Listening to the Experts - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR 

Catherine of Siena was the most important and influential person in Europe during the latter part of the 14th century. It could not happen now.

When the novelist Sigrid Undset was making her way from atheism to the Catholic faith, her most powerful guide was the Dominican laywoman Saint Catherine of Siena. The central moral insight in Undset’s most renowned works, the trilogy Kristin Lavransdatter and the tetralogy The Master of Hestviken, is that self-love—egotism—is the seedbed of all of the evil in the world, as it crowds out of the heart any room for love of God and neighbor, as weeds choke a garden. It is not an insight that requires a doctorate in philosophy to arrive at. That makes it all the more likely to be true, since the Father, says Jesus, has hidden his truths from the wise and the prudent in this world, and has revealed them unto innocents and fools, whose hearts are not clotted with pride. And no woman in 14th century Italy was more innocent than Catherine of Siena. 

Undset’s biography, Catherine of Siena, is a fascinating book, not only for its meticulous account of the life of Saint Catherine, based upon the remarkable memoirs of Blessed Raymond of Capua, Catherine’s long-time confessor and close friend, and upon the hundreds of letters which Catherine dictated to popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, governors, warlords, kinsmen, and friends. What really sets it apart from any hagiography I know of is Undset’s continuing comparison, usually implicit but sometimes bold and clear, of the Middle Ages with our own times. Now, Undset’s greatest novels are set in those same centuries, and she is under no illusion about their waves of cruelty and brutality. Indeed, Catherine was born into a world of bitter strife, the same world against which the aged Dante inveighed. The cities of Italy were economic and military rivals, the pope had moved the Curia to Avignon—across the Rhone from the kingdom of France—and French legates governed the Papal States, earning the hatred of the native Romans. It was a century of ever-shifting military alliances and civil war, with bands of robbers and murderers under mercenaries like Sir John Hawkwood helping to stoke the flames. 

Now it is true, as Undset points out, that the 20th century has not been behindhand in bloodshed. If we are weighing blood with blood, the Middle Ages may well come out cleaner. Yet that is not the most important thing. The plain fact, staring us in the face, demanding attention and explanation, is that a Saint Catherine, ever preaching the love of God and the peace of Christ, was the most important and influential person in Europe during the latter part of the 14th century, and what was she? According to her own accounts, she was nothing, just an ignorant girl, a slave of Jesus, a sinner. She had never learned to read, till the ability suddenly came to her as an adult. She dictated her letters, because she had never learned to write. She was grilled by suspicious theologians, and won them over with her wisdom. She was scoffed at by the worldly, and won them over by her persevering love. Almost single-handedly she compelled the Vicar of Christ himself, the genial but weak-willed Gregory XI, a Frenchman surrounded by French cardinals, to return to Rome after the 70-year-long “Babylonian Captivity” of the Church. The lords of Italian cities sought her assistance in brokering peace. That could and did happen in the Middle Ages. It could not happen now. 

What is the difference? Here Undset is describing Catherine’s first trip abroad, from Siena to Pisa, rather early in her “political” years. The Pisans had been friendly to the pope, but their allegiance was wavering, under pressure from the strongman Bernabo Visconti of Milan. Catherine hoped to strengthen their loyalty to Gregory. Note, then, how she was greeted. 

On their arrival in Pisa the nuns from Siena received a welcome such as people in the Middle Ages reserved for a guest who was generally considered a saint. The governor of Pisa, the archbishop, and crowds of other prominent personages went out to meet Catherine, and the crowds cheered her as the crowds always, everywhere, cheer their favorite heroes, whether they be victorious generals, highly publicized leaders, popular football players, or world-famous film stars. But in the Middle Ages it was chiefly saints who were popular heroes, even for people who themselves were very far from being saints, and had not the faintest desire to be saints because, as everyone knew, holiness demands heroism—heroism of an unusually severe and difficult kind. 

Was Catherine a famous scientist, like Einstein? Not even Einstein could have commanded such happy crowds. Was she a famous politician, like Franklin Roosevelt? No. Had she written any great novels or poems? Not one. What made her known was her astonishing commitment to Jesus—and the marvels that attended her (duly recorded by Blessed Raymond, after he had hunted down the witnesses and received their testimony; Raymond was a most sensible man). 

What in our time is comparable? Elton John, a man of immense musical talent, often questionable taste, and dubious morals, can fill a stadium with devotees. Many of them will wait in line for a day or two, just as they might camp out in front of a department store, waiting for its opening on Black Friday. Elton John can at least play the piano, and has a pleasant personality. Things go downhill from there. Millions of people buy tawdry magazines to learn the latest about the sex lives of “stars,” many of them no more than professional pornographers, whores and whoremasters. What is their claim to fame? Slickness rather than talent, flash rather than beauty. I think of Hollywood and wonder if, in this world’s long and sorry tale of sin and folly, a klatsch of men and women have ever pitched their tents in deeper depravity, stupidity, luxury, and vanity, and been admired for it. It seems too ridiculous to believe. But then the title of a show like American Idol comes to mind, and I see that it is all too true. 

“The Signoria of Florence,” writes Undset, relating an attempt by the Florentines to return to the papal fold, “the government of the proudest of the Italian republics, had given the power to decide all matters of vital importance for its future greatness and well-being to a young woman who was regarded as a saint.” We had a similar saint in our midst, the wizened little nun from Albania, Mother Teresa. She, like Catherine, drew to her “family” many men and women, whose lives were utterly changed by her holiness and her friendship: Malcolm Muggeridge, for instance. She too dwelt in an inner world of intense spiritual conflict, unrelieved by the protracted periods of ecstatic bliss that comforted Saint Catherine. She too challenged the worldliness of everyone about her, by a love whose fount was the radical love of Jesus. As Catherine bathed and dressed and tended people struck by the Black Plague, Mother Teresa bathed and dressed and tended the poorest of the world’s poor, the sick and the dying in the ditches of Calcutta.  

How did we treat Mother Teresa? We gave her, rather late in the day, the Nobel Peace Prize. We held her up as a model of humanitarian achievement—quite mistaking what she was about. Christopher Hitchens slandered her; the slanderers you will always have with you. She was something of a celebrity for a while. President Clinton and his wife stood stony-faced while Mother Teresa urged them and all Americans to care for the weakest of the weak, the unborn child. No statesman took her advice. No statesman sought her advice. Gandhi himself could not bring peace to the Muslims and the Hindus of his country. Mother Teresa could have played in India the role that Catherine so often played in northern Italy. No one asked her to try. 

We scoff at the supposed bigotry of the Middle Ages, but no woman in the last hundred years, none at all, was ever so surrounded by learned men who drank at her fountain than was Saint Catherine of Siena. Which professors of philosophy left their comfortable offices to learn from Mother Teresa? Consider a Peter Singer, the “ethicist” who argues that parents should be able to dispose of their newborns if they should have second thoughts—if the babies come out deformed or feeble-minded or otherwise imperfect. Imagine him saying to himself, “What do I know, really, about how to live a good life? I should seek out the one person on this planet who really does know. I am going to learn from Mother Teresa.” Of course, no “renowned” professor of philosophy is going to take notes from a mere nun, without the fancy credentials. It’s unthinkable. But many men as brutal and as morally stupid as Singer did go to Saint Catherine, and repented of their evils. 

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised if the world ignores holiness. Our world today has the attention span of a flea, and holiness requires attention at the least. But what about the Catholic Church? Mother Teresa walked among us, but the proud theologians scoffed at her lack of learning, and the proud Church officials scoffed at her simplistic championing of the unborn, and the proud nuns, in their proud orders, proudly dying away, scoffed at her submission to the male priesthood—ignoring her iron will and their own supine submission to the fads of the day. And I, proud also, salve my conscience by saying that we are not all called to be Mother Teresa. More’s the pity. 

Why do we, at least, not turn out in crowds? The men of the Middle Ages made sure we could learn about Saint Catherine. But even Catholics seem disposed to make sure we will not learn about Mother Teresa. The men of the Middle Ages tried, and usually failed, to raise their politics to the height of Christian teaching; we try to lower Christian teaching to the gullies of politics, and we usually succeed. 

We want to justify, not to change, our desires. We sit in judgment upon saints, and listen to the whispering of fools and devils. We want to see the credentials of the theologian, not his holiness. The world’s excuse is simple enough. The world is stupid. What is our excuse? 

(Editor's note: Mother Teresa was from Albania, not Yugoslavia as the essay orginally indicated.)

The Key that Fits the Lock, Part Four - by Anthony Esolen

In The Catholic Thing  

In Greek mythology, Zeus is called “father of gods and men.” But even though his procreative propensities are remarkable, it is not really true. Zeus is the son of Cronus and the grandson of Ouranos, the sky-god. He is preceded by a whole generation of Titans, the brothers and sisters of Cronus, whom he thrust from power, by the aid of strategic alliances with a few of those Titans, most notably the hundred-armed Cottus, Gyas, and Briareus – a boon to have on one’s side in battle.

He is called “father” rather because of the combination of force and intelligence which has resulted in his pre-eminence. His daughters, the Muses, confer some of that savoir-faire on men whom they especially favor. These men will not only see what is to be done but will be able, with their honeyed words, to persuade others.

In other words, the Greek religious system is a mythic presentation of the polis, founded upon controlled violence and persuasion – sometimes outright deceit. I don’t wish to discount the tremendous Greek achievement. It is a deeply human thing – but also a deeply fallen thing.

The first chapters of Genesis will have none of it. I am struck by the utter insouciance of the account of the Fall, which in so few words aims right at the heart of any attempt, ancient or modern, to raise political structures, and the violence they presuppose, to the status of idols.  

I’ve already noted the terrible change that sin works in Adam and Eve, replacing their nakedness with cunning. Now let us examine their response to the questions that God poses to them, starting with, “Where art thou?”  

God does not need to ask, “In what location may I find you?” In the psalms, to “dwell in the house of the Lord” or “to behold the countenance of God” is to dwell in a relationship of love. “Where are you?” is then an existential question. “Why have you not met me? Why do you hide from me? Why have you rejected me?”

Adam’s response is a childish dodge. He is hiding, he says, because of his nakedness. Again, we have been told that the nakedness is not a just cause of shame. It is rather shame that is the cause of Adam’s embarrassment. He is already alienated from his body and from the body of his wife. Nor can he be frank with his Maker. He is passing the blame.

Then God asks, “Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?”

What Adam then does should be seen as undermining the possibility of lasting communion and peace upon earth: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.”

It’s Eve’s fault. No, rather it’s God’s fault. We may well embellish the response in the fashion of Milton’s Paradise Lost. “The woman – you know, that woman that you gave to me for my companion, so perfect, so acceptable, so wise – that woman gave me the fruit,” and now the voice drops to a grumble, “and I did eat.” In this one sentence, Adam sets himself at enmity with both God and Eve – never so guilty as when he ducks his guilt.

Eve, “not so loquacious,” as Milton shrewdly notes, gives us her version: “The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” Hers is but half a dodge. The blame is placed on the serpent – on a creature beyond Eve’s control; and yet a beguilement requires someone to be beguiled, a fool, someone who places more trust in his or her own evaluation of things than in the commands of God. So Eve also suffers alienation in the very act of setting God aside.

I will treat of God’s judgment upon them at more leisure, in the next essay. For now, consider how much light these few verses shed upon the book of b’reshith – in Hebrew, “In the beginning.” For Genesis is, to the eye and ear of this reader accustomed to ancient poetry, a work of astonishing unity: I might say crushing and disillusioning unity, sparing no illusions of human greatness.  

Adam and Eve, cast forth from Paradise, beget two sons, Cain and Abel. Each son plies a trade without which there can be no human civilization: Cain is a farmer and Abel a shepherd. Of the two, the one most obviously necessary for cities is the farmer. There can be no city without a supply of dry storable grain.  

That, for the ancients, is what a city is: a place of granaries, protected by walls, political organization, and armies. It is no accident that when Cain is driven forth from his family, he “builded a city” and named it for his son. Cain is the elder son, the one who should principally benefit from inherited property.  

Yet we do not remember Cain for his seat on the chamber of commerce, but for his villainy. God rejects his half-hearted sacrifice, and Cain, seething with envy of his brother Abel, murders him. “And Cain talked with Abel,” says the verse – he “talked.” He used the medium of human intercourse – the verse does not say that they fought. Perhaps he took Abel aside, in a brotherly fashion but with evil intent. Then he slays his brother.

When God asks Cain, “Where is Abel thy brother?” the son dodges – as his father had. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain asks, casting God’s question back in his teeth. The malice that was skulking and ducking in Adam is now shameless.  

Cain’s rhetorical question, implying that it is absurd to believe that we are our brother’s keepers, is not only a sign of alienation. It is a celebration of it. A first fruit of the builders of cities everywhere.

Not a “Swerve,” but a “Slouch” - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR

According to The Swerve, the award-winning book of intellectual history by Stephen Greenblatt, the event that jolted the western world from its religious somnolence was the discovery, by the book-finder Poggio Bracciolini, of an old manuscript in the monastery of Fulda. That manuscript was of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, a poetic presentation of atomism and the Epicurean way of life. The “swerve” of Greenblatt’s title refers to Epicurus’ notorious jitter in the otherwise straight travel of the atoms, so as to allow for free will. Greenblatt, however, uses the word to refer to the West’s liberation from religion, to pave the way for scientific dominion over nature, releasing the erotic impulse in us all. 

It’s complete historical nonsense, as a few reviewers have noted. Scientific investigation was well underway in the Middle Ages. Aristotle, whom the schoolmen came to call The Philosopher, was the amateur biologist, not Epicurus, as Plato was the amateur mathematician. Epicurus himself was uninterested in the natural sciences, except insofar as he could use a scientific dictum as a weapon against the belief that the gods had anything to do with human affairs. Lucretius was a keen observer of the natural world, and his conjectures regarding the behavior of atoms are quite appealing. But he was not moved to study the world for its own sake. Hence his sometimes embarrassing shrugs: 

The wheel of the sun can’t be much bigger than
It seems to our senses, or its light much dimmer.  (5.564-65) 

Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy, and Eratosthenes could have told him otherwise.  

The great revolution in human thought about the universe that occurred in the 16th century had nothing to do with Lucretius, who was no astronomer. Nicholas of Cusa, a neoplatonist Christian and a cardinal of the Church, had no access to Lucretius, and did not need any to posit that perhaps the earth moved about the sun. Nicole Oresme, who died in 1382, well over a century before Copernicus’ famous treatise, had already maintained that the apparent motion of the stars, the planets, and the sun could be attributed to the earth’s diurnal rotation on a tilted axis and its revolution about the sun. Oresme was an accomplished physicist, astronomer, and mathematician. He was also bishop of Lisieux. Father Copernicus himself refers to ancient heliocentrists such as Aristarchus; not to Lucretius. Johannes Kepler was a neoplatonist in inspiration, a devout Christian by profession, and a regular correspondent with Jesuit and Lutheran mathematicians and astronomers. He had no particular use for Lucretius. Galileo does not refer to Lucretius at all in his Dialogue Concerning the Two World Systems. In short, though Lucretius did restore respectability to the word “atom,” there is no evidence to suggest that the history of science would have been much different without his poem. 

That isn’t to say that people didn’t read Lucretius. Thomas Aquinas, long before the printing press, read everything he could lay his hands on, and hired a personal translator, Thomas of Moerbeke, to provide for him an accurate rendering of the works of Aristotle. Chaucer and Dante were omnivorous readers, and Petrarch, a teenager when Dante died in 1321, was himself a digger-up of old manuscripts, and hired his own tutor in Greek. So we should certainly expect that Lucretius would find readers, especially among the poets. 

What’s most interesting, though, is their reaction to him. It doesn’t at all fit the Greenblatt narrative template. Demonstrably religious poets, like Du Bartas in France, Tasso in Italy, and Spenser in England, read Lucretius, admired the poetry a good deal (as well they should have), did not take the materialism seriously (they didn’t need Lucretius to introduce them to that), and then, in the cases of Tasso and Spenser, leveled a deeply searching critique at the whole Epicurean ethos. They did for Lucretius what Thomas did for his opponents, and what Greenblatt never attempts to do for the Middle Ages or for religious belief. They gave the man his best shot, and then showed where he was wanting. To be specific, they criticized Epicureanism not for being too erotic, but for not being erotic enough.

 

We see this criticism in Tasso’s handling of one of his heroines, the partly comical down-on-her-luck Erminia, in Jerusalem Delivered. This poor young lady, a Muslim princess by birth, has fallen in love with Tancred, the leader of the Christian army that has seized her kingdom. Now in refuge in Jerusalem, she sees Tancred in the company of the crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon. She stands on the ramparts with the Muslim king of the city, picking out the Christians she can recognize, until she comes to the man she loves—and then she speaks with double meaning: 

He is Prince Tancred.  Oh, that I might have
that man my captive, and alive, not dead —
alive I want him for a sweet revenge,
so my desires may yet be comforted! (3.20.1-4) 

Erminia is but one of the many passionate souls in Jerusalem Delivered; we are meant to draw comparisons between her love for Tancred and, for example, Godfrey’s love: 

[God] viewed all creatures, and in Syria
upon the Christian princes fixed his eye,
and with his sight which spies into the heart
of human loves in deepest secrecy,
saw Godfrey ardent for one aim, to rout
the heathen from the land of the Most High. (1.8.1-6) 

Everyone in this poem is moved by love; whether the love is disordered, or has something evil as its object, is another matter. 

Tasso introduces Lucretius into the work, though, not when love is allowed to grow heated and physical, but rather when it is allowed to grow cool. He was but taking Lucretius at his word. For the Epicurean, erotic love—what we would consider an all-encompassing passion, a desire for irrevocable union with the beloved—is to be avoided. It’s like political activity, or warfare—a hassle. Better remain cool and detached: 

The man who shuns love can enjoy sex still —
More, for the goods come with no penalty.  (4.1064-65) 

It’s that detachment that Erminia is tempted by, when after a few misadventures she finds herself in a pastoral hideaway, populated by a family that has nothing to do with the Saracens and nothing to do with the Christians, because they have nothing to do with anything at all beyond themselves. The old shepherd father says that he too was once a desiring soul, and tried to fulfill his ambitions in the court at Memphis, but after many disappointments retreated to this sweet and quiet place. Tasso allows him to describe it with delicacy and simple beauty: 

Low and worthless to others, dear to me.
No treasure do I crave, no kingly rod.
And never in my heart’s tranquility
does care for power or money make abode.
I fear no poison squeezed into the cup;
for thirst, my stream is always clear and good.
My little garden and my flocks are able
to give enough food, free, for my poor table.

For our desires are small and our needs few,
enough to preserve life, and keep us well. (7.10-11.2) 

Tasso here is reworking the well-known passage in Lucretius that describes the simple life of ataraxia, freedom from the coils of trouble: 

Our nature yelps after this alone: that the body
Be free of pain, the mind enjoy the sense
Of pleasure, far removed from care or fear!
And so we see what little our bodies need,
Only such things as soothe the pain away. (2.17-21) 

And what would one do, with that little? Enjoy a philosophical picnic with your comrades, 

In the shade of a tall tree by the riverside,
[Your] bodies refreshed and gladdened, at no great cost,
Most pleasantly when the weather smiles and the season
Sprinkles the grassy meadow with new flowers. (2.30-34) 

Lovely, isn’t it? And Tasso’s adaptation is meant to be lovely too—lovely, and unsatisfying. Erminia agrees to remain in this pastoral idyll, hoping that time will allay her passion. It doesn’t work. It isn’t meant to work. For Tasso loves his heroine too much to allow her to love too little. She writes love poems, and hangs them on the trees. She weeps, and imagines that someday, if she should die with her love unfulfilled, Tancred will happen upon her grave, and grant her sufferings “the late prize / of a few little tears and a few sighs” (7.21.7-8), so that her sorrow in life might be compensated by the shadow of love after death. 

Now here is Tasso’s point. This Epicurean spa is not what the heart of man seeks. There is a gray acedia to the place. Erminia does not remain there. In fact, her love for Tancred is going to be fulfilled. Near the end of the poem, she will save his life, using her very hair to bind his freely bleeding wounds, and when he hardly returns to consciousness, asking who she is, she reassures him with these, her final words in the poem: 

“As your physician I’m prescribing rest,
so you be still. You’ll know, when the time’s due.
You will be cured—get ready for the fee.”
And she held his head to her bosom tenderly. (19.114.5-8) 

That devotion is far from anything that the Epicurean, ancient or modern, can know. Were I to put a scientific gloss on it, I might write “light years away.” Amateur theologian as I am, I’ll say it is a universe away: a universe of love.

The Key that Fits the Lock, Part Three - By Anthony Esolen

In The Catholic Thing 

On the Fall of Man, recounted in but a few verses in the third chapter of Genesis, one might well fill many shelves full of books, so rich is the mythic presentation of what Newman called the aboriginal calamity, a disastrous turning away from God wherein we are all involved.  

All I hope to do here is to point out one feature wherein the nature of sin is seen as it were in the evil kernel, and therefore also the contradictions inherent in the unredeemed human condition.

The sacred author is careful to tell us that Adam and Eve were naked, and were not ashamed. Here we would do well to recall the Greek myths of the so-called Golden Age, when Cronus (Saturn) ruled, before his son Zeus seized his empire.

During that time, human beings lived in peace, but also in rustic barbarity – a not-quite-human innocence, or rather innocuousness, a life of gathering acorns and drinking from the streams. They were not holy, godlike, or naked.

But Adam and Eve are, in the beginning, all these things. They have been made in the image and likeness of God; Adam has exercised the divine power of the intellect in naming the beasts; and he has burst into praise upon seeing the goodness and the rightness of his wife Eve, brought to him by God.  

Eve is not a Pandora visited upon mankind by a malevolent Zeus. Adam and Eve are naked, implying that they belong to one another frankly and freely, with nothing to hide from one another or from God, because as Adam says, “a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.”  

God is the first in Scripture to command:  He spoke, and they were made, as the Psalmist says. But Adam is the first to prophesy, and that too is a godlike act.

So the nakedness is not a symbol of foolishness. A remarkable pun in the original Hebrew text is of tremendous consequence. Adam and Eve were naked, ’erom, but the serpent was the subtlest beast of all the field, ’erom, pronounced with a glottal opening before the initial vowel.  

Milton seems to have caught the pun and made it one of the central dramatic motifs in Paradise Lost. So Satan, on the fateful morning of the temptation, appears in the body of that subtlest beast, “in whose mazy folds / To hide me, and the dark intent I bring.”  

Satan is always hiding, from God, the loyal angels, his fellow demons, Adam and Eve, and himself; even his initial plan of rebellion against the Son is couched in terms of secrecy and duplicity, as he whispers to his bed-mate Beelzebub:  “More in this place / To utter is not safe.”

And Adam and Eve, after they have eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree, and made love in the fury of first licentiousness, find themselves not clad “in naked majesty,” as before, but cloaked in confusion and shame:

Up they rose
As from unrest, and each the other viewing,
Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds
How darkened; innocence, that as a veil
Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone,
Just confidence, and native righteousness,
And honor from about them, naked left
To guilty shame; he covered, but his robe
Uncovered more.

Those last words ending in the broken line, with their astonishing reversal of images, are among the saddest in all of literature.

Sad because true, as the sacred author means to show us. We are compelled by the pun to set the cunning against the nakedness. The telltale of sin is the need to hide, or, to put it another way, to present a false front, to cloak nothingness in a pretended glory.  

Adam and Eve in their nakedness are for one another and are free to speak with God as friend with friend. It is not subhuman but perfectly human and therefore divine. But the cunning, the subtle cloaking of the serpent is meant to spoil that nakedness.  

His lie about the forbidden fruit is a lie about God and about the love that God has showered upon the human couple – the lords of Paradise. “God doth know,” he says, “that in what day soever you shall eat thereof, your eyes shall be opened: and you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”  

He is calling God a liar and a concealer:  as if Adam and Eve do not already enjoy the knowledge of good as such. That includes the goodness of marriage itself. For, after all, if Adam and Eve are to fulfill the command, “Be fruitful, and multiply,” and if they are to cleave to one another, bone of bone and flesh of flesh, then they must know one another in the powerful sense of the Hebrew verb, so often and so stupidly obscured by bad modern translations.

After the sin, Adam and Eve require the pathetic fig leaves to hide their nakedness, and when God approaches them in the garden, they are still in hiding. In other words, they are no longer ’erom, naked, but ’erom, cunning, subtle – and foolish.

For who can hide from God? God probes the inmost heart, and sheds light upon those dark corners of the heart where we huddle, trying to hide our eyes from Him and from our own selves.  

Adam and Eve hide “from the face of the Lord,” another verse now stupidly translated so as to remove the Hebrew word for face:  because to face someone is to look upon him openly. So the Psalmist cries out:  “When shall I come and appear before the face of God?” And Saint Paul looks forward to that time when we will know, even as we are known, because we will see God “face to face.”  

Then will the original lie be undone forever.

Expertise and Ethics - by Anthony Esolen

In CRISIS

One of the more puzzling things about contemporary arguments regarding what things a good or free society ought to allow and what things it ought to forbid is our turn toward the “expert,” the ethicist, the person who has made a professional career of teasing out deductions from moral premises. But what really qualifies such a person to be regarded as a beacon of wisdom? Aristotle famously said that the best way to learn about justice would be to observe a just man. The dictum is not tautological. In the life of a Mother Teresa, for example, we may learn literally countless—that is, not reducible to numbers—lessons in love and magnanimity, whence we may confirm true principles already held, and reveal others whose existence we had not suspected. We would be confronting the just life not as an academic exercise, but as an intensely personal challenge.

The same aridity and insubstantiality can be found in “professional” conclusions that a certain act is ethical or unethical. Such terms are pallid substitutes for older, harder words, like right and wrong, or good and evil, or straight and crooked, or upright and depraved. They relieve us of the necessity of existential analysis. It is as if one were playing a game, with moves that would either promote or hinder our objective, but would remain comfortably extrinsic to us. But those older words are ineluctably existential. An act that is wrong is, etymologically, twisted: cf. wry, wrinkle, writhe, the contortions of the face of a man seized by wrath, a mind warped by evil; also Latin perversus, turned inside out. It is what gave Dante the happy idea of portraying Purgatory as a corkscrew mountain, whose turnings would unwind the bends in those whom the world had made crooked.

Now the thing about crookedness is that it is inherently unstable. Hammer a crooked nail head-on and you will bend it all the more. A car that is out of alignment will grow worse with every jolt of a pothole. So too with the lived reality of evil. It is disintegrative. “Sin will pluck on sin,” says Macbeth, knowing that the evil of his murder of King Duncan is not “the be-all and end-all.”  “For he that once hath missed the right way,” says Spenser’s Despair to the Red Cross Knight, speaking truly, “the further he doth go, the further he doth stray.”  “While they adore me on the throne of Hell,” says Milton’s Satan, referring scornfully to his fellows in crime, “the lower still I fall.”

To recognize the disintegrative character of evil is not to commit the fallacy of the slippery slope. Granted, a step in one morally neutral direction does not imply a further step in the same direction. To raise taxes by 5 percent is not to raise taxes by 10 percent. Nor does the affirmation of a certain kind of action in certain circumstances imply an affirmation of a superficially similar kind of action in other circumstances. To spank a child for drawing with a crayon on the walls is not to whip him for painting them. But evil is like a progressive and deadly disease. To engage in an evil act, again and again, is more than the acquisition of a habit, which will make the same act easier and easier to commit, but which has no effect upon the person otherwise. If we accept the insight of the ancient Platonists—that evil as a thing-in-itself does not exist, but is instead a privation or a corruption of a good that should be there—then the turn toward evil is a turn toward non-being. To embrace evil at the core is, as it were, to riddle oneself with unreason, with nonexistence. It is to warp, to rot.

We should recall, then, that the ancients never equated wisdom with a great facility for ratiocination or calculation. To be in one’s wits, to be wise is, literally, to see (cf. Latin videre, Greek idea). But evil twists the mind. A bad man is worse than a bad dog, not just because he can put his evil to greater effect, but because the evil causes him to see things wrong-side-out, so that he will apply his reasoning powers to unreason. If he is possessed of great natural intelligence, he may become a genius in depravity.  Alfred Kinsey, the teenager, was not yet hiring pederasts to molest infant boys in his laboratory; he was not yet collecting warped data from prison populations, and stretching it to “reveal” things about ordinary people. But by the time he was corrupting a nation with lies, I doubt that the greatest topologist in the world could have mapped the tangles of his heart to distinguish what was left of the genuine Kinsey and what was the serpentine and all-eating cancer.

In this sense all murderers are suicides, all liars are dupes. When, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Father offers grace to fallen mankind, it is described in terms of vision:

And I will place within them as a guide My umpire Conscience, whom if they will hear, Light after light well used they shall attain, And to the end persisting, safe arrive.

But those who reject that grace will walk in darkness:

This my long suffering and my day of grace they who neglect and scorn, shall never taste, But hard be hardened, blind be blinded more, That they may stumble on, and deeper fall.

Quite aside from the theology, the view of what happens to evil men is correct and is ratified by history and experience—the rogues’ gallery of twentieth-century despots alone provides evidence enough. With all his prodigious intellect, and even by way of that intellect, Lenin was a blind man; and they who followed the cruel mastermind were blinded too.

Then the first question we might ask of an ethicist who tries to persuade us, with diagrams and statistics and syllogisms, that what we had thought was evil is actually all right, is not “What degrees do you have?” or “What articles have you published in peer-reviewed journals?” but “Who are you?” It isn’t an easy question, nor is it decisive. An otherwise decent person may be, for a long while, better than his evil philosophy, and then we may thank God for foolishness and inconsistency. But it ought to be asked.

Who are these medical ethicists who recently have concluded, with wonderful logic, that parents have a right to murder their infant children—and who call it, with telling duplicity, “after-birth abortion?”  We would not turn to Larry Flynt or Hugh Hefner for a definition of decency; why should we turn to these people to advise us on which children we may kill and when? Are they crooked? Why should we follow the crooked, when we want to walk straight?

I am not recommending ad hominem attacks, or the ignoring of rational (or irrational) arguments. I wish merely to assert that when an ethicist, or anyone else for that matter, recommends that an action previously considered wrong be permitted, the burden of proof is particularly heavy, and we are justified in examining the virtue of the recommender. A warped heart, a warped mind— the one will eventually follow upon the other. Similarly, when a person of acknowledged moral courage, a Mother Teresa, warns us that an action which we have permitted is evil, we would be wrong not to pause and reconsider. Yes, we may admit the confusion of motives in any human being, and the rarity of pure saints or pure demons. But the virtuous life is an art; and one learns art not from theorists but from the artists themselves.

Lies, Damned Lies, and a Spirit of Confusion - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR

Today we see linguistic and moral confusion in almost everything said about the subjects that have us most perplexed: man and woman, marriage and children.

“He is a liar and the father of lies,” said Jesus of Satan (John 8:44). They who are committed to holiness must be committed to clarity of intention and speech: “Let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil” (Matthew 5:37). 

The lie is the distinguishing feature of evil, because of its self-devouring commitment to what is not: it is an inner vacuity. Shakespeare’s villain Parolles identifies himself as a “corrupter of words,” and the sardonic Porter in Macbeth remarks wryly upon the liar who equivocates his way down the primrose path to perdition. Orwell’s dystopian regime in 1984 rests upon a ground floor of terror and violence, but its bedrock foundation is the lie: witness the hero Winston Smith’s work at the “Ministry of Truth,” sending precious archival materials down the “memory hole,” where they will be lost forever. It is why Dante situates fraud below violence in the Inferno’s decrepit descent into non-being and idiocy; so we find the giant Nimrod, builder of the heaven-aspiring Tower of Babel, sputtering gibberish, and the consummate liar Satan uttering not a single word, but telling the same old lie again and again with every flap of his bat-like wings, “I rise by my own power.” 

The result is, literally, confusion—pouring together, a disorderly mélange, a chaos. I believe, in our day, that we see this linguistic and moral confusion in almost everything that is uttered about the subjects that have us most perplexed: man and woman; marriage and children. 

Examples abound.  A recent paper in a journal of medical ethics has recommended “after-birth abortion” as a morally sound measure for those parents to take who, once they see their child, determine that they would have killed it in the womb if they had known about its specifics beforehand. I note here that “abortion” itself was already a linguistic dodge, as its early meaning, the morally neutral “miscarriage,” was applied to soften the perception of an intentional killing. Nobody could sensibly say, “I am going to the doctor’s to miscarry,” because the absurdity of the infinitive would be immediately apparent; that is what made the more technical noun handy. 

But now our moral pathfinders wish to extend the utility of the initial lie. Of course they must, for the sake of feeling, limit themselves to the vicinity of birth. No one can sensibly say of her two-year-old son, “Johnny is proving altogether too much for me to handle. I’m going to take him down to the doctor’s to have him aborted, poor guy.” So it will have to be near enough to the birth for the pretense to take hold.  It is as if one were to fly to Paris, land on the tarmac, have a look about, and say, “I think after all that we shall abort our flight to Paris,” as if one had not already arrived there. What would then imply a completed trip to Paris? Wine and cheese on the Champs-Elysees? What would imply a fils accompli? A highchair and jars of stewed apricots? 

We may find the same embrace of confusion in the odd alliance between feminism and the homosexual movement. Each of those terms in itself embodies a confusion or a contradiction. Feminism should mean the promotion of what is peculiar to women as women: what is feminine. But that is precisely what it does not mean, or at least what it does not mean on odd-numbered days. On odd-numbered days, the feminist argues vociferously that there are no important differences between a male homo sapiens and a female homo sapiens. There are all kinds of important differences between a male equus equus and a female equus equus, or between a bull and a cow, or a stag and a doe, or a silverback orangutan and his consort, but when we come to the most complex of all the mammals, whose marks of sexual differentiation are more pronounced than those of horses, cows, deer, apes, dogs, cats, and what have you—well then, presto, they suddenly disappear. On the odd-numbered days, that is; for on the even-numbered days, we learn that women are superior to men. If there are no important differences, then, as far as the common good is concerned, it should not matter much if all of a nation’s congressmen are in fact men, or women, or half and half, or whatever. Then, since the feminist does cheer the advance of (some) female leaders, she must acknowledge the fact of difference; but if men and women are indeed different, we should expect to find talents and dispositions for various things unequally divided among them. Thus does the feminist saw off the limb upon which she is sitting. 

A similar contradiction bedevils us when we use the rather recently coined term “homosexual.” Sex implies difference-in-relationship. The sexes are, literally, distinguished and separated one from another. That is what the Latin sexus means: it is related to a host of Indo-European words having to do with separation, division, or distinction: cf. Latin scindere, Greek schism, German verschieden, English shed. But the separation-from, in this unique case, implies a being-for. To be male is to be oriented toward the female; that is what it means to belong to a sex. If we could imagine a group of human beings endowed with an organ not present in others, say a sixth finger, that would not constitute a sex, because there would be nothing intrinsically male or female about it. There is nothing that six-fingered people and five-fingered people need to complete in one another.  

Now then, the “homosexual” at once claims to belong to a sex, and not to belong to a sex. He says, “I am a man,” but he denies the implications of the manhood. If he makes common cause with the feminists and insists that there are no crucial differences between men and women, we may reasonably ask him, “What then attracts you so?” Unless he confesses a puerile fetish for the male organ, he must admit an attraction to the whole constitution of a man—not simply the form of the body, but the masculine nature itself. But that masculine nature is, by obvious biological design, oriented toward the female. 

The result is confusion. We can observe the confusion, indeed, in the gallimaufry of invented terms for every sexual proclivity under the rocks and bushes of human desire. Take the term “transgendered.” What does it mean? Again, if there are no important differences between a man and a woman, why not simply and charitably make everyone’s life easier and bow to custom? After all, one does not build a bridge from one end of a flatland to another. If “gender” is arbitrary or nugatory, why the “trans”? What’s to cross? But to bless the confusion we must nod when people say, “I am a woman in the body of a man who is attracted to men who are attracted to women,” or, “I am a man with a surgically altered female body from the waist up, in love with a male who is really a woman attracted to masculine women.” There are not sufficient letters in the alphabet to identify the endlessly dividing categories of self-deception. 

Or consider the matter of marriage and divorce. To this day, almost all marriage ceremonies include vows of perpetual fidelity, “as long as we both shall live.” The ring itself is a symbol of endlessness and of an indissoluble bond. It signifies, in Spenser’s words, “the knot that ever shall remain.” Now, people either intend that vow, or they do not. If they do intend the vow, why do they commit Ehebruch, to use the telling German word for adultery, vow-break? Why do they break the vow even more radically by divorce? If they do not intend the vow, or if they place unspoken conditions upon it, they are lying, and at what may be the most solemn occasion of their lives. Most of us will never be soldiers on a battlefield, or captains of a ship; or priests called to defend the faith with their very lives. The one time we will be called upon to give ourselves without reserve is when we utter the marriage vow. To tell a lie at that time would be as if a president of the United States, his hand on the Bible, were to swear to defend the Constitution against all enemies, while harboring a secret intention to become one of those enemies if the right occasion presented itself; or as if a witness in court were to swear to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, while harboring a reservation, “Depending upon what the lawyer asks me.” This vow-that-is-not thus strikes at the heart of every human enterprise. It uses the law to undermine the law, or uses the state to undermine the state; or employs the trappings of marriage to undermine the very possibility of marriage. 

Lies, lies. Planned Parenthood does not plan parenthood. Its business is to take women who are already mothers and make away with their unborn children. Birth control is not birth control. It is either conception-prevention, or, in the case of incipient human offspring already conceived, birth-prevention. Sex education is not education in the meaning of sex. It masquerades as how-to instruction in hygiene, as if the only concern of a boy or a girl were to keep the works clean while enjoying, when the “right time” comes, sexual expression. Even at that, the rising sewer of diseases is hardly mentioned, and least of all those odd and dangerous diseases, other than AIDS, that result from the unnatural things that some men do with other men. “You really shouldn’t live in the sewer,” says the teacher, “but everybody does, so make sure you wear a pair of galoshes, and watch out for the rats.” 

But the sexual lie whence all these others spring is common now and unregarded. It is the lie that says, with the body, “All that I am is yours,” while insisting, by virtue of not yet having made the solemn vow of marriage, “I am for now still my own.” It is “unrealistic,” we are told, to tell young people that they should embrace the virtue of chastity. One might as well say that it is unrealistic to tell them that they should embrace the virtue of truth. No one is without sin, nor will we ever find heaven upon earth. But it is one thing to fall, and another thing to insist upon calling the fall an ascent. It is one thing to deceive oneself and to believe in a “marriage” without the vow of marriage. It is another thing to enshrine the deceit. It is one thing to tell a lie; it is another thing to adore the lie. That is the constant and dire temptation that all human societies must face. Some face it on account of their desire for glory; others on account of their avarice; we face it on account of our hedonism. We are not fighting in a different war from that wherein other societies have fought. We are only fighting in a rather more contemptible field.

The Key that Fits the Lock - By Anthony Esolen

In The Catholic Ting

One of my friends, the most brilliant man I know, is a molecular biologist. He is also a Dominican priest, equally at home speaking to world-class scientists on the aging of cells as he is speaking to ordinary people on submitting to the direction of the Holy Spirit in all that they do, including such simple things as deciding what path to take to go home. 

One day, we were discussing the fruitful relationship between faith and reason. He said that he held the Catholic faith because of, literally, “everything,” or as I like to call it, The Everything. It is not only its explanatory power that appeals, but its power to bring us into ever-deeper relationship with the infinite and inexplicable: beauty, goodness, personal being, love, God Himself.

What might we expect of such a faith? Chesterton said it was like a key that fit the wondrously specific indentations of the lock of reality. Of such a key we might say two apparently contradictory things. 

One, that its engagement with reality is everywhere. There is nothing so mundane or lowly that it escapes the notice of the faith. The key meets the lock at every point. And indeed the faith instructs us not only on the nature of heaven, but on the nature of earth. 

It does not recommend escape, either with a golden Buddha or a steely Marcus Aurelius. In this sense, the key is like any other. But only one key fits the lock exactly, so we should also expect to find that, in important regards, it is unique.

Here we must take Chesterton’s advice, and be like the pilgrim who traveled the world and arrived at the destination of his dreams, and found it to be the home he had left but had not known aright. 

We are too familiar with the Scriptures; we are too familiar with the Church; we are too familiar with at least a caricature of Jesus – it is a disquieting thing to meditate too long upon Jesus. 

So, I want to begin a series of columns here examining this uniqueness.

There is no better place to begin than the beginning: “Let there be light, said God, and there was light.” A revelation that, if we could but understand it, should strike us with a tremor of the heart. What does it mean?

The first thing to note is its bold uniqueness. In every other “creation” story I know of, such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish or Hesiod’s Theogony, there’s some primal violence or sexual intercourse or spontaneous birthing or sculptor-like shaping. But the verse here rules all of that out.

It proceeds with the minimal metaphorical vehicle necessary to impart meaning to the human imagination – particularly the imagination of a half-barbaric people, as were the ancient Hebrews. The action, too, is not an action at all, but a speaking: God said. 

We need not here consider the profound relationship between this verse and the other in principio of sacred scripture: “In the beginning was the Word.” The “saying” is an instantaneous act of the creative and loving will of God. Its immediacy is suggested by the Hebrew words.

Hebrew oddly alternates verb forms after the conjunction “and.” Practically, this means that a normally future form will be used for the past, after the conjunction. In Hebrew: “W’yomer Elohim: Yehi ’or, w’yehi ’or.” The “let there be” and “there was” are identical, in language and in being. It is as simple as that.

That is not only far from the Enuma Elish’s tale of the world as fashioned from the dismembered parts of the evil sea-goddess Tiamat. It’s on another plane of understanding entirely. 

We see this more clearly when we consider what God first makes: light. Not the earth, sea, stars, nor any object bounded in any other way than by the being of God. For the phrase cannot have meant, to the Hebrews, “Let there be photons.” 

What does light mean in their ancient writings? The psalmists speak again and again about the light of the countenance of God, or the light of wisdom imparted by God: “In your light we see light.” The word implies intelligibility and truth, and especially the truth of the right paths of godly life. 

To put it in Greekish terms, “Let there be light” affirms that there is reason all the way to the core of things. Reason is not some film floating atop a pond of unreason, a late comer to the universe. We do not have to accept the springing of intelligibility from the unintelligibility of pure nothingness. 

The verb “let there be” is a command: it corresponds in the verse to come with, “God saw the light, that it was good.” The “seeing” of God is not to be interpreted temporally – as if God’s seeing depended upon a prior event. He created what was good, because of his own eternal, self-possessing, and self-communicating goodness.

But to put it in Hebrew terms, “Let there be light” affirms that there is love all the way to the core of things. To walk in the light is to walk with God. The light is good, that is to say desirable, because the God who made it is desirable. 

The Neo-Platonists, a thousand years later, would come around to saying that. But since the light is made, and not simply an automatic effluence of the great Alone, as in Neo-Platonism, its goodness is an invitation to approach its Maker. 

The covenant is already revealed, in that first terse and explosive sentence, “Let there be light.” And, therefore, so too is revealed what the Church has consistently taught: man is made for love and that if we are not to be intellectual and existential cripples, when we talk of truth, we must talk about our longing for union, personal union, with the Truth, for, as the exalted apostle says, “God is light.”