Fun with Latin (Yes, Latin is too Fun!)

I've been taking Latin this semester, rejuvenating the dried reeds of that ancient tongue which I had gleaned from the summer fields of Notre Dame years ago. (Whoa, whoa, slow it down there, Shakespeare....) There are all sorts of bits and bots and nuggets and gems to be found in studying this most venerable tongue. A few that I'd like to share:

....Roman names usually had three parts: a first name, a family name, and a sort of "nickname." Take, for example, Marcus Tullius Cicero, famous orator and statesman. "Cicero" is actually the Latin word for "chickpea" or "garbanzo bean." This led our Latin professor to make the morbid joke, "When Cicero was murdered, he had his hands and head chopped off; if his killer would have kept going, he could have made hummus. 'Cause... "Cicero"... chickpea... cut it up... makes hummus." He got a laugh from me, at least.

....A few steps are required for this next one. A participle is a continuous action verb like "doing" or "loving." A passive participle is a phrase like "is being done" or "is being loved." A future passive participle is a phrase like "will be done" or "will be loved," also rendered as "having to be done" or "having to be loved." Do you notice how that takes on a connotation of obligation or necessity? "It will be done," "it has to be done." The future passive participle is characterized by the -nd- in its middle. You know some English words that once upon a time were future passive participles in Latin: agenda are "things having to be done," and Amanda is "she who must be loved." (This may give girls named Amanda an ego problem, so be careful who you tell it to.)

....Have you ever heard the moving of relics from one place to another referred to as "translating" (e.g. "The Venetians translated the relics of St. Mark to their home city in 828 AD") and perhaps thought, "I thought you translated words and languages, not things. What does that mean? Why don't they say something like 'transfer'?" Well, actually, it turns out that "transfer" and "translate" share the same Latin root, a very irregular Latin verb. See, you learn Latin verbs according to their four principal parts: the present active indicative ("I love"), the active infitive ("to love"), the perfect active indicative ("I have loved"), and the perfect passive participle ("having been loved"), which in the case of this word "love" would be amo, amare, amavi, amatus. OK, they all look similar, a little different on the ends, right? Well, the verb for "carry" is super weird: fero, ferre, tuli, latus. Let's slap the prefix for "across" (trans-) on the front of there, and see what that looks like: transfero, transferre, transtuli, translatus. See? Whether you transfer or translate relics, it all amounts to the same thing: they get there in the end.

Now isn't that interesting?

Charlie Sheen and the Last Rites

Disney's 1993 version of The Three Musketeers is a family favorite. It's not exactly Citizen Kane, but where else can you find Robin, Jack Bauer, and Charlie Sheen matching wits with Pennywise?

One bit in the movie always bugged me, though. After having dispatched their enemies, Aramis is seen praying over the bodies of the slain and making the Sign of the Cross over them. D'Artagnan asks Athos, "What is he doing?" and Athos responds, "Last Rites. Aramis takes death very seriously." Not that I expect theological accuracy from a Disney movie, but there are several problems with this, and it might be a useful segue to a discussion on just what are the "Last Rites" and what they're about.

The so-called "Last Rites" are the three sacraments that are administered to those who are in danger of death (whether actually dying or in a serious medical situation). The three sacraments are Penance, Anointing of the Sick, and the Eucharist, given to cleanse the soul of sin and its effects, to prepare the recipient in case his life should end, or, if it be God's will, to heal his body and restore his life. Penance forgives sin; Anointing heals from the effect of sin and potentially restores health; and the Eucharist brings communion with God.

One common point of confusion is the tendency to conflate the Anointing of the Sick with "the Last Rites." You can receive Anointing apart from these other sacraments, and just because you're receiving Anointing does not mean you're going to die, or that the priest thinks you're going to die. Though there is some dispute over when exactly Anointing may be given (not wanting to give it either too frequently or too seldom), the Church's practice makes clear that those who are suffering from serious chronic medical conditions and those who are about to undergo a potentially risky procedure may receive the sacrament as a a means of comfort in their time of physical and spiritual trial.

So, after all that, we can see several problems in this scene from The Three Musketeers.

First problem: Aramis is not a priest, as far as I can tell. (It seems that he had had some training of that sort at one point, and I think in some of the later stories Aramis does become a cleric, but at this point, I don't believe he is.) Though any person could bring the Eucharist to someone, only a priest can dispense the sacraments of Penance and Anointing.

Second problem: Even if Aramis were a priest/soldier, he didn't appear to have brought the Oil of the Sick with him in his saddlebags, and thus he couldn't be administering the Anointing of the Sick. And since he doesn't appear to be giving the Eucharist to the dead soldier, or hearing his confession (both of which would be rather difficult for a dead man), then what he's doing can't be called "the Last Rites."

Third problem (perhaps the biggest problem of all): the enemy soldiers appear to be already dead. The sacraments are for the living, to put them into contact with God's grace that their wills may be strengthened to choose to love God. Once you're dead, your life's choice is made, and the sacraments are no longer of avail.

Or think of it this way: A living person is a union of soul and body; when that person dies, the soul is separated from the body (such that we don't even call it a body anymore, but a corpse [and yes, I know "corpse" comes from the Latin corpus meaning "body" but don't quibble with me]). So if a sacrament comes into contact with the dead body, it can have no effect on the person, because, with the soul being separated from it, then in a sense, that body is no longer that person's--nobody's home. (Yes, the soul does maintain a certain relationship to the body after death, but that's a conversation for another time.)

Point being: whatever Aramis is doing, it ain't the Last Rites. But Charlie Sheen praying is a good in itself.

On Comparing and Not Comparing Buddhism and Christianity

I'm taking a class on Buddhism this semester. Specifically, the class concerns the branch of Buddhism known as "Theravada," or "The Elders' View," designated thus because it claims to be that interpretation of the Buddha's teachings that was held and set out by those who were closest to him; after his passing, they gathered and chanted his teachings and agreed among themselves as to the wording of his teachings.

Now, one might read that sentence and say, "Oh, so it's sort of like what the apostles did after Jesus died and rose and ascended." Yes, there may be some similarities, but I've been trying not to make such comparisons while taking this course. Though it may sometimes aid understanding to relate some aspect of Buddhism to Christianity, I think more often it may be a hindrance. Conflating ideas in the two systems makes them lose their distinctiveness; if you translate the Buddhist term arahant (one who has become enlightened) as "saint," you drag all the connotations of that English word into the Buddhist word. Then you're no longer trying to understand Buddhism on its own terms, but instead are engaging it by mapping Christianity onto it. And then you'll go on to say how really similar all the world's religions are, how they're all true in their own way, etc. etc., when in fact you only say that because you're seeing Buddhism (and the rest of the world's religions) through Christian-colored glasses. While it's important to recognize truth wherever it exists, when we re-write other religions in Christian terminology, we're not helping that cause, only muddying the waters. We end up fulfilling the maxim of Msgr. Ronald Knox: "the study of comparative religions is the best way to become comparative religious."

That said, one tiny element of my reading struck me, and I thought a comparison would be beneficial precisely because it is true but likely to be rejected. In his book Theravada Buddhism: The View of the Elders, Asanga Tilakaratne describes the method for meditation. He says quite strongly that the one meditating "needs to find a suitable place for meditation and sit cross-legged with an erect body." Needs to? Needs to? How interesting. Many a Western person would read that and say, "The Buddhist understands the great importance of physical posture in maintaining a certain mindset. If you want to pay attention to something, have your body at attention: sit up, breathe deeply. If you slouch in your chair in class, you won't listen. You need to make your body ready for your mind to work. This makes perfect sense."

BUT if you were to tell many a Western person that there might be a preferred posture for praying or for engaging in that supreme act of communion with God, receiving the Eucharist, i.e. on one's knees, many of the very same Western persons who had just enunciated the universal proposition that there is a link between one's physical posture and one's mental state will suddenly make an about-face, and become indignant, and declare with deep feeling, "I may approach my God however I choose. It makes no difference whether I pray kneeling or sitting or standing on my head! It's all the same! God can hear me just as well! Quit trying to impose your preferences on me, you patriarchal, fascist conformist!"

Hmm. What a stark difference. What seemed an obvious and universal truth of human existence and operation in one context is suddenly objectionable in another context. But that truth can become obfuscated in our own familiar situation by cultural baggage and associations of thought. For some people, the thought of praying or receiving the Eucharist on one's knees conjures up images of a "pre-Vatican II mindset" of alleged rigidity and harshness and every other negative term one can associate with a religion, when it ought to convey reverence and humility and devotion. All that baggage obscures their view of the simple undeniable fact that there's a link between one's physical disposition and one's mental disposition. Anyone can see it; but sometimes your so blinded to your situation at home, you have to look at the neighbor's to see things as they are.

Varia: Belgian Suicides and Unscientific Science

Sorry about the recent silence, but things have been a bit hectic. School started up again. I totaled my car. Various wedding planning-related activities. And lots of inchoate notions that I never gave sufficient nourishment and sunlight to so that they might sprout into fully bloomed blog posts. So, as an exercise to get warmed up again, shall we consider a few brief points on various topics? ...

The Belgian parliament has voted to allow children with terminal illnesses to request that they be assisted in committing suicide, provided they are suffering unbearably, have their parents' consent, and make the request repeatedly. Nominee for understatement of the year: "Some paediatricians [British spelling] have warned vulnerable children could be put at risk and have questioned whether a child can really be expected to make such a difficult choice." No, really? We won't let a kid pick their own shoes, but suddenly they can decide whether they should live or die? I would guess that the motivation behind this is law is some vaguely well-intended but seriously misguided desire to alleviate suffering, with the solution being to eliminate the sufferer rather than the suffering. I thought it significant that "160 Belgian paediatricians signed an open letter against the law, claiming that there was no urgent need for it and that modern medicine is capable of alleviating pain." 160 may not sound like a lot, but Belgium is pretty small; that could be, like, half of them....

I often tell people that "science isn't an exact science." What do I mean by that? Well, the "scientific method," as we call it, employs inductive reasoning, which means that it comes to probable conclusions based on repeated observation of the same outcomes. Scientific conclusions are always provisional: they are sound, provided that the experiment was done properly, and that all the relevant facts were accounted for in the interpretation of the experiment's outcomes. But it's quite possible that reported scientific findings can be in error: some crucial factor was missed; some outcome misinterpreted; some item ignored. And, if one study is to believed, this happens quite frequently, such that the majority of research published in prestigious journals is false, perhaps unable to be reproduced in subsequent experiments or seriously flawed in its methodology. Be wary of reports in the news on scientific findings. Scientists, being human, want attention for their work, and reporters want attention for their stories, and the combination can lead to a whole heap of hasty conclusions....

Hmm, that may be enough to chew on for now. Do feel free to suggest topics or ask questions any time!

Silly Questions

You may occasionally come across the self-assured atheist or agnostic who believes he can prove to you that belief in God is an illogical and untenable position based on one or both of these two questions:

If God is all-powerful, can God make a rock so big even He can't lift it?

If everything needs a creator, who created God?

Briefly, I will show that these are damn silly questions that rely on basic logical errors for their rhetorical potency.

First: If God is all-powerful, can God make a rock so big even He can't lift it?

The argument goes like this: "You say you believe in a God who's omnipotent, who can do anything, who creates the moon and the stars and everything there is. Well, can God make a rock so big even He can't lift it? No? Then He can't do everything. Your 'all-powerful God' doesn't exist!"

Oh, gee, what a good point, you really got me there--NOT!

Here's the problem: the question contradicts itself. It is nonsense. Literally nonsense. It doesn't mean anything.

This seemingly clever question violates the most basic rule of logic, the principle of non-contradiction: "a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect." I cannot both be in the room and not be in the room at the same time and in the way same way. He cannot both be eating a cheeseburger and not eating a cheeseburger at the same time and in the same sense. Everybody and their great aunt Sylvia knows this; it's the foundation of our ability to think.

This question violates that principle in at least two ways. First, it assumes God's omnipotence ("If God is all-powerful") but then denies it by denying that he can do something. Second, the "something" it denies He can do is itself meaningless: there is no such thing as a rock so big that an all-powerful being couldn't lift it. To be all-powerful is to have every power, every ability, which would include the ability to lift anything, right? But it does not include the ability to make something that a being with the ability to lift anything is unable to lift. That's nonsense. There can be no such thing as "the ability to lift an un-lift-able rock." It's a self-contradictory definition. You might as well ask if God can make "a square circle," "a living dead thing," or "a dog that is a cat."

It's not a "gotcha" moment, or an unanswerable argument--well, perhaps it's unanswerable only in the sense that you can't answer a question with no meaning. I'm reminded of a Laurel and Hardy bit where someone asks the boys, "Lovely weather we are having tomorrow, wasn't it?" Ollie tries to answer, but realizes the question is ridiculous: it mixes past, present, and future tenses, and can't refer to any one time. The atheist's/agnostic's question here makes just as much sense.

On to the second question: If everything needs a creator, who created God?

The believer will argue something like, "Look, the world didn't just spring out of nothingness. Everything we see depends on something else outside of itself for its existence: babies come from parents, helium is formed by hydrogen fusing in stars, swords are made by swordsmiths. None of these things can account for its own existence. Everything depends on something else for its existence; everything in the world is contingent on something else. So there must be something that can account for everything existence, something that created it all, which itself is not contingent. And that must be God."

And the atheist/agnostic will smirk and reply, "Oh yeah? If everything needs a creator, then doesn't God, too? So who created God? And who created who created God? Huh?"

And the informed believer will reply: "Ah, I see, either you misunderstood, or I left something out. I said that everything we see in the world is contingent, it doesn't spring out of nowhere or cause itself. I mean by that: it doesn't have within itself the explanation for its existence; it depends on something else; it's contingent. So where did they come from? If we try to explain the existence of one contingent thing by the existence of another--babies come from parents, who come from parents, who come from parents, etc.--we get an infinite regress. We never come to the point where things began. And all things have a beginning, as we see with everything we encounter in the world. The only way to not have that infinite chain backward, the only way to have a starting point from which everything begins, is to have a First Cause, something that exists that doesn't depend on anything else for its existence--not a self-caused being so much as a non-contingent being, a necessary being, a being which has and does and will always exist, because its very nature is to exist. This First Cause or necessary being we call God. Only contingent beings need a creator. A necessary being does not. So God does not need a creator."

The mistake here is to think of God as one just one other existing thing among other existing things, even if He's the biggest and most powerful and way awesome-est thing there is. That's a mistake that will get you in a whole heap of philosophical trouble (as the late medieval nominalists and their modern progeny discovered, but that's for another time). God is not the biggest being among other beings. God is the very foundation of being. If the universe were a drawing on a chalkboard, God wouldn't be the biggest drawing of all, or the sum total of all the drawings: God would be the hand drawing on the board (possibly also the chalk, too, depending on how we take the analogy, but anyway....)

OK, I think I've packed too much into that last bit, but the point is: if ever someone faces you with these questions, give a gentle and charitable chuckle and explain to them the errors in their thinking. Don't let them fool you into thinking your faith is unreasonable or nonsensical. Introduce them to these arguments, and they'll soon discover the depth of logic to be found in the faith. After all, a belief must be logical when it is founded upon the Logos Himself.

Clericalism, Part Deux

I wrote a piece a few weeks back on the notion of women cardinals and the clericalism inherent in that desire. The essence of clericalism is the assumption that status and power determine one's worth in the Church, a far cry from Jesus' insistence that the meek will inherit the earth and the childlike will enter the kingdom of God. This attitude seems to be animating the call for female clergy or cardinals, and it is not a healthy one.

A few other examples of clericalism that I've encountered recently came to mind, and focus on matters liturgical.

Once while at our daily Mass, I noticed that one concelebrating priest, a visitor, was wearing a large ring which looked rather like a bishop's ring. The celebrant mentioned during the Mass that we were honored to have a bishop visiting us, and gestured to the man whose ring I had spotted. This confused me. According to the Church's liturgical rubrics (i.e. its rules and instructions for how Mass is to be celebrated), a bishop should not concelebrate at a Mass celebrated by a priest, but rather should sit "in choir" (i.e. dressed in simple liturgical robes, seated in a place of honor, and participating in the Mass much as a regular congregant would, but with certain differences), because the bishop is of a higher order than a priest--he (usually) heads a whole diocese, he ordains priests and bishops, he is a successor to the apostles. It would be like a CEO sitting in on a meeting run by a junior VP and acting like he's just another employee. When I asked an elder member of my community why this bishop didn't sit in choir, he smiled and said, "He's a bishop; he can do whatever he wants."

Another time, I attended a Mass being offered for a special intention (a justice issue of some sort, I think), and it was presided over by a visiting bishop. But rather than use the readings for the day, or some other readings from the lectionary, the bishop chose a few texts he thought fitting and had them read from a Bible. Now, the General Instruction of the Roman Missal does say, "In Masses with special groups, the priest is allowed to choose texts more suited to the particular celebration," but it adds the caveat "provided they are taken from the texts of an approved lectionary." It does not seem permitted to simply choose Scriptural texts you like and use them in the liturgy. When I asked someone about this, I was told, "He's a bishop; he can do whatever he wants."

Two aberrations from the Church's liturgy (granted, they are relatively minor) are given the same response: "He's a bishop; he can do whatever he wants." This, my friends, is clericalism. The liturgy belongs to the whole Church, and thus the competent authority has taken great care to set certain boundaries to liturgical practice (while allowing for a certain amount of freedom to adapt to particular situations) so that the liturgy is recognizable from place to place and thus easy for the faithful to participate in, and so that the words and actions of the liturgy accurately reflect the truths of the Catholic faith--every movement and positioning, every line spoken, communicates something of the faith. Yet a certain mindset, a clericalist mindset, would hold that because a bishop or priest is in a position of authority, they may do what they please, and alter the liturgy as they see fit. Might makes right. But no! The Second Vatican Council says,

Regulation of the sacred liturgy depends solely on the authority of the Church, that is, on the Apostolic See and, as laws may determine, on the bishop. In virtue of power conceded by the law, the regulation of the liturgy within certain defined limits belongs also to various kinds of competent territorial bodies of bishops legitimately established. Therefore no other person, even if he be a priest, may add, remove, or change anything in the liturgy on his own authority. (Sacrosanctum Concilium 22) 

Nor can any individual bishop, as the Code of Canon Law says, "no one on personal authority may add, remove or change anything in them." (CIC 846) 

Bishops just as much as anyone else are beholden to the Church's laws, traditions, and beliefs. Their place in the Church as successors to the apostles is to pass on the Good News of salvation, to teach the teaching of Christ, to care for the flock entrusted to them, to sanctify them by the sacraments; and all of this in continuity with the Church's tradition, its long memory, its ever-ancient and ever-new faith. But some, the clericalists, take it that the bishop decides by his own whim what is true and what is not; that he commands and rules his people according to his caprice rather than tending them for their own good; that the sacraments may be molded and adjusted and overhauled according to their tastes. This is false. Power is not for the exercise of one's will or desires; power is for furthering the flourishing of one's self or those in one's care. Not even the pope is a truly absolute monarch in the Church, for he, too, is answerable to revelation, tradition, and to God. He is the servus servorum Dei, the "servant of the servants of God." As is every cleric. 

Don't Let the Lights Go Out

Our society is continuously engaged in pseudo-debates about a range of issues, from abortion to gun control to redefining marriage to the proper response to poverty and immigration concerns. I call them "pseudo-debates" because they quite often seem to be missing a constitutive component of a debate: thought. There's an awful lot of emoting, but not a whole lot of thinking. People deem it sufficient to decide a matter merely by the expression of their feelings about it. Rather than defining our terms, stating our principles, making our arguments, and considering objections (in the serenely reasonable style of the medieval Scholastic philosophers), we instead shout and scream and stamp and snivel and point fingers and tear our hair out and rend our garments and call each other hateful and fear-mongers and heartless and brainless and just about every other pejorative we can conjure up (in the typically passionate style of the modern philosophers, who began by defending reason and usually ended by denying its applicability or trustworthiness).

This is not only immoral in its lack of charity, it's unproductive. We don't get anywhere in our discussions with each other, and when one side does get enough momentum going on its side to win the tug-of-war, we meet a host of unintended consequences that may well have been foreseen had we thought our way through things, and in the end everybody falls down. It reminds me of a parable from G.K. Chesterton's book Heretics (1905):

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good–” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

Though the medieval method may be too arid for the tastes of some, there is no denying its precision and efficiency. If the goal of debate is to air the various perspectives and thoughts of all and come to a reasoned conclusion on the subject, then we must stop our public debates from turning into shouting matches and lynch mobs and witch-hunts, and return to the cathedral school and the university of the pre-modern period, with its disputatio and quodlibet debates. Let's hurry, before the lights go out!