Scripture is Tradition

Recently a meme was posted to an Anglican group on Facebook that asserted that everything in the Book of Common Prayer was either taken directly from Scripture or could be proven from Scripture and that nothing was taken from tradition.  In response I pointed out the obvious flaw in this assertion.  The Bible did not just drop down from Heaven complete at the time of the Reformation.  It was passed down from generation to generation in the Church for sixteen centuries from the Apostles.  The Old Testament portion of the Scriptures had been received by the Christian Church in the period of the Apostles after having been passed down from generation to generation in ancient Israel.  In the case of some of the books of the Old Testament this stretched back almost as long before Christ as the Reformation was after.  The word for something that is received by being passed down from generation to generation is tradition.  The Latin verb trado, tradere means “to hand over” and its fourth principal part, the passive perfect participle which would mean “having been handed over” is traditus –a –um, from which tradition is obviously derived.  In the Diocletian Persecution of the early fourth century those who handed over their copies of the Scriptures and/or other Christians to the persecutors were called traditores, which is also derived from this Latin word, and which is the source of our word traitor.  It makes a big difference what is handed over, to whom it is handed over, and why.  Something that is handed over or passed down from generation to generation as a priceless heritage is a tradition.  This is, usually, a good thing.  Handing over someone to be persecuted or sacred books to be burned is a bad thing.  The point, of course, is that the Bible itself as something handed down from generation to generation, is a tradition.  Therefore, to assert that the Book of Common Prayer takes from Scripture but not tradition is to commit a fallacy.

 

The person who posted the meme responded by pointing out that memes by their very nature have to be short.  If the meme were revised to accurately acknowledge that what was excluded from the BCP was not tradition in general, but a certain kind of tradition that conflicts with the Bible, it would be too long and not pithy enough to be effective as a meme.  While that is certainly true it works better as an argument against social media memes than it does as a counter to my argument.  Social media memes are essentially the democratization of the sound byte.  Democratizing things seldom if ever improves them, usually it does quite the opposite.

 

The meme poster maintained that the word tradition by itself is acceptable short hand for the idea of traditions that conflict with and contradict the Scriptures.  This usage itself, however, is unscriptural.

Those who hold this view of tradition as a man-made rival that is hostile to the authority of the God-given Scriptures inevitably fall back on a single incident recorded by both SS Matthew and Mark in the fifteenth and seventh chapters of their respective Gospels.  In this incident, the Pharisees ask Jesus why His disciples violate the “tradition of the elders” by not washing their hands (a washing for ceremonial rather than hygienic purposes is in view here) before eating bread.  Jesus responded by asking them why they violate the commandment of God by their tradition.  The commandment He then specifies is the commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” and the tradition by which they were violating the commandment was the tradition of corban, that is, of dedicating something for sacred use in the Temple.  The accusation was that they were allowing people to get out of their obligation to honour their parents by taking care of them when they are old by allowing them to declare all their possessions to be corban.  The problem with the way those who pit Scripture and tradition against each other try to use this passage is that Jesus does not condemn tradition qua tradition, or even the tradition of men qua the tradition of men, in it.  He does not even condemn the specific tradition in question which tradition is itself drawn from Scripture in which corban is one of the basic Hebrew words for gift, offering, or sacrifice.  What He condemned was its misuse to evade one’s duty to do what God has commanded.  Indeed, just as it is not tradition, man-made tradition, or the specific corban tradition that Jesus condemned but its misuse, so what is contrasted with the misuse of tradition is not “the Scriptures” in general but the narrower “the commandment of God.”  Even “the word of God” in Mark 7:13 is best understood as meaning “the commandment of God” which appears twice in verses 9-9.  Note that what we call the Ten Commandments in English were called in Hebrew by an expression that means “the Ten Words” as does the Greek word into which it was translated in the Septuagint and which is the root of our own Decalogue.   The point of this passage has to do with priorities not some troglodytic message like “Bible good, tradition bad.”  There is nothing wrong with dedicating something to God’s use but there is something wrong with doing so in order to evade one’s duty to one’s parents.  In this, as in most of Jesus’ rebukes to the Pharisees, His most basic criticism was that their priorities were wrong, that they scrupulously tithed the tiniest of seeds, while ignoring judgement, mercy, and faith, that they strained out a gnat while swallowing a camel (Matt. 23:23-24).

 

The Lord Jesus’ actions bespeak a very different attitude towards tradition than that which is sometimes read into His rebuke of the Pharisees. While He preached on a mountain (Matt. 5-7) and from a boat (Lk. 5:1-3), His most frequent place of preaching and teaching was the synagogue (Mk. 1:21-28, Lk. 4:16-37, Jn. 6:59) which the Gospels say He regularly attended.  The synagogue was the local meeting place for Scripture reading, Psalm singing, prayer and teaching.  The synagogue in this sense of the word was an extra-Scriptural tradition.  There are no instructions for establishing any such institution in the Old Testament.  The word appears in the Septuagint but as a translation of Hebrew words depicting all of Israel as an assembly or congregation.  In the eighth chapter of St. John’s Gospel Jesus is said to have gone to Jerusalem for the feast of dedication (Hanukah) which was not one of the feasts instituted in the Law of Moses or anywhere else in the books regarded as canonical by both Jews and Christians but celebrates the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes who defiled it in events recorded in the books of Maccabees which are found in the LXX but not the Hebrew Old Testament.  St. Luke’s account of the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist depict elements of the traditional Passover Seder.  These elements were not prescribed in the Torah but are recognizable from the Jewish tradition today.  How far that tradition had developed into what it is today by the first century is unknown but what is clear is that Jesus had no objection to observing the traditions of His people merely because they were extra-Scriptural or man-made.  It was the abuse and misuse of tradition and not tradition itself that incurred His rebuke.

 

This is entirely in keeping with the attitude towards tradition found in the Old Testament (Psalm 11;3, Prov. 22:28-29).  St. Paul in his earliest epistles tells the Thessalonian Church to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15) and to withdraw from any brother who does not walk “after the tradition which he received of us” (2 Thess. 3:6).  In his first epistle to the Corinthians he depicted the Gospel message itself as a tradition “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received” (1 Cor. 15:3).

 

2 Thessalonians 2:15 reads like it was written to combat precisely the kind of ideas that I am addressing here.  That tradition is not something to be regarded as bad or suspect in itself is evident from his instructions to the Thessalonians to adhere to the traditions they had been taught.  My point that the Scriptures themselves are tradition is also present in the verse in the words “or our epistle.”  That something in tradition is not necessarily bad because it is not in the Scriptures is the only reasonable deduction from the words “hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.”

 

The false pitting of Scripture and tradition against each other belongs to the type of thinking that I call Hyper-Protestantism.  The ordinary Protestantism of Dr. Luther and his associates, the English Reformers, and even John Calvin much of the time at least when he is allowed to speak for himself rather than when he is interpreted by those who claim to be his followers, is conservative in its approach to tradition.  Tradition, the handing down of that which is valued from generation to generation, is in itself a good thing.  Attacking it, which is inevitably for the motive of setting up something of your own creation in its place, is a bad thing.  Bad things can be handed down along with good things.  When something bad is passed down this is a bad tradition and bad traditions are always man-made rather than coming from God.  It does not follow from this, however, that everything man-made is bad.  Indeed, the erroneous conclusion that everything man-made is bad is completely debunked by the example of Jesus Who Himself observed man-made traditions such as Hanukkah and synagogue attendance.  When bad things slip in to an otherwise good tradition these should be identified and removed in the interest of preserving the tradition as a whole.  This is precisely what the conservative Reformers were trying to do.  Dr. Luther, Archbishop Cranmer, and John Calvin on his good days, did not want to abolish or overthrow the Catholic tradition.  They wanted to excise certain bad things that had crept in to the Western branch of that tradition.  These were mostly recent innovations that had popped up after the Great Schism of the eleventh century.  The claims of the Roman Patriarchate to supremacy over the entire Church are an exception to that, obviously, because these were one of the factors that produced the Schism.  The sale of indulgences, by contrast, which set off the Reformation by arousing the righteous ire of Dr. Luther in the 95 Theses in 1517 was very recent at the time, although it grew out of seeds that had been planted in the first Crusade, a few decades after the formalization of the Schism.  Dr. Luther et al. did not see in these things reason to get rid of the Catholic tradition as a whole, or even as a reason to jettison everything that entered the Western branch of that tradition after the Schism (1).  They saw them as impurities that needed to be removed from the stream of tradition and the best way of cleansing the water to be to go back to the source.  In this they showed themselves to be Renaissance humanists for this is an application of the ad fontes principle behind the Renaissance revival of the study of classical antiquity.  The best result of the application of this principle to cleaning up the stream of Christian tradition where the waters had gotten muddied was with regards to the freeness of salvation.  That salvation, in the sense of forgiveness of sin, freedom from its bondage, and restoration to peace with God and everlasting life in His kingdom, is a gift of God’s grace, freely given to mankind in Jesus Christ, is essential to the Gospel message, attested throughout the New Testament, most strongly in the Johannine and Pauline writings, although it is clearly there in the others, even the Jacobean epistle (Jas. 1:17-18).  This truth has always been there in the Catholic tradition but it was particularly covered up by the mud that had entered the Roman branch of that stream and so was in most need of being cleaned up.  Classical Protestantism cleaned the mud off of this truth.  Hyper-Protestantism, as an inevitable consequence of pitting Scripture and tradition against each other, (2) has formulized and crystalized it, raising the question of whether this truth was better off with mud on it in the living water of tradition or cleaned off but embedded in dead crystal.

 

Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond classical Protestantism’s objections to errors of Roman innovation and opposes itself to the Catholic tradition claiming to be standing for Scripture in doing so.  Ironically what the meme that inspired this essay asserts about the BCP, that everything in it is either taken from Scripture directly or can be proven from Scripture, can for the most part be said about the Catholic tradition.  The errors of Roman innovation are not part of the Catholic tradition.  They have not been held everywhere, in all the ancient Churches, since the Apostolic era but are distinct to the Roman Church and, except for the Roman distinctions that contributed to the Schism, are post-Schism in origin.  The doctrine of Purgatory, for example, is a Roman distinctive.  The Eastern Church has never taught it and refused to ratify the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1431-1449) both of which had healing the Schism as their purpose, in part because of the affirmation of Purgatory by these councils which are wrongly considered to be ecumenical by Rome and which are the occasions by which this innovation became official Roman dogma.  Protestant objections to Purgatory, therefore, are to a Roman innovation, and not to something that belongs to Catholic tradition.  Hyper-Protestant opposition to iconography, by contrast, opposes something that genuinely belongs to the Catholic tradition.  Iconoclasm had been condemned by the Second Council of Nicaea despite its having been promoted by a series of Byzantine Emperors and a pro-iconoclasm council (Hieria in 754) convened under their sponsorship.  This council was held in 787, prior to the Schism, and was received by the entire Church, East and West, as the seventh ecumenical council.  It is therefore a genuine part of the Catholic tradition.  The Hyper-Protestants say this doesn’t matter and that icons are idols condemned by the Second Commandment.  If the Second Commandment means what the Hyper-Protestants claim it means, however, then it also condemns the Ark of the Covenant that God commanded to be made shortly after giving the Ten Commandments, the tablets of which were to be kept in said Ark.  The distinction between what violates the Second Commandment and what does not is made in the Old Testament by the account of the brass serpent of Moses.  In the twenty-first chapter of Numbers, the Israelites, after grumbling against God and Moses for the umpteenth time, were smitten with a plague of fiery serpents that poisoned them with their bite.  Moses intervened for them, God told him to make a brass serpent and put it on a pole, and everyone who looked at it would be healed.  From the New Testament we know that this was a type of Christ (Jn. 3:14-15).  While this involved making an image of something “in the earth beneath” it did not violate the Second Commandment.  This is because the purpose in making it was not to make a “god” to be worshipped.  When, centuries later, the Israelites did start worshipping it as a “god” it then became an idol in violation of the Second Commandment and King Hezekiah ordered it destroyed (2 Kings 18:4).  The lesson from this is that the making of likenesses is not itself a violation of the Second Commandment without the intent to treat such likenesses as gods.  The Scriptures, therefore, clearly do not support the Hyper-Protestant understanding of the Second Commandment.  This is the closest that Hyper-Protestantism comes to finding something in the Catholic tradition that is in violation of Scripture.  Most often it operates on the obviously fallacious assumption that something that is not commanded in Scripture is therefore in violation of it.  It treats prayers for the dead, for example, as being in violation of Scripture even though they are nowhere prohibited in it and the parenthetical part of 2 Tim. 1:16-18 is probably an example of it.  In some cases it treats parts of the Catholic tradition that are clearly taken from the Scriptures as being in violation of the Scriptures.  This is most obvious with matters pertaining to the Virgin Mary.  The words of the Ave Maria come directly from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke (vv. 28, 42), in which she is also called “the mother of my Lord” (v. 43) which is obviously the equivalent of Theotokos/Mother of God which cannot be rejected without being guilty of the Christological heresy of Nestorianism.  Even the title Regina Coeli comes from the Bible.  I’m not talking about the pagan practice condemned in Jeremiah 7, but the first verse of Revelation 12.  No argument that the woman in Revelation 12 is not Mary can withstand scrutiny.  The woman gives birth to Jesus and so is obviously Mary. (3)   While the Church of Rome has undeniably taken things way too far with regards to the Blessed Virgin, confusing the entire Catholic tradition of Mariology with Mariolatry as Hyper-Protestants tend to do, is not the answer. (4)  Nor, to conclude this point, do these matters which Hyper-Protestants often seem to object to in the Catholic tradition more than they do the Roman innovations that classical Protestantism objected to, comprise more than a fraction of the Catholic tradition.  Most of the traditional Catholic liturgy, Eastern or Western, is taken directly from the Bible, as is the traditional faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, and the traditional episcopal form of Church polity.

 

That is only to be expected.  The written Word of God comes to us via the route of having been passed down in the Church from generation to generation and so is itself a tradition rather than a something-other-than-tradition to be set against tradition.  Since it is the Word of God it is infallible and therefore the yardstick against which everything else in the tradition is to be measured but this should not be done in the hostile-to-tradition manner of Hyper-Protestantism.  Our attitude should be that what is in the Catholic, not merely Roman but genuinely Catholic in the Vicentian sense, (5) tradition is wholesome, good, and true unless disproven by the Scriptures, rather than that is suspect until proven by them.

 

(1)   John Calvins’s magnus opus was the Institutes of Christian Religion, the first edition of which was published in 1536.  His own account of this work was that it began as a type of catechism based on the Apostles’ Creed.  The Apostle’s Creed, however, like the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, consists of twelve articles arranged in three sections, in accordance with the Persons of the Trinity.  Calvin’s Institutes consist of four books, the subjects of which correspond to those of Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences.  Lombard’s Sentences were one of the most important texts in Medieval Scholasticism because from Alexander of Hales in the thirteenth century onward they were the text books used for dogmatics or systematic theology in the universities and writing a commentary on them was a requirement of graduation.  Dogmatic theology as a discipline has largely followed the Sentences in its structure, is organization and classification of topics, ever since.  Calvin in his Institutes, which quote Lombard over a hundred times albeit often in a hostile manner, was no exception and it is perhaps more significant in his case because like Tertullian his training had been in law.  It is also worthy of noting that his explanation of the Atonement takes the satisfaction model of the other father of Scholasticism, St. Anselm of Canterbury to the next stage of development beyond that of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Calvin’s Hyper-Protestant fan club will, of course, say that he found his explanation of the Atonement in the pages of Scripture and it can certainly be supported from the Scriptures.  So, however, can the classical and Patristic model with which the Eastern Church has explained the Atonement since the first millennium and which Gustaf Aulén who named it the Christus Victor model argued was Dr. Luther’s.  Indeed, the easiest model of Atonement to prove from the Scriptures, provided one doesn’t press the metaphor on the point of to whom the payment is made, is probably Origen’s ransom model.  Obviously John Calvin got his understanding of the Atonement from the New Testament, and just as obviously he did not get it by reading the New Testament for himself for the first time without ever having received any prior teaching.  Regardless of to what extent he was willing to acknowledge it himself his understanding of the New Testament on the Atonement was heavily influenced by St. Anselm and St. Thomas.  Even the doctrine of predestination with which his name is permanently associated shows the influence of a tradition of interpreting St. Paul that flows from St. Augustine through Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas.

(2)  The title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) and the essay in the same volume entitled “The Tower of Babel” are essential reading if one wishes to understand why this consequence is inevitable even though Oakeshott was writing from the perspective of political philosophy rather than theology.  The principle is the same.  Traditions, Oakeshott explained, are living and include both the kind of information that can be summarized and put down on paper as a formula and the kind of information that cannot.  Rationalism, treats the second kind of information as unimportant and discards it, taking the first kind of information and formulizing it.  So crystalized, this information which had been part of something living in the tradition, becomes a dead ideology.  The discarded type of information is not unimportant at all.  The difference is the same as that between someone who prepares a meal with nothing but the instructions in a recipe book to go by and someone who prepares the same meal after having been taught how to do it by a master chef. Hyper-Protestantism is this same approach that Oakeshott calls rationalism applied to the Christian tradition.  It separate the Scriptures, the living Word of God, from the living tradition of the Christian Church.  Then it takes the truths it wishes to emphasize from the Scriptures and formulizes them.  Think about the difference between the ancient Creeds and the Protestant Confessions.  The Creeds are as alive as the tradition to which they belong.  They contain the basic Christian faith and when they are liturgically recited in the Church the “I believe” of each individual member joins with that of each other, and with those of Christians past and yet to come, to form the collective “we believe” of Christ’s Church.  The Protestant Confessions, by contrast, are longer, contain secondary and tertiary doctrines as well as the basic faith, and express them in the form of a numbered list that gives the impression that one is supposed to go through it checking each item off.  Now consider the significance of this for the truth of the freeness of salvation.  The Protestant Confessions each express this truth clearly but contradict it by their checklist format.  The ancient Creeds don’t articulate it per se, but neither do they in any way, by direct expression or by format, contradict it, and this truth is implicit in what is confessed about Jesus Christ in the Creeds.

(3)  Since Revelation is a highly symbolic book she is also more than Mary, or rather Mary as the symbol or representative of something else.  That she is Mary as the second Eve, the fulfilment of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 in which “the woman” is both Eve and Mary, is clear from the entire chapter in which her nemesis is the dragon, “that old serpent.”  The imagery of the first and last verses would suggest that Mary, the New Eve, appears as the symbolic representative of the people of God.  The imagery of the first verse is that of Joseph’s dream, indicating Israel, and that of the last verse, is of the Church which has “the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

(4)  It also conflicts with the high Mariology of most of the Protestant Reformers.

(5) “Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly 'Catholic,' as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent.” – St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 2.6.

Beauty versus Blasphemy

The opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris became the latest in a series of highly controversial events to have occurred this July.  I am not going to say much about the others as they have to do with American domestic politics.  Nor am I going to say a whole lot about what happened at the Olympics as I am merely using it as a springboard for a discussion of theological aesthetics.  That it shocked anyone is rather surprising in itself.   What else would one expect from the games that represent the apex of Modern man’s regression into the pagan idolatry of sports, especially when located in the capital city of a nation that at the end of the eighteenth century threw off and murdered its divine-right king and queen, threw off its ancient allegiance to the Church, and paraded a prostitute through said capital telling the people to worship her as the “goddess” Reason?   Note that the part of the Olympic ceremonies that included a blasphemous reenactment of the Last Supper featuring drag queens, a celebration of Dionysius the Olympian whose festivals threatened civilization even in pagan days (read Euripides’ Bacchae), and the same sort of tasteless garbage that takes place in those silly parades in honour of the deadly sin of Superbia, also included an honouring of the French Revolution. Despite the glorious events of the ninth of Thermidor, the anniversary of which we just passed, France never recovered from this disaster, not even to the extent that England had recovered from the mother of all left-wing revolutions, the Puritan one, in the Restoration of the previous century and even that recovery, alas, was not as complete as it should have been.  Perhaps there are some who might still be surprised that an alphabet soup fest took place at what might reasonably be expected to be a celebration of jock culture.  Such have not been paying attention to how the costume and makeup division of the alphabet soup brigade have claimed the field of athletics as their own territory in the last few years.

 

Christian condemnation of the mockery of a key event in our sacred history has come under criticism from two directions.  There are those “liberal Christians” who can always be counted on to condemn any act of Christians standing up for themselves and their faith as being “unchristian”, “judgmental”, “hindering the Gospel”, “politicizing Christianity” or some other such balderdash. I place little value on such opinions and do not think them worthy of a response.  The other type of criticism is almost the opposite of this.  It takes Christians to task for being too milquetoastish in their defense of their faith.  The reason people like the performers at the Olympics and those who approved their performance feel free to mock Christianity in ways they would not feel similarly free to mock other religions such as, for example, Islam, is because Christians do not respond with such things as fatwas and jihads when their faith is mocked.  A more insightful variation of this would be to say that much of the Christian response to this mockery has been based on liberal principles rather than Christian ones.  In other words it has taken the form of “you wouldn’t treat other religions this way, it is unfair that you are treating us like that, this is discrimination” rather than “you have mocked the true and living God, Who will not be mocked, and furthermore mocked Him at a key moment in the history of His having taken on human nature and become Man in order to save us, the world, and yes, even you, from the sins for which we all must repent rather than celebrate as you are now doing, and if you don’t change your sorry ways and seek His forgiveness, you will suffer forever the consequences of mocking Him .”

This incident brought to mind an earlier controversy regarding a depiction of the Last Supper.  No, I am not referring to Dan Brown’s silly book but to a painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese.  In 1573 he completed a very large – 18.37 ft. by 42.95 ft. – oil painting that had been commissioned by the Dominicans as a replacement for a painting by Titian of the Last Supper that had been lost to fire two years earlier.  The middle of the painting features Christ at the centre of a table with the twelve Apostles on either side of Him much like other familiar portraits of the Last Supper.  The setting is clearly not an upper room in first century Jerusalem, however, from the architecture of the room and the skyline of the city in the large window behind them.  Then there are all the extras.  There are close to fifty people in the painting, including a dwarf in jester’s attire, a few African slaves, German soldiers, and all sorts of other people, none of whom one would have expected to have been present on the occasion even if the factor of anachronism were to be excluded.  There are a number of animals there too including a cat peeking out from under the table at St. Peter’s feet at a dog sitting in front of the table and tilting its head to look back at the cat and a parrot on the jester’s arm.  These promoted an investigation by the local Venetian branch of the Inquisition which, on the grounds that he had violated the rules regarding religious art that the Council of Trent (1545-1563) had imposed, ordered him to fix the painting, which he did by re-titling it “The Feast at the House of Levi.”  Monty Python did a sketch loosely based on this although they switched in Michelangelo for Paolo Veronese and the Pope for the local Inquisition.

 

A comparison of this incident with the current one brings a few observations to mind.  It goes without saying, of course, that the Church was more powerful in the sixteenth century than today.  It is also evident that Veronese’s painting was not intrinsically blasphemous like the performance art at the Olympics.  Had it been so, the Inquisition would not have been satisfied with a change of title.  One conclusion that might be drawn from this is that the Church then took lesser offences in the realm of art more seriously than the Church today takes greater offences.  Which makes it interesting to note  that this incident occurred ten years after the closing of the Council of Trent.  The Council of Trent was the Roman Church’s response to the Reformation.  The Reformation primarily had to do with ethical matters (charges of ecclesiastical corruption that began with the 99 theses pertaining to the sale of indulgences) and doctrine (the authority of the Church in relation to that of Scripture, the doctrine of salvation), but there was also an aesthetic element that was intertwined with both the ethical and doctrinal.  The Protestant Reformers considered the invocation of the saints and a number of similar or associated practices to be in violation of the second commandment, that is to say, the commandment against idolatry.  This is an ethical issue because if the Reformers were right the practices in question are sinful, because idolatry is a major sin, and if the Reformers were wrong, they were guilty of the sin of falsely judging the motives of other Christians.  It is also a doctrinal issue, because for the Reformers to be right the ancient Christian doctrine of the Communion of the Saints, that all Christians, whether in earth or in heaven, are members of the one body of Jesus Christ within which there is no veil between the living and the dead because all are one in Christ, would have to be wrong.  It was an aesthetical matter as well and became increasingly so as the Reformation progressed and newer Reformers developed traditions within Protestantism that adopted such strict views as that any artistic depiction of God was idolatry or, more extremely, that any artistic depiction of anyone was idolatry, and that consequently Church buildings needed to be stripped of all adornment.  That it was the rules of the Roman Church, adopted in the Counter Reformation, that Veronese ran afoul of demonstrates something that a lot of Christians find difficult to grasp today.  Aesthetic permissivism is not the only alternative to Puritanism, the extreme version of Protestantism that stripped Churches of their artwork, Church music of its instruments, closed theatres, and basically looked at almost any attempt at artistic expression as an offense against the God Who had given the ability of artistic expression to man.

 

By “aesthetic permissivism” I mean the idea that artists should not be subject to any rules external to those of their art, an idea closely related to the idea that art should not be subject to any criticism other than aesthetic.  In practice these ideas quickly translate into the artist not being subject to any rules whatsoever and his art not being subject to any criticism.  These are popular ideas today, not least among artists for whom they have an obvious self-serving appeal, because of a) the widespread notion that beauty, the standard upon which all aesthetic rules and judgements are based, is purely subjective and b) the less widespread, except among left-wing activists who think they are artists, notion that beauty is a false standard that needs to be deconstructed and so art must be made to deliberately eschew the standard of beauty by embracing its opposite.  Much of the corpus of the late Sir Roger Scruton was devoted to demonstrating how erroneous these ideas are.  Most Christians are uncomfortable with aesthetic permissiveness in its bald form as described in this paragraph although there is an idea popular in certain Christian circles that resembles an inverted version of it.  This is the idea that while artists and their art should be subject to rules and criticism of a moral nature, albeit not to the extent demanded by Puritanism, aesthetic judgements are purely subjective and should not be influenced by theology or ethics.  A version of this that arises with regards to Church worship is the notion, often supported by a misinterpretation of St. Paul, that the matter of how we worship is adiaphora. Fr. Paul A. F. Castellano’s As It is In Heaven: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Introduction to the Traditional Church and Her Worship (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2021) is an excellent rebuttal of this notion.

 

Puritanism is no more an acceptable position for orthodox Christians than aesthetic permissivism.  The premise that all artistic depictions break the commandment against idols can be answered in the same way as can the premise that killing in self-defense or defense of others, in war, and as the execution of a sentence for death passed for the commission of a capital crime are forbidden by “thou shalt not kill”, i.e., with “turn the page.”  Exodus 21:14-17 and 29 prescribe the death penalty for various offences in the chapter after “thou shalt not kill” or more literally “thou shalt not do murder” in Exodus 20:13.  Only a few chapters later in Exodus 25 comes the instructions on building the ark of the covenant, with the mercy seat, with two golden cherubim (images of heavenly – in the sense of the heaven where God dwells – beings) (vv. 18-20).  The candlestick was to have representations of almonds on it (Ex. 25:33-34).  The ephod of the high priest was to have depictions of pomegranates on it (Ex. 28:33-34).  The Puritan interpretation of Exodus 20:4 as forbidding all artistic depictions cannot hold up within the context of its own book.  It cannot hold up in the context of the next verse which provides the criteria which distinguishes an idol from something that is merely a work of art.  As for depictions of God, the ruling of the Second Council of Nicaea (787 AD) against iconoclasm maintained, Scripturally, that the Incarnation had changed things, He Who as the eternal Son of God is the perfect Image of the invisible God His Father (Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3) became Man and in doing so revealed God that He might be seen in Him (Jn. 1:18, 14:9), and so since in the Incarnate Son God and Man are forever united in Hypostatic Union, God can be depicted because Man can be depicted.  The Second Council of Nicaea was a general council of the Church prior to the East-West Schism, received by the whole Church and both sides of the later Schism, as the seventh truly ecumenical council.  Protestantism’s reasons for rejecting it as such are insufficient in my opinion.  The attitude that manifested itself in the iconoclasm against which Nicaea II pronounced judgement and then later again in Puritanism goes back prior to the coming of Christ to the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids.  Zealous lay leaders of Israel, recognizing from the prophets that the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities had come upon Israel because of idolatry, determined that Israel would not only not practice idolatry again but would not be allowed to get close, and “hedged” the second commandment, and all the other commandments of the Mosaic Law, with extra commandments making the burden of the Law that much heavier.  These became the sect of Second Temple Judaism known as the Pharisees with whom Christ interacted in His ministry.  The spirit of Pharisaism is evident in the way the English Puritans responded to the efforts of Archbishop Laud and the other Carolinian Divines to maintain the “beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2, 96:9) in the English Church within the limits of the rubrics of the Protestant Elizabethan Prayer Book with accusations of papist conspiracies, armed revolt against Church and King, regicide, and a tyrannical regime that stripped the Churches of everything of aesthetic value.

 

While the Roman Church’s handling of the Paolo Veronese “incident” demonstrates that a mean can be found between these two extremes it does not necessarily illustrate what the proper mean should look like.  Let us return to the incident that prompted this discussion.  A better Christian response to the blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper than to rely solely on the liberal principle that one religion should not be singled out and targeted for the kind of mockery to which other religions would not be subjected is to stand on the Christian moral and theological principle that the true and living God will not be mocked.  To this moral and theological condemnation, however, must be added aesthetic condemnation.  The performance was bad not just on moral and theological grounds but aesthetic as well.  It was a display of ugliness not beauty.  Performances of this nature, even when they are not desecrating events from sacred history, generally are.  The spirit of mockery in which they are conducted, even when not directed explicitly against God, is directed against standards that are wrongfully considered to be oppressive, which in the arts means especially beauty.  Mockery of beauty is ultimately mockery of God, of course, because beauty like the other transcendentals (properties of being), goodness and truth, finds its ultimate expression in Him in Whom Being and Essence are one and Whose very name translates as “He Who Is.”

 

St. Peter commanded us to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15) and to give such a response as discussed in the previous paragraph to “artistic” assaults on the faith, Christians should familiarize themselves with basic theological aesthetics.  Although more has probably been written in the last hundred years on this subject than in all the rest of Christian history put together it is much more of a niche subject than its counterpart philosophical aesthetics, the field of the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton.  Hans Urs von Balthasar’s seven volume The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (published in German from 1961 to 1967, English translation published by Ignatius Press in San Francisco from 1983 to 1990) is a good place to start.  For anyone wanting to learn more about how in God Being and Essence are the same thing read St. Thomas Aquinas, or if you are looking for a shorter treatment E. L. Mascall’s He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism, originally published in 1943, just republished last year by Angelico Press in Brooklyn.  Don’t mistake St. Thomas and Mascall as starting with being as possessed by created things and equating it with God.  This would be both idolatry and pantheism.  It is God’s Being, of which created being is merely analogous, that is one with His Essence, as no created being and essence are one.  For a warning against the idolatry of equating God with anything in creation, including our idea of Him, see the first chapter of Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002) but with the caveat that Eastern theology often takes its apophaticism to the extreme of denying the possibility of natural theology, a denial that is difficult to reconcile with the first chapter of Romans.  One final recommendation is Benjamin Guyer’s The Beauty of Holiness: The Caroline Divines and Their Writings (London: Canterbury Press, 2012), from the Canterbury Studies in Spiritual Theology Series.

Pride and Lust

The sixth month of the year is upon us.  This is the month formerly known as June.   It took that name from Juno who in Roman mythology was the queen of the Olympian gods, the equivalent of Hera in Greek mythology.  That her name has been supplanted is not a belated effect of the triumph of Christianity over classical paganism, alas, but a sign of the waning influence of Christianity in Western Civilization, the name given to what used to be Christendom after it was taken over by liberalism.  A few decades ago a day in this month was set aside by liberal neo-pagans for the celebration of every sort of, well, what Jorge Bergoglio recently called “frociaggine” to the rage of his cult of progressive fans.  There are those who think such language should not be used even in quoting another.  My response to such a Mrs. Grundy can be found in the Anglo-Norman motto of the Order of the Garter, “honi soit qui mal y pense which means “shame on he who thinks evil of it” (although I prefer the older, if slightly less precise, translation “evil to him who thinks evil of it”).   Should that prove unsatisfactory, the only thing I have to add to it is, from the mother tongue of both Bergoglio’s own language and the Italian he was speaking when he uttered the word quoted, “futue te ipsum”.  I will not provide a translation, suffice it to say it was probably what King Edward III was saying silently in his head to those to whom he originally uttered the chivalric motto out loud.   At any rate, it was the celebration, in other words, of all the letters of the alphabet soup.  Then, deciding that a day was not enough, they expanded it to a week, and then the whole month.  Somewhere along the way the word that at one time denoted a glad, cheerful, even merry disposition but which had been hijacked by the alphabet soup gang as a self-designation was dropped from the title and so it simply became “Pride.”  

 

I have observed several times in the past that when it was shortened to “Pride” the lesser of two sins was dropped and the greater retained.   Indeed, what was retained is the name of the greatest of all sins.   The famous Seven Deadly Sins are Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony and Lust.   Of these sins – actually vices, since these denote habits or ongoing attitudes rather than single acts – the one with which the dropped “Gay” would be associated is Lust, which is associated with Sloth, Avarice, and Gluttony at the lower end of the spectrum.  Each of these is a vice in the strict Aristotelean sense of the word – a natural appetite indulged in to excess, and susceptible of various perversions.   Pride and Envy are linked at the other end of the spectrum.  These are the Satanic sins, the sins by which Lucifer fell and evil began its parasitic infestation of God’s good creation. 

 

I wrote about this at length last year in an essay entitled “The Season of Hubris.”  This essay is intended to be supplementary to that one rather than a repetition of everything I wrote there so I encourage you to read the two together.  

 

With regards to the contrasted sins of Pride and Lust a few observations are in order.  The first of these is that Pride’s being the worst of the Seven Deadly is the ultimate answer to those who think that sin is something that resides in the body alone and is not found in the mind or soul.  Plato, in his Politeia, a dialogue aimed at providing an account of dikiaosune (justice), has Socrates and his interlocutors construct a hypothetical ideal city.   The assumption behind this experiment is that the city-state is like a larger-scale man and that therefore it is easier to understand justice in the individual soul by seeing it writ large in a city.   Thus in Plato’s ideal city-state the philosopher-kings who love wisdom rule the producers who love money through auxiliary enforcers who love honour, and these classes respectively represent the reason, the appetites, and the will in the soul.   In the justice of the rightly-ordered soul the reason governs the appetites through the will.   The truth of the Christian revelation does not oppose this description, but assigns it to natural justice.   Original justice, with which man was created, included natural justice but it also included a higher spiritual justice which was a grace given through the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.  Both were lost in the Fall and while natural man can attain a type of civic justice that approximates natural justice while falling short of it as it was in man’s original antelapsarian state it is only through the grace made available by the redemption accomplished by Jesus Christ that man can be made spiritually whole and just.   When St. Paul describes the state of unredeemed fallen human nature as sarkos (the flesh) this indicates both that in the fallen state the lower sensual part of human nature, the appetites of which  Plato wrote, which is supposed to be governed by the higher rational part of human nature, instead exert a rebellious dominance over the soul and that the entirety of human nature, body and soul, which is supposed to be governed by God, the indwelling Holy Ghost, is instead in rebellion against Him and in the absence of His indwelling presence spiritually dead.  While the Platonic concept of the rightly-ordered soul can be seen in this it should not be taken as teaching other Platonic ideas that are incompatible with Christian truth such as the idea that certain heretics that the Church struggled against in the early centuries of the faith derived from Plato as to evil being entirely and only a property of matter, and therefore the body, and that it did not touch spirit, and therefore the soul.  In Christian truth, including the epistles of St. Paul who wrote “we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12), sin and therefore evil, began in the spiritual realm with the rebellion and fall of the devil who then tempted man.  The worst sins that a person can commit are not those that consist of indulging the sensual appetites to excess and thereby binding in chains of slavery the rational soul that ought to be governing and moderating the appetites and thereby cultivating the cardinal virtue of temperance.  The worst sins are those that take place strictly in the soul in its rebellion against God and refusal to submit to Him in humility.  The foremost and worst of these is Pride.

 

This should not be taken as detracting from the seriousness of the sin of Lust which is, after all, still one of the Seven Deadly.  Which leads to the next observation.  While Pride was closely connected to Envy, the second of the Seven Deadly sins, in the fall of the devil it was closely connected to Lust, in the fall of man.   Or rather, since Lust, as distinguished from Gluttony and Avarice in the Seven Deadly Sins, clearly means immoderate desire of a specifically sexual nature, it was closely connected to “Lust” in a broader sense of immoderate desire in general.  The Lust in the Seven Deadly Sins as well as Avarice, Gluttony, and Sloth if conceived of as immoderate desire for rest, are each specific examples of this broader sense of Lust.   This is the sense in which St. John used the word – twice – when he wrote “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.” (I Jn, 2:16)  The Greek word for Lust in this verse is epithumia. (1)

 

The two Lusts and the Pride identified in this verse are precisely the means employed by the devil to tempt Eve to sin.   This is evident in how Moses describes her response to the serpent’s temptation:

 

And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. (Gen. 3:6)

 

First she saw “that the tree was good for food” meaning that she desired the forbidden fruit for food.   This is the “lust of the flesh” which includes Gluttony as well as Lust proper.   Then she saw “that it was pleasant to the eyes” and so desired it with the “lust of the eyes.”   Finally, she saw that it was “to be desired to make one wise” which is a desire that appeals to the “pride of life.”   So it is that by inspiring Pride and Lust together, the enemy wrought the Fall of man.

 

This observation would not be complete without noting that the devil attempted this a second time with very different results.   When he came to Jesus after He had been fasting forty days in the wilderness and said “If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread” (Matt. 4:3) this was an attempt to stir up the “lust of the flesh.”  When he took Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem and told Him “If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone” (Matt. 4:6) it was the “pride of life” that he sought to use.  When he took Jesus to a mountaintop and showed Him the kingdoms of the world and their glory and said “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me” (Matt. 4:9) the “lust of the eyes” was the means he sought to employ.  In each of these the Second Adam triumphed where the first had fallen.  That St. Luke was inspired to record these temptations in a slightly different order with the last two reversed is perhaps to be explained as making the parallel with the temptation of Eve stand out more by presenting the temptations in the same order as in Genesis.

 

So it was that Lust and Pride brought about the Fall of man and so, appropriately, one of the first things recorded in the accounts of the Redemption of man in the Synoptic Gospels is the Saviour’s successful triumph over these temptations.  In the Genesis account of the Fall, however, Pride stands out as playing the larger role in the temptation.   That Pride was what had previously brought about the tempter’s own fall can be deduced from the Old Testament passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel traditionally regarded as alluding to his rebellion and is explicitly stated in the New Testament by St. Paul in 1 Tim. 3:16.  When the deuterocanonical Wisdom of Solomon states that “through envy of the devil came death into the world” (Wis. 2:24) this has been interpreted as meaning either that Envy was involved alongside Pride in the devil’s own fall or that it was his motive in tempting Eve.  In a popular Medieval account of the fall of the devil these interpretations are united.   The school of Alexander of Hales attributed this account to St. Bernard of Clairvaux in his commentary on the book of Jonah (2).   St. Thomas Aquinas also attributes this account to St. Bernard in the commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences that he wrote to complete his master’s degree in theology at the University of Paris. (3)   According to this account the Incarnation, in which humanity would be raised to the highest honour by being joined to deity in the Hypostatic Union of the Son of God, was revealed to Lucifer, whose Pride rebelled at the thought of a lower order of being so being elevated above him and so out of Envy he sought to thwart the outcome by enticing man to sin.   Robert Grosseteste, the thirteenth century Bishop of Lincoln and Oxford University administrator and professor, gave the following approving statement of the account without mentioning its author:

 

Accordingly—and this seems truer than the above-mentioned way—the fall of the angel had happened because from the beginning it was proposed to the angel that the Son of God made man must be believed for justice and must venerated and adored with that adoration that is latria.  For if by this faith and not otherwise the angels had had salvation, this faith would not have been at any time denied to or kept hidden from the angels, but from the beginning it would have been proposed and manifest to them all.  From the beginning, it seems, the Devil refused through pride to offer this faith, despised the man who ought to be adored above him, and disdained receiving justice from him.  The Devil thought him unworthy, envied him, and coveted his singular excellence; through this envy, by which he envied the God-man and hated him, he was a murderer from the beginning, because “whosoever hates his brother is a murderer” (1 Jn 3.15).  So the Devil did not remain in the truth of faith and salvation offered to him. (4)

 

Peter Lombard, the Italian theologian and Bishop of Paris who was a contemporary of St. Bernard provided the following account of the devil’s envy in tempting man to sin:

 

ON THE DEVIL’S ENVY, BY WHICH HE CAME TO TEMPT HUMANKIND.  And so the devil, seeing that human beings were able to ascend by the humility of obedience to that from which he had fallen through pride, envied them.  He who through pride had previously become the devil, that is, the one who has fallen below, by the jealousy of envy was made satan, that is, the adversary. (5)

 

While to the extent that they go beyond what can be gleaned directly from the Scriptures these accounts must be reckoned as speculative they are not wild speculation.   Note that in each account Pride is the root of Envy.  Envy, in these accounts and in the Seven Deadly Sins, must not be thought of the way the word is often used today as a mere synonym for jealousy (in the sense of wanting what someone else has, not in the sense of zealously guarding one’s own to the point of constantly suspecting others of trying to take it).   It does not mean merely coveting what belongs to someone else but hating another person to the point of seeking that person’s destruction for having what one in one’s Pride erroneously thinks is rightly one’s own.

 

Which brings us to our final observation.   Outside the alphabet soup gang the earliest support for turning the sixth lunar cycle of the year into a celebration of the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins came from what is commonly called the Left.  Historically, the Left has usually been thought of as the political expression of an economic movement, socialism, that is best described as the second worst Deadly Sin of Envy wearing the mask of the greatest Theological Virtue, Charity or Love.  Since the expression “Love is Love” (6) associated with the celebration of Pride, similarly uses the mask of Love to cover the Deadly Sin of Lust, this is ironically appropriate.  Of course the mainstream “Right” has largely jumped on the Pride bandwagon today, but this is to be expected from the mainstream “Right” which has little use for King, Church, tradition, family, hierarchy, chivalry and all the other good things the Right was traditionally supposed to stand for and is little more than yesterday’s liberalism, which is to capitalism what the Left is to socialism, just as capitalism is to the Deadly Sin of Avarice what socialism is to the Deadly Sin of Envy.  All that can be said for it is that at least the Avarice doesn’t hide behind a mask the way the Envy of socialism does.  Its face can be plainly seen in all the businesses who have sworn their allegiance to the Deadly Sin of Pride in order to make a quick buck by selling merchandize emblazoned with the symbol of God’s covenantal promise not to destroy the world with another Flood employed in defiance of Him and His Truth which is the only Truth.

 

 

(1)   This might surprise those more familiar with our Articles of Religion than the Greek text of the New Testament.   Article IX “Of Original Sin or Birth Sin” says that the “lust of the flesh” is “called in the Greek, phronema sarkos.” This is not the expression used by St. John in his epistle, but the expression used by St. Paul in the eighth chapter of Romans and which is rendered “carnal mind” in the Authorized Version.  That Archbishop Cranmer et al. had Romans 8:7 and not 1 John 2:16 in mind is evident from how the Article goes on to say “which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh, is not subject to the Law of God” with the last clause being a direct reference to the verse in Romans.   The English Reformers seem to have interpreted the “carnal mind” of Romans 8:7 as being identical to the “lust of the flesh” of 1 John 2:16.  While the interpretation may be correct, it is rather a stretch to render phronema as “lust”.  “Mind, spirit” is the primary definition for this word given by Liddell and Scott, and “lust” is not one of the definitions provided.  Interestingly “high spirit, resolution, pride” is a secondary definition.   The portion of the Article in which this appears is the final section which articulates the Reformation position on concupiscence, namely that it is sinful in itself, and that it is not eliminated by regeneration.  Concupiscence is the Anglicized version of the word usually used to translate the Greek epithumia in Latin, although it is not the word used to mean Lust in the Latin list of the Seven Deadly Sins (that word is Luxuria).  Rome clumsily condemned the Reformation position in the fifth session of the Council of Trent – her wording suggests that sin has a “true and proper nature” or “essence”, which, of course, conflicts with the truly Catholic understanding that sin and evil do not have a true essence or nature but are present as defects in that which was created good and so are absences, or non-things rather than things in themselves, an understanding that Rome herself otherwise affirms – but the disagreement is largely semantic.  The Reformers and Rome did not use the word concupiscence with the same meaning.   The Reformers used it to mean desire for sensual sin qua sin, by which definition, of course, it is as Article IX (and Article II of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession) assert, itself sinful.   Rome used it to mean natural sensual desire and this, as Rome said, is not sinful in itself, but only when it is disordered and immoderate.   As for Rome’s seeming position that regeneration eliminates all inherited sinfulness it is difficult to take it seriously.   Its could only be harmonized with all the experiential evidence to the contrary by claiming that by His redeeming work, Jesus Christ merely returned man to the same precarious state he was in prior to the Fall rather than placing him on more solid footing, a claim which might be consistent with the stick-and-carrot soteriology to which the Reformers so rightly objected in the Roman teaching of the sixteenth century but which is hardly consistent with the Catholic Christian truth that God’s Son is the Last Adam the effects of Whose work to redeem and rescue us and place us in a state of abundant grace far exceed the ruinous effects of the sin of the First Adam.  E. L. Mascall’s remarks on Article IX and the effects of regeneration on Original Sin in Christ, the Christian, and the Church: A Study of the Incarnation and Its Consequences (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017, originally published in 1946), 83-88 are well worth reading on this matter.

(2)   A Reader in Early Franciscan Theology: The Summa Halensis, edited and translated by Lydia Schumacher and Oleg Bychkov, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022), 202.

(3)   St. Thomas Aquinas, Scriptum super libros Sententiarium III, D. 1, Q. 1, A. 3, Ad 7.

(4)   Robert Grosseteste, The Cessation of the Laws, translated by Stephen M. Hildebrand (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 171 (3.2.3).

(5)   Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2, On Creation, translated by Giulio Silano, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008), 90 (D. XXI, 1.1).

(6)   This expression is amusingly absurd to anyone with even the most basic classical learning.   The statement “Philia is Agape” does not mean the same thing as “Storge is Eros” and you would have statements with yet different meanings if you swapped either term in either statement for either term in the other and even if you just reversed the terms in the statements – “Agape is Philia” is a defensible statement in a way that is not true of “Philia is Agape” because Agape includes Philia or perhaps better is a specialized form of Philia.  Yet each of these terms means Love and this is not merely a matter of English being a less rich language than Greek, nor is it a case of equivocal uses of Love, such as when “bark” means both the sound that a dog makes and the outer layer of a tree trunk.  Even Eros means sexual Love rather than sexual Lust and is not merely a synonym for epithumia, as can be demonstrated by trying the experiment of reading the speeches about Eros in Plato’s Symposium and substituting epithumia or Lust for Eros or Love.  C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (London: Geoffey Bles, 1960) is the best treatment of these terms, how they differ, and how they relate to each other, in English.

 

 

 

 

Papal Verbal Flatulence

Jorge Bergoglio, who under the name Francis became the current pretender to St. Peter’s throne when its last occupant, a much sounder theologian than himself, the late Benedict XVI, resigned, gave an interview to 60 Minutes earlier this week.  I didn’t see the episode.   The last time I watched an episode of 60 Minutes Andy Rooney’s commentary was still the final segment.   Rooney was about the only thing that made the show watchable.  I have, however, since read transcripts of the interview as it has generated some controversy.  This is not surprising.  Bergoglio seems to suffer from a gastro-intestinal disorder that manifests itself in emissions from his mouth of gas that ought to be coming out the other end.

 

Bergoglio was asked about a number of current issues.   He gave abominable answers when it came to some matters such as the immigration invasion of the United States, passable if vague answers on certain other matters of international import, a surprisingly good answer on the ecclesiastical matter of the ordination of women, and a very strange have-it-both-ways answer on the Roman Church’s recent ill-advised foray into the world of same-sex blessings.

 

The interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, concluded her questioning by asking the Western Patriarch who mistakenly thinks he has universal jurisdiction what gives him hope.  His answer began with the single word “Everything” and ended with the following:

 

And people are fundamentally good. We are all fundamentally good. Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.

 

This is what has caused all the fuss because the words in bold have been taken to be in conflict with the doctrine of Original Sin.  Original Sin is the doctrine that in the sin of our first parents the entire human race fell and became sinful a condition from which we are unable to extract ourselves making us wholly dependent for our salvation on the grace of God and the redemption provided by Jesus Christ.   Unlike doctrines proclaimed by papal decree or even by any of the post-Schism councils falsely regarded as ecumenical by the Roman Communion, Original Sin is a truly Catholic doctrine.   Its affirmation is implicit in the condemnation of the heresy of Pelagius by the regional Council of Carthage in 418 AD, later ratified by the General Council of Ephesus in 431 AD, that was received as the third ecumenical council by the pre-Schism Catholic Church.   It is essential to both Lutheranism and Calvinism and accordingly is emphasized in the confessions of those traditions.  In the Anglican formularies it is affirmed in the ninth of the Articles of Religion.   While contemporary online Eastern Orthodox apologists sometimes claim that their Church rejects it this is not the case.  What the Eastern Orthodox Church rejects is Original Guilt, the idea that human beings inherit not just a fallen nature corrupted by sin from their first parents but also personal culpability for the sinful act that produced the Fall. Original Guilt and Original Sin are related but different concepts that are often confused with each other in both the East and the West.   In the East it has often been assumed that Original Guilt is an essential part of the Western idea of Original Sin, for which reason the Eastern Orthodox usually refer to Original Sin sans Original Guilt as ancestral sin.   Since, however, what they affirm as ancestral sin is Original Sin as distinguished from Original Guilt, regardless of whether the latter is affirmed or denied, Original Sin is actually affirmed by both East and West. (1)

 

So, was what Bergoglio said heretical in the Pelagian way and in conflict with Original Sin?

 

If you take the offending words – the ones I highlighted in bold, which are repeated in his next sentence – alone, the answer is “not necessarily.”   If, by saying that people are fundamentally good, Bergoglio meant that sin and evil do not exist in themselves as things or substances in their own right, but only parasitically in things that are good, then he was right.   Indeed, if that is what he meant, he was not only right but expressing the essence of the classical Christian theist version of that to which Gottfried Leibniz gave the name theodicy, the vindication of God in the face of the problem of evil.   This is not what Bergoglio meant, but let us pursue this thought a little further before considering the banality that he actually intended.

 

God is good.   Indeed, not only is God good, He is Goodness itself at its purest and most perfect.   God created everything other than God that exists and everything that He created He created good.   Another way of putting it would be to say that in His grace He gave to all that He had made participation in created goodness which is a finite reflection of His own infinite goodness.   Every gift that He gave His creatures was a good gift.  To rational creatures, such as ourselves, He gave the gift of free choice.  As a gift from God, free choice was both good in itself, and the means to a greater good, the good of rational creatures freely choosing to trust, love, and obey God.   It is through our misuse of that good gift that evil entered into the world.  Evil, not having been created by God, has no substance of its own, no essence.  It does not exist in the most proper sense of the word.   It has neither form, that which makes a thing the thing that it is rather than some other sort of thing, nor matter, that which makes a thing an actual thing rather than merely the idea of a thing.   It is present in things which do exist, in the proper sense of the word, which do have form and matter, in the way a hole exists in a wall, not a hole that is put there by an architect so that a window may be placed in it, but a hole that somebody makes by taking a sledgehammer to it in a fit of anger.   It is a hole, in other words, where there is not supposed to be a hole.  It is an absence or deficiency.   What is absent, in the hole that is evil, is a kind of good.  It is not, however, the entirety of the goodness that was bestowed upon the created thing in which evil parasitically resides that is absent, because if the entirety of that goodness were absent, the thing itself would no longer exist, existence being the most basic gift of goodness that God bestows upon His creatures.

 

Peter Lombard explored this at length in the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth distinctions of the second book of his Sentences.   The sixth paragraph of the second chapter of the distinction reads “From the aforesaid, it is gathered and inferred that, if there is an evil will and an evil action, insofar as it is, it is good.  But does anyone deny that an evil will and an evil action exist?  And so an evil will or action, insofar as it is, is a good.  And insofar as it is a will or an action, it is similarly a good; but it is evil from this vice; this vice is not from God, nor is it anything.”(2)  Lombard is a particularly important authority on this matter as his Sentences are a bridge of sorts between Patristic and Medieval theology.  The Scriptures and the Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine were his source material, his Sentences provided the structure for Systematic Theology for centuries to come, being the textbook from which St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, John Duns Scotus, and basically every Western theologian of note from the thirteenth century until the Reformation studied. (3)  Also worthy of note in this context are the third paragraph in the fourth chapter of the thirty-fourth distinction:

 

From this it is gathered that, when man is called evil, nothing else is meant than an evil good.  Hence Augustine adds, in the same place: “What is an evil man, if not an evil nature, because man is a nature?  Now, if man is a good thing because he is a nature, what else is an evil man, if not an evil good? Yet, when we distinguish between these two things, we find that he is not evil because he is a man, nor is he good because he is iniquitous; but he is called good because he is a man, evil because iniquitous. And so each nature, even if it is defective, insofar as it is a nature, is good; insofar as it is defective, it is evil.” (4)

 

And the second paragraph of the fifth chapter of the same distinction which paragraph consists entirely of quotes from St. Augustine’s Enchiridion:

 

“And these two opposites exist at the same time in such a way that, if the good did not exist in which evil might exist, evil could not exist at all, because not only would corruption not have a place to stay, but it would have no source from which to arise, unless there were something that could be corrupted, because corruption is nothing other than the extermination of the good.  And so evils have arisen from goods, and cannot exist in anything other than good things.” “Therefore, there was no source at all from which an evil nature could arise, except from the good nature of angel and man, from which the evil will first arose.” (5)

 

Note that Lombard here is quoting the Church Father who led the battle for orthodoxy regarding Original Sin and the need for grace against the Pelagian heresy.  It is also worth noting that these distinctions follow immediately after the section (distinctions thirty to thirty-three) of this book that covers Original Sin and are the segue into the discussion of actual sin, i.e., sinful acts, that closes the book.

 

Of course, none of this is what Jorge Bergoglio had in mind.   He probably doesn’t know the difference between Peter Lombard, Vince Lombardi and Guy Lombardo.  I could imagine him, in the unlikely event that somebody were to read this essay to him, asking “Peter Lombard? Wasn’t he an American football coach?  Or the guy who used to sing Auld Lang Syne on the radio every New Year’s Eve?” except that I seriously doubt he knows who any of these men were.

 

No, Bergoglio was just being a liberal, a progressive, a leftist.  The third sentence in the quotation confirms that.  Here it is again “Yes, there are some rogues and sinners, but the heart itself is good.”   That’s that heart about which the prophet Jeremiah said that it “is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9)   Or about which Jesus said “proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man.” (Matt. 15:19)  So no, he was not simply affirming that human nature, as created by God, is a good thing, in which sin/evil is present as a parasitical defect, as orthodox theologians have always taught.  He was affirming the liberal/progressive/leftist’s basic idea that the evils from which we suffer are not due to a moral defect in us but from defects in the structure of society.   If we could just get rid of economic/social/political disparity, if we could just eliminate poverty, illiteracy, or this-or-that other social ill, then everybody would finally be perfectly happy.   This never works because the ultimate cause of human suffering is not to be found in the organization of society, the distribution of its resources, or any of these other things, but in the human heart, in that very defect, Original Sin, which the Church affirms but which liberalism denies.   The Church is right and liberalism, including the liberal that the Cardinals of the Roman Communion have placed at the top of their hierarchy in the seat they wrongly claim to be vested with universal jurisdiction, is wrong.   The tragic consequence of liberalism’s error is that by denying that the ultimate cause of suffering is a defect in the human heart liberalism treats suffering as being treatable by political, social, and economic engineering, but since the ultimate cause of suffering is that defect in the human heart it is not so treatable and furthermore liberalism’s attempts to treat it by these means inevitably become, despite their denial that the problem is a defect in human nature, attempts to engineer better human beings, which attempts are doomed to fail and to fail in such a way as to increase rather than decrease human suffering.

St Peter in his first epistle advised his readers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” (1 Pet. 3:15)   This is precisely what O’Donnell asked Bergoglio.   While Bergoglio may have succeeded to St. Peter’s local jurisdiction over the Church in Rome he has sadly not inherited the reason for the Apostle’s hope.   St. Peter went on to write:

 

Having a good conscience; that, whereas they speak evil of you, as of evildoers, they may be ashamed that falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.  For it is better, if the will of God be so, that ye suffer for well doing, than for evil doing. For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; Which sometime were disobedient, when once the longsuffering of God waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was a preparing, wherein few, that is, eight souls were saved by water.  The like figure whereunto even baptism doth also now save us (not the putting away of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God,) by the resurrection of Jesus Christ: Who is gone into heaven, and is on the right hand of God; angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him. (1 Pet. 3:16-22)

 

Bergoglio, in his answer said “everything” and mentioned human goodness.  He did not mention Jesus Christ.   That tells us everything we need to know about Bergoglio.

 

 

 

(1)    See the section on “Original Sin” in the fifth chapter of Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, first published in Russian in 1963, first published in English in 1983 by the St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.  The section in question can be found on pages 162 to 169 of the current (third) edition of the English translation, and the footnotes by the translator, Fr. Seraphim Rose, on the first and last pages of the section are particularly helpful and to the point, as is the final sentence in the proper text of the section “Thus original sin is understood by Orthodox theology as a sinful inclination which has entered into mankind and become its spiritual disease.”

(2)   Peter Lombard, The Sentences: Book 2, On Creation, translated by Giulio Silano, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2008, 2013), 176-177.

(3)   A commentary on the Sentences was the thesis required for a Masters degree in Western Medieval universities.  St. Thomas Aquinas’ became his first published work.   Most of the extent writings of John Duns Scotus are his lectures at the universities of Oxford and Paris on the Sentences.

(4)  Lombard, op cit., 172-173, his quotation from St. Augustine is from the Enchiridion (Handbook).

(5)  Ibid., 173.