Just Merely to Triple Double Dog Emphasize the Essential Point of My Prior Post:

Each one of us is invited to recognize in the fragile human being the face of the Lord, who, in his human flesh, experienced the indifference and loneliness to which we often condemn the poorest, either in the developing nations, or in the developed societies. Each child who is unborn, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, bears the face of Jesus Christ, bears the face of the Lord, who, even before he was born, and then as soon as he was born, experienced the rejection of the world. And also each old person and - I spoke of the child, let us also speak of the elderly, another point! And each old person, even if infirm or at the end of his days, bears the face of Christ. They cannot be discarded, as the "culture of waste" proposes! They cannot be discarded!

- Pope Francis, Colloquy with Catholic gynecologists, September 20, 2013.

Translated from the Italian here.

---

Upon the Recent Hubba- Ballooo Over All Pope Francis's "Scandalous" Comments About Erotic Sin, etc. [revised]

[Written in response to all the crap like this in the media, in reaction to interviews like this, these days.]

On the hierarchy of needs sexual pleasure falls well behind prayer, love, friendship, clean air, good food, clean water, sleep, good sanitation, shelter, medical care and education. The West's current obsession with it is merely a sign of its decadence and spiritual bankruptcy. The pope is talking to us like babies- yes, you can masturbate and we will still love you. God still loves you when you wack off into someone's mouth or anus. That this is taken as big news here is hilarious.

I mean, the operative question here is - now and forever shall be - not whether God and his Church loves each of us, it's whether or not we love God and his Church. It's whether or not we love the Truth (who is a person) and one another..

The pope is a Jesuit and a Catholic priest.  The things he has been saying about sodomy are not new. It's called moral casuistry, a.k.a. Catholic moral theology. See Molina, Escobar and Suarez; John the Baptist,  John Vianney and Padre Pio. See in the Bible where it says "judge not lest you be judged" and "take the beam out of your own eye before you condemn your brother for the speck in his" and then again "love your enemy" and then "he loved me while I was still in sin, I, the foremost of sinners."

Love the sinner, not the sin. Forgive, and you shall be forgiven. Justice (being merely the consummation of mercy) is mine, says the LORD.

The pope cannot and will not declare sodomy sex, because it is not sex. That's just biological fact. And it isn't just those with same sex attraction who commit it. He cannot tell us the earth is the center of the universe in any other sense than it happens to be the center of our universe. The Roman inquisition once got itself balled up on that point, hewing incorrectly to Aristotelean and Ptolemaic scientific consensus, and the world has never let us forget it, has it?

So, this pope is saying nothing new. He isn't going to endorse the sexual revolution by abandoning Catholic anthropology. And sin is still sin - love of money, hatred of the immigrant amongst us, denial the worker of his just wage, the murder of innocents and (yes) sodomy are still - and shall forever be - sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.  These are also sins that we, the people of the de-Christianizing West, commit with abandon.

The pope is waiting for us to confess, reminding many of us who call ourselves Christian that pride, perjury, wrath, envy, gluttony, sloth, avarice, murder, *as well as* hatred of the poor and sinful, are just as sinful as lust & sexual decadence is. If not more so..



---

Glossarium: Thoughts On the Humility of Truth

As I'm driving about and finishing my grand tour of the peninsula, I've been thinking about this here blog, and all the things I've created it to say.   I've said virtually none of it yet, because of the overweening aspect of it all.    


Throw my thoughts upon the void impassive..  Strew my pearls..  


It needs to be said well, if at all.   


So far I've been coy.  I've been amusing myself that way, but also unsure of how - or even whether - to begin being explicit.   I want to start gently, and give my testimony in a way that the dozen or so people that  I want to hear it (and if they are so moved, respond somehow to it) to hear it well.  


Today, I realized that I feel ready to start saying it.   No time like the present, no moment like now.  So I will say what I've been holding to my heart all these years..  The secret work of my heart all this time, that has made my live the seared blessing that it has become.


First, I need to explain a few terms.  If you notice, I've been tagging my posts here.   I want to explain what I mean by a few of them, so that if you care to follow this blog and really understand what I am trying to say, you will. 


This afternoon I was listening to NPR and Neil Conan was interviewing this fellow about "apocalyptic" movies.   They were joking that the segment had nothing to do with the previous ones in which we learnt that London is burning, world markets collapsing, tanks are rolling the streets of Damascus, and the recession deepening.   They rattled on for a while, and talked about a bunch of movies in which the human race is almost or entirely annihilated by one thing or another, usually some combination of our own hubris and stupidity or alien invasion or natural holocaust.    


As listened I realized that they weren't going to talk about the origins of the term, about what the word "apocalypse" means.   Let me do it for you here.   This the etymology my dictionary gives the word:


ORIGIN Old English, via Old French andecclesiastical Latin from Greek apokalupsis, from apokaluptein ‘uncover, reveal,’ from apo- ‘un-’+ kaluptein ‘to cover.’


This word entered our lexicon by way of the Bible, of course.  It is used as a title of the last book of the New Testament, which is (if you did not know) written in Greek.   That book is the account of a prophetic dream attributed to the Apostle (Greek for "messenger") John, the only one of the 14 apostles (I include Judas, Matthais and Paul) to die a natural death.   Judas killed himself, and all the others were all martyred (Greek "to witness") for their faith in Christ.  


John, not incidentally, is the only one of the twelve who did not run away from the Crucifixion, and remained at the foot of the Cross.  


Wikipedia says that the name John derives via Latin Iōhannēs and Greek Ἰωάννης from the Hebrew name יוחנן (Yôḥanan, also transliterated Yochanan), a short form of the long name יְהוֹחָנָן Yehochanan, meaning "Yaweh is merciful".  


Now, why am I telling you all this?   If you notice, I've tagged a lot of the posts here with that word, apocalypse.   And when I do it, I am usually not (usually most often emphatically not) referring you to the end of the world, or to tribulations like those that Neil Conan and his guest were calling "apocalyptic" in those films.   Like I say, not normally..  


Instead, what I mean is that I think that whatever I am writing about is revelation of the hidden truth, the true nature of things, of veiled unappreciated goodness, veiled (often widely accepted) evil.  The way we, and things, truly are.  The beauty deep down things, or else the tricks that wicked bastards are doing in the shadows..  Things that people aren't noticing or being honest about, the subtle things that admit transcendence, the wickedness that we do to benefit ourselves and that harms others.


You know, all that which is "occult"  (from Latin occultare ‘secrete,’ frequentative of occulere‘conceal,’ based on celare ‘to hide’; the adjective and noun from occult- ‘covered over,’ from the verb occulere ).


Those things "seen through the glass darkly.."


These things are not usually "occult" in the sensational sense.  But evil things are always in the end diabolical, and the most evil people ultimately become satanic, in that they consciously revolt against the good and begin to worship their own wills which are evil.  And that is inevitably demonic and then spiritually uncouth in all the ways that people normally think "occult."


When I use "occult" as a tag on this here blog, I mean that I'm usually talking about something malevolent or diseased that is disguised, subtle or hidden.   Or, something beautiful that is gentle and unappreciated.


Which brings me to the issue of knowledge.  Gnosis, science, wisdom.   Love.   


Knowledge of good and evil.


Which is of course tantamount with knowing the truth.  The truth that shall set us free.


My ultimate message here, the thing that I want finally  to tell you, is that that truth exists.


Because what is is true, and that is inescapable.


We can either accept truth, witness and worship it, or else reject it and lie.  We either see that we serve the truth, and are subject to it, or else seek to escape it and deny it.


If we acknowledge our dependence upon the truth, our need for it.. If we see that we cannot control the truth or destroy it..


And that the truth will necessarily humiliate us, make us see ourselves and others as we really are..


That the truth is not in the end of the intellect, but rather of the heart..


That the truth, like everything good and real, is personal..  is indeed, a person.


This is my faith.  My testimony.   My heart knows it is so.




---

Edictum de Fide Catholica:

One need only shut oneself in a closet and begin to think of the fact of one's being there, of one's queer bodily shape in the darkness (a thing to make children scream at, as Stevenson says), of one's fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and see that it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge.

- Henry James, Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911 (posthumously published).



---

On Human Personhood

A further proof:


This is where I tell Friedrich to go screw himself. Nietzsche ist tot.

At least in time, that is.


One of the many seminal things that our culture has received from the Christian Faith is belief in human personhood.

Of the many the things that Western culture takes for granted in its Christian patrimony, this is one of the most important.

Know this: belief in your own existence, belief in the existence of other people, belief in each of our freedom and dignity as human beings, are all just as much articles of faith - that is, articles of the Faith - as is belief in God.

Belief in personhood is rooted in belief in the Incarnation, which is to say the Holy Trinity, which is merely another way of saying the Personhood and Humanity of God.

Our being and humanity is predicated upon His Being and Humanity.


For this much is irrefutable:

Without some manner of transcendence, human personhood is a fiction. If you do not transcend death, then you have no real being at all.

In ontological terms, "you" would be merely organized energy suffering from the illusion of self-hood.

Without some form of transcendence, "you" will cease to exist at death, which in essence means that "you" do not really exist at all.


If you do not transcend time, you are merely a field of organized energy evaporating before it.


Without transcendence "you" would have no more importance, reality, or dignity than a goldfish or a rock. You would have no moral agency, no true freedom. For none of your choices or decisions would be ultimately meaningful, in that without eternal consequence they would evaporate in time with "you."


Any idea you may have to the contrary would be mere convention; born of sentiment, a delusion.


This is why you must have faith.


First, faith in your own existence.

Then, faith in the existence of others - Which, again, you cannot prove - Every time you speak or communicate in any other way with another person, you are making an act of faith in that person's existence.

All of which leads to belief in the transcendent source of our personhood - for we did not create ourselves, nor do we sustain ourselves, nor can we transcend death and time by ourselves.

This leads us to belief and then faith in God, without whom we cannot be ourselves.

---

Post Script: Later on I may discuss Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence - which pertains to the argument I just laid out, because he recognized this very problem. I'll only say that he posited the idea of eternal recurrence without providing any reasonable agent to cause it. The idea is far more absurd than belief in God is.

On the same note, Descartes' lack of faith in his own being led him to radical doubt and hyper-rationalism, and the absurd formulation "I think therefore I am" (which is clearly not true) and set the context for modernity's rise and then inevitable collapse in upon itself. Faith is both a necessary prerequisite to thought as well as sanity.

(I will add a note in passing that René died a Catholic, and received the viaticum on his death bed. All of you who attack the Church for her supposed backwardness are provincial ignoramuses who have no sense of history nor any idea of what you are criticizing - for example: the Encyclopedists (Voltaire, Diderot, etc.) were almost without exception trained by the Jesuits, and almost every University in Europe - to include the Cathedral School of Paris (now better known as the Sorbonne), as well as the University of Bologna whose philosophy faculty was the main force that drove to have Galileo condemned for offending the Ptolemaic/Aristotelian scientific orthodoxy of that day, where nearly all established by Catholic priests (go Dominicans! hooray Franciscans!) and rulers (how about them Medicis!)..

More to come here on this all too disregarded history later, of course .. )


I'd carry on about people like Peter Singer, but I'm not in the mood. That will have to wait.

Cheers.



---