Chesterton on Suicide

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world. His act is worse (symbolically considered) than any rape or dynamite outrage. For it destroys all buildings: it insults all women. The thief is satisfied with diamonds; but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake. There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront. Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. There often are for rape, and there almost always are for dynamite. But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer's suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man's crime is different from other crimes -- for it makes even crimes impossible.

GK Chesteron, Orthodoxy

I know that there are a number of people who are grieving over Robin Williams suicide--it seems that every major celebrity who dies, and especially who dies early, invokes a bit of national mourning. It is a tragedy, and depression is an unfortunate thing to struggle against.

With that said, there is something far, far worse than depression even, something for which depression is at most a symptom, though something which may exist without depression. That is despair. There is the suicidal depression which preys upon the mind and the emotions, but it pales next to that deep and dark despair which preys upon the very soul. The man who is depressed may yet find hope: but he who finally despairs has rejected hope and so is lost.

A Critique of Modernity in a Review of a Review

John C. Wright offers this lengthy vivisection of modernity in the form of a response to a 60 year of review of "The Lord of the Rings." He has a tendency of being long-winded (even more so than I am), and of going down various rabbit-holes (even more than I do), but it is all interesting and entertaining and mostly correct. More importantly, it is a good read, and an important defense of the virtues, and of truth and beauty and goodness.

Excerpts will not do it justice, but here are a few anyway:

Now, the great matter of heroism is that it comes in three stages, a childish stage, a pagan stage, and a final stage.

The heroism of children, as in STAR WARS, is concerned with the plain and straightforward heroism of bravery and camaraderie; the heroism of pagans, as in Homer, is more mature yet, for it deals with the bright moments of glory and the dark, melancholy sorrow of inescapable fate that follows; the heroism that is more mature yet deals with the dark melancholy of free will and of fates that are freely chosen, albeit that they lead through dark and drear lands, but with the promise, in the end, of a bright harbor at the end of suffering, and a ship to carry the weary traveler away to a home he never knew, somewhere beyond the walls of the world.

Han Solo is an example of the first, as is John Carter the Warlord of Mars, or Robin Hood, or any number of action heroes or superheroes; Achilles is an example of the second, as is nearly every major figure in the matter of Troy; and of the third there are too few to list as examples, but that short list includes humble Frodo Baggins.

Each stage of heroism builds on itself, from mere bravery or courage, to fortitude, and at last to heroic virtue.

Lust and fornication, the moderns certainly admire and support, but lust and romance are opposites, even as fornication and marriage are opposites. The idea of a bride and bridegroom both coming to the marriage bower as virgins and cleaving to each other in tender yet fierce mutual adoration, worshiping each other with their bodies, and forswearing all other partners, this is an image the moderns find repellant, if not incomprehensible. It reminds them of the suburbs, or white picket fences, or Ozzie and Harriet. To them it is saccharine and nauseating. The only marriages they favor are gay marriages.

As for glory and honor and patriotism, love of chivalry and love of nation, the modern mind regard these things with distaste or disgust or even horror. They are regarded as machismo, as sinister attempts to oppress the weak, or to glorify violence and aggression. Patriotism to the modern man is bigotry, and vile; love of God they dismiss as superstition. The moderns have an insolent double standard: The superstition is harmless or even admirable, in an avuncular and condescending way, when practiced by Mohammedans or Buddhists or Animists, but it is an appalling enemy of enlightenment and progress when practiced by Christians.

The modern man disdains heroism in all its forms, and reduces them all to the heroism of children, brushing them away as "childish." Yet, even the child's heroism is greater than the cravenness of the modern men. The heroic virtue of the Christian saint sears the conscience of the craven man like a flame, and thus he hates it most of all, though he attempts to dismiss it as no different than "childishness."

There is a porn star who at the time of this writing is a Duke University freshman who appeared on a ‘rough sex’ website which portrayed her being choked, spat upon, and insulted during the sex act.

To justify herself in the face of criticism, she has publicly and defiantly stated that true feminism, true liberty and happiness, consists of her ‘ownership’ of her body, which ownership renders her immune from criticism, and hence allows her to do whatever degrading acts she wishes to herself for her own pleasure. She absurdly assumes a moralistic stance to blame the decent people who are disgusted by her acts. She is also a homosexual, and suffers from a crippling self-loathing. People who like themselves don’t act out fantasies of sexual degradation.

Reading the words of this poor, young morally crippled fool is a chore I will spare the reader. I am sure you can find her words through a thousand references on the Internet. I will provide no additional links or pingbacks or clicks-through to such sites. I will, nonetheless, mention the clear absurdity the words convey. She objects in the strongest and most morally elevated language, in fiery tones worthy of Tom Paine and Nathan Hale, that anyone should say demeaning things about her choice of playacting in scenes where she is demeaned. In other words, she enjoys being demeaned, but does not want anyone else to demean her. She is a masochist who does not want to be slapped.

This may be a bit of a rabbit hole, yet it is illustrative. Modernity is filled with people made of this material, the hypocrites (literally) who play-act and demand it be taken seriously and then decry those who critique the masks they wear. They are the men without chests, and perhaps worse, the followers of the faceless men who smell of the pit.

They are by nature iconoclasts, but only of fine and holy things, never of ugly and degrading idols; likewise, they are by nature romantics and idealists, but only of what is inhuman and loathsome. They hate happy marriages or heroism, but grow misty-eyed with deep emotion at the sight of Che or Mao lolling atop a mountain of corpses, and when they see the hill of smaller corpses of infants killed in the womb, they laugh and cheer and skylark, bright-faced and starry-eyed with rapture. So they have the same emotions as human beings, but merely reversed like a photographic negative.

 At this point, I've probably quoted as much as good internet etiquette allows without doing a more in-depth analysis or rebuttal. Please do go read the whole thing.

Actually, We're Pretty Much All "Born That Way"

There is an interesting opinion article on The Daily Caller about how the actual intellectual-scholars of LGBT(Q?) history states decisively that Nobody is "born that way." Most of these scholars are themselves members of the LGBT(Q?A?) communities themselves. An excerpt:

But scholars don’t think the ancient Greeks had a gay minority. Rather, that civilization thought homosexuality was something anyone could enjoy. In addition to a wife, elite men were expected to take a younger male as an apprentice-lover, with prescribed bedroom roles. The system was so different from ours that to describe specific ancient Greeks as gay or straight would show profound disrespect for their experiences, and violate the cardinal historical rule against looking at the past through present-colored lenses.

Another example in which evidence of same-sex relations has been misinterpreted to depict a gay minority involves 18th-century upper-class female romantic friendships. Even those women who probably had genital contact with each other in that context thought about sex, gender, and intimacy in such culturally specific ways that scholars have spurned the viewpoint (nearly universal among non-scholars) that any two females who wrote each other love letters and shared a bed were obviously lesbians.

Interesting reading, to be sure. However, there is another way of looking at it. The problem is not that some people are born that way and some are not. Rather, with some few exceptions [1] we are all to some extent "born that way." It's called "Original Sin" (or "the effects of the Fall"). In some cases, that leads to some proclivity (willed or not) towards the particular sin of sodomy (gay or straight), or towards illicit romantic involvements (whether between a married woman and a man who is not her husband, or between two single women, or two siblings, or a man and several women all of whom he attempts to wed). It could also be towards some other sin, such as gluttony (in particular, alcoholism) or sloth (for example, drug addictions).

And many of these other sins cannot really find licit satisfaction, either. Some alcoholics are so badly addicted that a single sip ends in drunkenness (and worse) every time. The kleptomaniac cannot steal even one purse, nor the man whose blood boils with wrath swing even one punch against a defenseless target.

Everybody is tempted by something. We all experience some kind of appetite or some passion or some desire which cannot be satisfied here. We all need temperance, and fortitude, and justice. We all need to die a little to ourselves, because we all have some desires which not only won't, but can't, be satisfied in this life.

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[1] The New and Old Adam and Eve.

Rock Bottom

It's become borderline predictable these days, in the debate of the legal redefinition of marriage, that there will be a few weary culture warriors who are ready to surrender before the final battle is fought. So much the more so when the warriors in question are fighting for a cause that they're not sure they actually believe in. I read Joseph Bottum's indefatigably long essay in Commonweal, and then went for a good stiff drink. There's really not much more response I can muster to it.

To treat it fairly as I can, and to give it as fair a reading as possible, I would say that it really isn't that different from what Fr Dwight Longenecker, or Monsignor Charles Pope, is proposing. Oh, I grant that the subtitle ("A Catholic's Case for Gay Marriage") is a bit misleading on that score [1], since he really doesn't make a case "for" so-called "gay marriage." Instead, he makes the case that we should all stop fighting it, at least in the civil sphere. Granted, he uses more than a few grating lines in his tedious tale; I especially groaned when I read this one: "Just as there’s a rule in some online discussion groups that you’ve automatically lost an argument if you compare your opponents to the Nazis, so there ought to be a rule in public discourse that you’ve guaranteed your failure if you compare modern America to the decline of Ancient Rome." It's possible that people are weary of hearing about this, but that does not make it any less true.

Anyhow, that a conservative Catholic is calling for the Church to change her approach to the whole "gay marriage" issue is nothing new. Monsignor Charles Pope has argued before (twice) that we should consider divorcing civil marriage from Holy Matrimony, with the Church then getting out of the civil marriage business entirely. Father Dwight Longenecker has more recently suggested something similar. I still think that these two priests are wrong, but I notice that neither one really elicited the same kind of reactions (both for and against) as Jody Bottum, at least not immediately and not in quite the same volume. And, much as it makes it into every other (negative) appraisal of Mr Bottum's essay, I suspect this has nothing to do with the medium chosen to present the argument [2] nor the source of (financial) inspiration behind the essay, though these didn't help.

Rather, I suspect that the crucial difference is that the posts by Monsignor Pope and Fr Longenecker read like proactive though apparently passive resistance to the march of "progress," whereas Mr Bottum's essay read more like a preemptive surrender. In part this may have been the focus of each essay: the good priests focused on the distinction between Holy Matrimony (the sacrament) and marriage (the civil institution), and on how the Church would refocus on and fight for the former in the face of losing the fight on the latter. Contrast this with Mr Bottum's essay, which devoted roughly 1500 words to his gay former friend [3] and managed to sound more-or-less like the Church's position against "gay marriage" was hurting more people than it helps. In reality, the Church's stance against "gay marriage" is motivated by metaphysics and morality rather than by bigotry, but from reading Mr Bottum's essay you would almost come to the opposite conclusion [4]. Thus, in the words of Mark Shea, Mr Bottum is "God's good servant, but the king's first":

If he wants to say, “Most Americans oppose the Church on this and realism dictates facing that fact” he gets no argument from me. But he’s saying, “The Church needs to get with the program and pretend gay ‘marriage’ is something other than a fantasy agreed upon by a culture that is radically out of touch with reality.” His core message is “Surrender”, not “Maintain the Tradition in a hostile culture.”

It is certainly easy to read Mr Bottum's essay in this way. And, in fact, I have read little to suggest that he intends anything other than surrender by his writing. Sure, he has this short line:

if that’s what the same-sex marriage movement is really about—the redefinition of history as Christian oppression, the rereading of even success stories like the civil-rights movement as tales of defeating Christian evil, all for the purpose of cutting off the religious roots of Western civilization—then to hell with it.

To hell with it, as well, if the campaign for same-sex marriage has anti-Catholicism as one of its major causes, or a feeding of anti-Catholicism as one of its welcome effects.

But this is precisely what the "gay rights" campaign is turning into. Add to this the timing--had he written this essay 10 years earlier, minus the parts about the culture's shifting attitudes, it might have looked more prophetic, more "be careful which battle you choose, and how you choose to fight it." It still has the quality of a warning about choosing carefully the beach or hill on which to die in the culture war, but it lacks that sense of doing so for the actual good of the Church as delivered. It looks far more like a tired missive explaining why he will be AWOL from this particular front of the culture war from now on--and why the rest of us should give up, as well. There are no hopeless battles when one fights on the side of the Church, even if victory in the here and now is far from assured, and even if not all the victors survive.

But to return one last time to the two priests, I note that their concerns really do seem to be more about how to "Maintain the Tradition in a hostile culture," inasmuch as they suggest something for the Church to do other than to surrender. Theirs is still a withdrawal, but it is a withdrawal to rest and regain strength, to renew the Church and then from there to renew the culture. For all of Bottum's musings about wanting to "enchant" the culture, I see no coherent plan for doing this. He may be saying essentially the same thing as Monsignor Pope and Fr Longenecker, but with one crucial difference. Whereas Monsignor Pope and Fr Longenecker's posts convey a sense of renewal and hope beneath the pessimism, Mr Joseph Bottum mostly conveys a sense of weariness and despair.


---Footnotes---
[1] Of course, there is no such thing as a Catholic case for "gay marriage," but I suppose that Catholics can at times break with the Church, at least on prudential matters. This doesn't make that break right, however.

[2] For the priests, it's personal blogs as opposed to the somewhat liberal Commonweal for Joseph Bottom. It is that same Commonweal in which we also read something of praise for the New Mexico Supreme Court's decision against a photographer who refused (on grounds of religion, conscience, and freedom of speech/association) to photograph a gay commitment ceremony and was promptly sued by the homosexualists involved. So much for tolerance from the homosexualists, which in this case includes the gays in question and there defenders at Commonweal.

[3] And rather pointlessly, since he concludes that his about-face on civil marriage is "not the answer same-sex marriage advocates want" and, showing that he really does understand that his surrender probably accomplishes nothing, he continues with "Certainly it will not satisfy Jim Watson, my old [gay] friend from New York. How could he accept talk of the Catholic Church’s charity and evangelizing? He wants the church hurt, its tax exemptions and even property-holding rights stripped away until it not only accepts laws allowing same-sex marriage, not only encourages same-sex marriage, but actually performs same-sex marriage."

[4] Yes, I know that he devotes some time to the idea of "enchanted" metaphysics and "enchanted" morals etc, and that his stated purpose is the work to the re-enchantment of the culture. But much of the rest of his essay sets up to paint the fight against legal recognition of "gay marriage" in a bad light, as if it is a bad fight.

TMM: This Will Ultimately Be Good for the Church

"Mark my word, in the long run, this will be good for the Church." So said one of my colleagues from work concerning the Supreme Court's Wednesday ruling on DOMA (by extension, on California Proposition 8). This, in response to my quoting from Scalia's dissenting opinion:

"But to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to con- demn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority's judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to "dis- parage," "injure," "degrade," "demean," and "humiliate" our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homo- sexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence -- indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race."

My own reaction to this passage had been that I am not particularly optimistic about what the final solution to this particular issue will involve. I continue to be very pessimistic, but I am a hopeful pessimist. God can write straight with crooked lines, as the addage goes. The source of my pessimism is how the secular world will react to Catholics and other people of Christian faith when we continue to call a spade a spade by noting that legal fictions do not change ontological realities. The source of my hope is knowing that final victory doesn't lie within history--which is full of re-writes anyway--but rather is in eternity.

In other words, I pessimistically think that the soft-persecution faced by people of faith today will only intensify into hard persecution, meaning that we will go from the occasional human rights kangaroo court over denials of service to actual jailings and perhaps worse. On the other hand, I suspect that once we go from facing having our livelihoods threatened and the occasional trumped up lawsuit to seeing churches burned and Christians arrested, beaten, exiled, tortured, and ultimately martyred, that the result will be a strengthening of the Church's remaining membership. The blood of the martyrs may be the seed of the Church, but in this day and age the Church in the West has largely grown complacent. It's not just a matter of the formal apostasies--it's the lack of heroic witness by many of us who are nonetheless trying to remain faithful. Heroism is always difficult, but it's even more difficult to distinguish from simple piety when the worst most of us will likely face is a few slurred insults and idle death threats.

In the meantime, we ought to pray that we will be granted the fortitude and fear of the Lord to be heroic witnesses to the faith if and when those hard persecutions do come. We will also be needing the wisdom and counsel to prepare for that day, and the knowledge, understanding, and piety to remain faithful through the challenges which we will continue to face until then. In the meantime, we should continue to face whatever soft persecutions come our way by acknowledging that they exist, and by fighting them where we are able, but also with the understanding that they can and probably will get much worse.