Few of my online interlocutors have so earnestly engaged with my archeaotraditional theological and metaphysical arguments as our friend Francis Berger. A.morphous, my good old dude, you had better up your game, if you want to stay in it (NB: I can well understand that it might seem to you anathematic to be understood as in the game with such as we to begin with, for any such engagement might damn you to a prison camp of your own side, or something like it, someday – so, props to you, a.morphous, brave man)! Francis has posted a long, earnest, charitable and wonderfully generous fisk of a post I uploaded a while ago, about creaturely freedom and its reconciliation with divine sovereignty. I now here respond to his really quite lovely critique.

I note in passing that Francis writes that his conversation with me has been for him now and then painful. I have nowise ever intended to hurt him – on the contrary – and regret that our conversation might have been for him ever an occasion of pain. I am not interested in hurting anybody. But, as I have so often discovered, truth can hurt; rather, learning of error can hurt; indeed, cannot but hurt.

The nub of my disagreement with Francis is to be found I think in this paragraph of his post:

I find [Kristor’s] admission that freedom is uncreated rather interesting here. It signifies a recognition that if freedom is entirely God-created, then freedom is not really free. I reject the assumption that we are thoroughly caused. The existence of everlasting Beings is what Kristor would refer to as a brute fact. In other words, there is no underlying explanation past that level. Some might argue that God is also a brute fact in this sense, but most Christians address this by claiming that God is a necessary being that can be explained. In any case, the Principle of Sufficient Reason does not really apply to what I assume. Our freedom is radical and authentic because it is an innate aspect of our everlasting “Beingness.”

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Replying to my previous post on Baird and Douthat, JMSmith doubted the capacity of many contemporaries to experience what I’ll call “holy dread.” Similarly, The Smirking Gnostic wrote concerning his seventies peers of “shock at the ice cold consciousness of an existence for no reason other than lust satisfaction” and that still today the “worship of their bellies goes on unabated.” Given that my post concerned Douthat’s book “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,” theirs was a skeptical view of the optimistic thrust of the book.

Nonetheless, and despite much contrary evidence from interpersonal experience, there remains in me a stubborn central apprehension of the common human vocation to salvation. So I expect the call of that vocation to express itself to every human soul in one way or another. However it manifests, it will evoke a recognition and a decision, even if that decision is to brush it aside. Unless the response to this prompting is to seek out salvation, the prompts, I believe, will be recurrent. Such is the power of Eastertide.

We live in a world of incomprehensibly complex and recondite systems that are operated by experts and specialists with varying degrees of honesty and skill.  These systems are, when taken together, the technostructure and these experts and specialists are its technocrats.  Each technocrat operates a limited system, but no technocrat operates, or even comprehends, the technostructure as a whole.  No one operates or comprehends the technostructure as a whole because the technostructure is incomprehensible and operates itself.

Our world also contains a great many people who lack technocratic expertise but are maintained in some degree of comfort and security by the technostructure.  This class has a lower division of proles who are excluded from the technocracy by their mental and moral defects, or by accidents of birth, and an upper division of worrywarts who lack technical knowledge but claim for themselves a more-than-compensatory largeness of heart.  These men and women of feeling supply a glutted market with moral critiques of the technostructure, their critiques in most cases hackneyed and juvenile, simply holy hot air.

In his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, Pope Leo confirms that he is a man of feeling who would, if he could, preside like a papa at the head of this worrywart class.

Most people reserve their heavy artillery for the folks next-door, it being all but impossible to love proximate peoples as ardently as one loves exotic strangers or one’s own kind.  The fierce hatred of creedal neighbors conforms to this pattern, a small deviation seeming altogether more deserving of the big guns than outright disbelief.  Sigmund Freud called this “narcissism in respect of minor differences” and explained that, to the human mind, resemblance triggers hatred because rivals look alike.** 

“The medieval world was oppressed with the terrors of Purgatory and Hell, far more than relieved by hoped of Heaven . . . .  The child stared with horrified eyes at the huge open jaws of Hell, and at the devils pitch-forking miserable beings into that flaming, gaping gulf.  The impression first made in childhood, renewed in after life every Sunday, grew in intensity of terror as old age and death drew nigh.  There was not much attractive on the other side of the picture: the Heavenly Jerusalem represented as a closely walled-in city, doubtless with malodorous narrow streets, and angels by no means beautiful and attractive as companions.” Sabine Baring-Gould, The Evangelical Revival (1920)

It is only when contrasted with being pitch-forked into a flaming, gaping gulf that the prospect of living through all eternity in a Heavenly Jerusalem appeals to my rustic mind.  My hopes and dreams run more to eternal elbow room in a spacious land where silence and solitude are numbered among the blessings of the blessed.  While no doubt preferable to writhing on a red-hot griddle under the eye of a tireless tormenter, to be domiciled cheek by jowl on a celestial Manhattan strikes me, for reasons I hope are not damnable, as a paradise less perfect than paradise might have been.  

I do rather hope that each of the many mansions of which Christ spoke is surrounded by parklands so broad that eternity will not suffice to ramble to their ends.

“What he didn’t understand was this international Jewish conspiracy of ‘stick-up-for-each-other against the goyim.’  He should have read The London Morning Post more diligently.” Henry G. Alsberg, “‘Borgwis’ and Communist Jews,” The Menorah Journal (1924)*

This curious quotation requires more than a little unpacking.  The confused “he” of these lines was a communist comissar in Soviet Crimea, Tatar by birth, who was baffled and outraged when he found communist Jews favoring “borgwis” (bourgeois) Jews over communist comrads who did not share their blood.  The silly Tatar had swallowed the lie that the workers of the world are bound in an international brotherhood of their class. He was therefore condemned to a life full of puzzling surprises.

Some of us have been tussling in the comments over ambiguities of figurative language, specifically the ambiguity of what Jesus meant when he said, “Gates of Hell.”  The question was then asked what Jesus meant when he said “keys,” specifically what Jesus meant when he said, “keys of the kingdom of heaven.”  These “keys,” as you know, he promised to deliver to Peter at some future date, although he does not specify when or how long Peter would have them.

These keys figure prominently in the papal seal (properly bulla) and are sometimes supposed to be the keys to Heaven and Hell.  This is not so but may appear warranted by the ambiguous phrase “kingdom of heaven.”  The meaning of this phrase, unique to Matthew’s gospel, is hard to pin down but is certainly not identical to place known as Heaven.  

We’ve been talking a lot here lately about what Jesus might have meant in saying that the Gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church he had founded upon the Rock of Peter his Apostle. These reduced (so far as I have myself been troubled to understand) to whether he meant that the Gates of Hell would be either offensive or defensive to the Church. Would the Gates of Hell march out against the Church, or would the Church besiege and conquer them?

It seems clear enough to me that the latter interpretation is correct. Gates are defensive. But there is room for other ideas.

I have had some thoughts about that, which do not at all controvert any of the perspectives advanced in the recent discussions of that passage, but which may shed some light on the whole controversy.

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