Death by a Thousand Papercuts, I

There’s a saying gets used around here: “Death by a thousand papercuts.”  It’s what you say when the spouse comes home, and asks how the day has gone with X number of small people running about; or, alternatively, when you ask said spouse how the day has gone at work.

“Death by a thousand papercuts.”

A papercut isn’t so bad, after all—they sting, and some of them bleed a lot (which can lead to yet more unmentionable horrors, like doing laundry) but on a scale of Thing I Can Handle, where one is “Breezin’ Right Along” and ten is “Fingernails Shredding as I Hold on For Dear Life,” a bad papercut is about a 1.5.  Nothing that a band aid can’t fix.

But the trouble is that many days, papercuts don’t come by ones and twos but rather by the score.  And at a certain point comes one that, like the straw that broke the camel’s back, is Death.

At which point there are two things one can do: lie down and bleed out (metaphorically!) or laugh.  Because, when you think about it, dying by a thousand paper cuts is a really, really silly way to die, n’est-ce pas?

The Solidity of Things Is from God, V

 I can’t prove that the second option is the correct one—I can’t prove that quotidian sufferings and life-altering ones are really drops in the bucket before the infinite sea of God’s delights.  But every now and then it seems obvious.

For example: have you ever looked at a tree, or a small child, or a blade of grass, or a beautifully-boned building, and realized what makes it—it?  Thomistic metaphysics says that God is constantly sustaining everything in existence.  If God turned his attention away from the blade of grass for a split second, it would vanish into nothingness—and ditto for monuments like the Sistine Chapel and Daniel Barenboim and Love’s Labor’s Lost.

It’s not that God wants us to “trade” the things that make us happy so that we can be holy.  No, he gave us these things—gives them to us every moment, over and over again—so that we can have a whisper of happiness even before we get to holiness.  He’s like the indulgent parent handing his children pea crisps before a fine French dinner.  And of course, being childish, we get upset when he tries to convince us to put down the pea crisps for a minute so that we can enjoy the beef bourguignonne and the asparagus souffle.

I mean, you could argue that I tried to make my children “trade” their pottage for the soul food I cooked the other night, and from their perspective I’m sure that’s what I felt like.  But.

The Solidity of Things Is from God, IV

The truth is, none of those things—job, health, family, friends, novels, and chocolate—are stable without God in the picture anyway.  Atheists and Agnostics lose these things and fear losing them too; religious saints and religious sinners suffer pretty near the same fates in terms of pain, as far as I can tell.  So there’s no point in backing away from God out of a fear that He’ll “require” tough stuff of you.

Tough stuff is required of everybody.  It’s called life.

In fact, I’ve said it before—I believe on this blog—that the older I get the more increasingly convinced I’ve become that life is so hard that the only way to be happy and good—to be the sort of person Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More and Francis de Sales would give a thumbs up to—is with God’s help.

The tough stuff comes, regardless of your relationship to God or lack thereof.  And that should suggest one of two things.

Either it’s all about the tough stuff, and God’s failure to intervene in preventing it, or at least to provide appropriate exhalations in exchange for it, proves his indifference or nonexistence.

Or the tough stuff actually is a pretty miniscule thing compared to … the whole picture.  Whatever the whole picture happens to be.

Eye hath not seen, and all that.

The Solidity of Things Is from God, III

 Regardless, God wants (if he does not need) our cooperation; we certainly need God’s help.  But, because we are used to dealing with human beings, we assume that God will not give his help to us freely.  We assume that there is bargaining involved.  Mind you, I am not talking about “Say these prayers, get this indulgence.”  That sort of mathematical calculation can lead to problematic spirituality—which is why Luther critiqued it, and why the Church, though she still uses the concept of indulgences in talking about grace and works, discourages literal interpretations of old indulgence books.  That sort of tit-for-tat spirituality can be a problem; but what I have in mind is something worse.  I’m thinking of the sort of spirituality in which one fears that becoming holy means God will take things away from you.

For example:

“I feel inspired to give up that piece of chocolate.  But what if I feel inspired to do this every afternoon?  What if being holy means I can ever eat chocolate again?”

“Hmm, I could read this novel, or that book of spiritual reading.  The spiritual reading book is objectively better.  *sigh*  I guess I won’t be reading novels anymore.”

You’re laughing right now, but it gets more serious.

“If I get really holy, will God take my job?”

“God sends holy people a lot of suffering.  I don’t think I’m ready for a serious disease right now.”

“If I keep praying and get closer to God, will he decide I’m ready to lose a spouse or a child?”

Spoiler alert: The answer to all these questions is … no … maybe … but you’re making the wrong connections … you’re asking the wrong question.

The Solidity of Things Is from God, II

 It’s foolish, then, to assume that your physical, emotional, and intellectual life is a zero-sum game.  You probably already knew that—you knew from experience that if you work on a skill you can usually improve.

But there is an odd tendency among religious people not to extend that thinking to the spiritual life.  Part of the reason, no doubt, is because we are reminded on a regular basis of the basic truth that God does it all.  We cannot save ourselves; we cannot make ourselves feel prayerful when we try to pray; we cannot “get enough grace stored up” to get by even one minute of the day.  And it is a salutary thing to interiorize those facts of the spiritual life.

But “God who created us without our cooperation and consent will not save us without our cooperation and consent.”  Indeed, I wonder—with all due submission to the proper ecclesial authorities—if he really could “save” us, in any meaningful sense of the word, against our wills, or whether that would not be something like squaring a circle: a logical or metaphysical impossibility—a nonsense sentence—the performance of which is beyond even an omnipotent being—indeed, is especially contrary to the nature of such a being.

What It Means If OCP’s Angel Is Mormon

A scandalette erupted over the past few days with the release of Oregon Catholic Press’s 2021 hymnal.  The scandal is not, for once, of a lyrical or musical nature; the eyebrow-raising issue is the cover art.  It portrays a blond, white-robed figure standing on a glob, blowing a trumpet, and carrying a golden book—an angel?

The figure is currently labeled on the artist’s website as “Angel VIII (2017).”  But it’s more complicated than that, because another angel in the series is called “Angel Moroni (2018)”.  Complicating matters further, an Instagram account associated with the artist, Jorge Cocco, identifies the OCP image (and “Most of the angels in this collection”) as “different versions of the angel known as Moroni” (h/t Father Matthew Schneider and Deacon Greg Kandra).  OCP, however, initially stated on Facebook that while they understand Mormons seeing it as Moroni, they “saw a beautiful image of an angel, and nothing more.”  They took it as an image of the last day, and, “[t]o ensure this didn’t conflict with the original intent of the art,” they “consulted with the artist. He stated, ‘This angel does not have a name, it is left to the interpretation of the viewer.’”

It’s hard to know the artist’s intention in this particular case, since he seems to have two different stories about who the angel is.  Not surprisingly, OCP at first decided that the artist’s intention (or lack thereof) was irrelevant—a position which is, from an academic viewpoint, arguably correct.  What they offered concerned customers was, essentially, reader-response theory.

Reader-response theory—a reaction of the 1960s and ’70s to earlier modes of interpretation concerned with literary form—argues that what truly matters in understanding a work of art is the consumer’s interpretation.  By this reasoning, if it were to turn out that Edvard Munch’s agonized portrait The Scream was actually intended as a bemused albeit alopecic individual attempting to hail her dog at sunset—that wouldn’t matter.  What would matter is that hundreds of thousand of people think of the picture as the image of a soul in existential angst.  For those people, that would be the “meaning” of The Scream.

Read the rest at the Register: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/feingold/what-it-means-if-ocps-angel-is-mormon

The Solidity of Things Is from God, I

One of the great errors in life is to imagine it as a zero-sum game.  You’re born with X amount of talent, or wealth, or luck, or willpower, and that’s that.  If you make such an assumption about yourself, you’re hobbling yourself before you even leave the gate; because the fact of the matter is you can increase your skills and abilities, your perseverance and your patience; and working on those qualities will benefit you at no cost to anyone else.

That’s pretty strange, when you think about it.  You can make something out of nothing … sort of.  You can, using the (perhaps fairly limited) set of gifts you were handed genetically, make yourself more.  Where did that more come from?  Was it anywhere before you possessed it?  It certainly wasn’t floating around in the ether; and you didn’t take it from anyone else.  Aristotle would say it was in you in potency, but that just means you had some more basic abilities or qualities in your nature that allowed you to develop this super(your)nature—which, again, did not exist before.

That the Man May Be Saved which God Made

There’s a certain politically correct attitude towards older cultures, especially older Western, Christian cultures.  They were bigoted—that’s the usual line—especially with regards to religion.  And yes, if bigoted means that people tended to take questions of religion very seriously, and to hold that there was a right religion, and theirs was it, well, then, they were certainly bigots.  (Although I hasten to add that not everyone felt this way, even in Ye Olden Dayes—see John Donne’s third satire.)

But the thing about being sure of one’s faith is—it doesn’t always lead to burning at the stake.  It can, of course; it shouldn’t, of course; it’s terrible when it does.  But sometimes even polemics, like the Anglican work quoted below, manage to keep a solid grip on the real implications of evangelical fervor.

In this appeareth the loue of God towards vs, because God sent his onely begotten son into the world, that we might liue through him.  Herein is loue, not that we loued God but that he loued vs first, and sent his sonne to be a reconciliation for our sinnes.  Beloued, if God so loued vs, we ought also to loue one another.  No man hath seene God at any time if wee loue one another, God dwelleth in vs, and his loue is perfect in vs.  God is loue, and hee that dwelleth in loue, dwelleth in God, and God in him.  We loue him, because hee loued vs first.  If any man say he loue God, and hate his brother, he is a lier, for how can hee that loueth not his brother whom hee hath seene, loue God whom he hath not seene?  And this cōmandement haue we of him, he that loueth God, should loue his brother also. By this instruction of the Apostle in this epistle it appeareth that it is a false, lying, and vaine boasting of any man, to say hee loueth and beleeueth in God truly, when hee shuteth vp all his compassion from the helpe of mankind, which beare the image of God in the person of our Sauiour Christ, which was both God and man, who presenteth himselfe to vs to bee beloued in them which beare the image of his māhood. For no man can truly say he hartely loueth the father, but hee must also loue the sonne; and although the sonne be naughtie, and vnthriftie, yet for his fathers sake hee must helpe to better him, and euen lament and bee sorry for the sonnes wickednes, euen so much the rather, seing God hath appointed, and by his holy ordinance commaunded that whatsoeuer any true Christian man is, or whatsoeuer hee hath, hee should thankfully receiue it as of the free bountie and gift of God, who himselfe is the fountaine and full treasure of all good things, the onely author and giuer of euery good and perfect gift, giuing and distributing to euery one of the abundance of his riches & treasures; to this end and purpose, that each should communicate to other, of the goods they haue receiued, for the supply of each others want and necessitie.  For which cause euery true Christian man must loue good men in Christ, and euill men for Christes sake, who so loued vs when wee were his enemies, that he gaue vp of his own life for our redemption.  Let him embrace the one because they are good, the other neuerthelesse to make them good, let him forgiue and pray for his enemies, persecutors & slanderers, that God would turne their harts, open their blind eies, and giue them true knowledge of himselfe his word & commandements: in whose nature let him see and behold, as in a glasse, the image of his own crookednes & corruption; for there is no man so mad, cruell, furious, or hard hearted, but all other as of themselues are as farre wide from God as hee.  So that euery man which escapeth the filthinesse and corruption of the wicked and vngodly, may thanke God that keepeth him by his grace from that or the like impietie, as for example, thou seest a man that is a theefe, a whoromonger, and an hereticke, or idolator, there thou seest euen thine owne image and picture, for if God keepe thee not of his mercifull grace and goodnes, out of such vices, thou wouldest be euen as euill and bad as he, and seeing thou art not such a one, glory in God, and not in thy selfe, hate not, nor bee not angry with those which are diseased in sinne, no more than a faithfull physition hateth a sicke man, but rather lament and bee sorrie for their euils. Be thou an enemie onely vnto sinne and vice.  The greater the disease is, the more care will true charity haue to remoue it.  Is he an adulterer, or hath he cōmitted sacriledge, or is he a Iew, Turke, Heretike, or Infidel?  Hate the adulterie, sacriledge, heresie, idolatrie, and infidelitie of the man, and seeke to remoue, purge, and cleanse these vices, wherewith the man is defiled, and wherin he is wrapped and entangled through his owne fault; so that the man may bee saued which God made …

—From the anonymous work, “A most godly and vvorthy treatis of holy signes sacrifices, and sacraments instituted of God, euen since the beginning of the world. Very necessary for Christian understanding. Seene and allowed by authority” (London: Printed for G.H, 1609, pp. 242-6).  (N.B. I have silently replaced most of the colons and semicolons, and at least one comma, with periods.  Ain’t no run-on sentence like a Renaissance run-on!)

All on the Same Page

It was a small gathering of Catholics al fresco, enjoying drinks and the evening breeze.  Heady theological and philosophical topics were being discussed.  And then somehow, someway, someone broached politics.  I may or may not have held my breath.

"Well, we are ALL on the same page now!" said this person, with a few more comments of the same sort, before falling silent.

I didn't say anything.  No one else said anything.  The pity of it was, I didn't know (and I suspect some of the others didn't know) WHAT page this person was talking about.  Our minds were all racing over the past weeks gaffes and court cases and tweets and COVID news and ... and ... I swear I really didn't know what page we were all supposed to be on.

Mon freres, can you tell me?

Different Ways of Taking the Evidence, III

 In the real world truth is less like a puzzle or a murder mystery and more like an actual murder trial.

Twelve Angry Men, a deservedly famous film (stop reading this and go watch it, mon freres!) offers a closeup of an old fashioned jury trial of a young man suspected of murder.  Over the course of two hours in one hot small room, Henry Fonda’s character, playing the cautious, law-conscious, convict-as-last-resort character, slowly manages to persuade the other members of the jury that every piece of evidence in the seemingly airtight case can actually be interpreted innocently.  The point of the film, as I understand it, is not that the suspect is actually innocent—indeed, by refusing to introduce him to the audience, the film pointedly makes the jury and their deliberations, their attitudes and innocence or lack thereof, the real topic.  A jury trial, in this showing, is not about determining what the evidence proves, but rather about whether or not, given certain evidence, a person can be found guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

That’s actually a fairly high bar, and one unlikely to ever be found in philosophical discourse, or related discourses like metaphysics, epistemology, theology, sociology, anthropology, and politics.  Why not?  Aristotle said it best: “Our intellect is related to the prime beings, which are most evident in their nature, as the eye of an owl is related to the sun” (Metaphysics Ia, 1).  Or, as Aquinas puts it, when he explains why revelation is necessarily, the truths about God which are attainable by human reason can be attained in that way only by those few men who by disposition and circumstances are inclined to philosophical inquiry, and even for them these truths could be attained only after a long time and with uncertainty and an admixture of falsity.

Translation: in this long-running and much contested case of Man v. World, we are never going to know beyond a Shadow of a Doubt (speaking of good movies) whodunnit.

Not So Midweek Muse

It's sort of a special weekend.

Most people whose parents have passed away, assuming they have the vaguest belief in an afterlife, like to imagine them in heaven.

Good news is, I can guarantee that your mom--well, one of them, anyway--is already there, body and soul.

Happy Feast of the Assumption, mes frères catholiques!

Different Ways of Taking the Evidence, II

 How does one know which way a given piece of evidence actually weighs?

Let me propose two very different ideas about that, both appropriate in their own context.

Sometimes, especially in detective stories, evidence appears to work like puzzle pieces.  Take any two pieces of a puzzle, or even half the pieces, and you may not be able to put a thing together.  All the pieces of a puzzle, however, only fit together in one given way (a fact my three-year-old is only just beginning to grasp, and one which is still beyond my two-year-old’s comprehension).  Get enough pieces together and hey presto! a picture emerges, the one and only true picture of the truth.  The family stands back and gazes on St. Petersburg Square in Wintertime or The Aztec Temple or Two Mandarin Ducks, and knows that it could not be otherwise.

Truth in the real world (as opposed to the world of art, in which both literary and physical puzzles, despite their lowly status in said world, are located) is not usually like that.

Different Ways of Taking the Evidence, I

 A friend tipped me off the other day to a book by a Protestant missionary, Don Richardson, titled Eternity in Their Hearts.  The basic thesis of the book is that a variety of (sometimes obscure) cultures throughout the world possess some version of monotheism, often combined with some version of the story of the Fall.

It's not unusual to come across analogies between Christianity and pre-Christian religions; what struck me in this instance was the fact that, while the similarities are frequently taken as an argument for debunking Christianity, Richardson takes the same evidence as supportive of Christianity.

Same evidence, different conclusions based on different priors.  So how does one know which conclusion is more likely to be true?  Or, to ask an even less ambitious question, how does one tell which way the evidence actually weighs?

Motte and Bailey, X

I promise this is the last of these I have up my sleeve.  I may have more thoughts on this topic later, but for now …

I thought it only fair to offer a few examples of what I consider to be real motte and bailey.

Here’s one someone else did on global warming: https://ordinary-times.com/2014/11/12/an-example-of-the-motte-and-bailey-doctrine/  (Note that I don’t necessarily agree completely with his breakdown, but I think his overall picture of the movement making extreme claims when there are milder ones that are much more reasonable, and defensible, is accurate.)

Here are a few I’ve encountered recently.  Baileys are in quotation marks, mottes in parentheses.

“Masks make you sick.”  (If you have a breathing/blood-oxygenation issue, they can.)

“Masks are harmless.  (Unless you have a breathing/blood-oxygenation issue!)

“Defund the police.”  (It turns out that it sometimes means “get rid of” but sometimes just “slash the funding” and sometimes “take some of the funding and give it to other people to do the same work.”  These are three very different things.)

“People lose their faith in college.”  (It turns out that “lose their faith” frequently means “don’t agree with their parents as much,” which is probably true, but also a more moderate claim.  It would also be true to say that some people lose their faith through attending college; and also that some people have their faith strengthened or gain a new belief system.)

“Most people are perfectly happy to stay home and not work and survive on government handouts.”  (It turns out that this applies to those of us who are in happy relationships, with several other people in the household, and plenty of fruitful hobbies and/or work from home opportunities.  Maybe that’s “most people”—I sure hope it is—but I rather doubt it.)

Motte and Bailey, IX

“OK, OK wise girl.  We get the point.  We should be more careful calling our interlocutors’ arguments fallacious.  But even you have to admit there are such things as real logical fallacies.”

Absolutely.  But since one of the renewed purposes of this blog is to get people to actually have conversations with each other, I’ve focused on giving your opponents the benefit of the doubt—on not calling their moves “fallacies” right out of the gate, but on trying to understand how what looks like a fallacy to you might actually not be one, in their mind.  They might still be committing a fallacy, and they might still be wrong; but its important to realize that even if it seems obvious to you that they’re either stupid or intellectually dishonest—they just might be neither.

“Stupid or evil?”

“Why not both?”

“Does it have to be either?”