convincingly to others, if at all. You have known it or you haven’t. It’s beyond rational communication. Mute.

All these conceptions of God skip over the term “existence,” and fail to consider its nature and power. Instead, they supply concepts aimed at capturing the essence of God. A misleading concept is guaranteed to frustrate any questions concerning God’s existence. A false concept would send seekers down fruitless paths, and make failure inevitable. Further, there is a vast yawning distance between essence and existence, between the concept of a thing (its essence) and that thing’s actually springing into being, a substantive reality (existence) out of nothingness. This difference is beyond the methods of science, but is as important as the difference between a “what-is-it?” question, and a question that asks: “Is that so?” The first question forms an accurate hypothesis. The second is an act of judgment: Yes, it exists; or No, that concept has been falsified.

The problem in thinking about God is twofold: First, how should we conceive of him, that is, which hypothesis are we testing? Second: What is the method of verification—how do we judge God’s reality?

Both questions are operative in the scientific method as well as in common sense. They operate in sequence: we need to be clear about what we are looking for and where we might find it, before searching for evidence about whether the being actually exists.

Human history has particularly cherished the definition of God laid out in the Torah: “I am Who am.” That is, God is purely and completely existence. His “nature” is not that of created things. God is, always is. Whereas for fragile, fleeting creatures such as ourselves, existence is derivative, borrowed, given us from elsewhere.

For the ancients, from God’s abundance flow all other existing things, borrowing from him their existence, as many candles may borrow from a single candle to turn a darkened room into one of soft, splendid light. Perhaps better: all briefly flickering flames depend on oxygen. Should the oxygen be withdrawn, darkness. Were God’s active existing withdrawn, all creaturely existence would end.

This discussion probably makes those trained exclusively in the scientific method uncomfortable. Still, the general form of its movement – from experience through understanding to judgment – actually follows a paradigm not unlike that of science. It moves from observable experience, to a hypothesis that captures the essential features of that experience, to a judgment that the hypothesis fits the facts. From experience and reflection we come to an understanding of how to think about God. Then we judge whether that understanding meets the facts. We may form an idea about God, a hypothesis. But does God, under that hypothetical understanding, exist? Put more exactly, can we with validity and force climb out from the realm of essences and hypotheses when we speak of God, up into the realm of existents?

Adapted from Michael Novak’s latest book No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers.

Copyright 2008 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org

Published in The Catholic Thing November 4, 2008

A Historical Change in Guidance Systems

Some social democrats and socialists, especially in Western Europe, view the current financial crisis in America with a certain gladness. They think this may discredit “democratic capitalism,” and confirm the superiority of social democracy. This stance returns our public conversation to the questions of the 1972 electoral campaign, during which a significant number of left-wing American thinkers and activists began to rebel against statist institutions, habits, and ways of looking at things propounded by the New Left, and the many promoters of the large omnivorous state.

Looking at the state of social welfare in the United States at that time, these liberals (social democrats) were “mugged by reality.” They saw that social democratic programs did not work. Since they had begun to find socialism in all its forms unsatisfactory (and self-destructive), they sought a better guidance system. They found it in the American tradition of limited government, personal initiative, and economic inventiveness. They wanted to trim government by cutting both taxes and expenditures. They wanted to preserve the welfare state, by limiting its functions, and restoring responsibility to individuals and families. Enemies called this movement “neo-conservative.” It was actually neo-progressive. It gave primacy to the initiative, creativity, individual moral maturity, and to Aristotle’s conception of virtue. Without recognizing it, they adopted something like the Thomistic evaluation of the human person as the most noble and beautiful of God’s creatures. In their eyes, the common good meant nurturing citizens in virtue and happiness.

By 1980, many in this young movement had begun to coalesce around presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, who believed that a just government had to be a great deal more limited than the government he would inherit, and that its budget needed to be greatly restrained. Mostly, he believed that the most dynamic propellants of a modern economy are the inventions and risk-taking of imaginative entrepreneurs.

Reagan recognized that more than 80 percent of new jobs in this country are created by businesses that employ twenty-five persons or fewer – and that the crucial incentives that lure entrepreneurs from the sidelines to the creative arena are marginal tax rates—which he cut from 70 to 28 percent. By also dropping the tax rates on capital gains (assets) to 30 percent, Reagan offered entrepreneurs a lure that they could not resist.

He foresaw that they would risk their capital, work as hard and inventively as they could, constantly hire new people, and keep 70 percent of their own capital gains. Under Reagan, the world experienced the passage from a Machine Age to an Electronic Age, a transformation that created whole new industries and large numbers of jobs.

More than half a million new small businesses came into being in each of the eight Reagan years, and 20 million new jobs overall. This new burst of production raised our GDP to nearly one-third larger than it had been when Reagan took office.

Reagan also opened the way to new methods of improving the welfare of the poor and the vulnerable. Not all of them were realized during his administration. An important part of it – asking millions of Americans to volunteer to help the poor – was put in place by his successor, the first President Bush. Another – welfare reform – was reluctantly accepted by President Clinton in 1996. Still other parts were extended by the second President Bush (e.g., generous aid to Africa).

The best way to grasp the new welfare approach pioneered by Reagan is to visualize it as a change in the nation’s guidance system: Aiming not at a larger, but a more limited state. It gave ample room to the dynamisms of civil society: enterprising individuals, voluntary associations, lively civic corporations, churches, and other institutions that provide aid to the poor, the ill, and the down-on-their-luck.

Today, the crisis in the home mortgage system, which has involved many other financial institutions in its toils and tangles, has raised new questions about our guidance system. Do we need another fundamental shift?

Recall that the current system failed in all three of the interconnected systems: political, economic, and moral. For a decade, my colleague at AEI Peter Wallison ( Privatizing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks) has been showing how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored buyers and resellers of mortgages, have been improperly regulated. Usually, the Republicans favor deregulation. But in this case, the Democrats led by Senator Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank blocked attempts to regulate Fannie and Freddie, both large sources of campaign contributions and votes for the Democrats. That was the key political failure, which brought the whole house of cards tumbling down these past few weeks.

The economic system failed when financial whizzes too clever by three-quarters invented elaborate schemes for packaging mortgages, good mixed with bad, which they resold for a profit. Then they invented still fancier schemes of "derivatives" to resell for further profit. They did not examine as closely as they should have the rot running through what they sold, the levels upon levels of packaging that disguised it, and their own responsibilities.

The moral system failed when Americans who borrowed at rates unknown to their parents or grandparents and rejoiced in the rapidly rising value of their homes, did not stop and think: "Something smells. This will all come crashing down." We watched the gains pile up, and we glowed with pleasure.

No system will work without vigilance in all three sectors. Making up for a train of abuses in our time will bring some of the pains of purgatory to everyone, before the system rights itself, each part of the system vigilant over the others.

The advantage of our poor system is that it carries within it latent powers of self-correction – not without pain, yet in a way that may be relied upon better than any other.

Michael Novak’s website is www.michaelnovak.net

(c) 2008 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info at thecatholicthing dot org

Published in The Catholic Thing October 8, 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

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

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

Two Public Policy Proposals: Catholic Social Thought in Practice

Here are two practical concepts for improving the welfare of all the citizens of a nation, especially the poor and the ill and the disabled. At least twenty nations have already adopted variations of these proposals, and they seem to be benefiting enormously thereby. They have not yet been adopted in the United States, except in small pockets, even though some of the key ideas were very well put forth by Steve Forbes in his campaigns for the presidency in 1996 and 2000. The Democrats in Congress blocked them when they were put forth by President Bush in 2005. These proposals are a threat to those with vested interests in government-run social democratic programs, because they tend to achieve many more goods, with greater efficiency, at less cost, and as a far greater impulse toward personal autonomy. Personal Medical Funds.

Do not build a government health service at huge public expense. Instead, mandate that income-recipients set aside some low percentage of their earnings. These savings would be deposited into a health fund owned by themselves, and this fund would be transportable to any future job they may move to. In case of their own premature death, this fund would be inheritable by any persons they have previously designated as their heirs.

These personal funds could be spent for ordinary health expenses at the owner’s discretion. However, any money he does not spend will be kept in his account as long as he lives, invested safely for modest growth – and given to his heirs if not spent. This policy makes every earner the owner of a capital fund of his own.

Mandate next that a small percentage of that personal fund, set by market rates, go for the purchase of (so-called) “catastrophic” coverage, in case of cancer or other serious illness, a personal accident, freak injuries, or the like. In the case of those with no income and no spouse – a minority of citizens – the government would pay an annual subsidy to provide similar coverage.

Ownership by individual families or individuals is important, for such ownership supplies an incentive to the one spending the money that he take responsibility for his own choices. Medical decisions ought not to be taken by the Government, nor even by health professionals alone, but by the individuals involved.

A public policy along these lines would greatly reduce the size of any government health bureaucracy. It would discipline costs, and it would raise the quality of service by encouraging competition among providers. President George W. Bush took a first step in this direction by his 2003 bill to cover the pharmaceutical costs of the elderly. The government funds this program, many providers compete to provide the services, and the elderly themselves choose the provider best suited to their needs. This vigorous competition has brought costs down far more than first predicted, and quality has been enhanced.

The reasons for personal medical accounts are three: first, to give individuals ownership of their own capital fund for health; second, to give them access to many more choices; and third, to invest individuals with responsibility for how they use their medical capital.

Personally Owned Old-Age Accounts.

In a similar way, nations widely scattered around the world have mandated that income earners set aside a certain percentage of their income to pay into a pension account for old age, of which they (not government) are the owners. This program has three significant good effects. First, the government saves enormous funds by closing down most of its own Old-Age bureaucracy. Second, every citizen becomes owner of a capital fund, whose remainder after his death goes tax-free to the heirs he designates in advance. In this way, any accumulated capital fund remains in the family. Third, this new investment flow immensely strengthens the national private economy, in which most of the family funds must be invested. In poorer countries, this domestic capital investment is especially important.

The policy of personal Old-Age Accounts has by now been tried with great success by such nations as Chile, New Zealand, Lithuania, Slovakia, and more than twenty others (half the population of Latin America now has access to personal accounts).

Let me close this point with one clarifying and affecting example. In the United States today, a disproportionate number of black men die before, or not long after, they reach the age of sixty-five. But that is the age at which they become eligible for a monthly stipend (“social security”) from the government. As matters now stand, the State owns the pension plan, so when these black men die, the government keeps everything remaining in their accounts. In other words, these men lose everything that they paid into the social security fund during their entire lives. What a waste for them and their families!

Neither of these two new policy ideas promises paradise on earth. But they do seem designed to strengthen both the common good and the sense of responsibility (and well-being) of the individual person. The person and the common good are the two main normative inspirations of Catholic Social Teaching.

Published in The Catholic Thing June 17, 2008

The Adventures of Catholic Social Doctrine

When I was liberal and young, the popes of the preceding eighty years – from Leo XIII (pope 1878-1903), to Pius XII (1939-1958) – were regarded as “liberal popes,” and they were often quoted by liberal Catholics against their local bishops. One professor I know used to read a quotation from one or another of these popes, then ask the class who was the author. Most guessed Marx, Engels, or some socialist. Generally speaking, these popes were defending an alternative to socialism and Marxism. They defended private property rights against the socialists, but also against a too-narrow libertarianism. Since a regime of private property is justified by its service to the common good (in Locke and Mill, for example), sometimes the common good imposes moral burdens on those who own property, to protect the weak.

These popes also defended the natural inequality of temperaments, skills, habits, and orders of preferences among humans – both against the socialists, who preached utopian equality, and against the partisans of “laissez-faire,” who thought the law of competition fair, without noting that there are many too weak to compete on even terms (See especially Leo XIII).

I still remember the glow that blushed over the whole Christian left (and the secular left, too) upon hearing the words of the new pope, John XXIII (1958-1963).

The popes from 1930 on were crucial to the discrediting of many socialist ideas – in both forms, National Socialism and International Socialism.

They were particularly important in encouraging the build-up of Christian Democratic parties to block the rise of Socialist and Communist Parties in most of the nations of Western Europe. (It was their unexpected success that so infuriated the East Germans, who launched a propaganda assault against the then-much-loved Pius XII.) These parties held the line until the surrender of Communism in 1989 and the spontaneous tearing down of the Berlin wall. (What rapturous days those were!)

The great difficulty in the inner development of Catholic Social Doctrine, from one historical phase into another, lies not primarily in the field of theological or moral principles, which are relevant to all ages and places. These are principles for all seasons: “The wise steward brings out from his treasure both old things and new, as suits the season.”

The wise steward must adjust when mild centuries give way to centuries of icy storms, and when new institutions sweep over all before them. One such turn occurred, for example, when Europe ceased to be primarily agricultural and became chiefly urban. At that point, Leo XIII was obliged to write of New Things, Rerum Novarum.

Catholic Social Doctrine depends crucially on the adjustment of “middle axioms,” which gear unchanging first principles to changing times. It also depends crucially on an instinct for the particular and the concrete, the accurate formulation of the new facts in play, and the shifting self-interests of all the players.

On sin and self-interest, in my experience, the great Protestant theologian of my youth, Reinhold Niebuhr, had more to say, and said it better, than any Catholic theologian I have read. Except for St. Augustine, of whom Niebuhr was a close reader.

For such reasons, Catholic Social Doctrine experiences “development” in two especially acute areas. Middle axioms need to be constantly reformulated to mesh with new sorts of institutions and regimes. Further, the shifting grounds of historical change need to be noted sharply, so as to reflect reality as it is, not as it was, nor as utopians wish it were.

Catholics know in their bones that history is strewn with ironies and tragedies, strange twists, monstrous actions by deranged individuals, the lassitude of the good, the collapse of the center, the rapidly spreading infection of destructive ideas. Even saintly leaders acting with good intentions have sometimes brought about ugly consequences they did not intend.

In other words, Catholic Social Doctrine is anything but cut and dried. It is a great field for young talent, full of energy and originality. It is also a hugely demanding discipline, because any practitioner (either on the theoretical or on the practical side) must learn an immense amount in the very short period of a human life.

Down in the public arena, no one has the luxury of hindsight. Those who fear making mistakes thereby disqualify themselves from taking action.

During my lifetime, Catholic Social Doctrine has been far too much distorted by being formulated through the lens of European experience, especially feudal, class-bound experience on the one hand, and social democratic experience on the other. That lens is a bit more pink than natural color. We in America are indebted to Europe; but we also have the experience of a New World. It is our task to contribute new things to the universal patrimony of the Catholic people.

Published in The Catholic Thing June 5, 2008