Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Just War

On 28 February, American Neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser posted to his blog a short piece with the title “The U.S. war on Iran is manifestly unjust”.  In this piece he demonstrated that the war on Iran does not meet the criteria to be considered just according to classical Catholic just war theory, focusing on the requirements that there be a just cause and showing that the reasons put forth by the White House for the actions against Iran do not make for a genuine casus belli.  He also briefly talked about the war’s not meeting the requirement that it be conducted under lawful authority because by the terms of American constitutional law the authority to wage war belongs to Congress and not the president.

 

Roman Patriarch Leo XIV is clearly of the same opinion as Feser on this matter.  Some others of the Roman communion who hold to just war theory are less certain.  Among these is R. R. (“Rusty”) Reno, editor of First Things. His argument that it is “unwise to issue confident moral judgments about Operation Epic Fury” was posted on 3 March, three days after Feser’s.  Feser has just contributed a piece to First Things entitled “Does Just War Doctrine Require Moral Certainty?”  In response to those like Reno who disagreed with him, he argues for an affirmative answer to the question asked in his title.  “What has long been the standard teaching in the Catholic just war tradition”, he writes, “is that the probability of a war’s being just is not good enough. The case for the justice of a proposed war must be morally certain. Otherwise, it is morally wrong to initiate the conflict.”  Note his use of the illustration of a hunter shooting into the bush.  Unless the hunter is certain there is no person hiding in or behind the bush that he might hit, to shoot is a reckless and morally wrong act.  The same illustration has been used for decades to answer the argument  that we don’t know when a fetus becomes a person made by those who think women should have the right to murder their unborn offspring.

 

I agree with Feser (and Leo XIV) on this matter.  I wish to point out, however, that he has been arguing mostly the one aspect of the just war question, that of jus ad bellum or when is it just to go to war.  There is also the aspect of jus in bello or what is the right manner in which to conduct war.  These aspects are not independent of each other.  If a war cannot be fought in a manner that is jus in bello then it can never be jus ad bellum.

 

This is often avoided in contemporary discussions of just war because of the uncomfortable question it raises of whether Modern developments in the technology of war have made a jus ad bellum war a practical impossibility.

 

The rules of just war theory or doctrine were hammered out at a time when wars were fought very differently from how they are fought today.  A king who went to war with another kingdom would be expected either to lead the troops into battle himself or delegate the task to his sons, brothers, or other close relatives.  Democratically elected politicians, by contrast, do not fight in the wars for which they vote and are notorious for protecting their own children from conscription.   How did Black Sabbath put it again?  “Politicians hide themselves away/They only started the war/Why should they go out to fight?/They leave that role to the poor.” (1)

 

Furthermore, when St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, et al., were drawing out the principles of just war from Scripture, moral philosophy/theology and reason, those who did the actual fighting and killing in war, generally had to see the people they were killing in order to do so.  This meant, of course, that they were also putting their own lives in jeopardy by going to war.  This was most obviously the case with combat involving swords and other weapons that could not kill beyond the range of the slightly extended arm-length they provided, but even with longer-distance weapons such as bows and arrows, catapults, and cannons you had to see what you were aiming at with your own eyes.

 

This was the way war was fought for most of human history.  Now think of the contrast with today.  Airplanes were first used in combat in World War I.  With World War II, the use of these machines to drop high explosive bombs that could kill large numbers of unseen non-combatants became normative.  By the end of that war, the Americans had developed the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb, which they dropped on two Japanese cities killing about 120, 000 people instantly with the death toll growing to about twice that amount by the end of the year due to radiation poisoning and other such injuries.  Mercifully, their use did not become normative, especially since the development of this monstrous technology after the war has exponentially increased its destructive power to the point where it could eliminate humanity and all other life on earth.  In 1957, the Soviet Union conducted the first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and two years later both the Americans and the Soviets had operational ICBM systems in place. By the 1970s, advanced guidance systems that used computers and lasers to direct bombs to their targets were in common use (this evolved out of technology that in a very early stage of development both the Americans and the Nazis had during World War II).  Today, cities can be reduced to rubble and thousands of non-combatants instantly killed, totally unseen by the person who does the destroying and killing with the push of a button, half a world away.

 

This, which, by the way, is what “progress” looks like, a fact which when it sinks in should be sufficient to make a reactionary out of any sane person, was not merely a series of changes to the tools of war.  It changed the very nature of war and in such a way as to raise the question of whether war fought in this manner and with these tools can ever be just.

 

It is a difficult question to answer, not least because however these changes have affected the nature and justice of war, they have not affected in the slightest its necessity.   If a hostile power attacks and invades your country this creates the necessity of your going to war defensively to stop them (blithering rubbish to the contrary from Mennonites, Quakers, and Gandhi be hanged).  To say that something is necessary, however, is not to say that it is just, since necessity and justice are two very different things. If we set the difference between necessity and justice aside and take the position that all defensive wars are just, note that this would obviously not justify the actions of the United States and Israel.

 

In popular American culture the demands of classical just war theory have largely been by-passed by a very different way of thinking about martial ethics.  In this way of thinking, it does not matter so much that a war have a valid casus belli, that it be a means of last resort, that the good that it accomplishes or at least tries to accomplish outweighs the death and destruction it causes and that non-combatants not be made into targets.  What matters is that “we” (the ones going to war) are the “good guys” and that “they” (the ones we are going to war with) are the “bad guys.”

 

This way of looking at things is so puerile if not infantile that it would scarcely be worth addressing if it were not so widespread in the United States (and other countries of the civilization formerly known as Christendom that have had the misfortune of being inundated with American pop culture) and so clearly the predominant way of thinking among those who started this war and its chief apologists.  This is, of course, the way superhero comic books and Hollywood movies tend to portray things and it can hardly be a coincidence that these started to become the staples of American pop culture that they are today around the same time as the rapid advancement of American military technology.  Hollywood and DC (2) cannot be blamed for creating this thinking, however much they may have helped popularize it, because it had been part of the American mindset long before World War II.

 

Indeed, I maintain that it can be traced back to the Calvinism that was the root of Yankee culture.  Now in this instance I am not using the word “Yankee” in the sense it normally has in my country or, for that matter, anywhere else outside of the United States, i.e., as a synonym for “American.”  I am using it rather to refer to the culture of the American northeast which developed out of the colonies settled by Puritans.  In the American Internecine War (1861-1865) this culture went to war with its chief rival, the more traditional and agrarian culture of the American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line which had developed out of colonies that were not so Puritan in nature.  It thoroughly defeated its rival and has dominated American culture on the national level ever since. (3)  By this point in time Yankee culture had become secularized, but it was still at heart a secular Calvinism.

 

While this most often comes up in the context of tracing American capitalism back to the Protestant (more specifically Calvinist) work ethic (4) or of Southern traditionalist conservatives pointing out the deleterious effects of the North’s victory on American society as a whole (5), I believe that it can be shown to also be the source of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset of American culture. 

 

The doctrine that most sets Calvinism apart from other Christians, including other Protestants, is its doctrine of double predestination and election.   This might seem to be an unlikely source of dividing people into “good guys” and “bad guys” since it is closely related in Calvinist theology to what seems at first glance to be the strongest possible affirmation of the orthodox Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin, i.e., that all of Adam’s descendants are tainted with the sin that infected human nature in the Fall and are therefore utterly dependent upon the grace and mercy of God.  In Calvinist theology, especially as formulated against Arminianism (a dissenting subcategory of Calvinism that stresses free will) this is stated as Total Depravity.  From the body of humanity so totally depraved by Original Sin, the doctrine of double predestination states, God in eternity past selected some upon whom to pour His mercy and grace and to bring to final salvation and chose others upon whom to pour His wrath and to punish eternally basing the selection entirely upon His Own pleasure rather than upon anything within the “elect” and the “reprobate” that might distinguish them from each other.

 

How this idea became secularized into the American “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset may already be apparent.  To make it clearer I will briefly show how the Calvinist doctrine differs from Christian orthodoxy.  Original Sin is sound, orthodox doctrine, taken directly from the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.  Pelagianism (that Adam’s sin isn’t inherited and that people can be righteous before God without His grace) and Semi-Pelagianism (that God’s grace is required for salvation, but that man can make the first step towards God) are both heresies, condemned as such by the universal Church.  This means that all people are sinners (Rom. 3:23).  The division of mankind into the righteous (those cleansed of sin and made righteous before God by His grace given to man in Jesus Christ) and the wicked (those who finally and incurably reject the grace of God) is not something that took place in eternity past but something that will take place on the Last Day.   Until then, God does indeed have those He has “chosen”, who have received His grace, but unlike in the Calvinist concept of the “elect” in orthodox theology being chosen by God does not mean selected to be an elite few who are given God’s grace to enjoy among themselves but being selected to receive His grace that they may assist in bringing it to others.   Think of God’s words to Abra(ha)m the very first time He spoke to him.  “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen. 12:2-3)  Far too many people read these verses as if the emphasis was on the words that I did not highlight with italics.  For Abraham, being chosen by God did not mean that he was the exclusive recipient of God’s favour and blessing but that he was a vessel through which it was to flow to everyone else. (6)

By contrast, the Calvinist view of election is that those chosen by God are chosen to be the sole and exclusive recipients of His saving grace and mercy.  In its strictest form, defined by the canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) rather than the Institutes of John Calvin himself, Calvinism teaches that God gave Jesus Christ only to His elect and that Jesus died only for the elect, a doctrine that most Christians rightly regard as blasphemous and heretical.  In Calvinism, the numbers of the elect and reprobate have been fixed from eternity past.  One is either “elect” or “reprobate”, this can never change, and it is in no way based on anything one does.  This is the doctrine of John Winthrop and his followers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who envisioned what would become America as a Puritan “city on a hill” even as the spirit of the Modern Age, the spirit of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him, had already infested his fellow Puritans in England who not long thereafter would, in complete violation of the Scriptural injunctions of SS Peter and Paul, wage what would ultimately be a regicidal war against King Charles I and lay the foundation for the twin evil doctrines of the Modern Age, liberalism (of which Americanism is a variety) and progressivism or leftism (of which Communism is a variety). It is the clear ancestor of the American idea that in war there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, their “goodness” and “badness” being who they are and not so much what they do, a notion that conveniently allows traditional Christian doctrine as to when it is right to go to war and how war can be rightly conducted to be bypassed.

 

That, of course, is the danger of this “good guys” versus “bad guys” approach to war.  The old rules of just war doctrine were carefully thought out to limit when wars can be fought and how they can be fought so as to limit the destruction and death wrought by war.  “Good guys” versus “bad guys”, however, is not such a limiting doctrine.  To the contrary, its tendency is to give carte blanche to the “good guys” when it comes to defeating the “bad guys.”  Look at how that has played out in American history.  In the American Internecine War, the North invaded the South and waged total war against those who from their own stated perspective they regarded as still their brethren and fellow countrymen.  Total war is always unjust by the standards of traditional Christian just war doctrine.  In World War II, FDR unilaterally – he did not inform Sir Winston Churchill of it in advance, and Churchill who had a lot more sense than Roosevelt recognized it to be a bad move although he was forced to go along with FDR’s press release – declared that the Allies would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender”, a stupid declaration that could only ever have had the result of prolonging the war and increasing rather than limiting its destructiveness.  At the end of that war Truman unconscionably ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though, contrary to the lies that are told today to justify this action, he knew that Japan was already willing to negotiate a surrender to General MacArthur.  The current head of the United States in an ill-thought out social media rant against Leo XIV said, among other things, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”  Would it not be more sensible to say that the only country that has ever committed the atrocity of using nuclear weapons in war is the country that should not be trusted with having them?

 

The “good guy” versus “bad guy” mentality leads those who hold it to regard earthly wars as microcosmic versions of a cosmic level struggle between good and evil.  Christians are forbidden to think this way (Eph. 6:12).  There may be a surface level resemblance between this idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil and the Christian teaching that an angel started a rebellion against God in the spiritual realm, which was brought to earth when Adam and Eve were tempted and fell, but the resemblance does not go much deeper than this.  It is much closer to Eastern dualistic concepts which, when they made their way into the Church in the early centuries through false teachers like Mani, were rejected as heresy.  Christianity – sound, orthodox, Christianity that is – does not teach that good and evil are two opposing forces, the struggle between which basically defines the universe and life within it.  Christianity teaches that there is One God, Who is Good, that other than God, everything that exists has been created by God Who created it good and pronounced it good, that the evil that became present in Creation when Satan and then man used the good gift that is their free will to rebel against God is present not as some force or power or thing that is equal and opposite to goodness, but only in the same way that a hole is present in a wall.

 

Classical just war doctrine, carefully formulated by the Church’s best doctors and theologians from Scriptural principles and moral philosophy to limit the destructive potential of war is really the only option for orthodox Christians.  A pacifism that tells you not merely to turn the cheek to the ἐχθροί (personal enemies) you are commanded to love but to allow the πολέμῐοι (military enemies) of your country to conquer, enslave or kill your family, neighbours and countrymen without fighting back is utterly vile and not to be regarded as a valid option.  The recipe for escalating rather than limiting endless numbers of wars that is the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset must also be rejected as repugnant.  This leaves us with classical just war doctrine, of which the United States’ current war against Iran fails all the tests. 

 

Unless the United States can figure out a way to fight a war without using technology that enables them to kill people they can’t see in large numbers from a safe distance far away and to dismiss the civilian casualties as “collateral damage” it is doubtful that any war she fights can ever be considered just again.

 

 (1)   Ozzy Osbourne, Terence Michael Butler, William T. Ward, F. Frank Iommi, “War Pigs”, 1970.

(2)   Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were introduced in 1938, 1939, and 1941 respectively.  Although Timely introduced Captain America in 1940, it was not until 1961 when the company rebranded as Marvel and Editor-in-chief Stan Lee working with Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, soon to be followed by Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men that it became the big player in the superhero comics market.

(3)   See Clyde N. Wilson, The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma, (Columbia SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2016). 

(4)   Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated from 1905 German edition by Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930).

(5)   Note 3, vide supra, and also The Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York & London: Harper and Bros, 1930) which is still in print from Louisiana State University Press and pretty much any book by M. E. Bradford.

(6)  The Calvinist view of election is not the only one that could stand correction from this passage.  Unlike previous American military escapades in the Middle East, the current war against Iran has little international support.  The United States’ most conspicuous ally in this war is Israel.  Much of the internal support for the war in the United States has come from Christians, mostly evangelical Protestants, who have a particular version of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset in which Israel is always the “good guy” in a Middle East conflict regardless of the circumstances and her neighbour is always the “bad guy”.

 

This is because the present day state of Israel shares the same name as the people of God in the Old Testament and these evangelicals believe that the Genesis 12 passage – the parts not highlighted in the quotation in the text of this essay – require that Christians give unconditional support to the present day state. 

 

This is an absurd conclusion.  It starts from an interpretation of Genesis 12 that like the Calvinist, regards God’s choosing or electing as being for the sake of the chosen or elect rather than for everyone.  In this case it is the interpretation that this passage, subsequent passages like it, and basically the whole of Old Testament history was all about creating an ethnic group which would enjoy God’s special favour.  The New Testament does not allow for this interpretation.  Galatians 3:16 clearly states that the Seed to Whom the promises to Abraham pertain is Christ.  Since everyone who believes in Christ is united to Christ and therefore in Christ the promises are available to everyone through faith in Jesus Christ.  They are only available through such faith, not through biological descent from Abraham. 

 

This is the clear teaching of the passage which, ironically, those who argue otherwise, claim as their principal proof text.  This passage, which interestingly follows the two chapters which Calvinists like to twist to support their view of election, is Romans 11.  In this chapter Israel, the people of God, is likened to an olive true.  Biological descendants of ancient Israel are described as “natural branches” of the tree. “Natural branches” who do not believe in Jesus Christ are cut out of the tree for their unbelief. Gentiles (from the Latin word for “nation” this is used to mean non-Jews) who believe in Jesus Christ are “wild branches” which are grafted in by faith.  The cut off “natural branches” can be grafted back in again if they believe.  Therefore, those who are in the olive tree that is the true Israel of both Testaments are believing (in Jesus Christ) Jews and believing Gentiles.  Believing Jews and Gentiles, however, make up the Catholic (universal) Church.  Clearly, therefore, this passage cannot support the claim that the Israel of God is a biological nation distinct from the Church which is the fundamental claim of the rubbish theology that underlies the “Christian Zionist” position. 

 

Those who cling to this theology, which, not coincidentally, is primarily to be found in the United States, will no doubt scream “Replacement Theology” at having this obvious truth pointed out, much like how Calvinists scream “Arminian” at anyone who does not accept their claim that God doesn’t love everyone and that Jesus died only for the elect, but this is akin to liberals screaming “racist” at anyone who disagrees with them.  “Replacement theology” would say either that the “wild branches” were grafted in to replace the “natural branches” or that a “wild olive tree” was substituted for the “natural olive tree” but neither of these is the case (that the “wild branches” are not “replacements” of the “natural branches” is evident from the fact that the “natural branches” can be grafted back in).  This is rather “Continuation theology”, that Israel, the olive tree, continues into the Church.   The only “replacement” is the “replacement” of the Old Covenant with the New, a “replacement” that is actually a “fulfillment” of the promises of the Old Covenant, and the replacement of the spiritual leadership of Israel under the New Covenant (the Apostles and their successor bishops leading a ministry of presbyters supported by deacons) from that of the Old Covenant (the Aaronic priesthood, supported by the Levites and led by the chief or high priest) which is what was prophesied by Jesus in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. 

 

Note that “replacement” of this sort took place in Judaism as well.  A parallel error to the one I have been debunking in this note is the error of thinking that what is called Judaism today is the religion of the Old Testament.  This is not the case.  Judaism shares a common history with Christianity before the coming of Christ, but with the coming of Christ the prophecies of the Messiah were fulfilled and the New Covenant established.  The Gospel was to be preached to the Jews first but many of these did not believe and held on to the religion of the Old Testament.  This was eventually taken away from them when the forces of Titus of Rome sacked Jerusalem in AD 70.  The principal elements of the Old Testament religion were the aforementioned Aaronic priesthood, the sacrifices that this priesthood was commanded to offer daily and on special occasions, at first in the Tabernacle, then in the Temple which replaced the Tabernacle and which had to be in a specific place in Jerusalem, and the feasts which by the Mosaic Law had to be celebrated in Jerusalem.   The destruction of the Temple made all that impossible.  The rabbis, originally lay teachers and leaders in late Second Temple Judaism, became the clergy of the new Judaism that arose after the destruction of the Temple.  Synagogue worship, which had developed after the Babylonian Captivity, probably around the time of Ezra himself, elements of which were incorporated into Christianity (the Ministry of the Word portion of the service prior to the Ministry of the Sacrament is largely an adaptation of synagogue worship), took over the central place in the worship of Judaism from Temple worship.  The feasts remained, but obviously they could no longer be kept in strict accordance to the Mosaic Law.  This new Judaism is not, as some Christians mistakenly think, an older parent religion to Christianity, but a younger religion by about forty years.  It too has other Scriptures by which the Scriptures which Jews and Christians have in common are interpreted.  These, consisting of the Mishnah (the codification of what the Second Temple Pharisees called the oral law) and rabbinic commentary on the Mishnah called the Gemara, comprise the Talmud, which was compiled between the third and sixth centuries AD (both in Palestine and Babylon with the Babylonian version which was completed later becoming the authoritative version).  

 

None of this excuses us from our duty to leave peacefully, so far as it depends on us, with all people and to “Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God” (1 Cor. 10:32).  It shows the folly in thinking that we are under an obligation to God to support the present state that calls herself Israel in all of her conflicts without taking any consideration of who, if anyone, is in the right in the conflict.  Note that thinking we have to oppose the present state of Israel in all of her conflicts is just as much folly and the kind of folly that is usually attached to the “woke” anti-white bigotry in the kind of academic leftism that Americans think is a form of Marxism created by the infiltration of American higher learning by European Communists but which is actually Americanism taken to its totalitarian extreme.  These conflicts should be evaluated by the standards with which we would judge the conflicts of any other states.  Certainly it is not helpful for Christians to be repeating the inane Scripture-twisting rhetoric of the state of Israel’s leaders that treats the nation that is currently located in the heart of what was King Cyrus’ empire as if it were Amalek.

A Heretical Meme

I recently saw a meme that read “We are not saved because we believe, we believe because we are saved.”  The person who posted the meme was a Calvinist who presumably thought that the meme was a nugget of theological truth about God’s sovereignty in salvation.  Internet memes, however, are merely the democratization of the sound-byte and sound-bytes do not gain in accuracy and truthfulness by being created by the average Joe rather than by the corporate media.  In this case, the meme is heretical.  It is heretical even by the standards of Calvinism.

 

The meme basically asserts that salvation is the cause of faith, rather than faith the cause of salvation.  This, however, mutatis mutandis, is what orthodox Christianity asserts about works rather than faith.  Protestantism, of which Calvinism is a strand, is particularly insistent upon this point.  To assert the same about faith, therefore, is to eliminate the distinction between faith and works and to make faith into a work.  The entire point of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, however, is that justification is by grace (a gift) rather than by works (a wage earned), and that justification can be by grace because it is by faith, since faith is not a work.

 

That faith is the cause and salvation the effect is clearly stated in multiple verses.  Any one of these can be quoted to demonstrate the point.  I will quote Romans 5:1 “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”   If faith were the effect, this wording would be nonsense.

 

The question is what kind of cause is faith?  The answer to this question brings clarity to many other questions concerning grace and salvation.

That there are multiple kinds of causes was recognized two and a half millennia ago by Aristotle in the second book of his Physics.  He identified four types of causes and provided several examples of each.  Subsequent writers have usually thought it best to provide a single illustration for all four causes.  We will follow this example and use a bookshelf as our illustration.  The bookshelf is, of course, the effect.

 

The first cause Aristotle identified was the material cause.  This is the stuff from which the final product is taken and made.  In the case of our bookshelf, the material cause is wood.

 

Aristotle’s second cause is the formal cause.  This is the idea of the product.  The person who took the wood and put it together to assemble our bookshelf did so in accordance with an idea of what the bookshelf should look like.  If he is a designer, he may have come up with the idea himself and sketched it out.  If the bookshelf is of the self-assemble type, someone else did this and printed it out in the schematic/instructions that came in the box with the pieces.

 

In these first two causes we have the basic Aristotelean concept that everything in creation has both form and matter.

 

Aristotle’s third cause, he called the primary source.  It is more usually called the efficient cause or the Agent.  This is the person who took the matter and made a concrete example of the form, or, if you want to put the other way, who took the form and shaped the matter.  In the case of our bookshelf this is the person who built it.  That could be us, if we bought the ready-to-assemble type that a particular Swedish furniture store is famous for, or, if we bought it pre-assembled, it was the craftsman who put it together in his shop or the factory as the case may be.

 

Aristotle’s final cause, in the sense of the fourth out of the four, is the final cause, in the sense of the end or telos.  This is the purpose or reason, for which the Agent, applies form to matter and vice versa, to produce the effect.  The final cause of our bookshelf is, of course, to store books.

 

The Reformer John Calvin is not ordinarily thought of as an Aristotelean.  Aristotle was “the Philosopher” to St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century Dominican Scholastic whose Summa Theologica significantly shaped the late Medieval theology to which Calvin and his associates objected, especially its popular form the abuses of which were often very far from what the Angelic Doctor wrote, although the Reformers found it in their interests to minimize this distinction.  For Calvin, the great theologian was St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Augustine was a Platonist.  Calvin, however, who like the Father of Latin theology, Tertullian, approached the study of Scripture and God with a legal education as his background, was also like his second-to-third century predecessor in regarding secular philosophy with disdain and suspicion.  This makes his application of Aristotle’s causes to salvation all the more interesting.

 

In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin identifies “the mercy of the Heavenly Father and his freely given love toward us” as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Christ, Calvin says, is the material cause and our faith the formal cause.  Obviously he would not be on board with “I believe because I am saved.”  All three of these causes, Calvin said, were found in one sentence in John 3:16.  The fourth cause he identified as “the proof of divine justice” and the “praise of God’s goodness.”

 

Calvin clearly did not understand these causes properly.  Since the efficient cause is the Agent it would have been better to identify God Himself as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Or, to be more precise, Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, is the efficient cause or Agent of our salvation, which is why we call Him Saviour.  That in turn means that the material cause should be more precisely identified as the events of the Gospel, especially the Atoning death of Jesus Christ.  To be fair to Calvin, he did write “Surely the material cause is Christ, with his obedience, through which he acquired righteousness for us.”

 

In his identification of faith as the formal cause of our salvation he wrote “What shall we say is the formal or instrumental cause but faith?”  There is a basic misunderstanding here, because instrumental cause and formal cause are not the same thing.  Calvin was correct to identify faith as the instrumental cause of our salvation – or rather an instrumental cause – but not in identifying it as the formal cause.  This is somewhat surprising when we consider what the formal cause of our salvation actually is.  If we understand formal cause to mean what Aristotle meant by it, then applied to salvation, the formal cause must be God’s eternal design.  One would expect John Calvin of all people to have gotten this right.

 

Aristotle did not speak of an instrumental cause, but the concept is simple enough to understand.  Think back to our bookshelf illustration.  The instrumental cause would be the hammer, screwdriver, Allen wrench, and whatever other tools the efficient cause used in putting the bookshelf together.  The instrumental cause, therefore, is not synonymous with the formal cause, but a subcategory of the efficient cause.  

 

Faith is indeed an instrumental cause of our salvation but not in the way the Allen wrench is an instrumental cause of our self-assembled Swedish bookshelf.  The equivalent of that kind of instrumental cause in the order of salvation would be the cross.  Faith as an instrumental cause of our salvation corresponds more with the delivery truck that brings a pre-assembled bookshelf to us.

 

Here the Lutheran dogmaticians are particularly helpful.  That salvation is a gift of God, the New Testament is absolutely clear on and all Christians affirm.  It is a gift that was given to the world in a general sense in the Incarnation and the events of the life and death of the Incarnate Son of God, something that we especially remember at this time of year.  It also has to be given in a more particular sense to each of us personally and here the Lutheran dogmaticians identify two different types of means through which this is accomplished.  There are the media or organa dotika, the means or instruments of giving.  These are the means through which God gives His saving grace to us.  Then there is the medium or organon leptikon, the means or instrument of receiving.  This is the hand with which we receive the gift of saving grace.   The ministry of the Gospel, which God has entrusted to His Church in the modes of Word and Sacrament, is the means through which God gives us His saving grace.  Faith is the organon leptikon, the means by which we receive it.  It is in this sense that it is the instrumental cause of our salvation.

So yes, whereas when it comes to salvation and works salvation is the cause and works the effect, when it comes to faith and salvation faith is the cause, the instrument of receiving cause, and salvation the effect.  The meme is heretical by the standards of all forms of orthodox Christianity, including orthodox Calvinism.

 

Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that theology should not be done by meme.

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.