God is dead 7 April 2007
Posted by DSM in faith, theology.comments closed
At first — and even second — consideration, the idea that God is dead doesn’t make much sense.
Assume there is a god as traditionally understood by the Western tradition: unique, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and so on, and thus appropriately capitalized and called God. If there is such a being, who stands above and before everything else, then he must be uncaused. He would also be ontologically necessary: that is, his existence would be the only one which must be. Everything else could have been different, or it might not have existed at all, but God must be who he is.
If such a god existed, then it’s obvious that he can’t die. He can’t end. Neither can he begin. He simply always was, and always will be. To suggest that God would die is to commit a category error of such magnitude that it’s hard to find a good analogy.
Moreover, if God is in fact logically necessary — in the same sense that 2+2=4 and Fermat’s Last Theorem is true are necessary truths: they could not have been otherwise — then again he can’t die. Mathematical truths can’t stop being true, and if they really do subsist in some Platonic realm in the mind of God, then to say that God died means more than saying that 2+2 stopped equalling 4: it’s to say that the statement itself is meaningless. From a contradiction you can derive anything.
The conclusion seems inescapable. Any god who could die is not God as we have believed or disbelieved in, and so “God is dead” could only refer to the social status of belief in him or something along those lines.
About the only loophole you can come up with is to distinguish between person and nature. If the “who” of a person isn’t the same as the “what” he is, then if God could take on a different “what” then he could die. That is, the person of God could die, even if the divine nature itself couldn’t. It’s easy to imagine this in a crude form. I think I’ve even seen it used in fiction, where the heroes defeat their enemy (who’s too strong to fight directly) by mind-swapping him into a weaker body. You get the drift.
In such a scenario it might actually be both logically and ontologically possible for God to die, as long as it’s a contingent nature that the person of God adopted which handles the mechanics of death.. though it seems something of a stretch, and it’s not obvious what the motivation would be.
Long ago, on an unremarkable Friday in a second-rate capital in a rural backwater of the Empire, the regional administrator signed off on a death warrant because the local aristocracy of his domain had threatened to take their complaints over his head, and he was still in political trouble from the last time they’d done so.
And thus the machinery of state brought about in an afternoon what looks like the most impossible event, the most incoherent truth, in all history:
God is dead.
hail thee, quasifestival day 25 January 2007
Posted by DSM in miscellanea, theology.comments closed
Happy Robbie Burns day, everybody!
I may have a few issues with my people — those who think like me having long since selected themselves to the New World, except for a hardy crew for whom I have undying respect fighting the good fight at home — but they’re family.
In the end you choose your friends, and you make your enemies, but your family you’re stuck with. You can renounce them as fools or uplift them as models, but one way or another, they’re yours.. and no amount of objection will change the matter.
Family, and its extension ethnicity, aren’t everything; to believe such is idolatry. (See, e.g., Matt 10:37). Only One is everything, and He calls those of every nation and tribe to sing in joyful adoration.
Still, just because it’s not the most important thing doesn’t mean that it’s nothing. Creation is made up of endless differences and things which are hard to compare because they’re different kinds of thing.
To quote Lewis, and my favourite novel in the whole world:
Another said, “Never did He make two things the same; never did He utter one word twice. After earths, not better earths but beasts; after beasts, not better beasts, but spirits. After a falling, not a recovery but a new creation. Out of the new creation, not a third but the mode of change itself is changed forever. Blessed is He!”
And another said, “It is loaded with justice as a tree bows down with fruit. All is righteousness and there is no equality. Not as when stones lie side by side, but as when stones support and are supported in an arch, such is His order; rule and obedience, begetting and bearing, heat glancing down, life growing up. Blessed be He!”
One said, “They who add years to years in lumpish aggregation, or miles to miles and galaxies to galaxies, shall not come near His greatness. The day of the fields of Arbol will fade and the days of Deep Heaven itself are numbered. Not thus is He great. He dwells (all of Him dwells) within the seed of the smallest flower and is not cramped: Deep Heaven is inside Him who is inside the seed and does not distend Him. Blessed be He!”
“The edge of each nature borders on that whereof it contains no shadow or similitude. Of many points one line; of many lines one shape; of many shapes one solid body; of many senses and thoughts one person; of three persons, Himself. As is the circle to the sphere, so are the ancient worlds that needed no redemption to that world wherein He was born and died. As a point to a line, so is that world to the far-off fruits of its redeeming. Blessed be He!”
“Yet the circle is not less round that the sphere, and the sphere is the home and fatherland of circles. Infinite multitudes of circles lie enclosed in every sphere, and if they spoke they would say, For us were spheres created. Let no mouth open to gainsay them. Blessed be He!”
[...]
“All which is not itself the Great Dance was made in order that He might come down into it. In the Fallen World He prepared for Himself a body and was united with the Dust and made it glorious for ever. This is the end and final cause of all creating, and the sin whereby it came is called Fortunate and the world where this was enacted is the centre of worlds. Blessed be He!”
[...]
“Though men or angels rule them, the worlds are for themselves. The waters you have not floated on, the fruit you have not plucked, the caves into which you have not descended and the fire through which your bodies cannot pass, do not await your coming to put on perfection, though they will obey you when you come. Times without number I have circled Arbol while you were not alive, and those times were not desert. Their own voice was in them, not merely a dreaming of the day when you should awake. They also were at the centre. Be comforted, small immortals. You are not the voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come. No feet have walked, nor shall, on the ice of Glund; no eye looked up from beneath on the Ring of Lurga, and Iron-plain in Neruval is chaste and empty. Yes it is not for nothing that the gods walk ceaselessly around the fields of Arbol. Blessed be He!”
“That dust itself which is scattered so rare in heaven, whereof all worlds, and the bodies that are not worlds, are made, is at the centre. It waits not till created eyes have seen it or hands handled it, to be in itself a strength and splendour of Maleldil. Only the least part has served, or ever shall, a beast, a man, or a god. But always, and beyond all distances, before they came and after they are gone and where they never come, it is what it is and utters the heart of the Holy One with its own voice. It is farthest from Him of all things, for it has no life, nor sense, nor reason; it is nearest to Him of all things for without intervening soul, as sparks fly out of fire, He utters in each grain of it the unmixed image of His energy. Each grain, if it spoke, would say, I am at the centre; for me all things were made. Let no mouth open to gainsay it. Blessed be He!”
“Each grain is at the centre. The Dust is at the centre. The Worlds are at the centre. The beasts are at the centre. The ancient peoples are there. The race that sinned is there. Tor and Tinidril are there. The gods are there also. Blessed be He!”
“Where Maleldil is, there is the centre. He is in every place. Not some of Him in one place and some in another, but in each place the whole Maleldil, even in the smallness beyond thought. There is no way out of the centre save into the Bent Will which casts itself into the Nowhere. Blessed be He!”
“Each thing was made for Him. He is the centre. Because we are with Him, each of us is at the centre. It is not as in a city of the Darkened World where they say that each must live for all. In His city all things are made for each. When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!”
“In the plan of the Great Dance plans without number interlock, and each movement becomes in its season the breaking into flower of the whole design to which all else had been directed. Thus each is equally at the centre and none are there by being equals, but some by giving place and some by receiving it, the small things by their smallness and the great by their greatness, and all the patterns linked and looped together by the unions of a kneeling with a sceptred love. Blessed be He!”
And I think that’s good, for the same reason I like constitutional monarchy: it’s a feature, not a bug, that a society has elements which aren’t simply reducible to the consent of the governed. Not all of life is what you make it; much of it’s what you’re given. This helps remind us that life itself isn’t purely a matter of choice, of a consumerism of the will (the natural temptation and endpoint of liberalism), but that it consists of countless stories few of which we agreed to but many of which are wonderful.
I’ve never understood why some people consider it a terrible tragedy to be “an accident”.. the best things in my life have happened independently of, and in many (most?) cases despite, my own plans. Even when I was a kid I knew this, and I don’t think it was a particularly impressive insight on my part. Frankly, I think I’d get a kick out of having surprised my parents in such a way. (Unfortunately I was born long after my parents married and surprised no one except myself. The disbelief continues thirty years later.)
The above, of course, is nothing more than a long-winded way of introducing the following:
Happy Robbie Burns Day to all!.. even those whose only connection with the Other True North is having occasionally worn plaid.
Shakespeare was a better writer, and Chaucer a better poet.. but Burns is mine in a way that they could never be.
She has my heart, she has my hand,
By secret troth and honour’s band!
Till the mortal stroke shall lay me low,
I’m thine, my Highland lassie, O.Farewell the glen sae bushy, O!
Farewell the plain sae rashy, O!
To other lands I now must go,
To sing my Highland lassie, O.
(She knows who she is, Highland or no.)
Toast your haggis, imaginary or otherwise, my friends. You have my thoughts and prayers.
concentrating the mind wonderfully 5 November 2006
Posted by DSM in politics, theology.comments closed
Soon, Guy Fawkes won’t be the only one still dead.
If memory serves, I toasted Saddam’s capture with a pint at the Brew Pub back in Kingston. So it’s only appropriate that I likewise toast his death sentence. With a Foster’s, it turns out, which I thought was only Australian, but this one looks like it’s brewed in Edinburgh!
Yes, I hope that before the end, Saddam repents of his many crimes.. but I rejoice in justice being done in his execution, and would still support it even if he did now honestly repent. For part of his repentance would be coming to believe, like St Paul, that “if I have done anything deserving death, I do not refuse to die”. And he most assuredly has.
Of course, the usual suspects are making the usual noises, which God willing shall be ignored. And as always various sorts at the Vatican are making tut-tut sounds about the invocation of the death penalty.
It’s worthwhile remembering in this context that JPII’s teaching in Evangelium Vitae on the application of the death penalty is in a sense only his opinion; he can’t edit the deposit of faith. His opinion is worthy of profound consideration, and a certain degree of obedience on the part of Catholics — the issue of the limits of the obedience due the Magisterium when she’s not speaking infallibly ex cathedra on a matter of faith and morals is complicated — but his views on prudential matters are not binding teaching as usually understood.
Note that the Church’s opposition to abortion and the Church’s opposition to the death penalty are of a different character. The former is considered intrinsically evil, whereas objections to the latter depend on details about the justice system of the day and all sorts of circumstantial concerns. Non-Catholics can be forgiven for not having understood this, given that Catholic clergy have the same tendency to add “Thus saith the Lord” behind their personal policy preferences and judgments as anyone else, and the distinctions are easily lost.
The Church has consistently taught over her long history that the death penalty is in itself entirely just, on the basis of clear Scripture, enduring tradition, and strong natural law arguments. She also approved of the death penalty in circumstances where the judicial process was a lot less likely to result in the right verdict than it is today, so bishops who use the various failures of our modern legal system as an argument against the death penalty are treading dangerously close to inconsistency. The Catholic Church, unlike the Anglican Church, can’t simply change her mind on this.
JPII can argue if he wishes that modern circumstances mean that the various ends of punishment (justice, deterrence, defence, and so on) are better served without invoking the death penalty. I’d agree that in most circumstances, sentencing a man to death for theft or common assault wouldn’t adequately conform to the dignity of the human person. It seems to me, however, in circumstances like those described in Joseph Bottum’s argument against the death penalty that not putting the criminal to death is the greater offence against the dignity of the human person, and such has been the ancient teaching of the Church.
St Paul writes in Romans 13 that “[the authority] does not bear the sword for nothing; for [he] is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil.” Bottum’s claim that “The ’sword’ [Paul] mentions is a metaphor for police powers that does not necessarily imply approval of the death penalty [emphasis added]” is definitely, er, one way to look at it. Maybe St Paul thought the Romans used swords merely to intimidate, and when they drew them it was only to beat people nonlethally about the head.. which would certainly be ironic. I can sympathize somewhat with Bottum, though: the biblical case in favour of the traditional position is strong, and you’re going to have to look at a large number of verses awfully cross-eyed and avert your gaze from others in order to square this particular circle.
Unsurprisingly First Things has a number of articles worth reading on the subject of the death penalty, both for and against. I recommend especially those of Avery Cardinal Dulles and Justice Antonin Scalia, where my sympathies lie with the latter.
Die, Saddam. Die repentant, if you can, or unrepentant, as you will.
But die.
the shadow of that hyddeous strength 30 October 2006
Posted by DSM in human rights, politics, theology.comments closed
Some buildings are very beautiful; some are very ugly. Only one that I know of actually scares me, and it’s not merely because of the architecture.
It’s the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.
I was going to write about this quite a while ago, but then by coincidence Kate mentioned it, and I didn’t want to look too derivative (cue silly memories of time spent at the Brew Pub and wondering who was going to order first so that he could order whatever he wanted).. but enough time has passed.
Jeff Harrell over at the Shape of Days has an excellent post on the subject, which I can’t improve on, and I agree completely when he writes that “[t]he Ryugyong Hotel is, in my opinion, the single most unsettling structure ever erected by the hand of man.”
I also think that the discomfort it induces is worthy of real consideration. Over a decade ago, Fr Richard John Neuhaus wrote of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred at the specific command of Hitler:
Many years ago I shared a platform with a theologian who suggested that Bonhoeffer’s opposition to Nazism was essentially aesthetic; it was the ugliness of the movement that first alerted him to the movement’s evil. At the time I thought this a rather improbable hypothesis that ran the risk of diminishing the moral and intellectual dimensions of Bonhoeffer’s conviction. But in the intervening years I have come to appreciate-with no little help from studying Hans Urs von Balthasar-the inextricable entanglement of the three transcendentals-the good, the true, and the beautiful. Reflecting on Bonhoeffer in the theological journal dialog, Jean Bethke Elshtain addresses the aesthetic under the rubric of shame:
“One of the reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer was so repulsed by Nazism was precisely because of its aberrant shamelessness. Nazi ideology dictated erasing any barrier between public and private, between that which should be open to public scrutiny and definition and that which should not. The horrific denouement of an ideology that required breaching the boundary of shame was the shamelessness of death camps where human beings were robbed of dignity, stripped of privacy, deprived, therefore, of an elemental freedom of the body in life and of the respect we accord the bodies of the dead after life is no more. Scenes of starved, naked bodies, piles and piles being shoved by bulldozers into lime pits, is a nigh inexpressible instance of shamelessness, with the dead reduced to anonymous carcasses.”
Bonhoeffer understood that the great temptation is to forget that we are not God, that we are creatures living in a world whose fragmentation cannot be overcome by our efforts.
This temptation is surrendered to completely by Juche, the official doctrine of North Korea, and the Ryugyong is truly another Babel. That Juche produced such a demonically ugly building should come as no surprise.
For me, one of the most frightening aspects of the Hotel is that tour guides won’t discuss it. Everyone can see it, everywhere in Pyongyang — it’s monstrously large — but admitting it’s there is off-limits because it’d reveal the magnitude of the state’s failure. As bad as the starvation and the poverty that the regime has produced are, as dark a place as they’ve made North Korea, when the inevitable end comes the greatest challenge will be healing the minds of the people.
The terrifying silence reminds me of the utterly brilliant novel by C.J. Cherryh (but I repeat myself), Wave Without a Shore. I picked it up on a whim from the downtown Kingston library near my house and it was shattering. From its Amazon description:
Freedom was an isolated planet, off the spaceways track and rarely visited by commercial spacers. It wasn’t that Freedom was inhospitable as planets go. The problem was that outsiders — tourists and traders — claimed the streets were crowded with mysterious characters in blue robes and with members of an alien species.
Native-born humans, however, said that was not the case. There were no such blue-robes and no aliens.
Such was the viewpoint of both Herrin the artist and Waden the autocrat– until a crisis of planetary identity forced a life-and-death confrontation between the question of reality and the reality of the question..
The story is a powerful study on the limitations of Nietzschean/Objectivist solipsism, which has a milder sister in modern relativism. It’s the journey of a man who discovers that the world is much bigger than he is, and he ultimately finds his redemption in the truth. One of my favourite contemporary philosophers, Alvin Plantinga, calls the protagonist’s original view “creative anti-realism“: the denial that there really is a world out there which is independent of us, but instead that we construct our realities based on our own perspectives.
Cherryh’s a master at exploring the social implications of a worldview, and she’s in exceptional form here, where totalitarianism and radical self-actualization meet in the denial of reality. Wave Without a Shore affected me emotionally for weeks, and forever changed the way I look at everything from poverty to the tyrants of North Korea.
It’s available in a nice anthology these days, and I recommend it to everyone.
For liberation-minded North Korea information, you can visit One Free Korea and DPRK Studies, and of course the heroic gang at Freedom House. If you haven’t already seen them, you can’t miss Artemii Lebedev’s astonishing photographs from inside the Hermit Kingdom; an English translation of his commentary is also available.
baptizing Confucius 14 October 2006
Posted by DSM in Confucius, theology.comments closed
John Rose over at the First Things blog makes some interesting comments about the increasing importance of third-world Christianity, describing a lecture by Philip Jenkins:
[...]
Among the interesting threads in the following day’s roundtable Q&A was Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech and its relation to the varieties of Christianity in the Global South. In his lecture, Benedict called the European synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem the “historically decisive character” of Christianity, a providential, normative event that “did not happen by chance.”
But to look at the picture Jenkins painted of the future Church—on average, non-European and un-Hellenized—is to call into question the universality of Rome’s marriage. If, a century from now, Africa and a freer China are the scholastic centers of Christianity, with folklore and Mencius taking the place of Aristotle, what then are we in the West left to conclude about the synthesis of faith and reason described by Pope Benedict at Regensburg?
A friend sends this along on the subject: “The sun of grace has shone on our part of the world, and we [Western Christians] must be grateful, avoiding all arguments about how Socrates was more critically rational than Confucius.” Had Christ been born, per impossible, on the Yangtze, or had Muslim arms conquered Europe, which was all too possible, the face of Christianity would doubtless look different today.
I’m very fond of Confucius, who I had the joy of discovering in university. The Analects is one of the most profound and practical books I’ve ever read. He is the the wisest of men, and in many ways I prefer him to the Socrates-Plato-Aristotle trio. I don’t know about critical rationalism, because that’s not how he approached the world, but I think the case can be made that Confucius is actually more sensible than Socrates; he accepts more of what is real.
The best explanation of why Confucius is worth reading for Christians that I know of is by traditionalist conservative writer Jim Kalb (read the whole article):
[..] Many such thinkers, whether they were Mohists trying to feed the people or Legalists trying to maximize state power, called for centralization of society on functional lines. Others, like the Taoists, favored mysticism and withdrawal from society as a response to disorder. Whatever their differences, such proposals would have destroyed the special position of family and other traditional attachments and the importance of public standards of conduct and value not devised by the state.
Confucians rejected such views as unbalanced and inhuman. In their view, neither the rational centralized state nor liberation from restraint could bring a better life because social order can neither be dispensed with nor constructed arbitrarily. Confucius sought a middle way that accords with natural moral tendencies. For him, good social order consists in a cultivated harmony between nature and social institutions. That harmony grows out of attentiveness to family and other unplanned natural relationships, and is promoted and preserved by ethical principles such as reciprocity, loyalty, forbearance and benevolence.
From a Christian perspective Confucius’ thought is wanting, but it’s surprising in how few ways; and many of those weaknesses are things Confucius couldn’t do anything about, not having the Incarnation to ground his metaphysics. His views of society, and the interrelationships among the people who constitute it, are more reasonable than those of almost anyone else, and his understanding of the role of Ritual has many congruences with a sacramental worldview.
In Chesterton’s biography of Thomas Aquinas, he says that
[T]he philosophy of St. Thomas stands on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkeleian may hold that poached eggs only exist as a dream exists; since it is quite as easy to call the dream the cause of the eggs as the eggs the cause of the dream; the Pragmatist may believe that we get the best out of scrambled eggs by forgetting that they ever were eggs, and only remembering the scramble. But no pupil of St. Thomas needs to addle his brains in order adequately to addle his eggs; to put his head at any peculiar angle in looking at eggs, or squinting at eggs, or winking the other eye in order to see a new simplification of eggs.
A similar common-sense glory applies to Confucius. His views are founded on the conviction that people are people; that is, they are creatures with a particular nature, with corresponding natural abilities and tendencies. Important among these qualities is that man is inherently a social animal. At heart, social order is not an oppressive imposition from without, but the natural expression of the interrelationships between men. To the contrary, it’s the antinomian rejection of authority other than a man’s own preferences (the triumph of the will) which is truly oppressive, for it denies man the power to be authentically himself. A man raised alone by wolves knowing nothing but need and the satisfaction of need is still a man, but he lacks the connections to others (such as language and tradition) which are a vital part of the full exercise of being truly human.
Reading Confucius requires a little discipline — it’s more like reading the Gospels than St Paul or Aristotle, because his philosophy comes across through a series of aphorisms, question/answer pairs, and brief stories — but I found it very rewarding. He’s a deeply insightful observer of the human condition, and since modern Catholic anthropology is exploring the same man-in-communion reality, there’s a lot he has to teach.
Many translations of the Analects are freely available on the Web. I like the Waley translation myself, which is older (and may be less accurate; I’m not qualified to say) but elegantly beautiful.
Third-millennium Christianity would do well to learn about the Order of Heaven from Confucius; he understands clearly many things which we today have forgotten.
so bad it’s bad 4 October 2006
Posted by DSM in music, theology.comments closed
Two posts that caught my eye today make for an interesting match of theory and data.
First, Robert Miller over at First Things on transgressive art:
Characteristic of postmodernist art is transgression, the idea that the artist ought to produce works that violate traditional moral and aesthetic norms. The theory is that such norms are ultimately baseless, and thus violating them will liberate us from their tyranny and (the theory suddenly gets vague here) open up for us a new form of life that will somehow be better than that we have enjoyed in the past. This was never, in my view, a plausible program, and the utter predictability of much postmodern art, along with its complete failure to deliver any better form of life, suggests strongly that the program of transgression is a dead end.
Second, Colby Cosh offers a revealing juxtaposition — not easily excerpted — of the Toronto Star’s review of a free concert at the Centre for the Performing Arts with an instant-message live review from a less artsy attendee. [Language warning.]
