Interview on C.S.

Lewis with Peter Kreeft

Source: Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, October 2003

A Conversation with Peter Kreeft
by Jedd Medifind

Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis scholar, spoke at the C.S. Lewis Summer Institute at the
University of San Diego in June of 2003. Jedd Medifind corresponded by mail with
Kreeft after the conference.

Four full decades after his passing, the legacy and influence of C.S. Lewis burn bright as
ever. If anything, the vintage of stories and ideas produced by the Oxford and Cambridge
don has only come to be more valued, more read, quoted, and discussed by pastors,
priests, scholars, laypersons, and skeptics alike. Although Lewis was an Anglican, his
work stirs the hearts and minds of individuals across the span of Christian traditions.
From the Chronicles of Narnia to The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, Lewis'
writings continue to find wide welcome among stodgy Mainliners, ebullient
Charismatics, devout Catholics, and tradition-loving Orthodox alike.

Dr. Peter Kreeft, a professor at Boston University, a writer in his own right, and a noted
scholar on C.S. Lewis, recently shared his thoughts on the persistent relevance of Lewis'
life and thought.

What first piqued your interest in C.S. Lewis?

What first piqued your interest in Chopin? In sunsets? In astronomy? In Audrey

Hepburn? The question does not need to be asked by anyone who has answered it. The
thing itself, the object, Lewis's mind and spirit, the truths and goodnesses and beauties in
his writings, rather than any psychological, individual, "felt need" on my part or any
sociological relevance or fashionableness on the part of the society or culture I came out
of.

My college roommate credited Lewis, especially Mere Christianity, with saving his faith.
When I tried it, it was like Augustine's first reading of the Bible: "Oh, I know all that;
that's too easy for me." Like the Bible, and like a human face, the book is deceptively
simple on its surface but inexhaustible in its depths. Once we have grown some depths of
maturity and overcome superficiality and superciliousness and adolescent arrogance, we
love it. It's the second book I mention, after the Gospels, when people ask me what to
read to understand Christianity.

The Problem of Pain was actually the first Lewis book I read, as a college freshman. I
didn't understand it all the first time, but I did understand that the reason I didn't
understand had nothing to do with Lewis, but only with me. Here was the clearest, most
direct, honest, intelligent, reasonable answer I had ever seen (and almost 50 years later it
remains that!) to the most difficult problem in the world.
What gives Lewis' writings their remarkable staying power? Is there something Lewis
offers that modern Christian thinkers lack?

The question has two parts: what does Lewis have and what do most modern Christian
writers lack?

My answer is that my own question gets it wrong. It's what Lewis lacks and modern
writers have that makes the difference. Most Christian writers today want to be up to
date, relevant, speaking to their generation, useful, etc. They want to be creative and
original. And they end up saying the same things and going out of date very quickly.
Lewis just tells the truth as he sees it, and ends up being original. He is totally
uninterested in "marketing," in intellectual economics. He does what Thoreau advises:
"Read not the Times, read the eternities." Chesterton says if you marry the spirit of the
times you will soon become a widower. If you seek and find and communicate "the
permanent things," you are permanently relevant.

There are also personal qualities in Lewis that make him one of the greatest Christian
writers: his intelligence, of course, and his imagination; but also his utter honesty and
openness and objectivity and love of being. He doesn't have ingrown eyeballs.

What allows Lewis' work to transcend many of the traditional Protestant-Catholic

barriers?

Two things: one a fault, the other a virtue. The fault is that that is the only subject Lewis
didn't want to talk about, even with his friends, much less in public -- the differences
between the churches, especially the differences between the Church of England and the
Church of Rome. He addressed issues within his own church and demolished Modernism,
which infected (and still infects) all the churches. But he refused to deal with 1517 (or
1054, for that matter.) Why? Both Christopher Derrick, Lewis's student, and Joseph
Pearce, Lewis's biographer, give the same answer: he was born in Belfast and knew his
prejudices sat deep.

But he [generally avoided this question] for two good reasons. This is true even if the
above constitutes a bad reason. For we must take him at his word in Mere Christianity
when he says that the reason why he does not address the issues between the churches are
these: first, he is not a professional theologian but an amateur whose "expertise" is in the
"basics."

Second, that he thought God wanted him to address the "basics" because most Christian
writers were not doing so; they were fighting on the flanks while the center was going
undefended. He also made very clear, in the preface to Mere Christianity, that "mere
Christianity" is not an alternative to any church, nor itself a church. It is like a hall, from
which different specific doors lead out, and only beyond those doors, only in the concrete
churches, is there food and fire and bed.
Yet, he says, "mere Christianity" is no mere abstraction, no lowest common denominator
(or "highest common factor," as they say in England), but a person: Christ Himself. And
that is why in each church there is a fundamental controversy between those who affirm
and obey and believe that Person totally and those who want to revise, update, nuance,
relativize, psychologize, or otherwise water down His strong meat. And this controversy
is far more important than the admittedly important controversies between the churches.
Whether Jesus really rose from the dead and is literally alive and active now has got to be
more important than sola scriptura or the Immaculate Conception. Whether there is one
savior or 260 million is more important than whether there are two sacraments or seven.

Do you think Lewis was on to something other Protestants often miss?

What Lewis was onto was the fullness of the faith. He wanted it all. Mere Christianity led
to more Christianity. This is a vague thing, a "tendency" rather than a doctrine; but Lewis
thought of Christianity as something like art rather than something like science in this
sense: science tries to purify its hypotheses and is minimalistic. [The method of science]
assumes that any idea is guilty (false) until proven innocent (true). Art, on the other hand,
glories in fullness and diversity and richness and universality ("catholic" with a small
"c").

If the churches ever did reunite, it would have to be into something that was as
sacramental and liturgical and authoritative as the Roman Catholic Church and as
protesting against abuses and as much focused on the individual in his direct relationship
with Christ as the Evangelicals, as charismatic as the Pentecostals, as missionary-minded
as the old line mainline denominations, as focused on holiness as the Methodists or the
Quakers, as committed to the social aspects of the Gospel as the social activists, as
Biblical as the fundamentalists, as mystical as the Eastern Orthodox, etc. Some people
have a nose for scandal, or garbage, or baloney; he had a nose for "Christianity-and-
water."

Does Lewis have something Catholics need to hear as well?

Yes, he was onto something Catholics need to hear too: the parts of their tradition, i.e. the
unbroken tradition of the single church which for a millennium was a single visible
church and then for another half millennium was still a single church in every way except
the papacy and the filioque. And that tradition contained every one of the ingredients
listed above. I think he thought (and I certainly do) that God was not allowing the desired
reunion of the churches until all of them had learned what they had forgotten. He did not
live to see Vatican II, but he would have been immensely pleased by it, because its genius
was to return to the sources, to interpret the Catholic Church's rich 2000 year history in
light of Scripture and the early Church Fathers. If all the limbs of the tree began again by
a return to the trunk, they would be united since there is only one trunk.

Which means, by definition, that insofar as Luther was right, Catholics have to learn, or
relearn, from him. And insofar as the Pope is right, Protestants have to accept him. Of
course that does not settle the substantive question of what they are right about, or even
whether they are right about anything, and what they are wrong about, if anything.

All the churches, including the "trunk," the Catholic Church, repeatedly forget things and
need reminders, sometimes from outside. Everything essential is already contained in the
"Deposit of Faith," or Sacred Tradition, left by the apostles; the Church, marked by
visible unity under Peter and his successors, is guaranteed infallibility to interpret this.
The people "staffing" this sacred organization, however, are not only morally defective
(that has always been so; even saints are sinners), and sometimes rather spectacularly so
(e.g. the Borgia popes, which dwarfed the current priestly sex scandals), but they also
forget (though never officially deny) some important theological dimensions, aspects,
angles on one or more of the "mysteries" (dogmas) of the Faith. The Church herself has
admitted as much.

The significant difference is that Catholics are assured that no matter how stupid her
teachers are, their Church will correct them and the Magisterium will never fall into
heresy, despite the fact that the Church is full of heretics. I don't believe any Protestant
can make that claim.

If Lewis were alive today and could deliver one more radio address on BBC, can you
speculate on what theme he might choose?

I'm sure of it. The last thing he ever wrote was an article for the Saturday Evening Post
on the sexual revolution and pop psychology (which are allies), titled "We Have No
'Right to Happiness.'" Like Chesterton, he saw that this was the most radical revolution of
all because it touched the very sources of life. It was a matter of practice and not just
theory, and it would destroy both the first and most fundamental institution of society, the
family, and the first and most fundamental precondition of all virtue, namely the principle
of honesty, or truth, or light—that reason must control the passions rather than vice versa.
Screwtape keeps coming back to that in The Screwtape Letters: dim the lights! In the
forties, when that book was written, the main motive for light-dimming rationalization
was social acceptance and "relevance." Once the Pill allowed the Sexual Revolution, a far
stronger passion has dominated the world, producing things our ancestors did not even
dream of, like the right of any woman to murder her own unborn son or daughter
(abortion), and the right of any family to commit suicide (i.e. divorce).

Any final thoughts?

It's always dangerous to try to outguess God, but I suspect [the reason Lewis never chose
to become a Catholic] has something to do with reunion. After the best conference I ever
attended, with two serious theologians [each] from the Roman Catholic, Eastern
Orthodox, Anglican, Evangelical, and mainline Protestant churches staying all week and
talking about their differences and agreements, in a frank and candid but irenic and
listening way, everybody constantly and naturally referring to things C.S. Lewis wrote
about this and that. Father Joe Fessio got up at the closing session and proposed that we
issue a joint statement of agreement and say that what unites us all, despite our serious
differences, is scripture, the first six ecumenical councils, and the collected words of C.S.
Lewis. Everyone cheered.

Let the cheers continue.

Is Stoke a Genuine Mystical Experience by Peter Kreeft

I teach the philosophy of religion at Boston College, including a course in Mysticism. I

am also a surfer. The question in the above title thus seems to me a "natural."

But no scholar has ever seriously asked it in writing. Why? Perhaps because of a double
danger in it.

For if stoke is a mystical experience, this answer will surprise and offend most serious
scholars. For then the gap between mystics and non-mystics is not nearly as great as the
"experts" think, and the door to mystical experience is open to more people than we
usually think. For let's be honest here: surfers do not have the reputation of being very
remarkable in any of the usually cited qualifications for being mystics: wisdom, self-
discipline, detachment, or holiness.

If, on the other hand, stoke is not a mystical experience, this answer will surprise and
offend most surfers, for stoke is almost always claimed to be a mystical experience by
surfers who are literate enough to understand the term. (Yes, there are some surfers who
are literate. Some even write articles for this journal.)

So my conclusion will inevitably challenge somebody's deeply held assumptions. That's

what we philosophers love to do most.

Every religion produces mystics, and though mystical experience is interpreted and
evaluated differently by different religions, it manifests a single common pattern
wherever it is found. But the content of this pattern, or the truths that mystical experience
claims to discover, cannot be defined, for one of the primary features of any mystical
experience is that it transcends definition: that"s why it's called "mystical" I. (So since my
subject transcends linguistic effability, I'm trying to eff the ineffable and unscrew the
inscrutable.) But we can describe the pattern of mystical experience well enough to
distinguish it from other human experiences, and we can do that by finding at last the
following 14 features. And we will find the very same 14 features in stoke.
It is ineffable.
It is irresistibly attractive.
It is direct. It is "caught" rather than taught, like measles.
It evokes a feeling of cosmic gratitude.
It evokes awe and humility in the face of something great.
It transcends fear, even the fear of death.
It transcends time.
It transcends boredom.
It supplies constructively the ecstasy (ek-stasis, "standing-outside-yourself") that is
sought destructively in drugs.
It transcends ordinariness, earthiness, or "homeyness."
It experiences a cosmic "Tao."
It fulfills our frustrated longing to get inside Tao.
It is generically "religious" but not specific to any one organized religion.
 It transcends duality into unity.

(This last feature is the most philosophically interesting, and the most distinctive to
mystical experiences. We find three forms of this unity: unity with the cosmos, unity with
all spirit or Self, and unity with God; or what F.C. Happold (in Mysticism) calls "nature-
mysticism, soul-mysticism and God-mysticism." The terms are Western, and the very
distinction is full of assumptions, but I use them only provisionally and pragmatically.

"Nature-mysticism" is typical of Romantic poets and Taoists, "soul-mysticism" is typical

of Buddhists and some Hindus, and "God-mysticism" is typical of Jewish, Christian and
Muslim mystics and some other Hindus.)

"Stoke" is the unique word used in the unique culture of surfers for the unique "high" that
surfers experience, either (a) during any surfing, or (b) at the moment of a perfect "catch"
of a wave, (c) at the moment of entering "the Green Room," the barrel of a crashing
wave, especially the first time in their life any of these three things happens. Stoke is not
just any "high." Most surfers have experienced other "highs," e.g. from sex, drugs, or
simply moments of natural perfection like sunsets; and they always say that surfing's
stoke is unique and incomparable.

To say that stoke is simply one among many joys, or "highs," is like saying that earth is
simply one among many planets, or that Beatrice is simply one among many women.
(Say that to Dante and he would challenge you a duel.) I can think of only two other
human activities that have unique words for the unique, incomparable and
incommunicable experience it alone provides: "Nirvana" and "orgasm."

Back in the 20th century a popular magazine took a survey of 100 surfers asking them
whether they would sooner give up surfing or sex. Eighty nine said "sex." When the
result was published, a chorus of surfers wrote in claiming the survey was bogus, since
no one could ever find 11 surfers who would give up surfing.(I do not know of any surfer
who has had a mystical experience that is recognized as authentic in his or her religion,
whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, or Taoist, and who can thus
compare stoke with mystical experience by personal experience. I would be fascinated
with any feedback information on this.)

Of course the fact that we can find all 14 of these common features in both stoke and
mystical experience is only a set of clues rather than proofs, since if they are taken as
proofs, all 14 commit the logical fallacy of Undistributed Middle:
Stoke has trait X.
Mystical experience has trait X.
Therefore stoke is mystical experience.

As a proof, this is no more persuasive than arguing that

Dogs have fur.
Rabbits have fur.
Therefore dogs are rabbits.
But as clues, common traits are significant. When seeking a culprit, a detective seeks a
large number of traits common to A, the person known to have been the perpetrator of a
crime and B, a certain suspect. If both A and B are male, fat, red-haired, and tall B is a
very likely suspect. If they are also both hunchbacked, the fit is even more probable. And
if their fingerprints match, the fit is certain, since two people never have the same
fingerprint. The "match" between stoke and mystical experience is significant, but not as
certain as fingerprinting.

(1) The first common trait is ineffability. Stoke is an experience that is far out beyond the
most distant sandbars of language, according to those who experience it. This ineffability
is probably the most clearly and universally present feature of all forms of mystical
experience, Eastern and Western, including near-death and out-of-body experiences. The
ineffability is not due to any unusual linguistic inadequacy on the part of the experiencer,
for the most articulate confess their linguistic helplessness as much as the least articulate,
though they confess it more articulately.

(2) A second common trait is irresistibility. Not everyone finds surfing irresistible, and
not all surfers experience stoke, and some experience it in milder forms that are less than
irresistible. However, full stoke is as irresistible as Beatrice to Dante, or Juliet to Romeo.

The classic example in surfing literature is Jack London's description of his initiation into
the art in Hawaii a century ago. Every surfer has a similar story; every surfer remembers
catching his first wave:

One after another they came, a mile long, with smoking crests ... these bull-mouthed
monsters, and they weigh a thousand tons, and they charge into shore faster than a man
can run .... I watched the little Kanaka boys. When a likely looking breaker came along,
they flopped upon their stomachs on their boards, kicked like mad with their feet, and
rode the breaker onto the beach. I tried to emulate them. I watched them, tried to do
everything they did, and failed utterly. The breaker swept past and I was not on it ... away
the little rascals would scoot while I remained in disgust behind. I tried for a solid hour,
and not one wave could I persuade to boost me shoreward.But then, at the end of the day,
Jack caught his first wave, and, in his own words,

From that moment I was lost.

Every surfer in the world can identify with that sentence. From the moment of your first
wave, you are hopelessly in love. Once you go to Heaven, you don't live on earth any
more.

(3) A third common feature to both stoke and mystical experience is that they are
"caught" (like measles) rather than taught (like math). That is, they are not attained by
any technology or "know-how" or calculation or method. No authentic mystic ever said:
"to attain mystical experience, simply perform acts X, Y, and Z." For mystical experience
transcends X, Y and Z, and the effect cannot transcend the cause. And the same is true of
stoke. Surfing can be taught, but not stoke.

Mystical experience is like dancing: you have to just forget yourself and fall into the
music. Until you do that, you're not really dancing. In mystical experience, God (or the
cosmos or some sort of super-self) is the music. Until you forget yourself and fall into
God, you're not a mystic. In surfing—that is, soul-surfing as distinct from competitive,
egocentric, performance surfing-the wave is the music. Until you forget yourself and fall
into the wave you're not soul-surfing. (The falling is spiritual and metaphorical, not
physical and literal, of course; literally falling into the wave is simply a wipeout.)

There is a technology or technique only for things less than yourself. There is no
technique for loving, only for making love (of one kind) or expressing love (of another
kind). There is no technique for seeing; you just remove the obstacles, by opening your
eyes. Technique is a cause-effect relationship: you bring about the effect (e.g. light in the
room) by a series of causes (e.g. electrical generators, wiring, and light bulbs). But the
effect cannot transcend its cause, and both stoke and mystical experience are effects that
vastly transcend any cause that we can control. (That's what technology is: a series of
controlled causes). If this were not so, we could invent something like stoke machines or
mystical experience machines; we could guarantee mystical experiences to everyone who
performed certain exercises, physical or mental. But all the mystics of the world agree
that this cannot be done. Mystical experience "just happens," like falling in love, or (at
the opposite end of the spectrum) s***.

(4) A fourth common feature is that both stoke and mystical experience evoke the feeling
of cosmic gratitude, perhaps the most pervasive psychological subsoil of all religion. This
happens on every good wave you catch, but especially your first. You know that you
have not chosen it, it has chosen you. You have simply placed yourself in the time and
place where the ineffable gift was given. "Pretty woman" has turned and smiled at you.

(5) A fifth common feature is the feeling of awe and humility in the face of greatness.
The mystic feels gripped by God and the surfer feels gripped by the sea, lifted up like a
tiger cub in Mother's jaws, or riding a giant, foamy torpedo that the sea has shot to shore.
But the most common image is riding horses, riding the stallions of the gods. And when
the offshore winds whip the crest of the approaching swells and leave haloes of white
spray behind each wave just before it plunges over, and when they are backlit by the sun,
you are not able not to see the waves as heavenly horses with wild white manes, ghost
riders from the sky, who disappear as quickly as they come.

(6) You also feel wild abandon, and fearlessness; and this is a sixth common feature. You
feel immortal. You want to whoop. Not many things in this world make you want to
whoop.

Once, in the sixties on the Jersey shore, I was foolishly body-surfing in such
exhilaratingly powerful waves and cross-currents generated by a passing hurricane that I
lost all fear. For though I am not a very strong swimmer, I am a strong logician, and the
following syllogism appeared to me as infallibly correct:
I have become one with the ocean; and
the one thing that cannot possibly drown in the ocean is the ocean;
Therefore I cannot possibly drown in the ocean.
I am still alive only because practical survival sanity overrode both mysticism and logic.

The danger is of course part of the thrill in both surfing and mystical experience. Both the
sea and God are dangerous; if you don't know that, you don't know either one. For
millions of years, not a single human being even dared to think of riding those monsters.
Waves can kill you, even if you are a good swimmer. Mark Foo, was no beginner. Failure
doesn't mean death in golf, or baseball, or basketball, but it can mean instant death in
surfing. And all mystics describe mystical experience as a death: of the ego, or at least of
egotism. And they don't fear it, they accept it.

(7) One of the most philosophically interesting features of mystical experience is its
transcendence of time. And although stoke shows this less radically, it does show it.
Sometimes stoke makes time not disappear but reverse itself. Surfing can be a time
machine, and actually do what the poet can only long for:Backward, turn backward, 0
time in thy flight:

Make me a child again just for one night.

Surfing actually does that, and not just for one night. Seventy year old surfers like myself
testify to this. Watch us old fogies feeling and acting like children again—only at one
place on earth: in the waves. Watch the magic light rise in our eyes like the sun on the
water. Watch the innocent, childlike joy squeeze up from between the wrinkles on our
faces, as swells arise on the face of the sea. If you watch us carefully, you can catch the
waves of stoke on our faces as we catch the waves of water on the ocean.

This turning back the clock to youth is not merely psychological magic; it is even
physical magic. Once, after a hot, humid, exhausting, and irritating 8-hour car trip to the
Jersey shore, I was literally too exhausted and hungry to be able to lift the suitcases out of
the car and into the beach house we rented. My board was my salvation and my magic
wand. Five hours later, I noticed that the sun had set and that I had forgotten supper. I had
been in the water for five hours, totally unaware of the passing of time, cavorting like a
toddler.

Stoke also resembles the transformed time-consciousness of mystical experience in a

second, stronger way: not only does it make time turn back, but it makes time stop, or
stand still, for that timeless moment when you and the wave are one, there at the top,
when you catch it at the exact split second when it breaks. That "split second," that
"timeless moment," is so big that it contains all time, it contains the whole history of the
universe, from the Big Bang right up to and including the breath you drew one instant
before. This instant is the only time, and it is also the last moment of time, the
apocalypse, and it is also the very first moment of time, the moment of creation.
("Morning has broken like the first morning/ blackbird has spoken like the first bird.")
Nothing more is needed now. There is no reason for time to continue.

This is paradoxical, for it's a wave that evokes this time-transcendence, and yet a wave is
utterly temporal—in fact it is the shape of everything that moves in time. The wave is the
form that unites matter and energy.

Stoke is the experience of dynamic, dynamite-like movement and of standstill shock, at

one and the same time. Mystics would say this is an experience of eternity—eternity
merely unending time, nor the mere absence of time, but the presence of all time at one
present moment.

I think this explains the deep happiness that both experiences always produce. It is a clue
that we were not meant to be in time forever, but in timelessness, and in these two
experiences we have a taste of our "home," our destiny. Both bring us back to the
timeless mode of consciousness we see in the very young and which some say was our lot
in Eden. (The consciousness of time, of death, of the ego, and of "the knowledge of good-
and-evil" all seem to stand or fall together.) I wonder: did Adam and Eve feel all the time
the way a surfer feels for that split second atop a wave?

Steven Wright, the dour Boston comedian, understands that moment. He says: "You
know that feeling you get when you lean back in your chair and lift your feet up and
balance on the two back legs for that one tiny instant before you fall either backwards or
forwards? Well, that's how I feel all the time." He's not at home in this world either; he
must be a surfer.

This timeless experience is available every time you catch a wave. For if time does not
stop for you, you do not catch the wave. If you remain in time for a quarter of a second
too long, the wave is past; "pretty woman" has not turned to smile at you. If you run
ahead too fast and enter the wave a quarter of a second too early, you get creamed. You
must find the split second. It is like a split coconut. But into that split, eternity can fit.

There are many parallels in great drama and cinema to that timeless moment. It's like the
magic moment in "Our Town" when the dead Emily sees her life in time with the eyes of
eternity and can't endure the beauty of it. Or like the magic moment in "The Miracle
Worker" when Helen Keller wakes to the meaning of meaning when Annie Sullivan
spells out "water into her hand, down by the well. Or like the magic moment experienced
by the lonely, abused, and dying sister on the white swing in the yellow sun and the green
grass of the Swedish spring in Ingmar Bergman's "Cries and Whispers," when her voice-
over mind says that even though her hypocritical sisters are only pretending to love her
and even though she will very soon have to go back into the house to die of cancer,
everything is perfect now, and everything is now; this moment is the only moment and
the meaning of all moments.

To the mystic, these experiences of eternity seem to take no time at all, though to the
observer they do. Which is truer, the inside vision or the outside vision? Who knows
stoke best, the surfer in "the Green Room" or the one outside who only watches or
photographs?

Mystical experience is an escape into the mystical reality of the present from the ordinary
unreality of the past and future. It is not a flight from reality, it is a flight to reality. And
so is stoke.

(8) Since stoke and mystical experience both transcend time, they also transcend
boredom. No surfer has ever been heard to utter the sentence: "Too many good waves;
I'm bored." No mystic ever said, "Too much God; I'm bored."

I don't claim to know what God, or Ultimate Reality, is, but I do claim to know
one thing it isn't: it isn't boring. Remember, in The Chronicles of Narnia, "Aslan is not a
tame lion." Neither is the sea.

Happiness eventually gets boring, but stoke and mystical experience give us not just
happiness but joy. It's new every time, like a sudden kiss. It feels like a lightning bolt that
does not go away but stands there shining.

Other things make you happy either (1) before but not afterwards, like dangerous
pleasures that are destructive, or (2) afterwards but not before, like doing your duty and
being courageous and making sacrifices, or (3) only while you do them, like eating
candy. But mystical experience and stoke both make you happy before, during, and
afterwards. When I know I'm going to surf in the afternoon, I'm happy all morning; and
when I remember the afternoon's joy, I'm happy all evening. A day of surfing is like a
wave: it has a long, grand swell before it breaks, and a glorious splash when it breaks,
and a great whitewater wash after it breaks. When you run across the beach with a spring
in your step and a song in your heart, your heart is already in the wave. Then you throw
yourself into the miraculously-healing waters, like the cripple at the pool of Siloam, as
soon as you see the angel troubling the water with waves. (That's some powerful angel!)
And when you come out, you're still stoked, with post-stoke stoke. For the sea keeps
loving you, washing you, and sweeping through your soul even after it leaves your body,
like a mother loving her baby even after the baby comes out of her womb. Mother Sea's
rhythms and music are inscribed in our hard-wired memory circuits, and in our blood,
and in our very genes. Your body rocks all night as you keep feeling the waves of the
waves. You are "out of the cradle, endlessly rocking."

(9) Both stoke and mystical experience transcend self-consciousness. They are not only
out-of-body experiences but out-of-mind experiences. The word for that is "ecstasy" (ek-
stasis), which means, literally, "standing-outside-yourself." This seems to fulfill
something we were designed for, and unconsciously demand, and are deep down restless
and unhappy until we get it.

This is why true mystical experience overcomes the temptation to the fake mysticism of
drugs. For drugs also deliver a kind of ecstasy by bringing us out of self-consciousness,
but destructively. We are programmed to be mystics, and if we have no mystical
experience and no hope of it, we are liable to sell our souls for cheap and easy imitations.

Stoke may be cheap and easy compared with the disciplines of religious mysticism, but it
is not an imitation. Stoke is a truer high than any drug can give. A wave carries you
higher into the heavens than a weed. And with no bad side effects: no scrambled brains,
no scrambled lives. And it's free. (The best things in life are.) And it makes you happy
and nice and even patient, without making you dull and uncreative and conformist. And
it's good for your body as well as your soul because it's healthy outdoor exercise. I can
tell the President how to win the war on drugs: get all the druggies to surf. That will
lower the crime rate by half. America's streets won't be safe until we have a surfer
President.

Surfing makes all your senses come alive in a different way than drugs because it plunges
you into reality, not away from it. Surfing makes you turn outward, not inward. It's the
exact opposite of hallucinogens. It's total sensory and mental immersion in a wet work of
art invented by Someone or Something a lot bigger than us. And the ecstasy spills over
onto all your senses: the feel of the hot caressing sun on your skin and the cold slap of the
wave on your muscles; the taste and smell of brine; the sound of booming and roaring
water; and the sight of a falling blue mountain with a gaping maw ready to swallow your
electrically-trembling body and suck you out of the body and into a moment of Heaven—
this is not hallucination, this is truth, this is verity, this is what-really-is. And that is
exactly what all the mystics say of their experience.

(10) Though both stoke and mystical experience are true, and real, and not fantasy, they
are also not earthly, or ordinary, but Heavenly, or transcendent experiences. They are not
"homely" but "unhomely," unheimlich, unearthly. Like love, they "lift us up where we
belong": out of our ordinary world, self, and time.

Yet though it is "unearthly," mystical experience is also utterly realistic, for the simple
reason that the "Heaven" it plunges us into is real. (Earth is real too, but the dull feeling
that "this is all there is" is not. Earth is real, but earthiness is not.)

Significantly, one of the commonest answers surfers give to "why do you surf?"
is "to go to Heaven." Other answers are:

(11) The next feature common to stoke and mystical experience is the experience of Tao,
or "Orenda," as the Iroquois call it. "Tao" means "the way," and it is one thing in three
places. (1) It is "the way" of ultimate reality, the timeless Pattern of all things. (2) It is
also "the way" of nature, which reflects this pattern in matter; the "way" natural energy
works, the way things happen. It is shaped like a wave. (3) It is also "the way" of the sage
who knows this pattern and conforms to it, who steps into this river and becomes a part of
it, who "follows the wave" and soul-surfs on Tao.

Tao attracts us in a mysterious, impractical way. We cannot live in the sea—we are not
fish—yet we love it; just as we cannot live in trees—we are not birds—yet we love them.
Why? What do we seek and find in air, sky, trees, mountains, sea and stars? The answer
is not clear, but there is a word for the answer: it is Tao. It is like a mysterious ingredient,
a mystical sugar that the Creator put into nature to make it taste sweet to us. It is
especially detected in moving water.

Tao has a character, a distinct and detectable personality, even though it is everywhere.
(It's like God that way.) It is not an abstraction. We can sense it—in waves, and in the
sun, and in birth and death. It is incredibly strong and incredibly gentle. It is subtle and
invisible, but it is alive. It is the ultimate source and ongoing energy of all life. It is the
blood of the universe, the pulse of the cosmic Mother. The wise work with it rather than
against it, painting with the grain of the wood, following the curl of the wave. This is the
philosophical basis of many Oriental arts: judo, tea ceremony, archery, painting,
gardening, architecture—and above all the art of living well, the highest of the arts.

The power of Tao is irresistible. The hard rock finds the power of the soft, gentle water
so irresistible that it eventually crumbles to sand. Surfers sense this power. When pressed
to be more specific about the thrill in stoke, every surfer mentions the incredible power of
the sea. Surfing even moderately sized waves is described as riding a giant's breath; or
riding tornadoes lying down on their side; or being a flea on a sleeping, snoring dinosaur;
or riding in a steam locomotive, with its great, grinding driving wheels beneath you. It's
locomotion on the ocean. Is it mere coincidence that the word that means "to heat up the
boiler of a steam engine" is also the word "stoke"? But this locomotive is not a machine,
it's alive. So it's more like a giant horse. But of course you don't really ride a wave as you
ride a horse, for you have to tame a horse before you ride it, but you can never tame a
wave. You can only catch a wave as a catcher catches a curve ball from the pitcher.

Dylan Thomas described Tao this way: "the force that through the green fuse drives the
flower/ drives my red blood." The force that drives all life is also the force that drives my
life. I discover my oneness with nature by tracing back both my blood and nature's to the
same cosmic heart pump, the same invisible force, the force that makes flowers grow and
waves swell. The force that drives the green flower, and the red blood, also drives the
blue wave, and my yellow surfboard, and pink-fleshy me, when we all become one in our
cosmic embrace.

(12) When this happens, we get inside Tao. I think we all secretly long to get inside Tao.
But if we are only ordinary believers rather than mystics, we can only stand outside the
sacred door, seeing and admiring and even worshipping it from a distance. Sometimes we
seem to smell it: the olfactory image is more intimate than the ocular one. But surfers can
get inside.

We all love to see water crystals, in the form of snow or ice, but surfers can slide inside
their crystals: the hollow tube of a collapsing wave is a crystal cathedral made of moving
water. You can actually enter it, ride through, and exit this inner sanctum, this holy of
holies.
It's the intimacy of being inside that's the deepest thrill of the stoke (S), as the deepest
thrill in sex is not merely the physical orgasm that we share with other mammals, but the
intimacy, the excitement of realizing that this beautiful woman, like the wave, has invited
you into her most intimate inner bodily being. Think of the difference between being in
the audience listening to a great choir perform, and hearing the same music from inside,
as a member of the choir itself. Surfing is like going inside nature's music.

The analogy is very close, for a musical note is the wave-form of all natural energy in the
medium of sound, as a wave is the same thing in the medium water. Music and water are
made of different kinds of matter, but they share the common form of the wave. Old
Pythagoras taught that the universe was one enormous musical instrument, and that the
heavenly spheres in their orbits made music, "the music of the spheres." He said we did
not hear this music because we were a part of it, since the earth is one of the heavenly
spheres. That's how it is with the sound of the surf: after you live on the shoreline for
years, you don't notice it because you have internalized it so much that it has become part
of your ear: no longer your object, your other, but part of your very self.

(13) Like mystical experience, stoke can be called a religious experience, though it is
independent of any "organized religions." (But, then, no religion in the world is really
"organized." At least I've never seen any. All I've ever found were disorganized religions.
When you get closer to them, they all look less like anthills and more like Noah's ark.
Can you imagine "organizing" all those animals?)

What I mean by distinguishing both stoke and mystical experience from "organized
religion" is simply that they contain no creed, moral code, or public cult of worship.
(These are the three dimensions sociologists observe in every religion.) Creed, code and
cult are like the shell of the nut: the visible surface. They exist only because there is a
living nut inside, an experienced or hoped—for fulfillment that is mystical. Mystical
experience in some sense is at the heart of every religion, whether that experience is one
of Eastern "cosmic consciousness" or 'enlightenment," or simply one of Western faith,
hope, and charity. Both forms are "'mystical" because they transcend ordinary experience
and reason's ability to define, discover, or demonstrate (the "three acts of the mind" of
traditional logic).

The religious character of surfing is clearer the farther back we go to its origins, and,
therefore, to its essence. In ancient Hawaii, the priest, the "big kahuna," uttered religious
incantations over the making of the sacred surfboard. Then as now, Hawaiians saw
surfing as a sacred sign signifying something somehow supernatural. (Look at all those
S's: is it purely accidental that S is the shape of a wave?) A sacred sign is like a delicate
handkerchief dropped by a goddess, or like a beam of starlight from another world; it
points to transcendence.

The tube of a breaking wave is not called a "green cathedral" because it looks like a
cathedral but because it feels like one. When you step into it, you spontaneously hush.
You stop breathing. Time stops. You have become total attention. You are in a magic
doorway, where the fundamental force of nature—wave energy—is now breaking
through into your little world from some larger world. Where does it come from? What's
on the other side of the door? I don't know the answer, but I know those are religious
questions. Surfing doesn't give you religious answers—it doesn't tell you whether to be a
Christian or a Muslim or a Buddhist or an agnostic—but it does give you religious
questions.

Also, like religion, surfing is gloriously impractical. It doesn't make you rich or famous,
unless you become a professional surfer. ("Soul-surfers" say that since surfing is love,
professional surfers are professional lovers—and the name for a professional lover is
"prostitute").This also makes surfing like religion, for God doesn't give a damn about
being rich or famous or powerful, and that's why He says we shouldn't either. He
preaches what He practices. He doesn't need us any more than the sea does; what we do
to Him mainly is to pollute Him, as we do to the sea. All He does to us is give Himself,
give us waves of His joy and beauty and power—just as the sea does. It's His icon.

When King David the psalm writer needed a natural image for God, he turned to the sea.
"The floods have lifted up, 0 Lord) The floods have lifted up their voice. / The floods lift
up their waves. / The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters. Yea, than
the mighty waves of the sea." (Psalm 93) And other prophets did the same. Habakkuk
wrote: "Thou didst walk through the sea with Thy horses, / Through the heap of great
waters." (3:15) But how often did David or Habakkuk see great waves? How often did
they even see the sea? The only sea they ever saw was the Mediterranean. How often
does the Mediterranean have great waves? Did they ever hold an international surfing
championship in Israel?

David probably had a once-in-a-lifetime experience of seeing great storm waves, and the
image haunted his dreams and stuck in his spirit so deeply that he repeatedly returned to
that image in his psalms as a natural symbol for God. That really makes me want to meet
God.

I think God surfs the universe. What boards does He use? Us. He shapes His boards
through all the events that happen to us. The whole universe is a set of shaping tools. And
each board is unique, not mass-produced.

I think we surf in God too. That's why surfing is good preparation for Heaven.We live in
three oceans. The watery one below us, we surf in with our bodies. The airy one above
us, we surf in with our lungs. And the Heavenly one above us, above the sky, above the
whole universe, is an ocean we surf in with our spirits. It is an ocean of joy, and God is
that ocean. We learn here to surf on His waves upside down. And that's the meaning of
religion: riding the swells of Divine Providence (also called Destiny or Fate), ecstatically
surrendering to the foaming love of God.

(14) Especially in Eastern religions, but also in the Western mystics, mystical experience
is the experience of absolute unity, the transcending of the essential form of all other
modes of consciousness, the subject-object duality. Is stoke that mystical?
Three or four millennia ago, India discovered that this supra-rational state of blissful
unitary consciousness could be attained by one or more lifetimes of arduous yoga. A few
centuries ago, Polynesia and Hawaii discovered that something like it could be attained
by good athletes after a few months' practice on a surfboard. Then, 30 years ago, America
discovered that it could be attained instantly by anyone on George Morey's great
invention of the boogie board: instant Nirvana for the masses. But is it the same thing?

Here is my demonstration that it is. (Remember, "demonstrate" can mean merely "show"
rather than "prove." Though my demonstration is a polysyllogism, it is not a proof, for all
its premises are deniable if you are not a surfer.)

Premise #1: S makes you one with the wave.

Premise #2: the wave is one with the sea, for a wave is simply the whole sea waving at
you, as the Queen's hand waving at you is the whole Queen waving at you.

Premise #3: the sea is the most perfect natural symbol for everything, for "the ocean of
being."

Conclusion: S makes you one with everything.

(I know this is also the formula for ordering a hot dog—"make me one with
everything"—but I refuse to stoop to such low attempts at humor.)

Here is an alternative demonstration of the mystical unity of S:

Premise #1: when you're in a wave, your body becomes part of the wave.

Premise #2: what your body does, your soul does too. You're not two people, a ghost in
a machine, but one. That's why your soul feels liquid and mobile and light when you are
in a wave: because it has traveled; it is no longer a landlocked soul. It's not solid earth
any more but water, and it sees its own reflection in the mirror of the sea. Thus surfing
also teaches you to "know thyself'. Surfing is Socratic.

The conclusion follows when you put the two premises together: if your body is
one with the wave and your soul is one with your body, then your soul is one
with the wave.

In S, you are "in" a wave not as a sardine is "in" a can but as your soul is "in" your body.
You are your body. You can't take your body off, as you can take your clothes off. And
you can't take the sea off your soul either because even after you come out of the water,
the water never comes out of you.

There is a scientific basis for this feeling of becoming one with everything when you
become one with the wave. For everything in the universe is in this wave. Everything
conspired to make this wave, everything from the Big Bang through the death of the
dinosaurs through last night's storm. Its parentage, its genetic heritage, is as wide as the
universe.

Surfing is always global: the sea horses we ride have run through every field of water on
earth. The water we touch in Hawaii has flowed under Arctic and Antarctic icebergs,
around Manhattan Island and uninhabited atolls, through California kelp fields and Cape
Horn storms. The home address of the water we ride is "Everywhere."

And you sink into this. Perhaps the best word for the experience is "melt." You melt into
the sea as a butter patty melts into a pile of hot mashed potatoes. When the butter melts
into the potatoes, it disappears. Yet it does not die. It simply becomes potato butter. But it
seems to die, and that death is supremely good because it's the death of the caterpillar to
release the butterfly. We live only when we die to ourselves, when we die to the I. The
self is a phoenix: it rises only from its own ashes. Every religion in the world knows this
incredible secret: that the only way to ultimately find your self is to lose it.

Surfing is one of the easiest and happiest ways to do this. To surf is not just something
you do but something you are. I surf, therefore I am.

Have I proved my conclusion? No. For stoke isn't, as well as is, the same as mystical
experience. But as far as I can see, the differences are all in degree, not in kind. All the
features of mystical experience are present in stoke, but not as fully, not as life-
changingly, as in most religious mystical experience. George Morey isn't quite Moses,
and kids on their boogie boards aren't quite Buddhas or Christs.

But there is at least a family resemblance between stoke and full mystical experience as
found in the world's great religions. So if you are in the market for mysticism, I
recommend surfing as the easiest and happiest preliminary.
Is There Sex in Heaven? by Peter Kreeft

We cannot know what X-in-Heaven is unless we know what X is. We cannot know what
sex in Heaven is unless we know what sex is. We cannot know what in Heaven's
name sex is unless we know what on earth sex is.

But don't we know? Haven't we been thinking about almost nothing else for years
and years? What else dominates our fantasies, waking and sleeping, twenty-four
nose-to-the-grindstone hours a day? What else fills our TV shows, novels, plays,
gossip columns, self-help books, and psychologies but sex?

No, we do not think too much about sex; we think hardly at all about sex.
Dreaming, fantasizing, feeling, experimenting—yes. But honest,
look-it-in-the-face thinking?—hardly ever. There is no subject in the world
about which there is more heat and less light.

Therefore I want to begin with four abstract philosophical principles about the
nature of sex. They are absolutely necessary not only for sanity about sex in
Heaven but also for sanity about sex on earth, a goal at least as distant as
Heaven to our sexually suicidal society. The fact that sex is public does not
mean it is mature and healthy. The fact that there are thousands of "how to do
it" books on the subject does not mean that we know how; in fact, it means the
opposite. It is when everybody's pipes are leaking that people buy books on
plumbing.

My four philosophical principles will seem strange or even shocking to many

people today. Yet they are far from radical, or even original; they are simply
the primeval platitudes known to all premodern societies; the sane, sunny
country of sexual common sense by the vote of "the democracy of the dead". Yet
in another way they are "radical", in the etymological sense of the word: they
are our sexual roots, and our uprooted society is rooting around looking for
sexual substitute roots like a pig rooting for truffles. It has not found them.
That fact should at least make us pause and look back at our "wise blood", our
roots. Here are four of them.

First Principle: Sex Is Something You Are, Not Something You Do

Suppose you saw a book with the title "The Sexual Life of a Nun". You would
probably assume it was a scurrilous, gossipy sort of story about tunnels
connecting convents and monasteries, clandestine rendezvous behind the high
altar, and masking a pregnancy as a tumor. But it is a perfectly proper title:
all nuns have a sexual life. They are women, not men. When a nun prays or acts
charitably, she prays or acts, not he. Her celibacy forbids intercourse, but it
cannot forbid her to be a woman. In everything she does her essence plays a
part, and her sex is as much a part of her essence as her age, her race, and her
sense of humor.
The counterfeit phrase "having sex" (meaning "inter- course") was minted only
recently. Of course a nun "has sex" she is female. Draftees often fill in the
box on their induction forms labeled "sex" not with the word "male" but
"occasionally" or "please!" The joke would have been unintelligible to previous
generations. The significance of the linguistic change is that we have
trivialized sex into a thing to do rather than a quality of our inner being. It
has become a thing of surfaces and external feeling rather than of personality
and internal feeling. Thus even masturbation is called "having sex", though it
is exactly the opposite: a denial of real relationship with the other sex.
The words "masculinity" and "femininity", meaning something more than merely
biological maleness and femaleness, have been reduced from archetypes to
stereotypes. Traditional expectations that men be men and women be women are
confused because we no longer know what to expect men and women to be. Yet,
though confused, the expectations remain. Our hearts desire, even while our
minds reject, the old "stereotypes". The reason is that the old stereotypes were
closer to our innate sexual instincts than are the new stereotypes. We have
sexist hearts even while we have unisex heads. Evidence for this claim? More
people are attracted to the old stereotypes than to the new ones. Romeo still
wants to marry Juliet.

The main fault in the old stereotypes was their too-tight connection between
sexual being and social doing, their tying of sexual identity to social roles,
especially for women: the feeling that it was somehow unfeminine to be a doctor,
lawyer, or politician. But the antidote to this illness is not confusing sexual
identities but locating them in our being rather than in our doing. Thus we can
soften up social roles without softening up sexual identities. In fact, a man
who is confident of his inner masculinity is much more likely to share in
traditionally female activities like housework and baby care than one who ties
his sexuality to his social roles.

If our first principle is accepted, if sexuality is part of our inner essence,

then it follows that there is sexuality in Heaven, whether or not we "have sex"
and whether or not we have sexually distinct social roles in Heaven.
Second Principle: The Alternative to Chauvinism Is Not Egalitarianism
The two most popular philosophies of sexuality today seem totally opposed to
each other; yet at a most basic level they are in agreement and are equally
mistaken. The two philosophies are the old chauvinism and the new
egalitarianism; and they seem totally opposed. For chauvinism (a) sees one sex
as superior to the other, "second", sex. This is usually the male, but there are
increasingly many strident female chauvinist voices in the current cacophony.
This presupposes (b) that the sexes are intrinsically different, different by
nature not social convention. Egalitarianism tries to disagree with (a) totally;
it thinks that to do so it has to disagree with (b) as well. But this means that
it agrees with chauvinism on (c), the unstated but assumed premise that all
dfferences must be dfferences in value, or, correlatively, that the only way for
two things to be equal in value is for them to be equal in nature. Both
philosophies see sameness or superiority as the only options. It is from this
assumption (that differences are differences in value) that the chauvinist
argues that the sexes are different in nature, therefore they are different in
value. And it is from the same assumption that the egalitarian argues that the
sexes are not different in value, therefore they are not different in nature.
Chauvinism:Egalitarianism:
(c)
and (b)
therefore (a)(c)
and not (a)
therefore not (b)

Once this premise is smoked out, it is easy to see how foolish both arguments
are. Of course not all differences are differences in value. Are dogs better
than cats, or cats than dogs? Or are they different only by convention, not by
nature? Chauvinist and egalitarian should both read the poets, songwriters, and
mythmakers to find a third philosophy of sexuality that is both more sane and
infinitely more interesting. It denies neither the obvious rational truth that
the sexes are equal in value (as the chauvinist does) nor the equally obvious
instinctive truth that they are innately different (as the egalitarian does). It
revels in both, and in their difference: vive la difference!

If sexual differences are natural, they are preserved in Heaven, for "grace does
not destroy nature but perfects it" If sexual differences are only humanly and
socially conventional, Heaven will remove them as it will remove economics and
penology and politics. (Not many of us have job security after death. That is
one advantage of being a philosopher.) All these things came after and because
of the Fall, but sexuality came as part of God's original package: "be fruitful
and multiply". God may unmake what we make, but He does not unmake what He
makes. God made sex, and God makes no mistakes.

Saint Paul's frequently quoted statement that "in Christ. there is neither male
nor female" does not mean there is no sex in Heaven. For it refers not just to
Heaven but also to earth: we are "in Christ" now. (In fact, if we are not "in
Christ" now there is no hope of Heaven for us!) But we are male or female now.
His point is that our sex does not determine our "in-Christness"; God is an
equal opportunity employer. But He employs the men and women He created, not the
neuters of our imagination.

Third Principle: Sex Is Spiritual

That does not mean "vaguely pious, ethereal, and idealistic". "Spiritual" means
"a matter of the spirit", or soul, or psyche, not just the body. Sex is between
the ears before it's between the legs. We have sexual souls.
For some strange reason people are shocked at the notion of sexual souls. They
not only disagree; the idea seems utterly crude, superstitious, repugnant, and
incredible to them. Why? We can answer this question only by first answering the
opposite one: why is the idea reasonable, enlightened, and even necessary?
The idea is the only alternative to either materialism or dualism. If you are a
materialist, there is simply no soul for sex to be a quality of If you are a
dualist, if you split body and soul completely, if you see a person as a ghost
in a machine, then one half of the person can be totally different from the
other: the body can be sexual without the soul being sexual. The machine is
sexed, the ghost is not. (This is almost the exact opposite of the truth:
ghosts, having once been persons, have sexual identity from their personalities,
their souls. Machines do not.)

No empirical psychologist can be a dualist; the evidence for psychosomatic unity

is overwhelming. No pervasive feature of either body or soul is insulated from
the other; every sound in the soul echoes in the body, and every sound in the
body echoes in the soul. Let the rejection of dualism be Premise One of our
argument.

Premise Two is the even more obvious fact that biological sexuality is innate,
natural, and in fact pervasive to every cell in the body. It is not socially
conditioned, or conventional, or environmental; it is hereditary.
The inevitable conclusion from these two premises is that sexuality is innate,
natural, and pervasive to the whole person, soul as well as body. The only way
to avoid the conclusion is to deny one of the two premises that logically
necessitate it-to deny psychosomatic unity or to deny innate somatic sexuality.
In the light of this simple and overwhelming argument, why is the conclusion not
only unfamiliar but shocking to so many people in our society? I can think of
only two reasons. The first is a mere misunderstanding, the second a serious and
substantial mistake.

The first reason would be a reaction against what is wrongly seen as monosexual
soul-stereotyping. A wholly male soul, whatever maleness means, or a wholly
female soul, sounds unreal and oversimplified. But that is not what sexual souls
implies. Rather, in every soul there is—to use Jungian terms—anima and animus,
femaleness and maleness; just as in the body, one predominates but the other is
also present. If the dominant sex of soul is not the same as that of the body,
we have a sexual misfit, a candidate for a sex change operation of body or of
soul, earthly or Heavenly. Perhaps Heaven supplies such changes just as it
supplies all other needed forms of healing. In any case, the resurrection body
perfectly expresses its soul, and since souls are innately sexual, that body
will perfectly express its soul's true sexual identity.

A second reason why the notion of sexual souls sounds strange to many people may
be that they really hold a pantheistic rather than a theistic view of spirit as
undifferentiated, or even infinite. They think of spirit as simply overwhelming,
or leaving behind, all the distinctions known to the body and the senses. But
this is not the Christian notion of spirit, nor of infinity. Infinity itself is
not undifferentiated in God. To call God infinite is not to say He is everything
in general and nothing in particular: that is confusing God with The Blob! God's
infinity means that each of His positive and definite attributes, such as love,
wisdom, power, justice, and fidelity, is unlimited.

Spirit is no less differentiated, articulated, structured, or formed than

matter. The fact that our own spirit can suffer and rejoice far more, more
delicately and exquisitely, and in a far greater variety of ways, than can the
body-this fact should be evidence of spirit's complexity. So should the fact
that psychology is nowhere near an exact science, as anatomy.

Differences in general, and sexual differences in particular, increase rather

than decrease as you move up the cosmic hierarchy. (Yes, there is a cosmic
hierarchy, unless you can honestly believe that oysters have as much right to
eat you as you have to eat them.) Angels are as superior to us in
differentiation as we are to animals. God is infinitely differentiated, for He
is the Author of all differences, all forms.

Each act of creation in Genesis is an act of differentiation—light from

darkness, land from sea, animals from plants, and so on. Creating is forming,
and forming is differentiating. Materialism believes differences in form are
ultimately illusory appearance; the only root reality is matter. Pantheism also
believes differences in form are ultimately illusory; the only root reality is
one universal Spirit. But theism believes form is real because God created it.
And whatever positive reality is in the creation must have its model in the
Creator. We shall ultimately have to predicate sexuality of God Himself, as we
shall see next.

Fourth Principle: Sex Is Cosmic

Have you ever wondered why almost all languages except English attribute
sexuality to things? Trees, rocks, ships, stars, horns, kettles, circles,
accidents, trips, ideas, feelings-these, and not just men and women, are
masculine or feminine. Did you always assume unthinkingly that this was of
course a mere projection and personification, a reading of our sexuality into
nature rather than reading nature's own sexuality out of it (or rather, out of
her)? Did it ever occur to you that it just might be the other way round, that
human sexuality is derived from cosmic sexuality rather than vice versa, that we
are a local application of a universal principle? If not, please seriously
consider the idea now, for it is one of the oldest and most widely held ideas in
our history, and one of the happiest.

It is a happy idea because it puts humanity into a more human universe. We fit;
we are not freaks. What we are, everything else also is, though in different
ways and different degrees. We are, to use the medieval image, a microcosm, a
little cosmos; the universe is the macrocosm, the same pattern written large. We
are more like little fish inside bigger fish than like sardines in a can. It is
the machine-universe that is our projection, not the human universe.
We do not have time here to apply this idea, so pregnant with consequences, to
other aspects of our being, to talk about the cosmic extension of consciousness
and volition, but many philosophers have argued for this conclusion, and a
deeper eye than reason's seems to insist on it. But we can apply it to sexuality
here. It means that sexuality goes all the way up and all the way down the
cosmic ladder.

At the "down" end there is "love among the particles": gravitational and
electromagnetic attraction. That little electron just "knows" the difference
between the proton, which she "loves", and another electron, which is her rival.
If she did not know the difference, she would not behave so knowingly, orbiting
around her proton and repelling other electrons, never vice versa.
But, you say, I thought that was because of the balanced resultant of the two
merely physical forces of angular momentum, which tends to zoom her straight out
of orbit, and bipolar electromagnetic attraction, which tends to zap her down
into her proton: too much zoom for a zap and too much zap for a zoom. Quite
right. But what right do you have to call physical forces "mere"? And how do you
account for the second of those two forces? Why is there attraction between
positive and negative charges? It is exactly as mysterious as love. In fact, it
is love. The scientist can tell you how it works, but only the lover knows why.

Sex at the Top

Sex "goes all the way up" as well as "all the way down Spirit is no less sexual
than matter; on the contrary, all qualities and all contrasts are richer,
sharper, more real as we rise closer and closer to the archetype of realness,
God. The God of the Bible is not a monistic pudding in which differences are
reduced to lumps, or a light that out-dazzles all finite lights and colors. God
is a sexual being, the most sexual of all beings.

This sounds shocking to people only if they see sex only as physical and not
spiritual, or if they are Unitarians rather than Trinitarians. The love
relationship between the Father and the Son within the Trinity, the relationship
from which the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds, is a sexual relationship. It is
like the human sexual relationship from which a child proceeds in time; or
rather, that relationship is like the divine one. Sexuality is "the image of
God" according to Scripture (see Genesis 1:27), and for B to be an image of A, A
must in some way have all the qualities imaged by B. God therefor& is a sexual
being. There is therefore sex in Heaven because in Heaven we are close to the
source of all sex. As we climb Jacob's ladder the angels look less like
neutered, greeting-card cherubs and more like Mars and Venus.
Another reason we are more, not less, sexual in Heaven is that all earthly
perversions of true sexuality are overcome, especially the master perversion,
selfishness. To make self God, to desire selfish pleasure as the summum bonum,
is not only to miss God but to miss pleasure and self as well, and to miss the
glory and joy of sex. Jesus did not merely say, "Seek ye first the kingdom of
God", but also added that "all these things shall be added" when we put first
things first. Each story fits better when the foundation is put first.

C. S. Lewis calls this the principle of "first and second things". In any area
of life, putting second things first loses not only the first things but also
the second things, and putting first things first gains not only the first
things but the second. things as well. So to treat sexual pleasure as God is to
miss not only God but sexual pleasure too.

The highest pleasure always comes in self-forgetfulness. Self always spoils its
own pleasure. Pleasure is like light; if you grab at it, you miss it; if you try
to bottle it, you get only darkness; if you let it pass, you catch the glory.
The self has a built-in, God-imaging design of self-fulfillment by
self-forgetfulness, pleasure through unselfishness, ecstasy by ekstasis,
"standing-outside-the-self". This is not the self-conscious self-sacrifice of
the do-gooder but the spontaneous, unconscious generosity of the lover.
This principle, that the greatest pleasure is self-giving, is graphically
illustrated by sexual intercourse and by the very structure of the sexual
organs, which must give themselves to each other in order to be fulfilled. In
Heaven, when egotistic perversions are totally eliminated, all pleasure is
increased, including sexual pleasure. Whether this includes physical sexual
pleasure or not, remains to be seen.

Application of the Principles: Sex in Heaven

In the most important and obvious sense there is certainly sex in Heaven simply
because there are human beings in Heaven. As we have seen, sexuality, like race
and unlike clothes, is an essential aspect of our identity, spiritual as well as
physical. Even if sex were not spiritual, there would be sex in Heaven because
of the resurrection of the body. The body is not a mistake to be unmade or a
prison cell to be freed from, but a divine work of arto designed to show forth
the soul as the soul is to show forth God, in splendor and glory and overflow of
generous superfluity.

But is there sexual intercourse in Heaven? If we have bodily sex organs, what do
we use them for there?

Not baby-making. Earth is the breeding colony; Heaven is the homeland.

Not marriage. Christ's words to the Sadducees are quite clear about that. It is
in regard to marriage that we are "like the angels". (Note that it is not said
that we are like the angels in any other ways, such as lacking physical bodies.)
Might there be another function in which baby-making and marriage are swallowed
up and transformed, aufgehoben? Everything on earth is analogous to something in
Heaven. Heaven neither simply removes nor simply continues earthly things. If we
apply this principle to sexual intercourse, we get the conclusion that
intercourse on earth is a shadow or symbol of intercourse in Heaven. Could we
speculate about what that could be?

It could certainly be spiritual intercourse—and, remember, that includes sexual

intercourse because sex is spiritual. This spiritual intercourse would mean
something more specific than universal charity. It would be special communion
with the sexually complementary; something a man can have only with a woman and
a woman only with a man. We are made complete by such union: "It is not good
that the man should be alone." And God does not simply rip up His design for
human fulfillment. The relationship need not be confined to one in Heaven.
Monogamy is for earth. On earth, our bodies are private. In Heaven, we share
each other's secrets without shame, and voluntarily. In the Communion of Saints,
promiscuity of spirit is a virtue.

The relationship may not extend to all persons of the opposite sex, at least not
in the same way or degree. Ifit did extend to all, it would treat each
differently simply because each is different—sexually as well as in other ways.
I think there must be some special "kindred souls" in Heaven that we are
designed to feel a special sexual love for. That would be the Heavenly solution
to the earthly riddle of why in the world John falls for Mary, of all people,
and not for Jane, and why romantic lovers feel their love is fated, "in the
stars", "made in Heaven".

But this would differ from romantic love on earth in that it would be free, not
driven; from soul to body, not from body to soul. Nor would it feel apart from
or opposed to the God-relationship, but a part of it or a consequence of it: His
design, the wave of His baton. It would also be totally unselfconscious and
unselfish: the ethical goodness of agape joined to the passion of eros; agape
without external, abstract law and duty, and eros without selfishness or animal
drives.

But would it ever take the form of physical sexual intercourse? We should
explore this question, not to kowtow to modernity's sexual monomania but because
it is an honest question about something of great significance to us now, and
because we simply want to know all we can about Heaven.

Since there are bodies in Heaven, able to eat and be touched, like Christ's
resurrection body, there is the possibility of physical intercourse. But why
might the possibility be actualized? What are its possible purposes and
meanings?
We know Heaven by earthly clues. Let us try to read all the clues in earthly
intercourse. It has three levels of meaning: the subhuman, or animal; the
superhuman, or divine; and the specifically human. (All three levels exist in us
humans.)

Animal reasons for intercourse include (i) the conscious drive for pleasure and
(2) the unconscious drive to perpetuate the species. Both would be absent in
Heaven. For although there are unimaginably great pleasures in Heaven, we are
not driven by them. And the species is complete in eternity: no need for
breeding.

Transhuman reasons for intercourse include (i) idolatrous love of the beloved as
a substitute for God and (2) the Dante-Beatrice love of the beloved as an image
of God. As to the first, there is, of course, no idolatry in Heaven. No
substitutes for God are even tempting when God Himself is present. As to the
second, the earthly beloved was a window to God, a mirror reflecting the divine
beauty. That is why the lover was so smitten. Now that the reality is present,
why stare at the mirror? The impulse to adore has found its perfect object.
Furthermore, even on earth this love leads not to intercourse but to
infatuation. Dante neither desired nor enacted intercourse with Beatrice.
Specifically human reasons for intercourse include (1) consummating a monogamous
marriage and (2) the desire to express personal love. As to the first, there is
no marriage in Heaven. But what of the second?

I think there will probably be millions of more adequate ways to express love
than the clumsy ecstasy of fitting two bodies together like pieces of a jigsaw
puzzle. Even the most satisfying earthly intercourse between spouses cannot
perfectly express all their love. If the possibility of intercourse in Heaven is
not actualized, it is only for the same reason earthly lovers do not eat candy
during intercourse: there is something much better to do. The question of
intercourse in Heaven is like the child's question whether you can eat candy
during intercourse: a funny question only from the adult's point of view. Candy
is one of children's greatest pleasures; how can they conceive a pleasure so
intense that it renders candy irrelevant? Only if you know both can you compare
two things, and all those who have tasted both the delights of physical
intercourse with the earthly beloved and the delights of spiritual intercourse
with God testify that there is simply no comparison.

A Heavenly Reading of the Earthly Riddle of Sex

This spiritual intercourse with God is the ecstasy hinted at in all earthly
intercourse, physical or spiritual. It is the ultimate reason why sexual passion
is so strong, so different from other passions, so heavy with suggestions of
profound meanings that just elude our grasp. No mere practical needs account for
it. No mere animal drive explains it. No animal falls in love, writes profound
romantic poetry, or sees sex as a symbol of the ultimate meaning of life because
no animal is made in the image of God. Human sexuality is that image, and human
sexuality is a foretaste of that self-giving, that losing and finding the self,
that oneness-in-manyness that is the heart of the life and joy of the Trinity.
That is what we long for; that is why we tremble to stand outside ourselves in
the other, to give our whole selves, body and soul: because we are images of God
the sexual being. We love the other sex because God loves God.

And this earthly love is so passionate because Heaven is full of passion, of

energy and dynamism. We correctly deny that God has passions in the passive
sense, being moved, driven, or conditioned by them, as we are. But to think of
the love that made the worlds, the love that became human, suffered alienation
from itself and died to save us rebels, the love that gleams through the fanatic
joy of Jesus' obedience to the will of His Father and that shines in the eyes
and lives of the saints—to think of this love as any less passionate than our
temporary and conditioned passions "is a most disastrous fantasy". And that
consuming fire of love is our destined Husband, according to His own promise.
Sex in Heaven? Indeed, and no pale, abstract, merely mental shadow of it either.
Earthly sex is the shadow, and our lives are a process of thickening so that we
can share in the substance, becoming Heavenly fire so that we can endure and
rejoice in the Heavenly fire.

From Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven

by Ignatius Press.

This text is also available as an expanded audio lecture under:

Sex in Heaven
"Jesus": The Shortest, Simplest, and Most Powerful Prayer in the World by Peter Kreeft

Its simplicity and flexibility

What it is not: Magic
What it is not: Psychology
What it is: Power
What it is: Real presence
What it is: Grace
What it is: Sacramental
What it is: Sacred
Its practice

I am now going to tell you about the shortest, simplest, and most powerful
prayer in the world.

It is called the "Jesus Prayer", and it consists simply in uttering the single
word "Jesus" (or "Lord Jesus", or "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a
sinner") in any situation, at any time and place, either aloud or silently.
There is only one prerequisite, one presupposition: that you are a Christian. If
you have faith in Christ, hope in Christ, and love of Christ, you can pray the
most powerful prayer in the world, because you have real contact with the
greatest power in the universe: Christ himself, who assured us, in his last
words to his apostles, that "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given
to me" (Mt 28:18).

It is also the simplest of all prayers. It is not one of the many "methods",
because it bypasses methods and cuts right to the heart of practicing God's
presence, which is the essence of prayer, the secret of which has been given to
us by God the Father. The secret is simply God the Son, God incarnate, the Lord
Jesus.

1. Its simplicity and flexibility

As the Catechism says, "The invocation of the holy name of Jesus is the simplest
way of praying always.... This prayer is possible 'at all times' because it is
not one occupation among others but the only occupation: that of loving God,
which animates and transfigures every action in Christ Jesus" (CCC 2668).
Because it is so short and simple, this prayer can be prayed literally at any
time at all and at all times, even times when longer and more complex forms of
prayer are not practical or even possible. This includes times of anguish, pain,
or stress, and times of deep happiness and joy.

It can be used by everyone (and has been): by the rankest beginner and the most
advanced saint. It is not only for beginners; the saints use it too. It is not
"cheating" just because it is so short. For it will make you pray more, not
less. This only sounds paradoxical, for one of the things Jesus reminds us to
do, when we invoke him by name, is to pray more!

It is so simple that it is like the center point of a circle. It is the whole

circle. It contains in itself the whole gospel. The Catechism says: "The name
'Jesus' contains all: God and man and the whole economy of creation and
salvation" (CCC 2666). Into this name the Christian can pour all of his faith,
with nothing whatsoever left over, for to be a Christian is to rest all of your
faith on Christ, with nothing left over.

It is not only the shortest prayer but also the shortest and earliest creed.
Twice the New Testament mentions this most basic of all the Christian creeds:
the simple three-word sentence "Jesus is Lord" (I Cor 12:3) and the same creed
in four words: "Jesus Christ is Lord" (Phil 2:11). It is also the most
distinctively Christian creed, for "Lord" (Kyrios) means "God", and Christ's
divinity and lordship over one's life is the distinctive, essential faith of
Christians: no non-Christian believes that (if he did, he would be a Christian),
and all Christians believe it (if they do not, they are not Christians) .

2. What it is not: Magic

Like any prayer, it "works", not by the power of some impersonal magic but by
the power of personal faith and hope and love. It is like a sacrament in that
way: it "works" objectively (ex opere operato), by the power of God's action,
not ours; but it does not "work" without our free choice. It is like turning on
a hose: the water comes to us, not from us, but it comes only when we choose to
let it through.

The mere pronunciation of the name "Jesus" is not invoking him and is not
prayer. A parrot could do that. God does not deal in magic, because magic
bypasses the soul, especially the heart; it is like a machine. But God is a
lover, and he wants our hearts, wants to transform our hearts, wants to live in
our hearts.

Love is its own end. Magic, like technology, is always used as a means to some
greater end. If you pray this prayer as a means, as a kind of magic or spiritual
technology, then you are using it as you would use a machine or magic spell.
What you love and desire is the higher end, the thing that the machine or magic
spell gets you. But whatever that thing is, the love of things—of God's gifts
instead of God—does not bring God closer; it pushes him farther away. So using
this prayer as a kind of magic does exactly the opposite of what prayer is
supposed to do.

When you pray this prayer, do not concentrate on the name, the word, the sound,
or the letters. Do not think of the name but of Jesus. And do not try to
meditate on scenes from the Gospels or truths from theology, or to imagine what
Jesus looks like, as you do in some other forms of prayer. Just reach out to
Jesus in blind faith. "The principal thing is to stand before God with the mind
in the heart, and to go on standing before Him unceasingly day and night, until
the end of life" (Bishop Theophan, quoted by Kallistos Ware in The Power of the
Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality).

3. What it is not: Psychology

This prayer is not merely subjective, like a psychological device, any more than
it is merely objective, like magic. It is not a sort of Christian yoga. It is
not meditation. Its purpose is not to transform our consciousness and make us
mystics, or to bring inner peace, or to center on our own heart. Whether these
things are good or bad, these things are not what this prayer is for.
For all these things are subjective, inside the human soul; but this prayer is
dialogue, relationship, reaching out to another person, to Jesus, God made man,
invoking him as your savior, lover, lord, and God. You have faith and hope in
him as your savior; you love him as your lover; you obey him as your lord; you
adore him as your God.

In this prayer our attention is not directed inward, into our own consciousness,
but only out onto Jesus. Even when we address Jesus living in our own soul, he
is not self but other; he is Lord of the self.

Yet, although our intention in this prayer is not to transform our

consciousness, this prayer does transform our consciousness. How? It unifies it.
Our usual consciousness is like an unruly, stormy sea, or like a flock of
chattering monkeys, or a cage of butterflies, or a hundred little bouncing balls
of mercury spilled from a fever thermometer. We cannot gather it together. Only
God can, for God is the Logos. One of the meanings of this incredibly rich word
in ancient Greek, the word given to the eternal, divine, pre-incarnate Christ,
is "gathering-into-one". When we pray this prayer and invoke Jesus the Logos,
Jesus the Logos acts and does in fact unify our consciousness. But this is not
what we aim at; we aim at him. The unification of our consciousness happens in
us (slowly and subtly and sweetly) only when we forget ourselves in him. This is
one of the ways "he who loses his self shall find it."

Repetition of the holy name conditions our unconscious mind to see this name as
normal, as central, and to expect him to be present and active, as a dog is
conditioned by his master to see its master as central and to expect its master
to be present and active. Do we train our dogs but not our own unconscious
minds?

You may object, "But this sounds like a magic spell or a mantra: something not
rational." In a sense it is (though not in the sense repudiated above). Do you
not know that black magic can be overcome only by white magic, not by reason?
And our culture's secularism and materialism is a powerful spell of black magic.
It makes us judge Jesus by its standards instead of judging it by his standards,
because it makes us see Jesus as abnormal and our culture as normal; to see
Jesus as a questionable, tiny thing surrounded by an unquestionable, greater
thing, namely, our culture. This is a cosmic illusion! Invoking the holy name
builds up resistance to that illusion. That is not black magic; it is not itself
an illusion but sheer realism. Jesus is everywhere and everywhen and the
ultimate meaning of everything. This prayer in deed conditions us, but it
conditions us to know reality.

4. What it is: Power

"The kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power", says Saint Paul (1
Cor 4:20). The reason this prayer is so powerful is that the name of Jesus is
not just a set of letters or sounds. It is not a passive word but a creative
word, like the word by which God created the universe. (He is the Word by which
God created the universe!) Every time we receive Christ in the Eucharist, we are
instructed by the liturgy to pray, "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but
only say the word and I shall be healed." All our energy and effort is not
strong enough to heal our own souls, but God's word of power is. That word is so
powerful that by it God made the universe out of nothing, and by it he is doing
the even greater deed of making saints out of sinners. That word is Jesus
Christ.

In most ancient societies, a person's name was treated, not as a mere artificial
label for pragmatic purposes of human communication, but as a truth, a sign of
the person's unique identity. Revealing your name was thus an act of intimate
personal trust, like a handshake. A handshake originally meant: "See? I bear no
weapon. You can trust me." It is a little like your P.I.N. today.

In all of human history, God revealed his own true name, his eternal name, only
to one man—Moses—and only to one people—the Hebrews, his own "chosen people"—
and
only at one time—at the burning bush (Ex 3). This name was the secret no
philosopher or mystic had ever attained, the very essence of God, the nature of
ultimate reality: "I AM."

But then, many centuries later, God did an even greater thing; he revealed a new
name in Jesus ("Savior"). This is now the most precious name in the world.
It is a golden key. It opens all doors, transforms all corners of our lives. But
we do not use this golden key, and doors remain locked. In fact, our society is
dying because it has turned the most precious name in the world, the name of its
Savior, into a casual curse word.

Even Muslims respect the holy name of Jesus more than Christians do, in
practice: they commonly add "blessed be he" every time they pronounce it.
In the Acts of the Apostles (3:1-10), Peter and John heal a man lame from birth
when they say, "In the name of Jesus Christ, walk." Throughout the history of
the Church and the lives of the saints, many such miracles of healing have been
done "in his name". Exorcisms are performed "in his name". The name of Jesus is
so powerful that it can knock the devil out of a soul!

The name of Jesus is our salvation. John ends his Gospel with this summary:
"These [things] are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name" (Jn 20:31,
emphasis added). "The name of Jesus Christ" is not only the key to power-filled
prayer but the key to our salvation. So we had better understand it! What does
the phrase "in the name of Jesus Christ" mean?

Suppose you are poor, but your father is rich. When you try to cash a check for
half a million dollars in your own name, you will get only a laugh from the
bank. But if the check is in your father's name, you will get the money. Our
Father in Heaven gave us unlimited grace in the "account" of Jesus Christ and
then put us "into Christ", inserted us into his family, so that we can use the
family name, so to speak, to cash checks on the account of divine grace. Saint
Paul tells us that our account is unlimited: "My God will supply every need of
yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus" (Phil 4:19). Jesus
himself first assured us of this wonderful truth, which we find hard to believe
because it seems too good to be true, and then he explained why it is true:
Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be
opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to
him who knocks it will be opened. What man of you, if his son asks him for
bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent?
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how
much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask
him! (Mt 7:7-I I).

If even we love our children so much that we do not settle for anything less
than the very best for them, why do we think God loves his children less?

5. What it is: Real presence

It is probably a very good exercise to practice "the imitation of Christ", to

walk "in his steps", to ask "What would Jesus do?" in all circumstances. But the
prayer we are teaching now is even better, for two reasons. First, invoking his
name invokes his real presence, not mental imitation; something objective, not
subjective; between us and him, not just in us. Second, it is actual, not
potential; indicative, not subjunctive; "What is Jesus doing?" rather than "What
would Jesus do?"

To invoke Jesus' name is to place yourself in his presence, to open yourself to

his power, his energy, The prayer of Jesus' name actually brings God closer,
makes him more present. He is always present in some way, since he knows and
loves each one of us at every moment; but he is not present to those who do not
pray as intimately as he is present to those who do. Prayer makes a difference;
"prayer changes things." It may or may not change our external circumstances.
(It does if God sees that that change is good for us; it does not if God sees
that it is not.) But it always changes our relationship to God, which is
infinitely more important than external circumstances, however pressing they may
seem, because it is eternal but they are temporary, and because it is our very
self but they are not.

6. What it is: Grace

In saying it brings God closer, I do not mean to say that it changes God. It
changes us. But it does not just make a change within us, a psychological
change; it makes a change between us and God, a real, objective change. It
changes the real relationship; it increases the intimacy. It is as real as
changing your relationship to the sun by going outdoors. When we go outdoors
into the sun, we do not move the sun closer to us, we move ourselves closer to
the sun. But the difference it makes is real: we can get warmed only when we
stand in the sunlight—and in the Sonlight.

When this happens, it is not merely something we do but something God does in
us. It is grace, it is his action; our action is to enter into his action, as a
tiny stream flows into a great river.

His coming is, of course, his gift, his grace. The vehicle by which he comes is
also his grace: it is Jesus himself. And the gift he gives us in giving us his
blessed name to invoke is also his grace. So, therefore, his coming to us in
power on this vehicle, this name, is also pure grace. Even our remembering to
use this vehicle, this name, is his grace. As Saint Therese said, "Everything is
a grace."

7. What it is: Sacramental

The Catechism says: "To pray 'Jesus' is to invoke him and to call him within us.
His name is the only one that contains the presence it signifies" (CCC 2666). In
other words, it is sacramental.

God comes to us on his name like a king on his stallion. When we pray to the
Father in Jesus' name, we provide God with a vehicle to come to us— or, rather,
we use the vehicle God has provided for us. We do not initiate, we respond; we
respond to his grace by using the gift of his name that he gave us and told us
to use; and he responds to our obedience by doing what he promised: actually
coming.

This is the definition of a sacrament: a sign instituted by Christ to give grace

and a sign that actually effects what it signifies. Jesus himself is the primary
sacrament. So the believing Christian's use of Jesus' name is sacramental. The
very act of praying "Jesus" effects what it signifies, brings about what the
name "Jesus" signifies, which is "Savior", or "God saves". That is the literal
meaning, in Hebrew, of the name God commanded Joseph to give to Mary's son: "You
shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins" (Mt
I:2I).

A name is not a machine, for a person is not a machine. The name of a person
must be personally "involved" (that is, called upon) in faith and hope and love,
as a human father is "invoked" by his son in Jesus' parable in Matthew 7. But
though it is not a machine, it really "works": when a son calls to his father,
"Dad!" the father actually comes. Why? Suppose we were to ask the father. His
answer would be obvious: "Because that's my son!" The same is true of our
relationship to God now that Christ has made us God's children and his brothers.
No stranger can call a human being "Dad", and no stranger can be sure that a man
will come if he calls him only by his "proper name", for example, "Mr. Smith".
But Mr. Smith's son can be sure his dad will come because his son can invoke him
under the name "Dad", as no one else can. Jesus has made it possible for us to
do the same with God. In fact, the name he taught us to call God is "Abba",
which is the Hebrew word, not just for "Father", but for "Dad", or "Daddy", or
even "Dada". It is the word of ultimate intimacy.

You may think the claim that invoking his name actually brings about his
presence is an arrogant one. But in fact it is a humble one, because it is
obeying his design, not initiating our own.

Or you may think, "What right do we have to think he will come whenever we call?
Is he a dog?" No, he is a lover.

8. What it is: Sacred

The fact that this holy name of Jesus actually brings about the presence of God
explains why God gave us, as the second of all his commandments, "You shall not
take the name of the LORD your God in vain" (Ex 20:7). In the Old Testament, the
self-revealed name of God was YHWH, in Hebrew: a name is always written without
the vowels because it was forbidden to pronounce it, since it meant "I AM", or
"I AM WHO AM", and to pronounce that name is to claim to bear it. You can
pronounce any other name, like "Ivan" or "Mary" or "Hey, You" without claiming
to be the person who bears that name; there is only one name that you cannot say
in the second person (you) or the third person (he or she), and that is "I".
Thus no Jew ever dared to pronounce that holy name, or even guess how the vowels
were supposed to be pronounced, because it could be truly spoken only by God
himself. That is why the Jews tried to execute Jesus for blasphemy when he
pronounced it in his own name (Jn 8:58).

And that is also why Jesus commanded us to pray to the Father, as the very first
petition of the model prayer he taught (which we call the Lord's Prayer, or the
Our Father) "Hallowed be thy name" (Mt 6:9). For we actually bring about and
fulfill what we pray for when we call on the holy name of Jesus. We bring his
presence and his mercy down from Heaven to earth, so to speak. Thus it is
blasphemy to treat this holy name like any other name, because it has a holy
power unlike any other power.

9. Its practice

I will tell you a little bit from my own experience about what I think will
happen when you use this prayer. For I have tried many other, more complex, and
more abstract ways to pray, and I have found them all less effective than this
most childlike of all ways.

Perhaps the most shattering consequence of his real presence, which is brought
about by invoking his name, is that we become unable to lie to ourselves any
more. He is light, and wherever he inserts his lordship there is now an absolute
necessity of honesty and a zero tolerance for any form of self-deception,
self-congratulation, or self gratification, even those forms that felt
necessary, natural, and almost innocent before. He is gentle, but he is light,
and he simply does not and will not coexist with any darkness at all; either he
casts it out, or it keeps him out.

This is the negative dimension of the fact that he is light. He subtracts our
falsehoods. But he also adds his truth. The positive dimension is essentially a
clarification of vision, of perspective, of "the big picture". He does not
(usually) give specific directions or instant solutions, but he always gives a
clarification of our vision. (This usually happens gradually.)

Thus there is a positive side to even the negative point made above. For
instance, he makes us men see how flawed and mixed our motives are even in such
natural and spontaneous things as a look into the face of a beautiful woman.
(Half of all the women in the world are beautiful to men, nearly all are
beautiful when they smile, and all are beautiful all the time to God.) We find
that there is something in this look that is his, and also something that is not
from him but is from the world, the flesh, or the Enemy.

And yet this insight does not bring about a guilty despair but a happy humility.
For it is a sign of his presence. He is the standard. When the plumb line is
present, apparently straight lines show their inclination. And this is, of
course, upsetting (how easily our lines incline!), but much more is it a cause
of joy (it is he!). As John Wesley said, "The best thing is, God is with us."
Once we realize that, we have the secret of joy: simply to do all that is from
his will with joy, because he is there, and what is not from his will do not do.

And when his light and our darkness, his straight and our crooked, are thus
brought into relationship and warfare, we gain rather than lose, even if it is
upsetting. It is like bringing in the Roto-Rooter man: the garbage becomes
visible, but it also becomes removable. Before his light came in, our sin was
just as much present but undetected. But he was not just as much present. So
that is a gain. Furthermore, he is stronger than sin; he exorcises sin more than
sin exorcises him. All we have to do is to give him a chance. Open the blinds,
and light casts out darkness every time.

This new sense of vision or perspective that invoking his name brings about is
most sharply perceived when we invoke his name upon our problems and complaints.
The wordless message I seem to get most frequently is something like this:
"There are things that are infinitely more important for you than these little
problems. They are all little compared to me. In fact, most of what you think of
as your problems are in fact your opportunities—opportunities for the really
important thing, the 'one thing needful', your relationship with me. So get on
with it. You don't have much more time." He is surprisingly brisk and
unsentimental. He is a no-nonsense God.

Perhaps the most definite and ubiquitous sign of his real presence, and the
clearest difference between the times when I invoke his name and the times when
I do not, is the state of quiet, calm alertness that he brings. Usually, I am
either calm or alert, not both. When I am calm, I am relaxed and ready for
sleep; when I am alert, I am worried or agitated and ready for problems. His
peace, however, is not sleepiness, and his alertness is not anxiety.
His presence manifests itself, not in fire or wind or thunder, but in a still,
small voice. Only in this quietness does he give us the certainty of his
presence. We usually cannot hear this because we are making so much inner noise,
especially when we are agitated. But this is when he wants most to come, for he
goes where the need is.

And what happens when we invoke him during our agitation? He answers! But not by
magic or spectacle. Nothing spectacular happens when I invoke the holy name at
times when I am reacting to my problems by the "fight-or-flight response" that
is so natural to our animal nature (that is, either by the "fight" of inner rage
and resentment or by the "flight" of self-pity and fantasizing). At such times,
when I pray his name, I do not suddenly feel holy or happy, but I do suddenly
feel ... well, "mature" is the only word that comes to mind. The word from the
Word is often something like "Grow up!" I suddenly see that far more important
things are at stake than my feelings, when I let his great wave come in and wash
my little garbage away. What had looked big on my beach looks tiny in his waves.

We do not always get specific answers, even when we invoke his name; but we
always get the Answerer. It is better to have his authority for "no answer" than
our authority for ours. When I am in the middle of some garbage, he gives me no
answer to my questions "Why did you put me here?" or "How do I solve it?", but
he gives me instead an answer to another question: "Who? " It is he. That is his
answer: himself. The real question is: "Who's there?" And the answer is in
Matthew 14:27.

We always start our sentences with "I". We unconsciously play God. He teaches us
to see our "I" as surrounded by him instead of vice versa. He is no longer an
ingredient in our experience; we are ingredients in his. We are actors in his
play; he is not an actor in ours, not even the most important actor.

Let me give you a small example of the positive side to this "sense of
perspective" that we get from invoking his name. The other day he reminded me to
speak his name while I was painting an unimportant piece of porch wood, and I
suddenly saw that what I was doing was not just painting a porch but painting a
portrait, myself, I was walking Home to him. Each brush stroke was a small step
to Heaven. Heaven was here in this old porch, too. For all beauty, even this
tiny bit of it that I was making, is his, is like him; beauty is one of the
things he is, and all earthly beauty is a sunbeam of his sun. I remembered the
story of two men hauling stones through a muddy medieval street. One was cursing
and the other was singing. A traveler asked them what they were doing. The
curser replied, "I'm trying to get this damned rock to roll through this damned
mud!" The singer replied, "I'm building a cathedral."

Is there any downside to this prayer? What is the main problem with this prayer?

Simply remembering to do it. This is embarrassing, because this forgetting is so

foolish. Why do we forget? Clearly this forgetting is not merely a mental
problem. There are mental blocks to remembering. Something in us fears
remembering. And I think we all know what that is.

When we do remember and call him, and he comes and acts, he does all the work,
for free! Our part is only to call; the Great Physician makes house calls and
charges nothing. And yet we continually fail to call him. Is this reasonable?
The solution to this "forgetting" is not in our power but his. In order to
receive, we must ask for the grace of remembering to ask. And for the grace to
trust him with our thoughts as well as with our lives. He is the Master also of
our miserable memories. A thought comes into our mind when he says, "Come!" and
leaves when he says "Go!" He is the centurion, our thoughts are his soldiers.
The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord.

From the book Prayer for Beginners by Ignatius Press.

For an audio interview on the same topic see Prayer for Beginners.

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Joy by Peter Kreeft

Joy is more than happiness, just as happiness is more than pleasure. Pleasure is
in the body. Happiness is in the mind and feelings. Joy is deep in the heart,
the spirit, the center of the self.

The way to pleasure is power and prudence. The way to happiness is moral
goodness. The way to joy is sanctity, loving God with your whole heart and your
neighbor as yourself.

Everyone wants pleasure. More deeply, everyone wants happiness. Most deeply,
everyone wants joy.

Freud says that spiritual joy is a substitute for physical pleasure. People
become saints out of sexual frustrations.

This is exactly the opposite of the truth. St. Thomas Aquinas says, "No man can
live without joy. That is why one deprived of spiritual joy goes over to carnal
pleasures." Sanctity is never a substitute for sex, but sex is often a
substitute for sanctity.

The simplest, most unanswerable proof that Aquinas is right and Freud is wrong,
is experience. It is not a matter of faith alone. It has been proved by
experience by many, many people, many, many times. You can repeat the experiment
and prove it to yourself. You can be absolutely certain that it is true, just as
you can be certain that fire is hot and ice is cold.

There is a catch:
you have to really do it,
not just think about it.

Millions of people for thousands of years have tried the experiment, and not one
of them has ever been cheated. All who seek, find—this is not just a promise
about the next life, to be believed by faith, but a promise about this life, to
be proved by experience, to be tested by experiment.

No one who ever said to God, "Thy will be done" and meant it with his heart,
ever failed to find joy—not just in heaven, or even down the road in the future
in this world, but in this world at that very moment, here and now.

In the very act of self-surrender to God there is joy. Not just later, as a
consequence, but right then. It is exactly like a woman's voluntary sexual
surrender to a man. The mystics often say all souls are female to God; that's
one reason why God is always symbolized as male. Of course it's only a symbol,
but it's a true symbol, a symbol of something true.
The symbolism is not "sexist" either. It holds for a man's soul as well. Only
when lovers give up all control and melt helplessly into each other's bodies and
spirits, only when they overcome the fear that demands control, do they find the
deepest joy. Frigidity, whether sexual or spiritual, comes from egotism.
We've all known people who are cold, suspicious, mistrusting, unable to let go.
These people are miserable, wretched. They can't find joy because they can't
trust, they can't have faith. You need faith to love, and you need to love to
find joy. Faith, love, and joy are a package deal.

Every time I have ever said yes to God with something even slightly approaching
the whole of my soul, every time I have not only said "Thy will be done" but
meant it, loved it, longed for it—I have never failed to find joy and peace at
that moment. In fact, to the precise extent that I have said it and meant it, to
exactly that extent have I found joy.

Faith, love and joy

are a package deal.

Every other Christian who has ever lived has found exactly the same thing in his
own experience. It is an experiment that has been performed over and over again
billions of times, always with the same result. It is as certain as gravity.
It sounds too good to be true. It sounds like pious exaggeration, a salesman's
pitch. Instant joy? All you have to do is surrender to God? What's the catch?
There is a catch. It's a big one, but a simple one: you have to really do it,
not just think about it.

To do it completely requires something we dislike very much: death. Not the

death of the body. The body is not the obstacle. The ego is. Self-will is. We
fear giving that up even more than we fear giving up our body to death—even
though that ego, the thing St. Paul calls "the old man" in us, or the Adam in
us, is the cause of all our misery.

That old self has sold itself to the devil. It's his microphone. It sits there
behind our ears chattering away. When we're about to give ourselves to God, it
instantly whispers to us: "Careful, now. Hold back. Don't get too close to him.
He's dangerous. In fact, he's a killer."

The voice speaks some truth. Even the devil has to begin with some truth in
order to twist it into a lie. It's true; God is a killer. If you let him, he
will kill your old, selfish, unhappy, bored, wretched, mistrusting, loveless
self.

But he will do it only if you want him to; and he will do it only as much as you
want him to. God is a gentleman. He will never rape your soul, only woo it.
And when he does, you understand one of the reasons why sex is so different, so
special, so holy: it is an image of this, of heaven, of the ultimate meaning and
destiny and purpose of your life.

Even the tiny foretaste of heaven that we can all have here on earth by
surrendering to God is as much more joyful than the greatest ecstasy sex can
give, just as being with your beloved is more joyful than being with her
picture.

You either believe all this, or you don't. If you do, then do it! If you don't,
then try it. You'll like it.

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Lesson One in Prayer by Peter Kreeft

Let's get very, very basic and very, very practical about prayer. The single
most important piece of advice I know about prayer is also the simplest: Just
do it!

How to do it is less important than just doing it. Less-than-perfect prayer is

infinitely better than no prayer; more perfect prayer is only finitely better
than less perfect prayer.

Nancy Reagan was criticized for her simple anti-drug slogan: "Just say no." But
there was wisdom there: the wisdom that the heart of any successful program to
stop anything must be the simple will to say no. ("Just say no" doesn't mean
that nothing else was needed, but that without that simple decision nothing else
would work. "Just say no" may not be sufficient but it is necessary.)

Similarly, no program, method, book, teacher, or technique will ever succeed in

getting us to start doing anything unless there is first of all that simple,
absolute choice to do it. "Just say yes."

The major obstacle in most of our lives to just saying yes to prayer, the most
popular and powerful excuse we give for not praying, or not praying more, or not
praying regularly, is that we have no time.

The only effective answer to that excuse, I find, is a kind of murder. You have
to kill something, you have to say no to something else, in order to make time
to pray. Of course, you will never find time to pray, you have to make time to
pray. And that means unmaking something else. The only way to install the tenant
of prayer in the apartment building of your life is to evict some other tenant
from those premises that prayer will occupy. Few of us have any empty rooms
available.

Deciding to do that is the first thing. And you probably won't decide to do it,
only wish to do it, unless you see prayer for what it is: a matter of life or
death, your lifeline to God, to life itself.

Prayer is like Thanksgiving dinner. It takes one hour to eat it and ten
hours to prepare it.

Is this exaggerated? Are there more important things? Love, for instance? We
need love absolutely; but the love we need is agape, the love that only God has
and is; so unless we go to God for it, we won't get it. And going to God for it
means prayer. So unless we pray, we will not love.

Having got that clear and having made prayer your number one priority, having
made a definite decision to do it, we must next rearrange our lives around it.
Rearranging your time, preparing time to pray, is like preparing your house to
paint. As everyone knows who has done any painting, preparation is
three-quarters the work, three-quarters the hassle, and three-quarters the time.
The actual painting is a breeze compared with the preparation. The same is true
of prayer: the hardest step is preparing a place, a time, a sacred and
inviolable part of each day for it. Prayer is like Thanksgiving dinner. It takes
one hour to eat it and ten hours to prepare it. Prayer is like Christmas Day: it
took a month of preparation, decoration, and shopping to arrange for that one
day. Best of all, prayer is like love. Foreplay is, or should be, most of it.
For two people truly and totally in love, all of their lives together is
foreplay. Well, prayer is like spiritual love-making. God has waited patiently
for you for a long, long time. He longs for you to touch the fringe of his being
in prayer, as the woman touched the hem of Christ's garment, so that you can be
healed. How many hours did that woman have to prepare for that one-minute touch?

The first and most important piece of practical preparation is scheduling. You
absolutely must schedule a regular time for prayer, whether you are a
"scheduler" with other things in your life or not. "Catch as catch can" simply
won't work for prayer; it will mean less and less prayer, or none at all. One
quick minute in the morning to offer your day to God is better than nothing at
all, of course, but it is as radically inadequate as one quick minute a day with
your wife or husband. You simply must decide each day to free up your schedule
so you can pray.

How long a time? That varies with individuals and situations, of course; but the
very barest minimum should certainly be at least fifteen minutes. You can't
really count on getting much deep stuff going on in less time than that. If
fifteen minutes seems too much to you, that fact is powerful proof that you need
to pray much more to get your head on straight.

After it becomes more habitual and easy, expand it, double it. And later, double
it again. Aim at an hour each day, if you want radical results. (Do you? Or are
you only playing?)

You have to say no to something else, in order to make time to pray.

What time of day is best? The most popular time—bedtime—is usually the worst
possible time, for two reasons. First, it tends not to be prime time but garbage
time, when you're the least alert and awake. Do you really want to put God in
the worst apartment in your building? Should you offer him the sickest sheep in
your flock?

Second, it won't work. If you wait until every other obligation is taken care of
first before you pray, you simply won't pray. For life today is so cruelly
complicated for most of us that "every other obligation" is never taken care of.
Remember, you are going to have to kill other things in order to pray. No way
out of that.

The most obvious and usually best time is early in the morning. If you can't
delay the other things you do, you simply must get up that much earlier.
Should it be the very first thing? That depends. Some people are alert as soon
as they get up; others need to shower and dress to wake up. The important thing
is to give God the best time, and "just do it."
Place is almost as important as time. You should make one special place where
you can be undisturbed. "Catch as catch can" won't work for place either.
What place? Some people are not very sensitive to environment and can even use a
bathroom. Others naturally seek beauty: a porch, yard, garden, or walk. (I find
praying while you take a walk a good combination of spiritual and physical
exercise.)

You probably noticed I haven't said a word about techniques yet. That's because
three-quarters is preparation, remember? But what about methods?

I can only speak from my own experience as a continuing beginner. The two most
effective that I have found are very simple. One is praying Scripture, reading
and praying at the same time, reading in God's presence, receiving the words
from God's mouth. The second is spontaneous verbal prayer. I am not good at all
at silent prayer, mental prayer, contemplative prayer; my thoughts hop around
like fleas. Praying aloud (or singing) keeps me praying, at least. And I find it
often naturally leads to silent prayer often, or "mental prayer," or
contemplation.

Most advice on prayer focuses on higher levels: contemplative prayer. But I

suspect many of my readers are prayer infants too and need to learn to walk
before they can run. So these are some lessons from one man's prayer
kindergarten. Let's "just do it" even if "it" is only crawling towards God.

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Love by Peter Kreeft

Without qualification, without ifs, ands, or buts, God's word tells us, straight
as a left jab, that love is the greatest thing there is (1 Cor 13: 13).

Scripture never says God is justice or beauty or righteousness, though he is

just and beautiful and righteous. But "God is love" (1 Jn 4:8). Love is God's
essence, his whole being. Everything in him is love. Even his justice is love.
Paul identifies "the justice of God" in Romans 1:17 with the most unjust event
in all history, deicide, the crucifixion, for that was God's great act of love.
But no word is more misunderstood in our society than the word love. One of the
most useful books we can read is C. S. Lewis' unpretentious little masterpiece
The Four Loves. There, he clearly distinguishes agape, the kind of love Christ
taught and showed, from storge (natural affection or liking), eros (sexual
desire), and philia (friendship). It is agape that is the greatest thing in the
world.

The old word for agape in English was charity. Unfortunately, that word now
means to most people simply handouts to beggars or to the United Fund. But the
word love won't do either. It means to most people either sexual love (eros) or
a feeling of affection (storge), or a vague love-in-general. Perhaps it is
necessary to insist on the Greek word agape (pronounced ah-gah-pay) even at the
risk of sounding snobbish or scholarly, so that we do not confuse this most
important thing in the world with something else and miss it, for there is
enormous misunderstanding about it in our society.

Feelings come to us, passively; love comes from us, actively, by our free
choice.

The first and most usual misunderstanding of agape is to confuse it with a

feeling. Our feelings are precious, but agape is more precious. Feelings come to
us, passively; agape comes from us, actively, by our free choice. We are not
responsible for our feelings-we can't help how we feel-but we are responsible
for our agape or lack of it, eternally responsible, for agape comes from us;
feelings come from wind, weather, and digestion. "Luv" comes from spring
breezes; real love comes from the center of the soul, which Scripture calls the
heart (another word we have sentimentalized and reduced to feeling). Liking is a
feeling. But love (agape) is more than strong liking. Only a fool would command
someone to feel a certain way. God commands us to love, and God is no fool.
Jesus had different feelings toward different people. But he loved them all
equally and absolutely. But how can we love someone if we don't like him?
Easy-we do it to ourselves all the time. We don't always have tender,

comfortable feelings about ourselves; sometimes we feel foolish, stupid,

asinine, or wicked. But we always love ourselves: we always seek our own good.
Indeed, we feel dislike toward ourselves, we berate ourselves, precisely because
we love ourselves; because we care about our good, we are impatient with our
bad.

We fall in love but we do not fall in agape. We rise in agape.

God is agape, and agape is not feeling. So God is not feeling. That does not
make him or agape cold and abstract. Just the opposite: God is love itself,
feeling is the dribs and drabs of love received into the medium of passivity.
God cannot fall in love for the same reason water cannot get wet: it is wet.
Love itself cannot receive love as a passivity, only spread it as an activity.
God is love in action, not love in dreams. Feelings are like dreams: easy,
passive, spontaneous. Agape is hard and precious like a diamond.

Love's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction

called humanity.

This brings us to a second and related misunderstanding. Agape's object is

always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of
humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient
demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.

Jesus commands us to love not humanity but our neighbor, all our neighbors, the
real individuals we meet, just as he did. He died for me and for you, not for
humanity. The Cross has our names on it, not the name "humanity". When Jesus
called himself the Good Shepherd, he said he "calls his own sheep by name" (Jn
10:3). The gospel comes to you not in a newspaper with a Xeroxed label, "Dear
Occupant", but in a handwritten envelope personally addressed to you, as a love
letter from God to you alone. One of the saints says that Jesus would have done
everything he did and suffered everything he suffered even if you were the only
person who had sinned, just for you. More than that, he did! This is no " if" ;
this is fact. His loving eyes saw you from the Cross. Each of his five wounds
were lips speaking your name.

Grandfathers are kind;

fathers are loving.

A third, related, misunderstanding about love is to confuse it with kindness,

which is only one of its usual attributes. Kindness is the desire to relieve
another's suffering. Love is the willing of another's good. A father can spank
his child out of love. And God is a father.

It is painfully obvious that God is not mere kindness, for he does not remove
all suffering, though he has the power to do so. Indeed, this very fact-that the
God who is omnipotent and can at any instant miraculously erase all suffering
from this world deliberately chooses not to do so-is the commonest argument
unbelievers use against him. The number one argument for atheism stems from the
confusion between love and kindness.

The more we love someone, the more our love goes beyond kindness. We are merely
kind to pets, and therefore we consent that our pets be put to death "to put
them out of their misery" when they are suffering. There is increasing pressure
in America to legalize euthenasia (so far only Nazi Germany and now Holland have
ever legalized euthenasia), and this evil too stems from the confusion between
love and kindness. We are kind to strangers but demanding of those we love. If a
stranger informed you that he was a drug addict, you would probably try to
reason with him in a kind and gentle way; but if your son or daughter said that
to you, you would probably do a lot of shouting and screaming.

Grandfathers are kind; fathers are loving. Grandfathers say, "Run along and have
a good time"; fathers say , "But don't do this or that." Grandfathers are
compassionate, fathers are passionate. God is never once called our grandfather,
much as we would prefer that to the inconveniently close, demanding, intimate
father who loves us. The most frequently heard saying in our lives is precisely
the philosophy of a grandfather: "Have a nice day." Many priests even sanctify
this philosophy by ending the Mass with it, though the Mass is supposed to be
the worship of the Father, not the Grandfather.

"God is love" is the profoundest thing we have ever heard. But "love is
God" is deadly nonsense.

A fourth misunderstanding about love is the confusion between "God is love" and
"love is God." The worship of love instead of the worship of God involves two
deadly mistakes. First it uses the word God only as another word for love. God
is thought of as a force or energy rather than as a person. Second, it divinizes
the love we already know instead of showing us a love we don't know. To
understand this point, consider that "A is B" does not mean the same as "A
equals B." If A = B, then B = A, but if A is B, that does not mean that B is A.
"That house is wood" does not mean "wood is that house." "An angel is spirit"
does not mean the same as "spirit is an angel." When we say "A is B", we begin
with a subject, A, that we assume our hearer already knows, and then we add a
new predicate to it. "Mother is sick" means "You know mother well, let me tell
you something you don't know about her: she's sick." So "God is love" means "Let
me tell you something new about the God you know: he is essential love, made of
love, through and through." But "Love is God" means "Let me tell you something
about the love you already know, your own human love: that is God. That is the
ultimate reality. That is as far as anything can ever go. Seek no further for
God." In other words, "God is love" is the profoundest thing we have ever heard.
But "love is God" is deadly nonsense.

You cannot be in love with love.

A fifth misunderstanding about love is the idea that you can be in love with
love. No, you cannot, any more than you can have faith in faith, or hope in
hope, or see sight. Love is an act, a force, or an energy, but persons are more
than that. What we love with agape can only be a person, the realest thing there
is, because a person is the image of God, who is ultimate reality, and God's
name is I Am, the name for a person. If anyone says they are in love with love,
that love is not agape but a feeling.

If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love requires three things:
a lover, a beloved, and a relationship
between them.

A sixth misunderstanding about love is the idea that "God is love" is unrelated
to dogmatic theology, especially to the doctrine of the Trinity. Everyone can
agree that "God is love", it seems, but the Trinity is a tangled dogma for an
esoteric elite, isn't it? No. If God is not a Trinity, God is not love. For love
requires three things: a lover, a beloved, and a relationship between them. If
God were only one person, he could be a lover, but not love itself. The Father
loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, and the Spirit is the love
proceeding from both, from all eternity. If that were not so, then God would
need us, would be incomplete without us, without someone to love. Then his
creating us would not be wholly unselfish, but selfish, from his own need.
Love is a flower, and hope is its stem. Salvation is the whole plant. God's
grace, God's own life, comes into us by faith, like water through a tree's
roots. It rises in us by hope, like sap through the trunk. And it flowers from
our branches, fruit for our neighbor's use.

Faith is like an anchor. That's why it must be conservative, even a

stick-in-the-mud, like an anchor. Faith must be faithful. Hope is like a compass
or a navigator. It gives us direction, and it takes its bearings from the stars.
That's why it must be progressive and forward-looking. Love is like the sail,
spread to the wind. It is the actual energy of our journey. That's why it must
be liberal, open to the Spirit's wind, generous.

Agape is totally defenseless against an objection like Freud's: "But not all men
are worthy of love." No, they are not. Love goes beyond worth, beyond justice,
beyond reason. Reasons are always given from above downward, and there is
nothing above love, for God is love. When he was about six, my son asked me,
"Daddy, why do you love me?" I began to give the wrong answers, the answers I
thought he was looking for: "You're a great kid. You're good and smart and
strong." Then, seeing his disappointment, I decided to be honest: "Aw, I just
love you because you're mine." I got a smile of relief and a hug: "Thanks,
Daddy." A student once asked me in class, "Why does God love us so much?" I
replied that that was the greatest of all mysteries, and she should come back to
me in a year to see whether I had solved it. One year later to the day, there
she was. She was serious. She really wanted an answer. I had to explain that
this one thing, at least, just could not be explained.
 When you give yourself away you find that a new and more real self has
somehow been given to you.

Finally, there is the equally mind-boggling mystery of the intrinsic paradox of

agape: somehow in agape you give yourself away, not just your time or work or
possessions or even your body. You put yourself in your own hands and hand it
over to another. And when you do this unthinkable thing, another unthinkable
thing happens: you find yourself in losing yourself. You begin to be when you
give yourself away. You find that a new and more real self has somehow been
given to you. When you are a donor you mysteriously find yourself a recipient-of
the very gift you gave away.

There is more: nothing else is really yours. Your health, your works, your
intelligence, your possessions-these are not what they seem. They are all
hostage to fortune, on loan, insubstantial. You discover that when you learn who
God is. Face to face with God in prayer, not just a proper concept of God, you
find that you are nothing. All the saints say this: you are nothing. The closer
you get to God the more you see this, the more you shrink in size. If you scorn
God, you think you're a big shot, a cannonball; if you know God, you know you're
not even buckshot. Those who scorn God think they're number one. Those who have
the popular idea of God think they're "good people". Those who have a merely
mental orthodoxy know they're real but finite creatures, made in God's image but
flawed by sin. Those who really begin to pray find that compared with God they
are motes of dust in the sun. Finally, the saints say they are nothing. Or else
(Saint Paul's words) "the chief of sinners". Sinners think they're saints and
saints think they're sinners.

Who's right? How shall we evaluate this insight? Unless God is the Father of
lies (the ultimate blasphemy), the saints are right. Unless the closer you get
to God the wronger you are about yourself, the five groups in the preceding
paragraph (from scorners to saints) form a hierarchy of insight. Nothing is ours
by nature. Our very existence is sheer gift. Think for a moment about the fact
that you were created, made out of nothing. If a sculptor gives a block of
marble the gift of a fine shape, the shape is a gift, but the marble's existence
is not. That is the marble's own. But nothing is our own because we were made
out of nothing. Our very existence is a gift from God to no one, for we were not
there before he created us. There is no receiver of the gift distinct from the
gift itself. We are God's gifts.

So the saints are right. If I am nothing, nothing that is mine is anything.

Nothing is mine by nature. But one thing is mine by my free choice: the self I
give away in love. That is the thing even God cannot do for me. It is my choice.
Everything I say is mine is not. But everything I say is yours is mine. C. S.
Lewis, asked which of his many library books he thought he would have in heaven,
replied, "Only the ones I gave away on earth and never got back". The same is
true of our very self. It is like a ball in a game of catch: throw it and it
will come back to you; hold onto it and that ends the game.

From Fundamentals of the Faith by Ignatius Press.

Design by davenevins.com
Love Sees with New Eyes by Peter Kreeft

There is a dimension of truth which most of us have tragically lost and need to
recover, a dimension that cannot be put into words and sentences, though words
and sentences can be used to suggest it.

All premodern societies had this other dimension, even the ones who were very
far from having the propositional truth, the Christian content of revelation.
This other dimension is a vision, a perspective, a habit of seeing rather than a
specific thing seen. If we do not have this habit—this vision—then our theology
will not sink much deeper than on a conscious, rational level.

The thing I speak of can be called myth, imagination, analogy, or

sacramentalism. All four words are slippery and ambiguous. Rather than trying to
define them, let me give an example. Indeed, let me give the crucial example for
our purposes here, for our topic is the theology of love and how it applies to
our lives. Without this way of thinking, such an application, such a connection
between what God is and what we are, is tenuous and strained.

Since God is the Creator and since creation reflects and reveals the Creator,
and since God is love, all creation somehow reflects and reveals love. That is a
logical argument, but my point here is not to deduce the conclusion but to see
it,to understand it, to stand under it. If God is love, all creation must
reflect love. Yet we do not habitually look for these reflections. For instance,
we no longer understand, except as a quaint historical curiosity, the idea that
sexual love is not just biological. We have lost the idea, implicit in almost
all the languages of the world except English—which has no masculine and
feminine nouns—that human sexuality is the human version of a universal
principle. When other languages call the Sun "he" and the moon "she," they are
not simply projecting the human reality out onto nature, but seeing something
that is really there. One version of this is the famous Chinese yin and yang.
Another is the Indian marriage ceremony in which the groom says to his bride, "I
am heaven, you are earth." She responds, "I am earth, you are heaven."

The modern mind reduces the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the
lesser as reflecting the greater.

Many readers will find such ideas utterly unintelligible and perhaps
suspiciously pagan. Why should a Christian take seriously the fact, for
instance, that all the pagans peopled the sky with male gods and the earth with
female goddesses? This sounds very strange to our ears.

It is not only pagan, any more than anything universally human is pagan. It is
Christian too. Dante was a great Christian poet, with all of a great poet's
power of imagination. However, the famous last line of his Divine Comedy is not
poetic fancy but sober and profound fact: it is indeed "love that moves the sun
and all the stars."

This is what we no longer spontaneously see. When we look up at the night sky,
we do not see—as did the ancients—the glory of God. We have to be reminded of
it, perhaps by a memorized quotation from Scripture. When we see the stars we do
not hear "the music of the spheres," but only silence. When we think of gravity,
we do not think of it as the body of love or the material expression of love, as
Dante did. We do not see God's love at work in the very structure of matter.

If God is love, all creation

must reflect love.

Let's try to do just that. Have you ever wondered why there is gravity? Science
explains that every particle of matter attracts every other particle according
to fixed laws, proportionate to mass and distance. But science does not explain
why. Why does that funny little electron in a hydrogen atom keep doggedly
orbiting around its positively charged nucleus rather than zooming off orbit in
a straight line? The scientific answer is: because its angular momentum, which
tends to move it straight away from the nucleus, is exactly counterbalanced by
its electromagnetic attraction to its oppositely charged nucleus. But why? Why
is it attracted to its nucleus? Why do negative and positive charges attract?
Don't you see a real connection between this and love? Juliet loves Romeo
because he's Romeo. And the electron loves (unconsciously, of course) its proton
because it's a proton.

We can see the same principle at work on every level: gravity and
electromagnetism on the inorganic level; a plant's attraction to the sun and to
water and nutrients in the soil on the plant level; instinct on the animal
level; and love on the human level. And within the human sphere there is also a
hierarchy beginning with the sexual desire (eros) and affection (storge) that we
share with the animals up to the friendship (philia) and charity (agape) that we
share with the angels. The universe is a hierarchy of love. This is not a myth.
This is the splendid and glorious truth. Look! How can you miss it? It's all
around us.

Science's reductionistic method fails to see cosmic love. Modern science

requires the use of the simplest possible explanation. This is the principle
called "Occam's Razor." The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to
the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater. It thinks of
human love as only complex animal instinct, or even complex electrochemical
attraction, rather than thinking of these subhuman attractions as love on a
lesser level. Premodern thought saw lust as confused love. Modern thought sees
love as rationalized lust. This is reductionism.

Juliet loves Romeo because he's Romeo.

Christianity is anti-reductionistic. Christians cannot buy into reductionism,
for they know that God is first. They know that the universe resembles God
rather than vice versa, that God made man in his image rather than vice versa.
They know that the best comes first, not last. They know that animal love is a
late comer and imitator of perfect, eternal, divine love rather than vice versa.
Evolution can never be the ultimate explanation for a Christian. Nor for that
matter, for a good philosopher: how can more come from less? It violates the
elementary Principle of causality.

An example of the influence of modern reductionism on the Christian mind is

this: There are two relationships between Creator and creature. But modern
Christians usually remember only one of them. First, God loves everything.
Second, everything loves God. The second is as true as the first. Acorns grow
into oak trees because they are in love with God. That is, they seek
unconsciously their own perfection, which is a participation in some of God's
perfection. An oak tree is more perfect, more godlike, than an acorn. An acorn
is not satisfied to be an acorn, because it wants (unconsciously, of course) to
be more like God. God is the magnet that draws all the iron filings that are
creatures closer to himself. That is why everything moves. It is seeking its own
perfection, which is a reflection of God's perfection. Everything moves out of
love of God.

The point can be put in the sober, commonsense terms of Aristotle's philosophy.
Any complete explanation of anything or any event, says Aristotle, must include
four factors or "causes."

The "material cause" tells what it is made of. For instance, we say that the
house is made of wood or that the sonnet is made up of fourteen lines of
iambic pentameter or that Aristotle is made of flesh and bones.

The "formal cause" tells what it is made into, what its form, nature, essence,
or definition is. This house is a private home or residence. This sonnet is a
rhymed poem. Aristotle is a rational animal.

The "efficient cause" tells what it has been made by. The house was made by a
carpenter. The sonnet was written by Shakespeare. Aristotle is the product of
sexual generation from his two parents.

The "final cause" tells what it is made for its purpose, goal, good, or end.
The house is to shelter a family and its goods. The sonnet is to express love
to the poet's lady fair. And Aristotle, like every man, exists to pursue and
attain happiness through knowledge of truth and love of goodness.

Of these four causes, the fourth is the most important because it is the reason
for all the others; it is "the cause of causes." Carpenters build houses only
because families knowingly seek shelter. Acorns grow only because they
unknowingly seek their natural end, to become oak trees.

Now God is not only the first efficient cause of the universe, its ultimate
origin. He is also the last final cause of the universe, its ultimate end. "I am
the Alpha and the Omega" (Rv 1:8), the beginning and the end, Jesus tells us.
Thus everything in the universe is and lives and moves and has its being not
only from God but also toward God. Augustine's great line is true of everything
in nature as well as man: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and [therefore] our
hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

Everything in the universe has its being not only from God
but also toward God.

The whole universe is a vast circulatory system. The blood of being is pumped by
the divine heart through the arteries of the new creation (efficient causalty)
and returns through the veins of love (final causality).

Everything loves God in its way. Not only did God love everything into existence
by creation, he also loves everything into perfection by being the universal
beloved. Not only does God love everything, but everything loves God. Only man
can move contrary to this principle of nature through freely choosing evil.
Every thing loves God, but not every one loves God.

But all this is only analogy, you say? True: acorns, electrons, tomcats, men,
and angels do not love God in the same way. But, then, neither does God love
acorns, electrons, tomcats, men, and angels in the same way either. That is why
they are different: because God loved these differences into existence. If we do
not balk at the latter analogy, why balk at the former? In both cases we have
real similarity, real analogy, neither simple sameness nor simple difference,
but real likeness.

Thus the theology of love gives us a whole new worldview. The apparently
abstract and theoretical theology of the inner life of the Trinity as love turns
out to have the most radical and revolutionary consequences for our view of
everything in the universe and everything in our daily lives. It brings us back
to the forgotten wisdom of the myths. It plunges us into a world that really
does shout the praises of its Creator. It allows the heavens to really declare
the glory of God (Ps 19:1). It is not just clever poetic artifice. It frees us
from the dusty, dirty, smelly little dungeon of a universe that "Enlightenment"
thought gave us: a universe in which love and beauty and praise and value are
mere subjective fictions invented by the human mind, in which the only things
that are objectively real are blind bits of energy randomly bumping into each
other.

This theology reinforces our own instincts. Our own deepest instincts are to see
love as the highest wisdom and ultimate meaning of life. The theology of divine
love which anchors this instinct in the nature of ultimate reality itself tells
us that our deepest values "go all the way up." It also extends this instinctive
wisdom, that sees love as the ultimate meaning of things, into the entire
creation. The arms of the Savior on the cross reach up to the Absolute and down
to the depths of the human heart and across the whole universe from atoms to
archangels. When Jesus threw open his arms on the cross, he said, in effect:
"See? That's how much I love you."

From The God Who Loves You by Ignatius Press.

See also Kreeft's online audio lecture of C.S. Lewis' joyful cosmology in The
Cosmic Dance.

Design by davenevins.com
Perfect Fear Casts Out All "Luv" by Peter Kreeft

Have you ever noticed the amazing fact that most modern "religious educators"
try to remove the very thing the Bible calls "the beginning of wisdom"? I mean,
of course, fear—"the fear of the Lord."

An army of modern psychologists is on the side of the educators rather than on

the side of the Bible—at least, in America. For Americans desperately want to be
wanted, like to be liked, need to be needed. ("People who need people are the
luckiest people in the world," you know?)

Then sometimes I think the situation couldn't possibly be that bad, that
clear-cut. I must be misunderstanding these modern religious eductors. Perhaps
the fear they want to erase is not the fear the Bible speaks at all. What they
say is that this biblical fear really means only respect, and the fear the bad
old days instilled was terror. Is this true? I think both parts of the claim are
untrue.

First, what the Bible means by "the fear of the Lord" is far deeper than mere
"respect." You can have respect for policemen, and for debating partners, and
even for money. But the "fear of the Lord" is something that takes its specific
character from its object, from the Lord. It is awe. It is worship. It is
wonder. It is absolute adoration. It is "islam," total "submission" to God. This
is precisely the thing absent from both modern religious education and from
modern liturgy. The reason is simple: You can't give what you don't have; you
can't teach what you don't know yourself.

True love includes awe.

The second part of the claim is also false. The church did not instill terror in
the past, nor is traditional religion based on terror. You have terror toward an
enemy, like cancer, or a lion, or a bullet. It is a dead, dread, doomsday kind
of feeling. "The fear of the Lord" is exultant and wonderful.

The church used to instill this awe. The main reason she is so weak and wimpy
today is because she no longer instills this awe. For this awe is "the beginning
of wisdom" and the heart of all true religion.

We have to distinguish three things, then, three kinds of fear: mere respect,
awe, and terror. Awe is, in fact, closer to terror than to respect; for awe and
terror have in common passion and mystery. Take passion and mystery out of
religion and it becomes "psychobabble"—something lukewarm and nice, something
flabby and flat and floppy and flaccid, like a wet noodle.

But doesn't the Bible say, "Perfect love casts our fear" (1 Jn 4:18)? And don't
Jesus and the angels always tell us, "Fear not"? Yes, but this fear is terror.
God would not tell us not to have "the beginning of wisdom"!

Terror is a bond, however primitive, between us and God. It is supposed to be

there, and it is supposed to be cast out. It is supposed to be there because we
are born original sinners, and the sinful self is naturally and rightly
terrified of the goodness of God, which is sin's enemy. It is meant to be cast
out because God saves us from sin, and then the relation changes from enemies to
friends, and from terror to wonder.

"As long as there are wild beasts around, it is much better to feel fear
(terror) than to feel secure," says George MacDonald.

If there is no fear for love to cast out, the love will not arrive as a great
conqueror. If there are no dragons, a knight is just a big boy in a tin suit.

Love is a fire.

Love should cast out terror, but it should not cast out awe. True love includes
awe. This is one of the great secrets of sex and marriage that our age has
tragically forgotten: awe at the mystery that sex is. Science has not explained
away this mystery, nor has psychology. No true mystery is ever explained away.
Sex, death, love, evil, beauty, life, the soul, God—these remain forever
infinite mysteries that we never exhaust and should not want to. They are like
the ocean, for us to swim in, not like a glass of water for us to drink and
drain dry.

God is love. And love is not "luv." Luv is nice; love is not nice. Love is a
fire, a hurricane, an earthquake, a volcano, a bolt of lightning. Love is what
banged out the big bang in the beginning, and love is what went to hell for us
on the cross.

The difference between love and "luv" is the difference between the prophetic
model of religion and the therapeutic model. In the prophetic model, God
commands us to be good. In the therapeutic model, people use religion to make
themselves feel good.

Not only are we missing something when fear is absent from religion, but (far
worse) we are sinning grievously. For the absence of the fear of God is
arrogance and pride. How dare sinners sashay up to God as a chum without first
falling down in repentance and fear and calling on the Blood of Christ to save
us?

Perfect love casts out fear,

but unless we begin with fear, we cannot progress
to perfect love.
This is not a private opinion; it is the teaching of the Bible, the church, and
the saints. All the saints, who are far more advanced in love than we are
(that's why they're saints), continued to have fear (awe) of God. They also
continued to have terror-fear: not at God, but at sin. They often said things
like: it would be better for the world to be destroyed than for one more sin to
be committed. Things like: One sin is a thousand times worse than a thousand
sufferings. Even the good pagan Socrates knew that "it is far better to suffer
evil than to do it." He had a better understanding of the terror of sin than
most modern Christians.

Christ himself told us to fear, and whom to fear: "Do not fear those who kill
the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and
body in hell" (Mt 10:28).

If the thing we fear most is sin, then we will not fear death much, for after
death we will no longer be able to sin. That's why the saints look forward to
death instead of fearing it. It's a little evil, like a tourniquet or a
quarantine; it prevents a far greater evil, like bleeding to death or an
epidemic.

Islam has not lost this awe. That's why it's the world's fastest growing
religion. Eastern Orthodoxy has not lost it as much has we have in the West.
That's one reason why we need reunion with it. The pope often says the church
has two lungs, East and West, and needs both to breathe. He has confided that reunion
with the East is one of the three most important goals of his pontificate. (The other two
are saving the world from nuclear war and cleaning up the church in America. One of
these is much easier, the other much harder, than reunion with the East.)

Yes, "perfect love casts out fear." That is, agape casts out terror. But perfect fear also
casts out "luv." Awe casts out "luv" as a hurricane casts out a teddy bear.

Perfect love casts out fear, but unless we begin with fear, we cannot progress to perfect
love. Fear is the caterpillar; love is the butterfly.

Design by davenevins.com
Pillars of Unbelief—Nietzsche by Peter Kreeft

Source: Jan-Feb 1988

National Catholic Register

Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals
who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers
with an enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the Christian
mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

Friedrich Nietzsche called himself "the Anti-Christ," and wrote a book by that
title. He argued for atheism as follows: "I will now disprove the existence of
all gods. If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Consequently,
there are no gods."

He scorned reason as well as faith, often deliberately contradicted himself,

said that "a sneer is infinitely more noble that a syllogism" and appealed to
passion, rhetoric and even deliberate hatred rather than reason.

He saw love as "the greatest danger" and morality as mankind's worst weakness.
He died insane, in an asylum, of syphilis-signing his last letters "the
Crucified One." He was adored by the Nazis as their semi-official philosopher.
Yet he is admired as profound and wise by many of the greatest minds of our
century. How can this be?

There are three schools of thought about Nietzsche. Most popular among academics
is the school of the "gentle Nietzscheans," who claim that Nietzsche was, in
effect, a sheep in wolf's clothing; that his attacks should not be taken
literally and that he was really an ally, not an enemy, of the Western
institutions and values which he denounced.

These scholars resemble theologians who interpret sayings of Jesus like: "no one
can come to the Father but through me" as meaning "all religions are equally
valid," and "he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery" as meaning "let
your divorces be creative and reasonable."

Second, there are the "awful, awful" Nietzscheans. They at least pay Nietzsche
the compliment of taking him seriously. They are typified by the footnote in an
old Catholic textbook on modern philosophy, which said only that Nietzsche
existed, was an atheist and died insane-a fate which may well await anyone who
looks too long into his books.

A third school of thought sees Nietzsche as a wolf indeed and not a sheep, but
as a very important thinker because he shows to modern Western civilization its
own dark heart and future. It's easy to scapegoat and point fingers at
"blacksheep" like Nietzsche and Hitler, but is there not a "Hitler in ourselves"
(to quote Max Picard's title)? Did not Nietzsche let the cat out of the bag? The
demonic cat that was hidden in the respectable bag of secular humanism? Once
"God is dead," so is man, morality, love, freedom, hope, democracy, the soul and
ultimately, sanity. No one shows this more vividly than Nietzsche. He may have
been responsible (quite unintentionally) for many conversions.

Nietzsche's main themes can be summarized by the titles of his main books. Each
is, in a different way, an attack on faith. The center of Nietzsche's philosophy
is always the same: He is as centered on Christ as Augustine was, only he
centered on Christ as his enemy.

Nietzsche's first book, "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music,"
single-handedly revolutionized the accepted view of the ancient Greeks as all
"sweetness and light," reason and order. For Nietzsche, the tragic poets were
the great Greeks, and the philosophers, starting with Socrates, were the small
ones, pale and passionless. All the Western world had followed Socrates and his
rationalism and moralism, and had denied the other, darker side of man, the
tragic side.

Nietzsche instead exalted tragedy, chaos, disorder and irrationality, symbolized

by the god Dionysus, god of growth and drunken orgies. He claimed that Socrates
had turned the world instead to the worship of Apollo, god of the sun, light,
order and reason. But the fate of Nietzsche's god Dionysus was soon to overtake
Nietzsche himself; as Dionysus was literally torn apart by the Titans,
supernatural monsters of the underworld, Nietzsche's mind was to be cracked
asunder by his own inner Titans.

"The Use and Abuse of History" continued the Dionysian-vs.-Apollonian theme. The
"abuse of history" is (according to Nietzsche) theory, science, objective truth.
The right use of history is to enhance "life." Life and truth, fire and light,
Dionysus and Apollo, will and intellect, are set in opposition. We see Nietzsche
being torn apart here, for these are the two parts of the self.

"Ecce Homo" was pseudo-autobiographical shameless egotism. Though he was only a

stretcher-bearer in the war, Nietzsche calls himself a "swaggering old artillery
man" adored by all the ladies. In fact, he was a lonely old man who could not
stand the sight of blood, an emotional dwarf prancing like Napoleon. What's most
terrifying is that he willingly embraces his falsehood and fantasy. It is
consistent with his philosophy or preferring "whatever is life-enhancing" to
truth. "Why not live a lie? He asks.

"The Genealogy of Morals" claimed that morality was an invention of the weak
(especially the Jews, and then the Christians) to weaken the strong. The sheep
convinced the wolf to act like a sheep. This is unnatural, argues Nietzsche, and
seeing morality's unnatural origin in resentment at inferiority will free us
from its power over us.

"Beyond Good and Evil" is Nietzsche's alternative morality, or "new morality."

"Master morality" is totally different from "slave morality," he says. Whatever
a master commands becomes good from the mere fact that the master commands it.
The weak sheep have a morality of obedience and conformity. Masters have a
natural right to do whatever they please, for since there is no God, everything
is permissible.

"The Twilight of the Idols" explores the consequences of "the death of God." (Of
course God never really lives, but faith in Him did. Now that is dead, says
Nietzsche.) With God dies all objective truths (for there is no mind over ours)
and objective values, laws and morality (for there is no will over ours). Soul,
free will, immortality, reason, order, love-all these are "idols," little gods
that are dying now that the Big God has died.

What will replace God? The same being who will replace man; the Superman.
Nietzsche's masterpiece, "Thus Spake Zarathustra," celebrates this new god.
Nietzsche called "Zarathustra" the new Bible, and told the world to "throw away
all other books; you have my "Zarathustra." It is intoxicating rhetoric, and it
has captivated adolescents for generations. It was written in only a few days,
in a frenzy, perhaps of literally demon-inspired "automatic writing." No book
ever written contains more Jungian archetypes, like a fireworks display of
images from the unconscious.

Its essential message is the condemnation of present-day man as a weakling and

the announcement of the next species, the Superman, who lives by "master
morality" instead of "slave morality." God is dead, long live the new god!
But in "The Eternal Return" Nietzsche discovers that all gods die, even the
Superman. He believed that all history necessarily moved in a cycle, endlessly
repeating all past events-"There is nothing new under the Sun." Nietzsche
deduced this disappearing conclusion from the two premises of (1) a finite
amount of matter and (2) an infinite amount of time (since there is no creator
and no creation); thus every possible combination of elementary particles, every
possible world, occur an infinite number of times, given infinite time. All,
even the Superman, will return again to dust, and evolve worms, apes, man and
Superman again and again.

Instead of despairing, as Ecclesiastes did, at this hopeless new history,

Nietzsche seized the opportunity to celebrate history's irrationality and the
triumph of "life" over logic. The supreme virtue was the will's courage to
affirm this meaningless life, beyond reason, for no reason.

But in Nietzsche's last work, "The Will to Power," the lack of an end or goal
appears as demonic, and mirrors the demonic character of the modern mind.
Without a God, a heaven, truth, or an absolute Goodness to aim at, the meaning
of life becomes simply "the will to power." Power becomes its own end, not a
means. Life is like a bubble, empty within and without; but its meaning is
self-affirmation, egotism, blowing up your bubble, expanding the meaningless
self into the meaningless void. "Just will," is Nietzsche's advice. It does not
matter what you will or why.

We are now in a position to see why Nietzsche is such a crucially important

thinker, not despite but because of his insanity. No one in history, except
possibly the Marquis de Sade, has ever so clearly, candidly and consistently
formulated the complete alternative to Christianity.

Pre-Christian (i.e., pagan) societies and philosophies were like virgins.

Post-Christian (i.e., modern) societies and philosophies are like divorcees.
Nietzsche is no pagan pre-Christian, but the essential, modern post-Christian
and anti-Christian. He rightly saw Christ as his chief enemy and rival. The
spirit of Anti-Christ has never received such complete formulation. Nietzsche
was not only the favorite philosopher of Nazi Germany, he is the favorite
philosopher of hell.

We can thank Satan's own foolishness in "blowing his cover" in this man. Like
Nazism, Nietzsche may scare the hell out of us and help save our civilization or
even our souls by turning us away in terror before it's too late.

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Sexual Symbolism by Peter Kreeft

The excerpt below from the book Women and the Priesthood (by Peter Kreeft and
Alice Von Hildebrand) comprises Kreeft's second of four reasons defending the
Catholic church's teaching on the male priesthood (Why Only Boys Can Be the
Daddies).

The full talk (with all four of Kreeft's portions) is available as an audio
lecture:

Women and the Priesthood Reason Number Two:

Sexual Symbolism

The first two things we learn about sex from God, right from the beginning, are
that God designed it, not man or society, and that it is very good. The first
command was, "Be fruitful and multiply." I do not think God had in mind growing
oranges and memorizing times tables. It is significant that most advocates of
priestesses do not seem to believe or care much about this. Feminists usually
see sexuality as a social, human, conventional, changeable thing, and radical
feminists usually see it as a problem, an obstacle, or even an enemy, when they
rail against the "prison" of having wombs. The next step is natural: glorifying
the act of breaking out of this "prison" by killing their unborn babies. If they
see their bodies and their sexuality as theirs and not God's, it is quite
natural that they should proceed to the next step of seeing their babies as
theirs and not God's.

Advocates of women's ordination usually misunderstand sexual symbolism because

they misunderstand symbolism itself as radically as they misunderstand
authority. They think of symbols as man-made and artificial. They do not see
that there are profound and unchangeable natural symbols, that things can be
signs. Saint Thomas Aquinas based his multiple method of scriptural exegesis on
this eminently sound but tragically forgotten principle. He writes: "The author
of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words
only (as man also can do) but also by things themselves. So whereas in every
other science things are signified by words, this science [sacred science] has
the property that the things signified by the words [of Scripture] have
themselves a signification. Therefore that first signification, whereby words
signify things, belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That
signification whereby things signified by words have themselves a signification
is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal and presupposes
it."

In other words, God writes history (and nature) as man writes words. Behind St.
Thomas's hermeneutic is a metaphysics—the sacramental view of nature and
history. Thomas Howard has brilliantly pinpointed the difference between the
ancient world-view, in which everything means something, and the reductionistic
modem world-view, in which nothing means anything, in Chance or the Dance? If
every thing in nature means something, then the big things in nature mean
something big. And sex is a Big Thing. What it means is so big that we will
never exhaust it, only discover more facets of its diamond. But it is there, a
massive fact of nature, not a clever human idea.

Every good poet knows that natural symbols are like the essential structures of
language itself, unchangeable. The sky is, always was, and always will be a
natural symbol for heaven; dirt is not. The eye's seeing is a natural symbol for
the mind's understanding; the gut's groaning is not. We all know and recognize
this unconsciously. That is why our language has evolved as it has. We use "see"
to mean both literal, physical seeing and symbolic seeing or understanding.
Ascending, light notes in a major key somehow have to mean hope and joy;
descending, heavy notes in a minor key inevitably mean something grave. Words
like "grave" and "gravity" have multiple meanings glued with inextricable mental
epoxy. Everything is connected, and everything points beyond itself—especially
sex. God, who deliberately designed sexuality, also deliberately designed to
incarnate himself as a male. Jesus Christ is still a male. He still has his
human body in heaven. It is and forever will be a male body. This is not
ideology or theology or interpretation this is fact, this is data.

What follows is my attempt to explain the Church's "no" to priestesses in light

of this data. My explanation can be summarized in two propositions. First,
priests of Christ who are Christ's mouths through which he himself says, "This
is my Body," must be men because Christ is a man. Second, Christ, the perfect
human image of the Father, is male because God is Father. To deny my first
proposition is to deny the Eucharist, and thus Catholicism. To deny my second
proposition is to deny the authority of Christ, and thus Christianity.

C. S. Lewis—not a Catholic himself—saw point one better than most Catholics do:
Why should a woman not in this [priestly] sense represent God?... Suppose the
reformer stops saying that a good woman may be like God and begins saying that
God is like a good woman. Suppose he says that we might just as well pray to
'Our Mother which art in Heaven' as to 'Our Father'. Suppose he suggests that
the Incarnation might just as well have taken a female as a male form, and the
Second Person of the Trinity be as well called the Daughter as the Son. Suppose,
finally, that the mystical marriage were reversed, that the Church were the
Bridegroom and Christ the Bride. All this, as it seems to me, is involved in the
claim that a woman can represent God as a priest does.... ...Christians think
that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not
matter is to say... that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely
human in origin... And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an
argument not in favour of Christian priestesses but against Christianity.... It
is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery.... ...One of the ends for
which sex was created was to symbolize to us the hidden things of God. One of
the functions of human marriage is to express the nature of the union between
Christ and the Church.

The priesthood does not mean merely ministry. The new ICEL mistranslations of
the liturgy which substitute "minister" for "priest" are blind to the blindingly
obvious fact that a priest is not just a minister. Ministries like lector,
eucharistic minister, teacher, psychologist, counselor, social worker, and
political activist—and even prophet—are indifferent to sex. Women can and do
perform them. But priesthood is different. Only a priest can consecrate. A
Catholic priest is not just a symbol of Christ (even that would form a strong
argument against priestesses) but is sacramentally in persona Christi. When he
says, "This is my body," we hear Jesus Christ speaking. Father Murphy does not
mean "This is Father Murphy's body"! The priest is not merely remembering and
repeating Christ's words here; he is really "channeling" them. The ICEL-proposed
revisions of the Roman Missal, rejected by the bishops in November 1993,
substituted "presbyter" (elder) and "presider" for "priest"; and eliminated
references to God as "Father."

Christ's priests are men because Christ is a man.

But why is Christ's maleness essential? Because he is the revelation of the

Father, and the Father's masculinity is essential. This is the second half of
our equation.

To understand this second proposition, we must distinguish "male" from

"masculine." Male and female are biological genders. Masculine and feminine, or
yang and yin, are universal, cosmic principles, extending to all reality,
including spirit.

All pre-modern civilizations knew this. English is almost the only language that
does not have masculine and feminine nouns. So it is easy for us who speak
English to believe that the ancients merely projected their own biological
gender out onto nature in calling heaven masculine and earth feminine, day
masculine and night feminine, sun masculine and moon feminine, land masculine
and sea feminine. In the Hindu marriage ceremony the bridegroom says to the
bride, "I am heaven, you are earth." The bride replies, "I am earth, you are
heaven." Not only is cosmic sexuality universal, its patterns are suspiciously
consistent. Most cultures saw the sun, day, land, light, and sky as male; moon,
night, sea, darkness, and earth as female. Is it not incredibly provincial and
culturally arrogant for us to assume, without a shred of proof, that this
universal and fairly consistent human instinct is mere projection, myth,
fantasy, and illusion rather than insight into a cosmic principle that is really
there?

Once we look, we find abundant analogical evidence for it from the bottom of the
cosmic hierarchy to the top, from the electromagnetic attraction between
electrons and protons to the circumincession of divine Persons in the Trinity.
Male and female are only the biological version of cosmic masculine and
feminine. God is masculine to everything, from angels to prime matter. That is
the ultimate reason why priests, who represent God to us, must be male.

There is striking historical evidence for this in the Jews, God's chosen people,
the people to whom God revealed himself (and if we do not believe that, we do
not believe in that God, for that is the only place we find that God).
The Jews, and the Christians and the Muslims and the philosophical theists who
learned from them, were radically different from all the others in their concept
of God in five related ways.

First, they worshipped no goddesses, and no bisexual or neuter gods. The Jews'
only God was always He, never She or It.

Second, they had no priestesses.

Third, the Jewish God was utterly transcendent to the universe, for he created
it out of nothing. There is even a word in Hebrew that is not in any other
ancient language: bara', "to create." Only God can do it, not man. This God
was not a part of the universe, as in polytheism, or the whole or the soul of
the universe, as in pantheism.

Fourth, God spoke. He revealed himself in prophetic words and miraculous

deeds. He came out of hiding and acted. All other religions were man's search
for God. Judaism (and Christianity, its fulfillment) was God's search for man.
Therefore, religious experience for a Jew was fundamentally response, not
initiative. There were no yoga methods, no ways to push God's buttons. God
initiated, man responded.

Fifth, the Law was the primary link with God, who revealed his will in Thou
Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots. The god of pantheism may have a consciousness, but
not a will; and the gods of polytheism have conflicting and sometimes evil
wills. Only in Judaism is there a full union of religion and morality. Only
the Jews united mankind's two primary spiritual instincts the instinct to
worship and the instinct of conscience. Only the Jews identified the object
and end of worship with the Author of conscience and morality.

These five remarkably distinct features of ancient Judaism are clearly

connected. As a man comes into a woman's body from without to impregnate her,
God creates the universe from without and performs miracles in it from without.
He also calls to man, reveals himself and his law to man from without. He is not
The Force but The Face; not Earthspirit rising but Heavenly Father descending:
not the ideal construct of man's mind but the Hound of Heaven. To speak of
"religion" as "man's search for God," if we speak of this God, is like speaking
of the mouse's search for the cat (to steal an image from C. S. Lewis).
This issue is absolutely central, and therefore I beg your indulgence while I
quote a long paragraph from Lewis, which I believe is the best single paragraph
ever written on the difference between Christianity and man-made religions:
Men are reluctant to pass over from the notion of an abstract... deity to the
living God. I do not wonder. Here lies the deepest tap-root of Pantheism and of
the objection to traditional imagery.... The Pantheist's God does nothing,
demands nothing. He is there if you wish for Him, like a book on a shelf. He
will not pursue you. There is no danger that at any time heaven and earth should
flee away at His glance. If He were the truth, then we could really say that all
the Christian images of kingship were a historical accident of which our
religion ought to be cleansed. It is with a shock that we discover them to be
indispensable. You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller
matters—when the fishing line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside
you in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the
thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It
is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. 'Look out!' we
cry, 'it's alive'! And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw
back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with
Christianity. An 'impersonal God'—well and good. A subjective God of beauty,
truth and goodness, inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force
surging through us, a vast power which we can tap—best of all. But God Himself,
alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an infinite
speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There comes a
moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was
that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been
dabbling in religion ('Man's search for God'!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we
really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He
had found us?

The fundamental problem with most advocates of priestesses is as radical as

this: they do not know who God is. Most would register strong discomfort or
puzzlement at the description Lewis gives of God—i.e., the Bible's God. Now, if
the reply is that this ancient biblical picture of the hunter-king-husband God
is historically relative, and that we should throw away the accidental shell and
keep the essential, timeless meat of the nut, I reply:

First, the masculinity of God is not part of the shell, but part of the nut. It
is not like Hebrew grammar, a translatable and replaceable medium. Something as
deliberate and distinctive and as all-pervasive in Scripture as God's he-ness is
no mere accident, especially when so obviously connected with the other four
points of the five-point complex noted above.

Second, if it is a residue of the sin of sexism, then God has revealed himself
sinfully. This really denies the existence of divine revelation. Or it judges
the divine revelation by human ideology and opinion rather than vice versa, thus
frustrating the very purpose, the essential purpose, of revelation, which is to
reveal something that we could not have come up with from our own opinions or
ideologies, to correct them.

Behind the idea of the need for divine revelation is the idea of Original
Sin—another traditional notion which most priestess-advocates deny, ignore, or
at least are very embarrassed at. We are not good and wise and trustable, but
sinful and foolish and in need of correction, so we should expect to be
surprised and even offended by God's revelation; otherwise, we wouldn't need it.
Third, there is the "camel's nose under the tent" argument. Once you start
monkeying with your data, where do you stop? Why stop, ever, at all? If you can
subtract the divine masculinity from Scripture when it offends you, why can't
you subtract the divine compassion when that offends you? If you read your
Marxism into Scripture today, why not your fascism tomorrow? If you can change
God's masculinity, why not change his morality? Why not his very being? If you
can twist the pronoun, why not the noun? If you revise his "I," why not his
"AM"? Priestesses are merely the camel's nose under the tent. If it is admitted,
the rest of the camel will follow, because it is a one-piece camel.

My previous point concerned the masculinity of God. The other half of the case
against priestesses based on sexual symbolism is the femininity of the Church.
The Church is God's Bride. All the saints and mystics say the ultimate purpose
of human life, the highest end for which we were made, is the Spiritual
Marriage. This is not socially relative; itls eternal. And in it, the soul is
spiritually impregnated by God, not vice versa. That is the ultimate reason why
God must always be he to us, never she. Religion is essentially heterosexual and
therefore fruitful.

The new birth—our salvation—comes from above, from without, from transcendence.
We do not spiritually impregnate ourselves with salvation or divine life any
more than we physically impregnate ourselves. Modernism, humanism, and
naturalism amount to spiritual auto-eroticism, spiritual masturbation.

The Church can no more be fruitful without being impregnated by her Divine
Husband than a woman can be impregnated with new life without a man. Feminists
who resent thisfact, resent this fact, and thus tend to resent facts as such,
including their own nature as feminine.

The issue of priestesses is ultimately an issue of God. There have been three
basic theological options, historically: the single transcendent Divine Husband
(theism), many imminent gods and goddesses (paganism), or the pantheistic Divine
Neuter or Hermaphrodite. Priestesses have always served the latter two gods,
never the former. Deny God's transcendence, which is the condition for his
revelation, and you get a lesbian Church, declaring independence from God as The
Other, God as transcendent, God as masculine, believing herself to be already
innately in possession of divine life, that is, denying Original Sin, or trying
to impregnate herself horizontally by a kind of perverse auto-eroticism,
narcissism, and self-idolatry. Lesbians, like gays, simply cannot make life, and
the lesbian spirit of Womynchurch will never be able to make life without God
the Father. The Christian saints and mystics have constantly used the scriptural
and authoritative heterosexual metaphor of God as Husband to the Church and to
the soul.

God made the Jews different and was extremely ornery and cantankerous about them
remaining different, even to the extent of demanding the wholesale slaughter of
pagan populations in the Promised Land to prevent them from corrupting his pure
revelation to the Jews. Is this true? Is this divine revelation? Is this data?
There it is, right in the very politically incorrect Bible. If God did not
invent the Jews, then the Jews invented God. In that case, let's all be honest
and cease to be Christians, or even theists, and become atheists, pagans, or
pantheists, as many radical feminists have already done. Their spiritual gravity
toward these three false religions is natural. And it is the agenda behind
priestesses.

The obvious and ubiquitous objection to this view is that it is male chauvinism.
To quote my colleague Mary Daly, "If God is male, then the male is God." Besides
the logical fallacy of the illicit conversion of an A proposition, I see five
other mistakes in this argument

The first and most obvious of which is her claim that Judaeo-Christian
tradition claims that God is male. It does not. God is masculine, not male.
Women as much as men represent the image of God (cf. Gn 5.1-2). But at the
heart of divine revelation is the simple fact that the First Person of the
Trinity has chosen to reveal himself to us as Father. This is a category which
transcends human biology (male and female), and of which human fatherhood is a
shadow (cf. Eph 3.14).

Second, another essential part of the Christian data is the fact that the
Eternal Word chose to incarnate and reveal himself as the Son of the Father
and Bridegroom of God's People. In order for a human to be a son or a
bridegroom, he must be male. Jesus Christ is male because he is Son, not vice
versa, as feminists assume. His choice does not constitute an insult to women,
nor does it imply "an alleged natural superiority of man over woman," yet it
"cannot be disassociated from the economy of salvation." For it was part of
the divine plan from the beginning for God to covenant himself to a people as
a groom covenants himself to a bride. Christ is the Bridegroom, the Church is
his Bride. This makes us all feminine in relation to God. Women need not
become like men when they approach God, but men must become like women,
spiritually. All souls are Christ's brides.

Third, Julie Loesch Wiley argues that if Jesus had been born a woman in the
male-dominated world of the first century, his life and teaching of unselfish
love for others would not have been as arresting and as instructively
 scandalous as it was. For women, in all times and places and cultures until
modern feminism, have always been in general more altruistic, less
power-greedy, less violence-prone, more self-emptying, and more naturally
religious than men. (You still see more women than men in church.) In becoming
a man, Jesus in a sense let women be and went after men to transform them—not
into women, and certainly not into wimps, but into men like himself. He
redefined manliness and power as the courage to suffer instead of the lust to
dominate; giving instead of taking. Women were a little less in need of that
lesson. Christianity seems closer to female chauvinism than to male.

The Incarnation was the kenosis, the "emptying." The Son of God came down to
the lowest place, a crucified criminal in a Roman-occupied hick town—not an
angel or an emperor, and not a woman. The Incarnation was not into privilege
and power, but into suffering and service, and it was into a male. It is the
modern feminists who are the real male chauvinists, lusting for reproductive
freedom (sexual irresponsibility) like playboys and demanding empowerment,
that is, envying and imitating not only males, but male fools, judging inner
worth by outer performance, sacrificing being for doing, finding their
identity in their worldly careers, not in their inner essence, in their
physical and spiritual wombs and motherhoods. This is what Karl Stern called
"the flight from woman." It is a strange and sad phenomenon. Genuinely hurt
women often become radical feminists, hating their own femininity and hating
ordinary women who love and enjoy their ordinary femininity. How often have
you heard radical feminists praise midwestern housewives?

Fourth, women priests would demean and insult women, for it would be like
asking them to be cross-dressers or to wear male sex organs. It would remove
the distinctive dignity of women qua women as symbols of the Church, whom
Christ, symbolized by the priest, marries. A symbol or sign is to be looked
along, not looked at. What would priestesses mean, what would they symbolize?
They would signify to all women that they are spiritual lesbians instead of
brides.

Fifth, Christ's maleness is not chauvinistic because he had a mother (but no

earthly father). Mary is the definitive refutation of the charge of
chauvinism. No merely human being was ever nearly as great as this woman,
according to the distinctive teachings of this "chauvinistic" Church. Mary is
"our tainted nature's solitary boast."

"Mother of God" is hardly a title to sneer at! Mother of anyone is hardly a

title to sneer at. A boy and girl were arguing about who would play captain in a
game of pirates. The boy insisted on being captain; the girl won the argument by
agreeing: "Okay, you can be the captain. But I'm the mother of the captain!"
The ground of Mary's greatness is the thing so simple and innocent that it is
too simple and innocent for the feminists to see. The reason she is crowned
Queen of Heaven, the reason for her great glory and power is her total
submission to God-her sacrifice, her suffering, her service. Muslims see it, but
so-called "Christian" feminists do not. It is islam, the total surrender, the
fiat, and the peace, the shalom, that are the secret treasures hidden in this
submission, the delicious fruit of this thorny plant. Modem feminist
"Christianity" becomes radically different from Christianity (or Judaism or
Islam) when it drifts into a radically different ideal of sanctity, of the
summum bonum, the greatest good, meaning of life, and purpose of all faith.
Feminists need most fundamentally what we all need most fundamentally: to go to
the cross, unclench the fist, and bow the knee.

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Spiritual History 101: How Did We Get to the Edge? by Peter Kreeft

The story of our civilization can be told from different viewpoints. The history
books usually tell it from only one point of view, and not the most important
one at that. What makes headlines to the historian is not necessarily what makes
headlines to God. He reads hearts while we read appearances.

Furthermore, God knows the meaning of history better than the historians do
because history is "his story". He is its Author and we are its characters. It
is true that human free choices move history, but so does God; just as Captain
Ahab moves the plot of Moby Dick, but so does Melville.

We cannot fully possess God's point of view, of course, but we can seek it and
approach it, rather than ignore it. We can also pay attention when God reveals
some clues to it. So let's try to write a short summary of the spiritual history
of Western civilization, a history not of its body but of its soul.
Its overall structure will look like a lazy H.

Think of two rivers emerging from a swamp, joining, parting again, and
reentering the swamp. The steps along the way in this story are the ten key
periods of our spiritual history:

The period of myth

The dawn of self-consciousness, the "axial period"
Hebraism: virtue in practice
Hellenism: virtue in theory
The medieval Christian synthesis
The Renaissance: the return to Hellenism
The Reformation: the return to Hebraism
Classical modernity: Enlightenment rationalism, Hellenism secularized
Antimodernity: Romantic irrationalism, Hebraism secularized
The postmodern period, the present: a new axial period?

1. Myth

For well over go percent of the time that our species has lived on this Planet,
we have thought and lived by myth. Yet we know and care less about this long and
formative period of time than about any other, probably because of our
chronological snobbery.

The word myth means "story". Myths are moving pictures that arise from the
imagination, that great, creative, unconscious well of wisdom within us that
psychologists are just beginning to explore in this century. These stories and
images that bubble up in myths still move us profoundly on the unconscious
level, especially in art, most especially in the cinema, that great waking
dream-machine. Jungian psychologists could have a field day with MTV videos;
they are chockfull of archetypes, mythic images.

Myth is immediate and spontaneous. It has beauty but not truth, except the truth
of beauty itself. It may sound profound to say with Keats that "beauty is truth,
truth beauty", but it is really confusion. To say this is no disrespect for
beauty, which is one of God's three great prophets in the human soul, the other
two being goodness and truth. Beauty is known by the imagination; goodness, by
conscience; and truth, by reason (in the large, ancient sense of wisdom, no just
cleverness; understanding, no just calculation; reason, not just reasoning). All
three converging streams of prophets-Jewish moralists, Greek philosophers, and
pagan myth-makers-point us to the Messiah. (See Figure 4.)

Myth does not ask for or give either reasons or laws. It neither questions nor
commands. It is not for explanation or morality. True, myths attempt to explain
the origins of things, but this explanation does not survive rational
questioning. Myths are not meant to be rational. Nor are they meant to be moral,
although myths often direct people to do things, such as self-torturing to prove
one's manhood, or speaking magic words to obtain the help of the local gods to
defeat the enemy. But this is not morality. In the myth's societies morality
came not from the priests but from the philosophers. The exception is the Jews,
who alone among ancient peoples were not dominated by myth, and who alone
identified the one Object of religious awe and worship with the source of moral
conscience and law. The innate sense of morality, or conscience, is quite
different from the innate sense of awe, wonder, worship, and transcendent
mystery ("the numinous") that is expressed by myth.

Worship and morality existed side by side in paganism for thousands of years.
Only one people joined them together, and their own records claim that it was
not they but God who did it. Their claim to be God's "chosen people" was really
the humblest of possible explanations for their genius.

2. The Axial Period

Karl Jaspers uses this term for the sixth century B.C. because in this century
human consciousness all over the world began turning, as if it were on its axis,
and facing itself. Consciousness became self-conscious, or reflective. This
happened independently at approximately the same time all over the world. It was
either a coincidence or a plot, either chance or divine providence. The more we
look, the less it looks like chance.

In China, for instance, we find the two great figures of Confucius and Lao-Tzu.
Confucius substituted deliberate tradition for "traditional tradition", and
Lao-Tzu substituted the individual mystical experience of the Tao, or cosmic
life-force, for the authoritarian and impersonal fortune telling of the I Ching,
in his little masterpiece, the Tao Te Ching.
In India, Gautama the Buddha abandoned the books and authority of the Brahmins
to seek nirvana deliberately and told the world that anyone could do the same:
"Be ye lamps unto yourselves."

In Persia, Zoroaster substituted prophetic and moralistic religion for animism,

tribalism, and nature-worship

In Greece, philosophers and scientists began the revolutionary act of asking

questions of the world and life, questions that the poets and myth-makers could
not answer.

In Israel, the great prophets demanded personal and social justice and holiness,
not just ritual observance.

Everywhere, in different ways, human consciousness was making new, inward

demands, becoming aware of its own powers and responsibilities. In a sense
modern man was born twenty-six centuries ago. Each of the subsequent events in
our spiritual history is dependent on this event, in this new context.

3. Hellenism

This is Matthew Arnold's name for the Greek spirit. Even when political Hellas
(Greece) died, its spirit was preserved in a Roman body, so that we can
meaningfully use the single term "classical" for both Greek and Roman culture.
The Greeks, to put it very simply, thought and talked more than anyone else.
Luke, writing Acts, has to explain to his non-Greek audience this strange Greek
behavior: "All the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time
in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing" (17:21). The most
important word in their language was logos, which meant (among other things)
"word, language, discourse, thought, reason, or intelligible truth". Thus John
begins his Gospel with the astonishing claim that the logos which the Greeks
searched for, the Truth, existed as God and with God "in the beginning" and
"became flesh" as Jesus, the Jesus who said, "I AM the Truth."

The kind of truth these thinking, talking, and searching Greeks thought, talked,
and searched the most about was the truth about virtue. Socrates, the greatest
of them, one of the two or three men in the history of this planet who made the
greatest difference and the greatest contribution to all subsequent ages,
thought about almost nothing else. Each of his dialogues is a quest for the
truth about some particular virtue.

We can contrast the Hellenic and the Hebraic minds as Matthew Arnold does, by
contrasting theory with practice, intellectualism with voluntarism, the
centrality of thought with the centrality of will, choice, and action. The
Greeks represented virtue in theory, thinking about virtue; the Hebrews
represented virtue in practice. For Socrates and Plato, right thinking is
virtue. Virtue is knowledge and knowledge is virtue. If we only know what is
good, we will do it. The will, choice, and action necessarily follow thinking.
We always choose what we think is profitable to us. If our thoughts are right,
our choices will be right. Thus philosophical wisdom is the prescription for a
moral utopia, as Plato set out in his Republic.

4. Hebraism

Two crucial categories of human existence were missing from the Greek scheme, if
we take the Hebrew and Christian perspective: sin and faith, the categories of
relationship with God. They are religious categories, not just ethical ones. The
religious includes the ethical but goes beyond it. The religious Jew and
Christian are to be ethically virtuous, of course, but also religiously
faithful. Of the two great commandments, the first is religious (to love the
Lord with the whole heart), the second is ethical (to love neighbor as self).

For Hebraism, faith (fidelity) is first; virtue, second; and knowledge, third in
importance. The knowledge of God and virtue is not prior to the practice of
them, as it was for the Greeks. Rather, it is embedded in or dependent on the
practice. Thus Jesus gives the perfectly Hebraic answer to the question: "How
can we know your teaching, whether it is from God or not?" when he says: "If
your will were to do the will of my Father, you would know my teaching, that it
comes from him" (Jn 7:17). For the Greek, head judges heart: "Live according to
reason." For the Jew, heart judges head: "Keep thy heart with all diligence, for
out of it are the issues of life" (Pr 4:23 KJV). (Heart in the Bible means
"will", not "sentiment". Hebraism is practical, not sentimental.)

5. The Medieval Christian Synthesis

Christian virtue is not fundamentally different from Hebrew virtue, because not
only Jews and Christians but nearly everyone innately knows what is right and
wrong (religions do not differ much in their ethics, but in their theology) and
because Jews and Christians believe in the same God, the author of the moral
law.

But Christianity, unlike Judaism, is a proselytizing religion. It sent

missionaries out into the Greco-Roman world to convert it, and the "it" that was
there to be converted included Greek notions of virtue.

There were from the beginning three different attitudes on the part of
Christians to the pagan world in general and to pagan notions of virtue in
particular: (1) uncritical synthesis, (2) critical synthesis, and (3) criticism
and antisynthesis. Different Christian thinkers accepted either (1) all, (2)
some, or (3) none of the Greek ideals of virtue. The greatest and mainstream
Christians, like Augustine and Aquinas, took the second way and have been
criticized by extremists of both wings right up to the present day. They are
labeled fundamentalists by the modernists and modernists by the fundamentalists.

Perhaps synthesis is the wrong word for the great tradition forged in the
thousand years of the Middle Ages. It was rather a profound Christian
reinterpretation of Greek philosophy and Greek morality. It was not like gluing
a rabbit onto a carrot but like a rabbit's eating and digesting a carrot.

6 and 7: The Renaissance and the Reformation

Two forces separated the strands of the rope that the Middle Ages tied together.
We no longer live in the Middle Ages, mainly because of the Renaissance and the
Reformation.

The Renaissance tried to return to the Greco-Roman classicism and humanism minus
the medieval additions of scholastic philosophy and theology. The Reformation
tried to return to a simpler, premedieval, New Testament Christianity, a
Christianity minus the additions of Greek rationalism and Roman legalism and
institutionalism which the reformers thought had corrupted the Catholic Church.
From our vantage point today we call the Renaissance and the Reformation
progressive movements because they led out of the Middle Ages into the modern
world. However, thinkers in those times saw themselves as part of nostalgic or
returning movements, purifying movements: the Renaissance returning to
Hellenism, the Reformation to Hebraism.

The dichotomy is still with us. Hebraism and Hellenism, heart and head, will and
reason, are still separated. Nietzsche's unsuccessful attempt to find the
unifying center of these two forces (which he called the "Dionysian" and the
"Apollonian" after the Greek gods of earth and sky, darkness and light,
vegetation and the sun) drove him insane. Along the road to madness, brilliance
was thrown off, like sparks from a destructive fire. All this is true for our
whole civilization as well as for Nietzsche. I am not glorifying a madman, but
Nietzsche was a prophet and a mirror to the madness of our own civilization, and
we can learn much from him.

8. The Enlightenment

The term is ironic; for spiritually the eighteenth century was the darkest ever.
Scientism and rationalism replaced faith; the human heart narrowed and hardened
in conformity with its own gods, the inventions of its own hands. G. K.
Chesterton was profoundly right about the three eras of our history-ancient,
medieval, and modern (pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian)—when he
summarized all of Western history in three sentences: "paganism was the biggest
thing in the world; and Christianity was bigger; and everything since has been
comparatively small."

Enlightenment rationalism cut the top off of Greek ideals and kept the bottom,
cut off wisdom and kept logic, transformed reason into reasoning. With this new,
streamlined tool, the world could be conquered. The scientific method became the
tool for the new summum bonum, the new meaning of life: 66 man's conquest of
nature". Alexander Pope summarized the faith of the Enlightenment in two lines:
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night; God said, "Let Newton be!" and all
was light.

9. Romanticism

Nineteenth-century Romanticism and its philosophical child, Existentialism, was

the reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, the reaction of heart against
head. But just as the Enlightenment's head was a trimmed-down and secularized
head, Romanticism's heart was a trimmed-down and secularized heart. It was
sentiment instead of will, and it was in relationship to nature rather than to
God.

10. The Present

Where do we go from here? Nearly everyone agrees that we are standing at the end
of an age, perhaps at a new axial period. We have left modernity behind almost
as surely as we have left antiquity behind. We are "postmodern". But we do not
yet know what that means.

From our unique experiment in living without a set of objective values, only two
roads lie open: return or destruction. Once the sled is on the slippery slope
leading to the abyss, we either brake or break; and no amount of rhetoric about
"progress" can alter that fact. Crying "progress" as we die will not raise us
from death.

Yet our diagnosis gives us reason to hope. We came from a place closer to home;
therefore it is possible to return. Our illness is not wholly hereditary. There
is, of course, a far deeper illness in us that is hereditary. It is called
"Original Sin", and for that a remedy far deeper than philosophy is needed, and
in fact has been provided, and that is "the greatest story ever told".

But there is also a cure, a hope, a home to return to on the natural level. It
is our own human nature. The four cardinal virtues, which we shall explore in
chapter four, are the heart of natural morality, and they lie embedded and
ineradicable in our very nature. That nature is weakened and perverted by sin,
but it is not obliterated. Natural virtue cannot save our souls, but it can save
our civilization, and that is no mean feat. But it can save us only if we both
know it and practice it.

On the supernatural level there is also hope because there too is a home from
which we came—Paradise—though the road back is only by grace. Since we were once
home, there is home and thus a hope, a possibility of return—or even something
better. The road to Paradise is supernatural virtue, the three theological
virtues of faith, hope, and charity and the blessedness, or beatitude, that
flows from them.

From Back to Virtue by Ignatius Press.

Design by davenevins.com
Suffering by Peter Kreeft

What is God's Answer to Human Suffering?

The answer must be someone, not just something. For the problem (suffering) is
about someone (God—why does he... why doesn't he ...?) rather than just
something. To question God's goodness is not just an intellectual experiment. It
is rebellion or tears. It is a little child with tears in its eyes looking up at
Daddy and weeping, "Why?" This is not merely the philosophers' "why?" Not only
does it add the emotion of tears but also it is asked in the context of
relationship. It is a question put to the Father, not a question asked in a
vacuum.

The hurt child needs not so much explanations as reassurances. And that is what
we get: the reassurance of the Father in the person of Jesus, "he who has seen
me has seen the Father" (Jn 14:9).

The answer is not just a word but the Word; not an idea but a person. Clues are
abstract, persons are concrete. Clues are signs; they signify something beyond
themselves, something real. Our solution cannot be a mere idea, however true,
profound, or useful, because that would be only another sign, another finger,
another clue—like fingers pointing to other fingers, like having faith in faith,
or hope in hope, or being in love with love. A hall of mirrors.
Besides being here, he is now. Besides being concretely real in our world, he,
our answer, is also in our story, our history. Our story is also his-story. The
answer is not a timeless truth but a once-for-all catastrophic event, as real as
the stories in today's newspapers.

It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet
it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and
will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at.
And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives
and needs. We needed a surgeon, and he came and reached into our wounds with
bloody hands. He didn't give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us
himself.

The answer is not just a word

but the Word;
not an idea but a person.

He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. Love
seeks above all intimacy, presence, togetherness. Not happiness. "Better unhappy
with her than happy without her"—that is the word of a lover. He came. That is
the salient fact, the towering truth, that alone keeps us from putting a bullet
through our heads. He came. Job is satisfied even though the God who came gave
him absolutely no answers at all to his thousand tortured questions. He did the
most important thing and he gave the most important gift: himself. It is a
lover's gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our darkness, our agonized
aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, "My God, my God,
why hast Thou forsaken me?" he came, all the way, right into that cry.

In coming into our world he came also into our suffering. He sits beside us in
the stalled car in the snowbank. Sometimes he starts the car for us, but even
when he doesn't, he is there. That is the only thing that matters. Who cares
about cars and success and miracles and long life when you have God sitting
beside you? He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are
we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for
our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was "despised and rejected of
men." Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost?
Do we ever say, "Oh, no, not again! I can't take any more!"? He was "a man of
sorrows and acquainted with grief." Do people misunderstand us, turn away from
us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love
betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed
by the ones he loved. "He came unto his own and his own received him not." Does
it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are
sinking into uselessness and oblivion? He sinks with us. He too is passed over
by the world. His way of suffering love is rejected, his own followers often the
most guilty of all; they have made his name a scandal, especially among his own
chosen people. What Jew finds the road to him free from the broken weapons of
bloody prejudice? We have made it nearly impossible for his own people to love
him, to see him as he is, free from the smoke of battle and holocaust.

Withness—that is the
word of love.

How does he look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn. We
add to his wounds. There are nineteen hundred nails in his cross. We, his
beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold and correct
and distant to him. And still he keeps brooding over the world like a hen over
an egg, like a mother who has had all of her beloved children turn against her.
"Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you." He sits
beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn his
face from us, however much we turn our face from him. He endures our spiritual
scabs and scars, our sneers and screams, our hatreds and haughtiness, just to be
with us. Withness—that is the word of love.

Does he descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten
Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, "No matter how deep our darkness, he
is deeper still." Does he descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and
leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to
try, the most notable in this century not even a Christian but a Hindu. Does he
descend into insanity? Yes, into that darkness too. Even into the insanity of
suicide? Can he be there too? Yes he can. "Even the darkness is not dark to
him." He finds or makes light even there, in the darkness of the mind—perhaps
not until the next world, until death's release.

For the darkest door of all has been shoved open and light from beyond it has
streamed into our world to light our way, since he has changed the meaning of
death. It is not merely that he rose from the dead, but that he changed the
meaning of death, and therefore also of all the little deaths, all the
sufferings that anticipate death and make up parts of it. Death, like a cancer,
seeps back into life. We lose little bits of life daily—our health, our
strength, our youth, our hopes, our dreams, our friends, our children, our
lives—all these dribble away like water through our desperate, shaking fingers.
Nothing we can do, not our best efforts, holds our lives together. The only
lives that don't spring leaks are the ones that are already all watery. The only
hearts that do not break are the ones that are busily constructing little hells
of loveless control, cocoons of safe, respectable selfishness to insulate
themselves from the tidal wave of tears that comes sooner or later.

But he came into life and death, and he still comes. He is still here. "As you
did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Mt 2 5:40).
He is here. He is in us and we are in him; we are his body. He is gassed in the
ovens of Auschwitz. He is sneered at in Soweto. He is cut limb from limb in a
thousand safe and legal death camps for the unborn strewn throughout our world,
where he is too tiny for us to see or care about. He is the most forgotten soul
in the world. He is the one we love to hate. He practices what he preaches: he
turns his other cheek to our slaps. That is what love is, what love does, and
what love receives.

Love is why he came. It's all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the
stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into his screamingly soft flesh,
the infinitely harder stroke of his own people's hammering hatred, hammering at
his heart—why? For love. God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and he can
no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.

He may not yet wipe tears away, but he makes them his.

Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our
hearts, we can know—we must know—that he is here with us, taking our blows.
Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes
them his. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones? He
came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all our broken
bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and
we are nourished. And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness
as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread
that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very
tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love. When those we
love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open. His withness with us enables us to
be with those who refuse to be with us.

Perhaps he is even in the sufferings of animals, if, as Scripture seems to say,

we are somehow responsible for them and they suffer with us. He not only sees
but suffers the fall of each sparrow.

All our sufferings are transformable into his work, our passion into his action.
That is why he instituted prayer, says Pascal: to bestow on creatures the
dignity of causality. We are really his body; the Church is Christ as my body is
me. That is why Paul says his sufferings are making up in his own body what
Christ has yet to endure in his body (Col 1:24).

Thus God's answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened 2,000
years ago, but it is still happening in our own lives. The solution to our
suffering is our suffering! All our suffering can become part of his work, the
greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we
love eternal joy.

How? This can be done on one condition: that we believe. For faith is not just a
mental choice within us; it is a transaction with him. "Behold, I stand at the
door and knock; if anyone... opens the door, I will come in and eat with him"
(Rev 3:20). To believe, according to John's Gospel, is to receive (Jn 1:12), to
receive what God has already done. His part is finished ("It is finished," he
said on the cross). Our part is to receive that work and let it work itself out
in and through our lives, including our tears. We offer it up to him, and he
really takes it and uses it in ways so powerful that we would be flattened with
wonder if we knew them now.

You see, the Christian views suffering, as he views everything, in a totally

different way, a totally different context, than the unbeliever. He sees it and
everything else as a between, as existing between God and himself, as a gift
from God, an invitation from God, a challenge from God, something between God
and himself. Everything is relativized. I do not relate to an object and keep
God in the background somewhere; God is the object that I relate to. Everything
is between us and God. Nature is no longer just nature, but creation, God's
creation. Having children is procreation. My very I is his image, not my own but
on loan.

Our suffering now becomes the work of love.

What then is suffering to the Christian? It is Christ's invitation to us to

follow him. Christ goes to the cross, and we are invited to follow to the same
cross. Not because it is the cross, but because it is his. Suffering is blessed
not because it is suffering but because it is his. Suffering is not the context
that explains the cross; the cross is the context that explains suffering. The
cross gives this new meaning to suffering; it is now not only between God and me
but also between Father and Son. The first between is taken up into the
Trinitarian exchanges of the second. Christ allows us to participate in his
cross because that is his means of allowing us to participate in the exchanges
of the Trinity, to share in the very inner life of God.

Freud says our two absolute needs are love and work. Both are now fulfilled by
our greatest fear, suffering. Work, because our suffering now becomes opus dei,
God's work, construction work on his kingdom. Love, because our suffering now
becomes the work of love, the work of redemption, saving those we love.

True love, unlike popular sentimental substitutes, is willing to suffer. Love is

not "luv." Love is the cross. Our problem at first, the sheer problem of
suffering, was a cross without a Christ. We must never fall into the opposite
and equal trap of a Christ without a cross. Look at a crucifix. St. Bernard of
Clairvaux says that whenever he does, Christ's five wounds appear to him as
lips, speaking the words, "I love you."

In summary, Jesus did three things to solve the problem of suffering. First, he
came. He suffered with us. He wept. Second, in becoming man he transformed the
meaning of our suffering: it is now part of his work of redemption. Our death
pangs become birth pangs for heaven, not only for ourselves but also for those
we love. Third, he died and rose. Dying, he paid the price for sin and opened
heaven to us; rising, he transformed death from a hole into a door, from an end
into a beginning.

Resurrection was so important to Christ's disciples that when Paul

preached the good news in Athens, the inhabitants thought he was preaching
two new gods, Jesus and resurrection.

That third thing, now—resurrection. It makes more than all the difference in the
world. Many condolences begin by saying something like this: "I know nothing can
bring back your dear one again, but.. ." No matter what words follow, no matter
what comforting psychology follows that "but," Christianity says something to
the bereaved that makes all the rest trivial, something the bereaved longs
infinitely more to hear: God can and will bring back your dear one again to
life. There is resurrection.

What difference does it make? Simply the difference between infinite and eternal
joy and infinite and eternal joylessness. Resurrection was so important to
Christ's disciples that when Paul preached the good news in Athens, the
inhabitants thought he was preaching two new gods, Jesus and resurrection
(anastasis) (Acts 17). The same Paul said, "If Christ has not been raised, then
our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. ... If for this life only we
have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied" (1 Cor 15:14, 19).
Because of resurrection, when all our tears are over, we will, incredibly, look
back at them and laugh, not in derision but in joy. We do a little of that even
now, you know. After a great worry is lifted, a great problem solved, a great
sickness healed, a great pain relieved, it all looks very different as past, to
the eyes of retrospection, than it looked as future, as prospect, or as present,
as experience. Remember St. Teresa's bold saying that from heaven the most
miserable earthly life will look like one bad night in an inconvenient hotel!
If you find that hard to believe, too good to be true, know that even the
atheist Ivan Karamazov understands that hope. He says,

I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all
the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful
mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small
Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal
harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all
hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the
crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it
not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.

Why then does Ivan remain an atheist? Because though he believes, he does not
accept. He is not a doubter; he is a rebel. Like his own character the Grand
Inquisitor, Ivan is angry at God for not being kinder. That is the deepest
source of unbelief: not the intellect but the will.

The story I have retold in this chapter is the oldest and best known of stories.
For it is the primal love story, the story we most love to tell. Tolkien says,
"There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true." It is
suggested in the fairy tales, and it is why we find the fairy tales so strangely
compelling. Kierkegaard retells it beautifully and profoundly in chapter two of
Philosophical Fragments, in the story of the king who loved and wooed the humble
peasant maiden. It is told symbolically in the greatest of love poems, the Song
of Songs, favorite book of the mystics. And the very loveliness of it is an
argument for its truth. Indeed, how could this crazy idea, this crazy desire,
ever have entered into the mind and heart of man? How could a creature without a
digestive system learn to desire food? How could a creature without manhood
desire a woman? How could a creature without a mind desire knowledge? And how
could a creature with no capacity for God desire God?

Let's step back a bit. We began with the mystery, not just of suffering but of
suffering in a world supposedly created by a loving God. How to get God off the
hook? God's answer is Jesus. Jesus is not God off the hook but God on the hook.
That's why the doctrine of the divinity of Christ is crucial: If that is not God
there on the cross but only a good man, then God is not on the hook, on the
cross, in our suffering. And if God is not on the hook, then God is not off the
hook. How could he sit there in heaven and ignore our tears?

There is, as we saw, one good reason for not believing in God: evil. And God
himself has answered this objection not in words but in deeds and in tears.
Jesus is the tears of God.

From Making Sense Out of Suffering by Ignatius Press.

This text is also available as an audio lecture under:
Making Sense Out of Suffering

Design by davenevins.com
Surfing and Spirituality by Peter Kreeft

Nothing is more important than our journey to God, or "the spiritual life," as
many writers call it. For this is our ultimate reason for living. It's what each
of us was born for.

Nearly all who write about the spiritual life distinguish stages in it. For it's
clearly like a road on which we move, and change, and progress.

Many different images from physical life have been used for the stages of the
spiritual life, for example, Teresa of Avila's "mansions" (in The Interior
Castle), or Walter Hilton's rungs on The Ladder of Perfection. Since these are
just analogies, differences between them are not really contradictions. The same
reality (the stages in the spiritual life) can be truly told by using many
different metaphors, or symbols from physical life.

One analogy that's never, as far as I know, been used—yet one that is quite
arresting to many souls—is the analogy of surfing.

Many of us love the ocean. It's our favorite place in the world. As soon as we
have the vacation time and money, we spend it there. We feel a mysterious
longing for the sea as some kind of secret to our own identity, as if our blood
had salt water in it. (It does, by the way.) This longing is a commonplace of
poets:

I must go down to the sea again

To the lonely sea and the sky
And all I ask is a tall ship
And a star to steer her by.
John Masefield

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll;

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain!
Lord Byron

We nonpoets feel it too. If we didn't, we wouldn't read and love the poets.
I'm not an expert swimmer, but I am a swimmer. I'm not a good surfer, not even a
"real" surfer with a full-sized board. But surfing with a boogie board, or
body-board—well, that is my "thing." It's not only one of the most delightful
experiences I know but also one of the most profoundly suggestive. I know only a
little about the spiritual life, much more from others than from myself. But
what I know well (surfing) is a powerful teacher, by analogy, of what I don't
know well (the spiritual life). That's the purpose of analogies: to use the
better-known to better know the unknown. I here share my favorite analogy
because I suspect many readers will reply, "What! You too? I thought I was the
only one!"
The key elements in the symbolism are pretty clear: I, the surfer, am—myself.
The body with which I surf in the sea symbolizes the soul, with which I "surf"
in God. The sea is God. The beach is the approach to God. Surfing is the
experience of God, or the spiritual life.

In my surfing experience I can distinguish twelve steps. In my experience of God

I can also distinguish twelve steps. The twelve clear, physical steps in surfing
help clarify the twelve more mysterious steps in the journey into God.
There are four main divisions, with three subdivisions in each.

The first three steps are preliminaries. The first step is the knowledge of the
sea. No one will ever experience the sea without going there, and no one will go
there without wanting to, and no one will want to without knowing about it.
Thus, the first three steps are: (1) knowing about the sea; (2) wanting to go
there; and (3) going there.

Parallel to these three necessary preliminaries for surfing are the three
necessary preliminaries to God. They are the three "theological virtues" of
faith, hope, and love.

First, we must know that God exists, and is good, and is our joy. That knowledge
comes by faith. (It can also come by reason for some, but it comes by faith for
all.)

Second, we must hope for God and seek him. "Seek and you shall find" implies
that if you don't seek, you won't find.

Third, love (charity, agape) is the fruit of this plant of hope, whose roots are
faith. For Christians, love means a life, not a feeling. As Kierkegaard puts it,
love is "the works of love." Faith blossoms into works. Faith works. The
plant—roots, stem and fruit—is one. Faith, hope, and love—works are not three
things but three parts of one living thing: the spiritual life, the life of God
in the soul. This is "the one thing needful" (Lk 10:42).

Faith in God is our knowledge of God. This is like our knowledge of the sea.
Hope in God is our desire for God. This is like our desire to go to the sea.
Love of God is our actual movement and growth toward God, or in God. This is
like our actual travel to the sea.

All three are delightful. Planning a vacation is almost half the fun. Foreplay
is as much a part of love as consummation.

Our knowledge of the sea need not be deep, like the sea, for it to be sufficient
as the first step in our journey. We needn't be oceanographers to be
vacationers. Similarly, we needn't be theologians to be saints.
But our desire for the sea must be deep if we are to take the time and money to
travel there. Mild curiosity isn't enough. Most of us have to move a lot of
schedules, people, and suitcases to take a vacation. We won't do it without
longing.

The next three stages in our journey to the sea happen only when we are already
there, in its "presence": (4) seeing the sea; (5) smelling the sea; and (6)
running down the beach into the sea.

The gift of understanding is like sight. No amount of words or verbal

explanations can substitute for seeing. You only believe the truth of the words
in a travel folder. But you see the sea when you arrive there, and that sight
strikes a chord in the heart, a chord of joy and homecoming—and at the same time
of further longing. It's a mysterious mingling of deep satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, a divine discontent. For the restless heart that God has made
for himself is not only restless until it gets to God; it's restless until it
rests in God.

The faith-hope-love pattern is repeated here. Seeing the sea is the fulfillment
of the faith-from-afar that we had from travel folders. And seeing God is the
fulfillment of faith: "If you believe, you will see" (Jn 11:40). Smelling the
sea is the fulfillment of desiring hope from afar. Smelling is a most mystical
sense. The thing itself enters into us, or we into it, when its very molecules
enter our noses. And smells move us more deeply and mysteriously, sometimes,
than any other sense. Finally, running into the sea is like self-forgetful,
self-offering love. It's an obligation, an offering of self.

The next three stages deepen our relationship with the sea and with God. First
(7), we get our toes wet. Spiritually, we experience a little of what we have
first believed and then understood.

Second (8), we get wet halfway up. Getting your bathing suit wet is the
essential step. Bathing suits cover our private parts, our tenderest spots. This
symbolizes the hopeful investment of our lives that is pain, sacrifice, and
death. The starkest difference between the saints and ourselves is their
willingness, even eagerness, to suffer for God.

Finally (9), getting wet all over symbolizes the total consecration of our whole
self, whole will, and whole life to God, leaving absolutely nothing left for
ourselves, not a penny or a second or any other thing we call our own.
The last three stages cover what is usually called "mystical experience."
Getting in over your head (10), with your feet no longer on the ground,
symbolizes the mind plunging into the divine mysteries, the "dark night of the
soul" that no words can mediate. We lose all footing. We are no longer in
control. We're a part of the sea, it seems. Thus, even the orthodox mystics say
pantheistic-sounding things, for they see and feel only God, not themselves at
all. Of course, they're still there—who's having the mystical experience,
anyway? But they don't know or feel themselves there any more. They're in over
their heads. This sounds scary only as heaven sounds scary. For it is heaven,
the beginning or foretaste of heaven. All of us will be mystics there.

Then comes the actual surfing (11). Let's make it body surfing. Body surfing is
an even more intimate oneness with the sea than board surfing, whether with a
full-sized board or small bodyboard. Here, our unity with the sea is greater
than the passive getting in over your head (10); it is the active doing what the
sea does. What the sea does is waving. So we wave. We become one with what the
sea does as well as one with what the sea is.

Steps 1-9 were all dynamic process, motion. Step ten was the end, peace. But
that's not the end. On the other side of the end there is more dynamism and
movement, but this time from the end rather than to it, from within it, as waves
come from within the sea. After we are moved to God, we find that once we are in
God we are moved again, this time from God, by God. God is dynamic, like
crashing surf, not static, like a stagnant pool. Living in God forever is the
most dynamic, exciting thing there is. Body surfing is (for surfing freaks like
me) a remote but intimate analogy, a weak yet powerful foretaste of heaven.

Finally, the analogy breaks down, as all do. The last physical stage (12) is not
joyful, but the spiritual stage it symbolizes is supreme joy. The last stage is
drowning (something I would not advise!). It symbolizes mystical union, death
not just of concepts (stage 10) or of self-will (stage 11, when we're moved
wholly by the sea's waves) but of the very ego-self itself. Something in us
longs to die, for only death brings resurrection. Something in us that we cannot
understand, something we both fear and love, cries out to God to slay us in the
Spirit:

Blow, blow, blow till I be

But the breath of the Spirit,
blowing in me.
And, "I live, nevertheless not I, but Christ lives in me."

For more on this talk, see the audio lecture/meditation:

The Sea and Spirituality

Design by davenevins.com
The Apple Argument Against Abortion by Peter Kreeft

Source: December 2000 issue of Crisis Magazine

I doubt there are many readers of this magazine who are pro-choice. Why, then,
do I write an argument against abortion for its readers? Why preach to the choir?
Preaching to the choir is a legitimate enterprise. Scripture calls it
"edification," or "building up." It is what priests, ministers, rabbis, and
mullahs try to do once every week. We all need to clean and improve our
apologetic weapons periodically; and this argument is the most effective one I
know for actual use in dialogue with intelligent pro-choicers.I will be as
upfront as possible.

I will try to prove the simple, common-sensical reasonableness of the pro-life

case by a sort of Socratic logic. My conclusion is that Roe v. Wade must be
overturned, and my fundamental reason for this is not only because of what
abortion is but because we all know what abortion is.

This is obviously a controversial conclusion, and initially unacceptable to all

pro-choicers. So, my starting point must be noncontroversial. It is this: We
know what an apple is. I will try to persuade you that if we know what an apple
is, Roe v. Wade must be overthrown, and that if you want to defend Roe, you will
probably want to deny that we know what an apple is.

1. We Know What an Apple Is

Our first principle should be as undeniable as possible, for arguments usually

go back to their first principles. If we find our first premise to be a stone
wall that cannot be knocked down when we back up against it, our argument will
be strong. Tradition states and common sense dictates our premise that we know
what an apple is. Almost no one doubted this, until quite recently. Even now,
only philosophers, scholars, "experts," media mavens, professors, journalists,
and mind-molders dare to claim that we do not know what an apple is.

2. We Really Know What an Apple Really Is

From the premise that "we know what an apple is," I move to a second principle
that is only an explication of the meaning of the first: that we really know
what an apple really is. If this is denied, our first principle is refuted. It
becomes, "We know, but not really, what an apple is, but not really." Step 2
says only, "Let us not 'nuance' Step 1 out of existence!"

3. We Really Know What Some Things Really Are

From Step 2, I deduce the third principle, also as an immediate logical

corollary, that we really know what some things (other things than apples)
really are. This follows if we only add the minor premise that an apple is
another thing.

This third principle, of course, is the repudiation of skepticism. The secret

has been out since Socrates that skepticism is logically self-contradictory. To
say "I do not know" is to say "I know I do not know." Socrates's wisdom was not
skepticism. He was not the only man in the world who knew that he did not know.
He had knowledge; he did not claim to have wisdom. He knew he was not wise. That
is a wholly different affair and is not self-contradictory. All forms of
skepticism are logically self-contradictory, nuance as we will.

All talk about rights, about right and wrong, about justice, presupposes this
principle that we really know what some things really are. We cannot argue about
anything at all—anything real, as distinct from arguing about arguing, and about
words, and attitudes—unless we accept this principle. We can talk about feelings
without it, but we cannot talk about justice. We can have a reign of feelings—or
a reign of terror—without it, but we cannot have a reign of law.

4. We Know What Human Beings Are

Our fourth principle is that we know what we are. If we know what an apple is,
surely we know what a human being is. For we aren't apples; we don't live as
apples, we don't feel what apples feel (if anything). We don't experience the
existence or growth or life of apples, yet we know what apples are. A fortiori,
we know what we are, for we have "inside information," privileged information,
more and better information.

We obviously do not have total, or even adequate, knowledge of ourselves, or of

apples, or (if we listen to Aquinas) of even a flea. There is obviously more
mystery in a human than in an apple, but there is also more knowledge. I repeat
this point because I know it is often not understood: To claim that "we know
what we are" is not to claim that we know all that we are, or even that we know
adequately or completely or with full understanding anything at all of what we
are. We are a living mystery, but we also know much of this mystery. Knowledge
and mystery are no more incompatible than eating and hungering for more.

5. We Have Human Rights Because We Are Human

The fifth principle is the indispensable, common-sensical basis for human

rights: We have human rights because we are human beings.
We have not yet said what human beings are (e.g., do we have souls?), or what
human rights are (e.g., do we have the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness"?), only the simple point that we have whatever human rights we
have because we are whatever it is that makes us human.

This certainly sounds innocent enough, but it implies a general principle. Let's
call that our sixth principle.

6. Morality Is Based on Metaphysics

Metaphysics means simply philosophizing about reality. The sixth principle means
that rights depend on reality, and our knowledge of rights depends on our
knowledge of reality.

By this point in our argument, some are probably feeling impatient. These
impatient ones are common-sensical people, uncorrupted by the chattering
classes. They will say, "Of course. We know all this. Get on with it. Get to the
controversial stuff." Ah, but I suspect we began with the controversial stuff.
For not all are impatient; others are uneasy. "Too simplistic," "not nuanced,"
"a complex issue"—do these phrases leap to mind as shields to protect you from
the spear that you know is coming at the end of the argument?

The principle that morality depends on metaphysics means that rights depend on
reality, or what is right depends on what is. Even if you say you are skeptical
of metaphysics, we all do use the principle in moral or legal arguments. For
instance, in the current debate about "animal rights," some of us think that
animals do have rights and some of us think they don't, but we all agree that if
they do have rights, they have animal rights, not human rights or plant rights,
because they are animals, not humans or plants. For instance, a dog doesn't have
the right to vote, as humans do, because dogs are not rational, as humans are.

But a dog probably does have a right not to be tortured. Why? Because of what a
dog is, and because we really know a little bit about what a dog really is: We
really know that a dog feels pain and a tree doesn't. Dogs have feelings, unlike
trees, and dogs don't have reason, like humans; that's why it's wrong to break a
limb off a dog but it's not wrong to break a limb off a tree, and that's also
why dogs don't have the right to vote but humans do.

7. Moral Arguments Presuppose Metaphysical Principles

The main reason people deny that morality must (or even can) be based on
metaphysics is that they say we don't really know what reality is, we only have
opinions. They point out, correctly, that we are less agreed about morality than
science or everyday practical facts. We don't differ about whether the sun is a
planet or whether we need to eat to live, but we do differ about things like
abortion, capital punishment, and animal rights.

But the very fact that we argue about it—a fact the skeptic points to as a
reason for skepticism—is a refutation of skepticism. We don't argue about how we
feel, about subjective things. You never hear an argument like this: "I feel
great." "No, I feel terrible."
For instance, both pro-lifers and pro-choicers usually agree that it's wrong to
kill innocent persons against their will and it's not wrong to kill parts of
persons, like cancer cells. And both the proponents and opponents of capital
punishment usually agree that human life is of great value; that's why the
proponent wants to protect the life of the innocent by executing murderers and
why the opponent wants to protect the life even of the murderer. They radically
disagree about how to apply the principle that human life is valuable, but they
both assume and appeal to that same principle.

8. Might Making Right

All these examples so far are controversial. How to apply moral principles to
these issues is controversial. What is not controversial, I hope, is the
principle itself that human rights are possessed by human beings because of what
they are, because of their being—and not because some other human beings have
the power to enforce their will. That would be, literally, "might makes right."
Instead of putting might into the hands of right, that would be pinning the
label of "right" on the face of might: justifying force instead of fortifying
justice. But that is the only alternative, no matter what the political power
structure, no matter who or how many hold the power, whether a single tyrant, or
an aristocracy, or a majority of the freely voting public, or the vague
sentiment of what Rousseau called "the general will." The political form does
not change the principle. A constitutional monarchy, in which the king and the
people are subject to the same law, is a rule of law, not of power; a lawless
democracy, in which the will of the majority is unchecked, is a rule of power,
not of law.

9. Either All Have Rights or Only Some Have Rights

The reason all human beings have human rights is that all human beings are
human. Only two philosophies of human rights are logically possible. Either all
human beings have rights, or only some human beings have rights. There is no
third possibility. But the reason for believing either one of these two
possibilities is even more important than which one you believe.

Suppose you believe that all human beings have rights. Do you believe that all
human beings have rights because they are human beings? Do you dare to do
metaphysics? Are human rights "inalienable" because they are inherent in human
nature, in the human essence, in the human being, in what humans, in fact, are?
Or do you believe that all human beings have rights because some human beings
say so—because some human wills have declared that all human beings have rights?
If it's the first reason, you are secure against tyranny and usurpation of
rights. If it's the second reason, you are not. For human nature doesn't change,
but human wills do. The same human wills that say today that all humans have
rights may well say tomorrow that only some have rights.
10. Why Abortion Is Wrong

Some people want to be killed. I won't address the morality of voluntary

euthanasia here. But clearly, involuntary euthanasia is wrong; clearly, there is
a difference between imposing power on another and freely making a contract with
another. The contract may still be a bad one, a contract to do a wrong thing,
and the mere fact that the parties to the contract entered it freely does not
automatically justify doing the thing they contract to do. But harming or
killing another against his will, not by free contract, is clearly wrong; if
that isn't wrong, what is?

But that's what abortion is. Mother Teresa argued, simply, "If abortion is not
wrong, nothing is wrong." The fetus doesn't want to be killed; it seeks to
escape. Did you dare to watch The Silent Scream? Did the media dare to allow it
to be shown? No, they will censor nothing except the most common operation in
America.

11. The Argument From the Nonexistence of Nonpersons

Are persons a subclass of humans, or are humans a subclass of persons? The issue
of distinguishing humans and persons comes up only for two reasons: the
possibility that there are nonhuman persons, like extraterrestrials, elves,
angels, gods, God, or the Persons of the Trinity, or the possibility that there
are some nonpersonal humans, unpersons, humans without rights.

Traditional common sense and morality say all humans are persons and have
rights. Modern moral relativism says that only some humans are persons, for only
those who are given rights by others (i.e., those in power) have rights. Thus,
if we have power, we can "depersonalize" any group we want: blacks, slaves,
Jews, political enemies, liberals, fundamentalists—or unborn babies.

A common way to state this philosophy is the claim that membership in a

biological species confers no rights. I have heard it argued that we do not
treat any other species in the traditional way—that is, we do not assign equal
rights to all mice. Some we kill (those that get into our houses and prove to be
pests); others we take good care of and preserve (those that we find useful in
laboratory experiments or those we adopt as pets); still others we simply ignore
(mice in the wild). The argument concludes that therefore, it is only sentiment
or tradition (the two are often confused, as if nothing rational could be passed
down by tradition) that assigns rights to all members of our own species.

12. Three Pro-Life Premises and Three Pro-Choice Alternatives

We have been assuming three premises, and they are the three fundamental
assumptions of the pro-life argument. Any one of them can be denied. To be
pro-choice, you must deny at least one of them, because taken together they
logically entail the pro-life conclusion. But there are three different kinds of
pro-choice positions, depending on which of the three pro-life premises is
denied.

The first premise is scientific, the second is moral, and the third is legal.
The scientific premise is that the life of the individual member of every animal
species begins at conception. (This truism was taught by all biology textbooks
before Roe and by none after Roe; yet Roe did not discover or appeal to any new
scientific discoveries.) In other words, all humans are human, whether
embryonic, fetal, infantile, young, mature, old, or dying.

The moral premise is that all humans have the right to life because all humans
are human. It is a deduction from the most obvious of all moral rules, the
Golden Rule, or justice, or equality. If you would not be killed, do not kill.
It's just not just, not fair. All humans have the human essence and, therefore,
are essentially equal.

The legal premise is that the law must protect the most basic human rights. If
all humans are human, and if all humans have a right to life, and if the law
must protect human rights, then the law must protect the right to life of all
humans.

If all three premises are true, the pro-life conclusion follows. From the
pro-life point of view, there are only three reasons for being pro-choice:
scientific ignorance—appalling ignorance of a scientific fact so basic that
nearly everyone in the world knows it; moral ignorance—appalling ignorance of
the most basic of all moral rules; or legal ignorance—appalling ignorance of one
of the most basic of all the functions of law. But there are significant
differences among these different kinds of ignorance.

Scientific ignorance, if it is not ignoring, or deliberate denial or dishonesty,

is perhaps pitiable but not morally blame-worthy. You don't have to be wicked to
be stupid. If you believe an unborn baby is only "potential life" or a "group of
cells," then you do not believe you are killing a human being when you abort and
might have no qualms of conscience about it. (But why, then, do most mothers who
abort feel such terrible pangs of conscience, often for a lifetime?)

Most pro-choice arguments, during the first two decades after Roe, disputed the
scientific premise of the pro-life argument. It might be that this was almost
always dishonest rather than honest ignorance, but perhaps not, and at least it
didn't directly deny the essential second premise, the moral principle. But
pro-choice arguments today increasingly do.

Perhaps pro-choicers perceive that they have no choice but to do this, for they
have no other recourse if they are to argue at all. Scientific facts are just
too clear to deny, and it makes no legal sense to deny the legal principle, for
if the law is not supposed to defend the right to life, what is it supposed to
do? So they have to deny the moral principle that leads to the pro-life
conclusion. This, I suspect, is a vast and major sea change. The camel has
gotten not just his nose, but his torso under the tent. I think most people
refuse to think or argue about abortion because they see that the only way to
remain pro-choice is to abort their reason first. Or, since many pro-choicers
insist that abortion is about sex, not about babies, the only way to justify
their scorn of virginity is a scorn of intellectual virginity. The only way to
justify their loss of moral innocence is to lose their intellectual innocence.
If the above paragraph offends you, I challenge you to calmly and honestly ask
your own conscience and reason whether, where, and why it is false.

13. The Argument from Skepticism

The most likely response to this will be the charge of dogmatism. How dare I
pontificate with infallible certainty, and call all who disagree either mentally
or morally challenged! All right, here is an argument even for the metaphysical
skeptic, who would not even agree with my very first and simplest premise, that
we really do know what some things really are, such as what an apple is. (It's
only after you are pinned against the wall and have to justify something like
abortion that you become a skeptic and deny such a self-evident principle.)
Roe used such skepticism to justify a pro-choice position. Since we don't know
when human life begins, the argument went, we cannot impose restrictions. (Why
it is more restrictive to give life than to take it, I cannot figure out.) So
here is my refutation of Roe on its own premises, its skeptical premises:
Suppose that not a single principle of this essay is true, beginning with the
first one. Suppose that we do not even know what an apple is. Even then abortion
is unjustifiable.

Let's assume not a dogmatic skepticism (which is self-contradictory) but a

skeptical skepticism. Let us also assume that we do not know whether a fetus is
a person or not. In objective fact, of course, either it is or it isn't (unless
the Court has revoked the Law of Noncontradiction while we were on vacation),
but in our subjective minds, we may not know what the fetus is in objective
fact. We do know, however, that either it is or isn't by formal logic alone.
A second thing we know by formal logic alone is that either we do or do not know
what a fetus is. Either there is "out there," in objective fact, independent of
our minds, a human life, or there is not; and either there is knowledge in our
minds of this objective fact, or there is not.

So, there are four possibilities:

The fetus is a person, and we know that; The fetus is a person, but we don't
know that; The fetus isn't a person, but we don't know that;
The fetus isn't a person, and we know that. What is abortion in each of these
four cases?
In Case 1, where the fetus is a person and you know that, abortion is murder.
First-degree murder, in fact. You deliberately kill an innocent human being.

In Case 2, where the fetus is a person and you don't know that, abortion is
manslaughter. It's like driving over a man-shaped overcoat in the street at
night or shooting toxic chemicals into a building that you're not sure is fully
evacuated. You're not sure there is a person there, but you're not sure there
isn't either, and it just so happens that there is a person there, and you kill
him. You cannot plead ignorance. True, you didn't know there was a person there,
but you didn't know there wasn't either, so your act was literally the height of
irresponsibility. This is the act Roe allowed.

In Case 3, the fetus isn't a person, but you don't know that. So abortion is
just as irresponsible as it is in the previous case. You ran over the overcoat
or fumigated the building without knowing that there were no persons there. You
were lucky; there weren't. But you didn't care; you didn't take care; you were
just as irresponsible. You cannot legally be charged with manslaughter, since no
man was slaughtered, but you can and should be charged with criminal negligence.

Only in Case 4 is abortion a reasonable, permissible, and responsible choice.

But note: What makes Case 4 permissible is not merely the fact that the fetus is
not a person but also your knowledge that it is not, your overcoming of
skepticism. So skepticism counts not for abortion but against it. Only if you
are not a skeptic, only if you are a dogmatist, only if you are certain that
there is no person in the fetus, no man in the coat, or no person in the
building, may you abort, drive, or fumigate.

This undercuts even our weakest, least honest escape: to pretend that we don't
even know what an apple is, just so we have an excuse for pleading that we don't
know what an abortion is.

One Last Plea

I hope a reader can show me where I've gone astray in the sequence of 13 steps
that constitute this argument. I honestly wish a pro-choicer would someday show
me one argument that proved that fetuses are not persons. It would save me and
other pro-lifers enormous grief, time, effort, worry, prayers, and money. But
until that time, I will keep arguing, because it's what I do as a philosopher.
It is my weak and wimpy version of a mother's shouting that something terrible
is happening: Babies are being slaughtered. I will do this because, as Edmund
Burke declared, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good
men do nothing."

Design by davenevins.com
The Bible: Myth or History? by Peter Kreeft

Sal: Chris, I've got to ask you something personal.

Chris: Go ahead, Sal: We're friends, aren't we?

Sal: How do you know so much about God? Are you a theological brain?

Chris: No, not at all. I'm just an ordinary person.

Sal:You must have taken some high level religion courses somewhere.

Chris: No . . .

Sal: Then you must have read hundreds of books.

Chris: No, Sal. Actually, what I know about God for sure comes from just one
book. In fact, what the whole human race knows about God for sure, and not just
as a matter of speculation and guesswork, comes from just one book.

Sal: The Bible, you mean?

Chris: Yes.

Sal: You really believe that one book gives you all the facts about God?

Chris: All the facts? Of course not. How could we ever have all the facts about
the Infinite One? None of us can have complete knowledge of God, any more than a
clam could have complete knowledge of us. Less so, in fact, because the
difference between us and clams is only finite, but the difference between us
and God is infinite.

Sal: Some facts, then?

Chris: Yes, what he told us.

Sal: So you think you've got some hard facts there in the Bible, eh?

Chris: I don't know what you mean by "hard facts".

Sal: Like the stuff science gives us.

Chris: No. Science measures things. We can't measure God.

Sal: So it's just myth, then.

Chris: No, it's truth.

Sal: You mean you really think God sits up there in the sky on a golden throne
and has a strong right hand, and gets angry?

Chris: No. That's poetic language. But you can tell the truth in poetic
language, you know. God really is exalted—though not physically, in space, in
the sky. God really does rule the universe, though not from a physical golden
throne. God really does have all power, though he doesn't have the same kind of
strength as Muhammad Ali had in his right hand. And God really does want us to
do good and not evil, though he doesn't get hysterical and red in the face.

Sal: So it's just symbolism.

Chris: But true symbolism. Not just a made-up story, like Santa Claus.

Sal: So you admit the whole Bible is poetic symbolism, not literal history.

Chris: No, I didn't say that. I said that the language it uses to describe God
has to be symbolic. God can't be described literally because we can't see him.
He doesn't have a physical body. But there are a lot of things in the Bible that
are described literally -things we can see.

Sal: How can you tell what parts of the Bible to interpret symbolically and what
parts to interpret literally? Isn't it just your personal preference?

Chris: No, there's an objective standard.

Sal: Well, what is it?

Chris: It's quite simple, really. Language about visible things is meant
literally, language about invisible things is meant symbolically.

Sal: So the story of the creation of the world in Genesis is meant literally? It
is about visible things, the universe.

Chris: But before the creation of Adam and Eve there was no human eye around to
see it. So the account isn't an eyewitness account. It's true, but not literal.
The "6 days" of creation, for instance, don't have to be 24 hour days.

Sal: And the last book in the Bible, the book of Revelation—all that stuff about
the end of the world, horses and burning mountains going through the sky and
angels blowing trumpets—that's not literal either, right?

Chris: Right. That's symbolism. But it's true. It'll happen, just as the
creation happened.
Sal: But it's not literal because nobody's there to see it yet. It's future.

Chris: Well, prophecies of the future can be literal. You could predict
something literally. Some passages in the Bible do. For instance, the Old
Testament predicts dozens of specific details about the Messiah that happened,
literally, to Jesus, like being sold for 30 pieces of silver, and having his
clothes gambled for.

Sal: I guess I'm really concerned with whether you interpret the miracle stories
literally or not.

Chris: If they're meant literally, yes.

Sal: Like Noah's flood and the ten plagues in Egypt and the crossing of the Red
Sea? And all Jesus' miracles? And the literal Resurrection?

Chris: Yes.

Sal: Well, I don't.

Chris: Don't what?

Sal: Believe the miracle stories. So I don't interpret them literally, I

interpret them symbolically.

Chris: You're confused, Sal.

Sal: You mean you think I'm wrong. But I'm not confused. I know what I believe
and what I don't believe.

Chris: No, I mean you're confused. You're confusing two different questions:
interpretation and belief

Sal: What do you mean?

Chris: The question of interpretation is: What did the writer mean? The question
of belief is: Do you agree with him? The question of interpretation is: What
does the Bible claim to be true? The question of belief is: What do you believe
really is true?

Sal: Well, I interpret the Bible according to my beliefs.

Chris: But that's your confusion, Sal: Suppose I read a speech by Hitler that
said we should create a super-race of Germans and kill all the Jews. Suppose I
didn't believe that, so I interpreted the speech according to my beliefs and I
said that what the speech really meant was that all races were equal and we
should love one another. Do you see how I would be confused?

Sal: Not about race, or love.

Chris: But about what Hitler meant.

Sal: Oh. Yes. I see. But wouldn't it be good to improve on such a terrible
speech?

Chris: If you want to make a speech yourself, yes. If you want to choose what to
believe in, yes. But if you want to know what Hitler meant, no. That's your
confusion. You think the Bible's stories of miracles are false. Why not just say
so, clearly? The miracle stories are either lies or true history. They're not
myth. They're not meant mythically, or poetically, or symbolically.

Sal: But I think they are. What could be more poetic and symbolic than life
coming out of death—Jesus' Resurrection is just like spring. And Moses' crossing
the Red Sea is a perfect symbol for overcoming death, or any obstacle. There are
all sorts of poetic, symbolic meanings in the miracles.

Chris: I agree. But that doesn't mean they aren't literal too. They're signs.
But if a sign isn't really there—if there's no literal piece of wood on a
pole—then it can't symbolize anything, can it? So if Moses didn't really cross
the Red Sea, it's not a real sign of anything. I believe the miracles are signs
and symbols, all right. But I also believe they really happened. They're not
just stories, myths. You think that's all they are, right?

Sal: Right.

Chris: So you agree with the demythologizers.

Sal: What's that?

Chris: The word was made popular by a German theologian named Rudolf Bultmann.
It means that the miracle stories are only myths, and that we should believe the
rest of the Bible, but not the myths. A lot of theologians believe that. Many
rabbis and priests and ministers do too. Some writers of catechism textbooks
too.

Sal: So I'm in good company.

Chris: No, in numerous company. Truth isn't found by counting noses. I'd rather
agree with God even if only a few human beings agreed with me, than agree with
millions of humans but disagree with God.

Sal: Well, doesn't the clergy teach demythologizing? You said a lot of rabbis
and ministers and priests believe it. Are they heretics?

Chris: Technically, yes. If they disagree with essential teachings of the Bible.
But the word heretic isn't used much any more.

Sal: You sound sad. Do you want to burn heretics, like the Inquisition?
Chris: Of course not. You can label an idea accurately without wanting to burn
the people who hold it.

Sal: I'm glad to hear that. Because I guess I'm a heretic. I think for myself I
don't just swallow whatever line the Church gives me.

Chris: Then you have your reasons for disagreeing?

Sal: Certainly.

Chris: I think you can guess what my next question is going to be.

Sal: We went over those reasons in that conversation we had about miracles.

Chris: Yes. You see, everything is connected. If there's no supernatural God

with the power to work miracles, then miracles can't happen. If miracles can't
happen, then Christ didn't really rise from the dead. If Christ didn't really
rise from the dead, the story is only a myth, and the demythologizers are right.
(Though they're still confusing the two questions of interpretation and belief;
they should say the story is a lie, not a myth.) Do you have any other reasons,
any new reasons for being a demythologizer of the Bible?

Sal: Yes, I do. I've been reading some books about this, and I think I've found
at least four good reasons for being skeptical about the Bible.

Chris: Go ahead. What are they?

Sal: For one thing, there's what they call "form criticism". That means you
should interpret a text not absolutely but relative to its literary form. If the
form is poetry or myth or parable, you just don't take the story literally.

Chris: That's a good principle. So apply it to eyewitness descriptions too, and

historical narratives, and interpret them literally, just as you interpret
symbolism symbolically. The miracle stories have the form of history, not myth.

Sal: No they don't. And that's my second point: the resemblances between the
Bible's miracle stories and myth. They're both full of magic. And things like
magic numbers: ten plagues, forty days of fasting, three days in the tomb.

Chris: Do you mean to say no one ever really fasts forty days, and plagues can
really come in any number but ten? Or that if Jesus had spent four days in the
tomb you'd be more likely to believe it?

Sal: Well, no. But mustn't we distinguish two different, questions, the question
of belief and the question of history? That's my third point. Whether Moses
really crossed the Red Sea or not is not important; that's the question of
history. The important thing is whether or not God was there; the point of the
Bible is religion, not history.

Chris: But the Bible's religion depends on history. Its God works in history.
Your distinction between history and religion fits Oriental religions, but not
Western religions. It's not important whether Buddha ever really lived; the only
important thing is meditation and practicing Buddha's way. But Christianity is
different: it's about Christ. If he never lived, or never died and rose again,
then Christianity is simply a lie. Aren't you honest enough to call it that, if
that's what you believe?

Sal: But it has so much good stuff to say about ethics and love and
neighborliness.

Chris: Everybody knows that already, even though they don't practice it.
Remember our first conversation? If ethics is all that Christianity means,
forget it.

Sal: Why?

Chris: Because then it's just copying all the other good philosophies and
moralities. It claims to be different; it claims to be history, "good news",
Gospel: that God came to earth and died on the cross and rose again to save us
from sin and death and Hell.

Sal: That's what you say it is.

Chris: That's simply what Christianity is, and always was from the beginning. If
you don't believe that, you're not a Christian. Just agreeing with Jesus' ethics
doesn't make you a Christian, any more than agreeing with Buddha's ethics makes
you a Buddhist.

Sal: Well, I guess I'll have to say I'm not a Christian, then.

Chris: Good! That's the first step to becoming one.

Sal: But I still have another reason for not believing in the stories in the
Bible. We haven't finished my four points, remember?
Chris: Sorry. What's the fourth one?
Sal: There are contradictions in the Bible, internal in the Bible? consistencies
in the stories. They can't all be true.

Chris: Name one.

Sal: Did Jesus speak the Sermon on the Mount all at once, as Matthew reports, or
on different occasions, as Luke reports?

Chris: Why couldn't it be both? In any case Matthew didn't say Jesus said it all
at once, he just said Jesus said it.

Sal: Well, what about the sign on the cross? How many words were on it? Each of
the four Gospels has a different version.

Chris: Why couldn't they all be right, but some are condensed, sort of Reader's
Digest versions, so to speak? If the sign really read, "This is Jesus of
Nazareth, the King of the Jews", then the account that says simply "Jesus, King
of the Jews" isn't false, just condensed. The essential point is the same. Show
me a single contradiction about an essential point of substance, not just a
matter of verbal style.

Sal: Well, they're different, anyway.

Chris: The very fact that the four Gospels tell the same story in different ways
is strong evidence that the story is true—like four witnesses in court telling
the story in four different ways. If they agreed word for word, you'd think they
had made it up and collaborated beforehand. The differences don't amount to
contradictions. And the four Gospels agree remarkably—more so, much more so,
than any other set of ancient documents about any other ancient event.

Sal: But an event so long ago—isn't it likely that the telling of it got
garbled, like the party game where you sit in a circle and tell a message
around?—by the time it gets to the tenth person it's a completely different
message.

Chris: That's why the Church wrote it down in the Bible, and preserved this book
with infinite care.

Sal: Well, even so, no matter how carefully the book is preserved, it's just a
book. Written by human beings. Their ideas about God.

Chris: That's the essential question about the Bible: Is it our ideas about God
or is it God's ideas about us? Is it God's Word to us or our words about God?

Sal: Yes, that's the essential question all right. It's like the question about
God: Did he create us in his image or do we create him in our image?
Chris: Yes, and that's like the essential question about the Christian story
too: Is it the story of our search for God or the story of God's search for us?
Is it God coming down in Christ, the "one way" down, or is it us trying to get
up to God, with Christ just one of the many human ways up, one of many manmade
religions?

Sal: At least we've got the questions straight. And I see that all these
questions are parts of one question: the question about the Bible being God's
Word or ours, the question about God being Creator or created by us, the
question about Christ being God's way down or our way up, and the question about
the Christian religion being the one divine way or just one of many human ways.
It all fits together.

Chris: Did I fail to answer any of your reasons for not believing the Bible?
Sal: Well, no, not really.

Chris: Then your reason for not believing it must be something else than what
we've talked about. We've clarified the question, but not your real motive for
answering it "no".

Sal: What do you think my real motive is? Are you going to psychoanalyze me?

Chris: No, but I have a good guess, and I can only ask you to honestly ask
yourself whether this guess is accurate or not. You want to believe the
demythologizers, right?

Sal: Right.

Chris: Why? Because you don't believe in miracles, right?

Sal: Right.

Chris: And why don't you believe in miracles? Because if miracles happen, then
Christ really did rise from the dead, and then he is not just a human ideal but
he is really God—everyone's God, your God too, Sal. Then he has claims on your
soul and on your life, right here and now. Then you have to face him and repent,
turn around, beg forgiveness, let him be your Lord rather than you being your
own lord. That's not an easy or comfortable thing to do, and I'm not trying to
put you down for not doing it. I'm just trying to help you be honest with
yourself and know yourself. Only you can answer the question: Is that really
your motive for not believing? The reason I suspect it is, is because none of
your arguments seem to stand up. The house of your beliefs doesn't stand on
rational foundations. All your arguments can be answered. You just choose to
believe there's no God, or no miracles, or no Resurrection, or no salvation.
Sal: Maybe so, Chris we're friends, so we have to be honest with each other. I
appreciate your speaking so frankly about this—acquaintances have to be polite,
but friends can say hard things to each other. And I have to be as honest with
you as you were with me: I just don't know.

Chris: That's a wonderful discovery, Sal: that you don't know. That's the
beginning of wisdom.

From Yes or No by Ignatius Press.

Design by davenevins.com
The Case for Life After Death by Peter Kreeft

Can you prove life after death?

Whenever we argue about whether a thing can be proved, we should distinguish

five different questions about that thing:

Does it really exist or not? "To be or not to be, that is the question."

If it does exist, do we know that it exists? A thing can obviously exist

without our knowing it.

If we know that it exists, can we be certain of this knowledge? Our knowledge

might be true but uncertain; it might be "right opinion."

If it is certain, is there a logical proof, a demonstration of why we have a

right to be certain? There may be some certainties that are not logically
demonstrable (e.g. my own existence, or the law of non-contradiction).

If there is a proof, is it a scientific one in the modern sense of

'scientific'? Is it publicly verifiable by formal logic and/or empirical
observation? There may be other valid kinds of proof besides proofs by the
scientific method.

The fifth point is especially important when asking whether you can prove life
after death. I think it depends on what kinds of proof you will accept. It
cannot be proved like a theorem in Euclidean geometry; nor can it be observed,
like a virus. For the existence of life after death is not on the one hand a
logical tautology: its contradiction does not entail a contradiction, as a
Euclidean theorem does. On the other hand, it cannot be empirically proved or
disproved (at least before death) simply because by definition all experience
before death is experience of life before death, not life after death.

If life after death cannot be proved scientifically, is it then intellectually

irresponsible to accept it? Only if you assume that it is intellectually
irresponsible to accept anything that cannot be proved scientifically. But that
premise is self-contradictory (and therefore intellectually irresponsible)! You
cannot scientifically prove that the only acceptable proofs are scientific
proofs. You cannot prove logically or empirically that only logical or empirical
proofs are acceptable as proofs. You cannot prove it logically because its
contradiction does not entail a contradiction, and you cannot prove it
empirically because neither a proof nor the criterion of acceptability are
empirical entities. Thus scientism (the premise that only scientific proofs
count as proofs) is not scientific; it is a dogma of faith, a religion.

1. No Reasonable Objection
The first reason for believing in life after death is simply that there is no
compelling reason not to, no objection to it that cannot be answered. The two
most frequent objections are as follows:

(a) Since there is no conclusive evidence for life after death, it is as

irresponsible to believe it as to believe in UFOs, or alchemy. Perhaps we cannot
disprove it; a universal negative always is difficult if not impossible to
disprove. But if we cannot prove it either, it is wishful thinking, not
evidence, that makes us believe it.

Now this objector either means by 'evidence' merely empirical evidence, or else
any kind of evidence. If he means the latter, he ignores all the following
proofs for life after death. There is a lot of evidence. If he means the former,
he falls victim to the self-contradiction argument just mentioned. There is no
empirical evidence that the only kind of evidence we should accept is empirical
evidence.

In most supposedly scientific objections of this type, an impossible demand is

made, overtly or covertly—a demand for scientific proof—and then the belief is
faulted for not satisfying that demand. This is like arguing against the
existence of God on the grounds that "I have not found Him in my test tube," or
like the first Soviet cosmonauts' "argument" that they had found no God in outer
space. Ex hypothesi, if God exists He is not found in a test tube or in space.
That would make Him a chemical or a meteor. A taxi trip through Cleveland
disproves quasars as well as a laboratory experiment disproves God, or brain
chemistry disproves the soul or its immortality. The demand that non-empirical
entities submit to empirical verification is a self-contradictory demand. The
belief that something exists outside a system cannot be disproved by observing
the behavior of that system. Goldfish cannot disprove the existence of their
human owners by observing water currents in the bowl.

(b) The strongest positive argument against life after death is the observation
of spirit at the mercy of matter. We see no more mental life when the brain
dies. Even when it is alive, a blow to the head impairs thought. Consciousness
seems related to matter as the light of a candle to the candle: once the fuel is
used up, the light goes out. The body and its nervous system seem like the fuel,
the cause; and immaterial activity, consciousness, seems like the effect. Remove
the cause and you remove the effect. Consciousness, in other words, seems to be
an epiphenomenon, an effect but not a cause, like the heat generated by the
electricity running along a wire to an appliance, or the exhaust fumes from an
engine's tailpipe.

What does the observed dependence of mind upon matter prove, if not the
mortality of the soul? Wait. First, just what do we observe? We observe the
physical manifestations of consciousness (e.g. speech) cease when the body dies.
We do not observe the spirit cease to exist, because we do not observe the
spirit at all, only its manifestations in the body. Observations of the body do
not decide whether that body is an instrument of an independent spirit which
continues to exist after its body-instrument dies, or whether the body is the
cause of a dependent spirit which dies when its cause dies. Both hypotheses
account for the observed facts.

When a body is paralyzed, the mind and will are still operative, though deprived
of expression. Bodily death may be simply total paralysis. When you take a
microphone away from a speaker, he can no longer be heard by the audience. But
he is still a speaker. Body could be the soul's microphone. The dependence of
soul on a body may be somewhat like the dependence of a ship on a dry-dock.
Ships are not built on the open sea, but on dry-dock; but once they leave the
dry-dock, they do not sink but become free floating ships. The body may be the
soul's dry-dock, or (an even better metaphor) the soul's womb, and its death may
be the soul's emergence from its womb.

What about the analogy of the candle? Even in the analogy, the light does not go
out; it goes up. It is still traveling through space, observable from other
planets. It 'goes out' as a child goes out to play; it is liberated.
But what of the need for a brain to think? The brain may not be the cause of
thought but the stopping down, the 'reducing valve' for thought, as Bergson,
James and Huxley suppose: an organ of forgetting rather than remembering,
eliminating from the total field of consciousness all that serves no present
purpose. Thus when the brain dies, more rather than less consciousness occurs:
the floodgates come down. This would account for the familiar fact that dying
people remember the whole of their past life in an instant with intense clarity,
detail, and understanding.

In short, the evidence, even the empirical evidence, seems at least as

compatible with soul immortality as with soul-mortality.

2. Argument From Authority

According to the medievals, the most logical of philosophers, "the argument from
authority is the weakest of arguments." Nevertheless, it is an argument, a
probability, a piece of evidence. Forty million Frenchmen can be wrong, but it
is less likely than four Frenchmen being wrong.

The first argument from authority for life after death is simply quantitative:
"the democracy of the dead" votes for it. Almost all cultures before our own
have strongly, even officially, believed in some form of it. Children
naturally and spontaneously believe in it unless conditioned out of it.

A second argument from authority is stronger because it is qualitative rather

than quantitative: nearly all the sages have believed in it. We must not, of
course, answer the challenge 'How do you know they were sages?' by saying
 'Because they believed'; that would be begging the question pure and simple.
But thinkers considered wise for other reasons have believed; why should this
one belief of theirs be an exception to their wisdom?

Finally, we have the supreme authority of the teachings of Jesus. Belief in

life after death is central to His entire message, "the Kingdom of Heaven."
Even if you do not believe He is the incarnate God, can you believe He is a
naive fool?

3. Convservation of Energy

Arguments from reason are logically stronger than arguments from authority. The
premises, or evidence, for arguments from reason can be taken from three
sources, three levels of reality what is less than ourselves (Nature), ourselves
(human life), or what is more than ourselves (God). Again, we move from the
weaker to the stronger argument.

We could argue from the principle of the conservation of energy. We never

observe any form of energy either created or destroyed, only transformed. The
immortality of the soul seems to be the spiritual equivalent of the conservation
of energy. If even matter is immortal, why not spirit?

4. The Nature of Man

The next class of arguments is taken from the nature of Man. What in us survives
death depends on what is in us now. Death is like menopause. If a woman has in
her identity nothing but her motherhood, then her identity has trouble surviving
menopause. Life after menopause is a little like life after death.

4a. The simplest and most obvious of these arguments may be called Primitive
Man's Argument from Dead Cow. Primitive Man has two cows. One dies. What is the
difference between Dead Cow and Live Cow? Primitive man looks. (He's really
quite bright.) There appears no material difference in size or weight
immediately upon death. Yet there is an enormous difference; something is
missing. What? Life, of course. And what is that? The answer is obvious to any
intelligent observer whose head is not clouded with theories: life is what makes
Live Cow breathe. Life is breath. (The word for 'soul', or 'life', and 'breath'
is the same in many ancient languages.) Soul is not air, which is still in Dead
Cow's lungs, but the power to move it.

Life, it is seen, is not a material thing, like an organ. It is the life of the
organs, of the body; not that which lives but that by which we live. Now this
source of life cannot die as the body dies: by the removal of the soul. Soul
cannot have soul taken from it. What can die has life on loan; life does not
have life on loan.
The 'catch' in this argument is that this 'soul' may in turn have its life on
loan from a higher source, and transmit it to the body only after having been
given life first. This is in fact the Biblical teaching, contrary to the Greek
view of the soul's inherent, necessary and eternal immortality. God gives souls
life, and souls can die if they refuse it. But in any case the soul survives the
body's death.

4b. Another quite simple piece of evidence for the presence of an immaterial
reality (soul) in us which is not subject to the laws of matter and its death,
is the daily experience of real magic: the power of mind over matter. Every time
I deliberately move my arm, I do magic. If there were no mind and will
commanding the arm, only muscles; if there were muscles and a nervous system and
even a brain but no conscious mind commanding them; then the arm could not rise
unless it were lighter than air. When the body dies, its arms no longer move;
the body reverts to obedience to merely material laws, like a sword dropped by a
swordsman.

Even more simply stated, mind is not part of the system of matter, not
measurable by material standards (How many inches long is your mind?) Therefore
it need not die when the material body dies. The argument is so simple and
evident that one wonders who the real 'primitive' is, the 'savage' who
understands it or the sophisticated modern materialist who cannot understand the
difference between mind and brain.

4c. A traditional Scholastic argument for an immortal soul is taken from the
presence of two operations which are not operations of the body (1) abstract
thinking, as distinct from external sensing and internal imagining; and (2)
deliberate, rational willing, as distinct from instinctive desiring. My thought
is not limited to sense images like pyramids; it can understand abstract
universal principles like triangles. And my choices are not limited to my body's
desires and instincts. I fast, therefore I am.

4d. Still another power of the soul which indicates that it is not a part or
function of the body and therefore not subject to its laws and its mortality is
the power to objectify its body. I can know a stone only because I am more than
a stone. I can remember my past. (My present is alive; my past is dead.) I can
know and love my body only because I am more than my body. As the projecting
machine must be more than the images projected, the knower must be more than the
objects known. Therefore I am more than my body.

4e. Still another argument from the nature of soul, or spirit, is that it does
not have quantifiable, countable parts as matter does. You can cut a body in
half but not a soul; you can't have half a soul. It is not extended in space.
You don't cut an inch off your soul when you get a haircut.

Since soul has no parts, it cannot be decomposed, as a body can. Whatever is

composed (of parts) can be decomposed: a molecule into atoms, a cell into
molecules, an organ into cells, a body into organs, a person into body and soul.
But soul is not composed, therefore not decomposable. It could die only by being
annihilated as a whole. But this would be contrary to a basic law of the
universe: that nothing simply and absolutely vanishes, just as nothing simply
pops into existence with no cause.

But if the soul dies neither in parts (by decomposition) nor as a whole by
annihilation, then it does not die.

4f. One last argument for immortality from the present experience of what soul
is, comes from Plato. It is put so perfectly in the Republic that I quote it in
its original form, adding only numbers to distinguish the steps of the argument:

Evil is all that which destroys and corrupts. . .

Each thing has its evil . . . for instance, ophthalmia for the eye, and
disease for the whole body, mildew for corn and for wood, rust for iron . . .
The natural evil of each thing . . . destroys it, and if this does not destroy
it, nothing else can . . .

(a) for I don't suppose good can ever destroy anything,

(b) nor can what is neither good nor evil,

(c) and it is certainly unreasonable . . . that the evil of something else

would destroy anything when its own evil does not.

Then if we find something in existence which has its own evil but which can
only do it harm yet cannot dissolve or destroy it, we shall know at once that
there is no destruction for such a nature. . . .

the soul has something which makes it evil . . . injustice, intemperance,

cowardice, ignorance. Now does any one of these dissolve and destroy it? . . .

Then, since it is not destroyed by any evil at all, neither its own evil nor
foreign evil, it is clear that the soul must of necessity be . . . immortal.

5. The Nature of God

We turn now to a stronger class of arguments: not from the nature of Man but
from the nature of God; not 'because of what I am, I must be immortal' but
'because of what God is, I am immortal.' The weakness of this type of argument
for practical apologetics, of course, is that it does not convince anyone not
already convinced, because it presupposes the existence of God, and those who
admit God usually admit life after death already, while those who deny the one
usually deny the other as well. Yet, though apologetically weak, the argument is
theoretically potent because it gives the real, the true reason or cause why we
survive death: God wills it.

5a. We could first argue from God's justice. Since God is just, His dealings
with us must be just, at least in the long run, in the total picture. ("The long
run" is the answer to the problem of evil, the apparently unjust distribution of
suffering.) The innocent suffer and the wicked flourish here; therefore 'here'
cannot be 'the long run,' the total picture. There must be justice after death
to compensate for injustice before death. (This is the point of Jesus' parable
of the rich man and Lazarus.)

5b. The next argument, from God's love, is stronger than the one from His
justice because love is more essential to God. Love is God's essence; justice is
one of His attributes-one of Love's attributes.

Love is "the fulfillment of the whole law." Each of the Ten Commandments is a
way of loving. "Thou shalt not kill" means "Love does not kill." If you love
someone, you don't kill him. But God IS love. Therefore God does not kill us. We
want human life to triumph over death in the end because we love; is God less
loving than we? Is He a hypocrite? Does He refuse to practice what He preaches?
Only if God does not love us or is impotent to do what He wills, do we die
forever. That is, only if God is bad or weak—only if God is not God—is death the
last word.

6. The Nature of the World

Whether the premises be taken from the nature of the world, of man, or of God,
the last three arguments were all deductive, arguments by rational analysis.
More convincing for most people are arguments from experience. These can be
subdivided into two classes: arguments from experiences everyone, or nearly
everyone, shares; and arguments from extraordinary or unusual experiences. The
first class includes:

The argument from the demand for ultimate moral meaning, or long-range justice
(similar to the argument from God's justice, except that this time we do not
assume the existence of God, only the validity of our essential moral
instinct)—this is essentially Kant's argument;

The argument from our demand for ultimate purpose, for a meaningful end, or
adequate final cause—this argument is parallel, in the order of final
causality and within the psychological area, to the traditional cosmological
arguments for the existence of God from effect to a first, uncaused cause in
the order of efficient causality and within the cosmological area;

The argument from the principle that every innate desire reveals the presence
of its desired object (hunger indicates the existence of food, curiosity
 knowledge, etc.) coupled with the discovery of an innate desire for eternity,
or something more than time can offer-this is C. S. Lewis' favorite argument.
The argument from the validity of love, which insists on the intrinsic,
indispensable value of the other, the beloved—if love is sighted and not blind
and if it is absurd that the indispensable is dispensed with, then death does
not dispense with us, for love declares that we are indispensable;

Finally, the argument from the presence of a person, who is not a thing
(object) and therefore need not be removed when the body-object is removed-the
I detects a Thou not subject to the death of the It.

From one point of view, these five arguments are the weakest of all, for they
presuppose an epistemological access to reality which can easily be denied as
illusory. There is no purely formal or empirical proof, e.g., that love's
instinctive perception of the intrinsic value of the beloved is true. Further,
each concludes not with the simple proposition 'we are immortal' but with the
disjunctive proposition 'either reality is absurd or we are immortal.' Finally,
each is less a demonstration than an almost-immediate perception: in valuing,
purposing, longing, loving, or presencing one sees the immortality of the
person. These are five spiritual senses, and when one looks along them rather
than at them, when one uses them rather than scrutinizing them, when they are
innocent until proven guilty rather than proven innocent, one sees. But when one
does not take this attitude, when one begins with Occam's razor, or Descartes'
methodic doubt, one simply does not see. They are less arguments from experience
than experiences themselves of the immortal soul.

7. Extraordinary Experience

Three arguments from unusual or extraordinary experience are:

The argument from the experience of medically 'dead' and resuscitated

patients, all of whom, even those formerly skeptical, are utterly convinced of
the truth of their 'out-of-the-body' existence and their survival of bodily
death. To outside observers there necessarily remains the possibility of
doubt; to all, who have had the experience, there is none. It is no more
deceptive than waking up in the morning. You may dream that you are awake and
in fact be dreaming, but once you are really awake you are in no doubt.
Unfortunately, this waking sense of certainty can only be experienced, not
publicly proved.

A similar sense of reality attaches to an experience apparently even more

common than the out-of-the-body experience. Shortly after a loved one dies
(most usually a spouse), the survivor often has a sudden, unexpected and
utterly convincing sense of the real here-and-now presence of the dead one. It
is not a memory, or a wish, or an image from the imagination. It is not
usually accompanied by an image at all. But it is utterly convincing to the
 experiencer. Only to one who trusts the experiencer is the experience
transferable as evidence, however. And that link can be denied without
absurdity. Again, it is a very strong and convincing experience, but not a
convincing proof.

What would be a convincing proof from experience? If we could only put our
hands into the wounds of a dead man who had risen again! The most certain
assurance of life after death for the Christian is the historical, literal
resurrection of Christ. The Christian believes in life after death not because
of an argument, first of all, but because of a witness. The Church is that
witness; 'apostolic succession' means first of all the chain of witnesses
beginning with eyewitnesses: "We have been eyewitnesses of His resurrection. .
. and we testify (witness) to you." This is the answer to the skeptic who
asks: "What do you know for sure about life after death anyway? Have you ever
been there? Have you come back to tell us?" The Christian reply is: "No, but I
have a very good Friend who has. I believe Him, and I follow Him not only
through life but also through death. Come along"

Design by davenevins.com
The Dynamite in Prayer by Peter Kreeft

Sal: Well, Chris, what do we talk about today?

Chris: How about talking about dynamite?

Sal: Dynamite?

Chris: The dynamite in prayer.

Sal: Wow! What’s that?

Chris: The Holy Spirit.

Sal: Oh

Chris: You sound disappointed.

Sal: Well... you have to admit, “dynamite” is more of an attention-getter than

“the Holy Spirit”. I thought you were going to talk about something more well,
more practical.

Chris: I couldn’t possibly do that, Sal.

Sal: Why not?

Chris: Because there’s nothing more practical than the Holy Spirit.

Sal: Oh? What practical difference does it make, then?

Chris: Not “it”, “he”. He’s a person, remember?

Sal: O.K. But what difference does he make? Or is that a wrong question to ask?

The Holy Spirit is dynamite.

Chris: It’s a very good question. If something makes no practical difference, no

difference to your life, then you don’t care about it. Who cares whether the
moon has 1,000 or 2,000 craters on its dark side? Only astronomers. But we care
about dynamite, if it’s in our neighborhood. Because dynamite can make a
difference, right?

Sal: Right. And the Holy Spirit can make as big a difference as dynamite?

Chris: The Holy Spirit is dynamite. The word “dynamite” comes from one of the
Greek words used in the New Testament to describe the Holy Spirit: dynamis. It
means “power”.
Sal: Oh, I think I understand. You mean unless there were a Holy Spirit, there
couldn’t be the power to start the Church and the power to inspire the writers
of the Bible and so on. He’s sort of like spiritual electricity?

Chris: That’s part of it. But you seem disappointed again.

Sal: Because that’s theoretical, theological. I want to know what practical

difference he makes here and now. If he’s spiritual electricity, I don’t just
want to know that he happens to be the source of power, I want to know if I can
get a shock.

You know Jesus,

not just about Jesus.

Chris: Good question. That’s the other part of it, the practical difference he
makes. Yes, you can get a shock. You can touch him.

Sal: He makes a difference, then. Good. But what difference?

Chris: The same kind of difference Jesus does. Just as Jesus gives you a new
relationship with God the Father, the Holy Spirit gives you a new relationship
with Jesus.

Sal: What new relationship?

Chris: There are a lot of aspects to it, but the heart of it is that Jesus
becomes real to you, not just ideal or abstract. You know him, not just know
about him. It’s as big a change as Job found at the end of his story, when the
God he had been praying to and complaining to and calling on finally came to
him. When that happened, Job said, “I had heard of you with the hearing of the
ear, but now I see you with the seeing of the eye.” Firsthand knowing instead of
secondhand. And that’s as big a difference as weIl, imagine your father had left
home to fight in some foreign war when you were born, and you never saw him. You
only got letters from him (that’s like the Bible), and your mother told you
about him (she’s like the Church). Then one day he shows up at your front door
and comes in, and you hug him and talk with him and play with him—you meet him.
Sal: I see. You mean the Holy Spirit brings Jesus home to me, sort of?

Chris: Exactly.

Sal: That is a tremendous difference.

Chris: Like the difference between a photograph and a person.

Sal: So the Holy Spirit makes Jesus more than just “thought about”.
Chris: Yes.

Sal: More than “believed in” too? Beyond faith?

It’s deeper than feeling,

just as human love
and human friendship is deeper than feelings.

Chris: Not beyond faith, no; your faith deepens. It becomes more than an
intellectual faith. You believe in Jesus, not just believe things about Jesus.
You trust him. You get to know him, as you get to know a friend. By experience.
Sal: By feeling? Is that what you mean by “experience”?

Chris: No, not just feeling. Feeling is only a part of it. It’s deeper than
feeling, just as human love and human friendship is deeper than feelings.
Feelings can change, but the relationship can endure. The feelings are only in
you, but the relationship is between you and your friend. Feelings are
subjective, but relationships are objective. The change the Holy Spirit makes is
more than a subjective thing, a change in your feelings. It’s a change in the
real relationship between you and God.

Sal: And this is true about my prayer and about my life, right?
Chris: Right.

Sal: O.K., I think I see where the change is: in the relationship, not just in
me. But I’m not clear what the change is.

Chris: One part of it is that the action doesn’t come only from you, but from
God. The energy of God comes into your prayer and into your life.

Sal: Is that what the Holy Spirit is, “the energy of God”?

Chris: Yes, but remember, he’s a Person, not just energy in the abstract.

Sal: But he’s like electricity in that you can get a shock. You can touch him.

Chris: Yes. Actually, he touches you.

Sal: Not physically, of course?

Chris: No, but spirits can really touch too.

Sal: It sounds exciting. He sounds exciting. He must make prayer exciting.

Chris: Yes, but he doesn’t give you a perpetual high. Remember, it’s not
primarily a matter of feeling. So even when you don’t feel God is there, you
still know he is.

Sal: With your mind?

Chris: No, it’s more than intellectual, just as it’s more than emotional. Deeper
than both: the real presence of a person—a divine Person. All three of them, in
fact.

Sal: It sounds incredibly precious.

Chris: It is. More precious than anything in this world. So precious that even
if only one person who reads this book believes this one point and decides to
ask God for the Holy Spirit (and everyone who asks, receives), then it will be
infinitely worth all the time and effort of writing and publishing and
distributing it to thousands of others, just for that one.

Sal: It sounds too good to be true, too good for me. I’m not good enough for it,
I mean.

Chris: That’s right. You’re not. Nobody is. Nobody deserves God. God works by
love, not justice. It’s sheer grace, sheer gift. And he’s free. He comes with
the package deal. The Spirit comes with the Father and the Son.

Sal: Aren’t there a lot of people who are living on only a third or two thirds
of the package?

A lot of Christians are living on spiritual cheese sandwiches, when steak

is offered.

Chris: Yes! They’re like the family of immigrants on a ship from Europe to
America. They were so poor that they had to spend almost all their money on the
ticket, and what they had left over for food was only enough to buy bread and
cheese. So for the first couple of days all they ate was cheese sandwiches. Then
the littie boy said to his father, “Daddy, please, can I have money for an ice
cream cone, just this once? I hate cheese sandwiches!” His father said, “We have
almost no money left. And cheese sandwiches will keep you alive till we get to
New York. Once we’re there, there are golden streets and everybody’s rich.” The
boy wouldn’t stop asking, so his father finally gave him some change for an ice
cream cone and waited. The boy didn’t come back for two hours. His father was
getting worried when the boy finally came back with a fat tummy and a smile on
his face. “Did you get your ice cream cone?” “Oh, sure, Dad. And then another
one, and then a steak, and then apple pie.” “What? You bought all that with the
money I gave you?” “Oh, no, Dad. It’s free. It comes with the ticket!”

Sal: Ouch! I see the point. A lot of Christians are living on spiritual cheese
sandwiches, and the Holy Spirit is steak, right?

Chris: Right. There’s a passage in Acts where Paul goes into a church in Ephesus
and asks the question: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became
believers?” And they answer, “Who’s that? We never heard about the Holy Spirit.”
Why do you think Paul asked that question? I think he saw spiritual cheese
instead of spiritual steak there. He sensed something missing: the power, the
certainty, the joy. Maybe he’d ask the same question if he came to most of our
churches.

The experience of the

Holy Spirit is for all Christians
not just charismatics.

Sal: This still sounds too good to be true. Are you sure it’s for me? Not only
for saints?

Chris: The Bible calls all Christians “saints”.

Sal: Isn’t it only for charismatics? Pentecostals? Holy Spirit people?

Chris: Don’t let denominational lines and theological labels and walls of words
keep you out. The Holy Spirit is for all Christians. That’s very clear in the
New Testament.

Sal: But this experience of him—the joy, the power, the certainty—is that what
they call “the baptism it the Holy Spirit”?

Chris: That’s what charismatics call it, yes, but it's not just for one group of
Christians, not just for charismatics. In fact, that’s just what charismatics
say too.

Sal: You know, I’ve been impressed throughout these conversations of ours with
how much solid substance there is in the Christianity common to all the
different churches, Protestant and Catholic, charismatic an noncharismatic.

Chris: That’s because I’ve tried to stick to the center.

Sal: The center?

Ecumenical content is not a thin "lowest common denominator", but "the

beef", essential Christianity.

Chris: God himself, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He’s for everyone, not just
one group. For all who will have him.
Sal: Are you saying denominational differences don’t matter?

Chris: Not at all. The differences are very important. But even those very
important differences can’t compare with the deep agreement all Christians have
about the center. We agree much more than we disagree.

Sal: Do all Christians agree about “the baptism in the Holy Spirit”?

Chris: No, but he’s for everyone, whatever they think of him.

Sal: Is “the baptism in the Holy Spirit” necessary for salvation?

Chris: No. Steak isn’t necessary for food either; cheese sandwiches will keep
you alive. But when the steak is free, why not take it?

Sal: I thought the Holy Spirit was given to everybody who’s saved, everyone
who’s a Christian. Didn’t Jesus promise the Holy Spirit to all his disciples?

Chris: Yes, he did. The “baptism in the Holy Spirit” isn’t the same as Christ
giving us the Holy Spirit in the first place. The Holy Spirit is given to us as
soon as we believe.

Sal: What’s the “baptism in the Spirit” then?

Chris: A release of the power of the Spirit who’s already there.

What Protestants and

Catholics agree about is
incomprably more important
than what they disagree about.

Sal: O.K., that point is cleared up. But I’m still not Clear how you know the
“baptism in the Spirit” is for all Christians, just as the giving of the Spirit
in the first place is. Only a few seem to have it.

Chris: Because when it first happened, on Pentecost, Peter said to the thousands
there, who heard the mighty wind and saw the tongues of fire and heard the
apostles speaking in tongues. “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the
name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you shall receive the
gift of the Holy Spirit”—that’s the three parts of the Christian package deal:
repentance to the Father, salvation by the Son and receiving the Holy Spirit.
Peter then went on to say that “the promise (the whole promise, including the
Holy Spirit) is to you and to your children and to all that are far off, every
one whom the Lord our God calls”. It’s as if Peter was looking down the
centuries, over the heads of his listeners, and saw us, and said to us, “This is
for you too.” Look; it makes sense. God is love, and what’s the gift a lover
longs most to give? What do flowers or a wedding ring symbolize?

Sal: The lover himself. The gift of self.

Chris: So God wants to give each one of us himself, his whole self, Father and
Son and Holy Spirit. God is pure love, pure generosity, and the aim of love is
always intimacy, oneness with the beloved. Doesn’t the lover always want to get
closer and closer, to get inside the beloved’s soul? You want to give your whole
self to the one you love. That’s why God gave us the Holy Spirit. And that’s why
it’s better to have the Holy Spirit than to have Jesus only physically present,
as the first disciples did.

Sal: Better even than having Jesus here on earth?

We're better off after

Jesus’ ascension into Heaven than before.

Chris: Yes, that’s what he said himself. He said, “It is better for you that I
go away (he was speaking of his ascension into Heaven) because if I do not go
away, the Spirit will not come to you, but if I go away, I will send him to
you.”

Sal: Why is that?

Chris: Because no matter how close you are to Jesus, without the Holy Spirit,
Jesus is still somebody outside you. He’s close beside you, but the Holy Spirit
is inside you. That’s even closer, and that’s what love wants, remember:
closeness.

Sal: You mean we’re really better off now without Jesus, with the Holy Spirit
instead?

Chris: No, no, not “instead”. Jesus is with us too. He promised that: “Behold, I
am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” The Holy Spirit is his
Spirit. The Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us.

Sal: But we’re better off without Jesus’ bodily presence? Better off after
Jesus’ ascension into Heaven than before?

Chris: Yes.

Sal: That’s pretty hard to believe. Frankly, I should think it would be

fantastic if we could talk to him now, directly.
Chris: Ah, but you can!

Sal: Oh. Prayer, you mean?

Chris: Yes. Because Jesus sent us his Spirit instead of leaving us his human
body, our prayers can be more intimate.

Sal: How?

Chris: You know the one you talk to. He’s your friend, not a stranger. And he
talks back, and you hear him. Not usually in words... we’ll talk later about
that. And here’s another difference he makes: he lights up Scripture. When you
read it, it’s not a dead book, but alive.

Sal: What do you mean by that? It sounds pretty vague.

Chris: What’s the difference between a love letter and an encyclopedia?

Sal: I see: the first one is alive.

The Bible becomes

a personal love letter,
not an old encyclopedia.

Chris: And the whole Bible becomes a love letter written to you personally, not
some old, historical encyclopedia.

Sal: To me personally?

Chris: Yes. God doesn’t address his mail “Dear Occupant”.

Sal: You can really see that big of a difference in the way you read the Bible?

Chris: Yes. It reads you now. It becomes like a sword: not dead on the ground,
but alive because Somebody’s hand is using it.

Sal: That Somebody is the Holy Spirit?

Chris: Yes. The Bible calls itself “the Sword of the Spirit”, you know.

Sal: It sounds almost scary.

Chris: It can be—like looking through a keyhole and seeing an eye looking back
at you. But it’s the eye of Infinite Love. Here’s another way to put the
difference it makes: Did you ever see one of those kids’ puzzles in the Sunday
papers, where there’s a jungle scene or something, and the puzzle reads, “Find
the man in the picture”? After you squint and turn it sideways you notice that
that tree trunk is his mouth, and that elephant ear is his chin, and so on.
Then, once you see all the lines as part of his face, you can never see that
picture the same again. It’s not just a jungle; it’s a man. It’s a little like
seeing the “man in the moon". But in the case of Scripture, he’s really
there—though he’s not just a man, he’s God. Every word becomes part of his face,
tells you about him. You meet him now when you read.

Sal: Really? You’re not exaggerating or idealizing?

Chris: No. It really happens.

Sal: That’s a way to pray, then: reading Scripture.

Chris: Yes. We’ll talk about that later too.

Sal: And I suppose the Holy Spirit makes a difference to your life too, right?

Chris: Of course. One difference is that he gives you a sense of direction, of

guidance. You need more than written rules, you know.

Sal: Why?

The Spirit directs us

in different situations.

Chris: Because no set of rules can cover everything. Situations and

personalities are different. There are rules, but we have to apply them to
different situations. That’s where the Holy Spirit helps. You sense what his
will is because you know him—just as you can tell what your father would want
you to do in a situation because you know him. But you don’t know what some
stranger would want you to do, because you just don’t know him personally.
Sal: O.K., enough! It’s for me. What do I do? How do I get it?

Chris: Only ask.

Sal: That’s all?

Chris: That’s all.

Sal: No, that can’t be. It’s too simple, too easy. What’s the catch?

Chris: No catch.

Sal: What are my chances?

Chris: Chances?

Sal: Of getting all these great things you described.

Chris: Oh, 100 percent.

Sal: Can you prove that?

Chris: I sure can. Read Luke 11.... Here it is. Don’t believe me; believe Jesus.
Here’s what he says: “I say to you, ask and it will be given to you; seek, and
you will find; knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks
receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.”

Sal: How can it be that simple? And how do you know that Jesus was talking about
the Holy Spirit in that passage?

Ask!

Chris: He himself answers both of those questions in the next few verses: “If a
son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he
asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? Or if he asks for
an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give
good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the
Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

Sal: Just “those who ask”? That’s all it says?

Chris: That’s all.

Sal: It’s just too good to be true.

Chris: If it isn’t true, Jesus is a liar. Isn’t that even harder to believe?

Sal: Of course, but maybe we’re misinterpreting his words.

Chris: How much clearer and simpler could they be? In fact, it’s too simple for
you! That’s your objection: “It just can’t be that simple.” But it is. Love is
very simple-hearted. It just loves to give gifts, just because it’s love. That’s
what God is: just love.

Sal: I think love just trapped me in a corner. And I don’t want to escape.

From Prayer: the Great Conversation by Ignatius Press.

davenevins.com
The First Cause Argument by Peter Kreeft

The most famous of all arguments for the existence of God are the "five ways" of
Saint Thomas Aquinas. One of the five ways, the fifth, is the argument from
design, which we looked at in the last essay. The other four are versions of the
first-cause argument, which we explore here.

The argument is basically very simple, natural, intuitive, and commonsensical.

We have to become complex and clever in order to doubt or dispute it. It is
based on an instinct of mind that we all share: the instinct that says
everything needs an explanation. Nothing just is without a reason why it is.
Everything that is has some adequate or sufficient reason why it is.

Philosophers call this the Principle of Sufficient Reason. We use it every day,
in common sense and in science as well as in philosophy and theology. If we saw
a rabbit suddenly appear on an empty table, we would not blandly say, "Hi,
rabbit. You came from nowhere, didn't you?" No, we would look for a cause,
assuming there has to be one. Did the rabbit fall from the ceiling? Did a
magician put it there when we weren't looking? If there seems to be no physical
cause, we look for a psychological cause: perhaps someone hypnotized us. As a
last resort, we look for a supernatural cause, a miracle. But there must be some
cause. We never deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason itself. No one believes
the Pop Theory: that things just pop into existence for no reason at all.
Perhaps we will never find the cause, but there must be a cause for everything
that comes into existence.

If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with
many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain
is held up by nothing.

Now the whole universe is a vast, interlocking chain of things that come into
existence. Each of these things must therefore have a cause. My parents caused
me, my grandparents caused them, et cetera. But it is not that simple. I would
not be here without billions of causes, from the Big Bang through the cooling of
the galaxies and the evolution of the protein molecule to the marriages of my
ancestors. The universe is a vast and complex chain of causes. But does the
universe as a whole have a cause? Is there a first cause, an uncaused cause, a
transcendent cause of the whole chain of causes? If not, then there is an
infinite regress of causes, with no first link in the great cosmic chain. If so,
then there is an eternal, necessary, independent, self-explanatory being with
nothing above it, before it, or supporting it. It would have to explain itself
as well as everything else, for if it needed something else as its explanation,
its reason, its cause, then it would not be the first and uncaused cause. Such a
being would have to be God, of course. If we can prove there is such a first
cause, we will have proved there is a God.
Why must there be a first cause? Because if there isn't, then the whole universe
is unexplained, and we have violated our Principle of Sufficient Reason for
everything. If there is no first cause, each particular thing in the universe is
explained in the short run, or proximately, by some other thing, but nothing is
explained in the long run, or ultimately, and the universe as a whole is not
explained. Everyone and everything says in turn, "Don't look to me for the final
explanation. I'm just an instrument. Something else caused me." If that's all
there is, then we have an endless passing of the buck. God is the one who says,
"The buck stops here."

If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many
links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up
by nothing. If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a railroad
train moving without an engine. Each car's motion is explained proximately by
the motion of the car in front of it: the caboose moves because the boxcar pulls
it, the boxcar moves because the cattle car pulls it, et cetera. But there is no
engine to pull the first car and the whole train. That would be impossible, of
course. But that is what the universe is like if there is no first cause:
impossible.

Here is one more analogy. Suppose I tell you there is a book that explains
everything you want explained. You want that book very much. You ask me whether
I have it. I say no, I have to get it from my wife. Does she have it? No, she
has to get it from a neighbor. Does he have it? No, he has to get it from his
teacher, who has to get it. . . et cetera, etcetera, ad infinitum. No one
actually has the book. In that case, you will never get it. However long or
short the chain of book borrowers may be, you will get the book only if someone
actually has it and does not have to borrow it. Well, existence is like that
book. Existence is handed down the chain of causes, from cause to effect. If
there is no first cause, no being who is eternal and self-sufficient, no being
who has existence by his own nature and does not have to borrow it from someone
else, then the gift of existence can never be passed down the chain to others,
and no one will ever get it. But we did get it. We exist. We got the gift of
existence from our causes, down the chain, and so did every actual being in the
universe, from atoms to archangels. Therefore there must be a first cause of
existence, a God.

If there is no independent being, then the whole chain of dependent beings

is dependent on nothing and could not exist.

In more abstract philosophical language, the proof goes this way. Every being
that exists either exists by itself, by its own essence or nature, or it does
not exist by itself. If it exists by its own essence, then it exists necessarily
and eternally, and explains itself. It cannot not exist, as a triangle cannot
not have three sides. If, on the other hand, a being exists but not by its own
essence, then it needs a cause, a reason outside itself for its existence.
Because it does not explain itself, something else must explain it. Beings whose
essence does not contain the reason for their existence, beings that need
causes, are called contingent, or dependent, beings. A being whose essence is to
exist is called a necessary being. The universe contains only contingent beings.
God would be the only necessary being—if God existed. Does he? Does a necessary
being exist? Here is the proof that it does. Dependent beings cannot cause
themselves. They are dependent on their causes. If there is no independent
being, then the whole chain of dependent beings is dependent on nothing and
could not exist. But they do exist. Therefore there is an independent being.

Saint Thomas has four versions of this basic argument.

First, he argues that the chain of movers must have a first mover because
nothing can move itself. (Moving here refers to any kind of change, not just
change of place.) If the whole chain of moving things had no first mover, it
could not now be moving, as it is. If there were an infinite regress of movers
with no first mover, no motion could ever begin, and if it never began, it
could not go on and exist now. But it does go on, it does exist now. Therefore
it began, and therefore there is a first mover.

Second, he expands the proof from proving a cause of motion to proving a cause
of existence, or efficient cause. He argues that if there were no first
efficient cause, or cause of the universe's coming into being, then there
could be no second causes because second causes (i.e., caused causes) are
dependent on (i.e., caused by) a first cause (i.e., an uncaused cause). But
there are second causes all around us. Therefore there must be a first cause.

Third, he argues that if there were no eternal, necessary, and immortal being,
if everything had a possibility of not being, of ceasing to be, then
eventually this possibility of ceasing to be would be realized for everything.
In other words, if everything could die, then, given infinite time, everything
would eventually die. But in that case nothing could start up again. We would
have universal death, for a being that has ceased to exist cannot cause itself
or anything else to begin to exist again. And if there is no God, then there
must have been infinite time, the universe must have been here always, with no
beginning, no first cause. But this universal death has not happened; things
do exist! Therefore there must be a necessary being that cannot not be, cannot
possibly cease to be. That is a description of God.

Fourth, there must also be a first cause of perfection or goodness or value.

We rank things as more or less perfect or good or valuable. Unless this
ranking is false and meaningless, unless souls don't really have any more
perfection than slugs, there must be a real standard of perfection to make
such a hierarchy possible, for a thing is ranked higher on the hierarchy of
perfection only insofar as it is closer to the standard, the ideal, the most
 perfect. Unless there is a most-perfect being to be that real standard of
perfection, all our value judgments are meaningless and impossible. Such a
most-perfect being, or real ideal standard of perfection, is another
description of God.

There is a single common logical structure to all four proofs. Instead of

proving God directly, they prove him indirectly, by refuting atheism. Either
there is a first cause or not. The proofs look at "not" and refute it, leaving
the only other possibility, that God is.

Each of the four ways makes the same point for four different kinds of cause:
first, cause of motion; second, cause of a beginning to existence; third, cause
of present existence; and fourth, cause of goodness or value. The common point
is that if there were no first cause, there could be no second causes, and there
are second causes (moved movers, caused causers, dependent and mortal beings,
and less-than-wholly-perfect beings). Therefore there must be a first cause of
motion, beginning, existence, and perfection.

How can anyone squirm out of this tight logic? Here are four ways in which
different philosophers try.

First, many say the proofs don't prove God but only some vague first cause or
other. "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not the God of philosophers and
scholars", cries Pascal, who was a passionate Christian but did not believe
you could logically prove God's existence. It is true that the proofs do not
prove everything the Christian means by God, but they do prove a transcendent,
eternal, uncaused, immortal, self-existing, independent, all-perfect being.
That certainly sounds more like God than like Superman! It's a pretty thick
slice of God, at any rate—much too much for any atheist to digest.

Second, some philosophers, like Hume, say that the concept of cause is
ambiguous and not applicable beyond the physical universe to God. How dare we
use the same term for what clouds do to rain, what parents do to children,
what authors do to books, and what God does to the universe? The answer is
that the concept of cause is analogical—that is, it differs somewhat but not
completely from one example to another. Human fatherhood is like divine
fatherhood, and physical causality is like divine causality. The way an author
conceives a book in his mind is not exactly the same as the way a woman
conceives a baby in her body either, but we call both causes. (In fact, we
also call both conceptions.) The objection is right to point out that we do
not fully understand how God causes the universe, as we understand how parents
cause children or clouds cause rain. But the term remains meaningful. A cause
is the sine qua non for an effect: if no cause, no effect. If no creator, no
creation; if no God, no universe.

Third, it is sometimes argued (e.g., by Bertrand Russell) that there is a

 self-contradiction in the argument, for one of the premises is that everything
needs a cause, but the conclusion is that there is something (God) which does
not need a cause. The child who asks "Who made God?" is really thinking of
this objection. The answer is very simple: the argument does not use the
premise that everything needs a cause. Everything in motion needs a cause,
everything dependent needs a cause, everything imperfect needs a cause.
Fourth, it is often asked why there can't be infinite regress, with no first
being. Infinite regress is perfectly acceptable in mathematics: negative
numbers go on to infinity just as positive numbers do. So why can't time be
like the number series, with no highest number either negatively (no first in
the past) or positively (no last in the future)? The answer is that real
beings are not like numbers: they need causes, for the chain of real beings
moves in one direction only, from past to future, and the future is caused by
the past. Positive numbers are not caused by negative numbers. There is, in
fact, a parallel in the number series for a first cause: the number one. If
there were no first positive integer, no unit one, there could be no
subsequent addition of units. Two is two ones, three is three ones, and so on.
If there were no first, there could be no second or third.

If this argument is getting too tricky, the thing to do is to return to what is

sure and clear: the intuitive point we began with. Not everyone can understand
all the abstract details of the first-cause argument, but anyone can understand
its basic point: as C. S. Lewis put it, "I felt in my bones that this universe
does not explain itself."

From Fundamentals of the Faith by Ignatius Press.

This text is also available as an audio lecture under:

Arguments for God's Existence

Design by davenevins.com
The Importance of Free Choice: The Role of Our Will by Peter Kreeft

Q: What has the priority, the intellect or will? Knowing or loving?

Hear Kreeft on The Head and the Heart (MP3, 1:31, 450k)
Though agape comes from God, it resides in our free will as
human beings. Its home is not the body or the feelings, or even the intellect,
but the will. True, the intellect has to work with it. But it is not the
intellect that loves, any more than it is the light in the operating room that
performs the surgery. Agape may be aided by seeing, accompanied by feeling, and
accomplished by doing, but it is essentially an act of choosing, an act of free
will.

If God is love, then God must be that which loves, the will. God is not just
being or the Force or Cosmic Consciousness, but a willer with a will. This is
the distinctively biblical concept of God, which is missing in most Oriental
religions.

Three other words for will in Scripture are "heart" (the center or core of the
person), "spirit," and "I" (as in "I AM WHO AM"). All three mean the self. The
source of agape is not any function of the self but the self itself, that
mysterious and non-objectifiable personal center which is the root and source of
all our functions. Who is it that thinks and feels? Whose body and soul is this?

Who am I? "Know thyself."

I sense, I think, I know, I feel, I desire, I long-there is an "I" behind

everything I do, inner or outer, spiritual or physical. This I is God's image in
me. Like God, it is hidden (Is 45:15). For like God, it is the subject rather
than the object, the thinker rather than the thought, the feeler rather than the
felt, the doer rather than the deed. "Know thyself," then, is the insolvable
puzzle—the mystery that cannot be reduced to a problem. The self or I is the
thing we are but cannot know, the thing that is not a thing.

The closest thing to it is willing. I can distance myself from my thoughts, hold
them captive as an object and criticize them. I can do the same with my
feelings. But not with my willing—at least not my present willing—for the very
act of holding something before my consciousness is an act of willing.

I am not wholly free or responsible for my thoughts and feelings, which partly
come to me from my heredity and my environment. But I am completely free and
responsible for my will's choices, which come from me. I am not what I think or
feel but I am what I will. I can distance myself from my thought. I can even
distance myself from my feeling, for I can feel angry and yet refuse to be
identified with that feeling. But I cannot distance myself from my willing. I
cannot will and refuse at the same time because refusal is willing.
That is why it is not important whether temptations come to me, but it is
important whether I consent to them. "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a
man, but what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a man" (Mt 15:11). This is
true not only of the mouth or the body, but also the soul. What comes into my
soul is not necessarily what I will, but what comes out of my soul is precisely
what I will.

The Greek philosophers did not clearly recognize this personal center. They were
intellectualists; they thought the deepest thing in us was the mind. Thus Plato
taught that whenever we really know the good, we do it. He thought that all evil
is ultimately ignorance and curable by education. Aristotle too identified
reason with the true self, that which distinguishes us from animals. He defined
man as "a rational animal." But Scripture goes deeper. When asked how people
could understand his teachings, Jesus replied, "My teaching is not mine, but his
who sent me; if any man's will is to do his [the Father's] will, he shall know
whether the teaching is from God" (Jn 7:16.17, emphasis added).

The will leads us to wisdom. The heart leads the head. Therefore Solomon says,
"Keep your heart with all vigilance; for from it flow the springs of life" (Prov
4:23). In the natural sciences the head must lead. But in knowing
persons—ourselves, others, or God—the heart must lead the head. "Deep calls to
deep" (Ps 42:7), I to I. Thus Augustine declares that his Confessions cannot be
understood by those who "do not have their ear to my heart, where I am what I
am."

"Know thyself' was the first and greatest commandment for the Greeks. It was
inscribed on every temple of Apollo. We can distinguish at least five levels of
profundity in attempting to answer that fundamental question, What is the self?
What am I? What is the human person? Only the key of love unlocks the deepest
answer.

Answer #1: I am the social self. I am simply a social function, an ingredient

in society. Society is the absolute. This old tribal view is coming back into
modern consciousness. Many of my students use "Society" (always with a capital
S, like "Science") exactly where theists would use "God" as the ultimate
authority. De Tocqueville, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Ortega y Gasset, Huxley,
Orwell, and Riesman all warned of this: xeroxed souls, standardized selves,
mass conformity, "the lonely crowd."

Answer #2: I am the individual physical self. I am the thing that eats, diets,
jogs, exercises, and dies. I am what I eat. This old pagan materialistic
notion is also undergoing a great comeback in the modern yuppie world.

Answer #3: I am the feeling self. I am a mass of self-actualization,

loneliness, positive and negative vibes, different strokes, complexes,
 libidinous urges, or other kinds of liberations of the psyche! This is another
very popular view in the modern world. It is a little deeper and closer to the
heights reached by classical paganism, which is the next deeper view.

Answer #4: I am the rational self. Unlike the animals, which include all the
above answers, I can know truth. I stand in a light for which the animals have
no receptor: the light of understanding, meaning, and intrinsic value.
"Reason" meant this to the ancients: something immeasurably greater than what
"reason" means to moderns. Namely, calculation, clever-ness, or logical
correctness. To the ancients, it meant a divine attribute: wisdom.

Answer #5: I am the will, heart, soul, spirit, self, or I. I am that which
chooses, commits, decides, and loves.

Why is the fifth answer the truest one? The will is central because love is
central. Not the intellect. Not quite. Plato is half right: evil does indeed
come from ignorance, but not only from ignorance for then it would be excusable.
In fact, ignorance first comes from evil. We will, we choose, we create the
moral ignorance in our souls the ignorance that Plato saw was a prerequisite to
doing evil. We voluntarily turn off the light of truth. For instance, we shut
out the divine truth and justice of "thou shalt not steal" before we sin by
stealing. The ignorance of the thief—by which he thinks that filling his pockets
with stolen money will make him happier than filling his soul with proper
virtue—is indeed, as Plato saw, a prerequisite for his act of theft. But that
ignorance in turn has as its prerequisite the will's choice to turn the thief s
attention away from the truth of the moral law. He wills to look instead at the
pleasures he thinks will derive from his loot. His ignorance comes from his
ignoring.

From The God Who Loves You by Ignatius Press.

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The Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality by Peter Kreeft

Source: Crisis Magazine, April 2003

Spectacular proof of the decline of the liberal arts is the simple fact that the
only places in America where you can be sure you will get a liberal education,
in the authentic sense of the term, are a few tiny little upstart crackpot
islands of sanity like St. John's, St. Thomas More, Magdalene, Christendom,
Corpus Christi, St. Thomas Aquinas, Ave Maria University, Kings College, and
Campion College. Whenever major secular universities like Kansas or USF relax
the vigilance of their animus against Great Books programs and tolerate the
creation of a classical liberal arts program (like the St. Ignatius Institute),
two things always happen: It is spectacularly successful, and the university
demands to murder it. That is why I called these universities "secular," not
"Catholic."

Whereas liberal education has declined so much that the term has become nearly
unintelligible, sexual morality has declined so much that it has become nearly
extinct. We do not need to define it, only to find it. Like liberal education,
it can be found mainly in enclaves of eccentricity: mainly families (often
unfashionably large ones) that believe the orthodoxy and live the orthopraxy of
six religious traditions: Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, Evangelical, Mormon, and
Islamic. But its definition is not hard to find, unless you have a Ph.D. As a
very simple, earthy neighbor of mine said when complaining about the elaborate
"sex education" program in our local, very liberal high school, "They teach them
everything except to keep their pants on."

Though the graph of the decline of the two venerable traditions of liberal
education and sexual morality is nearly identical, it would be the fallacy of
"post hoc ergo propter hoc" to conclude that they are therefore casually
connected. But we can see four clear connections, if we only look.

First, liberal education seeks truth—that is, it seeks to know the truth for its
own sake rather than as a means for the sake of anything else as an end.
Aristotle called this "theoretical science" distinct from "practical" or
"productive" sciences, since its end is knowing for the sake of knowing rather
than knowing for the sake of practice or production. He ranked it highest
because it perfects the most important power of the most important part of the
self: the reason, that faculty of the soul that is naturally fit to rule the
passions. "Practical science" perfects not quite our very selves but something
almost as close: our lives, our activities. "Productive science" perfects only
things in the external world that touch our lives.

The immense cultural, psychological, and scientific changes of the last 23

centuries have not diminished the validity of Aristotle's ranking of these three
sciences; in fact, they have made his point prophetic. For at the very beginning
of the modern era, some four centuries ago, we find a nearly universal revolt
against this fundamental ideal of liberal education, knowing the truth as an end
that is justifiable, even noble, for itself.

Aristotle's hierarchy is turned exactly upside down. Francis Bacon most clearly
trumpets the new educational philosophy: "Knowledge for power," for "man's
conquest of nature," has replaced knowledge for truth. All the early classical
modern philosophers agree with Bacon here, even Descartes (see chapter 6 of
Discourse on Method). The goal of education suddenly becomes utilitarian,
pragmatic, and instrumental.

This is a sea change far deeper and wider than can be confined to education
alone; in fact, it is a radically new answer to the most important question one
can ask, the question of the "summum bonum," the greatest good, the meaning of
life. As C. S. Lewis notes in The Abolition of Man, in the single most
illuminating sentence I have ever read about the difference between modern
culture and all premodern cultures:

There is something that unites magic and applied science (technology) while
separating both from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the ancients, the
cardinal problem of human life had been how to conform the human soul to
objective reality; and the means were knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.
For magic and applied science alike the cardinal problem is how to conform
reality to the wishes of the soul; and the solution is a technique.

In other words, truth is now a prostitute, bought and sold for the money of
power over nature.

It does not require much of a stretch of the imagination to see the new relation
to truth mirrored in the new relation to women. I speak only of men's attitudes
toward women, because I am a man. Probably everything I say about this would be
duplicated by a woman writing about women's attitudes toward men. But from a
man's point of view, it is surely no coincidence that Truth and Wisdom are
almost always imagined as women rather than men. Both aletheia and sophia are
feminine nouns.

The change is this: The old contemplative attitude of objectivity, wonder, and
respect is replaced by a new activist attitude of conquest, use, and subjective
satisfaction - in relation to women just as in relation to truth. The old poets
used to sing of women as ends, as objects of admiration, awe, contemplation, and
even worship; the new ones sing of them as means rather than ends, as objects of
use (and, if we are to call rappers poets, of domination, rape, murder, and
mutilation). We have transformed women from Beatrice to Barbie, from the Madonna
to Madonna (what a difference a "the" makes!), from images of God to occasions
for self-gratification. This is inevitable, for the subjective experience of the
sexual "high" is our culture's substitute for the mystical experience we were
designed for. Aquinas says, "No man can live without joy. That is why, deprived
of spiritual joys, he must go over to carnal pleasures."

When I remember this, I also remember Machiavelli's memorable image at the end
of The Prince, the book that changed political philosophy forever. His formula
for success is the conquest of fortuna (chance, luck, fortune) by virtu
(prowess, control, force), and he says: "Fortune is a lady. It is necessary, if
you want to master her, to beat and strike her." This is not just about
politics; it is about the whole world. It is as if he were to say, "What doth it
profit a man if he gain his whole soul but lose the world?"

The fundamental change of attitude that I am trying to find a single clear

definition for concerns not only education or women or politics but everything,
life itself, certainly nature. "We must put nature to the [torture] rack," Bacon
says, "and compel her to reveal her secrets." The result has been that the very
concept of nature has been lost. Our culture no longer understands the most
basic meaning of a term like "natural law" or "unnatural acts." "Nature" used to
mean "the intelligible principle [source] of characteristic activity from within
any being." But that is a metaphysical definition, and metaphysics has gone into
the garbage can. Nature means now merely what we can kick or all that we can
observe with our five senses or all that we have not yet turned into technology.
But why do we love technology? To ask this simple question is to enter a second
dimension of the new attitude toward nature, toward education, and toward
sexuality. And the answer is, essentially, that we have become subjectivists. We
love technology because it satisfies our desires. That is why we have forgotten
the meaning of the word "nature": because we approach nature mainly as raw
material for the satisfaction of our own subjective desires—just as we approach
women. The roots of the sexual revolution are not merely a new morality, a
nonconformity to social law, but a new philosophy, a new "big picture." As the
quotation from C. S. Lewis shows, we have become subjectivists, egotists—in
relation to matter, nature, the body, sex, and women.

And we have made the same turn in relation to truth. Postmodernism and
deconstructionism are only the most extreme, last logical steps in the process.
Nietzsche, the prophet of postmodernism, questioned the primal innocence that
united all his predecessors, no matter how deeply they were divided from each
other, when he asked what he called "the most dangerous question": "Why truth?
Why not rather untruth?" What Nietzsche questioned for the first time was what
he called "the will to truth," or what we might call the fundamental virtue of
honesty, which had at least purportedly motivated all previous thinkers, no
matter how deeply they disagreed about just what the truth was. When Jesus spoke
of one "unforgivable sin," it is likely that this is what He meant: deliberately
refusing known truth, preferring darkness to light, unreality to reality,
refusing the most fundamental virtue of all, honesty. For every other virtue
presupposes this one. It is Heaven's Lesson One; its absence is Hell's Lesson
One. The vice Christ denounced most vehemently was hypocrisy, which is
dishonesty in its most harmful form.

Because of the priority of honesty, because the fundamental rule of moral

goodness is Right Response to Reality—the three-R principle—the single most
necessary requirement for morality, including sexual morality, is absolute
honesty, standing in the light, demanding total conformity to reality, openness
to the truth, practicing the presence of God, who is Truth, standing in the
light. In other words, being sane. Sanctity and sanity are ultimately the same
thing.

"Openness" is the liberal shibboleth. But in its fashionable form it means

anything but openness to absolute, objective truth. It means openness to
subjective personal opinions and desires and to socially fashionable ideologies;
to society rather than to nature, that is, to man's media rather than God's, to
what is designed by the Antichrist, the Anti-Logos, rather than what is designed
by Christ the Logos.

Purity of life comes from purity of mind, thought, and heart. Solomon says,
"Keep thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are all the issues of life."
Buddha says, "All that we are comes from our thoughts; it begins where our
thoughts begin, it goes where our thoughts go, it ends up where our thoughts end
up." The poet says, "Sow a thought, reap an act; sow an act, reap a habit; sow a
habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny." The apostle Paul
says, "Bring every thought into captivity to Christ."

Leon Bloy reminded us that "there is only one tragedy: not to have been a
saint." The first key to being a saint is perpetual honesty. Sin is always
darkness and dishonesty; it cannot stand the light of truth that is let in by
raising the shades. Two events in our lives raise the shades radically: prayer
and death. Only the most appallingly depraved will commit deliberate sins on
their deathbeds or while at prayer. But we are on our deathbeds now, if we only
remember; we have been there since our birth. "We give birth astride a grave,"
says Samuel Beckett in "Waiting for Godot." Memento mori, St. Thomas More
reminded us: "Remember death, and you will not sin."

For sanctity is really sanity, the three-R principle. That is the justification
for all morality, both the morality of honest education and scholarship (that
is, nonaborted, nonraped, noncontracepted scholarship) and the parallel morality
of honest sexuality.

Why is honesty such an absolute value for us? Because its object, truth, is an
attribute of Absolute Reality, or God: Truth "goes all the way up." There are
only two sentences in Scripture that identify God without qualification with a
noun. One is well known: "God is love." The other is not so well known, though
it is from the same epistle (1 John): "God is light." God is truth. God
Incarnate said, "I am the Truth."
Subjectivism performs the blasphemous operation on both light, or truth, and on
love, or goodness. It subjectivizes objective reality, it humanizes divinity, it
relativizes the absolute. It refuses to do metaphysics—to think about being,
about reality, about what really is. And therefore scholarship has become power,
and sex has become pleasure. Both are now something you do. Sex used to be
something you are Our culture has pretty much lost the very concept of sinning
against the being, against the truth, of what we are, and against the very being
of love, the nature of love, and against the very being of sex, the nature of
sex, the objective meaning of sex. Sexual sins like sodomy, adultery,
fornication, contraception, and masturbation are wrong not simply because the
laws of the Church or society forbid them, or simply because they are not
psychologically mature, and not even simply because they hurt other people (they
always do, but sometimes it is easy to see how they do and sometimes it is not).
They are wrong because they sin against truth, against being, against reality;
because they lie about the nature of love, that is, about the nature of God, and
about God's image, man. They contradict the design of the Designer who created
sex in His own image. Remember that Genesis 2:7, Scripture's first mention of
"the image of God," immediately connects it with sexuality: "And God created man
in His own image; in the image of God created He him: male and female created He
them."

Both truth and love are sacred because they are what God is. When the Word of
God made man in His own image, He made man male and female and designed the
sacred door of sex as the way He Himself would continually enter the world to
perform His greatest miracle, creating new eternal souls. For an eternal human
soul capable of marriage-like union with God forever is a far greater thing than
all the galaxies, which are deaf and dumb and die.
And when the Word became flesh, He instituted another continuous miracle: the
continuation of His own incarnation in the Eucharist. These are two continuing
miracles by which God Himself enters our world. They are the two most sacred
things in this world. They are sacred doors between Heaven and earth. The first
one was instituted in a garden in Eden, the second one in an upper room in
Jerusalem.

Both, in different ways, were subject to the divine command "Be fruitful and
multiply." When God gave man this first of all commandments, He did not mean
"grow apples and do math." And when God gave us His last commandment, "Do this
in remembrance of Me," He did not mean "I will not be with you always, even unto
the end of the world, but you can perform this nice little symbolic play to
remind yourselves of me, as a bereaved wife keeps a picture of her dead husband
in her wallet to remember him." Both commands deal with life, not death: the
first gives bios, natural life from the holy flesh; the second gives zoe,
supernatural life from the Holy Spirit. Through both doors, God Himself keeps
coming to us again and again. Every baby that is born contains in his flesh a
label from the Manufacturer that says, "I have not yet given up on humanity."
And every Eucharist has the same label, from the same Manufacturer.

Respect for the Eucharist and respect for sex naturally stand or fall together.
They are both divine, miraculous sacraments of love. Education is a natural,
human sacrament of truth. Love and truth are the two absolutes because they are
the two things that God is. Our culture has become suspicious of absolutes, has
subjectivized them. When we subjectivize truth, liberal education becomes
deformed; and when we subjectivize love, sex becomes deformed.

Speaking in terms of the relative and absolute leads us to our third issue that
connects liberal education with sexual morality: whether truth is relative or
absolute; whether we should seek it with infinite passion or not; whether it
transcends all ifs, ands, or buts; whether, when we touch Truth, we touch God.
It would be difficult to justify the sacrifices of energy, time, and money that
have been put into traditional liberal arts education if the answer were no. For
the truths taught in philosophy, theology, English, history, and pure science,
unlike those of economics, engineering, law, medicine, and computing, do not
have payoffs that are immediate or obvious. And when they do have payoffs it is
in their own spiritual coin, not in another, foreign coin like money, power,
physical health, or efficiency.

Similarly, the patience, self-control, and sacrifices required by traditional

sexual morality do not always have immediate and obvious payoffs. (Though in
both fields, education and sex, the payoffs come, eventually, inevitably, and
overwhelmingly.) Unless you believe that doing the right thing just because it
is the right thing is an absolute, you are almost certainly not going to
sacrifice doing the easy, immediately gratifying, enormously attractive thing
for doing the right thing. All you have to do is take one little bite of the
apple You don't have to destroy the whole apple. Keep it, but make it relative
to changing situations, subjective intentions, cultural expectations, individual
personalities, and desires disguised as needs.

But when you do this, as soon as the camel of moral relativism gets his nose
under the tent, the next part to enter is always the genitals. In fact, almost
the only reason anyone in our society ever believes and teaches a philosophy of
moral relativism is to justify sexual immorality. All the controversial issues
in the culture war are sexual. How often have you heard arguments for moral
relativism to justify nuclear war, or insider trading, or child abuse, or
genocide, or racism, or even environmental pollution?

The fourth connection concerns time, and it is important because time is a

dimension of all human experience, spiritual as well as physical. One question
about time is: Should we give priority to the authority of the past or to the
authority of the future? This is analogous to the more abstract ethical question
of principalism versus consequentialism, or utilitarianism: Should our morality
look back to principles or forward to consequences? But the question I have in
mind here is more concrete than that. It asks whether conserving or progressing
is our primary task. C. S. Lewis says that he is amazed that nearly everyone in
our society assumes without question that it is better to attempt to create or
discover some little new good that we do not yet have than to enjoy the many
very large old goods that we already have—like a surfer never surfing the wave
he is on because he is always looking for a bigger one, or like Alice, promised
by the Red Queen that she can have jam tomorrow, but "tomorrow is always a day
away." Thus, Pascal says, it is inevitable that those who are always planning to
be happy never will be happy.

I have always thought that the essential difference between a conservative and a
progressive is simply that the conservative is happy and the progressive is
unhappy. Why else would the conservative want to conserve something unless it
made him happy, and why else would the progressive prefer to change a thing
unless it made him unhappy? Thus, women are progressive and men are conservative
about the placement of the furniture in the house, and men are progressive and
women conservative about the placement of the furniture in the state. Thus, the
obvious connection between liberal education and sexual morality is that both
are "conservative," or traditional.

A second question about time is whether or not there is any timeless, unchanging
truth about human nature and human life. Our lives have changed very much in the
past 1,000 years; some may think that human nature itself has changed in its
essence and is still changing, as Marxism claims. What are the limits to change
within humanity? If there is an unchangeable human essence, can we know it?
"Know thyself" would seem to be a primary requirement for any wisdom. The
traditional view of education that comes to us from both Greece and Israel (like
two rivers feeding the same sea) says yes. The new view says no and, therefore,
focuses on being up-to-date, culturally relevant, and sensitive to the latest
purported movement of the Spirit, who is, of course, as fidgety and impatient
and unhappy as His purported prophets.

Our culture has moved massively from the first philosophy to the second. That is
why I have received more feedback from the few articles I have published in
magazines than from the many books I've written. Ephemeral things—newspapers,
magazines, movies, TV, music, fashion of thought as well as clothing—has
displaced "the permanent things" in our consciousness and in our culture.
And the power that controls these airy ephemera is the airy media, which in turn
are controlled by the Prince of the Power of the Air. The media are the most
powerful educational force in our culture. They are also the most deeply
antireligious, especially anti-Catholic, more especially regarding morality, and
most especially regarding sexual morality. If you think this is an exaggeration,
I think you must be either unforgivably ignorant of Catholicism or forgivably
ignorant of our culture. I hope you have had a nice vacation on the moon.

The conservative emphasizes virtues that resist change, especially patience,

self-control, and courage. The sudden disappearance of these three virtues from
our culture in the Sixties was the catalyst for the sexual revolution. It was
also the catalyst for the abandonment of liberal education, especially those
old, dusty, irrelevant dead white European heterosexual males who wrote the
so-called canon of so-called Great Books.

If you want to restore liberal education, restore sexual morality. And if you
want to restore sexual morality, restore liberal education. The same virtues of
honor, self-control, innocence, purity, respect, patience, courage, and honesty
are cultivated in both places. They reinforce each other.

And so do their absences. Just as injustices provoke wars and wars provoke
injustices, dishonesty with truth provokes dishonesty with sex and dishonesty
with sex provokes dishonesty with truth. You can't be a totally honest thinker
if you are living a lie. Your lived sexual lie will make everything in your life
a little lie-like. There will be a vague shuffling, a hiding, an escapist
politeness that will come to settle on everything you say or do like a fog. You
will not dare to speak out clearly lest you offend someone. You will begin to
sound more like a bishop than a saint. You will be nice instead of being holy.
And so you will miss the meaning of liberal education and of sex.

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The Pillars of Unbelief—Freud by Peter Kreeft

Source: Jan-Feb 1988

National Catholic Register

Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals
who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers
with an enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the Christian
mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

He was the Columbus of the psyche. No psychologist alive escapes his influence.
Yet, along with flashes of genius, we find the most bizarre ideas in his
writings—e.g., that mothers cuddle their babies only as a substitute for their
desire to have sexual intercourse with them.

Sigmund Freud's most influential teaching is his sexual reductionism. As an

atheist, Freud reduces God to a dream of man. As a materialist, he reduces man
to his body, the human body to animal desire, desire to sexual desire and sexual
desire to genital sex. All are oversimplifications.
Freud was a scientist, and in some ways a great one. But he succumbed to an
occupational hazard: the desire to reduce the complex to the controllable. He
wanted to make psychology into a science, even an exact science. But this it can
never be because its object, man, is not only an object but also a subject, an
"I."

At the basis of our century's "sexual revolution" is a demand for satisfaction

and a confusion between needs and wants. All normal human beings have sexual
wants or desires. But it's simply not true, as Freud constantly assumes, that
these are needs or rights; that no one can be expected to live without
gratifying them; or to suppress them is psychologically unhealthy.

This confusion between needs and wants stems from the denial of objective values
and an objective natural moral law. No one has caused more havoc in this crucial
area than Freud, especially regarding sexual morality. The modern attack on
marriage and the family, for which Freud set the stage, has done more damage
than any war or political revolution. For where else do we all learn the most
important lesson in life—unselfish love—except in stable families who preach it
by practicing it?
Yet, with all his faults, Freud still towers above the psychologies that
replaced him in popular culture. Despite his materialism, he explores some of
the deeper mysteries of the soul. He had a real sense of tragedy, suffering and
unhappiness. Honest atheists are usually unhappy; dishonest atheists happy.
Freud was an honest atheist.

And his honesty made him a good scientist. He believed that the mere act of
raising up some repression or fear from the hidden darkness of the unconscious
into the light of reason would free us from its power over us. It was the faith
that truth is more powerful than illusion, light than darkness. Unfortunately,
Freud classified all religion as mankind's most fundamental illusion and
materialistic scientism as his only light.

We should distinguish sharply among three different dimensions in Freud. First,

as an inventor of the practical, therapeutic technique of psychoanalysis, he's a
genius and every psychologist is in his debt. Just as it's possible for a
Christian philosopher like Augustine or Aquinas to use the categories of
non-Christian philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, it's possible for a
Christian psychiatrist to use the techniques of Freud without subscribing to his
religious views.

Second, Freud as a theoretical psychologist is like Columbus, mapping out new

continents but also making some serious mistakes. Some of these are excusable,
as Columbus' were, by the newness of the territory. But others are imply
prejudices, such as the reduction of all guilt to pathological feeling and
failure to see that faith in God could ever have anything to do with love.

Third, Freud as a philosopher and religious thinker is strictly an amateur and

little more than an adolescent. Let's explore these points one by one.
Freud's greatest work is certainly "The Interpretation of Dreams." Investigating
dreams as a printout of the subconscious seems obvious today. But it was utterly
new to Freud's contemporaries. His mistake was not to overemphasize the
subconscious forces that move us, but to underemphasize their depth and
complexity, as an explorer of a new continent might mistake it for simply a
large island.

Freud discovered that hysterical patients who seemed to have no rational cause
for their disorders were helped by what he called "the talking cure," using
"free association" and paying attention to "Freudian slips" as clues from the
subconscious. In a word, the thing worked despite the inadequacies of the theory
behind it.

On the level of psychological theory, Freud divided the psyche into the id, the
ego and the super ego. This seems at first to be quite similar to the
traditional and commonsensical division into appetites, will and intellect (and
conscience) that began with Plato. But there are crucial differences.
First, Freud's "super-ego" is not the intellect or conscience, but the unfree,
passive reflection in the individual's psyche of society's restrictions on his
desires—"thou shalt nots." What we take to be our own insight into real good and
evil is only a mirror of man-made social laws, according to Freud.

Second, the "ego" is not free will but a mere facade. Freud denied the existence
of free will, he was a determinist and saw man as a complex animal-machine.
Finally, the "id" ("it") is the only real self, according to Freud, and it's
comprised simply of animal desires. It is impersonal; thus the name "it." Freud
thus is denying the existence of a real personality, individual I-ness. Just as
he denied God ("I Am"), he denies God's image, the human "I."

Freud's philosophical ideas are most candidly expressed in his two most famous
anti-religious books, "Moses and Monotheism" and "The Future of an Illusion."
Like Marx, he dismissed all religion as infantile without seriously examining
its claims and arguments. But he did come up with a detailed explanation of the
supposed origin of this "illusion." It has basically four parts: ignorance,
fear, fantasy and guilt.

As ignorance, religion is a pre-scientific guess at how nature works: If there

is thunder, there must be a Thunderer, a Zeus. As fear, religion is our
invention of a heavenly substitute for the earthly father when he dies, gets
old, goes away or send his children out of the secure home into the frightening
world of responsibility. As fantasy, God is the product of wish-fulfillment that
there's an all-powerful providential force behind the terrifyingly impersonal
appearances of life. And as guilt, God is the ensurer of moral behavior.
Freud's explanation of the origin of guilt is one of the weakest parts of his
theory. It amounts to the story that once, long ago, a son killed his father,
the head of a great tribe. That primal murder has haunted the human race's
subconscious memory every since. But this is no explanation at all; Why did the
first murderer feel guilt?

Freud's most philosophical book was his last, "Civilization and its
Discontents." In it he raised the great question of the summum bonum—the
greatest good, the meaning of life and human happiness. He concluded as
Ecclesiastes did, that it is unattainable. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,"
he says in effect. Instead, he promised to move us through successful
psychotherapy, "from unmanageable unhappiness to manageable unhappiness."

One reason for his pessimism was his belief that there's a contradiction
inherent in the human condition; this is the point of his title, "Civilization
and its Discontents." On the one hand, we are animals seeking pleasure,
motivated only by "the pleasure principle." On the other hand, we need the order
of civilization to save us from the pain of chaos. But the restrictions of
civilization curtail our desires. So the very thing we invented as a means to
our happiness becomes our obstacle.

Toward the end of his life, Freud's thought became even darker and more
mysterious as he discovered thanatos, the death wish. The pleasure principle
leads us in two opposite directions: eros and thanatos. Eros leads us forward,
into life, love, the future and hope. Thanatos leads us back to the womb, where
alone we had no pain.

We resent life and our mothers for birthing us into pain. This mother-hate
parallels the famous "Oedipus complex" or subconscious desire to murder our
father and marry our mother—which is a perfect explanation of Freud's own
atheism, resenting Father God and marrying Mother Earthiness.

As Freud was dying, Hitler was coming to power. Freud prophetically saw the
power of the death wish in the modern world and was unsure which of these two
"heavenly forces," as he called them, would win out. He died an atheist but
almost a mystic. He had enough of the pagan in him to offer some profound
insights, usually mixed up with outrageous blind spots. He calls to mind C.S.
Lewis' description of pagan mythology: "gleams of celestial strength and beauty
falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility."

What raises Freud far above Marx and secular humanism is his insight into the
demon in man, the tragic dimension of life and our need for salvation.
Unfortunately, he saw the Judaism he rejected and the Christianity he scorned as
fairy tales, too good to be true. His tragic sense was rooted in his separation
between the true and the good, "the reality principle" and happiness.
Only God can join them at their summit.

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The Pillars of Unbelief—Kant by Peter Kreeft

Source: Jan-Feb 1988

National Catholic Register

Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals
who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers
with an enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the Christian
mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

Few philosophers in history have been so unreadable and dry as Immanuel Kant.
Yet few have had a more devastating impact on human thought.

Kant's devoted servant, Lumppe, is said to have faithfully read each thing his
master published, but when Kant published his most important work, "The Critique
of Pure Reason," Lumppe began but did not finish it because, he said, if he were
to finish it, it would have to be in a mental hospital. Many students since then
have echoed his sentiments.

Yet this abstract professor, writing in abstract style about abstract questions,
is, I believe, the primary source of the idea that today imperils faith (and
thus souls) more than any other; the idea that truth is subjective.
The simple citizens of his native Konigsburg, Germany, where he lived and wrote
in the latter half of the 18th century, understood this better than professional
scholars, for they nicknamed Kant "The Destroyer" and named their dogs after
him.

He was a good-tempered, sweet and pious man, so punctual that his neighbors set
their clocks by his daily walk. The basic intention of his philosophy was noble:
to restore human dignity amidst a skeptical world worshiping science.
This intent becomes clear through a single anecdote. Kant was attending a
lecture by a materialistic astronomer on the topic of man's place in the
universe. The astronomer concluded his lecture with: "So you see that
astronomically speaking, man is utterly insignificant." Kant replied:
"Professor, you forgot the most important thing, man is the astronomer."
Kant, more than any other thinker, gave impetus to the typically modern turn
from the objective to the subjective. This may sound fine until we realize that
it meant for him the redefinition of truth itself as subjective. And the
consequences of this idea have been catastrophic.
If we ever engage in conversation about our faith with unbelievers, we know from
experience that the most common obstacle to faith today is not any honest
intellectual difficulty, like the problem of evil or the dogma of the trinity,
but the assumption that religion cannot possibly concern facts and objective
truth at all; that any attempt to convince another person that your faith is
true—objectively true, true for everyone—is unthinkable arrogance.

The business of religion, according to this mindset, is practice and not theory;
values, not facts; something subjective and private, not objective and public.
Dogma is an "extra," and a bad extra at that, for dogma fosters dogmatism.
Religion, in short, equals ethics. And since Christian ethics is very similar to
the ethics of most other major religions, it doesn't matter whether you are a
Christian or not; all that matters is whether you are a "good person." (The
people who believe this also usually believe that just about everyone except
Adolf Hitler and Charles Manson is a "good person.")

Kant is largely responsible for this way of thinking. He helped bury the
medieval synthesis of faith and reason. He described his philosophy as "clearing
away the pretensions of reason to make room for faith"—as if faith and reason
were enemies and not allies. In Kant, Luther's divorce between faith and reason
becomes finalized.

Kant thought religion could never be a matter of reason, evidence or argument,

or even a matter of knowledge, but a matter of feeling, motive and attitude.
This assumption has deeply influenced the minds of most religious educators
(e.g., catechism writers and theology departments) today, who have turned their
attention away from the plain "bare bones" of faith, the objective facts
narrated in Scripture and summarized in the Apostles' creed. They have divorced
the faith from reason and married it to pop psychology, because they have bought
into Kant's philosophy.

"Two things fill me with wonder," Kant confessed: "the starry sky above and the
moral law within." What a man wonders about fills his heart and directs his
thought. Note that Kant wonders about only two things: not God, not Christ, not
Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection and Judgment, but "the starry sky above and
the moral law within." "The starry sky above" is the physical universe as known
by modern science. Kant relegates everything else to subjectivity. The moral law
is not "without" but "within," not objective but subjective, not a Natural Law
of objective rights and wrongs that comes from God but a man-made law by which
we decide to bind ourselves. (But if we bind ourselves, are we really bound?)
Morality is a matter of subjective intention only. It has no content except the
Golden Rule (Kant's "categorical imperative").

If the moral law came from God rather than from man, Kant argues, then man would
not be free in the sense of being autonomous. This is true, Kant then proceeds
to argue that man must be autonomous, therefore the moral law does not come from
God but from man. The Church argues from the same premise that the moral law
does in fact come from God, therefore man is not autonomous. He is free to
choose to obey or disobey the moral law, but he is not free to create the law
itself.

Though Kant thought of himself as a Christian, he explicitly denied that we

could know that there really exists (1) God, (2) free will, and (3) immorality.
He said we must live as if these three ideas were true because if we believe
them we will take morality seriously, and if we don't we will not. It is this
justification of belief by purely practical reasons that is a terrible mistake.
Kant believes in God not because it is true but because it is helpful. Why not
believe in Santa Claus then? If I were God, I would favor an honest atheist over
a dishonest theist, and Kant is to my mind a dishonest theist, because there is
only one honest reason for believing anything: because it is true.

Those who try to sell the Christian faith in the Kantian sense, as a "value
system" rather than as the truth, have been failing for generations. With so
many competing "value systems: on the market, why should anyone prefer the
Christian variation to simpler ones with less theological baggage, and easier
ones with less inconvenient moral demands?

Kant gave up the battle, in effect, by retreating from the battlefield of fact.
He believed the great myth of the 18th-century "Enlightenment" (ironic name!):
that Newtonian science was here to stay and that Christianity, to survive, had
to find a new place in the new mental landscape sketched by the new science. The
only place left was subjectivity.

That meant ignoring or interpreting as myth the supernatural and miraculous

claims of traditional Christianity. Kant's strategy was essentially the same as
that of Rudolf Bultmann, the father of "demythologizing" and the man who may be
responsible for more Catholic college students losing their faith than anyone
else. Many theology professors follow his theories of criticism which reduce
biblical claims of eyewitness description of miracles to mere myth, "values" and
"pious interpretations."

Bultmann said this about the supposed conflict between faith and science: "The
scientific world picture is here to stay and will assert its right against any
theology, however imposing, that conflicts with it." Ironically, that very
"scientific world picture" of Newtonian physics Kant and Bultmann accepted as
absolute and unchangeable has today been almost universally rejected by
scientists themselves!

Kant's basic question was: How can we know truth? Early in his life he accepted
the answer of Rationalism, that we know truth by the intellect, not the senses,
and that the intellect possesses its own "innate ideas." Then he read the
Empiricist David Hume, who, Kant said, "woke me from my dogmatic slumber." Like
other Empiricists, Hume believed that we could know truth only through the
senses and that we had no "innate ideas." But Hume's premises led him to the
conclusion of Skepticism, the denial that we can ever know the truth at all with
any certainty. Kant saw both the "dogmatism" of Rationalism and the skepticism
of Empiricism as unacceptable, and sought a third way.

There was such a third theory available, ever since Aristotle. It was the common
sense philosophy of Realism. According to Realism, we can know truth through
both the intellect and the senses if only they worked properly and in tandem,
like two blades of a scissors. Instead of returning to traditional Realism, Kant
invented a wholly new theory of knowledge, usually called Idealism. He called it
his "Copernican revolution in philosophy." The simplest term for it is
Subjectivism. It amounts to redefining truth itself as subjective, not
objective.

All previous philosophers had assumed that truth was objective. That's simply
what we common-sensically mean by "truth": knowing what really is, conforming
the mind to objective reality. Some philosophers (the Rationalists) thought we
could attain this goal through reason alone. The early Empiricists (like Locke)
thought we could attain it through sensation. The later skeptical Empiricist
Hume thought we could not attain it at all with any certainty. Kant denied the
assumption common to all three competing philosophies, namely that we should
attain it, that truth means conformity to objective reality. Kant's "Copernican
revolution" redefines truth itself as reality conforming to ideas. "Hitherto it
has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects...more progress
may be made if we assume the contrary hypothesis that the objects of thought
must conform to our knowledge."

Kant claimed that all our knowledge is subjective. Well, is that knowledge
subjective? If it is, then the knowledge of that fact is also subjective, et
cetera, and we are reduced to an infinite hall of mirrors. Kant's philosophy is
a perfect philosophy for hell. Perhaps the damned collectively believe they
aren't really in hell, it's all just in their mind. And perhaps it is; perhaps
that's what hell is.

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The Pillars of Unbelief—Karl Marx by Peter Kreeft

Source: Jan-Feb 1988

National Catholic Register

Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals
who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers
with an enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the Christian
mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

Among the many opponents of the Christian faith, Marxism is certainly not the
most important, imposing or impressive philosophy in history.
But it has, until recently, clearly been the most influential. A comparison of
1917, 1947 and 1987 world maps will show how inexorably this system of thought
flowed so as to inundate one-third of the world in just two generations-a feat
rivaled only twice in history, by early Christianity and early Islam.

Ten years ago, every political and military conflict in the world, from Central
America to the Middle East, turned on the axis of communism vs. anti-communism.
Even fascism became popular in Europe, and is still a force to be reckoned with
in Latin America, largely because of its opposition to "the specter of
communism," as Marx calls it in the first sentence of his "Communist Manifesto."

The "Manifesto" was one of the key moments in history. Published in 1848, "the
year of revolutions' throughout Europe, it is, like the Bible, essentially a
philosophy of history, past and future. All past history is reduced to class
struggle between oppressor and oppressed, master and slave, whether king vs.
people, priest vs. parishioner, guild- master vs. apprentice, or even husband
vs. wife and parent vs. child.

This is a view of history even more cynical than Machiavelli's. Love is totally
denied or ignored; competition and exploitation are the universal rule.
Now, however, this can change, according to Marx, because now, for the first
time in history, we have not many classes but only two-the bourgeoisie (the
"haves," owners of the means of production) and the proletariat (the
"have-nots," non-owners of the means of production).
The latter must sell themselves and their labor to the owners until the
communist revolution, which will "eliminate" (euphemism for "murder") the
bourgeoisie and thus abolish classes and class conflict forever, establishing a
millennium of peace and equality. After being utterly cynical about the past,
Marx becomes utterly naive about the future.

What made Marx what he was? What are the sources of this creed?
Marx deliberately turned 180 degrees around from the (1) supernaturalism and (2)
distinctiveness of his Jewish heritage to embrace (1) atheism and (2) communism.
Yet Marxism retains all the major structural and emotional factors of biblical
religion in a secularized form. Marx, like Moses, is the prophet who leads the
new Chosen People, the proletariat, out of the slavery of capitalism into the
Promised Land of communism across the Red Sea of bloody worldwide revolution and
through the wilderness of temporary, dedicated suffering for the party, the new
priesthood.

The revolution is the new "Day of Yahweh," the Day of Judgment; party spokesmen
are the new prophets; and political purges within the party to maintain
ideological purity are the new divine judgments on the waywardness of the Chosen
and their leaders. The messianic tone of communism makes it structurally and
emotionally more like a religion than any other political system except fascism.

Just as Marx took over the forms and the spirit of his religious heritage, but
not the content, he did the same with his Hegelian philosophical heritage,
transforming Hegel's philosophy of "dialectical idealism" into "dialectical
materialism!" "Marx stood Hegel on his head," the saying goes. Marx inherited
seven radical ideas from Hegel:

Monism: the idea that everything is one and that common sense's distinction
between matter and spirit is illusory. For Hegel, matter was only a form of
spirit; for Marx, spirit was only a form of matter.

Pantheism: the notion that the distinction between Creator and creature, the
distinctively Jewish idea, is false. For Hegel, the world is made into an aspect
of God (Hegel was a pantheist); for Marx, God is reduced to the world (Marx was
an atheist).

Historicism: the idea that everything changes, even truth; that there is nothing
above history to judge it; and that therefore what is true in one era becomes
false in another, or vice versa. In other words, Time is God.
Dialectic: the idea that history moves only by conflicts between opposing
forces, a "thesis" vs. an "antithesis" evolving a "higher synthesis." This
applies to classes, nations, institutions and ideas. The dialectic waltz plays
on in history's ballroom until the kingdom of God finally comes-which Hegel
virtually identified with the Prussian state. Marx internationalized it to the
worldwide communist state.

Necessitarianism, or fatalism: the idea that the dialectic and its outcome are
inevitable and necessary, not free. Marxism is a sort of Calvinistic
predestination without a divine Predestinator.

Statism: the idea that since there is no eternal, trans-historical truth or law,
the state is supreme and uncriticizable. Marx again internationalized Hegel's
nationalism here. Militarism: the idea that since there is no universal natural
or eternal law above states to judge and resolve differences between them, war
is inevitable and necessary as long as there are states.

Like many other anti-religious thinkers since the French Revolution, Marx
adopted the secularism, atheism and humanism of l8th century "Enlightenment,"
along with its rationalism and its faith in science as potentially omniscient
and technology as potentially omnipotent. Here again the forms, feel and
function of biblical religion are transferred to another god and another faith.
For rationalism is a faith, not a proof. The faith that human reason can know
everything that is real cannot be proved by human reason; and the belief that
everything that is real can be proved by the scientific method cannot itself be
proved by the scientific method.

A third influence, on Marx, in addition to Hegelianism and Enlightenment

rationalism, was economic reductionism: the reduction of all issues to economic
issues. If Marx were reading this analysis now, he would say that the real cause
of these ideas of mine was not my mind's power to know the truth, but the
capitalistic economic structures of the society that "produced" me. Marx
believed that within man thought was totally determined by matter; that man was
totally determined by society; and that society was totally determined by
economics. This stands on its head the traditional view that mind rules body,
man rules his societies, and society rules its economics.

Finally, Marx adopted the idea of the collective ownership of property and the
means of producing it from previous "utopian socialist" thinkers. Marx says,
"The theory of communism may be summed up in the single phrase: abolition of
private property." In fact, the only societies in history that have ever
successfully practiced communism are monasteries, kibbutzes, tribes and families
(which Marx also wanted to abolish). All communist governments (such as that of
the U.S.S.R.) have transferred ownership to the state, not to the people. Marx's
faith that the state would "wither away" of its own accord once it had
eliminated capitalism and put communism in its place has proved to be
astonishingly naive. Once power is seized, only wisdom and sanctity relinquish
it.

The deepest appeal of communism, especially in Third World countries, has been
not the will to communalism but "the will to power," as Nietzsche called it.
Nietzsche saw more deeply into the heart of communism than Marx did.
How does Marx deal with the obvious objections to communism: that it abolishes
privacy and private property, individuality, freedom, motivation to work,
education, marriage, family, culture, nations, religion and philosophy? He does
not deny that communism abolishes these things, but says that capitalism has
already done so. For example, he argues that "the bourgeois sees in his wife a
mere instrument of production." On the most sensitive and important issues,
family and religion, he offers rhetoric rather than logic; for example: "The
bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed
correlation between parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting...." And
here is his "answer" to religious and philosophical objections: "The charges
against communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an
ideological standpoint are not deserving of serious examination."

The simplest refutation of Marxism is that its materialism simply contradicts

itself. If ideas are nothing but products of material and economic forces, like
cars or shoes, then communist ideas are only that too. If all our ideas are
determined not by insight into truth but by the necessary movements of matter if
we just can't help the way our tongues happen to wag-then the thoughts of Marx
are no more true than the thoughts of Moses. To attack the grounds of thought is
to attack one's own attack.

But Marx sees this, and admits it. He reinterprets words as weapons, not as
truths. The functions of the words of the "Manifesto" (and, ultimately, even of
the much longer, more pseudo-scientific "Capital") is not to prove what is true
but to encourage the revolution. "Philosophers have only interpreted the world;
the thing to do is to change it." Marx is basically a pragmatist.

But even on this pragmatic level there is a self-contradiction. The "Manifesto"

ends with this famous appeal: "The communists disdain to conceal their views and
aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible
overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a
communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!" But this appeal
is self defeating, for Marx denies free will. Everything is fated; the
revolution is "inevitable" whether I choose to join it or not. You cannot appeal
to free choice and at the same time deny it.

There are strong practical objections to communism as well as these two

philosophical objections. For one thing, its predictions simply have not worked.
The revolution did not happen when and where Marxism predicted. Capitalism did
not disappear, nor did the state, the family or religion. And communism has not
produced contentment and equality anywhere it has gained power.

All Marx has been able to do is to play Moses and lead fools backward into the
slavery of Egypt (worldliness). The real Liberator is waiting in the wings for
the jester who now ``struts and frets his hour upon the stage" to lead his
fellow "fools to dusty death" the one topic Marxist philosophers refuse to face.

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The Pillars of Unbelief—Machiavelli by Peter Kreeft

Source: Jan-Feb 1988

National Catholic Register

Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals
who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers
with an enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the Christian
mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

We need to talk about "enemies" of the faith because the life of faith is a real
war. So say all the prophets, Apostles, martyrs and our Lord Himself.
Yet, we try to avoid talking about enemies. Why?

Partly because of our fear of confusing spiritual with material enemies; of

hating the sinner along with the sin; of forgetting that "our struggle is not
with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the
world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens"
(Eph. 6:12).

But that fear is more unfounded today than ever in the past. No age has been
more suspicious of militarism, more terrified of the horrors of physical war,
than ours. And no age has been more prone to confuse the sin with the sinner,
not by hating the sinner along with the sin but by loving the sin along with the
sinner. We often use "compassion" as an equivalent for moral relativism.

We're also soft. We don't like to fight because fighting means suffering and
sacrifice. War may not quite be hell, but it's damned uncomfortable. And anyway,
we're not sure there's anything worth fighting for. Perhaps we lack courage
because we lack a reason for courage.

This is how we think as moderns, but not as Catholics. As Catholics we know life
is spiritual warfare and that there are spiritual enemies. Once we admit that,
the next step follows inevitably. It is essential in warfare to know your enemy.
Otherwise, his spies pass by undetected. So this series is devoted to knowing
our spiritual enemies in the struggle for the modern heart. We'll discuss six
modern thinkers who've had an enormous impact on our everyday life. They have
also done great harm to the Christian mind.
Their names: Machiavelli, the inventor of "the new morality"; Kant, the
subjectivizer of Truth; Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"; Freud, the
founder of the "sexual revolution"; Marx, the false Moses for the masses; and
Sartre, the apostle of absurdity.

Niccolo Machiavelli (1496-1527) was the founder of modern political and social
philosophy, and seldom in the history of thought has there been a more total
revolution. Machiavelli knew how radical he was. He compared his work to
Columbus' as the discoverer of a new world, and to Moses' as the leader of a new
chosen people who would exit the slavery of moral ideas into a new promised land
of power and practicality.

Machiavelli's revolution can be summarized in six points.

For all previous social thinkers, the goal of political life was virtue. A good
society was conceived as one in which people are good. There was no "double
standard" between individual and social goodness-until Machiavelli. With him,
politics became no longer the art of the good but the art of the possible. His
influence on this point was enormous. All major social and political
philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche,
Dewey) subsequently rejected the goal of virtue, just as Machiavelli lowered the
standard and nearly everyone began to salute the newly masted flag.

Machiavelli's argument was that traditional morals were like the stars;
beautiful but too distant to cast any useful light on our earthly path. We need
instead man-made lanterns; in other words, attainable goals. We must take our
bearings from the earth, not from the heavens; from what men and societies
actually do, not from what they ought to do.

The essence of Machiavelli's revolution was to judge the ideal by the actual
rather than the actual by the ideal. An ideal is good for him, only if it is
practical; thus, Machiavelli is the father of pragmatism. Not only does "the end
justify the means"-any means that work-but the means even justify the end, in
the sense that an end is worth pursuing only if there are practical means to
attain it. In other words, the new summum bonum, or greatest good is success.
(Machiavelli sounds like not only the first pragmatist but the first American
pragmatist!)

Machiavelli didn't just lower the moral standards; he abolished them. More than
a pragmatist, he was an anti-moralist. The only relevance he saw morality having
to success was to stand in its way. He taught that it was necessary for a
successful prince "to learn how not to be good ("The Prince, ch. 15), how to
break promises, to lie and cheat and steal (ch. 18).

Because of such shameless views, some of Machiavelli's contemporaries saw "The

Prince" as a book literally inspired by the devil. But modern scholars usually
see it as drawn from science. They defend Machiavelli by claiming that he did
not deny morality, but simply wrote a book about another subject, about what is
rather than about what ought to be. They even praise him for his lack of
hypocrisy, implying that moralism equals hypocrisy.

This is the common, modern misunderstanding of hypocrisy as not practicing what

you preach. In that sense all men are hypocrites unless they stop preaching.
Matthew Arnold defined hypocrisy as "the tribute vice pays to virtue."
Machiavelli was the first to refuse to pay even that tribute. He overcame
hypocrisy not by raising practice to the level of preaching but of lowering
preaching to the level of practice, by conforming the ideal to the real rather
than the real to the ideal.

In fact, he really preaches: "Poppa, don't preach!"-like the recent rock song.
Can you imagine Moses saying, "Poppa, don't preach!" to God on Mount Sinai? Or
Mary to the angel? Or Christ in Gethsemane, instead of "Father, not my will but
thine be done"? If you can, you are imagining hell, because our hope of heaven
depends on those people having said to God, "Poppa, do preach!"

Actually, we have misdefined "hypocrisy." Hypocrisy is not the failure to

practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

By this definition Machiavelli was almost the inventor of hypocrisy, for he was
almost the inventor of propaganda. He was the first philosopher who hoped to
convert the whole world through propaganda.

He saw his life as a spiritual warfare against the Church and its propaganda. He
believed that every religion was a piece of propaganda whose influence lasted
between 1,666 and 3,000 years. And he thought Christianity would end long before
the world did, probably around the year 1666, destroyed either by barbarian
invasions from the East (what is now Russia) or by a softening and weakening of
the Christian West from within, or both. His allies were all lukewarm Christians
who loved their earthly fatherland more than heaven, Caesar more than Christ,
social success more than virtue. To them he addressed his propaganda. Total
candor about his ends would have been unworkable, and confessed atheism fatal,
so he was careful to avoid explicit heresy. But his was the destruction of "the
Catholic fake" and his means was aggressive secularist propaganda. (One might
argue, perhaps peevishly, that he was the father of the modern media
establishment.)

He discovered that two tools were needed to command men's behavior and thus to
control human history: the pen and the sword, propaganda and arms. Thus both
minds and bodies could be dominated, and domination was his goal. He saw all of
human life and history as determined by only two forces: virtu (force) and
fortuna (chance). The simple formula for success was the maximization of virtu
and the minimization of fortuna. He ends "The Prince" with this shocking image:
"Fortune is a woman, and if she is to be submissive it is necessary to beat and
coerce her" (ch. 25). In other words, the secret of success is a kind of rape.
For the goal of control, arms are needed as well as propaganda, and Machiavelli
is a hawk. He believed that "you cannot have good laws without good arms, and
where there are good arms, good laws inevitably follow" (ch. 12). In other words
justice "comes out of a barrel of a gun," to adapt Mao Tse-tung's phrase.

Machiavelli believed that "all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed
prophets have come to grief" (ch. 6). Moses, then, must have used arms which,
the Bible failed to report; Jesus, the supreme unarmed prophet, came to grief;
He was crucified and not resurrected. But His message conquered the world
through propaganda, through intellectual arms. This was the war Machiavelli set
out to fight.

Social relativism also emerged from Machiavelli's philosophy. He recognized no

laws above those of different societies and since these laws and societies
originated in force rather than morality, the consequence is that morality is
based on immorality. The argument went like this: Morality can only come from
society, since there is no God and no God-given universal natural moral law. But
every society originated in some revolution or violence. Roman society, e.g.,
the origin of Roman law, itself originated with Romulus' murder of his brother
Remus. All human history begins with Cain's murder of Abel. Therefore, the
foundation of law is lawlessness. The foundation of morality is immorality.

The argument is only as strong as its first premise, which-like all sociological
relativism, including that which dominates the minds of writers and readers of
nearly all sociology textbooks today-is really implicit atheism.

Machiavelli criticized Christian and classical ideals of charity by a similar

argument. He asked: How do you get the goods you give away? By selfish
competition. All goods are gotten at another's expense: If my slice of the pie
is so much more, others' must be that much less. Thus unselfishness depends on
selfishness.

The argument presupposes materialism, for spiritual goods do not diminish when
shared or given away, and do not deprive another when I acquire them. The more
money I get, the less you have and the more I give away, the less I have. But
love, truth, friendship and wisdom increase rather than decrease when shared.
The materialist simply does not see this, or care about it.

Machiavelli believed we are all inherently selfish. There was for him no such
thing as an innate conscience or moral instinct. So the only way to make men
behave morally was by force, in fact totalitarian force, to compel them to act
contrary to their nature. The origins of modern totalitarianism also go back to
Machiavelli.
If a man is inherently selfish, then only fear and not love can effectively move
him. Thus Machiavelli wrote, "It is far better to be feared than loved...[for]
men worry less about doing an injury to one who makes himself loved than to one
who makes himself feared. The bond of love is one which men, wretched creatures
that they are, break when it is to their advantage to do so, but fear is
strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective" (ch. 17).
The most amazing thing about this brutal philosophy is that it won the modern
mind, though only by watering down or covering up its darker aspects.

Machiavelli's successors toned down his attack on morality and religion, but
they did not return to the idea of a personal God or objective and absolute
morality as the foundation of society. Machiavelli's narrowing down came to
appear as a widening out. He simply lopped off the top story of the building of
life; no God, only man; no soul, only body; no spirit, only matter; no ought,
only is. Yet this squashed building appeared (through propaganda) as a Tower of
Babel, this confinement appeared as a liberation from the "confinements" of
traditional morality, like taking your belt out a notch.

Satan is not fairy tale; he is a brilliant strategist and psychologist and he is

utterly real. Machiavelli's line of argument is one of Satan's most successful
lies to this day. Whenever we are tempted, he is using this lie to make evil
appear as good and desirable; to make his slavery appear as freedom and "the
glorious freedom of the sons of God" appear as slavery. The "Father of Lies"
loves to tell not little lies but The Big Lie, to turn the truth upside down.
And he gets away with it-unless we blow the cover of the Enemy's spies.

Design by davenevins.com
The Pillars of Unbelief—Sartre by Peter Kreeft

Source: Jan-Feb 1988

National Catholic Register

Just as we have pillars of Christian faith, the saints, so are there individuals
who have become pillars of unbelief. Peter Kreeft discusses six modern thinkers
with an enormous impact on everyday life, and with great harm to the Christian
mind:

Machiavelli - inventor of "the new morality"

Kant - subjectivizer of Truth
Nietzsche - self-proclaimed "Anti-Christ"
Freud - founder of the "sexual revolution"
Marx - false Moses for the masses, and
Sartre - apostle of absurdity.

Jean-Paul Sartre may be the most famous atheist of the 20th century. As such, he
qualifies for anyone's short list of "pillars of unbelief."
Yet he may have done more to drive fence-sitters toward the faith than most
Christian apologists. For Sartre has made atheism such a demanding, almost
unendurable, experience that few can bear it.

Comfortable atheists who read him become uncomfortable atheists, and

uncomfortable atheism is a giant step closer to God. In his own words,
"Existentialism is nothing else than an attempt to draw all the consequences of
a coherent atheistic position." For this we should be grateful to him.

He called his philosophy "existentialism" because of the thesis that "existence

precedes essence." What this means concretely is that "man is nothing else than
what he makes of himself." Since there is no God to design man, man has no
blueprint, no essence. His essence or nature comes not from God as Creator but
from his own free choice.

There's profound insight here, though it is immediately subverted. The insight

is the fact that man by his free choices determines who he will be. God indeed
creates what all men are. But the individual fashions his own unique
individuality. God makes our what but we make our who. God gives us the dignity
of being present at our own creation, or co-creation; He associates us with
Himself in the task of co-creating our selves. He creates only the objective raw
material, through heredity and environment. I shape it into the final form of
myself through my free choices.

Unfortunately, Sartre contends that this disproves God, for if there were a God,
man would be reduced to a mere artifact of God, and thus would not be free. He
constantly argues that human freedom and dignity require atheism. His attitude
is like that of a cowboy in a Western, saying to God as to an enemy cowboy:
"This town ain't big enough for both you and me. One of us has to leave."

Thus Sartre's legitimate concern with human freedom and his insight into how it
makes persons fundamentally different from mere things lead him to atheism
because (1) he confuses freedom with independence, and because (2) the only God
he can conceive of is one who would take away human freedom rather than creating
and maintaining it—a sort of cosmic fascist. Furthermore, (3) Sartre makes the
adolescent mistake of equating freedom with rebellion. He says freedom is only
"the freedom to say no."

But this is not the only freedom. There's also the freedom to say yes. Sartre
thinks we compromise our freedom when we say yes, when we choose to affirm the
values we've been taught by our parents, our society, or our Church. So what
Sartre means by freedom is very close to what the beatniks of the `50s and the
hippies of the `60s called "doing your own thing," and what the Me generation of
the `70s called "looking out for No. 1."

Another concept Sartre takes seriously but misuses is the idea of

responsibility. He thinks that belief in God would necessarily compromise human
responsibility, for we would then blame God rather than ourselves for what we
are. But that's simply not so. My heavenly Father, like my earthly father, is
not responsible for my choices or the character I shape by means of those
choices; I am. And the fact of my responsibility no more disproves the existence
of my heavenly Father than it disproves the existence of my earthly father.

Sartre has a keen awareness of evil and human perversity. He says, "We have
learned to take Evil seriously...Evil is not an appearance...Knowing its causes
does not dispel it. Evil cannot be redeemed."

Yet he also says that since there is no God and since we therefore create our
own values and laws, there really is no evil: "To choose to be this or that is
to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never
choose evil." So Sartre gives both too much reality to evil ("Evil cannot be
redeemed") and too little ("We can never choose evil").

Sartre's atheism does not merely say that God doesn't exist, but that God is
impossible. He at least pays some homage to the biblical notion of God as "I Am
by calling it the most self-contradictory idea ever imagined, "the impossible
synthesis" of being-for-itself (subjective personality, the "I") with
being-in-itself (objective eternal perfection, the "Am").

God means the perfect person, and this is for Sartre a contradiction of terms.
Perfect things or ideas, like Justice or Truth, are possible; and imperfect
persons, like Zeus or Apollo, are possible. But the perfect person is
impossible. Zeus is possible but not real. God is unique among gods: not only
unreal but impossible.

Since God is impossible and since God is love, love is impossible. The most
shocking thing in Sartre is probably his denial of the possibility of genuine,
altruistic love. In place of God, most atheists substitute human love as the
thing they believe in. But Sartre argues that this is impossible. Why?
Because if there is no God, each individual is God. But there can be only one
God, one absolute. Thus, all interpersonal relationships are fundamentally
relationships of rivalry. Here, Sartre echoes Machiavelli. Each of us
necessarily plays God to others; each of us, as the author of the play of his
own life, necessarily reduces others to characters in his drama.

There is a little word which ordinary people think denotes something real and
which lovers think denotes something magical. Sartre thinks it denotes something
impossible and illusory. It is the word "we." There can be no "we-subject," no
community, no self-forgetful love if each of us is always trying to be God, the
one single unique I-subject.

Sartre's most famous play, "No Exit," puts three dead people in a room and
watches them make hell for each other simply by playing God to each other—not in
the sense of exerting external power over each other but simply by knowing each
other as objects. The shocking lesson of the play is that "hell is other
people."

It takes a profound mind to say something as profoundly false as that. In truth,

hell is precisely the absence of other people, human and divine. Hell is total
loneliness. Heaven is other people, because heaven is where God is, and God is
Trinity. God is love, God is "other persons."

Sartre's tough-minded honesty makes him almost attractive, despite his repellant
conclusions like the meaninglessness of life, the arbitrariness of values and
the impossibility of love. But his honesty, however deep it may have lodged in
his character, was made trivial and meaningless because of this denial of God
and thus of objective Truth. If there is no divine mind, there is no truth
except the truth each of us makes of himself. So if there's nothing for me to be
honest about except me, what meaning does honesty have?

Yet we cannot help rendering a mixed verdict on Sartre, and being gratified by
his very repulsiveness—for it flows from his consistency. He shows us the true
face of atheism: absurdity (that's the abstract word), and nausea (that's the
concrete image he uses, and the title of his first and greatest novel).
"Nausea" is the story of a man who, after arduous searching, finds the terrible
truth that life has no meaning, that it's simply nauseating excess, like vomit
or excrement. (Sartre deliberately tends toward obscene images because he feels
life itself is obscene.)
We cannot help agreeing with William Barrett when he says that "to those who are
ready to use this [nausea] as an excuse for tossing out the whole Sartrian
philosophy, we may point out that it is better to encounter one's existence in
disgust than never to encounter it at all."

In other words, Sartre's importance is like that of Ecclesiastes: He asks the

greatest of all questions, courageously and unswervingly, and we can admire him
for that. Unfortunately, he also gives the worst possible answer to it, as
Ecclesiastes did: "Vanity of vanity, all is vanity."

We can only pity him for that, and with him the many other atheists who are
clear-headed enough to see as he did that "without God all things are
permissible"—but nothing has meaning.

Design by davenevins.com
The Problem of Evil by Peter Kreeft

The problem of evil is the most serious problem in the world. It is also the one
serious objection to the existence of God.

When Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote his great Summa Theologica, he could find only
two objections to the existence of God, even though he tried to list at least
three objections to every one of the thousands of theses he tried to prove in
that great work. One of the two objections is the apparent ability of natural
science to explain everything in our experience without God; and the other is
the problem of evil.

More people have abandoned their faith because of the problem of evil than for
any other reason. It is certainly the greatest test of faith, the greatest
temptation to unbelief. And it's not just an intellectual objection. We feel it.
We live it. That's why the Book of Job is so arresting.

The problem can be stated very simply: If God is so good, why is his world so
bad? If an all-good, all-wise, all-loving, all-just, and all-powerful God is
running the show, why does he seem to be doing such a miserable job of it? Why
do bad things happen to good people?

The unbeliever who asks that question is usually feeling resentment toward and
rebellion against God, not just lacking evidence for his existence. C. S. Lewis
recalls that as an atheist he "did not believe God existed. I was also very
angry with him for not existing. I was also angry with him for having created
the world."

When you talk to such a person, remember that it is more like talking to a
divorcée than to a skeptical scientist. The reason for unbelief is an unfaithful
lover, not an inadequate hypothesis. The unbeliever's problem is not just a soft
head but a hard heart. And the good apologist knows how to let the heart lead
the head as well as vice versa.
There are four parts to the solution to the problem of evil.

Evil is not a thing

but a wrong choice.

First, evil is not a thing, an entity, a being. All beings are either the
Creator or creatures created by the Creator. But every thing God created is
good, according to Genesis. We naturally tend to picutre evil as a thing—a black
cloud, or a dangerous storm, or a grimacing face, or dirt. But these pictures
mislead us. If God is the Creator of all things and evil is a thing, then God is
the Creator of evil, and he is to blame for its existence. No, evil is not a
thing but a wrong choice, or the damage done by a wrong choice. Evil is no more
a positive thing than blindness is. But is is just as real. It is not a thing,
but it is not an illusion.

The all-powerful God gave us

a share in his power
to choose freely.

Second, the origin of evil is not the Creator but the creature's freely choosing
sin and selfishness. Take away all sin and selfishness and you would have heaven
on earth. Even the remaining physical evils would no longer rankle an dembitter
us. Saints endure and even embrace suffering and death as lovers embrace herioc
challenges. But they do not embrace sin.

Furthermore, the cause of physical evil is spiritual evil. The cause of

suffering is sin. After Genesis tells the story of the good God creating a good
world, it next answers the obvious question "Where did evil come from then?" by
the story of the fall of mankind. How are we to understand this? How can
spiritual evil (sin) cause physical evil (suffering and death)?

God is the source of all life and joy. Therefore, when the human soul rebels
against God, it loses its life and joy. Now a human being is body as well as
soul. We are single creatures, not double: we are not even body and soul as much
as we are embodied soul, or ensouled body. So the body must share in the soul's
inevitable punishment—a punishment as natural and unavoidable as broken bones
from jumping off a cliff or a sick stomach from eating rotten food rather than a
punishment as artificial and external as a grade for a course or a slap on the
hands for taking the cookies.

Whether this consequence of sin was a physical change in the world or only a
spiritual change in human consciousness—whether the "thorns and thistles" grew
in the garden only after the fall or whether they were always there but were
only felt as painful by the newly fallen consciousness—is another question. But
in either case the connection between spiritual evil and physical evil has to be
as close as the connection between the two things they affect, the human soul
and the human body.

If the origin of evil is free will, and God is the origin of free will, isn't
God then the origin of evil? Only as parents are the origin of the misdeeds
their children commit by being the origin of their children. The all-powerful
God gave us a share in his power to choose freely. Would we prefer he had not
and had made us robots rather than human beings?

The Cross is God's part of the

practical solution to evil.
Our part is to repent, to
believe, and to work with
God in fighting evil
 by the power of love.

A third part of the solution to the problem of evil is the most important part:
how to resolve the problem in practice, not just in theory; in life, not just in
thought. Although evil is a serious problem for thought (for it seems to
disprove the existence of God), it is even more of a problem in life (for it is
the real exclusion of God). But even if you think the solution in thought is
obscure and uncertain, the solution in practice is as strong and clear as the
sun: it is the Son. God's solution to the problem of evil is his Son Jesus
Christ. The Father's love sent his Son to die for us to defeat the power of evil
in human nature: that's the heart of the Christian story. We do not worship a
deistic God, an absentee landlord who ignores his slum; we worship a garbageman
God who came right down into our worst garbage to clean it up. How do we get God
off the hook for allowing evil? God is not off the hook; God is the hook. That's
the point of a crucifix.

The Cross is God's part of the practical solution to evil. Our part, according
to the same Gospel, is to repent, to believe, and to work with God in fighting
evil by the power of love. The King has invaded; we are finishing the mop-up
operation.

Why do bad things happen

to good people?
The question makes three questionable assumptions.

Finally, what about the philosophical problem? It is not logically contradictory

to say an all-powerful and all-loving God tolerates so much evil when he could
eradicate it? Why do bad things happen to good people? The question makes three
questionable assumptions.

First, who's to say we are good people? The question should be not "Why do bad
things happen to good people?" but "Why do good things happen to bad people?" If
the fairy godmother tells Cinderella that she can wear her magic gown until
midnight, the question should be not "Why not after midnight?" but "Why did I
get to wear it at all?" The question is not why the glass of water is half empty
but why it is half full, for all goodness is gift. The best people are the ones
who are most reluctant to call themselves good people. Sinners think they are
saints, but saints know they are sinners. The best man who ever lived once said,
"No one is good but God alone."

Second, who's to say suffering is all bad? Life without it would produce spoiled
brats and tyrants, not joyful saints. Rabbi Abraham Heschel says simply, "The
man who has not suffered, what can he possibly know, anyway?" Suffering can work
for the greater good of wisdom. It is not true that all things are good, but it
is true that "all things work together for good to those who love God."
Third, who's to say we have to know all God's reasons? Who ever promised us all
the answers? Animals can't understand much about us; why should we be able to
understand everything about God? The obvious point of the Book of Job, the
world's greatest exploration of the problem of evil, is that we just don't know
what God is up to. What a hard lesson to learn: Lesson One, that we are
ignorant, that we are infants! No wonder Socrates was declared by the Delphic
Oracle to be the wisest man in the world. He interpreted that declaration to
mean that he alone knew that he did not have wisdom, and that was true wisdom
for man.

A child on the tenth story of a burning building cannot see the firefighters
with their safety net on the street. They call up, "Jump! We'll catch you. Trust
us." The child objects, "But I can't see you." The firefighter replies, "That's
all right. I can see you. We are like that child, evil is like the fire, our
ignorance is like the smoke, God is like the firefighter, and Christ is like the
safety net. If there are situations like this where we must trust even fallible
human beings with our lives, where we must trust what we hear, not what we see,
then it is reasonable that we must trust the infallible, all-seeing God when we
hear from his word but do not see from our reason or experience. We cannot know
all God's reasons, but we can know why we cannot know.

God has let us know a lot. He has lifted the curtain on the problem of evil with
Christ. There, the greatest evil that ever happened, both the greatest spiritual
evil and the greatest physical evil, both the greatest sin (deicide) and the
greatest suffering (perfect love hated and crucified), is revealed as his wise
and loving plan to bring about the greatest good, the salvation of the world
from sin and suffering eternally. There, the greatest injustice of all time is
integrated into the plan of salvation that Saint Paul calls "the righteousness
(justice) of God". Love finds a way. Love is very tricky. But love needs to be
trusted.

The worst aspect of the problem of evil is eternal evil, hell. Does hell not
contradict a loving and omnipotent God? No, for hell is the consequence of free
will. We freely choose hell for ourselves; God does not cast anyone into hell
against his will. If a creature is really free to say yes or no to the Creator's
offer of love and spiritual marriage, then it must be possible for the creature
to say no. And that is what hell is, essentially. Free will, in turn, was
created out of God's love. Therefore hell is a result of God's love. Everything
is.

No sane person wants hell to exist. No sane person wants evil to exist. But hell
is just evil eternalized. If there is evil and if there is eternity, there can
be hell. If it is intellectually dishonest to disbelieve in evil just because it
is shocking and uncomfortable, it is the same with hell. Reality has hard
corners, surprises, and terrible dangers in it. We desperately need a true road
map, not nice feelings, if we are to get home. It is true, as people often say,
that "hell just feels unreal, impossible." Yes. So does Auschwitz. So does
Calvary.

From Fundamentals of the Faith by Ignatius Press.

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The Sea Within by Peter Kreeft

Why are we in love with the sea? Everyone knows we are, but no one knows
why....

Modern times are not the low tide of sea-love but the high. Our minds may have
demythologized the sea, but our hearts have not. We no longer think of it as
Mother, or goddess, or spirit, as our ancestors did, but I think we love it even
more than they did. Just look at the prices on real estate ads for oceanfront
land....

When we're at the place where the sea and the land meet, why do we love to look
at the sea rather than at the land?
We act on the sea with our ships, but she acts on our souls with her beauty. We
conquer her physically, but she conquers us spiritually. How does she come to
have such power?

Is the gravity that draws our soul to the sea in us, or is it in the sea? What
is the link between the matter without and the spirit within, between salt water
and love? Is it the sea water in our souls, or is it the soul in the sea water?
Or is that very question the wrong one, one that could be asked only by a
modern mind that has separated reality into mere matter without and mere spirit
within, the intellectual albatross of Descartes and the so-called
"Enlightenment"? We may have to turn back the cultural clock to solve our
riddle...

The myth maker, the poet, the mystic, the sailor, the saint, and the child know
here best because they know HER; the scientist knows only many things ABOUT her.

They know her personality; he knows only her blood type.....

Though the sea is not a goddess, she is more like a goddess than a chemical. So
the pagan mistake of seeing too much in her is not as bad as the modern mistake
of seeing too little.

Moses used her as a symbol for all matter. That cosmic stuff that God's Spirit
blew on and formed in the creation story in Genesis—why did Moses call that
"water"? If you watch the stormy sea pacing in its cage like a tiger, you will
know. As you watch, you enter a time machine: you are watching a picture of the
drama of creation. When He designed earth's stormy oceans, God painted a
picture of His Spirit breathing His timeless passion out onto the heavy seas of
time, on the first day of creation; and He hung this picture in His nursery
(earth) for His children (us) to see once they would be born....

The mystery of the sea is only the most obvious example of the mystery of all
nature. For not only the sea but all nature contains a mystery: why does it
fascinate us so? Why is it inexhaustible to our spirit? Why is a forest of
trees better than a forest of telephone poles? We deliberately turn trees into
telephone poles or buildings, yet we love the raw material more than the things
we make out of it. Why?

An Iroquois would say it is ORENDA. A Taoist would say it is the Tao. But what
is that? What is the spiritual power of matter?...What power, what spiritual
electricity, what strong magic, did the Creator put into the creation?

If we ever find the answer to that question, I think we will find it first in
the sea. For there we find the most magic of all. All nature is radioactive
with a mysterious spiritual power that we do not understand, but it shows itself
most powerfully in the sea. We never feel more humble and helpless than when we
face the sea—and we never feel happier...

We are no longer versed in the art of third-eye seemanship...This ancient art

was practiced in all premodern cultures. It could be called the art of sign
reading. It assumes that nature is not just a thing but also a sign, like a
word, and therefore is not just to be looked-at but also looked-along. You
look-along a sign, not just at it; you READ the sign. But modern books at the
sea always look AT it instead of ALONG it, so they miss its significance, its
signing. They never learned its language, which is sign language. They're so
busy imposing their own advanced scientific languages on nature that they don't
listen to nature's own simple sign language speaking to them....They think
nature isn't signing but spastic. They are like unsocialized children who can't
read body language....

I think words are not meant to capture the answer to the sea's mystery, any more
than they are meant to capture the strangely similar mystery of music. I think
our question about the riddle of the sea is meant to be asked, but not meant to
be answered. It is supposed to go on and on like the waves....

The music is playing all the time. All the intermittent musics on earth are
surrounded by the perpetual music of the sea; and the music of the sea is
surrounded by "the music of the spheres."

Why doesn't God let everyone hear this angelic music all the time if it is so
beautiful? Maybe He does but we don't hear it because we let worldly wax grow
in our ears. Or maybe He doesn't; maybe it's not our folly but His mercy that
insulates us from it; maybe God puts cotton in our ears because beauty so big
would drive us mad (the sea almost does, already); because if we heard those
cosmic chords, so tremendous and remote, perpetually shaking the skies and
making Him that sitteth in the heavens to laugh, we would be unable to eat,
sleep, reproduce, or survive; because it would be an unbearable weight of glory
that would crush our spirit like a locomotive crushing a bug, a fire that would
burn up ouor mind as a furnace burns a moth. Maybe we would just disappear.
Maybe the only way to survive in this angel-haunted universe is to be deaf and
dumb....

God, our hearts, and the sea: three inexhaustibles. No surfer in history has
ever been heard to say: "Now I've had enough of waves." No lover will ever say,
"Now I've had enough of her." And no saint will ever say, "Now I've had enough
of God."...

When you live by the sea, everything changes, and the change is the same as when
you believe in God: you are never alone. There is a Greater Presence next to
you every minute. You have to take account of this Presence every day, at least
unconsciously....You always have this large, unpredictable wild animal in your
neighborhood. It's like having a 500-pound mother-in-law living in your back
yard....

Waves are lips. Lips can kiss, or speak, or bite. Gentle little waves kiss the
children who play in them. Larger waves kiss the surfers who ride them. Bigger
waves than we can handle bite us. But what do they speak?
All waves speak, but they speak in tongues, and we can't interpret their speech.

That's probably because it's too simple, like God's. Maybe all they're saying
is I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU until the
end of
time. Like God....

The sea is the perfect toy. It's unbreakable and unloseable, always available
and always alive. It plays and plays with you without ever getting tired or
bored. It dances with you and wrestles with you and boxes with you and tosses
you around. It's just dangerous enough to be exciting. And you never have to
put it away when you finish playing with it.

The surf can make us all children again in five seconds if only we let it.
Think a truly radical thought: think what a revolution it would be if everyone
on earth played in the surf once a week. How much depression and suicide and
hatred and violence and resentment and anger and envy and boredom and addiction
and wars and murders and plots and tyrannies would just go out like a candle in
the water? The sea is a peacemaker. How can surfers be warmongers? How could
anyone drenched with the wisdom of playwater ever come up with this brilliant
idea, the idea that has moved so much of our history?—"Hey, it seems we've got
problems. Let's deal with them this way: let's dress up in funny uniforms and
go out and kill each other."..

Deep down, we know our souls need something wild, something dangerous, something
that makes us feel alive. The sea does that. It's the last untamed place on
earth.

These exerpts are from Kreeft's unique book The Sea Within
For an audio lecture on this topic hear The Spirituality of the Sea

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The Three Most Profound Ideas I Have Ever Had by Peter Kreeft

Ideas are more precious than diamonds. The three most precious ideas I have ever
discovered all concern the love of God.

None of them is original. But every one is revolutionary. None of them came from
me. But all of them came to me with sudden force and fire: the "aha!"
experience, the "eureka!" experience. They were all realizations, not just
beliefs.

1. There Is Only "One Thing Necessary." The first happened when I was about
six or seven, I think. It was the first important conscious discovery I ever
made, and I don't think I have ever had a more mature or wiser thought than that
one. I remember to this day exactly where I was when it hit me: riding north on
Haledon Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets in Paterson, New Jersey after
Sunday morning church with my parents. Isn't it remarkable how we remember
exactly where we were when great events happen that change our lives?

I had learned some things about God and Jesus, about heaven, and about good and
evil in church and Sunday school. Like most children at that age, I was a bit
confused and overwhelmed by it all, especially by what this great being called
God expected of me. I felt a little insecure, I guess, about not knowing and a
little guilty about not doing everything that I was supposed to be doing. Then
all of a sudden the sun shone through the fog. I saw the one thing necessary
that made sense and order out of everything else.

I checked out my insight with my father, my most reliable authority. He was an

elder in the church and (much more important) a good and wise man. "Dad,
everything they teach us in church and Sunday school, all the stuff we're
supposed to learn from the Bible—it all comes down to only one thing, doesn't
it? I mean, if we only remember the one most important thing all the time, then
all the other things will be O.K., right?"

He was rightly skeptical. "What one thing? There are a lot of things that are
important."

"I mean, I should just always ask what God wants me to do and then do it. That's
all, isn't it?"

Wise men know when they've lost an argument. "You know, I think you're right,
son. That's it."

I had perceived—via God's grace, not my own wit, surely—that since God is love,
we must therefore love God and love whatever God loves. I now knew that if we
turn to the divine conductor and follow his wise and loving baton—which is his
will, his Word—then the music of our life will be a symphony.
2. The Way to Happiness Is Self-forgetful Love. A second realization follows
closely upon this one. That is, it follows logically. But it did not follow
closely in time for me. Instead, it took half a lifetime to appreciate, through
a million experiments, every one of which proved the same result: that the way
to happiness is self-forgetful love and the way to unhappiness is self-regard,
self-worry, and the search for personal happiness. Our happiness comes to us
only when we do not seek for it. It comes to us when we seek others' happiness
instead.

It is an embarrassingly common lesson to take so long to learn, but most of us

are incredibly slow learners here. We constantly try other ways, thinking that
perhaps the happiness that did not come to us the last time through selfishness
will do so next time. It never does. The truth is blindingly clear, but we are
clearly blind.

The secret of love is not hidden, for "God is love," and God is not hidden. God
said through his prophet Isaiah: "I did not speak in secret, / in a land of
darkness; / I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, / 'Seek me in chaos.' / I
the LORD speak the truth, / I declare what is right" (Is 45:19).
Of course God's secret plans, which we do not need to know, are hidden. And
God's infinite nature, which finite minds cannot know, is hidden. But the thing
that we need to know, God does not hide from us. He offers it to us publicly and
freely. Jesus invited prospective disciples to "come and see" (In 1:39). We are
told by the apostle Paul to "test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thes
5:21).

This lesson is so well known that even a pagan like Buddha knew it profoundly,
or at least its negative half. His "second noble truth" is that the source of
all unhappiness and suffering (dukkha) is selfishness (tanha). All who teach the
opposite—that selfishness is the way to happiness—are unhappy souls. "By their
fruits you shall know them," as Jesus tells us. Who are the happiest people on
earth? People like Mother Teresa and her nuns who have nothing, give everything,
and "rejoice in the Lord always" (Phil 4:4).

3. "In Everything God Works for Good with Those Who Love Him." A third
shattering realization was that Romans 8:28 was literally true: "In everything
God works for good with those who love him." This is surely the most astonishing
verse in the Bible, for it certainly doesn't look as if all things work for
good. What awful things our lives contain! But if God, the all-powerful Creator
and Designer and Provider of our lives, is 100 percent love, then it necessarily
follows, as the night the day, that everything in his world, from birth to
death, from kisses to slaps, from candy to cancer, comes to us out of God's
active or permissive love.

It is incredibly simple and perfectly reasonable. It is only our adult

complexity that makes it look murky. As G.K. Chesterton says, life is always
complicated for someone without principles. Here is the shining simplicity: if
God is total love, then everything he wills for me must come from his love and
be for my good. For that what love is, the willing of the beloved's good. And if
this God of sheer love is also omnipotent and can do anything he wills, then it
follows that all things must work together for my ultimate good.

Not necessarily for my immediate good, for short-range harm may be the necessary
road to long-range good. And not necessarily for my apparent good, for
appearances may be deceiving. Thus suffering does not seem good. But it can
always work for my real and ultimate good. Even the bad things I and others do,
though they do not come from God, are allowed by God because they are included
in his plan. You can't checkmate, corner, surprise, or beat him. "He's got the
whole world in his hands," as the old gospel chorus tells us. And he's got my
whole life in his hands, too. He could take away any evil—natural, human, or
demonic—like swatting a fly. He allows it only because it works out for our
greater good in the end, just as it did with Job.

In fact, every atom in the universe moves exactly as it does only because
omnipotent Love designed it so. Dante was right: it is "the love that moves the
sun and all the stars." This is not poetic fancy but sober, logical fact.
Therefore, the most profound thing you can say really is this simple children's
grace for meals: "God is great and God is good; let us thank him for our food.
Amen!" I had always believed in God's love and God's omnipotence. But once I put
the two ideas together, saw the unavoidable logical conclusion (Rom 8:28), and
applied this truth to my life, I could never again see the world the same way.
If God is great (omnipotent) and God is good (loving), then everything that
happens is our spiritual food; and we can and should thank him for it. Yet how
often we fail to recognize and appreciate this simple but profound truth.

These are, I think, the three most profound ideas I have ever had. However,
there is one idea that I have heard that I think is even more profound. It is
Karl Barth's answer to the questioner who asked him, "Professor Barth, you have
written dozens of great books, and many of us think you are the greatest
theologian in the world. Of all your many ideas, what is the most profound
thought you have ever had?" Without a second's hesitation, the great theologian
replied, "Jesus loves me."

From The God Who Loves You by Ignatius Press.

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The Uniqueness of Christianity by Peter Kreeft

Ronald Knox once quipped that "the study of comparative religions is the best
way to become comparatively religious." The reason, as G. K. Chesterton says, is
that, according to most "scholars" of comparative religion, "Christianity and
Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism."

But any Christian who does apologetics must think about comparative religions
because the most popular of all objections against the claims of Christianity
today comes from this field. The objection is not that Christianity is not true
but that it is not the truth; not that it is a false religion but that it is
only a religion. The world is a big place, the objector reasons; "different
strokes for different folks". How insufferably narrow-minded to claim that
Christianity is the one true religion! God just has to be more open-minded than
that.

This is the single most common objection to the Faith today, for "today"
worships not God but equality. It fears being right where others are wrong more
than it fears being wrong. It worships democracy and resents the fact that God
is an absolute monarch. It has changed the meaning of the word honor from being
respected because you are superior in some way to being accepted because you are
not superior in any way but just like us. The one unanswerable insult, the
absolutely worst name you can possibly call a person in today's society, is
"fanatic", especially "religious fanatic". If you confess at a fashionable
cocktail party that you are plotting to overthrow the government, or that you
are a PLO terrorist or a KGB spy, or that you molest porcupines or bite bats'
heads off, you will soon attract a buzzing, fascinated, sympathetic circle of
listeners. But if you confess that you believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son
of the living God, you will find yourself suddenly alone, with a distinct chill
in the air.

Here are twelve of the commonest forms of this objection, the odium of elitism,
with answers to each.

1. "All religions are the same, deep down."

That is simply factually untrue. No one ever makes this claim unless he is (1)
abysmally ignorant of what the different religions of the world actually teach
or (2) intellectually irresponsible in understanding these teachings in the
vaguest and woolliest way or (3) morally irresponsible in being indifferent to
them. The objector's implicit assumption is that the distinctive teachings of
the world's religions are unimportant, that the essential business of religion
is not truth but something else: transformation of consciousness or sharing and
caring or culture and comfort or something of that sort—not conversion but
conversation. Christianity teaches many things no other religion teaches, and
some of them directly contradict those others. If Christianity isn't true, why
be a Christian?
By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much
truth they teach.

Catholicism is first, with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue of papal
authority.

Then comes Protestantism and any "separated brethren" who keep the Christian
essentials as found in Scripture.

Third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via
Christ.

Fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies.

Fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism;

Sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos;

Seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and secular

humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural religion but
only ethics;

Eighth, idolarity; and

Ninth, Satanism.

To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat.

2. "But the essence of religion is the same at any rate: all religions agree at
least in being religious.

What is this essence of religion anyway? I challenge anyone to define it broadly

enough to include Confucianism, Buddhism, and modern Reform Judaism but narrowly
enough to exclude Platonism, atheistic Marxism, and Nazism.

The unproved and unprovable assumption of this second objection is that the
essence of religion is a kind of lowest common denominator or common factor.
Perhaps the common factor is a weak and watery thing rather than an essential
thing. Perhaps it does not exist at all. No one has ever produced it.

3. "But if you compare the Sermon on the Mount, Buddha's Dhammapada, Lao-tzu's
Tao-te-ching, Confucius' Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, the Proverbs of Solomon,
and the Dialogues of Plato, you willfind it: a real, profound, and strong
agreement."
Yes, but this is ethics, not religion. The objector is assuming that the essence
of religion is ethics. It is not. Everyone has an ethic, not everyone has a
religion. Tell an atheist that ethics equals religion. He will be rightly
insulted, for you would be calling him either religious if he is ethical, or
unethical because he is nonreligious. Ethics maybe the first step in religion
but it is not the last. As C.S. Lewis says, "The road to the Promised Land runs
past Mount Sinai."

4. "Speaking of mountains reminds me of my favorite analogy. Many roads lead up

the single mountain of religion to God at the top. It is provincial,
narrow-minded, and blind to deny the validity of other roads than yours."
The unproved assumption of this very common mountain analogy is that the roads
go up, not down; that man makes the roads, not God; that religion is man's
search for God, not God's search for man. C. S. Lewis says this sounds like "the
mouse's search for the cat".

Christianity is not a system of man's search for God but a story of God's search
for man. True religion is not like a cloud of incense wafting up from special
spirits into the nostrils of a waiting God, but like a Father's hand thrust
downward to rescue the fallen. Throughout the Bible, man-made religion fails.
There is no human way up the mountain, only a divine way down. "No man has seen
God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he has
made him known."

If we made the roads, it would indeed be arrogant to claim that any one road is
the only valid one, for all human things are equal, at least in all being human,
finite, and mixtures of good and bad. If we made the roads, it would be as
stupid to absolutize one of them as to absolutize one art form, one political
system, or one way of skinning a cat. But if God made the road, we must find out
whether he made many or one. If he made only one, then the shoe is on the other
foot: it is humility, not arrogance, to accept this one road from God, and it is
arrogance, not humility, to insist that our manmade roads are as good as God's
God-made one.

But which assumption is true? Even if the pluralistic one is true, not all
religions are equal, for then one religion is worse and more arrogant than all
others, for it centers on one who claimed, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the
Life; no man can come to the Father but by me."

5. "Still, it fosters religious imperialism to insist that your way is the only
way. You're on a power trip."

No, we believe it not because we want to, because we are imperialistic, or

because we invented it, but because Christ taught it. It isn't our way, it's his
way, that's the only way. We're just being faithful to him and to what he said.
The objector's assumption is that we can make religion whatever we want it to
6. "If the one-way doctrine comes from Christ, not from you, then he must have
been arrogant."

How ironic to think Jesus is arrogant! No sin excited his anger more than the
arrogance and bigotry of religious leaders. No man was ever more merciful, meek,
loving, and compassionate.

The objector is always assuming the thing to be proved: that Christ is just one
among many religious founders, human teachers. But he claimed to be the Way, the
Truth, and the Life; if that claim is not true, he is not one among many
religious sages but one among many lunatics. If the claim is true, then again he
is not one among many religious sages, but the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

7. "Do you want to revive the Inquisition? Don't you value religious tolerance?
Do you object to giving other religions equal rights?"

The Inquisition failed to distinguish the heresy from the heretic and tried to
eliminate both by force or fire. The objector makes the same mistake in reverse:
he refuses to condemn either. The state has no business defining and condemning
heresy, of course, but the believer must do it-if not through the Church, then
by himself. For to believe x is to condemn non-x as false. If you don't believe
non-x is false, then you don't really believe x is true.

8. "I'm surprised at this intolerance. I thought Christianity was the religion

of love."

It is. It is also the religion of truth. The objector is separating two divine
attributes. We are not. We are "speaking the truth in love".

9. "But all God expects of us is sincerity."

How do you know what God expects of us? Have you listened to God's revelation?
Isn't it dangerous to assume without question or doubt that God must do exactly
what you would do if you were God? Suppose sincerity were not enough; suppose
truth was needed too. Is that unthinkable? In every other area of life we need
truth. Is sincerity enough for a surgeon? An explorer? Don't we need accurate
road maps of reality?

The objector's implicit assumption here is that there is no objective truth in

religion, only subjective sincerity, so that no one can ever be both sincere and
wrong; that the spirit does not have objective roads like the body and the mind,
which lead to distinct destinations: the body's physical roads lead to different
cities and the mind's logical roads lead to different conclusions. True
sincerity wants to know the truth.
10. "Are non-Christians all damned then?"

No. Father Feeny was excommunicated by the Catholic Church for teaching that
"outside the Church, no salvation" meant outside the visible Church. God does
not punish pagans unjustly. He does not punish them for not believing in a Jesus
they never heard of, through no fault of their own (invincible ignorance). But
God, who is just, punishes them for sinning against the God they do know through
nature and conscience (see Rom 1-2). There are no innocent pagans, and there are
no innocent Christians either. All have sinned against God and against
conscience. All need a Savior. Christ is the Savior.

11. "But surely there's a little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the
best of us. There's good and bad everywhere, inside the Church and outside."
True. What follows from that fact? That we need no Savior? That there are many
Saviors? That contradictory religions can all be true? That none is true? None
of these implied conclusions has the remotest logical connection with the
admitted premise.

There is a little good in the worst of us, but there's also a little bad in the
best of us; more, there's sin, separation from God, in all of us; and the best
of us, the saints, are the first to admit it. The universal sin Saint Paul
pinpoints in Romans 1:18 is to suppress the truth. We all sin against the truth
we know and refuse it when it condemns us or threatens our self-sufficiency or
complacency. We all rationalize. Our duty is plain to us—to be totally
honest—and none of us does his duty perfectly. We have no excuse of invincible
ignorance.

12. "But isn't God unjust to judge the whole world by Christian standards?"
God judges justly. "All who sinned without [knowing] the [Mosaic] law will also
perish without the law, and all who have sinned under the law will be judged by
the law" (Rom 2:12). Even pagans show "that what the law requires is written on
their hearts" (Rom 2:15). If we honestly consult our hearts, we will find two
truths: that we know what we ought to do and be, and that we fail to do and be
that.

Fundamentalists, faithful to the clear one-way teaching of Christ, often

conclude from this that pagans, Buddhists, et cetera, cannot be saved. Liberals,
who emphasize God's mercy, cannot bring themselves to believe that the mass of
men are doomed to hell, and they ignore, deny, nuance, or water down Christ's
own claims to uniqueness. The Church has found a third way, implied in the New
Testament texts. On the one hand, no one can be saved except through Christ. On
the other hand, Christ is not only the incarnate Jewish man but also the
eternal, preexistent word of God, "which enlightens every man who comes into the
world" (Jn 1:9). So Socrates was able to know Christ as word of God, as eternal
Truth; and if the fundamental option of his deepest heart was to reach out to
him as Truth, in faith and hope and love, however imperfectly known this Christ
was to Socrates, Socrates could have been saved by Christ too. We are not saved
by knowledge but by faith. Scripture nowhere says how explicit the intellectual
content of faith has to be. But it does clearly say who the one Savior is.

The Second Vatican Council took a position on comparative religions that

distinguished Catholicism from both Modernist relativism and Fundamentalist
exclusivism. It taught that on the one hand there is much deep wisdom and value
in other religions and that the Christian should respect them and learn from
them. But, on the other hand, the claims of Christ and his Church can never be
lessened, compromised, or relativized. We may add to our religious education by
studying other religions but never subtract from it.

From Fundamentals of the Faith by Ignatius Press.

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The Weight of Glory by Peter Kreeft

We all know what the weight of glory is, whether or not we have read Lewis'
golden sermon.

We know it from the magic words of the poets;or we know it from the wordless
word of great music, work of the Muses, not of man; or we know it from the word
spoken by human love, the moment when the world's most prosaic word suddenly
becomes the most wonder-full word in the world, the word "we"; or we know it in
high liturgy, in the solemn joy of adoration before the astonishing mystery of
God-with-us, when we are side by side with Mary, hailed by the angelic
annunciation of the heavenly glory, visited from another world, another
dimension; or we meet the glory in great art, when a picture becomes no longer
an object in this world but a magic window opening up onto another world for us,
a hole in our world, as the stars were to the ancient Greeks and as the painting
of The Dawn Treader was to the Pevensie children; or we know it in the
electrical shock of an absolutely perfect flower, or in the high, clear, crystal
glass of a winter night, or in the seagull's haunting, harking call to return to
Mother Sea.

For some, the glory is not so much in the far country as in the magic word
"home", the fairest place on earth, attained after Ulyssean adventures,
Herculean labors, or prodigal wanderings aplenty. All of us will know it flat in
the face when we die; we shall be hailed by the Angel of Death with the same
lightsome glory with which Mary was hailed by the Angel of Life, because Christ
has made Death into life's golden chariot, sent to fetch his Cinderella bride
out of the cinders of this fireplace of a world, through a far midnight ride, to
his very own castle and bedchamber, where Glory will beget glory upon us
forever.

Suppose you reply that you have never felt this "weight of glory". That is too
bad, but here are two things that are much worse, two dangerous conclusions you
may be tempted to draw from your not feeling the "weight of glory". One: Since I
have missed out on this most precious secret, I must be worthless and may as
well despair. It is worth much, therefore I am worth little. Two: Since I have
never experienced this thing, those who do are foolish dreamers of foolish
dreams. I am worth much, therefore it is worth little.

Both conclusions are not only logically fallacious but spiritually destructive.
They amount to a sigh and a sneer, despair and pride—the two things we can most
profitably exorcise from our lives, especially the sneer, the lowest thing in
the world.

We are immortals dreaming the terrible dream of

mere mortality.
But no one is devoid of the invitation to glory. Hide as we may, we are all
hailed by the angel. Ah, but we hear the hailing only on the "hailing
frequency": that spiritual ear that is buried at the very bottom of our being,
buried under the louder shouts and bellows of a hundred hungry, howling animals,
the this-worldly desires. So you may never seem to hear the heartbreakingly
sweet voice of the nightingale that sings every night in our heart. But it is
there whether we hear it or not. Be sure of that. If you are a human being, made
in the image of God, then you too are a potential god or goddess, creature of
the Creator, glory reflecting Glory, deep calling unto deep. All are weighted by
the Glory. But not all feel the weight.

There is no escape from the glory, for the glory is the glory of God, and there
is no escape from God. But there is an escape from knowing it, like the dwarfs
in The Last Battle. We cannot turn the universe inside out, but we can turn our
own minds inside out: we can believe we are mere mortals dreaming the dream of
immortality, while in fact we are immortals dreaming the terrible dream of mere
mortality. We can dream that we are only dreaming the glory, while in fact we
are never so wide awake as when we open our eyes to the glory. We can follow
Freud the Fraud and call it all illusion, soporific, and wishful thinking, while
in fact it calls us to waken to Ultimate Reality. We can think of it as airy and
insubstantial, like the creatures in The Tempest, while in fact it is the
"enormous bliss of Eden", bigger than a twenty-billion-light-year universe of a
trillion trillion suns and heavier than death. And stronger too.

From Heaven, the Heart's Deepest Longing by Ignatius Press.

Design by davenevins.com
Thirty-five FAQs About Eternity by Peter Kreeft
Source: Tough Questions Christians Ask
from Christianity Today

Asking questions about Heaven may seem like asking questions about Katmandu,
Kuala Lumpur, or some other exotic place you are unlikely to see firsthand—an
occasion for speculation. But writing about Heaven is not really like writing
about faraway places with strange-sounding names, for writing about Heaven is
really writing about God.

A creation reflects a Creator and the laws of a kingdom, the ideals of the King.
So asking whether we will have sex in Heaven or whether our pets will be there
is really asking what kind of God we serve and what his best intentions are for
our eternity.

Philosopher Peter Kreeft agreed to write this chapter because Christianity Today
still capitalized Heaven (which it usually doesn't) "as if it were a real place
like Boston" (which it is) "rather than a wispy abstraction like "wellness." In
this essay, Kreeft addresses (often whimsically) 35 frequently asked questions
about Heaven (and here Christianity Today capitalizes Heaven).

In this brief chapter I would like to attempt the impossible: to answer the 35
most frequently asked questions about Heaven. Obviously, it would take more than
an article, more than a lifetime, and more than human wisdom to answer any one
of these questions adequately. But "fools rush in where angels fear to tread."
More seriously, sometimes a taste can whet the appetite for more complete
consumption later on, and perhaps these samples will at least suggest ways to
think about the subject.

1. How do we know anything about Heaven, anyway?

If we had no "inside information," we could only speculate. Fortunately, we have
some solid data to build on: divine revelation. I think God wants us to use our
reason and also our imagination (for why should we neglect any God-given
faculty) to explore the treasure of tantalizing hints in Scripture. To be
indifferent to it is to be like the unprofitable servant who hid his master's
talent in the ground.

In having this data, we are in a position very different from that of the
unbeliever (or rather, the difference lies in our believing the data, for the
whole human race has it; it is public). We are like the sighted compared to the
blind, who can only speculate about things visible. We can do more than
speculate about things invisible.

"What do you know about Heaven, anyway? Have you ever been there?" We can answer
this challenge: "No, but I have a very good Friend who has. He came here and
told us about it and showed it to us. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life."
2. Why won't we be bored in Heaven?
I suspect this question subconsciously bothers most of us more than we like to
admit. I can remember having something of a crisis of faith as a child: I
thought I didn't want to go to Heaven since the popular pictures of it seemed
pretty boring to me.

Freud, who occasionally comes up with nuggets of wisdom sandwiched between

mountains of nonsense, says that everyone needs two things to make life worth
living: love and work. The two are really one, for love is a work and work is a
love. Love is a work, for it is something you do, not something you just feel or
fall into. And work must be a love, for if not, it is threatening and boring.
What love-work will we do in Heaven, then?

We will complete the very love-works we are meant to do on Earth. There are only
six things that never get boring on Earth, six things that never come to an end:
knowing and loving yourself, your neighbor, and God. Since persons are subjects
and not objects, they are not exhaustible; they are like magic cows that give
fresh milk forever.

The two great commandments that are our job description for life, in both this
world and the next, express this plan: We must love God wholly and we must love
our neighbor as ourself. And in order to love we must know, get to know, as
endlessly as we love endlessly. This never gets boring, even on Earth: getting
to know and love more and more someone we already know and love. It is our clue
and our preparation for our eternal destiny of infinite fascination.

3. Will we recognize our loved ones in Heaven?

George Macdonald answers this question with a counterquestion: "Will we be

greater fools there than here?" Of course we will know our loved ones. This is a
divinely designed, essential part of our joy. We are not designed to be solitary
mystics, lovers of God alone, but to be, like God himself, lovers of men and
women as well.

Just as Jesus on Earth loved each person differently and specially—he did not
love John as he loved Peter, because John was not Peter—so we are designed to
love people specially. There is no reason why this specialness should be
removed, rather than added to, in eternity. Our family and special friends will
always be our family and special friends. In this life a child begins to learn
to love by loving mother, then father, then siblings, then pets. The concentric
circles of love are then gradually expanded, but the beginning lessons are never
abandoned. There is no reason to think God rips up this plan after death.

4. How can I be happy in Heaven if someone I loved deeply on Earth doesn't make
it to Heaven?
This brings up all sorts of other questions about emotions, relationships, and
suffering in Heaven. These will be dealt with shortly, but the simplest and most
important answer to this question for now is this: If there is someone you love
and identify with so deeply that you cannot imagine being happy in eternity
without him or her, and that someone seems now to be in peril of being unsaved,
then use the relationship that God's providence has ordained for you.

Tell God that he has to arrange for this person's salvation as he has arranged
for yours, because this person is a real part of you, and for you as a whole to
be saved, this person has to come along, just as your own body and emotions have
to come along. It need not be a "wheedling" or "blackmail" prayer; it can be a
simple presentation of the facts, like Mary's "They have no more wine." Let God
do his thing: it is always more loving, more gracious, and more effective than
our thing, more than we can ever imagine or desire.

Trust him to use your earthly love as a channel, supernatural and/or natural, of
grace and salvation for your friend. Your very question, your very problem, is
the clue to its answer. God put that burden on your heart for a reason: for you
to fulfill.

5. Can suicides be saved?

Simply, yes. Most people who commit suicide are not in full control of their
reason and thus are not fully responsible. Suicide is a dreadful mistake, of
course, and a terrible sin. But only unrepented sin locks Heaven's door, and
sometimes sins are repented of at the same time they are committed, or
immediately afterward. The deeper part of a suicide's soul and will may believe
and hope in and love God even while the surface part drives him to despair. Or
repentance may come in an instant between the act and its result, death, or even
at the moment of death. We do not know. Only God sees and judges hearts, not
just acts, and God will use every possible means to save us. Perhaps many of
those means are unknown and unsuspected by us. No one dare limit the mercy, the
cleverness, or the power of God.

But our very uncertainty should send us running from this horribly dangerous sin
in holy terror. Those who commit suicide do not automatically ensure their
damnation, but they certainly risk their salvation.

6. Will we have emotions in Heaven?

This question prompts a series of questions of the form: Will we have the
following earthly thing in Heaven? I believe the answer to all such questions is
this: Yes, but not in the present form. Nothing is simply continued, and nothing
is simply lost forever; everything is transformed, as it is at birth.
We can know very little about this transformation, of course, and our answers
must be largely disciplined guesswork. But I strongly suspect that we will have
emotions in Heaven, for they are part of God's design for our humanity, and not
only a result of the Fall. But our emotions will not drive us or control us.
They will be no less passionate, but they will be less passive. Thomas Aquinas
opines that sexual enjoyment was greater, not less, before the Fall (since sin
always harms, never helps, every good thing), and Augustine opines that in
Heaven the joy that we receive from God in our souls will "overflow" into our
resurrection bodies in a "voluptuous torrent" of pleasure.

7. 1f we have emotions in Heaven, why won't we be sad about those we loved who
are in hell?

We know there is no sadness in Heaven: God "will wipe away every tear from their
eyes" (Rev. 7:17). I think we will not be sad about the damned for the same
reason God is not. According to the Sermon on the Mount, he will say to them, "I
never knew you" (Matt. 7:23). God will wipe our memories clean. This is not
falsehood or ignorance, but truth, for in a sense, the damned no longer are—that
is, they no longer are in the most real place of all, Heaven. They no longer
count. They are like ashes, not like wood. They once were fully human, fully
alive, real men and women. But hell is a place not of eternal life but of
eternal death. We do not love or weep over ashes; we only love or weep over the
thing that existed before it was burnt. In Heaven, however, we will not live in
the past—we will have no regrets; nor will we live in the future—we will have no
fears; but like God, we will live in the eternal present. Our heavenly emotions
will be appropriate to present reality, not past reality.

8. Does this mean hell is unreal?

Certainly not. Jesus is very clear about the reality of hell. But he is also
clear that it is death, not life, for the soul. In Greek philosophy, souls
cannot die. In Christianity, they can—in hell. Is this annihilation? No, it is
death. Annihilation is the opposite of creation; death is the opposite of life.

9. What happens in hell?

Nothing.

10. What happens in Heaven?

Everything.

11. Can the blessed in Heaven see us now?

Let me put it this way: Is there any compelling reason why they shouldn't? Would
their perfection be threatened thereby? Can Heaven be Heaven only by being
quarantined and having the blinds drawn? It is reasonable to interpret the
"cloud of witnesses" in Hebrews 12:1 not only as witnesses to their faith during
their own lifetimes but as witnesses to us, now; not just as the dead "witness
to" the living by our memory of them but as the living witness the living by
their living consciousness.

Is there anything wrong with your love of your family? Will there be anything
wrong with it in Heaven? Will there be anything wrong with your desire to see
how they fare on Earth? I see no compelling reason to answer no.

12. Will we know everything in Heaven?

I think not. Only God is omniscient. We will never stop learning, but we will
never come to the end, either. Only God can endure knowing everything without
being bored.

13. Will we all be equal in Heaven?

We will be as we are now: equal in worth and dignity, equal in being loved by
God. But will we be equal in the sense of the same? God forbid! One of the chief
pleasures of this life, as of the next, is the mutual sharing of different
excellences, the pleasure of looking up to someone who is better than we are at
something and learning from him or her. The resentment expressed in saying, "I'm
just as good as you are" is hellish, not heavenly. (By the way, that is one
sentence that always means the opposite of what it says. No one who says it
believes it.)

14. Do differences include sexual differences? Is there sex in Heaven?

Of course. Sex is part of our divinely designed humanity. It is transformed, not

removed, in Heaven. We will be "like the angels" in "neither marrying nor being
given in marriage," according to Christ's answer to the Sadducees (Matt. 22:30),
but not in being neutered. Sex is first of all something we are, not something
we do. I do not think we will be "doing" copulation in Heaven, but we will be
busy being ourselves, and that includes being men and women, not genderless
geldings. Vive la difference!

15. What kind of bodies will we have in Heaven?

Gnostics of all kinds (Platonists, Buddhists, Hindus, Spiritualists,

Manichaeans) say we will become pure spirits, angels, for they do not know the
dogma of Creation. Pagans and Muslims say we will have earthly bodies and harems
or happy hunting grounds.

Christians say we will have transformed bodies, but real, physical bodies, as
Christ had after his resurrection. His body could be touched and could eat. Yet
it could come and go as he pleased, with neither walls nor distance as an
obstacle. It was the same body he had before he died, and it was recognized as
such by his friends. Yet it was so different that at first they did not
recognize him. I think our new resurrection body will be related to the body we
have now in the same way that our current body is related to the body we had in
our mothers' wombs. If a fetus saw a picture of itself at the age of twenty, it
would at first not recognize itself, so unforeseen and surprisingly new would it
be. Yet it is the same self, even the same body, now grown radically more
mature.

16. What of injuries and deformities? Will they all be removed in the
resurrection body?

I think not. Christ still had his wounds. But they were badges of glory, not
suffering and sadness. I think everything—in the body, in the soul, and in the
person's world—that was offered to God and taken up into the eternal kingdom
will be preserved and transformed and glorified in Heaven: but everything that
was not—everything that was not the work of God or of the sanctified soul but
was of the world, the flesh, or the devil—will be left outside Heaven's gate.
The martyrs' wounds will glow like gold, but the amputee's limb will be
restored, and so will the brain-damaged person's intelligence. God's justice and
mercy are perfect, and so is his style.

17. Will there be nature in Heaven?

Scripture tells us there will be "a new heaven [that is, sky] and a new earth"
(Rev. 21:1). If we have a new body, we need a new Earth: bodies are not for
drifting in empty space. And if a world, why a dead world, like the moon, rather
than a world brimming with life, like this Earth? I think we will have a much
more intimate relationship with nature than we do now, not less. I think the
images of the nature mystics and pantheist poets are almost right, but as
prophecy: In the heavenly future we will get inside the secret of life that we
now stare at as outsiders.

C. S. Lewis suggests, in his great sermon "The Weight of Glory," that the reason
we have peopled the Earth with gods and goddesses is so that these projections
of ours can do what we long to do but cannot do, or at least cannot do yet:
touch the inner secret of the beauty we see in nature. "But all the leaves of
the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.
Some day, God willing, we will get in."

18. Will we be able to perform magic and miracles?

I think so. Powers that are now largely denied us, for our own safety, will be
restored to us when we have learned to use them well. When our souls follow the
will of God like orchestra players follow the baton of their conductor, then we
will play in harmony. But just imagine what havoc God would allow if he gave us
preternatural powers over nature in our fallen condition!

19. Will there be animals in Heaven? Will my dead cat be there?

The simplest answer I know to this question, so frequently asked by children,

is: Why not? Children's questions are usually the best ones, and we should
beware treating them with any less seriousness than their askers have in asking
them. Right now, pets, like everything else in this world, can mediate God's
love and goodness to us and train us for our union with him, or they can
distract us from him. In Heaven, everything mediates and nothing distracts.

20. Will we eat in Heaven?

We will have bodies, so we will be able to eat, as Christ did after the
resurrection. But I think we will not have to eat. The resurrection body will
live off the soul and the soul off God. As we are now, our bodies are dependent
on what is less than they are, subsidies from nature; and our souls are
dependent on what is less than they are, our bodies (if our brains are damaged,
we cannot think well). This situation of being hostage to our inferiors must be
reversed. Perhaps the matter of which the resurrection body will be composed
will not have separate atoms and molecules (and so will be indestructible).
Perhaps our bodies will not have separate organs and systems, but the body as a
whole, or the whole soul in the whole body, will perform all of its operations.
But of course this is pure speculation.

21. Will our bodies be clothed in Heaven?

Those who claim to have caught some glimpse of people in Heaven, whether in a
vision or in a near—death experience, usually say that the people in Heaven are
clothed, but differently than we are. The clothing is not artificial and
concealing, but natural and revealing. Clothing came after the Fall, to conceal
what was shameful only because it was fallen. Once redemption is complete and
the Fall wholly reversed, nothing is shameful. Clothes will then be a pure
glory, not half glory and half shame, as they now are. Perhaps they will seem to
grow out of the resurrection body itself rather than be put on from outside.
The issue is more important than it seems, because clothing symbolizes the whole
world and our relationship with our world. We take parts of our world unto
ourselves as clothes and make them intimate parts of our lives. In Heaven we
will clothe ourselves with the new heavens and the new earth, like the "woman
clothed with the sun" in Revelation 12:1.

22. Will there be music in Heaven?

Indeed. Even now, great music seems like an echo from Eden, a souvenir, a memory
from Paradise—something not merely pleasant but profoundly meaningful in an
ungraspable, unformulatable way, a high and holy mystery. Once again I refer
(only as a clue) to numerous visionaries who have said they heard music in
Heaven, but of such a different quality from earthly music that it was
incomparable—like comparing a toddler's banging on a toy xylophone with a
symphony orchestra.

Music, according to widespread tradition, was the first language, the language
God spoke to create the universe. I strongly suspect there is more to this than
we think. We usually think of music as ornamented poetry and of poetry as
ornamented prose. But God is not prosaic. I think prose is fallen poetry and
poetry fallen music. In the beginning was the "music of the spheres," and so it
will be in the end.

23. Will Heaven be big?

Yes, but with a different kind of bigness. Now, space contains us, confines us,
defines us. But we can transform space into place by humanizing it,
spiritualizing it. A house becomes a home, a space becomes a place, by our
living in it. Heaven will be both as intimate and as unconfining as our spirits
want.

No one will think it too small or too large. In a sense, it will be in us rather
than we in it—not in the sense that it will be subjective, but in the sense in
which stage settings and props are in a play, or part of a play, rather than the
play being in or part of the setting.

24. Is Heaven in this universe?

No. If it were, you could get there by rocket ship. It is another dimension, not
another world. Yet, in a sense, it is continuous with this world, somewhat as
this one is continuous with the world of the womb. From the viewpoint of an
unborn child, this world is distant and outside the womb; but from the viewpoint
of a born person, the womb is in the world, and the unborn child is already in
the world—the child just doesn't see this until after birth.

I suspect that from the viewpoint of Heaven we will truly say that Earth was
part of Heaven, Heaven's womb. But you cannot get there by rocket, only by faith
and death, just as the fetus cannot get into the world outside the womb except
by birth.

25. Will there be time in Heaven?

Eternity does not mean simply endless time; that would be boring. Nor does it
mean something strictly timeless; that would be inhuman. Time is part of our
consciousness, and God does not tear up his plan for us; rather, he fulfills and
transforms it.
I think eternity will include all time, as the dying see their whole life pass
before them in perfect temporal order, not confusion, yet
instantaneously—somewhat as you can do now when you call to mind a story you
have read and know well. When you say "David Copperfield," you mean all the
Davids, in order, but you see them all at once, from the young David to the old
David, because, having finished the story, you are outside it.

You are "after death" regarding David. One day you will be "after death"
regarding yourself. Time now confines us. There is never enough of it. I think
heavenly time will be like heavenly space: fully humanized and subject to the
soul. Even now there are two kinds of time, as there are two kinds of space
(space and place): chronos, or chronological time, material time, and kairos, or
lived time, human time, time for some purpose measured by mind and will. Now,
kairos is contained and constrained by chronos; there is seldom enough time to
do justice to anything. In heaven this inside-out situation will be reversed,
and chronological time will be contained and mastered by kairos, somewhat as
even now playwrights and novelists master the time in their stories.

Our dissatisfaction with time, by the way, is a powerful piece of evidence that
we are made for eternity. There is nothing more natural and all-pervasive in
this world than time. Not only our bodies but our souls as well are immersed in
time. Yet we complain about it. C. S. Lewis asks, "Do fish complain of the sea
for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact not strongly suggest that they
had not been, or were not destined always to be, aquatic creatures?" We long to
step out of the sea of time onto the land of eternity, even though we do not
really understand what eternity is!

26. What age will we be in Heaven?

Medieval philosophers usually thought we would all be 33, the ideal age, the age
of maturity, as of Christ's earthly maturity. I take it this is symbolically
accurate: we will all be fully mature. Infants who die prematurely will be
given, by God (perhaps through the mediation of their own parents!), all the
maturing they missed on Earth.

Geneticists say that the aging process is not inevitable; that a live organism
could theoretically be immortal, never age, never die. Cancer cells do not die
unless they are killed or their host dies. The aging and dying process began at
a certain time in our history, after the Fall. God did not make death, but he
unmakes it. In Heaven no one will be old. Yet in a sense everyone will be both
old and young, as a reflection of the God who is the Alpha and Omega, oldest and
youngest, "beauty ancient yet ever new." Even now we sometimes see the wisdom of
old age in the musing face of a baby or the eternal freshness of youth in the
twinkling eyes of the very old. These are hints of Heaven.
27. What language will we speak in Heaven?

My ancestors stoutly maintained that it would be Dutch, of course. A rabbi I

know has told me it will be Hebrew; every baby, he said, still remembers the
language that will be restored in Heaven, the language of Eden, as evidenced by
the fact that a child's first word is often abba ("Father" or "Daddy" in
Hebrew).

It will be none of the languages that now divide us, which began at Babel. Babel
and its babble will be reversed. This was foreshadowed at Pentecost, where
distinctive languages were preserved, not muddled, yet each person understood
everyone else. Perhaps there will be as many languages as there are individuals,
and yet at the same time only one. What is sure is that there will be no
misunderstanding. Language, like clothing, now both reveals and conceals,
unveils and veils meaning. In Heaven, language, like clothing, will only reveal.

28. Will there be privacy in Heaven?

I think not. No one will want to hold anything back, for no one will be ashamed
or afraid of being misunderstood or unloved. Privacy is like clothes and like
laws: necessary only because we are fallen. When sin is gone, all hiding will be
gone.

Certainly there will be no private property, no "this is mine, not yours."

Communism, like nudism and anarchism, dimly sees something heavenly, but by
insisting on enacting it now, by human force, it turns the heavenly into the
hellish, as when adult powers are given to infants.

29. Will we be free in Heaven? 1f so, will we be free to sin? If so, won't
anyone ever exercise that freedom?

"Freedom to sin" is a contradiction in terms, like "freedom to be enslaved."

Free choice is only the means to true freedom, "the freedom of the sons of God,"
liberty.

In heaven we will not sin because we will not want to. We will freely choose
never to sin, just as now great mathematicians do not make elementary mistakes,
though they have the power to do so. In Heaven we will see the attractiveness of
goodness and of God so clearly, and the ugliness and stupidity of sin so
clearly, that there will be no possible motive to sin.

Now, we are enslaved by ignorance. Every sin comes from ignorance, for we sin
only because we see sin as somehow attractive, which it is not, and goodness as
somehow lacking in attraction. This is an ignorance that we are responsible for,
but it is ignorance, and without that ignorance we would not sin. In Heaven, in
the "beatific vision" of God, overwhelmed and filled with the total joy of
goodness, baptized with goodness as a sunken ship is filled with water, no one
could possibly ever want to turn from this perceived glory. Now, "we walk by
faith, not by sight"(2 Cor. 5:7). Heavenly sight will not remove our freedom.

Ask the blind whether sight would remove their freedom.

30. Isn't concern about Heaven escapist?

I answer the question with another question, from C. S. Lewis: Who talks the
most against "escapism"? Jailers. Is it escapist for a baby to wonder about life
outside the womb? Is it escapist for someone on a long ocean voyage to wonder
about landfall? Is it escapist for the seed to dream of the flower? It is
escapist if, and only if, Heaven is a lie. Those who call Heaven "escapism" are
presupposing atheism.

31. But doesn't concern for Heaven detract from concern for Earth?

No, just the opposite. Does a pregnant woman's concern for her baby's future
detract from concern for her baby's present? If she believes her baby will be
born dead, she will cease to take care of it, and if we believe that this life
ends with a cosmic abortion, we will cease to take much care of it. But if we
believe that this life is the preparation for eternity, then everything makes an
eternal difference.

The early roads that led to California were well cared for; the ones that led
nowhere were abandoned. If Earth is the road to Heaven, we will care for it. If
it leads nowhere, we will not. Historically, it is those who have believed most
strongly in Heaven who have made the greatest difference to Earth, beginning
with Christ himself.

32. How intimate is the connection between Heaven and Earth? Does Heaven begin
now?

The joy of Heaven does, because Christ is our joy, who tells us "I am with you
always, even to the end of the world" (Matt. 28:20, Phillips). We do not now
fully appreciate that joy, but it is here, because the very life of Heaven, the
very life that flows from the Vine into the branches, is here. If it is not here
in us now, it will not be there in us then.

If Heaven is not in us now, we will not be in Heaven forever. For Heaven is

where God is. God determines where Heaven is; Heaven does not determine where
God is. God contains Heaven; Heaven does not contain God. If God is in our souls
now by faith, then the very life of Heaven is here in us now, in seed form. That
is what Jesus came to preach about and to give, the focus of all his sermons:
"the kingdom of Heaven." It is the "pearl of great price," the thing for which
the whole world is far too small a price to pay. And it is free.
33. How do you get to Heaven?

This is the most important question anyone can ask. The answer has already been
given: It is free. "Let him who is thirsty come, let him who desires take the
water of life without price" (Rev. 22:17). Faith is the act of taking.
It sounds crazy, too good to be true. But it makes perfect sense. For God is
love. Love gives gifts, gives itself. God gives himself, his own life,
membership in his family. We are made "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter
1:4). For God is pure love, and pure love has no admixture of stinginess in it.
34. Is Jesus the only way? (Or can good pagans, Hindus, et cetera get to Heaven
too?)

The first part of the question is clear, and the answer is clear: Unless Jesus
is the victim of grandiose self-delusion or deliberate, blasphemous lying, he is
the only way, for he says exactly that (John 14:6). But the second part of the
question is not clear. People who have never heard of Christ, and thus have
neither consciously accepted him nor consciously rejected him, must also get to
Heaven through Christ, for there is no other way. That much is clear from
Christ's own words. But it is not clear what is going on in the unconscious
depths of the souls of such people. Only God knows. Perhaps they know and love
him in the obscure form of a deep, unconscious desire and love.
The game of heavenly population statistics is one that Christ discouraged his
disciples from playing. When they asked him, "Are many saved?" he answered
neither yes nor no but said, "Strive to enter in" (Luke 13:24). In other words,
mind your own business, your own salvation, rather than speculating about others
and statistics. God has not told us the answer to this question, for his own
good reasons, just as he has not told us when the world will end, another
question about which we love to speculate. I think that in both cases we can see
the wisdom of not telling us. If we knew when the world would end, we would not
be ready at all times for the thief who comes in the night, unexpectedly. If we
knew that most were not saved, we would tend to despair; if we knew that most
were saved, we would tend to presumption.

What we do know is that Christ the Savior is not only a 33-year-old, 6-foot-high
Jewish man, but also the eternal God, the Logos that enlightens every individual
(John 1:9). Thus everyone has a fair chance to accept him or reject him, whether
implicitly (for all light of truth and goodness is from him) or explicitly. We
are not saved by how explicit our knowledge is; we are saved by him. Faith is
the glue that holds him fast (or, more accurately, the glue by which he holds us
fast, for faith is also his gift).

This is a traditional, mainline Christian position, from the time of Justin

Martyr and Clement of Alexandria to the time of C. S. Lewis. It is halfway
between the liberal view that one can be saved in other ways than Christ (for
example, by good intentions) and the frequent fundamentalist view that it takes
an explicit knowledge of Christ to be saved.

The middle view does not detract from the infinite seriousness of missionary
work, as the liberal view does. For if we do not know how many children will
fall through a hole in the ice and drown, we feel just as much urgency in
shouting warnings (and in putting our words into action) as we would if we knew
exactly who would die and who would not.

35. How do you think all these questions and answers will look to you in Heaven?
I think they will look very much like Michelangelo's first lump of clay—worked
on at the age of two—looked to him after he had sculpted the Pieta. I think we
will see these childish babblings about "what no eye has seen, nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man conceived" (1 Cor.1:9) as we will see everything else in
our present lives: suffused with the light and love of God. And so we will
cherish these childish toys, even as we laugh at them. Seeing and loving God in
all good things, including our own, is what we were made for, and what we will
be doing forever without boredom. We had better get some practice now.

In the light of Heaven, everything we do and everything we experience takes on

two new meanings. On the one hand, everything becomes infinitely more important,
more serious, more weighted with glory than before. If we are practicing only
for a casual pastime, our practice is not terribly important, but if we are
practicing for the world championship, it is.

On the other hand, Heaven makes everything earthly seem light and trivial by
comparison. Saint Theresa says that the most horrible, suffering-filled life on
Earth, looked at from Heaven, will seem no more than a night in an inconvenient
hotel. Saints and martyrs know the value of this life and this world; they love
it because God loves it. But they lightly give it all up for Heaven. Heavenly
light gives us not only "an eternal weight of glory," but at the same time a
lightsome spirit, as in the Cavalier poet:

Man, please Thy maker and be merry,

And for this world give not a cherry.

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Time by Peter Kreeft

Recently I was late getting a manuscript to an editor. My excuse? By far the

most popular one in America: I had "no time." Let's examine that excuse. Why do
we all seem to have no time for anything, much less for prayer?

I am constantly feeling guilty about this, and I suspect most of you are too. I
think the single biggest obstacle to our relationship with God (after sin, of
course) is "no time." If I gave my children as much time as I give God, I could
be prosecuted for child neglect and abuse. If I spent as little time with my
wife as I spend with God, she'd have grounds for divorce for desertion.

Yet we all know from experience that when we give God time, we are happy. When
we cheat God, we cheat ourselves. We know this from thousands of repeated
experiments. And yet we keep running away from God, from communion with God,
from prayer, as if it were bitter medicine. We are so afraid of silence and
solitude, which are necessary for private prayer, that we give it to our most
desperate criminals as the most horrible torture our mind can conceive—"solitary
confinement!"

Why don't we seem to have as much time as our ancestors? In fact, we all have
exactly the same amount: twenty-four hours each day. Technology should have
given us scads of extra time. Our lives should be oozing with leisure. All those
time-saving devices! Yet they've done exactly the opposite. The more time-saving
devices we have, the less time we have. (The only way to get time is to turn the
clock back, not forward!) What went wrong?

Today, machines have replaced slaves; yet we have less leisure, not more.
Why?

Our great-grandmothers took many hours to scrub their clothes on a hand-held

washboard; we just push a button on a washing machine. Our forefathers had to
grow, hunt, and slaughter their own food; we buy it at the supermarket, open the
microwave door, and push a button. Yet we are far more harried and hassled by
time than they were. Why?

In most ancient societies, the rich had slaves to do their manual work so that
they could enjoy leisure. Today, machines have replaced slaves; yet we have less
leisure, not more. Why?

This is not the place for a general diagnosis of our society's sickness (though
for a quick, profound hint, read Pascal's Pensées, especially on "diversion").
But it is the place for a diagnosis of our excuse for not praying, and I think
this diagnosis has many other applications too.

"All that we are begins with our thoughts; it moves as our thoughts move, and it
ends where our thoughts end." So says Buddha, wisely. We must begin here with
our thoughts about time. We don't have time for prayer because we think wrongly
about time and prayer.

We have time and prayer backwards. We think time determines prayer, but prayer
determines time. We think our lack of time is the cause of our lack of prayer,
but our lack of prayer is the cause of our lack of time.

Lack of prayer is the cause

of lack of time.

When a little boy offered Christ five loaves and two fishes, he multiplied them
miraculously. He does the same with our time, but only if we offer it to him in
prayer. This is literally miraculous, yet I know it happens from repeated
experience. Every day that I say I am too busy to pray, I seem to have no time,
accomplish little, and feel frazzled and enslaved by time. Every day that I say
I'm too busy not to pray, every time I offer some time-loaves and life-fishes to
Christ, he miraculously multiplies them and I share his conquest of time. I have
no idea how he does it, I know that he does it, time after time.

And yet I resist sacrificing my loaves and fishes to him. I am an idiot. That's
one of the things original sin means: spiritual insanity, preferring misery to
joy, little bits of hell to little bits of heaven.

We must restore our spiritual sanity. One giant step in that direction is to
think truly about time.

Time is like the setting of a play. The setting is really part of the play,
contained by the play, determined by the play. But we often think the opposite:
we think the play is contained by the setting. We think that the theme, the
meaning, the spirit of the play is in its material setting instead of the other
way around.

That's like thinking the soul is in the body. In fact, the body is in the soul.
So says St. Thomas Aquinas. And since time measures the movements of material
bodies, while prayer measures the movements of the soul, time is really in
prayer rather than prayer in time. Prayer determines and changes and
miraculously multiplies time (the loaves and fishes).

Prayer multiplies time.

But prayer multiplies time only if and when we sacrifice our time, offer it up.
There's the rub. We fear sacrifice. It's a kind of death.

All the real religions of the world are based on sacrifice, on willing death.
Only the fake religion of pop psychology (which has infiltrated even the modern
church) ignores this fact. Even pagans and polytheists know it. The most popular
god in India is Shiva, the Destroyer, and the most popular goddess is Kali, his
female equivalent. Even Hindus know the importance of spiritual surgery, death,
sacrifice. After Calvary, how can Christians know this any less? Our Lord
repeatedly taught us that unless we took up our cross and followed him, we could
not be his disciples.

This probably means some terrible and difficult things; but one of the simple
and easy things it means is to sacrifice our time to God. For time is
life—"life-time."

The point is very simple: in order to create time to pray, we must destroy time
to do something else. We must kill something, refuse something, say no to
something.

To what? Let me make a simple, obvious, radical suggestion: the TV. Kill the TV.
Go cold turkey for a month. I dare you. If you can't do that, then TV is your
drug and you're an addict. "A man is a slave to whatever he cannot part with
that is less than himself," said George MacDonald.

Eternity is not in the future

but in the present.

Every single person and family I know who has done this (voluntarily) has been
very happy about it. TV is largely a sewer pipe anyway; why fill your brain and
your soul with the waste products from the most bigotedly antireligious elite in
our society? Even if there were nothing to sacrifice TV for, it would be good to
sacrifice it, to save your moral sanity and intelligence. All the more reason to
sacrifice it for prayer. Find out how many hours a week you watch TV and use
just half of that time for prayer. You get a threefold benefit: garbage cleanup,
prayer time, and extra time left over.

The alternative is the mental slavery we see around us, the juggernaut—the
worrying and rushing and never getting there because "there" is not in time at
all but in eternity. The modern world is unhappy because it does not touch
eternity. All true happiness is a foretaste of eternity.

Eternity is not in the future but in the present. The future is unreal, not yet
real. One of the devil's most ridiculous and successful lies is the idea that we
should devote our lives to pursuing and acquiring goods we do not yet have
rather than enjoying the ones we do have. This makes us slaves to time, to the
unreal future, forever, for "tomorrow is always a day away."

The first rule for prayer, the most important first step, is not about how to do
it, but to just do it; not to perfect and complete it but to begin it. Once the
car is moving, it's easy to steer it in the right direction, but it's much
harder to start it up when it's stalled. And prayer is stalled in our world.

So stop reading and start praying. Right now.

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Toward Reuniting the Church by Peter Kreeft

Can unity be achieved? If and only if there is a way, a road. A dream is not
enough. There must be a Jacob’s ladder to connect the heavenly dream to earth.
There is a ladder, and the angels continually ascend and descend on it. It is
not a method or a teaching or a technique. It is a way, not a method; a truth,
not a teaching; a life, not a technique. It is, of course, the one who said: “I
am the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” and then continued: “No man comes to the
Father but by me.” Unity is with the Father. The only way to unity is the Son.”

The way from unity to disunity was through the loss of Christ as the center.
Therefore the only way back is through Christ as the center, through letting
Christ rule our churches completely. This is a guaranteed recipe for success.
For we know his will is unity (reread Jn 17:20—26). Therefore if we only let him
do his will in us we will have unity.

The only road to unity is total openness to his will, even if it means admitting
that we were wrong. We don’t know in advance what letting Christ have his will
completely in us will lead to except that it will lead to truth. “Follow me.”
Where? “Come and see.” Might it lead to an admission that we Catholics were
wrong? That you Protestants were wrong? It might. I firmly believe all that the
Catholic Church teaches; but if I should meet God face to face and find that I
was wrong in this, I would still be his child.

Catholicism and Protestantism do not essentially define our identity, as Christ

does. If I should die and find out that Christ is not my Savior, I could not be
me, I could not exist in such a world Christ is essential to my very self: “For
me to live is Christ.” The Church is like my family: very close to me, loyal to
the death.—but not my essence. Saint Paul did not say: “For me to live is
Catholicism.” He did not say: “I live, nevertheless not I but Protestantism
lives in me.” The only absolute certainty we have is Christ. The unity we
already have in Christ includes doctrinal unity, for if we accept the teacher we
also accept all his teachings, at through Scripture. None of the Catholic
Church’s interpretations of or additions to Scripture is as important as the
scriptural agreements between Protestants and Catholics. The agreements between
orthodox Protestants and orthodox Catholics are more important than the
agreements between orthodox Catholics and liberal, or Modernist, or
demythologized Catholics, and more important than the agreements between
orthodox Protestants and liberal Protestants.

The following questions do not divide Protestants and Catholics—and they are the
most important questions of all—but they do divide the orthodox from the

Modernist in both churches:

Is God a transcendent, supernatural, personal, eternal, omnipotent,

 omniscient, providential, loving, just Creator? Or is God an immanent cosmic
force evolving in nature and man?

Do miracles really happen? Or has science refuted them? A transcendent God can
perform miracles; a merely immanent, naturalistic God cannot. The three great
miracles essential to orthodox Christianity are the Incarnation, the

Resurrection and the new birth.

Is there a heaven? Or is heaven just all the good on earth?

Does God really love me? Or is that just a helpful sentiment?
Does God forgive my sins through Christ? Or is sin an outdated concept? In
other words, is Christ a mere human example or a Savior from sin?
Is Christ divine, eternal, from the beginning? Or is he only divine “as all
men are divine”?

Did he physically rise from the dead? Or is the Resurrection only a myth, a
beautiful symbol?

Must we be born again from above to be saved, to have God as our Father? Or is
everyone saved automatically? Does everyone have God as Father simply by being
born as a human being, or by being reasonably nice during life?

Is Scripture God’s word to us? Or is it human words about God? Does it have
divine or human authority behind it? And can an ordinary Christian understand
its true meaning without reading German theologians?

Most important of all, can I really meet God in Christ? If I ask him to be my
Lord, the Lord of my life, will he realty do it? Or is this just a “religious
experience”? This question is really one with the question: Did Christ really
rise from the dead? That is, is he alive now? Can I say: “You ask me how I
know he lives? He lives within my heart!”?

Affirmative answers to these questions constitute the most important kind of

unity already: not unity of thought but unity of being, the new being, being “in
Christ”.

The evangelical resurgence, the charismatic movement, and the born-again

phenomenon are all indications that God is working in our time at precisely this
center, this place of unity. No human can create new being, and therefore no
human can create unity, for unity follows being, But although with man it is
impossible, with God all things are possible. God can and does create new being
in us, and therefore God can create new unity among us—and he’s doing it right
now! We are witnessing with our own eyes in this generation the definitive
solution to the problem of division in the Church. God is solving the problem in
exactly the same way he solves all our problems. He has one answer to all our
needs, and the answer is a Person.

It’s working. You can see it, surely, at charismatic prayer meetings: without
compromise, indifference, or watering down their faith, Protestants and
Catholics are experiencing the kind of Christian unity New Testament Christians
experienced: unity in Christ. And the world is noticing: “See how they love one
another!”

Excerpted from Fundamentals of the Faith by Ignatius Press.

Also see the audio lecture:
Ecumenism

also

Charismatic Experience (MP3, 1:53, 556k)

Design by davenevins.com
What Difference Does Heaven Make? by Peter Kreeft

If a thing makes no difference, it is a waste of time to think about it. We

should begin, then, with the question, What difference does Heaven make to
earth, to now, to our lives?

Only the difference between hope and despair in the end, between two totally
different visions of life; between "chance or the dance". At death we find out
which vision is true: does it all go down the drain in the end, or are all the
loose threads finally tied together into a gloriously perfect tapestry? Do the
tangled paths through the forest of life lead to the golden castle or over the
cliff and into the abyss? Is death a door or a hole?

To medieval Christendom, it was the world beyond the world that made all the
difference in the world to this world. The Heaven beyond the sun made the earth
"under the sun" something more than "vanity of vanities". Earth was Heaven's
womb, Heaven's nursery, Heaven's dress rehearsal. Heaven was the meaning of the
earth. Nietzsche had not yet popularized the serpent's tempting alternative:
"You are the meaning of the earth." Kant had not yet disseminated "the poison of
subjectivism" by his "Copernican revolution in philosophy", in which the human
mind does not discover truth but makes it, like the divine mind. Descartes had
not yet replaced the divine I AM with the human "I think, therefore I am" as the
"Archimedean point", had not yet replaced theocentrism with anthropocentrism.
Medieval man was still his Father's child, however prodigal, and his world was
meaningful because it was "my Father's world" and he believed his Father's
promise to take him home after death.

Heaven must be either

be a fascinating lie or
a fascinating fact.

This confidence towards death gave him a confidence towards life, for life's
road led somewhere. The Heavenly mansion at the end of the earthly pilgrimage
made a tremendous difference to the road itself. Signs and images of Heavenly
glory were strewn all over his earthly path. The "signs" were (1) nature and (2)
Scripture, God's two books, (3) general providence, and (4) special miracles.
(The word translated "miracle" in the New Testament [sëmeion] literally means
"sign".) The images surrounded him like the hills surrounding the Holy City.

They, too, pointed to Heaven. For instance, the images of saints in medieval
statuary were seen not merely as material images of the human but as human
images of the divine, windows onto God. They were not merely stone shaped into
men and women but men and women shaped into gods and goddesses. Lesser images
too were designed to reflect Heavenly glory: kings and queens, heraldry and
courtesy and ceremony, authority and obedience—these were not just practical
socio-economic inventions but steps in the Cosmic Dance, links in the Great
Chain of Being, rungs on Jacob's ladder, earthly reflections of Heaven.
Distinctively premodern words like glory, majesty, splendor, triumph, awe,
honor—these were more than words; they were lived experiences. More, they were
experienced realities.

The glory has departed. We moderns have lost much of medieval Christendom's
faith in Heaven because we have lost its hope of Heaven, and we have lost its
hope of Heaven because we have lost its love of Heaven. And we have lost its
love of Heaven because we have lost its sense of Heavenly glory.

Medieval imagery (which is almost totally biblical imagery) of light, jewels,

stars, candles, trumpets, and angels no longer fits our ranch-style, supermarket
world. Pathetic modern substitutes of fluffy clouds, sexless cherubs, harps and
metal halos (not halos of light) presided over by a stuffy divine Chairman of
the Bored are a joke, not a glory. Even more modern, more up-to-date
substitutes—Heaven as a comfortable feeling of peace and kindness, sweetness and
light, and God as a vague grandfatherly benevolence, a senile philanthropist—are
even more insipid.

Our pictures of Heaven simply do not move us; they are not moving pictures. It
is this aesthetic failure rather than intellectual or moral failures in our
pictures of Heaven and of God that threatens faith most potently today. Our
pictures of Heaven are dull, platitudinous and syrupy; therefore, so is our
faith, our hope, and our love of Heaven.

It is surely a Satanic triumph of the first order to have taken the fascination
out of a doctrine that must be either a fascinating lie or a fascinating fact.
Even if people think of Heaven as a fascinating lie, they are at least
fascinated with it, and that can spur further thinking, which can lead to
belief. But if it's dull, it doesn't matter whether it's a dull lie or a dull
truth. Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as
indifference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love.

It is Heaven and Hell that put bite into the Christian vision of life on earth,
just as playing for high stakes puts bite into a game or a war or a courtship.
Hell is part of the vision too: the height of the mountain is appreciated from
the depth of the valley, and for winning to be high drama, losing must be
possible. For salvation to be "good news", there must be "bad news" to be saved
from. If all of life's roads lead to the same place, it makes no ultimate
difference which road we choose. But if they lead to opposite places, to
infinite bliss or infinite misery, unimaginable glory or unimaginable tragedy,
if the spirit has roads as really and objectively different as the body's roads
and the mind's roads, and if these roads lead to destinations as really and
objectively different as two different cities or two different mathematical
conclusions—why, then life is a life-or-death affair, a razor's edge, and our
choice of roads is infinitely important.
We no longer live habitually in this medieval mental landscape. If we are
typically modern, we live in ennui; we are bored, jaded, cynical, flat, and
burnt out. When the skies roll back like a scroll and the angelic trump sounds,
many will simply yawn and say, "Pretty good special effects, but the plot's too
traditional." If we were not so bored and empty, we would not have to stimulate
ourselves with increasing dosages of sex and violence—or just constant busyness.
Here we are in the most fantastic fun and games factory ever invented—modern
technological society—and we are bored, like a spoiled rich kid in a mansion
surrounded by a thousand expensive toys. Medieval people by comparison were like
peasants in toyless hovels—and they were fascinated. Occasions for awe and
wonder seemed to abound: birth and death and love and light and darkness and
wind and sea and fire and sunrise and star and tree and bird and human mind—and
God and Heaven. But all these things have not changed, we have. The universe has
not become empty and we, full; it has remained full and we have become empty,
insensitive to its fullness, cold hearted.

Yet even in this cold heart a strange fire kindles at times—something from
another dimension, another kind of excitement—when we dare to open the issue of
Heaven, the issue of meeting God, with the mind and heart together. Like Ezekiel
in the valley of dry bones, we experience the shock of the dead coming to life.

C.S. Lewis: "You have had a shock like that before, in connection with smaller
matters—when the line pulls at your hand, when something breathes beside you
in the darkness. So here; the shock comes at the precise moment when the
thrill of life is communicated to us along the clue we have been following. It
is always shocking to meet life where we thought we were alone. "Look out!" we
cry, "It's alive!" And therefore this is the very point at which so many draw
back—I would have done so myself if I could—and proceed no further with
Christianity. An "impersonal God"—well and good. A subjective God of beauty,
truth and goodness inside our own heads—better still. A formless life-force
surging through us, a vast power that we can tap-best of all. But God Himself,
alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps approaching at an
infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband—that is quite another matter. There
comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush
suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when
people who have been dabbling in religion ("Man's search for God"!) suddenly
draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that!"

When it does come to that, we feel a strange burning in the heart, like the
disciples on the road to Emmaeus. Ancient, sleeping hopes and fears rise like
giants from their graves. The horizons of our comfortable little
four-dimensional universe crack, and over them arises an enormous bliss and its
equally enormous absence. Heaven and Hell—suppose, just suppose it were really,
really true! What difference would that make?
I think we know.

From Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven

by Ignatius Press.

Design by davenevins.com
Twenty Arguments For The Existence Of God by Peter Kreeft & Ronald K. Tacelli

The Argument from Change

The Argument from Efficient Causality
The Argument from Time and Contingency
The Argument from Degrees of Perfection
The Design Argument
The Kalam Argument
The Argument from Contingency
The Argument from the World as an Interacting Whole
The Argument from Miracles
The Argument from Consciousness
The Argument from Truth
The Argument from the Origin of the Idea of God
The Ontological Argument
The Moral Argument
The Argument from Conscience
The Argument from Desire
The Argument from Aesthetic Experience
The Argument from Religious Experience
The Common Consent Argument
Pascal's Wager

In this section you will find arguments of many different kinds for the
existence of God. And we make to you, the reader, an initial appeal. We realize
that many people, both believers and nonbelievers, doubt that God's existence
can be demonstrated or even argued about. You may be one of them. You may in
fact have a fairly settled view that it cannot be argued about. But no one can
reasonably doubt that attention to these arguments has its place in any book on
apologetics. For very many have believed that such arguments are possible, and
that some of them actually work.

They have also believed that an effective rational argument for God's existence
is an important first step in opening the mind to the possibility of faith—in
clearing some of the roadblocks and rubble that prevent people from taking the
idea of divine revelation seriously. And in this they have a real point. Suppose
our best and most honest reflection on the nature of things led us to see the
material universe as self-sufficient and uncaused; to see its form as the result
of random motions, devoid of any plan or purpose. Would you then be impressed by
reading in an ancient book that there exists a God of love, or that the heavens
proclaim his glory? Would you be disposed to take that message seriously? More
likely you would excuse yourself from taking seriously anything claimed as a
communication from the Creator. As one person put it: I cannot believe that we
are children of God, because I cannot believe there is anyone to do the
adopting.
It is this sort of cramped and constricted horizon that the proofs presented in
this chapter are trying to expand. They are attempts to confront us with the
radical insufficiency of what is finite and limited, and to open minds to a
level of being beyond it. If they succeed in this—and we can say from experience
that some of the proofs do succeed with many people—they can be of very great
value indeed.

You may not feel that they are particularly valuable to you. You may be blessed
with a vivid sense of God's presence; and that is something for which to be
profoundly grateful. But that does not mean you have no obligation to ponder
these arguments. For many have not been blessed in that way. And the proofs are
designed for them—or some of them at least—to give a kind of help they really
need. You may even be asked to provide help.

Besides, are any of us really in so little need of such help as we may claim?
Surely in most of us there is something of the skeptic. There is a part of us
tempted to believe that nothing is ultimately real beyond what we can see and
touch; a part looking for some reason, beyond the assurances of Scripture, to
believe that there is more. We have no desire to make exaggerated claims for
these demonstrations, or to confuse "good reason" "with scientific proof." But
we believe that there are many who want and need the kind of help these proofs
offer more than they might at first be willing to admit.

A word about the organization of the arguments. We have organized them into two
basic groups: those which take their data from without—cosmological
arguments—and those that take it from within—psychological arguments. The group
of cosmological arguments begins with our versions of Aquinas's famous "five
ways." These are not the simplest of the arguments, and therefore are not the
most convincing to many people. Our order is not from the most to the least
effective. The first argument, in particular, is quite abstract and difficult.
Not all the arguments are equally demonstrative. One (Pascal's Wager) is not an
argument for God at all, but an argument for faith in God as a "wager." Another
(the ontological argument) we regard as fundamentally flawed; yet we include it
because it is very famous and influential, and may yet be saved by new
formulations of it. Others (the argument from miracles, the argument from
religious experience and the common consent argument) claim only strong
probability, not demonstrative certainty. We have included them because they
form a strong part of a cumulative case. We believe that only some of these
arguments, taken individually and separately, demonstrate the existence of a
being that has some of the properties only God can have (no argument proves all
the divine attributes); but all twenty taken together, like twined rope, make a
very strong case.

1. The Argument from Change

The material world we know is a world of change. This young woman came to be
5'2", but she was not always that height. The great oak tree before us grew from
the tiniest acorn. Now when something comes to be in a certain state, such as
mature size, that state cannot bring itself into being. For until it comes to
be, it does not exist, and if it does not yet exist, it cannot cause anything.

As for the thing that changes, although it can be what it will become, it is not
yet what it will become. It actually exists right now in this state (an acorn);
it will actually exist in that state (large oak tree). But it is not actually in
that state now. It only has the potentiality for that state.

Now a question: To explain the change, can we consider the changing thing alone,
or must other things also be involved? Obviously, other things must be involved.
Nothing can give itself what it does not have, and the changing thing cannot
have now, already, what it will come to have then. The result of change cannot
actually exist before the change. The changing thing begins with only the
potential to change, but it needs to be acted on by other things outside if that
potential is to be made actual. Otherwise it cannot change.

Nothing changes itself. Apparently self-moving things, like animal bodies, are
moved by desire or will—something other than mere molecules. And when the animal
or human dies, the molecules remain, but the body no longer moves because the
desire or will is no longer present to move it.

Now a further question: Are the other things outside the changing thing also
changing? Are its movers also moving? If so, all of them stand in need right now
of being acted on by other things, or else they cannot change. No matter how
many things there are in the series, each one needs something outside itself to
actualize its potentiality for change.

The universe is the sum total of all these moving things, however many there
are. The whole universe is in the process of change. But we have already seen
that change in any being requires an outside force to actualize it. Therefore,
there is some force outside (in addition to) the universe, some real being
transcendent to the universe. This is one of the things meant by "God."

Briefly, if there is nothing outside the material universe, then there is

nothing that can cause the universe to change. But it does change. Therefore
there must be something in addition to the material universe. But the universe
is the sum total of all matter, space and time. These three things depend on
each other. Therefore this being outside the universe is outside matter, space
and time. It is not a changing thing; it is the unchanging Source of change.

2. The Argument from Efficient Causality

We notice that some things cause other things to be (to begin to be, to continue
to be, or both). For example, a man playing the piano is causing the music that
we hear. If he stops, so does the music.

Now ask yourself: Are all things caused to exist by other things right now?
Suppose they are. That is, suppose there is no Uncaused Being, no God. Then
nothing could exist right now. For remember, on the no-God hypothesis, all
things need a present cause outside of themselves in order to exist. So right
now, all things, including all those things which are causing things to be, need
a cause. They can give being only so long as they are given being. Everything
that exists, therefore, on this hypothesis, stands in need of being caused to
exist.

But caused by what? Beyond everything that is, there can only be nothing. But
that is absurd: all of reality dependent—but dependent on nothing! The
hypothesis that all being is caused, that there is no Uncaused Being, is absurd.
So there must be something uncaused, something on which all things that need an
efficient cause of being are dependent.

Existence is like a gift given from cause to effect. If there is no one who has
the gift, the gift cannot be passed down the chain of receivers, however long or
short the chain may be. If everyone has to borrow a certain book, but no one
actually has it, then no one will ever get it. If there is no God who has
existence by his own eternal nature, then the gift of existence cannot be passed
down the chain of creatures and we can never get it. But we do get it; we exist.
Therefore there must exist a God: an Uncaused Being who does not have to receive
existence like us—and like every other link in the chain of receivers.

Question 1: Why do we need an uncaused cause? Why could there not simply be an
endless series of things mutually keeping each other in being?

Reply: This is an attractive hypothesis. Think of a single drunk. He could

probably not stand up alone. But a group of drunks, all of them mutually
supporting each other, might stand. They might even make their way along the
street. But notice: Given so many drunks, and given the steady ground beneath
them, we can understand how their stumblings might cancel each other out, and
how the group of them could remain (relatively) upright. We could not understand
their remaining upright if the ground did not support them—if, for example, they
were all suspended several feet above it. And of course, if there were no actual
drunks, there would be nothing to understand.

This brings us to our argument. Things have got to exist in order to be mutually
dependent; they cannot depend upon each other for their entire being, for then
they would have to be, simultaneously, cause and effect of each other. A causes
B, B causes C, and C causes A. That is absurd. The argument is trying to show
why a world of caused causes can be given—or can be there—at all. And it simply
points out: If this thing can exist only because something else is giving it
existence, then there must exist something whose being is not a gift. Otherwise
everything would need at the same time to be given being, but nothing (in
addition to "everything") could exist to give it. And that means nothing would
actually be.

Question 2: Why not have an endless series of caused causes stretching backward
into the past? Then everything would be made actual and would actually be—even
though their causes might no longer exist.

Reply: First, if the kalam argument (argument 6) is right, there could not exist
an endless series of causes stretching backward into the past. But suppose that
such a series could exist. The argument is not concerned about the past, and
would work whether the past is finite or infinite. It is concerned with what
exists right now.

Even as you read this, you are dependent on other things; you could not, right
now, exist without them. Suppose there are seven such things. If these seven
things did not exist, neither would you. Now suppose that all seven of them
depend for their existence right now on still other things. Without these, the
seven you now depend on would not exist—and neither would you. Imagine that the
entire universe consists of you and the seven sustaining you. If there is
nothing besides that universe of changing, dependent things, then the
universe—and you as part of it—could not be. For everything that is would right
now need to be given being but there would be nothing capable of giving it. And
yet you are and it is. So there must in that case exist something besides the
universe of dependent things—something not dependent as they are.

And if it must exist in that case, it must exist in this one. In our world there
are surely more than seven things that need, right now, to be given being. But
that need is not diminished by there being more than seven. As we imagine more
and more of them—even an infinite number, if that were possible—we are simply
expanding the set of beings that stand in need. And this need—for being, for
existence—cannot be met from within the imagined set. But obviously it has been
met, since contingent beings exist. Therefore there is a source of being on
which our material universe right now depends.

3. The Argument from Time and Contingency

We notice around us things that come into being and go out of being. A tree,
for example, grows from a tiny shoot, flowers brilliantly, then withers and
dies.

Whatever comes into being or goes out of being does not have to be; nonbeing
is a real possibility.

Suppose that nothing has to be; that is, that nonbeing is a real possibility
for everything.
 Then right now nothing would exist. For

If the universe began to exist, then all being must trace its origin to some
past moment before which there existed—literally—nothing at all. But

From nothing nothing comes. So

The universe could not have begun.

But suppose the universe never began. Then, for the infinitely long duration
of cosmic history, all being had the built—in possibility not to be. But

If in an infinite time that possibility was never realized, then it could not
have been a real possibility at all. So

There must exist something which has to exist, which cannot not exist. This
sort of being is called necessary.

Either this necessity belongs to the thing in itself or it is derived from

another. If derived from another there must ultimately exist a being whose
necessity is not derived, that is, an absolutely necessary being.

This absolutely necessary being is God.

Question1: Even though you may never in fact step outside your house all day, it
was possible for you to do so. Why is it impossible that the universe still
happens to exist, even though it was possible for it to go out of existence?

Reply: The two cases are not really parallel. To step outside your house on a
given day is something that you may or may not choose to do. But if nonbeing is
a real possibility for you, then you are the kind of being that cannot last
forever. In other words, the possibility of nonbeing must be built—in,
"programmed," part of your very constitution, a necessary property. And if all
being is like that, then how could anything still exist after the passage of an
infinite time? For an infinite time is every bit as long as forever. So being
must have what it takes to last forever, that is, to stay in existence for an
infinite time. Therefore there must exist within the realm of being something
that does not tend to go out of existence. And this sort of being, as Aquinas
says, is called "necessary."

4. The Argument from Degrees of Perfection

We notice around us things that vary in certain ways. A shade of color, for
example, can be lighter or darker than another, a freshly baked apple pie is
hotter than one taken out of the oven hours before; the life of a person who
gives and receives love is better than the life of one who does not.
So we arrange some things in terms of more and less. And when we do, we
naturally think of them on a scale approaching most and least. For example, we
think of the lighter as approaching the brightness of pure white, and the darker
as approaching the opacity of pitch black. This means that we think of them at
various "distances" from the extremes, and as possessing, in degrees of "more"
or "less," what the extremes possess in full measure.

Sometimes it is the literal distance from an extreme that makes all the
difference between "more" and "less." For example, things are more or less hot
when they are more or less distant from a source of heat. The source
communicates to those things the quality of heat they possess in greater or
lesser measure. This means that the degree of heat they possess is caused by a
source outside of them.

Now when we think of the goodness of things, part of what we mean relates to
what they are simply as beings. We believe, for example, that a relatively
stable and permanent way of being is better than one that is fleeting and
precarious. Why? Because we apprehend at a deep (but not always conscious) level
that being is the source and condition of all value; finally and ultimately,
being is better than nonbeing. And so we recognize the inherent superiority of
all those ways of being that expand possibilities, free us from the constricting
confines of matter, and allow us to share in, enrich and be enriched by, the
being of other things. In other words, we all recognize that intelligent being
is better than unintelligent being; that a being able to give and receive love
is better than one that cannot; that our way of being is better, richer and
fuller than that of a stone, a flower, an earthworm, an ant, or even a baby
seal.

But if these degrees of perfection pertain to being and being is caused in

finite creatures, then there must exist a "best," a source and real standard of
all the perfections that we recognize belong to us as beings.

This absolutely perfect being—the "Being of all beings," "the Perfection of all
perfections"—is God.

Question 1: The argument assumes a real "better." But aren't all our judgments
of comparative value merely subjective?

Reply: The very asking of this question answers it. For the questioner would not
have asked it unless he or she thought it really better to do so than not, and
really better to find the true answer than not. You can speak subjectivism but
you cannot live it.

5. The Design Argument

This sort of argument is of wide and perennial appeal. Almost everyone admits
that reflection on the order and beauty of nature touches something very deep
within us. But are the order and beauty the product of intelligent design and
conscious purpose? For theists the answer is yes. Arguments for design are
attempts to vindicate this answer, to show why it is the most reasonable one to
give. They have been formulated in ways as richly varied as the experience in
which they are rooted. The following displays the core or central insight.

The universe displays a staggering amount of intelligibility, both within the

things we observe and in the way these things relate to others outside
themselves. That is to say: the way they exist and coexist display an
intricately beautiful order and regularity that can fill even the most casual
observer with wonder. It is the norm in nature for many different beings to
work together to produce the same valuable end—for example, the organs in the
body work for our life and health. (See also argument 8.)

Either this intelligible order is the product of chance or of intelligent

design.

Not chance.

Therefore the universe is the product of intelligent design.

Design comes only from a mind, a designer.

Therefore the universe is the product of an intelligent Designer.

The first premise is certainly true-even those resistant to the argument admit
it. The person who did not would have to be almost pathetically obtuse. A single
protein molecule is a thing of immensely impressive order; much more so a single
cell; and incredibly much more so an organ like the eye, where ordered parts of
enormous and delicate complexity work together with countless others to achieve
a single certain end. Even chemical elements are ordered to combine with other
elements in certain ways and under certain conditions. Apparent disorder is a
problem precisely because of the overwhelming pervasiveness of order and
regularity. So the first premise stands.

If all this order is not in some way the product of intelligent design—then
what? Obviously, it "just happened." Things just fell out that way "by chance."
Alternatively, if all this order is not the product of blind, purposeless
forces, then it has resulted from some kind of purpose. That purpose can only be
intelligent design. So the second premise stands.

It is of course the third premise that is crucial. Ultimately, nonbelievers tell

us, it is indeed by chance and not by any design that the universe of our
experience exists the way it does. It just happens to have this order, and the
burden of proof is on believers to demonstrate why this could not be so by
chance alone.

But this seems a bit backward. It is surely up to nonbelievers to produce a

credible alternative to design. And "chance" is simply not credible. For we can
understand chance only against a background of order. To say that something
happened "by chance" is to say that it did not turn out as we would have
expected, or that it did turn out in a way we would not have expected. But
expectation is impossible without order. If you take away order and speak of
chance alone as a kind of ultimate source, you have taken away the only
background that allows us to speak meaningfully of chance at all. Instead of
thinking of chance against a background of order, we are invited to think of
order-overwhelmingly intricate and ubiquitous order-against a random and
purposeless background of chance. Frankly, that is incredible. Therefore it is
eminently reasonable to affirm the third premise, not chance, and therefore to
affirm the conclusion, that this universe is the product of intelligent design.
Question 1: Hasn't the Darwinian theory of evolution shown us how it is possible
for all the order in the universe to have arisen by chance?

Reply: Not at all. If the Darwinian theory has shown anything, it has shown, in
a general way, how species may have descended from others through random
mutation; and how survival of these species can be accounted for by natural
selection—by the fitness of some species to survive in their environment. In no
way does it—can it—account for the ubiquitous order and intelligibility of
nature. Rather, it presupposes order. To quote a famous phrase: "The survival of
the fittest presupposes the arrival of the fit." If Darwinians wish to
extrapolate from their purely biological theory and maintain that all the vast
order around us is the result of random changes, then they are saying something
which no empirical evidence could ever confirm; which no empirical science could
ever demonstrate; and which, on the face of it, is simply beyond belief.

Question 2: Maybe it is only in this region of the universe that order is to be

found. Maybe there are other parts unknown to us that are completely chaotic—or
maybe the universe will one day in the future become chaotic. What becomes of
the argument then?

Reply: Believers and nonbelievers both experience the same universe. It is this
which is either designed or not. And this world of our common experience is a
world of pervasive order and intelligibility. That fact must be faced. Before we
speculate about what will be in the future or what may be elsewhere in the
present, we need to deal honestly with what is. We need to recognize in an
unflinching way the extent—the overwhelming extent—of order and intelligibility.
Then we can ask ourselves: Is it credible to suppose that we inhabit a small
island of order surrounded by a vast sea of chaos—a sea which threatens one day
to engulf us?

Just consider how in the last decades we have strained fantastically at the
limits of our knowledge; we have cast our vision far beyond this planet and far
within the elements that make it up. And what has this expansion of our horizons
revealed? Always the same thing: more—and not less—intelligibility; more—and not
less—complex and intricate order. Not only is there no reason to believe in a
surrounding chaos, there is every reason not to. It flies in the face of the
experience that all of us—believers and nonbelievers—share in common.

Something similar can be said about the future. We know the way things in the
universe have behaved and are behaving. And so, until we have some reason to
think otherwise, there is every reason to believe it will continue on its
orderly path of running down. No speculation can nullify what we know.

And, anyway, exactly what sort of chaos is this question asking us to imagine?
That effect precedes cause? That the law of contradiction does not hold? That
there need not be what it takes for some existing thing to exist? These
suggestions are completely unintelligible; if we think about them at all, it is
only to reject them as impossible. Can we imagine less order? Yes. Some
rearrangement of the order we experience? Yes. But total disorder and chaos?
That can never be considered as a real possibility. To speculate about it as if
it were is really a waste of time.

Question 3: But what if the order we experience is merely a product of our

minds? Even though we cannot think utter chaos and disorder, maybe that is how
reality really is.

Reply: Our minds are the only means by which we can know reality. We have no
other access. If we agree that something cannot exist in thought, we cannot go
ahead and say that it might nevertheless exist in reality. Because then we would
be thinking what we claim cannot be thought.

Suppose you claim that order is just a product of our minds. This puts you in a
very awkward position. You are saying that we must think about reality in terms
of order and intelligibility, but things may not exist that way in fact. Now to
propose something for consideration is to think about it. And so you are saying:
(a) we must think about reality in a certain way, but (b) since we think that
things may not in fact exist that way, then (c) we need not think about reality
the way we must think about it! Are we willing to pay that high a price to deny
that the being of the universe displays intelligent design? It does not, on the
face of it, seem cost effective.

6. The Kalam Argument

The Arabic word kalam literally means "speech," but came to denote a certain
type of philosophical theology—a type containing demonstrations that the world
could not be infinitely old and must therefore have been created by God. This
sort of demonstration has had a long and wide appeal among both Christians and
Muslims. Its form is simple and straightforward.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being.

The universe began to exist.

Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being.

Grant the first premise. (Most people—outside of asylums and graduate schools
would consider it not only true, but certainly and obviously true.)
Is the second premise true? Did the universe—the collection of all things
bounded by space and time—begin to exist? This premise has recently received
powerful support from natural science—from so—called Big Bang Cosmology. But
there are philosophical arguments in its favor as well. Can an infinite task
ever be done or completed? If, in order to reach a certain end, infinitely many
steps had to precede it, could the end ever be reached? Of course not—not even
in an infinite time. For an infinite time would be unending, just as the steps
would be. In other words, no end would ever be reached. The task
would—could—never be completed.

But what about the step just before the end? Could that point ever be reached?
Well, if the task is really infinite, then an infinity of steps must also have
preceded it. And therefore the step just before the end could also never be
reached. But then neither could the step just before that one. In fact, no step
in the sequence could be reached, because an infinity of steps must always have
preceded any step; must always have been gone through one by one before it. The
problem comes from supposing that an infinite sequence could ever reach, by
temporal succession, any point at all.

Now if the universe never began, then it always was. If it always was, then it
is infinitely old. If it is infinitely old, then an infinite amount of time
would have to have elapsed before (say) today. And so an infinite number of days
must have been completed—one day succeeding another, one bit of time being added
to what went before—in order for the present day to arrive. But this exactly
parallels the problem of an infinite task. If the present day has been reached,
then the actually infinite sequence of history has reached this present point:
in fact, has been completed up to this point—for at any present point the whole
past must already have happened. But an infinite sequence of steps could never
have reached this present point—or any point before it.

So, either the present day has not been reached, or the process of reaching it
was not infinite. But obviously the present day has been reached. So the process
of reaching it was not infinite. In other words, the universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause for its coming into being, a Creator.

Question 1: Christians believe they are going to live forever with God. So they
believe the future will be endless. How come the past cannot also be endless?
Reply: The question really answers itself. Christians believe that their life
with God will never end. That means it will never form an actually completed
infinite series. In more technical language: an endless future is
potentially—but never actually—infinite. This means that although the future
will never cease to expand and increase, still its actual extent will always be
finite. But that can only be true if all of created reality had a beginning.

Question 2: How do we know that the cause of the universe still exists? Maybe it
started the universe going and then ceased to be.

Reply: Remember that we are seeking for a cause of spatio-temporal being. This
cause created the entire universe of space and time. And space and time
themselves must be part of that creation. So the cause cannot be another
spatio—temporal being. (If it were, all the problems about infinite duration
would arise once again.) It must somehow stand outside the limitations and
constrains of space and time.

It is hard to understand how such a being could "cease" to be. We know how a
being within the universe ceases to be: it comes in time to be fatally affected
by some agency external to it. But this picture is proper to us, and to all
beings limited in some way by space and time. A being not limited in these ways
cannot "come" to be or "cease" to be. If it exists at all, it must exist
eternally.

Question 3: But is this cause God—a he and not a mere it?

Reply: Suppose the cause of the universe has existed eternally. Suppose further
that this cause is not personal: that it has given rise to the universe, not
through any choice, but simply through its being. In that case it is hard to see
how the universe could be anything but infinitely old, since all the conditions
needed for the being of the universe would exist from all eternity. But the
kalam argument has shown that the universe cannot be infinitely old. So the
hypothesis of an eternal impersonal cause seems to lead to an inconsistency.

Is there a way out? Yes, if the universe is the result of a free personal
choice. Then at least we have some way of seeing how an eternal cause could give
rise to a temporally limited effect. Of course, the kalam argument does not
prove everything Christians believe about God, but what proof does? Less than
everything, however, is far from nothing. And the kalam argument proves
something central to the Christian belief in God: that the universe is not
eternal and without beginning; that there is a Maker of heaven and earth. And in
doing so, it disproves the picture of the universe most atheists wish to
maintain: self—sustaining matter, endlessly changing in endless time.

7. The Argument from Contingency

The basic form of this argument is simple.

If something exists, there must exist what it takes for that thing to exist.

The universe—the collection of beings in space and time—exists.

Therefore, there must exist what it takes for the universe to exist.

What it takes for the universe to exist cannot exist within the universe or be
bounded by space and time.

Therefore, what it takes for the universe to exist must transcend both space
and time.

Suppose you deny the first premise. Then if X exists, there need not exist what
it takes for X to exist. But "what it takes for X to exist" means the immediate
condition(s) for X's existence. You mean that X exists only if Y. Without Y,
there can be no X. So the denial of premise 1 amounts to this: X exists; X can
only exist if Y exists; and Y does not exist. This is absurd. So there must
exist what it takes for the universe to exist. But what does it take?

We spoke of the universe as "the collection of beings in space and time."

Consider one such being: yourself. You exist, and you are, in part at least,
material. This means that you are a finite, limited and changing being, you know
that right now, as you read this book, you are dependent for your existence on
beings outside you. Not your parents or grandparents. They may no longer be
alive, but you exist now. And right now you depend on many things in order to
exist—for example, on the air you breathe. To be dependent in this way is to be
contingent. You exist if something else right now exists.

But not everything can be like this. For then everything would need to be given
being, but there would be nothing capable of giving it. There would not exist
what it takes for anything to exist. So there must be something that does not
exist conditionally; something which does not exist only if something else
exists; something which exists in itself. What it takes for this thing to exist
could only be this thing itself. Unlike changing material reality, there would
be no distance, so to speak, between what this thing is and that it is.
Obviously the collection of beings changing in space and time cannot be such a
thing. Therefore, what it takes for the universe to exist cannot be identical
with the universe itself or with a part of the universe.

Question 1: But why should we call this cause "God"? Maybe there is something
unknown that grounds the universe of change we live in.

Reply: True. And this "unknown" is God. What we humans know directly is this
sensible changing world. We also know that there must exist whatever it takes
for something to exist. Therefore, we know that neither this changing universe
as a whole nor any part of it can be itself what it takes for the universe to
exist. But we have now such direct knowledge of the cause of changing things. We
know that there must exist a cause; we know that this cause cannot be finite or
material—that it must transcend such limitations. But what this ultimate cause
is in itself remains, so far, a mystery.

There is more to be said by reason; and there is very much more God has made
known about himself through revelation. But the proofs have given us some real
knowledge as well: knowledge that the universe is created; knowledge that right
now it is kept in being by a cause unbounded by any material limit, that
transcends the kind of being we humans directly know. And that is surely
knowledge worth having. We might figure out that someone's death was murder and
no accident, without figuring out exactly who did it and why, and this might
leave us frustrated and unsatisfied. But at least we would know what path of
questioning to pursue; at least we would know that someone did it.

So it is with the proofs. They let us know that at every moment the being of the
universe is the creative act of a Giver—A Giver transcending all material and
spiritual limitations. Beyond that, they do not tell us much about what or who
this Giver is—but they point in a very definite direction. We know that this
Ultimate Reality—the Giver of being—cannot be material. And we know the gift
which is given includes personal being: intelligence, will and spirit. The
infinite transcendent cause of these things cannot be less than they are, but
must be infinitely more. How and in what way we do not know. To some extent this
Giver must always remain unknown to human reason. We should never expect
otherwise. But reason can at least let us know that "someone did it." And that
is of great value.

8. The Argument from the World as an Interacting Whole

Norris Clarke, who taught metaphysics and philosophy of religion for many years
at Fordham, has circulated privately an intriguing version of the design
argument. We present it here, slightly abridged and revised; for your
reflection.

Starting point. This world is given to us as a dynamic, ordered system of many

active component elements. Their natures (natural properties) are ordered to
interact with each other in stable, reciprocal relationships which we call
physical laws. For example, every hydrogen atom in our universe is ordered to
combine with every oxygen atom in the proportion of 2:1 (which implies that
every oxygen atom is reciprocally ordered to combine with every hydrogen atom in
the proportion of 1:2). So it is with the chemical valences of all the basic
elements. So too all particles with mass are ordered to move toward every other
according to the fixed proportions of the law of gravity.
In such an interconnected, interlocking, dynamic system, the active nature of
each component is defined by its relation with others, and so presupposes the
others for its own intelligibility and ability to act. Contemporary science
reveals to us that our world—system is not merely an aggregate of many separate,
unrelated laws, but rather a tightly interlocking whole, where relationship to
the whole structures and determines the parts. The parts can no longer be
understood apart from the whole; its influence permeates them all.

Argument. In any such system as the above (like our world) no component part or
active element can be self—sufficient or self—explanatory. For any part
presupposes all the other parts—the whole system already in place—to match its
own relational properties. It can't act unless the others are there to interact
reciprocally with it. Any one part could be self—sufficient only if it were the
cause of the whole rest of the system—which is impossible, since no part can act
except in collaboration with the others.

Nor can the system as a whole explain its own existence, since it is made up of
the component parts and is not a separate being, on its own, independent of
them. So neither the parts nor the whole are self—sufficient; neither can
explain the actual existence of this dynamically interactive system.

Three Conclusions

Since the parts make sense only within the whole, and neither the whole nor
the parts can explain their own existence, then such a system as our world
requires a unifying efficient cause to posit it in existence as a unified
whole.

Any such cause must be an intelligent cause, one that brings the system into
being according to a unifying idea. For the unity of the whole—and of each one
of the overarching, cosmic—wide, physical laws uniting elements under
themselves—is what determines and correlates the parts. Hence it must be
somehow actually present as an effective organizing factor. But the unity, the
wholeness, of the whole transcends any one part, and therefore cannot be
contained in any one part. To be actually present all at once as a whole this
unity can only be the unity of an organizing unifying idea. For only an idea
can hold together many different elements at once without destroying or fusing
their distinctness. That is almost the definition of an idea. Since the actual
parts are spread out over space and time, the only way they can be together at
once as an intelligible unity is within an idea. Hence the system of the world
as a whole must live first within the unity of an idea.

Now a real idea cannot actually exist and be effectively operative

save in a real mind, which has the creative power to bring such a system into
real existence. Hence the sufficient reason for our ordered world—system must
ultimately be a creative ordering Mind. A cosmic—wide order requires a
 cosmic—wide Orderer, which can only be a Mind.

Such an ordering Mind must be independent of the system itself, that is,
transcendent; not dependent on the system for its own existence and operation.
For if it were dependent on—or part of—the system, it would have to presuppose
the latter as already existing in order to operate, and would thus have to
both precede and follow itself. But this is absurd. Hence it must exist and be
able to operate prior to and independent of the system.

Thus our material universe necessarily requires, as the sufficient

reason for its actual existence as an operating whole, a Transcendent Creative
Mind.

9. The Argument from Miracles

A miracle is an event whose only adequate explanation is the extraordinary and

direct intervention of God.

There are numerous well-attested miracles.

Therefore, there are numerous events whose only adequate explanation is the
extraordinary and direct intervention of God.

Therefore God exists.

Obviously if you believe that some extraordinary event is a miracle, then you
believe in divine agency, and you believe that such agency was at work in this
event. But the question is: Was this event a miracle? If miracles exist, then
God must exist. But do miracles exist?

Which events do we choose? In the first place, the event must be extraordinary.

But there are many extraordinary happenings (e.g., numerous stones dropping from
the sky in Texas) that do not qualify as miracles. Why not? First, because they
could be caused by something in nature, and second, because the context in which
they occur is not religious. They qualify as mere oddities, as "strange
happenings"; the sort of thing you might expect to read in Believe It or Not,
but never hear about from the pulpit. Therefore the meaning of the event must
also be religious to qualify as a miracle.

Suppose that a holy man had stood in the center of Houston and said: "My dear
brothers and sisters! You are leading sinful lives! Look at yourselves—drunken!
dissolute! God wants you to repent! And as a sign of his displeasure he's going
to shower stones upon you!" Then, moments later—thunk! thunk! thunk!—the stones
began to fall. The word "miracle" might very well spring to mind.
Not that we would have to believe in God after witnessing this event. But still,
if that man in Texas seemed utterly genuine, and if his accusations hit home,
made us think "He's right," then it would be very hard to consider what happened
a deception or even an extraordinary coincidence.

This means that the setting of a supposed miracle is crucially important. Not
just the physical setting, and not just the timing, but the personal setting is
vital as well—the character and the message of the person to whom this event is
specially tied. Take, for example, four or five miracles from the New Testament.
Remove them completely from their context, from the teaching and character of
Christ. Would it be wrong to see their religious significance as thereby greatly
diminished? After all, to call some happening a miracle is to interpret it
religiously. But to interpret it that way demands a context or setting which
invites such interpretation. And part of this setting usually, though not
always, involves a person whose moral authority is first recognized, and whose
religious authority, which the miracle seems to confirm, is then acknowledged.

Abstract discussions of probability usually miss this factor. But setting does
play a decisive role. Many years ago, at an otherwise dull convention, a
distinguished philosopher explained why he had become a Christian. He said: "I
picked up the New Testament with a view to judging it, to weighing its pros and
cons. But as I began to read, I realized that I was the one being judged."
Certainly he came to believe in the miracle—stories. But it was the character
and teaching of Christ that led him to accept the things recounted there as
genuine acts of God.

So there is not really a proof from miracles. If you see some event as a
miracle, then the activity of God is seen in this event. There is a movement of
the mind from this event to its proper interpretation as miraculous. And what
gives impetus to that movement is not just the event by itself, but the many
factors surrounding it which invite—or seem to demand—such interpretation.
But miraculous events exist. Indeed, there is massive, reliable testimony to
them across many times, places and cultures.

Therefore their cause exists.

And their only adequate cause is God.

Therefore God exists.

The argument is not a proof, but a very powerful clue or sign. (For further
discussion, see chap. 5 on miracles from Handbook of Christian Apologetics.)

10. The Argument from Consciousness

When we experience the tremendous order and intelligibility in the universe, we
are experiencing something intelligence can grasp. Intelligence is part of what
we find in the world. But this universe is not itself intellectually aware. As
great as the forces of nature are, they do not know themselves. Yet we know them
and ourselves. These remarkable facts—the presence of intelligence amidst
unconscious material processes, and the conformity of those processes to the
structure of conscious intelligence—have given rise to a variation on the first
argument for design.

We experience the universe as intelligible. This intelligibility means that

the universe is graspable by intelligence.

Either this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to grasp
it are the products of intelligence, or both intelligibility and intelligence
are the products of blind chance.

Not blind chance.

Therefore this intelligible universe and the finite minds so well suited to
grasp it are the products of intelligence.

There are obvious similarities here to the design argument, and many of the
things we said to defend that argument could be used to defend this one too. For
now we want to focus our attention on step 3.

Readers familiar with C. S. Lewis's Miracles will remember the powerful argument
he made in chapter three against what he called "naturalism": the view that
everything—including our thinking and judging—belongs to one vast interlocking
system of physical causes and effects. If naturalism is true, Lewis argued, then
it seems to leave us with no reason for believing it to be true; for all
judgments would equally and ultimately be the result of nonrational forces.
Now this line of reflection has an obvious bearing on step 3. What we mean by
"blind chance" is the way physical nature must ultimately operate if
"naturalism" is true—void of any rational plan or guiding purpose. So if Lewis's
argument is a good one, then step 3 stands: blind chance cannot be the source of
our intelligence.

We were tempted, when preparing this section, to quote the entire third chapter
of Miracles. This sort of argument is not original to Lewis, but we have never
read a better statement of it than his, and we urge you to consult it. But we
have found a compelling, and admirably succinct version (written almost twenty
years before Miracles) in H. W. B. Joseph's Some Problems in Ethics (Oxford
University Press, 1931). Joseph was an Oxford don, senior to Lewis, with whose
writings Lewis was certainly familiar. And undoubtedly this statement of the
argument influenced Lewis's later, more elaborate version.
If thought is laryngeal motion, how should any one think more truly than the
wind blows? All movements of bodies are equally necessary, but they cannot be
discriminated as true and false. It seems as nonsensical to call a movement true
as a flavour purple or a sound avaricious. But what is obvious when thought is
said to be a certain bodily movement seems equally to follow from its being the
effect of one. Thought called knowledge and thought called error are both
necessary results of states of brain. These states are necessary results of
other bodily states. All the bodily states are equally real, and so are the
different thoughts; but by what right can I hold that my thought is knowledge of
what is real in bodies? For to hold so is but another thought, an effect of real
bodily movements like the rest. . . These arguments, however, of mine, if the
principles of scientific [naturalism]... are to stand unchallenged, are
themselves no more than happenings in a mind, results of bodily movements; that
you or I think them sound, or think them unsound, is but another such happening;
that we think them no more than another such happening is itself but yet another
such. And it may be said of any ground on which we may attempt to stand as true,

Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum ["It flows and will flow swirling on
forever" (Horace, Epistles, I, 2, 43)]. (Some Problems in Ethics, pp. 14—15)

11. The Argument from Truth

This argument is closely related to the argument from consciousness. It comes

mainly from Augustine.

Our limited minds can discover eternal truths about being.

Truth properly resides in a mind.

But the human mind is not eternal.

Therefore there must exist an eternal mind in which these truths reside.

This proof might appeal to someone who shares a Platonic view of knowledge—who,
for example, believes that there are Eternal Intelligible Forms which are
present to the mind in every act of knowledge. Given that view, it is a very
short step to see these Eternal Forms as properly existing within an Eternal
Mind. And there is a good deal to be said for this. But that is just the
problem. There is too much about the theory of knowledge that needs to be said
before this could work as a persuasive demonstration.

12. The Argument from the Origin of the Idea of God

This argument, made famous by Rene Descartes, has a kinship to the ontological
argument (13). It starts from the idea of God. But it does not claim that real
being is part of the content of that idea, as the ontological argument does.
Rather it seeks to show that only God himself could have caused this idea to
arise in our minds.
It would be impossible for us to reproduce the whole context Descartes gives for
this proof (see his third Meditation), and fruitless to follow his scholastic
vocabulary. We give below the briefest summary and discussion.

We have ideas of many things.

These ideas must arise either from ourselves or from things outside us.

One of the ideas we have is the idea of God—an infinite, all-perfect being.

This idea could not have been caused by ourselves, because we know ourselves
to be limited and imperfect, and no effect can be greater than its cause.

Therefore, the idea must have been caused by something outside us which has
nothing less than the qualities contained in the idea of God.

But only God himself has those qualities.

Therefore God himself must be the cause of the idea we have of him.

Therefore God exists.

Consider the following common objection. The idea of God can easily arise like
this: we notice degrees of perfection among finite beings—some are more perfect
(or less imperfect) than others. And to reach the idea of God, we just project
the scale upward and outward to infinity. Thus there seems to be no need for an
actually existing God to account for the existence of the idea. All we need is
the experience of things varying in degrees of perfection, and a mind capable of
thinking away perceived limitations.

But is that really enough? How can we think away limitation or imperfection
unless we first recognize it as such? And how can we recognize it as such unless
we already have some notion of infinite perfection? To recognize things as
imperfect or finite involves the possession of a standard in thought that makes
the recognition possible.

Does that seem farfetched? It does not mean that toddlers spend their time
thinking about God. But it does mean that, however late in life you use the
standard, however long before it comes explicitly into consciousness, still, the
standard must be there in order for you to use it. But where did it come from?

Not from your experience of yourself or of the world that exists outside you.
For the idea of infinite perfection is already presupposed in our thinking about
all these things and judging them imperfect. Therefore none of them can be the
origin of the idea of God; only God himself can be that.
13. The Ontological Argument

The ontological argument was devised by Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109), who

wanted to produce a single, simple demonstration which would show that God is
and what God is. Single it may be, but far from simple. It is, perhaps, the most
controversial proof for the existence of God. Most people who first hear it are
tempted to dismiss it immediately as an interesting riddle, but distinguished
thinkers of every age, including our own, have risen to defend it. For this very
reason it is the most intensely philosophical proof for God's existence; its
place of honor is not within popular piety, but rather textbooks and
professional journals. We include it, with a minimum of discussion, not because
we think it conclusive or irrefutable, but for the sake of completeness.

Anselm's Version

It is greater for a thing to exist in the mind and in reality than in the mind
alone.

"God" means "that than which a greater cannot be thought."

Suppose that God exists in the mind but not in reality.

Then a greater than God could be thought (namely, a being that has all the
qualities our thought of God has plus real existence).

But this is impossible, for God is "that than which a greater cannot be
thought."

Therefore God exists in the mind and in reality.

Question 1: Suppose I deny that God exists in the mind?

Reply: In that case the argument could not conclude that God exists in the mind
and in reality. But note: the denial commits you to the view that there is no
concept of God. And very few would wish to go that far.

Question 2: Is it really greater for something to exist in the mind and in

reality than in the mind alone?

Reply: The first premise of this argument is often misunderstood. People

sometimes say: "Isn't an imaginary disease better than a real one?" Well it
certainly is better—and so a greater thing—for you that the disease is not real.

But that strengthens Anselm's side of the argument. Real bacteria are greater
than imaginary ones, just because they have something that imaginary ones lack:
real being. They have an independence, and therefore an ability to harm, that
nothing can have whose existence is wholly dependent on your thought. It is this
greater level of independence that makes them greater as beings. And that line
of thinking does not seem elusive or farfetched.

Question 3: But is real being just another "thought" or "concept"? Is "real

being" just one more concept or characteristic (like "omniscience" or
"omnipotence") that could make a difference to the kind of being God is?

Reply: Real being does make a real difference. The question is: Does it make a
conceptual difference? Critics of the argument say that it does not. They say
that just because real being makes all the difference it cannot be one more
quality among others. Rather it is the condition of there being something there
to have any qualities at all. When the proof says that God is the greatest being
that can be "thought," it means that there are various perfections or qualities
that God has to a degree no creature possibly could, qualities that are
supremely admirable. But to say that such a being exists is to say that there
really is something which is supremely admirable. And that is not one more
admirable quality among others.

Is it greater to exist in reality as well as in the mind? Of course,

incomparably greater. But the difference is not a conceptual one. And yet the
argument seems to treat it as if it were—as if the believer and the nonbeliever
could not share the same concept of God. Clearly they do. They disagree not
about the content of this concept, but about whether the kind of being it
describes really exists. And that seems beyond the power of merely conceptual
analysis, as used in this argument, to answer. So question 3, we think, really
does invalidate this form of the ontological argument.

Modal Version

Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm developed this version of the ontological
argument. Both find it implicitly contained in the third chapter of Anselm's
Proslogion.

The expression "that being than which a greater cannot be thought" (GCB, for
short) expresses a consistent concept.

GCB cannot be thought of as: a. necessarily nonexistent; or as b. contingently

existing but only as c. necessarily existing.

So GCB can only be thought of as the kind of being that cannot not exist, that
must exist.

But what must be so is so.

Therefore, GCB (i.e., God) exists.

Question: Just because GCB must be thought of as existing, does that mean that
GCB really exists?

Reply: If you must think of something as existing, you cannot think of it as not
existing. But then you cannot deny that GCB exists; for then you are thinking
what you say cannot be thought—namely, that GCB does not exist.

Possible Worlds Version

This variation on the modal version has been worked out in great detail by Alvin
Plantinga. We have done our best to simplify it.

Definitions:

Maximal excellence: To have omnipotence, omniscience and moral perfection in

some world.

Maximal greatness: To have maximal excellence in every possible world.

There is a possible world (W) in which there is a being (X) with maximal
greatness.

But X is maximally great only if X has maximal excellence in every possible

world.

Therefore X is maximally great only if X has omnipotence, omniscience and

moral perfection in every possible world.

In W, the proposition "There is no omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect

being" would be impossible—that is, necessarily false.

But what is impossible does not vary from world to world.

Therefore, the proposition, "There is no omnipotent, omniscient, morally

perfect being" is necessarily false in this actual world, too.

Therefore, there actually exists in this world, and must exist in every
possible world, an omnipotent, omniscient, morally perfect being.

14. The Moral Argument

Real moral obligation is a fact. We are really, truly, objectively obligated

to do good and avoid evil.

Either the atheistic view of reality is correct or the "religious" one.

 But the atheistic one is incompatible with there being moral obligation.

Therefore the "religious" view of reality is correct.

We need to be clear about what the first premise is claiming. It does not mean
merely that we can find people around who claim to have certain duties. Nor does
it mean that there have been many people who thought they were obliged to do
certain things (like clothing the naked) and to avoid doing others (like
committing adultery). The first premise is claiming something more: namely, that
we human beings really are obligated; that our duties arise from the way things
really are, and not simply from our desires or subjective dispositions. It is
claiming, in other words, that moral values or obligations themselves—and not
merely the belief in moral values—are objective facts.

Now given the fact of moral obligation, a question naturally arises. Does the
picture of the world presented by atheism accord with this fact? The answer is
no. Atheists never tire of telling us that we are the chance products of the
motion of matter—a motion which is purposeless and blind to every human
striving. We should take them at their word and ask: Given this picture, in what
exactly is the moral good rooted? Moral obligation can hardly be rooted in a
material motion blind to purpose.

Suppose we say it is rooted in nothing deeper than human willing and desire. In
that case, we have no moral standard against which human desires can be judged.
For every desire will spring from the same ultimate source—purposeless, pitiless
matter. And what becomes of obligation? According to this view, if I say there
is an obligation to feed the hungry, I would be stating a fact about my wants
and desires and nothing else. I would be saying that I want the hungry to be
fed, and that I choose to act on that desire. But this amounts to an admission
that neither I nor anyone else is really obliged to feed the hungry—that, in
fact, no one has any real obligations at all. Therefore the atheistic view of
reality is not compatible with there being genuine moral obligation.
What view is compatible? One that sees real moral obligation as grounded in its
Creator, that sees moral obligation as rooted in the fact that we have been
created with a purpose and for an end. We may call this view, with deliberate
generality, "the religious view." But however general the view, reflection on
the fact of moral obligation does seem to confirm it.

Question 1: The argument has not shown that ethical subjectivism is false. What
if there are no objective values?

Reply: True enough. The argument assumes that there are objective values; it
aims to show that believing in them is incompatible with one picture of the
world, and quite compatible with another. Those two pictures are the
atheistic-materialistic one, and the (broadly speaking) religious one. Granted,
if ethical subjectivism is true, then the argument does not work. However,
almost no one is a consistent subjectivist. (Many think they are, and say they
are—until they suffer violence or injustice. In that case they invariably stand
with the rest of us in recognizing that certain things ought never to be done.)
And for the many who are not—and never will be—subjecivists, the argument can be
most helpful. It can show them that to believe as they do in objective values is
inconsistent with what they may also believe about the origin and destiny of the
universe. If they move to correct the inconsistency, it will be a move toward
the religious view and away from the atheistic one.

Question 2: This proof does not conclude to God but to some vague "religious"
view. Isn't this "religious" view compatible with very much more than
traditional theism?

Reply: Yes indeed. It is compatible, for example, with Platonic idealism, and
many other beliefs that orthodox Christians find terribly deficient. But this
general religious view is incompatible with materialism, and with any view that
banishes value from the ultimate objective nature of things. That is the
important point. It seems most reasonable that moral conscience is the voice of
God within the soul, because moral value exists only on the level of persons,
minds and wills. And it is hard, if not impossible, to conceive of objective
moral principles somehow floating around on their own, apart from any persons.

But we grant that there are many steps to travel from objective moral values to
the Creator of the universe or the triune God of love. There is a vast
intellectual distance between them. But these things are compatible in a way
that materialism and belief in objective values are not. To reach a personal
Creator you need other arguments (cf. arguments 1-6), and to reach the God of
love you need revelation. By itself, the argument leaves many options open, and
eliminates only some. But we are surely well rid of those it does eliminate.

15. The Argument from Conscience

Since moral subjectivism is very popular today, the following version of, or
twist to, the moral argument should be effective, since it does not presuppose
moral objectivism. Modern people often say they believe that there are no
universally binding moral obligations, that we must all follow our own private
conscience. But that very admission is enough of a premise to prove the
existence of God.

Isn't it remarkable that no one, even the most consistent subjectivist, believes
that it is ever good for anyone to deliberately and knowingly disobey his or her
own conscience? Even if different people's consciences tell them to do or avoid
totally different things, there remains one moral absolute for everyone: never
disobey your own conscience.
Now where did conscience get such an absolute authority—an authority admitted
even by the moral subjectivist and relativist? There are only four
possibilities.

From something less than me (nature)

From me (individual)
From others equal to me (society)
From something above me (God)

Let's consider each of these possibilities in order.

How can I be absolutely obligated by something less than me—for example, by

animal instinct or practical need for material survival?

How can I obligate myself absolutely? Am I absolute? Do I have the right to

demand absolute obedience from anyone, even myself? And if I am the one who
locked myself in this prison of obligation, I can also let myself out, thus
destroying the absoluteness of the obligation which we admitted as our
premise.

How can society obligate me? What right do my equals have to impose their
values on me? Does quantity make quality? Do a million human beings make a
relative into an absolute? Is "society" God?

The only source of absolute moral obligation left is something superior to me.

This binds my will, morally, with rightful demands for complete obedience.

Thus God, or something like God, is the only adequate source and ground for the
absolute moral obligation we all feel to obey our conscience. Conscience is thus
explainable only as the voice of God in the soul. The Ten Commandments are ten
divine footprints in our psychic sand.

Addendum on Religion and Morality

In drawing this connection between morality and religion, we do not want to

create any confusion or misunderstanding. We have not said that people can never
discover human moral goods unless they acknowledge that God exists. Obviously
they can. Believers and nonbelievers can know that knowledge and friendship, for
example, are things that we really ought to strive for, and that cruelty and
deceit are objectively wrong. Our question has been: which account of the way
things really are best makes sense of the moral rules we all acknowledge—that of
the believer or that of the non-believer?

If we are the products of a good and loving Creator, this explains why we have a
nature that discovers a value that is really there. But how can atheists explain
this? For if atheists are right, then no objective moral values can exist.
Dostoyevsky said, "If God does not exist, everything is permissible." Atheists
may know that some things are not permissible, but they do not know why.
Consider the following analogy. Many scientists examine secondary causes all
their lives without acknowledging the First Cause, God. But, as we have seen,
those secondary causes could not be without the First Cause, even though they
can be known without knowing the First Cause. The same is true of objective
moral goods. Thus the moral argument and the various metaphysical arguments
share a certain similarity in structure.

Most of us, whatever our religious faith, or lack of it, can recognize that in
the life of someone like Francis of Assisi human nature is operating the right
way, the way it ought to operate. You need not be a theist to see that St.
Francis's life was admirable, but you do need to be a theist to see why. Theism
explains that our response to this believer's life is, ultimately, our response
to the call of our Creator to live the kind of life he made us to live.

There are four possible relations between religion and morality, God and
goodness.

Religion and morality may be thought to be independent. Kierkegaard's sharp

contrast between "the ethical" and "the religious," especially in Fear and
Trembling, may lead to such a supposition. But (a) an amoral God, indifferent
to morality, would not be a wholly good God, for one of the primary meanings
of "good" involves the "moral"—just, loving, wise, righteous, holy, kind. And
(b) such a morality, not having any connection with God, the Absolute Being,
would not have absolute reality behind it.

God may be thought of as the inventor of morality, as he is the inventor of

birds. The moral law is often thought of as simply a product of God's choice.
This is the Divine Command Theory: a thing is good only because God commands
it and evil because he forbids it. If that is all, however, we have a serious
problem: God and his morality are arbitrary and based on mere power. If God
commanded us to kill innocent people, that would become good, since good here
means "whatever God commands." The Divine Command Theory reduces morality to
power. Socrates refuted the Divine Command Theory pretty conclusively in
Plato's Euthyphro. He asked Euthyphro, "Is a thing pious because the gods will
it, or do the gods will it because it is pious?" He refuted the first
alternative, and thought he was left with the second as the only alternative.

But the idea that God commands a thing because it is good is also
unacceptable, because it makes God conform to a law higher than himself, a law
that overarches God and humanity alike. The God of the Bible is no more
separated from moral goodness by being under it than he is by being over it.

He no more obeys a higher law that binds him, than he creates the law as an
 artifact that could change and could well have been different, like a planet.
The only rationally acceptable answer to the question of the relation between
God and morality is the biblical one: morality is based on God's eternal
nature. That is why morality is essentially unchangeable. "I am the Lord your
God; sanctify yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy" (Lev. 11:44).
Our obligation to be just, kind, honest, loving and righteous "goes all the
way up" to ultimate reality, to the eternal nature of God, to what God is.
That is why morality has absolute and unchangeable binding force on our
conscience.

The only other possible sources of moral obligation are:

a. My ideals, purposes, aspirations, and desires, something created by my mind

or will, like the rules of baseball. This utterly fails to account for why it is
always wrong to disobey or change the rules.

b. My moral will itself. Some read Kant this way: I impose morality on myself.
But how can the one bound and the one who binds be the same? If the locksmith
locks himself in a room, he is not really locked in, for he can also unlock
himself.

c. Another human being may be thought to be the one who imposes morality on
me—my parents, for example. But this fails to account for its binding character.
If your father commands you to deal drugs, your moral obligation is to disobey
him. No human being can have absolute authority over another.

d. "Society" is a popular answer to the question of the origin of morality "this

or that specific person" is a very unpopular answer. Yet the two are the same.
"Society" only means more individuals. What right do they have to legislate
morality to me? Quantity cannot yield quality; adding numbers cannot change the
rules of a relative game to the rightful absolute demands of conscience.

e. The universe, evolution, natural selection and survival all fare even worse
as explanations for morality. You cannot get more out of less. The principle of
causality is violated here. How could the primordial slime pools gurgle up the
Sermon on the Mount?

Atheists often claim that Christians make a category mistake in using God to
explain nature; they say it is like the Greeks using Zeus to explain lightning.
In fact, lightning should be explained on its own level, as a material, natural,
scientific phenomenon. The same with morality. Why bring in God?

Because morality is more like Zeus than like lightning. Morality exists only on
the level of persons, spirits, souls, minds, wills—not mere molecules. You can
make correlations between moral obligations and persons (e.g., persons should
love other persons), but you cannot make any correlations between morality and
molecules. No one has even tried to explain the difference between good and evil
in terms, for example, of the difference between heavy and light atoms.

So it is really the atheist who makes the same category mistake as the ancient
pagan who explained lightning by the will of Zeus. The atheist uses a merely
material thing to explain a spiritual thing. That is a far sillier version of
the category mistake than the one the ancients made; for it is possible that the
greater (Zeus, spirit) caused the lesser (lightning) and explains it; but it is
not possible that the lesser (molecules) adequately caused and explains the
greater (morality). A good will might create molecules, but how could molecules
create a good will? How can electricity obligate me? Only a good will can demand
a good will; only Love can demand love.

16. The Argument from Desire

Every natural, innate desire in us corresponds to some real object that can
satisfy that desire.

But there exists in us a desire which nothing in time, nothing on earth, no

creature can satisfy.

Therefore there must exist something more than time, earth and creatures,
which can satisfy this desire.

This something is what people call "God" and "life with God forever."

The first premise implies a distinction of desires into two kinds: innate and
externally conditioned, or natural and artificial. We naturally desire things
like food, drink, sex, sleep, knowledge, friendship and beauty; and we naturally
shun things like starvation, loneliness, ignorance and ugliness. We also desire
(but not innately or naturally) things like sports cars, political office,
flying through the air like Superman, the land of Oz and a Red Sox world
championship.

Now there are differences between these two kinds of desires. We do not, for
example, for the most part, recognize corresponding states of deprivation for
the second, the artificial, desires, as we do for the first. There is no word
like "Ozlessness" parallel to "sleeplessness." But more importantly, the natural
desires come from within, from our nature, while the artificial ones come from
without, from society, advertising or fiction. This second difference is the
reason for a third difference: the natural desires are found in all of us, but
the artificial ones vary from person to person.

The existence of the artificial desires does not necessarily mean that the
desired objects exist. Some do; some don't. Sports cars do; Oz does not. But the
existence of natural desires does, in every discoverable case, mean that the
objects desired exist. No one has ever found one case of an innate desire for a
nonexistent object.

The second premise requires only honest introspection. If someone denies it and
says, "I am perfectly happy playing with mud pies, or sports cars, or money, or
sex, or power," we can only ask, "Are you, really?" But we can only appeal, we
cannot compel. And we can refer such a person to the nearly universal testimony
of human history in all its great literature. Even the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre
admitted that "there comes a time when one asks, even of Shakespeare, even of
Beethoven, 'Is that all there is?'"

The conclusion of the argument is not that everything the Bible tells us about
God and life with God is really so. What it proves is an unknown X, but an
unknown whose direction, so to speak, is known. This X is more: more beauty,
more desirability, more awesomeness, more joy. This X is to great beauty as, for
example, great beauty is to small beauty or to a mixture of beauty and ugliness.

And the same is true of other perfections.

But the "more" is infinitely more, for we are not satisfied with the finite and
partial. Thus the analogy (X is to great beauty as great beauty is to small
beauty) is not proportionate. Twenty is to ten as ten is to five, but infinite
is not to twenty as twenty is to ten. The argument points down an infinite
corridor in a definite direction. Its conclusion is not "God" as already
conceived or defined, but a moving and mysterious X which pulls us to itself and
pulls all our images and concepts out of themselves.

In other words, the only concept of God in this argument is the concept of that
which transcends concepts, something "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the
human heart conceived" (1 Cor. 2:9). In other words, this is the real God.

C. S. Lewis, who uses this argument in a number of places, summarizes it

succinctly:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires
exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A dolphin
wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire;
well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no
experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I
was made for another world. (Mere Christianity, Bk. III, chap. 10, "Hope")
Question 1: How can you know the major premise—that every natural desire has a
real object—is universally true, without first knowing that this natural desire
also has a real object? But that is the conclusion. Thus you beg the question.
You must know the conclusion to be true before you can know the major premise.
Reply: This is really not an objection to the argument from desire only, but to
every deductive argument whatsoever, every syllogism. It is the old saw of John
Stuart Mill and the nominalists against the syllogism. It presupposes
empiricism—that is, that the only way we can ever know anything is by sensing
individual things and then generalizing, by induction. It excludes deduction
because it excludes the knowledge of any universal truths (like our major
premise). For nominalists do not believe in the existence of any
universals—except one (that all universals are only names).

This is very easy to refute. We can and do come to a knowledge of universal

truths, like "all humans are mortal," not by sense experience alone (for we can
never sense all humans) but through abstracting the common universal essence or
nature of humanity from the few specimens we do experience by our senses. We
know that all humans are mortal because humanity, as such, involves mortality,
it is the nature of a human being to be mortal; mortality follows necessarily
from its having an animal body. We can understand that. We have the power of
understanding, or intellectual intuition, or insight, in addition to the mental
powers of sensation and calculation, which are the only two the nominalist and
empiricist give us. (We share sensation with animals and calculation with
computers; where is the distinctively human way of knowing for the empiricist
and nominalist?)

When there is no real connection between the nature of a proposition's subject

and the nature of the predicate, the only way we can know the truth of that
proposition is by sense experience and induction. For instance, we can know that
all the books on this shelf are red only by looking at each one and counting
them. But when there is a real connection between the nature of the subject and
the nature of the predicate, we can know the truth of that proposition by
understanding and insight—for instance, "Whatever has color must have size," or,

"A Perfect Being would not be ignorant."

Question 2: Suppose I simply deny the minor premise and say that I just don't
observe any hidden desire for God, or infinite joy, or some mysterious X that is
more than earth can offer?

Reply: This denial may take two forms. First, one may say, "Although I am not
perfectly happy now, I believe I would be if only I had ten million dollars, a
Lear jet, and a new mistress every day." The reply to this is, of course, "Try
it. You won't like it." It's been tried and has never satisfied. In fact,
billions of people have performed and are even now performing trillions of such
experiments, desperately seeking the ever-elusive satisfaction they crave. For
even if they won the whole world, it would not be enough to fill one human
heart.

Yet they keep trying, believing that "If only... Next time ..." This is the
stupidest gamble in the world, for it is the only one that consistently has
never paid off. It is like the game of predicting the end of the world: every
batter who has ever approached that plate has struck out. There is hardly reason
to hope the present ones will fare any better. After trillions of failures and a
one hundred percent failure rate, this is one experiment no one should keep
trying.

A second form of denial of our premise is: "I am perfectly happy now." This, we
suggest, verges on idiocy or, worse, dishonesty. It requires something more like
exorcism than refutation. This is Merseult in Camus's The Stranger. This is
subhuman, vegetation, pop psychology. Even the hedonist utilitarian John Stuart
Mill, one of the shallowest (though cleverest) minds in the history of
philosophy, said that "it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied."

Question 3: This argument is just another version of Anselm's ontological

argument (13), which is invalid. You argue to an objective God from a mere
subjective idea or desire in you.

Reply: No, we do not argue from the idea alone, as Anselm does. Rather, our
argument first derives a major premise from the real world of nature: that
nature makes no desire in vain. Then it discovers something real in human
nature-namely, human desire for something more than nature-which nature cannot
explain, because nature cannot satisfy it. Thus, the argument is based on
observed facts in nature, both outer and inner. It has data.

17. The Argument from Aesthetic Experience

There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Therefore there must be a God.

You either see this one or you don't.

18. The Argument from Religious Experience

Some sort of experience lies at the very core of most people's religious faith.
Most of our readers have very likely had such an experience. If so, you realize,
in a way no one else can, its central importance in your life. That realization
is not itself an argument for God's existence; in fact, in the light of it you
would probably say that there is no need for arguments. But there is in fact an
argument for God's existence constructed from the data of such experiences. It
is not an argument which moves from your own personal experience to your own
affirmation that God exists. As we said, you most probably have no need for such
an argument. Instead, this argument moves in another direction: from the
widespread fact of religious experience to the affirmation that only a divine
reality can adequately explain it.
It is difficult to state this argument deductively. But it might fairly be put
as follows.

Many people of different eras and of widely different cultures claim to have
had an experience of the "divine."

It is inconceivable that so many people could have been so utterly wrong about
the nature and content of their own experience.

Therefore, there exists a "divine" reality which many people of different eras
and of widely different cultures have experienced.

Does such experience prove that an intelligent Creator-God exists? On the face
of it this seems unlikely. For such a God does not seem to be the object of all
experiences called "religious." But still, he is the object of many. That is,
many people understand their experience that way; they are "united with" or
"taken up into" a boundless and overwhelming Knowledge and Love, a Love that
fills them with itself but infinitely exceeds their capacity to receive. Or so
they claim. The question is: Are we to believe them?

There is an enormous number of such claims. Either they are true or not. In
evaluating them, we should take into account:

the consistency of these claims (are they self-consistent as well as

consistent with what we know otherwise to be true?);

the character of those who make these claims (do these persons seem honest,
decent, trustworthy?); and

the effects these experiences have had in their own lives and the lives of
others (have these persons become more loving as a result of what they
experienced? More genuinely edifying? Or, alternatively, have they become vain
and self-absorbed?).

Suppose someone says to you: "All these experiences are either the result of
lesions in the temporal lobe or of neurotic repression. In no way do they verify
the truth of some divine reality." What might your reaction be? You might think
back over that enormous documentation of accounts and ask yourself if that can
be right. And you might conclude: "No. Given this vast number of claims, and the
quality of life of those who made them, it seems incredible that those who made
the claims could have been so wrong about them, or that insanity or brain
disease could cause such profound goodness and beauty."

It is impossible to lay down ahead of time how investigation into this record of
claims and characters will affect all individuals. You cannot say ahead of time
how it will affect you. But it is evidence; it has persuaded many; and it cannot
be ignored. Sometimes—in fact, we believe, very often—that record is not so much
faced as dismissed with vivid trendy labels.

19. The Common Consent Argument

This proof is in some ways like the argument from religious experience (18) and
in other ways like the argument from desire (16). It argues that:

Belief in God—that Being to whom reverence and worship are properly due—is
common to almost all people of every era.

Either the vast majority of people have been wrong about this most profound
element of their lives or they have not.

It is most plausible to believe that they have not.

Therefore it is most plausible to believe that God exists.

Everyone admits that religious belief is widespread throughout human history.

But the question arises: Does this undisputed fact amount to evidence in favor
of the truth of religious claims? Even a skeptic will admit that the testimony
we have is deeply impressive: the vast majority of humans have believed in an
ultimate Being to whom the proper response could only be reverence and worship.
No one disputes the reality of our feelings of reverence, attitudes of worship,
acts of adoration. But if God does not exist, then these things have never
once—never once—had a real object. Is it really plausible to believe that?

The capacity for reverence and worship certainly seems to belong to us by

nature. And it is hard to believe that this natural capacity can never, in the
nature of things, be fulfilled, especially when so many testify that it has
been. True enough, it is conceivable that this side of our nature is doomed to
frustration; it is thinkable that those millions upon millions who claim to have
found the Holy One who is worthy of reverence and worship were deluded. But is
it likely?

It seems far more likely that those who refuse to believe are the ones suffering
from deprivation and delusion—like the tone-deaf person who denies the existence
of music, or the frightened tenant who tells herself she doesn't hear cries of
terror and distress coming from the street below and, when her children awaken
to the sounds and ask her, "Why is that lady screaming, Mommy?" tells them,
"Nobody's screaming: it's just the wind, that's all. Go back to sleep."

Question 1: But the majority is not infallible. Most people were wrong about the
movements of the sun and earth. So why not about the existence of God?

Reply: If people were wrong about the theory of heliocentrism, they still
experienced the sun and earth and motion. They were simply mistaken in thinking
that the motion they perceived was the sun's. But if God does not exist, what is
it that believers have been experiencing? The level of illusion goes far beyond
any other example of collective error. It really amounts to collective
psychosis.

For believing in God is like having a relationship with a person. If God never
existed, neither did this relationship. You were responding with reverence and
love to no one; and no one was there to receive and answer your response. It's
as if you believe yourself happily married when in fact you live alone in a
dingy apartment.

Now we grant that such mass delusion is conceivable, but what is the likely
story? If there were no other bits of experience which, taken together with our
perceptions of the sun and earth, make it most likely that the earth goes round
the sun, it would be foolish to interpret our experience that way. How much more
so here, where what we experience is a relationship involving reverence and
worship and, sometimes, love. It is most reasonable to believe that God really
is there, given such widespread belief in him—unless atheists can come up with a
very persuasive explanation for religious belief, one that takes full account of
the experience of believers and shows that their experience is best explained as
delusion and not insight. But atheists have never done so.

Question 2: But isn't there a very plausible psychological account of religious

belief? Many nonbelievers hold that belief in God is the result of childhood
fears; that God is in fact a projection of our human fathers: someone "up there"
who can protect us from natural forces we consider hostile.
Reply A: This is not really a naturalistic explanation of religious belief. It
is no more than a statement, dressed in psychological jargon, that religious
belief is false. You begin from the assumption that God does not exist. Then you
figure that since the closest earthly symbol for the Creator is a father, God
must be a cosmic projection of our human fathers. But apart from the assumption
of atheism, there is no compelling evidence at all that God is a mere
projection.

In fact, the argument begs the question. We seek psychological explanation only
for ideas we already know (or presume) to be false, not those we think to be
true. We ask, "Why do you think black dogs are out to kill you? Were you
frightened by one when you were small?" But we never ask, "Why do you think
black dogs aren't out to kill you? Did you have a nice black puppy once?"

Reply B: Though there must be something of God that is reflected in human

fathers (otherwise our symbolism for him would be inexplicable), Christians
realize that the symbolism is ultimately inadequate. And if the Ultimate Being
is mysterious in a way that transcends all symbolism, how can he be a mere
projection of what the symbol represents? The truth seems to be—and if God
exists, the truth is—the other way around: our earthly fathers are pale
projections of the Heavenly Father. It should be noted that several writers
(e.g., Paul Vitz) have analyzed atheism as itself a psychic pathology: an
alienation from the human father that results in rejection of God.

20. Pascal's Wager

Suppose you, the reader, still feel that all of these arguments are
inconclusive. There is another, different kind of argument left. It has come to
be known as Pascal's Wager. We mention it here and adapt it for our purposes,
not because it is a proof for the existence of God, but because it can help us
in our search for God in the absence of such proof.

As originally proposed by Pascal, the Wager assumes that logical reasoning by

itself cannot decide for or against the existence of God; there seem to be good
reasons on both sides. Now since reason cannot decide for sure, and since the
question is of such importance that we must decide somehow, then we must "wager"
if we cannot prove. And so we are asked: Where are you going to place your bet?
If you place it with God, you lose nothing, even if it turns out that God does
not exist. But if you place it against God, and you are wrong and God does
exist, you lose everything: God, eternity, heaven, infinite gain. "Let us assess
the two cases: if you win, you win everything, if you lose, you lose nothing."
Consider the following diagram:

The vertical lines represent correct beliefs, the diagonals represent incorrect
beliefs. Let us compare the diagonals. Suppose God does not exist and I believe
in him. In that case, what awaits me after death is not eternal life but, most
likely, eternal nonexistence. But now take the other diagonal: God, my Creator
and the source of all good, does exist; but I do not believe in him. He offers
me his love and his life, and I reject it. There are answers to my greatest
questions, there is fulfillment of my deepest desires; but I decide to spurn it
all. In that case, I lose (or at least seriously risk losing) everything.
The Wager can seem offensively venal and purely selfish. But it can be
reformulated to appeal to a higher moral motive: If there is a God of infinite
goodness, and he justly deserves my allegiance and faith, I risk doing the
greatest injustice by not acknowledging him.

The Wager cannot—or should not—coerce belief. But it can be an incentive for us
to search for God, to study and restudy the arguments that seek to show that
there is Something—or Someone—who is the ultimate explanation of the universe
and of my life. It could at lease motivate "The Prayer of the Skeptic": "God, I
don't know whether you exist or not, but if you do, please show me who you are."

Pascal says that there are three kinds of people: those who have sought God and
found him, those who are seeking and have not yet found, and those who neither
seek nor find. The first are reasonable and happy, the second are reasonable and
unhappy, the third are both unreasonable and unhappy. If the Wager stimulates us
at least to seek, then it will at least stimulate us to be reasonable. And if
the promise Jesus makes is true, all who seek will find (Mt 7:7-8), and thus
will be happy.

Questions for Discussion

Why might someone think that the whole question of this chapter, whether God's
existence can be proved, is trivial, unimportant, distracting or wrongheaded?

How might such a person's argument(s) be answered?

Could there be an argument for God's existence that does not fit into either
of the two categories here, cosmological (external) or psychological
(internal)?

How psychologically forceful and how psychologically impotent is a valid

argument for God's existence to an atheist? What does the answer to that
question depend on? (There are many answers to this question; mention as many
as you can. Which do you think is the most important one?)

How can anything be "outside" the universe if "the universe" = "everything in

space and time and matter?" What is meant by "outside" here? Can you give any
analogy or parallel situation where a term is used like this?
Why are there more than twenty arguments for and only one against God (the
problem of evil)? (See chap. 6.)

What commonsense meaning of cause do these cosmological arguments use

(especially 2)? What alternative meanings of cause have some philosophers
preferred? How do they change or invalidate the cosmological argument(s)? How
could these alternatives be refuted? (Hume's is the most famous.)

Does the answer to question 2 after argument 2 prove that God is creating the
world right now?

Would alternative theories of time change or invalidate any of the

cosmological arguments?

Does the simple answer to question 1 after argument 4 refute subjectivism? If

not, where is the error in it? If so, why are there so many subjectivists?
Why is the design argument the most popular?

What is the relation between intelligibility and intelligence? Are

intelligibility, design and order interchangeable concepts?

Isn't there a tiny chance that the universe just happened by chance? A
quintillion monkeys typing for a quintillion years will eventually produce
Hamlet by chance. Couldn't this book have been caused by an explosion in a
print factory?

Regarding argument 10, how do we know the universe is not conscious or aware?
Does the answer to question 3 of argument 6 prove God is a person?
Sartre wrote: "There can be no eternal truth because there is no eternal
Consciousness to think it." What is the implied premise of his argument and of
proof 11?

Does argument 12 presuppose "innate ideas"? If not, how and when did the idea
of God get into our minds?

Why is it that you can tell a lot about a philosopher's metaphysics by knowing
whether or not he or she accepts the ontological argument? What do Anselm,
Descartes, Spinoza. Leibniz and Hegel have in common? What doctrine of
Thomistic metaphysics enables Thomas to criticize Anselm's argument?
Can you refute the modal and possible worlds versions of the ontological
argument?

Can an atheist believe in real moral obligation (argument 14)? If so, how? Do
most atheists believe in real moral obligation?

Is the argument from conscience any stronger if you admit objective moral
laws?

How would you formulate the relationship between religion and morality?

Between God and morality?

Does everyone have the desire mentioned in premise 2 of argument 16? If so,
must atheists suppress and ignore it?

Would nominalists be able to escape argument 16? (C.f., question 1.)

Can you formulate argument 17 logically?

Why is religious experience any more of an argument for the real existence of
God than any common delusion, illusion, fantasy or dream for its object? Are
we arguing here from idea to reality, as in the ontological argument?

Why is the common consent argument hardly ever used today, whereas it was very
popular in the past?

Is Pascal's Wager dishonest? Why or why not? Read Pascal's version of it in

the Pensees; what do you find there that is significant that is not included
 here?

Do you know of, or can you imagine, any other argument for God's existence?
Which of these twenty arguments do you find the most powerful?

How would an atheist answer each one of these twenty arguments? (Remember,
there are only three ways of answering any argument.)

From the Handbook of Christian Apologetics by Peter Kreeft and Fr. Ronald
Tacelli, SJ (Intervarsity Press, 1994

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