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Teach the controversy?

Timothy Wilson’s translation of excerpts from Cardinal Zigliara’s Summa philosophica continues at The Josias. Today: the error of “liberty of teaching.” While perhaps not as pressing as the question of toleration of non-Christian cults, this is still an important question. The Cardinal’s analysis begins:

Question. Simultaneously one with liberty of conscience and of cult, there is proclaimed by the more recent liberalism a liberty of teaching, particularly with respect to the means with which it is principally exercised, namely, with respect to liberty of the press (la libertá della stampa). We ask, therefore, whether this liberty is upright, and to be approved by the civil authority. Here again I caution that the discussion is concerned, not with tolerance, but with approbation: evils indeed are able to be tolerated, yet naught but goods ought to be approved.

(Emphasis in original.) You should read the whole thing at The Josias.

For our part, we note that the question of the rights of error seems to be more, not less, important with each passing day.

Cardinal Zigliara on political atheism

The Josias has made available a selection from Tommaso Maria Cardinal Zigliara’s Summa philosophica, dealing with political atheism. Timothy Wilson, a fine Latinist with a deep interest in the (now largely forgotten) scholastic and manualist tradition, translated the selection for publication. Cardinal Zigliara, a Dominican, was a noted Thomist of the late nineteenth century. A close collaborator of Leo XIII, Cardinal Zigliara was a contributor to Leo’s encyclicals Aeterni Patris, which restored the Common Doctor to his place of preeminence among the theologians, and Rerum novarum. This is the first of five selections, according to The Josias, and we will be following the series with great interest.

By the way, if you have not been following The Josias, you have been missing out. In addition to regular essays from the perspective of the Church’s traditional social teaching, the site makes available many important documents that have long been unavailable for linguistic reasons. For example, earlier this year, The Josias published a translation of Pius IX’s Maxima quidem, an allocution that ultimately served as the basis for several propositions condemned in his wonderful Syllabus Errorum. It is well worth checking from time to time.

Update to Girard and the Letter to the Hebrews

It has been called to our attention, by a source acquainted with our prior post, that a discussion of René Girard’s theory of substitutionary atonement in the context of the Letter to the Hebrews has been offered. Raymund Schwager’s Jesus in the Drama of Salvation has a lengthy treatment of the question.  Based upon an initial read, we are not wholly convinced by Schwager’s argument. However, we are away from our copy of Craig Koester’s commentary on Hebrews, which, while written from a Lutheran perspective, with all that entails, is a solid commentary, and we would want to start there (along with, of course, Father Haydock’s notes) in examining Schwager’s argument.

René Girard and the Letter to the Hebrews

Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., of Sancrucensis, points our attention to a new blog, Spoils of Egypt. Semi-pseudonymously run by Coëmgenus, Spoils of Egypt has already posted an interesting piece “Against René Girard.”

We admit that Girard’s philosophy is, well, not particularly known to us, except in very broad strokes. Something to do with memes, we think. But, since Girard’s recent passing, we have seen, in various places, memorials placing him in a Christian context. Coëmgenus’s piece begins,

The death of René Girard has been followed by the flood of eulogy one expects for an author so often cited, a professor beloved of so many students, and a thinker so effectively popularized.

Much of that appreciation, I’m sure, is merited. Girard was nothing if not thought-provoking, and he gets plenty of mileage out of the few idées fixes that run through all his writing. (His key concept of “mimetic desire” strikes me as one that may bear great fruit for psychology and politics alike, and at any rate will keep the grad students busy for a long while.)

But among his disciples, René Girard is not only praised as a critic or as an interesting writer, but as a kind of theologian, as a sage whose anthropological key has deciphered the secret meaning of Christianity. His practice of the Catholic religion, and his personal loyalty to the Church, were commendable, and do nothing to refute this view. Girard himself suggests that he held such an opinion of his career — but it’s wrong, and wrong enough that those who would recommend Girard to Christians do him no service by repeating it.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink omitted.) Read the whole thing there. As we say, we are probably not qualified to make such a sweeping assessment of Girard’s philosophy.

One point struck us as an interesting point for jumping off, however. In criticizing Girard’s approach to substitutionary atonement, Coëmgenus makes this point:

In every language and in every rite, Christians have viewed the eucharist as a sacrifice, typologically tied to the offerings of Melchizedek and of the Jewish priests, and figuring the perfect sacrifice of the Passion. This typological connection is everywhere in Christian thought. When the Church repeats Christ’s words — “this is my body, given for you” — this is taken to refer equally to the cross and to the liturgy, which are understood together to be the perfection and seal of the finite sacrifices offered by those who had not yet heard the Gospel.

The difference between this and Girard’s view is vast — for him, the Cross is not the perfection of sacrifice but its final refutation, an absurdity and an offense designed to convince us of the fatuity of all sacrifice. Christ’s Passion saves us not because he is offered in our place, or as a propitiation to the Father, but because it teaches us to set aside the myths of sacrifice and the economy of violence they entail. It is not Christ’s blood, but his instructive witness, that saves.

(Emphasis supplied.) It seems to us that one could profitably read Girard through the Letter to the Hebrews, which is a sustained, dense explanation of the nature of Christ’s priesthood and his sacrifice. Perhaps someone has already done this.

As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped

Fr. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., at his always-excellent blog, Sancrucensis, has a wonderful post today, “‘Reasoning Is Worse than Scolding.” In short, he uses Dickens’s David Copperfield to come to this conclusion,

As Fr Hunwicke recently remarked, “Anti-intellectualism is a stance people very often adopt when they propose to do something irrational,” and it is even more the stance that people adopt one when they do not want to have the unpleasantness of being rationally strict with others. But in the long run such a stance always leads to misery. Happiness can only come from conforming human life to right reason, and a cowardly and infantile refusal of the demands of reason leads to misery in this life, and eternal punishment in the next.

(Emphasis supplied and hyperlink omitted.) Read the whole thing there. It’s enough, by the way, to convince us that we have been perhaps unjust to David Copperfield, preferring A Tale of Two Cities and Bleak House.

We perhaps state the obvious when we say say that one cannot hope to live a virtuous life without constant application of reason—we note that Aristotle says as much. Moral excellence, Aristotle tells us, “is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.” (Ethic. II.6, 1106b36–1107a2 [emphasis supplied], Barnes ed. p. 1748.) But everyone knows this instinctively. (Cf., e.g., ST Ia IIae q.91 a.2 co. & ad 2–3.) It makes sense, intuitively, that you can’t know how to be good without reason, since being good involves regular application of reason. Not exactly earth-shattering stuff. But the upshot is this: Fr. Waldstein is right when he identifies an intrinsic connection between reason and happiness.

Or he would have been right for pretty much the entire history of the West. Whether he is right today seems to be a different question. Certainly, there are any number of movements at large today that hold that happiness is contingent upon fundamentally irrational things. (We will omit, for our sensibilities as much as yours, naming them.) In other words, people insist that they will be happy only if they do something irrational. And the thing is, few people seem to object on this basis; they may object on other bases, but they do not insist that the thing the people want is irrational.

We have written a little bit about the Church’s process of losing things—for example, the Church seems to have lost a sense that the Divine Office ought to be part of her public worship—and it seems to us that society is on the verge of losing the ability to think in terms of reason and unreason. That is, we don’t criticize various ideas and proposals as being irrational. We criticize them as immoral or impractical or expensive or unbiblical or any of a whole host of things. But none of those criticisms is quite the same thing as the criticism that something is irrational.

At any rate, check out Fr. Waldstein’s post.

Circular firing squads

Elliot Milco at The Paraphasic has a very thoughtful post called “Freaking Out about the Church.” His argument begins,

But I’d like to suggest that accusations of people “flipping out” or “coming unhinged” are sometimes used not as diagnoses of real defects in authors or their works, but as ways of marginalizing certain ideas.  What are the standards for deciding that someone is “unhinged”?  How do we know that someone’s writing is “nuts”?  When is shrill polemic justified?

(Emphasis supplied.) He goes on to argue:

In a community which is on the margins by default, in which members are constantly confronting the mainstream, trying to explain themselves to it, and trying to reduce their separation from it, there is a silent question: Am I an extremist? Am I crazy? Have I gone beyond the pale?  Different people deal with these questions in their own way, depending on their temperaments and intellectual habits.  Some are truly indifferent to the matter.  A few bask in their marginality, always trying to flaunt the expectations of the mainstream.  But most set up little barriers in their mind.  They pick out someone a bit further out than them and say, “Oh no, I am not extreme, that group is extreme.  I am not irrational, that person is irrational.”  In this way the marginalized person often has more hostility for the slightly-more-marginal group, than for the mainstream which is much more distant from his own stance.

(Emphasis supplied.) You should read the rest at The Paraphasic. The conclusions are startling, and need to be taken seriously.

For our part, we think that, were times different, it would be perfectly acceptable to engage in intense debates, which occasionally involve flamboyant rhetoric. So-and-so’s gone off the deep end. So-and-so’s a crypto-Modernist. And so forth. Under these circumstances, however, it may be more reasonable—it may be more appropriate—to circle the wagons. Tradition is already as marginalized as it has been in a long time. Tradition-minded Catholics marginalizing other tradition-minded Catholics seems extraordinarily counterproductive.

Finding the gold seam

Pater Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., writing at Sancrucensis, plugs an offshoot of Marrow devoted to Catholic blogs. It is a splendid service, not only because it aggregates our posts, but also because it represents one-stop shopping for people interested in the Catholic blogosphere. Obviously, we think that you, dear reader, should sit down first thing—with your morning coffee and Dunhill, of course—and read Semiduplex. But you could do a lot worse than starting your morning by perusing Marrow.

Good intentions

We really didn’t mean for Semiduplex to become “interesting things other people wrote” and “Synodmania 2015.” Honest. But it isn’t like people are discussing Callewaert’s interesting treatment of the ferial preces—including their apostolic and patristic origins—in what was left of the old Breviary, in his fascinating De Brevarii Romani Liturgia (nn. 292–93), published in 1939 after Pius X’s Divino afflatu reforms. (This reminds us of a recent piece touching, not favorably, upon those same reforms.) At any rate, we did not intend for Semiduplex to be a showcase of other people’s best writing. But here we are. All of which is long way of saying, at Athanasius Contra Mundum, there is a very good reflection on why the author—a traditional Catholic—is not covering the Synod where basic teaching, to say nothing of traditional teaching, is up in the air for the first time, well, in a long time.

Reading “Pastor aeternus”

The Paraphasic, which just had a series on “practical Mottramism,” which is, of course, the disorder that affected poor Rex Mottram so hilariously in Brideshead Revisited, and which has made an unhappy reappearance in our time, is engaging in a “close reading” of Pastor aeternus, the dogmatic constitution of the First Vatican Council that defined the dogma of papal infallibility—and the narrow circumstances under which infallibility can be invoked. We shall follow The Paraphasic‘s series with interest.