My dear friend Bruce Charlton – an Orthospherean from before our first days and indeed the moderator at his own site of the discussion in which we decided to call this blog “the Orthosphere,” a pen friend of mine for years beforehand, and an honored contributor here still (so far as WordPress is concerned, he can post here anything he likes) – has it seems taken my recent post on the difficulties that bedevil radical ontological pluralism as a philosophical challenge. It was not intended as such, but so be it. It would be cheap of me to ignore his response, so, here goes: a fisking, alas.
Catholicism
An Archon of Right Liberalism Takes the Turn to Orthogony
John C. Wright has long been one of the most intelligent and effective writers at the Right end of the political spectrum. He has been a great defender of the Constitution, the Enlightenment, the private sector as against the state, of traditional customs, mores and values, and so forth; and, in particular, of Christianity. He is one of the more competent, clever and entertaining Christian apologists now writing online.
He’s prolix, even compared to such as I. But his writing is always sprightly, and fun to read … so long as one has a half hour or so to spare for it each day. He’s a lawyer, so his comments on current affairs are well grounded in the tradition of English Common Law, in its down to earth common sense. And he’s also a competent and successful writer of science fiction novels, so he is able, ready and indeed eager to explore novel notions, and consider imaginatively how they might work out in practice.
A formidable guy, altogether. And what is more rare in these latter days of cultural antagony and deliquescence, sweet tempered and irenic withal. He is valuable and discerning wit.
Having grown jaundiced upon it myself circa 2009, it had bugged me for some years that despite all that, he had been so far still convinced of the Enlightenment as a natural and just evolution of Christian culture, rather than a divagation therefrom.
Well, I am pleased to report that he has recently suffered – nay, enjoyed – a paradigm shift of an orthogonal sort.
A Dream of a Lesson from Saint Thomas Aquinas
I woke at 6 AM from a dream of a theological lesson delivered by STA in lecture. My young employee Colton – a bright man, recently graduated from college – was sitting with me in a class room full of people. At the front of the class, STA stood in his habit, delivering a lesson. He held a brown paper Amazon envelope, with shipping label, unopened, and containing something cylindrical that rattled when he shook it– perhaps a plastic bottle of vitamins, or two. The envelope was the matter of a didactic metaphor.
“You see,” says he, “the contents of this envelope have fallen away from their point of origin, and arrived here among us in this class room, where they have no fitting purpose; so that this class room is not their true and intended destination. That is like our Fall. It is also like the Incarnation.”
Colton leant over to me and whispered: “That’s terrible.”
I answered, “Well, it’s problematic, certainly. It is difficult. But the fact that Jesus is here amongst us, and has gone ahead to our true intended destination ahead of us, means that we can send ourselves there, too, using the address information he has given us.”
It was all about the proper addresses, you see; the proper final causes.
What strikes me about this dream is not so much its substance – which is striking enough, to be sure – as the fact that I dream about theology. Which is weird.
Divine versus Creaturely Creativity
I wrote the other day in a comment over at the blog of our friend and fellow Orthospherean Bruce Charlton:
… one of the things that God can do – which creatures cannot – is create creatures that can and do act.
I then wrote to myself, in my Journal:
This argues against the possibility of our success in creating actual persons via AI. It does not however rule out the possibility that our work in AI could provide an occasion or niche for the ingress or inception of actual persons to the mundane order. After all, our sexual acts do not create persons, but do, rather, provide the mundane occasions for their incipience. So then likewise from time to time for our buildings and crossroads, our battlefields and ruins. And our bodies.
We creatures cannot create novel actual entities – novel creatures – ex nihilo. We can at most so arrange already actual things in our near vicinity (spatial and temporal, and indeed also conceptual) as to allow for the ingress to our world of such entities – whether they be already actual in our world, or only in their own proper natural world, or in some other worlds, or whether they be altogether novel, in every world whatever.
New book!
I’ve been playing hooky from this site for a while, but I hope no one minds if I show up to announce I have a new book coming out, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. It’s about the old identities that worked (man, woman, Catholic, American), the new ones that really don’t (Latinx, nonbinary), why the change, whence the lunacy, and what to do about it. The problems go pretty deep, and like everything else today they’re not going to get better unless we change a lot about how we live and think about things.
Goodness, Truth & Beauty are Classist, Racist & Sexist
Woke seppuku reached something of an apotheosis – I shall not say, a maximum – in the recent announcement by a Loyola professor of marketing (marketing, forsooth – that quintessential organ of oppressive capitalism) that clean, tidy, well stocked pantries are “classist, racist and sexist.”
I kid thee not. Pantries. What’s next: butt wiping?
One wonders immediately whether professors of marketing are per se classist, racist and sexist. How not?
Keep working your way down this rabbit hole with me. For “clean, tidy, well stocked pantries,” substitute any other denotation of something that has been from ancient days – or even in the last day or two – thought unremarkably good. To wit:
How to Increase Priestly Vocations
I heard the other day driving along and listening to Catholic Radio that in some diocese or other, the Catholic Church had one priest for every 12,000 laymen.
The mind boggles, right?
I can’t cite to a source, because I can’t even remember what program I was listening to at the time.
Obviously, there are not enough priests. And this itself must be an important factor of the dearth of priestly vocations. Imagine you were thinking about taking a job serving 12,000 people regularly even as, say, a cashier. It’s a non-starter.
The Church needs more priests. Fortunately, the recipe is not hard to discern – although it is a fair bit of work to implement. But then, once the men of the parish were engaged in the overall project, it could get to be lots of fun for everyone.
On the Immaculate Conception
It seems clear as a matter of scriptural fact that Mary was immaculately conceived: Gabriel, who is in a position to know, said as much, in Luke 1:28. He could not have noticed or said that she was full of grace if there had been a jot of sin in her anywhere; for, being a defect of being, sin is an emptiness – a defect of fullness of grace. OK, so far so good.
But that I submit is not the real nub of the issue. It is, rather this: stipulated that Mary was indeed free of Original Sin from her very conception, why was that necessary? Why was it necessary that the Mother of God should be without spot or stain of sin? As Gabriel went on to say in Luke 1:37, all things are possible with God; so, why couldn’t God have raised up his Son from a sinful woman, or for that matter from some stone? Matthew 3:9.
Romantic Christianity versus Christianity Proper
To my recent post about Finding the True Way to Life, Bruce Charlton commented:
@Kristor – I find your post and comments both surprising and confusing! Your post concedes pretty much all the ground to Romantic Christianity; so that you seem to be advocating the same attitude to churches.
Your comment of July 25, 2022 at 4:49 AM suggests that any particular actual or manifest church (including the RCC) is ultimately ‘merely’ (secondarily) helpful or harmful – but never should be regarded as primary or decisive – precisely the Romantic Christian attitude.
And that the individual person’s intuitive knowledge of the mystical/spiritual/immaterial ‘church’ is all that *really* matters at the bottom line (albeit, I cannot distinguish this concept of ‘church’ from knowledge of deity – of God the Father/Jesus Christ/the Holy Ghost).
Most remarkably, you apparently regard the actual, worldly functioning of the Roman Catholic Church to be a matter of ultimate indifference to you! I.e., whether or not the RCC locks its churches; if it ceases to offer the mass, marriage, funerals; and if most of its bishops and priests focus their teachings on defending and endorsing … whatever policies the global totalitarian Establishment are currently pushing – you say:
I am not too troubled by all of this outward and merely formal ecclesial subjection to the tyrannical civil authority.
I suppose the crux is that you regard this as ‘merely’ formal submission. Yet when formal *and informal* RCC discourse overwhelmingly endorses – and indeed instructs – not just submission, but enthusiastic and active participation, over many years and increasingly … Well, I believe you are in error.
Altogether, I don’t [see] you are putting forward a coherent argument here – which may simply mean that you are in a transitional phase.
Indeed I hope so; because I find your casual, dismissive attitude to the RCC enthusiastic-self-shut-down of 2020 (etc.) to be abhorrent!
Like Archbishop Viganò; I regard 2020 as probably the worst disaster in the history of Christianity, an existential catastrophe, the significance of which can hardly be exaggerated.
These are all important points, and it is important that I respond to them cogently, and forthrightly. The first thing that I would say in response is that this latest travesty of the craven responses of the various church hierarchs to the mandates of the civil authorities in respect to the supposed crisis of covid is not our first rodeo of that sort. Things were much, much worse with the Church during the Black Death, a real pandemic:
On Finding the True Way to Life
Over at his Notions, our friend Bruce Charlton has commented upon the discussion here about the question, raised by our friend Francis Berger, whether the throne and altar have been superseded.
He writes:
I think the ultimate question is something like this:
Is The Christian Church (in some sense of The Church) in-charge-of human salvation – or is salvation primarily a matter for each individual.
The answer is yes.
The Orthosphere 