Down the Ladder of Depravity - by Anthony Esolen

In Crisis

Shall we allow sharp dealing, or not?  That’s one of the questions that Cicero takes up in his wise and noble work, De officiis (On Moral Duties).  One side, represented by the philosopher Antipater, holds that you are in the clear so long as you don’t actually tell a lie about what you are selling.  Caveat emptor: it’s the buyer’s business to look into these things.  If you are selling a house that you know is structurally compromised, you needn’t say anything about that, unless the prospective buyer inquires.  But Cicero holds with the other side, represented by the Stoic, Panaetius.  To fail to tell the buyer of something which you know quite well concerns him is to sever the bond between men; it is to strike at the brotherhood of all human beings.  Therefore you are obligated to be candid and forthright.

Yet there’s another reason why you should be candid, and it opens up what moral philosophy is really about: the development of those habits that distinguish a virtuous person.  Cicero observes that nobody, not even thieves, actually likes to deal with people who are sly, underhand, and full of plots.  Even people who are not forthright do not want the reputation of a double-dealer.  If it were not for candor, hypocrisy itself would be to no effect.  We come to a quick answer to our question, not when we ask, “Is this action permissible?” but “Do I want to be known as the sort of person who behaves in this way?”

And make no doubt about it, the evil action strikes first and most keenly at the agent.  The knife turns back upon the mugger.  The trap snatches the trapper.  The engineer is hoist with his own petard.  We cannot make our beds in corruption and rise from them as white as snow.  Instead the evil will grow like a cancer and spread its tendrils about the rest of our moral lives.

I suppose we can construct a ladder of moral descent, thus.  Let stealing be the evil in question:

Stealing is wicked, and those who engage in it destroy themselves within.

Stealing is wrong.  (That’s one step below the fullness of moral vision.  It is detached from the drama of personal being.)

Stealing is impermissible.  (Another step down.  The claim is a weak negative, and is open to further question.)

Stealing is bad, but I am not really stealing.  (A tip-toeing refusal to examine one’s actions with frank honesty.)

Stealing is bad, but there are circumstances in my case that overrule the moral law.  (A rationalization, an excuse.)

Stealing is bad, and I know it, but I am going to do it anyway.  (Over the threshold of grave sin.)

Stealing is bad for other people, but it is good for me.  (Adding idolatry now to the theft.)

Stealing is not necessarily bad, because nobody can tell what is bad.  (The intellect itself has begun to collapse.)

Stealing is sometimes bad but sometimes good.  (The threshold of depravity.)

Stealing is good.  (Over the threshold.  The person who believes such a thing is bent: depraved.)

The man who says, “Stealing is good,” and who believes it and acts upon it, is ravaged with a moral disease.  Just as we see the effects of a dreadful cancer in sick organs scattered throughout the body, so moral depravity soils almost everything that the sufferer touches.  We can sometimes judge the evil of one act by noticing the other evils to which its proponents fall.  We won’t be surprised to find that the man who would rob you blind will also lie under oath, will break a promise, or will forge a signature.  If stealing someone’s property is fine, why not burn it down and have done with it?  Or if it is good and praiseworthy to steal from a man, why not gain all the glory and steal from a nation, or steal a nation itself?

Change the sin from theft to fornication or sodomy or abortion.  Go all the way down the ladder.  We are not now saying, “I know it is wrong to do the child-making thing outside of marriage, but there are special circumstances in my case.”  We are saying, “It is good, it is praiseworthy, it is a blessing, to fornicate.  Everyone should, as often as they can.”  What other evils will we find such people promoting?  What other organs will be shot through with cancer?

Here’s an example of that form of depravity.  It’s from a recent article, by a self-styled libertarian, on three methods for persuading a woman to abort the child you’ve begotten in her womb (boldface and asterisks mine):

Let’s face it: sexually active people have accidents.  S*** happens, that’s life. But we know that men have no reproductive rights in opting out of a being a parent.  With only two birth control options available to men (a condom and a vasectomy) the words you use to get your girl off the fence about having an abortion must be well thought out.  If you are not ready to be a father, the following arguments may help you convince a girl to get an abortion.  The first two methods I describe below have worked for me in separate instances for the two abortions I have paid for.  I know other guys who simply did not say the right things or trusted her to “make the right decision.”  Well, now they are stuck paying child support for children they barely see.

The first method is most applicable for a girl who is a long term booty call or girlfriend; basically, a girl who believes there is an emotional element to your sexual relationship.  For these situations I recommend the “Hail Mary,” a term referring to the end of an American football game when a team attempts a difficult play in a last ditch effort to win.

You need to bring up the subject of abortion with every ounce of verbal finesse and situation-appropriate sensitivity.  You should sound as sincere as possible and tell her that you want her to be the mother of your children one day, but that now is not the right time to start a family.  Explain [sic] you want to wait until you are further along in your career/life goals and you can afford to give your future family all the comforts of life you cannot deliver today.  Finally, explain [sic] if she has the abortion now, you will be able to plan your lives together so that everything is [sic] perfect.  Then, after she agrees and has the abortion, dump her.  It’s called a “hail mary” [sic] in part because of its difficulty to execute, so if you stay with her post-abortion and she becomes pregnant again you’re really f*****.

Where to begin?  Or why begin at all?  The writer recommends shameless lying.  Is that a surprise?  Isn’t fornication itself, even for the mildest of people, all tangled up in evasions, demurrals, half-promises, and lies?  The writer uses girls for his pleasure, but despises them.  They are his toys, and when you’re sick of a toy, you throw it away.  Is that a surprise?  And if the perfectly predictable result of the child-making thing occurs, and they make a child, his one thought is how to persuade her to throw it away, too.  Why not?  It is an accident (a piano falling upon your head from the tenth story of a tenement, that is an accident; begetting a child by the child-making thing is not), or it is s*** (which must be disposed of).  No care for her sorrow or her health; no care for the child; no moral qualms at all.

When we find someone loudly affirming the goodness of something wicked, our first step should not be to try to persuade him otherwise.  That would be to aim at but one tentacle of the cancer.  The treatment must reach much farther down to the roots.  But for the sake of everyone else within earshot, and for our own sanity, we should look to the nearby organs.  You defend pornography, do you?  Then be honest.  Do you not also defend legal prostitution?  Group sex, or any sexual escapades among consenting adults?  Polygamy, for those who want it?  Sexual experimentation among teenagers, so long as it makes a pretense of epidermal hygiene?  Easy divorce?  Abortion?

Jack Kevorkian did not only affirm the goodness of suicide.  He was himself a murderer.  His paintings were sufficient to lead any sane person to conclude that he was profoundly evil, or mentally deranged, or both—for evil is itself a derangement.  The media could have sunk him into the public’s contempt if they had only publicized those paintings, or probed the other cancerous organs in that man’s moral psyche.  They did not.  They chose instead to bracket the one cause, assisted suicide, and ignore everything else.  That plays into the devil’s hands.

We must not do so.

Contraceptive Eating - by Randall Smith

In The Catholic Thing

As those who have been following this series may recall, a friend once asked the question:  “Let’s say there are two women who love one another and are committed to one another the way you and your wife are committed to one another, and let’s say they’re engaged in an act that, if their biology were different, might lead to children, but in this case cannot.  Why does the absence of this one, single dimension of the act – the possibility of having children – make it morally unacceptable?”

There are a number of challenges involved in answering such a question.  

First, many modern people think “sex” means any kind of sexual titillation, whereas the Church has a very specific understanding of what “sex” entails.  

Second, the Church does not think an “act” is defined simply by a certain arrangement of body parts, but by the formal object of the act, the intention with which it is done, and the relevant circumstances.  

Third, it’s important that questioners understand the Church will generally not be replying to this question in the usual ways: that is to say, the Church is neither utilitarian nor Kantian, so the answer to the question of why the act is morally unacceptable will not involve showing that it “harms” someone else or by demonstrating that the act is always and everywhere wrong.  

The act may not “harm” (at least physically) the two persons involved, nor are we going to say that “sex” is always and everywhere wrong or dirty or disgusting, something just barely made acceptable if done in marriage and then only for the purposes of having children, the advice being:  “Just close your eyes, and think of the Church.”  

Instead, the Church approaches moral questions by trying to get people to think differently about the way they live and about the nature and meaning of their acts.

Allow me, if I may, to use an example from an entirely different realm.  Suppose a young woman says to me:  “I’m a person who loves eating.  I derive great pleasure from eating. I just don’t want the food to become part of my body, so I purge the food after I’ve eaten it.  Why would the absence of this one, single dimension of the act of eating – namely nutrition – make  the act morally impermissible?”

The first thing we might say to such a person is:  “I’m not sure that’s actually eating.”  “No,” she may insist, “I chew, I swallow, and the food goes into my stomach.  Are you saying that whenever a person is sick and throws up, he or she failed to eat?”  At which point I might try going into a complicated discussion about the difference between involuntarily having something happen to one’s food because of disease and voluntarily choosing to purge it, although it might not help, especially if she’s already convinced that an act can be defined merely by what happens physically.  In both cases, someone physically throws up, thus to her it will seem that both acts are the same. 

Notice the oddity, however, of suggesting that the goal of nutrition is merely “one, single dimension” of the act of eating, one that “eating” may lack (she imagines) and still be called eating. 

Doesn’t it make more sense to suggest that while eating certainly (and agreeably) involves something more than merely nutrition, nutrition also seems to be one of the basic purposes of eating? And thus to cut out that dimension of the act is to violate its nature in a fundamental way, the consequences of which might not be altogether healthy.

“But I don’t want to get fat,” says our young woman.  “Getting fat isn’t healthy.”  No, it isn’t.  But there are other ways of not getting fat.  The problem is those involve temperance, and what our friend wants is the pleasure of eating without the consequences of eating.

Notice also how the “getting fat isn’t healthy” response ends up nullifying the “harm” principle.  If I suggest a possible “harm,” she can always trump my “harm” with one of her own – getting fat is bad for you – one that (surprise, surprise) allows her to continue doing what she wants to do.  Besides, no one else is getting hurt.  

Notice as well how feckless most Kantian unversalizability arguments would be:  eating is not intrinsically wrong.  Eating and throwing up is not intrinsically wrong.  Sick people do it involuntarily; people who have taken poison do it voluntarily.  

Can we do better?    

How about something like this:  What we want for you, young lady, is a different relationship with eating (to use the contemporary jargon), one that involves both nutrition and pleasure, that meets your physical needs and realizes your communal nature.  

Both of these dimensions of eating – the nutritional and the communal – are, as the philosopher and physician Leon Kass has shown admirably in his wonderful book The Hungry Soul, what characterize truly human eating.  

Take one dimension or the other out, and trouble begins.  Scarf down food alone, and you miss the joys of the social dimension of eating.  Eat and throw up and you destroy the nutritional dimension.  It is when both come together that we get truly human eating that will lead to true, human flourishing.

That sort of eating is what we want for our children and loved ones, isn’t it?  But let’s be honest:  that sort of eating requires discipline.  You have to choose the right foods and eat them in the right amounts to get the proper nutrition.  And you have to choose the proper times and places to eat communally with loved ones. If each person goes off on his or her own, there’s no communal meal.  In short, one has to develop the relevant virtues of both prudence and temperance in order to realize the human goods of eating.

What would the Greeks have thought of gay marriage? - by Robert R. Reilly

In MercatorNet

 

It is ironic that the proponents of homosexuality so often point to ancient Greece as their paradigm because of its high state of culture and its partial acceptance of homosexuality or, more accurately, pederasty. Though some ancient Greeks did write paeans to homosexual love, it did not occur to any of them to propose homosexual relationships as the basis for marriage in their societies. The only homosexual relationship that was accepted was between an adult male and a male adolescent. This relationship was to be temporary, as the youth was expected to get married and start a family as soon as he reached maturity.

The idea that someone was a “homosexual” for life or had this feature as a permanent identity would have struck them as more than odd. In other words, “homosexuality”, for which a word in Greek did not exist at the time (or in any other language until the late 19th century), was purely transitory. It appears that many of these mentoring relationships in ancient Greece were chaste and that the ones that were not rarely involved sodomy. Homosexual relationships between mature male adults were not accepted. This is hardly the idealized homosexual paradise that contemporary “gay” advocates harken back to in an attempt to legitimize behavior that would have scandalized the Greeks.

What is especially ironic is that ancient Greece’s greatest contribution to Western civilization was philosophy, which discovered that the mind can know things, as distinct from just having opinions about them, that objective reality exists, and that there is some purpose implied in its construction.

The very idea of Nature and natural law arose as a product of this philosophy, whose first and perhaps greatest exponents, Socrates and Plato, were unambiguous in their condemnation of homosexual acts as unnatural. In the Laws, Plato’s last book, the Athenian speaker says that, "I think that the pleasure is to be deemed natural which arises out of the intercourse between men and women; but that the intercourse of men with men, or of women with women, is contrary to nature, and that the bold attempt was originally due to unbridled lust." (Laws 636C; see also Symposium of Xenophon, 8:34, Plato’s Symposium, 219B-D).

For Socrates, the sight of beauty is not to be taken as something in itself, but as a reflection of divine Beauty and the ultimate Good toward which Eros directs the soul. It is an error, therefore, to be diverted by the reflection in one’s search for the ultimate Good, which is the source of beauty. Beauty stirs and awakens the soul, but it is philosophy that provides the means of perceiving and coming to know the Good.

As a consequence of this metaphysical view, Socrates sees the erotic attraction of a grown man (erastes) for a beautiful male youth (eromenos or paidika) within the perspective of the erotic drive for wisdom. This drive will be thwarted by a life of self-indulgence and can proceed only with a life of self-discipline. Therefore, the relationship between the erastes and the eromenos should be of the older enlightening the younger in philosophical education. This means that any physical touching by the older man of the younger must be in regards to the latter “as a son,” as Socrates puts it, and not further than that.

What went further than that, Socrates condemned. He loathed sodomy. According to Xenophon in The Memorabilia (i 2.29f.), Socrates saw that Kritias was sexually importuning the youth of whom Kritias was enamored, “wanting to deal with him in the manner of those who enjoy the body for sexual intercourse”. Socrates objected that “what he asks is not a good thing.” Socrates said that, “Kritias was no better off than a pig if he wanted to scratch himself against Euthydemos as piglets do against stones.”

In Phaedrus (256 a-b), Socrates makes clear the moral superiority of the loving male relationship that avoids being sexualized: “If now the better elements of the mind, which lead to a well-ordered life and to philosophy, prevail, they live a life of happiness and harmony here on earth, self-controlled and orderly, holding in subjection that which causes evil in the soul and giving freedom to that which makes for virtue…”

By their chastity, these Platonic lovers have, according to another translation of the text, “enslaved” the source of moral evil in themselves and “liberated” the force for good. This was the kind of mentoring relationship of which Socrates and Plato approved. On the other hand, “he who is forced to follow pleasure and not good (239c)” because he is enslaved to his passions will perforce bring harm to the one whom he loves because he is trying to please himself, rather than seeking the good of the other.

In the Laws, Plato makes clear that moral virtue in respect to sexual desire is not only necessary to the right order of the soul, but is at the heart of a well-ordered polis. The Athenian speaker says:

“… I had an idea for reinforcing the law about the natural use of the intercourse which procreates children, abstaining from the male, not deliberately killing human progeny or ‘sowing in rocks and stones’, where it will never take root and be endowed with growth, abstaining too from all female soil in which you would not want what you have sown to grow.

“This law when it has become permanent and prevails—if it has rightly become dominant in other cases, just as it prevails now regarding intercourse with parents— confers innumerable benefits. In the first place, it has been made according to nature; also, it effects a debarment from erotic fury and insanity, all kinds of adultery and all excesses in drink and food, and it makes man truly affectionate to their own wives: other blessings also would ensue, in infinite number, if one could make sure of this law.” (The Laws 838-839)

The central insight of classical Greek philosophy is that the order of the city is the order of the soul writ large. If there is disorder in the city, it is because of disorder in the souls of its citizens. This is why virtue in the lives of the citizens is necessary for a well-ordered polis. This notion is reflected in the Athenian’s statement concerning the political benefits of the virtue of chastity.

The relationship between virtue and political order is, of course, par excellence, the subject of Aristotle’s works. It was a preoccupation of not only philosophy, but of drama as well. Just read The Bacchae by Euripides. Euripides and the Classical Greeks knew that Eros is not a plaything. In The Bacchae, as brilliantly explicated by E. Michael Jones, Euripides showed exactly how unsafe sex is when disconnected from the moral order. When Dionysus visits Thebes, he entices King Penthius to view secretly the women dancing naked on the mountainside in Dionysian revelries. Because Penthius succumbs to his desire to see “their wild obscenities,” the political order is toppled, and the queen mother, Agave, one of the bacchants, ends up with the severed head of her son Penthius in her lap — an eerie premonition of abortion.

The lesson is clear: Once Eros is released from the bonds of family, Dionysian passions can possess the soul. Giving in to them is a form of madness because erotic desire is not directed toward any end that can satisfy it. It is insatiable. “That which causes evil in the soul” – in which Plato includes homosexual intercourse – will ultimately result in political disorder.

For Aristotle, the irreducible core of a polity is the family. Thus, Aristotle begins The Politics not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and a woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. As he says in The Politics, “first of all, there must necessarily be a union or pairing of those who cannot exist without one another.” Later, he states that “husband and wife are alike essential parts of the family.”

Without the family, there are no villages, which are associations of families, and without villages, there is no polis. “Every state is [primarily] composed of households,” Aristotle asserts. In other words, without households – meaning husbands and wives together in families – there is no state. In this sense, the family is the pre-political institution. The state does not make marriage possible; marriage makes the state possible. Homosexual marriage would have struck Aristotle as an absurdity since you could not found a polity on its necessarily sterile relations. This is why the state has a legitimate interest in marriage, because, without it, it has no future.

If Aristotle is correct – that the family is the primary and irreducible element of society – then chastity becomes the indispensable political principle because it is the virtue which regulates and makes possible the family – the cornerstone unit of the polis. Without the practice of this virtue, the family becomes inconceivable. Without it, the family disintegrates. A healthy family is posited upon the proper and exclusive sexual relationship between a husband and wife. The family alone is capable of providing the necessary stability for the profound relationship which sexual union both symbolizes and cements and for the welfare of the children that issue from it.

Violations of chastity undermine not only the family, but society as a whole. This accounts for Aristotle’s pronounced condemnation of adultery, which he finds all the more odious if committed while the wife is pregnant: “For husband or wife to be detected in the commission of adultery – at whatever time it may happen, in whatever shape or form, during all the period of their being married and being called husband and wife – must be made a matter of disgrace. But to be detected in adultery during the very period of bringing children into the world is a thing to be punished by a stigma of infamy proportionate to such an offense.” (The Politics, XVI, 18) Aristotle understood that the laws were, or should be, ordered toward the formation of a certain kind of person – toward the realization of a virtuous citizenry.

This is why Aristotle forbids adultery, wants to make it disgraceful in all circumstances, not only because it subverts virtue, but because it attacks the political foundations of society. Adultery becomes a political problem because it violates chastity, which is indispensable to a rightly ordered polis. There is no comparable condemnation of adultery in homosexual marriage in Aristotle because such an institution would have been inconceivable to him, as it has been throughout history until recent times. That is because it is a self-contradiction. Marriage cannot be based on an act which is in itself a violation of chastity, because something cannot be its opposite. A homosexual household would not make sense to Aristotle since it could not contain parents and all the generational relations that spring from them, which makes the polis possible. What did not make sense then still does not make sense now, and for the same reasons.

“The Goodness and Humanity of God” - by Rev. James V. Schall, S.J.

In Crisis 

The sub-title of J. Budziszewski’s 2009 book, The Line Through the Heart, reads as follows: “Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction.” The initial dedicatory citation in the book, from which the book derives its title, is a memorable one from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It reads: “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Needless to say, this sentence is soul-wrenching. It compels us all to stop blaming external causes and systems for the conditions of our souls and of our society. This insight is but a graphic adaption of Plato’s affirmation that the disorders of our polities are first found in the disorders of our own souls. These disorders are not our subjective “feelings” about what ought to be if we were given what we wanted but standards first found in the reality of things that remain valid and have their defined consequences whether we ignore them or not.

What particularly struck me in reading Budziszewski’s book, however, was his attention to natural law as itself a sign of contradiction. He went into what has always been a murky moral area, namely, why is it so difficult to recognize and act on the truth of things? We might, at first sight, think that it is a rather simple problem. Show me the truth and I will change my ways! But it does not really work that way. One might say that our public order is today a massive refusal to accept the truth of human nature itself. We ultimately are forced to justify this doing what we want by denying that there is a human nature to conform ourselves to.

Ultimate questions are said to be insolvable. Thus, we are free to believe and act as we want. The purpose of government, as a consequence, is to make whatever we want to do possible for us with little or no cost to ourselves. If our activities cause diseases or derangements of human lives, the solution is not, through self-discipline, to stop the activities that cause the damage but to find a “cure” that will enable us to continue what we want without any consequences to ourselves. We look to technology to substitute for our own lack of self-rule.

II.

The phrase, a sign of contradiction, is from Luke’s gospel (2:21-40). The scene in the Temple of Jerusalem depicts the aged Simeon who sees the child Jesus. He recognizes Him to be the savior who was promised to Israel. This Child will be the cause of “the rise and fall of many in Israel.” Evidently, the “cause” of this rising or falling itself had to do with the recognition or the refusal to recognize Him. It was something in our power to do or refuse. Simeon addresses these words to Mary, Christ’s mother. He tells her further that her soul will be pierced. In retrospect, we know that a relation exists between the rejection of Christ and His death on the Cross. This consequence too is related to the fall of many who reject Christ’s identity and hence the Father’s plan for our salvation through Him.

Benedict XVI takes up this theme of a sign of contradiction in his own reflections on the scene in the Temple when Christ is brought for His purification. Not only was Christ a sign of contradiction to the Jews but He remains a sign of contradiction to our times and pretty much for the same reason. What, we might ask, exactly is this contradiction that Christ is said to signify and portend? Clearly, it has to do with what Bernard of Clairvaux was getting at when he told us of divinity and humanity existing in the same person, in this Jesus. Obviously, man is not God. The claim of a man to be a god is considered blasphemy which attributes to man what does not belong to him.

Yet, if there is no God, there can be no nature either. Hence, the most basic step in establishing a human “freedom” that has no relation to what man is would be to deny the existence of a God who stood outside of the world which was dependent for its existence on Him. This is the specifically Christian God. Modern atheism is itself dependent on an understanding of a God who did not need to create. Thus, when it denies nature, atheism is likewise denying the cause of nature as we know it. Nature does not stand independently of God for its own being.

III.

Benedict tells us that the “contradiction” that moderns express is directed toward the  Christian God. That is, we are not merely saying that no god exists, but we are positively affirming, defiantly, that this creator God, who is said to create human nature and become incarnate in it, is specifically denied. The result is that we affirm man in the place of God. Our understanding of man must, in other words, reject in a positive, voluntary manner, those things in human nature that are said to be inclinations placed there by God. This God “limits” us. He wants us to be what He has intended for us to be. We are to choose what is best for us by following the inclinations of our nature, of our natural law. We would like to “free” ourselves from nature in order that we become what we “want” to be. And what we “want” to be must, logically, eliminate any sign that something in us is better made than what we ourselves could conjure up.

This result is why so much of our contemporary life is taken up with ways of life that deny marriage, children, and seek to glorify ways of life that are intrinsically opposed to them. To achieve this latter goal of complete independence from God, we must lie to ourselves about what we are. Here the pope takes up a theme that is already in Plato. No one, Plato said, wants a “lie in his soul about the most important things.” But if we do want to replace God with our own definition of ourselves, we must lie to ourselves, deceive ourselves, about what we are. We must seek ourselves independently of what we ought to be. If we succeed in this endeavor, we will make ourselves into monsters and oddities, as Benedict spelled out for us in Spe Salvi.

If we turn back to the line of thought that Bernard was pursuing, we see that God did not disdain to join Himself to human nature as He created it. In the Incarnation, God affirms the goodness of human nature as such. Thus, modern atheism’s uniqueness is not just a denial that God exists, but that He could become man and remain true God. Indeed, there is no world of nature that exists apart from the divine plan that includes the Incarnation.

As Benedict graphically shows in the earlier volumes of Jesus of Nazareth, the world is different precisely because the Son of God became man in the world at a definite time and place. This fact, which all evidence seems to affirm as true, is itself sufficient to make us aware that the world is different when God is within it. It contains within itself an order to the divinity which passes through the heart of every human being and deals with his affirmation or rejection of good and evil.

The sign of contradiction is most manifest by the difficulty we see in accepting the truth of the Incarnation with all its implications. Yves Simon once remarked that it is a most difficult thing for a man to give up an idea or theory that he knows or suspects may be wrong. The habits of vice in many ways have become so solidified in our culture that it is almost impossible for most people even to conceive that their way of life is disordered.

In this sense, the natural law becomes yet another sign of contradiction as it remains present at least in our minds and memories as a judgment on how we have chosen to live. In many areas of the world, including our own, we are seeing more and more not just the legally enforced living of disordered lives but the official effort to repress any speaking or information that suggests anything is wrong with it. This is really what is behind the establishment of “diversity” as the only criterion of truth. It is a form of relativism that seeks to silence any possibility that “the goodness and humanity of God” are the true keys to human living and its ultimate destiny in eternal, not political, life.

The Vampire State - by Anthony Esolen

In CWR

 Just loosen your collar—this will all be over in a moment

“They live in the northernmost community in Canada,” said the fellow at the hamburger joint. “They’re Inuit, and have been living there for more than 2,000 years. They used to follow the caribou herds from place to place, but the government has settled them down, and now they have a permanent village, with the houses built up high, above the permafrost.” 

He then told me that the government had given them a quota for fishing turbot, and if they fell short of the quota, the government would make up for the shortfall by a cash grant. Until recently, they’ve attached themselves to international fishing expeditions, but now they have purchased a ship of their own. That was why they had flown the 4,000 miles from the 15th parallel to our island on the 46th—to take possession of the ship. The cost of the ship was borne by the government. I don’t know whether the $20,000 for four round-trip plane tickets was also borne by the government—that is to say, by other people, with the government middlemen taking their substantial cut—but it wouldn’t surprise me. 

“I suppose,” I said, “that living in such a forbidding place, they don’t have the social problems they have in, say, Yellowknife,” the capital of the Northwest Territories, notorious for alcoholism and family breakdown. My reasoning was simple. You can’t survive from one year to the next unless you preserve moral order. 

“No, they have the same problems there that they have all over the Territories,” he replied, and he put the blame squarely on Ottawa. “Paternalistic” was the word he used. 

The conversation caused me to consider what a place like Yellowknife has in common with, say, Detroit. Yellowknife is a small town on the Great Slave Lake, in the midst of the richest mineral deposits on Earth. It is, for all that, a deeply dysfunctional place. Detroit used to be the jewel of the Great Lakes, the auto capital of the world. It is now a pit of crime. Whole neighborhoods have been abandoned. The current mayor, Dave Bing, has ordered some of them to be plowed under, to turn them back to grasslands, perhaps for pasturing sheep. 

It’s not just Detroit, and money alone is not the problem. A good friend of mine used to tell me stories of growing up in Philadelphia after the war. His family was poor, but so was everybody else’s in the neighborhood. The streets were safe. He and his friends would often jump a train on the Main Line, just to hang around one of the outlying towns for a day, and then come back at suppertime, and nobody thought anything of it. People used to wonder how the economist Thomas Sowell could have attained such prestige, having grown up in Harlem; but he would tell them that when he was a boy, Harlem was a pretty good place for children, and the schools were solid. The teachers knew their subjects, and insisted on good behavior. And families were mostly intact. 

I don’t suggest that there is only one cause to explain what happened to Detroit, Harlem, Yellowknife, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Seattle, and so on. I do want to suggest a significant cause and, in a short time, a sufficient cause, which I’ll call the Vampire State. 

The two things to keep in mind about vampires are that they need blood and that they confer a wraith-like immortality upon their victims. It is an inverted symbiosis. Vampire and victim remain alive forever, but it is a death-in-life, dependent upon the consumption of health. 

The Vampire State needs blood. It can never have enough. The deal it cuts with the victim is simple enough. “You are weak,” says the Vampire State. “You are needy. You will soon die. I can help you. I can make you last forever. But you must give me your blood: your initiative, your moral strength, your independence, your manhood and womanhood, your folkways, and your self-government. I have the money—my business with other of my, er, clients. I will give this to you. The gift involves a little transfusion. Kindly loosen your shirt collar, and it will be over in a moment.” 

The Vampire State must have victims, whom it “helps” in this way. Its prime directive is to survive as it is, upon the blood of false charity. The Amish govern themselves, and keep the Vampire State at bay. The Vampire State will encourage none of the habits and the virtues that would make the victims of its benevolence more like the Amish. 

The Amish do not countenance divorce. Their families are strong and, as much as is possible in this vale of tears and sinners, happy. The Vampire State cannot abide strong families. So it seeks to divide man from woman, and woman from child. It will reward women with blood if they bear children out of wedlock; and if those women should be so foolish as to marry, the transfusion ends. “You had better stay single,” whispers the Vampire. “You need what I give you.” 

Vampires have a weird hankering for women. The Vampire is like the eunuch in charge of a great harem of female wraiths. How to build up the harem? The Vampire’s strategy these days is disarmingly simple: promote the independence of women, with great noise and chivalry. Now, most healthy women actually want to marry a good and reliable man, who will provide for them and their children. The Vampire despises such women, and encourages others to despise them too, so that the women themselves will begin to doubt that something may be wrong with them. The Vampire reasons thus. For every woman who goes forth in fierce independence, I will attain two or three who will either never find a completely reliable man, or who will turn to Me for their sustenance. It is a real bargain. And once I have them for a few years, their children will also be mine. Not one step will you take, without my permission or my “support.” 

Healthy people seek solutions to problems. The Vampire seeks problems. The Vampire State must, however, appear to be attacking crime, and will therefore multiply crimes to attack. This it will do in two ways. It will criminalize perfectly ordinary things, like spanking a child or drinking soda; and it will permit and encourage pathological things that help to destroy those institutions that provide for genuine life, genuine community, and genuine law. After it has reduced the churches to rubble, the Vampire expresses astonishment and grave concern when rogues rule the streets; which gives the Vampire cause to “intervene,” with canines. 

I’ve mentioned the churches. The Vampire State will, at times, tolerate the churches, and even appear to encourage them, so long as they remain subservient. But that tolerance is never stable. For there is a deep enmity between the Vampire State and the churches. The reasons are easy to see. The Vampire does evil, and on some level must know it; but the churches uphold an absolute condemnation of evil. The Vampire feeds on weakness; but the churches attempt to perfect the natural virtues by Christian love. The Vampire is gray and ugly and dead; the churches are founts of living water. Not all of them, mind you; the Vampire State has suborned quite a few. But even those can yet repent of their ways. 

The Vampire State, I’ve said, despises ordinary women. It fears ordinary men. An ordinary healthy man might command the respect of his fellows. He might preach a godly self-reliance which is a form of charity for his neighbors. He might wean some people off the dead blood. He might even try to hammer a stake through the Vampire’s heart. The Vampire can’t have that. For the Vampire is an effeminate old cad. His métier is not honest confrontation and clear debate, but subterfuge and seduction. 

So the last thing the Vampire State wants is a lot of strong men around. These days, the Vampire State has conceived the idea of promoting sexual deviance among men. A troop of Boy Scouts is dangerous—to the Vampire; silver bullets and all that. So the Vampire holds parades for men who depend completely upon the Vampire to enforce social approval for their pathologies. 

The Vampire State likes blood. More than one million unborn children in the United States every year shed their blood to keep the Vampire State alive. The Vampire knows well: if human life is sacred, then the sexual union of man and woman, which brings life, must also be sacred. If that union is sacred, then marriage is sacred. If the sanctity of marriage is upheld, then it is possible—just possible—that healthy and independent communities will be born. In such communities, the Vampire is not welcome. No, the Vampire will shed a little tear or two, and then consume the blood. Eventually the Vampire will get around to manufacturing his human victims—when his dependent vampires are sufficiently drained of genuine humanity and life to oppose him. 

What does the all-competent, all-meddling, all-controlling modern state do? Simple to answer. What would the Vampire do?

Chastity: The Seventh Lively Virtue - by Anthony Esolen

In CRISIS

When Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, insinuates himself into the garden of Eden, he encounters a perfect riot of beauty: lush grapevines hanging over grottoes and heavy with fruit, grassy meadows full of browsing cattle and sheep, streams splashing their way over the rocks, and flowers literally pouring forth at the bidding not of dainty art but of “Nature boon,” showering her gifts in abundance.  But although he recognizes that these things are beautiful, they bring him no pleasure.  The fiend “saw undelighted all delight,” and then he comes upon a sight that saddens him to the core of his being:

Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honor clad
In naked majesty seemed lords of all,
And worthy seemed: for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone:
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,
Severe, but in true filial freedom placed.

Adam and Eve are both naked and clad: their innocence and their honor are as a robe of majesty, and they need no other.

Milton understood well that chastity is not the same as abstinence.  Indeed, Adam and Eve are chaste, and they do not abstain from the “rites mysterious” of wedded love.  What they do is not merely permissible.  It is blessed by God.  It is holy.  That is why, when they enter their bower at night, they enter a sacred place where none of the lowly animals will go, “such was their awe of man.”  That is where they go after a day of creative labor, and conversation, and prayer; for theirs is not “casual fruition,” but the consummation of their love as embodied souls made by the God of love.  Chastity is the virtue of reverence for sexual being, male and female, both in oneself and in all other persons.

This reverence, as I see it, implies a metaphysical realism with regard to sex.  What Pope John Paul II called “the nuptial meaning of the body” is immediately and powerfully evident to anyone who sees a husband and wife walking together, hand in hand.  This sense of fittingness precedes a child’s awareness of the details of sexual intercourse, but it is founded upon that reality, for the “mysterious parts,” as Milton calls them, are made for one another.  I can breathe on my own, digest food on my own, and think thoughts on my own.  The only thing I cannot do on my own is, however, the most time-transcending and creative thing of all: I cannot engage in a reproductive act on my own.  Only a man and a woman together, in genuine sexual intercourse – that is, the interactive congress of the sexes as such, male and female – can perform that kind of act.

Here we stand on the shores of a vast and life-giving but also dangerous sea.  Sex is the first thing we notice about someone, and the last thing we forget.  In social situations it never quite fades from our awareness.  We understand that the man is for the woman, as the woman is for the man.  This being-for is marked in the differences themselves.  In the husband and wife, these differences are for completion, as Genesis suggests and as Milton makes clear, in the scene when Adam pursues the newly-created Eve:

                         To give thee life I gave
Out of my side to thee, nearest my heart,
Substantial being, to have thee by my side
Henceforth an individual solace dear;
Part of my soul I seek thee, and thee claim
My other half.

We are not talking here about the pleasure one gains from friendship, or the enlargement of the heart and the mind that is occasioned by social interchange generally.  We are talking instead of something new in the world: the literally “individual” solace of marriage, wherein the man and the woman become one flesh, never, without grave sin, to be put asunder.

Man is a social being; he casts bridges over the rifts that separate one person from another.  But the union of man and woman is unlike those; in it, and in it alone, do we unite with a different kind of human being altogether, a person who sows the seed, which a woman can never do, or a person who is the field wherein the seed and the egg bear fruit, which a man can never be.  It requires the most radical surrender of self.  I do not simply mean that the man and woman bear certain emotions toward one another.  I mean that the man, precisely as a man, gives himself entirely in the act of sexual congress to the woman, who gives herself in return, as a woman.  The very act cries out: “I was made for you,” meaning not just, “I give you pleasant feelings,” or even, “I will always be with you,” but rather, “Everything that I am, in all the reality of my sex, belongs to you, is yours by right, because with you its meaning, biological and personal, is fulfilled.”

Unlike mere abstinence, then, chastity is ineluctably social.  It colors all of our relations with men and women, because it recognizes them and reveres them as sexual beings.  Every man, married or not, is the sort of being oriented towards fatherhood, as every woman is the sort of being oriented towards motherhood.  I’m not saying that every man will actually sire a child; nor will every woman bear a child.  Here we might well mention the spiritual fatherhood of a priest or the spiritual motherhood of a nun.  But instead I would like to draw a corollary from the being-for that is inscribed in each sex.  It is inseparable from procreation.  Animals reproduce; only man, in the act of love, bears within himself a consciousness that he is doing what his own parents did, and what his children may do in turn.  The meaning of the act transcends the moment just insofar as the man and woman are open to that fact and all that it implies.  Our popes have understood the point.  It is a logical and psychological contradiction to say, “I give myself entirely to you,” while saying, “I deny to you the fullness of my sexual being, and the heritage of the generations that I bear within me.”  That is to treat a man or a woman as somewhat less than a man or a woman: as male and female givers of pleasure.

On the liveliness that chastity brings I could say much; and perhaps the subject requires another essay or two.  C. S. Lewis shrewdly noted, in The Four Loves, that the first casualty of a misplaced exaltation of eros is eros itself.  I note this deadening all the time.  Where chastity is not honored, people lose their reverence for the sexes, and with that reverence they lose also interest.  Not to say that they keep themselves free of sexual encounters.  But these then tend to be loveless and joyless, disappointing, sometimes even perfunctory.  The simple pleasures of sexuality are lost.  A lad and a lass cannot flirt innocently without the shadow of a sexual liaison falling over the act.  They are thus “free” to fornicate, but that very license cramps them and everyone else.  The stakes are raised too high.  If a boy says to a girl, “Would you like to go to a movie with me?” she must think beyond the movie – far beyond.  Knowing that this is so, the boy does not trouble to ask her in the first place.

The dash, the pursuit, the courtship, the sending of poems, the singing of songs, the high hearted pleasure occasioned by a smile, or by the touch of a hand – all these are dulled.  One needn’t take my word for it.  The lyrics of folk love songs testify: they could not be composed now, because they would not be understood.  Something as simple as Loch Lomond appears to have come from another world.  The first singer of that song would have understood what prompted Dante to write, centuries before him, Ladies who have intelligence of love.  Our young people can understand neither.

Where chastity is not honored, the boy cannot even enjoy the foolish pleasures of boyhood of old.  If you look at old photographs of high school football or baseball teams, you will see the boys fairly hanging all over one another; that physical expression of affection is only possible because reverence for male sexual being clears room for it.  Boys are for girls: that is that.  If one were to intrude upon this picture of camaraderie and say, “I feel a sexual desire for you,” that would do violence to the maleness of the boys.  It would be a subtle attempt to divert their confidence that they are husbands-to-be or fathers-to-be, to turn their attention in upon themselves – to conceive of their maleness in the severely restricted sense that they possess a certain sort of body, without considering what that body is for.  It would dampen philia with eros, and then would subvert eros itself, replacing it with a kind of mutual autoeroticism.

The society that promotes chastity thus promotes true wedded love, and the land of marriage, despite all the troubles that sinful human beings bring upon themselves, is a perfect paradise by comparison with the land of easy fornication and childlessness by choice.  There we will find all the glorious expectancy of young people in love; the pilgrimage that begins with an exchange of glances and ends within the temple, with man and woman exchanging vows, before they enter that other temple where they exchange their very bodies; the beauty of a gift given without reserve, at the just time, with due ceremony; and the beauty of the child ever present in their midst; the child who may be born from their loving interchange, and the Child whom they in their innocence revere.

Humility: The First of the Lively Virtues
Solicitude: The Second Lively Virtue
Meekness: The Third Lively Virtue
Zeal: The Fourth Lively Virtue
Liberality: The Fifth Lively Virtue
Temperance: The Sixth Lively Virtue