What Was Her Name?

 

Had a bad night awake brooding last night. Probably mostly just Monday blahs. Another week begins, and no sense of progress; just treading water. Just the same damned thing over and over. I began thinking, “What’s the point of a world in which the Holocaust happened?” And I truly believe it could happen again, is happening again. There are several holocausts ongoing: abortion, “mental illness.” We see the growing scapegoating and persecution of “whites,” males, Christians, Catholics, Asians, Jews.

I look at the present Canadian government: to my mind, obviously corrupt, incompetent, and plain evil, and yet voted in three times as if everything is fine…

When we were young, or at least when I was, we imagined we could make the world better. We haven’t. Or if we have, here and there, the incremental change does not seem to justify a life. 

So what’s it all about? Having kids, doing your best for them, and passing on the flame of life? Cockroaches do as much.

Feeling somewhat cheerier by this afternoon. Two conclusions. 

First, this word is not supposed to be a nice place. This is the valley of tears. Our principal job is to just forge on, trying to do what is right. Anybody who is cheerful in this world has no heart.

Second, for some reason I thought of a girl I went to high school with. I probably haven’t thought of her for forty years. Not my girlfriend; the girlfriend of a friend of mine. But he went off to sea for a year, joined the merchant marine, and she started to make a play for me. Then my family moved to Gananoque, and that ended that.

I never loved her then. As I said, I have barely thought of her since. I backed off, not wanting to betray my friend. And yet now she comes to mind, and thinking of her is oddly consoling.

She was not good looking. Her politics were nuts; she thought the ideal form of government would be a benevolent dictatorship. It would be, too, if there were any way to get a benevolent dictator into power, but there isn’t. Her politics were dangerously unrealistic. But she was a brilliant artist.

And thinking of her consoled me. Why? I was not sure at first. But I conclude that she was an example of a worthwhile life and a worthwhile attitude. Regardless of anything else, relentlessly, we can, do, should, and must find our meaning in the creation of beauty. In any way we can. 

Moreover, these two thoughts twine together. Beauty comes from sorrow. Beauty justifies sorrow.

RIP RBG

The notorious RBG is with us no more. May she be with the angels.

I find the news depressing. For this reason. This was a brilliant women; a woman of herculean determination, drive, and physical courage. She dedicated her life to a cause, the cause of left-wing judicial activism. She died still thinking of that cause, and not of her own imminent destination. Her dying wish, I hear, was that the vacancy not be filled by Donald Trump.

And it all looks to me like a useless, hollow life. Because the cause to which she committed it was wrong, and fairly obviously wrong. In fact, the sum total of her efforts made things worse.

And isn’t this true of most of us? Even the most brilliant of us? What is the point of all the talents we have, and all the efforts we make, if we begin from faulty premises? Isn’t it essential that we first make sure we have that right? Yet few of us seem to seriously think about those premises.

And nothing in our society, and our educational system, encourages any more any such introspection, at any level and at any point. Rather, they are discouraged. We are all in some all-fired rush to fill up time and go nowhere.

No doubt Ginsberg thought she had the right direction, and the right answers. It seems to me obvious that she did not, and I think it should have been obvious to her too that she should have doubted. For she could see that others as intelligent and committed were working as hard as she was on the other side, in case after case. And really, in order to get where she was, she had to refuse herself the time necessary to think such fundamental things through. Too busy throughout getting into that law school, getting that next credential, arguing that next case. Maybe also getting that nice house in that prestigious neighbourhood.

All for nothing, and less than nothing.

In case you, gentle reader, despair, and suppose there are no fundamental answers to be found, indeed there are, and they are closer than your own outgoing breath.

Seek the True.

Seek the Good.

Seek the Beautiful.

Trapped in a World You Never Made?

What, after all, is the meaning of life?

The common (post)modern stance is that we do not know. We wander our wasteland, waiting for Godot, and Godot does not show.

Some say the meaning of life is 42. Good joke. We are less than laboratory rats.

Or it is up to each of us to simply invent or construct a meaning. As if it were possible to immaculately conceive meaning from meaninglessness, something from nothing.

This sad conception has led to ugly things. It seems to me that it has led to the present cancel culture, rampant censorship, unfriending, shouting down those with whom we disagree. Everyone is losing all their friends. Many are losing livelihoods. To do such things amounts to spiritual murder: when we stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to listen, we are declaring the other a non-person. And it leads on an unwavering trajectory to actual physical murder, perhaps on a mass scale.

For what, after all, can we do, if we have invented our meaning by some act of will, and it conflicts with the next guy’s meaning? As it inevitably will. There is no higher authority to which to appeal. So there is no way to settle the conflict but to pretend he or she does not exist; to silence them; or to eliminate them.

At the same time, from the same cause, at least in the developed world, indications are that the incidence of “mental illness,” and suicide, and death by overdose, alcohol, or “accident,” is growing by spiraling upward seven-league strides.

We have gotten ourselves into a dark place, with this notion that life has no meaning.

Is it right? Is it all Godot’s fault?

It is worth pointing out that life does have meaning. At least, everyone thought it did until quite recently. Until the early 20th century, the meaning of life was uncontroversial. And no, it did not depend on anyone’s particular sect or religion.

The meaning of life was to seek the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This was understood by the ancient Greek philosophers, and did not change with the coming of the great monotheisms—except that they called the ultimate Good, Truth, and Beauty “God.”

As did the Hindus, independently. Classifying in terms of the human experience of God as opposed to God’s own qualities, they arrived at a similar trinity: Sat, Cit, Ananda, roughly translating as Truth, Consciousness, and Bliss. Bliss describes the aesthetic experience, and corresponds to Beauty. “Consciousness” corresponds to the Good—morality is at base the awareness of the independent consciousness of others, treating another as an independent sentient being instead of a thing.

But, you say, there is no Truth, just as there is no God. You have sought and sought, and found none.

Let us point out first that that claim is contradictory. “There is no truth” is a claimed truth. Of course, if true, it is false.

All you can say, then, is that you have not yet found truth; you cannot claim you know there is none. And if you do say there is none, of course, you are not looking.

Were you ever really looking? Speaking from my experience, those who claim to be such perennial seekers of Truth are those who recoil most dramatically from anyone who claims to have found Truth. Religious believers, most notably. This is contradictory: they seem to dismiss out of hand the possibility that anyone has found Truth. If so, they cannot really be looking for it.

It seems to me that the claim that they cannot find Truth is also easily and trivially disproven. If you insist you have found no truth, are you really prepared to deny the Pythagorean theorem, or that 2 + 2 = 4? Are you prepared to ignore the Law of Gravity in your own daily actions?

But, you will say, if there is Truth, there is no Good. Morality is just what each society agrees on: it is “socially constructed.”

That leaves you with no possible argument that Hitler did anything wrong. He was, after all, the duly elected social authority. You similarly have no argument against such cultural practices as child sacrifice, slavery, or widow burning.

To the contrary, Kant has shown that the moral imperative is self-evident and beyond question. It is enshrined, almost word for word, in all known moral codes: do to others as you would have them do. Respect other sentient beings.

You will then say, at least, that there is no Beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We all know that much.

This is a consolation for physically ugly people like me; we all know it is not really true. While not everyone will find a given thing beautiful, results of a survey will be far from random. Balance, harmony, clarity, seem to be consistent elements. We say that beauty fades, or is often a matter of trickery; but then we mean gross physical beauty, not the Beauty referred to as transcendental. The beauty of art is something else, and does not trick or fade.

Next you will say, but why are these three qualities, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, to be valued? The question cannot really be answered, because their value is self-evident. It is in our ROM. Rather, we determine the value of all other things by the degree to which they are either good and useful, true, or beautiful. Posit, if you like, a divine programmer. There is a point beyond which, in self-knowledge, we cannot go.

How then did we get so knocked off the path in modern times? Why are we sleeping in ditches in Eliot’s Waste-Land?

I can only speculate. I think it was and is a disease of the Humanities. Before the Enlightenment, knowledge was unified by religion; theology was the queen of the sciences. The first schools and the first universities, everywhere, were religious institutions. This is true in Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or Confucian lands. It is universal. Knowledge therefore had a plot and a direction.

With the success in the West over the last few centuries of empirical science, it gained such prestige that it tended to supplant religion and philosophy as the perceived centre of knowledge: now physics and not theology was the queen of the sciences.

For all its impressive success, science does not work well in this role. It is not possible to unify all knowledge on physical terms; most of the real world and of real human experience is on the metaphysical, spiritual plane. We are more than robots with sensing organs.

With the growing prestige of the sciences, the Humanities, over the past two hundred years or more, have been struggling to be “scientific.” This has spawned the “social sciences.” Yet as is increasingly apparent with each generation, every attempt to put the human world on a scientific basis has failed. It must always necessarily fail. Marxism seemed promising, but was wrong. Freudianism was wrong. Behaviourism was wrong. Chomsky was wrong. Keynes was wrong.

All this while physical sciences were building towers and bridges, arcing from strength to strength. No surprise if it was demoralizing. The Humanities/Social Sciences are depressed.

Yet rather than realizing or admitting that they have been hunting in the wrong place with the wrong dogs, scholars in the humanities/social sciences have thrown up their hands and said, increasingly since the Second World War, “There is no truth.” “There is no meaning.” This is the sin of acedia, of spiritual sloth, of despair.

They have then extended this to empirical science as well. It is just not tolerable to accept that science has truth, and they do not. This is the sin of pride; for acedia and pride are interlinked.

But you, gentle reader, need not be so misled. You need not retreat into some personal “reality,” some cherished hallucination, whether drug-induced or otherwise. And you need not then murder your neighbour to maintain it.

Wake up. Smell coffee. Seek truth.

The Simple Law of Love

A Wall Street Journal article speculated on a Third Great Awakening as a result of this virus.

Yet if God sent this virus as a means to shake and wake, I fear He has more work to do.

It’s incredibly simple, really. The meaning of life is to seek the truth, the good, and the beautiful.

But most people avoid or deny the truth, have little sensitivity to beauty and deny there is such a thing as the good.

All that is arbitrary, “culturally conditioned.” Truth is just a matter of opinion. Evil just a matter of a “misunderstanding.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I have written here before of the simplicity of truth.

The good is even simpler.

It is love.

Jesus gave it as “Love God with your whole heart and your whole mind; and love your neighbour as yourself.” St. Augustine shortened it to “love, and do what you will.”

Love means you seek the best for the other. Just as you would for yourself.

It is simple enough to grasp that anyone who pretends not to get it must surely be lying.

They get it; they do not want to do it.

Waiting for Godot

We imagine ourselves as Vladimir or Estragon, wandering aimlessly through our modern-postmodern wasteland wondering why Godot has not yet come.

It is a damnable lie.

Godot—God—has no reason to hide from us. Remember the story of the Garden of Eden. It was Adam and Eve who hid from him.

We are only conning ourselves that we are looking for him. If he were to appear, we would crucify Him.

The wasteland is our protective shell of lies, that keeps us from having to think. Then we can go about our daily lives untroubled, worrying only about in which ditch to sleep. It is the matrix; it is the idolatry we have inherited from our parents.

We find any sincere quest for truth profoundly threatening. Leave aside Jesus; Socrates was executed for asking too many questions.

We would rather believe the obvious nonsense of Marxism, long ago disproven; or of Freudianism, long ago disproven; of postmodernism, or existentialism, or for that matter of “Hallelujah Chorus” Christianity, which obviously contradicts the gospel, but looks easier. There are many such idols of the tribe. The one thing they have in common is a denial of moral concerns.

Here’s the plain truth. God is both omnipotent and benevolent. He will hide nothing. All it takes is a sincere quest for the truth, and truth begins to be apparent. “Seek and ye shall find.”

This is why Descartes was able to conclude that anything we perceive with clarity and distinctness must be true.

Of course God would not have abandoned us in some wasteland without direction.

Here’s how simple it is: the point of life is to seek truth, and the good, and beauty. As soon as you seek truth, you have found it, because the sincere effort to find truth is the essential truth of life. As soon as you seek good, you have found it, for the sincere effort to be good is the essential good. As soon as you seek beauty, you have found it, for the quest for beauty is the most beautiful of stories.

As Vladimir might well have mumbled to Estragon, “Now where did I put my nose? I’m sure I left it around here someplace…”

The Meaning of Life

We are born naked and bawling.

Why are we here?

What’s the point?

Where’s the manual?

It’s to achieve “success,” right? You want to be a “success in life.”

Okay, so what is success?

“Success: noun. The accomplishment of an aim or purpose.”

Wait a minute. That’s circular. So if I decide my only aim is to keep my belly button clean, I have more or less guaranteed myself a great life?

Welcome to Buddhism 101.

Yet this seems too simple. This seems, in the end, utterly pointless.

Some—most—define success more specifically, as acquiring significant wealth, or social status. But doesn’t that, too, seem ultimately pointless? Wealth beyond a certain point is just a symbol, because what it can do to change your life is limited. And, whatever it can do to change your life, studies show that it does not, really does not, bring happiness.

It tends to cost friends. Either they envy you, or they want money from you. You never know if they really care for you, or just want the money.

What does it do that makes it worth a life?

Striving for social status seems even worse: it means living your life in someone else’s eyes. It is like being a ghost. Those who achieve fame, supposedly the pinnacle of this, tell us it is not an enjoyable thing. You are no longer your own.

But wait. Isn’t the answer implicit here? We speak of money or fame not bringing happiness. Isn’t the real goal, then, the pursuit of happiness?

No.

Looks good for a moment, but no. Isn’t that, too, ultimately meaningless? Not that there is no clear formula for achieving it. Not that one cannot even experience happiness, it seems, except in contrast with sadness, making a quest for happiness seem like chasing one’s tail. That is all true; but more importantly, happiness itself seems trivial and selfish. Okay, so you are happy, with lots of hot sex and a Marguerita balanced rakishly on your gut, for seventy or eighty years; then you die. Was that life meaningful? And is it right, is it worthy of human dignity, to even be happy so long as you know a lot of people in the world are suffering?

Pigs are happy like that, perhaps, but not people.

So what’s the point? Is it all vanity?

It was actually all worked out by the ancient Greek philosophers: by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. There are certain things that are indisputable, self-evident values in themselves, of absolute consequence. These, therefore, are the things we are here to seek. These are the good (the moral right), the true, and the beautiful. Wasting time pursuing anything else, beyond necessity, is losing the game. Every thing else is a cul de sac.

If our culture and civilization is currently in a morass, it is because we have lost this direction.

Not incidentally, the perfection of the good, the true, and the beautiful is God. As God is by definition a perfect and supreme being, he must be perfectly good, perfectly true, and perfectly beautiful. Moreover, each instance of truth, goodness, or beauty is a glimpse of His being. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light”: I am the good, the true, the beautiful.

And so, put another way, our ultimate goal in life is to find and become closer to God. To find and follow the way, the good; to seek and say the truth, the real; to seek and to make beauty.

Welcome to the human race. Now at least you know the rules.

There is a fourth element: the motive power. The seeking. What is the natural vigour that impels us to these values? That fourth element, as fundamental then as the others, is love. One must love the good, absolutely. One must love the truth, absolutely. One must love beauty, absolutely. One must worship no false gods before them.

Hence the first commandment: to love God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole mind. Mind for the truth, heart for the good, soul for beauty.

If you cannot do that, if you do not do that, you cannot love anyone other than God either. Nobody who does not love the truth can really love another human. I am not sure why this is so; but I know it is so. Nor can anyone who does not love good, or does not love beauty, love another human. You might want to own them, or have sex with them, or get something from them, but you do not love them.

Anyone who loves the good, the true, and the beautiful, loves God. He or she is a Christian, whether they have ever heard the name “Jesus” or not. The name is not important; it is not even his real name. The man would not have responded to the name “Jesus” if hailed on the streets of Jerusalem. It is the cosmic Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Light, to which we must turn for salvation.

Anyone who does not love with full heart the good, the true, and the beautiful does not love God or Jesus, and is not a Christian, whatever words they use. And does not love any man, whatever words they use. And has failed in the race.

My Five Favourite Things About Being Catholic

Catholic Link recently challenged its readers to list the five things that make them happiest about being Catholic. If anyone out there is wondering why I am Catholic, I too have my reasons. I was raised Catholic, so there's that. On the other hand, I studied world religions for some years, so it is not as though I just signed on without thinking about the issue. My adherence to Catholicism is not at all a rejection of other faiths. I have warm spots in my heart, in particular, for Judaism and Buddhism. But in the end, I do figure, if God wanted me to be anything else, he would have had me born into that tradition. Assuming God loves us all, and all equally, he would not put some of us in a significantly worse position in trms of salvation. Once you start out on one path or another, switching paths sets you back; you have to start at the beginning again, learning it all anew. Unless there is something definitely wrong with the tradition you were raised in, it seems unwise to switch. And one more thing: switching faiths can easily be a way to dodge the hard bits. I think I see this again and again, among those who do. They dislike something about their tradition, usually something it requires them to do that goes against their perceived self-interest. So they switch to another faith that does not require it. Then, if they sincerely get involved in their new faith, they soon find that it requires something else that seems to go against their self-interest. The process continues, and no spiritual progress is made.

But that is not exactly the question. It is, what makes me happy about being Catholic. And I am happy about being Catholic. Here are some reasons.

1. Upon This Rock.

Most academic disciplines are subject to fashions; they are trendy as can be. For twenty years, one theory is dominant, and then it is supplanted by another. Do we get any closer to truth? It sure does not look like it.

If so, in the quest for truth, the whole thing ends up being a waste of time. And the quest for truth is what we are here for.

The hard sciences might at first look better. They certainly seem to be building something. But what? All we know is that we have a model that produces results closely resembling the truth. Is this truth? Philosophically, we do not really know. And everything in science is properly a theory, subject to being overturned at any moment. What seems true now may be disproven tomorrow. Moreover, the useful subject matter of science is trivial. It can only deal well with physical objects. It is entirely possible, philosophically, that the physical world as a whole is an illusion, or nothing like what we perceive it to be.

So we are building on sand.

Philosophically, the only way we can know anything as truth is divine revelation. Only God knows for certain what is true. Therefore, you need at least a claim of divine revelation to have any hope of discovering truth. Moreover, if there is a God, he would have done this. It is simply a matter of where it is.

So if a body of truth is not at least claimed to be divinely revealed, it is of no known value.

The Catholic Church does claim that its truth is divinely revealed. Of course, a claim is not proof, and other bodies claim the same for their truths.

However, if God loves us, he would not have hidden the truth. He would have put it out there in plain sight. Catholicism is the most obvious vehicle: the biggest denomination, indeed organization of any kind. Moreover, its doctrines have not changed for two thousand years. Or more, for much of it, if you include what is revealed in the Old Testament. These truths have in the meantime been endorsed and clarified and extrapolated from by the best minds in Europe.

So with Catholicism I am standing on a solid rock, something the gates of hell have never prevailed against.

Protestantism, to the extent that it differs from Catholicism, propounds doctrines only five hundred years old at most, and even in those five hundred years, they do not seem to have held up well. Protestantism keeps fragmenting into novel doctrines, and established Protestant groups keep discarding or changing doctrine. Judaism, Hinduism, or Buddhism can claim to be older than Catholicism, but their doctrines are more diverse and internally debatable.

As an intellectual enterprise, in the end, Catholicism is the only game in town. Anything else is wasting your life.

2. One Holy Catholic Church

When I go to a Catholic mass, in Canada or just about anywhere else, I meet people of all ethnicities. The point used to be even stronger, back in the days when the Mass was in Latin wherever it was. But even so, Catholicism is transnational in a way no other religion is, with the possible exception of Islam. If you are a Jew or a Hindu, I have a pretty good chance of guessing your ethnicity. So too if you are an Anglican, or a Lutheran, or a Mormon. The orthodox churches are organized by nationality: Sofia has Bulgarian Orthodox churches, of course, but also a separate Russian Orthodox church and a Romanian Orthodox church. Within US Protestantism, there are “black denominations.” But if you are Catholic, you could be Italian, or Irish, or Polish, or African, or Filipino, or Peruvian, or Lebanese, or anything else, at just about equal odds. And we all attend the same mass, together.

Ethnicity and nationalism is, on the whole, a pernicious influence that divides us. Religion ought to be an antidote, promoting the brotherhood of man. Catholicism most clearly embodies that ideal.

Most other religious, in practice, segregate by ethnicity, implicitly and by example making religion and universal brotherhood secondary to politics and tribalism.

Almost as disturbingly, telling me your religious denomination often tells me something about your income, education level, or class. Telling me you are Anglican or Episcopalian says one thing; saying you are Pentecostal or Jehovah's Witnesses says sometyhinge else. Catholicism seems uniquely untethered to a class. It appeals equally, it seems, to aristocrats and peasants. And either are equal in worship. If you say you are a Catholic, similarly, I cannot tell whether you have a Ph.D., indeed, are one of the greatest minds of the ages, or mentally deficient. Good Catholics might be either. This is a kind of proof of Catholicism. God loves us all. His own religion would not favour the very bright, but would have all they need at the same time.

3. Join the Club

The Catholic Church is the largest human organization of any kind, and the oldest. As a human being, why would you not want to be part of it? Stay out, and you are out of the human mainstream; you are not part of the conversation. Stay out, and you are in a way rejecting the largest single proportion of your fellow men, living and dead. Are they all wrong? Are they all damned? It almost amounts in itself to misanthropy.

4. A Reliable Moral Guide

Back in the early seventies, one after another, human institutions seemed to be bowing to the sexual revolution and accepting, or even endorsing, abortion. I am sorry, but this was always obviously a moral wrong. Pope Paul VI and the Catholic Church appeared to be the only voices clearly and loudly saying this was not okay—as it obviously, to my conscience, wasn't. I knew at the time that they would suffer for it, and they have ever since.

By this, the Catholic Church demonstrated to me that it was a reliable moral guide, and perhaps the only reliable moral guide available in the social sphere. Everyone else, including other denominations, seems to be primarily about politics. They wait to see what the polls say, and reshape their own positions in light of them. If the majority was in favour of Jew-burning, they would soon be for Jew-burning. So long as the money kept dropping on the collection plate.

Only the Catholic Church seems to sincerely believe what they are saying, and to be bringing God's message to man.

It is ironic that Catholicism keeps getting knocked for supposedly not speaking out strongly enough against Hitler, or against slavery, or against the Spanish Inquisition, or this or that, when historically, they were invariably the lone group speaking out against any of these things. No doubt, eventually, they will be condemned for not speaking out strongly enough against abortion.

But there are pastoral reasons they are not more forceful than they are, as well. The Church is not here to end sin, which is not possible, but to forgive it. The important thing is to be a reliable moral guide.

5. Oh Ancient Beauty! Too Late Have I Loved You!

Plato had it right when he enumerated the three essential objects of human life: the true, the good, and the beautiful. As perfect being, God must combine in himself perfect truth, perfect goodness, and perfect beauty. We tend to forget door three. But a being that is not perfectly beautiful is not perfect.

Have you not had an aesthetic experience? Is there any thing you know closer to a direct experience of the divine?

And yet, a good proportion of the world's religions not only overlook beauty as an aspect of the divine; they actually condemn it. Protestantism, especially Calvinism, Islam, Judaism to some extent. This has to be wrong. Aside from denying one third of the divine nature, it gives the Devil, as has been said of Milton, all the best lines. Beauty untied from morality and truth, agreed, exerts a dangerous glamour. But the obvious solution is not to untie it from morality and truth; it is to bind all three tight.

Catholicism is not alone in its appreciation of beauty—Hinduism and Taoism are also strong in this regard. But Catholicism has a pretty good track record in the arts. You get Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, Caravaggio, all those ninja turtles. You get Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, and the boys. Western art stacks up very well against art from any other part of the world, and Western art is paradigmatically Catholic. Even in majority Protestant countries, art is mostly the Catholic contribution. Name a famous English poet: discover another Catholic. Pope, Dryden, Yeats, Shakespeare, the Celtic fringe: poetry in English is almost always a Catholic avocation. When Milton is not giving choice lines to the Devil. Name a famous German composer: discover another Austrian, which is to say, another Catholic.

The lack of beauty is a critical deficit in, for example, American culture. All those cities with ugly names, laid out in a sensible grid pattern, or worse, spaghetti roads to reduce traffic, each home identical to the next, everything with only practicality in mind. (On the other hand, greatest American visual artist: Andy Warhol. Catholic. Best American playwrights: Tennessee Williams, Eugene ONeill. Catholics. Best American novelist: Ernest Hemingway. Catholic. And just get startedd on actors and directors...). Much of English culture too seems deliberately ugly. When I was young and living in Catholic Montreal, the thought of moving to Protestant Ontario seemed a fate worse than death. It still does, actually, aside from the distinctively Irish and Highland Scottish settlements, which are indeed beautiful. And Catholic. But Oshawa, Brampton, Sudbury, Scarborough, Kitchener? Surely any fully human heart recoils.

One annoying symptom of the failure to appreciate beauty is the eternal complaint that the Catholic Church is “rich,” and all that art should be sold off to help the poor. As if the only purpose of art is as a financial investment.

Sinulog 2012

The Philippines is pretty poor. But Cebuanos live for the annual Sinulog festival, during which teams dress in wildly colourful costumes and perform dances in the street. I have seen it. It is so beautiful, it brings tears to your eyes. The intent of the fiesta is religious, in celebration of the Christ Child, and it is indeed an intense religious experience.

God made man in his own image, and formed him out of clay. Which is to say, forming things out of clay is acting in God's image, fulfilling his design for us. We are to take the raw materials he gave us, the clay of the material world, and create; he is a creator God.

If we are not doing this, then we are, as Milton has been accused of being, “of the Devil's party without knowing it.”

The Narrow Way

This piece by Captain Capitalism confirms my own experience completely. Real life is off the beaten track every time.

On Solving the World's Problems

St. Michael the Archangel

Everyone ought to have a leftist friend—or, if you are yourself of the left, a rightist friend. Without one, how do you know what the other side really thinks? And, if you do not know what they think, how do you know whether you really disagree?

The trick is staying friendly. Sadly, most people these days don’t talk with those on the other side of the culture wars; that is what happens when it becomes a kind of war. I think abortion made it a war; it is now hard to be a leftist without being consciously immoral. And it is hard to be sanguine about the difference between right and wrong.

I am lucky enough, though, to have more than one friend who is on the left and who is still speaking to me. One of them recently presented me with what seems a, maybe the, fundamental argument for leftism generally.

Here it is, in point form:

1. We imagine heaven as a place without wars, without armies or weapons, of perfect equality, where nobody dominates anyone else.
2. If we can imagine this in heaven, we can imagine it on earth.
3. If it is imaginable, it is possible.
4. Therefore, we ought to work to make earth like this.

Sounds good, on the face of it. And this seems to me to raise some important and interesting points.

First, can we really imagine heaven as a place without wars?

St. James

I think not.

Those who have read the Bible will be aware that it indeed speaks of a “war in heaven.” St. Michael and all that. Revelation 12: 7-9, inter alia.

This is usually thought of as happening in the primordial past; but in fact, in Revelations, it is also reported as a future event, part of the end times. Jesus also speaks, cryptically, of “the violent taking heaven by storm” (Matthew 11:2) at the time of the New Testament.

And, at the end of the Book of Revelations, when the New Jerusalem, the ultimate image of the perfection of the created world, descends from the sky… it has walls. “It had a great, high wall with twelve gates” (Revelations 21:12). There is no point to a walled city if there is no threat of war.

St. John sees the New Jerusalem descend from heaven.

So the matter is clear. Not only has there been war in heaven, but war is an eternal feature of heaven. There was war in heaven before Adam and Eve, and there will be war in heaven at the end of time.

And there are armies in heaven. God is “Lord of Hosts,” “The Lord who commands armies” (Isaiah 6:5).

Is there free will in heaven? Of course; there has to be; it would not be heaven if we lost our free will in getting there. But so long as there is free will, there is the chance of choosing evil. Ask, not only Lucifer, but Adam and Eve, who chose evil in the very face of the beatific vision. Therefore, there can be and has been moral conflict in heaven. And, if there has ever been war in heaven, there is always war in heaven. That is the nature of things eternal.

Does the presence there of war make heaven less than heaven? No, just the reverse. Ask any decent storyteller. A story without conflict is dead. Would a heaven that is deadly boring be heaven? No.

Ergo, heaven without war is inconceivable. The difference with earth, I suspect, is that in heaven, as in a work of fiction, the participant, the reader or the fictional character, never really gets hurt.

Is war in itself evil? Certainly not, if it is a clear contest between good and evil. It is not evil to fight evil, for that would be a contradiction in terms. While we have a moral obligation to avoid unjust war, it is too often forgotten that we have, equally, a moral obligation to engage in just war. It is pacifism, not war, that is objectively immoral.

Consider this too: how could a truly moral person be content sitting in heaven strumming a harp with the awareness that evil and suffering persisted in the created world below? Therefore, so long as there is ill-being on earth, there must also be conflict in heaven. Happiness would require continuing to fight in that war. Hence, of course, the Catholic doctrine of saints. And at the end of time? That is eternity, and eternity is not an absence nor an infinite extension of time; it is a point from which all times are equidistant. The war is still present.

So premise 1 in my friend’s argument is false.

But let’s not pass on without dealing as well with equality, since that is yet closer to the modern left’s bosom.

Here too, it is quite clear from the Bible that there is no equality in heaven. There is an elaborate hierarchy. There are ranks of angels, and levels of saints, with thrones, principalities, powers, some elders seated closer to the throne of God than others (Revelations 4:4), and so forth. When James and John ask for seats at Jesus’s left and right, he does not demand equality; he says that it is not for him to choose.

Really, equality in heaven is a strange idea. There is no equality with God, of course. Moreover, why would someone who was “no better than he should be” be equal in heaven to a Mother Teresa, an Oskar Schindler, or a John the Baptist, who demonstrate “heroic virtue”?

This is objectively unjust.

The idea that there should be equality in heaven, I gather, comes from a misunderstanding on the left of what political equality on earth means or ought to mean--a concept that itself comes from Christianity. It means everyone should get the same chances; not that everyone should get the same results. We understand and accept that when we put murderers in prison. Meritocracy is not opposed to true equality, but is its result. The absence of meritocracy is automatically inequality.

If heaven, or indeed social justice, is our aim, then, the left has it wrong. We should not be seeking a situation in which everyone gets the same salary, for example, but one in which everyone is rewarded according to their efforts. Just as in heaven. The whole concept of heaven and hell is of ultimate just rewards, not everyone ending up with the same result.

On to point 2 and 3: that what we can imagine in heaven, we can imagine on earth; and what is imaginable is possible. This is true in a sense, but trivial. The limits of what we can imagine are the limits of what we can imagine. And we cannot imagine anything that is logically or mathematically impossible. But we can imagine things that are impossible in practical terms, like flying pigs or the moon being made from green cheese.

Just so, anything we can imagine happening in a dream, we necessarily can imagine happening in waking life. But if I dream that I can fly, it is not necessarily a good idea to jump off a tall building the next morning.

In fact, recognizing this distinction is more or less definitive of sanity.

Practical circumstances in heaven and on earth might be somewhat different.

But let’s even allow points 1, 2, and 3. I think there is still a problem with point 4: that we ought to work to make earth more like heaven.

Actually, why? Couldn’t God manage it on his own? Isn’t he omnipotent and all? So why isn’t it perfect already?

In other words, it follows from God’s omnipotence that the world is as it is largely because it ought to be or must be so.

So should we change it? Are we sure?

It takes long and sober thought to understand what our proper role and purpose is here. To seek to remold the world to fulfill our desires is not obviously it; it might instead be an act of disobedience, of arrogance, and of selfishness. One thinks, first off, of the Tower of Babel. The builders sought to make something “whose top may reach unto heaven.” Bad idea. As bad as Eve’s similar plan “to be as God.”

Why are we here, then? Genesis suggests an answer: Genesis 2: 15. We were created to tend a garden. It is not our garden; we are just the gardeners.

And, at least at the creation, there was no need to work the garden for material sustenance; that came after the fall (Genesis 3:17-18). Though we have to do that now as well, that was not the purpose. It is not that kind of garden.

Now, if a gardener is not gardening for food, what is his purpose? What other kind of garden is there?

He is gardening for beauty. That is our mission: to change and adapt the natural world as and when this produces greater beauty. Pruning here, weeding there.

But not just beauty in the strictest sense. It is important to add, with Keats, that truth and moral good are both forms of beauty—the selfless good deed, the mathematical equation that elegantly solves the problem.

This may, but does not obviously or automatically, involve political action.