Eusebius of Vercelli, Letter 2 Ad Populum

Eusebius of Vercelli, Letter 2, to the People (355-361 AD)

[As I have posted periodically on this blog, here is a translation of a historical document, in this case a letter written by Eusebius of Vercelli to the people of his diocese from exile c. 355-361 AD. This document provides an important firsthand account of episcopal exile under the Roman Emperor Constantius II, and I am using it as such for a current academic project.

St. Eusebius of Vercelli is one of the more obscure members of the group of exiled Nicene bishop-ascetics from the mid-4th century of the Arian Controversy, but perhaps one of the most important. A prominent Italian bishop and ally of the bishop of Rome Liberius, he was exiled by the Emperor Constantius II at the Council of Milan in 355 AD after refusing to subscribe to the condemnation of Athanasius of Alexandra and the Creed of Sirmium offered by the Emperor. According to our one contemporary narrative, this happened after Eusebius arrived late to the Council and demanded that everyone present sign the Creed of Nicaea before proceeding with any more business. He remained in exile in the East until the death of Constantius in 361 AD, when he played a key role in the Council of Alexandria chaired by Athanasius upon the Emperor's death and attempted without success to resolve the bitter schism in Antioch. He then returned home and died circa 370. He also played an important role, like his close ally Hilary of Poitiers, in establishing early monastic and ascetic institutions in the West, likely inspired by Athanasius' ally Anthony of Egypt.]

To my most beloved brothers, and very much desired priests, but also to the holy peoples of Vercelli, Novarium, Hippo Regius, and also Dertonium who stand firm in the Faith: Eusebius the bishop in the Lord wishes eternal salvation. 

1. Although our Lord comforts us, separated in body from you, with many good things, and shows your presence to us at least through the arrival and visits of very many brothers; nevertheless we were sorrowful and sad and not without tears; because for a long interval of time we did not receive writings from Your Holinesses. Indeed we were afraid that either some diabolical subtlety had taken hold of you, or human power had subjugated the unfaithful.

Therefore, while we were afflicted with these thoughts, and I was turning all the consolation of brothers who were coming to us from various provinces more to sorrow at your absence than to joy: the Lord thought it right to bestow this, that I was able to learn the very thing about which I was worried, not only by the letters of your sincerity, but also by the presence of our dear ones Syrus the deacon and Victorinus the exorcist.

And so I have come to know, dearest brothers, that you, as I desired, are unharmed. And, as though I was suddenly snatched up through all the breadth of the earth (as happened to Habakkuk, who was carried by an angel all the way to Daniel [cf. Daniel 14:33-36]), I judged that I had come to you, while I was receiving the letters of each person, while I was racing to your holy friends and the love found in your writings. 

2. Tears were mingling for me with joy: and my mind, eager to read, was constrained by being occupied with tears. And both things were necessary, as each of my senses was desiring to anticipate its duties of loving for this fulfillment of desire. Thus each day while occupied with this I was judging that I was spending time with you, and I was forgetting my past labors: in this way truly joys were encompassing me on every side, offering from here stable faith, from here love, from here fruitfulness; so that in so many and so great established goods, suddenly I was judging, as I said above, that I was not in exile, but with you.

I rejoice therefore, dearest brothers, in your faith: I rejoice in your salvation which follows faith: I rejoice in your fruits, because from this they have not only been established, but also have travelled far. As indeed the farmer has grafted on that good tree, which does not suffer the axe, is not given up to flames, for the sake of its fruits; so also we want and desire not only to show to Your Holinesses service according to the flesh, but also to spend our lives for your salvation.

You have extended, as I said, branches strong with fruit, and you have labored to reach through such long spaces of the earth to touch me. I rejoice as a farmer, and gladly pluck the apples of your labor, because you wanted to do so much: not only I, or those very holy priests and deacons or other brothers who are with me, but also all of us who are longing for you.

For you filled up, as the most blessed Apostle says, my heart when you fulfilled the divine commandments which it is right that Christians fulfill towards a bishop or ecclesiastical men who you know labor in exile because of the Faith. You have fulfilled the things which it is right for brothers to do for brothers, and for sons to show for a father.

But when we were wanting you, according to divine commandments, to produce heavenly fruit from earthly things, stable fruit from fleeting things, eternal fruit from fragile things; in suffering by necessity we began to sow seeds daily. The poor were rejoicing at your fruits: not only were the people of the city itself glorifying God, but also everyone: and these people were able to see from the fruits themselves the love you have for me, and in seeing were glorifying God, and naming us with all honor with your blessing. 

3. The devil seeing this, the enemy of innocence, the rival of justice, the opponent of faith, because God was being blessed in this work, inflamed against us his Ariomaniacs, who now for a long time were raging not only over this work, but also over their own infidelity, to which they were not able to persuade us, so that they violently erupted; in this way that he has always used, those whom he was not able to persuade, he terrified with force and power.

And so he gathered the multitude of his own people, who seize and bring us to the factory of their infidelity and mock us: and they say that all this power has been handed over to them by the Emperor. Therefore when they were saying many things and boasting about their power, in this I wanted to show them that the things they were able to do are nothing, while I handed over in silence as though to executioners my body, which the Lord was saying was able to be handed over in persecutions. How free in mind I was, while I am suffering from these things, and am imprisoned, and am preserved through four days, and hear the insults and persuasions of different kinds of people: in this I have shown that I have not spoken even one word.

They wanted to add to their malice, that my brothers would depart from me, that is, priests and deacons: but also they said they were going to prevent the rest of the people from coming to me. I, in order to not accept food from the hands of unbelievers, or rather of transgressors (which is worse) who are unbelievers, as the Apostle says, made a petition to them in this way. 

‘The Servant of God Eusebius with his fellow servants who labor with me for the Faith, to Patrophilus the prison-guard with his people:

With what violence and rage of many people you carried me off, not only dragged across the ground, but at times even prostrate with a naked body, from this guest-house which you gave to me through your people and agentes in rebus, which I have never left except through your violence, both God knows, and the city knows, nor are you able to deny it now and in the future.

Therefore I reserve my case for God, so that, inasmuch as he himself has ordained it, he may be able to undertake the end. Meanwhile, I want you to know that I have decreed this (so that the reason may be able to stand now and in the future, even here), in the guest-house where you are holding me imprisoned, in which after first carrying me and thrusting me inside very cruelly, you dared to carry me from there in the same way, and to throw me into a single cell, that I will not eat bread nor drink water, until each of you have promised, not only by word, but also by hand, that you will not prevent my brothers who are willingly suffering these things with me from offering me necessary food from the guest-house where they are staying–and also others who have thought it worthy to ask for it.

Indeed, it was right to go out from the body, so that I would not be compelled to often tell those who want to know what a great crime you all have committed against divine and public law. But so that no one from among the unbelievers may call you cruel towards us, and think that we are ignorant of the divine commandments and did not want to avoid confusion more than to obey the Lord, for this reason we wanted to presume this: again I say that unless you make a promise by word and in writing, you will be murderers by preventing [food from being brought to me]. 

5. The omnipotent God knows this: also his Only-Begotten Son, indescribably born from him, knows, who as God of eternal virtue for our salvation put on a perfect man, wanted to suffer, triumphed over death and rose on the third day, sits on the right hand of the Father, is going to come to judge the living and the dead: also the Holy Spirit knows: the Catholic Church is witness, which confesses like this: because I will not be liable in myself, but you all, who have wanted to prevent my fellow-servants from ministering necessary things.

And if you have prepared this, you ought to despise yourselves: not as though I fear death, but so that after my departure you may not say that I wanted to depart by a voluntary death and may not find a certain cloud of accusation for us. Know that I am going to communicate with the Churches which I am able to reach with letters that have been for a time locked up; I am going to communicate also with the servants of God, so that the whole world might be able to recognize, through these persons running together, how the complete faith which has been approved by all the Catholic bishops is suffering from the Ariomaniacs, which it condemned before. I, Eusebius the bishop, have subscribed in the same way [i.e. to the Nicene Creed].

I adjure you who read this letter, through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that you not suppress it but [allow] it to be be read by others.”

6. Therefore these men, softened on barely the fourth day from this letter [libellus] compelled us, hungry, to return to the guest-house in which we had stayed. They saw from within how the people, returning, received us with joy. They surrounded our guest-house with lights.

We begin, with the Lord approving, to again minister to the poor. Their inhumanity did not endure this, and they destroyed our love for their hatred. They were able to tolerate this for around nearly twenty-five days. They break out anew, and with the destroyed hand of many they come to our guest-house armed with clubs, they break the wall through other people’s doors, and they come to us with violence. Again they grab us, and they lock us up in a narrower guard-house with only our dear priest Tegrinus.
Also our brothers, that is all the priests and deacons, they grab and lock up.

After three days by their own power they send them into exile throughout various places. Other brothers who had come to visit us they send in the public jail and hold them locked up through very many days. Rushing again to the guest-house, they destroy everything which had been prepared either for expenses or for the poor.

But because this their public crime was known by all the citizens, they used this argument, that they were returning some less important things, and were trying to return to us our own property. But they kept the expenses in their own possession: and after so great a crime they were seeking, if it was possible, to deny this, that they had permitted nothing from my property to come to me, I who was trying to bring necessary food to my body. Barely on the sixth day, with people everywhere shouting against them, they permitted one to come. In all that pertained to them, they showed that they had the minds of murderers. At first, they sent away this person, so as not to cease from their malice: afterwards, barely on the sixth day, when we were failing, they allowed him to come once with some food. And so these are the works of the Ariomaniacs. 

7. See, most holy brothers, if this is not persecution, when we who keep the Catholic Faith suffer these things: and think more deeply whether this persecution is not very much even worse than that one which happened through the ones who serve idols. Those men were sending people into prison: nevertheless they were not preventing their own from coming to them.

How much, therefore, has Satan wounded the Churches through the cruelty of the Ariomaniacs! People who are obliged to free men send into public guard-houses. People who are taught to suffer for the sake of justice commit violence. People who are taught by the divine law not to demand back their own property when it is stolen steal others’ property. I pass over how much cruelty has invaded them, while they rejoice in their temporal ease. The ability to see their own people is not denied by torturers or judges to bandits shut up in prison: our people are kept from us: and not only are they forbidden from the guest house in which we are held, but they are terrified by threats so that they will not approach the prison. In this way they have subjugated everyone, as I have very plainly known.

I will begin from the bishops: while certain of them fear to lose their office, they themselves have lost the Faith; while they do not not want to lose their earthly faculties and immunities, they have judged the heavenly treasuries and true security to be nothing. In the same way also the rest have been led astray, while they see the bishops fearing these things perish, and have begun to love the things which they cannot have forever.

8. In this way the Ariomaniacs frighten the rich, since they threaten them with proscription: in this way they frighten the poor, since they have the power to shut them up in prison. And how great this insanity is! In the place in which we are held, they not only send the men who serve us into prison, but also they shut up the holy girls [sanctiominales=consecrated religious] in the public guard-houses without any fear of God. But as the the evil old men who sought to violate the chastity of Susanna did not rejoice: so neither will these rejoice always, who try to subject the Church to their infidelity with various persecutions and excessive oppressions. For the holy Daniel said to those men: ‘In this way, because they were afraid, the daughters of Israel slept with you’ [Daniel 13:57].

But let human fear, Most Holy ones, depart from your minds, since you have the consolation of the Lord, who says: ‘Do not fear those who kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul’ [Matthew 10:18]. This is the time of testing: the time exists so that those who have been tested and proved may be made known and manifest. Therefore they have received human help, because they do not have divine help: because if they did have it, they would never subjugate innocent souls to themselves with earthly power.

9. We were obliged to write many things about those men’s evil deeds, by which not I alone, but very many are oppressed: but it is so that we might not be able to do this, and communicate their cruelty by letters, that we are kept in this very confined guard-house by them. For this reason also our other people and friends are kept from approaching us.

But the Lord has granted to me to send this letter to you through our most dear deacon Syrus, whom we have in our power to send; because by the providence of our Lord at that time he approached to see the holy places and was not discovered with the rest of the brothers. 

10. As for the rest, we have with difficulty written this letter in whatever way we could, always begging God that he would restrain our guards for a time, and grant that the deacon might bear more the announcement of our labors than what letters of greetings are usually like.

For this reason I beg you all sufficiently that you keep the Faith with all vigilance, that preserve harmony, that you lean on prayers, that you remember us without ceasing: so that the Lord might think it worthy to free his church which labors over the whole earth, and so that we who are oppressed might be able to be freed to rejoice with you: the Lord will think it worthy to grant this since you ask for it through our Lord Jesus Christ, who with him is blessed from the ages and into all the ages of ages. Amen.

The Council of Nicaea: A Historical Explainer

 The Council of Nicaea: A Historical Explainer

This year is, among other things, the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. Ecumenical commemorations have already begun, focusing for the most part on the dual institutions of the Papacy and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople--institutions both deeply entwined, though in different and somewhat ironic ways, with the event. 

Later this year, two men will meet in Nicaea: Pope Leo XIV-- an American born in Chicago who spent his ministry in Peru, places that none of the bishops at Nicaea had ever heard of, but the latest sitter on what was already in the fourth century the ancient and venerable seat of the bishop of the Church of Rome, and Patriarch Bartholomew--an ethnic Greek whose see was, at the time of Nicaea, a minor suffragan of Heraclea, who today presides over a tiny, purely vestigial Christian flock in what was, in the 4th century, the population heartland of Christianity, but which now resides within the borders of an ethnic nation-state named after Central Asian nomads and populated by the largely secularized followers of Islam, a Christian offshoot that would emerge centuries later from a portion of the world that nearly all the bishops of Nicaea would have regarded as a minor scrap of territory stuck rather awkwardly between two great Empires. These two men will no doubt issue appropriate statements of fraternity and commemoration for what both traditions they represent regard as the first Ecumenical Council of the undivided Christian Church of the first millennium. 

Accompanying these commemorations will come many, many explanations by the popular press the world around, designed to communicate to ordinary folks from America to Siberia to India and back again just what the Council of Nicaea is, anyway, and why it's important enough to make the Chicagoan Pope go all the way to Turkey. Alas, the popular press being what it is, the vast majority of these explanations will be wrong. This event will also be accompanied, no doubt, by many intelligent and intellectual explanations of just what the Council of Nicaea is, in podcasts, tweets, blueskys and the like: and as is frequently the case, these will be even more wrong. 

Hence, to get out ahead of these takes, I wanted to issue, as a scholar who has published an academic volume among other things on Nicaea and its context and legacy, a brief explainer on the historical event of the Council of Nicaea. This will be a deliberately broad take, deliberately designed to skirt most controversial scholarly questions; but nevertheless unavoidably based on my own opinions and scholarly judgments. 

As such, I am confident it will contain a great deal of information that will come as a surprise to most moderately-informed people, and an even higher percentage of information that both ordinary, good people and wicked take-having intellectuals have never heard of. I hope it will prove both informative and reasonably diverting.

Pope Francis (1936-2025)

Pope Francis (1936-2025)

Of all the tasks a writer may attempt, evaluating a Pope is perhaps the hardest. The Papacy, as I have tried to emphasize elsewhere, is above all a personal and historical institution: it incarnates the messy, human side of the Faith. It is not a thing suited to pristine abstractions, even doctrinal abstractions. 

A Pope is first and foremost a human person; which is to say, an individual substance of a rational nature; which is to say, an entity defined and constituted by numerous relations, personal and familial and social and cultural. A Pope, though, is a person whose relations have been radically extended in a way that is, in a genuine sense, supernatural; who relates to others throughout the world in ways that go beyond the ordinarily human into the realm of the sacramental and the eternal. A Pope's relations encompass the whole world, and enter into practically every realm of human life and interaction, from the familial to the cultural to the political to the diplomatic to the economic to the mass-media and back again. 

Because of this, there is almost an infinity of ways one can analyze an individual Pope and pontificate. There are, at the very least, as many modes of analysis as there are people in the world. Historical analyses are no more valid, in themselves, than the simplest personal anecdote; and this, in turn, does not take away from the most inchoate sense a person may have of the state of the Church, the world, or a life, and the impact of the Pope on that. Popes cannot be understood solely in ideological and political terms: but for all that, they are legitimately political figures who may well have much to do with the triumph or defeat, success or failure, of particular ideologies and political parties and movements. They are international diplomats, with a unique ability to intercede between nations; and they are judges, presiding over the world's largest non-state justice system, and administrators, presiding over the world's largest non-state charitable organization and the world's oldest continuous bureaucracy. And then, of course, they are Fathers, and Shepherds, and intercessors before God, and the rulers of the rulers of this age, and poor sinners who will one day stand with us all before the judgment seat of God. 

Popes can be evaluated legitimately based on any of these things; and in all of them, their records are likely to show normal human inconsistencies, as well as the influence of their own personalities, historical events and conflicts, their advisors and subordinates, and the bureaucratic, political, and religious systems in which they participate. 

There are, to be frank, a lot of terrible takes on Pope Francis, takes that are ignorant or mendacious or malicious or outright stupid. Most of them fail, like most journalistic writing today, simply by imposing a simplistic, highly-colored narrative, based primarily on mass-media symbols, partisan conflicts, bullshit pseudo-intellectualism, and/or private emotion, onto this vast network of relationships and acts. All such takes, without exception, are false. Pope Francis was not the Progressive Pope; he was not the Dictator Pope; he did not preside over the Catholic Church's irreversible decline; he was not a plotter dedicated to power at all costs; he was not a Trumpian revolutionary; he was not a frustrated liberal; he was not the last humane figure in a world gone mad; he was not the death blow of the Imperial Papacy, or Vatican 2, or progressive Catholicism, or the End of History, or anything else. As they have since the very beginning of his pontificate, the soi-disant intellectuals of our frankly pathetic intellectual-cum-journalistic culture continue to lie. 

I don't want to add to these takes; I wish, in fact to denounce them, and will by the end of this essay. 

There are also, of course, any number of encomia, religious and secular, appropriate to the passing of such a significant figure, reflecting on his accomplishments, his character, and the positive personal impact on all of the above on many persons. The present essay also does not belong to this genre. As will become clear, a significant portion of this essay consists of reflections on Francis' weaknesses and limitations as a Pontiff, and the conflicts by which his Papacy was marked. I loved Francis very much, and tried my best to make others love him; but as Chesterton pointed out long ago, it is always dangerous merely to whitewash the weaknesses of any person, since it is often on such weaknesses that a proper understanding of their strengths depends. 

For my own small part, then, I will be proceeding primarily from an abstract, historical perspective, supplementing such analysis with thoughts on Francis as a person and his importance for the Catholic Church of the 21st century. Though I will make a number of comments and preliminary conclusions, the principle intended utility of this essay is to provide various frameworks and contexts through which, I think, Francis can be fruitfully considered: and in which he should be considered, at greater length, by others. I will not attempt a true theological evaluation of Francis, let alone attempt to conclude what his narrative meaning is for all of history for all time.

This is, then, by no means a "definitive take" on Francis; it is not intended to, nor could it, detract from any genuine perspective on the Pope. 

Poem: If You Had Said No

If You Had Said No

If you had said no

the burning Archangel

would have offered no rebuke

(he had not been sent

as for the priest

to humble pride

but to exalt humility)

he would have bowed

his crowned head

in silence

and in silence turned

and walked away

his rainbow plumage

receding in the endless distance

forever

in the courts of heaven

a hush would have fallen

on the cosmic powers

the cherubim

turn their thousand eyes

away from the earth

and the stars

take up

a new song

the celestial spheres

sigh like strings

in perpetual, cyclical

mourning

(for one can neither mourn nor desire

the impossible—

but what was possible

can be mourned and longed for

in remembrance

forever)

a quiet

would have fallen

upon the earth

the grass and the trees

clothe themselves

as in winter

with dimness

the burning desire

would go out

of the heart of things

no more of blood

in the dying leaves

no more of fire

in the blooming rose

the moths

would no longer

seek the flame

the leaves would have

no voice in the wind

the trees would have no eyes

and there would be no face

in the dark forest

the sons of men

would cease from

the ancient rites

of winter and springtime

they would make

no war

for immortal glory

the daughters of men

would be fair only

desired only

possessed only

there would be no light

in their eyes

no gleam of gold

fire earth moonlight

in their tresses

they would bear their children

in silence

with no wild hope

in the pain and blood

the birds

would not sing more sweetly

in their presence

nor would the fire burn brighter

there would be no roses

in them

at all

the littleness

of their children

would have no

greatness

in it

bread would be

only bread

wine only wine

and the blood of men

only like the blood of cattle

Don't Follow the News

[This is an old essay I wrote for a local Catholic publication a number of years ago. I am reposting it now for obvious reasons.]

Don’t Follow the News: A Manifesto

Don’t follow the news. Don’t watch it. Don’t listen to it. Don’t read it. Don’t engage with it. Don’t post about it or argue about it on social media. I have given this advice to friends, enemies, total strangers, Catholics, Protestants, and atheists. This is the most important advice I can give to Americans today.

Allow me to explain, in a somewhat roundabout and proverb-studded way, why I say this.

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you’ve satisfied his hunger for a whole day, though, you’ve created a problem for all the people who also wanted to sell this man fish, or perhaps Hamburger Helper. Instead, try selling him a picture of a fish. When you come back to him ten minutes later, he will be even more desperate, even more fixated on fish, and his judgment will be even more impaired from the hunger. In short, he will be an even better customer than before. By the time the man finally dies of starvation a few months later, you will have had the opportunity to sell him an enormous number of pictures of fish, increasing the shareholder value of your publicly-traded fish media corporation to the greatest degree possible. Call this the economy.

A fool and his money are soon parted. Unfortunately, the money actually possessed by any given hungry and stupid man is finite. As an alternative to this system, consider one where a third party gives you money every time you manage to momentarily catch the man’s attention. Call this advertising.

There is nothing sadder than the death of a clown. A single clown, wearing the same outfit and performing the same set of tricks, possesses only a limited ability to catch and hold the same person’s attention. Also you have to pay the clown. Instead, consider getting people to send you pictures and videos and texts describing random things that may or may not be happening or have happened anywhere in the world. Using all of these, you should be able to attract the fool’s attention a great deal longer. Call this journalism.

Everyone is special. It turns out that not everything in your pile of random media is equally effective at catching and holding the fool’s attention. Perhaps you should consider constructing a robot to sort that pile into an infinity of smaller piles, each one associated algorithmically with a particular group of people. Use this robot’s findings to more effectively attract and hold your fool’s attention. Call this targeted advertising.

Sex sells. So does self-righteousness and homicidal rage. Thanks to your personal targeted advertising robot, you will soon discover that some types of content, and some types of human emotion, are more successful at attracting and holding your fool’s attention than others. Put simply, you want to be manipulating emotions that are easily activated, intense, overpowering, and self-reinforcing. You want to be able to hold up a picture and have your fool be instantly and intensely focused, resulting in a fool who is more pliant and receptive to similar content for all time thereafter. Call this, depending on the precise emotions targeted, pornography, advertising, political action, or the news.

Truth is stranger than fiction. It turns out that if you show a man a picture of his best friend being beaten to death by his oldest enemy, you will attract his attention very strongly. However, you will also produce any number of other highly incalculable effects, such as wailing and gnashing of teeth, intense depression, ritual acts of mourning, and so on, most of which stand in the way of attracting his attention again soon. Instead try showing him a picture of someone he has never met, who slightly resembles his best friend, being mildly to gravely inconvenienced by someone else he has never met, who has some random feature in common with his oldest enemy. It turns out that while this distant and possibly fictitious scenario produces a similar emotional reaction and gets the man’s attention just as effectively as a truthful account of a meaningful personal disaster, his reaction will be much more repeatable and manipulatable. Call this the news cycle.

Despair is the opiate of the masses. If you show someone a grave act of injustice happening to people they care about a few feet from them, odds are they will want to do something about it, whether that involves stopping the injustice in progress, punishing it, or perhaps creating a systemic societal revolution to prevent it from happening again. Show someone a grave act of injustice happening to perfect strangers half a world away, and they are much less likely to either want or be able to do anything about it. Show them five-hundred such injustices consecutively over the course of twenty-four hours, and they will enter a state of functional despair where the impulse to do anything meaningful in response to any injustice anywhere has totally disappeared. Minus hope, your fool’s reactions to injustice will become, as if by magic, shallow, manipulable, self-deluding, and selfish. Call this, depending on the personality of the man in question, either blackpill or entertainment.

It is expedient that one man should die for the people. Even when constantly subjected to injustices about which he can do nothing, your subject will still react to visual stimuli, building up a great deal of tension and anxiety and anger and stress. Given enough time, the man is capable of doing any number of regrettable things with these feelings, including acts of violence, rituals of mourning, psychological breakdowns, disengagement from mass media, religious conversion, or connection with other human beings. To stop these unprofitable trends in their tracks, do everything in your power to associate each and every injustice he is made to witness with groups of his fellow human beings. This will provide him with an outlet for his emotions, particularly if you can provide at the same time an arena where he can performatively and self-righteously condemn such people and be randomly cruel and hateful towards them. Find a way to monetize that, and call it social media.

Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards. Follow this process to its logical conclusion and you will have produced a society full of despairing, isolated individuals whose time, attention, and energy is totally and continually taken up with passively absorbing media that preys on their emotions and/or being randomly cruel to each other on the Internet. Meanwhile the stock market flourishes. Call this, in a final flourish of black humor, politics.

I repeat myself: nevertheless, don’t follow the news. Don’t follow the news because it’s trying to monopolize your attention for ad dollars. Don’t follow the news because most of what it shows you is either false or is deliberately designed to prevent you from doing anything about it. Don’t follow the news because it will consistently appeal to your basest instincts. Don’t follow the news because it will train you to be totally inactive and despairing in the face of injustice. Don’t follow the news because it will isolate you and teach you to hate your fellow human beings. 

A Catholic is called to live a virtuous life, a life in which through habitual action, aided by divine grace, his immediate, unthinking reactions to people, places, and things are more and more conformed to the true, the good, the beautiful, the just, and the charitable. A virtuous person does not react to injustice except so as to mourn it or work towards setting it right through  prayer and virtuous action. A virtuous Christian does not give himself over to hatred or contempt for fellow human beings, but works for their salvation through prayer and charitable action. All this requires, however, a great deal of training and retraining of our basic habits and affections. And this training requires, as its absolute sine qua non, that one not spend all one’s time and energy on a training regimen with precisely the opposite purpose.

I concede that it is not impossible to follow the news in a virtuous, charitable way. One can learn about evils happening a world away, and pray for those affected. One can learn about evils happening close to home, and work to correct them. To a limited degree. 

We live, however, in a society of addicts, and when dealing with addicts, moderate approaches are seldom effective. Which is why en masse, on balance, I would say to my fellow American Catholics: don’t follow the news. 

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

Future Heresies: A Thought Experiment

The following post will most likely interest very few people; but, well, it interests me. 

I have spent a great deal of time and energy studying the history of Christian and Catholic doctrine; and have even published a scholarly volume on the subject. There are a number of interesting facets or aspects of such a study: one, which is absolutely central to any serious contemporary Christian theology, may be called the theory of development, or more precisely theories of development, encompassing all the various attempts, from Antiquity to the present day, to understand theoretically the mix of continuity and change visible in Christian doctrine over time, its causes, and its results. These theories have spanned the entire range from naive to absurd to self-contradictory to insightful and back again; and to have a real theology, in any sense, it is necessary to operate on the basis of some such schema, if only implicitly: and to have a rational, explicit, truthful theology, it is necessary to have a rational, explicit, truthful theory of development.

However, that is not what I am going to be talking about in this post, at least not directly. Rather, what I have been trying to develop, based on my studies, here and elsewhere, is what I might call a theory of deformation, or perhaps (with a nod to Whip It) a theory of devolution.

This is, however, to put the matter somewhat dramatically, as well as somewhat polemically. The more basic truth is that Christianity as such, not to mention Catholicism, embodies a highly particular metaphysics, ethics, philosophy, ethics, history, and way of living, and that there are few, if any, things in human life that it does not in some way touch on or incorporate into its grand synthesis. 

For precisely this reason, however, Catholicism necessarily overlaps withareas of human life also dealt with by more human and secular and historical sciences and philosophies and cultures and politics. It not only covers the same ground as them, but frequently addresses the same concepts, even uses the same words. It typically does so, however, in very different ways, ways that are opaque, confusing, and often even offensive to many people, and which are therefore highly susceptible to being reinterpreted entirely in light of their more common usages.

To take only one instance, the use of the term nature in Catholic Christology necessarily overlaps to some limited extent with the uses made of this concept in science, philosophy, genetics, ethics, etc, of our own or indeed any historical society--but for all that, the concept of nature used in Catholic Christology is highly different than that used in any contemporary domain. To simply take the Christological sense of nature and insert into a discussion of, say, ecology would produce nonsense; while to take the contemporary ecological sense of nature and insert it into Christology might produce nonsense, but might also produce something a great deal more like a heresy.

This framing, however, is a bit more abstract than is necessary. I do not think, really, that most historical or contemporary heresies arise from mere confusion of the technical language of Catholicism with the technical language of contemporaneous science or philosophy. This has been, in the past, a common way of interpreting historical heresies; and it usually produces historiography (and heresiography) that is overly schematic and conceptually muddled. 

As a matter of fact, in most cases technical domains, so long as they remain technical and specific, remain to that extent open to broader domains of philosophy and metaphysics and theology, or more precisely subordinate to them in the sense that they deal with more particular matters that can and should and to an extent even must be integrated with broader domains: and to the extent this is true, engagements between technical domains and theology, so long as they are done skillfully, can produce positive fruit in both domains. 

Rather, what usually happens in regards to serious deformations of Catholic doctrine, I think, is quite a bit more subtle than this, and much harder to resolve simply with reference to mere definitions.

Most people do not study technical fields; but most people do live in societies, in communities, and in institutions. And these societies, communities, and institutions, explicitly or implicitly, run off of and embed and embody and incarnate particular views of the world, particular anthropologies, particular practical ethical goals and conceptions of the good. And it is these, in particular, that most directly and frequently clash with the overarching, holistic ethics and metaphysics of Catholicism; and which most frequently and impactfully lead to reinterpretations and deformations of Catholic belief and practice.

To take only one example, my scholarly book (AVAILABLE NOW!) focuses in part on the complex conceptual and practical clash between the implicit and explicit views of God, man, person, nature, equality, hierarchy, etc, found in the world of Late Imperial politics and Late Antique Christianity: and the various ways in which this led to radical reinterpretations of Imperial politics in terms of Christianity, and of Christianity in terms of Imperial politics. This is, of course, by no means a simplistic one-way affair, without ambiguity.

Still, if one accepts the basic framework above, it becomes clear that something like this has happened again and again in the history of the Catholic Church; and, considered soberly, to some degree must happen, in every age, place, institution, culture, and time. For, after all, the truth, even considered qua abstract and universal, must be concretely and particularly received and understood in every age, by every person: and for it to be understood, it must be related to existing stores of knowledge, culture, terminology, and so on. And if it is possible for this to be done well, in a way faithful to the essential meaning of Christian revelation, subordinating earthly knowledge to divine revelation, it is also possible, and intrinsically a great deal more likely, to be done badly.

And more interestingly, all this must happen here and now, and in the future: and must be, to some degree, predictable and understandable, even where said deformations are only implicit or only incipient. 

Here, then, is the ambitious and likely ludicrous "thought experiment" I wish to engage in this post: namely, to see if I can to some extent predict, to some extent extend, and to some extent make explicit the implicit deformations of core Catholic doctrines created by, or likely to be created by, our contemporary institutions and social systems. In so doing, I wish to be clear that I am using the term "heresy" only in a colloquial sense, as a helpful abstraction, and that I am in no way attempting to preempt Church authority, define a canonical crime, and/or accuse anyone of being a formal heretic deprived of divine grace and/or liable to ecclesiastical sanction. Similarly, in dealing with the below "heresies," I am in no way predicting, even theoretically, that anyone in particular will ever explicitly argue for the positions laid out below, let alone turn them into widespread theological or popular or religious movements. I am merely postulating that the following deformations of Catholic belief do exist or will exist, explicitly or implicitly, to vastly varying degrees, in the lives and thoughts and arguments of Catholics: and as such, will have, to vastly varying degrees, negative effects.

For my next blog post, most likely, I will be examining what I think are the emerging political principles likely to govern global and American politics over the next several decades. Before doing that, though, I wish to preserve the proper hierarchical order of things, and deal first with the higher domain of theology, before proceeding to lesser matters. 

Three Prayers

 [These are three prayers of my own composition that I pray daily. Perhaps others might find them helpful as well.] 

Prayer For Divine Correction

English:

Receive, beloved God,
all my words, deeds, and intentions of this day:
complete them, correct them, if necessary replace them entirely with your own: 
so that your words may be heard, your deeds done, your intentions fulfilled, for the good of those whom you love.
Amen.

Latin:

Recipe, amate Deus, 
omnia mea verba, facta, intentionesque huius diei:
ea perfice, corrige, si oportet muta pro tuis:
ut audiantur verba tua, faciantur facta tua, compleantur intentiones tuae, ad bonum eorum quos amas.
Amen.

Prayer to the Blessed Virgin for Healing

English:

True and loving Mother of God,|
Mary,
Take me into your arms, embrace me, caress me, and kiss me,
And remove from my midst all those lies which the Devil has inscribed in my flesh,
in my body, heart, mind, and soul, in order to hinder the work of God.
Heal me and save me, most sweet mother.
Amen.

Latin:

Vera et amans Dei Mater,
Maria,
Recipe me in brachias tuas, me complectere, me mulce, me basia,
Et omnia mendacia quae diabolus ut operi Dei impediat
inscripsit in meam carnem, in corpus et cor et mentem et animam meam,
a medio me remove.
Me sana et salvum fac, dulcissima mater.
Amen.

Prayer to the Blessed Virgin Before Sleep

English:

Mother,

I entrust into your hands all my own affairs:

property, duties, cares, souls.

Guard them while I sleep,

and do for them all the good which I cannot:

find what is lost,

fix what is broken,

attend to what is forgotten,

heal what is wounded.

Oh most blessed Mother of God, I beseech you,

make my life whole, and lead everything to God.

I have hoped in you, Mary;

let me never be put to shame.

Amen.

Latin:

Mater,

commendo in manus tuas omnes meas res: 

propria, officia, curas, animas.

Dum dormio, eas custodi:

fac eis omne bonum quod non possum ego:

erratam inveni;

fractam repara;

ad oblitam attende;

vulneratam sana.

O beatissima Mater Dei, te quaeso:

fac meam vitam integram, et duc totam ad Deum.

Speravi in te, Maria;

non confundar in aeternum.

Amen.

Column 09/03/2024: Testament of Belief

Testament of Belief

[I apologize for doing so little writing on here, as I have been both rather busy and also my creative energies have been directed towards (1) fiction, and (2) academic writing, neither of which is yet polished enough to post here. I have several pieces in various stages of construction, however, which should be appearing on here soon enough. This is not really any of those pieces, but an impromptu decision to say something about my belief and its bases, inspired mostly by my thoughts as I was going to bed and written in about an hour and posted in honor of Pope St. Gregory the Great on his feast-day. His writings are much more worth reading than mine.]

Every one, I suppose, has their own function when it comes to the Church and the life of grace; which is another way of saying their own testament, a thing to which they are able to witness. One of mine, I suppose, is to give the lie to the basic idea that faith is essentially a form of wish-fulfillment, that it is bound up with thoughts and emotions and beliefs and doubts and moral hypocrisies, in short something entirely other and opposed to reality in the sense believed in by scientists and engineers and so-called practical mean. 

To that, I can only say, for better or worse, that my belief, in its foundation and inceptions, has nothing really to do with the former, and everything to do with the latter. 

I sometimes envy people with what I would call a natural belief, or even a natural disbelief: people who find it difficult, if not impossible, to see where their own minds end and the reality to which all these things refer begins. Belief is natural to human beings: it is a necessary corollary of having a mind. Believing, and disbelieving, are simply things that people do, all the time, without much in the way of thought or even necessarily interest; and these acts of believing and disbelieving are naturally intertwined with all the other operations of people's minds, emotions and hopes and desires and fears and traumas and loves and hates. Among these beliefs, and disbeliefs, are mental states referring to God, or Christianity, or the Catholic Church--beliefs which may be important, but are not fundamentally different from any other similar mental state. Hence, even the most honest believer or disbeliever may, and should, ask themselves: am I sure that my beliefs (or disbeliefs) are accurate, that they refer to reality, that they are not unduly influenced by my own emotions? After all, it is so tied in with me that it may turn out to be all me after all. 

Alas, this is not how I relate, or have ever related, to God or the Catholic Faith. My relationship with God is in this sense based more on experience than belief: and it is not an experience, even, of having an idea confirmed by observation, or a hypothesis advanced by testing, or even a desire fulfilled by fruition. To the extent the experience may be analogized to other types of experience, it may be compared to any sudden, unanticipated physical reality: the step you miss while walking and thinking of other things, the car you collide with while listening to music, the pain you feel suddenly from the beam you did not see. It simply and undeniably asserts its reality precisely by its utter heedlessness, its utter lack of relation, to everything in your head and your heart. 

There was, and is, simply no proportion, no real relation, between my ideas and beliefs and hopes and fears and desires about God, and the experience of God I came to in and through my entrance into the Catholic Church. I did not anticipate it; I did not in any straightforward sense seek it out or ask for it or desire it. It was simply there. 

To the extent beliefs about God or Catholicism emerged from this experience, they are in no sense, really, beliefs about me. I do not believe that I believe in God; I do not believe that I experience God. I believe in God. God is; and the interesting (psychological) truth is that since that time period I have not really been capable of doubting the existence of God. That God exists is simply not something that is in any sense dependent on me, and so it is not something I have any straightforward capacity to challenge or occlude or disbelieve. 

Of course, to say this is not to make any particular claim about my own positive virtue or fidelity or indestructibility. Psychologically and physically speaking, I am certainly capable of denying that God exists, or even coming in some sense to believe it; as I am capable of being lobotomized, or decapitated, or losing all my memories, or coming through some strange series of freakish accidents to believe that I am a shoe. But as I said, this is not really something that has anything in particular to do with the fact of God's existence or my belief in it.

Or rather, if I am being completely honest, the truth is that not only does my belief in God, or in the Catholic Faith, not have anything in particular to do with any belief in my own intelligence or virtue or correctness; it is positively correlated with the opposite, which is to say, with my stupidity and sinfulness and incorrectnesss and lack of existence. This is, I suppose, something in the same sense in which the strength of a hammer striking my skull is positively correlated with the weakness of my skull, or the strength of gravity and a gravel road is positively correlated with the weakness of the small hay wagon out of which I was flung when I was ten years old, and of the skin of my leg as it was dragged across said gravel at high velocity. I have generally become aware of God's reality precisely through my own lack of reality, so closely that they could be said to be nearly one and the same reality.

All this may well seem extremely negative, if not cold and unfeeling. I cannot help that, I suppose. Yet it is worth saying that by no means was my experience of God solely or primarily an experience of divine wrath or power or judgment or any of those things--that it was, emphatically and overwhelming and in its totality an experience of divine mercy, benevolence, and indeed love. 

Yet if it is true that our lack and nothingness may be demonstrated to us by something opposing or overpowering us, it is no less true that our lack and nothingness can equally be demonstrated to us by something giving to and loving us. Perhaps a metaphor would help here. The more water is poured into a cup, the higher the proportion of the cup that is filled, the more the cup's prior emptiness is necessitated and demonstrated. The more that is given, the less that there could have been before the gift.

There were in fact dimensions in which my experience of God was one of my own will, my own self, being checked and overruled from without. Yet the more fundamental experience even in these instances was of something giving to me, giving to me so much of my self that it necessitated and demonstrated that before that gift I could not have had a self at all. I experienced being given everything that I was and had and have and will have--will, thoughts, desires, fears, emotions, losses, victories, defeats, doubts, acceptance, resistance, sins, life, death, moment to moment existence--and even more; much more; infinitely more. This was at one and the same time and for the same reason and in the same degree an experience of divine love and of my own nonexistence.

For this reason, I find it impossible, generally speaking, to doubt not only that God exists, but also that he loves me. After all, my own moment-to-moment experience of my own existence is, quite simply, the experience of divine love. Yet as with God's existence, so too with God's love; my belief is not really, for better or worse, a belief about me. For whatever it may mean, there is a real sense in which I find it habitually easier to doubt and deny my own existence than to doubt that God loves me; or at least that God loves.

Before I close this odd rambling, I should also add, briefly, what all this has to do, for me, with the question of belief in the Catholic Faith and the Catholic Church as opposed to other religious bodies or beliefs Christian and non-Christian, a question that preoccupied me a great deal when I was younger. I am, or have become, very familiar with the bases for intellectual belief in all the above, and do my best to communicate them and live them out. 

Yet the simple truth is that my belief in Catholicism, and my entrance into the Faith, is not ultimately based on any of those things, but again on an experience of what appeared to me, and appears to me still, simply as reality: indeed, precisely that same heedless, overpowering, proportionless reality spoken of above. My experiences of the Catholic Church have, without exception, been simply experiences of God. Hence, in the most immediate sense, my experience and principal belief about the Catholic Church is simply that it is God; or rather, to weaken and perhaps make comprehensible the claim, that the experience of God I discussed above came and comes entirely and solely in and through and with reference to the Catholic Church, her words and deeds and saints and clergy and monks and laypeople and liturgy and Sacraments. The latter statement, though, is a rationalization of my actual experience: which is, as I said, simply that God and the Catholic Church are one and the same thing. 

(I may also say parenthetically that in about the same way, my experience is that God and the poor and suffering people are one and the same thing.)

I have now spent many years of my life reading and writing theology in an attempt to work out what I believe that experience reflects; which is, put in correct theological language, the mystery of the Incarnation, of God become man, tangible and material and natural and historical, and of his union with the Church his inseparable Body and Bride, and his consequent presence and activity in the authority of the clergy and the Sacraments and above all the Eucharist. This theological thinking-out is much more mixed with my own thoughts, has proceeded much more naturally, by hypothesis, thought, trial and error; and I consequently believe it in a different sense from the above. But that God is in the Church, in the Eucharist, in Catholic words and deeds and saints and doctrines, I believe not for these reasons, but because I have experienced it--like a blow to the head.

I am quite conscious that all this may well seem insane, incomprehensible, fanatical, or what is worse, fundamentally unappealing and even frightening to people. As I said, I cannot really help that; at least without dishonesty. From this basic set of experiences, I have striven very hard to understand and to integrate the various aspects and dimensions of earthly faith, including personal piety and religious emotion and social and communal life and institutional functioning and historical tradition and all the complex and amusing byplay of belief and doubt, proof and evidence and argument, thought and claim and counterclaim, so necessary for the life of the human beings and the Church on earth: and I have come to love and appreciate them all. 

Yet for all that, I have no choice but to finally acknowledge that the fundamental thing that is the basis of my faith, the fundamental thing that I have, I suppose, to testify to, is different from all this. 

This is my (very poor) attempt to express a little of that.