On textual criticism

I would never deny that textual criticism can have its uses in the study of Sacred Scripture. But I am skeptical about how all-powerful this usefulness is.

For example, the Fathers confirm that the Apostle John wrote the Gospel of John and the three Epistles of John. Some textual critics argue that this cannot be correct because of the difference in writing style.¹ To investigate this further, I will propose and experiment.

Here is something I wrote on a lark in college. Read it and, if you are familiar with the general tone of this blog, tell me if you would have guessed it and this blog were written by the same man if you had not been told:

I don't trust the Care Bears. They're up to something. I believe that they are an alien species bent on conquering the Earth. Think about it. They live in the sky, among the stars. They fly around in strange vehicles.

And how comes they're always trying to spread peace and love? Because they want us all to be shiny, happy people? I think not. They're trying to disarm humanity and take away our ability to fight. When we have disarmed and all people are living in harmony, they will launch their quick and devastating attack, destroying our communications infrastructure and murdering world leaders. After this quick coup they will rule us all with an iron fist... er, uh... paw.

What I don't understand is how I am the only one to see it. They fire lasers from their freaking stomachs. FROM THEIR FREAKING STOMACHS PEOPLE! They use these tummy-lasers to eliminate any enemies that stand in the way of their diabolical plan of slowly sifting the fighting spirit out of the human race.

Once this information goes public, I will probably be targeted for "caring." I can only hope that this message reaches enough people in time. Don't let this cuddly alien menace get away with it. Fight these hibernating hell-bringers with all your strength. Do it for humanity.

I hope this experiment has been useful to you.

¹ I'm honestly not all that up on the current ins and outs of Biblical scholarship. Is this still a popular view? It certainly was when I was in high school and college.

The foolishness of values subjectivity

"At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" (Planned Parenthood v. Casey).

If all values are purely subjective, then your life is only worth what I hold it to be worth. And if I hold it to be worth less than anything else, and I further believe that it is worth sacrificing your life to achieve something I value more, then you have no right to stop me. To do so would be to impose your meaning of human life on me, and my right to define human life for myself is at the heart of liberty. What are you, a fascist?

"Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom" (H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu").

Fhtagn, baby. The stars will soon be right. They must be. After all, we're almost there already.

Of course the best part of all thus bull plop is that it is self-refuting. If liberty means that I get to define life, the universe and everything, then that means I have every right to define them in such a way as to allow me to forcibly impose my definitions on others. Which in turn violates the right people have to define life, the universe and everything.

Do we actually pay Supreme Court justices? Because this is first year undergrad, intro to philosophy, "here's your F-" crap.

A belated post for Independence Day

I did not post anything on Independence Day. Partially because I spent most of the day away from the computer with my family, and partially because my thoughts on the Declaration of Independence are complicated. But I found the following poem by Robert Frost and thought it said something important about my native country, the land that I love, these United States.

The Gift Outright

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

A tip of the hat to the Faith & Reason Institute's new web-journal, The Catholic Thing.

A bit on the last things

The source of the chill might have been an understanding that our only choice is pyre or pyre, that we live and breath to be consumed by fire or fire, not just now and at St. Bartholomew's, but always and anywhere. Consumed or purified by fire. ~Dean Koontz, Brother Odd, c.5

I've been thinking about the four last things a bit lately. I remembered the preceding quote from Dean Koontz's Brother Odd, and since I had written it down in my notebook market "Quodlibet," which is currently sitting on my desk, I thought I'd use it as a place to begin.

I think, when you get right down to it, that our only real choice is how to burn. Will we burn like great saints, full of the fire of the Holy Spirit, the tongues of flame that fell on the Apostles and Our Lady at Pentecost? Will we burn with the fire of the Fathers, the Doctors, the Martyrs and all the other great saints whose learning, mysticism and, most importantly, love of God and faithfulness to Christ Jesus the Church holds up to us as examples to follow?

Will we burn in the purifying fires? Will we burn with a mixture of pain and joy? Pain from our purification, but joy from the knowledge that every moment of this pain brings us that much closer to seeing God face to face.

Or we will burn forever, in the fire set aside for the devil and his angels, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched?

In the end, this is what all our choices in this life boil down to: how will we burn? Will it be with the fire of eternal life, the fire of sanctity and purification, the fire of the Holy Spirit and the burning bush, the fire of divine love, the Flame Imperishable? Or will we burn with the fire of eternal death, the death of joy, the death of hope, the death of love, the fire that consumes every illusion we thought was good and leaves us only with pain and the knowledge that we have freely chosen it?

How will we burn? For burn we surely shall.

On weird fiction

I've been reading a lot of H.P. Lovecraft and related mythos tales lately. It's fun to sit down and begin a story with a thought like, "Such quaint prose!" and end it with the heebie-jeebies. I've realized, however, that Lovecraft's stories aren't as scary if I try to adopt his own philosophical presuppositions when reading them.

Lovecraft was, as far as I can tell through my limited research into the matter, a materialist. Well fine. But if this is true, then Cthulhu is nothing more than a squid-headed dragon-man from another planet. He may have an unknown physiology. He may even be composed of unknown elements. But he is still simply a material being, nothing more, nothing less. Thus killing him involves nothing more than applying the proper amount of force to the proper place in the proper way.

Now, weapons technology has, for better or for worse, increased in leaps and bound throughout the twentieth century. How long until we can turn great Cthulhu into little more than cosmic dust and sink R'lyeh forever? How many nuclear bombs does one think it would take to reduce the mountains of madness to the plane of glass? Or to seal the deep ones forever in their undersea trenches? Demons are scary because they cannot be defeated by force of arms. But aliens can be. It's just a matter of discovering, stealing, building and/or modifying the right technology. Heck, large dogs could wound and kill the fungi from Yuggoth, how scary can they really be once one gets over their unfamiliar appearance? Pluto's not even a planet anymore, why should Terra fear its inhabitants?

Fairy-stories, the Good and the Beautiful

(N.B. This post is a slight expansion of a comment I left on this post over at The Sci Fi Catholic.)

The use of "beautiful = good" and "ugly = evil" is a standard fairy-story trope. This is why the spoiled prince gets turned into a hideous beast--since his soul is hideous--and only gets restored to his true form after he falls in love with a good woman who inspires him to be a better man. His outer appearance is made to match his inner disposition. It's the same reason that wicked enchanters may have pleasing appearances at the beginning of stories, but by the end they are usually stripped of this appearance and revealed to be hideous.

This is not simply a trope that makes stories easier for children to understand, but a fundamental understanding of the nature of reality. At the deepest level the Good and the Beautiful are transcendental properties of Being, along the the True and the One. They are interchangeable and differ only in notion. The equating of goodness and beauty is good metaphysics. Problems only arise if we make category errors, such as equating a beautiful appearance (category: quality, sub-category: shape) with a beautiful character (category: quality, sub-category: habit or disposition) and beautiful actions (category: action). But the possibility of category errors on our part does not a bad story make.

In his essay "On Fairy-stories," JRR Tolkien said the following:

Even fairy-stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards Nature; and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man. The essential face of Faerie is the middle one, the Magical. But the degree in which the others appear (if at all) is variable, and may be decided by the individual story-teller. The Magical, the fairy-story, may be used as a Mirour de l'Omme; and it may (but not so easily) be made a vehicle of Mystery.

The equating of good characters with beauty and evil characters with ugliness, as well as the transformation of characters' shapes and appearances to match their inner dispositions is part of a fairy-story's use of magic to reveal to the reader something about nature.

Art is revelatory of being and this trope reveals the ontological unity of goodness and beauty. This is true even if such revelation is not something the author necessarily intended. Good characters are not good because they are beautiful, they are beautiful because they are good and fairy-stories often match inner disposition to outer appearance. Insofar as transformations are used to cause outer appearances to match inner dispositions, the trope shows that we should move past appearances to get to the truth. The evil enchantress may appear beautiful, but she is truly ugly. This ugliness is later revealed and made explicit by the lifting of a glamour, or by her transforming into a monster to battle the hero, or some other use of magic that reveals her true character through a change in her appearance.