April 26, 2005

Three Meetings

The attention of the world has been focussed recently on the Catholic Church with the death of John Paul II and the election of the new Pope, Benedict XVI. These outward events occupying the world-stage have coincided with my own recent thoughts and preoccupations. I have been thinking a lot recently about Catholicism specifically and religion generally, asking myself what kind of future for mankind we may anticipate with or without religious awareness. To ask about the "future of religion" is to ask about "the future." For religion is that which binds us to the future.

My readers may be surprised to hear this. The classical definition of religion is that it is that which links us to God. But what is God? I am not sure that I could say what God is, other than the certainty of God is the guarantee of the meaningfulness of history, and that the presence of God is the testament of the wholeness of life and thought, only a small portion of which I may be capable of perceiving at any given time. Where it would be presumptuous of me to point to anything and say, "This is God," I can freely and humbly acknowledge my own partiality and the "given-ness" of this moment in which I find myself. My acknowledgement of the "given-ness" of my life is my way of saying that I am not God, that I am a participant in rather than the creator of this "situation." To know the radical partiality of my situation as radically partial is, in a manner of speaking, to be convinced of God, to know God. To call a thing for what it is, to know a thing for what it is, is to come into a condition that can be called the "accuracy of Mystery." This is what it is to "know God."

I met three men recently, each of whom seemed to embody and exemplify what could be called the "Catholic moment" in my thoughts and in the events of this time. I wish to describe these three individuals in the context of the theme of purposeful futurity – the context of work, and of how one’s work gives expression to a certain supposition about the way things are with human beings, the way things are with respect to the soul. For manifestly, each of these men, by being a man, is not a woman – just as I being a woman, and writing about these events, am not a man. What attitude should we have regarding this radical fissioning in human nature? What is it possible for any man or any woman to say, given the radical partiality and fissioning of our "human nature"? Or should we have an attitude about it at all?

Unfortunately it is impossible to escape having an attitude about it, thanks to the tireless propaganda of the feminists. I have long thought that feminism was the final excrescence of Protestantism, which in its unholy stampede to accommodate itself to worldly intellectualism, trampled the Abode of the Virgin. What appears in us shyly and reticently as a thought is commemorated, be it ever so briefly, in the Catholic tradition by virtue of the presence of the Holy Mother. It is called other things, but in essence the radiance of the Virgin claims for both sexuality and thinking an inner and originally uncontaminated union. Protestantism broke this link, this momentary passing likeness between the power to think and the power to procreate, and in so doing, Protestantism sexualized all thought. It became no longer possible, in the Protestant domain, to distinguish a thought from its intellectualistic form and appearance. It was a way, may I point out, to banish the future. This moment, this work, this earth, became all in all. It was the collapse of radical partiality, the beginning of the self-divinization of man. Or should I say, its new beginning: for it is the oldest heresy in the world.

So let us now characterize two forms of human work. The work that bears the future in its wings is analogous to the thought that appears before the radioactive decay that turns thinking into intellectualism sets in. This fissionable material, i.e., our "thoughts," can soon take on a sort of relentless logic of division in their own right, and they can equally soon become objects in which we are enamored. The Enlightenment was perhaps the period of history which discovered the endless possibilities for self-love, self-fructification, self-division, self-enamorment – if I may indulge in making up a word -- for itself.

The first person I talked to, E. Michael Jones, has explored the connection of Enlightenment-era intellectualism with the sexualization of thought in his book, Libido Dominandi, which I have reviewed elsewhere on this website. Michael is the editor of Culture Wars Magazine – a position he fell into after being fired at a Catholic College for expressing opposition to abortion. Culture Wars is one of the rare manifestations of spiritualized intelligence in the USA, full of articles (many written by Michael himself) about history, politics, urbanism (he’s committed to cities and hates suburbs), and of course, Catholicism – the false and the true. The man, in fact, is a dynamo, and has produced eleven books (many of them quite long, and the ones I’ve read, extremely interesting. It is a venture I recommend to persons of WASP background in the USA: read the history of the USA from the Catholic perspective. It’s a real eye-opener.)

Mike was in town recently to address the Pro-Life Coalition, a group to which he bore the sad news that the Republican Party is not pro-life and that conservatism is dead. He described both the Democratic and Republican parties as entities which are engaged in ‘the colonization of the Catholic vote’ – because neither party can allow the Catholics any real political power. In an earlier book, The Slaughter of Cities, Mike described "urban renewal" programs as essentially a covert war against Catholic ethnic neighborhoods as a way of dividing and dispersing Catholic political power. He argued that the basis of the American economy is cheap labor and that the chief aim of social engineering by government and corporate elites is to bust up the unions, prevent people from organizing, dissolve ethnicity, and force people to ally themselves in groups determined by consumer preferences. Race and skin-color, he pointed out, have always been alien to the Catholic faith. He argued that ethnic lines in the United States are ultimately religious ones (i.e. Protestant, Catholic, Jew) but that the aim of the ruling elites was particularly to prevent Catholics from thinking ethnically. The break up of urban Catholic parishes and neighborhoods was paralleled by the Rockefeller-led crusade for contraception – a crusade which divided the Catholics into conservative and liberal camps. He also mentioned that the new strategy of the WASP elites is to colonize the Mexican immigrants and turn them into Protestants. His next stop on the lecture platform was to be Los Angeles, in which he planned to open a campaign on behalf of religious fidelity to the Mexican Catholics.

Jones believed that the significance of the Nixon presidency was that Nixon’s strategy was to ‘capitalize on Catholic dissatisfaction.’ Nixonian conservatism took up the banner after the social engineering schemes of the WASP elites had succeeded in fracturing the Catholic vote – schemes in which, I am sorry to admit, the Quakers had taken part in. But the Nixon landslide in 1972 was followed by Roe v. Wade of 1973. So much for the promise of the ‘emerging conservative majority’ – the title of a 1969 book by Kevin Phillips. Carter was a flaming abortion supporter, and Reagan used the Catholic mandate to bust up unions and lower taxes for the rich. Thus Reagan, too, lied to the Catholics. Conservatism, it seems, was emerging as the main engine of Catholic suppression.

So what to do? Jones expressed a moderate hope for the Papacy, and felt that the election of Benedict XVI signified that the Church was determined to fight for Europe. St. Benedict I was the Pope under whose reign the Church took control of ethnicity when the Roman Empire collapsed – the Pope who unified Europe. The Constitution of the European Union did not see fit to mention this fact. But it is incumbent on Catholics, Jones believes, to break the hold of the cultural controllers. Get rid of the TV! – that instrument of cultural bondage – and work fruitfully in the local parish and the small religious community in the light of failing Empire. Perhaps not all in the audience last Saturday applauded enthusiastically when Jones urged them to throw out their televisions – but they heard his message. Social change begins with small beginnings; the instrument of change is the new thought, which begins to build a platoon in society by learning to recognize its legitimate interests and fortifying its ranks with loyalty and community.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting Frank Wilson, book page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer for 25 years. Mr. Wilson describes himself as a libertarian Catholic, and he hopes to expand his blog to a full internet presence for book reviewing.(http://booksinq.blogspot.com/) I mentioned that he might wish to review Mike Jones's book,  The Slaughter of Cities, which he said he may have already done by "passing the book to an architect." I also mentioned Jim Kunstler’s forthcoming book, The Long Emergency, about which he raised a demurral that he wasn’t sure he wanted to the review pages to include "a book like that." I wasn’t sure what he meant until he mentioned some article or book by someone named Huber, who I believe is one of these apostles of unlimited resources and techno-fixes. I don’t think that Mr. Wilson shares my apocalyptic sense about Peak Oil. Our conversation ranged over a multitude of topics in a most friendly fashion. Each time we drew near to a potential source of disagreement, I turned the conversation back to another channel until the rifts would start to appear once again, necessitating another turn. I believe that Mr. Wilson is a civilized presence on the Philadelphia Inquirer, which like all entities in USA, Inc., is finding is harder and harder to support "the civilized presence." As our libraries cut back on hours, public transit goes begging for funds, and book review pages suffer the financial cutbacks of short-sighted corporate managers, it is a tribute to the act of will on the part of people like Mr. Wilson to keep their ship going. If Mike Jones was an encounter with the intentionality of Thought, Mr. Wilson seemed to me to express the act of Will in the intentionality to create future.

And what of Feeling? After my wide-ranging conversation with Frank Wilson, I walked from North Broad Street to 38^th and Chestnut, about twenty blocks, to catch the lecture by Timothy Luke Johnson on "The DaVinci Code, the New Gnosticism, and the Culture Wars." Mr. Johnson is a professor of Christian theology and New Testament studies at Emory University in Atlanta, and I believe he is a former Benedictine. Luke Johnson once wrote a review of my absurd little book, Consecrated Venom, in which he noted that despite, or perhaps because of, its absurd naivete, that the book had something of freshness and originality in its attitude toward the Biblical Creation story. Unfortunately the review was never published in Commonweal, where he had sent it, but if I can dig it up in my files I will post it to one of my websites shortly.

Luke Johnson is one of these rare academics who teaches what he loves and believes in what he teaches. Overflowing with Holy Spirit, he peppered the atmosphere with cheerful witticisms and small explosives of joyous self-disregard. Truly it is good to realize that such people still do exist in this world. He gave a good talk about all the theological and historical errors in that vile book, The Da Vinci Code, which Frank Wilson also agreed is a vile book, and which Mike Jones no doubt, were he to be consulted, would also agree is a vile book. That makes three people, including the person writing this posting, who think that The Da Vinci Code is a vile and dishonest book. The book is vile because it pretends to report facts about early Christianity which are not facts and because it disguises its agenda, which is to undermine the Catholic Faith and substitute for it a religion of feminist sexualist gnosticism. Dan Brown, the author of this vile bestseller, made the statement that "Jesus was the original feminist," thus insuring booming sales in the college girl department. Perhaps it is these same college girls who ridiculed Lawrence Summers at Harvard, and more recently, Jim Kunstler at the University of Wisconsin. When speaking of what it will take to bring the American public into consciousness of the dire condition of the oil resource, Jim Kunstler said it would take "a bitch slap upside the head," which brought down the wrath of the feminists.(see his April 25 diary posting at www.kunstler.com) But whether it is women in science, Peak Oil, or Christianity, the feminists have declared their immunity to the one feature of the human race which occasionally drags it up from the abyss of utter hopelessness: that is, a grudging submission to the world of reality, the being of things-are-as-they-are.

Allegiance to things-are-as-they-are is not enough to bring us to the realm of the Virgin and of the Accuracy in Mystery, but it is a stage along that path. It seems to be the heavy burden of our time that millions of people believe that the way things have been handed down in the Christian tradition is false and untrue, not because they possess the knowledge to evaluate spiritual and historical truth, but because it was handed down that way, and anything handed down is, ipso facto, proof of a conspiracy. Because it exists, it is wrong: thus does the double-mind insinuate itself between the perceiving-thinking self and this vale of events and appearances which comprises history. Then begins the consummation of Satan in the appearances, the relentless intellectual fissioning in place of the integrity of coherences,  the Accuracy of Mystery. A place for the Virgin in the mystery of thinking enables one to engage in proper arguments and engage in persuasion, which is a right and proper activity for the human mind. Not everything-that-is can or should be accepted, but everything can be discussed and entered into the purifying fires of argument and clarification.  But deconsecrating the virgin only leads to destructiveness, and it is this we see in every angle of light we cast upon modern society today. The paradox of blasphemy is that it not only takes away the grace of life, it takes away things-as-they-are and leaves man in the void which is himself - or herself. 

So may the Three Catholic Gentlemen I met this week – representing, like figures in a medieval mystery play, Thought, Feeling, and Will, continue in the strength of their work and in their faith. I believe that Catholicism has the potential to lift Protestant America out of its blind refusal to face things-as-they-are, if it can but recover its own tradition of reason in the protection of Mystery.

For it is time to begin the work of the Third Synthesis. Readers of Paul’s essay "Urbino" (http://mysite.verizon.net/vze495qq/urbino/) will recall that the First Synthesis was that of St. Thomas Aquinas, and the watchword of the First Synthesis was that of the integrity of the two spheres, "Faith and Reason." The Second Synthesis, brought forth by means of the intellectual labors of Kant and the contractarian philosophers, might be called the period of "Faith in Reason," and it led to the Enlightenment and ultimately, the intellectual fissioning we know today. We may say that this period has culminated with a kind of totalitarian intellectualism and social control mechanisms that parade as liberation movements - as detailed in Libido Dominandi - reviewed in the essay "Life As Passion: To Live or To Rule" - see link at left. 

May I suggest that we look for the thinker who will bring the Third Synthesis? Not faith in reason, but the "Faith of Reason" – it is just the little word that makes all the difference. For the ‘faith of reason’ is the humble acknowledgement that the use of reason is also a kind of faith, and it is the faith of a humble kind that we must practice if the world is to have a future.