From the Department of Names I Haven’t Heard in a Long Time comes Edward Feser, philosopher-blogger extraordinairre, who gets me right from the opening by framing the issue so clearly that I immediately recognized the absurdity of his errant interlocutors:
It must be Kick-a-Neo-Scholastic week. Thomas Cothran calls us Nietzscheans and now my old grad school buddy Dale Tuggy implicitly labels us atheists. More precisely, commenting on the view that “God is not a being, one among others… [but rather] Being Itself,” Dale opines that “this is not a Christian view of God, and isn’t even any sort of monotheism. In fact, this type of view has always competed with the monotheisms.” Indeed, he indicates that “this type of view – and I say this not to abuse, but only to describe – is a kind of atheism.”
I won’t risk over-quoting as I risked it yesterday with Patrick Deneen. Suffice that Feser readily finds three historic giants Tuggy apparently would dismiss as atheists:
As Orthodox blogger Fr. Aidan Kimel remarks:
I was surprised by [Tuggy’s] statement. Right off the top of my head, I can think of three Christian theologians of antiquity who identified divinity and Being—St Gregory of Nazianzus, St Augustine of Hippo, and St Thomas Aquinas. I can also think of three Christian theologians who preferred to speak of God as “beyond Being”—Dionysius, St Maximus the Confessor, and St Gregory Palamas. And not one had a problem identifying their God with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
(By the way, don’t miss Fr. Kimel’s old seminarians’ joke while you’re over there.)
It’s not a discussion for the faint of heart, but Fr. Kimel’s citations of Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas and God “beyond being” again illustrates Orthodoxy’s apophatic approach, which I found, and continue to find, so right compared to brash bloviating about God.
Oh. I almost forgot: Feser beguilingly titles his blog “Dude, Where’s My Being?” and I give the H/T to First Thoughts.
Grégor Puppinck at the First Things blog cautions against minimizing evil with wimpy complaints of “discrimination against Christians”:
the concept of non-discrimination is at an impasse because it is founded on an abstract equality: Firstly, the real problem is not the matter of “discrimination against Christians,” but the fact that the law distances itself from justice and invades all spheres of life. The real question is that of the definition of justice and the source of public morality. What Christians perceive as an “anti-Christian discrimination” is none other than the violence with which another “morality” tends to replace the Christian anthropology. What some Christians perceive as a discrimination against them, is actually an injustice per se.
(Emphasis added)
Rod Dreher appends to his shout-out to Dana Gioia this oldy-but-goody from his own New Republic days:
The plea of invincible ignorance seems just about the only hope for Catholic parents in a southern Louisiana town who succeeded this summer in banning from a local Catholic high school the work of the woman widely held to be the greatest Catholic fiction writer of twentieth-century America.
…
Opelousas Catholic High — has the dubious distinction of being the first recorded school in America to ban the southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor.
The connection to Dana Gioia’s long and important piece is at least this:
Catholic literature is rarely pious. In ways that sometimes trouble or puzzle both Protestant and secular readers, Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent. Catholics generally prefer to write about sinners rather than saints. (It is not only that sinners generally make more interesting protagonists. Their failings also more vividly demonstrate humanity’s fallen state.)
So some Catholic folks in Opelousas apparently wanted “pious.”
Speaking on long pieces, Tom Scocca on Gawker uses Buzzfeed’s “Bambi Rule” ban on negative book reviews as the launching pad for an extend praise of snark, extended scorn for smarm, a subset of bullshit. A specimin, with a culture & sensitivity report:
If negativity is understood to be bad (and it must be bad, just look at the name: negativity) then anti-negativity must be good. The most broadly approved-of thing about Barack Obama, in 2008, was his announced desire to “change the tone” of politics. Everyone agreed then that our politics needed a change of tone.The politicians who make speeches, the reporters and commentators who write the articles expressing the current state of political affairs, the pollsters and poll respondents who ask and answer questions about politics—in short, the great mass of people who do anything that could conceivably generate something that could be called a “tone” of politics—all were dissatisfied with the tone.
One of the silliest or most misguided notions that David Denby frets about, in denouncing snark, is that “the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side threatens to win national political campaigns.” This is more or less the opposite of the case. What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick flow of opaque smarm.
Here is Obama in 2012, wrapping up a presidential debate performance against Mitt Romney:I believe that the free enterprise system is the greatest engine of prosperity the world’s ever known. I believe in self-reliance and individual initiative and risk-takers being rewarded. But I also believe that everybody should have a fair shot and everybody should do their fair share and everybody should play by the same rules, because that’s how our economy is grown. That’s how we built the world’s greatest middle class.
The lone identifiable point of ideological distinction between the president and his opponent, in that passage, is the word “but.” Everything else is a generic cross-partisan recitation of the indisputable: Free enterprise … prosperity … self-reliance … initiative … a fair shot … the world’s greatest middle class.
Yup. Certified smarmy bullshit, resistant to reason. Start a D5W drip with 100mg of snark per hour.
It’s only in the last 15-16 years that I’ve discovered poetry, and learned at least what could be meant by “truth” that wasn’t “fact” – a concept I had trouble even in my late teens not dismissing as double-talk.
People used to argue about poetry. Really.
I kind of miss those days (though truth be told, I don’t remember those days). When I was very young, a great poet even was hauled before Senator McCarthy’s inquisition because of a poem. Read all about it in Concerning “Goodbye Christ”: Langston Hughes, Political Poetry, and African American Religion
I recently discussed Patrick Deneen’s thoughtful take on Pope Francis.
Someone named Adam Shaw at FoxNews.com says “Pope Francis is the Catholic Church’s Obama – God help us.”
Read the piece. Marvel at the superficiality. It is a thing of wonder, no?
Then debate the resolution “Fox is what passes for conservatism today – God help us.”
This is my late father’s 94th birthday. I want to be like him when I grow up.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 