The Maverick Philosopher on human wretchedness

Over at the Maverick Philosopher‘s blog, there’s a great new post inspired by Blaise Pascal. It’s short, so I’ve reproduced it in its entireity, go here for the original.

.

—————–

.

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

“Man’s greatness is so obvious that it can even be deduced from his wretchedness, for what is nature in animals is wretchedness in man, thus recognizing that, if his nature is today like that of the animals, he must have fallen from some better state which was once his own.” (Pensées, Penguin, p. 59, #117, tr. Krailsheimer)

“What is nature in animals is wretchedness in man.”  That is a profound insight brilliantly expressed, although I don’t think anyone lacking a religious sensibility could receive it as such.  The very notion of wretchedness is religious.  If it resonates within you, you have a religious nature.  If, and only if.

Man’s wretchedness is ‘structural’: man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as healthy and well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in Pascalian divertissement, diversion. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. Pascal writes that we “must have fallen from some better state.”  That is not obvious.  But the fact remains that we are in a dire state from which we need salvation, a salvation we are incapable of achieving by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

How do we know that?  From thousands of years of collective experience.

Meditations on Mark 7

The essential element of Christianity is a personal relationship with Jesus. Last week I participated in a study of Mark 7, and was reminded just how personal Jesus’ interactions with people were during his ministry on Earth.

There are three major segments to Mark 7, and at first glance they don’t seem to have too much in common (at least, they didn’t to me). I strongly encourage you to read the whole chapter yourself (use BibleGateway if you don’t have a Bible handy), but I’ll give a brief overview of each section:

In the first section (verses 1-23), some Pharisees arrive to see Jesus and complain that his disciples aren’t doing the full ritual washing that would usually precede dinner, and Jesus responds by teaching them that holiness is more about what’s in your heart than what’s in your stomach. He also rebukes them for elevating the mechanics of ritual above the intent.

The second part (verses 24-30) takes place in Tyre, a predominantly Gentile town, where a Gentile woman comes to Jesus and begs him to heal her demon-possessed daughter. Jesus responds with what, at face value, seems like a pretty offensive remark, but the woman is undeterred and Jesus responds to her faith by healing her daughter.

Finally, we have the account of Jesus healing a deaf mute (verses 31-37). He takes the man away from the crowd, and heals him by touching his ears and tongue… with his spit.

.

Clean hands and dirty hearts (Mark 7:1-23)

There are a few things to note about this passage. The first is that the Pharisees don’t seem to be concerned on hygiene grounds, this is all about performing the appropriate rituals for cleanliness. Jesus cuts right to the heart of the matter, criticising their concern with appearance before people over seeking to do God’s will. He quotes Isaiah 29:

“These people honor me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.
Their worship is a farce,
    for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.” (Mark 7:6-7, NLT)

He follows this with detailed teaching on holiness, specifically that our sinful nature is really about what is in our hearts: “evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, lustful desires, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness”. And equally importantly, true holiness is in having a heart that is right with God, and not about whether we perform the “right” rituals, or use the “right” words in prayer.

Afterwards, when instructing his disciples in private, he gives the first indications here that he, the promised Messiah of the Jewish people, has actually come to redeem the whole world. His comments on the acceptability of food are a presage of Peter’s vision (Acts 10:9-22), in which concept of “clean” and “unclean” food is used to tell Peter to go and preach to Gospel to the Gentiles.

.

Of Dogs and Children (Mark 7:24-30)

After the encounter with the Pharisees, Jesus heads off to Tyre, a coastal city in the predominantly Gentile province of Phoenicia. He’s probably gone there for a bit of a rest, as he’s specifically avoided attracting attention. But a woman comes to the house where he’s staying, and begs him to heal her daughter, who is possessed by evil spirits. This itself isn’t too unusual (in the context of Jesus ministry, anyway!); in Mark 5 he casts a number of demons out of a possessed man. Based on previous encounters, we might expect Jesus to immediately go out and heal the daughter, but instead he says to this woman, “First I should feed the children — my own family, the Jews. It isn’t right to take food from the children and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27, NLT).

The implication seems to be that Jesus, as the Messiah, is the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy, and should primarily minister to the Jews. But the striking thing for me is that the woman is not offended. Instead, she turns his challenge straight back to him, and points out that dogs can eat the children’s leftovers. Jesus responds to her expression of faith by healing her daughter.

There are two things to note here: one is the suggestion in the metaphorical word-play that there is an excess of food: there is more than enough for both “children” and “dogs” to eat. But also, Jesus challenges the woman in a way that allows her to express her faith and humility. Although we may see the text as offensive, she didn’t think of it that way: Jesus spoke to her with personal knowledge of how she would understand what he said.

Also, following on from the teaching about clean and unclean foods, Jesus confirms that he has come as a saviour to all people, not just the Jews.

.

Healing … with spit? (Mark 7:31-37)

The final part of the chapter is an account of healing which is superficially similar to many healing accounts, but subtly different in important ways. A deaf-mute man is brought to Jesus, and he leads the man away from the crowd and then heals him in private. (This is important, we’ll come back to it). Specifically, he touches the man’s ears, and then spits on his fingers and touches them to the man’s tongue.

Now in other cases, Jesus simply speaks to people whom he heals. “Take up your mat and walk.” (Mark 2:11) “Your faith has made you well.” (Mk. 5:34) But this time he’s a lot more hands-on, because the man is deaf! How would he understand what was happening if Jesus just spoke to him? The poor guy is probably already pretty confused, it’s not clear how much he understood about what was going on. So Jesus takes him away from the bustle and mess of the crowd, and makes it clear: “I’m doing something to your ears and your tongue”. So when the man was then able to hear and speak, he could also understand what had just happened. Jesus healed him in a way that was very personally tailored to his specific needs.

There’s another element at work in this story: Jesus leads the man away from the crowd to do all of this, and then uses spit in the healing process. Remember the teaching back in the first section? Well, this is basically the reverse. Under the same ritual laws that describe the appropriate hand-washing procedure, we also see that if a man spits on another man, he is unclean for the rest of the day. But here, the holiness that is the very essence of Jesus leads to blessing and holiness in the man who is healed. The crowd would probably not understand this distinction, but Jesus has deliberately done this away from the crowd. As with the Gentile woman, what could seem offensive is instead intended – and understood – to bring healing and blessing. Both the Gentile woman and the deaf-mute understand completely what Jesus is doing, and respond with faith and rejoicing to his personally-designed ministry.

.

Jesus understands us and interacts with us at a deeply personal level. He knows the depths of our hearts, and desires an intimate relationship with each of us.

.

A legal defense of marriage

Here’s an example of a legal right, and a justification for its existence:

Society needs someone appointed to make decisions on everyone’s behalf, because we can’t get anything done if we need to consult the whole population about every decision. Since this person is making decisions for everyone, everyone should have a say in choosing who this person is. Therefore, everyone should have a right to vote.

We start with a societal need, and the rights endowed upon citizens are based on that need.

Here’s another societal need:

Society needs good future citizens. Thus, society needs children, and needs to promote the best upbringing for those children. Children require a mother and father. The best care for children is usually given by their parents, and this care will take many years and require huge investment. Thus the people involved need to feel secure as they invest time, effort and money into creating a family in which children can grow up. Thus, we create a legal framework where any man and woman (the most basic and universal requirement for parents) may enter into a legal contract that encourages them to invest in creating a potential home for children. Thus, any pair of one man and one woman may choose to get married.

From the state’s perspective, that’s pretty much it. That’s the legal justification for the existence of a marriage contract. The state needs kids, and kids need parents, and parents need legal protection as they invest in the kids.

Of course, there are plenty of ancillary benefits to marriage. But those are not relevant to the legal existence of marriage.

There’s also nothing in that description about love. Or attraction. Or sexual orientation. Because in terms of marriage as a legal institution, those things are also meaningless. There is no legal basis for a “celebration of love”, but there is a legal basis for providing a framework in which children can be created and raised.

Having a right does not mean that you have to execute that right, just that you have the option. Anyone also has the option not to get married.

Note: As this post discusses the legal justification for marriage, I am of course referring solely to the legal aspects of civil marriage. Religious justifications for marriage are better discussed independently of secular legal questions.

.

—————————————

Related posts:

Some thoughts on the redefinition of marriage

.

Some thoughts on the redefinition of marriage

Several countries are currently discussing (or are already in the process of) redefining marriage. With that in mind, there’s a new paper by Ryan T. Anderson entitled: Marriage: What It Is, Why It Matters, and the Consequences of Redefining It. Although there are obvious religious considerations to this issue, Anderson isn’t actually discussing those issues in any detail in this paper.

The abstract expands:

Marriage is based on the truth that men and women are complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the reality that children need a mother and a father. Redefining marriage does not simply expand the existing understanding of marriage; it rejects these truths. Marriage is society’s least restrictive means of ensuring the well-being of children. By encouraging the norms of marriage—monogamy, sexual exclusivity, and permanence—the state strengthens civil society and reduces its own role. The future of this country depends on the future of marriage. The future of marriage depends on citizens understanding what it is and why it matters and demanding that government policies support, not undermine, true marriage.

There are a few key points that come up throughout the paper. The first is that redefining marriage does not simply expand the existing understanding of marriage. It would actually contradict the traditional concept of marriage. Raising kids – and thus sustaining society – happens best in a stable home with both parents present. Marriage as an institution is primarily about bringing up the children that are produced by the husband and wife. As Anderson wrote in another paper on the same topic:

In recent decades, marriage has been weakened by a revisionist view that it is more about adults’ desires than children’s needs. This view reduces marriage primarily to intense emotional bonds.

If marriage were just intense emotional regard, marital norms would make no sense as a principled matter. There is no reason of principle that requires an emotional union to be permanent. Or limited to two persons. Or sexual, much less sexually exclusive (as opposed to “open”). Or inherently oriented to family life and shaped by its demands.

Redefining marriage would further distance marriage from the needs of children and deny the importance of mothers and fathers. It would deny, as a matter of policy, the ideal that children need a mother and a father.

Redefining marriage would also diminish the social pressures and incentives for husbands to remain with their wives and their biological children and for men and women to marry before having children. It would be very difficult for the law to send a message that fathers matter once it had redefined marriage to make fathers optional.

The traditional definition of marriage (one man, one woman, monogamous) does not restrict consenting adults from forming whatever other relationships they like.

The paper is presented in three sections. Here’s an outline of the major points:

.

I. What Is Marriage?

1. Marriage exists to bring a man and a woman together as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children their union produces.
2. Marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children need a mother and a father.
3. Marriage as the union of man and woman is true across cultures, religions, and time. The government recognizes but does not create marriage.
4. Marriage has been weakened by a revisionist view of marriage that is more about adults’ desires than children’s needs.

II. Why Marriage Matters for Policy

1. Government recognizes marriage because it is an institution that benefits society in a way that no other relationship does.
2. Marriage is society’s least restrictive means of ensuring the well-being of children. Marital breakdown weakens civil society and limited government.
3. Marital breakdown costs taxpayers.
4. Government can treat people equally—and leave them free to live and love as they choose—without redefining marriage.
5. We reap the civil society benefits of marriage only if policy gets marriage right.

III. The Consequences for Redefining Marriage

1. Redefining marriage would further distance marriage from the needs of children and deny the importance of mothers and fathers.
2. Redefining marriage would put into the law the new principle that marriage is whatever emotional bond the government says it is.
3. Redefining marriage would weaken monogamy, exclusivity, and permanency—the norms through which marriage benefits society.
4. Redefining marriage threatens religious liberty.

Check out the whole paper here.

.

—————————————

Related posts:

A legal defense of marriage

.

.

Thomas Nagel: a heretic amongst heretics?

There’s a fantastic article at The Weekly Standard about Thomas Nagel. Nagel may not be as much of a household name as Dawkins, but he is probably America’s most prominent philosopher and a serious intellectual heavyweight. But his latest book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, was roundly attacked by the self-proclaimed “brights” of atheism. In short, Nagel thinks that the worldview of philosophical materialism is wrong, despite being a very useful presupposition of science. For voicing these thoughts, Nagel has been branded a heretic by his fellow atheists.

The most interesting aspect of this drama is that Nagel is actually just voicing what every one of those critics believes. Or at least, he’s voicing the line of thought that is revealed by their actions. Because nobody actually lives as if materialism were true (unless they are certifiably insane). As the article puts it:

As a philosophy of everything [materialism] is an undeniable drag. As a way of life it would be even worse. Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.

Applied beyond its own usefulness as a scientific methodology, materialism is, as Nagel suggests, self-evidently absurd. Mind and Cosmos can be read as an extended paraphrase of Orwell’s famous insult: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Materialism can only be taken seriously as a philosophy through a heroic feat of cognitive dissonance; pretending, in our abstract, intellectual life, that values like truth and goodness have no objective content even as, in our private life, we try to learn what’s really true and behave in a way we know to be good. Nagel has sealed his ostracism from the intelligentsia by idly speculating why his fellow intellectuals would undertake such a feat. 

“The priority given to evolutionary naturalism in the face of its implausible conclusions,” he writes, “is due, I think, to the secular consensus that this is the only form of external understanding of ourselves that provides an alternative to theism.”

Apparently, the acceptance by “freethinkers” is contingent on your committment to the idea that thinking freely is impossible.

.

P.S. – For anyone wanting a more in-depth review of Nagel’s work and the criticisms it has attracted, check out the posts by Edward Feser on the subject.

.

Infallibility: a user’s guide

I received the following piece via email from the Jesuit Institute of South Africa.

I didn’t write it, but I think that it is a useful discussion of what the Catholic concept of “papal infallibility” actually entails.

.

—————————————

.

Infallible? by Raymond Perrier

Infallible must be one of the most misunderstood terms in Catholic vocabulary.  Reflecting on the Papacy of Benedict XVI we can remind ourselves what Papal infallibility is and most importantly what it is not.

The origins of the idea of infallibility started not with Popes but with the Church.  The notion is that the whole body of the Church gathered together – for example a council of the worldwide college of bishops – must be inspired by the Holy Spirit and so cannot make an error.  Thus, the bishops assembled with the Pope (as at the Second Vatican Council 50 years ago) can invoke infallibility.

However, 150 years ago, faced with the prospect of being isolated in the Vatican City by the newly united Italy, the then Pope Pius IX was worried that he would not be able to call a Council of the Church if he needed to.  He thus proposed that infallibility applied not only to Councils but also to the Pope acting on his own; this was declared by the First Vatican Council in 1870.  Thus, every Pope since has in theory been able to invoke infallibility.

But this is the key: infallibility must be invoked.  It is not automatic.  The Pope has to be speaking from his office as Bishop of Rome (the Latin term for this ‘ex cathedra’ is the source of the word ‘cathedral’); it must be on a matter of faith or morals; and it must be in keeping with Scripture and the tradition of the Church; it is held to be ‘divinely revealed’.  So you can’t go and ask the Pope to tell you the location of the Holy Grail or the weather forecast for next April or the winning numbers of the Lotto and expect his answer to be infallible.

In fact, infallibility was never invoked by Pope Pius IX nor by Paul VI nor even by John Paul II.  It has only been used explicitly once which was in 1950 when Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption – which had actually been widely since at least the 4^th century.

When a Pope teaches it is – outside of a General Council – the highest teaching of the Church but it is not automatically infallible.  Benedict knew that very well.  Furthermore, he knew that he had to distinguish between his authoritative teaching as Pope (his extraordinarily beautiful and thoughtful encyclicals or his weekly Angelus address) and his writings as a theologian, even the ones that came out while he was Pope.

He was also able to admit a mistake.  One example of this was when, in an attempt to build bridges with a right-wing breakaway group of bishops, he unwittingly engaged with a man who turned out to be a holocaust denier.  Pope Benedict came as close to any Pope ever has in saying – whoops, we got it wrong; we didn’t do our homework.

It is worth remembering the answer he gave just before the conclave that elected him in 2005.  A journalist asked if the Holy Spirit would be electing the new Pope.  The then Cardinal Ratzinger replied: “No, the cardinals will elect the new Pope.  However, we hope that the Holy Spirit is not absent from the process.”

.

Raymond Perrier is Director of the Jesuit Institute of South Africa

.

—————————————

Related posts:

Vale, Pope Penedict XVI

.

Reading the story of Nature

So, in a previous post I talked about how Nature doesn’t have a voice, and that this makes it difficult to ask it questions. Today I want to talk about an alternative way of interpreting nature.

Francis Bacon talked about reading “both books” in order to gain insight about God. By this he meant that God is revealed in scripture, because the Bible is God’s Word to us, and God is also revealed in nature, because he is the Creator of the universe. It seems to me that asking questions of nature can be very similar to asking questions of Scripture, which in turn is very similar to asking questions of a novel. Let me explain:

.

Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.
© Penguin Publishing (2012)

Victor Hugo had a lot of big ideas about life, death, love, honour, justice, duty, sin and redemption, and social inequality. Now, he could have written a series of essays on each one of those, but instead he wrote a book called Les Misérables, which deals with all those topics (and more). It also provides a host of unforgettable characters, some beautiful prose, and an epic story spanning several decades (as well as a few fascinating diversions into the Battle of Waterloo and the history of the Parisian sewer system).

A series of essays might have clocked in at about 50-100 pages, in total. The book is anywhere from 1500-2000 pages, depending on the imprint and/or translation that you read. So why did he make life so difficult for himself?

The simple answer is that people are much happier to read 1000 pages of novel than 100 pages of essay. The far more important answer is that you can say things that are far more nuanced, insightful, and challenging within a story than you can in an essay. This is because the story does not speak directly, and thus it requires active involvement from the reader to understand what the message is.

.

Now consider scripture. If you read through the Old Testament, you’ll find that a great deal of it can be classified as narrative. That is, it tells the story of stuff that happened to God’s people. It’s not always a happy story: there is death and betrayal and revenge killing and adultery and idolatry and lots more besides. In some places, that sort of wickedness is explicitly condemned (such as in 2 Samuel 11:1 – 12:12), but in other places the Bible itself makes no obvious judgement on things that seem wicked. However, it is naive to say that if something is in the Bible and isn’t explicitly condemned, it is therefore condoned. These sorts of passages are a challenge to the reader: what does the history of the nation of Israel tell us about God, about human nature, about the world in which we live, about the short- and long-term consequences of our decisions and our actions?

These are not simple issues, and a simple set of bullet points cannot capture the scope of human experience. There is a great rule of cinema: “Show, don’t tell.” This concept is equally true in novels, although it is less pithy to phrase it for a writer: “Tell implicitly through the narrative, not explicitly through commentary”. This is not just an issue of artistic expression: we understand things far more deeply when they are told through a story.

.

So what about Nature?

The messages of nature, understood as God’s creation, are also less direct than a set of bullet points. We see the majestic beauty of the stars, and also the beauty of a tiny flower. We feel insignificant against the unimaginable scale of the universe, and yet we know that Jesus loves us so much, and sees us as so precious, that he was willing to suffer and die for us. We know that God made the world, and that He is immeasurably loving and good, and yet we see the relentless and brutal struggle for survival that seems to define all living things.

Many of these issues are challenging and thought-provoking. There are few simple answers. But they are all chapters in the greatest story ever told.

.

—————————————

Related posts:

Questions to Nature

On reading both books

The power of narrative

.