Tag: Natural Law

Are there any Jews in this house?

A difference between East and West

It has been a while since I did much more than curate some quotes here for Sunday. But the juices got going yesterday.

J Budziszewski, a Roman Catholic academic who has an avocation of studying and teaching Natural Law, fields a reader question about whether it’s always wrong to lie, and whether people aren’t sometimes forced into lying.

Budziszewski’s reply (I hesitate to call it an answer) includes the suggestion that one of the three questions the reader collapsed into one is:

What is the proper understanding of a lie? Is the classical definition right, so that a lie is saying what one knows to be false with the intention of deceiving? Or is a lie only speaking in such a way to someone who has a right to the truth? Or does anything which conceals the truth count as a lie, so that, for example, silences, disguises, ambushes, and polite equivocations are kinds of lie?

A test of one’s theory about lying is this fairly classic question, now mercifully hypothetical but not at all hypothetical 85 or so years ago in great swaths of Europe: “Are there any Jews in this house?”

I have tended to think that the right response to that is to look the Nazi in the eye and answer “No,”, even if you’re sheltering three families of Jews, and that doing so is not a lie because the Nazi has no right to the truth about whether you’re sheltering Jews (or perhaps are married to one).

But I’ve been leaning very recently toward a subtly different answer, one that I suspect would be relatively favored in the Christian East. Paradoxically, the right response is still “No” — but I’m inclined to think that so answering is a sin.

Let me explain. In the Christian East, sin is viewed consistently with the literal meaning of the Greek word for it: amartia or hamartia, literally “missing the mark.” It is not viewed primarily as rebellion against God.

I’ll elaborate. In a prayer all Orthodox Christians know, we ask “Lord, cleanse us of our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for Your Name’s sake.” This three-fold distinction of ways in which humans miss the mark (and what they need in each case) startled me when I first encountered it because it gave voice and vocabulary to an intuition I’d had for years but didn’t know how to articulate (it was a factor in my becoming Orthodox that they nicely articulated my intuition). And it implied that we need repentance even for our mere “infirmities” (see below).

Just this week, I heard a very erudite Orthodox Priest addressing an arguably analogous situation. In the Canons of the Church, the penance for murder is three years of excommunication. (Temporary excommunication in Orthodoxy can be a treatment, not a death sentence.) There’s not exactly an exception for killing in war, because that typically carries a penance of one year of excommunication. That is, there’s no ban on military service that might require killing in war, but if that befalls an Orthodox Christian, it is treated as a sin and given a penance — for the healing of the trauma of the soldier who killed if nothing else.

So we don’t say a soldier killing in war doesn’t sin thereby. We don’t say that he shouldn’t have done it, either.* It seems to me that the Church is treating some sins, some times, as necessary but still sin. And that seems consistent with the whole creation groaning for redemption. We live in a fallen world and cannot rise entirely above it. So maybe circumstances in this sorry world sometimes leave us spattered with the merde of doing the best we can when the best we can is bad.

So back to the Nazi jew-hunter at the door. I’m unequivocal that the right answer is ”No” and inclined to think that the right answer is still a sin. Treating it that way opens the door to confession, repentant, possibly a bit of penance (which I’ll bet wouldn’t include any period of excommunication these days), and thus the effectuation of healing the soul of the trauma of having been through that.

On a related note,

Orthodox often feel that Latin scholastic theology makes too much use of legal concepts, and relies too heavily on rational categories and syllogistic argumentation, while the Latins for their part have frequently found the more mystical approach of Orthodoxy too vague and ill-defined.

Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church.

After some 29 years as Orthodox, I feel as if the rational and syllogistic arguments are ways of keeping God at arms-length. In the context of the hypothetical I’ve been writing about, I feel that any approach that excludes the “No” as “sin” deters the person forced to utter it from an opportunity for needed spiritual healing.

Bear in mind that I’m not an expert on the Canons. That asterisk above is a reminder:

  • that St. Basil the Great and St. John Chrysostom differed on war: Chrysostom essentially forbidding killing even in war; Basil allowing that violence may be required for the “defense of the weak and innocent,” that “it is never justifiable,” but that killings in war should not be “classifiable as murders.”
  • that Chrysostom seemingly held that beneficial deception isn’t really a lie at all, which is pretty close to Budziszewski’s second proferred definition of a lie.
  • that the Orthodox Church treats no single Church Father as the final word on things.

So if I were in a situation like the householder with the Nazi Jew-hunter at the door, you’d be right to think (a) I’m answering “No” but (b) I’m taking that “No” to the sacrament of confession next time, letting my Confessor sort it.

Repentance

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

Properly ordering things

Church leaders of a later age might have said, “Let’s admit them as they do their current jobs and eventually, when they have ‘heard the word,’ they will think their way into a new life.” The church of the Apostolic Tradition says in effect, “No, our approach is the opposite. We believe that people live their way into a new kind of thinking.

Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church.

It came as a surprise to me that Catechesis in the Early Church consisted more of breaking the behavioral habits of life in a pagan setting than of imparting question-and-answer doctrinal orthodoxy, but Kreider isn’t the only one to allude to that.

Between the Revolution and the Civil War

American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, was to make most questions of truth into questions of practicality. What message would be most effective? What do people most want to hear? What can we say that will both convert the people and draw them to our particular church? The heavy pressure for results meant that very little time or energy was available to think about God and nature, God and society, God and beauty, or God and the shape of the human mind.

Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

In my mind, after considerable reading over decades, this period, and particularly the early 19th Century revivalism, is the birth of what we call evangelicalism today. The evangelical tendency of earlier times (starting particularly around the first “Great Awakening”) was closer to historic Christianity.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

The Cyruses we need

The sexuality scholars of the time fancied themselves edgy characters exploding bourgeois norms. They took pleasure in deriding older scholars, the “dead wood” who devoted their careers to such square projects as the Standard Edition of John Dryden. They, by contrast, wrote books with such titles as Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault; Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities; and Vested Interests: Cross-dressing and Cultural Anxiety. The key words of the day were “subversive” and “transgressive.”

Paglia showed them what subverting and transgressing really looked like, mocking the tenured radicals’ bogus cultural politics—bourgeois lives in leafy college towns and hip urban neighborhoods—and inept handling of bohemian, illicit material.…

… It was taken as a sign of profundity, not incoherence, that few people could untangle sentences such as this from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990):

Once the incest taboo is subjected to Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis in The History of Sexuality, that prohibitive or juridical structure is shown both to instate compulsory heterosexuality within a masculinist sexual economy and to enable a critical challenge to that economy.

Rather than labor to translate such a sentence into English, Paglia mocked it. Why take these writers’ half-baked “readings” and low standards seriously, she asked. They come from dilettantes, not creative minds.

…

In 1991 Paglia spoke at Harvard, where she accused the university of hiring “trendy people in cultural studies centers who believe that the world was created by Foucault in 1969.”…

… Since those professors were too ensconced and comfortable to improve, or even to carry out the basic pedagogical duties, the students must take charge of their own education:

First, make the library your teacher. Rediscover the now neglected works of the great scholars of the last 150 years, who worked blessedly free of the mental pollutants of poststructuralism. Immerse yourself in the reference collection, and master chronology and etymology. Refuse to cooperate with the coercive ersatz humanitarianism that insultingly defines women and African-Americans as victims. Insist on free thought and free speech.

The critique struck home. Under Paglia’s raillery, the theorists of sex and politics looked like small ignorant figures in spite of their knowing demeanor. All they really understood was academic politics, which they played very well. Paglia demonstrated that they had erected a social network that operated on cronyism and prestige, which would collapse as soon as a few genuinely erudite and courageous critics challenged them.

…

In Provocations Paglia declares that the heart of the ’60s movements was “a new religious vision,” whose votaries cared about political reform, but “were also seeking the truth about life outside [existing] religious and social institutions.” The truth came before politics, sex, rebellion, or drugs. The truth Paglia identified long ago is that in all human beings there is an “emotional turmoil that is going on above and below politics, outside the scheme of social life.” Great art touches it, and so does religion. Individuals who respond to art and religion understand that when politics and social life presume to replace them as right expressions of that turmoil, they falsify it instead…and Paglia won’t countenance a lie. That puts her at odds with every institution liberals have managed to seize, from academia to the Democratic Party. But if you mentioned that to her, she would shrug and get on with the truth-telling. She has nature on her side.

Mark Bauerlein, Force of Nature, Claremont Review of Books.

A lot of Evangelicals reportedly believe that Donald Trump is kind of like King Cyrus in Jewish Scriptures/Old Testament (pick your preference), sent to rescue Real Christians® from liberal captivity.

I’m more inclined to think that Camille Paglia and Jordan Peterson, neither of them Real Christians® but with extraordinary crap detectors, are doing the Lord’s work, probably unwittingly, in demolishing parts of the deathworks. (They are two reasons I believe in common grace and natural law.)

It remains to us to walk out of the rubble.

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