A Thinking Reed

Month: August 2007

  • “Our hearts are restless until they rest in You”: St. Augustine

    Today is St. Augustine’s feast day. He remains one of the most influential, as well as controversial, figures in the history of Christianity. Some blame him for all that’s wrong with “Western” Christianity: its alleged obsession with sin, legalism, hangups about sex, the frightful predestinarian picture of God, etc. Some of these charges are caricatures, others have (IMO) some truth to them.

    augustine11.jpg

    But, despite his mixed legacy, Augustine made more lasting contributions to the church than virtually any other single theologian. He formulated a truly Christian metaphysics that made the distinction between created and uncreated being (rather than, say, spirit and matter) the fundamental ontological distinction, while insisting that creation is fundamentally good. He struggled for the priority of grace over Donatist legalism and Pelagian moralism. He accepted some of the best insights of Platonism and other pagan learning, but more thoroughly Christianized them than many of his predecessors. He worked out a comprehensive (for its time) Christian vision of history. And he set the template for much “Latin” theorizing about the Trinity.

    Here’s the collect for the day:

    O Lord God, the light of the minds that know you, the Life of the souls that love you, and the strength of the hearts that serve you: Help us, following the example of your servant Augustine of Hippo, so to know you that we may truly love you, and so to love you that we may fully serve you, whom to serve is perfect freedom; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

    I did a series on Augustine’s Enchiridion early this year.

  • ATR prescience watch

    Today: AG Alberto Gonzales resigns among pressure from Democrats and many in his own party.

    November 11, 2004: this blog (well, its predecessor actually) says Gonzales is a bad pick for AG.

    Nice to know it only took DC 2 and a half years to catch up.

  • Doubt and atheism aren’t the same thing

    Thomas has an excellent riposte to some of the truly insipid things being said about Mother Teresa in light of some recently publicized letters that make it clear that she (like many, many other saints) struggled with doubt and a feeling of God’s absence.

    Of course, this won’t be news to anyone who read Carol Zaleski’s “The Dark Night of Mother Teresa,” published in that notorious skeptic rag First Things over four years ago. What is surprising is that some atheists have such a shallow understanding of religious faith that they can’t fathom how it can coexist with doubt. Indeed, you might think that someone who could persist in the kind of ministry Mother Teresa was engaged in, even in the absence of the kind of experiential awareness of God she had experienced earlier, was displaying even greater faith.

  • Jesus as sacrament

    It’s not uncommon for theologians to try and explain, or at least illuminate, the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament of Communion by making an analogy with the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in the Person of Jesus.

    Whether or not this is a case of trying to explain the obscure by the even more obscure, I’ve been wondering if it might be possible to shed some light on the meaning of the Incarnation by making an analogy with the Sacrament.

    For instance, we don’t think of a sacrament as a transaction whereby we receive a certain amount of something called “grace.” Or if we do, there’s a good chance we have an excessively mechanical, or perhaps magical, understanding of what a sacrament is.

    The Book of Common Prayer defines sacraments, of course, as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace” (BCP 857). Grace, in turn, is understood as “God’s favor towards, us, unearned and undeserved,” by which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills” (858). The concrete, visible things – the bread and wine and water – are signs of God’s grace, but not in a merely symbolic way. They actually communicate it.

    So could the Incarnation and Atonement be understood in an analogous way? It’s no secret that theological explanations of the Person and Work of Christ have sometimes been excessively mechanical and transactional, and perhaps thinking in “sacramental” terms could help correct that.

    It is sometimes suggested, at least implicitly, that there has to be some transaction (between God and the Devil, or the Father and the Son) before human beings can be received back into God’s favor. And the way this takes place is sometimes couched in equally transactional terms (the paying of a ransom or debt; the receiving of punishment).

    This view seems to imply, much like the magical or mechanical view of the sacraments, that God must inject grace into the world where it was formerly lacking or absent. But what if we were to re-think the work of Christ along the lines suggested by the BCP‘s understanding of what a sacrament is?

    There is no indication, for instance, that God’s favor is absent from us prior to the sacrament. Rather the sacrament is the means by which God has chosen to make his already existing favor effectually present to us.

    Likewise, we could see the entire life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a sacrament of God’s grace. It’s not as though that grace was absent from the world prior to the Incarnation; the Bible describes Jesus as the lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. This would seem to suggest that God’s grace was “there” all along, but that Jesus is the “outward and visible sign” of this grace.

    At first sight this might seem to be a merely “exemplarist” view of the work of Christ – that Jesus is a “mere” symbol of some eternal truth about God’s love. But this is no more necessary than viewing the sacrament as a memorial or symbol of Christ’s presence.

    Most Christians historically have seen the sacrament as the means by which God’s love and favor is specially communicated to us and in which God “forgives our sins, enlightens our minds, stirs our hearts, and strengthens our wills.” And so, in Jesus God does the very same thing: communicates God’s gracious, forgiving, enlightening, and empowering love to us.

    Seeing Jesus as a sacrament may also give us some inkling as to why the Incarnation was in some sense “necessary.” One of the aspects of sacramental Christianity that I’ve always found especially appealing is that it recognizes our status as fleshly, embodied beings.

    The way we enter into fellowship with God is not by some spiritual “flight of the alone to the alone,” leaving behind the encumbrances of bodily existence. Rather, God graciously descends to be with us in a visible, tangible way, albeit in a way that confounds our expectations of what is proper for the Divine Majesty.

    It may be, as Gerhard Forde has said, that as an abstraction God is always a terror to us. Only when God becomes concrete, through God’s self-enfleshment in Jesus, can we receive grace. This doesn’t necessarily mean that God isn’t gracious “outside” of or “before” Jesus; we recognize that other earthly things can be channels of grace besides the dominical sacraments.

    But we believe by faith that God has promised to be present, to communicate grace to us in the bread, wine, and water. And similarly we believe that God has specially communicated the divine love to us in Jesus, even though it may well be possible that grace is available to those who have never heard of Jesus, or who, for whatever reason, have been unable to accept the Gospel.

    I assume some actual theologian may have already tried to explain things along these lines. If so, I hope a reader more theologically informed than I am will let me know (as well as if this is total b.s. ;-))

  • From animal rights to cosmic democracy

    The second part of Clark’s essay on “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” wades into deeper and more interesting waters.

    Clark contends that it’s “better to abandon abstract argument, in favour of historical.” Ownership, he maintains, is a social concept and thus the idea that we can do whatever we want with what we “own” is a needlessly abstract and ahistorical way of looking at things. It’s better to think in terms of “historical claims and protections, not with the pre-social rights of self-owners: rights established not by abstract argument, but by the slow discovery of a mutually acceptable forebearance and cooperation–a process, incidentally, that there is no sound reason to limit to human intercourse.”

    The early liberals, he maintains,

    did not appeal to absolute rights of self-ownership (restricted by the equal rights of others). Private property was defended as the likeliest way of enabling a society of freemen to subsist in mutual harmony, and cultivate their virtues: if we each had some portion of the land to tend we would be less likely to fall prey to tyrants, and the land itself would prosper. What we owned, however, was not the land itself, but the lawfully acquired fruits, and we owned these only for their lawful use. “Nothing was made by God for Man to spoil or destroy” (Locke, ‘Treatises’ 2.31: 1963 p. 332; see Hargrove 1980). Individual liberty rested on the value God placed in every soul, as a unique expression of His glory, such that any despotism, however benevolent in purpose, must issue in a decline of valuable diversity. Each of us has a profound and vital interest in the virtue of our fellow-citizens, and in the continued viability of the ecosystems within which we live.

    Clark brings this classical liberal insight into conversation with recent writing on “deep ecology” with interesting results. The main idea of deep ecology is that, rather than being self-sufficient individuals, we are all parts of the ecosystems to which we belong, the whole which has a certain priority over the parts. This is not to downgrade the value of the individual, but to point out that her flourishing depends on the flourishing of the whole of which she is a part.

    Individualists, and some animal rights proponents like Tom Regan, have been wary of what they call “environmental fascism” that seems to threaten to subordinate the interests of the individual to the collective. We sometimes see this tension between environmentalists and animal rights people: environmentalists are mainly concerned with preserving ecosystems even if that means, for example, culling animal herds.

    Clark, however, sees a “necessary moral synthesis” of libertarian and “zoophile” intuitions in a vision of a kind of cosmic ecology. A reasonable and proper good for individuals depends on the good of the whole: “The living world (which is itself an element or function of the cosmic whole) is like ‘the federation or community of interdependent organs and tissues that go to make up [a physician’s] patient’ (Gregg 1955; see Lovelock 1982). Claiming a spurious advantage for individuals at the price of damage to the whole is simply silly.”

    The whole he sees as the City of God. Invoking Berkeley he identifies this with the whole created universe, each in its own way reflecting an aspect of God’s glory. And each part has a claim to exist, if only for a short time. It’s reasonable that we should protect our own kind against threats to life and limb, but beyond that we ought to be content with our allotted portion. There can be no absolute “right to life” because death comes for us all and is part of the fabric of the universe; but we can aim for a “letting be” of things according to their kind:

    The rights that all self-owners have simply as such cannot include any right of immunity to disease, predation or famine. No such right can be justly defended for all self-owners, since the terrestrial economy is organized around the fact of predation. None of us can be treated absolutely and only as ‘ends-in-ourselves’, never to be material for another’s purposes. Of all of us it is literally true that we are food. If blackbirds have no right not to be eaten by foxes (and people, correspondingly, no duty to protect them), since such a general right would deny the right of life to foxes, but blackbirds have all the ‘natural’ rights that all self-owners have, it follows that we too have no right not to be eaten. The only ‘right to life’ that all selfowners might be allowed, just as such, is the right to live as the creature that one is, under the same law as all others. Foxes do no wrong in catching what they can: they would be doing wrong if they prevented the creatures on whom they prey from enjoying their allotted portion in the sun, if they imprisoned, frustrated and denied them justice. Foxes, obviously, are not at fault.

    The libertarian thesis, applied to the terrestrial biosphere, requires that no-one do more than enjoy a due share of the fruits of the earth, that forward-looking agents plan their agricultural economy with a view to allowing the diversity of creatures some share of happiness according to their kind. It does not require that everyone abstain from killing and eating animals, if that is how the human creatures that are there can live. Some people may so abstain, because they see no need to live off their non-human kindred, but this (on liberal views) must be their choice, not their duty. Libertarians, by the same token, will not see any general duty to assist people against aggressors. Even aggression, it turns out, is not necessarily unjust, a violation of right, though enslavement is. Even if some acts of aggression are unjust, there is no general duty to defend the victims. Any duty that such libertarians acknowledge to assist the prey will rest upon their sense of solidarity, not on abstract rights of self-ownership.

    Clark calls this a “radically anarchic view of human and extra-human intercourse,” but says that we might be justified in going beyond this by acknowledging the fact that, within the “cosmic democracy,” most of us animals already exist in social groupings, many of them including multiple species. “We can,” he says, “moderate the merely libertarian ethic by the ethic of solidarity: both depend upon our vision of the moral universe, both are necessary.”

    The vision of the cosmic democracy, of a universe in which each thing has its appointed part to play and its own particular dignity, eminently justifies decent treatment of non-humans, and even an extension of sympathy and mercy. “[I]t may also be compatible with justice, even required by a more elevated sense of ‘justice’, that we should give each other more than we have a right to demand: we may construct ‘laws of the nations’, and tacitly agree to assist those who are in need, so long as we may justly do so.” What Clark seems to have in mind here is what I referred to the other day as the “special duties” owed to those creatures that we share our lives with in a particular way, such as pets or other domestic animals. “Emotions of solidarity” combine with and reinforce “contractual justice” as we find our circle of sympathy expanding outward, pushed by the vision of cosmic democracy wherein we are all related as partial reflections of the Creator’s glory.

    This “visionary solidarity” seems a long way from the bare-bones political ethic of libertarianism, and Clark admits that he has pushed the liberal ethic to the point of collapse:

    If ‘we’ are illumined by this vision of the living world, we may request a like forebearance and enthusiasm from our fellow citizens. Those who show that they cannot conceive of the world in its richness, cannot sympathize with their fellow-creatures, may seem to us to be menaces. It is, correspondingly, our ‘natural right’ as self-owners so to organize society to introduce that vision into all with whom we must associate.

    Now this is heady stuff. Though it must be qualified by what Clark says a bit earlier:

    This would be a ‘fascist’ vision only if it implied that there was some elite group entitled to inflict upon an ignorant world the legislation they thought justified, at whatever cost to the ideals and lives of their victims. There is no such implication: on the contrary, it is just those elite groups which most offend against the rules of liberal solidarity.

    So it seems that what he’s getting at is this: we need something like a paradigm shift, a new moral vision that takes in the whole of the living world, not just the human sphere and this vision will naturally impace the way we order our common life. But this isn’t the sort of thing that can be imposed from the top down. So there’s no question of a kind of green fascism.

    Given what I’ve seen elsewhere of Clark’s political views, I would imagine that he would favor this vision being propagated through decentralized and non-hierarchical local communities joined in some kind of loose federation.

    From my earlier post on Clark’s “anarcho-conservatism”:

    Following Jefferson and Kropotkin, Clark seems to favor a decentralization of political power to the most local feasible level. He rejects, however, revolution as a means to replacing the military or political form of association with peaceful and non-coercive methods. Even Gandhi’s “non-violent” revolution, he points out, resulted in no small amount of bloodshed, and the Indian state that replaced British colonialism arguably suppressed liberty in a number of ways, not the least of which being the incorporation of unwilling minorities into the Indian state.

    Instead, Clark adopts what he calls “anarcho-conservatism,” an anti-revolutionary commitment to expanding the organization of the civil or economic means of social cooperation, side-by-side with, and gradually replacing coercive means. He concedes that such a conservative stance risks being insufficiently sensitive to present injustice, but argues that change which grows organically out of a people’s past is preferable to the kind of sharp break with it that revolution often brings.

    Analogously, Clark might say that a change in our evaluation of the moral status of animals can and should develop organically from existing moral traditions. And so he might find Matthew Scully more congenial than Peter Singer on this score. A gradual modification of our moral views, developing in an organic, quasi-Burkean fashion is more likely to take root than some attempted revolution from above.

  • Friday metal – leather fetishism edition

    When it comes to classic British heavy metal, I’m more partial to your Black Sabbaths or Iron Maidens than Judas Priest. But this is a terrific song (and pretty awesome video):

    Judas Priest – “Painkiller”

    And, yes, that first solo is over a minute long!

  • Debating the bomb

    Apparently some people never get tired of arguing about whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified. Happily, though, there is a link there to G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr Truman’s Degree” in its entriety, which I don’t think I’ve been able to find on the web before now.

    I mean, look: in terms of traditional moral theology Anscombe is absolutely right. The bombings were murder plain and simple. The only way I can see to defeat this is by abandoning deontological considerations and making some kind of consequentialist argument that the bombings were justified, which is what defenders usually do. You also get the rare bird who actually denies that there were any “civilians” in the morally relevant sense at those targets, not seeming to realize that this repugnant doctrine would license virtually any act of terrorism since civilians can always plausibly be held to be “contributing to the war effort” if you define that broadly enough.

  • The political is the personal

    Two recent articles talking about the difficulty of being in relationships with people where sharp political differences are involved: a gay conservative writer for the New Republic writes about being dumped by his liberal boyfriend, and a guy writes to Salon‘s Cary Tennis about how he can’t stand to be around his Republican parents. I think I also recall a NY Times piece a while back about realtionships being strained on account of the partisan tensions of the Bush era.

    When my wife and I first started dating our politics were pretty far apart, but I think we’ve actually come to agree about more things as we’ve been married. I’m not sure who’s yielded more ground, though! And it took me a while to figure out that when arguing about politics with your spouse, you don’t necessarily want to go for the jugular, i.e. the way you argue can be just as important as what you’re saying. I was kind of clueless about this because when I was in college my best friends and I used to have rowdy no-holds-barred arguments about politics, religion, you name it, infused by that undergraduate willingness to follow an idea wherever it led.

    These days I usually find myself in polite (mostly liberal) circles where it’s either assumed that everyone agrees about most things or at the very least that no one wants to start a fight. Which is fair enough! There’s a time and place for everything, and the neighbor’d backyard barbeque may not be the place for a verbal throwdown over the Iraq war or abortion. But I do occasionally miss those epic battles of yore.

    In some ways I think genuine closeness allows for more frank disagreement. You can speak your mind more freely with someone that you know already accepts you. You’re not as worried about appearing as a person with the “correct” views on everything.

    But it does seem that there could be “deal-breakers,” though what they are will obviously vary from person to person. The writer of the Boston Globe piece linked above couldn’t understand why his liberal boyfriend couldn’t abide his support for the GOP. But it’s not tough to see that a gay man might take the GOP’s record on gay rights pretty personally: how do you have a relationship with someone who supports a political party that, in your view, is trying to deny you fundamental rights? Whether that’s a fair argument or not, it’s not difficult to see why someone might feel that strongly about it. On the other hand, most people won’t be moved to quite the same heights of passion by, say, the farm bill or tax credits.

    So, how about you? Do you have friends, relatives, spouses, lovers with whom you disagree strongly about politics? How do you negotiate those differences? Heated arguments? Friendly ribbing? Polite silence? Are there “deal-breaker” issues where you couldn’t see yourself in a relationship or friendship with someone who took the opposing view?

  • Libertarians and animal rights

    Jim Henley asked for a libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws here. Other libs have chimed in here and here.

    As it happens, I was recently reading an article by Stephen R. L. Clark called “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” (The Monist, Vol. 70:1, Jan. 1987) where he tries to articulate a rationale for protecting animals (and ecosystems) that arises out of liberal/libertarian ethic.

    We’ve already seen that Clark is something of an anarcho-conservative, and here he takes the tack of showing that a concern for libertarian style rights is by no means incompatible with concern for animal rights.

    What Clark suggests is, in essence, that we can’t assume that the differences between humans and animals are so great that the former always have a full complement of rights while the latter have none:

    First, it is implausible to claim that the only evil done in imprisoning, tormenting and killing even a rational agent is that we thereby interfere with her moral choices: much of the evil is simply that we do what she does not want done. That evil is also done if our victim is non-rational, not morally autonomous. What difference does it really make whether or not she has or could have a principled objection to our behaviour? If she has no will in the matter I do not violate her will, but I clearly violate her wishes.

    Secondly, what ground have we got to make so radical a distinction between wishes and the will, between the desires and projects of a nonhuman or sub-normal human and the principled will of a rational agent? Why should it be supposed that I make my claims upon the world as a carefully moral being, in some way that a non-rational being could not manage? “A cat who is being hurt will struggle, scratch and try to bite. Why is not this a claiming of its rights?” (Sprigge 1984 p. 442). Why isn’t a blackbird claiming his rights when he proclaims his territorial possession? What is lacking in too much discussion of these questions is any serious attention to what ‘animals’ are like, and what evidence there is for the vast difference in nature that humanists like [H.J.] McCloskey must conceive. It is quite inadequate to appeal to current English linguistic usage, as if that settled the question. If it is wrong (not merely imprudent) to batter human infants this may be partly because it seems likely to interfere with their future projects, but it is chiefly wrong because they do not like it, nor would they like its further consequences if they knew of them. The same wrong is done in battering baboons: who could imagine that baboons don’t mind?

    It follows, if the abstract argument for natural human rights must be extended to allow similar rights to other agents (even if not strictly ‘moral’ agents), that our property rights in non-human animals must often be suspect. A right that licenses the violation of a right is no right at all, and ‘self-owning’ is a category more widely extended than we had thought. A being ‘owns itself if its behaviour is the product of its own desires and beliefs, if it can locate itself within the physical and social world, and alter its behaviour to take account of other creature’s lives and policies (see Clark 1981). This, I take it, is [Tom] Regan’s concept of what it is to be ‘the subject of a life’, not merely living (1983 p. 243). Such self-owners are, in the relevant sense, equals, and a just, liberal society cannot allow them to be owned by others, even if it allows them to be employed on terms not strictly of their own making.

    The libertarian argument is that “self-owners” have the right not to be arbitrarily subjected to the will of another. Clark’s contention is that “self-owner” covers a wider range of creatures than just human beings. This is essentially a version of the so-called argument from marginal cases: it’s very difficult to specify a set of criteria for whatever morally important category you like (self-owner, person, rational agent, etc.) that includes all and only human beings. Either it will be drawn so narrowly as to exclude some classes of humans, or it will be drawn so widely that at least some non-human animals count.

    What’s noteworthy is that a lot of libertarians seem to want to maintain the traditional status of human beings as sole rights-bearers without the metaphysics to back it up. An Aristotelian worldview that insisted on big bright distinctions between natural kinds might be able to provide support for this view, as might some religious views. But a world of evolutionary development where living things exist along a continuum without sharp breaks seems to sit more comfortably with the idea of a continuum of moral rights.

    Clark’s distinction between animals being “owned” and being “employed on terms not strictly of their own making” injects some fuzziness into thinking about what might actually be entailed by all this. Is there a sense in which animals could be said to “consent” to at least some of the relationships that have evolved between them and human beings? Could domestication be understood as somehow analogous to the entering into of a partnership? Wherever we draw that line, though, some forms of wanton cruelty would seem to be easily ruled out. Also, I might add, would things like factory farming: an arrangement which is extremely difficult to see any animal “consenting” to in however attenuated a sense we can come up with.

  • Faith on the farm

    The New York Times looks at a variety of religiously-motivated farmers concened with good stewardship, humane treatment of animals, and fair treatment of farm workers.

    It’s always tough to know how widespread the phenomena discussed in these kinds of “trend” stories actually are, but it’s heartening to think that “environmentalism” is no longer a dirty word even among some very conservative religious believers. I think this may well be a function of age; an older generation of religious leaders may have dismissed environmental concerns as inimical to our glorious system of “free enterprise” or even condemned it as a kind of ersatz religion, but younger believers don’t seem to be carrying that baggage:

    “Food and the environment is the civil rights movement for people under the age of 40,” said the Rev. John Wimberly, pastor of the Western Presbyterian Church in Washington.