Reality discloses itself according to a manner of attention, conditioned both by what and how it is attended to. As to the first, Edith Stein remarks that the “methods of a science are conditioned by their object”; to know the color red as such is not merely to describe a frequency range of visible light nor only to comprehend a network of impressions and associations like “blood”, “fire”, and “anger”, but to relate these things constitutively to “redness” as experienced in act. And with respect to the second, St Thomas offers the complementary dictum that “what is received comes in the mode of the receiver”. If I am to know the color red, I am to know it as a human being does, by human sensibility and concept. The terms in which we may pose our questions already set the agenda for their possible answers, and implicate the criteria by which those answers can be readily appraised.

For many centuries, the pre-eminent method of inquiry in the natural sciences has involved the systematic consideration of things in terms of their constituent parts, and an accompanying derivation of governing “laws of nature” which obtain in more and more general conditions. Newton’s laws of motion do not concern this or that sort of object, but simply the behavior of any objects with mass in space and time. Einstein’s gravitation is more generally applicable still, accounting for the behavior of even very large masses that shape the very space and time in which they are situated. Coulomb describes the electrostatic force between charged objects, and Maxwell succeeds him with a general account of electro-magnetism altogether. In this process, both the objects of concern and the relationships described become more and more abstract, precise, and universal. Objects of ordinary experience are highly composed and conditioned, while the progress of the sciences seems to provide an understanding of them in ever simpler and more fundamental terms, as particular instances of the behavior of more primal matter according to more general and absolute physical laws.

This method of investigating nature conditions the manner in which that nature is disclosed to us, and the sort of knowledge it yields implicates criteria for what such knowledge can amount to. Galileo captured the first sensibility in remarking that “the book of nature is written in mathematics”, since mathematics affords the language by which these laws of nature may be readily expressed. At the same time, the criterion for demonstrating knowledge in these terms comes through its predictive power. We observe X phenomena and speculate that they are conditioned by Y relationship, which predicts a whole host of other related phenomena that can be subsequently tested and validated. To understand something in this way is to stand over it, to see it at the joints and hinges, and to show this in wielding them to our own particular ends. We show our understanding of electricity in making electric lamps or an understanding of nuclear fission in making nuclear reactors.

Because of the many successes of this endeavor, we now live in a world where most of the objects with which we regularly interact are mechanical artifacts, designed around the leveraging of this sort of knowledge. We drive cars which leverage the thermodynamic potential of fuel in their engines, and communicate via satellites which leverage gravitation to orbit the earth or electromagnetism to transmit and receive signal. More and more of the world is built, which is to say the ordinary objects of experience exist and operate according to principles extrinsic to their constitution as such. It is not because of the car or the satellite that the principles by which they operate unfold as they do, but rather because of the reliability of those principles that cars and satellites can be designed at all.

The ostensible exceptions to this are living things: birds, bees, potted plants and the like. These act according to principles intrinsic to their being what they are. The bird makes its nest and the rooted plant lifts its leaves towards the light. This isn’t to say that we cannot find the same general principles at work in them: food may be analogous to fuel, and sensory organs to “sensors”, but we cannot quite omit the cat itself from its eating and looking in the same manner that we really can omit the car from an exhaustive description of its engine.

“Fine-Tuning”

It’s in this context that an appeal to “fine tuning” has become one of the more popular arguments to the existence of God in modern discourse. There are a handful of precise quantities, abstracted from observed relationships in the constitution of nature, upon which the given order of the world depends. A slight deviation of any of these figures could make the whole affair impossible: stars couldn’t form, heavy elements couldn’t emerge, there could be no stable equilibrium to anything etc…

This felicity, that such quantities “happen to be” what they turn out to be, rather than some other figure in the much wider space of modal possibilities which would render life impossible, is taken as evidence of deliberation. They seem, so says the advocate of this line of reasoning, to be chosen in order to condition the causal unfolding of the world in accord with the designs of an intellect.

We are drawn to this inference in part because the analogous sorts of correspondence with which we are most familiar, those which govern the behavior of our toasters and elevators, all do indeed direct us back to the deliberate activity of an intelligent agent. Much of the observable orderliness we regularly experience we know to be the result of such extrinsic design because we are its designers, and so we are prone to see the shadow of the same within the wider conditions in which we are situated. We design from a space of possibilities and choose that which we judge best fitted to our purpose, and so we may imagine God as a perfect designer choosing analogous parameters from the space of logical possibility for His own more mysterious purposes.

Skeptical rebuttals to this inference tend to highlight its anthropocentrism or the inability to justify assigning probabilities to logical counterfactuals. Of course we come to find the world “well fit” for us, because the circumstances in which we might exist at all to make such inquiries presuppose at least as much. And how do we justify any remarks about the counterfactual “likelihood” of narrow values discovered at the most general level of reality “happening to be” otherwise? It’s not quite clear what this means. Part of the motivating intuition here seems to be that most of these values are quite particular: the fine structure constant of ~1/137 which conditions the structure of atoms or the proton-electron mass ratio of ~1836.153. It’s not only that the range of values which could make life possible is narrow, but it’s further that those values seem brute and irregular. We are prone to associate simplicity with necessity, and parsimony is a mark of credibility for ultimate explanatory power. Kepler’s cosmology displaced Ptolemy’s not firstly by outright falsification, both could in principle explain what was observed, but by parsimony in their relative descriptions of the same phenomena. For similar reasons, the bruteness of a figure like the fine-structure constant seems to draw the mind towards some more simple and obscure pre-condition.

But skeptics are not the only ones who ought to object to the nascent reasoning in the most popular “fine-tuning” arguments. Those of us who are entirely convicted of the reality of God, of His presence and His providence in all things, have perhaps even more reason to be reticent about them. What follows then, are three distinctly theistic objections to the “fine-tuned” characterization of the cosmos.

Taxidermies of Causality

The fixed quantities which occasion this discussion are firstly abstracted from events in nature. What are first given in experience are objects which act and change: fire from the stove heats a pot of water until it boils, electrical current runs through a copper wire, the light from the sun turns red as it sinks into the horizon. The quantities we invoke are abstracted from attention to these things: the 450 THz frequency of the red light, the 100 degrees centigrade of the boiling water, the ohms, amps, and voltage which characterize the circuit through the copper wire etc… Quantities offer a language with which to express robust relationships, which consistently obtain in our observation of events, but they are always firstly properties of those actual events. Their reliability is in fact derivative of the natural activity of the things they are abstracted from: Red light has this frequency, water boils at that temperature etc…

As our terms of description become more “abstract, precise, and universal” they also become increasingly attenuated from the very objects they describe. Quantitative abstractions, however powerful they are in predicting and describing behavior, are not its causes in the plainest sense. Fire causes the water to boil, and the magnet draws the iron to itself. Different things act in accordance with their natures and incumbent powers. Abstracted mathematical relations are like “taxidermies” of that causality: frozen displays of what is always in the first instance living and active. Already implicit in things being what they are is their doing what they do.

With this order of priority in view, the “fine-tuning” we have been discussing seems trivial, since it is already abstracted from the being of the very things it is invoked as the condition of. Further, from this perspective, the aforementioned “exceptional” character of living things seems less exceptional. To understand nature in terms of substances and powers omits any needless discontinuity in the terms by which it might be characterized. What this view does not always permit is the same sense of comprehension, nor the same degree of predictive power and control, of the objects of experience. Reality discloses itself according to a manner of attention.

Likewise, God is not firstly a deistic “designer”, extrinsic to the unfolding of His designs. He is always and everywhere the first act of existence, and the unconditioned cause of all conditions. To marvel at “fine tuned” particularity in the unfolding of the created order risks marveling at the blueprints of an absentee author, as the engineer is absent from the engine. The word of God, though, is “living and active” (cf. Hb 4:12). From the first light to the last man, He speaks and so it is.

The Violence of Miracles

A further objection to the “fine-tuned” picture of the universe is that it readily fosters an allergy to the miraculous. Against the backdrop of a well-tempered cosmos, God’s infrequent and dramatic interventions can seem scandalous and arbitrary. Why should the God who perfectly established the order of nature have further cause to disrupt it?

But even further, how could He? If the “laws” and constants we have derived and expressed describe reality at its most fundamental level, then to subvert or suspend them in this or that instance for this or that purpose is to do a sort of violence to the whole created order. It would be to remove the bottom plank from a tower and to set it crosswise on the top, or to pluck the link which chains the chandelier to the ceiling so to hang it from the bulbs.

But to think instead firstly of substances and powers as prior-in-being, and the quantitative laws we abstract from them as posterior and derivative, is again to dissolve the discontinuity. God is once more the active cause of all things being what they are, and so too the natures in accord of which they act. Just as living things no longer run afoul of a wider mechanical picture, neither do miracles “violate” prior and more fundamental laws of nature. They are, like natural things and events, acts of God in accordance with His will.

Ordinary nature, on this view, concerns the principles of motion and rest which are present in the activity of things “always or for the most part” (cf. Phys. II.1, 192b21–23; II.5, 196b10–17): the tree which draws nourishment from its roots or the iron which is oxidized from air and water vapor. God’s supernatural acts, from beyond and without, could then illuminate an order which is already present to us precisely in surpassing it. We may come to grasp just what things are in the special testimony of the God who made them so. And what is it that He declares?

Fallen Nature

Creation, preaches St Paul, was “subjected to vanity” (Rm 8:20). It groans and travails in labor, awaiting the redemption of the children of God (cf. Rm 8:21-22). The book of Wisdom asserts that God did not make death, nor does He delight in the death of the living (cf. Ws 1:13). Still everything we find is burdened with decay, corruption, and dissolution. Life, as the world alone displays it, is brief and contingent, while death surrounds it in timeless and unyielding necessity.

In reconciling these two testimonies, Scripture and the Church offer us an image of an original calamity, that the world as we encounter it is otherwise than God intends it to be. In such a state, nature is not an entirely reliable narrator, it does not declare itself unscathed. Likewise men as we are, with wounded hearts and twisted souls, are surely not reliable interpreters even of ourselves. “I do not understand myself” again admits St Paul, “for I do not do the good I want but do the very thing I hate” (Rm 7:15-19). In such a condition, neither nature as an object of experience nor men as subjects of its understanding can be entirely depended upon. A fallen world does not firstly display even the truth of itself and fallen men do not desire that truth first of all.

In this context, a superficially “fine-tuned” characterization of the cosmos is not merely trivial or constricting but is grossly misplaced. In John’s gospel, Jesus thrice refers to the devil as “the prince of this world” (cf. Jn 12:31, 14:30, and 16:11). He is a “murderer from the beginning” and the “father of lies” (cf. Jn 8:44). From his lie to our first parents, sin entered the world and through sin, death (cf. Rm 5:12). And so death haunts the objects of our knowledge and lies haunt all the knowers.

God though, is “not the God of the dead but of the living” (cf. Mt 22:32). His word is truth and life (cf. Jn 17:17, Jn 6:68). In willing to be born and die, He freely shared in what for us is stark necessity, the death which haunts all “certain” causes. In the miracle of His Resurrection, He sheds light on all creation and the nature of its groaning and its labor. And in His long-expected coming, He will have redeemed (“fine-tuned”) the world.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For about six years in my twenties I made my living traveling, writing songs, and playing upright and electric bass for a group called Upstate. Playing music full time was something we had mostly stumbled into, and even what we called ourselves was a bit of an accidental accretion. We enjoyed writing music together, the spirit and the energy of a crowd, and the romantic allure of a life on the road. At first, if we made any money at all it was a nice bit of gratuitous validation. Later, when we made enough, the money helped to justify our time and attention. We started young and easy, and we weren’t pressed to take stock of which part of the life we were living was our ultimate reason for living it.

Our longest single stretch on the road took up seven weeks in the summer of 2016. We went from New England down through the mid-Atlantic, across the South to the Southwest and Colorado, and then up through California and Oregon to end up in Seattle. The route looked a bit like someone had drawn a big smile right across a map of the lower 48. There were eight of us in a twelve-passenger van, with the back four seats removed and replaced with a large wooden shelf for our suitcases. We kept all the instruments and merchandise underneath, and above it we put up a shower curtain pole to hang a repurposed soccer net for all our less stackable things, like pillows and sleeping bags. Most nights we stayed in campgrounds or with various hosts, either friends or strangers we found through a couchsurfing website. Every ten days or so we booked a couple hotel rooms (one for men and one for women) to get reliable access to laundry and a shower.

That route in the middle of the summer was a bit disorienting. We could wake up one morning an hour shy of the sunrise, half-chewing on the thick wet air in a Toad Suck, Arkansas campground, and within a week find ourselves meeting a host at a mile marker in the middle of a dry New Mexican desert. That host led us to a little compound he had set up a couple miles off the road, though our van could hardly manage the terrain to get there. At night we ate some of his homemade pickles and drank whiskey under a canopy of stars (rare for us northeasterners) that made the sky seem like a pierced veil set over an ocean of light. Later still in Berkeley, we stayed with an eclectic mathematician who showed us the thousands of Klein bottles that he stored under his house. He had made a little robot forklift from a toy racecar and a repurposed Pontiac window mechanism to sort them. He gave us each some special keepsakes, with the hope that we would someday return the favor with a comparably personal gesture, smirking as he assured us it would linger on our consciences. It still does.

Over the years that followed, and especially after we had a booking agent, we got more demanding about our itineraries and expectations. We cut out the campgrounds, couchsurfing, and sleeping on the floor. We put a hard limit to our set lengths, and how long we were willing to drive in a day, and we booked more hotel rooms so everybody could expect a bed of their own. We were selling tickets, and our new standards weren’t unreasonable, but still there was an odd sense that the better the conditions got for us the less satisfied we were with them. Everything that visibly improved brought along a loss that was more obscure or at least harder to describe.

As we got older, different members came and went, and the band became a sort of ship of Theseus with respect to our sound and personality. We lost and gained cello, saxophone, mandolin, and cajon. We went from two female lead vocals to three and ultimately back to two. Today we have three original members remaining and ten or so former members. Some decided they weren’t fit for life on the road, others just that they needed more financial stability, and still for others the reasons were largely creative or interpersonal. Even among those of us who continued together over the years, we were often at odds with each other in what we wanted out of playing music. The band at times was like a car trip with no clear or shared destination, and each of us negotiating over our turn at the steering wheel.

It’s hard to mark then when it happened, but at some point we started to really live at the mercy of our listeners. There’s of course a crude practical sense in which that’s always true, it’s the ticket sales that put gas in the van and pay for the hotel rooms. But there’s a spiritual sense as well. When our personal reasons for touring and playing failed to satisfy us, or when our internal conflicts seemed most unbridgeable, the desire of others to see and hear us play kept us willing to do it. Fans occasionally wrote to us about the ways our songs had become a soundtrack to the changes in their lives, and some even had us perform at their weddings. Playing the same songs can grow stale, but even at a midweek show with sparse attendance, we’d often talk to someone for whom everything was new and it made it all a little newer for us in their hearing it. It’s a bit like when you show someone a favorite movie. Your attention stays fixed on their response, hoping you might again share in something of that virgin experience, or even that their fresh impression will deepen your own encounter with the film. Sometimes when we’d play a concert, I’d pick out one person in the audience and fix my attention on them, and in watching them hear this or that song I’d start to hear it again too.

Artists, and musicians especially, are continually subject to the dual temptations of self-importance and self-indulgence. People value the mark of music on their lives in immeasurable ways, and so musicians can be prone to an inflated self-regard for providing it. At the same time, music can seem a gratuitous addition to the bare necessities of life, and so we might also reason that our dedication to it is merely a matter of personal fulfillment and authenticity. Making music “for the audience” can be prideful, or it can turn the music you make into a kind of funhouse mirror, reflecting a crude image of the crowd’s easy responses back at them. Making music “for yourself” can be trivializing, or it can aim that same sort of reflective gaze only at the easy reaches of your heart. In either extreme, nothing can really break in from without, and so nothing really new can ever happen.

* * *

Our particular band was formed in New York’s Hudson Valley, which has its own sort of secondhand cultural world, one that has made it almost a pilgrimage site of American music. Little of the sound that marks the place originated there. There’s nothing like a Congo square, where African drumming and French marching rhythms pressed against each other to bring forth American swing. There’s no real distinctive rhythm, like the shuffle of Chicago blues or the crooked forms of old-time fiddle, and no tin pan alley harmony marked with the aural palette of Eastern European Jews. But it’s a place where circumstance and accident brought together waves of sundry musicians who each made a lasting mark on the American musical lexicon. Bob Dylan and the Band made their famous basement tapes in Saugerties, on the west side of the river, and Pete Seeger settled in Beacon and started up the Clearwater festival on the east side. The Woodstock festival of love which capped off the 1960s happened in Bethel, New York, about an hour inland.

When my dad was in his twenties, he lived with several friends who formed a Hudson Valley band called Mirkwood, named after the dark forest of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. They played a blend of earnest folk-rock mingled with the spirit and influences of the valley: both like the clanky rock-and-roll of Big Pink and The Band, and the mild American folk of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason. When I was growing up I’d often sit in and play bass with the Mirkwoodians during their infrequent reunions, especially after their original bassist, Nick, had passed away. Years later, when I had gathered together a band of my own, my dad was keen again to have everyone live in his house while we spent more than half our lives on the road. His old friend Jim Kramer, who had managed and booked for Mirkwood in the ‘70s, came out of his music industry retirement to do the same for us. Tony Falco, a dedicated supporter of musicians and artists throughout the valley, hosted us for all the concerts that really built our local following at his (modestly) famed venue, the Falcon. It was all of their charity, enthusiasm, and patronage that made it possible for us to do what we did at all.

But what was it we were doing? Were we carrying the torch of a local legacy? Or providing a vicarious second life for the generation before us who had hung up their own musical adventures? Were we after the allure of the road and the thrill of the crowd for ourselves or were we really, as the troubadour James McMurtry puts it, just “traveling beer salesmen”? What, when all is said and done, are the ends of art? There are two subjects of that question, the artist and their audience, and they are intertwined. All art is a kind of address, and the fullness of its meaning implicates both giver and receiver, even if they together remain somewhat of a mystery to one another.

***

Over the thirteen years that I’ve been playing and writing songs, my own sense of that meaning has shifted a great deal. The earliest songs I wrote were a sort of pastiche, my idea of what songs were meant to be like. One of our first hits, a song called “Old Advice”, is largely a patchwork of encouraging cliches set to be a foil for a bouncy rhythm and oblong harmony that had already been stirring in my head. With another song, “Sarah”, I followed John Prine’s counsel that songs about a single character seem to be the richest when they come from a patchwork of impressions of different people encountered in life. Some songs have come together almost all at once in an elusive moment of inspiration, and others have been like pulling teeth. Sometimes I knew exactly what I meant to convey, and at other times the meaning of a song only became clear to me in hindsight. Having a body of past creative work offers a kind of mirror into the unfolding shape of my life; it highlights what I’ve grown to care about or even just to pay attention to. And still that always goes along with what might resonate with or delight the audience. The songs over time have been like an extended conversation, but it’s been so drawn out that it can seem disjoint. Both audience and artist have changed in ways that couldn’t be predicted or directed in advance, so it can be obscure what presence, if any, ties the dialogue together. Leonard Cohen wasn’t blowing smoke when he noted in an interview that “you don’t write the songs anyhow”.

Across that same stretch of time, I also experienced a drawn-out conversion to the Catholic faith, and no other event has had a more profound impact on my understanding. Faith has made my life, with some fits and starts, into an extended conversation with God. A sense of His presence brings a constancy to what had seemed erratic and disjoint, but not necessarily by any new or visible clarity. Saint John of the Cross described faith as a “dark light”; it illuminates the presence of what can’t be seen or sensed. It hasn’t shown me how the arc of my life might hang together, but it nonetheless grants me the assurance that it does, because it’s a palpable gift of the One in whom it does. So the author of Hebrews calls faith the substance of things hoped for, and what makes evident those things unseen (cf Hb11:1).

Faith also has given me a different lens with which to view the relationship shared by art, artist, and audience, especially as it concerns the mystery of inspiration. When Jesus explained the work of the Spirit to Nicodemus, he compared it to the wind (cf. Jn 3:8). It’s known by its effects but we know not from whence it comes or where it’s going. Both origins and ends elude us; a journey from God to God. The Church offers a similar insight about Holy Writ when she speaks of the Holy Spirit as both the author and the interpreter of Scripture. Every book of the Bible has a human author who wrote in human language for a particular audience in a particular time. They have been further read and interpreted across several more millennia of diffuse cultures and traditions, mediated by various structures of authority and worship and by the private devotion and direct encounter of millions and millions of solitary souls. From the point of view of the world alone, the conversation is irreparably disjoint. There is no common presence thread between the various human authors and the many more varied human interpreters. But to believe with the Church that the Holy Spirit is likewise both their author and interpreter is to believe that the Bible is a book and that the Church is a Body. Because He’s God, His presence in both roles is entirely noncompetitive. He does not dictate the words of the text, He inspires them. It’s his inspiration which is both the constancy and coherence of the Word and its true reception in those who hear it. He is the conduit which links the address and those addressed.

This image offers an analogy to the work of any artist. There’s something I mean to convey when I write a song, even if some of its contours are veiled to me. But I mean to convey it to someone; I want something to be understood and shared. Because it’s a song and not only a lyric, it won’t be carried by the shape of words and phrases alone, but as much by the shape of air and time, which are together the media of music. None of those channels belong to me, neither the words, nor the wind, and still less the time. I borrow and arrange them to convey something else, a meaning which seems like it might belong to me. But in its hearers more might be made illuminated, they might receive more than I intended to give, and the same might be made clearer to me in their reception. Between us the meaning is a conduit, and a good song is a conduit for both of us to some small part of what is real.

God’s Word is at the heart of the meaning of any word we speak, and his Spirit carries it along through the world like the wind. The fullness of time is his creature and his canvas, and it can belong to Him alone. But it’s his presence in these that thread the things they carry along together and make them part of one thing, though its origins and ends elude us. We know the wind by its effects, but not from whence it comes or where it’s going.

“Christ’s compassion toward the sick and his many healings of every kind of infirmity are a resplendent sign that “God has visited his people” and that the Kingdom of God is close at hand. Jesus has the power not only to heal, but also to forgive sins; he has come to heal the whole man, soul and body; he is the physician the sick have need of. His compassion toward all who suffer goes so far that he identifies himself with them: “I was sick and you visited me.” His preferential love for the sick has not ceased through the centuries to draw the very special attention of Christians toward all those who suffer in body and soul. It is the source of tireless efforts to comfort them.” -CCC 1503

A man goes to see a physician because something is wrong. There are signs which make it known to him. He feels nauseous or has trouble sleeping, there is a throbbing behind his eyes or a ringing in his ears. Each symptom is an interior address of an obscure condition.

The physician might then examine the man, and he too will look for signs. The man’s eyes are red, or yellow, or gray. Capillaries snake up to the edge of his iris or his pupils are slow to respond to the light. He notes too the man has patchy skin, or that he shivers in the heated room. Each of these marks is an exterior address of the same hidden condition.

There is still more that he can only glean from what the man reveals to him, what is accessible only in and through the man’s subjective experience. The physician asks him questions and pays attention. The questions help to guide the man’s own attention to himself, to how he feels and where he hurts. This is an imperfect process, and neither end of the exchange will ever be exhaustive. There are reaches of the man’s interior experience he will not plumb deep enough to encounter, and there are outward signs even a good physician will miss. Still, the truth of the man’s condition is found, insofar as it is, in the conduit between them, and so it is conditioned also by the trust which may obtain between them. The ill man must be truthful with the physician if he is to permit the physician to heal him, and the physician must seek the man’s good and do no harm if he is to be worthy of such trust.

Jesus, we hear in the gospels, is the great physician, and “those who are well have no need of a physician, but rather those who are sick. [He] has come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Lk 5:31). We are all of us sick, not merely of body and mind but of soul. The soul draws its life from God, and sin has sundered it from its source. Christ enters history to restore us by the humility of His humanity, and to elevate us in the grandeur of His Divinity. We must trust Him if this work is to be effected in us, and it is this trust which we call Faith.

The priest, who acts in His person, is a physician of the soul. We come to him because something is wrong. Like the ill man, there may be signs which make this known to us. We have trouble sleeping, or persistently unwelcome thoughts. We may feel dejected or despairing, or just a dulled sense of desire for what is real and good. We may have a sense of we know not what, lurking beneath what we can reach and signify with words.

The priest may examine us, and he too will look for signs. He will depend even more than the ordinary physician on our testimony. The signs which make us known to him are what we do, our actions in the world, which disclose the person from whence they spring. If he is a good priest, he will have a sober wisdom about our reasons for acting and our capacity to misperceive them. He will gather an impression from our testimony of our present relationship to God. Insofar as he is truly a priest, he will help to mediate that relationship from without.

But this can only be so if there is a meeting with our conscience. That is, with the original priest that dwells in the human heart. Jesus Christ, who is very God, acts at the heart of our person from within and through the communion of His Church from without. As with the physician and the ill man, the truth is encountered in the conduit by which they meet. This can seem imperfect, we often have a very poor knowledge of ourselves, and priests are fallible sinful men themselves, who can be imprudent or capricious. But Jesus Christ, who is the perfect high priest, completes what is lacking in us and in them.

The Gardener

“The Church is a cultivated field, the tillage of God. On that land the ancient olive tree grows whose holy roots were the prophets and in which the reconciliation of Jews and Gentiles has been brought about and will be brought about again. That land, like a choice vineyard, has been planted by the heavenly cultivator. Yet the true vine is Christ who gives life and fruitfulness to the branches, that is, to us, who through the Church remain in Christ, without whom we can do nothing.” - CCC 755

A man tends a garden, not because something is wrong, but such that something may grow. He digs to make space for roots to burrow. He plants and he waters. He plucks weeds where he can, and abides them where he can’t. He prunes all that withers. But however much he labors, it is not him who gives the growth. He is not the source of life which springs from the earth, nor the source of light and heat which gazes on from above. “Life” and “light” are both titles of Christ, who calls Himself “the truth and the life” (Jn 14:6) and “the light of the world” (Jn 8:12). It’s of Him the psalmist sings that “truth springs out of the earth, and righteousness looks on from the heavens” (Ps 85:11). We may in at times in our confusion, mistake what acts from without with what acts from within, but it may also be He mingles them. When He rose from death, Magdalene mistook Him for the gardener (Jn 20:15).

The faith of the Church is like a garden in the world, and so her ministers are gardeners. Paul writes to the Corinthians that it may be he who planted and Apollos who watered, but it was God who gave the increase; for they are each laborers together with God, though it is the body of the faithful who are His “husbandry” and His “building” (cf. 1 Cor 3:6-9). It is a strange pairing of images, invoking both cultivation and artifice. Peter’s first epistle does the same when he writes of God’s people that they are “the living stones of a spiritual house”, again gesturing at both organic growth and laborious assembly.

A garden may be our only familiar experience of such a pairing. It is full of creatures ordered from their own internal principles of life, which are cultivated and arranged from without by human efforts. This is the primordial priesthood of man to creation: the nature of things is only given to him, but he may order and arrange it as he sees fit. He is constrained by much more than his taste however, some arrangements will bear more fruit than others, some may be overgrown and others may wither.

He may order this or that to his immanent purposes: for food and clothing, shelter or just the beauty and fragrance of new flowers. But he is meanwhile preparing for a harvest for he knows not what, sown from before his time upon the earth and set only to be reaped at its end. In God’s kingdom, “he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together.” (Jn 4:36).

Jesus often likens His Word to a seed sown in the soil of men’s hearts, wherein their souls may be its harvest. He tells a parable about its being sown gratuitously and the different ways it may be, or fail to be, received (cf. Mt 13:1-9). He likens God’s kingdom to a mustard seed, small enough to be unnoticed but which may grow to be the largest of trees (Mt 13:31-32). He notes in another parable that wheat and weeds must come up together, until their separation at the harvest (Mt 13:24-30).

Jesus, through the ministry of the Church, is the gardener of the world. He sows and waters and prunes and lights and heats and harvests. But He is also Himself the “True Vine”, such that His members are the branches (cf. Jn 15:1), and it is His selfsame life the Church will tend to in the world. Her bishops cannot give it growth, but they can order and prune and they do so with His authority; they can seek out the charisms of others and build them up, and do away with that which bears no fruit.

The Shepherd

“The Church is, accordingly, a sheepfold, the sole and necessary gateway to which is Christ. It is also the flock of which God himself foretold that he would be the shepherd, and whose sheep, even though governed by human shepherds, are unfailingly nourished and led by Christ himself, the Good Shepherd and Prince of Shepherds, who gave his life for his sheep.” - CCC 754

A shepherd looks after his flock. They go this way and that, and they feed where they please. He leads them to pasture and makes them to rest (cf. Ps 23). The vine is rooted in one place, but the sheep are led through the sheepfold. They have a destination.

As He is physician and gardener, so is Jesus Christ a shepherd. Of all these roles, it is this one which is most explicit. He does not disclose it by metaphor or parable, He simply declares that He is “the good shepherd” (Jn 10:11). But unlike with the other titles, He must tell us what He means. Our good shepherd is more strange than our physician and our gardener, for He is more unlike the image that the world has yielded us.

He tells us that a good shepherd lays down His life for His sheep, that He knows them and they know His voice. He tells the story of a shepherd who will leave His ninety-nine alone to seek the one who’s wandered off until he’s found. There is an unworldliness to these impressions. What shepherd dies for his sheep? Which risks the whole of his flock just for the one who’s gotten loose? Certainly not “the hireling” who abandons them at the first sign of trouble (cf. Jn 10:12-13). This is how our worldly guides may be, but if we are His then we will know His voice and we will follow Him (Jn 10:27). Sheep are docile creatures, and such docility is how we may be led.

Insofar as we are ill, we are in need of a physician. Insofar as we are soil, we are in need of seed to bear. But insofar as we are lost, we await a voice to guide us home. When Jesus heals He may declare our faith has saved us (cf. Lk 18:42). He ever likens such faith to a seed which bears good fruit. The apostle yet reminds that “faith comes from hearing” (cf. Rm 10:17). His sheep hear His voice, it says “follow me”.

Header image is “The Lord is My Shepherd” by the painter Ira Thomas

Lord, 
The air is crisp
This peach is ripe
And sweet enough
It is so light to be at all
Bare-tethered to eternity
And ill-fit for it
The day is mostly spent
Perhaps it was enough
The fleeting glare gave all its savor

Please,
Strip me of this tepid satisfaction
It can answer for nothing
Burn the water off my bones until they hiss with hatred of the grave
Let the air groan heavy wet
And make this peach to taste of sour wine
So I will know to thirst

I cannot ask this earnestly
But I could maybe see it through
I could not really bear the world,
In its heaving and its labor
Or offer any easy answer for it

Lord,
Please,
Offer one in me
Yours would be enough

Magnifica Humanitas

Iron dreams of hopeless men
Cleave open through the midst of life
Here, Cross island through old estates
There, Cross Bronx through old poverty
Come and see the new Moses 
Parting land to bring his people to the water

Refashioning the world by force of will
Unraveling the will by force of world
Each time a jagged flood to wear away the form it fills
Prayerless little storms of unmaking
The mountains may not melt like wax or leap like rams
But they can yet be blown to bits

Hope though, comes by dreams more strange and marginal
By arrogant itinerants on stone pillows
And anxious kings in purpled thread
Full of ladders and angels
Premonitions of famine and plenty
Eyes and wings and faces that do violence to the imagination

And yet most tender still is that
which came by iron spear 
through dreamless Man
Cleft hidden in the midst of death

At the Capuchin Crypt

When the trumpet sounds, there will be a great commotion here
Fra Paolo finds his femur on the ceiling
Padre Giovanni recollects himself
from the diffuse ornate displays
perhaps the friars will not know
which of what belongs to who
God may raise them rearranged
Perhaps it will matter, in some fitting way
known only to the One 
from whom these bones were never hidden
It will be neither comic nor monstrous

A Creed of Contingency

There may yet be some place
Wherein a circle could be square
But I am sure there is no place
Save that the Son is present there

And there may be some time to come
That one and one will sum to three
But there will never be a time
In which He did not die for me

I may know enough to know myself
The seed of Abraham
Yet I am not so self-assured to boast
"I think therefore I am"

For it was not by thought or thinking
That He first made known His proof
But in Rivka’s gracious welcome
Showed His Mercy and His Truth

Love to me is mystery
Still more what is truly good
But I know that I might taste it
In His body and His blood

He has shown me by salvation
From my life of dust to dust
That what is, though it need not be
Is more certain than what must

For Pope St. Paul VI, the Gardener of Modern Men

Are not the limbs which bear the bud the thinnest of the branches?
Winding the most crooked path to lift their leaves to light
The trunk’s thick bark is thickened more for every wound it stanches
While slender twigs yield sweeter figs with scarcely room for blight

It has been said that modern man is thinnest of his brethren
He’s sifted far from root and dirt by which he drew his life
From home and tongue, and kin and cult, yet just as far from heaven
As any man who ever lived with thicker woe and strife

But Paul VI did not see chaff when he beheld his children
He saw the buds of charity now poised to bear sweet fruit
He loved what was sui generis in every man and woman
And yet he knew the root sustains, 
Not they who hold the root

So when the world risked losing
What could never be recovered
He yet held fast that life and love
Condition one another

Early on I made a few regular friends at lunchtime, sitting in with a group of young mothers who mostly ate together, but after the pandemic hit in early 2020 our schedules got even more staggered and I couldn’t count on seeing anyone with much consistency. At that point we were also wearing masks throughout our shifts, and it was harder to make any new introductions. No one ever comes to feel familiar with half a face and a muffled voice, and so the lot of us began to keep more easily to ourselves.

The job was largely solitary, but we were permitted a single earbud to listen to something while we worked. We were told not to fuss with it once we had it playing; just to “set it and forget it”. Music was unsatisfying since it would compete with the noise of loud machinery buzzing in my empty ear, and short-form media like podcasts would finish well before I had a chance to pick something to follow them, so I mostly tried to stick with audiobooks that could last through an entire shift. It was in that environment that I first listened to a recording of Alasdair Macintyre’s “After Virtue” over two or three successive overnights.

After Virtue

I was, at the time, in an especially fitting place of life to encounter it, and I subsequently went out and bought a physical copy to read it again. I had recently moved home after resigning from the Socialist Workers Party branch in Albany, and I had become disillusioned with Marxism for many of the same reasons Macintyre gestures at in After Virtue. Those reasons had partly prompted his own similar intellectual trajectory, which was in media res at the time of its composition. The book is, as a result, unsettled and a bit disjoint, mirroring the contemporaneous state of its author. In a certain sense, the work lacks the very thing it so compellingly highlights the needfulness of: a living tradition and form of life which can make a moral vocabulary intelligible.

Macintyre opens After Virtue with the “disquieting suggestion” that our loftiest moral language has been stripped of a shared context needed to adjudicate it. He likens modern moral argument to the pseudoscientific babble of the monks in the dystopian novel, a Canticle for Leibowitz, who quibble over the terminology of particle physics without any sense of either the experimental conditions or the wider paradigm which gave those terms any meaning. We either engage in conflicts of incommensurable values, with no rational means to prioritize them, or our words themselves have been so stripped of a sensible context that they can be marshaled in the service of entirely opposite practical commitments. Debates about abortion may set the justice owed to the unborn child against a woman’s agency or autonomy in terms which don’t readily admit of argument or even much dialogue at all. Advocates for and opponents of medically administered death appeal to “dignity” with rival animating force. Everyone in every conflict exalts “justice”, but in a manner that makes it seem to mean nothing at all.

That diagnosis follows with an ambitious attempt at an intellectual genealogy, aiming to pinpoint the roots of our moral deracination. These passages have garnered a great deal of criticism, much of it later welcomed as friendly amendment by their author, but as a reader then I knew too little to judge them. They seemed to me to possess a great deal of erudition, more at least than my political life had formed me to seek out; though they are likewise marked with Macintyre’s own residual Marxism. He had by this juncture despaired of the notion that Marx’s historical and dialectical materialism offered any answers to the most urgent questions of human life, but his analysis remained indelibly marked with Marx’s diagnostic power. In the vision of After Virtue it seems, all that’s solid really does melt into air and all that’s holy really is profaned.

The real brilliance and originality of the book though, is in neither the pessimistic diagnosis nor the intellectual genealogy, both of which have many analogues in all sorts of other thinkers. Macintyre’s more unique contributions instead come when he seeks to recover a general conception of the human virtues. He first explores the diffuse historical contingencies of the virtues as represented in literature, eclectically highlighting Homer and Jane Austen. But after pressing the limits of that endeavor, he more boldly grasps at the contours of virtue through his quasi-analytic notion of a “practice”. By this he means those “coherent and complex” activities of human common life for which means and ends are constitutively inextricable. That is, wherein the ends pursued as goods internal to the practice are entirely bound up with excellence in the means of pursuing them. Practices so conceived, don’t exist as means for the extrinsic rewards of wealth, honor, power, or pleasure that might incidentally accompany them, and part of maturing as a practitioner involves coming to value and desire those goods intrinsic to a practice more than any of the external rewards incidentally associated with its mastery.

Pre-modern forms of life and thought had often been accompanied by politics, law, and productive activity which were themselves analogous to this notion of a practice. To be a great lawyer or statesman had to do with one’s service to the end that law and politics was aimed at, justice among those sharing a political life and service to the common good. The processes by which cobblers made shoes or bakers baked bread were likewise “practices” in this sense, good shoes being the work of good cobblers etc.

But the terms in which modern political life is carried out have rendered such analogy untenable. Those terms were built up from a hodgepodge of social contract theories and liberal indeterminacy with respect to even the ordinary ends of life and justice, and brought about through aging articles of peace between diffuse communities who disputed those ends to the point of violence. The age-old problems of politics concerned the ways that the pursuits of wealth and power, private pleasures and public honors, corrupted the ends of justice and harmony that politics existed to achieve. But modern politics had reduced the boundaries of political concern to only these things alone: the distribution of wealth and pleasure by the measure of “utility”, or the exaltation of private powers by the enumeration of “rights”, with no singular means to judge between them and no vision of a shared good in which they might be situated.

Industrial capitalism, which had come alongside those political developments, had had a similar effect on human productive activity. Less and less of what gets produced could be made by cobblers, or bakers, or haberdashers, rather than the de-skilled labor of proletarians according to the designs of engineers. Rarely could the ordinary work of human life, nor the means by which that life is organized and shared, cultivate the virtues needed to make that life a genuinely human one. Where such humanity could be cultivated at all, it would have an almost arbitrary relationship to the actual carrying on of the world; it would be more and more “useless”. Still, even in that sort of “moral wilderness”, we would surely go on dancing ballet and playing chess, and it’s in these enduring human practices that Macintyre sought to rediscover the grammar of the virtues.

Alongside the many years I had spent caught up in Marxist politics, I had also studied, worked, and taught as a jazz musician and double bassist. My experience with music had made Macintyre’s notion of a practice resonate with intimate familiarity. How I practiced and performed, apprenticed with venerable masters and communicated what I had learned to students of my own, was at once how I would come to flourish as a musician and what that flourishing consisted of. There was an internal harmony of being and doing, of means and ends, which was utterly self-evident in the discipline. Playing jazz also meant participating in a living tradition, one with a musical language and a history that was itself a part of the ends sought in its mastery. Participation in that tradition was necessary to really understand or speak sensibly about it.

When I later had some minor success on the road with a commercial touring band, I got to live out the classical tension of means and ends as it had always been experienced: the aims of selling tickets and attracting attention often stood at odds with the aims of making the best art, and our relationship with our audience could sit in tension with our relationships with each other. Alongside the cultivation of needful virtues to the practice of playing music and writing songs, it would take habits of honesty, constancy, and temperance to navigate the extrinsic challenges of doing so in a commercial context.

In After Virtue, Macintyre had at once penetrated the major domains of my life from its political radicalism to its musical practice and creative ambition, and in a manner which seemed broad and eclectic and erudite, whatever misreadings and confusions were there (I wouldn’t have known enough to recognize them anyway). It seemed to make sense of the whole of my experience of life in a kind of confused flash, and it set a trajectory for how my life would continue, mapping the contours of the path its author had trod ahead of me. People will often speak of what it might mean to live a “Hegelian life” or a “Nietzschean life”. That is, philosophy if it is to be philosophy is meant to help us live and to understand our lives in living them. If there is any philosopher I can say has most consistently informed my life and my understanding of my living it, it is Alasdair Macintyre. I hope this piece and those which will follow it might display my understanding of what it is to live something like a “Macintyrean” life.

A recent critical review in the socialist magazine Current Affairs highlights the philosophical sloppiness of Douthat’s case. The magazine’s editor, Nathan J. Robinson, appends a comment in promoting the piece that “religious claims are still false and need debunking”.

I don’t intend here to adjudicate the particular claims in Mr. Douthat’s book or the objections raised by the review in Current Affairs. I think God’s existence, in the sense understood by classical theists, is a trivial and necessary part of the grammar of reality. Rightly understood, it’s the most certain thing known, and sufficient humility and reason permit it to be known definitively by anyone. I think St. Thomas’ traditional “ways” to God’s existence from motion and contingency are plainly valid and invite needless absurdities and confusion in their being rejected. These are not the sorts of arguments Ross emphasizes in “Believe”. His chosen alternatives seem to me more eclectic and tenuous, and justifiably subject to some of his interlocutors’ objections. But I am more interested in emphasizing that none of the arguments offered, either by Ross or his interlocutor, concern “religious claims”. They are engaged in a philosophical dispute, which has import for the manner in which religious claims can and will be entertained, but they are not participating in a distinctly “religious” argument at all.

Philosophy approaches God by the force of necessity, and the God approached in thought alone is aloof and indeterminate. He is simple and self-existent, without composition or cause. What is such a God to men, and what is man that God should be mindful of him (cf. Ps 8:5)? What difference can He make to men’s affairs and the courses of their lives, the justice by which they live together or the hearts from which they seek and will what’s good? These are perennially intractable questions, and thought in any age and culture continually finds itself shipwrecked upon them. They can be at once the most urgent questions life poses and the most impotent.

Religion instead approaches God, if and when God is indeed its object, by the force of contingency. It binds its adherents to be these people who worship Him in this way, with this history and myth by which they understand their place in the cosmos and that desired end for which they hope together. Because religions in this sense are particular and contextual, they are anything but perennial. They come to be and they pass away, they can be vital and full of life or they can shatter and die. They can suffer crises of authority or crises of epistemology. But religions mediate the common loves we will and seek, and the justice which we live together by; in all their facets they are a means by which these dimensions of life relate us to God and to each other. In this sense philosophy grasps in thought at what religion gives in act. There is nothing more natural to man than to be religious.

A distinctly “religious” claim is then a claim concerning the relationship of some brute contingency: that this happened rather than that (be it a war, a marriage, an earthquake) or that this exists rather than that (rabbits and not unicorns, horses and not minotaurs), to that subject of most lofty and intractable necessity, God. Philosophers speak of God in lofty transcendental words like “beauty”, “truth” and “goodness”. Theologians speak of fire, fig trees, bread, and wine. Hugh of St. Victor in the 12th century lamented that students arrived at his abbey enchanted with Plato’s Symposium and repelled by the crudity and earthiness of the episodes recounted in Scripture. He excoriated them by likening pagan philosophy to an ornately painted wall of mud and the dense terrain of Sacred Scripture to a honeycomb, primed to be excavated for its infinite sweetness.

The Catholic faith in particular is, in a certain sense, an unfolding of the perpetual friction of these twin registers, and the Church herself is the mystery such friction leaves in its wake. In Hebrew Scripture, God reveals Himself at once to Moses in both necessity and contingency. When Moses asks who he might say has sent him, God offers His Name, “I AM THAT I AM”. He is the Act of to be, “esse ipsum subsistens” as the Latin scholastics would describe Him, and He could not be otherwise. But He is quick to follow with another identity, that of “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (cf. Ex 3:14-15). In this He is inexorably indexed to a history and promise, a promise He did not have to make and a history that did not have to be, but is no less certain on that account. The prologue to the Gospel of John recapitulates the same pairing. “In the beginning” John writes, “was the Word [Logos]” who was “with God and who was God” (Jn 1:1). He is the reason of everything, the intelligibility by which everything that is might come to be (cf. Jn 1:3). But it’s this word who has “become flesh and dwelt among us” (cf. Jn 1:14). That is, as this man in this time and place, speaking that language among that people, such that He might be lifted up and “draw all people to Himself” (Jn 12:32).

The first and richest question that the wonder of reality provokes is at once both philosophical and religious: “Why is there anything at all?” It’s a question that haunts the margins of every dimension of human life. Philosophy may draw us towards the One whom we may ask, but it’s in contingency that we encounter His address. “Religious claims” concern the meaning of those given things by which we live: by events and relationships; by words, stories, and things. But we are modern people. We are keenly aware of the dangers of false religion and its abuse, distrustful of arbitrary authority, and primed to retreat to the solid ground of the most “necessary” truths. But this retreat is just as impotent as it is urgent, and thought is just as prone to the same shipwrecks as it ever was. There is nothing more natural to man than to be religious.

Regular readers will probably have the sense by now that much of what I write is catechetical rather than apologetic. That is, most everything I have to say on matters of faith and religion presumes the truth of the Christian faith, and the mediating reality of the Catholic Church and her sacraments. If I engage seriously with doubts and obstacles, it is almost always in the mode of St Anselm’s “faith seeking understanding” rather than adopting even a conditionally critical or skeptical posture. Insofar as the Christian faith is true, if it is, this seems to me to be the only way to think well or clearly about its meaning. The truth conveyed in God’s address is fittingly the measure of all else that is known or seen.

That faith though, is mediated. It has both natural and distinctly human conduits. We encounter the sublimity of a sunrise or the intricate intelligibility of a seashell and we wonder of the mind of God. We look on the glow of ordinary loves, or the strange luminescence of a rare heroic charity, and we might wonder about His heart. In Scripture we might meet God in ancient words and deeds, and ponder their meaning. In obscure religious practice we might detect the faintness of His traces, and ponder their purpose. Through all that we experience, our first indeterminate faith will be simply placed in the identity of what is real and what is good. It is the gaze by which our hearts and minds find a common object for which to know and to love.

And yet so much in what is given in experience seems arbitrary or inscrutable. The testimony of history can be overwhelming in its meandering futility, and even the sacred history recounted in Scripture can seem especially so. There is something vulgar in looking out at the depth and gravity of evils in the world and seeking to make satisfying sense of them. There is certainly nothing at hand which could answer for them. All of which is to say that I think it is the task of a faith which seeks understanding to sift through the debris of experience in order to make space for an encounter with the living God in it. This invites engagement with every sort of discipline (philosophy, natural science, history, poetry, whatever) on its own terms. But I am less convinced that it can be the task of the objects of those disciplines to justify one’s faith. It’s rather a true faith which justifies the world.

There is also the peculiar challenge of religious discourse that what is load-bearing for one person’s faith can be a stumbling block for another’s. The Catholic faith in particular has accumulated a great many binding and convoluted claims, and its profession involves assent to more propositions than anyone is likely to entirely understand (let alone be aware of). Catechesis then, handing on the content of the faith, can itself be a kind of apologia. It can help to show that something which seems obscure and complicated can be a part of what permits the Church to unsentimentally proclaim something simple and true. It can and should be an exercise of untangling.

All that said, I recently enjoyed reading this piece by a person who writes under the name “Woke Beria” which raises a few interesting objections to the Christian faith. I found them also to be a useful foil for reflection, and I thought a reply would give me an opportunity to try writing in a more apologetic register. For all of my temperamental aversion to it, some of the most significant and important religious texts which have shaped the faith as I’ve received it have been apologetic and polemical, and nearly everything the Church has learned about herself in the past millennia has come through the sieve of her great controversies.

The “resurrection” of Simon Ondeto

His first objection concerns the appeal to eyewitness testimony by juxtaposing the proclamation of the risen Lord with that of a contemporary messianic cult. The Legio Maria is a Kenyan religious sect which professes its founder to be the second coming of the Christ, and testifies to an event at which a gathering of 30,000 people witnessed his post-mortem preaching in a spiritual body (while his body of flesh remained in the grave). Beria asks why he should believe Paul’s comments in 1 Corinthians about the testimony of 500 witnesses 2,000 years ago and not the testimony of 30,000 witnesses here and now.

I confess that I have often bristled at a common sort of apologetic appeal to the “eyewitness testimony” described in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament. I certainly don’t mean to deny that such testimony is critically important to what these texts mean to convey. They are appealed to such that we might believe. We are meant to come to belief by testimony, “faith comes from hearing” in the words of the apostle (cf. Rm 10:17). When Paul preaches about the appearances of the resurrected Christ to the Corinthians, whether to Peter, the 500, or to himself, he is inviting them to “come and see”. He emphasizes that these are largely living witnesses, to whom his hearers could make recourse if they were determined to do so. The believers today in the resurrection of Simon Ondeto have every reason to make the same appeal to us on the same basis.

But at the same time, I find something uncanny and irreligious about the modern version of this appeal as it concerns the resurrection of Christ. Firstly, of course, because there are no “eyewitnesses” to the event itself. Whatever happens at the heart of the Resurrection is between the Father and the Son, and we are left to contemplate its wake. The “public” evidences of the paschal mystery are only the Cross and the empty tomb. Throughout especially the gospel of John, when Jesus speaks of His glory, He is speaking of His Cross. The hour when the Son of Man shall be glorified is that in which He dies as the grain of wheat, and the Cross where He is “lifted up” is what “draws all men to Himself” (cf. Jn 12:23-32). The Cross is where the Father’s love is declared. Most any fair-minded skeptical or unbelieving historian is keen to concede that Jesus was a man and that he was crucified, and many will likewise accept an empty tomb, explainable by a bit of grave-robbing on behalf of the beleaguered disciples. Even if the red letters of the gospels were not court stenography, the parables and preaching which one finds in them obviously originate from someone. Faith and unbelief are different lights by which to gaze upon this common evidence.

Beyond this though, the expectations which often accompany the appeal to eyewitness testimony don’t match the reactions which are actually depicted in the gospels. “We have seen the Risen Lord!” The apostles tell Thomas, and he does not believe (cf. Jn 20:25). The women had told the demoralized disciples on the road to Emmaus of the angels and the empty tomb, but they continued on in their grief, even when confronted with the risen Lord himself, who they do not recognize (cf. Lk 24:17-18). Mary Magdalene, herself standing before the empty tomb, weeps because “they have taken [her] Lord, and she does not know where they’ve lain Him” (cf. Jn 20:13). It’s when Thomas feels His wounds, or when He opens up the Scriptures for the grieving disciples, or when He calls to Mary by name, that each of them comes to understand what’s taken place. If this was how faith could come to those who lived through and witnessed these events for themselves, why should they be more simply convincing for us who are two millennia removed from them?

The earliest “apologetic” proclamations are depicted in the book of Acts. It’s notable that neither Peter’s exhortations at Pentecost, Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin, nor Paul’s preaching at the Areopagus, make much recourse at all to “eyewitness testimony”. Peter mentions that he and his fellows are witnesses to the Risen Lord, but his appeal for the belief of his hearers is an appeal to the Scriptures, to the prophets and the psalms and the way that David spoke of Christ (cf. Acts 2:14-41). Stephen recounts the whole of salvation history, and places the events unfolding around them in its light (cf. Acts 7:2-53). Unlike Peter and Stephen, Paul is preaching to gentiles, and so he does not appeal to Hebrew Scripture but instead to Greek philosophy and religious cult. He finds a dedication to the “unknown God”, in whom the philosophers say “we live and move and have our being” and from whom the poets say we are true offspring, and declares the revelation of this very God to the men of Athens (cf. Acts 17:22-28). When he proclaims the resurrection and the judgment, he provokes mockery and dismissal in some and a nascent belief in others.

To bring this back to Simon Ondeto, his cult has spread in the manner that any religious cult (non-pejorative) might spread: by the testimony and enthusiasm of its believers. We might see up close in our own time, many of the same dynamics at work as those which unfolded in the early Church. If we are to appraise the movement for ourselves, we can look to the same other criteria to which those early apostles appealed, to the psalms and the prophets and to salvation history as we’ve received them. We might also survey philosophy, and the most plain existential questions life poses for us, and see how the resurrection of Simon Ondeto might speak to them. Finally, we can take our cue from St Gamaliel in Acts 5, who cautions his fellow pharisees against persecuting the nascent Church too much, for if it were not from God it would peter out of its own accord (and if it were from God, then the opposition would be futile).

Ancient Cosmology

Beria’s next objection to religious claims is the degree to which they are bound up with ancient and untenable cosmologies. The Church fathers and medieval scholastics, whether imagining a flat earth or an empyrean heaven beyond celestial concentric circles, really did understand heaven to be a corporeal place where Jesus was. This is meant to scandalize post-Copernicans among us who index “earth” to a pale blue dot, and the “cosmos” to an untraceable void. Even more difficult is his cited consensus among theologians, persisting into the 20th century, that hell was a place deep beneath the earth. This sort of uncanny clash between modern cosmology and the ancient/medieval counterparts which inform our religious inheritance is not unique to Christianity of course, and Beria cites similar difficulties in other cultures and communities.

I do think parts of his case are overstated. Regardless of what they may take for granted, the Church fathers do not generally make Ptolemaic cosmology particularly load-bearing in their thought, nor even do the authors of Genesis 1 and 2. The testimony to this is simply the contemporary breadth and ease with which a myriad of scholars and pious persons living today have appropriated the content of their thought without great difficulty. They also persistently emphasize that God does not have a body, nor an abode in space and time, for He is the author of space and time. It’s the Incarnation and Ascension, that God has been born and died and raised and returned to the Father, which presses their thought towards the contemplation of a corporeal heaven.

There is always, throughout Scripture, an elusiveness to God’s presence. He “walks” with Adam in the cool of the morning (cf. Gn 3:8). Moses may see “his back but not His face” lest he die (cf. Ex 33:23). He is displayed in pillars of fire, strange guests, or unconsumed burning greenery. He abides with Israel covered in the ark, and veiled in the temple. Today He abides in the tabernacles of the Church, hidden in the Blessed Sacrament. Wherever and however He is, He is present to us there.

But there is a real sense in which believers cannot dismiss the stranger implications of their creed. Jesus, in His body, “ascended into heaven” and “sits at the right hand of the Father”. His mother Mary followed after, assumed body and soul into heaven, a dogma the Church only declared well into the 20th century and in full view of our modern cosmology. Wherever they are, “where” remains a question we may ask about it. The line the faith continues to walk holds together both the tangibility of her promises in the resurrection of the body and the new creation already underway among us, alongside the elusiveness of their consummation.

There is an asymmetry though, between the celestial horizons which have expanded in the modern view, and the depths of the earth which have contracted beneath us. To imagine Jesus and His mother past the furthest reaches of light wherefrom only light may spring sits well enough with the testimony of the stars. To imagine the souls of the damned confined to the core of the earth seems less sensible. I often wonder if this asymmetry has implications for our shared sociological religious sense.

Historical argument

Beria goes on to say that he finds the strongest objections to religious claims to be historical rather than philosophical, and I think that’s probably true, though I am less keen to concede a hard boundary between the two. It is harder to make sense of history than it is to make sense of ideas, for exactly the reason that it is harder to make sense of contingency than it is to make sense of necessity. Distinctly “religious” authority concerns itself with the former, but specifically how contingency stands in relation to the most necessary thing, which is God.

Beria rightly points out that expanded scientific knowledge has produced a reactionary crisis of authority in every religious culture, and it’s obvious on this view why that would be so. Both the natural sciences and mathematical disciplines deepen an understanding of both contingent natures and their necessary condition of possibility, and so they mediate some knowledge of God apart from the guidance of a priesthood. What the modern world has since discovered though, is that practitioners of such sciences make for a lousy priesthood, because their methods and objects do not even permit them to reason about true contingency in the deepest sense. They cannot speak to why this or that event or person was or is, if indeed we permit there to be a “why” to ask about, or even more importantly to why there is anything at all.

The growth of modern science has, in this sense, revealed and clarified what a distinctly religious and priestly authority consists in, and perhaps this adds another explanation to the sharp “historical” turn in the past several centuries of Catholic theology.

The Swiss protestant theologian Karl Barth was famously averse to natural theology. He wanted nothing to do with “reasoning” about God’s existence from motion or contingency or the contours of experience. The figure that such endeavors illuminated for him was not the One that saved him on the Cross. But once when pressed, he admitted that there was indeed one such sort of ‘argument’ that did compel him: the persistent fact of the Jews in human history. In Jews, Barth saw a testament of God’s relentless fidelity to His promises, despite whatever infidelity and meandering may be returned on the part of men.

The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who was unlike Barth entirely friendly to natural theology, still also saw something of God’s fidelity in the “mystery of Israel”. Even more, he diagnosed a latent hatred of God in the antisemitism that had engulfed Europe in war and mass murder in the first half of the 20th century. Historically Christian cultures and nations, he thought, wrestled with a dormant desire to be free from the Cross, from both its great gift and its great burden, and to recover a vital mythic past beyond its long shadow. The nations would rage and the people imagine vain things, kings of the earth taking counsel against the Lord and His anointed, hoping to break their bonds asunder and cast away their cords (cf. Ps 2:1-3). But even if they could, the Jews yet barred the way, standing a torturous reminder of God’s inexorable assurances and the heavy claim He had placed over the nations by the Cross of His Son. “Ask and I shall give you the nations for thine inheritance” thunders God to His begotten “and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession” (Psalm 2:8). After all, “the gifts and calling of God” preached the apostle “are irrevocable” (Rm 11:29). There is no going back.

In a real sense, those modern Jews hand on a culture formed in the debris of an antique disaster: the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. “How lovely is your tabernacle” sings the psalmist in exile, his soul crying out to make a home there, where “even the sparrow finds a nest” by the altars of the Lord. “Blessed are they” he acclaims “who dwell in His house” (cf. Psalm 84:1-4). But there is no such dwelling today in Jerusalem, there is no temple and there are no sacrifices. Each year, Tisha B’Av comes as a great day of lamentation and fasting for the Jewish people, to commemorate the many calamities which have befallen them, and especially this great destruction and the exile in which they now remain.

The late Pope emeritus Benedict XVI, writing near the end of his life, observed that what we today broadly call “Judaism” and “Christianity” could be understood as two distinct reactions to that same catastrophe. For the Church, Christ in His resurrected flesh has become the new temple, and she sojourns through time and burns through nations drawing all who might restlessly seek His face to herself. The priesthood of His new covenant then, re-presents that single perfect sacrifice, made once and for all at Calvary, on every altar across the world. The Lord too, continues to abide with her in every tabernacle.

For the Jews, what remains instead are the people, the law, and the land. The raging nations and their vanity pass like withered grass, but the Lord knows the way of the righteous who delight in His law (cf. Ps 1). His chosen people remain by virtue of His promises to them. It’s that law, the Torah, which rests in the arks of their synagogues. The rabbis, teachers of torah, are the stewards of the only given law of God, that sacred law by which he set apart a people for Himself. They have cleaved to that law even as those promises for which it binds have seemed to become more hazy and remote. God has given it, and that is reason enough.

St Bernard of Clairvaux, in the midst of medieval Christendom, once called Jews the “living letters of the law”, a sign to contemporary Christians of that very law which Christ fulfilled (and did not abolish, cf. Mt 5:17) and through which their Savior was born. He was, after all, “born of a woman, born under the law” (cf. Gal 4:4).

“Traditional” Catholics

The Church too though, has experienced her own share of catastrophes and humiliations. There was the gradual, then sudden, schism between her Greek and Latin lungs just past the close of the first millennium. Still further there was the convulsion of the western world throughout the protestant reformation, which stoked wars across the European continent and estranged millions of Christians from the sacraments altogether. Most recently, the loss of the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870 seemed to quell the last gasps of a public and visible “christendom”. Insofar as it remains at all, it too is a hazy and remote reality, at least as it concerns the common life of Christians.

There are also a notable share of Catholics who have experienced the wake of the Second Vatican council as its own sort of traumatic event. The implementation of the liturgical reform was rife with episodes of stripped altars and a spirit of iconoclasm that conjured the distant specter of the English reformation. The new calendar hollowed octaves and feasts, and replaced an order which had been reliable for centuries with an unruly three-year cycle. The loss of Latin as a set apart sacred language did much to diffuse the experience of mystery in the liturgy, and to hollow the sense of stable universality across cultures that had gone along with it.

But like the many Jewish rituals which persist even absent the center and form of life that had shaped and ordered them in the past, there are many self-identified “traditional” Catholics today who persist in observing customs drawn from the deep well of a foregone epoch. Their perdurance leaves the Latin rite of the sacred liturgy divided. The majority of Latin rite Catholics worship with the “ordinary form” of the Mass, while a small but devoted set of communities retain the older “extraordinary form” and its calendar. There is a great unease in the life of the Church about this, and it seems an unstable equilibrium which begs for an account.

The successive papacies of Benedict XVI and Francis wrangled with giving one, seemingly acting at cross purposes. Benedict issued the Motu Proprio Summorum Pontificum, granting greater freedom and deference to those Catholics devoted to the “Mass of the Ages”, and such communities flourished in its wake. Francis abrogated that decision with his own Motu Proprio Traditiones Custodes, once more restricting its use. Bishops for their part have unevenly implemented all of these directives, and so divisions and confusion have seemed only to widen as a result.

In a letter accompanying his decision, Pope Benedict XVI had appealed to a noteworthy principle. He wrote to his brother bishops that:

“In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.” [Emphasis mine]

13 years later, in reversing his predecessor’s decision, Pope Francis expressed his own sorrow that those attached to the older form of the Mass had often fostered a different sense of rupture. Many had implicitly or explicitly denied the validity of the second Vatican council and its continuity with the received faith of the Church. He rightly noted that Pope St. Pius V had, after the council of Trent, acted to ensure that the Missale Romanum he promulgated could be “the principal expression of the lex orandi of the Roman Rite”, and he embraced the same authority to ensure that the same would be true of the missal of St Paul VI.

Pope Francis also frequently excoriated the “indietrismo” or backwardness of many pious Catholics, who he described as trading an authentic tradition which progresses by the “living faith of the dead” with a traditionalism that acted more as a “dead faith of the living”. There is no going back.

Jews and the Church

The Church has a long history of wrangling over a weighty inheritance, and this at least is nothing new. She has sifted everything, often with great anxiety and trepidation, and never more so than in the sifting of her Jewish roots. The first ecumenical council, described in the book of Acts, concerned a dispute over the obligation of gentile believers to observe the law of Moses. The council took place in Jerusalem and involved a conflict between Paul and Barnabbas on the one hand and a group of “pharisees who believed” on the other (cf. Acts 15:1-5). The council decreed that the Church would not place a yoke on gentile believers beyond necessity, encouraging them only to refrain from sexual immorality, strangled flesh, and blood. In the text, the decree is followed by a strange and notable comment, which has its own history of disputed interpretation. St James remarked:

“For Moses has had throughout many generations those who preach him in every city, being read in the synagogues every Sabbath.” (Acts 15:21).

He offers this as reason not to trouble the gentiles with the burden of circumcision and the like. Lest the pharisees be anxious that the gentile believers would come to eclipse the treasury of God’s law, they could be consoled by the assurance that the law would continue to be read in synagogues across the world every sabbath. Both the Pharisees’ concerns and James’ assurance to them proved prophetic in a sense. After the destruction of the temple, the mark of the Mosaic covenant upon the character of the Church has grown ever more attenuated, and yet the law of Moses has indeed continued to be read in synagogues across the world on every sabbath, though only in Jewish communities outside of the Church.

The relationship between those Jewish communities and the Church in the millennia since has been fraught and erratic. Pope St. Gregory I in the sixth century defended the rights of Jews to practice their religious rites and to the protection of law, and he forbade their forced conversion. Pope Paul IV in the sixteenth century called it an “absurdity” for Jews to share a common society with Christians, and he ghettoized the Jews of Rome, forcing them to wear humiliating marks to identify themselves. William I invited Jews to settle in England after the Norman conquest in 1066, and Edward I expelled them in 1290.

Even more contentious has been the treatment of potential Jewish life within the Church herself. As a pastor, the Church father St John Chrysostom denounced the temptation of his flock to share in Jewish festivity with inflammatory fervor. The scholastic theologian St Thomas Aquinas considered the practice of Jewish ritual after the advent of Christ to be dead and deadly. And the Council of Florence in 1442 taught that baptized Jews continuing to observe Mosaic ceremonies would forfeit their salvation.

Still, such a long record of engagement in these controversies also points to their persistent reappearance within the Church’s life. Paul famously asked the gentile Galatians, captivated by the Mosaic covenant, who it was that had bewitched them (Gal 3:1), and assured them that there was “neither Jew nor Greek” in Christ (Gal 3:28). And yet he set that vision of unity alongside “male nor female” and “slave nor free”. The latter distinction persisted in the Church well beyond Paul’s time, and the former will persist at least until the end of the world. Even more, Paul’s most passionate lamentations over Israel were written to the gentile Romans. He described the unbelieving Jews as natural branches broken off an olive root, such that the wild branches of the nations might be grafted in. “And if their rejection meant the reconciliation of the world” he mused, “what might their acceptance be but life from the dead?” (Rm 11:15).

The danger which concerned Paul, and which finds ever more stark expression from Chrysostom, through Aquinas, to the Florentine council fathers, is the danger of denying Christ. The law is not abolished, but it is ordered to its end in Him. To live as if bound in its precepts seems then to deny their purpose, and the salvation which that purpose has already accomplished. At the same time, in her periodic revolts against such temptations, the Church has frequently rediscovered an opposite danger, that of losing her understanding of herself as the fulfillment of particular promises made in and through a particular people. Jesus Christ, her bridegroom, did not enter history from without it; firstly as an answer to an abstract cosmic dilemma. He was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Gal 4:4). That is, He was born of Mary under the law of Moses. As He assures the Samaritan woman, “Salvation is from the Jews” (Jn 4:22), for salvation is not a generality.

‘Traditional’ and Hebrew Catholics

There are analogous dangers concerning Catholic traditionalism. The persistent attachment to any venerable expression of faith and devotion can come to eclipse the simple promises in which that faith abides. Christ has promised to build His Church on Peter the rock, and that the gates of hell shall not prevail against her (cf. Mt 16:18). He has promised to send the Spirit of Truth, who will abide with her forever, and lead her into all truth (cf. Jn 14:16, Jn 16:13). Traditionalist movements like the Society of St Pius X, disturbed by a perceived “rupture” in the 20th century, have illicitly consecrated bishops and courted excommunication. Other sects have gone further in declaring that Peter’s chair is vacant, and the Pope is illegitimate. Each finds the measure of history and truth in a reconstruction of an epoch which appeals to them, and so they find the present, that is Christ’s presence in His promises, wanting.

At the same time, for the Church to outright abandon a treasury of prayer and practice which has guided generations of her saints is to risk obscuring who she is, and the depth of the hope which she possesses. The Church today, perhaps more thoroughly than at any time in her history, has thrown herself into the heart of the world. She does not stand aloof from the cry of the poor, or hesitate to bless the good in anything she can. But the manner of her being in the world can convey a false sense that she is of it. It can obscure the mystery from whence she springs and whither she goes, and it’s that very mystery which her traditional inheritance can help her to remember. “Do this” Christ told his apostles at the institution of the Eucharist, “in memory of me” (Lk 22:19).

Despite a vocal and rebellious minority, the great bulk of Catholics who are devoted to the traditional form of the Mass are loyal children of the Church and relatively docile towards their religious authorities. They are not generally motivated by restorationist political fantasies, nor do they mostly doubt the legitimacy or validity of the reformed liturgy. Some may simply love the shape of life they have received and so desire to live and die within its embrace. Others may not have received a shape of life at all, and so may have found refuge in the tried and tested order of this one.

At the same time, there is today a small but non-negligible revival of a Church of the circumcision. That is, cultural and ethnic Jews who have come to believe in Jesus Christ and have been received into His Church. Many wish to keep Jewish feasts and observe some of the practices of their forebears. Most are loyal children of the Church, and docile towards her magisterium. They are not generally convicted of the binding necessity of these observances, and they are certainly not tempted to deny their fulfillment in Christ. Indeed, for a great many Hebrew Catholics it was their faith in Christ which awakened their affection for their Jewish inheritance. They will often remark that such faith brought the obscure traditions they were raised with to life for the first time for them. If their rejection had meant the reconciliation of the world, what might their acceptance be but life from the dead?

Pope Benedict XVI’s maxim holds true, what has been held sacred by our forebears remains sacred for us too. And likewise Pope Francis’ warning against “indietrismo” is no less wise, lest a living faith of the dead become a dead faith of the living. The revival and persistence of good and holy practices must not be an exercise of nostalgia. Worse still, they must not become false ends in themselves, set apart from the prophetic fulfillment of the Cross or the apocalyptic hope of Christ’s return.

Behold, He is making all things new (cf. Rv 21:5). There is no going back.

We would loftily recount the literacy campaign of the early 60s which mobilized young people to teach peasants to read, or the many medical missions all over the world; the solidarity Cuba provided in Angola’s confrontation with apartheid South Africa, or the taking in of many victims of the Chernobyl disaster.

Leaving aside the many and serious potential objections to this enthusiasm for revolutionary Cuba, many people who were willing to grant it as an inspirational exemplar would still follow quickly with some variation of: “okay, but that’s a small and poor island of a few million people. The US is hundreds of millions of people in the richest society on the planet, what can Cuba have to do with a place like this?”

It was too obvious a question to be readily conceivable for us. It was both robustly concrete and practical, and it privileged reality in a way which disarmed any mystification. I never had a compelling answer to it, either to satisfy the person asking or to assuage my own uncertainty.

What the question draws attention to is the plain fact that scale is not merely a quantitative, but a qualitative dimension of human life, and indeed this is true of any domain of any complexity at all. A household is not a village is not a city is not a county is not a state is not an empire is not a world. But there is no instance of those larger entities which does not entail a mediated composition of the smaller in various arrangements of interdependence. This is true of firms, of families, of religions, and anything else which is intractably human. Orders of magnitude set the terms of possibility for everything, and optimizing what is legible to one scale often disrupts the health and good order both below and above it.

The Catholic principle of “subsidiarity” is more or less illuminated in this recognition alone. It is a notion which is often enough abused in the service of one or another half-truths. Some invoke it to argue that it is good and right for responsibility to be devolved to the lowest order necessary for its accomplishment. Others invoke the same principle that the goods of lower orders are rightly ordered to, and so subordinate to, the goods of the whole in which they subsist. These two invocations, taken in isolation, can play out as symbiotic poles of opposition, with the first tending towards an atomistic individualism and the latter tending towards an administrative totalitarianism. What is lost in that tug of war are the very layers of common life which the principle of subsidiarity most exalts. Subsidiarity itself is a principle of concentric and constitutive scales of mediation. It is a recognition that the common good is bound up with the good of the orders which constitute it, which are often incommensurable with one another.

All this came to mind today in reading Pope Leo’s fraternal greeting to the principality of Monaco, and the broad discourse it provoked. The Pope seemed to speak especially favorably about Monaco’s embrace of the Catholic faith as a state religion, and it is one of the few polities on earth for which this remains the case. Monaco is also notably recognized by neutral observers to safeguard “freedom of religion” to a degree which rivals or exceeds any other society on earth (to the extent that this can be coherently judged at all).

Monaco also has a population of less than 40,000 people. It is orders of magnitude smaller than most individual Catholic dioceses within the United States. To infer from any positive remarks about Monaco’s political form a general celebration of confessional states seems a great deal more absurd even than my former speeches about the “revolutionary example” Cuba’s government provided for the working class of the United States.

It seems to me that discussions about how we all ought to be bound up together, politically or otherwise, would be better served if they were carried on in terms which were amenable to all the breadth and depth of human life, and of the incommensurability of the scales which constitute it.

Nature, History, and Revelation

The natural world gives testimony of itself. It is full of sediment. Living things disclose a deep organic history, written both into their makeup and amid the ancient bones of their ancestors caked into the earth. The distant radiation that speckles the reaches of space discloses an even deeper cosmic history, and a primal locus of heat and light. Those naturalists who are competent to judge the matter, estimate that life began on the earth more than three billion years ago. Those cosmologists who are likewise fit to make their own appraisals trace that ancient source of heat and light back a further 11 billion years, though it is ambiguous to speak of ‘years’ at all before the earth and sun, to which such ‘years’ are indexed, were formed.

Man too has a hazy place in this history, partly because of the porous boundaries around his disparate ancestors (and the haziness of such distinctions within organic history altogether). But still more, because man is a hazy figure himself. It’s not clear what properties he shares with all of his kind to sketch the outline of his nature. Is he the rational animal? The talking animal? The political animal? Is he anything solid enough to say?

God, in the words of Scripture, gives another testimony both of nature and of man. The heavens and the earth, read the opening lines of Genesis, are His creation. The Hebrew verb by which He creates, bara, is predicated of God alone and never creatures. They might “make” [a-s-h] or “spring forth” [y-tz-a] but God alone creates. And analogously to nature’s own disclosure, He too is a primeval origin of heat and light. He is a “consuming fire” per the letter to the Hebrews (Hb 12:29), and He is light absent any darkness per the first letter of John (1 Jn 1:5). He appears to Moses in a verdant bush engulfed in flame (Cf Ex 3:2), and “light” is the first word that He speaks (Gn 1:3).

Still behind any of the images through which He’s reckoned, whether in the words of Holy Writ or in the debris of cosmic history, He is simply Who He Is. That, after all, is the Name that He reveals to Moses: “I Am That I Am” (Ex 3:14). But He is also known one other way. He follows the revelation of His Name with another title, “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Ex 3:15). He is the Eternal God, but He has likewise marked a history, that of His fidelity to His promises.

Man again has a hazy place in this testimony. In the first chapter of Genesis, God creates him “B’tzalmenu ki-demutenu”, “in our image, after our likeness” and “tzakar u-nekevah”, male and female (cf. Gn 1:27). Man’s nature is not indexed to any property or power, to chatter or to politics, but to a mystery and to a relationship. Whatever he is truly like, that is something of what God is like. And that image involves something of a dissimilarity within similitude: man is male and female, and they are made like God.

In the second chapter, he is instead made known by what he’s made of. The LORD God forms man from the dust [afar] of the earth (cf. Gn 2:7). This is wordplay, Adam min-ha’adamah; he is dirt from dirt. And while the man is drawn from the dust of the earth, the woman is drawn from the side of the man, Isha Me’Ish. In this account, he had first appeared in solitude, until God brought forth a fitting companion for him, the “bone of [his] bone and the flesh of [his] flesh” (Gn 2:23). In the Genesis 1 picture of man, the one was really two. In the Genesis 2 picture of man and woman, the two shall become “one flesh” (cf. Gn 2:24).

But he also is known one other way. In Genesis 3, the man and the woman sin, and they find themselves cursed and in exile. The man will eat by the sweat of his brow, reaping a hard ground until he returns to it himself. He is dust [afar], and to dust he will return (cf. Gn 3:17-19). The woman is cursed to the subjection of the husband she desires, and her labor pains are magnified (cf. Gn 3:16). It is only now that she receives her name. The man calls his wife Chavah, because she is the em kol chai, the mother of all living (cf. Gn 3:20). Man too now marks a history, this one the history of his infidelity and sin. This event, and not what preceded it, the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the beginning of the history of man.”

And so it’s in this fall and exile, and no sooner, that the testimonies of nature and revelation ought first to meet, for this nature is the world of our experience and that sin is the origin of our experience. We have gestured at the hazy man of history, and likewise at the Adam of faith, but how must we reckon them to know each other? What must we say of our “first parents” to make sense of natural history and Sacred Scripture alike? Who and how might be the “Adam of history”?

Faith and Reason, Uncanniness and Crudity

A first caution in proceeding is that we should avoid anything which is either uncanny or crude. Beauty and parsimony are both, whether in matters of faith or in the natural sciences, marks of credibility. The God in whom we place our faith is ultimately simple and unconditioned. Copernicus did not first falsify Ptolemy’s system, but he surpassed it in the elegant integration of what was evident. We should be generally unsatisfied with square pegs crammed into round holes, or convoluted just-so stories. Holy Writ is neither journalism nor a textbook, and likewise no historical or scientific discipline can speak to us as Scripture speaks. To neglect this is to do violence to the meaning of what either can say. At the same time, Truth is One, so we should not fall into the opposite error of dividing our inquiries after truth into irreconcilable silos. The ultimate object revealed in either God’s works (in nature) or in His address (in Sacred Scripture) is Himself, and none of our investigation of either will permit us to grasp or to domesticate Him.

One example of this sort of crude overfitting might be to associate our proto-parents with a “chromosomal Adam” or a “mitochondrial Eve”. It is indeed the case that at any given time there is a most recent male from whom all living males inherit their Y-chromosomes, and a most recent female from whom we all inherit our mitochondrial DNA. The identity of both these figures though, is always relative to a snapshot in time, and they are both subject to hidden replacement as particular unknown lines of ancestry come to be extinguished. Still more, it is entirely improbable that any such pair of individuals have ever been contemporaries, let alone that they have been a couple themselves. The estimates of population geneticists also tend to place both of these figures several hundred thousand years in the past. All this in mind, these designations seem to be a misappropriation of biblical titles into an ill-fitting domain.

But there is also another sort of potential uncanniness. Rather than crudely attaching biblical significance to genetic precursors who do not tenably bear it, there is equally the risk of importing too much naturalistic debris into the biblical testimony. The protestant apologist William Lane Craig models this sort of approach in his book, In Quest of the Historical Adam. Therein, Craig posits that Adam was a unique male who lived about three quarters of a million years ago and belonged to a particular species of human ancestor (possibly “Homo Heidelbergensis”). Part of his motivation for this view is his judgment that these ancestors were possibly the earliest to display what we might regard to be marks of human distinction in their primitive arts and toolmaking. Craig thus regards Adam to be a “mytho-historical” figure, a literary stand-in for a real but obscure ancient primate. There is much to commend in this endeavor, but it is plagued by a sense of arbitrariness. Craig has notably indexed the mystery of God’s “image and likeness” to a set of properties and powers, and he has planted his flag as far back in time as he can find their traces. The evidence of Scripture and nature have both been marshaled and attended to, but the conditions for their reception have been established by a set of criteria which is foreign to both. Craig’s “image of God” is empirical: it is to make tools and to draw paintings on the wall, to reason and to talk, and it comes by a special act of God hundreds of thousands of years before much of anything that resembles a distinctly “human” history begins.

The Stakes and Criteria of Faith

Before proceeding, a further help to us will be to try and clarify the stakes that orthodox faith might place in such inquiries. How we understand the theological significance of what Genesis depicts will condition the way we expect it to accord with the debris of natural history. For Catholics, those stakes will chiefly pertain to the doctrine of original sin and the common brotherhood of man. Pope Pius XII, in the 1950 encyclical Humanis Generis, offered criticism of a litany of anthropological errors that he claimed that faithful Catholics could not tenably hold to. Among these he numbered “polygenism”, by which he meant a belief that there were true men who did not descend from a first Adam, or that Adam could be understood as a figure standing in for a diffuse sea of men living in the distant past. It is because we share a common origin in the one Adam that we may say without equivocation that all men are brothers, even now according to the flesh, and it is because of that Adam’s sin that his sinful condition is present in every man, through generation, as his own (cf. Humanis Generis §37).

But while Adam may not be mere figment, he is indeed a figure. St Paul preaches that he is a “type of the one who is to come” (Rm 5:14), such that “as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by one Man’s obedience many more will be made righteous” (Rm 5:19). Among His many titles, Christ is called the “new Adam”, and His mother Mary is likewise called the “new Eve”. The old Adam was made from the dust of the earth and received his life from the breath of God, to become a living soul (cf. Gn 2:7). Christ is Himself the living and eternal God who receives His flesh from the womb of Mary, to become the Son of Man (cf. Jn 1:14, Gal 4:4). Eve is the mother of all living men according to the flesh, and Mary becomes the mother of all who by baptism share in the death and resurrection of her Son (cf. Jn 19:27). The catechism goes on to add that “the whole human race is in Adam as ‘one body in one man’” and that “all men are implicated in Adam’s sin as all are implicated in Christ’s justice”. That sin is “transmitted by propagation to all mankind” (cf. CCC 404).

The Adam of history then, must be one man, through whom all men living are linked by propagation according to the flesh. Every man is born to die in Adam, such that they may die to live in Christ. The salience of Adam and the image of God that he bears is not only natural but narrative. He is the first priest, by whom God’s presence is made manifest among His works, and he declares His maker by both nature and address. Or at least this would be so, were it not that he had sinned. Because of that sin, his lineage is instead bound up with a catastrophe, and the self-exclusion of man at his origin from the relationship by and for which he comes to be. This is the history that marks all flesh, a history of futility and ruin. Even this condition though, already bears God’s nascent promises. In the wake of our first parents’ sin, before God addresses them, He first addresses the tempter. He promises to “put enmity between [him] and the woman” and between their seeds, such that they will crush his head and he will bruise their heel (cf. Gn 3:15). The catechism again calls this promise the “protoevangelium”, a first gospel of the messiah and redeemer (CCC 410). The end is already hidden in the beginning, and man’s restoration is already hidden in his fall.

Genealogy and Genes, Behind and Before

There are two more notes to consider in reply to our earlier “crude” and “uncanny” examples, one strictly natural and the other metaphysical. The first of these is to emphasize the daylight between genealogy and genetics. The latter is such that we may come to share little to no genetic information with very recent ancestors (~7-10 generations), while we may share a great deal with those around us even if our common ancestry more remote. Each of us is situated in a story of begetting cut across time that our genes quickly become too noisy to tell. This more than any other reason is why titles like “chromosomal Adam” and “mitochondrial Eve” are so ill-fitting, because they conflate a real history with a kind of mechanical inheritance, and one which is more stochastic than genealogical.

A second note instead concerns our understanding of God and time. The unchanging and eternal God is not subject to time, which is itself the measure of change in created things. We may reckon time as the unfolding of potency into act, but God is purely actual. Or we may likewise reckon time the unfolding of past into future, but God is ever-present. He is not, most importantly, “before” us in time but in being, and He is everywhere before us in this way. So Christ the God-man can say of Abraham, “before [he] was, I am” (Jn 8:58), and the baptist can say of Him that “He who comes after me is preferred before me, because He was before me” (Jn 1:15). Even Adam, who is behind every man in the succession of time, is already a type of Him who is to come. The psalmist sings to the God who is “behind and before” him, achor va’qedem (Ps 139:4), surrounding him end-to-end in space and time, and even at the core of his being.

“Qedem” also has the ordinary sense of “East” in Hebrew Scripture. After the LORD God forms Adam, He places him in a garden “mi’qedem”, “eastward” (cf. Gn 2:8). Scripture notes four rivers which flow out of that garden. Two, the Tigris and Euphrates, are robustly identifiable with a pair of extant rivers in ancient Mesopotamia (contemporary Iraq). The other two, Pishon and Gihon, have ambiguous reference (if indeed they have any at all). The horizon of man’s history, gestured at in the creation litany of Genesis 1 and 2, sits on a porous boundary of what is present to us and what eludes us.

In the 9th millennium BC, a man living in that corridor would find himself at the dawn of human agriculture, replete with his mandate to “keep and till” the earth (cf. Gn 2:15). By the 4th millennium, he would be at the threshold of human history. He might see the violent establishment of the first cities (cf. Gn 4:17) and trade routes that reach the far corners of the world. A single couple living somewhere in that hazy window could, through the wives of their sons, plausibly be ancestors to the whole of mankind by the time of Abraham, even perhaps those peopling the Americas. That obscure ancient Adam would then be the head of the body of man, and his bride the mother of all living.

History, Nature, and Faith

“History”, the poet Lord Byron famously remarked, “is the devil’s scripture”. It is a litany of murder and lies, and the devil is the “father of lies” who “was a murderer from the beginning” (cf. Jn 8:44). Sacred history gives testimony of that same unfolding world but in the light of a saving faith, authored instead by the Spirit of Truth who goes where He pleases (cf. Jn 3:8, 16:13). Both have their origin in the fall of our first parents, and the seed of redemption present even within it (cf. Gn 3:15).

That fall leaves a wound in the nature of man, a distance between what springs from the antecedent will of God and the condition in which he finds himself. And since that nature is itself composed of a long organic history, the fall of man may likewise implicate and disfigure the whole of that history. And if that is so, then how much more does the advent of Christ bind up and transfigure it? “Where sin abounds” reminds the apostle, “grace abounds all the more” (Rm 5:20).

A last note, is that the greatest and most certain truths of the Christian faith are those which we publicly proclaim. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” we hear in the first words of Scripture (Gn 1:1). He looked on all He made and saw that it was good (Gn 1:31). Our first parents sinned, and that world now comes down to us by a catastrophe. And so the Word by which God made, who is God Himself, took flesh and dwelt among us (cf. Jn 1:1-3,14). He came not out of condemnation, but for love of us, that we might have life in Him (cf. Jn 3:16). “As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive” Paul preaches to the Corinthians (1 Cor 15:22), and when mortality is clothed in incorruption death shall be swallowed up in victory (1 Cor 15:54). God will finish what He has begun in us, and He shall wipe all tears away; there will come a new heavens and a new earth, where He will dwell with us forever (cf. Rv 21:1-4). This will be a fitting end, for God Himself is Love (cf. 1 Jn 4:16).

There is limitless mystery hidden in those simple proclamations, much to be unveiled and reconsidered, but there is nothing esoteric in them. When our first parents sinned, “their eyes were opened” to a world which had somehow been present in their midst (cf. Gn 3:7). When the despairing disciples on the road to Emmaus listened to the hidden Christ and broke bread with Him, “their eyes were opened” and they recognized Him (cf. Lk 24:31). We have opened our eyes to a world which is obscure and complicated, wherein nothing truly hangs together. Faith again may heal our vision by a simple light, and we might comprehend the truth which was first made known to us in what we heard (cf. Rm 10:17). In this too is the salience of our hazy proto-parents, their sin begins our story, and so they mark the truth of what we dare to say.

In August of 1942, Edith Stein (Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross) and her sister Rosa were arrested by the Gestapo at their Carmelite convent in the Netherlands and loaded onto an eastbound train which brought them to Auschwitz. Jewish converts, they had been left at peace for a time, until the Dutch bishops had finally summoned the boldness to denounce Nazi racialism. In doing so, the bishops forfeited the protections that baptism had temporarily secured for their flock of Jewish origin. As they were detained, Edith spoke her last recorded words, an encouragement to her sister. “Come” she said, “we are going for our people”.

The train of Jagerstatter’s dream was a vision of the Nazi movement and the Hitler youth, frictionlessly drawing up an eager generation with the allure of its vigor and boundedness for glory. The train that brought Edith and Rosa to their deaths was not so glamorous. Deportations were largely conducted with freight cattle cars, wooden boxes without seats or sanitation. Today, Stein and Jagerstatter are both raised to the altars, martyrs of the Nazi holocaust and war machine. Jagerstatter is celebrated for the firmness of his conscience, his refusal to board that train to hell which cost he and his family his life. Stein is venerated for her love and surrender to the Father’s will, whereby that cattle car of death became a caravan to glory. Both Franz and Edith were killed on August 9th, a year apart from one another.

Franz wrote much of his concerns about freedom and sin. It was clear to him that Hitler’s war in Poland was unjust, and that the Aktion-T4 which systematically euthanized the disabled and mentally ill was evil. His parish priest before the Anschluss had affirmed him in these judgments, but he had been replaced by a man of less years and experience, more inclined to keep his head down. Franz had pressed his pastors for clarity, including a trip to the office of his bishop (who feared that Franz might be a Gestapo spy). None went as far as to entirely deny his charges or dismiss his concerns, but they rather emphasized that these matters were not his responsibility. He had an obligation to his wife and children, they said, and to his homeland, all of which demanded obedience to political authorities. If indeed this caught him up in great evils, they said, those evils belonged to Hitler alone.

“Do our officials actually bear so great a responsibility?” Franz wondered privately in notebooks, “or have we lost our own sense of ours?” Surely God’s judgment will not merely weigh a catalogue of offices and titles, ascribing culpability only in accordance with man’s formalities. God’s word, after all, “is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, joints and marrow, a discerner of thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hb 4:12). And as to the family which he loved so dearly, his wife and three little ones, the voice of Christ again rang out in his soul: “He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it.” (Mt 10:37-39). Shortly before his execution, a priest pleaded with Franz to change his mind. Franz asked him if he could be assured that signing an oath to Hitler would not lead him into mortal sin. The priest acknowledged that he could give no such assurance, and Franz did not sign. He was beheaded within the week.

Stein, for her part, had written much of her own concern with freedom and grace. She had attempted to chart the drama of her own conversion to the Catholic faith and the role of God’s initiative therein. Salvation, she knew, was God’s doing, and she pondered over the role man’s freedom could play in it. At Carmel she had completed one major work of theology and metaphysics, Finite and Eternal Being, and left another on The Science of the Cross unfinished on her desk on the day she was arrested. In the two decades prior to her arrest, her philosophical life had shifted in its grammar. At the feet of her first teacher Husserl, she had been transfixed by the thought of possessing the truth of things, and concerned especially with the method of attaining it. In the wake of her conversion, she recognized the Truth as the one who does the possessing. It was He who would lay claim to her, and the task of her life would be to be His instrument.

In his discourse on the credible hope of universal salvation, the theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar closes with an extensive quotation of Stein. Therein, she remarks that man’s freedom alone is insufficient to understand the work of redemption. Divine and human freedom cannot be entirely opposed when we fully consider the conditions of possibility for creaturely freedom. “The descent of Grace to the human soul is a free act of divine love” Stein writes, and God’s reasons in so acting “escape rational penetration”. But our faith in the omnipotence of divine love, she muses, justifies a hope in a universal redemption.

Franz Jagerstatter refused to participate in evils that most of his countrymen, friends, and neighbors willingly and eagerly joined in. It earned him their contempt, and the maltreatment of his widow and his family in the years that followed his death. Edith Stein willingly suffered evils unjustly for the sake of the salvation of others, and there is much testimony of the consolation she brought to those who suffered them unwillingly beside her. Franz expressed sympathy with his compatriots, and despite his fears for their souls he did not judge them, he only knew what it would mean for his own soul if he were to join them, and so he could not. Edith hopefully pondered what good those who “complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (cf. Col 1:24) might merit even for those many souls caught up in Franz’s train to hell. She was committed to suffering on behalf of others, and we cannot bear to suffer for those we do not also hope for. Both gave solitary witness to the mystery of Christ and his presence amid the worst calamity of human history.

Praying Like Little Children

Decades earlier in Fatima, Portugal, while the world was convulsed in another awful war, three shepherd children reported their encounter with an angel while tending to their family’s flock, who began to teach them how to pray. The following year in 1917, they experienced several apparitions of the Virgin Mary. On one of these occasions, the Blessed Mother showed the children a vision of hell. This one was not so veiled as Franz’s dream, it was a cauldron of black fire in the heart of the earth full of demons appearing as distorted animals and the figures of men groaning in pain and despair. The children went white and cried out to Mary in their horror. The youngest two, a pair of siblings named Jacinta and Francisco, were less than ten years old. “You have seen hell where the souls of poor sinners go” the Virgin told them “to save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my immaculate heart”.

Francisco and Jacinta both died only a few years later, each a victim of the influenza pandemic of 1918. Despite many reservations, fits and starts, both children too were canonized by Pope Francis on May 13th, 2017, on the centennial of the first apparition. They are the youngest canonized saints who were not martyred. “Let the little children come to me” spoke our Lord as the disciples were shooing them away, “and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Mt 19:14).

Francisco and Jacinta’s impact on the life of faith in the 20th century is hard to overstate. Just as the angel did for them, these children have taught us how to pray. Their most fervent prayer has been added to the ordinary practice of the rosary, one of the oldest and most prolific devotional Catholic prayers, prayed millions of times daily across the globe. After each decade of “Hail Mary” prayers, and the “Glory be” doxology, we add the “Fatima prayer”:

“O My Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of Hell and lead all souls to Heaven, especially those who are in most need of Thy mercy.”

“Truly I tell you” spoke the Lord again, “unless you become like little children, you shall never enter the kingdom of heaven”. Today this is how we pray at least, if not yet how we are. We pray as children between wars; as fearful of the reality of sin as Franz’s conscience made him and as hopeful in our love and sacrifice for sinners as prompted Edith Stein’s devotion. As we pray, offers the ancient maxim, we believe.

Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi.

Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, Saint Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, Saints Jacinta and Francisco, Pray for us!

Tradition holds Mark to be a secretary for Peter the apostle, and his gospel to be something like a memoir for the fisherman, penned from sustained recollection years after the events described. Matthew is traditionally held to be from the pen of the apostle himself, or at least that he is among its primary sources. Taking this to be so, it is worth noting that neither apostle was present for the scene they describe. Peter thrice denied Jesus and bitterly wept outside the court of the high priest. Matthew, together with most of the other apostles, had fled in fear of the Roman authorities. Each man’s vision of the crucifixion matches their own experience of it, much betrayal and abandonment with little light to see by.

It’s Luke who gives us Jesus’ promise of paradise to the good thief, His appeal to the mercy of the Father for those who know not what they do, and the commendation of His spirit. And it’s John, the beloved disciple, who gives us the gift of His mother, His thirst, and His annunciation that the work is fulfilled. Luke was not an apostle at all and certainly was not present for the events he describes, but his extensive infancy narrative and intimate portrayal of Mary suggest her to be a prominent source for his gospel. John was the only apostle who remained at the foot of the Cross, and so the only witness to what he records, together with the mother who he took into his home.

Mary had known, since the presentation of her Son, that a sword would pierce her heart. She had always sensed what His mission would cost her, while the apostles could not grasp it even when He made it plain to them. Her whole life had been a continual offering of Him: in conceiving and bearing Him, in His consecration at the temple, at Cana to initiate His public ministry, and here in her sorrow at the foot of the Cross. John the beloved had just the night before reposed in Jesus’ breast, the breast now pierced before his eyes.

Together their memories of the crucifixion too match their closeness to it. The consolations in Luke and John are fruits of constancy and contemplation. They are small mysteries of hope that one might encounter when they stay close to the suffering of their beloved. These gospels were also written later than the others, and so they may likewise be the fruit of deeper recollection of the events that had occurred. As we enter the Lenten season, let us pray to be like John and Mary and draw nearer to the crosses in our midst, that we may one day give true testimony to their hidden consolations.

Dividing the question: How and Why

“How could God allow this?” is an ambiguous question, and it could be understood in two distinct ways. The first of these is almost cold and clinical. It would seem that God, being identical with good itself, as well as its source and measure, cannot be a cause of evil. Yet since He is the origin of everything, from whence else can evil come? How can we speak sensibly about a world full of both natural and moral evils which has its source in the will of a good and perfect God? Must all distinction be dissolved? Must we then call evil “good” and darkness “light” and bitter “sweet” (cf. Is 5:20)? Must we say in our hearts “there is no God” (cf. Ps 14)?

The second sense though, is hot and personal. Everything is firstly gift; it comes to be at all because God has willed it so, and God wills what He pleases. He is no bystander to the unfolding of the created order; He is the ever-present cause of its being-such and its remaining so. More than that, He is a God who has revealed Himself in history; from the first promises to Abraham through to their fulfillment in the Son who has declared Him (cf. Gn 12:1, Jn 1:18). He is a God of miracle and wonder. There is no malady He cannot cure, and no calamity that He cannot prevent. Not one sparrow falls outside the Father’s care, and He has numbered each hair on your head (Lk 12:6-7). He has made the blind to see and the lame to walk, healed the sick and raised the dead (Mt 11:5); He is not averse to such interventions.

Why then, does He stand afar off, and hide himself in times of trouble (cf. Ps 10)? Why does He hide his face (cf. Ps 88)? Why has He forsaken us (cf. Ps. 22)? For anyone who may desperately need and desire His aid, each claim to an answered prayer for someone somewhere else can be a twist of the knife. Here God has brought this child’s cancer to remission and there another slowly wastes away. This hurricane fortuitously breaks out to sea before it hits the coast, and that tsunami leaves 20,000 dead amid inland debris. Millions cry out to the Lord throughout the violence of the Second World War, and they are met with His silence until the smoke of their incineration rises to heaven like incense. “How could God allow this?”

Scripture emphatically rebukes those first temptations to doubt God’s goodness or His presence. The prophet Isaiah promises woe to those who mingle evil together with good and the psalmist declares that the fool who says ‘there is no God’ in his heart is corrupt and abominable. But it’s the psalmist himself who begs answer from the God in whom he’s put his trust. It’s that very trust which gives all of his lament its fearsome sting. The righteous Job too, in the pit of his grief, cried of his wish to bring God before a court to plead his case; to make God answer to his innocence. “The earth” Job saw, “is given into the hands of the wicked. He covers the faces of its judges. If it is not Him then who is it?” (Jb 9:24). God cannot throw up His hands and plead His impotence. When He does respond to Job, He rebukes the friends who had offered pious platitudes on His behalf. It’s Job, God says, who unlike them has “spoken well of Him” (Jb 42:7-8).

Dividing the will

Confronted with this pair of questions, we are often tempted to wave our hands and point to the freedom of creatures. God has willed that there be not only rocks and trees, flora and fauna, but also men and angels. That is, rational creatures who know and who love, with rational appetites by which to order their activity towards the good at which they aim their lives. In other words, creatures with wills of their own; and free creatures, we might reckon, can choose otherwise than God. In making angels, God must risk diabolical rebellion. In making men, He must risk their perdition. If He is to desire that they freely love Him, He likewise allows that He may freely lose them. And so He has made, and so they have chosen. So we might say.

Our first parents as recounted in Genesis, who knew no ailment or lack, still were tempted to doubt the goodness of God’s will, and chose instead the bitterness of disobedience and exile (cf. Gn 3). Further still, behind that first sin there lurked the seductive voice of the serpent, and those fallen angels lost before the foundation of the world. That world then, as we experience it, is not as it is made to be. Some spirits, made to patrol and govern its seams have abandoned their posts, and the seams have split. Men, made for freedom and for love, have instead been given up to the lusts of their hearts, exchanging the truth for lies, and worshipping creatures instead of their Creator (cf Rm 1:24-25). Can we then hold God responsible for such calamities, when we have brought them upon ourselves? Might such freedom, and the love it may occasion, be the good which stays His hand from relieving our distress, lest he do some violence to it?

No, it won’t do, my sweet theologians.
Desire will not save the morality of God.
If he created beings able to choose between good and evil,
And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,

(excerpt, "Theodicy", by Czeslaw Milosz)

What is it, though, for creatures to be free? To be a creature is to be both caused and willed; to be both dependent in one’s being and powers and contingent on the free creative act of God. A power present in an effect must, in some sense, first be present in its cause; so if creatures may be free at all, it is firstly because God is free. Their freedom, however conditioned, stands as testimony to the unconditioned freedom of their maker. For there is nowhere else to find it; there are no free causes in nature taken on its own, nor in the abyss from whence nature is called forth. If there is freedom to be found, it is a share in His first freedom, and so a share in His activity. Freedom is God’s doing, and it can be nothing otherwise.

But it can indeed be nothing. The ardent naturalist may seek freedom in nature and find nothing, since he has left himself nothing to find. For freedom to abide in the order of nature, nature itself must be encountered as a contingency. Gift must be the first thing known, and the only true necessity. To claim as faith would have us do, that God has created “ex nihilo”, from nothing pre-existent, is a condition of possibility for creaturely freedom to mean anything at all. An effect must first be present in its cause.

Still likewise reason too is just as needful a condition. The ardent voluntarist, in ascribing sovereignty to God’s will, would unbind Him even from the fetters of non-contradiction. But to impute irrationality to God is to blaspheme, it is to say of Him the very thing that the prophet condemns in man: that He may call darkness “light” and evil “good”, which is to noisily say nothing at all. “and if the light in you is full of darkness” says the Son of God, “oh how great that darkness is” (cf. Mt 6:23).

Dividing Creation

In the first few lines of Genesis, it’s by an act of speech that God creates the heavens and the earth. He says “let there be light”, and so there is, and He divides it from the darkness (cf. Gn 1:3-4). This division will be the refrain with which he closes each day in the unfolding of Creation: “ve-yehi erev, ve-yehi boqer”, “and there was evening, and there was morning”. The Hebrew of erev gestures at a “mixture”, while the root of boqer relates it to examination and distinction, and the kind of separation that distinctions bring about. Light and darkness are mingled together in the evening, and they are divided at the coming of the dawn.

It’s in the daylight that God speaks things into being (amar), that he sees them and reckons them good (ra’ah, vay’yar ki-tov), and that he names them (qara, va’yikrah). Each motion in this process brings division. For a word to be a word, for it to mean anything at all, is for it to set apart its object from all else. To be some “what” is to be a “this” rather than a “that”. Every word is a sharpened sword, and the clearer its meaning the sharper it is.

Further, to see at all is to see distinction, and to judge is to make distinction. We say of a clearer picture that it has “more definition” and a “sharper image”. The blind man half-way healed at Bethsaida first sees the blurry forms of men as if they were tall trees, before a second touch makes “all things clear” (cf. Mk 8:22-25). To judge anything “good” or “true” is to reckon it apart from evil and falsehood; it is not to mingle them. God reckons good all that He sees by His day’s illumination, rather than as it is obscured in the “mixture” of the evening.

And every naming still further sets apart that which is named. God divides the waters from the waters, and names those above “the heavens” and the gathering of those below “the seas” (cf. Gn 1:6-10). He makes all the animals, but commissions man to name them (cf. Gn 2:19). Naming adds purpose to distinction and judgment: God names the seas and heavens that “the dry land may appear”, and Adam names the creatures in the search of one unto his own kind. The Hebrew root k-r-a has the sense of both designation and vocation, to name and to call. Each name bears traces of a will to an end, whether human or divine, and so divides that which accords with such a will from that which cuts against it.

This trio taken together bears resemblance to the classical acts of the intellect: to apprehension, judgment, and reasoning. To apprehend is to grasp what something is, and God makes all to be what it is by His word. Our words may be clear or confused, more or less well-defined; God’s first word is “light” itself, and His word is definitive. To judge is to affirm or to deny, to distinguish truth from falsehood and good from evil; God sees truly all that is and judges it to be “good”. To reason is to discern what follows from what is, and to order a will to the good for which it acts; God gives names that call to what is there, that He may order all things to His ends.

But for any created thing to be at all is already for it to be willed by God, and so insofar as it transgresses His will it must lack something of what it is. The first time God judges anything “not good” in the creation accounts, He is judging what it lacks. “It is not good” God says, “for man to be alone” (Gn 2:18), and so for him to be without another like himself. It is not good because he is made to be-with, and so his world remains incomplete.

Here we encounter the asymmetry at the heart of good and evil, and along with it the sovereignty of the good. What is good is substantial, it is what God has actively intended it to be. It may be distinguished this from that, but it need not be indexed to any lack to be made known. We may comprehend health without reference to illness, or reckon hope without the shadow of despair. Evil instead, is privative; it is to be without. I cannot make illness known as illness if I do not know what health would be, and I will not see despair for what it is unless I feel the hole that hope has left in its absence. Evil is, as Saints Augustine or Aquinas would describe it, a “privatio boni”, a privation of the good.

And as evil is to good, so sin is to the will of God. The Greek “hamartia" carries the sense of an archer missing his mark. God brings all to be out of nothing by His word, and calls all to Himself by name. Where there is a will there is a way, and to sin is to choose against the only will which is the only way. It is to surrender truth for lies and worship creature over Creator (cf. Rm 1:24-25). Such is the condition of the world of our experience from the origin of our experience, the original sin of our first parents. And the wages of sin, preaches Paul, is death (cf. Rm 6:23); that is, the privation of even being at all.

“How might we know the way?”, asks the disciple Thomas (cf. Jn 14:5). “What is truth?”, scoffs Pilate (cf. Jn 18:38). “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” asks the rich young man (cf. Mk 10:17).

“I am the way, the truth, and the life” replies the Son of God (Jn 14:6). “No one comes to the Father but through me” He says. Unless a grain of wheat shall fall and die it will abide alone, but if it dies it avails much fruit; so it is that he who loves his life will lose it, but him that hates his life in this world shall keep it for eternal life (cf. Jn 12:24-25). It is not good that man should be alone.

Jesus Christ, Measure and Divider

The first lines of John’s gospel draw us even closer to the heart of things than do those first of Genesis. The latter recount the first thing that God does; these now reveal the heart of who He Is. “In the beginning” says the evangelist, “was the Word” who “was with God, and [who] was God” (cf. Jn 1:1). Before God speaks, His Word is ever with Him; even alone God is never solitary.

Each word might mean this or that, but this Word is the meaning of everything. It is the sense through which anything may be what it is, and so it is “through Him” that “all things come to be” while without Him there is nothing (Jn 1:3). He is the light that shone in darkness, which the darkness has not comprehended (cf. Jn 1:5). A world that has not known the light cannot know itself, and “the world did not know Him” (Jn 1:10). Illness cannot reckon itself ill, nor can despair detect its desperation. Such a world calls evil “good” and darkness “light”, and mingles everything together. It is evening until He comes, the light of the world (cf. Jn 8:12).

And as it’s in the Word that all is apprehended, so it’s in the Light that all is to be judged. Jesus says as much to Nicodemus, the rabbi who comes to speak with Him by night. “This is the judgment” He says, “that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.” (Jn 3:19-21). The world hates Him because He testifies its works are evil (cf. Jn 7:7), and yet God Has loved the world in giving this His only Son that all who believe might have life in Him (cf. Jn 3:16).

And He has entered that world not only by the Word through which all came to be, nor only by the light through which it will be seen and judged, but also through the birth by which it was redeemed. “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (Jn 1:14), and “in the fullness of time, the Son of God was born of a woman, under the law” (Gal 4:4). It’s for this reason of His mission, of that end for which He’s born to die, that He has been “given a name which is above all names” (Phil 2:9). “You shall call His name, Jesus” spoke the angel unto Mary, and “she pondered these things in her heart” (Lk 1:31, 2:19).

Men in their exile had been “without hope, or God in the world” (cf. Eph 2:12). Absent kings, they had all “done what was right in their own eyes” (cf. Jg 17:6, 21:25). Even those who lived by the promises of God had been left blind, with blind guides (cf. Mt 15:14). God is the source and measure of what is good, and not knowing God, they could not take the measure of anything. There were many that had said, “who will show us any good?” (Ps. 4:6), but “The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men” to seek for any that sought Him, and found “none who does good” (Ps 14:2-3).

But because the Word was born in flesh, there was a Man to be the measure. The formless invisible God, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being” (cf. Acts 17:28) had condescended to “take the form of a slave, in the likeness of men” and modeled obedience “even unto death on a Cross” (Phil 2:7-8). All this that we “being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that [we] may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:17-19). Those saints then, will judge the world and even judge the angels (cf. 1 Cor 6:2-3), by He who is the measure of everything.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”

In both Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels, this is the first proclamation of Jesus’ public ministry. It is the first Kerygma, the announcement of the gospel, and the event which invites our conversion. But to what end and purpose? To what might we liken the kingdom of heaven?

Jesus himself will tell us. It is like the wheat and weeds which grow up together, until the harvest when the wheat will be gathered and the weeds will be bundled and burned (cf. Mt 13:24-30). Or it is like a net cast wide into the sea to gather fish of every kind, and when it’s full the good fish will be gathered into vessels and the bad fish will be scattered (Mt 13:47-48). When the King arrives at the end of time, He will divide the sheep from the goats, and those who have shown mercy to “the least of these” will know the mercy of the living God. Those who have not, He will have never known (cf. Mt 25:31-46, Mt 7:23).

Just as the coming of the light is a judgment, the coming of the kingdom is a division. “I have come not to bring peace but a sword” says Christ “to divide father and son, and mother and daughter” (cf. Mt 10:34-35;Lk 12:51). “Anyone not with me is against me, and those who do not gather with me are scattered” (Mt 12:30). Every word brings some division, and the Word of God brings the division. “The word of God” says the epistle to the Hebrews, “is living and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” (Hb 4:12). When the evangelist beheld the Son of Man in his glory, such a two-edged sword proceeded from His mouth and His countenance was as bright as the sun (Rv 1:15). No longer will they be mingled together: good with evil, light and darkness, bitter and sweet. The evening will give way to the dawn, and “when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.” (1 Cor 15:28).

Part Two: Providence

Untangling the first question: “How could God allow this?”

All this has permitted us to say a great deal about our first “cold and clinical” question. That is, how evils may be accounted evil in a world which has its origin from God. We have noted first that everything created is gratuitous, that it need not be at all, and that God has willed it so from nothing pre-existing. Creation adds nothing to God, who is Himself fullness without qualification, and neither do its lacks detract from Him for the same reason. Gift is the first thing known, the beginning and the end of our experience, and the only true necessity.

God is good, and to be a creature is to be willed by God, so we may say also without qualification that everything which is, insofar as it is, is good. Evil instead, is privative and parasitic. Evil is a wound in creation, and it only finds its measure in the light of how created things are made to be. Our illness is reckoned in the splendor of our healing, and our desperation brought to light against the hope that we are made for.

And since everything is from a will, so too, in some sense, must be every wound. It is because there are free creatures, men and angels, that evils may be possible. Some sin must be reckoned at their source, some will apart from the will by which things come to be. What we name ‘moral’ evils are accounted such by defects of the human will. “I do not understand myself” preaches the apostle, “for I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want I do” (cf. Rm 7:15-19). The law has made sin known to him as sin, but that has only brought him death, for “the law is spiritual, but [he] is of the flesh” (Rm 7:14). “What is born of flesh, is flesh” says Christ again to Nicodemus, and “what is born of spirit, is spirit”; we must be born of “water and spirit” he says, to inherit the kingdom of God (cf. Jn 3:5-6). Flesh is from the dust of the earth, and spirit from the breath of God (cf. Gn 2:7); “dust returns to the earth as it was” says the preacher, “and spirit to the God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7).

Before God speaks a word in Genesis, His own Spirit hovers over the face of the waters, “Ruach elohim merachefet al-penei ha’mayim” (Gn 1:2). To be born of water and spirit then, is to be born of nothing but the will of God. The Spirit is likened to the wind, made known by His effects, but not from whence He comes or whither He goes (cf. Jn 3:8). He too is God, and God wills what He pleases. But it’s by that same Spirit that the Word has taken flesh (cf. Lk 1:35), that through His dying even flesh might be redeemed.

Untangling ‘Natural’ Evils

Our battle though, once again preaches the apostle (this time, at least a decade later), is “not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Eph 6:12). Paul has widened the horizon of his gaze. Behind even the first sins of the flesh are still yet sins of the spirit, and so behind the fall of matter is a fall of spirit. In his letter to the Romans, Paul had spoken about sin, law, and death; the subjection of flesh to futility and the labor pains of creation. Now to the Ephesians, he writes of the spiritual drama hidden beyond creation’s veil. Christ too speaks of things “hidden since the foundation of the world” revealed in His parables and John’s Apocalypse (lit. “unveiling”) recounts a vision of the “war in heaven” at the bookends of all time (cf. Mt 13:35, Rv 12:7-12).

With this in mind, we should be uneasy in our casual talk of ‘natural’ evils. The nature we encounter in experience is not as God intends it. The world as it alone discloses itself springs from nothing to nothing, from a single ancient point of light and heat unto a cold and empty dissolution. Life is everywhere fragile and contingent, while death is robust and absolute. And nature too is further red in tooth and claw, everywhere violent and scarce; a pond in lush surroundings, harmonious and serene, still may hide a massacre below its surface.

But this is not the nature God reveals to us in the first two chapters of Genesis. The waters swarm with life, and every sort of fowl pierces the firmament of heaven; cattle, beasts, and creeping things spring forth from the earth after their kind, but throughout there is no trace of violence (cf. Gn 1:20-25). God gives man every herb-yielding seed and each fruit of the trees to eat thereof, and to the other creatures of the earth green herb (Gn 1:29-30). Here, even in consumption, man may only more spread life and not destroy it; the whole of his presence on the earth is priestly. Even among the brutes there is no feast of flesh. The first bloodshed in Scripture is in the silence of Abel’s righteous offering of his firstling lambs to God, and it is quickly succeeded by Cain’s unrighteous shedding of Abel’s own blood in envy. That blood cries out to heaven from the ground (cf. Gn 4:4-10).

It is not until after the calamities of sin and the flooding of the world that God commissions man to eat of animal flesh, and so to take his place atop the tooth and claw. Adam had been given a peaceful dominion over the creatures, to name them and to dress and keep the earth on which they trod (cf. Gn 1:28, 2:15,19). Now, Noah and his children are to multiply upon the earth in the fear and dread of all flesh and all that teems from the ground, and God will require the blood of them all for Himself (cf. Gn 9:1-5).

Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,
Which would find its explanation only by assuming
The existence of an archetypal Paradise
And a pre-human downfall so grave
That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.

(Concluding excerpt, "Theodicy" by Czeslaw Milosz)

God is good, and only good can come from God, and so even those evils that we reckon most impersonal, and most ‘natural’, must bear the traces of some original fault. The angels who have turned themselves from God have torn the seams of the cosmos, and in the temptation of our first parents they have torn the very heart of man. Nature is everywhere good, for it can be nothing else-wise, but it is nowhere unscathed.

How are we to reckon then, the natures we encounter which are so plainly bound up with evils? The good for the lion is evil for the gazelle. Every gratuitously beautiful thing upon the earth is weaved about through a long and meandering violent history, a furnace of sex and death that yields the peacock and the giraffe as the kiln yields the potter’s vessel, and “has not the potter power over the clay?” (cf. Rm 9:21)

Here the theologians do not answer in concert, nor does an orthodox faith demand their uniform reply. The extent to which the nature of experience discloses the natures of things is contentious. What they affirm together is that nature is good, that it is firstly from a God who reckons all things good, and that by everything that comes to be He shows us something of Himself. Evil can break, and wound, and twist the good of things, but it cannot exhaust them.

The more rosy and sober of the theologians, more determined to plant their faith in a hard ground, may say simply that lions are just the sort of good thing for which their being-such entails God’s permission of evil and violence; that even their goodness is already a small testimony to the manner in which God may bring good out of evil. The more brooding and immanently pessimistic, made so by the fixity of their vision on God’s transfiguring intent, may claim instead that we know very little of what a lion really is, and we will not know truly until the day one lays down with a lamb (cf. Is 11:6).

That the Church in her wisdom has not seen fit to foreclose either of these poles from the boundaries of orthodoxy is not at all to deny the real stakes of the difference. It implicates our common life and the Church’s relationship to it in profound ways; the manner with which she can reasonably expect to engage in dialogue with the wider world and appeal to the ‘natural law’ as a basis of common understanding. As man continues to exercise greater and greater powers to manipulate nature, in the pursuit of what he takes to be good, the gulf between thinkers like Herbert McCabe OP and Paul Griffiths will surely become a more acute one. But even bracketing that difference aside, the phenomena we are considering still certainly entail the permission of evils, and so too must point us to the “downfall” of Milosz’s “Theodicy”.

Untangling Freedom

“It is for freedom Christ has set us free” St Paul exhorts the Galatians, and for his own part Jesus tells his disciples that those abiding in His word shall “know the truth, and the truth shall set them free” (cf. Gal 5:1, Jn 8:31-32). To abide in God’s word is to be what God has made us to be, and to worship Him in “spirit and truth” (cf. Jn 4:24). Freedom for a creature is to do the will of God, and it can be nothing else-wise, because only God is truly free. Thus everyone who sins, says Christ “is slave to sin” (Jn 8:34). There can be no true freedom in even the most trivial of sins, because there is no true freedom apart from the activity of God.

Sin is a defect of the will, in much the same way that illness is a deficit of health, or despair a lack of hope. Created freedom is a necessary condition of its possibility, and so such freedom can be marshaled towards explaining the reality of evil, but it is not a sufficient condition. God could well make free creatures who never sin, and they would be that much freer for it. All of their activity would be from and for the greatest good there is, which is God, and this would be the end and meaning of their freedom. This is the very freedom Christ has promised to those who abide in His word. It is a word which has divided truth from falsehood and good from evil, a light which has illuminated and judged between them, and a spirit which has taken flesh in those who hear that word and do God’s will. This is the salvation that is the very life of God, given through the grace of faith imparted in baptism. We, born sinners, cannot live this life without His grace, and without the gratuitous mercy through which He renews that life in us. But insofar as we abide in love, it will be Him who lives in us (cf. Gal 2:20, 1 Jn 4:16).

This vision of freedom then, can account for the possibility of evils, but it cannot answer for them. How evil may be reckoned brings us no closer to understanding why it may be permitted. Evil may depend on the abuse of created freedom, but the good of that freedom does not depend on evil’s possibility. God need not risk rebellion by the splendor of a free angelic order, and He need not risk our loss to have our love. There is no malady He cannot cure, and no calamity that He cannot prevent. Not one sparrow falls outside the Father’s care, and He has numbered each hair on your head (Lk 12:6-7).

When St Thomas considers the question of God’s existence near the beginning of the Summa Theologica, he offers many “ways” of arriving at its certainty: from change, from contingency, from degree, from finality. He entertains only one serious objection to it, the reality of evil, which he elegantly considers in this way:

“It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word God means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world.” (ST.1.Q2.A3)

He answers, quoting Augustine, that “Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil.”

In short, that God must have His reasons, and His reasons must be good. But what is good?

Untangling Reasons

Despite its haunting urgency, “why does God permit evil?” is really a derivative question. Whatever may suffice to answer it is bound up with a more primitive and fundamental mystery. That is, “why is there anything at all?” Just as evils are everywhere relative to goods, so too must the reasons for the permission of evils be relative to the reasons for the creation of goods. Good is everywhere prior to evil, as everything is firstly from God, and everything from God is good.

The original order of creation, and our first parents’ original justice within it, disclosed nothing of evil or lack. But it also disclosed few traces of God’s ultimate purposes. Genesis is notably silent about God’s ends in creating, especially when juxtaposed with rival ancient accounts of the world’s origins. The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian origin myth most closely associated with Genesis, and with which the human authors of Genesis were likely polemicizing, is quite explicit about the motivations of its fickle gods. The God revealed in Scripture is comparably mute about His own.

In Genesis 1, God looks on each thing that He’s made and sees that it’s good, but Scripture rarely offers an etiology of His ends in acting. Where it does, it is almost always in His responses to evils or defects. It is not good that man should be alone, therefore God shall make for him another like himself (cf. Gn 2:18), the curses in Genesis 3 are because of our first parents’ sin (cf. Gn 3:14-19), and God floods the world because the sin of man has grieved His heart (cf. Gn 6:5-7). The goodness of God and His will are at once both mysterious and certain; it is the distance between that goodness and the world of experience that perpetually invites explicit explanation.

That is, until the proclamation of the Gospel, when the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, comes to make Him known (cf. Jn 1:18). The four gospel accounts and the many letters which make up the New Testament canon draw as closely as words can take us to the purposes of God. In Hebrew Scripture, we generally encounter God’s reasons as ostensible responses, whether to man’s transgressions or petitions. The gospels unveil the living God who is always first, who acts first from before everything for ends after everything (cf. Rv 22:13), and calls who He will to those ends. And “the gifts and calling of God” preaches the apostle, “are irrevocable” (Rm 11:29).

Through John, we hear that God has revealed His love for us by sending His Son into the world that we might live through Him (cf. 1 Jn 4:9); through Paul that He has bound up all in disobedience, that he might have mercy on all (cf. Rm 11:32). When his disciples ask of a man born blind whether it was his or his parents’ sin which caused his blindness, Jesus answers them that it was no sin at all, but so that “the works of God could be revealed in him” (Jn 9:3). When He hears of His friend Lazarus’ illness, He declares that it is not unto death, but for the glory of God that His Son should be glorified through it (cf. Jn 11:4). Paul again rejoices in his sufferings, that they might fill up what is lacking in Christ’s own afflictions for the sake of His body the Church (cf. Col 1:24). Where we once heard of God’s punishments in response to our faults, we now hear of God’s glory already anticipated even in evils both suffered and done. That is, the glory and the splendor of true love.

Inscrutable saints and intelligible sinners

The “splendor of truth” and the “glory of love” though, both remain as mysterious to us as God does; and this not only because sin has darkened our intellects and divided our hearts. Our first parents lacked neither the unblemished light of reason nor purity of heart, and they were close enough to God to walk beside Him in the cool of the day, but His purposes were no less inscrutable to them. Similarly, though we live many centuries removed from the earthly life of Christ, His purposes are no more obscure to us than they were to His most intimate companions and friends, who constantly mistook them. Our first parents, not knowing what God intended for them, could doubt its goodness enough to seek their own good apart from Him. The apostles, not understanding what Jesus was born to do, could doubt Him enough to flee in fear, abandon, and betray Him at the moment of His passion.

And because God and His ends are mysterious to us, there is something equally mysterious about the saints who make those ends their own. The purest reasons of the heart, God’s reasons made ours, must share in something of His inscrutability. That is not to say that they would be irrational or contradict those goods that we can grasp, but rather that those reasons and goods within our grasp are always conduits to something yet beyond our reach. We may work to untangle the threads of our lives, but it is so God may sow a garment with them, and “no eye has seen, nor ear has heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man the good things God has prepared for those who love Him (1 Cor 2:9).

As sinners though, in choosing finite goods over the infinite good of God, we act in a manner which is more intelligible. Our actions are plainly explicable, because they are indexed to a last good which is known, whether we steal a car, commit adultery, or murder a political rival. It’s a great deal easier to establish motive for a crime than to make sense of a saint. The last “why” in a litany of them for any sin is an idol, and any idol is more graspable than God. The last “why” in the litany of them for the acta santorum is the love that God is, and words fail to touch it.

Repentance and Regret

There is a true sense in which God wills for everything that happens to happen, and even that “everything that happens, happens for a reason”. But it is often much more important for us to emphasize the senses in which both of these platitudes are perniciously false. God’s will is living and active, and God never wills even the most trivial evil. He is not present in evils in the same way that He is present in good things and good works. Evil too, is senseless, in that it ultimately stems from wills acting apart from the reasons of God. Evils do not happen for true “reasons”, and we should not try to make sense out of them.

We are permitted these distinctions because God creates from nothing, and so nothing in creation detracts from the fullness of God. Where there are good things and good works, there is His activity, and where there are evils, there are the traces of the abyss from which creation was called forth. It is because God creates from nothing that He can draw good even from evil, and because we are creatures that we must not do evil such that good may come. We cannot truly will a good out of an evil because we can only do good from what is first given to us, and all that is given to us is good. God can draw good from evils because He can draw good from nothing at all.

A common obstacle to true repentance for the sins of our past is that we often cannot truly wish they had never occurred, because we see clearly too many great goods which have flowed from them. My life is the fruit of all I’ve sowed, and if I am grateful for it, how can I also have regrets? How can I repent of a sinful affair where by it my child was born? Can I truly wish I had not stolen, or lied, or cheated when my litany of faults have brought me to the life that I am grateful for?

It is to these sorts of questions that the asymmetry between God and creatures is both answer and consolation. We may repent of what we’ve done, and feel sorrow over sins committed, without disdaining the goods that have been worked through them. Those goods belong to God, who makes all to be from nothing and who wills what He pleases, and we may thank Him even moreso for what He has done for us through our faults.

“You meant it for evil” Joseph says to his brothers who have sold him into slavery, “but God meant it for good” (Gn 50:20).

“Why do You allow this?”

Still despite all this, we cannot be flippant. We may see the traces of how good may work through evils, in the ‘natural’ order of the lion and the peacock or in the historical providence of God, but there is no good present to us which can blithely answer for the gravity of the evils which are. They are too many and too grave. We should not try to marshal such goods as evidence in Job’s imagined court, and we should not, like Job’s friends, attempt to be God’s lawyers there. Nothing we have ever known can speak to what we have already seen, and insofar as we retreat from God to created goods this only gets more true. The shallower the goods at which we aim our lives, the more we are inclined to judge God for the evils He permits, because the fickle things we love don’t answer for them. For most of history, many children died while their parents trusted Him enough to risk another birth. Today, we are mostly spared this great evil and we hardly trust Him enough to risk anything at all.

So what is left for us to say?

Firstly, if we truly seek God’s face and love His justice, we may be full of anger and lamentation. The psalmist has given us the words, and Job has given us the witness. There is nothing impious in this, and there is much impious in the platitudes which attempt to domesticate such passions. We should be unsatisfied with the world. God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind is not really an answer, it is not a reason, but it is a reminder of who we are and to whom we are addressing the question. We were not present when he laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and the angels shouted in joy (cf. Jb 38:4-7). We have not entered the depths or seen the gates of death; comprehended the bread of the earth, or the way to the dwelling of the light (cf. Jb 38:16-19).

Secondly, because Christ was born, because He suffered and died, God too is present even in His own absence. Though He is not active in evils done, He is present in evils suffered. He wastes away with the child, and lies strewn amid debris with the victims of disaster, and it’s the smoke of His own holocaust that rises to heaven like incense. He was there at the laying of those foundations, and He has trampled those gates of death. Through that same bread of the earth He gives us the fullness of Himself, and He is the way to the dwelling of the light. Yet still He can cry from the Cross, in the voice of the psalmist, “Eli Eli, Lama Sabachthani”, My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me? Blessed are those who mourn, He has assured us, for they shall be consoled (cf. Mt 5:4).

On the Cross we may first see God’s ‘responsive’ justice, but this is the adjusting of our eyes, like the blind man who firstly sees the men looming as tall trees. We may also see all those evils we fear: pain, betrayal, abandonment, humiliation, as the Israelites saw that which they most feared in the brass serpent Moses lifted up (Jn 3:14, Nm 21:4-9). In the cry of the innocent Christ, we may see the mystery of all that God allows to befall us, especially so in the lament of the one who is most truly undeserving of it. And when we see that here is God, the Son of God freely offering Himself for the reconciliation of the world, we may still more see the glory and the splendor of true love. At least, as much as we can see it. No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered our hearts, what good such work has prepared (cf. 1 Cor 2:9).

The Wisdom of the Saints

A few months after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, a survivor of the blast named Takashi Nagai spoke at a requiem Mass for the victims. The bomb had fallen upon the city’s cathedral, and Nagai noted that no man had intended that, the clouds that day had rerouted the bomber. Were they not, he asked, an offering of God to end the war? Could not the victims there have helped to complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ (cf. Col 1:24)?

In 1877, St. Josephine Bakhita was kidnapped by slave traders in Darfur, when she was only eight years old. This began for her a life of tumult and violence, changing homes and hands across North Africa, Asia, and finally northern Italy. It was in Venice in 1888, through Canossian religious sisters, that she encountered the God that her heart had always known, though namelessly. This Jesus, she saw, was a master unlike the fickle and merciless masters she had known. He was a master she would love to serve, and to serve Him made her free. Later in her life, she was asked what she might say to her former captors if she were to see them again. She said that she would kneel and kiss their hands in gratitude, for had these things not happened, she would not then be a Christian and a religious sister now. They meant such things for evil, she understood, but God meant them for good.

Leon Bloy writes:

“There is no human being on earth who is capable of declaring who he is with certainty. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, to what his acts, feelings, ideas correspond, or what his real name is, his imperishable Name in the registry of Light… History is an immense liturgical text, where the i’s and the periods are not worth less than whole verses or chapters, but the importance of both is undeterminable and is profoundly hidden”

O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! (Rm 11:33).

Feast Your Eyes

We have heard, on good authority
That we will not marry then
But we will be as angels are
And so the theologians
In their sweet and crude sincerity
Have often pondered what becomes
Of what of us is made for marriage

For my part,
I have wondered over eyelids
For why should eyes beholding only uncreated light
Have any needful interruption?

Perhaps they will be made like jaws
With spittle tears
And pin-prick pupil tongues
To tenderize and taste
All that will then be laid before us
How else might we enjoy it
While our busy lips are full of endless declamation?

Think of lilies even now
Resplendent in their finery
dressed ever for a banquet; 
The wedding of dirt and firmament
That comes anew each sunrise
In a feast of light

Nomine Domini

The Name is on the lips of all my friends
He haunts their shock and their calamities
Or substitutes for their vulgarities
Invades the thoughts that grasp at hidden ends

How scandalous their speech can seem to me
To clothe a gift of sweet sacrality
In all their blather and banality
Is surely such a dreadful vanity

Still were it not for sin that they recall
That tender Name, they’d scarce hear it at all
Perhaps God-willing they might someday boast
“O Happy Fault that kept His Name so close!”

Luke Recalls the Virgin’s Face

Even after everything, in John’s house
There remained the traces of her tears
Etched with iron permanence
And in our days of fire and exuberance
Joy and terror irrepressible
Hers was an uncanny register
And it scarcely came as consolation
Or perhaps it troubled us
Fearing that our doubtful moments
Could mistake it for despair

We do not grieve as others do

But Mary knew grief
Was love apprehending distance
And hers was never vanity
It was a distance He had traveled
And a threshold He would cross again
To lift her whole

Watching a Turtle

This turtle seems more whole than I
More pure of heart, if it were sensible to say it
His every lumbered step singing only the
Inscrutable will of his creator
My fevered paces sing of nothing in particular
He, being made to know nothing, knows all he ought to know
I, flattered that I am made to know everything
know not even what I ought
For God is not a turtle, nor is He like a turtle,
Or a tower of turtles
And a man is not God (is he like God?)
Still, he would be just as inscrutable
Were it not for his dishonesty

From a strictly anthropological point of view by contrast, the sacraments are distinct religious rites. That is, they are an orderly sequence of words and actions with a symbolic meaning of shared significance to their participants. Nearly every human culture and community makes its common life cohere by means of such rituals. In particular, rites traditionally mark discrete changes in the relationship of an individual to the community of which he is a part, or in his status within it. These are what the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep famously termed “rites of passage”.

The sacraments of the Church are well-fitted to this sort of understanding. Those of initiation, particularly Baptism and Confirmation, graft their recipients into Christ’s Body and seal them with His Spirit. In the anthropological register, they signify a lasting change in their relationship to others in the Church. Matrimony and Holy Orders likewise leave an indelible mark on the relationship of the couple or the ordained to the wider community; theologically, God joins these together or sets those apart for service. Still more, Reconciliation and the Eucharist restore and justify their recipients in their relationship with God and others. Said otherwise, they signify a formal remedy to a rupture in the life of the community.

This sort of linguistic two-step, wherein we may characterize the sacramental economy at once in respectively divine and human terms, does much to illustrate the manner by which God saves mankind in a human fashion. It’s perhaps fitting that the rites which Christ has instituted should seem to be particular species of genera which are common to humanity. Religion is natural to man, as is his instinct to fear and rejoice in trembling before the margins of his existence; at each birth and death, each wedding and each funeral. Christ offers His presence precisely in those moments where even the most distant might be inclined to seek Him out, and He does no violence to their nature in so offering.

But is that entirely the case? While much may be said about the concordance of the sacraments with the ordinary contours of natural religion, it is even more notable what they conspicuously omit. Perhaps the most ubiquitous occasion for a “rite of passage” across human cultures is the child’s entrance into adulthood. “Coming of age” rituals signify the transition from childhood into the responsibilities of a full member of the community, often effected by a brief liminal “setting apart”. Such rites help to cultivate a feeling of belonging and deliberate integration of adolescents into the community. Christ, in the institution of the Sacraments, left us nothing fitting to effect this sort of event. Why might this be? And what might this absence help to illuminate about the essence of Christian religion and its distinct mark on the character of human life? Lastly, what might be the implications of this sort of consideration for pastoral practice?

Baptism: Evangelization and Infancy

We ought first to consider, as a matter of history, how the Church has come to grow and continue herself in human affairs. The first obvious impression we will be left with from the accounts of the New Testament and the record of the early Church is that the Church has grown by mission and conversion. All of the baptisms described in the gospels involve adults seeking after repentance and new life, and the great commission which concludes the gospels of Matthew and Luke sends the eleven apostles out to “baptize disciples of all nations” (cf. Mt 28:19). The Didache, a brief manual of Christian teaching and practice which most scholars date to the early second century, presumes adult catechumens as entirely normative for the reception of baptism. It instructs the initiate to fast one or two days before their baptism, implicitly presuming a person capable of the mature assent to an ascetical practice. Even in our contemporary world, the Vatican’s 1997 General Directory for Catechesis notes that since “the missio ad gentes is the paradigm of all the Church’s missionary activity, the baptismal catechumenate, which is joined to it, is the model of its catechizing activity.” All these examples above would suggest that the normative case of Christian initiation involves the conversion of a person already formed in and by the world, whether that experience is understood as a fulfillment of the life which has preceded it or as a radical rupture from it (or some mix of the two).

At the same time, there’s a great deal of evidence to suggest that the baptism of children and even of infants was broadly practiced early on in the life of the Church, though not without controversy. Tertullian expressed aporia about it in his treatise on baptism in the second century, and Origen even attests to its apostolic beginnings. The Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, another second century text, includes even little children incapable of speech in its instructions for baptism, expecting their parents to speak for them. Both ecclesial doctrine concerning the necessity of baptism for salvation and Jesus’ injunctions in Scripture to “suffer little children come unto [Him]” and not to forbid them (Mt 19:14), pressed upon the practices of the nascent Church as expectations of an imminent eschaton receded.

But in either case, the conversion of adults or the reception of little ones, there is nothing akin to a traditional “rite of passage”. By contrast, these typically involve a person already present in the life of the community with one status or relationship to it who is briefly set apart in order to be reintegrated with a new status and relationship. Candidates and catechumens are made brethren in Christ and children of God in a different manner. They are baptized “into Christ’s death” that they may be brought into the “newness” of His life (cf. Rm 6:4). There is no “returning”, so to speak, to the place from whence they came. The life they have received is something new and unrepeatable, since it stems from the unrepeatable gift of the Paschal mystery. Perhaps there is an implicit perennialism in the traditional coming-of-age rites, which situate a person into the world that has preceded them and will continue after them. But there is no trace of perennialism in the rites of the gospel, for the world as we know it is passing away (cf. 1 Cor 7:31).

Confirmation, a misplaced rite?

Confirmation is often described as a Sacrament in search of a theology. The distinctive character it confers and its place in the sacramental economy, especially in the shadow of baptism and the Eucharist, have both been matters of great historical and practical controversy. Its institution is ambiguous, and its roots in Scripture have more to do with events of divine economy like Pentecost, or John the Baptist’s comments about a baptism of “fire and spirit” (cf. Mt 3:11) then they do with any explicit commission. It’s unclear how broadly distinguished a sacramental rite of Confirmation is from Baptism in the early Church fathers, though there are many remarks about the gifts of the Spirit, as well as anointing and laying on hands in relation to their imparting. Despite many ambiguities though, there is a clear and consistent parallel between the relationship of baptism to the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s death and Resurrection and that of Confirmation to the descent of the Holy Spirit which succeeds it and gives birth to the Church. There is perhaps a fitting dynamism to this relationship: the disciples are sent out to baptize, and the baptized are drawn close to the heart of the Church (with the bishop as “original minister”) to be sealed with the Holy Spirit, in whose power they will go out again to preach the Gospel.

In the East, Confirmation has retained its entanglement with baptism in a single rite, while in the West they have been gradually set apart. There are various circumstantial reasons for that development, in particular the sparser access to bishops as the Church grew into more rural communities. In practice, this has meant that confirmation is typically received in the West at what Canon law calls an “age of discretion”. For those who have been baptized as infants, there is an element of agency in their reception of the Sacrament that was not present for them in their baptism. They might choose a confirmation name for themself and give an assent that was previously given for them at their initiation into the Church. This de facto situation has sometimes encouraged an impression among the faithful that confirmation is a kind of ritual of maturation. Might it be the missing rite-of-passage we have been inquiring about?

There are a great deal of reasons to think otherwise. For one, the scriptural foundations of the sacrament, whether the typology of Pentecost or the proto-form of laying on hands all found in the book of Acts have no relationship to this sort of maturation. Further, the de facto practice has led in many dioceses to a misordering of the Sacraments of initiation, whereby children will receive their first communion many years before receiving Confirmation. These are all indications that Confirmation has been pressed into a role it is ill-fit to play. The Eastern practice of fully initiating infants has by contrast retained the proper order of initiation as well as its scriptural and typological significance. None of this is to suggest that the Western practice is necessarily mistaken, but it is important that it be conceived and explained without falsely implying a kind of Christian “coming-of-age” ritual. Having noted this, we should be reaffirmed in our initial observation. That is, that the absence of such rituals in the life of the Church is real and significant.

Concluding remarks

The Church is not of the world, but she is in the world. Her presence in it draws her members through a different origin to a different end than those of their worldly lives. Each lives a life in Adam from dust to dust, but through their Baptism they are invited to live a coterminous life from God to God in Christ. Insofar as they are Christians, they are pilgrims in the world on their way to eternity. The Church brings us through this experience of life by means of religious ritual. Such rituals are how human beings receive the coherence of our common existence, and it’s human beings who the Church is given to save. But the shape of her Sacramental life shows not only her likeness to what is natural to human religion but also her dissimilitude from it. Like those found in tribal or agrarian societies throughout the globe and across time, the rites of the Church communicate a kind of “passage”, but it is not a passage to a home in the world, but rather to the transcendent and eternal God. The Church may always help to “root” us in our authentic human lives by fostering our vocations; by setting us apart for service and ministry or joining us together for a fruitful love in marriage. But she can not make us fully “at home” in a world which is not her lasting home nor ours, for “we have no abiding city here” (Hb 13:14).

There are laws of God and laws of men. Scripture and the Church enjoin us to obey them both. St Paul preaches that there is no sovereignty but that which God has established and permitted, and that we are to be subject to political authorities insofar as they are ministers of his justice (cf. Rm 13). Wherein conscience permits such obedience, it obliges it. Jesus likewise enjoins his disciples to practice and observe the counsel of religious authorities, even when such men are hypocrites and liars and do not practice it themselves (cf. Mt 23:2-3). But, when conscience comes to work in us at cross purposes, “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). Jesus was crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem at the behest of religious authorities, and Paul was beheaded in Rome by political rulers, both dying at the hands of those to whom they had counseled such obedience.

Further, there are duties we render distinctly to God, and others distinctly to men. Christ and His Church once again enjoin us to both. St Paul counseled children to obey their parents, wives to serve their husbands, and even slaves to serve their masters (cf. Eph 5-6). Jesus deemed it lawful to pay taxes even to oppressive political authority, to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s” (cf. Mt 22:15-22). Such obligations order life in the world, and even those marked by evil, corruption, and sin can be ordered to the purposes of God, as long as what is due to God is rendered first and it’s His kingdom which is firstly sought (cf. Mt 6:33).

But further still, there is the love of God and neighbor, itself “the whole of the law and the prophets” (cf. Mt 22:40). It is the love at which all the law of God directs us, and with which all the laws of man must find some accord if they are to be accounted just or even to be laws at all. It is that love which is the cause and consequence of our obedience. Laws are adopted for the sake of ends, and their natural ends are justice, peace, and the common good. That begins with the punishment of murder and it ends with the more minute contingencies needed to govern any sufficiently complex society.

Amid this canvas then, of law, duty, and love; how are we to understand the laws which today police the migration of peoples, and the obligations we may have to migrants? At what love are such laws and duties aiming us?

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The Common Good and the Body of Christ

The Catechism of the Catholic Church frames the subject this way in point 2241:

“The more prosperous nations are obliged, to the extent they are able, to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin. Public authorities should see to it that the natural right is respected that places a guest under the protection of those who receive him.

Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens.”

The two paragraphs are framed around two related sets of obligations: those of host nations (especially “prosperous” ones) to generously welcome immigrants, and those of migrants to gratefully respect and build up the civic culture into which they are received.

The first is simply a contemporary articulation of the imperatives of Hebrew Scripture. The God of Israel persistently enjoins His people to remember that they themselves were sojourners in the land of Egypt. For this reason, He decrees, they are to treat a stranger in their land as one born among them (cf. Lv 19:33), not to oppress him for they should know his heart (cf. Ex 23:9), and to give him food and clothe him (cf. Dt 10:18-19). They shall be cursed if they “pervert judgment” against him (cf. Dt 27:19). God often concludes these injunctions with a reaffirmation to His people that they were once sojourners and that He is their God (Lv 19:34). The prophets too, along with king Solomon and even Christ Himself, tie such curses to the destruction of Sodom (cf. Ez 16:49-50, Ws 19:13). Sodom was a city full of decadence and sexual violence, wherein an insatiable mob had threatened to gang rape the city’s guests sent from the Lord himself on the eve of their destruction (cf. Gn 19). “Be mindful of hospitality”, reminds the Letter to the Hebrews, for by it we may unknowingly entertain angels (cf. Hb 13:2). Receiving the stranger is among those works of mercy by which Christ warns we will be judged at the end of time (cf. Mt 25:35).

The second set of injunctions, made to immigrants themselves, flows from the conditional docility asked of all Christians with respect to political rule. They are a part of our rendering unto Caesar what is his. Such docility, and gratitude towards any who receive us, is a condition of possibility for the “peace to people of goodwill” that we proclaim and express desire for in our liturgical worship.

These two paragraphs though, are not framed around two distinct principles, but only one; namely, the common good, which is addressed right at the center of the passage. It’s for the sake of the common good, for which political rulers are responsible, that they may govern and juridically restrict human migration, for that is the proper end to which all such governance is aimed and indexed. Nations and states are not, in this picture, addressed as possessing abstract “rights” except insofar as they are corollary to a first responsibility. Migrants however, are said to have a “natural right” to the protection of those who receive them. Unlike the administrative and juridical rights of authorities, this right is not a means to achieving the common good but is itself a constitutive part of it. The goods of justice and peace are held in common (if they are held at all), but they are enjoyed by persons.

St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, offers us the richest image of what the common good may be likened to by invoking the unity that is proper to a body. The members of the body are not one but many, but they all in their place enjoy the unity of the body, be they hand, eye, or foot. Those members which we may regard as less honorable or more feeble may be yet all the more necessary, for the eye cannot say to the hand “I have no need of thee”. And, most crucially, there should be no schism in the body but the members should have the same care one to another, for when any member suffers all the members suffer with it (cf. 1 Cor 12).

The human race in Adam is a body in schism, the schism wrought by original sin. The eye and foot and hand offer one to another contempt, if not outright violence. The nations rage and the people imagine vain things (cf. Ps 2:1). The wicked in his pride persecutes the poor (Ps. 10:2). We have been given up to the lust of our hearts, to dishonor the body among ourselves, exchanging the truth of God for a lie and worshipping creature over creator (cf. Rm 1:24-25).

But despite this, the good we ultimately enjoy is a common one, and the body in schism remains a body yet. The Church, and so all those brought into her by baptism, share one body in Christ. It is one and the same body which was broken and given up for her on the Cross. Christ comes and brings division, in nations, communities, and even households (cf. Lk 12:51), but He is not divided (cf. 1 Cor 1:13). The good the Church enjoys, and the only good which lasts, is to share in His life, which will abide as all else that rages in vain passes away.

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State and Family

There are laws for which their enforcement is itself an exercise of justice. Governments do not punish murder and theft only to curtail its preponderance, or remediate its perpetrators, but firstly because such punishment is what justice demands. But the laws which states adopt to govern immigration are not exactly of this sort. They are codified to establish a distinction, between the legitimate authority of states to repatriate some foreigners and to bar entry to others, from behavior which is unjust and lawless. In the 20th century, the latter included many efforts by various national governments to expunge sizable populations from their territories. The experience was common enough that Gaudium et Spes, the Church’s address to the modern world, named such “deportation” among a litany of infamies which “poison human society” and “do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury” (cf. Gaudium et Spes 27).

This rhetoric is not concerned with the ordinary juridical conduct of modern states: this deportation for an overstayed visa, that barrier to entry on the basis of a criminal history, the arrest and expulsion of gang members and purveyors of violent disorder. It is concerned rather with the uprooting of large populations and communities, woven into the fabric of a common human life, and especially for narrow and demographic ends: Kurds expelled from Eastern Turkey or Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. Very often such events involve the destruction of real human communities in favor of imaginary abstractions; this town and that city may be severed down the middle but “Turkey” or “Azerbaijan” may be made “pure” and “whole”. The nations rage and the people imagine vain things.

In addition to their incipient violence, such endeavors cause obvious upheaval and disorder. It is only to remedy those very ills for which the Church countenances the regulation of migration at all, and so the migratory governance which produces them erodes the basis of its just legitimacy. This is especially true when such governance sunders the integrity of stable and established family ties. There is an important sense in which the Church regards the family, the bond of spouses and their natal children, as something prior to and more fundamental than the wider political society; possessing an integrity and dignity upon which the health of that society depends. The catechism calls the family “the original cell of social life” (CCC 2207). For modern states to systematically uproot well-settled families, separating spouses and parents from their children, especially in a manner which causes persistent chaos, is to act at cross purposes from the good for which their authority is accounted a just one. It is often to privilege vain imaginings about the nation over the good of the actual society for which such states are responsible.

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The Pilgrim Church

In salvation history, God’s people have been slaves in foreign lands, wanderers in exile, and a divided kingdom in the land that they were promised. In the Church’s history, she has shared in the same condition. She has filled herself with women, slaves, and children in a pagan world where to be any of these was to be regarded without dignity (cf. Eph 5-6). She has been scattered across all the nations of the earth. She has been a kingdom divided East from West and North from South. In salvation history, God promised his people a land and earthly kingdom wherein He would dwell with them, and in his coming He was faithful to his promise. To his Church He has yet promised a heavenly kingdom where they may come to dwell with Him, for in His Father’s house are many mansions, and He has gone to prepare us a place (cf. Jn 14:2-3).

All of which is to say that the condition of the migrant in this earthly life is the true condition of the Church. She is a pilgrim on her way to eternity, with no abiding city here (cf. Hb 13:14). She shares in his condition not only because she suffers with him but because she hopes with him. She knows of no other respite than the respite in heaven, and she prays each day as her Lord taught her, that God’s kingdom may come and His will be may done here below as it is already there. She here prepares the sojourner a place, where she has one to prepare, in imitation of her Lord who has done the same for her.

She has lived this condition in the early days of her life in cosmopolitan cities scattered across a diffuse empire. She has lived in the ruins of that empire, in rural villages alongside monasteries and the protectorates of dukes and kings. She has lived it in the highest cultural peaks of “Christian civilization”. And today she lives it in the curious arrangement of a world carved up into post-Westphalian modern states, oft arranged according to procrustean national identities. She will live it still in whatever world there is to come, when what yet rages now has passed away.

There’s a real power in the surrender of distinction for the sake of a common aim, be it a love or a hatred. In a certain sense, it’s the only way we can really speak of being “united” at all which doesn’t amount to an empty platitude. We are most naturally rallied to such surrender over those things which we might kill each other over; it’s not accidental that the easiest way to imagine “collective” strength is a barracks (nor is it accidental that our liturgical exclamations praise the “Holy Lord, God of Hosts”, meaning hosts of armies).

But when the ultimate object of that stirring is just the very solidarity itself, it’s akin to making “community” the object itself, or “happiness”. These are all the fruits of the ordering power of a shared love, and they simply can’t be grasped at. In that way they are all as elusive as God is. We want all these things, we are made for all these things, but we will not be granted them in our pride. They are all the fruits of some surrender.

An impossible problem of human life is finding the shape of that surrender, who and what can we offer it to that will not destroy those loves wherein we are already known and needed, but where they might instead help to constitute the very thing that’s loved in common, in peace and in justice.

It’s unsettling then, that Jesus Christ, who should rightly be loved above everyone and everything else, entered history and broke those loves apart. He set father against son and daughter against mother (cf. Lk 12:53), and He could, because He knows us more deeply and loves us more personally than all our natural bonds (cf. Ps 139).

He came to set a fire on the earth (cf. Lk 12:49), that all who receive Him might be drawn together in a common love of the Father as sons and daughters of the most high God (cf Jn 1:12-13), and this blows apart the calcified order of the world that He enters. He is a sign of contradiction, and the rise and fall of many (cf. Lk 2:34). Still despite appearances to the contrary, it’s that world which is always and everywhere passing away, and His brief word carried on the wind which never will.

And yet in the shape of His life and death, He still affirms every natural bond and worldly authority. He enters history through a family, He obeys His parents, He acknowledges religious and political authority even as it rejects Him. The Church He left us is in one sense, millennias’ worth of answers to this tension life confronts us with. She is the reconciliation of our loves, from the grandest to the smallest, the right re-ordering from bottom-up and the in-breaking disruption from above to below.

She is the gardener of all earthly affections, sometimes planting and watering, and wherever she can simply blessing the growth God gives w/o any need of her. Sometimes pruning or uprooting this or that, even despite herself with all the great reluctance of her human frailty. And all the while collecting souls like wheat for the harvest of eternal life.

In God’s kingdom, there is a sense in which everyone is known and necessary, because God’s perfect plan includes everything that they are and that they love rupture, transfigured, and redeemed by the in-breaking of His own perfect love. And there is another sense in which everyone is gratuitous, because they needn’t have been at all. God doesn’t need any particular person to accomplish any purpose, unless His purpose simply is that person and His love for them made known through the whole mystery of what they are caught up in.

This is all to say that the endlessly shallow juxtaposition of “individualism” and “collectivism” in our contemporary political discourse excludes even asking the right questions about what we are and how we’re made to live. They aren’t just bad or insufficient answers to those questions; they are “not even wrong”.

There, the poet encounters the lovers Francesca and Paolo, in-laws in life who had carried on a clandestine affair, until Francesca’s husband (and Paolo’s brother) discovered it and murdered them both. Francesca recounts their tragic story to the pilgrim Dante while Paolo weeps beside her. It was the strength of a passionate love which gripped them both and brought them here, where they shall never rest again. Dante, romantic poet that he is, is so moved with pity that he collapses.

What is such love for (if love it may be called at all)? Why should our deepest yearnings seem to vainly run afoul our Author’s will for our lives? We all may have some sense of how such loves can blow our lives apart, shatter families, and even spark violence; how Bob’s affair breaks up his children’s home or Helen’s beauty brings war to Troy. But even apart from any calamities, these desires can simply steer the course of our lives in a way that aims them at nothing in particular; the lost love that blows Tom T. Hall to Memphis just leaves him there to wallow. Such affections can break into our heart like an asteroid, and leave only a debris of insensibility. There is no great reason to them, nor much of any at all. Dante’s image endures partly because it so palpably captures the dangers of erotic love. The damned in his infernal windstorm are always moving, but they are not going anywhere.

And yet, the same Scripture which warns so starkly against our lust and our concupiscence is also full of enjoinders to zealous love from its beginning to its end. The primal image of nuptial love in Genesis 2 is a desire for total communion, bone for bone and flesh for flesh, each made one with the other. God’s love for His people is ever-expressed in the language of a jealous and yearning love, from the Pentateuch through the prophets, and hardly ever in terms fitting for a cool or detached rational moralism. Even more, there is the Song of Songs, a jewel of the canon, which is in its plainest sense an erotic love poem. The song is a play of bride and bridegroom seeking one another, “sick with love” and longing. The bride there too finds her life steered by a restless search for her beloved, through the night and the city with the jeers and abuse of the watchmen around her, aimed at what likewise may seem to come to nothing.

What are we then to make of restless desire? How might it relate to the love that Dante will later behold in paradise, that love which moves the sun and stars?

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In the film Casablanca (1942), we meet Rick Blaine, played by Humphrey Bogart, at his nightclub in Morocco in the midst of the Second World War. As we find him, he is something of a cold and distant figure. He never shares a drink with his guests, and in his own words he “sticks his neck out for nobody”. He has been the occasional intimate companion of Yvonne, a woman we first meet at the bar demanding to know if she might see him after hours, but she is usually disappointed with his absence. As the film unfolds, we come to learn more about his past, marked both by a mercenary pragmatism and a lurking conscience. He had been a gun runner during the Spanish Civil War for the beleaguered Republicans, always working for a price but never for the highest bidder. He is something of a Han Solo figure, at once shrewd and cynical but with a hidden romantic sincerity.

All of these qualities are pressed to their limit by the central drama of the film. Rick’s aloofness is undone when his old flame Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman, arrives in Casablanca. She is accompanied by her husband, the Czech resistance hero Viktor Lazlo, and they are together hoping to find their way to America. A soft heart can be pierced, but a hardened heart can only shatter, and the sight of Ilsa is enough to shatter Rick’s. After hours, he drinks himself into a bitter pit as he remembers their love affair in Paris, cut short by the Nazi occupation of the city. He had expected her to flee the city together with him, but she had left him alone with a note of farewell as his train drew away from the platform. He had not seen her since.

It’s here in Casablanca where he learns that she had always been married, even during their brief affair. She had not really been unfaithful to Viktor, who she had thought to be dead when she had fallen in love with Rick. She had only learned of Viktor’s survival on the eve of Rick’s departure, and she had left him alone at the station for the sake of loyalty to her spouse. Now, Rick possesses the letters of transit which may be their only means of escape to America.

As the film unfolds, Ilsa eventually finds herself threatening Rick with a pistol to give her the letters, but when she cannot bring herself to shoot, she is instead overcome with a rekindled and long dormant longing for him. Collapsing into his arms, she tells him that he must now do the thinking for the both of them.

And so he does. While allowing Ilsa to believe that he intends to help only her husband escape, at the pivotal moment steps from the aircraft, he insists that she must go with him. He tells her that while their brief reconciliation had rekindled all that was good in their love for one another, it was clear that she belonged with her husband. Far from the dramatic self-involvement that so often marks romantic affairs, Rick soberly reminds her of how little their love lives amount to in an enormous world. Ilsa can help Viktor with his important work, and she would only regret staying behind in the hopeless mess that is Casablanca. Rick has once again taken the side of the underdog, but this time for no price at all.

Over the course of the film, Rick is transformed. He is turned from a cold and shallow self-regard, making his living off gamblers and sticking his neck out for nobody, into a hero who takes dangerous risks in order to help another man escape captivity with the woman he loves. He first lives a life averse to great risk, only to then risk everything for the love of a woman he cannot possess. It’s that very love for her that motivates his transformation, and the same love that convicts him he must let her go. He has “done the thinking for the both of them”. He has been moved by a great love to act with a great reason. Desire has stirred a restless wind through the sail of his life, but a sail that has aimed him at an end. Rick and Ilsa are the opposite of Paolo and Francesca; instead of being blown to nowhere, their passion briefly points them towards a glimmer of that very love which moves the sun and stars.

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The Norwegian Bishop and Trappist Monk, Erik Varden, writes in his book Chastity, about the great many modern misunderstandings of this ancient Christian virtue. Rather than a mortification of the senses, or a denial of the bodily and carnal, Varden claims that a chaste integrity ought to reconcile them with the loftiest ends of the human spirit. He cites St John Climacus, who writes laudably of a “chaste harlot” that “‘because she loved much’ she was able to drive out love with love”. Varden follows his citation with this commentary:

“It is an astonishing statement. It effectively dismantles the view that would separate a spiritual eros from a carnal eros. For Climacus, they belong to a single continuum. He calls on the ‘chaste harlot’ to witness to his thesis…This perspective does not ‘insult the body’. It offers neither sublimation nor appeasement. It acknowledges a flicker of eternity in passion. Even disordered eros can kindle a sanctifying love of God that drives out fear. Nothing is beyond God’s ordering power. Nothing in man is unredeemed. Everything natural to man is made in view of the robe of glory. The new Adam waits to embrace the old. The garments of skin are lent to us a while, to warm and protect us. Then we are to leave them behind.”

Klein’s figure is empty, even of itself, but it is not without a form. Emptiness need not be shapelessness. St. Paul preaches a man of a distinct form, that of a humble slave, who is made empty of himself, that he might fill all things. Klein’s figure has no edges, but a single face, what is within it is without it, as if it might contain all things. Paul says we cannot trace the height, or depth, or breadth of love but that we may yet see his face.

We can’t quite see Klein’s figure as it is. To represent it here, it’s made to cross itself. Here, we do not see him as he is, save that we see him on the cross. To see them at all is to see them wounded. Klein’s bottle is a useless figure, but it delights. The cross is a dreadful figure, but it consoles. That is because they point beyond themselves.

May what does not meet be met in me. May I be made empty that I might be made full. May I search the depths of what’s within me and the breadth of what’s without, so that I may have just one face.

Scripture affirms that man is made in the “Image of God” and makes much ado of the affirmation. Today, it is often made a critical premise of syllogisms concerning man’s dignity and what that reality might demand of any and each of us. “Every person is made in God’s image therefore…” prefaces the decalogue and the corporal works of mercy, arguments against every sort of maltreatment and positive injunctions to concrete acts of love. Such is notably true of arguments offered in opposition to capital punishment, which the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” (CCC 2267).

There is something of an irony here, since Scripture itself offers the same premise to reach exactly the opposite conclusion. Genesis 9:6 might even be the closest that the God revealed there comes to offering a syllogistic “reason” for what He commands:

“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image.” (Gn 9:6)

God doesn’t enjoin this sort of punishment because of its utility, but because of its justice. Human dignity is the very reality which demands it. Such punishment, it seems, is affirmed for witness to the very same truth that today it is reckoned to obscure. Unlike the 613 mitzvot of the Mosaic covenant, particular injunctions to a particular people for a particular purpose, this commandment is among those given to Noah, who receives it on behalf of the whole human race (then present in his loins). It is also not merely God’s intervention in and governance of an already wicked human reality, such as His commands concerning slavery or the captivity of conquered women, given to the Hebrews in the midst of their tribal sojourning.

In the lens of the New Testament, the execution of such punishment is a bedrock of all political rule and legitimate authority, which exists to foster justice but most especially to punish injustice. In his letter to the Romans, Paul counsels obedience to all worldly authorities, who “do not bear the sword in vain” (Rm 13:4). Paul’s sense of providence is absolute, and he assures with a fervent confidence that all such authority comes from God, to be an instrument of His judgment and vindication. Jesus says the same to Pilate, that he would have no authority if it had not been given to him from above (Jn 19:11). Roman rulers later beheaded Paul and Pilate crucified Jesus, each dying at the hands of the same worldly authority they had acknowledged and conditionally obeyed.

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Utility

“In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state.” (CCC 2267)

Public arguments about the ends of punishment carried on in modern life are often set in terms of deterrence and rehabilitation. Those with a stern mind towards severity in punishment emphasize the manner in which it ought to deter other criminal behavior and protect society. Others see the legitimation of punishment firstly in its capacity to reform and improve the life of the offender, and generally favor leniency in light of how poorly fit most penal systems are to achieving such ends. Prisons can be violent and cruel habitations, which can do as much to harden their occupants into criminality as they can to “reform” them. The arguments are carried on nearly exclusively with reference to sociological data and crime statistics, peppered with moving emotional anecdotes either from the victims of violent crime or from sympathetic offenders who have been failed by the system.

C.S. Lewis famously noted of this state of affairs that it leaves no room for any notion of justice at all. We may speak of the utility for society in this punishment or that on the basis of crime rates, or its “effectiveness” with respect to the transformation of the one who undergoes it, but we may not speak of its justice in these terms. Justice concerns what is due for some wrong, what is deserved, and in that sense it is a matter of moral reality. It inescapably concerns the meaning of events and actions, not merely their effects. Justice is a matter of spiritual weight. Children of a certain age develop an immediate, if warped and grossly self-regarding, sense of justice; and nearly every religious tradition of any sort exhorts us to desire and to love justice as a shared good for its own sake, however much they differ in their account of its demands. Practical execution of justice might always be constrained by concerns about social order, and tempered by concern for the welfare of those who bear it, but it cannot really be reduced to either of these things. That’s why its exercise is the task of those who judge, rather than engineers or physicians.

In this light the death penalty is interesting, since it is almost totally irrelevant to the terms by which we carry on arguing. It seems, as far as criminologists and other such experts are apt to weigh in on the matter, to be largely inconsequential for deterring murder. And it obviously can have nothing to do with any ordinary sense of rehabilitating those subjected to it, since it involves killing them. In our litigious society it is significantly more expensive to kill the condemned than to keep them in prison, and in our fallible legal system the potential for executing the innocent is a grave and acute concern. Capital punishment is hardly defensible for its “uses”. The Catechism also gestures at these concerns in remarking that today “more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption” (CCC 2267). Even for the utility of saving the soul of the offender, surely a longer life affords more possibility.

But with respect to that primordial concern of justice and desert, the death penalty might be the clearest and most sensible of any sort of punishment. What length of incarceration is a “just” punishment for theft? For arson or assault? How can one really measure such a thing? It is a matter fitting for common persons to have common opinions, and wiser men to have wiser opinions. One would hope that virtuous judges would be formed to possess just opinions. But the notion instead that taking someone’s life may justly cost one their own is palpably sensible, and contains no hint of potential arbitrariness. In an important sense, it is uniquely clear.

The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once remarked upon a curious tension in modern states, which are compelled to present themselves in two ways at once. On the one hand, they have largely relegated any ultimate notions of justice and common purpose to the domain of private judgment. Appeals then, to shared and common goods are made effectively inadmissible to political argument, and rational deliberation concerns instead the means and distribution of private goods. The state is there to make things run well, and politics can be judged exhaustively on the basis of legible costs and benefits. But at the same time, the state can’t help but claim the “allegiance of the traditional political community”, wherein membership conveys an identity and identification of its good with one’s own, even up to the point of offering one’s life for the sake of that good. He writes further:

“The citizen of the modern state is thus invited to view the state intellectually in one way, as a self-interested calculator, but imaginatively in quite another. The modern state presented in the former light could never inspire adequate devotion. Being asked to die for it would be like being asked to die for the telephone company.”

This same tension and duality are present in the modern exercise of justice. The state generally appeals to one set of criteria to reason about its purposes in punishing, but depends on an entirely different set of criteria for punishment to be reckoned a just or humane exercise. The former vocabulary is hardly fit for the responsibility of depriving someone’s liberty, let alone the far graver task of depriving someone’s life. Killing for such reasons might be likened to killing for the phone company. Since matters of ultimate justice are largely inadmissible to the constitution of our public politics and law, perhaps its fitting that the Church makes recourse to this same “inadmissibility” in reference to capital punishment in such a society.

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The Church and her “reasons”

“To the Church belongs the right always and everywhere to announce moral principles, including those pertaining to the social order, and to make judgments on any human affairs to the extent that they are required by the fundamental rights of the human person or the salvation of souls.” (CCC 2032)

The Church possesses a magisterium, a teaching office, and claims a solemn authority to teach concerning matters of faith and morality to which all Catholics owe a religious assent of mind and will. Today she teaches that the death penalty is “inadmissible” and that she “works with determination for its abolition worldwide”.

This sort of authority prompts a great deal of both paranoid anxiety and magical thinking. On the one hand, it attracts the sort of personality which is ever seeking solid ground and lasting answers to the questions life presents. On the other, it is a magnet for those who may have arbitrary and totalitarian fantasies in regard to its exercise. Its actual reality as mediated through the judgments of bishops and popes is always marked by both these sorts of persons, either in their acrimonious conflict or in their consensus.

But neither a perennial certainty nor a limitless sovereignty constitute the reason for such an office with such an authority. It is simply part of what it is to have a Church from God, with the marks we regard her to have. We proclaim a belief in a Church which is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” in the creed, and trust she will proclaim the one true gospel of Jesus Christ from now until the end of time. Because she is one, she possesses a papacy which marks her visible unity. Because she is apostolic, each of her bishops traces his own authority through successors of the apostles. Because she is Holy, God gives her saints in every age to illuminate His presence to it. Because she is catholic, that is, universal, she might proclaim that same faith to and through every culture, nation, and tongue on the earth.

And so the Church across space, through her bishops in communion with the Pope, and across time, through the valid succession of those bishops is really one Church; she is scattered in her many cults and cultures and gathered together in the holiness of her saints (however few they seem). The assurances which undergird this unity are the assurances of Christ, and they in turn are the condition by which we recognize His presence and His promises.

This is why and how the Church may teach with authority, so that the Church may be His body. Her magisterium is not the office of philosopher kings, it is the office of a priesthood. Its exercise is not the normal exercise of human reason, simply protected as if by magic from its human fallibility. It is the exercise of the stewardship of a living faith in the living God, protected from decisive error by the Spirit of that faith.

And so when the Church teaches with authority, she does not teach “conclusions”. If what she taught was merely valid inference from true premises, we would have no need of her to teach it. Her reasons gesture at elucidating what it is she proposes for obedience, and these reasons may be more or less satisfying. But neither their sufficiency nor their validity is a pre-condition for assenting to the teaching they are offered to defend. To paraphrase St. Anselm, we do not understand in order to trust, but we trust in order to understand.

That authority stems from what has been entrusted to her by faith through the Passion, death, and Resurrection of her Bridegroom Jesus Christ. It comes firstly as a gift, and so gratuitously. Ultimately, the Church teaches not what necessity demands but what gratuity reveals.

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Mercy

“Our worth was not spoken with carefully chosen words of eloquent design but with the piercing cry of a newborn child born to a young mother. A child born into a world filled with darkness and despair. A world that would not only reject him but would break even their own laws to kill him. His birth brought forth a light this broken world had never known. A light that pierced through and exposed the very hearts of man. A light that would burn bright long after he departed this earth. A light that dwells within us, reminding us each and every day of our worth. He came for us...knowing the cost, knowing the price that must be paid. As we prepare ourselves to celebrate his birth remember, it was in that very moment our worth was spoken. ‘For God so loved the world that he sent his only son to save it.’” -Brittany Holberg, Oblate of the Sisters of the Morning Star

In 1996, the woman who penned these words murdered the 80-year-old A.B. Towery in Texas. She stabbed him several times and shoved a brass pole down his throat. She then took all the money from his wallet and some of his prescription drugs, and fled to Tennessee. She was arrested in Memphis, and she has been on death row in Texas since March of 1998, when she was 25 years old.

The magisterium of the Church has no special competence concerning the efficacy of punishments for deterrence or rehabilitation. She is not ultimately responsible for the “social order” nor even for the practical reintegration of criminals into it. But she bears a treasury of God’s justice in her history and Scripture, and she is a tribune of His mercy in the witness of her saints. It’s by this she claims the right and responsibility to speak. The world she addresses today is not a just one, and this at least has never been otherwise. It may be though, that the world she addresses today uniquely dreads the thought of justice, and especially the justice of God.

In the 20th century, it’s possible one billion unborn children were killed in the womb globally, more than 10% of all-cause human mortality and the biggest single cause of death. If restricted only to violent and untimely deaths, it greatly exceeds comparison with the sum total from war, genocide, and famine. The wealth and convenience of modern life, especially in developed countries, is largely inconceivable without it.

The Church teaches that the killing of the unborn is a grave crime which cries to heaven for justice, that the right to life and its sanctity are the foundations of all legitimate rights of persons (rooted in the love of God rather than the power of the capable), and that this teaching “has not changed and remains unchangeable” (CCC 2271). Procuring, or aiding in the procurement of, an abortion carries a Latae sententiae penalty of excommunication, though the Catechism goes on to emphasize:

“The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.” (CCC 2272)

Frequently, those who devote much of their lives to the defense of the unborn complain of the hollow conflation of their cause with the effort to abolish the death penalty under the banner of “pro-life”. The enormous gravity of the injustice of abortion is surely disproportionate to that which may haunt the execution of condemned murderers, almost so much as to make their juxtaposition obscene.

But if what the Church teaches about human life and its worth are true, and so her corollary witness to the gravity of abortion, then God’s justice is simply and assuredly unbearable. Possibly the most vivid image Scripture conjures for us to contemplate it is in the book of Revelation, at the opening of the sixth seal:

“behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood. ¹³ And the stars of heaven fell to the earth, as a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind. ¹⁴ Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. ¹⁵ And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, ¹⁶ and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! ¹⁷ For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?” (Rv 6:12-17)

And yet the Church’s commission is to justify us, to make us able to stand. And to be able to stand, we must be able to see. To our ancestors steeped in a chaotic violence, it was firstly God’s justice which illumined His Image. To their descendants, steeped instead in an orderly barbarism, it will firstly be the scandal of His Mercy. It is no accident that God reveals the splendor of His love in the face of a condemned man, Christ crucified; foolishness to those who are perishing but the power of God for those being saved. If she could not witness to the depth of His Mercy even on death row, who could believe it for the rest of us?

The psalmist’s words are the prayer of the Church, sung from morning to night around the world in her daily office. Often, they exalt God’s justice to a point that can seem excessively vindictive or even comically self-righteous. He proclaims his fierce hatred of the enemies of God, and fantasizes about dashing the heads of his enemies’ children against stones. But such a heart which yearns for justice can truly feel its needfulness, and such a heart can delight in the Mercy which exceeds it. This is the Mercy that the Church proclaims, that she witnesses to when she visits prisoners, condemns their maltreatment, and intercedes even for the most odious killers. Such witness is not novelty. It is the same Mercy proclaimed in the Acta Santorum, replete with tales of the liberation of condemned prisoners, and it is the same Mercy which poured forth from the pierced side of Christ at Golgotha.

“If you LORD, should mark iniquities, O Lord who could stand? But there is forgiveness with You, that You may be feared” (Ps 130:3-4)

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Header image is “Justice and Mercy” by the painter Ira Thomas