Sin and "Missing the Mark"

At the beginning of a book titled The Symbolism of Evil, Paul Ricoeur asks, "How shall we make the transition from the possibility of evil in man to its reality, from fallibility to fault?" A related question would be, "What distinguishes a mistake from a sin?" In our modern minds, the distinction is relatively clear. Ricoeur attributes this modern distinction in part to the emphasis we place on human autonomy and the will: a mistake in this case is simply the unwitting manifestation of a flaw, whereas sin is a willful embrace of wrongdoing.

I am not persuaded that these categories are so water-tight (neither is Ricoeur). I offer three demonstrations. First of all, the treatment of pedophiles in the decades leading up to the 2002 Long Lent assumed, with the regnant psychological understanding of the day, that the fault of the pedophiles was mitigated by psychological flaw, and that, such flaw being 'mended', would render the pedophile no longer controlled by this temptation, free to act morally again (this did not work). Had this behavior consistently been treated as a moral failing, as Canon Law seems to assume that it is (and from the point of view of the victim is surely is!), even where the perpetrator acted in the grips of an overwhelming compulsion, fewer relapses would have been permitted, in my opinion. In any case, the line between fault and compulsion to wrong/sinful behavior is not so clear. Knowingly dabbling with sinful behavior can bring about the situation of addiction and compulsion, in which our actions are no longer freely chosen. Is behavior after the development of addiction therefore no longer sinful? In other words, is the person who tempts fate by drinking too much too frequently a sinner while the hardened alcoholic not? If it feels wrong to call an addict a 'sinner', I suggest that this is evidence of our modern mindset, that divides a person between materialistic components and existential components. Incidentally, this is not the position taken by Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that requires both an admission of helplessness and amendment of harm done to others.

Second example: Is it not the case that claiming to have made a mistake seems to absolve us from blame? But what if we make the same mistake five times in a row and by doing so, we harm others? "Oh, I forgot to stop at that sign; I didn't mean to hit you with my car!" At what point are we derelict for being distracted, not paying attention to others? We can demand that others forgive us (everyone makes mistakes! give me a break!) without having to repent.

Third example: we are often made uneasy by Biblical stories in which persons are apparently punished for having made (innocent?) mistakes. Nadab and Abihu are obliterated for ignorantly offering incense (Lv 10) inappropriately, and Uzzah is struck down when he touches the Ark of the Covenant, ostensibly to prevent it from falling (2 Sam 6: 6-7). The punishments of Moses and of Saul have provoked probing questions about God's justice. Job presents an even tougher case.

The Old Testament does not distinguish much between ritual impurity deriving from circumstances beyond our control and impurity that is clearly moral, in our sense of the term. A leper is no better off than a murderer with regard to the temple cult.

The Christian tradition interprets this state of affairs as evidence that the world is in the grip of an anti-creation force of evil, and we suffer from this state whether we will it or not. We humans are not able to extricate ourselves by effort, either by moral effort (the Pelagian option) nor by scientifically identifying flaws and solving them (the Enlightenment program). Rather, we are in need of grace, of a Savior, to set things right.

That there is a 'right' way of things being is a crucial point for a future post, on why Thomas Kuhn and others are correctly criticized by A. MacIntyre when they assert that conversions or paradigm shifts occur as ruptures in a person's life rather than in some way as a fulfillment (a topic that I am still working on!). I have adumbrated this by drawing attention to the presumed rupture between 'mistake' and 'sin'. So hopefully I will build on today's post as we explore this question.

P.S. I also plan to answer several questions posed by attentive readers in these main posts, since I'm not sure how many of you read the comments sections. Let me know if this approach is too confusing, or if it matters at all! Thank you and God's blessings to you!

Autonomy vs. Freedom: Cui bono?

During my ongoing meditations on autonomy and freedom, it occurred to me to ask which of these two purported 'goods', on the face of it, is more beneficial to the average person. Looked at in this way, the advantage of the traditional Christian emphasis on the liberation afforded by virtue for the have-nots is obvious. Autonomy can only be actualized to the extent that we are not impeded by the typical restraints of life necessitated by provision for self and family. Put another way, the poor are far more 'determined' than the rich. In the days when I was a starving artist, I was prohibited from all kinds of activities because I did not have a credit card! The wealthy have an array of possibilities in life that even the middle class can't dream of. Does this make life qualitatively better?

On the other hand, the potential freedom to choose the good is available to all persons in all circumstances. I qualify that statement with 'potential' only to allow for the fact that we can forfeit freedom by choosing vice.

Autonomy, if it is a good at all, is one that is limited by living with other persons. Indeed, those of us who make commitments to others in marriage or in religious vows intentionally curb our self-determination and yoke it to others. Because autonomy is limited, those who favor it will naturally be inclined to limit others' autonomy in order to increase their own. Might this not be behind the idea of 'class conflict'? Is Marxism simply an outgrowth of the Enlightenment preference for autonomy over virtuous freedom?

On the other hand, virtue, being strictly spiritual, cannot be limited. "In the memory of virtue is immortality....When [virtue] is present, men imitate it [Wisdom of Solomon 4:1-2]." The increase of virtue in one member of a community benefits the whole community and tends to encourage a corresponding increase in other members. No one can limit my growth in virtue--it is a good that does not depend on my material wealth or any other external factors. In fact, an emphasis on the virtue of justice, for example, tends to ameliorate the tensions caused by the disparity in the distribution of limited goods, such as material wealth. Not only are the wealthy encouraged by justice to look after the downtrodden, but those who are less well-endowed are encouraged not to envy or steal. Obviously, limiting my incentive to hoard or to steal impedes my autonomy...

Conversion and the Paschal Mystery

In my previous post, I suggested that Alasdair MacIntyre's insights on conversion (what he might prefer to call 'resolution of an epistemological crisis), based on the writings of Thomas Kuhn and Imre Lakatos, have interesting implications for the Christian life. This is not surprising, given M's clear self-identification as a Catholic (he begins The Tasks of Philosophy with reflections on Pope John Paul II's encylcical Fides et Ratio, "Faith and Reason").

In a previous series of posts I developed a distinction between the modern ideal of autonomy, which prizes self-determination, and Christian freedom, which emphasizes the ability to choose good over evil. One of the great difficulties of living a genuine Christian life today is that we must constantly be converted from 'autonomy' to a fuller understanding of Christian freedom. That sounds easy; but in fact it produces in us a never-ending series of 'epistemological crises', if we truly believe that our goal is God and that God is infinitely greater than we are. We should expect, in other words, to be confounded regularly by our encounter with God and His invitation to discipleship.

So far, I doubt most Christians would have qualms with that. On the other hand, practically speaking, this is far more difficult than most people would like to admit, especially living as we Americans do in relative security and wealth. Let us demonstrate with an example from Monday's gospel, Mark 10: 17-27. A rich man comes to Jesus and asks what he must do to be saved. It is a funny question, really. The fellow, judging by the fact that 'from his youth' has followed all of the commandments, seems already to have a pretty clear idea of what is required for salvation. At first, the Lord seems to affirm his present worldview.

And then Jesus throws this in (because he 'loved him'?), "You lack one thing...[only one! this shouldn't be too bad!]...go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me."

"At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions."

It turns out that the fellow had a completely opposite worldview, as did the apostles. They too were shocked by Jesus' teaching. For heavens' sake, if the rich can't be saved, who can? Here is an epistemological crisis. Will we be converted to a totally new view of righteousness, or will we reject it?

All of us who wish to follow Christ will be called upon to make these conversions. As I suggested above, we are never through with them. The Bible is full of commandments and teachings that, if taken seriously, force us to confront our limited provisional and personal view of the world with God's Truth.

At times, this will feel 'all wrong'; let me give an example now from the pope. During his visit to the United States, he said this of 'individualism' as a destructive American trend:

"In a society which values freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of our dependence on others as well as the responsibilities that we bear towards them. This emphasis on individualism has even affected the Church, giving rise to a form of piety which sometimes emphasizes our private relationship with God at the expense of our calling to be members of a redeemed community....If we are truly to gaze upon him who is the source of our joy, we need to do so as members of the people of God. If this seems countercultural, that is simply further evidence of the urgent need for a renewed evangelization of culture."

How often does our personal piety shield us from conversion instead of contribute to it? The pope basically says in the last sentence (as I read), "If changing your personal piety doesn't feel good, that's no excuse!" If the culture makes a sense of communio difficult, well, get out there at convert the culture! And Pope Benedict XVI is not someone we can credibly claim to be saying this with a hidden agenda for the Kumbaya Mass!

Now let us return, very briefly, to MacIntyre. Part of his argument is that for a new worldview to be personally credible and intellectually coherent, it needs to be continuous with our previous worldview and help explain why we previously thought differently. This fundamental continuity is, in my humble opinion, another idea requiring conversion. Many today tend to see conversions as things requiring a loss of narrative, a total revolution and negation of what went before. What follows from this, if I am right, is of weighty import:

We fear conversion because we fear losing our selves and we fear losing our selves because we believe they are bound up with autonomy, which deludes us into thinking, "I am who I say I am, and not who God says I am."

When God calls us to conversion, what we lose is what Fr Thomas Keating calls the 'false self', the one we have autonomously constructed with our very limited knowledge of how things really are. While it may feel like annihilation, with God we can be confident that it is actually 'resurrection': a re-constitution of our true selves, rid of previous imperfections. We will not annihilate or negate our memories even: they will be purified so as not to cause us to sin out of old hurts. Jesus' resurrected body bears the same wounds as His dead body, but now they are sources of life and healing.

So conversion is a call to resurrection. Resurrection requires death, but, ironically, does not break the narrative of our lives. We continue to be the same person, as Jesus was after rising. The 'epistemological crises' brought on by the gospel can be embraced in faith.

How can we be sure that these crises are leading to God and not away? I will take this up with some thoughts on the spiritual sense of Scripture next time.

Notes on Conversion of Life

I promised a while back to present some thoughts on the philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre and how his insights offer some material for contemplation in the area of conversion of life, which ought to be dear to Christians.

MacIntyre, today considered a 'traditionalist' Thomist Catholic, underwent a 'conversion' experience around 1972. After having cut his teeth on Marxism and Freudianism, he came to what seemed like a dead-end in his inquiries into moral philosophy. In a recent collection of essays, The Tasks of Philosophy, he writes in the introduction that the problems he was facing in, "were bound to remain intractable so long as they were understood in the terms dictated by those larger assumptions which I shared with many of my contemporaries [x.]."

This led M to embrace the Aristotelian synthesis, especially as handed on to posterity by St. Thomas Aquinas, as a vantage point from which to make sense of the apparently intractable problems of modern philosophy. This in turn culminated with the publication of his best-known book, After Virtue, already considered a classic a few years after its appearance in 1981. He famously ends After Virtue with a call for a 'new Saint Benedict', which has endeared him to some members of my Order.

Underlying this waiting for a new Benedict is a consideration of the importance of culture in any kind of systematic thinking. Philosophers are not the only ones who need this; all of us think systematically when we speak, make plans for the future, and arrange our days. We undertake these activities as members of one or more cultures that provides us certain foundations that we take for granted. In the essay Epistemological crises, dramatic narrative, and the philosophy of science, M points out that when Descartes attempted to doubt everything, he was not able to go without the Latin language in order to pronounce, "Cogito ergo sum," and that writing in Latin already assumes a huge amount of cultural baggage. Experts on Descartes can point out how much of his language is indebted, for example, to St. Augustine, including the famed 'cogito' itself.

So M sets out to critique modern liberalism (and by 'liberalism' I don't mean what is usually meant in political journalism, but rather the enthroning of 'autonomy' that I have been posting on for the past two weeks), by stepping outside of this culture, embracing the cultural assumptions of Aristotle and Aquinas, and then offering his own view of modernism. I find his writing scintillating to say the least. One might immediately object that we can't go back to Paris of 1222, much less Athens of 370 B.C. MacIntyre is no simpleton about such objections, and lacking the means to defend his thesis in the cramped medium of the weblog, I will leave it to readers to discover for themselves how he reasons his way through this dilemma.

What I hope to post on over the coming week or so is this idea of 'conversion'. As M sees it, this requires not merely adapting new information into an existing system (which is what most of us do most days), but opting to be changed by moving into a totally different system, a new system that requires us to re-think the the meaning of the whole of our past, in new terms.

I gave as an example last week the idea that Christians ought to be converted away from 'autonomy' toward 'Christian freedom'. This constitutes no less than a total 'renewal of our minds [Romans 12: 1]', for so much that we take for granted in modern times assumes that autonomy and personal authenticity is a greater good than, say, the salvation of our souls by living the virtuous life. Certainly, entering a monastery ought to provoke some sort of conversion this way: the fact that we do not watch television, that a higher value is placed on mopping the floor according to customary practice than on 'self-expression', that we spend hours a day reciting words of long-dead Hebrew poets; these assume a world-view very much at odds with what exists outside the cloister.

This however does not mean that my life experience before I entered the cloister in meaningless. MacIntyre writes that he was inspired by Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to see that the whole 'paradigm', world-view or cultural stance needs to be questioned in order to move forward at times in systematic inquiry. However, he is also highly critical of the either/or implications of Kuhn's thinking; that embracing a new paradigm necessarily makes the old one completely obsolete. Rather, M wants to show how a coherent human life requires a coherent story or narrative, and that a conversion, in order to be coherent, must not only account for the world according to a new paradigm or world-view, but must also explain how the person could have reasonably held the previous world-view.

My sense is that today, 'conversions' are often suspect because we assume that the person who undergoes one has to repudiate what had gone before, rather than explain it. The Fathers of the Church were less certain of this--they expressed a variety of opinions, but I would point out that the view that was eventually embraced as something of a default, at least in the West, was the Benedictine view, one that integrates what is best in the cultures converted by the gospel. Jean LeClerq, in The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, demonstrates that the Benedictine way of life, while professing to leave the world behind, in fact was able to purify 'worldly' knowledge and rhetoric by placing it at the service of a comprehensive Christian worldview.

I will end this post today by addressing a comment made by Ascending Incense two weeks ago (and let me insert here that I repent of my infelicitous language that claimed that infants are 'infected' by Original Sin--perhaps I could change this to 'subject to' so as to assert their innocence before God). He noted that Karol Berger located the beginnings of modernism with Rousseau, whereas he thought that Descartes was more normally given that dubious distinction. Berger is operating within a very specific frame of reference, and Rousseau mirrors the changing sensibilities in musical composition in mid-Eighteenth century that separate Bach from Mozart. I agree that Descartes is more typically seen as the breaking point. However, my own personal point of view is that the break begins with Nominalism, the late scholastic philosophy that claims that the objects we encounter in the physical universe do not tell us anything meaningful about the nature of things. Thus, we would not be able to abstract a concept called 'human nature' from observing individual human beings. This sets up what I have long called a 'disjunctive universe', in which things are not related to one another, except in the minds of those who decide to call different things by the same name (hence 'nominalism'--it's all about naming things).

The effects of Nominalism have taken a long time to play out, but I would venture to say that they have reached a certain maximization today. How often are we scolded for trying to generalize about the world by those who wish to be left alone to make their own generalizations, to 'define the mystery of life' according to their own lights rather than by things-as-they-really-are? Postmodernism is defined by just this sort of disjunction, leading people to assert that there is no truth, or at the very least that any claims to truth are ideological and therefore violent and out-of-bounds (we normally say 'offensive' or 'insensitive').

The Thomistic view, which I take to be the Catholic one, rather exercises discretion to 'baptize' pagan cultures, adopting what is good, while defining, explaining and excluding what is bad. Thus there is an emphasis on the fundamental continuity of persons and cultures, even through a conversion experience. On this, MacIntyre interestingly takes issue with Burke's criticism of the French Revolution (note for political junkies).

So I locate the wellsprings of modernism with Scotus and William of Occam, which seems about right for a monk. It happens to coincide with the claims of so-called Radical Orthodoxy, though for somewhat different reasons. At the same time, both Descartes and Rousseau are owed a certain credit/blame for advancing the cause.

Legitimate vs. Illusory Autonomy

This topic has proven fruitful, and so I will stay with it, at the risk of boring my gentle readers...

The contrast of freedom and autonomy might appear to produce the oversimplification that 'freedom is good; autonomy is bad'. I have, however, hinted at the idea of 'legitimate autonomy'. Avery Cardinal Dulles, in a recent issue of First Things, wrote about the 'freedom of theology', by which he meant something akin to what I have been describing as autonomy. Theologians should not be stifled in their important work by the Magisterium unless it is clearly the case that a proposition is outside the Catholic faith. Professional theologians, that is to say, require a certain autonomy to choose the topics they wish to explicate and to choose the methods and contexts out of which these speculations occur.

Autonomy as a good has emerged in the West in the past two hundred-fifty years, and did so within the larger context of the concepts of personhood and individuality, concepts that Christianity has done much to clarify. Some would even go so far as to assert that the Trinitarian controversies gave rise to the concept 'person'; the Latin persona meant simply 'a mask' before it was yoked to the idea of hypostasis, to denote the distinction between Three Persons in the Trinity.

The difficulty in modern times is perhaps not autonomy per se, but autonomy disengaged from moral virtue and discernment. Since at least Plato (and with notable parallels in Hebrew wisdom literature), the connection between virtue and knowledge had been a commonplace, until the making of distinctions in the late Middle Ages severed moral philosophy from, say, analytical philosophy. The idea that a philosopher had to be virtuous so as to be disinterested and unswayed by his own preference and desire fell into desuetude.

With this in mind, we can consider this quote (sent by Dave B) from a lecture by then-Cardinal Ratzinger:

"The destruction of the conscience is the real precondition for totalitarian obedience and totalitarian domination. Where conscience prevails there is a barrier against the domination of human orders and human whim, something sacred that must remain inviolable and that in an ultimate sovereignty evades control not only by oneself but by every external agency. Only the absoluteness of conscience is the complete antithesis to tyranny; only the recognition of its inviolability protects human beings from each other and from themselves; only its rule guarantees freedom."

Before Dave had sent along the quote, I had been trying to formulate a related point. My observation would be that when autonomy is severed from Christian 'freedom', the freedom that virtue makes possible, those who practice such 'autonomy' are ripe for manipulation by those who can seize on their vices (as previously noted, vices are a negation of freedom). This is why people buy beer and cars advertised by women in bikinis; why there is hardly a protest against governmental invasions of privacy out of fear of terrorists; why demagogues usually appeal to racism and tribalism; why Americans on average waste four hours a day in front of the television, and so on. All a dictator need do is exploit these weaknesses on the one hand, while proclaiming them to be extensions of autonomy (You can have it all! The War on Terror is to protect your freedom!), and he will have you in the palm of his hand.

So genuine autonomy is only available to the genuinely free person. A person locked in vice may feel as if he is responsible to no one, but is in fact pushed here and there by the winds of passion and prejudice.

Autonomy and Freedom, Part 5

Thoughts, freedom, autonomy, yet again...



If we are unable to discern thoughts properly, we risk falling into vice. Vice, by definition, is a habitual disposition to sin. Habits are hard to break. Thus, vice is the predicament of being unfree because we are in the grips of a kind of addiction to sin. In Christian terms, then, vice represents a diminishment of freedom, a slavery to sin, to use the Biblical phrase. The way out of this is to allow grace and God's law to instruct us in proper behavior. Through repentance and conversion of life, we can shed vice and become virtuous instead. Virtue is like a habit, but properly speaking, it is different from vice inasmuch as it is a ability or a power to achieve some good action. The courageous man is able to undertake difficult or painful tasks for a higher good. A coward lacks the freedom to say yes to this sort of task. Or he might say yes, but fail from weakness. The virtuous man is still quite free to say no; his virtue does not, strictly speaking, compel him in the same way that a vice compels us. So virtue is an extension of freedom.

Because of the Transgression (or Original Sin), we are born bound, and we require God's assistance to become truly free. For freedom Christ set us free!

Christians are also autonomous, in the sense that we have the ability, if we so choose, to determine our own goods and pursue them. Within certain contexts of our temporal state, this is quite legitimate. Pope Benedict in his most recent encyclical indicated that hope is not merely directed toward heaven, but that there are legitimate 'proximate' hopes: it is not wrong to hope that our marriages are happy, that are children are healthy, that our country will be at peace, and so forth. However, if we are truly seeking virtue and conversion of life, we will want to 'bracket' autonomy to a certain extent, in order to be formed by the goods proposed by God. After all, He made us and the whole of the cosmos, so His idea of the good is probably better than one we discern without Him.

Now modern ideas of autonomy, which Karol Berger (in Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow) associates with J-J Rousseau, is a kind of practical atheism. This is so because the 'bracketing' that I suggested above is not seen as necessary. I suggested in a previous post that Enlightenment philosophers often rejected the idea of original sin in the Christian sense, and instead located human failing not so much in the will as in the intellect. If we started fresh, a la Descartes, and thought through everything carefully, we would figure out, without God's help, how to live in accord with nature. According to Rousseau, socialization brings about a diminishment of the intellect because we tend to 'sell out' to the crowd, being more concerned with what others think than with being ourselves. Since in his view we are by nature good and not fallen, the trick is so to inculcate autonomy that society does not threaten our natural goodness. This is part of the argument in R's interesting (but tremendously flawed) book on education, Emile.

[Part of the flaw comes from the fact that Rousseau played almost no part in the rearing of his own children!]

Now the connection with thoughts is this: if we are not fallen, and vice only comes from socialization, which is outside of ourselves, then the thoughts we have inside ourselves cannot but be good in some way. We should be free to draw our own conclusions about them without having moral judgment imposed from outside. And indeed, in our world today, we have seen the legitimation and normalization of all kinds of vices, under the rubric of anti-discrimination and 'freedom'--meaning autonomy.

I can think of no better illustration of the highly problematic nature of autonomy and its central place in public discourse today than this famous opinion from Justice Anthony Kennedy:

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."



Holy cow!

That is from Planned Parenthood v. Casey; i.e. in defense of the 'right' to abortion.

If we possess a 'right' to define our own concept of existence, what incentive do we have to question our thoughts? Aren't they just 'part of the mix'? Why not just redefine our concept of existence every time we have a new thought? Again, whether Justice Kennedy consciously intended it, this is practical atheism: in this view, God has apparently no say in defining the concept of existence, whatever credit He might be owed (in theory) for creating it.

Is Christian discernment a radical form of civil disobedience? It certainly is an invitation to the Kingdom of God being established in our hearts, a kingdom at enmity with the world.

Autonomy and Freedom, Part 3

It is said of St. Teresa of Avila that a young nun asked her how she knew what God said to her. Aren't the thoughts that we attribute to God only our imaginations? St. Teresa responded, "How else would God speak to us if not in our imaginations?"

Now St. Teresa is using an older, scholastic idea of the imagination as a faculty of the soul. I believe that our modern concept is much less extensive and therefore impoverished. For us, imaginary things aren't real in the end. By contrast, in the Christian psychological tradition and especially in the monastic tradition, the images in the imagination are quite real, and therefore require constant surveilance and attentiveness. The traditional teachings on discernment deal primarily with the thoughts that capture our imagination. Which ones will we allow to linger and 'solidify', so to speak, becoming incarnate in our behavior? And which ones will we purge so as not to allow them to see the light of day?

To pose the question in this way begins to answer it. Christ, the Word of God, became incarnate. This says a great deal about the heart and the imagination of His mother: she was so formed inwardly by God's Word, that He literally took on flesh. Each of us is called upon to imitate her example.

Thus the Word of God should be constantly in our hearts, insofar as this is possible.

But what about ambiguous thoughts? The monastic tradition locates three origins of thoughts and other stimuli: thoughts can come from God--these we hold on to and put into action. Thoughts can come from ourselves--we naturally feel hungry, respond to praise and insult, respond to beauty, and so on. These thoughts need to be measured by the virtues of prudence and temperance. We cannot let appreciation for beauty slide into lust, or hunger drive us to gluttony.

Third, and less popularly appreciated today, thoughts can come from demonic forces: the 'world' and the ruler of this world. These thoughts should be let go of or even driven out, if we can do so by the power of the Cross.

Sorting our thoughts into these categories might seem difficult at first, but like anything, we get better at it with practice, and we can learn from the advice of others. The first step is simply to be aware that we are thinking! This is more difficult than it sounds. We tend to identify our 'selves' with our thoughts when in fact, they are separate. We are not our thoughts. If I could urge one mantra for today's young people, that might be it. You are not your thoughts! Separate from your thoughts and examine them! Let God's Word and the teachings of the Church help you to reject thoughts that are not of God: fear and anxiety, anger, sadness, selfishness, party spirit--these sorts of lists are readily available in Paul's letters (see Galatians 6) and in the wisdom literature, as well as in the gospels.

A good inspiration that seems like it comes from God should be tested against the Church's power to discriminate. The devil does appear as an angel of light and never suggests things that are outright harmful to begin with (by the way, this means that most of our obvious inclinations to sin are from our fallen selves--sorry to say! We can't blame the devil for the vices that we have either chosen or slid into by sloth). There is a story of St. Francis staying up and praying all night and then the next day being grumpy and short with his friars. He reflected, "I gave the night to God, and then I gave the day to the Devil." And so he gave up his all-night vigil as being beyond what God was actually asking.

If we feel moved to begin a project for the Church, or to seek to live the religious life, we should check out these movements with our spiritual directors, with our pastors, with religious who have some experience with these things. I believe that Bob's follow-up comment to Connie's question contains some helpful 'caveats' about the good and bad motivations that we all have when we come to serve God. Since none of us hears God perfectly, He has given us the Church to help sort out what is and what is not of God.

Next time, I will conclude my long answer to this question with two observations: first, that we can become better listeners to God through humility and formation; second, that modern 'autonomy' makes the mistake of confusing the ego with thoughts. This is why we should keep repeating to ourselves, "We are not our thoughts!"

Autonomy and Freedom, Part 2

I've decided to answer questions and respond to comments on my previous post, which clearly touched a nerve. I hope to go on to speak about conversion soon, since I believe that there is a link between them.

First of all, Connie asks, "How does one discern Father? Especially a religious vocation? I know that I want to live my life for God, with God, and in God. It is very difficult for me to live in duality, i.e. a secular "life" with a job and its responsibilities and only time for God sandwiched in between. How do I know that my desire to live for, with and in God comes from God and not from me? Or would I even have these desires if they did not come from God?"

There are several questions there, and each of them could inspire a book (some of them have). In the context of my post, I was explaining the difference between a modern preference for autonomy (the ability to define one's own moral goodness and goals in life) and the Christian idea of freedom (in which we are set free to make morally good choices, given in the structure of God's creation and in His law, and to pursue the goals that God sets for us).

So discernment, in the Christian context, means first of all listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit. God speaks to us in many ways: through the moral law, through the sacraments, through our superiors in the Church (this can mean simply one's pastor or it could mean the pope). In any case, the voice comes from outside ourselves, and not infrequently poses a challenge to our sense of identity and comfort. I tell people that I never much thought about being a monk as I grew up, but the various signs that kept coming to me from the Church, from prayer, and from meditation on Scripture eventually led me to inquire into the possibility. When I did enter the monastery, I had no intention of becoming a priest, but in that case, the community asked it of me.

There is no possibility in the end of discerning a religious vocation without speaking to religious communities and letting them help you sort out which signs are from God and which are not. My general advice for anyone who has inclinations in this direction is simply to approach a religious community and begin praying with them, and if possible visiting with them. While the vocation director might be most helpful, it does not need to be someone official. Anyone with some experience of religious life can help interpret what God is saying to you.

What takes place once we open ourselves up to genuine dialogue with God and with others is that our own limited vision of reality and our subjective notion of the world undergo a challenge. The cultural forces that urge us toward autonomy will incline us to depart from dialogue if that dialogue suggests that our own opinions need revising. We might be inclined to say, "That's fine for you, but not for me!" Some of the prophets tried to do that with God, but He insisted that His idea was better. So we must commit ourselves to being disciples and students of the Church's wisdom. This being the case, we will want to entrust ourselves to teachers of good repute, but even poor teachers can mediate God's will if we take a real stance of faith.

Finally, we know that we have a vocation to religious life if the Church allows us to profess vows. Before that, there is always a certain amount of questioning going on, but it is not an existential sort of questioning only (of the sort, "Should I do this? Is it right for me? Am I selling out?"). These are only part of the questions that we should allow ourselves to encounter. The primary question is, "Is this what God wants?" and each religious order has its own criteria for determining whether a candidate is being called by God. In our Benedictine tradition, we look for zeal for the divine office, for obedience and humiliations. If a person does not show signs of having this zeal or a willingness to cultivate it, well, monastic life will probably be too difficult. If a person has all these things but is married, well, that is another sign from God that there is not a monastic vocation but a vocation to married life. And so on. Trust the Church's guidance and submit yourself to it! That would be my principal advice.

The last question is an excellent one: we all have thoughts and desires, too many to count. Which ones are of God and which ones are simply echoes of our own psychology? Are some even off demonic origin. It is a question right up our monastic alley, so to speak, and I will post on this next.

Miscellaney

I've returned safely from Colorado, where I had what I hope was a fruitful visit with the community of St. Walburga's.

As is my habit on the road, I brought along books I normally wouldn't get to read at home. The two in particular were Karol Berger's Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow, an exhilarating read (though musically very technical), and a collection of essays by Alasdair MacIntyre called The Tasks of Philosophy. Both books have stimulated a lot of thought, as did the Visitation of the abbey itself. Rather than attempt a systematic presentation of these thoughts at this point, I will simply lay down some observations over the next few days.

1) Berger, between sections on Bach and Mozart, locates the beginning of modernity in the break that Rousseau and others made with the Augustinian synthesis of Christendom. Now this was of particular interest to me, as I often make the point that these two thinkers represent fundamental opposites in terms of the understanding of evil. For Augustine, original sin infects even infants, who fight over milk when there is plenty to go around. The cure is socialization, into one of the two cities: the city of the world, in which force and domination keep unruly passions somewhat at bay, or into the City of God, in which grace allows us to be refashioned in God's image and freed from slavery to sin.

By contrast, Rousseau begins with an original goodness in children that is destroyed by socialization (this is very oversimplified, but it will do, I hope)! Socialization keeps us from being our good, natural selves.

Berger's view is consistent with mine (and I doubt very much that my observation is original). His focus, however, is on the addition of 'autonomy' to Christian freedom as a defining mark of Rousseau's innovation (along with that of the whole Enlightenment). In other words, Christians, who are 'set free for freedom', understand the universe to be a moral place, and this implies the freedom to choose either good or evil. Moderns also understand this, but with the addition of 'autonomy', which Berger defines as the ability to define the good for oneself, by applying reason according to one's own lights. Then one is free to choose to follow one's own good or not.

This is consistent with my observation above that Rousseau thinks that persons are naturally good and not afflicted by original sin. If this were the case, then of course we would not be liable to misuse autonomy to define a course of life for ourselves that will have a bad end. We would naturally choose good moral standards. Again, in R's opinion, the pressure of society and the pressure to conform or at least be thought well of (which generates the bad kind of self-love, amour-propre), causes us to negate our autonomy and to live inauthentically, which in his view is evil.

These issues are very much alive today. Who among us does not feel that certain areas of Church teaching, for example, force us to be inauthentic? The problem affects discernment especially. Very few people today find it easy to consider discernment as a process of finding out what God wants of me and choosing that, especially when what God wants is not what I want. We are rather more inclined to assume that our desires are all good, at least until they get us into deep trouble.

People frequently ask me, for example, if I find being a priest, monk or religious superior fulfilling. I am hesitant to say yes to the question phrased that way. I suppose that being a priest and superior, if anything, is the opposite of fulfilling; it is rather emptying. I have to get rid of all kinds of plans and little freedoms that I might otherwise want to keep. I have to do all kinds of things that I am not inclined to do. Now I write not so as to play the martyr, simply to say that I have come to believe that this is about obedience to a God Who knows better than I what is for my benefit and others' benefit. I had it my way for many years before I entered the monastery, and it was fun, I guess, but I also know that for me, autonomy, that is, choosing for myself what my life was going to entail, was a recipe for selfishness and generally lax moral behavior. So my life today, as a struggle to live discipleship faithfully, requires me to un-learn all kinds of behaviors over and over again, and at times it feels like the 'me' that I had kinda liked outside the monastery, is in danger of disappearing. But is this not the death that each of us must die in Christ so as to allow God to be all in all in us?

"Autonomy" might be a new term, but the idea of it I think is captured in the Tradition by the term "self will." What has changed is that whereas 'self-will' has a narcissistic and anti-social ring to it, who can find fault with autonomy?

So if we are to make sense of the monastic and otherwise Christian teaching that requires us to subjugate our will and autonomy to God's will and His creation, we need conversion. So I will pick up there with MacIntyre tomorrow, God willing.

Peace to you!