Comments on Schopenhauer's On Religion - A Dialog, continued

So the truth can only be expressed in philosophical prose. Religious mysteries, myths, allegories – translate, usually badly, these truths in a way that the weak of mind can understand in the best case, or replace them with a pack of consoling fantasies on the other. That is the disagreement between Schopenhauer’s protagonists.

    If Schopenhauer is right, if the very fact that reality only comes to us through experience, and experience is always conditioned by the senses, by the concepts of our language that depend on the senses, by the categories of time, space, and causality which make experience possible and which our mind contributes to experiences – if, in other words, by the very fact of experience we can only represent reality from a human point of view, if we can only know reality as it appears to us and not as it is in itself, then: anything we write about reality as it is in itself can only have a symbolic or analogical meaning. We can write about what is beyond us in the way we write or speak about the world that appears to us.  This is as true of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation as it is for the mythical parts of scripture.

     If we want to picture ultimate reality as beyond being and call that God, and picture his relation to us as that of a “father”, then that is a figurative use of language. I am a father. God as some understand him is not a literal father as I am. But in an experience that is either sublime (if an intimation of a reality beyond our concepts and senses, beyond the principle of sufficient reason, magical in a sense) or an example of consoling fantasy – and there is no empirical fact of the matter that confirms or refutes either possibility in general – the language used to express that experience can only be metaphorical (within Schopenhauer’s metaphysics). God, though transcendent to our categories of understanding, is felt in the deepest heart to be somewhat like the best human father in that his love for us, who have our being from “him” (another figurative use of language). We use something from our experience (fathers) to understand through projection something that is utterly beyond our experience based only on a sublime experience that somehow God is love – God again also having to clear reference. Based on either an intimation or a consoling fantasy to interpret a feeling through a metaphor.

    These feelings are radically personal, radically subjective, whether intimations of reality as it is in itself breaking through like a leak from another realm or consoling fantasy (no doubt such feelings usually are nothing but consoling fantasy but perhaps not always). That means that there is no way to decide between incommensurable feelings that seem sublime, at least no way that is not equally radically subjective. Schopenhauer could not conceive of my Christian images as being anything from consoling fantasy. The sublime feeling that gives sense to his metaphysics was no less subjective, however. Perhaps this passage, taken from The World as Will and Representation (vol. I), describes it:

And to this world, to this scene of tormented and agonised beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths; and in which the capacity for feeling pain increases with knowledge, and therefore reaches its highest degree in man, a degree which is the higher the more intelligent the man is; to this world it has been sought to apply the system of optimism, and demonstrate to us that it is the best of all possible worlds. The absurdity is glaring.

This feeling went deepest for Schopenhauer, as the feeling of love went deepest in a Christian. To go deep in one is to have the sense of making contact with a reality beyond our everyday experience, the reality of the world as it is in itself. Such sublime experiences are our only possible access to it. Schopenhauer’s metaphysics expresses truth as revealed by this experience of the world even as the Sermon on the Mound expresses truth as revealed by the experience of sublime grace or love for all of humanity.

     Both The World as Will and Representation and the teachings and parables of Jesus as well as the myths associated with his life use language in a new key, language. The very indeterminacy of the feeling, its joy or terror, the sense that it is a response to what goes deepest in life, the concomitant sense that the feeling expresses man’s relation to a transcendent reality whether called “God” or “Will” is captured in both metaphysical and mythical language. Both have a ‘meta’ character, the gap between the sublime feeling and the everyday world is symbolized by these different forms of language. Granted, it is harder to read a tome like Schopenhauer’s masterpiece. But the metaphysical philosophy – again, if we press it to its own conclusions – is no less symbolic than other works of art that attempt to picture sublime reality, reality transcendent to our everyday ways of experiencing and representing.

   So Lewis wrote: I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” This is what the expression of our deepest feelings and intimations of life in art, religion, or philosophy do for us: they make sense of reality as a whole, our experience of it, our place in it. They are analogous to the axioms of geometry in which sense: themselves unprovable, self-evident in a sense, they allow us to go on making deductions, understanding things. As Wittgenstein put it:

Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative with the belief appropriate to a historical narrative, – but: believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life. Here you have a narrative, – don’t take the same attitude to it as you do to other historical narratives! Make a quite different place in your life for it.

Now I  could paraphrase for Schopenhauer, who presents himself as a disciple of truth in the spirit of Socrates but in his life put forth his masterpiece that makes sense of his innermost feelings toward life

       The World as Will and Representation is not based on a scientific truth; rather it offers us a (metaphysical) narrative and says: now believe! Isn’t it just like this! Can’t you now grasp the meaning of the world!? If you are in tune with the picture of the world I lay out in the book, change your life! You are beyond the “veil of Maya” most people dwell in.

But whether a person will respond to Schopenhauer, The Sermon on the Mound, or some other interpretation of the world as such depends not on the intellect alone, but what (if anything) goes deepest in that person – which may or may not be in touch with reality as a whole. Ultimately it is what feels most real to the clear mind and heart that decides how to respond.

    Schopenhauer’s protagonists in On Religion – A Dialog make it seem like two physicists who understand Relativity and Quantum Theory discussing the truths of physics relative to the common folk for whom the sun still rises and whose world consists of everyday objects. That is a very misleading picture.

 

  I am not done. I still want to reflect on his dialog in light of Lewis’s statement that ““The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.”

Comments on Schopenhauer’s On Religion: A Dialog

 

Schopenhauer’s On Religion: A Dialog shows two friends (of sorts) discussing religion from different points of view: Philalethes (lover or friend of truth) and Demopheles (friend of the people, I think). Philalethes loves truth and has contempt for common people; Demopheles is an enlightened man but qualifies his contempt for illusions if they help the common people get through the day. Both assume that Christianity in particular, and the monotheistic religions in general, are not true: “a pack of lies” according to Philalethes; for Demopheles, they are “allegory.” I am not interested in the attitude toward the common people, who are incapable of philosophy and, indeed, are basically children who need comfort through stories. I don’t want to examine the idea that ordinary people are too limited to do philosophy or the role of priests in keeping culture in a primitive state; rather I want to reflect on the relation between religion and truth Schopenhauer has his two characters explore in this dialog.

 

     So here is Schopenhauer’s apologist for the common man, Demopheles, on the relation of religion to truth:

For, as your friend Plato has said, the multitude can't be philosophers, and you shouldn't forget that. Religion is the metaphysics of the masses; by all means let them keep it: let it therefore command external respect, for to discredit it is to take it away. Just as they have popular poetry, and the popular wisdom of proverbs, so they must have popular metaphysics too: for mankind absolutely needs an interpretation of life; and this, again, must be suited to popular comprehension. Consequently, this interpretation is always an allegorical investiture of the truth: and in practical life and in its effects on the feelings, that is to say, as a rule of action and as a comfort and consolation in suffering and death, it accomplishes perhaps just as much as the truth itself could achieve if we possessed it. Don't take offense at its unkempt, grotesque and apparently absurd form; for with your education and learning, you have no idea of the roundabout ways by which people in their crude state have to receive their knowledge of deep truths. The various religions are only various forms in which the truth, which taken by itself is above their comprehension, is grasped and realized by the masses; and truth becomes inseparable from these forms.

 

The people have no direct access to truth. The various religions are only various schemata in which the truth, which taken by itself is above their comprehension, is grasped and realized by the masses; and truth becomes inseparable from these forms.

 

But religion is not opposed to truth; it itself teaches truth. And as the range of its activity is not a narrow lecture room, but the world and humanity at large, religion must conform to the requirements and comprehension of an audience so numerous and so mixed. Religion must not let truth appear in its naked form; or, to use a medical simile, it must not exhibit it pure, but must employ a mythical vehicle, a medium, as it were.

 

The mythical, the mystical are understood as masks, ornaments – or perhaps to take something from Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, a “veil of Maya”, the world as seen not as it is but as distorted. But some truth can shine through the distortions – and that means the mythical elements: God, the angels, Christ as savior, life in heaven or hell after death, the immaculate conception and virgin birth, the resurrection: everything that Christianity means for most of the faithful. Throwing gasoline on the fires of the ego for Schopenhauer, giving the ego hope of everlasting life, of a God that has a good plan for it and will help it on its way, etc.  The mythical and mystical elements – the fairy tale elements, the supernatural elements – feed the ego while the diamond in the rough, the pure moral teaching, gets passed along with it, a diamond which usually gets lost.

     The disagreement between Schopenhauer’s protagonists involves the value of keeping what they both agree are the fantastic elements that constitute the core of religion. If they were understood to be allegories, Philalethes would have no problem with religion. Both agree that most people cannot grasp truth – they would need to grasp metaphysical philosophy, they would need to be able to grasp Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Myth, allegory can at best present an introduction to the truth for a child – much as a fable of Aesop can present a childlike or folk version of morality whose truth can only be intellectually understood in a treatise like Aristotle’s Nichomachaen Ethics. So the Christian stories give a child a way to grasp the truths contained in The Sermon on the Mound, which expresses the diamond in the rough.

     This misrepresents things in two ways. First, a metaphysical masterpiece like Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation has a lot more in common with myth and allegory than Schopenhauer allows his protagonists to admit. Schopenhauer claims that we have a metaphysical need – a need that comes with the knowledge of our mortality, the experience of the self as a separate and valuable being (from the species, from nature), and the experience of evil, of suffering. These and other facts of life give rise to the need to make sense of it all. Religions like Christianity or Hinduism as well as metaphysical philosophies such as presented in The World as Will and Representation give us interpretations of the world as a whole and our place in it.

      But on Schopenhauer’s own understanding, his vision of the world as a whole concerns a reality beyond human conceptual thought, beyond even the purest Ideas of reality. Thus in any attempt to interpret reality as a whole we run up against the limits of conceptual thought and representation. Schopenhauer’s philosophy contains an inherent tension: putting a vision of reality as a whole – by definition beyond thought and language of creatures bound to their experience and languages – in the language of philosophy. How can Schopenhauer’s work represent reality as a whole except symbolically – as language that represents the gap between a particular human interpretation and transcendent reality as it is in itself? He is trying to express in language what cannot be expressed in language – on his own account.

    Neither myth nor philosophy gives us a description of reality as it is in itself. At best, both can communicate an intimation of transcendence. Schopenhauer himself believes that such an intimation of transcendence is possible through the aesthetic contemplation afforded by (great) art. Great art – especially music, because it is non-conceptual, close to being non-representational – allows for a suspension of the individual will or as Iris Murdoch put it “the fat, relentless ego,” which Schopenhauer rightly interpreted as a suffering ego. It is like our ego (Schopenhauer’s principle of individuation, which is at the same time a veil of maya casting a distorting light onto the real world) is suspended when, in my case, I am lost in listening to a work of Bach, say the second movement of the Organ Sonata No. 4, like a solar eclipse. The light of the ego goes out and I can see the night stars beyond the everyday world i.e. I can feel the world as it is apart from my ego, my desires, wishes, striving, agendas, hopes, dreams, etc. I have an impersonal experience of reality sub specie aeternitatis, from the perspective of eternity i.e. not from the perspective of my distorting ego. It gives rise to a kind of compassion for the world itself and all the people in it - a feeling that has nothing to do with me. 

    Not all art can allow this prison break. Sentimental art idealizes and falsifies reality to feed the ego. Imagine a painting  called “Nostalgic Reverie.” "Nostalgic Reverie" is a painting that evokes a sentimental longing for the past, creating a romanticized depiction of reality that elicits a self-gratifying feeling in the viewer. The scene is set in a picturesque countryside, with rolling hills, lush greenery, and a quaint cottage nestled among trees. The sky is painted in soft hues of pink and orange, suggesting the warmth of a sunset. In the foreground of the painting, a young couple sits on a rustic wooden bench, holding hands and gazing lovingly into each other's eyes. A gentle breeze rustles the leaves of the trees, and the sound of birdsong fills the air, creating a sense of tranquility and serenity. The cottage in the background is adorned with blooming flowers and ivy-covered walls, exuding a sense of coziness and charm. Smoke rises from the chimney, suggesting the comfort of a warm hearth and home-cooked meal. The scene is imbued with a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality, inviting the viewer to escape into a romanticized vision of the past. As the viewer gazes upon "Nostalgic Reverie," they are transported to a world of idyllic beauty and romantic fantasy. The painting evokes feelings of warmth, nostalgia, and longing, allowing the viewer to indulge in a self-gratifying reverie of a simpler, more romanticized version of reality. Thus the ego escapes from its own everyday reality through a flight of fantasy it constructs for its own comfort. (Used to be one of my favorite past times, daydreaming.) It is all ego. Such art is not an escape from ego but a projection of it.

     So it is with religion and myth – and philosophy. It can be such that it allows an escape from ego and its fantasies or is reducible to the same. Of course, religion can be either like Bach’s sonata or the sentimental work “Nostalgic Reverie.” Both protagonists assume that because it is not plain, hard philosophy, because it is art or like art (myth, religious stories), it must be sentimental, ego construction.

     That is wrong on Schopenhauer’s own account. Philosophy too can be contemplation, can like music allow for escape from the ego and thus allow one to have an intimation (not a concept, a representation) of Being as such. But philosophies can be sentimental too. Not all philosophy is great philosophy. The question is: does one achieve a degree of emancipation from the ego, the principle of individuation? Does one eclipse the sun to be granted a glimpse of the stars beyond?

    Another way to transcend the ego for Schopenhauer is through compassion for the suffering of others. Again, compassion can be genuine, in which case it allows for a view of the world beyond what the ego affords – and thus all of conceptual language and thought as these have their source in the ego, in the principle of individuation – or it can be shallow or sentimental i.e. counterfeit, i.e. have its source in the ego (e.g. one enjoys thinking of oneself as compassionate, or feeling superior to those who are not compassionate, or presenting oneself to others on Facebook as compassionate, etc.).

   Philosophy is not inherently superior to myth or art. Religion is not untrue because it is not expressed in the language of philosophy. To me, Schopenhauer himself would have to grant this to be consistent.

 

I am not yet finished. I want to continue this reflection following this quote from C. S. Lewis:

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

 

Our Convictions

   The tree is known by the fruit. With respect to a person’s professed religious or non-religious convictions, there is a simple test to judge the fruit: do they divide you from other souls, your family, your community (if you have one), the nature of your place, the nature of your own body, or a rich inner life. Are the convictions the fruit of an alienated ego? Do the convictions themselves alienate the ego from the soul? Do they undo essential connections? That is the essence of sin: to isolate the ego, to make the ego absolute, its own judge over good and evil, over reality. To undo essential connections. To imprison the ego in its own fantasies, its own virtual reality.

    The whole Israeli-Palestinian Hell, for example. But also on the spiritual micro level: the tendency to de-mean the intrinsically good in whatever way. Think of all the myriad ways people demean others with their self-definitions and ‘identities.’ I’m an x; therefore, I am superior to the entire world of y’s – whereby the y’s also include nature. I believe x; therefore, I am superior to all who believe y.

It amazes me how much of human life - including my life - is determined by this simple principle. Which is in religious terms: determined by sin.

. . .

A disagreement is not necessarily a division. My father and I had many political disagreements, for example, but these disagreements did not diminish the love between us in the least. Neither of us was demeaned by the other's beliefs or arguments in support of those beliefs.

    There is something wonderfully impersonal about the search for truth. We are all limited in so many ways – by our cognitive capacities, by the fact of being born into one time and place and not another, by the limited amount of time we have for inquiry, etc. etc. etc. And thus fallible. It’s like we are all human chess players; every move expresses a belief or an argument supporting a belief. The other player can refute that belief or argument – or not. Often the game ends in a draw. But just because it doesn't end in a draw is no reason to think the belief or argument is therefore proven true beyond doubt. The greatest possible chess player – God, or if you prefer, the most advanced possible computer chess program imaginable – defines Truth (with a big ‘T’), and none of us are anywhere near that level. Our differences relative to the absolute chess player are vastly more significance than the relatively minor differences between our own limited abilities. Therefore, there is no reason to resent a conversation partner who disagrees with you than to resent a chess partner. Of course, unlike chess a genuine conversation is more thoroughly cooperative, lacking the competitive spirit of much chess.  

       We make each other better – we advance our game, our insight and understanding – every time we ‘play’ i.e. converse about what is true, good, or beautiful. I assume I can learn from ‘good players’ from almost all philosophies and religions. Nothing is demeaning in this, even if I have to revise some of my beliefs. It is all quite impersonal, even when it goes deep in us.

     The problem comes only when one person’s different opinion is not the first move in a conversation whose point is to get wiser, but to prove who is better: smarter, better educated, more moral, more fashionable, more patriotic, or whatever. Then we see the presence of the fat, relentless ego. Truth is no longer what drives communication, the form of truth-seeking is perverted into a war of one ego against another; its purpose is to destroy the opponent and elevate itself. Conversation becomes “rhetoric” (propaganda). Words and thoughts become weapons to defend and destroy egos rather than the means by which we erase a bit more of our ignorance, partly through conversations between people who see things differently.

    Jesus, when questioned by Pilatus, uttered these words: "For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world—to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." The second part always puzzled me but now I think I understand. But the Pharisees and high priests were not of the truth. They felt threatened and demeaned, their social status also called into question. It was not about truth for them but defense of the ego. They defended their egos with the cross.

    The same in the corrupted state of American political discourse. Nobody - neither MAGA nor WOKE or any of the other camps - believe they are fallible, and thus it is not a matter of finding the truth, of overcoming one step at a time our deep ignorance. Disagreement about what is true is translated immediately into one person's attempt to reduce and demean another. We can disagree about what is the best policies for the country, but we can't disagree about our "identity" (alienated egos) when the very existence of one is understood as an attempt to demean the other; when indeed the one is defined as essentially demeaning to other other. Disagreement about matters of truth presupposes transcending ego, and disintegrates whenever egos are at stake. 

    And the belief that all search for truth is nothing but such a contest between egos is one of those beliefs that divide one soul from another such that disagreement implies demeaning. I like to remember how far apart my father and I were from that. 

 Meditations on the limits of our knowledge

 

 Thinking about God, philosophically. Two openings to God seem available to us, apart from direct revelation. We can start with the universe and try to think back to its origin as well as reflect on our responses to it. The line from the poet Gerald Manly Hopkins catches the experience I am referring to: “The world is filled with the grandeur of God.” Or we can we reflect on the experience of the sacred and the absolute claim of the Good. Here I follow Kant: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me” – adding the experience of the sacred, which might have been out of Kant’s reach (unless his ‘sublime’ is a synonym). In the experience of the sacred or the absolute demand of goodness, we experience something that feels like a leak from another world. Our experience travels to the edge of the world, to its horizon, glimpsing darkly through a glass a dimension that transcends space and time. 

        Now the skeptical or naturalistic response to these two openings must be: they are illusions. No middle ground exists: either such experiences are illusions or they are a dark window into what lies beyond Being as we can experience it. Is there a knockdown argument that proves they are illusions? Such experiences take place in time and space – in someone’s brain. All explanation is by definition showing how the phenomenon under question has its place in the natural world – understood as a closed system in which events cause other events according to mathematically predictable patterns. Thus, we explain such experiences as we explain everything else: scientifically. Or culturally perhaps, such experiences arise from the attempts of the individual to make sense of their life by reading into phenomena our deepest wishes. These wishes, finding no natural or human cause that could possibly satisfy them, we imagine lead us to transcendence. But everything real has an explanation, and all explanation takes place within the closed system of nature. Thus our wishes or hopes – no spiritual phenomena – either have a footing in this closed system, or they are mere wishes or hopes.

 

 

The ground under our feet. We cannot – so Kant – think beyond the realm of the human: the realm bound by space, time, and causality. We can only stand on this ground. There is no ground that reaches beyond. And no matter our subjectively certain we may be, no sublime experience offers the slightest logical proof that our experiences of the divine are not illusions. To achieve knowledge of what these experiences are, we must not look at them from the inside, from the 1st person perspective, but from the outside, as astronomers learned to look at the solar system. We must look for a naturalistic explanation – such as an anthropologist explains the religious rites of ‘primitive’ cultures. Religion must be explained as any other phenomenon – explained in terms of its social or evolutionary development and function, and then physically as brain events. There is no opening to another world. 

        If this way of thinking is right, then religious thought and experience is a fiction – one that might have practical or evolutionary advantages. Such advantages, however, do nothing to explain what the fictitious experience really is. Whatever is in us – if anything – that presses some of us to imagine windows looking out into eternity, it must be explained in these terms. If we cannot ultimately live meaningfully without projecting a narrative or a vision onto the whole as a limited whole (sub specie aeternitatis), again that does not allow us to leap beyond the system of nature in which we are, as it were, held tight. 

      This is not a knockdown argument. Even if we accept – as I do – that science tells us something about reality, science as science does not force us to discount the 1st person perspective. The proposition that reality is reducible to what scientists can explain within the closed system of nature they must posit to do science at all, cannot be scientifically elevated to a metaphysical interpretation of Being as such. Our inner lives become meaningless or illusionary only within a metaphysical (not scientific) system that denies a priori (deducing from propositions taken to be axioms) the possibility that our 1st person perspective can be a window onto anything. About what lies beyond science, science itself has nothing to say. This is not an argument proving that the two openings, cosmological and sacred-moral, are truly openings. It does put the burden of proof on those claiming such experiences are fictions to justify their metaphysical argument.

 

 

Subjective, objective – no thanks. I dislike the ‘subjective’ versus ‘objective’ dualism – a hangover from Descartes and logical positivism that is still powerful culturally together with the fact-value dualism that underwrites it. Rather than the subjective-objective distinction, I prefer to distinguish between a belief, thought, or judgment that logically must embody the concrete life of the individual, their quality of self-awareness, as opposed to such mental acts taking place in a restricted context – like science or forensics – that are logically, epistemologically worldview neutral. Affirming the import of an experiment in physics or a mathematical proof means accepting the ‘rationality’ (the method) of physics or math, which implies bracketing out all other aspects of my concrete life. Some beliefs, thoughts, or judgments we can justify apart from who we happen to be (i.e. purely as a scientist, etc.) and the core convictions we happen to hold. Other beliefs we cannot justify independently of who we are, our core convictions, and the larger life world we are a part of. 

           My understanding of the experiment has nothing to do with whether I am Christian or atheist, secular humanist or nihilist, shallow or profound, narcissistic or mature. Making a judgment about Macbeth, however, does depend on having the right ‘horizon’ to read it with understanding. Much of my concrete life – core beliefs, memories, etc. – serves as the window (more of less clear, more of less rightly positioned) through which the meanings show themselves to me through my translations of them – not into another language, but into my understanding of them. Our understandings of Macbeth are like translations: each distinct, with overlaps and differences; each growing out of the original though with irreducible differences that come from the ‘translator,’ who is always also an interpreter. Only for someone with no insight into Shakespeare could these various understandings of the play be merely ‘subjective.’

But they aren’t ‘objective’ in the sense of logical positivism either, which doesn’t mean they make no claim to be ‘translations’ of a reality that is the original. 

 

 

The Bible, the Church, and Homosexuality

             

 

I asked a Catholic website for the passages in the Bible on which the Church bases its teaching.

“For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural, and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error” (Rom. 1:26–27).

 

“Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Cor. 6:9–10).

 

“Now we know that the law is good, if any one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:8–10).

 

“Just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust, serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 7).

 

All these are from St. Paul except the last one, which is traditionally from Jude, brother to James, perhaps the brother of Jesus. It seems the teachings of the Old Testament have been left intact, both in word and in spirit – the advent of Jesus changed nothing about the way St. Paul and Jude understand homosexuality. So you can read in the Encyclopedia Britannica about the letter of Jude:

 

The letter appeals to Christians to “contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (1:3) and to be on their guard against people “who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (1:4). The author struggles forcefully against heretics who deny God and Christ and attempts to strengthen his readers in their fight against such heresy that leads to wickedness and disorder. Libertinism is a characteristic of such heresy, and he warns that the punishment of the heretics will be similar to that which befell the unfaithful in the Old Testament patriarchal times [emphasis mine].

 

I also think it was not disputed that St. Paul was active in establishing the early Christian church, as his letters are deeply concerned with distinguishing true believers from false, true beliefs from heresies. Who is a Christian? Who is not a Christian? Inevitably in such a project something like ‘the law’ comes into play, though in modified form: for example, Paul did not take over all the rituals and punishments of the Old Testament. But the underlying idea of distinguishing between the righteous whom God loves from the unrighteous who shall be punished – even if now in the afterlife – does come (I think) through St. Paul into Christianity. In any case, I personally feel a change of spirit from the agape love of Jesus to the somewhat pharisaical puritanism of St. Paul. Be that as it may.

 

     In the Old Testament, Leviticus 18:22 we read in the King James translation:

 

Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.

 

Other translations replace abomination with ‘disgusting’, ‘repulsive,’ or ‘abhorrent.’ The context is important, which we can gather from the following passage, Leviticus 18:23:

 

Nor shall you mate with any animal, to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion.

 

Leviticus spells out the consequences as well (20:13):

 

If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them.

 

Sins that were punishable by death include homicide, striking one's parents, kidnapping, cursing one's parents, taking God’s name in vein, blasphemy, witchcraft and divination, bestiality, worshiping other gods, violating the Sabbath, child sacrifice, adultery, incest, and male homosexual intercourse (there is comically no biblical legal punishment for lesbians).

      Of course, the first mention of this theme in the Old Testament was in Genesis 19, when the “men of Sodom” demanded that Lot, son of Abraham, deliver the two guests, both men, actually angels who had taken on human male form, to be homosexually raped. Lot offers them his daughters instead.

 

Now the two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them, and he bowed himself with his face toward the ground. And he said, “Here now, my lords, please turn in to your servant’s house and spend the night, and wash your feet; then you may rise early and go on your way.” And they said, “No, but we will spend the night in the open square.” But he insisted strongly; so they turned in to him and entered his house. Then he made them a feast, and baked unleavened bread, and they ate. Now before they lay down, the men of the city, the men of Sodom, both old and young, all the people from every quarter, surrounded the house. And they called to Lot and said to him, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us that we may know them carnally.” So Lot went out to them through the doorway, shut the door behind him, and said, “Please, my brethren, do not do so wickedly! See now, I have two daughters who have not known a man; please, let me bring them out to you, and you may do to them as you wish; only do nothing to these men, since this is the reason they have come under the shadow of my roof.”

Yes, that’s the text. I don’t know what to think of that. There does seem to be a distinction between homosexual and heterosexual rape, with the latter – perhaps being more ‘natural’ – the lesser evil. (Did God destroy Sodom because of homosexuality or rape?)

       Of course, I don’t know and interpretation is involved, but the homosexual acts in play here seem to be pornographic, perverted, and violent acts, explicitly placed in the context of other such acts. Orgies. Swinger clubs. Sado-masochism. That sort of thing comes to mind. Yes, I can see that such things do not exactly express the love of one’s soul, the souls of others, the Creation, or a loving Creator. I can see that such descriptions of a person’s sexual practices as a biographer of the philosopher (or sorts) Michel Foucault

 

Miller is nevertheless gruesomely particular in his descriptions of the sadomasochistic underworld that Foucault frequented, a world that featured, among other attractions, “gagging, piercing, cutting, electric-shocking, stretching on racks, imprisoning, branding. . . .” “Depending on the club,” he dutifully reports, “one could savor the illusion of bondage—or experience the most directly physical sorts of self-chosen ‘torture.’” Foucault threw himself into this scene with an enthusiasm that astonished his friends, quickly acquiring an array of leather clothes and, “for play,” a variety of clamps, handcuffs, hoods, gags, whips, paddles, and other “sex toys.”

 

represent desecrations of nature, the human form, and sexuality from a Christian perspective. I can see why the Church doesn’t want to make a saint of Foucault. Indeed, the Foucault analogues living in the culture of the Old Testament – the men of Sodom – would have been stoned to death on command of the priests speaking for God. And if St. Paul had his way, the Foucaults of the world would all end up in Hell, or rather, if he has understood the mind of God, like the other categories of people who offended God and nature – the witches, the murders, the adulterers. See Dante’s Inferno for a translation of this desire into imaginative literature. The adulterers, perverts, and witches break God’s rules. The desecrate the Creation. The acts they do are inherently “disordered” – not ordered to their true purpose and reality – as the Catechism puts it. In Old Testament terms, God cannot dwell among us unless we purify the community from such pollutants. In Christian terms, Christ cannot dwell in our hearts while we are in the grip of such compulsions.

      You know what does not come into my mind reading these passages? The image of two human beings loving one another and living responsibly according to the vow of marriage. A loving caress for one person to another, yes of the same sex does not come to mind. Nor do the many kindnesses that any married couple do for one another come to mind. Nor does the pain that married people cause each other through their all-too-human failings. Nor do the broken hearts of lovers when they are abandoned – homosexual or not. The grief one feels upon the death of a lover and a friend. I could go on. None of this can I connect with the Sodomites or with Foucault.

        And yet Leviticus 18:22 seems to see all homosexual attraction as by definition something akin to having sex with an animal, as something utterly de-humanized, depraved, perverted. There is no conceptual space for love, commitment, friendship, union inside of a homosexual attraction. I am not sure about this, and I don’t see how anyone else could be either. In any case: either the passages in the Bible see as sinful only certain forms of homosexual sex, as it also does certain forms of heterosexual sex; or all homosexual acts are by definition “disordered” no matter what the subjective attitude of the people involved. And if the latter, then I say: it suffers from an all-too-human failure of moral imagination, a failure still prevalent in our times – the inability even to imagine a loving relationship between two human beings of the same sex. In either case, the Bible passages offer no basis for the Church to find all homosexual love as such “disordered.” [Reading Plato’s Phaedrus might have helped the early Christians.]

 

     Did Jesus not change all this? It is true: Jesus did not make what was evil – murder, adultery – good; he did not make sins like lust or pride into virtues. But recall the woman caught in adultery. She broke the law. The punishment was clear: she was to be stoned to death (Leviticus 20:10-12). The Pharisees about to do this wanted to test Jesus, to see if he was willing to violate the law. Now I’m talking about Jesus Christ, who for Christians shared the consciousness of God the Creator, was one with the Creator. And he did not carry out the law the priests of Leviticus ascribed to God. You know the story from John 8:

 

Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to Him a woman caught in adultery. And when they had set her in the midst, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses, in the law, commanded us that such should be stoned. But what do You say?” This they said, testing Him, that they might have something of which to accuse Him. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with His finger, as though He did not hear. So when they continued asking Him, He raised Himself up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” And again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. Then those who heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest even to the last. And Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had raised Himself up and saw no one but the woman, He said to her, “Woman, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said to her, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more.”

 

    I promise you I have heard (on YouTube) sermons given by Catholic priests on topics like Wokism and homosexual marriage not physically, but with their minds and words throwing stones, as did St. Paul, who was a Pharisee before his conversion according to tradition: it seems his conversion was not complete, which is only human. Again, throwing stones not only at the men of Sodom, Michel Foucault, the sex addicts visiting your local swinger club or porn website, but at my niece, who has lived lovingly and responsibly in marriage for many years, and who is a loving and responsible, indeed virtuous woman.

       Jesus didn’t even stone the adulteress and presumable would not stone Foucault. Why? Because Jesus knew our hearts. Even I, who don’t know much, know that any soul caught in the grip of perversions is suffering, has been damaged by other people or nature. For Jesus love transcended condemnation. He removed absolutely condemnation from human beings, and put it completely in the hands of God. It is none of our business to condemn another to stoning or Hell. We are only commanded to love and forgive. We know what violates love. It is pretty easy to see that Foucault’s sado-masochistic orgies had little to do with love. But we are only tasked to doing that which Foucault’s good demands – loving him, treating him like a human being even if he didn’t always act like one. Had I been his friend, I would have tried to help him see his sex compulsions in the light of love, though as my light shines rather weakly, this might have been presumption. Be that as it may:  compassion and not condemnation is the right response to the Foucaults of the world, according to Jesus, which is to say, according to God. The will to divide the world into the righteous and the unrighteous has its source in resentment, not love. This will is what God tried to correct. The second any of us cast the first stone, we have violated our reality and cut ourselves off from our roots in God. Or as Wendell Berry put it in a little poem:

 

Dante

 

If you imagine

others are there,

you are there yourself.

    

       My point is that my niece and thousands like her should not be see in the light of the men or Sodom or a Michel Foucault at all. The Bible just sees homosexual acts in this light. Perhaps the people of that time had experienced nothing else. Perhaps they were incapable of imagining nothing else, though Plato certainly was.

  

     The same website that made the passages available also shared this:

 

Yes, interpretation is important. If interpretation were left up to us as individuals, we could make the Bible say whatever we want it to say, and our sinful natures could gravitate toward interpretations that serve our passions. That is why, ultimately, the Church reserves the right to interpret Scripture to herself. “For all of that has been said about the way of interpreting Scripture is subject finally to the judgment of the Church, which carries out the divine commission and ministry of guarding and interpreting the word of God” (Dei Verbum 12).

 

  Well, where does that leave me? Either I must submit to Church authority and equate my niece’s marriage with the men of Sodom wanting to rape two angels, with men having sex with sheep, with an inherently “disordered” – read perverted, unnatural, pornographic – sexual practice, in opposition to my reason, my heart, and my conscience, to all the better angels of my nature; or I am on the Church’s shitlist. Either I can remain attached to the Bible as sacred scripture authoritatively interpreted by the priesthood and understand those passages as distinguishing loving from pathological sex; or if a Church gives me no choice and tells me I have to see all homosexuality in the light of the men of Sodom, then I must reject that as simply an error, one with profoundly negative consequences. No, I don’t enjoy being a damned Luther. I don’t like criticizing the Church. I hate it. I only do it when absolutely forced (which is often). So far I don’t see that I have an option when it comes to homosexual marriage.  No exit. Do I feel that cuts me off from God? No. I don’t even feel it cuts me off from the invisible Church. I know it seems arrogant and I hate that, but I fear this Church teaching cuts the theologians who hold it.    

    You can see how this frankly immoral teaching on homosexuality is undermining the life of the Church. You can see how tying Christianity down to ancient texts and their interpretation – or bowing down to a monopoly on interpretation – is not the right foundation for a Church or a religion.

 

 

 

Moral Judgments on People from Past Epochs and Different Cultures

      I struggle with this one. Condemning Aristotle for his views on slavery and women, Robert E. Lee for his defense of slavery, or Dante and Aquinas for their thinking that those whom they had to understand as ‘heretics’ belong in a lower circle of Hell; or even my grandparents for their uncritical acceptance of a division of family labor between man and woman that most find unacceptable today – I find it easy to condemn the beliefs of Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, and Lee on these points, but more difficult condemning the people. Perhaps what bothers me most is the man who penned the Declaration of Independence – “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal” – was a slaveholder himself (with a bad conscience) and supported a constitution that made slavery quasi-legal and afforded political protections for it. I could today only visit the monument to him in Washington D.C. with very ambivalent feelings – as opposed to the reverence I felt in its presence when there as a school child. 

      Of course, it is a Christian commonplace to condemn the sin, but not the sinner (we are all sinners); that we have our lives in a community of sin; that our culture is meaning-blind to other things we will be condemned for by future generations; that we cannot say how we might have acted had been born into those other worlds, and so on. These valid and familiar arguments do some work but don’t completely remove my discomfort with it. I would like to reflect on this by reflecting on a passage from Gaita’s A Common Humanity:

 

 Cultures are partly defined and distinguished by what is unthinkable in them – unthinkable not in the sense that no one ever thinks them, but in the sense that they are beyond argument; they are ‘indefensible’ because any serious attempt to defend them would show one to lack the judgment necessary for the proper exercise of reason on the matters in question. Or, in the case of moral matters, because it is wicked even to contemplate them. It is, for example, unthinkable that we should eat our dead or can them for pet food in order to reduce the slaughter of animals. Any argument that led to such a conclusion would have found its reductio ad absurdum. It is also in the same sense unthinkable that we should consider murder as a means for political advancement. We have not considered this an option in political life and rejected it on moral grounds. It is not up for serious consideration. That distinguishes us fundamentally from some other cultures, in which political murder is practiced or – more importantly for the point I am making – considered an option amongst others and then rejected for fear of its consequences. What is unthinkable is different for different cultures and changes from time to time (181).

 

I think it is fair to say that for the cultures Aristotle, Jefferson, and Lee inhabited, to see slavery as a moral evil or Africans as fully the equals of the causations was, if not impossible, then possible only after a difficult revolution that would have destroyed their identity as well as their roots in their respective communities. I am sure not even Jefferson could do it, and it polluted him. I am not sure about the culture of antiquity, where slavery (which was not really racially based) might have been so ingrained that to imagine a world without it may have disqualified a person who imagined it as unhinged; if this is so, then however sick I get when I read Aristotle’s view of slavery, it is the views and the cultural views I condemn. He is not without some blame. He was a great intellect. One feels he should have seen through the cultural acceptance of slavery rather than adapting his own philosophy to accommodate it – to the detriment of his philosophy. Indeed, that Plato’s moral thought, while not explicitly defending abolition, plants the seeds for it because it is incompatible with it, is a key to the greater wisdom of Plato over his student – though for Aristotle precisely this feature of Plato meant that for him (and the culture) Plato was a crank ‘trying to defend a thesis at any cost’ – namely, the thesis that the evil-doer is absolutely more to the pitied as wretched than his victims because he, in contrast to them, has poisoned his very soul.

        But in the American south more enlightened and indeed moral views did enter Jefferson’s and Lee’s world, and indeed their own persons. They struggled with their cultures views, the views of their own lived experience, and the moral views that condemned the practice and would not allow them to translate what they knew in their head fully to their heart and into their actions. Lee, in any case, had to deform his Christianity to make it compatible with slavery and racism; he had a slave whipped; he was unrepentant; he had to rationalize his decision to defend the slave power rather than the constitution, to which he had sworn an oath. I think Jefferson would have never sided with the Confederacy and welcomed the emancipation he should have helped bring about. Jefferson did not offer any defense of his actions except the fear that emancipation might result in a bloodbath. Both were aware that slavery was evil, though Lee more superficially.  I am not sure either really believed blacks were morally fully our equals. Still I judge them both less harshly than I would one of my contemporaries (all things being equal) for whom the idea of human dignity is a powerful cultural Ideal if not a reality and who grow up in a society without slavery or even the worst, overt forms of segregation.

     I also struggle with those decision-makers in WWII who authorized the terror bombing of German and Japanese civilians, and dropping the Bomb on two defenseless cities. It is hard to judge people on the one hand when you cannot be in their situation; it is impossible to excuse such actions for fear that the past be glorified in the service of some ideology.

       I know a woman whose lived experience and cultural inputs ingrained in her the belief that her worth as a human being was a function of her power to sexually attract men, which in turn was a function of the degree to which she corresponded to the very physical Ideal or model of a female body – roughly the body of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, with somewhat bigger breasts. Now she knows this ideal is de-meaning and de-valuing of women as human beings – a form of woman-hating. But the program is just as strong in her as ever. I know that given the climate catastrophe unfolding and the horrific conditions animals suffer under through the power of industrial meat, I should not eat meat. Yet I find it extremely difficult to give up the occasional hamburger. The slaveholders Jefferson and Lee were in a similar condition, but with more on the line.

        I guess what I am saying is that it is more important than ever to condemn slavery and racism; and we are all responsible for our views before our maker, so to speak, though in a human way. We are limited; we are fallible; we are indeed sinners. ‘There for the grace of God go you or I’ – a good cliché. Indeed, to have been born into the Jefferson or Lee families seems more a misfortune than those beggars and homeless people we usually apply the cliché to, if one thinks of one’s immortal soul. Aristotle is further away from us, more like trying to condemn the Chinese emperor for the practice of having concubines. Unthinkable for ‘us,’ not for ‘them’. So much good or bad is simply a gift or a curse of culture. (Of course, our deepest sympathy belongs to the victims of slavery and racism, and not the slave holders and racists. But this has been a reflection on my attitude to the latter.)

     I do know this: though I did not own any slaves, though I am guilty only of the evils I have done, my relationship to the ancestors of those whose ancestors were dehumanized by my ancestors is importantly defined by this history. It would be wrong of me to be indifferent. It would be wrong to imagine I were a little Absolute disconnected from the world and its history. We belong to each other; we cannot be free of one another – and should not strive to be.  History defines our moral starting points, the meaning of our relations with one another. You can’t ignore it or falsify it without blotting out reality in preference to a virtual reality.

      And I know this: my hesitancy to condemn Aristotle or Jefferson or Truman for dropping the Bomb on defenseless cities may in no way serve as a justification or relativization of evil done. Apologies for past sinners may not ever rationalize a fake, imaginary sentimental picture of the past to legitimize current regimes and their agendas. I despise the way history has been misused in my country.