Father Gereon Goldmann was an SS soldier who was ordained without having finished his seminary education at the expressed wishes of the pope in the middle of WW2. Goldmann discerned his vocation before the start of the war and, rather than fight against the enemy, he began to care for the spiritual well being of his men. He would scavenge for consecrated hosts in chapels, churches and monasteries all throughout northern italy to return to nourish his brothers in arms. He would famously wield his pistol, not against the enemy, but against stingy priests and bishops who wouldnt let him depart with the Blessed Sacrament for his brothers. Learning of his desire to care for the souls of german soldiers, a religious sister organized hundreds of Nuns to pray for his ordination and safety. Their intercession proved remarkably potent. After He won a personal audience with the Pope, Goldmann was granted emergency permission to be ordained, which would improbably transpire a few years later in a prison camp in North Africa. And if you read his story, Fr Goldmann´s guardian angel would steer him out of near death situations— for instance commanding Goldmann once to dig a foxhole and jump in it minutes before arial bombing would tear through the forest he was traversing. As a rare priest with unfinished seminary education, he said Mass, heard confessions, and administered last rites to the german soliders.1

Its the sort of story that helps one see the complexity of WW2 from the german side. If you read about him, its obvious Fr Gereon Goldmann was a hero. And its obvious that he was a hero regularly given supernatural graces to perform his vocation. So God wanted the Nazi troops to have access to the Blessed Sacrament? The answer should be obvious, yet its strangely jarring to bourgeois western sensibilities. He was critical of the Nazi´s and was even sentenced to death by them, but, when acquitted, he put back on the uniform and went back to work. Fr Goldmann worked for a side where heroes havent been allowed to be acknowledged or revered. He worked for a side where only atrocities and vice are permitted to be seen.What happens to a society when their fallen heroes aren´t honored, nor even forgotten, but whose memories are held in open disrepute?

To fixate on and enlarge the flaws of a person is to hate that person. Same with a group of poeple. And it seems like this acute generational animus, more than anything else, has proved to be a curse on the german people. The cultural post-war ethos in germany was erected on a shoddy foundation, on a prideful condemnation of the kriegsgeneration (i.e. “war generation“) that succumbed to national socialism. Germans were taught in school to self righteously think, speak, and act like they would have been Franz Jägerstädter or Dietrich Bonhöffer had they lived in the 1930s. Yet this conviction makes them almost more pliable to political pressure and tyranny than resilient and composed in the face of evil.

How different would germany be today if the generations following the second world war were told they should be like Fr Gereon Goldmann? Rather than to not be like Hitler, Göbbels and Hess as a primary point of ethical reference?2 Its hard to imagine because it would be a substantially different—a positive, rather than a negatively framed— sort of culture. The presumed ethical superiority of the post-war generations to the “evil” kriegsgeneration that came before has been ritualized into the cultural fabric in matters linguistic, memorial, and architectural in germany, where trite expressions of collective guilt as well as attempts to increase the awareness of the victims and crimes are quite commonplace. Yet these efforts are at least partially ritualized hubris rather than humility: for why is genocide memorialized so differently in germany in contrast to all other cultures? unless germans think themselves morally superior?

Our Lord condemns this attitude in Matt 23:29-31 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets.”

Yet, this is what 99% of germans seem to believe: If we had lived in the 1930s, we wouldnt have been party to the NSDAP hype. This hubris warps ones perspective of the past and removes it as both a source of humility and strength. Elders have the power to bless and curse even from the realm of the dead. And germans will tell you they live beneath the curse of the generation that was given the label ´greatest generation´ in the US. And they aren´t wrong, but it seems like the curse is, if real, largely self imposed. It´s their own animus that cut themselves off from the strength of their fathers, culture, and past.

If contemporary germans were so serious about not committing genocide, they would teach in schools the reverse: why each student would have been a Nazi had they lived in the 1930s— i.e. the manifold reasons why national socialism was appealing in that moment, and why humans are weak in general and susceptible to tyranny.3 These would also be reasons that could exonerate their forefathers to some extent. Yet in the german ideology this isnt allowed. Instead, here, moral purity has its basis in seeing this generation as succumbing to “pure evil.” To seek to understand what happened with nuance could contaminate the soul. Any sympathy or complexity threatens the prideful and largely performative claim on being “good.”

A consequence of the german ideology is a willed ignorance about the facts of WWII itself. Nearly all mainstream historians for the past thirty years—Broszat, Browning, Gerlach, Kershaw, Longerich, etc— think Hitler decided on the final solution in late 1941. There is dispute as to why—e.g. the failure of deportation efforts, the failure of operation Barbarossa, paranoia about Jews brokering the alliance between the US and Russia, and, perhaps most crucially, the entrance of the US into the war subsequent to Pearl Harbor. Göbbels seemed to concur with this view, writing in his own notebook following a Dec 12, 1941 meeting with Hitler:

“He [Hitler] warned the Jews that if they were to cause another world war, it would lead to their own destruction. Those were not empty words. Now the world war has come. The destruction of the Jews must be its necessary consequence.”4

The minority view that Hitler had planned to commit genocide all along is, for many reasons, difficult to square with the evidence. Yet Germans dont merely hold this minority view, they cling to it and resist discarding it in the face of counterveiling evidence as if doing so would make them evil. The idea of Hitler being motivated by pure irrational hatred seems to grant them ethical status and security. Why? Because reasons would make Hitler, according to the ideology, less evil, and the whole cultural project is to subjectively distance oneself from Adolf Hitler by making him objectively as evil as possible.

This project runs on pride, not humility. The reality is that Hitler blamed the Jews for the US entry to both WWI and WWII and that his anti-semitism had this predominant source. This doesnt make punishing all of european Jewry good, but it does make the retaliatory action more human. And the german ideology won´t permit this, it insists “good” will come from increasing the objective evil of Adolf Hitler. The Christian spirit, in contrast, works toward humility. It would seek to understand Hitler by making him as objectively good as possible without betraying the facts, and then subjectively try to see how close to him we might be as a warning. The german ideology runs on animus, not charity towards enemies. Would it really make the world a worse place if the life and decisions of Adolf Hitler were given a hermeneutic of charity? A lot of germans seem to think so.

Yet, this intergenerational animus didnt just stay put. It infected the whole world— if germany provides the clearest, most potent and perhaps the original example of it. People still speak of their “nazi“ grandfather or great grandfather with shame here. But the spectre of “Nazis” as a negative reference point to establish moral rectitude seems only to have increased as time has passed. The countries that forced this punishment upon the germans—or did they welcome it?— seem to have been themselves overtaken by the same negative spirit starting in the US with the post-war boomers. Boomer is now a pejorative term. And with each subsequent generation, the gen-x, millennial, gen z caricature is largely negative, and this caricature provides the reference point for the reaction and rebellion of the next generation.

No ideology can ever improve upon a past it wont consent to and doesnt respect. Because we are products of our past, we have to work with not against the stream, even if we have very little to work with. The prescribed psychology of the german ideology is self defeating because it trips on the following rule: your psychological orientation towards your parents will be reproduced in your children. So if you disrespect them, prepare to be disrespected. If you fixate on and enlarge their flaws then expect the same treatment.

You can only imitate your forefathers: if you focus on the evil in them you will become this evil by trying to avoid it; if you focus on the good they exemplified then you can creatively manifest this good in the present. This leads to the following conclusion: If germans were serious about not committing genocide, they would do more to honor their own fallen soldiers in WW2.5 To fixate on evil creates weakness, its a temptation for self-victimization and often an excuse for bad conduct. The german ideology perpetuates itself because those weakened by it donate a far greater sample of evil deeds to tempt the next generation. This will continue until some generation is so weakened by the german ideology, that it realizes the only way forward is to honor the generations that fell prey to it.

No religious text seems more sensitive to this dynamic than the Bible, where both story and law again and again issue warnings about the danger here of failing to honor elders and the dead. Many forms of faux traditionalism have their root in this self defeating, un-traditional negative spirit. Tradition honors elders, full stop. Tradition honors elders, if nothing else, because they gave life. In the german ideology, pride and ingratitude insist on damming up the flow of life and wisdom from one generation to the next.

True humility would, as strange as it sounds in the case of Nazis, look for and find whatever good was to be found in that generation, and try to honor and imitate it—because this is all one can do— without honoring or imitating the evil to which they were party. To love Nazis by seeing them in the best possible light (without sacrificing truth or reality) is the best way to not be like them. If you do this, a beautiful and tragic sense of life comes into view to strengthen you. If you do this, ones tiny, vital, and magnificent stature as a human being stands out in freedom, a human being rooted in a specific place, held by duty in a specific time in the course of generations. And if you try to do this explicitly and publicly, and seek to find, recognize, and honor the good in the case of the “war generation” (i.e. kriegsgeneration) here in germany—or any other despised generation elsewhere— you´ll realize the surprising grip of the german ideology still in the present day.

In 1940, a Jesuit house in Poland had been shut down by the SS and all the priests were brought to Auschwitz where they were murdered. All except one. One Jesuit brother was away at the time of their apprehension. And, upon hearing of the fate of his brothers, this priest walked to Auschwitz smuggled himself into the prison camp on his own accord. This brother was caught and then sent Rudolf Höss, the commandant at Auschwitz at the time, begging him to let him die with his brothers in the camp. Höss refused. Moved by this priests courage, he sent him back home but never could forget him.

In his youth, Höss had neglected a call to the priesthood and instead turned away from his faith altogether. Yet, when condemned to execution in 1947, Höss began to fear for his soul. Given the gravity and extent of the crimes he had committed, Höss doubted God´s mercy. And he went to extraordinary lengths to resolve his doubts. In his despair, Höss longed to confess to the Polish priest he let slip away. If he could believe in forgiveness, he knew he needed to hear the words of absolution from the mouth of one of the living men whose sterling life and courage had haunted his memory almost as much as the weight of his crimes. He needed to hear the words of absolution from this man whose life his own actions had irrevocably marred. The Polish priest obliged. He came to visit Höss in detention and heard his four hour long confession shortly before his death. And Our Lord spoke the merciful words of absolution even to Rudolf Höss, commandant at Auschwitz. The same priest stayed to celebrate Mass for Höss the following day.

Thus Höss, for all of his crimes, did something excellent the post-war german ideology doesn´t seem to permit—i.e. repent. Yet its the only thing that can heal this land. And post-war Germans could be healed by his example, if only they would learn to identify with his sin—e.g. if Nazism was a prideful racial ideology that betrayed Germany´s future by cutting it off from its christian past, the betrayal of the german ideology is not different in kind. A christian future will only be won in germany through concrete acts restoring due honor to the previous generations and the kriegsgeneration in particular. Devotion to the Holy Souls is one concrete way to start the required temporal reorientation. Its also a way for blind eyes to begin to discover the unforeseen graces that dwell in the past. We could start by looking at Gereon Goldmann, but should end by praying for Rudolf Höss.

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da solo a piedi

Simone, Assisi´s Songbird, St Francis´s Little Flower

I heard her soft, mild and high pitched voice before I ever saw he…

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2 years ago · 11 likes · 5 comments · Stephen Weller

5

The point of Substack Syndicates is to increase intentional reading and critical\constructive commenting on Substack.

As a means toward this end, Substack Syndicates promote collaborative literary friendship via norms for reciprocal reading and commenting.

Substack Syndicates are self-selecting communities on Substack that operate according to self-defined norms to promote and guide reciprocity within the group.

Peter Maurin Syndicate (open to new members)

1. Mandatory Rules

   1. All comments writing according to Syndicate Protocol link to the Home Page of Peter Maurin Syndicate.

   2. Reciprocal comments are one and done: one comment for one comment Not a game of tag without end.

   3. Syndicate Comments have the following Protocol:

      1. assessment of the perceived aim for the intended audience of the post

      2. assessment of how well the post achieved the aim for the audience.

      3. the thing about the post that most creatively or brilliantly supported the aim

      4. the thing about the post, either present or absent, that detracted from the aim.

      5. one suggested edit at the level of general form or structure.

      6. one suggested paragraph level edit

      7. one suggested sentence edit.

      8. personal reaction to the post

      9. link to a post that the commentor wants the author to reciprocally read and comment on.

   4. People may join the syndicate by invitation of the Organizer; OR if they first comment on the text of a Peter Maurin Syndicate member according to the Peter Maurin Syndicate Protocol and he or she responds according to the same protocol.

   5. People may be removed from the syndicate according to the wishes of the Syndicate Organizer

   6. Syndicate members have 7 days to reciprocally respond to a comment.

   7. A Syndicate member may choose to cease to respond to another syndicate member but only after letting them know not to try again following a reciprocal comment according to the protocol.

   8. No use of AI at all in comments, not even for better comprehension of the text in question.

Peter Maurin Syndicate Members

Organizer: Stephen Weller

Joseph Edward Kalinski

A Sample Syndicate Rule

Peter Maurin Syndicate (open to new members)

1. Mandatory Rules

   1. All comments writing according to Syndicate Protocol link to the Home Page of Peter Maurin Syndicate.

   2. All posts of members of the Peter Maurin Syndicate identify the author as a syndicate member and link to the Home Page.

   3. Syndicate Comments have the following Protocol:

      1. assessment of the perceived aim for the intended audience of the post

      2. assessment of how well the post achieved the aim for the audience.

      3. the thing about the post that most creatively or brilliantly supported the aim

      4. the thing about the post, either present or absent, that detracted from the aim.

      5. one suggested edit at the level of general form or structure.

      6. one suggested paragraph level edit

      7. one suggested sentence edit.

      8. personal reaction to the post

      9. link to a post that the commentor wants the author to reciprocally read and comment on.

   4. People may join the syndicate if they, first commenting on the text of a member of the Peter Maurin Syndicate according to the Peter Maurin Syndicate Protocol, are given a response according to the same protocol.

   5. People may be removed from the syndicate according to the wishes of the Syndicate Organizer

   6. Syndicate members have 7 days to reciprocally respond to a comment.

   7. A Syndicate member may choose to cease to respond to another syndicate member but only after letting them know following a reciprocal comment according to the protocol.

Peter Maurin Syndicate Members

Organizer:

I. Justification per Sola Fide is indistinguishable from Psychological Projection

Part I of this series constituted a constructive hylomorphic analysis of Jung´s notion of psychological projection along with Luther´s notion of justification as a self-conscious status. No doubt protestants and Lutherans will accuse me of a straw man so, in charity, I´ll switch it up to disputatio in part II to free myself from this accusation and clarify the critique. This section dives deeper into the metaphysics of the human soul to extend the argument.

II. Indistinguishability translates into identity.

1. Indistinguishable Form, Matter, and Intention\End translate into the same essence.1

A. Is the Form of Justification per Sola Fide Identical with Projection?

1. It seems the Form of Justification per sola fide is objectively the Righteousness of Jesus Christ. The status of justification is, thereby, not a projection but a free gift. The visible form or evidence of faith is testimony, by which the justified soul lays claim upon the mercy and merit of Jesus Christ. Romans 10:9 “For if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus, and if you believe in your heart that God has raised him up from the dead, you shall be saved.”

2. It seems the Form of Justification per sola fide is fiduciary trust in the promises of God, which engages the whole existence of man and bears a distinct psychological form with clear indicators—e.g. fruits of the spirit. The object is certainly God and His Work, not our own good works and certainly not a distorted image of projection. Romans 3:28 “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith alone apart from the works of the law.” Human works or imaginings add nothing to the work of God´s Grace through faith alone.

   1. On the contrary, James 2:24; 26 ^“You see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” ^“For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” Faith and obedience are inseparable, as are justification and justice. So says the Council of Trent, “Justification itself, which is not remission of sins merely, but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man, through the voluntary reception of the grace, and of the gifts, whereby man of unjust becomes just…an heir according to hope of life everlasting.”2 To claim with certainty to the status of being justified without becoming just could only be the work of psychological projection.

   2. I answer that the two formal conditions of justifying faith as pertains the intellect—i.e. testimony, assent—and will—i.e. baptism, obedience— are satisfied and unified by membership in the Church Catholic. Recall the teaching of the Fathers: Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus. Without this sufficient condition, the object of faith becomes obscured as if justifying faith could (1) be an experience rather than assent to Apostolic Faith testifying to the person and character of Our Lord Himself, or (2) as if regeneration were an experience rather than the efficacious operation of the Sacrament of Baptism.

      The argumentation has hithertofore concerned the self-conscious status of justification according to sola fide and not the reality of justification in the regenerate soul. These two must be clearly distinguished. All baptized souls are really made just, they are cleaned of original sin, and the charity of God is infused the soul with the indwelling of the Holy Ghost. This holds regardless of what opinion the believer himself holds about baptism, regeneration, and justification. And from this basis it is only natural that good works and fruits with follow the dispensation of supernatural grace and infusion of supernatural virtue, again regardless of specific dogmatic conviction.

      However, because the normative content of the justification status per sola fide denies and contradicts the reality of justification via baptism in the soul, as well as the exact formal conditions of the submission of the intellect and obedience of the will to proper authority, the self-conscious “status” of justification according to sola fide threatens the regenerate souls capacity to attain or retain the status of justification—e.g. baptism may be neglected, sacramental confession is an outright redundancy—and frustrates the movement of the soul toward perfection.

      1. Correlary Distinction: Speculative\Practical Intellect

         The speculative intellect assents to truth, while the practical intellect orders acts toward the good. St Thomas clarifies: “the speculative and practical intellect are not distinct powers, because they are distinguished only according to their relation to action. The speculative intellect considers things as they are, while the practical intellect considers things as they are to be done.”3

      If the speculative intellect assents to the absence of punishment as its redemption, the practical intellect will be tempted to share this disfigured grace with the world and call it prudence. If the highest good is a justice that is understood by the speculative intellect as a strictly forensic non-ontological declaration rather than the instantiation of just order, the practical intellect will suffer greatly as guided by privational rather than substantive justice. Where true justice would embrace or utilize punishment to restore just order, this privational justice applied by the practical intellect will be reticent to do so. This will lead the will to fear rather than desire punishment and punishing, also foster resentment towards those not punished, and derision of one´s own soul not so dignified to desire it.4 Ultimately, the practical intellect co-natured by this privational notion of justice will perceive many good things that are in accord with justice to be evil and contrary to God´s own nature falsely concieved and vice versa—E.g. Fasting and penances will be seen as redundant and superfluous by the practical intellect operating under this privational notion of justice. Correcting, or worse punishing, others cruel. This perversion will tend to produce a laxity towards oneself, an obsequiousness towards ones neighbor, and a negligence in devotion to God.

      1. Correlary Definition: The Good Arises from an Integral Cause, Evil from Any Defect. A single defect makes something evil. One is healthy who suffers from no bodily ailment whatsoever; One is sick who suffers from even a slight cold. Good can only be caused by something wholly good. This guards against a common false inference. St Bonaventure points out, because “evil occurs in every way, and the good in one way, it does not follow that if the defect of something (e.g., a good intention) suffices to produce evil, its presence suffices to produce good.”5

      We see that the entire soul is poisoned by this small but ultimately consequential fracture in the regenerate soul. The status of justification per sola fide precludes rather than fosters the potency for participation in the created justice of God infused in the soul at baptism.

3. To the first opinion, the form of justification is the soul´s own created justice, not the justice of God Himself. By denying this, the distinction between creature and Creator is blurred, all while issuing an invitation to the problematics of panthiesm. Without this a distinction between God´s own justice and created justice, its not obvious why justification is Good for the soul—e.g. why should the soul thereafter seek to become actually just?— or why justification is Good for God—i.e. that the ultimate work of Jesus Christ amounts to something greater than a Precious Blood inspired form of nominalism. Does God actually perfect the soul or simply replace it´s justice with His Own. In the latter case the intelligibility of justification itself becomes and issue, as we have seen, and the only way out is an irrational mysticism whereby justification is grounded in a direct, private, immanent experience of the Divine, rather than a public, created reality mediated by the Church and her Sacraments. In each case, we gain immediate contact with “God´s own justice, at the price of our soul never becoming actually just or even believing it was redeemed to hope to participate in and possess God´s created justice. Matt 6:26 “For what good is it for a man to gain the whole world at the price of his own soul?”

4. To the second opinion, the object of hope in the case of sola fide is, at least in part, a false one: ones own belief or experience. Having thoroughly obscured the proper object of faith, i.e. intellectual assent to the symbol of the faith\obedience as regards baptism and submission to the Church, it follows that sola fide then perverts the virtue of hope itself—detached from its proper object— to adorn the doctrine with some apparent existential depth. Trusting in God´s promises takes the form of abuse of Divine Mercy and presumption, if hope is detached from the Apostolic faith and obedience. Detached from these formal conditions of faith, the content must be self-confirmed, experiential, interior detached form objective conditions—identical to what we see in projection.

B. Is the Matter Identical As Well?

1. It seems the Matter of Justification for are the Merits of Jesus Christ imputed as righteousness in the regenerate soul.6 To psychologize the origin of this dogma is to commit the genetic fallacy.

2. It seems the Matter is belief itself, not merely believing in Jesus Christ as Savior, but also believing that one is also saved by him. Luther says “thou must receive by faith, and in receiving him thou must believe that thy sins are his sins, and that his righteousness is thy righteousness.”7

3. It seems the Matter of Justification is in the testimony of inner transformation and renewal of the heart. The experience of billions of Christians confirms this interior reality of faith, not projection or an Evil Image.

   1. On the contrary, Titus 3:5 “He saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.” Water is the material cause of regeneration in baptism, operating on a human being who recieves the sacrament. The status will manifest itself primarily in the growth of infused Charity in the soul. The will is, therefore, the crucial matter of justification, because the virtue of justice and charity reside in the rational will, not in the intellect. Therefore, belief alone does not really justify, it resides only in the intellect, belief can reflexively self-justify via projection.

   2. I answer that sola fide justification resides in the mind. And furthermore that there can be no certain reflexive knowledge of one´s own possession of the justification status. The likelihood that one is living in a state of grace or can be known by the intellect abstracting on the basis of similitude—i.e., primarily whether one is increasing in charity as measured by deeds or producing fruits of the Spirit and\or practicing the beatitudes. These give evidence of ontological participation in supernatural infused grace.

      In contrast, the sola fide justification status, relieving the will of its duty, then places a heavy epistemological burden on the shoulders of the intellect, whereby (1) not mere (a) belief in Jesus Christ, but also (b) a reflexive belief in, or rather certainty as regards, one´s own eternal glory, is required to claim the justification status. This might not be such a burden if it were not coupled with: (2) this certainty cannot be grounded in any positive observable factor, because intrinsic justice is ruled out as a formal cause of the status, excluding ipso facto ontological participation as a basis for claiming the status. Thus, (1) and (2) together present a near intolerable psychic stressor, and guarantee that the intellectual backing for (1) will have to find its ground in sense experience.

      This is not all, (3) the privational notion of justice that governs the status known by the speculative intellect, then deforms the practical intellect and thereby the will.

      1. Corollary Distinction: Synderesis\Conscience: Synderesis is the common sense habits that provide general principles to the practical intellect—e.g. that good should be pursued and evil avoided. Conscience, in contrast, application of these general principles to particular actions.

      The worse the reality of sin gets, the more the status of justification will conflict with the principles of synderesis—i.e. not to lie or that the status of being eternally redeemed should have some evidence in the soul. This will stress the conscience to try to reconcile not merely (1) the needed certainty of the status with (2) its own absence of formal conditions, but then (3) the reality of sin in the life of the believer and anxiety about this picture not making sense. The normal release valve is to remove the status but that is tantamount to apostasy here. Thus conscience, finding no formal way to integrate evil into the status, nor to doubt the status or do penance to regain it, has to seek a universal to integrate the particular outside of the soul.

      1. Corollary Definition: The Intellect is of Universals, Sense of Particulars. Sense knows particulars intuitively and cannot know universals, the intellect can know both particular and universal through abstraction or intuition.8

      The worse the believer sins, the more knowledge of his justification will need to look like intuitive knowledge and the only adaptation of the intellects abstractive capacity is to make sense of the particular in terms of an Evil Universal, becuase the formless good status doesn´t permit abstractive knowledge or doubt even. Thus sin in the life of the believer increases proportionately to the integrating power of exterior universals like (a) total depravity, (b) alien righteousness, and (c) the Evil Image to hang onto to the justification status. (a) claims intellectual universality to the unflattering moral reality, (b) gives intuitive intellectual justification for the reconciliation of (1) with (3), and (c) helps resolve remaining stress and problems integrating moral failure with declarative righteousness. Yet the problem integrating evil particulars whether deeds or moral feelings, is a formal condition of the metaphysical structure of the sola fide justification status. Furthermore we know this circumstance (3) is more likely to arise due to the ill effects of the doctrine on the will itself. Thus while the sola fide justification status will not necessitate projection in every case—in the case of upright individuals it entails that the status will be warranted with, likely positive and elevating, religious experience rather than moral performance. However, as viciousness increases, so will the tendency to appeal to (a) a general depraved condition of man, (b) alien righteousness, and (c) a projected Evil Image about “works righteousness.”

4. The first claim is beyond dispute: the Merit of Our Lord is the matter of justification as to an efficient cause. I only dispute the Lutheran idea that the soul is not made properly just therethrough or that the soul doesn´t properly constitute the matter of justification as to a formal cause. To omit this does make the dogma identical to projection, where a positive status is granted to the self “from outside“ without any good action done by or potency present in the soul to justify the claim.

5. To the second, there are two competing objects of knowledge to claim to the status, one of which is false. The second claim that by believing we are saved, rather than believing Christ is Savior sets up two rival objects to justifying faith, (1) Jesus Christ as Redeemer and (2) Self-Conscious belief in one´s Redemption by Jesus Christ—only one of which is proper object of justification.

6. To the third, similarly there is little to dispute. To call upon the Holy Name in faith and to be baptized in the Holy Spirit come with inward transformation. This confirms to Catholic dogma. The doctrine of sola fide as a self-conscious status, in contrast, poisons the practical intellect and rational will, so that this potency cannot be fully actualized, yet there is no doubt that the supernatural potency of regeneration via baptism will manifest in the life of every believer regardless of doctrine.

C. Is the End Identical?

1. The End of Justification per sola fide is of Eternal Glory.9 Not a dissociation from reality.

2. The End of Justification per sola fide is Good Works carried out in gratitude, joy, and charity, rather than in fear.10

   1. But I say, Matthew 7: 10 Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them. This is eloquently translated by The Semiotician “The meaning of a belief is the sum total of its practical consequences for action.” The practical fruits of the Justification status per sola fide are bad.

   2. I answer that temporally separating justification and sanctification destroys both. Justification is lost conceptually, as the soul is called just without being just, and the soul is imagined to be able to enter glory immediately after death without having been made just as well. Thus misconceiving the Form and End itself, the perfection of the soul needed at the end, as well as the proper intention to get there, sola fide promotes sloth aboud desiring our final End.

      1. Corollary Distinction: Concupiscible and Irascible Appetite. There are two species of sensitive appetite. The concupiscible appetite is that faculty by which the soul desires the good, as it is apprehended as agreeable and delightful to the senses, and turns away from evil, which is apprehended as harmful and unpleasant to the senses. The irascible appetite is that faculty by which the soul tends toward something because it is apprehended as a good that has the power to overcome difficulties that hinder the attainment of the good desired by the concupiscible appetite or the avoidance of the evil it turns away from; for example, by the irascible appetite, we desire a fight as a good by which we resist those obstructing the attainment of food.11

      The sola fide status has, with Luther at least, its root in excessive fear in the irascible appetite and a deficit of courage in the will to govern this fear towards the good. As we have seen this fear of justice or punishment is a sensible particular that cannot be integrated into the self, and is externalized in the form of the Evil Image. This allows the concupiscible appetite to enjoy the absence of the fear it projects onto another in the Evil Image. Thus what is really an issue for the rational will to govern, is resolved by mind itself via projection and enjoying the self´s freedom from the Evil Image. The less difficult the path to salvation actually is for a human, the more likely the irascible appetite will be frusterated and manifest undue fear and anger that threaten the justification status and need to be externalized. This sensible pleasure of the concupiscible appetite in being not-Evil, is not the same as the delight in or love of the Good and progress in virtue towards beatitude.

      1. A Thing’s Ultimate Perfection is its Operation. A thing is perfect insofar as it is in act. The first act is that of its very being, the second is its operation. A MD degree gives a doctor, complete doctor-being or act and rights. yet surgery is the proper operation and ultimate perfection of the surgeon.12

         Thus one must distinguish between justification as a self-conscious status, and justification in the baptized believer. And consider both in act and operation. Regardless of their own belief about baptism or justification, the soul is cleansed of original sin and really made just through baptism. Each baptized soul has, through the merits of Jesus Christ the act or form of justice animating it. The works of love that are the proper operation of the justified soul will follow as a matter of course from the grace of regeneration. With this exception: Sola Fide is a projection as regards the form and first act of the self conscious status, which does not make baptism invalid, rather it makes perfect sanctification thereafter impossible. The form of the self-conscious status of sola fide Justification removes the two great guardrails of the spiritual organism. First the fear of God´s justice and necessity of penance for the temporal punishment of sin. Second, the desire for perfection manifest in perfect obedience and conformity to law. The status invites the luke-warm soul to stay put when penance is desperately needed, and the devout soul to avoid excessive piety and works of mercy when under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost to perform great deeds. These are two forms of the same thing: spiritual sloth, and thus the act or form of self-conscious justification is defective which therefore obstructs the ultimate perfection and operation of the justified soul.

3. The End of Justification per sola fide cannot be Eternal Glory because the desire for perfection and reward is an invalidating condition of faith itself. Furthermore St Paul declares that Charity is the only sufficient condition for salvation: I Cor 13:2 “if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”

4. Without desiring perfection, also imagining salvation without charity as a possibility, this dogma cuts faithful of from their true Eternal End. This in the long run increases, not only fear as a consequence of bad conscience, but then increases the negative very same image that is fueled by fear of divine judgment against sin to create once again a mirror: a pharisaical attitude against works-righteousness itself. The only salvific work of sola fide—i.e. faith in faith absent works—is not good at all.

   Summary: Something Good, like the status of justifiction can only be caused by something entirely good, it cannot be caused by evil or infected with evil as a defect. With projection and sola fide, we see a similar causal structure, the formal cause is an increasing absence of form itself and dissociation from reality as well as the claim of justice over their soul or actions, the material cause is an Evil image projected onto another. The final cause operates efficiently, so say the scholastics, and here as well, where the end is a sensible enjoyment of the negative freedom from unintegrated negative subconscious elements in the form of the Evil image. This is the grace of projection, and it is forensically without inhering in the soul.

   We see the psychological mechanism of sola fide is a re-enforcing one just like projection: The status does not come from another, but from the self, thus this misrecognition at the very heart of the self-conscious status becomes an engine of mediocre moral lives and subsequent psychic frustration by obviating the intention of the just: i.e. perfection. These negative externalities build up over time then serve to fuel the projection and privational identity. Thus, rather than tending towards freedom for the good as it intends, sola fide in practice increases the slavery of souls to a projection of their own increasingly diseased self-consciousness to secure for them the privational sola fide status of “being justified.”

D. Contrast this with the causal analysis of the Sixth Session of the Council of Trent concerning Justification:

Of this Justification the causes are these: the final cause indeed is the glory of God and of Jesus Christ, and life everlasting; while the efficient cause is a merciful God who washes and sanctifies gratuitously, signing, and anointing with the holy Spirit of promise, who is the pledge of our inheritance; but the meritorious cause is His most beloved only-begotten, our Lord Jesus Christ, who, when we were enemies, for the exceeding charity wherewith he loved us, merited Justification for us by His most holy Passion on the wood of the cross, and made satisfaction for us unto God the Father; the instrmental cause is the sacrament of baptism, which is the sacrament of faith, without which (faith) no man was ever justified; lastly, the alone formal cause is the justice of God, not that whereby He Himself is just, but that whereby He maketh us just, that, to wit, with which we being endowed by Him, are renewed in the spirit of our mind, and we are not only reputed, but are truly called, and are, just, receiving justice within us, each one according to his own measure, which the Holy Ghost distributes to every one as He wills, and according to each one’s proper disposition and co-operation. 13

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Judas´s betrayal of Our Lord is perplexing: how could someone who stood by Jesus of Nazareth every day for three years want to betray Him? Even out of pure self-interest, how could someone who not only witnessed, but participated in, the great miracles worked by Jesus muster the courage to deliver Him to death? A few weeks ago in France, I witnessed a 4 hour long passion play and was reminded of how strangely the character of Judas is often portrayed. In this play, Judas was greedy, doubting, and little more. His eyes lit up at the prospect of 30 pieces of silver like an rabid hungry animal; his remorse and suicide were almost equally implausible in their superficiality. Greedy men don’t commit suicide, I thought. Prideful men do. So what was going on with Judas? We have so little information. Despite this, most accounts miss a crucial factor likely influencing Judas’s betrayal. It’s important because Judas, in this picture, also becomes a more edifying or instructive warning. And his actions appear to come much closer to the betrayals we repeatedly make that lead the way to the ultimate rejection of God.

The 3 Likely Motives

Sometimes it’s not even clear why Judas´s betrayal was needed at all. From the perspective of the high priests, only an insider could make possible the private arrest that the religious authorities wished for. They had a great fear of apprehending Our Lord in public, because, given his popularity, any public act against Jesus threatened violent conflict.

From the perspective of Judas, what he stood to gain is less clear. Greed does seem to have played a role. For instance, Judas goes of his own accord and asks specifically for money in the book of Matthew:

“Then one of the Twelve—the one called Judas Iscariot—went to the chief priests and asked, ‘What are you willing to give me if I deliver him over to you?’ So they counted out for him thirty pieces of silver. From then on Judas watched for an opportunity to hand him over.” (Matthew 26:14-16)

Furthermore St John refers to Judas elsewhere as a “thief.” And his final betrayal comes shortly after Judas is reproached for his preoccupation with money when Our Lord was anointed with costly perfume at Bethany. Judas protested this act of devotion and instead focused on the cost. He complained about the waste of money that could have gone to the poor. Yet, 30 silver shekels translates directly into around about 3-4 months wages at the time. The sum total still doesn’t seem to equal the gravity of the act. It seems like Judas has already made up his mind and then greed compelled him to make the most of his treachery by taking the blood money. Yet, greed fails to explain his attempt to return the money and also his suicide afterwards. If he acted on greed alone, why part with the money? and why kill oneself after?

Thus a second more likely motive is outright hatred. Greed, however, can still be seen as a foundational motive in this picture. If we consider that Judas might have followed Jesus originally for material gain—thinking he would be given a high office once the Messiah came to rule the nations—we can only imagine the magnitude of Judas´s disappointment as he slowly came to grips with the reality of following Jesus of Nazareth. Judas had to come to grips with the fact that discipleship meant poverty and persecution rather than conquest and high position. Thus greed and worldly ambition might have given way to some combination of hatred and severe disillusionment, leading to his ultimate betrayal.

Yet, this account is also unsatisfying in some regards. Other disciples simply stopped following Jesus when they were disillusioned. It’s hard to imagine why Judas could not have done so as well even if he grew to hate Jesus. After the difficult Bread of Life discourse in John 6, where the disciples who would not accept a hard teaching of Jesus–i.e. to eat His flesh!-- we hear of disciples leaving. John 6:66 reads: “from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” Perhaps his frustration did become obsessive hatred and he couldn’t simply let go without seeking vengeance. Perhaps Judas, having renounced all to follow Our Lord, couldn´t simply give up without getting some remuneration for his labor, and grew to wish ill upon Our Lord. But even here, the remorse and suicide are still not intuitive.

Thus a third motive complements these other two nicely or could even be a stand alone motive, a motive mentioned by William Barclay in his classic Bible commentary. Barclay writes “it may be that Judas never intended Jesus to die. It may be that, as we have seen, he saw in Jesus the divine leader. He may have thought that Jesus was proceeding far too slowly; and he may have wished for nothing else than to force his hand. He may have betrayed Jesus with the intention of compelling him to act. That is in fact the view which best suits all the facts.”1 This angle does seem to explain Judas’s doom more adequately. It can explain why Judas stuck around—i.e. He wanted to bring about revolution and didn´t want to relinquish his position where he could play a leading role. In this view, Judas’s pride and self-will likely came together with one very false and dogged conviction: that the reign of the messiah would be this-worldly and political.

Judas the Zealot

Two considerations help clarify just how widely held and important this “zealot” belief was amongst first century jews. First think of this: most jews must have been aware that the time had come for the arrival of the Messiah. The Jews likely knew why Herod committed genocide in Bethlehem. Their parents or grandparents saw the star and heard of the curious wise men coming from the East to Bethlehem to greet the future King. The Essenes, one of the three most important sects within in the first century Judaism, knew with certainty the time was at hand through the miraculous testimony of the temporarily mute Zachariah. And these are just a few of the signs that we know of. There must have been many others.

We should not underestimate the pressure and intensity of thousands of years of expectation coming to rest upon one generation. And this pressure likely put everyone on edge. Fathers were eyeing and testing their sons differently knowing the time had come for the fulfillment of prophecy. I imagine men over evening fires speaking of little else. Telling of the strange healings in pools in and around Jerusalem at the same time St John started baptizing with water. Do these have anything to do with each other? And what does water have to do with the coming Messiah? How to put it all together? They knew something big was transpiring. And were anxiously and zealously trying to fit the pieces together. So the question for most jews wasn’t whether the time was at hand, but what about the shape of the messianic hope and what to expect and how to prepare. This is even before the polarizing figure of St John the Baptist came onto the scene. Once he began announcing “repent and be baptised for the Kingdom of Heaven is near” this messianic zeal and controversy must have reached a frenzy. The Kingdom of Heaven is explicitly an appeal to the messianic hope of Israel.

Secondly, the political character of first century Jewish popular messianic fervor is well documented. Biblical scholar, NT Wright, in his well-known work, Jesus and the Victory of God, writes:

“I have demonstrated in some detail (a) that popular Judaism in the first century was eagerly expecting Israel’s god to act decisively to get rid of the Roman overlord, (b) that this expectation regularly expressed itself in terms of Israel’s god becoming king, and (c) that the apocalyptic language of some of its favourite writings, not least the book of Daniel, had nothing to do with a supposed end to the space-time order, and everything to do with the great climax of Israel’s history, the final liberation of Israel from her pagan enemies.” 2

The popular conviction thus anticipated a violent conflict. Pilates own concern with Jesus being a King seems to track with this fear of revolt. This zealot interpretation seems also to square well with both the paucity of the human imagination but also a great deal of scripture. Consider Jeremiah 23:5, for instance, as a paradigmatic prophetic text about the messiah that lends itself toward a this-worldly political interpretation:

“Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness.’”

Joshua was a conqueror, so was David. Wouldn’t the man who was to sit on David’s throne be a warrior as well? It´s likely an overwhelming majority thought this answer was obvious. Sure some men did follow St John into the desert to take a different path, these men knew that the the Kingdom would only be grasped and pursued by a few, they knew that preparation to welcome it would be consist in growth in virtue not in fighting prowess. But it must have been the case that many were elsewhere sharpening their swords. How many men had been training alone for years in quiet hours in anticipation of the triumph of their God? How many men were eagerly awaiting what they saw as their divine task and moment to fight and die for their God and people and usher in the Messianic Kingdom of God? I suspect quite a few.

And even today amongst practicing Jews, this conviction is not subject to doubt. This is what they think: the Messiah will have a kingdom that is of this world and himself rule politically over the nations. And it’s this unique messianic hope that the activity and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth both summoned and condemned at the same time. He summoned the conviction by His miracles and fulfillment of prophecies about the Messiah. But Jesus himself condemned this expectation with His manner of activity and the content of His speech. He wandered and preached with a small band of men. He spoke in parables to depict a heavenly kingdom. He didn’t act towards or speak about political liberation or the establishment of an earthly kingdom.

When we hear in John 7:43 that “the people were divided because of Jesus,” it seems likely this popular division was, in part if not totally, based on this specific controversy. The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth failed to conform with the political shape of the messianic hope in the popular imagination. Popular division was more likely to rest here than on the more pharisaical objections of the Pharisees themselves regarding Our Lord’s willingness to break sabbath laws on rare occasions. Due to its messianic hope, Israel was a powder keg ready erupt into violence. It just needed a spark. It´s plausible Judas wanted to create it. The paschal feast in Jerusalem was the perfect time to start the uprising, as all of Israel was gathered there, many of whom were, like him, eager for the violent conflict to begin.

If Judas held this zealot conviction and if he was convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, then there was little left to do but to get the fighting started. Victory was assured. Fighting would also mean the end of his misery and humiliation living the vagabond life of an apostle. With this third angle, we can also discover more laudable motives for Judas, like ending the era of oppression and humiliation of the Jewish people. Judas likely got tired of parables he couldn’t understand and miracles that didn’t seem to lead towards the change he wanted to see. He, and I suspect many people on the outside, had the same complaint: “If this Man can raise the dead, why doesn’t he fight already. We can´t lose.”

It’s not at all clear whether the other apostles had rid themselves of this popular first century messianic hope. The visionary Ann Catherine Emmerich wrote of the apostles still speculating about some this-worldly triumph even after Our Lord announced his pending death at the last supper. She writes of this,

“the Apostles got into a kind of dispute as to who among them should have the first place, for as the Lord had expressly announced that He was about to leave them and that His Kingdom was near, they were strengthened anew in their idea that He had some­where a secret force in reserve, and that He would achieve some earthly triumph at the very last moment.”3

This false hope also explains why Peter is primed to fight at the time of Jesus´ arrest. Yet, he obeys and sheaths his sword in obedience. And this is the difference between Judas and Peter. Peter obeyed in an instant, while Judas acted wantonly according to his own designs. Peter´s endearing humility also contrasts with Judas. It is Peter who at the last supper questions if he himself is going to betray Jesus Christ! Judas, despite having already done so wont entertain the thought at the last supper. Peter is ready to believe it on no evidence, just the Word of the Lord. Peter must have been wrong so many times, he was open to everything in humility.

This third reading highlights how crucial it is to revise one’s thinking both as regards doctrine and even one’s plans and designs according to God´s revelation and plan. We betray Our Lord when we do not hear His Word and submit to it, when we react to disappointments and frustration by asserting our own will in self-defense, rather than seeking more earnestly His will. We betray Our Lord when He becomes a part of our plans rather than us consenting to His plan even when we cant understand it.

This reading also suggests how comfortable Judas must have become with not understanding what Our Lord was saying. This too should be a warning for us. The Venerable Anne Catherine Emmerich saw in her visions of the life of Jesus, the final contact between Judas and Our Lord:

“When Jesus washed Judas’ feet, it was in the most touching and loving manner. He pressed them to His cheek and in a low tone bade him enter into him­self, for that he had been unfaithful and a traitor for the past year. But Judas appeared not to notice, and addressed some words to John. This roused Peter’s anger, and he exclaimed: “Judas, the Master is speaking to thee!” Then Judas made some vague, evasive remark, such as: “Lord, far be it from me!””

Many Saints speak of how troubled and sorrowful Our Lord was over Judas. Its heartbreaking to catch a glimpse of it in this scene, with Our Lord giving him one last loving embrace, warning, and command. I suspect Judas was outwardly dutiful, zealous even, in the service of Our Lord, but with selfish motive and without his heart in the right place. The seeds of his betrayal were likely most apparent in small moments like this, where he ignored what Our Lord was saying, where he stopped listening altogether with a heart ready to obey and repent. I suspect the other disciples heard parables they couldn’t understand and mulled over them for days and weeks trying to make sure they understood the meaning. Judas likely gave up hanging onto His Word, and longing to understand it so that he could live accordingly. He became comfortable with the fact Jesus would do things and say things he didn’t understand and didn’t agree with. He therefore grew more comfortable pursuing his own will and ideas.

Judas´s remorse and suicide are also easier to grasp in this third interpretation. After betraying Our Lord, at least by the time of the scourging, Judas must have came to realize things weren’t developing as he anticipated. He came to realize there would be no resistance at all, no violent conflict. Instead, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, the Christ, would be crucified because of his betrayal. Judas ran through his head all the sayings of Jesus he had passed over in ignorance and hadn´t taken seriously–all the foreshadowings and warnings given to Judas by Our Lord. And now he understood them all and hated himself for what he had done. He thought he would be the hero of the revolt, but in the end he came to realize he was the goat of the story. And the same pride that couldn´t bear the poverty of apostleship couldn´t bear the humiliation of delivering the Messiah to death. The same false love of Israel that triumphed over the word and will of Jesus Christ also led him away from the generous mercy of Our Lord in the closing moments of his life.

This interpretation also helps explain why the crowd turned so violently on Jesus–i.e. why some of the very same people who welcomed Jesus of Nazareth into the city, crying Hosannah, were screaming we want Barabbas just days later. The people dripping with hatred in that scene were those who were most zealous for the glory of the Lord falsely conceived. They couldn’t revise the false expectation for how things were supposed to be. Some of them came to Jerusalem ready to fight and die for this man. To see this wonder-worker so humiliated, brutally beaten by the authority they came to overthrow, it was too much to bear. All of their deepest hopes were crushed. And frustrated love becomes hate. And their love of their God and people was misplaced in this instance, but it was a relatively small and very common mistake.

Judas should be a warning for us to attend to all details of our lives and belief in humility and out of love for God, docile to His Will and correction. False ideas we cling to in pride are occasions for betrayal. And fervor and good intentions alone will not protect us from disastrous falls. We have to ask, seek, and knock. Judas goes to show our problem with God is all too often that we know too much rather than too little to correspond with His plans for us. His example is also a warning that our greatest sins also seek to manifest themselves in our regret and repentance.

Our (Zealot) Veil of Ignorance

What is perhaps most strange amongst our current age, at least in the west, is the implausibility of all of Judas´s possible motives. We are an opulent age and an opulent age struggles to feel the pull of greed. Insidious greed emerges out of real poverty. Furthermore, we are a slothful, egalitarian age where few wish to be the hero or the protagonist of the story, nor do men long for status as they once did in a more hierarchical and rigid society. Few today would find eating with outcasts or sinners to be a degradation worthy of resentment as in former times. In this way, what might have moved Judas to hatred and betrayal involve cultural sensibilities to which we are dull.

If these two particularities make Judas a figure we struggle to sympathize with, a final particularity of our age makes us resemble him in his zealot conviction. Just as Judas, at least according to the third possible motive, was certain of a this-worldly political triumph of Israel, we are equally certain that the explicit religious support from the political order is not material to the flourishing of the church. Nor do we believe political authority should be made to bow before the King of Kings and explicitly confess Him as Lord as was common in the past. This near universal consensus has little place in traditional Christianity and is particular to the post-WWII era of western Christianity.

Today, our leaders are all too aware of the problem of making an idol out of the political as Judas may have, or as various 20th century or even many contemporary movements undoubtedly do. But they are usually quite blind to how the same idolatry of the political manifests itself in false repentance. If the Christian fascist movements of the early 20th century ended in betrayals, the post-war democratic Christian consensus about the separation of Church and State has proved to be suicidal. The same idol needs to be shattered in both cases.

Today, the Church is often portrayed as something too other-worldly, holy, pure and precious to inform the bad and ugly political sphere. Hereby the political order is deformed and set against its teleos by banishing the influence of the Church entirely. Just as a family without religion would be. Rather than preserve the integrity of Church, those who claim the Church should not place demands on the State endow the State with rights and autonomy that are only proper to the Church. This is idolatry. Its at this point contemporary Christians are likely to mirror Judas in his the false political conviction and consequent betrayal of Our Lord.

The Church must take a concrete, bodily, political shape so that it can seek to remain free from this-worldly politics. Yet when the church has little or no political or institutional form, it tends to become all too politically involved and culturally compromised. Historically speaking, catholic sovereigns were given at most a veto, never even a vote, in a papal conclave, because the State has no right to interfere in the government of the Church.4 But the converse is not true. The Popes have at times claimed the right to depose Emperors and Kings.5

The Church needs robust Christian States to thrive and should strive to establish them. These states wont save one single soul, but they can and will support and defend a Church in the business of saving souls. And this church needs political support and defense from time to time. Just think of Nicea! The Council of Nicea was called by the Emperor Constantine, not the Pope. Rather than getting a church today that is more focused on saving souls, in the democratic era where religion was supposedly freed for a more pure and unsullied existence apart from the machinations of state-craft, we ironically got a church that has increasingly curried the esteem of the politically powerful. We got was a church that was less zealous about the glory of God and obedience to Him. This should be no surprise as our zealot conviction was tantamount to asking God to kneel before a political sphere that was indifferent to His Reign and needed to remain “neutral” concerning His Existence and Laws. Our God gives everything, and wants everything. We carve up neutral political spaces of insubordination to Him at our own peril.

Its therefore no contradiction to think a Church which vigorously promotes confessional states will also be better poised to stay in its own lane to fulfill its teleos to save souls and lead them in right worship of the living God. Its no contradiction to think a Church that doesn’t make an idol out of the political, but keeps it in its proper place, will be better suited to hand down the faith from one generation to the next. Such a Church Catholic—proclaiming and advocating the social reign of Christ the King— will once again bless states that acknowledge and submit to its authority.

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“The Son is not a creature, but the true God, unoriginate, principle (archē) of all things, through whom everything exists.”1
—St Athanasius

Is Theology a Science?

A basic thesis of my critique of re-enchantment was that we are living in a “sensate“ society where intellect is subordinate and obedient to sense. This creates a theoretical problem--i.e. the intellect works to thematize sense experience itself and abstract from this, rather than attend to the objects themselves-- and practical problem--i.e. that the intellect cannot be practically useful in orienting us towards our transcendental teleos if its locked in on making sense of how things appear in sense experience. It comes as no surprise that if theology in this degenerate frame is instrumentalized to make sense of sense experience (credit to St Pope Pius X this is his definition of theological modernism), then thinking of theology as a science is impossible. Within a sensate mentality, theology as a science becomes a dirty word, something only cold, stale scholastic theologians do, blah blah, blah. “We want theology to be concrete, practical, living!” Here thinking rebels against thought. and the thought of theology being universal, abstract and general is perceived as its death knell, but in reality theology can only be useful within these confines. Theology is a Science. And the most advanced theological science took the form of Scholasticism.

We can understand contemporary theological developments best within this frame—e.g. so little of theological speech transcends a self-aggrandizing poetical or hyperbolic theoretical mode: e.g. “what we need today is a radical embodied sacramental ontology of concrete everyday life.” Sounds nice, but perhaps we need precision instead? Sense mocks intellect by making it try to pretend it’s not universalizing the particular itself, that it’s not abstracting and fetishizing “the concrete” as a concept. It´s true, all knowledge comes by way of the senses. And the job of the intellect is to elevate sense and abstract from it to obtain knowledge of higher truths and goods. In a sensate age, however, sense appetites dominate and constrict the intellect. This leaves christians with their bellies full but without proper defense from false teachings. People seem to forget that saints and mystics alike had no issue with theology being a science. They wholeheartedly supported this. What they couldn’t stomach was irreverence and imprecision, which the sensate mode of theology has in excess.

So what does it mean to be a science for our purposes? Quite simply--(1) that all parts be connected to the whole through a purposeful order. And serving this end, (2) both the proper object and the various aspects under which it is to be considered must be precisely determined. Then (3) all questions material to the intended knowledge must be addressed. In terms of activity, the cycle of dogma will be (a) explained, (b) demonstrated from proper sources, and (c) defended against objections. And, finally, what is the hallmark of scholasticism vis a vis the apostolic fathers, (4) that individual doctrines will be derived from one or a few fundamental principles through reasoning or at least give in a manner that expresses the internal logical coherence of christian dogma, which will then (5) seek to unite itself with the whole of our natural knowledge. This is the humble project of Scholasticism. A project now almost entirely in disrepute.

To those confined to a sensate mentality, this previous scholastic theological science comes into view only as an edifice from the outside. Scholasticism is accused of (1) serving argument or defensive purposes strictly, and not living faith or piety, (2) being “excessively rational” so as to the detriment of genuine mysticism or the service of pride alone. Yet, this is a projection of what theology in a sensate frame is anyway, i.e. its mode tends to trade clarity for theoretical over-reach and rhetorical ostentation. Long term, this threatens genuine piety, humility, and participation in the form of theological and moral reflection that sustained and developed within Christianity for centuries. Only those for whom intellect reigns over sense can profit from the scholastic edifice by dwelling within it, by discovering the internal edification of the form of thought, and of these only those who have learned the manner of explanation, demonstration, and defense (i cannot think of one single institution where these are learned, only a smattering of various figures, schools, and perspectives—e.g. most “Thomists” only know at best the most rudimentary scholastic definitions and distinctions).

It is thus no wonder that scholasticism has become a pejorative term, but it is also unjust. I think we need scholastic theological science now more than ever to discern spirits, to clarify the truth faithful must cling to, and to set forth the good to be desired. “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” (Romans 12:2). Faithful are all too easily decieved by bad theology. I think Saints rather than Scholasticism will be best suited to respond to the spiritual problems of our time. Yet, only the sort of person who can be and desires to be edified by learning this science, even if it remains quite rudimentary out of a desire for holy simplicity or poverty, can help. Why? Because the object of said science is the living God! And Saints know He deserves nothing less than the best!

Theological science is about having a standard of reverence and propriety about theological language, language which relates analogically to God Himself. Today, theological science is often more about making sense of religious experience, or worse provoking activism. When this is the case, proprieties change dramatically from decade to decade and culture to culture, while word use becomes slovenly and careless. All of which reflects a God who is kinder to the extent He grows more indifferent to Himself and what is taught about Him than He was before. Without theological science we tend towards believing in a god who is either an idol of the zeitgeist, e.g in the immanent frame this is a god who is indifferent towards the truth—a god who is there to serve and promote our experience of him. The just instead will desire that theology takes the form of a science out of respect and love for its proper object.

Where did Scholasticism Come from?

There are two formal hallmarks of scholastic theology. (1) presenting the body of doctrine in a unified logically ordered manner, where not merely internal coherency but also the mutual implication of doctrines is sought to be established and (2) the extensive use of philosophy towards the end of (1). Both of these points are as blithely dismissed today as they were easily defended for centuries.

Scholasticism is perhaps most harshly critiqued for, and sometimes its pejorative word use means little more than, (a) getting distracted by pointless philosophical questions, and arcane debates. The second all-too-common critique is that it is (b) too focused on defense and apology of dogma.2 And the third that (c) its use of philosophy is tantamount to reason encroaching on faith, i.e. the critique of excessive rationalism.¹

All three of these points can be made to exclusively refer to (2) the consequence of the extensive use of philosophy in scholastic theology, because philosophy is going to insist upon (a) and (b) and push in the direction of (c.) And it is comforting that (2) is also far easier to defend as regards the patristic use of the scholastic method. The propriety of the use of philosophical concepts of greek provenance was established with the adoption of “substance“ and “nature“ in the nicene and calcedonian creedal formulations respectively.

Furthermore, we see the seeds of (1) a desired unity of dogma in the frequency with which St Athanasius refers to the Triune God as ἀρχή or archē, i.e. the one cause, governor, and principle of intelligibility of all things in greek philosophy, (e.g. what thales thought was water, what the pythagoreans thought was number). So already in the 4th century christian tradition chose to make use of philosophy both to deepen our understanding of particular dogmas, and to lay the groundwork for unifying the dogmas of the faith.

Even the most radical biblicist has to deal with this same work archē being used in the Septuagint to render Proverbs 9:10—i.e. “The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom“ also as archē in “ἀρχὴ σοφίας φόβος κυρίου.” Furthermore, Our Lord identifying Himself as Logos or λόγος in the Prologue to the Gospel of John is almost more appalling. Logos is what Heraclitus identifies as the principle of reason and order permeating and organizing the cosmos. Critics, therefore, objecting to scholastic aims for theological science lack biblical, creedal, historical grounds for their conviction. If Our Lord is archē or Logos, then the project of systematizing dogma into a well ordered and mutually implying whole, ordered by one or a few principles, appears to be perfectly fitting response to the Christian claim.

We see, furthermore, in a figure like St Augustine the extensive use of philosophy. St Augustine, like the other fathers, treated various theological topics piecemeal. We dont find with him the drive to organize (1) a unified systematic theology with a philosophically informed architectonic structure. But we see in St Augustine the extensive use of philosophy. And this application to lead into (a) arcane questions—e.g. about the nature of time and how to measure it, and (b) aggressive apologetic work attacking the common errors of his day, classicism, manicheanism, etc, and (c) arriving at dogmatic conclusions that have no basis in scripture of tradition by means of philosophy alone, e.g. using the tripartite division of the soul as a reference point for explaining the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s rare that a critique of scholasticism wouldn´t also oppose the theological method of St Augustine.

Concerning (1) we see the systematic tendency also long before the age of the schoolmen— at least the impulse to order dogma into a whole—but not yet carried out with the aim of unifying or synthesizing the various dogmas into a systematic whole. St John of Damascus´ 7th century work “De Fide Orthodoxa” is perhaps the best example. It treats of God, then Creation, then Redemption of Man, then the Church and Sacraments and, in this ordering, prefigures the unity and ordering found in classic scholastic texts of the 12th and 13th century. So the impulse towards a unified presentation of the body of dogma, as well as the extensive use of philosophy in theology preceded the birth of scholasticism proper by centuries, a millenium almost if you look at St Justin Martyr.

The Birth of Scholasticism

This being said, while the origins of scholasticism can be found in the apostolic age or even in scripture, at the start of the 12th century, Peter Lombard can claim to be the first to give definite form to scholasticism: his “libri quatuor sententiarum” presented (1) the body of doctrine as a unified whole, and (2) with the extensive use of philosophy to establish the unity of the whole cycle of doctrine. What was almost more impressive, Lombard´s book and his method quickly came to dominate theological instruction in the Latin church. St Albert the Great and St Thomas would give commentary on The Sentences of Peter Lombard. The term “scholastic” comes from the men i.e. scholastici entrusted with the theological education of the youth educated in monasteries or presbyteries, i.e. schola. Thus “a scholastic” was originally a learned man and teacher—a title like dr or professor today—rather than someone who belonged to a specific school of thought.

In sum, it can be said that the 12th century was a real genesis for scholasticism in western Christianity, but its more appropriate to say this century was the moment two separate theological impulses—for unity and for the use of philosophy in theology— that had long since been apart of tradition, came to fruition and dominance in and through the person and work of Peter Lombard.

Criticism of Scholasticism Tends to be Off Point

Criticisms of scholasticism usually express a disdain for philosophy or even rationality itself that would implicate patristic fathers as well. It’s very rare to see a criticism of scholasticism that hits the only possible target, i.e. the excessive use of philosophy for the purpose of unifying dogma into a whole. And for the rare bird who even aims correctly at the target, it’s hard not to feel pity for such a miser, as this task is wholesome, good and edifying for the right sort of person.

Rarer still are consistent critiques of scholasticism, i.e. those who wish in simplicity that theology stick to the fathers and scriptures. Instead, those who despise scholasticism usually have no issue with the use of philosophy in theology in general, their issue is with the specific case of good philosophy being used well to clarify and support the task of theology. Of theology abused by bad philosophy, these critics rarely object and almost always practice themselves.

As anyone who loves philosophy knows, arcane debates are surprisingly fun and helpful, and a symptom of principled, earnest, logical thinking, and they so often lead to important insights, discoveries, and conclusions. Furthermore, anyone who loves the truth loves to defend it well and systematically. The scriptures tell us: “study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” (2 Tim 2:15). The universe is magnificently ordered, and our minds were ordered to comprehend both its grandeur and the character of Our Creator through His works. True men of faith, men like St Augustine, see reason complimenting faith rather than stealing from it. And true men of intellectual brilliance and integrity , like St Thomas or Bl Duns Scotus, know that the proper exercise of reason is a material support and defense of mysticism and the spiritual life, rather than its enemy.3

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Here are a few of my other posts on scholastic theology and terminology:

True.
The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.”

-Plato (Republic: Book VIII—https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.9.viii.html

The analysis of Plato in Book VIII of “the Republic” outlining the final descent of democracy into tyranny could not be more prescient for this time: democracy lets freedom run amok and gives birth to a (rational) desire for tyranny. This is, for Plato, an unavoidable dialectic. And we should understand someone like Nick Fuentes within this dialectic. So, when I hear that he or other gen z males praise Hitler or Stalin, it’s most charitable to read their sentiment—which isn´t entirely earnest nor entirely in jest— not as an expression of hate, but as a rational reaction to the greater chaos and tyranny created by democratic freedom.

Plato says democracy will eventually make a strong-man populist type leader, who instantiates order through tyranny, preferable to the chaotic and levelling excesses of democratic freedom and equality. And if these excesses hit their peak at around 2017, it’s clear the generation that came of age at the time of peak negative liberty are going to swing the pendulum back towards valuing order, hierarchy, stability and wealth.

Rather than offering charity to the upcoming generation of conservatives, the tone deaf elder statesmen of the movement have tended to greet the newfound racial convictions and religious zeal of their gen z progeny with moralizing and scolding calls for “civility.” Forgetting their own history of opportunistic compromises on principle and “civility”, boomer conservatives took the occasion of Fuentes´ rise to sanctimoniously gesture towards the observance of sacred bourgeois proprieties and cherished democratic principles. Principles they never held consistently in the first place, as their severe treatment of gen z race-realists and generous treatment of zionist race-realists bears witness.

Yet, if the boomers miss the current moment entirely in this internecine conflict, both young and old seem to be driven by a disgust of their own feeble appearance in the mirror. Neither have organization, neither have a realistic plan to promote their own core interests. And if the younger group has more integrity, its only due to inexperience, and they pay for their purity dearly in terms of institutional irrelevance. Both are disgusted by and afraid to look at their own face in the mirror: the young fear the cowardice and hypocrisy they see in the compromised conservative establishment. And the establishment fears the irrelevance and rejection of civic decency in the “misled” conservative youth.

The core issue is this: a “sensate mentality,“ as Sorokin calls it, cannot be governed by principle. This is the existential source of conservative political powerlessness and despair. This mentality all but ensures both a rule of tyranny, hypocrisy, and the decay of civic propriety, and a mentality that is petrified of the threat of the same.

If they are blind to themselves, people living within this mentality still have a human conscience, and thereby need some plausible strategy for thinking well of themselves as conforming to a morally upstanding life, and also some ground for defending the societies to whom they owe allegiance. And, the less the goodness of one´s life can be defined by objective normative criteria like duty or natural law, the more simply belonging to the right group will takeover one´s ethical identity.1 Thus, due to sheer intellectual sloth or an absence of self control, a sensate mentality seeks its summum bonum, not in an intellectual common Good or conformity to a specific form of life, but in the only available alternative: right sentiment.

Here right sentiment is defined, as it always is, by the tribe. Sentiment always rests here because sentiment cannot be applied evenly or justly to all humans, as principles and laws or other intellectual things can. Sentiment runs quickly in short supply, so you simply have to pick what to get worked up about. Our political life is defined by various tribal confederacies who arbitrarily establish what one should get worked up about to convince oneself that one is good. This is the only way to explain the almost religious apotheosis of the virtue signal in our time. Performative morality depends on an audience and grows addicted to the levelling power of public opinion. And virtue signals then become more essential for social belonging, existential meaning, and for policing thought and behavior.

Media in general, and social media in particular, has become so powerful, not strictly due to its taking advantage of our political need to build coalitions by imparting a public morality through propaganda, but more so becuase of our existential need to publicly signal virtue to fill in for actually living a good life as a source of ethical satisfaction. So we rely on (social) media generated public opinion almost equally to direct our conscience as we rely on it to forge coalitions. Media direction has replaced the role of sound principle or intellectual virtue for the masses.2

Based on the observance of behavior, I cannot realistically expect anyone, and I mean anyone, who holds power in the church or politics to act in a principled way—i.e. as if their behavior was governed by a moral law or justice consistently applied. If anyone started to, it’s a near certainty they would be harangued by the tribe they represent. Justice is even and asks to be applied evenly. Justice will demand that any real intellectual bend too much in sympathy toward tribal enemies, and in severity towards his own tribe. And these demands conflict with our entire existential or moral project: to signal to the right people that one has the right sentiments for the right people, or, more often than not, against the right people. This is the game. We all play it in varying degrees. There is little demand to agree about what is the highest good, but there is always a demand to agree certain people are the greatest evil.

We don´t aim at the common good, because sentiment can´t see a transcendent, intellectual good to aim at. And if it could aim it lacks the patience and courage to pursue the courageous action reason demands. Instead sentimentalists will weep, scream over, or protest something awful like a genocide. They will go off on self righteous tirades when people refuse to ritually cleanse themselves by failing to make the requisite virtue signal. Yet, sentimental people wont act or make sacrifices on account of good reasons to actually help the victims of a genocide. They arent willing to put even a dent in the ugly, unpleasant surface of political life that transcends the spectacle of protest. Sentiment fails and virtue flourishes where people are asked to risk and sacrifice for the good of the polis.

We have tyranny today, because the only check against tyranny in a democracy is civic virtue. And virtue struggles to be dominant in the “immanent frame” or in a “sensate mentality.” Its like asking an anorexic to try out power-lifting. Reality is too heavy. We are not built for heavy lifting, i.e.—applying abstract thinking to life consistently, the fortitude required for rule following. We don’t have the muscle nor the diet to interact profitably with the weights.

Instead we can feel. We then have to build coalitions out of common sentiments, i.e. why Charlie Kirk’s death was so powerful: a sensate age will react well to the right ritual murder, if they can all see it live. And they´ll build a coalition out of their experience of it. Ideas do not have traction anymore. Aesthetics do, which is why racial politics is becoming increasingly important. The other option, as we have all seen and many of us have enjoyed, is a coalition based on consumption and entertainment. Trump became so powerful because he made himself the star of his own reality show. Before he did this politically!

Our current realpolitik is some combination of a victim-based and entertainment-based sovereignty. Trump was the reality TV show resentful right wingers wanted to watch and the dictatorial rape fantasy the progressive left wished to simulate and “protest.“ His ability to play both roles so well remade American politics. And the media discovered just how much demand there was for this product. A tactical, civil, professional Mitt Romney type centrist is no longer desired by anyone. All sides profit from transgression. American sovereignty is now founded on animus—i.e. either the schadenfreude of dominant party exacting reprisals on its ideological enemies or the narcissistic spectacle of resistance from the opposing side.

Trump´s immense power was garnered from his rediscovery of the anthropological origin of sovereignty itself. The primitive warrior-king establishes his sovereignty in his ability to suspend or stand outside of law. Primitive enthronement rituals would often ritualize trangression to demonstrate the new kings sovereign status. Trumps intentional trolling of oppressive PC culture, his rejection of democratic norms and civility, these all worked to his political advantage, as did the hysterics that followed. Here we see the resurgence of the pre-rational dynamics of the tribe. Nick Fuentes has capitalized on the exact same dynamic: the media and masses are hungry to create and amplify evil people that functionally work to let the sociality think well of itself. Those who can break the most taboo laws of public opinion and still triumph over opposition unleashed to cancel them are subsequently enthroned as tribal kings.

Rather than represent the general will, the sovereign in a therapeutic age plays this unique therapeutic role, where both approval of and opposition to him constitute a source of self-concieved ethical goodness for all. Tyranny becomes thereby a form of psychic survival in the spiritual swamp of liquid modernity. The manufacture of theatre, victims, crisis, protest, and controversy expand the power of the sovereign over the minds of the populace and provide a raison d´etre for the same. The current American sovereign now occupies more attention in the minds of those throughout the globe than ever before. And not because he presents a real threat to their livelihoods or safety—as might have been the case when the world was threatened by the prospect of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the American sovereign in the cold war—but because they desire an imagined threat of Evil to oppose. Tyranny, or the appearance thereof, has a broad therapeutic appeal that is almost entirely detached from reality.

The manufacture of theatre on the peripheries of politics and in culture wars gives the electorate the false conviction there is something at stake in their vote. This theatre also distracts them from engaging strategically in the political realm to promote their own rational interests, while permitting the oligarchical corporate class to hold the reigns of real political, military, and economic decision without contest. There is next to no deliberation or dispute between the two parties over the core aspects of good governance—currency, law, social welfare, military. These issues are not decided democratically. Instead, elections comprise media generated theatre contesting cultural matters on the periphery.

Since this lack of real political freedom and integrity is endemic on both sides of the political aisle, most politicians divert attention away from their own incapacity, corruption, and failure by accusing their opponents of the same. Bi-partisain legislation is increasingly difficult—e.g. if the republicans weren´t actually so evil after all and worthy of cooperating with, then the democrats would have to take responsibility for their tendency to produce bad legislation, also for their willingness to cave to oligarchic interests. The inverse is equally true. Rather than holding government accountable in serving the interests of the populace, partisan politics has obviously become a pathological distraction from accountability altogether.

Democratic intellectual life has grown to become dominated by psychological projection (two sides who accuse each other of the type of behavior they themselves are demonstrating) Why does this occur? Projection is the only form of intersubjective intellectual activity possible in souls where reason obeys sense and where reason cannot transcend sense and appetite. The task of the intellectual here is to police the friend\enemy distinction. And the less the two opposing tribes distinguish themselves from one another in reality, the more puritanical and litigious the intellectual policing of this boundary has to be in order to allow the tribe to think well of itself. This is the role of intellectuals in contemporary society: to explain to a tribe that cannot substantially distinguish itself from its enemy why it is good and the enemy is evil. Our intellectuals are soothsayers of the virtue signal, and adorn psychological projections mapped onto their enemies with the appearance of academic rigor and intellectual depth.

The clearest sign of this sort of behavior is when enemies are seen as pure evil as in this case with Nick Fuentes. The temptation for the likes of Trump and Fuentes is that they don´t have to actually be good to garner the aura of kings in this environment. Only break a sacred taboo and harness the force of the subsequent negative reaction to increase their power. That Fuentes was able to ride a wave that crushed basically everyone before him is more a sign that he must be getting a few things crucially right than anything else—e.g. the return of explicitly Christian Nationalist politics. Our political class will overlook the worst of sins, but an actual threat to power will not be forgiven—i.e. Breitbart, Kirk, et al. To establish sovereignty by demonstrating ones superiority over unjust laws, rather than ones performance of just ones—i.e. by signalling one is not Evil to ones tribe rather than by being good and just to all, this is the temptation for both woke and reactionary kings alike. To the extent they fall for it and rely on the spectacle of transgression to maintain clout3, they only mirror their liberal or woke tribal enemies.

The path forward is for individual souls to seek to inhabit the pattern of the just. In Theaetetus, Socrates remarks,

“My friend, there are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it, and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness. This truth the evildoer does not see; blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding, he fails to perceive that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one and less and less like the other. For this he pays the penalty of living the life that corresponds to the pattern he is coming to resemble.”4

The Republic envisioned a society where such divine and happy and excellently (i.e. the golden) souled persons would perpetually rule as philosopher-kings. Our society appears to be, by and large, the opposite—where the decrepit, perverse souls are more likely to ascend to the reigns of power and never relenquish them. The Republic reminds us, and can also console us with the fact that there were always periods of disintergration and degeneracy. The case can be made, however, that the purely negative, free-market, democratic sort of liberty which developed over the course of the last century to commodify all facets of life—ethnicity, family, gender, religion—is unique to our time.

As we transition from democracy, the emerging forms of tyranny are at once both particular to our unique time and also entirely unoriginal and predictable. Once negative freedom emptied life of its contents in the name of free expression and self-discovery, life itself returned as a torrent to torment feeble, formless selves who were no longer free for charity and responsibility. The weight of life and liberty now leaves therapeutic selves longing for distraction and tyrannical control, longing for relief from the dignifying burden of choice.

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I go into much more detail about a sensate mentality and what it entails in the post above.

Last night in adoration, I started praying the stations of the cross and decided to offer it up for a Priest of whom I was fond: Pater Jan Pieper, who had just died a few days ago. I then found myself spontaneously adapting my normal stations meditations into a petition that Fr Pieper died a holy death. These can be found below.

I probably wouldn´t have published it, but, after the close of adoration, I returned to discover I had two new paid subscriptions to my Substack. Which is nothing short of a miracle! Ok, not really, but still an unlikely occurence. This good fortune seemed to either commend the method of prayer, and\or the need for prayer on behalf of our beloved Fr Jan Pieper (picture below). Or maybe it was a simple thanks from heaven or purgatory. But please do pray for the repose of his soul. Or pray this exact meditation—if enough people get two paid subscribers after praying then we could open up a case for canonization!

I put my normal subjects for meditation on the stations below in (parenthesis), and normally I meditate on the death of Our Lord and then petition for myself—e.g. for the grace to consent to death, for patience, for a desire for perfection, etc. Yet, this time I tried to find analogues from the stations in creatively imagining the death of Fr Pieper, and to make the similar themed petitions for him to die a holy death uniting with the death of Our Lord. Perhaps others will want to try it for their loved ones as well. Our prayers are not confined by time.

1. Our Lord is Sentenced.

(Petition to Consent to Death)

I had precious little information about Fr Pieper´s passing, the news came as a total surprise to me. So a lot was left to my imagination. He was old but of sound mind and was strong enough to celebrate mass a few weeks ago (cf, picture below). I thought he likely fell and died in his home, as he had fallen a few times this past year. For the meditation, I imagined him falling, perhaps he hit his head or an artery and I prayed that Fr Pieper— realizing he had come to his end—would consent to the death providence had given him.

Our Father…

We adore Thee, O Christ, and we praise Thee, for by thy Cross Thou hast redeemed the world.

2. Our Lord embraces the Cross.

(Petition to Embrace specific circumstance and hardships)

I imagined Fr Pieper lying on the floor or maybe he was in a hospital and asked that he would be given the grace to consent to this place to die, this room, and environment. Being likely alone, also unprovided for as the death Our Lord wished for him and the salvation of his soul.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

3. Our Lord falls the First Time

(Petition to Find Strength in the Weakness of the Cross)

I imagined a first wave of overwhelming pain as his body began to fail. I imagined his hands growing cold, him losing feeling im the extremeties of his body. Thinking there must have been a better time, a better place. I imagined Fr Pieper being tempted by wanting to escape or ask for a different death. I prayed he would be given the strength, rather than turn away from this cirumstance, to consent and turn to Our Lord. To be consoled by He who revealed his strength in weakness, who gave his life in death, and whose time of salvation was the most inopportune time of communal feasting.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

4. Our Lady greets Our Lord Carrying the Cross.

(Petition for Consolation from Our Lady´s Loving Eyes given to Imitators of Christ)

I imagined Fr Pieper, starting to panick, turning to Our Lady for assistance and beginning to praying an Ave. I asked Our Lady to console Fr Pieper in the moment of death and to guide his attention to Our Lord carrying His own Cross.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

5. St Simeon aids Our Lord in Carrying the Cross

(Petition to realize the Glory of sharing the Cross with Our Lord)

I asked his guardian angel to assist Fr Pieper at the moment of death as Simeon did Our Lord. To guide his thoughts toward Our Lord and His Mercy and uniting Himself with the sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, so that he could exit this world having shown himself to be a brother of Our Lord.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

6. St Veronica wipes the Face of Our Lord

(Petition for Courage in offering Acts of Sacrifice to Reveal the Face of Our Lord)

I asked that, like St Veronica, Fr Pieper would run to Our Lord and offer up his last moments on this earth, his sufferings and death to God as a sacrifice. I prayed, what I have always thought the mystery of this Station was, that Fr Pieper would get a foretaste of his heavenly glory and that Our Lord´s glory and Face would shine through Fr Pieper at the moment of death, beaming with the joy and hope of the Saints, united with Our Lord in the midst their final sufferings.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

7. Our Lord falls a Second Time.

(Petition for Patience)

I imagined some second onslaught of pain and agony befalling Fr Pieper again and asked that he be given patience to endure his final agony. Recalling that he never gave me the impression that He could endure physical sufferings well, I then recalled his above average intelligence and his ecclesial career of being patient with imbeciles both above and below him. I asked that he be given the grace to draw on this same patience to endure his final agony.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

8. Our Lord weeps over the Women of Jerusalem

(Petition for Selflessness—in this case in Departing from Loved Ones and also Love of Enemies)

I imagine Fr Pieper thinks of all those he loved with whom he will never be able to properly say goodbye with great sadness. He also remembers his enemies or those whom he wronged and never will be able to properly make amends. I ask that he be given the graces to die in total selflessness, thinking with gratitude of those whom he loved and praying for them, forgiving all those who wronged him, also to offer his sufferings for the conversion and edification of his enemies.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

9. Our Lord falls a Third Time.

(Petition for a Desire for Perfection)

I imagine the final agony of death assailing Fr Pieper and him again being tempted to recoil back from Eternal Glory and wish to stay in this earthly life or at least to have died sooner. I ask that he be given the grace, not to succumb to despair or sloth but instead, be given a firm desire for perfect union with the death of Our Lord and a steadfast trust in Providence that this will last as long as needed for his perfection.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

10. Stripped of Garments

(Petition for Humility and Contrition in the face of Judgment)

I then imagined Fr Pieper then being led in his thoughts astray by all of his imperfections. I will not mention them but I did a few in prayer. I imagine him fearing God´s justice as he considers his failings. He thinks about all the potency in him and his priestly ministry never realized and is confused and full of dread. I pray that he ask forgiveness with contrition and be given strength to turn towards Gods mercy in hope.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

11. Our Lord is Nailed to the Cross

(Petition for Diligence and Perseverance in Grace)

I recalled here the solemnity with which Fr Pieper celebrated mass, and asked that he be give the grace to offer his own life with the same reverence, devotion and intensity and zeal with which he offered Our Lord on the Altar. I hoped he would find peace and comfort in returning to this solid foundation of good habit and devotion within him—i.e. that he would try to say Mass one final time only to offer himself rather than Our Lord.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

12. Our Lord is Crucified.

(Petition for the Charity of God)

I imagined Father reciting one last time the Mass or at least the Roman Cannon as he passed out of this life. I petitioned that he depart this life full of the Charity of Jesus Christ.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

13. Our Lord is taken down from the Cross to rest on the Bosom of His Mother

(Benefits of True Devotion to Our Lady, in particular Her Sorrows)

I imagined Fr Pieper standing before Our Lord in Judgement and being shown the fearsome measure of Justice for his many sins. I reminded Our Lady of his virtues and also devotion to herself and asked for her to plead for mercy on his behalf.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

14. Our Lord is Buried.

(Petition for Peaceful Enterance into Eternal Rest)

It was truly hard for me to imagine that Fr Pieper went directly to heaven. He was a good priest. But he didn´t give me the impression he was a Saint and I have no desire to say why. I prayed he would consent to God´s sentence with great gratitude and joy and accept his temporal punishment as he entered into eternity.

Our Father, We adore Thee…

Fr Jan Pieper (1945-2026)— requiescat in pace—

My last memory of Fr Pieper was about a month ago when he celebrated Mass on Sunday morning. I think this picture was likely taken the same Sunday. As he proceeded out of the Church, we sang my favorite Marian Hymn—Wunderschön Prächtige (My english translation here). And Father Pieper started singing abnormally loud, with his voice blaring through the Church, almost in desperation, audibly above all other voices. He was quite musical, could play a number of instruments and could talk about pipe-organ construction in germany for the past three centuries for literally hours on end. He was charmingly precocious like this. Yet I hadn´t heard or seen him do something like this before, so I asked him about it after and he said we sounded like we were dead, singing too softly without vigor, and this disturbed him. He wished to correct it by his example. This was a good testimony to the man that he was, a testimony to his zeal for the Catholic faith and devotion to Our Lady, and also his leavening, priestly role as a light and example in a country where most faithful are singing far too softly.

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These english translations of Angelus Silesius came from a book loaned to me by Father Pieper. A book I never returned.

Arcadian Gossip

Cherubinischer Wandersmann

Loose Translations of one of my favorite German Poets, Angelus Silesius…

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a year ago · 12 likes · 7 comments · Stephen Weller

Check out other posts outlining methods of prayer:

“The most dangerous psychological mistake is the projection of the shadow on to others; this is the root of almost all conflicts.”1 -Carl Jung

“The article of justification is the master and prince, the lord, the ruler, and the judge over all kinds of doctrines; it preserves and governs all church doctrine and raises up our consciences before God. Without this article the world is utter death and darkness.”2 -Martin Luther

Proposition: Sola Fide is Self-Justification

This is the first installment of a four part argument. I clarify this in depth in part II, but it´s worth mentioning at the outset: I am strictly critiquing the self-conscious functioning of the status of sola fide justification in the mind of the believer. I believe in baptismal regeneration and assume many good works will follow from faith and baptism regardless of confessional identity. Rather than being about the effect of the sacrament on the soul, this argument is primarily about the effect of the believer´s self-understanding on the flourishing of the regenerate soul and its ability to participate in the life of grace.

I. Justification per Sola Fide is indistinguishable from Psychological Projection.

A. Sola Fide takes the Form of a Projection.

1. Form—is (1) the principle which determines something with its specific character or nature. It is thereby the principle of individuation of the thing as that specific type of thing and not another. Furthermore, epistemologically, form is (2) the principle by which something is known as being that sort of thing.

   1. Corollary Distinction: Absolute\Relative—i.e. Something exists absolutely if it exists simply of itself, like a plant or pencil, relatively when it has its existence through something else, like a leaf or an eraser.

   2. Corollary Definition: Evil is a privation of Good.

      Here is St Augustine: “When a cure is effected, the evils which were present (i.e., the sickness and the wounds) do not retreat and go elsewhere. Rather, they simply do not exist any more.”3

   3. This means that: Evil exists only Relative to Good, and Good is Absolute or self-subsistent. Pure Evil is a fiction, Evil only Exists as parasitic on some Good.

2. The Form of Projection is an instinctive, psychological act of self-defense whereby a (1) privational positive status—i.e. “not-that-evil-thing\person”—is ascribed to the self by the self on the basis of (2) a negative judgment of another. 4

   1. Carl Jung describes this as follows:

      “A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbor.”5

   2. Projection generates a privationally “not-Evil” status whose existence is relative to an Evil Image of another which exists absolutely in the mind. And it has two primary markers: if (3) the Evil Image were to disappear, so would the justification for the subject´s possession of the “good“ status.

      1. Jung explains in his work “Civilization in Transition”:

         “We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior ‘soul’ has emigrated from one person to another.”6

   3. Neither does this status positively constitute the form or soul or act of the human in any positive way outside of the act of negation of the Evil-Image itself. The second marker is that (4) the function of the status is to free the “status“ from feelings or acts that threaten its existence.

      1. Sigmund Freud explains:

         “The most striking characteristic of symptom-formation in paranoia is the process which deserves the name of projection. An internal perception is suppressed, and, instead, its content, after undergoing a certain kind of distortion, enters consciousness in the form of an external perception. In the case of a delusion of persecution, the proposition ‘I hate him’ is transformed by projection into the proposition ‘He hates (persecutes) me’… Thus the proposition ‘I do not love him — I hate him’ is transformed by projection into the proposition ‘He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him’.”7

      In sum, the key metaphysical error with projection is to instinctively treat the privation of Evil as if it had some intrinsic ordering to or participation in the Good. Projection treats evil as if it were something Absolute or self-existing, and good as if it were relative to evil, as if it were a privation of Evil.

3. The Form of Justification per Sola Fide for Luther has this exact same structure, where we discover (1) a privational “good“ status granted—i.e. justification— in the absence of (2) something he takes to be evil—i.e. “works\law\threat-of-punishment“ whereby (3) the Evil Image is the individuating formal quality of the status, which functions to ensure that (4) the status is protected and cannot be invalidated by any other action or law. Let´s go through these:

   1. Justification takes the form of a privational “good“ status…:

      1. He writes in his Galatians commentary,

         “the doctrine of the gospel (which of all others is most sweet and full of most singular consolation) speaks nothing of our works or of the works of the law, but of the inscrutable mercy and love of God towards most wretched and miserable sinners.” 8

         With Luther, justification is external, forensic, and imputed righteousness in the soul—i.e. the form of justice does not take root in the soul with Luther´s justification, nor is the soul bound by law or works in obedience in order to be justified. The justified soul is, in contrast, “free“ from these constraints and the threat of punishment. Luther explains this in his Romans commentary:

         “Righteousness is not in us formally or habitually, as the sophists dream, but is outside us in Christ and imputed to us. We are righteous not because we possess an inherent quality or ontological change that makes us righteous in ourselves, but because God imputes Christ’s righteousness to us. Thus we are sinners in fact and in ourselves, but righteous by imputation and in Christ. This is the true righteousness of faith, which is not a biological or essential transformation but a divine reckoning.”9

         Thus the formal individuating condition is the belief that law or deeds could invalidate the status, which is the minimum possible form for any status and a most succinct summary of the sort of status won by projection.

   2. …based on an apparent Evil Image.

      1. The basis of the justification status in the Evil Image is perhaps most clearly formulated in Luther´s famous screed, “The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.” He writes,

         “Hence it is a manifest and wicked error to offer or apply the mass for sins, for satisfactions, for the dead, or for any other purpose than thanksgiving and remembrance of the Lord’s passion. This error has produced those endless burdens of vows, religious works, satisfactions, pilgrimages, indulgences, and sects, by which the world has been so miserably oppressed that it can hardly breathe under the weight of them. For when once the mass is made a sacrifice and a work, then it must follow that it is offered for sins and for the dead, and thus the whole gospel is overthrown, Christ is denied, and faith is destroyed.”10

         The oppression, and Christ-denial, for Luther is to think that deeds or sacraments could have any connection to justice and punishment. This idea clearly gives shape to his justification dogma.

   3. The only formal normative claim that individuates faith as faith is the negation of the claim of law, good works, and the threat of possible punishments themselves.

      1. Luther writes, in his famous essay “The freedom of the Christian“ about the necessary separation between faith and works and law. Here, what was hithertofore understood as being complementary is separated by Luther and constitutes the basis of his theological discovery:

         “A Christian has no need of any work or law in order to be saved since through faith he is free from every law and does everything out of pure liberty and freely. It is clear, then, that a Christian has all that he needs in faith and needs no works to justify him; and if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law; and if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law.”11

4. This negation ensures that no action—besides denying the Evil Image—can cause one to lose the status.

   1. Luther writes in his Galatians commentary,

      “To mix Law and Gospel not only clouds the knowledge of grace, it cuts out Christ altogether. The words of Paul, ´and would pervert the gospel of Christ,´ also indicate how arrogant these false apostles were.”12

      According to Luther´s most extreme texts someone with faith who intentionally commits murder retains the justification status, but someone who thinks obedience is necessary to be justified would lose the status and connection to Jesus Christ at once. This was later clarified by Lutheran theologians that the act of murder wouldn´t itself cause one to lose the status by itself, but it would only be a sign that one didn´t really have faith and only thereby would one lose justification. Rather than exonerate Luther, this sort of argumentation only further exemplifies the issue at hand—i.e. actually being unjust doesn´t cause one to lose the status, only ceasing to believe or believe properly.

5. Summary: This places us in the curious metaphysical space, where the individuating aspect of the form is the absence of claim to manifest in the observable world, as law and works would require. Luther admits this formlessness himself in his Galatians commentary, writing:

   “The righteousness of faith is a hidden righteousness, a righteousness that is not seen by the eyes of the world, nor can it be proved by external works. It is a righteousness that is in the heart, before God, and is known only to God and the believer. The world sees only the outward man, the sinner, the weak, the afflicted; it cannot see the inward man renewed by faith. Therefore, the regenerate man appears no different outwardly from the unregenerate in many cases—both suffer, both sin, both die—but inwardly, by faith, the regenerate is righteous and free, while the unregenerate remains under the law and condemnation.” 13

   Thus the form of justifying faith, the principle by which the justification status can be known, is next to nothing—i.e. just the prohibition against believing in the normative claim of divine justice to punish evil action. In sum, we see the false inference here as well, for a status granting freedom from divine punishment does obviously not entail participation in justice at all. In fact, this expectation is what Luther excludes out of hand. Here, as with projection, Evil—understood as the threat of punishment for bad action—is something absolute—and the justification status ensure the good understood as the absence of evil only, not as a positive or formal participation in justice. So we turn to seek out what sort of matter is composed by the nearly formless form of Luther´s Justification status.

B. Sola Fide determines the Matter of a Projection

1. Matter—is (1) that which can receive the essence of a thing and that by which the essence is determined and thus (2) that which when absent its form cannot take shape.14 There aren´t iron baseball bats, or cold blooded cats. Thus specific matter has potency for specific types of form.

   1. Corollary Distinction: Real\Ideal—Real is something as it is. Ideal is something as it is in the mind.

      1. Evil, therefore, as a privation does not have real, positive existence at all. Evil can have positive existence as mis-recognized by the mind.

      2. Therefore we can see how, if it is impossible in reality, it is possible for the mind to mistake Evil for something self-existing and absolute, and to mistake good as the absence of Evil, just like what we see in projection and with Lutheran justification. The indicator of this is that when Evil disappears then “good” status does as well.15

   2. Corollary Definitions: Good and Evil are in Things, Truth and False are in the Mind. Truth consists in the conformity of a thing to the intellect, thus while the truth is founded upon a conformity to the thing, its completion is being known by and conforming to the intellect.16 On the contrary, the good has the notion of goodness not from the fact that it is known by the soul, but insofar as it is something outside the soul: St Thomas writes,

      “Therefore, the knowledge of the true occurs through the progression of the object to the subject, but the attainment of the good occurs through the progression of the subject to the object: Intellectual apprehension is according to a movement from things to the soul… but the operation of appetite is according to a movement from the soul to things.”17

      1. Consequence I: Only acts of the will can elevate the human organism, i.e. the reason Charity is more perfect than Faith: Charity elevates the soul to God, Faith lowers God to our paltry intellect.

      2. Consequence II: Only by thinking of and desiring the Good can the intellect and will unite and work together to elevate the human organism.

      3. Consequence III: A great temptation for the human is to think it can ascend by mind or knowledge at all—i.e. gnosticism—but most dangerously when it is deceived to think it can ascend by knowing or opposing Evil. Knowing Evil by itself introduces no possible connection with Good at all.

      4. Consequence IV: What is in principle excluded here is human perfection—i.e. a perfect good that exists, is contemplated, and is desired as something good, outside of mind or in reality, whereas “good” taken to be not-Evil takes something ideal and not real existence as absolute.

2. The Matter of Projection is the sensible experience of (1) the subconscious, unresolved negative contents of the self (fear, anxiety, anger) (2) finding an external outlet in a hook, and are then (3) are projected onto (4) an Evil image of another. 18

   1. These negative elements can be sins, fears, over-whelming desires, dread, momentary anger, whatever—projection is an infantile way to escape these by splitting and externalizing the bad elements, rather than integrating them into a realistic picture of the self. These constitute the real matter of projection.

   2. Projection usually finds some real point of contact or hook—i.e. a real flaw or hypocrisy on which to hang the negative image.

      1. Jung writes,

         “Not that these others are wholly without blame, for even the worst projection is at least hung on a hook, perhaps a very small one, but still a hook offered by the other person.”19

         The hook is what hangs the Evil Image. Perhaps someone acted greedy on one occasion, but then they are labelled by someone projecting for the rest of their lives as a greedy, narcissistic person, which they aren´t. But the place of connection is usually quite real and legitimate, while the Evil Image distorts reality altogether.

   3. Projection is a way whereby any negative feeling or action that threatens the self-identity can be dissociated from the self and attached to another. Projection externalizes these negative elements onto a Evil image of another. The accusation about being greedy—i.e. the Evil Image—in the last example has more to do with the specific fears, or anxiety of the projector than with the person on whom they are projected.

   4. The self preserves its self image by bifurcating or “splitting” the world into “not-evil” first-person self-consciousness and all that lies outside. The ideal world becomes “good” and the real world is subject to becoming “evil” when need be to preserve the ideal self-identity. A consequence is (i) a dissociative, unstable and solipsistic identity\status, and (ii) an unhealthy dependence on negative (i.e. Evil) external factors to prop up (i).

   5. A further consequence is that the self becomes a mirror of its own Evil Image through projection. By dissociating from and condemning the work of its own psyche rather than to integrate and take responsibility for these negative unconscious contents. Projection only serves to preserve and increase (1) the shadow-self, (2) the presence of negative unconscious phenomena, and (3) blindness to 1 and 2.

   6. Thus the real Matter of projection is the negative unconscious elements that cannot be integrated into the self. The Ideal Matter is the Evil Image of these contents projected onto another. Thus, the source of normativity is the presumed knowledge of Evil in the mind, instinctively playing the role of an absolute point of reference in order to generate the relative and privational “good“ status. This privational “good” status excludes perfection, i.e. a human being whose identity is rooted in objective good rather than subjectively perceived Evil.

3. Luther´s justification-status is made out of real, subconscious, unresolved negative contents…

   1. Luther suffered from scruples—i.e. a spiritual disease where one is oppressed by the reality of sin and struggles to accept or believe in forgiveness.20 His struggle with the weight of his sin and the fear or inevitability of God´s judgment led him to despair.

      1. Luther confesses in the intro to his collected works,

         “I hated that word, ‘justice of God,’ which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust. But I, blameless monk that I was, felt that before God I was sinner with an extremely troubled conscience. I couldn’t be sure that God was appeased by my satisfaction. I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners.” 21

   2. The real ground of the projection is this interior conflict—i.e. between Gospel and Law, between God´s Mercy and Justice—where grace and works, sin and forgiveness, cannot be integrated into the psyche.

      1. The previous quote continues:

         “In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, ‘Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are crushed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments? Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath?’ This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience…“22

4. …projected onto…

   1. The real hook for Luther seemed to be indulgences. And indulgences appear to mirror his theory of forensic justification.

      “Some two years ago I wrote a little book on indulgences, which I now deeply regret having published. For at the time I still clung to the Roman tyranny with great superstition and held that indulgences should not be altogether rejected, seeing they were approved by the common consent of men. Since then… I have come to see that they are nothing but a fraud of the Roman flatterers by which they rob people of their faith and fortunes.”23

   2. Other legit hooks were scandals and hypocritical devotions— all real abuses that presented as superficial ways to get into heaven without interior transformation. Yet Luther´s dogma of justification is a parody of the same. Luther says the justified believer…

      “ought to think: ‘Although I am an unworthy and condemned man, my God has given me in Christ all the riches of righteousness and salvation without any merit on my part, out of pure, free mercy, so that from now on I need nothing except faith which believes that this is true. But if I do not believe this, it is of no use to me, even though Christ were crucified a thousand times and all things that belong to Christ were given to me.’”24

      His doctrine of justification became a mirror of his own externalized psyche and took the form of a free, externally given indulgence that had little connection with piety and played the role of being an excuse for the absence of devotion.

5. …an evil image of another.

   1. Luther fixated on the evil of “works righteousness.” He regularly expresses his fury at this singular point:

      “I cannot get over the blindness of the Pope’s theologians. To imagine that the mighty forces of sin, death, and the curse can be vanquished by the righteousness of man’s paltry works, by fasting, pilgrimages, masses, vows, and such.”25

      Martin Luther, as an ex-monk-catholic-theologian, knew this quote was a gross misrepresentation of catholic teaching. Luther himself knew no good catholic could think the forces of sin and death are defeated without Jesus Christ. Yet, a trademark of projection is that it simplifies and obscures reality to meet the pathological psychological needs of the self. This distortion makes more sense as a psychological defense mechanism.

6. Summary: Thus, the negative image that constitutes the matter of the doctrine here looks like it is of pathological origin. The matter is what is taken to be Evil and the Matter does not transcend mind at all but instead is the projected Evil Image mistaken as something absolute. The sculptor is not better than his clay, and Luther´s clay was the privation of an evil projected Image about “works righteousness” out of fear of divine punishment, so he´s working with a little less than nothing. The only act of consequence or invalidation for Justification per sola fide, outside of losing faith itself, is to carry out good works out of fear of punishment. This mandatory presumption of justification is perhaps the most superficial possible form of “works righteousness” ever imagined. Yet in reality the real good work, an a work for which he was equally zealous as he was to list every sin in the confessional, is to hang the Evil image for Martin Luther, an image that justifies his life, dogma, and reform. Consider his condemnation of female religious life:

   “But how many, do you imagine, are the nuns in convents, where the daily word of God enters not, who joyously and with pleasure perform the divine service and maintain their state unforced? Verily, scarcely one in a thousand.” 26

   Martin Luther didn´t have the information to make such a claim. So few female convents in his day were even open to the public. Yet he regularly makes uncharitable overgeneralizations like this to self-justify, in order to secure the status, as is the case with projection. Thus, this very fear of punishment is the real matter and reason for Luther´s sola fide dogma itself. Only its imagined absence gives form to the dogma of Sola Fide and the status of being justified. And its the ideal ground, the Negative Image that free´s Luther from his fear of punishment, that separates both him and his dogma of justification from responsibility to law and the possibility of divine punishment. Thus, having examined the form and matter of the justification status for Luther, let´s turn to the final, and most crucial convergence: what or who is justification per sola fide for?

C. Sola Fide tends toward the End of a Projection

1. Teleos— we know some thing by feature of its form, we know its nature by virtue of its tendency towards an end. There is always a tight relationship between formality and finality, between the shape of something and that for which it is made. Thus the real End and ideal End (i.e. intention) of an action can—according to imprudence—vary widely. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, because our ideal intentions so often contradict the Ends to which our acts are really ordered.

   1. Corollary Distinction: Potency\Act—Potency is relative as ordered to Act. Act is the realization of the potential perfection of a thing.

      1. This means that: Good is a Potency for Evil, not vice versa. Anything caused by Evil is itself Evil. Good can never be discerned from or generated out of Evil as if a privation through absence itself could lead us to the knowledge or desire of its opposite.

      2. A Corollary Definition: Good is What All Things Desire, Evil what All things Avoid.27 All things tend by nature towards what is good for them, or at least toward what appears good.28 By this fact, it also holds that all things avoid evil. All things act according to a natural aptitude for what is fitting or contributes to its flourishing and a natural dissonance toward what is repugnant and destructive.29 We explain the movement of things, animals or humans with reference to good and evil. The form of a voluntary act for humans is the reason for action, and these reasons have two genera avoiding evil or pursuing good. Thus the morality—i.e. the goodness or badness of a human act—can be known by its reason or intention, which brings it in reference toward some desired end.

      3. Perfection therefore is found in Acting according to Desires for the Good, not in Avoiding Evil. Because avoiding Evil is never in itself good at all—i.e. Evil has no potency ordered toward any specific Act or Good, other than to reduce potency toward Act in general. If your only wish in life is to escape Hell, the further you get from hell the less clear it will be to you in what direction you should go. Opposing Evil is, therefore, only intrinsically good in relation to a Good preserved by the opposition or avoidance of Evil.

         1. Consequence III: To act to avoid evil without knowledge or intention to preserve the good is to be controlled by non-being.

            1. E.g., Thomas Hobbes defined “peace” as “the absence of war” in his Leviathan. In this case, war was absolute and peace was a privation of war or something relative. St Augustine, in contrast, defined peace as “the tranquility of order,” and war was the absence of this good. He thought Evil was always a privation of Good, whether real or ideal. Pursuing peace is principally about avoiding something Evil for Hobbes, i.e. War and for St Augustine its about pursuing something good, i.e. Order. And this is dangerous because: the absence of Evil is in reality not-Evil. Metaphysically, it is not necessarily Good. The threat of punishment haunts Luther´s justification status in the same way as Hobbes “war of all against all.” The existential peace Luther wins makes Jesus Christ Himself take the purely privational form of the absence of punishment rather than a positive person to whom the soul is now rightly ordered and to whom one is responsible and whom one loves.

      4. A further consequence: there are potencies that are understood as not being oriented towards a specific act. These sorts of potencies, like Evil, can exist ideally in the mind or be understood. Yet, to let these potencies justify action is to let oneself be controlled by non-being.

         1. e.g. consider the right to free speech. It is understood as a potency in the mind, but one that is not oriented toward any specific act in reality. Its only act is to oppose those who would infringe on the right. Free speech carves out neutral space in reality where any constriction of political speech would be evil. Thus what is to be avoided—laws prohibiting free speech — are imagined to be the cause of “good” ideally. These sorts of ideal potencies constitute the very foundation of modern political and economic life. And they work wonders. But they also aren´t obviously metaphysically good. They contradict a realist metaphysics of good and evil. Negative notions of freedom as the absence of constraint contrast with positive concepts of liberty as being a capacity for the Good. In this same way, rights-talk contrasts with duties, which are understood in mind as potency for a specific act, and thus duties increase this second sort of positive liberty.

         2. Luther´s justification status similarly creates a neutral space where all of ones actions, past present or future are free from the normative claim of God´s justice or punishment. The status is oriented towards the specific act of rebuking those who seek to infringe on the neutral zone of “free“ action, and otherwise to the non-specific justification as to why any specific evil deed will not be measured according to justice. Here the status as a potency is not ordered to any specific act at all.

      5. Avoiding Evil is the most common case where the ideal end for which we act often conflicts with the end of the act in reality. Here is where we are most likely to be deceived by a good intention. This is because avoiding evil tempts us to think what exists in the mind actually exists in reality, when in fact it is a privation. Yet, there is no magical bridge from the not-Evil to the Good. Few will deny that our biggest mistakes in life are made trying to avoid evil, or when we feel caught between two bad options. When this happens we cannot see how the Good itself can be operative in the dilemma at all, and allow our action to be solely coerced by the weight of evil or what we wish to avoid.

2. Projection tends towards the reinforcing an ideal positive status experienced sensibly as negative freedom from the evil image projected onto another.30 It is an extreme case of Evil producing “not-Evil” misrecognized as “Good” by the mind, and Act being ordered toward a “Potency” that establishes the scope of impunity as regards action for the self holding the status.

   1. Projection is an instinctive flight from reality—i.e. the real unconscious negative elements that cannot be integrated— and tends towards both (1) the preservation of a positive privational ideal self image, and, having destroyed all interior, principled means of preserving the self-image, (2) a dependency on negative external factors to re-confirm the ideal image.31

   2. Projection tends toward the sensible enjoyment of the self, falsely taken to be “good” because it is not the negative image. Because projection is instinctual, it is sensible knowledge—i.e. predicated on sensible difference. (Intellectual knowledge is based on similitude). The self wins freedom by a fraudulent inference, moving from sensible unknown to intellectual known—i.e. from interior knowledge of the other as Evil based on sensible appearance, to knowledge of oneself as Not-Evil taken to be “Good.”

   3. In sum, the form of a privational status won by projection tends toward increasing conflict with the Evil Image. To define oneself as not-Evil makes one´s identity contingent upon the knowledge of, and in the case of projection, the repeated experience of Evil. Projection thereby tends toward conflict, rather than peace. When one doubts the identity or feels lost, then conflict with the Evil Image provides the outlet for the unresolved anxiety regarding the privational status itself.

3. In Luther´s foundational work “The Freedom of the Christian,“ the shape of Christian liberty takes this same metaphysical character. He writes, “A Christian has no need of any work or law in order to be saved since through faith he is free from every law and does everything out of pure liberty and freely.”32

   1. Furthermore, Luther´s key insight comes as a sensible freedom from the shadow self—animated by a fear of God´s punishments—projected and negated.

      1. Luther experienced his discovery of distinctively Lutheran “faith” as a release valve for his scruples and anxiety about going to hell. The sensible enjoyment of Christian freedom is the sensible enjoyment of the self unencumbered from the claim of law or by the punishments of the lawgiver in eternity.

         “At last, by the mercy of God, as I meditated day and night on the meaning of ‘the righteousness of God,’ I grasped that the righteousness of God is that righteousness whereby, through grace and sheer mercy, he justifies us by faith. Thereby it became clear to me that the justice of God is the righteousness by which he makes us just through faith. Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates. There a totally other face of the entire Scripture showed itself to me. Thereupon I ran through the Scripture from memory. I also found in other terms an analogy, as, the work of God, that is, what God does in us, the power of God, with which he makes us wise, the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God. And I extolled my sweetest word with a love as great as the hatred with which I had before hated the word ‘righteousness of God.’“ 33

   2. Luther´s love of God is contingent upon the status of justification not being subject to God´s justice, and\or his deeds past, present, and future being free from the claim of God´s justice. His paradise is a neutral space, a place where he can act with impunity, not a place ordered by God´s own justice and charity. He writes in his Galatians commentary that his delight is in this freedom from the possibility of justice:

      “The Law terrorizes the conscience. The Law reveals the wrath and judgment of God. The Gospel does not threaten. The Gospel brings consolation and peace. The Law shows us our sin and God’s wrath; the Gospel shows us Christ and God’s grace. Therefore the Law is a ministry of death, the Gospel a ministry of life. The Law accuses, the Gospel justifies. The Law terrifies, the Gospel comforts. The heart overflows with gladness, and leaps and dances for the joy it has found in God. This joy is the fruit of faith, the delight of the conscience set free from the curse of the Law, from sin, from death, and from the fear of eternal punishment.”34

   This is evident in that his own charity does not imitate that of Our Lord, where charity freely takes justice upon itself and also the justice due to others. In contrast, with sola fide the intellect comes to rest in faith alone, rather than faith formed by charity, which would at the same moment—and not sequentially differentiated as the account of forensic justification claims—lift the soul to God. Luther´s status precludes the charity of Jesus Christ conceptually, because it is a privational status—a freedom from punishment— whereby what is taken to be Evil in the mind is negated, rather than a status participating in and ordered to the summum bonum. Like other forms of projection the form of the privational status of sola fide justification tends toward a conflict with Evil as its telos. Our Lord seemed privy to the danger here when He taught on the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye and tooth for tooth. But I tell you not to resist an evil person” (Matt 5:38-9).

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   Move to Part II of the argument below.

Part II deals with common objections in disputatio form and deepens the critique on an anthropological basis.

Final sections remain to be published.

III. Projection cannot Justify At All: A Critique of Pure Justification

The a priori conditions of the possibility of justification.

IV. Justification per Sola Fide cannot justify in any case. Much less justify before Almighty God.

The essential shape of an edifying self-conception in the life of grace.

TWO OTHER RELATED POSTS:

I heard her soft, mild and high pitched voice before I ever saw her. She´s not an exceptional singer—she seems unable to change pitch without breaking the tone slightly, which doesnt ruin her song by any stretch, but its not excellent singing— and that´s part of the beauty behind her song, that you see more of her heart through the imperfections and weaknesses of her singing. But then you get to know her and her real struggle and weaknesses and it´s even more astounding that she returns to the streets to praise God and wake up souls. She´s Assisi´s songbird, she´s a little flower of St Francis.

I was reading in the legends of St Francis upon my arrival in Assisi about his prayer for the city, as St Francis, unable to walk due to his final illness was being carted on a board out of Assisi and to the St Mary of the Angels in Portiuncula, where he wished to die, he asked to be turned once more ´round on exiting the city, to view it one last time:

“Lord, I pray You, that this city may always be a place where holy people live, who glorify Your name and spread Your light throughout the world.”

Remimiscent of Jesus´ high priestly prayer in John 17, to know who St Francis was and something about the God of Jakob is to know this prayer was answered. Thus any trip to Assisi piques my curiousity as to whether I will meet one of the fervent, light bearing souls God has brought to Assisi in answer to the prayer of its Holiest Saint. The most famous collection of legends about St Francis is called, appropriately, i fioretti, the little flowers(virtues), as it treats not merely the life of St Francis but demonstrates how quickly his flame caught on in other souls, and how holy and virtuous his confreres became within his lifetime. They were little flowers planted by St Francis, a blossoming of heavenly virtue in Assisi through the foundation of the Franciscan order and the charism of Poverty. But this visit I think I found one.

I was walking away from the Basilica of St Francis towards the center of the town and was just at the point of a bend in the road where I began to hear her meek song. I turned the corner and was charmed to find a near 60 year old lady singing in a maroon stocking cap with a ball on top and wearing a long plaid skirt. A small mat lay on the ground in front of her for people to throw spare change in her direction. She had probably about 15 euros in coins given by the slow but steady stream of Christmas pilgrims making their way to the Basilica of St Francis.

Being an occasional street singer myself, I stopped to listen as I was intrigued and pleased by her singing immediately. One could pick up from the melodies, even if the italian songs she was singing were foreign to me, that she was singing religious songs. She was uncomfortable at first with my presence there. When I suggested we sing together, she said she would only sing christian songs, making it clear she didn´t think I would know any, which given my strange appearance is certainly justified. I thus kept my distance as an observer and clapped and cheered after the first song and she blushed and told me to stop. I clapped and cheered after the second with the same result. By the third repetition of my applause and her protest, I told her if she was going to sing on the streets she couldnt expect to boss around her audience. She smiled and laughed and didn´t seem to be bothered by my applause thereafter.

We briefly spoke and I asked her if we could sing a few german songs together and she obliged but said she´d never done that with her street act. It was a day before Christmas and Simone wanted to only sing advent carols so as not to spoil advent (and christmas for that matter) with a christmas song or two. So we sang “maria durch ein dornwald ging,“ one where I can hold down a good second part, our voices blended nicely and she was smitten. “Oh I never thought I´d sing something so beautiful” she said with glee. And this began the friendship. Upon leaving she asked me to take a few euro for something to eat, as our duo act had brought in a little cash. I obliged, enough for a coffee at least.

She has the sort of cheerfulness I attribute to spiritual excellence, the sort that seems to overflow from a noble composure of ones speech and gestures, from selflessness and self-restraint. There´s another kind thats common to zealous religious sects and salesmen that betrays itself in its instrumentalization towards an end. Yet without intrigue or device, Simone´s cheerfulness was simply there, in misery, in a precarious circumstance and a very strange, and likely tragic, life.

Simone told me that first meeting she lived from singing and I was enamoured, but it was hard to fathom as she had only a little change in front of her. When she invited me over to her apartment the next week I struggled to see how her singing could cover costs of even her very humble dwelling and she told she had benefactors helping her as well.

I didn´t see her again until the feast of St John on the 27th of December when I myself was singing on the streets of Assisi she walked by. She was giddy “oh, I kept wondering if I would see you again!” And wanted to sing german christmas songs together. And we sang this time more extensively than before. She was in unusually good spirits that evening, I sang one of my favorite german christmas hymns, “Menschen die ihr wart verloren“1 with her and she drifted off to go home mid song. She pranced elegantly through the streets to my song, doing pirauets and swinging her arms elegantly curved like a ballerina, she´d pause to sing the chorus with me “Ehre sei Gott, ehre sei Gott, Ehre sei Gott in der höhe“ and then drift further down the street in her joyful christmas dance before the stopping at the next chorus to sing with me. I loved this! I think she did too.

Simone has a typical german sturdyness to her for a 60 year old woman. Her beautiful long auburn hair flows out of her stocking cap, which when removed, betrays about twice the density of gray hair at top as at bottom. I love older ladies with long hair like this as its so rare to find and the ones who keep it long are usually very dear and old fashioned like Simone, who is single-mindedly devout, her apartment has the hallmarks of the single catholic who has a religious soul but never found a convent—i.e. religious images and icons galore.

When she sings she lifts and twists and turns her arms in a dainty, feminine manner to the tune of her song, both as if to express herself more beautiful and to beckon passers by to join in. One time we were singing on the street and she told me, “now i like to improvise,” as if trying to teach me. She wanted me to sing along with her but I didnt know how to predict her next note as proceeded singing “glo-ri-a, glo-ri-a, glo-ri-a in excellsis deo!” on repeat with various lovely spontaneously created melodies, each one different, with her arms raising up with her song in a natural movement of exuberance and praise.

But she says shes physically in a lot of pain, so that a walking pilgrimage would be out of the question….had to ask! Ha. But moreso her weakness is what she calls an electromgnetic sensitivity: she literally cannot stand to be around phones. As I first approached her to sing with her, she made me immediately turn off my phone before coming in proximity to her. And when we went out for pizza once, she spontaneously exited the restaurant and refused to come back in due to a single woman using her smartphone. This wrinkle makes her life very difficult! Oh what a burden. She is unable to travel by bus, train, or plane. Even when people try to video her singing from afar she will not allow it and reminds people of her hypersensitivity. At the end of a short stint of street singing she says she is truly exhausted by being in the close proximity of so many people.

This whole issue has left her often living outside in homelessness. When she travels she can only hitchhike as its the only way of traveling that gives her freedom to tell the people surrounding her to turn off their phones. When she first moved to Assisi she was homeless here, and homeless for years. She tried to enter a few convents but her hypersensibility made them think she was mentally ill. She gives absolutely no signs of this in terms of her conversation. But in the precarious situations she often finds herself on account of her hitchhiking and homelessness, she keeps her cool and trusts in God.

Yet, unlike other bohemian women I have met, Simone doesnt strike me as rebellious at all, or counter cultural, quite the contrary, shes meticulously genteel, carries herself with a wonderful and contagious nobility. She said she would change into evening dress before going to sleep as a homeless lady, which I have never heard of before but I found endearing. Simone wields a serene tranquility and abiding joy while living what most women would define as a nightmare.

She shared her best stories of living on the margins, of being in danger and being delivered. One time a mysterious man was lurking around her where she slept at the time, under the collonade at the church of St Damiano. She prayed to Our Lady for deliverance and someone came with a car from a nearby villiage shortly thereafter. They simply wanted to sleep in their car in the peaceful presence of that holy church, and invited her to sleep in the passenger side. “Our Lady always takes care of me,” she tells me. I believe her.

She´s lived all over the tiny town of Assisi, various religious communities have given her a room for months at a time, then she´d find herself back on the streets. It doesnt seem to phase her, the songbird waited for worms from her creator, which always eventually came. When she´d tell her stories a common phrase was her recounting her conversation with God with the following “God if you really want me living like this, then I need x thing,” and x would always come.

Because of her hypersensitivity, being an anchorite or hermit somewhere far away from wifi and electricity would be ideal. But for now she´s in Assisi. And for someone so easily unsettled by the presence of phones or what have you, its not easy. Assisi is very small and bustling with tourists. She disappeard from the streets for days because she recieved a hurtful letter from a family member and needed to be alone for a few days thereafter. Despite the crowds, she loves it here. Because the various churches—San Damiano, Santa Maria degli Angeli—are irreplacable places of spiritual respite and rejuvenation for her.

The Bible speaks of the very stones crying out against our sins on the day of judgment. I believe this will occur, but I then must believe the flip side, that there are stones that are blessed by what they have witnessed, stones that cry out in praise and joy. But truly, here in Assisi, a stillness and peace pervades the city that gives a believer like me the impression the stones are still praising God for what they´ve seen. They saw the holiest group of men on planet earth since the twelve Apostles. And that´s why people come here, the reflection of these men into this unchanging place 800 years ago seemingly commenced a permanent chorus in this place. Thus for a very sensitive soul like Simone, these walls are refuge and home. She loves it here, and her mission is to join in their song. The church of San Damiano, the tiny chapel in Portiuncula are refuges for battered souls seeking refuge and peace.

I recall a conversation I had this past year with a pilgrim friend who’d lost his faith, complaining about all the hypocrisy and lack of charity he’d experienced from catholics. I told him, “but father x (a remarkable priest I wrote about elsewhere) has been taking care of you this whole time, openning his home to you and feeding you, how can you say all catholics are hypocrites? At a time when you are being housed and fed by such an exemplary person” he responded, “yeah but that´s just one.” I retorted, “one! you got one!” defiantly. “isnt that enough? its more than most people get!” and my friend fell silent.

I love the example of St Francis but haven´t met many people who really seem to live accordingly, I mean no disrespect of the franciscan religious, but, for what attracts me most to St Francis and his path—i.e. the abandonment to and romance with Providence through poverty— perhaps Simone is my one example. This Christmas at least, she was a gift given. And one is more than enough for me. What a grace to meet her!

Returning to my book of Legends,2 I was pleased to find the story of a german brother who, on the occasion of the relaxing of the rule in 1223, came to St Francis and asked if he´d rather see him and others separate from the order and keep ther rule, rather than go on with groups of friars that no longer lived according to the original charism, St Francis didn´t hesitate. “Christ not less than I give you the power to do what you just asked!”

For all her sweetness and good manners, Simone has this same blunt tenancity within her spirit. I haven´t found it elsewhere. She taking the path of poverty, the path of St Francis, and expects those who take the franciscan name to do the same. She had recently asked group of franciscan brothers if helping leapers still had something to do with the franciscan charism, and told them she didnt want to hear an answer just asked that they consider it. I love her for doing things like this. I confided to her some of the trials I was going through and, after some thought, the advice she gave me was simple, severe, and consoling, just like St Francis. Another example of this: when she arrived here years ago in Christmas-time, she told me she almost fell over in shock when she first beheld the gargantuan and extravagant Christmas tree standing next to the basilica of St Francis (pictured above). She was scandalized: how does this tree fit with the charism of poverty? Her conscience moved her to write a personal letter to the friars responsible for the tree, posing this very question. Her letter still awaits response! I so admire Simone! And could not contain my joy hearing this tale. She lives by the charism of poverty and knows its difficulty and blessing. And by living it she can defend and commend it.

The grace of poverty is that the heart shows forth with a beauty, a clarity and wholeness, in poverty and weakness that is concealed by riches and strength. And, in this spirit, I think Simone has to be one of the cherished little flowers St Francis is cultivating in virtue in his holy city. Simone must be someone God brought to this city, to fulfill his final prayer, “oh no, where are the poor souls in Assisi,” say the angels, “is there one left, singing, preaching in the streets like St Francis and his brothers?” … “how ‘bout this coy songbird from germany.” “you mean the one whose afraid of smartphones… perfect!!!” “send for her, she can hold down the fort for a decade or two.” And so she does.

Simone sings to spread the good news of the Gospel, and the courage it requires for her to do it, the costs of doing so are much greater than meets the eye. The world she lives in is a dangerous and uncertain one, a numb-skull tourist trying to video her can send her running for the hills, running for peace and quiet. Shes a delicate bird, and thrives on solitude, as did St Francis, who complained about feeling dirty being around so many people when he would preach to the masses.

Lest this become a hagiography, she did close the door to me once when I came to her home in the cold wanting a warm tea. She had nothing going on and had given me the open invitation to drop by, but then wouldnt let me in her home for fear of how her cats might react to my being there. This pained her, and she acknowledged sheˋd been on the other side of this equation, but still the fear of disturbance was too great. This saddened me as it blemished her image in my mind some, but really just gave me a more realistic picture. It drove home the psychological weakness and fears that befall her delicate psyche and keep her in severe isolation.

Thus it´s through this fragile poverty of spirit that her heart greets you through her soft, pitch perfect, fluttering voice on chance days in Assisi. And her heart seems to me to be a uniquely christian miracle: joyful, abandoned to God, full of confidence and trust. Yet also imperfect—obsessing about her cats tranquility, perhaps too much?—on one occasion. Yet, observing her just before Christmas, I could only thank God that I could have the grace of meeting Simone. “What other religion could produce a woman like this?” I asked myself.

She shows the work of the cultivating power of poverty, of the poor in spirit, in the inverted world of Christianity, where every weakness can become a strength, so long as your aim is to offer your heart and your whole heart. For those who look, and behold her, or at least to me, Simone seems to betray this part of the mystery of the Incarnation, of beauty wrought in poverty, of the Divine Nobility more clearly set on display in the lowly stall in Bethelehem, where the sideshow was the shining star, and where shepherds gave their perfect song of praise and sang with all their hearts, because they had nothing else to give.

Merry Christmas!

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The Christmas Fool

Comes once a year

On Christmas Eve

He will appear

To break a rule

That you hold dear

He feasts of yule

Not without beer!

He’ll cause a scene

At family fair

His mouth obscene

Not self-aware

He doesnt see

It isnt cool…

Read more

Our Fathers

Look at our Father Abraham, at his heavy and anxious footsteps scaling Mt Moriah, cloaked with dread—how did I get myself into this one?—why would God put me up to this?—consider his near despair, and tangible desolation, perhaps he even questioned his sanity. He was going on blind obedience and couldnt see the whole picture.

From our vantage point, we can also see something else going on behind the scenes: The angels cheering! The souls in sheol along with them! “Woot! Woot! Lets get this Salvation process started!” It has to start with a Father sacrificing his son! If only we could tell him! In hindsight, we know now what God Father and the Angels knew: this was the perfect test for Abraham. He was born for it.

The test was asking a lot, but it was also the bare minimum: How could he be Father of the chosen people by Almighty God, A God who would sacrifice Hiw Own Son for the redemption of the world, if Abraham himself wasn´t willing to do the same? Wouldn´t the Patriarch Abraham have to show some similarity to the God of whom his people were to give testimony? The test was fair, but only in hindsight. In the moment, it must have felt insane. For the test to be the test, Abraham couldn´t know the point of it. He had to obey blindly. He did obey and became Our Patriarch, blessing us with his faith and obedience.

Fathers are supposed to give us their word to point us further into the future than we can see. They are supposed to have made good on the various trials of prudence that life presents. A good father has profited from these and can help his sons with his foresight. The more tried and true this foresight proves the more trusting and devoted the children. The more trusting and devoted the children, the more the father is able to bless the children with his word and the more he is blessed by witnessing the growth and perseverance of his children by his word. There´s no clear line separating fatherhood and prophecy. The words of the Father are creative in his children. The words of a father don´t just see into the future, they create the future for the son.

The inevitable consequence of fatherlessness, whether desired or not, is conversely, a lack of identity, preparedness, and strength. The fatherless go through life consistently saying “I wish someone had told me it was like this! I wish someone had told me I had this gift! to develop it! I wish someone had warned me not to go down this path! Or had told me of the consequence of this vice!” Fathers are supposed to do such things; they are supposed not just to name, bless and curse, but also correct and shape the life of his children, so they don´t hit these points in their life, or go through their whole entire life learning the hard way, always learning after it is too late.

Blessing can Close a Window of Opportunity

Like a game of chess, sometimes life puts you in a place where you know you can´t win long before the game ends. If a husband decides to leave his wife after she is paralyzed. He has a window of opportunity to repent and prove his love, a window that lasts as long as she is in this impaired condition. For if she were miraculously healed or dies, then, even if he returns, the window for proving his love is closed. He wont be able to prove a condition-less, selfless love of his wife if she is healed. The window of opportunity went away in this case with a miraculous blessing. These sorts of windows come about more often than we think, and the fatherless don´t know about them or see them; they aren´t prepared or warned.

The most significant too late for us is death, or judgment. Our Lord gives these harsh warning in the sermon on the Mount, Matt 7:21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” The problem is one of desire: the people who miss their window of opportunity, they didn´t desire God´s Will above all else and thus didn´t do it.

We find this exact situation with poor Lazarus and the rich man in hell in the book of Luke. The rich man was begging the Father Abraham for relief, also that he could warn his brothers about the closed window.

Luke 16:19 And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.’ ²⁵ But Abraham said, ‘Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. ²⁶ And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’ ²⁷ And he said, ‘Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father’s house— ²⁸ for I have five brothers—so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.’ ²⁹ But Abraham said, ‘They have Moses and the Prophets; let them hear them.’ ³⁰ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ ³¹ He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”

After we are judged the window is closed. We cannot change our fate, nor can we warn our loved ones. Judgment is very little spoken of in the church and the pains of hell are so little spoken of as the joys of heaven. Most of us are lulled to sleep—even though it is forbidden to believe—with the thought they are assured of a positive judgment. We lack fathers. We lack true shepherds. We are not hearing Moses and the Prophets. Yet, a real father wouldn´t just go around scaring the shit out of his children. He would strengthen them with his word. Just like Our Lord. So let´s turn to Scripture to let Our Heavenly Father speak to us.

A Parable about Judgment and Providence: Joseph and His Brothers

There is one biblical story that is an obvious teaching on Final Judgment. And that is the story of Joseph and His brothers. Its also a consoling story. For those who forget or are unaware: Joseph, in this story, is a type of Christ. He is sold into slavery as Our Lord was sold into this fallen world to atone for Sin. Joseph was the favorite Son of His Father Jacob and his brothers got jealous on account of the Fathers favoritism. They sold him into slavery and broke their fathers heart by their sin and treachery. The brothers lived their entire lives with the shame of their betrayal, Benjamin notwithstanding.

Joseph was taken to Egypt, got into trouble and was put in prison. He was called up out of prison for his ability to interpret dreams accurately and Joseph was able to interpret the Pharaohs dream, when no one else could. Known for his wisdom, Joseph became the right hand man in the Kingdom, preparing for the years of feast and famine that Joseph himself foresaw.

The crucial part of the story, for our purposes, is where Joseph tests his brothers. Joseph already knew of the prophecy that his brothers would return to him someday and bow before him. He saw this in a dream as a child. He longed for their return to him and to reunite with them and his father. But there was one problem: How could he ever know if they loved Joseph? How could he ever know if they truly loved their father Jacob? If, on arrival in Egypt, Joseph disclosed himself and began showering them not just with grain but with wealth and high positions in the kingdom, his brothers would never have the chance to prove their love and repentance.

Joseph wanted to close the window, he wanted to shower them with blessing and gifts. They would of course, out of self interest, then say they loved him, after Joseph welcomed them and gave them land, wealth, and position beyond their wildest dream. They might then say they regretted what they did, or say they regretted how they broke their fathers heart with their treachery. But then Joseph would never know their heart for real. Neither would his brothers know their own hearts. So he devised the perfect plan to reveal the truth.

The Purpose of Tribulation

The brothers arrived famished and asking for grain, and Joseph, not disclosing his identity, gave it to them in abundance but only half of what they needed and told them to return with their brother Benjamin, who remained at home with their Father Jakob, in order to get the remainder of the grain. Joseph needed Benjamin, now the most beloved of all the Brothers by their Father, in order to prove them. So when the brothers came back with Benjamin to get the rest of the grain, this time Joseph sent them off with his own silver chalice in the sack of grain given to Benjamin, to make it appear as if Benjamin had stolen his chalice- Joseph sent one of his guards to recover it and arrest Benjamin who was presumed to have committed the crime. Joseph told his brothers he would only punish Benjamin and keep him as a slave. The rest could go. But the brothers knew they could not return home to their father without Benjamin; they had even promised Jacob that Benjamin would return come, hell or high water.

Joseph, in his wisdom set up this circumstance to see if his brothers had changed, if they had repented of their sin against him and moreover against their Father Jacob. Its one of the most beautiful scenes in all of scripture. Joseph has been waiting for this day his entire life, i.e. that his brothers would bow down before him. He has been planning, working tirelessly to prepare to share his entire share of the Kingdom in Egypt with them. But he couldn´t do it unless they complied with him, unless they passed the test. Joseph knew besides him, Benjamin was his fathers favorite, so he wanted to see if his brothers would act in His Fathers interest or their own interest as before. One brother stepped forward. It was Judah. Judah pleaded with Joseph, begging him to let him take Benjamins punishment for himself, and to let Benjamin return to His Father Jacob.

To me, its one of the clearest testimonies of the heart of Our Lord in scripture. Joseph, upon seeing the beauty of Judas´ selflessness, sacrifice and devotion to their Father, which was really Judah´s repentance or penance, Joseph revealed himself to his brothers and wept bitterly.

Then Joseph could not refrain himself before all them that stood by him; and he cried, Cause every man to go out from me. And there stood no man with him, while Joseph made himself known unto his brethren. And he wept aloud: and the Egyptians and the house of Pharaoh heard. And Joseph said unto his brethren, I am Joseph; doth my father yet live? And his brethren could not answer him; for they were troubled at his presence. And Joseph said unto his brethren, Come near to me, I pray you. And they came near. And he said, I am Joseph your brother, whom ye sold into Egypt. Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life. (Genesis 45:1-5)

It is this picture we should have when God´s Providence brings trials our way. Without it, we often grow frustrated, angry even, we say: why me? does God hate me? It´s helpful in such moments—when we lose sight of Our Lord— if we can only, like Judah, consent in those moments to God´s providence and duty, and abandon ourselves to his plan selflessly as a sacrifice, whatever dragons stand in our way—to see Our Lord, revealing himself, hidden in these moments, weeping tears of Joy on our account. Just like Joseph in this story. The Saints could endure great trials and tribulations because they framed things just like this. They were prepared to meet Our Lord in and through tribulation. In the lowest valley of humiliation and sorrow, they still praise God. They consent to Providence in the hope they are being prepared for Eternal Blessing.

Joseph wept out of joy in part because now he could now bless them beyond measure. He also wept also out of gratitude I think, that all of his sufferings, all of Gods promises were being made good in this moment. Joseph was able to welcome them as princes in to the kingdom he had been preparing for them. Our Lord too, takes great joy in being able to bless us, he longs for it, and suffered for it, thus its crucial not to lose sight of Him in tribulation.

What we also forget is that the test was actually the only way he could really bless his brothers. The test was for their own good. Joseph was keeping the window open for his brothers all the way to the very last second with this test. Had Joseph simply welcomed them into his kingdom without the trial, the shame that had chased his brothers, or at least Judah, their whole lives would never have been expiated. They wouldn’t be able to enjoy the blessing Joseph had prepared without a clear conscience. Without Joseph´s test, they would die without knowing they loved their Brother, or if they were true Sons of their Father, willing to sacrifice for his honor and pleasure. Once they arrived as hungry beggars at the gates of Joseph´s Kingdom in Egypt, loving Joseph became in their self-interest. The window would be closed. So too will we desire to serve God at the gates of heaven, but it will be too late. Like with Abraham, the brother’s test was hard but also really the bare minimum to let them in the kingdom.

This is the exact same circumstance each faithful Christian finds themselves: Jesus has bought our salvation with his precious blood, and we, in our sins have delivered Jesus Christ to his death. Like Joseph, our sin was the condition of His Glory, so Our Lord wants to forgive us. He has gone to prepare a glorious and wonderful place for us to dwell for eternity. Yet He wants to see one thing: Have we repented? Are we zealous for the honor of His Father? And in His Wisdom, just like Joseph, Divine Providence will present us with various trials to reveal our character. These are for our own good, they are perfectly tailored to our sin and circumstance and help purify us and clean our conscience if we consent and work with God´s plan. And this story helps us frame these trials, we fall when we lose sight of Our Lord, His Goodness, Wisdom, and Perfection, His desire to bless us and prove us on this earth for our own good.

The greater the trial, like Abraham, the greater the blessing one should anticipate and hope for. Matt 5:11 “Blessed are you when others revile you and pursecute you and utter all manner of evil against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad for great is your reward in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who came before you.“ It is not a sin to consider the reward that awaits us. Many Saints, and particularly St Francis, considered the reward of their suffering when pushed to the limit. If we could see on the other side of things we might just discover Our Lord, like Joseph, revealing himself to us weeping tears of joy when we consent to suffering.

The Blessing of the Father

The close of the story has a final and fitting twist. The Patriarch Jacob comes to Egypt. At the close of his life, Jakob blesses each of his twelve sons, the Patriarchs of the twelve tribes of Israel. His Blessing contains one of the most important prophecies about the Messiah in all of the Old Testament. Jacob gave one blessing that far exceeded the blessing given to all the other sons. He foretold that the redeemer of mankind, the Messiah, would belong to one of the twelve tribes.

Our first impulse is to think this blessing should go to Joseph. Joseph saved the family, Joseph was virtuous, Joseph was wise. We do not hear of him committing serious sin. He was even supposed to be remarkably handsome. Yet joseph did not get this singular blessing. Neither did the other beloved Son of Jacob, Benjamin, Nor the firstborn Ruben. The blessing was given—and its impossible to see this as a coincidence—to Judah. Here are the prophetic words of the Patriarch Jacob to his son just before his death:

Judah, your brothers will praise you;
your hand will be on the neck of your enemies;
your father’s sons will bow down to you.
You are a lion’s cub, Judah;
you return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?
The scepter will not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
and the obedience of the nations shall be his.
He will tether his donkey to a vine,
his colt to the choicest branch;
he will wash his garments in wine,
his robes in the blood of grapes.
His eyes will be darker than wine,
his teeth whiter than milk. (Genesis 49:8-11)

And in receiving his Fathers Blessing, Judah and the history of mankind were changed forever. The word of the father is prophecy, so too can the word of God in Holy Scripture lead us toward judgment and eternal glory. The word of God in this story gives us clarity, encouragement, and strength, even for the lowest of sinners like Judah, who betrayed his own brother, that they can receive the highest blessing and reward in eternity. It was Judah´s sacrifice that made the reunion of the family possible. It was Judah´s sacrifice that made the blessing Joseph had been preparing possible. Judah, like the elect, consented to the tribulation of Divine Providence. The greatest blessing and reward, according to this scripture, goes to those who offer themselves as a sacrifice for the redemption of sinners. The highest reward goes to those who imitate Our Lord Jesus Christ as Judah did.

Death is an Open Window

Our Lord taught in parables and so many of the Old Testament stories are parables themselves that we might not be deceived, nor led astray. Like the words of a wise father, Sacred Scripture guides us into a future we cannot see, and helps us see a bigger picture. Where others would fall into despair, confusion, or anger, Our Father God gave us this story to help us frame suffering and tribulation in hope. In situations where wicked men fear losing their honor, or health, or even life, the Saints are hungry to prove their love and see an open window of opportunity. Where others might stumble and begin to turn in on themselves in self-interest, this story teaches us to look for Joseph in disguise, i.e. to look for Our Lord waiting to reveal His Heart for us through the trial.

This story too should give us confidence as we approach death and judgment. Death is an awful trial. Its our final trial. And usually marked by intense suffering. Like Abraham, like Judah, we cannot see the whole picture, we have to consent to God´s will and timing. We have to offer ourselves to God as a sacrifice in the imitation of Christ in that final trial. This story highlights God´s immense mercy, in delivering all the brothers through the sacrifice of the one. But also a common principle of life and death: that how one lives is how one dies. Those who live well, die well. Those who live impatiently die impatiently. Those who live peacefully, die peacefully. And those who live selfishly die selfishly. It was Judah who saved Josephs life and suggested that his brothers sell him into slavery rather than murder Joseph. And it was Judah who offered his own life, and what he expected to be his death as a slave in Egypt in exchange for his brother Benjamin. Judah´s heroic sacrifice in the end was conditioned and the result of his former actions. It didn´t come out of no where. So too should we see our life, each day and action, as a preparation for death, and death itself as our last open window, i.e. as our last chance to prove definitively we are in it for God and not ourselves.

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I love nuns. A nun saved my life! I lost track of a college friend when she entered with the Ann Arbor Dominicans. Then, a few years after my conversion, which came because of an unusual grace, a fund raiser from her convent arrived in my mailbox. I sent some money back with the news I was a catholic. Sr Athanasius wrote me back to tell me she celebrated with a Te Deum. She also told me she had been praying for my conversion for seven years. Don´t give up! And she informed me that her prayer wasn´t just that I´d become catholic but that I´d become a Dominican. Hopefully she´s still praying… In any case, people rescued by firemen love firemen a little more thereafter, and I can´t fully express my gratitude for Nuns—not just for saving my life, but beyond this, they are such inspiring spiritual creatures and encouraging witnesses of eternal life and joy. I always love to see them! They also give one of the strongest arguments for the Existence of God and even the Divinity of Christ, which I´ll dedicate to Sr Athanasius, and it goes as follows:

The Nun Argument for the Existence of God

1. Women by nature do not tend to get along with other women as well as men by nature tend to get along with other men.

2. Women by nature do not tend to get along well with other women proportionate to the size of an all-female group (with males scale is no issue, neither is gender).

3. Women by nature do not tend toward anti-social behavior (in comparison to men).

4. Women by nature tend towards tyrannical, obsessive, and duplicitous behavior in proportion toward their sexual dissatisfaction and/or unfulfilled longing for children.

5. Sum of 1-4: the idea that millions of women over centuries would freely choose to act in an anti-social manner—i.e. scorn the wishes of their parents and society to produce children—and join large female-exclusive, celibate communities is contrary to reason and nature.

6. Tens of millions of women have in fact done this over the past 20 centuries, the vast majority of whom have been in the Christian religion.

7. Whatever force drawing women into these communities and peaceably sustaining these communities must be Supernatural.

8. A Supernatural Power Must Exist that supports and sustains these communites.

9. The women confirm this. All these women say the force drawing them into the communities and peaceably sustaining the community is supernatural or divine, and the vast majority of them say it is Jesus Christ, God-Incarnate.

10. Lies cannot sustain people and community, nor be a source of happiness, in the long term.

11. These women and communities are long lasting, and unusually productive of happiness both in community members and the world at large.

12. It is highly unlikely these women are lying.

13. God Must Exist.

14. The absurd testimony of the Nuns claiming Jesus Christ as their mystical spouse is itself remarkably strong evidence for the Divinity of Jesus Christ.

    1. (Sub-Argument below)

15. Jesus Christ must be God Incarnate.

    

I´ll run through these again and provide substantial backing for these claims. I certainly hope this argument avoids the appearance of chauvinism. Men and women are different and have different sorts of weaknesses and strengths. Granting this or even clarifying aspects of it should be no occasion to disrespect women or be less interested in their flourishing or thinking. Regrettably pointing out differences and weaknesses in this case is material to the strength of the argument—you could make the argument that male chastity or humility or meekness is also a divine miracle and perhaps others will make those arguments— but this one is devoted to the supernatural miracle that is female religious life!

I. Women Are Mean to Each Other

Studies Show…

• Female “relational aggression” peaks amongst all female groups. Relational aggression includes indirectly hostile actions like gossip, exclusion, slander, and calumny.

• With men there is no significant difference in how they treat each other and women. Men instead have a stronger tendency toward physical aggression with other men but have less potency for relational aggression overall. 1

• In the big five personality characteristics framework, women, in aggregate, tend to be higher in neuroticism and this leads to more frequent conflicts.

Valliant Theoretical Attempts to Account for the difference:

• That shrewd observer of biological life, Aristotle, specified a defect in the deliberative capacity as contributing to female cruelty towards her own kind: “The slave is wholly lacking the deliberative faculty, the female has it but it lacks authority, the child has it but it is incomplete. The male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject.”2 Thus, according to Aristotle, when women are left to themselves there is an absence of rational authority and one that invites outbursts of passion, discord, and conflict.

• Nietzsche, that fine-feeling admirer of female kind, remarked “Woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love. In woman’s love there is injustice and blindness toward all that she does not love. And even in woman’s conscious love there is still always surprise attack and lightning and night alongside light. Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women are still cats and birds. Or at best, cows.” This quote is a bit more cryptic, Nietzsche is contrasting masculine capacity for noble, rational friendship and a feminine tendency towards emotional, possessive love. This bovine tendency in women leads to more rivalry with their own kind, women, for instance, exhibit relational aggression in higher proportion towards attractive women who are rivals for mates.

• Montaigne, who possessed quite progressive views in his day, concurred with this observation , “I have never seen any two women who were friends without some hidden jealousy or suspicion between them. I say nothing of the violent passions which sometimes separate them; their friendships are full of spite and suspicion. The more women are together, the more they quarrel and the more they hate one another. I have seen in my time, in divers places, great companies of women, and never any that lived in perfect amity, without some secret grudge or open falling out.”3

• Baudelaire put the matter perhaps most succinctly. “Woman is the opposite of the dandy. Therefore she should inspire horror. Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty, and she wants to drink. She is in rut and she wants to be possessed. Woman is natural, that is to say abominable. Thus she is always vulgar—that is, the opposite of the dandy. She is always in a state of war with her own sex.”4 It seems the ancients thought women tended to quarrel with another due to (1) a deficit in rational nature, (2) and an abundance in passionate nature. The latter creates a potency for conflict and rivalry, and the former insufficient order or structure for avoiding the same.

  

II. Women are Nastier to Each Other in Proportion to Female-Exclusive Group Size

Studies Show…

• Female relational aggression varies positively with group size, and there is no corresponding linear progression in male behavior. Physical aggression and contest does increase corresponding to male group size but these conflicts do not affect social harmony as relational aggression does in all female groups.

  • Relational aggression rose 300% from small (3–5 girls) to large (15+) friendship groups amongst females. While male relational aggression rose only 40% in comparable male groups.5

  • In all-female dorms/playgroups, larger size translated into more coalitionary exclusion. With all-male groups, larger size translated into more physical dominance contests, not increasing relational sabotage. 6

• Women, when in executive corporate or political position, are more likely to escalate conflict and instigate war. 7

• All-female groups scale poorly due to the fact they are in aggregate high in both agreeableness and neuroticism.8 Thus, in women, there is a greater potency for conflict (high neuroticism) and a lack of potency for direct and forthcoming resolution of the conflict (high agreeableness).

Reasons for this difference from Proto-(Wave-Zero) Feminists:

• Aristotle highlights how modern science and medicine have cut us off from the penetrating insights of the ancients, “in the generative process the male contributes the principle of movement and the female the material. For the female is softer in disposition, and more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young. The female is, as it were, a deformed male; and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition. For the male is hotter in temperament, and the female colder.”9 Aristotle contends it is not merely a deficit of reason that is the cause of the cruelty we witness in women to her own kind, but defective matter as well. He claims her nature to receive, to be moved rather that move, to be colder, and to leak defective semen out of her body once a month, all these natural characteristics set women at war with herself.

• Montaigne contrasts the “perfect union” of male dyads that scales in councils or armies, with women’s friendships devolving into “cabals and conspiracies” as numbers grow. He attributes this to women’s natural “multiplicity of humors,” making harmony fragile beyond intimate pairs. “The more women are together, the more they quarrel and the more they hate one another.”10

• Baudelaire again has earned the last word as he contrasts the difference in social nature between men and women: ”The crowd is his [the man´s] element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd […] Woman, in these social whirlpools, becomes the center of rivalry, where each seeks to eclipse the other through artifice and malice, their natural instincts sharpened by the multitude into a venomous competition that devours the weak.”11

III. Women are far less likely to engage in Anti-Social Behavior

Studies show…

• females exhibit significantly lower overt antisocial behaviors (e.g., violence, delinquency) during adolescence.12 Furthermore, protective factors (e.g., family support) reduce antisocial behavior more effectively in females.13

• this too is attributed to high agreeableness in women.

Reasons given by Womyn-Allied Intellectuals:

• Aristotle, who did marry, contends that women are by nature more obedient creatures: “The courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying. For the one is superior and the other inferior by nature; the one is fit to command, the other to obey. And this holds good of mankind universally. For wherever there is a combination of ruler and ruled, there is the same difference between the ruling and the subject elements; and this is especially the case in the human soul, where the male is better fitted to rule and the female to be ruled.”14

• Montaigne seconds this point of view, saying “women are more obedient to the laws of marriage than men; they are less apt to break the bonds of society. For the most part they keep themselves within the limits of modesty and duty, whereas men are more prone to wander and to transgress. I have observed that in all estates and conditions, women are more constant in their affections and more faithful in their promises than men.”15

• Nietzsche seemed to have a deeper insight on this point: ”The perfect woman is a higher type of human than the perfect man, but also something much rarer. The natural history of animals furnishes grounds for believing that the female is more perfect than the male in many respects. Woman’s nature is more bound to the species, to preservation, to the average; man’s to the exceptional, to the rare, to the dangerous. That is why woman is more moral, more law-abiding, less inclined to evil.”16

IV. Women without Sex and\or Children are more prone to Conflict, Aggression, And Tyrannical Behavior

Studies Show…

• childless women are more relationally aggressive in aggregate than women with children. Women without children tend to be more obsessive, and possess more of a trait psychologists call Machiavellianism, which a combination of tyrannical, obsessive, manipulative and controlling behavior.17

Confirmation from leading pre-20th Century Women´s Lib Philosophers:

• Aristotle claimed women are more dependent upon sex and children due to the incompleteness of their female nature: “the female by nature is defective and misbegotten; for the active power in the seed of the male tends to produce a perfect likeness in the masculine sex, while the production of a female comes from a defect in the active power or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence, such as that of a south wind, which is moist. Hence the female is incomplete in her nature, and without the male she is barren and unfulfilled in her nature.”18

• Montaigne´s observations seconded this idea, “A woman without a husband or children is like a branch without fruit, withered and useless; she becomes bitter and tyrannical, full of complaints and discontent. I have seen many such widows and old maids who, having no outlet for their natural affections, turn their love into hate and their tenderness into cruelty, oppressing their servants and neighbors with their peevish and domineering ways.”19

• Nietzsche, though he never sired children himself, offered his own machiavellian realist take of what’s at stake between men and women: “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man? Two different things the real man wants: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.”20

• Baudelaire gets the last word: “The childless woman is a monster, an aberration of nature. She becomes cruel, vindictive, and tyrannical, for she has no object for her love and no outlet for her instincts. Woman is made to bear children and to nurse them; without this, she is incomplete, unhappy, and dangerous to society.”21

V. Convents Should Not be Possible

Given these four propositions, female celibate religious life should be impossible. In fact given the research here we would envision that such communities, if they were ever to exist, would be hellish prisons or gulags of unhappiness and conflict, and death and even genocide. To discover such a community would be like discovering water than ran up a mountain rather than down it, or a pack of vegetarian lions. Women are mean to each other, and this scales with all female group size. Thus the worst possible place for women to flourish is in a large female exclusive community. Beyond this, women are not adept at defying convention. And the convention and hopes of family are usually that they marry and bear children. Thus, the possibility of multiple women defying these expectations only to seek an all female community seems unlikely. On top of all of this, women become more miserable creatures when they forgo sex and children, which is what is required in religious life. This makes the prospect of an all female celibate community absurd and insane.

VI. Convents Exist

Yet, contrary to all expectation, such communities exist, develop organically and without coercion, and flourish. Approximately 30 million women have entered celibate all female religious life and dwelled in these communities. The vast majority of these are Christian (Catholic and Orthodox). Estimates put the number at about 15 million Christian Nuns altogether over 20 centuries.22 Coming in second are Buddhist bhikkhunis with approximately 5 million,23 and there are also Jain sadhvis with about 2 million.24 The Essene Jews were also known for their practice of male and female celibacy, but neither post-Talmudic Judaism or Protestantism seem to be able facilitate these curious communities. So the question is then how to explain the phenomenon. How can this occur? What can explain the free decision of women to enter an all female celibate community for life?

VII. The Unifying Force must Be beyond Nature

There are typical natural characteristics of the women who enter these communities. They tend to be more introverted, they tend to be more intelligent, they tend to take more enjoyment out of obeying rules, order and discipline than your average lady. Estimates are that 5-10 percent of women have this sort of Nun-potency or properties by nature. So one could argue that it goes without saying such communities exist, and women with this potency will want to make it actual, right?

Not so fast. The considerations previously outlined take the natural occurrence of these communities to something like .01%. Even if women wanted something like a convent to exist, the chances of the right women coming together, cohering as a group without dissention and figuring out how to structure communal life that they all were pleased with, financing the project long term, and then continuing to peaceably exist for centuries is highly improbable and impracticable for the reasons already given. A small minority of women might dream of this sort of thing for themselves and according to their own designs, but its hard to figure out how the dream could turn out to be anything other than a nightmare when tried out in reality.

This is seconded by the evidence. These sorts of communities only exist in very peculiar religions and\or cultures. If they were naturally possible or desirable we would expect their existence to be more consistent throughout all cultures, like prostitution, fraternities, etc. Furthermore, modern attempts to try out this idea on humanistic grounds have not been successful long term. There have been several well known left wing, hippy, and feminist attempts at this concept. All failed to survive long term. These failures too support the idea that convents are impossible on the basis of nature alone, which points to a supernatural reason for their existence.

VIII. The Sisters Say They Are There Because of God; They Say they are Spouses of Jesus Christ

If you ask the most prominent group of Nuns, the Christian ones will say they are there for God—i.e. that a Personal, Omnipotent, Triune God sustains the communal life, and knowing, serving, and loving this God is the teleos of the religious life. As we shall see we have every reason to take these sisters at their word, but two factors complicate a simple acceptance that the God of Abraham, or a theistic God is the omnipotent facilitator of nun-potency and convent-potency. These complicating factors are twofold (1) that many theistic religions do not produce Nuns—e.g. Islam, Post-Talmudic Judaism, and Protestantism, and (2) that the other Nun-producing religions are non-Theistic. So anyone looking for the existence of Nuns to support, in a simple straightforward way, a specific metaphysical doctrine of God will be sorely disappointed.

Yet, here as elsewhere, the complications of reality are far more instructive and interesting than the simple answer we perhaps wished to discover. I will frame this at the outset that it there seems to be three ways to explain the difference here. Either (1) metaphysical doctrine alone can explain, and there are essential doctrinal differences between theistic nun-producing and non-nun producing religions, and similarly a convergence of doctrine even between non-theistic and theistic nun-producing religions. Or (2) practical doctrine alone can explain, and the heart of the matter is praxis not teaching. So that Buddhists and Catholics may in practice relate to the same supernatural spirit, and Catholics and Protestants do not, and its crucially a mater of praxis not written dogma. Or (3) that its both, that the Nun-Producing metaphysic and praxis are interdependent. Here are the crucial points of convergence that determine a Nun-Producing religion from those in whom such flowers do not bloom!

1. Teleos: Cosmos and Ultimate Reality: Rational or Voluntaristic?

   1. Nun-Producing Believe in an Ultimate Transcendent Reality Beyond this World: God (Catholicism), Nirvana/Emptiness (Buddhism), Siddha state (Jainism) all exist beyond worldly life. And this world is both rationally and ontologically ordered so as to direct souls to this perfect transcendent good found outside of it.

   2. Non Nun-Producing view this Ultimate Transcendent Reality as more Voluntarist, Communal, and affirming of this world. Post-Talmudic Judaism, Islam and Protestantism do not see this world as teleologically, or rationally ordered toward the knowledge of the Ultimate Reality, but instead view God as more voluntaristic, revealing himself through law or scripture and less through creation, furthermore pleasing Him is more about obedience to the right law and belonging to his chosen people in this life, rather than attaining a perfection or a status\reality beyond this world that requires renunciation of this world.

2. Form of Life: Spiritual Hierarchy: Imitation or Gnosis?

   1. Nun-Producing Religions have a more elaborate spiritual hierarchy of beings and encourage imitating the higher beings. Saints, Angels, devas, siddhas, or Buddhas inspire imitation of higher beings in a hierarchical ontological universe. These beings are often mediators that can be profitably interacted with as means of ascent. This hierarchical transcendental, transhistorical community serves to bolster their ideas about (1) the Cosmos and Ultimate Reality.

   2. Non Nun-Producing Religions admit the existence of higher beings but do not emphasize imitation of them, interaction with them, or their role as mediators. These religions tend to knowledge of the Holy Text as a substitute imitation of higher beings. There aren’t protestant Saints, No guardian angels in Judaism, etc. And this worldly communal belonging and rule-following becomes more essential. As does book knowledge which tends to support their ideas about (1).

3. Matter of Ascent: What about “the World”? Ascesis or Community?

   1. Supported by (1) and (2) the deciding factor is practical: Nun-Producing religions believe in renunciation of “the World” for the purposes of spiritual ascent, illumination and perfection. Ascesis here is not an option, but a necessity in moving towards a more perfect state of being.

   2. Non Nun-Producing theistic religions do not see ascesis as necessary, nor departing from “the world.” Without being necessary or seen as valuable, ascesis won´t be done. These religions see observance of the law and belonging to the right covenantal people as paramount to living well in this life.

And the Nun´s make a strong argument all together that there is a (1) transcendent God, gods, or ultimate reality and that a cosmos is rationally and teleologically ordered to this reality, (2) and a state of human perfection in relation with to this reality is achieved by means of imitating beings in a transcendent hierarchical community which instructs that (3) aiming and moving towards other-worldly perfection is worth the trouble of self-denial and ascetic practice. In contrast, (1) a more voluntaristic doctrine of God, (2) a more this worldly focus both book learning and on communal belonging that (3) makes redundant ascetic practice—these are Nun-Destructive Religious Dogmas, anathema sit!

IX. Lying and Happiness

There´s a great deal of tongue and cheek in what I have posted before to bolster the first four propositions, at least as regards the quotations. But this point is dead serious: Lying invites unhappiness. Even lying, even when it is highly disadvantageous to tell the truth, brings unhappiness. And telling the truth when we have every reason not to similarly brings strength and joy to the human soul. So many studies prove this.25 Thus any longstanding community that is generative of happiness has to be based on truth telling.

X. The Nuns Are Happy (So) XI. They Aren´t Lying

Nuns tend to be happier than average women; they tend to live longer. They are less likely to have a midlife crisis. And the most wonderful difference in female women religious is hidden and not visible to empirical sociological or psychological measurement—i.e. their sweetness and demeanor and joy is unique. It must be experienced to be believed. All this makes it impossible to believe they are lying. Therefore complimenting the reasoning in I-VII that only a supernatural cause can explain all female religious community, the testimony of the sisters themselves supports this. That they believe God exists and is sustaining them doesn´t make God real but both their testimony and happiness in VIII-XI compliment the first argument nicely.

XII. God Must Exist.

Argument one is about how Nuns are possible, and that only a specific teaching and praxis makes nuns possible. And the improbability of convents, the rarity of convents, and the existence of convents only in religions with certain elements gives credence to the reality of what these ladies claim to be true about the ultimate reality they are seeking.

By shifting to talk about testimony and the possibility lying, I started an entirely new argument on the credibility of testimony, with happiness lending credibility to testimony and that, as it stands is a very weak argument. Over one billion Muslims believe they are servants of Allah and many are very happy or unusually happy, so is Allah metaphysically true? Of course not. But there is something particular about the testimony of the Christian Nuns that lends credence to their claim.

XIII. Credo quia Absurdam! The Testimony of the Nuns claiming spousal relationship with Jesus Christ is incredibly strong.

The idea that the testimony of happy people translates their belief into ontological reality is a weak to foolhardy argument. However, in the rare case of someone claiming spousal relationship, I think this testimony can become quite powerful as regards the existence of the spouse. Consider the following sub-argument:

i. Caring for One Wife is Difficult
ii. Having Many Wives is More Difficult, Undesirable Even.
iii. Having 20 Million (Spiritual) Wives is Humanly Impossible
iv. There is Good Reason to Believe Jesus Christ Spiritually Married 20 Million Women Religious
a. Approx. 20 Million Women have lived and died claiming to be a Spouse of a Man called Jesus of Nazareth. With ceremony and communal recognition of the Spiritual Marriage and all.
b. Women aren’t happy marrying men that don’t exist
c. Women are unlikely to either misrecognize whom they marry or whether he exists. Its also unlikely they are lying about who they marry.
d. Women aren’t happy pretending they are married to men with whom they are not actually married. And the women are happier on average.
f. if they weren´t actually Married to Jesus, there is little reason to pretend that they are.
g. The probability that Jesus Christ, on account of this absurd testimony, exists as Spouse of the 20 million is therefore exceedingly high.
i. Ok, lets revisit this objection: 1 Billion Muslims say they are servants of Allah, they are relatively happy, does this make Allah God as well? No, there is a difference between servitude and espousal, the demands of a spouse are far different than that of a servant on his master. A servant may never see or know his master, but a spouse knows her husband, and has the most intimate knowledge of Him. If 3 Million women said they were married to Allah in a similar spiritual fashion as Catholics Nuns, I would have to take the theological claim of Islam much more seriously. But there aren´t Muslim nuns at all, much less those who claim this absurdity.
h. If 20 million women married someone who didn´t exist, or said they married someone whom they didn’t, and\or this espousal was disappointing, some of them would complain and word would get out.
i. Many women make a sport of complaining about their absent or disappointing husbands. Its impossible 20 Million women would keep it to themselves if Jesus didn’t exist or was disappointing them.
j. They keep offering themselves to Him as Spouse, so word must not be out.
k. Jesus Christ must exist and have spiritually married the 20 Million
v. It is Impossible for a Human to Spiritually Marry and Satisfy 20 million women, this task would require omniscience and omnipotence.
vi. Only God is omniscient and omnipotent and can do the impossible.

XIV. Jesus Christ Must Exist and Be God Incarnate.

QED.

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I like to think of Our Lady as a Weaver. I know she loves beauty; I know she was highly intelligent; I know she was a diligent worker. And weaving, stitching, and knitting are crafts that can combine all of these things. So it must be so. Textile manufacture is in my mind the ultimate feminine expression of love for children. My grandma would stitch Christmas stockings for each grandchild and put just an immense amount of labor into each one of them and she loved doing it as it was the perfect way to express her immense love for us. The woven design in each one was as spectacular as her beaming face as she would present them to us as small children, with tears running down her eyes. A great aunt of mine, without grandchildren, knit all of us wool blankets with the most complex and beautiful stitches. To sleep in these was to sleep in her labor and love. Our Lady was the smartest, most creative lady to ever live, the most loving mother to ever live—just imagine the sort of garments she made for Our Lord! Imagine the sort of love and thought she poured into them! They must have been incredible!

I imagine they were all white with intricate embroidered white designs, sometimes I imagine her creativity running wild and embroidering into His garments small biblical scenes dwarfed by placid natural scenery like in old Japanese paintings—when people who caught glimpse of Our Lord wearing them, they would be appalled by the grandeur of what they saw, yet only visible to those who were close to him, so as not to embarrass him. I imagine Our Lord still getting mercilessly made fun of for his absolutely stunning Fūkei-ga-style Spring ´09 catalogue and having to decide whether to suffer it or tell his mom to calm down and make him more basic clothes. In this too, I am just going off memories of my grandma. She was always trying to clothe us like royalty, with bright colors, “snazzy,” as she would say. I hated the attention it drew, but she wanted us to know our value. She wasn´t wealthy but she bought clothes for us like she was loaded. I didn´t see the point of it then, but we were her royalty and she wanted us to know it. She knew the value in looking the part; die Kleidung macht den Mann, as the Germans say.

Suffice it to say, Our Lady has a flair for drama and symbolism. The Wedding at Cana was her idea in scripture. It was the perfect symbolic event for Our Lord to commence His public ministry, the wedding scene contained the most beautiful harmony between the beginning and end of His public ministry. So I can only see Our Lady weaving beauty, stories, symbols and drama in terms of how I read her Apparitions as well.

Our Lady of Guadalupe is perhaps the most obvious and spectacular instance in terms of apparel. Her image appeared on a nahua peasant—Juan Diego´s—garment 500 years ago along with a bouquet of roses and this image has miraculously resisted decay to this very day. Scientists cannot explain it. In this image Our Lady herself is clothed with a cloak full of stars, and the ordering of the stars were a very specific sign fulfilling the prophecies of mexican indians, so they knew exactly what these stars meant on her mantel. The starts told of the indian prophecies that were fulfilled in her womb, in the child she would bring forth to save mankind. 7 million mexican Indians converted within a decade because of this image alone. The natives knew what it meant, or their wise men did at least. They were waiting for a transition, and this miracle and garment pulled together threads that had been woven for millennia and brought whole peoples to to the faith.

Yet Our Lady of Fatima is one of the more tricky Apparitions to decipher: there is a lot of doubt surrounding the meaning and accuracy of the third secret, also the person of Sr Lucia. Yet I will skip over these controversies to something that has never been mentioned before and something that seems to me to be essential to comprehending the 1917 Apparition in Fatima, Portugal. This hermeneutic key is the biblical story of Esther and the Jewish Feast of Purim. These are, in my mind, clearly woven into the prophetic messages of Fatima.

What should we look for?

One of my guiding rules for the spiritual life is as follows: God knows how dumb we are—i.e. look for obvious answers and connections. This rule is a sort of Occam’s Razor for the spiritual life. God does not want your vocation to require a PhD to figure out; he doesn´t want the Church you are supposed to be apart of, or His true doctrine, to be left to intricate theological debates that require the knowledge of Greek and Hebrew. He lets simple souls know the truth simply. So if you are making it too difficult you can know you are getting it wrong. Our God is much more interested in seeing how souls react to the obvious and simple Truth when it is revealed than leaving it an out of reach mystery.

Pope Pius X, no slouch theologian himself, said the strongest proof for the catholic faith is miracles. Miracles are simple; miracles make divine election clear. This was also the strongest proof for the teaching of the Apostles in the first days of the Church following Pentecost. They were working unheard of miracles—who could deny their teaching when they were raising the dead, breaking out of jail, etc— this gang of fishermen and nobodies! Preaching such a sublime doctrine and with penetrating knowledge of the scriptures! It can only be the work of the living God. Ethan Muse did a masterful job of commanding the evidence of the supernatural character of the Apparition at Fatima in 1917 and the Sun Miracle in the post linked here. For those wanting to inform themselves of the basic facts of the Apparition, also its miraculous character, check out his post.

Another rule of the spiritual life I have is: Our Lord is teaching through all things, and this principle applies especially with Miracles. God doesn´t prefer to rely on miracles or special revelations. Instead, when He uses them it´s because they were absolutely necessary, and when He makes them, nothing is wasted—i.e. usually many things are being accomplished at once with a miracle. Jesus didn´t want to overly rely on his supernatural strength to convince others of His Divinity either. He could have done awesome magic tricks being God and all—He could have thrown sea turtles in the sky like boomerangs. He could have hunted wild animals with molten lava that shot out of his pointer finger—-yet He never did these sorts of things as I would be tempted. He heals on the Sabbath to teach that He is Lord of the Sabbath. His bread miracles—even the whole biblical obsession with bread miracles from manna, to the widow Elijah visited to tell her she might live off a little flour and oil for the duration of a drought, to the bread of presence—all these miracles are there to elucidate the very difficult Eucharistic Doctrine of Our Lord. He resurrects Lazarus to prove the reality of the resurrection, also that He wields is the same Spirit that will raise the dead to Eternal Life. All miracles are polyvalent and pedagogical, and no sign is wasted; no detail is insignificant.

The 1917 Apparition of Our Lady at Fatima

With the Apparition of Our Lady of Fatima it is no different. Every detail matters. Our Lady appears first to the shepherd children on May 13th, 1917. The Children described a lady, “dressed in white, more brilliant than the sun, radiating a light“ who spoke to them:

Our Lady: “Do not be afraid. I will do you no harm.”
Lucia: “Where does Your Grace come from?”
Our Lady: “I am of Heaven.”
Lucia: “What does Your Grace want of me?”
Our Lady: “I have come to ask you to come here for six months in succession, on the 13th day, at this same hour. Later on, I will tell you who I am and what I want. Afterwards, I will return here yet a 7th time.”
Lucia: “Shall I go to Heaven too?”
Our Lady: “Yes, you will.”
Lucia: “And Jacinta?”
Our Lady: “She will go also.”
Lucia: “And Francisco?”
Our Lady: “He will go there too, but he will have to say many Rosaries…”
Then Our Lady asked: “Are you willing to offer yourselves to God and bear all the sufferings He wills to send you, as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended, and of supplication for the conversion of sinners?”
The children: “Yes, we are willing.”
Our Lady: “Then you are going to have much to suffer, but the grace of God will be your comfort. Pray the Rosary every day, in order to obtain peace for the world, and the end of the war.”

Here is a quick hylomorphic break down of the Apparition at Fatima.

• The Formal Elements of the Apparition are the conversations like these that took place during the 6 Apparitions of Our Lady, also the public messages, prayers, prophecies, and secrets given by Our Lady of the Rosary. In addition any visions or visible signs like the miracle of the Sun. Here are the most essential formal aspects of the Apparition:

  • Vision of Hell: Our Lady tells the children: “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.”

  • Rosary Prayer: the rosary is the central prayer of the Apparition, the children are instructed to pray it together after Our Lady visits, and also each day. And the children are given a prayer to add to the recitation of the rosary, “O my Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell, lead all (pour) souls to heaven especially those in the most need of thy mercy.“

  • Offering Up Sacrifices: Our Lady told the Children: “Say this many times; especially whenever you make a sacrifice.” Meaning this prayer: “O Jesus, it is for love of You, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

  • Consecration of Russia and Promise: Our Lady tells the children “If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred; the Holy Father will have much to suffer; various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me, and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.”

• The Material Elements of the Apparition are:

  • the three shepherd children, Jacinta (7 years old), Francesco (9), and Lucia (10)

  • and proximately the six visits in Fatima Portugal, each on the 13th day of the month, from May to October, (the seventh promised visit has not yet occurred.)

  • visits by Our Lady of the Rosary

  • where, on Oct 13, 1917, on the final visit, there occurred a Sun Miracle before a crowd of 30,000 in Fatima Portugal.

  • within a months time, on Oct 25, 1917, the Bolsheviks would seize power in Russia in the October Revolution. Making the connection between Russia and her errors more obvious, i.e. the error is communism.

• And the Intentions or purposes are

  • the offering of the Children of their suffering and prayer as an act of reparation and as a supplication for the conversion of sinners;

  • the consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart in order to bring about world peace.

  • the highest intention is the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary over the wars, errors, and persecutions of this Age.

If the miracle of these Apparitions is undeniable, the prophetic meaning and intentions are still hotly debated. It´s not exactly clear how to weave the formal elements together with the material elements so as to fully comprehend the reason of Fatima. Why did it occur there? And exactly as it did? The ultimate purpose of Fatima is still an open question—when will we see the triumph of the Immaculate Heart?— in part because many of the problems that Fatima was meant to address remain unresolved.

The prophetic messages themselves are disputed: John Paul II said the third secret referred to the attempt on his life. Many say the 3rd secret has never been revealed. Our Lady told Sr Lucia that the 3rd Secret had to be released at or before 1960. It was released, or a text was released in the year 2000, so forty years late! This blatant disobedience and delay justifiably shrouds the veracity of the entire third secret with doubt. If they couldn’t be trusted to get it out on time, can they be trusted to preserve the message itself? Likely not. If it was simply about the assassination of John Paul II, it doesn’t explain why it needed to be released in 1960.

We do know the reaction of John XXIII when confronted about the matter by a Cardinal Oddi who said, “Most Holy Father, there is one thing for which I cannot forgive you….Your decision not to publish the Third Secret of Fatima.” Apparently disagreeing with Our Lady about the proper timing, John XXIII responded “that is not for this time.“ Most trads think the real content of the third secret was to warn faithful about the reforms in the 60s. This makes sense and does explain both why the year was 1960 was the proper time. Yet this convinces only those already predisposed to believe.

Concerning all of this, what stands out in the current time is the incompleteness of the Apparition at Fatima. The dubious text of the third Secret seems to speak of events that have not yet come to fruition. Our Lady also says she will appear a seventh time and this has never occurred. Its also disputed but many don´t think the consecration of Russia has ever been properly done in the manner proscribed. The errors of communism are still spreading throughout the world in the form of cultural Marxism rather than economic command and control economies. With this incompleteness or even apparent failure, the overall intention of Fatima remains shrouded in doubt. So we must be missing something crucial.

Our Lady of Fatima and The Story of Esther

I want to draw out one aspect of the matter of the Apparitions: the date. It must have some significance and I have never heard anyone speak about it. God knows how dumb we are, and also doesn´t waste miracles. So there must be something to the 13th day of the month, right? And the simplest and really only theological or biblical connection I see is a thrilling one: the Jewish Feast of Purim occurs on the 14th day of the month of Adar.

Here is the biblical account which occurs at the end of the Old Testament book of Esther:

(Esther 9:1-19) Now in the twelfth month, that is, the month Adar, on the thirteenth day of the same, when the king’s commandment and his decree drew near to be put in execution, in the day that the enemies of the Jews hoped to have power over them, (though it was turned to the contrary, that the Jews had rule over them that hated them;)

² The Jews gathered themselves together in their cities throughout all the provinces of the king Ahasuerus, to lay hand on such as sought their hurt: and no man could withstand them; for the fear of them fell upon all people… ⁵ Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruction, and did what they would unto those that hated them. ⁶ And in Shushan the palace the Jews slew and destroyed five hundred men…

¹⁷ On the thirteenth day of the month Adar; and on the fourteenth day of the same rested they, and made it a day of feasting and gladness. ¹⁸ But the Jews that were at Shushan assembled together on the thirteenth day thereof, and on the fourteenth thereof; and on the fifteenth day of the same they rested, and made it a day of feasting and gladness. ¹⁹ Therefore the Jews of the villages, that dwelt in the unwalled towns, made the fourteenth day of the month Adar a day of gladness and feasting, and a good day, and of sending portions one to another.

So the thirteenth day is the day of the slaughter of the enemies of Israel. We need to pay attention to this day. The thirteenth day is one of a miraculous turn of fortune. On the very day the Israelites were to be exterminated—the thirteenth—they instead vanquish their enemies. And then the fourteenth day is the feast of Purim, which celebrates God´s deliverance and the day of rest needed after the taxing day of violent reprisals. This is the best explaination for why the apparitions always occur on the 13th.

The story goes as follows: at the prompting of Haman, one of his underlings, the Persian king Ahasuerus (i.e. Xerxes) had set the 13th day of the month of Adar as the date for the literal genocide of the entire Jewish people in his realm, recall Cyrus King of Persia conquered Babylon in 538 BC. And the Jewish Queen Esther, at the prompting of her uncle Mordechai, shrewdly intervened to save the Jewish people, and not only that, she convinced the King to reverse the fates of those who set out to murder the Jews. The King gave the Israelites permission to execute justice against their enemies on the day they were supposed to be destroyed, on the thirteenth day of the month of Adar.

This liberation and vengeance is won by the petitions of the humble and exceedingly beautiful Queen Esther, who dared to appear before the King without invitation, something that could have cost her her very life, and petition on behalf of her people. Esther stands with Rebecca and Judith as one of many Marian types in the Old Testament. Esther is teaching us about who Our Lady is. Just like Joshua conquering the promised land, or David, with his 33 year reign in Jerusalem, teach us about the Person of Our Lord, Joshua and David are Old Testament types of Christ. But Esther´s Role is one of deliverance, she turns the fortune of a nation set for the guillotine. And so too, should we see the prophetic message of Fatima yet to be fulfilled, Our Lady has not yet delivered us as Esther did!

Exile and Persecution

Purim is one of the three central feasts of the Jewish calendar, and the only one that was communal, not a sacrificial feast bound up with the temple. This event occurs just after the End of the Babylonian Exile under King Xerxes (486–465 BC), when many Jews had not yet returned from the exile. So this setting is more than apropos for the current time, where there is not a single viable political entity in the world that is catholic or is capable of defending Catholics in the event of a massive persecution. Russia is arguably the only military power with any explicit mandate to defend Christianity, thus the conversion of Russia could plausibly be the instrument of the deliverance of Christians in a desperate time. One of the most surprising feats of the post-war era, which corresponded with the rapid de-Christianization or secularization of the political realms across the world and their embrace of liberal democracy, is that Christians were not persecuted more in the west; they had much to suffer under atheist communism in the east.

Yet if there ever were a true resurgence of Christianity, and a Christianity with political ambitions, I suspect many Hamans would come out of the woodwork and try to brutally snuff it out. I´ve always feared the tolerations of Christians in the increasingly anti-Christian west was only permitted because—the church was saving so few souls—persecution could only improve its awful rate of efficiency and thus demons had no incentive to incite violence. But if the Church storms back, as it is prophesied to do, then Christians will be in a very vulnerable position, like the Christians in Nigeria right now. They are being slaughtered, and they are also saving souls in Nigeria. Nigerians have the faith!

Penance: Esther and the Shepherd Children

The words of Mordechai to his niece Esther, encouraging her to take action to save her people, are some of the most powerful in all of Sacred Scripture:

¹³ Then Mordecai commanded to Esther, saying: “Think not that thou mayst save thy life only, because thou art in the king´s house, more than all the Jews:

¹⁴ For if thou wilt now hold thy peace, the Jews shall be delivered by some other occasion: and thou, and thy father’s house shall perish. And who knoweth whether thou art not therefore come to the kingdom, that thou mightest be ready in such a time as this?”

¹⁵ And again Esther sent to Mordechai in these words:

^{16 “}Go, and gather together all the Jews whom thou shalt find in Susa, and pray ye for me. Neither eat nor drink for three days and three nights: and I with my handmaids will fast in like manner, and then I will go in to the king, against the law, not being called, and expose myself to death and to danger.”

Esther had nothing to fear from the persecution of the Jews because she was in the Kings Palace and beloved of the King. So too do many traditional Catholics think they can hold their peace and keep their quiet in a time like this. They wear their scapular and have confidence in their fate, as they should! But what, therefore of thy Father´s house, of thy loved ones, were we not all born to be ready for a time such as this?

I am always amazed how catholic intellectual leaders appear content with a world without a Catholic state and content with a Catholic Church where so few bishops who seem to have the faith. Do they not know we need shepherds to find the narrow way? Do they not know shepherds can only prosper when the church is free? We are in the most dire situation, all of us, and concerning the matter of our own salvation. Much like Esther, we need to resolve to do all we can. We also need to fast and pray and solicit the aid of our Christian brothers and sisters. In this we can find no better exemplar than the vigilance and heroism of these three Portuguese shepherd children in Fatima.

Fatima is a hard Apparition because of the severity. Our Lady showed little children a vision of hell and the souls being tortured there! The children reacted accordingly, doing extreme fasting and eating only distasteful foods like acorns, refusing water even when thirsty, wearing rough abrasive cords around their bodies that caused them pain. Our Lady did tell them to take these off at bedtime so they could sleep but didn´t reprimand them for the cords themselves. They were to be worn during the day. All of this strikes contemporary sensibilities as wildly inappropriate for young children but this is what happened at Fatima. This was the will of Our Lady. After the Miracle of the Sun Sr Lucia screamed at the crowd, “Do Penance, Do Penance, Our Lady wants us to do Penance.” The Apparition at Lourdes is consoling, but this apparition is deadly serious, disturbing even.

The fasting prepared the children for the severe persecutions they would face. Again, here, the story couldn´t be more extreme: Lucia, Francesco, and Jacinta were taken into prison, threatened with death by being thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil, and then they were taken away each one at a time under the impression that they were going and their siblings had already gone to a painful death—all to see if they would recant their story under such immense pressure. They would not lie about what they had seen and who they had seen. Much like Esther, they were willing to lay down their lives for their people and that God´s Will be done.

The Miracle of the Sun and the Three Days of Darkness

If we see the connection between Purim and Fatima, the Miracle of the Sun itself takes on a new possible significance. The genesis of the Sun Miracle was the children´s complaint that no one will believe their prophetic message, that they were not being taken seriously and no one would believe the secrets they had been given. Our Lady said she would take care of that with a miracle on the 13th of October. Yet again, we should ask, why this miracle? What was the miracle of the Sun for? What work is it doing in terms of shaping the message of Fatima itself?

Here is the account of the miracle by Dr Jose Maria de Almeida Garrett, who was one of over 30,000, believers and skeptics alike, who witnessed the miracle.

“We saw the sun turn round on itself in an immense circle of fire, as if it were about to fall upon the earth... Suddenly the light went out and the sun plunged forward, as if to fall upon the people... The sun stopped its movement and remained still for a time, and then it began to turn on itself again, as before, with the same extraordinary colors. This happened three times... The ground, which had been soaked by the rain, was perfectly dry.”1

Purim gives at least one provisional answer as to what the Sun Miracle was for. The catholic prophecy of the three days of darkness is the tale of a miraculous turn of events. The church and faithful are set to be violently extinguished, and with the three days of darkness there is a great reversal of fortune. Instead, all of their enemies are destroyed. Rather than the blessing and presence of the Sun descending to earth, here the Sun will withdrawal. The Sun will vanish for three days and demons will roam the earth and be made to put to death all the enemies of the church. This prophecy of the three days of darkness is affirmed by other Saints but it lacks the confirmation of other prophecies. St Padre Pio was supposed to have believed it. The most extensive writing about this is from a holy soul is the Italian mystic Bl. Anna Maria Taigi (1768-1837), she writes:

There shall come over the whole earth an intense darkness lasting three days and three nights. Nothing can be seen, and the air will be laden with pestilence which will claim mainly, but not only, the enemies of religion. It will be impossible to use any man-made lighting during this darkness, except blessed candles. He, who out of curiosity, opens his window to look out, or leaves his home, will fall dead on the spot. During these three days, people should remain in their homes, pray the rosary, and beg God for mercy. All the enemies of the Church, whether known or unknown, will perish over the whole earth during that universal darkness, with the exception of a few whom God will soon convert. The air shall be infected by demons who will appear under all sorts of hideous forms.

This would explain the Miracle of the Sun, that it is a foreshadowing of the Three Days of Darkness. It is necessary because, much like the Jewish passover, Christians will need to be prepared for this trial, and know what to do. I personally don´t like to speculate too much about these things but, once you see the connection between Fatima and Purim, the connection here is also unavoidable so I mention it. Yet, there are many other end times prophecies that are more certain and equally involve deliverance. For instance, the coming of the Two Witnesses prophesied about in Revelation 14. The Prophecy of a Great Monarch and a Great Pope who will single-handedly bring the church back to and beyond its former glory and dominance, these prophecies have much stronger support amongst the saints and biblical text. And finally the prophecy about the Reign of Mary, that before the coming of Our Lord there will be a great Marian Age, with peerless Saints who set about rebuilding the church which wars reduced to rubble by the great apostasy. All of these are well covered in Yves Dupont´s excellent book “Catholic Prophecy: The Coming Chastisement.”

The 5th Age of the Church

All of these prophecies—the great Monarch, Pope, etc—take their narrative from the theory of the Seven Ages of the Church. These are most excellently laid out by the Venerable Bartholomäus Holzhauser but other prophets and saints also use the seven letters to the seven churches at the beginning of St Johns Apocalypse as signifying seven ages of the church. These are:

1. The Seed of the Church: from Christ and the Apostles to Pope Linus and Emperor Nero

2. The Era of Persecution: the days of persecution to the triumph of Constantine.

3. The Era of Illumination: from Pope Sylvester to Leo III;

4. The Period of Peace: from Leo III to Leo X;

5. The Era of Tribulation: from Leo X to a great monarch and a Holy Pope

6. The Period of Consolation: from that Holy Pope to the birth of Antichrist;

7. The Time of Antichrist: from Antichrist to the end of the world.

This also dovetails well with the idea of the 7 apparitions and the framing of the entire story. Fatima is about deliverance from the 5th age of the church, one of increasing heresy and tribulation. The Sun Miracle occurs on the sixth visit, which fits perfectly with this picture and timeline. The deliverance will bring us into the 6th age of the Church, an age of consolation and peace before the coming of the Anti-Christ.

“It is Time they Came Out and Filled the World with Light”

The words of the wise uncle Mordechai apply to all faithful Catholics today, “Think not that thou mayst save thy life only, because thou art in the king´s house, more than all the Jews: For if thou wilt now hold thy peace, the Jews shall be delivered by some other occasion: and thou, and thy father’s house shall perish.“ God will protect and save his people. The question is whether we are going to be a part of it or not.

The story is still incomplete, but today the Apparition of Fatima looks like a frightful story of God´s will not being fulfilled. So much of Our Lady´s command was not fulfilled, and the negative consequences she warned about have come to be. These failures should strike fear in us. We too can fail. This Apparition wishes we would take seriously the possibility of hell for ourselves and our loved ones. Sr Lucia wrote at the age of 20, “The souls who fall into hell are as many as the snowflakes that fall on a cold winter day.“ God too, wills our salvation, and wills the salvation of all humans, but we need to obey and cooperate with His Will. Deliverance out of this 5th age of the Church an age of heresy and tribulation will come through Our Lady. It will come through her because God wills it so. We read in the book of Revelation, Chapter 12, of a final battle between Our Lady and the Great Beast.

And a great sign appeared in heaven: A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars: And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered. And there was seen another sign in heaven: and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads, and ten horns: and on his heads seven diadems: And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered; that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son. And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with an iron rod: and her son was taken up to God, and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she had a place prepared by God, that there they should feed her a thousand two hundred sixty days. And there was a great battle in heaven, Michael and his angels fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought and his angels: And they prevailed not, neither was their place found any more in heaven.

The point of prophecy is to give us hope in difficult situations and direction in situations that try our prudence. Prophecy helps us see ourselves as apart of a story, even in the lowest moments, and comforts us with the knowledge of both God´s Will, Sovereignty, and the final triumph of Good and Justice. Presumption and Despair sin against hope, and hope is the virtue that most comes under threat in times of confusion or tribulation. Presumption is to hope without (good) action, and to despair is to act without hope. Hopeless situations tempt us in both directions.

The Apparition at Fatima gives shape to our hope in this age of the church. Our hope should express itself through devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, the Rosary Prayer, devotion to the Immaculate Heart and the First Saturdays Devotion, doing penance for our sin, offering sacrifices for the conversion of sinners. All of these signs, Revelation Chapter 12, the Miracle of the Sun on the 6th Apparition, the Story of Esther, even the Image of Our Lady of Guadalupe crushing not on a serpent but a crescent moon— they are all woven together to clothe us in hope in this difficult time. We are given the most beautiful story to wear and is not the greatest romance, not at the point of triumph, but at the point of decision. The highest drama is Esther´s decision to act, and to mobilize the Jews to her cause in prayer and fasting. Prophecy can help us consent to and even embrace with gladness our current moment. Fatima doesn´t just give us a hopeful story, one that says our fortunes will be reversed, but it gives a spiritual program to hope in, something to do to bring about this reversal and deliverance.

My favorite type of Mary in the old testament is not Esther, it is Rebecca. Perhaps because it reminds me of my grandmothers impulse to bless through clothing. Rebecca knows Jakob is supposed to receive his father Isaac’s blessing, and that he has no right to it. The birthright belongs to Esau, the eldest. Esau is also to worldly eyes the superior man. He is the strong hunter. Yet the mother finds a way for her beloved son Jacob. She has a lamb slaughtered, and she clothes Jacob in the skins of a slaughtered lamb. The rest she cooks to please Isaac, who is nearly blind. Jakob receives the paternal blessing because he was clothed by His Mother in the skin of the Lamb who was slain. His father Isaac touches him and thinks his rough skin is Esau. The Christological significance could not be more clear. Our Lady seeks through her intercession to clothe us in the virtues and in the redeeming blood of Her Son. She clothes us with the skins of the Lamb so that we begin to resemble Him. In these clothes we may be found worthy of the Blessing of the Father, just like Jacob. There are no more dignified clothes than these. She wants to clothe us like royalty. Our Lady does so when we turn to her and her prayer and honor her as Our Mother. Yet Jacob was not so clothed and blessed to remain at home forever. Our Patriarch Jacob was clothed and blessed for a task, one that would take him and his twelve sons all the way to Egypt.

The last words of St Jacinta to her sister before she parted never to see her again—Jacinta would soon die and she knew it—were: “when the time comes, speak!” Sr Lucia would never have the chance, she likely died around 1957 and didn´t live to see the tumultuous era that would follow.⁴ But its the exact same desperate message we hear from Our Lady to the two shepherd children in La Salette decades earlier and one we need to hear today (I highly recommend reading this aloud and even daily recitation, I love this message!):

I issue an urgent appeal to the earth. I call on the true disciples of the living God who reigns in Heaven; I call on the true followers of Christ made man, the only true Savior of men; I call on my children, the true faithful, those who have given themselves to me so that I may lead them to my divine Son, those whom I carry in my arms, so to speak, those who have lived on my spirit.

Finally, I call on the Apostles of the Last Days, the faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who have lived in scorn for the world and for themselves, in poverty and in humility, in scorn and in silence, in prayer and in mortification, in chastity and in union with God, in suffering and unknown to the world.

It is time they came out and filled the world with light. Go and reveal yourselves to be my darling children. I am at your side and within you, provided that your faith is the light which shines upon you in these unhappy days. May your zeal make you famished for the glory and the honor of Jesus Christ. Fight, children of light, Combat, you, small band who can see. For now is the time of all times, the end of all ends.

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St Padre Pio is the most extraordinary saint of the 20th century—I think without question—and when asked about what he wanted people to take from his life, he responded, “My Child, the Rosary.“ The Rosary!?!?! He was bearing the wounds of Christ at the time! How could he say this? But it was his side hustle; he was basically always praying the rosary behind the scenes. People would ask him mid-day how many rosaries he had prayed and He´d rattle off some number like 14 in response! He wasn´t joking around because this prayer was helping him endure a literal crucifixion in his own flesh. He could bi-locate and also basically do two things with his mind at once, which gave him an unusual advantage, but still, this prayer was his bedrock. What´s the big deal about the rosary? What does it do? Padre Pió´s near unceasing rosary prayer along with his witness and stigmata suggest: this prayer helps make us like Jesus Christ.

The origin of the rosary—and the dominicans when I discerned with them openly mocked me for believing this legend—is with St Dominic. Unamuno said believing too much was only ever a protestant problem. And shouldń´t this still be the case?! How could Dominicans not believe? I told them St Louis de Montfort believed and that was good enough for me. The legend goes as follows: St Dominic was preaching in the streets to no success. No souls were converting. And he retired into the forest inconsolable; he wept over the lost souls in this city for three days. Then Our Lady appeared to him, and gave him the rosary. She introduced the 15 mysteries and told him to preach these mysteries and then souls would convert.

Preaching on the 15 Rosary mysteries1 then served then as a preparation for evangelization. When St Dominic obeyed, he began to win souls. The 15 mysteries or the 150 fifty Aves of the rosary were a clear gesture to the psalms, where monks might pray all the psalms in a day—ok for non-hermits more likely in a week—so too could laity now pray 150 aves each day in imitation of monastic life. In previous times, both with the Rosary and with the Little Office of the BVM, the focus was to get even lay life to take its point of reference in monastic life. The best book I have read on this prayer is St Louis de Montfort´s “The Secret of the Rosary.“ In this book, de Montfort attributes the name of the prayer to his conviction that each “Ave” is a spiritual offering, akin to presenting a rose to the Blessed Virgin.

Germany has the most marian anthems of any country I have been to. I love them so! Sieg…Ave! This song about the rosary, das Rosenkranz, is called “die wertvollsten Perlen” i.e. “The Most Valuable Beads!”

My story is a little different, upon coming to the faith my life was a total mess and I needed help and prayed the rosary like I needed it and it checked out. I was going through a lot of suffering and noticed I could only really emote, or only weep about what was going on when I was praying the rosary before a statue of Our Lady. Before this I had gone years without shedding tears, or almost never, and was pleasantly surprised find myself crying like a baby again before my spiritual Mother. Who would have thought this possible? It was cathartic. But you start picking up on small differences like this: a different texture of life with Our Lady and in her prayer. After some of the hardship and drama subsided, I noticed when applying myself to this prayer as a mental prayer I would be given holy thoughts, graces, insights, affections I hadn’t dreamed of possessing before. But they came through this prayer. So I kept at it.

The Rosary is a Mental Prayer

One of my favorite definitions of prayer is from St Peter of Alcantara, he says “prayer is a bath, an open place, a bed of pleasure, wherein the soul recreateth and refresheth herself” (Golden Treatise of Mental Prayer). And that’s also been, through practice and experience, my impression of the rosary: I am being re-ordered—cleaned!— through the intercession of Our Lady through applying myself to the Life of Christ in the 15 mysteries of this prayer. I can think of two primary reasons why its so potent, or why seeking the intercession of Our Lady through the rosary is so potent: (1) a metaphysical reason and (2) an epistemological reason.

First, when I think of Our Lady, I think she is the spiritual matter we need to be in-formed by the Holy Ghost. We need to be Born Again, born of the Spirit. So do we not also need a womb? asked Nicodemus, perplexed. It´s always been curious to me that Our Lord didn’t answer in the negative to his question, He instead scolds Nicodemus for not grasping the idea of rebirth. St Louis de Montfort attributed to St Augustine the idea that the elect dwell in the womb of Mary, but I have never been able to locate the exact citation.

Our Lady gives the spiritual Matter to Our Lord´s Form, she gives the spiritual Potency to His Act. Her perfect sinless flesh was literally the matter and potency of the Incarnation. We doń´t get Mary´s literal flesh as Jesus did but instead Her Prayer, Incomparable Merit, and Maternal Presence and Care. She, as Spouse of the Holy Ghost, is most docile to the promptings of The Spirit and she communicates this characteristic to those close to her. The matter of our identity is invariably social, as I have argued elsewhere regarding Our Ladys essential role in Recognizing Our Lord. Our capabilities come through community and the recognition and encouragement of others. So its no surprise drawing nearer to the Mother of God has a potent effect. She is “blessed amongst women,” says St Elizabeth, she is “full of Grace,” says the Angel Gabriel. And it´s one of the joys of praying the rosary to know one is fulfilling the prophecy of Elizabeth in the Magnificat that “all generations shall call thee Blessed“ when we say with each bead: “benedicta tu in mulieribus!”

I´ve always thought of this matter as simply Mary´s most pure intention for God´s Glory alone and her desire and prayer for the same, come what may. In Her abandonment and fiat, through Her prayers to Her Son, we are turned towards our final end. By Her intercession, we are more susceptible to being quickened by the Holy Ghost and quickened in the knowledge and charity of Jesus Christ.

Second, she is an epistemologically necessary interpreter of Him. We know by likeness and she is most like Him. Therefore she clarifies Him. An example of this principle:

If aliens came down to earth and first saw a crocodile and no other animal and then wanted to know what aspects of the crocodile were specific to the species, would they wish to examine a turtle or a bear to figure out the species specific characteristics of a crocodile? Obviously, a turtle or any other reptile would help them figure out the crocodile specific attributes, because of the greater similarity. With the bear one might think being cold blooded was unique to the species, not the genus reptile.

Yet its the exact same problematic with the Incarnation; how can we isolate God-specific characteristics in Our Lord? If perfection and divinity are the two variables for humans, and we only have imperfect or sinful humans, and then we by faith affirm a Divine Incarnation exists who is necessarily a Perfect Human, it´s going to be unclear what to attribute to His Human Perfection or to His Divinity. The only way to clarify is if there is a non-Divine perfect human, through which we can know His Divinity specifically. And this is Our Lady. She is born without Original Sin. She is the absolutely essential person to help see Him clearly. Without a non-Divine perfect person to compare to God-Incarnate, we would mistakenly attribute things that belong to perfect humanity to His Divinity, and things that belong to His Divinity as being human perfection.

This too contributes to the efficacy of the Rosary, which involves examining or meditating on the difference between Our Lady and Lord, and clarifying them both as to their role—He is Crucified as a Divine/Human Atonement for Sin and She is pierced by it; Or She loses Him and finds Him in the Temple teaching, each mystery outlines the spiritual movements we have to make— and we find our role principally in Our Lady looking at Our Lord and beholding Him. This is the means and end of the Rosary, to look at Our Lord and to be transformed by learning to look at Him aright. And genius of the prayer is that Our Lady will give us her eyes for her Son if we petition for it. And if we try to look at Him through the mysteries of this prayer, and specifically from her vantage point as best we can, we are sometimes given the right affections, thoughts of admiration and praise through Our Lady. I was raised Christian and had studied scripture, but I had never really tried to look at Jesus this way before, as He is in various scenes in scripture but recreated in the imagination and surveyed and turned over by reason. And the magic of the rosary is the fruitfulness of this mental activity applied to these mysteries and the life of Our Lady and Lord.

The rosary prayer is a meditation; it is mental prayer. But unlike other religions where one might seek to more deeply wed the spirit with the body in meditation (hindu meditation seems to have this tendency), or even silence all emotion and thought (buddhism), here, with attention turned to the Mysteries of the Life of Our Lord, the spirit begins to detach from the body, and, rather than be put to sleep, thoughts and effections and desires run wild. These are unique hallmarks of christian mental prayer.

Beyond this, the thought of this prayer being a gift from Mother to Son is a most consoling one to me—i.e. that Our Lady, with all her zeal for her Son, with all her longing to turn souls towards Him, that she came up with this brilliant invention of the rosary to get people looking at Him more often and looking at Him in the right way. I think of the mysteries as the Y axis and the words of the prayers as the X axis and one is free to move around where one pleases in this space, sometimes attending more to the mysteries, sometimes more to the repeated words of the prayers, sometimes both, oftentimes when Í’m tired im not attending much at all. All is efficacious but one certainly is rewarded richly for every ounce of effort put in.

The Dividing Line: Beads and Philosophy

The Rosary thereby preserves one aspect of the ancient civilization. No one grasped this more succinctly than Chesterton in the following quote:

“Those countries in Europe which are still influenced by priests, are exactly the countries where there is still singing and dancing and colored dresses and art in the open‑air. Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism.” ( Ch 9. Authority and the Adventurer)

This quote also hints at other revelation with the rosary: i.e. this is the greatest philosophical technology ever invented. The rosary prayer is about contemplating the Good. This startled me when I saw this angle. It humbled me. I had loved philosophy for years. I read, I wrote, I argued. I argued alot! But I didn´t contemplate the highest things; I didn’t implore mysteries with my understanding like this. I doubted, deconstructed, over analyzed with my mind. And when I started praying the rosary it donned on me, “hey, wait a second, this is what Socrates was up to. This is the most fundamental, most essential activity of philosophy! How have I avoided this for so long!” And Our Lady, she´s the inventor! She brought the spirit of philosophy to millions, billions of souls through these beads! Rich and poor alike, in the city and country the project of Socrates and Plato has never been more purely distilled than here with these beads. Ah! How wonderful! And the hallmark of the ancient philosophy is that it begins in wonder, and wonder about the true, the good, the beautiful.

As regards philosophical method the paradigmatic modern philosophers begin with skepticism and doubt, Descartes doubts whether we can know the difference between appearance and reality, Kant questions whether or how we know at all. They begin with a negative movement, a receding movement, one that cannot be joined with action and life. Ancient philosophy—while it also is about discarding irrationality and false appearances— begins with a positive movement: the philosopher in Plato’s cave distinguishes himself from slaves by his knowledge of causes and the cause of the sunlight/good. It’s just like this method of prayer. Ave Maria! gratia plena! dominus tecum! It all starts with Wonder and Praise! “et beneditus fructus ventris tui, Iesus!”

The Rosary doesnt merely preserve this impulse and philosphical spirit, it perfects it. The Greeks sought with all the their might and genius and ingenuity to cross the great divide—to find some mediator to unify the transcendent unchanging immaterial world of forms and the immanent material perishable world of movement—and couldn’t figure it out. Not Elements, not Math, Not Grammar or the Structure of Language, Not Ascesis, Hedonism, Doubt or Discipline could bring these worlds together. Only A Person. The discovery and brilliant argument of St Athanasius was that only a Divine Person could only satisfy the longings of the Greeks and Romans, Only Jesus Christ. St Athanasius demoted scientia and promoted sapientia according to His Discovery. He said Wisdom was the bridge, not science, and Eternal Wisdom was both as simple and as difficult as getting to know a Divine Person. And thats exactly the focus here with the rosary, Plato had His Academy, Our Lady has her Bead School. And the latter Lyceum is exceedingly superior means of its formal object of study: Jesus Christ, Eternal Incarnate Wisdom.

Pick One Devotion…

I recall going to Clear Creek Monastery looking for advice about my vocation. I divulged what had been growing in my heart to a monk, all my inclinations, passions, etc. And he said: “make it all about the rosary, all the philosophy, also seeking a life of prayer, try to bring it all together in the rosary.” I liked this idea. I was a Percian before I ever tried to become a Thomist, and C.S. Peirce has this triadic structure to his whole philosophy, all the layers of reality are appearing in threes—e.g. ontological categories, normative sciences, sorts of signs; its always three for Peirce. This corresponds with the three sets of five mysteries, the joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries. The Summa Theologica also has a triadic structure and seems to fit so well with the structure of the rosary. So I’ve tried to use the rosary as a map for philosophical concepts and anthropology. In any case, this task of synthesis by means of the rosary became one of my objectives, which is still in progress, but has taken shape in the diagram here and my—momentarily abandoned, help!—academic project here. In any case, I was told soon after I became catholic to pick one devotion and go deep into it and settled on the Rosary.

So when I started my current pilgrim mission, I longed to give them Rosaries to people I would meet as I travelled. At first I started to scrounge them at various chapels. I´d find a statue of Our Lady with 30 rosaries draped around her arms and I´d take a few so I could give them to people. It looked gaudy anyway I told myself. Yet I had scruples about this practice, even though I think all parties would rather the rosaries be distributed and used rather than rot on a statue. When I arrived in Rome a few years ago I ran into an Indian priest studying in Rome who asked me if there was any way he could support me and I mentioned my wish to manufacture rosaries. He bought me a years worth of supplies! And he replenishes me each year!

This was a boon to my work evangelizing because I meet people, particularly when I’m on pilgrimage, and am able to connect with them, talk about faith and then commend the rosary prayer and give a hand made rosary. Sending people away with a rosary in their hands gives me hope that the seed planted will be watered and grow. It had also bothered me for years that cheap plastic rosaries are often distributed on the camino by religious nuns and priests. This gives—according to McLuhan’s medium is the message principle—the impression the rosary is of little value. So I wanted to give people high quality chord rosaries to give the right message: this prayer is precious! Sometimes I am even able to pray it with people before parting and if not I always have hand-out guides in all languages with me. Since my interactions with other pilgrims are often brief its consoling to think if they only start praying the rosary they will start being pulled toward Our Lord and acknowledgement of who He is. My experience with the rosary is that one cannot pray it consistently without embracing the catholic faith.

All devotees of the rosary learn to place great confidence in prayer in general but this specific prayer especially.2 The quickest way to learn of its efficacy is, of course, “Ask and you shall recieve, seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be opened. (Matt 7:7-8)“ God knows what we need, yes, but we have to ask! The best way to ask with the rosary is to pray a rosary with a specific intention. By intention I mean one opens the prayer with, “I\we offer this rosary with X intention.“ X can be to get a job or wife, or for world peace or the conversion of a soul. But it´s rare that these intentions, particularly at the start of praying the rosary, are not in some way fulfilled. I remember I was concluding a novena for a spiritual director when I was still living in Chicago, praying alone in the enormous church St Mary of the Angels, and a priest entered the church and approached me asked me if I needed anything. And I told him a spiritual director. And so my prayer was answered. He was exceptional!

The one prayer that has been enormously efficacious for me and others I know has been the 54 day rosary novena. It´s always remarkable how the prayer intentions are usually quite punctually and profoundly answered at the conclusion of this Novena. The best argument for the rosary is that it checks out in practice: try it! A friend of mine was a leftist radical at the occupy wallstreet protests in New York years ago and found a rosary at the campgrounds there. Out of curiosity he decided to try to pray it once and that was all it took. Within fifty beads, He knew immediately this prayer and religion were legit; he was baptized within a year. Ave Maria!

Our Weapon for the End Times

St Louis de Montfort says that devotion to Our Lady is more necessary in these latter days where the demons have more strength and freedom to attack souls. Pope Leo XIII, who had the vision of Satan being given 100 years of freedom to assail the Church, wrote six encyclicals on the Most Holy Rosary! Yet this last battle between Our Lady and Satan is found in the Bible. We see in Genesis that the Woman will “crush the serpents head” (Genesis 3:15—the vulgate translation suggests this at least, most protestants render it differently). More powerfully in Revelation 12, “a woman clothed in the Sun” engages in battle with the great beast. If one studies the Prophetic Apparitions at Fatima, the woman who appeared there said she was “Our Lady of the Rosary“ and the shepherd children described her as “dressed in white, more brilliant than the Sun.“ All this suggests the battle depicted in Revelation 12 is at hand. St Padre Pio, for instance, says the rosary is the appointed weapon for the End Times. This makes sense as both demonic attack and oppression seem so much more common than before, and also citizens of the west have been thoroughly weakened by life in a sensate culture, where moral fortitude is hard to come by and thus we need extra graces to persevere in faith and virtue.

Legend has it that Our Lady told St Dominic that one day she would, through the Scapular and Rosary, save the world. I practice both devotions, but one thing I think about as regards this promised deliverance, is the reality of Her Assumption in relation to the foretold Reign of Mary or the Triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (I wrote about this last week regarding the Apparition at Fatima). We know Our Lord was ascended into heaven so that he could distribute His Body throughout the whole earth in the Blessed Sacrament from eternity. And Our Lady was assumed into heaven as well. And it is prophesied She will raise up mighty Saints to rebuild the Church before the coming of Christ, so as to, for the second time, make a fitting Bride for his Second Coming.

It´s interesting for me to think of Mary donating her flesh once more for this task, again at the natural level, in a way analogous to Our Lord but through a special spiritual dispensation of her merits in the End Times. Not that she donates flesh in the supernatural way Our Lord does at Mass, but that she helps re-order the broken souls at the End of Days at the level of nature, souls who—through lack of good examples or societal breakdown—struggle to even aim in the right direction towards perfection as regards the order of nature. These souls have lost phronesis, the practical wisdom or know-how, of how to attain natural virtue. And in this way Her return, Her Immaculate Human Nature, i.e. that pure intention for God´s Glory alone, Her Holy Ignorance— “how shall this be done, seeing how I know not man? (Lk 1:34)“— given to the denizens of our time or some later time will work to restore the natural goodness and nobility of soul stolen from post-industrial society and the pandemic of impurity. St Louis de Montfort speaks of this prophecy of a Reign of Mary preceding the Second Coming and describes the Apostles of these latter days in his book, True Devotion to Mary. He depicts an age with unsurpassable Saints with Terrific Marian Devotion:

They will carry the gold of love in their heart, the frankincense of prayer in their mind and the myrrh of mortification in their body. They will bring to the poor and lowly everywhere the sweet fragrance of Jesus, but they will bring the odour of death to the great, the rich and the proud of this world.

They will be like thunder-clouds flying through the air at the slightest breath of the Holy Spirit. Attached to nothing, surprised at nothing, troubled at nothing, they will shower down the rain of God’s word and of eternal life. They will thunder against sin, they will storm against the world, they will strike down the devil and his followers and for life and for death, they will pierce through and through with the two-edged sword of God’s word all those against whom they are sent by Almighty God.

They will be true apostles of the latter times to whom the Lord of Hosts will give eloquence and strength to work wonders and carry off glorious spoils from his enemies. They will sleep without gold or silver and, more important still, without concern in the midst of other priests, ecclesiastics and clerics. Yet they will have the silver wings of the dove enabling them to go wherever the Holy Spirit calls them, filled as they are with the resolve to seek the glory of God and the salvation of souls. Wherever they preach, they will leave behind them nothing but the gold of love, which is the fulfillment of the whole law. (True Devotion to Mary §56-58)

Surely Her Reign is approaching! Prope est Regnum Mariae! Pray the Rosary! Hail Mary!

One Last Marian Hymn! Rosenkranzkönigin! Rosary-Queen!

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Interested parties should write me at: arcadiangossip@gmail.com.

Responsibilities (Could be separate positions or all-together)

1. Edits Posts for Substack

2. Publishes Posts\Curates Blog (Blog Manager)

3. Edits Book Chapters for a specific Book, which will then be published on Substack, and Prepares Texts for On-Demand Publishing.

Time Commitment

1. Edit and Publish Posts (~1hr\wk)

2. One monthly 30min Conversation.

3. One quarterly 60min Conversation.

Pay

1. Substack (Editor and\or Manager)

   1. The starting salary is 50\50 of all earned income on Sancti Stulti and buy-me-a-coffee, paid once each month. This would currently be ~50$\month.

   2. If I hit at or above 15% growth in overall subscribers for a given month, relative to the number at the end of the previous month, OR if I hit 15% growth in revenue from paid subscribers for a given month relative to aggregate income from the previous month (incl buy me a coffee), you get 100% of the profits for that month, so ~$115\month.

   3. If I hit at or over 10% growth for the same, you get 90% of the profits for that month.

   4. If I hit 5% growth, you get 70% of profits for that month.

   5. If I hit 20% growth, you get 120% of profits for that month in terms of extending the final 20% as a claim on future earnings.

2. Books (Optional\Could be an Entirely Separate Position)

   1. The Editor/Manger takes 100% of the profits of any books or devotional materials developed and published by her\him alone from my writing and then sold separately until costs of labor are recovered at 40$\hr.

   2. If the book does not recover labor costs, this deficit may be applied to other books published by the editor.

   3. Profits from books thereafter are split 50\50 until Editor/Manager earns 50,000$ on any given book or item.

   4. After the Editor\Manager has recovered wages for his\her labor plus 50,000$, I take 100% of profit.

Development:

I was trained in academic editing\rhetoric in the Writing Center at the University of Chicago and would happy to take time to train the right person in the methods I learned there.

Experience:

None required. Looking for someone who is (1) excited about this opportunity and (2) generally interested in the sorts of things I like to write about. Some background knowledge in philosophy or theology would be a plus but not at all necessary.

Benefits (optional):

All expenses paid (not including airfair) 7-14 day guided experiment in sanctimonious vagrancy in Spain (summer) or Italy (winter).

Here is the current growth of Sancti Stulti (~45$/mo), dasoloapiedi (~35/mo), and the 90 day income of my buy-me-a-coffee (~40/mo). Someone could get a good hourly wage editing especially if the growth keeps up.

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In Germany, I´ve started distributing a no-nonsense chart to help people get a grasp of two opposing spirits at play both in the church and in society, and hopefully convince souls that one is worthy of promotion the other of strident opposition. (German Version Here).

This sort of Two Ways genre one finds in so many of the Psalms and Wisdom literature, also in one of the very first Christian theological texts called the Didache, and in the classic chapter on spiritual discernment—which everyone should read!— in Thomas a Kempis´ “the Imitation of Christ” (LINK: Book III, Ch 54).

So here is my riff on the genre:

Is this helpful to you in making sense of spirits active in society and the church? What would you add? Where do you disagree?

A PDF of this chart is available for download on my dropbox: here.

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I don´t think needs Re-Enchantment. I don´t think many of us do. Nor do I think he or we can conjure it. I´m not sure, even on the most generous interpretation, what re-enchantment could concretely signify. It seems to signify the absence of an absence of something. Thus I tend to doubt—given how its used—that re-enchantment could refer to anything specific at all. And therein lies the heart of my problem: the word isn´t helping anyone pick something out in the world and comprehend it more clearly in order to bring it to life. The push for “re-Enchantment” seems more symptomatic of our disease rather than a cure for it.

Activists Anonymous

The backdrop for Re-Enchantment is a reaction of course against dis-Enchantment. And dis-Enchantment is a reaction against Enchantment. So lets start there. Here is Rod Dreher:

“In the medieval model, everything in the visible and invisible world was connected through God. All things had ultimate meaning because they participated in the life of the Creator. The specifics of that participatory relationship were matters of dispute among theologians, but few if any doubted that this was how the cosmos worked.”

So “Enchantment,” as I understand it, is the general historico-epistemological human condition before the 18th century or before the industrial revolution, Ferdinand Braudel spoke of life under a “Biological Regime” before this time. And this seems to be the salient factor: how life and culture were once wed to the agriculural cycles, how our form of life was once catechized and disciplined by the exigencies of nature—i.e. of seasons, feast and faimine, natural disaster and disease. Humans living under the Biological Regime also tended to inherit a semiotic cosmos imbued with supernatural meaning and direction. Both morality and ritual extended from this inherited natural frame just like physicists today think of physical laws being imbeded in the movement of the physical world.

The frame for re-Enchantment thus seems to wish for the imagined benefits of the spirituality internal to the Biological Regime without the return of this regime itself. And having and eating cake at the outset belies the fact that the spirituality of the biological regime, if plausibly superior to that of the late-capitalist one, didn´t tend to be christian or uniquely productive of virtue on its own. Pagans were all enchanted by this definition; the Mongols, the Vikings, the Huns were enchanted. It´s a pretty low baseline. Even more curious is the historical fact that Christianity has tended to take a rationalizing, dis-enchanting force vis a vis paganism.1 So why do christian theorists today find “re-enchantment“ so appealing?

The frame for re-Enchantment is dis-Enchantment. And its the pernicious dominance of modern dis-Enchantment that frames the entire program and its appeal. As technology began to win human beings unforseen freedom from the Biological Regime—i.e. they were less likely to starve or die of famine— so too did science and ideology begin to speculatively call the so-called “enchanted“ world into question, a world in which norms and ends were naively wed to the cosmos itself. Since the 18th century, with both agrarian and industrial revolutions, and then, with subsequent sexual and computer revolutions, the human form of life was gradually moved from a life where meaning was given to one where meaning needed to be made. Dis-Enchantment signifies a life where normative direction is no longer given by some combination of nature, culture, and history.2

If we agree with this picture. And agree that there was and is a crisis of meaning—i.e. that the human teleos was no longer a given but up for discussion for each individual—then next diagnostic question is whether dis-Enchantment is due to a speculative error—like believing in “karma”—or a practical ignorance—like not knowing how to train a dog. Speculative errors can be addressed with better explanation and argument, practical errors need to be demonstrated by example. A carpenter needs some basic speculative knowledge of geometry to carry out his task, but mostly he needs to be shown how to do a great deal by a master craftsman. A great deal of bad thinking in our current time falls into one of two errors: (1) trying to solve practical problems with better speculation—like solving for bad carpentry with instruction in the principles of physics or (2) to try to solve speculative problems with better practical know-how—like asking a Newtonian physicist to discover relativity through learning carpentry. Or like asking an atheist to pray. Yet this last one isn´t a bad idea. Sometimes the right know-how by its own nature leads to the right knowing-that—i.e. the right practical knowledge produces the right speculative knowledge. So what sort of problem is dis-Enchantment?

Charles Taylor speaks most extensively and perspicuously about the speculative side of the disenchantment thesis. In “Sources of the Self,” Taylor argued, that modern, disenchanted selves were increasingly formed by new notions of rationality and autonomy that were valued apart from the determination of a natural teleos. Rationality and autonomy were pitted against the yoke of society and tradition. Taylor claims these modern or “buffered“ selves were defined by anxiety about figuring meaning, morality and life´s teleos on their own. In “A Secular Age,” Taylor further explains this in terms of modern man living in an lebenswelt that he calls an “immanent frame” where life is oriented towards immediate, experiential, sensible, natural goods, a life where transcendent, intellectual, and supernatural realities are by and large out of reach. Someone like Ed Feser also works on this intellectual front. His work identifies skepticism about final causality in modern philosophy as the distinguishing characteristic of a new sort of religiosity. But even for Feser, Modernity isn´t the absence of something, as the word “disenchantment” suggests, its the presence of a superstitious sloth about seeking the knowledge of final causes.

If Taylor or Feser focus on the speculative story, they don´t claim the ideas are working top down, as many mistakenly do, who might blame Cartesian skepticism for the “buffered” self, or a Kantian phenomenal\noumenal distinction for the “immanent frame.” Others like Ellul, Rieff, Harvey, Postman, and Lasch look to the practical axis to fill out this other, practical half of the Disenchantment thesis. In “the Culture of Narcissism,” Lasch, for instance, sees—to take one of many wonderful object lessons from the book—the mass production and use of polaroid cameras and subsequent cultural development of photo-albums as an intrusion on the way humans naturally tend to narrate their life and narrative is a basis for identity and selfhood. And for Lasch this is one instance of hundreds where technology is disrupting more natural cultural forms and practices that mediate how we make sense of ourselves as persons. Rather than Kant and Locke being drivers of a new weltanschauung, on this practical level, its cars and computers, factories and onlyfans. The focus is the role of technology and capitalism in the new emerging sense of self-hood and concomitant alienation from a cosmos that gave normative direction to souls.

In sum, the disenchantment thesis—i.e. modern selves increasingly afflicted with anxiety about not knowing what life is for, where the self is left out of sync with society and the cosmos—has a speculative axis driven by (1) philosophical assumptions that derive from enlightenment philosophy and the scientific revolution and also a practical axis driven by (2) industrial and tectological developments that have moved humans from country to city, from farm to factory, and from the letter to the house phone to the pocket handy. The first axis led philosophers to speculatively doubt whether there was a singular summum bonum for human kind, and the second separated people from co-natural knowledge of this summum bonum practically. Denizens of the immanent frame are both deaf and dumb. dis-Enchantment involves a combination of both speculative blindness and practical ignorance, which leaves us in a tough spot as regards recovering a flourishing human form of life oriented towards our true teleos.

The re-Enchantment project acknowledges this general picture and seeks to return to life as imagined in the biological regime. Here is Dreher again,

“Re-enchantment is not about imposing fanciful nostalgia onto the world, like coating a plain yellow cake with pastel fondant frosting. Instead, it is about learning how to perceive what already exists and reestablishing participatory contact with the really real. God has already enchanted the world; it is up to us to clear away the scales from our eyes, recognize what is there, and establish a relationship with it.”

Yet the foundational impulse of re-Enchantment seems however not to be a clarity about how things could go right but how things are certainly going wrong. Here is Kingsnorth from his latest book:

The fact is that the culture which is crumbling, or being demolished, around me is also a culture I never felt comfortable with. Though it is the world that made me, I’ve long felt that the modern West is broken in some deep way. Something always felt bent out of shape, as if there was some hidden wound beneath it all.

Dreher´s focus seems equally transfixed by the evils of the LGBT movement and what he calls “liquid modernity“—i.e. the apotheosis of the leveling movement, first depicted by Marx, where “all that was once solid melts into thin air“ as capitalism unfolds. Thus both retain a generally activist frame to their authorship—i.e. reacting against Evil— against what calls the “Machine.” He writes “Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.” Taking a short break from opposing activism itself, Kingsnorth´s latest activist effort is AI. I stopped reading Dreher after years of devout reading when he became almost entirely focused on opposing LGBT issues. My critique of re-Enchantment talk is (1) that it still tends to occur in this Activist frame, and that it (2) doesn´t transcend the spirituality of dis-Enchantment itself. I´ll turn to W.H. Auden to help me make this second point more clearly.

Auden´s Chart and The Late-Capitalist “Sensate“ Side of Hell

The most brilliant diagram of the 20th Century (pictured below, not above)—composed by W.H. Auden for his students at Swarthmore—sheds light on the fundamental misdiagnosis at play: we are a sensate and not an ideational culture. And it seems Re-Enchantment is envisioned as a medicine for a perverse “ideational” culture not a “sensate” one (see chart above if you´re unfamiliar with Sorokin´s terms). An ideational mentality—i.e. the apex of great civilization and traditional religion that seeks to enjoy the realization of ideas—seeks satisfaction through techniques of self control. And a sensate one—i.e. decline of great civilizations that seek to enjoy the gratification of sense—seeks satisfaction through techniques modifying the external environment to manipulate sensate reality.

Auden´s chart extensively maps human existence as it falls into sin either to the right or left of the Good. With the Good or Being residing in the middle column as the Mean, the chart resembles Aristotle’s take on the virtues. Yet it´s far more expansive: Auden´s chart covers everything— temporality, sex, sin, politics, types of heroes, mythological symbols, etc. And the most crucial rows for grasping the dramatic structure of the whole are the first and last, depicting two types of fall and two types of redemption corresponding to the perversion of sense and the perversion of intellect generally.

Those who end up on the left side of Hell search for salvation “by taking refuge in Nature“ and those on the right side of Hell “by finding release from Nature.“ Both of these paths are false and lead to hell, but the left one is driven by seeking to perfect the sensible life apart from reason, the right is driven by seeking to perfect the intellectual life apart from sense. The left side leads to the sin of sensuality, the right side leads to the sin of pride. This chart is worth spending some time with—together with friends especially— so you can finally (gently!) inform them of their tendency toward “Aesthetic Non-entity” or “Barbaric Vagueness” depending if they tend right or left in their depravity.

I share it here because “re-Enchantment” seems to advertise itself as a solution for people on the right side—i.e. people who have mistakenly sought salvation by finding release from nature, who have sought with their intellect to rise above and dominate nature. The stereotypes are the Bertrand Russells or Don Giovannis of the world—e.g. logical positivists, physicalist engineers, behaviorist social theorists, pick-up artists, etc— who by seeking to perfect the intellect apart from sense. This quest to dominate nature ends up in a desert, so says Auden´s Chart. With the Mean or Good, sense is transformed by intellect, and not entirely neglected by it; here intellect is in-formed by sense and the natural order, rather than being subjected to these. In contrast, on the right side, one is driven by the pursuit of intellect against sense—also against rather than in accord with our nature—leaves one with the “hell of the pure word—i.e. knowledge without power.“ These sorts of men end up in a pit of “Pride,” “Promiscuity,” “Empty Abstractions,” “Self-Negation,” “Decadent Triviality,” “Indecision,” and “Anarchy.” Auden says their journey to paradise is to lead “the corrupt mind through the sea,” to “purge pride through dissolution,” to “fertilize the wasteland.” It is plausible that these sorts of men on the right side of hell do need something like re-Enchantment. They need a re-attunement of intellect to sense and that sense be co-natured by the order of nature, and supernatural order of Sacrament.

The problem with “re-Enchantment” is that the cold, hard, empirical scientist type doesn´t exist anymore. We live in a highly “sensate culture,“ as Sorokin says. We are confined to what Taylor calls “the immanent frame.“ Walker Percy spoke of the 1920s as an “Age of Ideology,” and our present Age—from the 60´s on— as an “Age of Consumption.” These anthropological assessments—also empirical studies of a return to occult and superstition—suggest our cultural tendency is to the left side of Hell—i.e. “the Hell of pure deed, power without purpose.“ We tend towards “tyranny,” “blind superstition,“ and “aesthetic immediacy” as Auden puts it. Kingsnorth´s own arc, from his original rebellion against “the machine” as a leftist radical activist and environmentalist then diving into occult, pagan spirituality before turning to orthodoxy, seems to fit with Auden´s left side trajectory of seeking refuge in nature and sense. The problem with “re-Enchantment“ is this fundamental mis-diagnosis: that people in a sensate mentality need ascesis. We need a scetis in the desert not the lush tapestry of the rainforest. We need austerity as regards sensible enjoyment, and that´s not on offer “re-Enchantment.”

It´s true we´ve created a technological lebenswelt that leaves us woefully alienated from nature. And it´s true that this technological lebenswelt was fueled by a right side fantasy of dominating nature through money and technology. Yet, this technological alienation itself has left us increasingly intellectually limpid, and thereby increasingly “sensate.” Today most souls are tending to the Left Side of Auden´s Chart due to the civilizational process of disenchantment itself. And this alienation we all experience tempts sensate souls with a Left Side of Chart fantasy: it tempts them with “seeking salvation by finding refuge in Nature,“ exactly as Auden says. Talk of “Re-Enchantment” or recent talk of “Veriditas” on Substack seems to bite the following critique: it´s pursuing the common fantasy of a sensate mentality in the immanent frame. We want an Applebees that makes us think we are in a log cabin, we want rustic cases for our smartphones, etc. The temptation is to fetishize and consume certain experiences, whether in nature or liturgical as helping to “re-enchant a world,” while in reality the mode of enjoying life is still servile to the degenerate social form, or to the form of rationality permitted to support the economic system, if we want to look at it with a Marxist lens.

Thus, “re-Enchantment” as a solution seems like an foolhardy effort to irrigate our late-capitalist, sensate swamp by discovering a deeper religious sense or immanent feeling for fetishized things.3 The problem is that we already have a hyper-religious sense for consuming experience itself as a religion, and this needs to be mortified. If we return to Sorokins chart, he would say a sensate culture would proscribe new techniques of manipulating the external world as a means of personal growth, rather than new techniques of self-control. Re-Enchantment thus seems to fit more with the sensate mentality. It doesn´t attempt to break our chains to the “immanent frame” altogether, but rather strengthens them by advertising a religious fulfillment within the boundaries of sensible enjoyment. Sensate souls want a better, more spiritual, more authentic, aesthetic experience of the world, but what they need, according to the christian anthropology is a better rational ordering of their lives towards their final end.

According to Auden, the purgatory for those sensate souls falsely seeking salvation by taking refuge in nature—i.e. the path of sanctification for those who have corrupted their bodies through the pursuit of immediate sensate pleasures—is to drain the swamp—i.e. “the voluntary journey of the corrupt body through the desert,“ i.e. “the purgation of Lust by desiccation.” This is needed to make room for the activation of the intellect towards its ideational teleos. If our world was disenchanted by enlightenment ideas or by industry, it has already been re-enchanted with a world full of technology and advertizing. It has been filled with sensible enjoyment utterly detached from our teleos as humans. Getting rid of this world takes serious ascesis. And Auden says this process is going look more like life wandering in the desert. Thus, whatever disenchantment means—and that it seems equally applicable to the influence of Spinoza or Smartphones seems a weak spot for the theory—the way out of “the immanent frame” and to the living God is going to be ascetical, ideational, a re-activation of the dominance of reason over sense. Those who do try to fill the void with a better aesthetic experience or frame things this way, only signify their wish for better irrigation in our sensate swamp. They aren´t pointing the way out.

On the Mortification of Sense; On the Power of Positive Disenchantment

So what is the way out? It should look more like the Christian salvific dis-enchantment of the pagan world, i.e. the mortification of sense. According to Catholic Ascetical and Mystical theology there are Three Ages in the life of the soul: Novice, Purgation, Transforming Union. Discovering this was for me both a consoling and then an increasingly frightening reality. As consoling as finding a map when you are lost, and as frightening as finding a map that seems to check out but no one else will agree to use or take seriously.

These three stages are divided by two nights, the night of sense and the night of the intellect, i.e. the famous “dark night” by St John of the Cross makes reference to these. The first task of the spiritual life is to mortify sense and to go through the night of sense, where one no longer receives sensible consolations—i.e. think sweetness in prayer, elevation when one sings hymns etc. Without these, we need to follow intellect alone to keep praying in aridity, to keep serving our neighbor when there is no sensible joy given as a reward. This map says that sense needs to be mortified so that the intellect itself can be purified.

99% of us are all too ready abuse this notion of the “dark night” of sense to glamorize the dark night of sin. Most of us experience God´s absence due to sin, not due to the dark night of sense—i.e. not due to God withdrawing sensible consolations from a soul dear to Him so that the intellect alone might be strengthened and purified in preparation for the departure of the soul from the body at death. The dark night of sense can only happen to a soul in a state of grace. Yet, I personally have never heard of someone laying claim to the “dark night” who wasn’t in a habit of mortal sin.

Given how dominant the sensate mentality is at this time, God is—in my experience as a missionary I can speak to this—more than willing to deal out immense sensible consolations to convert lost souls and get their attention at the start of a spiritual path. The problem is that for the vast majority of believers, these consolations constitute the end rather than the beginning of a journey. If I wasn´t in good graces, then why did God save me miraculously at the start. And if I were in trouble, wouldn´t he do it again?, we mistakenly think. Sensate souls seem to forget the intellectual truth: extra-ordinary graces are, more likely than not, a sign that you are in a uniquely bad situation. All too often, the graces that were meant to be a launch pad for souls to pursue God with all their heart and intellect, instead become a lounge chairs for self-satisfied sensate souls.

Many souls then in a consumeristic way remained chained to sense gratification, only climbing to higher rungs of sensate gratification. Evangelicals who used to fetishize sensible consolation via a worship experience become catholic and fetishize an aesthetic experience at the TLM. Vocations that began with consoling, miraculous signs or coincidences never get off the ground because the sign hunting never stops their whole life long. Sanctification requires the activation of reason orienting souls toward their final end. And this movement is going to hurt the attachment to sense, it will be dis-Enchanting at times if done properly.

What does this movement look like? The activation of the intellect could mean taking stock of ones virtues and vices and developing a rational plan to mortify vice. It could mean Exodus-90. It could mean actually considering what your church or sect teaches and comparing that with the Bible or the Church fathers. It could mean reading in the Bible that you will be healed by oracular confession and testing that out in some way if you never have. It could mean seeking spiritual direction from an elder or priest and letting them guide you. It could mean applying oneself to and experimenting with mental prayer so that one makes better resolutions thereafter, etc. It means applying your mind to your life, thinking about how you could honor God more regardless of how it feels. These sorts of things aren´t sexy. They are really hard, and hard to do alone in churches today, churches that almost without exception pretend everybody goes to heaven and this sort of work isn´t necessary. Framing these things as part of an effort to re-Enchant seems counter-intuitive, because the likely result is a positive dis-enchantment, i.e. the realization of and sorrow about the scope of one´s frailty and sins, an increasing sorrow about the sinfulness of loved ones and its likely consequence, etc.

One needn´t be catholic to get this anthropological picture. St Paul is constantly railing against sarx, “the flesh,” in his epistles. And sarx implies self-love just as much as concupiscence, because our self-love seems to almost exclusively reside in our sensible appetites and spiritual rebellion rarely occurs without undue attachment here. Our Lord commands us to “deny thyself, take up thy cross, and follow me” and thus the battle with sense or the flesh is paramount to being able to live the Christian life. And I don´t want to straw man the re-enchantment theorists. Many of them commend liturgy and liturgy is a way to begin bumping up against our supernatural End of humans, and then begin to know more about it and desire it. Kingsnorth advocates taking up ones cross, martyrdom even. Yet, the word “re-enchantment” still seems too focused on sense experience of the world as an End, while the path to beatitude asks us to mortify the attachment to sense completely.

The likely cause of the error here is that, in practice, re-enchantment is telling us more about what to avoid than to pursue. Re-enchantment takes its meaning from the negative sense experience of something called “the void,” or “the machine“ and it seeks to oppose these without rising above the mentality within which the experience of these things are commonplace. Rising above will entail the re-assertion of the basic Christian anthropology articulated in the Imitation of Christ—i.e. that sense must be disciplined by reason, and reason submit to God´s will:

“A good and devout man arranges in his mind the things he has to do, not according to the whims of evil inclination but according to the dictates of right reason. Who is forced to struggle more than he who tries to master himself? This ought to be our purpose, then: to conquer self, to become stronger each day, to advance in virtue.“ (Bk 1, Ch 3 ) “Nothing so mars and defiles the heart of man as impure attachment to created things. But if you refuse external consolation, you will be able to contemplate heavenly things and often to experience interior joy.” (Bk 2, Ch 1).

In the Imitation, we find the testimony of an ideational mentality, focused on self-control and inward perfection, not on a re-invigorated experience of created things, though it might entail this as a consequence. And this turns me to the philosophical import of the use of the word, “re-Enchantment,“ which conversely threatens to lose touch with reality altogether, so as to reify a common philosophical error of our time.

On the Very Idea of Re-Enchantment

Moving beyond this anthropological mis-diagnosis or danger and turning to the philosophical problems, both disenchantment and re-enchantment are said to act on and transform something called “the world.“ And it´s at this point where the instrumentalization of language in a sensate mentality rears its head, because “the world“ is not in reality something pliable. “The world“ is not up for discussion. Anyone giving 5 simple ways to dis-enchant or re-enchant your “world” is a charlatan. The world is much more like a fixed map or a house that cannot be altered. We can move around to a different place on the map or we can rearrange the furniture within our house, but we can´t change the map wholesale. We can´t move mountains; we can´t alter north, south, east, and west. Nor can we reorder the house itself without it´s total destruction. We can only reorganize things within the house. The world is not shaped; it shapes. It will not be re-Enchanted. We can be justified, sanctified before God within a fixed world. Getting the vocabulary right is important.

Even with dramatic conversions, its astonishing how people still inhabit the same frame by and large, it´s remarkable how their attitudinal world stays the same. There are evangelical atheist apologists, charismatic hedonists. I know a few of both!—where following their apostasy, either atheism or hedonism still seem to take the back seat to their previous spiritual formation now informed by a different ideology and usually some new habits. The presumptuous, when they repent of their sin, usually fall quickly into despair: so as not to escape their defect in hope, they only find the other side of it. The promiscuous when they repent lust after similar sorts of gratification in the spiritual life, consuming worship or entering into prayer with a partially perverse desires for sensible consolation. Yes, to repent and be baptized is to take on the potency for a whole new supernatural life and End. Yet, penance, prayer, and a lot of patience is required for grace to perfect nature perverted by sin. And grace does not do violence to nature, so it actually is important to aim in the exact right direction, and this involves getting the vocabulary right about what has to change.

St Mary of Egypt was tormented for 17 years alone in the desert by her lust before she was freed of it. She worked for 17 years as a prostitute before. This was not an accident. Wholescale renovation of a “world“ can take time, and a sensate age isn´t particularly patient, it wants to rebrand new experiences in the same old frame. It´s consoling that there is a St Mary of Egypt equivalent—also a former whore—who also went into the desert and felt such compunction of heart for her sin she died and went straight to heaven! Yet St Mary was called to the higher glory and edifies us more through her naked years in the desert.

Thus, it´s symptomatic of a sensate mentality, one where intellect is bound by sense, to say that language shapes a world. It´s appealing for a social critic to say he knows what could re-enchant your world. But it´s bad philosophy. The world will not be re-enchanted without one missing the real world conceptually altogether. In reality, one cannot miss the world, which is the grace. When “the world“ becomes something like play-dough in the mind, liable to being shaped by culture, language, etc, philosophy offers itself as a hallucinogen. The cost is that we lose contact with reality ideally—at the level of thought or ideology. The very wish to reorder the world signifies our alienation from the real at the level of thought. Are there things we can do that dramatically transform our experience of life, our capacity for joy, for sorrow, for charity? Yes, of course. Yet, if better thinking can aid us in this quest to live well, then something called the “world” or “reality” not a subject for “enchantment” or dramatic change.

The second conceptual problem with re-enchantment is that it signifies the absence of something evil than the presence of something good. Here, both the imprecision but more so the negative identity is a danger. The Enlightenment luminaries all said Europe was maturing in their day, it was now “self-conscious, independent, free.” But all of these adjectives signified the absence of the Christian society that came before. “Mature” was the absence of faith in church authority and replacing that faith with reason, “free” was to act according to your own law, rather than the traditional law. These privational goods only signify the absence of real or perceived evil. This is the heart of dis-enchantment in an ideological form, because it entails a separation of thought and action in practice. To pursue purely negative freedom as a summum bonum ensures that something other than thought determines what you end up doing. These sorts of negatively defined goods, or privational goods, cannot promote real human autonomy, which comes only when the intellect and will operate together persuant something good. Yet “Re-enchantment“ as a term has this same metaphysical character. “Re-enchantment“ discourse only seems to ape the “dis-enchanted“ enlightenment enemy as a result. Re-enchantment, as a privation of the evil of the past, preserves rather than abrogates the spiritual form of modernity.

Real Autonomy returns with the Good, and with pursuing a well defined good. Consider the difference—I even did this once—I went and lived and worked on a farm as an existential experiment. Thanks Wendell Berry! Yet, my own reasons were for doing this would inevitably color the experiment itself. Did I go for re-enchantment? For escape? Out of dissatisfaction with my previous life? Or could I concretely define a good I hoped to attain through the experience. The vocabulary I used when I told both myself and other people why I acted as I did conditioned the sort of knowledge I garnered from the action itself. To say I went to farm for re-enchantment is to almost assure my thinking is not going to be connecting with my action as best as it can. In contrast, if I´m given positive concrete ends to attain—as I did from Wendell Berry—if I say I want to explore the connection between the body and the earth, agriculture and culture, or if I say I want to observe how working with vegetable and animal being might shape and start to inform my practical knowledge of being in general and thus inform my grasp of the human condition and my own self specifically, I have more to learn than if my goal is to escape the city. I can improvise more how I run the experiment if I know exactly what good I am aiming at and what it might look like for me to hit the mark. This is where talk of re-enchantment fails, its a negative definition, its a privational good.

Define Your End: Charity

When Dreher writes, “Enchantment—the restoration of flow among God, the natural world, and us—begins with desiring God, and all his manifestations, or theophanies, in our lives” one might wonder what this means concretely. I suspect he desires sensible consolations, some experience of God, or of being-in-the-world yet more aware of God´s presence. In the lives of the Saints, we do not see this focus. We often see the total withdrawal of sensible consolations, even St Therese was robbed of intellectual consolations shortly before her death. She was sent into the desert, why? to be purified. Purification sometimes requires profound disenchantment, depending both on ones level of attachment to sin and on the degree of perfection to which one is called. I fear this vision has more to do with a reaction against the poverty of late-capitalist sensible life—i.e. family bonds are often broken, weaker friendships, we look at screens too much etc.—than with a true conversion to God or to an ideational mentality. Hope and activism look different ontologically. For activists Evil is absolute, and good appears as something relative to one´s opposition to evil. With hope, Good is Absolute, and combat with evil is relative to the Good. In the Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosimma gives an alternative solution to unbelief as he councils the doubting Madame Hohlakov:

“Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.” 2

Father Zosimma uses the christian vocabulary, and clearly defines the highest Christian good that this woman can concretely pursue. He suggests a good that he knows will open up the soul and heart toward God. My issue then is with the word re-enchantment, is it not at the very least a distraction? Why not commend charity like Fr Zossima? Framing our spiritual battle as “disenchantment\machine (evil) versus re-enchantment (absence of evil)” keeps a privationist or activist frame, and keeps us unsuspectingly chained to the machine.

This has costs. Even concerning cell phone use, its much better to try to fit it into the Christian metaphysic and moral universe. The sin is really one of gluttony and a problem of temperance. Yet I rarely hear the problem framed by christians in these terms. Yes, a “like” satisfies the sensible concupiscible appetite, and this appetite needs to be governed by temperance. People addicted to likes are intemperate, they have a perverse sort of social gluttony. Getting the vocabulary right, as tedious and humiliating as it is, is key to growth and key to envisioning the answer. We can lose our firm grip on reality with just one false word that is overemphasized. For instance, St Thomas talks about the deep interrelation between temperance and contentment, that the intemperate think about what they don´t have, and the temperate are content with what they do have. It´s simple and common-sense, but this actually is a more perspicuous way to frame social media addiction than thematizing our sense experience of a technologically saturated void. It´s more practical and ready to hand than offering God-saturated “world” to those who seek to escape the void. Why? Because the frame is still escaping discontent! Perhaps the way out is only to learn to see and be content with the poverty-stricken IRL lives and relationships we already have, and to see and seek concrete ways to pursue incremental improvements of these relationships, rather than imagine life as apart of a divine theo-phany. Re-enchantment looks like the same discontentment-based frame just applied differently, and that´s my whole issue.

We´ll be more likely to escape our phones if we are pursuing holiness as a concrete, positive goal, and if we have a clear idea of what incremental progress towards this end looks like. We´ll pursue holiness when we know the lives of the saints that exemplified this word and help us get a sense for how we could pursue it concretely in our lives. In addition to Dreher, people like are adept at giving takes about what is going wrong with online culture or dating culture. These insightful, diagnostic takes alone don´t help anyone put their phone down. People don´t need to know its bad out there. They know. They need to know something else is good, they need to see this and desire this good. Only a positive, possible vision of life, only concrete things to be pursued that are mutually exclusive with a phone addiction, or better yet: a love that simply crowds out the addiction—only these will help people break free. And for most people they simply aren´t ready-to-hand. Much of our predicament is that we do have a good idea what is going wrong but either don´t have the vocabulary or the right examples to help us see an alternative—or that even if we do see a clear alternative, it requires societies and usually institutions that don’t yet exist to support them socially.

To close, I think the speculative side of the crisis is best addressed by seeking to return to the traditional christian vocabulary, both as regards metaphysics and morals. The practical crisis should focus on the imitation of Christ and the Saints as exemplars. The unity of these is found in community. The unity is found in the Body of Christ, where others will insist we call our cell phone addiction intemperance and not “the Machine.“ They´ll call our dis-Enchantment, Sloth. And rather than re-enchantment, they´ll proscribe charity as a medicine as St Thomas Aquinas would, lest one think animal sacrifice or wind-catchers could also help. If we do live in unusually dark times, the virtue of hope is perhaps most crucial and also the most difficult for us. Thus we should be sensitive to the words we ourselves decide to pursue. These are also the words we give to others to aim at and to hope in. In dark times all the more, we must be bearers of Good News. And that means our vocabulary and hope must take it´s reference from the highest good, not the absence of the great darkness or distraction that pervades contemporary society, lest we too become distracted by evil. To witness to the Gospel in hope, our vocabulary must take the Incarnation of the Son of God as its absolute point of reference, He who came to save all humanity from slavery to sin and to reveal God´s majestic love.

For Good Measure, I will give one final excellent 20th Century Chart from my fellow hoosier John Wooden!

Also honorable mentions for 21st Century Charts, I submit two of my own:

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