A House Divided

I have not written a lot about the Synod, but it continues to... (is haunt the right word?...) me.

Last night I read Bishop Athanasius Schneider's powerful response to the final document. I was interested that he named our own Cardinal Nichols.

It seems to me that what +Schneider is saying, and indeed the known positions of various Cardinals who were at the Synod, such as ++Pell, ++Sarah, and indeed many others, are in stark opposition to what ++Nichols, ++Kasper and so on are saying (here for example, though as ever, ++Nichols' studied ambiguity makes it very hard to be sure quite what he means...).

So what is a Catholic to do? One's instinct is to look to the Holy Father: where is Peter on this? But that is not entirely clear (which in itself is a problem, I believe). So we then have to look a little more searchingly: what is the Tradition of the Church? What have previous Pontiffs said and, more importantly, formally taught? What do the Catechisms say? And in this case, we also have the very clear teaching of Our Lord and St Paul. So it is not difficult to conclude that +Schneider et al stand in the Faith of the Church, and insofar as ++Nichols et al are opposed to that, they have departed from the Church's teaching.  

If my analysis is correct, that is a grave situation indeed: one inevitably reflects on Mark 3:25, A house divided against itself cannot stand. However, we also have Our Lord's promise in Matthew 16:18 that 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against her (the Church).'

So we have to conclude that, even if, as at the time of the Arian heresy, many bishops are espousing heretical beliefs, the Church will stand: the bishops in error will either fall away, leaving the house still standing, albeit somewhat shaken by their fall; or they will come to their senses.  We hope and pray, of course, for the latter.

On another note, I am currently reading, inter alia, Christopher Booker's mighty work on The Seven Stories. I don't like his Jungian interpretations, but his fundamental analysis of story types is fascinating and compelling.

It led me to ask myself What is the story we are living through: is it a comedy of a tragedy?

I have to conclude that it is a Divine Comedy: that ultimately,  'All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.' But that does not preclude personal tragedy, of course. Souls may be lost, and much damage done along the way.

But we must not lose the Faith, we must not lose Hope, and we must remain in Charity: for these three endure.

Determined to be free...

I listened to a fascinating edition of In Our Time the other day, on Free Will.  It was first broadcast some time ago, I think but I subscribe to the Podcast, and listened to it on a journey just recently.

It seemed to me that the academics discussing it got themselves into something of a bind; particularly when trying to distinguish between fatalism and determinism.  The argument seemed to be that if you were fatalistic, it didn't matter what he did Oedipus was always going to end up killing his father and marrying his mother; whereas, in a deterministic world, his behaviours (over which he had no choice) were always going to lead to that outcome.  I found that a very nice (in the more technical sense) distinction.

In fact, as one of them pointed out, a thorough-going determinism, lets even Hitler off the hook: if he has no free will, then he cannot be blamed for his actions, as they were the result of everything else, and ultimately were determined at (or before) the time of the Big Bang.

Such a thought naturally repels us: it means that anything and everything we do is devoid of any moral content; that it is equally irrational to be grateful or angry in response to someone else's behaviour (as they were bound to behave in that way); that education, training, formation - and indeed planning or even discussing such issues is pointless (though we will still do those things if it is already determined that we will) and so on.

But the fact that it repels us is not, ipso facto, proof that it is wrong (though I will argue later that it is an indicator).

Likewise, the fact that we experience 'making decisions' does not mean that we do actually do so. There are well-documented cases of our being deluded about what we are actually doing; and in this instance, there are some fascinating experiments that demonstrate that a subject's motor-neurones are activated towards a course of action before the pre-frontal cortex is activated to make the relevant decision…  However, my view is that such experiments could equally demonstrate that we don't understand the brain (and still less the mind) as well as we think we do, as that we do not in fact decide in some sense that is meaningful.

In fact, the whole business is very complicated.  If one reflects on what one does, one can see that there is a whole spectrum. At one end are the autonomic processes (such as maintaining a heart beat, breathing) that we do not will at all. Moving along a bit are deep-rooted responses, some instinctive and some habitual, which may or may not seem mutable, such as the fight or flight response; then there are more superficial habits, which operate if we don't over-ride them, but which are relatively easy to over-ride, such as biting one's nails, or smiling on seeing a friend; and then there are the consciously willed decisions, such as making a cup of coffee, or deciding one has spent long enough on the internet and engaging with one's family.

Under determinism, these are a priori believed to be equally non-voluntary; the notion of choice is an illusion, and though we may think we are choosing, in fact we are always going to do whatever we end up doing.

But that, I think, is an example of physics over-stepping the mark and getting into metaphysics.

The fundamental point is that if we are to claim that we cannot prove free will (despite it being a universal experience, and being the basis on which civilisation is organised, and indeed being an illusion [if such it be] that is both necessary and impossible to shed), we can equally make the same claim about absolutely anything else - including the scientific method, or indeed our own perception of reality.

For we cannot get outside ourselves sufficiently to be able to prove empirically that we do exist and are not the febrile imaginings of some other being: a being whose imagination is so potent, that the creatures it imagines believe themselves to exist.  Likewise, we cannot prove empirically that the physical phenomena we observe bear any relation to an external reality, and are not the projections of a deranged mind.  Nor can we prove, empirically, that empirical proof is the only or most secure way to knowledge.

To put it in the positive, we can only think if we make some assumptions - such as that the process of thought has some validity; and even that we do, in fact, exist.

Once we do that, we can certainly tease out the implications of such assumptions, and test them to ensure that they are coherent and render a plausible account of whatever we are engaging with.  But to imagine that we can proceed 'scientifically' with no assumptions at all is simply deluded. 

The question that then arises is what assumptions we choose to make: and I am determined to choose to assume that I have free will...

Dying Gasps

Deacon Nick Donnelly,  at his Protect the Pope site,  has revealed that the sad old folk of Call to Action have convened meetings in various English dioceses. (I've linked to Call to Action in the US - CTA-USA I tried CTA-UK but that turns out to be the rather more interesting  Cinema Theatre Association).

They maintain ‘there seems a reluctance to listen to the people whose lived reality is so often at odds with the teaching of the institutional Church.’

I think they are nearly right.  What I see is a reluctance to listen by the people whose lived reality is so often at odds with the teaching of the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

I think these poor deluded souls are quite panicked as their sell-by date has come and gone, and they remain rotting, unwanted, on the back of the shelf...

The days when anybody seriously thought that they could re-create the Church to reflect their own self-centred view of what the Church should be are long past.

With hindsight, one can see that this idea was dying even when it seemed to flourish.  Humanae Vitae and the Credo of the People of God were early signs; Veritatis Splendor was very clear writing on the wall, the Catechism of the Catholic Church was the death-knell for such thinking, and practically everything said or done by Pope Benedict XVI, now gloriously reigning, has confirmed that reality.

True, there has been a lot of noise in the system; and true, that has resulted in the tragedy of many being deceived and losing their Faith.

But Portae inferi non praevalebunt adversus ecclesiam (the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church), and it was to Peter that Christ said tibi dabo claves regni caelorum (I will give you the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven.)

So whilst we should, rightly, be indignant at the noises emanating from these sad Call to Action chaps, and at those who collude when they should know better, we should recognise such noises for what they are: the dying gasps of an ill-conceived and ill-fated movement that, in the fullness of time will barely be a footnote in the history of the Church.

--

Footnote:

Why the Latin?

1 It annoys the Latin-haters (inc Satan)

2 It adds an appearance of class to an otherwise pedestrian blog

3 It rewards those who persevered through the Liturgical Latin blogs

4 It is the language of the Roman Church

False Gods of Our Time: 1 Choice

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.

I have been mulling over, for the last few weeks or more, the various false Gods we have sought to set up in place of the One True God.

In particular, I am thinking of things such as choice, democracy, politics, equality and so forth.  Clearly these are not evil; indeed they are good in and of themselves.  But when we make a god of any one of them, we corrupt the good that it represents, and ourselves.

Let’s start with choice. (I may pick off the others in future posts - I seem to remember promising someone a post on the heresy of politics a while back).

Choice is clearly a good: it is a gift from God, which enables us to choose the good, and thus conform ourselves to Him and fulfil our nature and our destiny; or not, of course.  For so great is our God that He really allows that.

But problems arise when we elevate choice from a good to the good.  The most obvious example is the elevation of a woman’s right to autonomy to include the killing of a child.

That gives us a clue to one of the problems of individual choice: my choice may constrain someone else’s.  With abortion, that is extremely clear, but consider the choice of a couple with kids both to go to work.  That choice, when multiplied up and down the land effectively denies the choice of other parents for one of them to stay at home to raise their children.  The reasons are not just the economic ones (two-income households drive up the cost of housing etc) but also the social ones: it becomes less socially acceptable to be a full time mum (or dad), and much more socially isolated.  The old support network of mums via coffee mornings etc has largely disappeared.  So my choices affect others, and not always in obvious ways.

Sitting behind all this is a philosophy that all freely-chosen autonomous choice is ipso facto good, or more specifically, good for that person. That is the philosophy behind Carl Rogers’ work - the back drop for all non-directional counselling, which has now become such a dominant philosophy that even pro-life groups adopt it, when they know that, in truth, there is a good choice or a bad choice to be made...

That way madness lies, in fact, and Rogers (according to his friend and associate William Coulson) was bordering on the loss of his own personality by the end of his life.

The most extreme example of choice being deified which I have encountered is in the thinking of William Schutz, who believed that we choose everything in our lives: including our accidents, our illnesses, our death - and our parents...  

Nutty?  Perhaps.  But extremely influential, and his understanding of group dynamics (including the tools he developed FIRO, FIRO-B, FIRO-S etc) is widely used in corporate life.

Most insidious, therefore, is the way in which my choices may affect me.  For of course any choice made, by definition, limits my successive choices. The choice to indulge my appetites rules out the choice for ascetism; the choice to hurt another rules our the choice to be charitable, and so on.  And these choices, over time, form (or deform) my character. So the choice to treat Choice as an ultimate good is a choice to deny God - and ultimately to destroy myself.

You Can Believe Anything You Want

In the recent debate between me and Part-time Pilgrim over the presence of women in the sanctuary, I was reminded of Blessed John Henry Newman's words:

We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.

Part-time Pilgrim had a particular belief about the issue. I had a different one. Each of us was able to interpret history, tradition, praxis and so on in the light of our existing belief - and do so in good faith.

C S Lewis makes the same point: It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.

What I mean is this: any intelligent person can construct an interpretation of anything he encounters that fits with his pre-existing beliefs. More often than not, we do this without even noticing: we interpret reality through the lenses of our beliefs and assumptions about the world.

Sometimes we have to work harder to do so: faced with great pain or distress, we may have consciously to call to mind the image of our Crucified Saviour having trod this path before us.

Which raises the interesting question of how do we know what to believe? I find it very hard to imagine the way an atheist makes sense of the world - but that is not evidence, merely habit of thought. He finds my God-bathed view of reality equally incomprehensible.

Finally, for me, it comes down to a question of trust: in whom do I choose to place my trust? And the answer is, immediately, in my parents but ultimately in the Church.

Of course I can construct all sorts of rational reasons for this - but rationality only goes so far...

Or to put it another way, you can get nowhere by relying on evidence alone, because that reliance on evidence already assumes a philosophical position, and even more fundamental than that, a belief that evidence is really out there, and not merely a figment of our own insane imaginings.