The Prince of Darkness

Preliminary Considerations

The Devil occupies a curiously ambiguous position in contemporary American spirituality. There are two main atmospheres. The distinction cuts across the important distinction between Protestant and Catholic Christians, and people of each sort can be found in nearly every denomination, if not every congregation.

One may, loosely, be called the minimalist school; it is far the larger of the two. Many who are (in this respect) minimalist doubt, or explicitly deny, that the Devil exists at all; or redefine it to the point that it means little more than the selfish impulses of mankind. Some others who are of this atmosphere, particularly evangelicals, admit the existence of the Devil as a personal being but pay little attention to the matter. The Devil, for them, is a being who does exist in principle, but cannot be expected to exercise any noteworthy influence upon the daily life of the Christian. Such views are often bolstered by the contention, not supported by Scripture or the historical consensus of the Church but popular nonetheless, that believers are immune to possession or indeed any form of diabolical attack because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The other might be called the apocalyptic perspective. It consists chiefly in charismatic Christians both Catholic and Protestant, Dispensationalists (a la Left Behind), and such Catholics as might be called 'rigorous.' These believe quite fervently in the Devil, and see his operations in many if not all areas of human life and society. Some of them are very happy to instruct the ignorant and admonish the sinner enthusiastically on such matters; and we may pray that their works of mercy commend them to God.

Some readers may be surprised that I have used liberal and conservative, respectively. This is intentional; the terms are not really applicable. The word liberal is properly a political rather than a theological term, and is therefore not specially suitable for discussions of Christian thought. A more accurate term for that theology called liberal would be Modernist; but, since Modernism has been condemned as a heresy, there are few who would take up such an appellation in the Catholic Church; and Modernist Protestants are many things, but being wedded to clear, fixed terminology is not one of those things. As for the fanaticism being conservative, that is a fantasy, projected by progressivism onto ignorance of the past. The degree to which orthodox theologians emphasize the reality and activities of devils varies and always has; some ages have been hysterical on the subject and others stuporous, or anything in between; and the attention paid to the diabolical by the Church has rarely corresponded to the rationalist's definition of what qualifies as a superstitious age.

The sort of attitude taken by informed and thoughtful Catholics has been -- with allowances for the emphasis of differing times and cultures -- that the Devil is not only personally real (of which more in a moment), but that devils are active in the spiritual lives of human beings; but that, nevertheless, most things which people attribute to the Devil are natural phenomena. This is not because the activity of evil spirits is intrinsically improbable, but just because people are excitable and prone to make mountains out of molehills.

The Doctrine of the Fallen Angels

The Catholic belief in devils is derived both from Scripture and from the unanimous testimony of the Church. It is dependent on the ancient Jewish-Christian belief in angels: these are free, intelligent, incorporeal beings who carry out the will of God. It has long been believed that there are nine varieties of angelic beings, of whom three do not concern us, while the other six are concerned in differing capacities with the material universe in general or with the human race in particular. Of these, some -- since they have free will and can therefore choose either to obey God or to rebel against Him -- chose to revolt against their Maker, thus becoming what we call devils or demons. In so doing, they became morally depraved; but their powers, which are in the nature of angels rather than being a reward for obedience, remained intact.

None of this should be confused with the dualist concept, popular among the Gnostic heretics of the early centuries of the Church and the high Middle Ages. Many ill-educated persons, Christian and otherwise, are under the impression that it is an article of the faith that the Devil, like God, is eternal, all-knowing, omnipotent, and as it were disinterested in his pursuit of evil. The Devil, in a dualist ideology, is the embodiment of evil as God is of all good.

This is not only unorthodox but literally impossible in Christian theology. Christianity regards God as the Maker of all things seen and unseen, and the Catholic is bound to regard existence as good in itself. C. S. Lewis disposed very neatly of this idea in his introduction to his invaluable book The Screwtape Letters; he there points out that no being could attain a perfect badness as God has perfect goodness; for once you had taken away every kind of good thing, including intelligence, will, and being itself, there would be nothing left to be bad with.

It is likewise worth pointing out that, though Catholics do believe that the Devil in fact brought about the Fall of Man by tempting us, this did not have to happen. Most if not all the evil in the world may be traceable, directly or indirectly, to his malice; but men are free also, and there is no particular reason why we should not have fallen all by ourselves, if the Devil had remained good or if his assault on our innocence had been unsuccessful.

The Satanic Verses

Now, down to brass tacks. The existence of the Devil in the abstract is all very well (or perhaps not), but what has it got to do with our lives as we live them?

Well, to begin with, there are the continually reiterated Scriptural warnings to beware of him; they are in St. Paul:

See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. (Col. 2.8)

What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be participants with demons. (I Cor. 10.19-20)

And you were dead in trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience ... (Eph. 2.1-2)

St. Peter:

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, solid in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world. (I Pet. 5.8-9)

St. James:

Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. (Jas. 4.7)

And certainly St. John:

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil. ... By this it is evident who are the children of God and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother. (I John 3.8, 10)

Nor can we reasonably suppose that these were superstitions indulged by the Apostles, which their Master took no part in. Quite apart from His character as an exorcist -- up to and including discourses on the habits of devils (cf. Matt. 12.22-45) -- He speaks freely in the Gospels about the Devil as the animating power behind evil in this world:

Jesus said to them, 'If God were your Father, you would love Me, for I came from God and I am here. ... You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies.' (John 8.42, 44-45)

The New Testament both presupposes (in speaking of exorcisms) and directly teaches the existence, malevolence, and power of demons. But what does that mean -- especially if we do not need to suppose a diabolical origin for every human evil?

The key is to be found in a passing remark of St. Paul's: he speaks of those trying to discredit his ministry, calling them false apostles, and adding, And no wonder, for Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. As the Flesh signifies the temptations of individual human nature, and the World the temptations of the various established systems, so the Devil signifies not simply one depraved seraph, but the general category of depraved spirituality. It is more than natural that we should be warned of his power so constantly, and in such severe terms, as the Apostles insisted on penning. For a depraved spirituality, which the devil and his angels are specially concerned to produce, is obviously a danger for anyone embarking on the spiritual life.

Such transcendental evil may ordinarily take one of three forms.

The Devil In the Details

There is, first, spiritual predation. This encompasses everything from temptation to full-blown possession, and makes better movies than the other two kinds.

On the whole, the predatory activities of the Devil are comparatively straightforward in this category: in temptation, he flatters and frightens in order to push us into sins, and then takes a malefic pleasure in accusing us thereafter. In obsession, a step deeper than temptation, he takes advantage of a pattern of sin into which he has trained a person, and uses it as a foothold within his personality, from which he tries to expand his territory. If he succeeds in tricking, cajoling or terrifying his victim into consenting, he may then move on into possession, in which he takes command of the person's body at will. This last requires an exorcism to be fully dealt with.

With most people, naturally, things do not go beyond temptation and similar forms of exterior harassment -- or, at most, obsession. Possession is rare, though not perhaps so rare as it was a hundred years ago; and this is in large part because of the second main form of spiritual evil.

This second form is spiritual error. This encompasses all manner of false beliefs, and the channels for invasive diabolical activities that such beliefs open. Everything from heresy to atheism to false religions can constitute spiritual error.

However, certain distinctions must be made. Not every incorrect belief has its origin with an evil spirit, or even that they find all false beliefs equally easy to manipulate. An untrue belief held merely by mistake, for instance, will not prove very fertile soil for the devilish weed; especially if the person who holds it is intellectually responsible, in which case the error will very likely be corrected. Nor does it mean that all or most principles of non-Catholic faiths are of diabolical origin. The Second Vatican Council's statement on the relationship of the Church to other religious traditions, Nostra Aetate, went out of its way to say that good and holy elements exist in the higher religions of the Orient -- even more so in Judaism and Islam -- and these good elements are not to be rejected.

What is necessary for a false belief to be a spiritual error in this sense is that there must be a spiritual agency of deceit operating within it. Some religions may have originated in this way, or incorporated such elements in themselves -- for example, through divination, inviting powers into human minds and thus opening them to demonic influences. The foothold of a devil in a specific person, exacerbating his desires not to see this or that truth and clouding his mind, would also qualify.

Spiritual error differs from spiritual predation in that it is directed toward a diffusion of falsehood, rather than tearing down one person -- it is the tilling of the soil, whereas evil spirit preying on an individual is comparable to a specific weed. Each furthers the other, but neither is necessary to the existence of the other.

Both are different from the last and worst form, which may be called false holiness. This is what the Bible calls hypocrisy; but the word hypocrisy has been rather worn down from overuse, and now includes things as simple as human failings out of weakness. Dr. Johnson's maxim should be kept in mind: precept may be very sincere where practice is very imperfect. Indeed, that seems to be what St. Paul is going on about in the second half of Romans 7. Mere failure to live up to one's convictions is not properly called hypocrisy, but simply sin.

What distinguishes false holiness from human weakness is a terrible sincerity in the person afflicted with it. False holiness need not be supported by heresy, or even moral inadequacy. Christ's attitude to the Pharisees is much to the purpose here, if only we will remember what it was. For it is noticeable that Jesus Christ and the Pharisees had a very substantial agreement on matters doctrinal. Nor was their practice, in His eyes, always reprehensible. Their study of the Scriptures was admirable in itself; their care for ritual purity may have gone beyond the Law, but it did not fall short of it, which is more than could be said for some Jews in Galilee or Samaria; and, while it may not have been in debilitating proportions, they did give to the poor. False holiness is often arrayed not only with doctrinal accuracy, but even with impressive personal virtue -- as was said of the puritanical nuns of Port Royal in seventeenth-century France by the local archbishop, "as pure as angels and as proud as devils."

Merely to say pride, however, is not informative. The distinction between false and true holiness lies in the motive behind it. T. S. Eliot laid his finger on it in his play, Murder In the Cathedral, in which St. Thomas a Becket is tempted to become a martyr for his own religious glory rather than for God: The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. A person under the power of false holiness may easily -- in fact, will probably -- be chaste, generous, truthful, wise, patient, just, brave; even humble after a fashion. It is deep inside the heart that the deadly poison has corroded him. It is there that, in truth, he cultivates these virtues, fights temptations, scorns the World, and even perhaps fights spiritual error -- for himself.

And there the devil sits, laughing without mirth.

Get Thee Behind Me

How, then, is the Devil to be fought? There is absolutely nothing we can do of ourselves. Our sole recourse is to give ourselves up to God, continually: through prayer, through Scripture, through the sacraments (particularly Confession and the Eucharist), and through sound spiritual direction (a principle neglected all too often). It is in these things that the Holy Spirit works. Prayer, so as to breathe the Holy Spirit, to be in continual, intentional contact with Him to the best of our ability. Scripture, to know what God says in general, and thus be better equipped to recognize His specific intimations to us. The sacraments, because in them God literally meets us; Confession, where He meets us with His forgiveness and healing, and the Eucharist, where He meets us with Himself. Spiritual direction, because we cannot dispense with the mentorship of someone who knows God and knows people, and knows how to bring people close to God -- the Pope himself doesn't go without one. (St. Teresa of Avila said dryly that he who is his own spiritual director has the devil for his spiritual director.)

And how are we to know that these very things are not done out of false holiness? Well -- we cannot manufacture true holiness; we can only ask for it. So ask for it.

Unspotted From the World

Having taken a look at the Flesh, it seems appropriate to look next at the World.

The Greek word that is usually translated "world" is rather interesting. It is kosmos, derived from a verb, kosmeo, meaning to arrange or set in order, especially in the sense of making something beautiful (thus cosmetics). As the English universe reflects the tendency of our own age to consider 'everything there is' in terms of a singular mass of hugely varying individual things, so the Greek kosmos reflects the tendency of the ancients to think of 'everything there is' in terms of a harmoniously ordered whole.

The word aion, typically translated 'age' (hence eon), can also mean 'world.' However, it has slightly different connotations. Where kosmos means the world as a physical location, aion tends to mean world more as we speak of 'the ancient world' or 'the modern world' or 'the Roman world.'

Both words contribute, probably, to the Biblical significance of the World as a source of temptation. All Christians confess that the world (kosmos), as it was made, was originally very good; however, that kosmos has become infected by evil in its very structure, both human and angelic, and hence this present world (aion) is contrasted in Scripture with the world to come, an aion of its own. Jesus, in descending from Heaven and executing judgment, will cleanse this kosmos of its present aion and usher in a new aion; He will cleanse the world itself of worldliness, as it were.

By World, then, are signified those temptations which come, not from our interior pressure to sin (what technically is called concupiscence by theologians, and which we have discussed under the name of the Flesh) -- rather, the World means those temptations which come from deficient or depraved structures of sinfulness. These are pressures not interior to individuals, but systemic in societies. It doesn't matter terribly what sort of society we have in mind: political, artistic, religious, economic; all are vulnerable to weaknesses flowing, not just from individual follies and failures, but from systemic and corporate sins and blind spots.

Stereotypically, the class of sins a person is willing to recognize depends upon their socio-political disposition, at any rate in our time and country. Conservatives are generally fairly good at seeing sins of the Flesh, and also in seeing that individual lapses have consequences for the rest of society too. The remedy to such things, as they say, is an increase of personal responsibility.

Liberals, meanwhile, tend to see systemic wrongs and injustices more clearly. Racism, sexism, environmental concerns, education, and the disparities between classes are problems in which political and economic systems are heavily involved, and the American left has become associated with advocacy for such causes. The solution they generally set forth is legal reform, so as to establish a system in which (as the slogan Dorothy Day loved goes) it is easier for people to be good.

And all of that would be fine, if it resulted in a united society with stereoscopic vision. Unfortunately, though rather predictably, what it has in fact produced is a society bitterly divided between people who cannot see individual responsibility, and people who cannot see anything else. Since, by and large, Christians tend (for reasons we need not examine just now) to fall among political conservatives in America, it is precisely the battle with the World that we have a tendency to be blind to -- and to lose.

The reality of the World is in fact difficult to impress on people's minds nowadays, even on Christian minds. And, in a society so saturated with depraved forms of sexuality and general excess of pleasures, it is natural that our minds should be directed very largely to the Flesh rather than the World. But the idea that our very struggles with the Flesh are, in part, imposed upon us by a system designed to vex us on such counts, and that not only personal devotion but societal repentance and reform are needed, is frequently forgotten or even dismissed as leftism. For example, the sufferings of the poor -- a group to whom nearly every book in the New Testament pays significant attention, let alone the warnings and imprecations of the Old -- are regarded as being perfectly soluble by hard work in a capitalist society; without any analysis of the real effects of capitalism upon a society, not to mention its impact on the individual heart. That the rich systematically oppress the poor, in this society like any other, is not clearly before the minds of our generation in the Church. That economic success can be an occasion of sin, or even a temptation, is not evidently considered even by very good Catholics, despite our Lord's reiterated warnings that the rich will find it hard -- impossible, even -- to enter the kingdom of God, impossible certainly while they maintain their attachment to the kingdom of the World.

There is a sort of foul parody of the Holy Spirit going on here. Since God is love, there must be present in Him a Lover and a Beloved and Love between them; and Christian teaching identifies these three respectively with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The Spirit is given a pale reflection in the way associations of people differ from the members that constitute them. The very fact of association brings a corporate entity into being; the association influences its members, just as they influence it; it is a Gestalt reality, greater than the mere sum of its parts. The problem is, the World is such a Gestalt too. The World can corrupt individual people, just as individual people can corrupt whatever society they find themselves in. All of us, to be sure, have our sins that we found our own way into. But is any of us so independently minded, that there are no sins we have been led into because 'everyone was doing it'? Things we would never have done on our own initiative, but which a corrupt system -- social, religious, political, etc. -- made possible and even compelling?

The remedy to the World's tempting power is the Church. This may sound clericalist or naive, but it is not. Our present generation of Christians has, aside from Catholics, a contempt of the institutional church that I have never understood, one which often smacks too of a diluted Gnosticism about the Body of Christ.

When I say the Church is the remedy to the World, I mean 'the Church' in every sense of the word. True, local institutional churches may be of little credit to the Church Catholic; true, the worldwide institution has at some times been a somewhat regrettable sight. But when it comes to opposing the systemic evils of the World, there is very little good in setting up another secular system to purify it. You cannot wash water. The Church on earth is not perfect, but she is that very society set up, by Christ Himself, to be a rebuke and a corrective to the sins of the World; if she fails at that, it is right and necessary to reform her, but abandoning her has never yet gotten anybody anywhere. The Protestant Reformation was many things, both bad and good; but only a complete ignorance of the real conditions of the lives of common people in Protestant nations thereafter, will allow anybody to say that leaving the Catholic Church improved society. Nor, nowadays (and stretching back into the nineteenth century), has the exodus of many former Christians from the faith noticeably improved -- well, anything really. The rebukes of ex-Christians, and especially ex-Catholics, to the Church, reveal a frame of mind unable either totally to leave the religion and either ignore it or else judge it with real impartiality (as, say, a Confucian might), or to return to it and truly understand it, from within. It must be admitted that such a preoccupation does nothing to help the World become better, in any dimension. Chesterton sums it up quite nicely, I forget where, when he says that "If the world grows too worldly, it may be rebuked by the Church. But if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world."

But the reason that the Church is the remedy to the World is that she is not simply part of the World. A non-Christian might not accept the claim, but the Scriptures plainly teach that the Church is, mystically, the Body of Christ -- the Incarnation of Christ in this world -- and this claim is, therefore, binding upon those who profess Him. She is admittedly an earthly society as well as a heavenly society; as Jesus whom she communicates to this planet was Man, as well as God. In giving our allegiance to the Church, we are literally commending ourselves to the coming aion in the midst of the present aion. It is only such a supernatural appeal that can fix any part of the present age for any appreciable length of time. This world, infected by the World, cannot sustain itself. The Church alone can do so, for she is the vessel specifically appointed to bear everlasting life into every society. We can no more do that by ourselves than we could clear away a rainforest with a penknife. In opposing a system of evil, we need not only individual holiness, but a system of holiness; principalities and powers must be answered by powers and by principalities.

And again the Devil led Him to the top of a high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; and he said, "All these will I give to You, for they have been given to me and I may give them to whomever I please, if You will fall down and worship me." And Jesus said, "Get behind me, Satan! For it is written, 'You shall worship the Lord your God only, and Him you shall serve.'"

Provision for the Flesh

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: these are the monikers by which Scripture presents to us the three great sources of temptation. Lent being a time specially devoted to introspection and refocusing upon the practice of virtue, let us look at what precisely these things mean.

When we talk about the Flesh, we usually mean lust. This is one of what are called the Seven Capital Sins, or more loosely the Deadly Sins; the others being gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Of course, gluttony and sloth may hover vaguely in the background as also being of the Flesh, but usually lust comes first to our minds, particularly a culture such as that of contemporary America, which is so utterly sodden in sex, to the point that not only decency but good taste is affronted.

However, the Flesh does not mean the body. We are accustomed to think of the body when we hear the word, because our bodies are made of flesh. But the real theology behind the word is subtler than that, and illuminates a good deal more about human nature. For a Biblical understanding of the term, let us turn to St. Paul:

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you would. but if you are led by the Spirit you are not under the law. Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and the like. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. -- Galatians 5.16-24

Note that, in this list of fleshly things, only four -- immorality (a polite translation of the Greek porneia, which could more vividly be rendered "whoring" but did cover a wide variety of sexual, uh, conduct), licentiousness (for which "immodesty" might be a better equivalent), drunkenness (which probably needs no further explanation), and carousing (which can also be translated "orgies" for the modern) -- only these four are intrinsically connected to bodily activities at all. It might be noted that half deal with gluttony rather than lust; but what I want to look at is all the other terms. The word "impurity" is as vague in Greek as it is in English, though we might suspect a sexual connotation. But the others are all social -- enmity, strife, etc. -- or related to a depraved spirituality, as idolatry and sorcery. The saint is clearly as much concerned with our conduct as souls among souls, as he is with our conduct as bodies among bodies.

And this squares with the Christian faith generally. St. Paul is sometimes taken to be a grim ascetic, and ascetic he certainly was; but, unlike some other patently pessimistic forms of spirituality called Gnostic, Catholic asceticism is really asceticism. That is, it is concerned with askesis: rigorous self-discipline. The Gnostic cults which were largely simultaneous with, and frequently drew upon, Christianity, were not ascetic in this sense at all. They practiced and valued many of the same things, such as celibacy, but they did so for reasons that were opposed to the faith in their very essence. The Gnostics believed, not in self-discipline, but in self-destruction. A Catholic monk and a Gnostic sage might equally whip themselves with cords; but the monk does so for a quite definite set of reasons: to train himself to be ready to endure pain, for instance, or to identify himself with the sufferings of Christ, or as an aversive against some sin. We may think them bad or inadequate reasons, whether in general or in an individual case, but those are the reasons, and they are very different reasons from those of the Gnostic. He too might whip himself with cords; but he would do it to punish the body for being material, or in order to prove that his body was irrelevant to his soul. In other words, his self-torment was based on contempt for the body as such. No Catholic is able theologically to countenance contempt for the body; or if, and to the extent that, he does, he becomes a heretic; for in Jesus, God Himself took on a body. Matter in general is, for a Catholic, sacred because of Creation, and the body especially because of the Incarnation.

So if the body has been sanctified by the Incarnation, and if the Flesh doesn't really need to have to do with the body, then what is the Flesh exactly? It is the sinful nature of man, with the specific character of our natural desires and weaknesses.

This doesn't mean that the Flesh is identical with all things that draw us on to sin, though it would be easy to think so from the preceding definition. The World and the Devil I plan to deal with in my next two posts in more detail; suffice it to say here that both of them, in differing ways, are pressures on us to sin that come from without. The Flesh is the interior pressure toward sin. C. S. Lewis, in his book on prayer titled Letters to Malcolm, notes a desire to peer into the transcendent realms of the spirit, "behind the scenes" of this earthly life, and points out frankly that this desire is properly a desire of the Flesh in the Pauline sense. Human sexuality in its crassest perversions is a sample of the Flesh; but so is the most romantic, and even the most morally observant, Eros, when it is made a substitute for God. Drinking oneself stupid is a sample of the Flesh; so too is dabbling enough in philosophy to sound intelligent and sophisticated, without actually bothering about the questions of whether life is worth living or righteousness worth pursuing. The Flesh can, in one sense, be as spiritual as anything.

The remedy to the Flesh is what the apostle says it is: recourse to the Spirit. The Flesh consists in the corruption, better to say the defection, of our merely natural longings -- longings for pleasures (gluttony), for human relationships (lust), for security (avarice), for peace of mind (sloth), and so forth. The work of the Spirit against the Flesh consists in an invasion of nature by the supernatural, whose work is one but is manifest in a twofold manner; the Person is not divided, nor the natures confused.

Human nature, left to itself after the Fall, is no longer self-sustaining. Of course, really nothing is self-sustaining except God, but human nature now needs supernatural help even to be natural; before the Fall of Man this would not have been the case. Anyway, the curious warp of human nature is that it is directed toward God, but is directed to Him very largely through other things He has made, because He made those things in order to communicate Himself to us. Since we are very limited beings, and God has no limits imposed on Him, this is a pretty obvious thing to do. The Fall (whether one takes Genesis 3 to be historical or not) consisted in seeking certain of these good things God meant for us, but independently of Him, even to the exclusion of Him. In fact, it consisted in seeking them as if they were self-sustaining goods. But, apart from God, creation turned out to be very like an onion: one peels away layer after layer, and there's nothing in it, and one ends in tears. Creation was made from nothing, and the moment it was treated as self-sufficient it quite honestly told us that it had been made from nothing; or, in C. S. Lewis' tragically accurate statement about our history in The Problem of Pain, we began "the whole terrible story of man trying to find something other than God that will make him happy."

As a result of the Fall, we now instinctively look to creation as if it were independently capable of making us happy. That is the Flesh. In order to correct that, we must have recourse to the Spirit; i.e., the guidance and gifts of the Holy Spirit, of which the first two (in the traditional list of seven) are wisdom and understanding. These two gifts in particular grant us a supernatural perspective, founded in the truth about God and what He has made: they impress upon us that the real and final good we are seeking is God Himself, and that insofar as our pursuit of any other good thing is not directed toward Him, it will make us miserable rather than happy.

The Spirit therefore restores to us the essentially supernatural orientation of humanity. But in so doing, it restores human nature itself to a more natural condition. Take the matter of sex. Chesterton points out, I believe in The Everlasting Man, that about sex in particular men seem to be born mad, and they scarcely reach even sanity until they reach sanctity. Any human being left to pursue sex as his untutored instincts led him would, at best, subject himself to raucous and irresponsible excesses that might easily ruin not only his happiness but his health. Surrendering oneself to the Spirit, however, brings one to one of the two obviously sane approaches to sex: Matrimony, which is what all people everywhere have in some measure recognized as the norm and ideal of sexuality, and also happens to be a Catholic sacrament; or else celibacy -- which, though unpopular with the lascivious superstition of the West, has been recognized by nearly every religion and society as something that is peculiarly suitable to some persons, respectable, even laudable. In reordering us to the supernatural, the Spirit thus gives a natural order even to the natural; a natural order which, we know from experience, cannot sustain itself.

This reorientation of nature from the Spirit is specially set forth in the sacraments, and in none more than the Blessed Sacrament. The very normal human act of eating is transformed, sublimated, into the most intensely spiritual act we ever perform; and it is so transformed without at all ceasing to be the normal human act of eating. Nature is united to supernature. I have quoted before Lewis' passing remark in Perelandra that the sacraments were instituted in part to remind us that the customary mental division we make between the material and the spiritual is neither wholesome nor final. It is no coincidence that we often find ourselves tempted by the Flesh at the altar; it sense the Presence of its nemesis.

And the tempter came and said to Him, "If You are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread." But He answered, "It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.'"

The Practice of Lent

Lent has come around again, the period of penitence and reflection that leads up to the fifty days of Easter. No meat on Fridays. Fasting. Almsgiving. The Stations of the Cross. What is it all for?

Then the disciples of John came to Him, saying, "Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?" And Jesus said to them. "Can the wedding guests fast as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast." -- Matt. 9.14-15

Fasting is one of the oldest religious practices of all humanity. It is interesting that, as with sacrifice, the practice is taken into the Abrahamic tradition without question; there is no direct discussion of its purpose -- it is simply part of the assumed nature of religious practice. There are directions on what to do when fasting, or accounts of people being called to a fast, but no reasoned explanation of the practice.

This, American Christians typically find hard to stomach. We do not like the idea that an unexplained, opaque tradition can claim to dictate our behavior. We wish to reserve our consent to those things we understand; we want to know the whys and the wherefores, and to claim the right to dissent from those things that we do not believe in.

Unfortunately, though there is a noble impulse contained in this desire, there is another impulse which is ignoble in the extreme. To try to understand so as to avoid sin is one thing: I am by no means sure that the desire to avoid sin really animates our behavior here, however. Judging from my own examination of conscience, what calls itself independence or principle is very frequently only an ancient voice saying that I have the right to do whatever I please, or nothing if I like that better, that I will not be ordered around, that I will have an explanation so that I may be like God, knowing good and evil.

This illustrates the wisdom of the Church in mandating certain practices as a minimum for the Christian life -- what are called technically the precepts of the Church. This draws criticism occasionally from Protestants, and more frequently from heretical or lazy Catholics; but if we believe seriously that the Church is in any sense from God -- and, whether we accept the theory of Petrine primacy or not, Christ did certainly say that He would found the Church -- then it is not manifestly irrational to suppose that she has the right to discipline her members. This insistence on certain corporate practices, traditions we all observe in common, benefits us in a multitude of ways:

1) It gives us an opportunity to practice obedience. Jesus is recorded in John as saying, "If you love Me, keep My commandments." This theme of obedience as the sacramental manifestation of love is continually harped upon in all of the apostle's writings. And it makes sense. Even on a natural level, is anyone much impressed by a man who claims to love a woman, but consistently puts his own pleasures or his own ego before her desires? Obedience is the natural expression of love. What does this have to do with the Church? Well, the same Gospels that emphasize love record our Lord telling His apostles that anyone who received His word would also receive theirs. It is hypocrisy to claim to love Christ and at the same time pour contempt upon His Mystical Body, which Body, St Paul tells us, is the Church.

Indeed, the unexplained-ness of the traditions of the Catholic Church reminds us, not so much of her authority, as of the factual truth of the Christian religion. When something is a fact, you cannot argue with it; there is no good pleading that you want a simpler solar system or a more accessible geography; you have to take them, as they stand, or shut your eyes to them. G. K. Chesterton wisely drew out one of the most fascinating elements of the image of St Peter being given the keys of the kingdom. A key, he points out, is not a matter of abstraction or of argument. Susceptible to analysis and yet not to dispute, it is indeed complex; the only simple thing about it is that it opens the door.

2) It puts us in touch with the wisdom of the whole Church. Related to this first point is the fact that submitting oneself to these traditions is, literally, following the practice of most Christians (Catholic or otherwise) who have ever lived. These practices were not chosen arbitrarily. In adopting them -- better, in allowing ourselves to be adopted by them -- we are recognizing the wisdom of someone other than ourselves; which, after the first shock, is a refreshing exercise.

3) It sets forth to the World the unity and universality of the Faith. We say, whenever we recite the Creed, that we believe in one holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church. The oneness and the catholicity of the Church are witnessed to the world every time we abstain from meat on Friday or observe the law of fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. We are saying wordlessly, through these actions, that we are part of a people with an identity that is not drawn from this world, but from another world altogether. Though mortifications may be difficult, they are anything but dull, however dully they may be kept by some; they have, could we but see it, all the thrill of rebellion. They particularize our refusal to be ruled by the Flesh at the behest of the World. They do this far more, not less, when we keep them as members of the faith, in union with countless brethren spread throughout space and time, rather than on our own initiative; for anybody can follow his own desires. The elevation of private devotions over public ones as being worthier, because they spring from personal fervor rather than blind submission to authority, is based on a caricature of reality. It has no grounding in the Scriptures (take a look at the ancient Israelite calendar some time), and it smacks of Gnosticism more than Christianity.

But what does fasting do, exactly? Why was it taken into the Jewish tradition in the first place, and thence inherited by Christians? Again, there are several answers.

1) It asserts the spirit's dominance of the body. This, while in some ways one of the less important aspects of a fast, is one of the most obvious. The body -- not to be confused with the Flesh in the Pauline-Johannine sense, that is, our inner selfish nature -- wants things that make it feel good, like a child. Body and soul alike benefit from the reminder that it is the soul that has the right to authority in the person, and both suffer when this authority is never asserted; just as spoiling a child damages the parents, too.

2) It sacramentalizes our repentance and mourning. Passing to Scripture, this is the meaning we see fasting most consistently associated with. As we see in the passage from Matthew above, and frequently in the Old Testament when kings or prophets call for a fast or go into mourning because the whole nation needs to turn back to God, it is assumed that this will be an expression of the heart's movement to the Lord. (Not, note well, an expression of emotion. If anything, it is likelier to order and strengthen the emotions than they are likely to sort fasting out properly.) But when the heart moves, the body should move also, for we are not ghosts in machines but a single whole, a body-and-soul complex. C. S. Lewis says in his novel Perelandra that the sacraments were instituted partly as a reminder that the division we draw between the body and the spirit is neither wholesome nor final. Fasting allows the body to participate in our penitence; and, as Jesus suggests in Matthew, in our remembrance of that great day when the Bridegroom was taken away from us for a time.

3) It brings about a confrontation with the False Self. Why precisely fasting does this, I do not know; though it should be said that it does not do it automatically, but only according to the spirit with which we enter our fast. If we enter it inattentively, and merely on the grounds that the Catholic Church has bound us to fast, we will glean but a little benefit; if we enter it with a desire to show off, whether to others or ourselves, we are already whited sepulchers, empty perhaps of food but full of dead men's bones. But if we enter it humbly, accepting the practice of the Church and trying to allow God to work in us through that medium, we will learn a surprising amount about ourselves, and particularly about the False Self.

Why do I say "the False Self"? To distinguish it from the ordinary confrontation with fleshly desires. Crankiness, for instance, seems to be a catholic experience among Catholics when we fast. This is natural; when the body is refused its habitual pleasures, it goes into hysterics; the Flesh neither knows nor cares what our larger goals are, but simply wants to get what it likes. But all of this lies in the realm of the natural conflict between the Spirit and the Flesh. When we speak of the False Self, we are dealing not with bodily but with spiritual realities. It must always be remembered that our identity in Christ is our real identity, even though it may be less familiar than the identity we lived in before our conversion (whether that conversion was to a newfound faith or to an intentional practice of what we once took for granted). That second identity is the False Self.

This is not necessarily a malicious or vulgar identity; it may, indeed, be very self-disciplined, even very moral -- even, in a sense, very religious. It is, in a way, the Devil: the temptation, not of wicked self-indulgence, the Flesh, nor of a wicked acceptance of the corrupt systems of the World; rather, it is a wicked spirituality. Chesterton's phrase, "things of that extreme evil that they seem innocent to the innocent," is very fitting. Fasting, for whatever reason, seems to awaken the False Self. As for its identifying marks, they are probably unique to each person; provided that we stick like limpets to prayer, I dare say we will know it when we see it.

I wish I could say that there were some dramatic and decisive way of defeating the False Self. Possibly there is, but if there is I do not know anything about it. The only ways I know of dealing with the False Self are the same ways that every sin and tendency to sin is dealt with: Confession, Communion, prayer, spiritual direction, studying Scripture, brotherly fellowship, tithing, Eucharistic Adoration, examination of conscience, the Rosary. Do this and you will live.

The Mystery of Marriage

The question of gay marriage, having already been broached in a number of places, has come to roost in Maryland (not that it is likely to be the last). Thoughtful people are divided about the right conclusion; I have been on both sides of the fence myself, and transitions have been at once painful and tedious; not a little rhetorical shrapnel has exploded, more than once, too close to my head for comfort. (Hoping to keep that shrapnel to a minimum, I repeat here that I am a homosexual myself, one who attempts to live chastely, in accord with Catholic teaching, which may be found in the Catechism, paras. 2357-2359.) What ought a Christian -- or any person of good will -- to think of the matter?

Marriage, says St. Paul in Ephesians 5, is a great mystery -- translated into Latin as sacramentum -- and has reference to Christ and the Church. This much we know from revelation, and this we could not have learned on our own. That marriage, in one form or another, exists in basically every culture and has roughly the same form and implications does tell us that it is a manifestation of the law of human nature, but it would tell us nothing of its mystical significance, as understood by the Catholic Church.

Now, it is an element of Catholic teaching -- one violated by ostensibly Catholic governments many times over the course of history, but never mind -- that anything which is known solely through the medium of revelation, and could not be known through human reason however consistently and persistently exercised, is properly the province of the Church, not the state. Only the Church has the authority to authoritatively teach those truths revealed by God and not known through any other medium. There are some truths which are not revealed at all, like the multiplication table, known through unaided reason; and there are some which one could reach through reason or through revelation, because both are adequate to produce the conclusion. Reason alone is the province of the state. Anything known solely through revelation is outside the state's ken, and it would be wrong -- a usurpation, a gross injustice -- if it attempted to enforce doctrines proper to the revealed sphere. Tendering respectful regrets to St Augustine, this is why the political persecution of heretics, although it has not always been adequately denounced by the authorities of the Church (though sometimes it has), has at any rate always been wrong.

Returning to the subject at hand, we are now in a position to formulate a right approach to the problem. Is the belief that marriage ought exclusively to involve one man and one woman, without any variation in the gender or number of the partners, something known only through Christian revelation, or is it known through human reason as well? If it is known through reason, then it is right and proper for the state to publicly recognize the fact, and enshrine it in law. If, however, this truth falls solely into the province of the Church, the state certainly ought to do nothing about it.

Viewing things through a strictly social lens, I believe it is safe to say that the sociological purpose of marriage has always been the begetting and rearing of legitimate children. (I specify "legitimate," because of course many societies have not only had hordes of illegitimate children, but turned a somewhat indulgent eye toward the manner of their getting -- on the part of the male, anyway.) For this purpose, most societies have deemed it necessary to have one man and one woman put in a permanent bond, a covenant, for the raising of said children.

There have been two major, conspicuous exceptions to this pattern. One is polygamy and the other is divorce. Both were tolerated for Israel under the Old Covenant, though Jesus Himself tolerated neither of them. But their genesis is fairly easy to see: the one, due both to the extreme predominance of men in the cultures where it prevailed, and possibly to a shortage of men on account of wars and so on; the other, because people often get tired of each other and want somebody else, and most societies have seen fit to enshrine the fact in law. (I am not here addressing the question of marriages that are invalid in themselves, and are therefore eligible to be broken up through annulment -- a formal declaration that there was no valid marriage in the first place -- rather than divorce. Msgr. Ronald Knox, a contemporary of C. S. Lewis, has an excellent bit on the subject in his sermonic collection In Soft Garments; but this issue, while interesting, is beside the point.)

Both, however, share premises with the view which our Lord says was "from the beginning" -- that is, an element of the law of human nature, which every sin departs from. Lewis puts it best when, somewhere in Mere Christianity, he says, "Men have disagreed over whether you ought to have one wife or four. But they all agreed that you shouldn't simply have any woman you liked." Both polygamy and divorce are clearly declensions from, not mere alternatives to, the ideal of a permanent covenant between one man and one woman. They rely on monogamous marriage for sense to be made out of them. Polygamy literally consists in multiple marriage covenants made severally -- the man and all his wives were not part of one covenant; he simply had multiple individual marriages. Divorce, even more obviously, depends on marriage for its existence, since it is the destruction of marriage.

A homosexual pair, for reasons I hope I need not elaborate in much detail, cannot produce offspring no matter how theoretically fertile one or both of the parties. It therefore cannot constitute a marriage in the sociological sense we have been dealing with.

But what of the other significances of marriage? After all, even hardline conservative Catholics rarely insist that begetting children is the only reason for marriage. True; and it is, in fact, Christianity itself which set forth those other reasons. "Mutual society, help, and comfort that one ought to have of the other," as the Anglican rite has it (or used to have it -- one can hardly keep pace with the fluctuation of their traditions) is something we can see through reason, but of course that is scarcely specific to marriage; indeed, if marriage were our only source of society, help, and comfort, life would have come to a parlous pass. As for being in love, eros in the strict sense, attitudes to that (Catholic or otherwise) have been consistent through time and space only in being at variance. Everything from ranking eros nearly among the virtues, to making it practically a vice, to devout indifference about the whole question, have prevailed; there's no good seeking a consensus down that road. Nor has there, until very recently -- the last century or two at most, I believe -- been any attempt to regard eros as intrinsically connected to marriage, and many people, from swooning poets in the twelfth century to frivoling cynics in the twentieth, have regarded eros and marriage as positively irreconcilable. It is only Christianity that has elevated marriage from a covenant focused simply on progeny to a sacrament, mystically setting forth the relation between Christ and the Church. So if we trust the Church to tell her that there is something more to marriage than children, what grounds can we offer for not believing her when she tells us what the something is?

Of course, we might argue that we merely happen to agree with the Church for other reasons, but in that case we had better have some solid arguments to hand when asked why we wish to define marriage in a way that -- for better or worse -- has never been done by any human society in history. (This is not to say that there have never been societies which were highly tolerant of homosexual behavior, but that is another matter.) If we happen to feel (or wish?) that marriage is just a symbol of our love, fine; but why should the government be compelled to bestow any legal status on a private romance? If it is a pragmatic question of inheritance and visiting rights in hospitals and the like, naturally people ought to be able to make out their wills as they please and see whomever they like when they are sick, but reinventing marriage is not precisely the obvious solution. If it is a matter of the right to adopt children, I fear I must say, frankly but without relish, that I do not support it; not because I expect lesbians or gay men to be bad parents -- not in the least -- but because, psychologically, a child needs both a father and a mother; to deprive them of either causes quantifiable psychological detriment, as anybody can see from the results of single parent families, rapid successions of partners, and the like.

Perhaps the most troubling dimension of the whole discussion, though, is the determination on the part of some (not all) gay activists to have the question decided without discussion. Not legal discussion, of course that will take place. But one argument that I, at any rate, have frequently heard upon the lips of fellow homosexuals is that lesbians and gay men deserve the right to get married, period. End of talk. To even raise the question, with such people, constitutes bigotry.

That, no person of integrity and respect for others ought to countenance. Those who are deeply convinced that their position is right should not need to bully people: only to state the facts and exhibit their implications, clearly, logically, and calmly. A phrase from the Second Vatican Council's decree on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, is very much to the purpose: "The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power." I refuse to agree that any alteration of one of the fundamental building blocks of any human society -- perhaps the single most fundamental building block -- should or can be accomplished, or even halted, without an honest investigation of the realities behind the current state of affairs, and the implications of the change being considered.

That such implications are too little considered is, I think, adequately illustrated by the fact that Catholic Charities in the District was forced to shut down its adoption and foster care services after the passage of the new laws on marriage -- not because it objected to the laws, but because those laws would have compelled such organizations to provide services to lesbian and gay couples as well, even if such services violated their religious beliefs. One of my great disappointments with the gay movement generally is that, in its understandable (and, with qualifications, laudable) desire to establish equality and liberty for homosexuals, it does not seem prepared to look closely nor to keep a strict conscience when it comes to recognizing other people's liberty and equality. That is not right.

Pilgrims and Aliens

The debate over immigration into the United States seems to be heating up a bit -- whether this is a function of increased violence in the north of Mexico, or the polarized nature of American politics, or both. Arizona's recently instituted law has been defended as just and prudent by conservatives and bitterly attacked as implicitly racist by liberals.

I do not claim any solid opinion on the matter, let alone an answer. However, I do feel strongly that Christians are allowing their judgment of the question to be unduly influenced by political considerations that are entirely worldly -- whether the worldliness is right-wing or left-wing is of no interest to me. The influence of the World upon the Church is my bete noire; something with the persistence of a pet peeve, the enmity of a jealous rival and the seriousness of blasphemy.

In the hopes of remedying that, rather than attempting to provide a solution to the problem -- which, given my poor understanding of politics, I could not plausibly expect to do -- I would like to lay out seven principles that seem necessary to the proper framing of the problem. This has the advantage of making the problem clear; for, in this as in most political debates in our nation, each side is starting without any defined terms or defended premises; they exhibit only passionate rhetoric based on a mixture of power and ideology, which are not the same things as statecraft and ideas. This causes much hatred: never having bothered to realize what our own premises are, let alone examine them, we are then so shocked by others having different premises that they have never examined that the only possible explanation for their revolt against all common sense is that they are malicious or pinheaded demagogues. This does not make for mutually intelligible discourse, let alone civic civility.

But I digress. One of the roles of the Church in society (Dante, though today famed chiefly for his Hell, outlines this in his treatise On Monarchy) is to form the consciences of all men, and most especially of Catholics. The Church as an institution does not and must not wield temporal power, but she does wield influence upon the temporal powers indirectly, by helping all men to see the realities of right and wrong. Or, as C. S. Lewis says somewhere, theology (whether natural or revealed) tells us what ends are desirable; politics tells us what means are effective; and theology tells us which of these means are consistent with justice and love.

Taking several points of Catholic theology (though I imagine these would be acceptable to Orthodox or Protestants also), as well as several points of American history, I think we can at least put ourselves in the right frame of mind to answer the question of immigration justly.

1) A nation does have the right to protect its borders. Both military invasion and the incursion of criminal individuals are violations of the rights of nations, which may be met if necessary with violent force. It has, more generally, the right to enforce its own laws, provided that they are just; there is, of course, no point in having laws if one does not enforce them, something that God says plainly He instituted governments to do (Rom. 13.1ff). (Enforcing an unjust law is of course an act of injustice. Enforcing a neutral law, or one made for practical rather than moral reasons, is just.)

2) All human beings are made in the image of God; nations are not. Now, this does not mean nations are simply conveniences or fictions -- they have traditionally been regarded by Christians as being spiritually guarded by an order of angels, called Principalities. However, nations are not, like men and women, made in the image of God. Nations exist to serve persons, not the other way around; even if a man serves his country by dying for it, he is ultimately dying for his fellow citizens -- that is, other people -- rather than an idea. It is worthwhile to keep in mind that every nation will cease to exist before any person will; for persons will never cease to exist. Every one of us is immortal, stamped with the image of God. No nation is.

3) Welcoming the poor, the disfranchised, and the alien is an act of mercy, one which was not only encouraged but assumed in the Old Testament, which contains the only set of laws for a government that can be unequivocally called Biblical. When God tells His people, "You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Ex. 22.21), He is not only requiring the Israelites to treat foreigners justly. He is doing that; but note that there is no "if." It is taken for granted that there will be aliens within their gates. This was in-keeping with the ancient notion of hospitality that has withered practically to nothing in our own day. Nor was ancient Israel unique in this regard; every ancient culture set great store by hospitality, and many associated it with the commands of the gods -- as in a Greek variant of the Flood myth, in which wrath is visited upon mankind because of his refusal to show hospitality to gods disguised as poor strangers. Our own rejection of the long human tradition of hospitality is bizarre -- and, it may be added, unchristian (cf. Hebrews 13.2).

And Scripture affirms not only the command to welcome, and to some extent provide for, the stranger (cf. Deut. 24.19-22), but warns us with terrible solemnity that if we ignore God's command, we will be punished. Traditional Catholic catechesis included a mention of "sins that cry to heaven," one of which was said to be the sin of the Sodomites. Nowadays people usually think of, well, sodomy, but Ezekiel illuminates it for us: "Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, surfeit of food, and prosperous ease, but they did not aid the poor and the needy. They were haughty, and did abominable things before me; therefore I removed them when I saw it" (Ezek. 16.49-50; cf. Deut. 27.19). The duty of almsgiving is especially incumbent upon the citizens of a wealthy democracy -- for we have unparalleled freedom to behave generously and unparalleled resources with which to do so. In the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats, it seems to be the hook on which everything hangs.

4) Every person is obliged to live justly and lovingly toward all other men. We have, however, a hierarchy of obligations: our obligations to our family, for instance, outweigh our obligations to strangers. And one of these special obligations is love of our country, and love of our compatriots. Yet we must be vigilant and examine our consciences to be sure that we are not allowing any particular obligation to obscure the universal obligation that still impinges upon us. Every crackpot morality, every claptrap heresy, is the result of allowing some particular truth to muscle other particular truths aside -- in so doing, destroying our perception of universal truth. (For instance, the Gnostic heresies took the truth that human sexuality has to be disciplined, sometimes severely; and went off the deep end, declaring sexuality as such to be depraved, the work of an evil being.) Oversimplifications like this are tempting because they are, intellectually and practically, a great deal easier than the rigorous balance that is essential to Catholic doctrine. Everybody finds falling off easier than walking on a tightrope, regardless of which side they happen to fall on.

5) To be blunt, there is a point at which hostility to immigrants becomes rank hypocrisy. I am not asserting that our cultural attitude has reached that point, or that laws in Arizona or elsewhere have reached that point, nor positively denying it; I am only saying that there is such a point, and that that fact ought to be kept in mind. For -- with apologies to any of my audience who are of purely Amerindian stock -- we are a nation of immigrants; we are the children of immigrants, some of us immigrants ourselves and others only one or two generations removed; our nation purchased the stolen liberty of immigrants for two centuries; we thrust the original inhabitants of the lands we live in from their places, making them immigrants somewhere else; and for a long time we congratulated ourselves on the generous welcome we extended to immigrants. One of our most prominent national monuments, the Statue of Liberty, has this written on a plaque near its base:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Is this a binding statement of American law? No. But it is certainly an expression of our national heritage, our national identity; and if we are serious about our national borders on those grounds, it is an expression we must honestly reckon with.

It is easy to reply -- and, in the case of those who would thus reply, true -- that it was not we, but our ancestors, who made the decision to immigrate; we were born here. We cannot be held responsible for their decision. That is true, up to a point. We cannot be held directly responsible for the actions of another, whether a relative or not; but we can be held responsible for whether we approve of their actions or not. And if we approve of their actions, we ought to take a philosophically consistent stance on comparable actions. Furthermore, their actions have secured for us great prosperity and liberty: we live in one of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most democratic nations on the face of the globe. We must, therefore, acknowledge that we cannot treat our own ancestors' decision as a matter of indifference to ourselves; we have a vested interest in it; it cannot be summarily dismissed as irrelevant. Do we approve, or not? And are our attitudes toward contemporary immigration, over the Rio Grande rather than the Atlantic, in harmony or discord with our attitudes towards our forefathers, and why?

6) There are prudential questions to be considered; that is, questions of practicality. Many who cross the border are criminals -- seeking victims, or a market for their wares, or refuge from their own police. Not all are by any means -- indeed, given that many criminals make a habit of darting back and forth across the border, it is doubtful whether any significant proportion of permanent immigrants are criminals, and a considerable proportion come specifically to seek employment. Nevertheless, the depredations of foreign criminals are serious, and such problems as this deserve the most careful deliberation.

7) Finally, one thing we are very apt to forget in every political discussion is that we are talking about human beings. It is easy to lose a sense of others' humanity when we talk about movements, tendencies, policies, means, laws, demographics, sectors, interests ... the mind reels. Remembering that we are discussing not "immigrants" but real, living, breathing human beings will not decide the issue for us, but it will both cloud and clarify our minds: cloud them momentarily with emotion, and then, when we have conquered emotion, we will perhaps remember the real import of our decision, precisely because our hearts have been roused to the moral dimension of dealing with other people, and not with labeled counters. This question brings itself to bear upon human beings, not upon a cost-benefit ratio. Of course the practical effects do not determine what is just; but it is well to bear them in mind.

The Morals of the Mushroom Cloud

The topic of the atomic bombings of Japan, which closed the Second World War, cropped up with some friends a couple of times as the semester was ending. It is a subject that I have visited and revisited over the years, without knowing why: my personal links to Japan may have something to do with it. I find myself in a minority in adamantly rejecting the decision taken by our nation, but there are few things of which I am so absolutely convinced, as that this was a war crime.

It may seem academic even to discuss the matter. After all, the dead are dead and cannot be brought back to life by argument. However, I am persuaded that this act represented -- and represents for us, to the extent that we give it our approval -- a radical compromise with evil; and that cannot be permitted: not to Catholics, not to Christians, not to self-respecting human beings.

For we must always remember that it is not only the things we do which influence our souls; nor only the things we think. The actions of others influence us also, even if we neither directly assist nor suffer them; for the whole question of innocence is not simply question of what we have done, but what we would do -- how our souls have been shaped by thought, word, and deed, including our responses to the actions of others: keeping them out of our soul by opposition or welcoming them in by approval, rightly or wrongly. By giving something our approval, we involve ourselves in it -- not practically, but spiritually. And the spirit is too valuable a thing to be compromised. It is our very self.

The issue at hand is whether the U.S. was justified in using the atomic bomb on Japan as she did.

Now, the fact that this was a war-time act situates it in the territory of Just War Theory, a favorite topic of several Christian philosophers, beginning with St Augustine. One of the basic elements of Just War Theory (reiterated endlessly over the centuries, most recently in the Catechism of the Catholic Church) is that non-combatants are not to be touched. Hiroshima did include secondary military headquarters; however, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets not although, but because they were both large urban centers -- in other words, the bombings would result in severe damage to the civilian population. Damage to non-combatants in these strikes was not collateral. It was intended. This, if we accept Just War Theory at all, is an atrocity. The Catechism has the following to say (without directly citing the events of 1945): "The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict. 'The mere fact that war has regrettably broken out does not mean that everything becomes licit between the warring parties.' Non-combatants, wounded soldiers, and prisoners must be respected and treated humanely. ... 'Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation'" (secs. 2312-2314, emphasis original).

This actually yields a surprisingly clear syllogism for our use:
1. All acts of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities, etc., are war crimes (Major Premise)
2. These acts of war (the atomic bombings) were directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities (Minor Premise); therefore
3. These acts of war were war crimes (Conclusion)
With which we have the syllogism Barbara in the first mode, for all you logic nerds out there. (I hope you are both well.)

I have only once heard or read an attempt to evade the charge that it was not really intended as an attack on civilians. Paul Fussell, in his essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb," sets forth the argument that, days before Hiroshima, leaflets were dropped on the city warning people to get out. For this particular argument, I have approximately the same sympathy as with that of a murderer who defends himself by pointing out that he courteously sent death threats before carrying out the actual killing.

Defenders of the bombings may take several more reasonable tacks. One, favored by the more pragmatic, is that the bombings saved lives in the long run: because the war ended so shortly thereafter, unnumbered American soldiers survived it. Some, taking a more universal perspective, will point out that Japanese soldiers, and even Japanese civilians, were likewise saved from the attrition of a slow march into the heart of the Japanese Empire. I have heard more than once about the last-ditch machinations of the Japanese government to arm the elderly, the women, and the children in a final effort to defend the nation.

Which, in fairness, makes perfect sense in view of the Potsdam Declaration made by the Allies earlier that year. It was, in the view of the Japanese government, a rehash of the Cairo Declaration of 1943 (which it cited). It was the Cairo Declaration which required of Japan not simply surrender, but unconditional surrender. The alternative presented to the Empire was a full invasion, which, in the Allies' words, would mean "the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland." What country would not make plans to arm its people so that they could defend themselves against that kind of threat?

Here comes the joke, though. Note that the Cairo Declaration, and that of Potsdam which reaffirmed it, demanded an unconditional surrender. Anything less, any peace terms which might be offered by the Japanese Empire, were being rejected categorically. The joke is that one of the other essential elements of Just War Theory is that any war, to be just, must be fought only to reach peace. Being able to unconditionally impose one's own will upon the opposing side is not a prerequisite, and in fact is unjust if it obstructs a reasonable prospect of peace. It could theoretically be argued that only an unconditional surrender from Japan could possibly have resulted in peace; but that can scarcely be proven. It could also theoretically be argued that, by insisting upon an unconditional surrender -- which, aimed at Japan, was not prima facie a realistic demand -- the Allies themselves made it necessary (if indeed it was) to drop the atom bomb. I do admit that this joke is not particularly funny.

Going back to the argument that it saved lives, whether American or Japanese (for I cannot abide even to answer the stance that it saved American lives at the expense of Japanese, as if we were worth more than they), it can only be said that this is not true.

That is, American soldiers were prevented from dying in the Second World War, and went home -- to die anyway: from cancer, or after crossing organized crime, or when they were shipped out to the next wars in Korea and Vietnam, or fifty years later asleep in their beds. Everyone dies. We know that, if we let ourselves. Whether a person dies in war does not make a difference about whether they will die at some point: the rate still holds at one per person, 100% (with allowances for those assumed a la Elijah, or raised from the dead Lazarus-style). Whether a person dies in war does certainly make a difference to what sort of pain they and their families go through -- though, it must be said, not necessarily a negative difference. The man who died at Iwo Jima as a war hero is a source of family pride, when, had he come back, he would have been traumatized by his experiences, estranged himself from his family and friends, and drunk himself to death. An imagined storyline, of course. But so are all the speculations about what would have happened between the Allies and Japan if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.

In any event such an argument is hardly tenable among Christians. For what ultimately matters is not how or when a man dies, but that "it is appointed for a man to die once, and after that to face the judgment." And no man will be judged according to the manner in which he died; but we are solemnly warned, repeatedly, by our Lord Jesus Himself, that "the dead were judged according to what they had done." To die, innocent, is a happy death: a fate to be hoped for. To die, morally compromised, is to risk your soul -- perhaps, to be damned. Everyone is going to die; what we need to be concerned about is not avoiding it as long as possible, for that is to think the way the World does, but to die having traveled as close to Christ as we possibly can. And we can hardly expect to travel close to Christ if we not only practice injustice, but defend it as integrity.

I do not claim it easy to maintain moral clarity in the face of such questions as this. It is also, I admit, far easier to sit writing about Hiroshima on a netbook than to sling a gun on my back and sail off, very probably, to be killed on the coast of Honshu, or captured and horrifically tortured. But if we believe in the Four Last Things -- death; judgment; Heaven; Hell -- in any real sense, we have to maintain that moral clarity. I believe that any price is worth paying to preserve one's innocence -- not that I imagine that I would pay any price. I know for a fact that I would sell my innocence for a lentil stew, because I have, God only knows how many times. But is what I or anyone would actually do of any consequence? The question before us is not what we, in our stupidity, cowardice, or selfishness, would in fact do. It is what is right. It is a question of whether, objectively, our innocence is worth everything, not whether we would pay everything to keep it. And if we do believe in the Four Last Things, then we had damn well better believe that innocence is worth everything, because innocence (or rather, that innocence God bestows on us on repentance, forgiving our lack of it) means everlasting bliss, and guilt, obstinately defended, means everlasting torment.

Does this mean I would rather have seen Americans and Japanese fighting to the bitter end -- in Taiwan, China, Okinawa, in the very streets of Tokyo? A thousand times, yes. No one would want that for its own sake. But I would rather see good, honest, loyal American and Japanese men fall as soldiers, one of the noblest deaths afforded to our broken race, than see children's faces full of broken glass and pregnant women with their skin melted by radiation. For one soldier to kill another is, at least, within the possibilities of a just war, and the soldier stands a very good chance of going to his death, to the extent that this is possible for anybody, prepared. For soldiers to kill non-combatants -- well, we have a word for what Al-Qaeda soldiers do in killing American civilians, and it is not an attractive one.

As Christians, it is vitally necessary for us to have clear heads on this question. Remember, we are the salt of the earth -- i.e., something that is supposed to preserve, prevent things from going bad, by being extremely unlike the thing we are preserving, as unlike as salt is unlike meat. We must not absorb the assumptions and attitudes of the surrounding culture: for instance, that preserving physical life is worth every moral compromise, or that anything that brings a war to an end is ipso facto justifiable, or even (though of course we would not put it this way) that whatever we did must be right because we are America. When we do that, we cease to fulfill one of the chief functions for which God put us into society -- to be a beacon of light in the midst of darkness (and if the very light in us is darkness, how great is that darkness!), proclaiming the eternal and vivifying truths that right is more important than might, that the soul is journeying at all times to damnation or salvation, that the real root of peace lies in justice rather than military, political, or economic force. And if the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be seasoned? Or what is it good for, save to be thrown out, and trampled underfoot by men?