Fatherhood, Marriage, Faith, and Family: Father’s Day Thoughts 2013

Paul Adams

All the young families at Mass today, together with our new young parish priest and several other spiritual fathers, made vividly present to me the links among fatherhood, marriage, faith, and family.  

Fatherhood and marriage

Marriage created fatherhood. Not biologically, of course.  When men mate, most will sooner or later become fathers.  All of us alive and dead had a father.  But not all our fathers were married or stayed married.  Marriage creates fatherhood as a social role, in the sense of a male caring for children he knows to be his (see Miller, 2000 on “The Troubled Dawn of Fatherhood”), a sense unknown to our closest kin, the chimpanzees.  This was the explicit aim of marriage law from the very earliest known legal codes in Mesopotamia, which concerned themselves mostly with marriage, its nature, rights, and obligations. Their point was to give to the child the mother and father who made the child. They created fatherhood, so to speak, with the stroke of a pen.

Marriage is the institution through which one generation sacrifices itself for the next.  It is the institution that binds fathers to their own children.  It is the institution that enables and supports a man’s decision, as between the choices all males face, to be a protector rather than a predator.

Faith and family

As Mary Eberstadt compellingly argues, there is an intimate and complex tie between faith and family.  Not only do the religiously observant have more children, but couples with more children are more likely to be or become religious.  Children drive their parents to church.  Christianity, in particular, with its God as Father, its Holy Family, is hard to comprehend in the absence of a natural father who loves and protects, guides and corrects.  Where such fathers are rare in the experience of communities, Christianity atrophies. Christianity and the natural family rise and fall together.

In our community of Ave Maria, we see fatherhood, marriage, faith and family, thriving together and supporting each other.  This has, of course, ceased to be the norm in the larger society in the West.  Even a place like this is not immune to the anti-family, anti-marriage, secularizing influences expressed in explicit promotion of the sexual revolution and all that attends it as official government ideology - the new state religion.  Or in the ubiquity of internet pornography.  Each in its way delinks sex from marriage and both from children.  It is astonishing to me now to see how openly a show like Frasier, not to mention Seinfeld or Sex and the City, promoted casual sex as normal, morally acceptable, and healthy, as well as how minimal (exiguous to the point of nullity) a role children play in their individualistic ideology of sexual expressionism.  

Strong faith and large families are the norm here, but for some of us, myself included, it was only, in Hegel’s metaphor, with the coming of the dusk that the owl of Minerva spread its wings and took flight.  And no-one imagines that even the young who grow up or study in this community are uniformly virtuous.

There is any case, no utopia on earth - the very etymology of the term, coined by St. Thomas More in 1516, tells us that there is no such place.  We fathers are, in the English understatement, no better than we should be.  Our efforts to do the best by our families are shaped, enabled and constrained by the community of faith and family life around us - and the wider pressures of media and government that impinge on it.

Fatherhood, we are reminded today, is a social role shaped by the experience of millennia.  It is created by and tied to marriage and to faith.  The results of breaking those links are disastrous - the social and personal costs of fatherlessness in our society are staggering.  We are reaping what the sexual revolution in its myriad social, legal, and ideological expressions sowed.  The weakening of the links among marriage, sex, and fatherhood has affected even the way we define and conceptualize marriage.  This is apparent in the widespread tendency to reduce our concept of marriage to a kind of Hallmark card sentiment, having to do with the feelings of love and commitment between two adults (so long as the feelings last), but nothing intrinsically to do with sex, sexual complementarity, or children.

Walking the Way

Last month I walked the Camino de Santiago from Sarria to Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain with my adult daughter (see the blog posts here - working from last, April 26, to most recent, June 10).  Others we met on pilgrimage also undertook the journey at least in part as a time for family bonding.  The father-child theme is at the center of the The Way, the film by the father-son team of Sheen-Estevez.  It is also the heart of the best recent writing I have seen on the Camino, about another father-daughter team, ten years younger than us, who made the pilgrimage last year.  The father blogged the experience from start to finish along the whole of the longest, French route - see Webster Bull’s vivid and inspiring narrative - now an e-book and to be developed into a memoir.

The Camino continues to be, as it has been for more than a thousand years, many things - religious, spiritual, cultural, even athletic - to many people.  But for some of us it serves as a time of respite, of healing or convalescence.  Even without the personal drama and intensities of the movie, it is a time of restoring or rebuilding or sustaining those bonds of family and fatherhood that time along with other demands and pressures, competing ideological tendencies, and the mad, dehumanizing pace of our mundane lives, as well as our own fallen natures, vices, and follies, has weakened.

Love as Science

SATURDAY, 01 OCTOBER 2011

St. Thérèse, Getting Scientific

By Matthew Hanley

One of the passages in Story of a Soul, the autobiography St. Thérèse of Lisieux, whose feast day is today, that has most struck me is when she recounted coming across the words Jesus spoke to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque: “I want to make you read in the book of life, wherein is contained the science of LOVE.”

This made quite an impact on Thérèse: “The science of Love, ah, yes, this word resounds sweetly in the ear of my soul, and I desire only this science.” Her famous vocation of love was crystallizing.   

Science and love don’t ordinarily seem to go together. Love we tend to associate with feeling, attraction, and passion – not exactly the stuff of science, which goes with reason, empiricism, and progress. But love as science is not an unfounded mystical metaphor or eccentricity.             

I happened to come across St. Thérèse’s passage shortly after reading the Brothers Karamazov, and Dostoevsky – writing around the same time as St. Therese (the late 1800s) – also uses this formulation. In one of the book’s early dialogues, Father Zossima attempts to console a “lady of little faith,” first by advising her not to be frightened at her own faintheartedness in attaining love, and then by pointing out that love in action is harsh compared to love in dreams: “Active love is labor and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science.”

Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, also wrote that “love is a science, a knowledge, and we lack it.” This is why we need to constantly plead with the Holy Spirit – infunde amorem cordibus, as the beautiful, ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus has it – to fill our hearts with love. 

Not long before St. Thérèse’s time, the concept known as positivism, which holds that no sciences exist except those that study the phenomena of the natural world, had begun to gain traction. The great Russian philosopher Vladimir Soloviev, however, wasn’t buying it. In his 1874 book The Crisis of Western Philosophy: Against the Positivists, he dismantled the view put forth by the French philosopher Auguste Comte that humanity was entering into an era in which scientific knowledge alone is fit to replace all other forms of knowledge, such as “primitive” theological knowledge or even philosophical knowledge. These, Comte felt, were merely outdated precursors to an emerging historical phase of strictly “scientific” advance. “Order and Progress” – Comte’s motto (emblazoned on the Brazilian flag, by the way) – would simply follow.

History didn’t quite get that memo. Yet St. Thérèse perceived at age fourteen that the learnéd, despite spending their whole lives in study, would have been astonished to discover that she could understand things they, in all their “knowledge,” could not. Feats of the intellect pale in comparison with acts of the will grounded in love.

St. Thérèse, doctor of Christian love

Soloviev felt the Western philosophical crisis had resulted from mistakenly elevating (not just unnecessarily pitting) one form of knowledge (reason) above another (faith). He maintained this had begun to emerge even prior to the Enlightenment, which accelerated the promise that science would solve humanity’s perennial problems. The Enlightenment also solidified the idea that science should supersede traditional moral and ethical systems, which could, after all, easily be dismissed as “unscientific.”                                

But that entire moral framework rests upon what Jesus specified as the two greatest commandments: love of God and love of neighbor. We might even say Jesus was speaking “scientifically” – imparting real knowledge – in attesting to the primacy of love.

Dismissing the traditional moral framework does not liberate the self from supposedly arbitrary “rules” but – and this seems generally underappreciated – involves the real danger of the loss of love itself.

Science has enriched our world in important ways. But you don’t have to be a cradle Catholic to perceive that playing the science card – in contemporary bioethical debates, for example – is a manipulative, self-exculpatory means of attempting to secure carte blanche approval for blazing any trail you wish. Soloviev recognized, as too few do today, what was at stake in relegating religious and philosophical knowledge to the periphery where they are not allowed to inform how scientific advances should be interpreted: “Carried to its logical end, the principal of utilitarianism is obviously equivalent to the complete negation of ethics.” Benedict XVI said virtually the exact same thing just last year.

Only the “science of love”, which Benedict described as “the highest form of science,” can protect mankind from the corrosive effects of today’s default (utilitarian) mentality because – as Karol Wojtyla put it in his 1960 book Love and Responsibility – “only love can preclude the use of one person by another.” And only love can extract us from the meaninglessness that scientific materialism has made so widespread.  

Shortly before her death at Auschwitz, Edith Stein wrote a detailed philosophical study of the thought of fellow Carmelite St. John of the Cross, entitled The Science of the Cross, which is the pinnacle of all wisdom. In it, she equated what she called the “science of the saints” with “the truths of the faith” (which never contradict science or reason).

This type of terminology, I think, has the power to arrest the believer and the non-believer alike; it invites us to revisit just what we mean by science – and by love, which John Paul II called “the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.”

The saints all pursue their own diverse vocations of love by following the “scientific” method Jesus counseled: discite a me — “learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart.” What could be more worth seeking to know than His Sacred Heart – “glowing furnace of charity (love)”?

St. Thérèse, great Doctor of the Church, reminds us in her own “little way” that while not all scientists are saints, all saints are scientists – by virtue of their intimate knowledge of and active engagement with love, the deepest reality of life.

Matthew Hanley is, with Jokin de Irala, M.D., the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. His latest report, The Catholic Church & The Global AIDS Crisis is now available from the Catholic Truth Society, publisher to the Holy See in the U.K.

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The Catholic Thing is a forum for intelligent Catholic commentary. Opinions expressed by writers are solely their own.

Retrieved October 2, 2011 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2011/st-therese-getting-scientific.html

The Rage Against God

Peter Hitchens has published an insightful book, drawing on his own experience as former atheist and brother of a famous New Atheist. The Rage Against God is interesting both 1) for its discussion of atheism and atheism's links to intolerance, violence, and totalitarianism and also 2) for its portrait of the disintegrating world of postwar England in which he and I and also Roger Scruton grew up. (See Scruton's Gentle Regrets and England: An Elegy.)

Amazon has a brief clip in which Hitchens talks about the book at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/mpd/permalink/m582FJ1QOUGY1

The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith
Gentle Regrets (Thoughts from a Life)
England: An Elegy

Science, Charity, and Scientific Charity

Paul Adams

Michael Novak makes the point, in his excellent new book, No-One Sees God, that atheists have a harder time empathizing with religious believers than vice versa. That is a serious handicap when you want, as Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens have done, to write books about God and religion without any attempt to understand the inner lives of serious believers.

Many people, and not only these evangelical atheist authors, react with intense hostility toward the Catholic Church in particular. They just want to fling some accusations at one, but do not actually want to hear a response, assuming perhaps there is none or that no-one ever thought of that before. As Dr. Johnson said of the 18th century atheist philosopher David Hume, "Every thing which Hume has advanced against Christianity had passed through my mind long before he wrote. . . . Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull' (July 21, 1763).

You see this in the evangelical popular atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, who pour scorn and ridicule on religion in general and Christianity in particular, without taking the trouble to inform themselves at even a rudimentary level on theology or history or philosophy. Other famous anti-Christians, from Celsus to Nietzsche, at least knew what they were attacking.

On many apparently unrelated issues, such as global warming or health insurance, people tend to cluster in their opinions according to whether they consider themselves liberal or conservative. But the liberal-conservative divide is hard to disentangle since both terms cover very different ideologies that overlap. So one tendency in conservativism is the Burkean perspective which values tradition and the wisdom and resources embedded in it. (Tradition is the democracy of the dead, I think Chesterton said.) Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, is my favorite writer in this vein--I loved his autobiographical England: An Elegy and Gentle Regrets, even the bits I disagreed with.

On liturgy, I also loved German novelist Martin Mosebach on The Heresy of Formlessness, which shows the importance of liturgy as it develops organically over centuries. He argues that the post-Vatican II iconoclasm and attempt to be "relevant" has been a tremendous loss that emptied the pews in Europe especially. He extends the argument to much modernist art and architecture too. I especially like his comment on "senile avantgardism."

It's significant, isn’t it, that "liberal religion" within mainline Protestantism and the "liberal" tendencies within Catholicism are dying on the vine. When people from nominally Catholic countries (Mexico, South America) convert to Protestantism, it is to forms like Pentecostalism because they see them as more demanding, not less, more counter-cultural, not more accommodating to secularism. Within the Catholic Church, it is the more "traditional" and orthodox seminaries, dioceses, religious orders, and movements that are thriving and attracting the young.

Making the question more paradoxical is the fact that the defenders of tradition in indigenous or traditional societies--ones that are hierarchical, intolerant of dissent, conformist, anti-democratic and characterized by gerontocratic polygyny--are often political liberals and post-modernists who oppose all those features to the extent they survive in their own culture. In contrast, Christianity played a revolutionary role in the development of science, democracy, civil and human rights, separation of religion/church and state, ending of slavery, the liberation of women, and insistence on that core social work value, the equal and intrinsic dignity and worth of the individual person (slave or free, male or female, able-bodied or disabled, from conception to natural death). All of these in themselves undermine traditional cultures. (See David Bentley Hart's wonderful book, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies as well as the work of Rodney Stark--The Victory of Reason, The Rise of Christianity, etc.)

So who is liberal, who conservative? Another tendency in "conservatism" comes from classical liberalism and is thus very different. It supports the free market and the sweeping away of tradition that it brought and brings about. The Economist magazine represents this tendency--pro-market, against protectionism and statism in most of its forms, but pro-same-sex marriage and decriminalization of drugs, etc. Like Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan. In its strongest form, it becomes libertarianism, the hypertrophy of individual autonomy against the demands of culture, family, and community and thus the opposite of Burkean conservatism.

In a milder form, neo-conservatism ("liberals who were mugged by reality" as they say) takes this sort of view. Within Catholicism, George Weigel, Michael Novak and others take this position--orthodox on everything except the Church's social teaching, with its preference or option for the poor. The Church, of course, is the major provider of social services and direct aid to the poor in the world. Novak and Weigel would agree and support this work and point to the much higher level of charitable giving in time, talent, and treasure, of the orthodox-religious. But the Church hierarchy--traditionally Democrats--also favors things like national health insurance (except insofar as it involves taxpayer subsidies for plans that provide abortions) and other governmental protections of the poor.

I just finished the book Michael Novak wrote with his daughter, Jana, then in her early twenties, called Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions About God. It discusses all the questions people raise against religion in general and Catholic Christianity in particular, but in a civil and respectful way. (It would not be helpful for those of my family and acquaintance who are so hostile as to be unwilling even to hear counter-arguments or responses.) Now I'm reading Novak's more recent book, No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers. It is very interesting and also very empathetic and respectful of atheism. He especially likes Albert Camus, but also is remarkably patient and civil in the face of today's polemical atheists, some of whom are personal friends.

There is a view or assumption that the most “liberal” in religion, those who most accommodate to or approximate secular-liberal thinking are also the most rational or committed to reason. But I would argue that that distinction belongs to the Catholic Church, for which Reason (Logos) along with Love (Caritas) are central to their understanding of God. It was that commitment to reason and hence the intelligibility of everything in a reasonable God's Creation that made possible the rise of science (as even atheists like Alfred North Whitehead recognized, unlike today's public atheists). It also explains why most of the world's great scientists, theologians, and philosophers have been Catholic or at least--after the Reformation--Christians. As Juergen Habermas, the distinguished leftist, atheist German philosopher who had an interesting dialog with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, put it, 'Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.'

In contrast to Protestantism, at least to those tendencies within it that see reason as depraved since the Fall and hence unreliable, Catholicism always emphasized the centrality of reason in defining and developing doctrine, and the complementarity and necessity to each other of both faith and reason. Every phrase and aspect of this most complex of religions has been subjected to intense scrutiny and theological discussion. (Not to discount Catholicism's mystical and contemplative traditions, but these developed within the rational structure of Catholic doctrine, not as substitutes for it.)

I think there is an interesting parallel between the professionalization of science and of social work. Both were important activities of the clergy in particular--the amateur parson-scientist was a stock figure of 19th century literature--and charity remained and remains at the heart of Christian "ministry." But as these fields professionalized, they distanced themselves from their clerical roots. Social work emerged as a profession out of the Charity Organization Societies, an effort to adopt "scientific charity" in place of the earlier disorganized efforts of amateurs. Scientists became professionals and also distanced themselves from amateurs and their association with the Church. The narrative of a fundamental opposition between science and religion, so dear to today's public atheists, was an invention of the 19th century--of two books in particular, Draper's History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1876). (For a modern analytic philosopher's assessment, see Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism.) This was the very same time as the COS's were getting under way in the eastern U.S. Not cause and effect of course, but two expressions of the professionalizing tendencies of the time and place (White was the first president of Cornell).