Zacharias: Atheism contradicts itself

An idea from Ravi Zacharias's Jesus Among Many Gods (2000): A prominent argument for atheism is that "the universe is immoral, therefore there is no (good) God." But such a statement is meaningless except on the basis of an absolute morality [itself left over from Judeo-Christian belief]. Our belief in this morality appears to be so strong that we are willing to deny the existence of God over it! Yet such a belief makes sense only in terms of an essentially religious world-view. Such atheism is itself "Christian". All this atheist argument proves is that our idea of Divine morality is inadequate.

(Zacharias, a Christian from India, is also interesting on the effects of religion on Indian culture. Indian culture is traditionally "pluralistic" and so is in some ways like modern Western culture. Both are beguiled by the ideas that "truth is subject to the beholder," and that "we all come through different routes and end up in the same place." But no religion actually says this. Meanwhile, India, like the contemporary West, has a veneer of openness, but it is highly critical of anything that hints that a challenge to it. "Within such systematic relativism, one tends to drift and float with the cultural tide and give no thought to the unforgiving nature of reality. That is how life is lived out in pantheistic cultures.")

Cutsinger et al. (II)

James Cutsinger's ideas (see preceding post) about the non-uniqueness of the historical Jesus are laid out in more detail in two recent articles, "The Mystery of the Two Natures" and "Christianity and the Perennial Philosophy", available at his website. He makes a surprisingly plausible case that the writers of the New Testament, and the early Church Fathers, viewed Jesus as Divine but not as identical to God, or even to "God the Son". . . . CONTINUE When the New Testament and the Fathers make statements if the type "Jesus is God", Cutsinger argues, these are of about the same logical form as the statement "this beagle is a dog", not "there is no other dog than this beagle". In the second of the two articles just named, Cutsinger makes it explicit that Jesus should ideally be considered as divine in the same sense as a Hindu avatar. Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, can appear not only as an avatar, but impersonally, as in the form (Cutsinger and his fellow "Traditionalists" believe) of the Koran.

The Traditionalist school with which Cutsinger is associated holds that the major, "orthodox" religions are not only all Divinely inspired, but essentially equivalent. Each religion, being Divinely inspired, must be completely valid; therefore, it must be identical to all the others, if one looks beneath the surface to the deeper meaning. This idea is profoundly conservative, since it rejects the possibility of a revelation that develops (or regresses) as the capacities of human beings to receive it develop (or regress). The Traditionalists do not, in fact, believe in human progress at all (though they seem quite willing to acknowledge regression). This degree of conservatism has led some of them into highly questionable political associations. But I do not see that one has to follow the Traditionalists down this path once one has accepted the basic Traditionalist argument about the Divinity of Jesus. One can recognize that God is not confined to the Lord Jesus while still believing that Jesus represents the fullest revelation of God that we happen to have been given. One can also retain other specifically Christian or Jewish ideas, such as the non-cyclical nature of history and the consequent possibility of human progress, which the Traditionalists are obliged to reject. Rudolf Steiner, the founder of "Anthroposophy", seems to have had this kind of view of the status of Christianity. In a sense he therefore seems more "orthodox" than the professedly orthodox Christian Traditionalists—despite the extreme weirdness of many of his ideas.

Some further remarks on Cutsinger

Cutsinger and his teacher, Frithjof Schuon, know far more about the history of Christian doctrine than I do. Nevertheless, it seems to me Cutsinger must be wrong when he interprets Jesus's saying, "No man cometh unto the Father . . ." as meaning that there is no entry into the Divine Essence (the Father) except through the Divine Person (the Son). Whom Jesus knew as the Father, he also called "Abba"&mdash"Daddy". Would even a Divine man call the absolutely transcendent, impersonal Divine Essence "Daddy"? More reasonable seems William Temple's view that Jesus's "Father" is closer to the later Christian "Son", the personal God. But then that does require one to start impudently questioning orthodoxy, which the Traditionalists probably wish to prevent.

It seems strange to me that the Christian Traditionalists (like most other Traditionalists, such as the Muslim convert René Guénon) put so much emphasis on Islam; or rather, it is said, a particular interpretation of Islam held by a small minority of Muslims. One would imagine that Christians interested in comparative religion would turn their attention first of all to Judaism, Christianity's closest relative on the religious family tree, and a religion with a tremendous spiritual depth, as any reader of Abraham Heschel, for example, is aware. But for the most part "Judaism is curiously unrepresented amongst the religious realizations of Traditionalism" (Mark Sedgwick). Could this have anything to do with the ultra-rightist political tendencies of some Traditionalists?

The Catholic blogger Carrie Tomko has also voiced some down-to-Earth skepticism of Cutsinger.

Cutsinger on the non-uniqueness of Jesus

The Eastern Orthodox writer James S. Cutsinger has attempted to describe how Christianity can be reconciled with other religions without depriving it of its essence. The following are some notes on Cutsinger's 2001 article, "Hesychia: An Orthodox Opening to Esoteric Ecumenism" (available at www.cutsinger.net/pdf/hesychia.pdf). . . . CONTINUE

"[T]here are Christians . . . who insist that the only way to honor the convictions of other religious people is to jettison the idea of Christ's Divinity, an idea often joined to the belief that Christianity is uniquely true and salvific." But this liberal approach is based on a "lie" and a betrayal of Christianity which will strengthen, not weaken, the Christian fundamentalists who reject other religions entirely (and whom Cutsinger evidently regards as The Enemy?)

It is necessary for religions to respect each other as valid at the same time that they keep hold of their own beliefs. This is possible through an "esoteric ecumenism" (the term of the Traditionalist thinker Frithjof Schuon). Narrow dogmatic literalism has become dangerous in a world of several religious traditions in contact with one another. The dogmas must be shown to have a common inner meaning despite their outward differences.

So for example the Christian in dialogue with a Muslim must continue to insist that Christ was God incarnate, "and not merely a prophet" as Islam believes. How are these views possibly reconcilable? (See Cutsinger's "Mystery of the Two Natures", Sophia: The Journal of Traditional Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998.) One key is that "the Christian tradition forbids us to think that the Second Person of the Trinity is the same as the first". The Father was not incarnate in Jesus. Also "nor was it some particular man, but man as such, who was hypostatically assumed into God." (??) "[T]he God who took us into Himself was the Logos or Word, whose Divinity is itself derived from a yet more ultimate Source: 'The Father', as He Himself tells us, 'is greater than I' . . . " Jesus is certainly God. "But this does not mean that saving power was fully expended at a single moment of history, or that we should confuse the uniqueness of Him who was incarnate . . . with the human particularity of Jesus of Nazareth." The one eternal Son is not a particular human being. "[N]owhere do the creeds oblige us to equate His transcendent uniqueness with a singularity of the factual or temporal order", i.e., with Jesus the human being.

Speaking of (hesychastic) prayer, which has traditionally been directed to the person of Jesus (even more than regular Catholic prayer, I think, which regards Jesus as Mediator?), Cutsinger says, "Without in any way denying the miraculous facts of Christ's life or the saving truths of Christological doctrine, the Christian pilgrim must make an effort to abstract from those facts to their essential meaning, and to look along these truths toward the Truth." (But if the incarnate Christ is not the ultimate truth, he cannot be God?)

Cutsinger stresses that "Jesus is not the only name of the Son, nor is the Son the only name of God, nor is God the only name of the Named, and the Named is truly named by no name." Jesus should be approached as a "window":

"Seekers living in the Christian house must not turn their backs on this window, supposing it to be too narrow to show them the Truth. But neither should they remain at a distance, as if they were admiring a favorite painting from across a gallery. They must take a step forward and lift up the sash, placing their head and shoulders both inside its ample opening. What they shall see then, of course, is no longer the frame, but instead the bountiful emptiness of a mountain valley and across its grassy expanse, if they look carefully, the outlines of other houses with other windows not their own."

Which is the looniest democratic country?

Well, I would have said England. (An Englishman I know pointed out the other day that the English now find the word "Englishman" somewhat ludicrous, like something out of a Noel Coward play. There can't be many other nations whose members are embarrassed to use the word denoting their nationality. For continuing coverage of England's slide into insanity, see the Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips, who for some reason seems to be immune from pandemic Mad Englishman Disease.) But now I have come across an essay which argues that actually Israel is at the head of the pack, lunacy-wise.

Update: And here's someone laying a claim on behalf of New Zealand.

Internet radio (II)

Australia seems to have a public radio system that puts Canada's to shame, despite Australia's considerably smaller population (about 20 million vs. 30 million). Particularly good is the "Radio National" network. This has, for example, several different programs about science, and several about religion and ethics, compared with CBC's single entry in each of these categories. (CBC's science show, the last time I checked a couple of years ago, also had a style that suggests the producers think that science could be of possible interest only to adolescents.) Canada seems to have fallen below the critical mass for intelligent national radio: even those people who prefer radio to TV now have to turn to TV, because that is where everyone who wants an audience wants to be. In fact, where I live, the best broadcast radio available at a given time is not infrequently the audio track from the current affairs programming on local private TV, which can be picked up at the bottom of the FM band.

I found these two Radio National programs particularly interesting:

• The Philosopher's Zone
• The Spirit of Things

See also: Internet Radio (I).

Is the Lord Jesus absolutely unique?

NOTICE: Some Christians might find this post offensive. CONTINUE

(I say "the Lord" Jesus in order to avoid giving the impression that I am discussing some kind of laboratory specimen.)

The orthodox Christian idea that Jesus is God rests on a selective reading of the New Testament, which itself is not an entirely reliable record of Jesus's ministry (as is evident in the contradictions between different Gospels). This idea has some bad effects. It cuts off Christianity from Judaism, which considers Jesus-worship to be idolatrous, an admixture of paganism into Judaism, to be condemned much as other forms of idol-worship had to be condemned in Biblical times. It weakens Christianity in the face of challenges from Islam, which likewise can claim that Christianity is idolatrous, that Islam alone stands for pure universal monotheism, revering Jesus as a prophet but not confusing him with the Divinity. If Jesus is of another order of being than ordinary humanity, it also seems unreasonable to expect people to imitate him with any degree of success—even if we are all made in the "Divine image". And yet there is also in Christianity the idea that Jesus is the "New Adam", the first of many of his kind, and that these successors who will work wonders as great as or greater than his own.

As far as I can tell, the idea of Jesus as God also irretrievably confuses the (notoriously "mysterious") idea of the Trinity. The Trinity seems to be a productive concept in that it acknowledges different forms of the One God: God is both absolute (the Father), personal (the Son) and (?) immanent (the Spirit). Some Christians also emphasize that the triune God, with His inner communion, is a model for loving relationships in the world. But the close association of Jesus with God-the-Son means that prayer to the Father becomes an incomprehensible form of prayer to a remote absolute being, while prayer to the Son becomes idolatrous Jesus-worship. I think that William Temple pointed out that the "Father" to whom Jesus prayed, the personal God, was actually closer to the Son of the Trinity than to the absolutely transcendent Father. So we seem to have the "Son" praying to the "Son". What a mess!

On the other hand, attempts by liberal Christianity to regard Jesus as a mere man, as a great moral teacher, seem to have been disastrous to those denominations that have made them. The Unitarians, the oldest group to adopt this position, seem to have for the most part turned into a political agitation group. Other liberal Christian denominations are following the Unitarians down the same path. Whatever spirituality such groups retain seems likely to be a primitive pantheistic kind.

What is really essential to Christianity? Is it the belief in Jesus as uniquely God, or something else which has been missed by the liberals?

The key is whether we are to interpret Jesus's actions, and in particular his self-sacrifice on the Cross, as the actions of God or of a man. If Jesus is merely human, we might still tend to worship him for his self-sacrifice on our behalf, but then this worship would clearly detract from what is owing to God. Alternatively, we may decide to put little emphasis on his self-sacrifice. Then we are left with an empty, "liberal" religion, in which Jesus is no more than a moral teacher. Either way, if the sacrifice is something performed by a man only, we are left with something which is no longer Christianity. The Church seems to have recognized this in developing its fairly elaborate doctrine of Jesus's dual Divine-human nature. Jesus in both his human and Divine aspects decided or consented to sacrifice himself. His sacrifice was that of a man as well as that of God. He can be both loved as a man and worshiped as God. But, as just pointed out, this doctrine is also alienating, both in the sense that Jesus is turned into a member of a different species and in that it is unacceptable to those whose background is in other forms of monotheism.

It seems to me, however, that there is nothing here (other than the desire of the Church to retain a spiritual monopoly) which demands that Jesus be the sole being with a dual nature of this kind. I think most Christians would acknowledge that an alien species, on some other planet, could well receive its own Incarnation of Christ, rather than having to wait until some distant date when missionary astronauts brought the Gospel to it. But why shouldn't different human cultures also receive such incarnations? And, more generally, why should we not all share, actually or potentially, in the dual Divine-human nature? Such a concept seems no more difficult to grasp than the orthodox idea of Jesus's dual nature. It would, though, have been quite novel as far as pre-Christian religions were concerned. Judaism never thought of human beings as God, though man was supposed to bear the Divine "image". Classical paganism believed that some human beings might become "gods", but these gods were still created beings, not the Creator of monotheistic religion. The idea of man as God seems least remote from Eastern religions, but I think that in this case the idea has gone along with the view that human individuality is illusory. Perhaps such an idea would have been incomprehensible in the environment in which the early Church found itself.

Such an idea of universal Divine nature would seem to carry a certain risk of encouraging pride and self-worship. But Jesus (in contrast, I believe, to most Hindu gurus, at least until recent times?) provided a standard of great humility for those in whom the Divine nature was highly developed or evident.

In search of good Internet radio

As a newcomer to Internet audio, in the last few days I have been looking for decent public-affairs programming to replace the CBC junk-food diet which is all that you can get over the airwaves in this part of the country. (The local private broadcasters may do a fairly good job with Newfoundland news, in which many Newfoundlanders are intensely interested, but if you want intelligent radio coverage of what is going on in the wider world you're generally out of luck.) Here are links to two broadcasts which seem worth listening to:

• Shire Network News. Approximately 1 hour of moderate conservative "Anglospheric" news commentary by various bloggers, in the form of a downloadable MP3 file made available each Saturday. Approaching professional technical quality, and with more evident zest than most professional work. Become a member of the exclusive group of 2000 listeners worldwide!
• CHQR Calgary's The World Tonight. Two hours each weeknight, starting at 9:00 Eastern Time. Leisurely in-depth interviews on Canadian and international matters with people who know what they're talking about, but whom the mainstream North American media usually doesn't bother to consult. Moderate populist-type conservative. (That is, the working assumption is that more democracy will solve all problems.) Available both as a live feed and as a feed from the station's "audio vault" for 30 days after each broadcast.

Blogger.com technical difficulties

Apparently blogger, the people who host this weblog for free, have been experiencing technical difficulties lately, and I have been able to see my own blog only intermittently the last couple of days, although many sister-sites have remained accessible. Don't give up if you can't get into an advertised ".blogspot.com" site: try again later. (The fellow-users at the "blogger-help" google group say that sometimes it may be necessary to remove the blogger cookies from your browser to make a site visible again, but that's not guaranteed to work either, so it may not be worth doing.)

See also:

• status.blogger.com
• bloggerstatusforreal.blogspot.com

William Temple on good deeds

"Only a perfect Christian can follow the purely Christian way of life; and so far as an imperfect Christian—i.e. any Christian who actually exists—forces himself to a line of conduct which his own character does not support, it will have bad effects on both him and his neighbours: . . . CONTINUE on him, because it will be an assertion of self-will and must root him more firmly than ever in his own self as centre of his life, that is in his Original Sin; and on others, because he will appear as a Pharisee and a prig, and will alienate people from the standard by which he is self-righteously guiding this part of his conduct."

    —Christianity and Social Order, SCM Press, 1950

(It seems strange, then, that Temple spends much of the rest of this book advocating a far-reaching welfare state as the Christian mode of social organization. He is apparently oblivious of the fact that this must rest on massive taxation, paying which is not merely a self-imposed "line of conduct which [the taxpayer's] character does not support", but which is actually externally enforced with the threat of jail sentences. At the beginning of the book he strongly opposes involuntary community of property, while seeing freely chosen communism, practiced within voluntary associations, as the Christian ideal. Yet what is a fully-developed welfare state but a coerced, bureaucratically controlled type of community of property? Reading a book such as this, one wonders whether the present Western cultural crisis is not due to modern Christianity as much as to left-wing atheism.

Another possible interpretation of Temple's position is that externally coerced good behaviour, for example giving up most of one's income for the community's benefit, is preferable to internally imposed discipline, because it does not foster "self-will" but rather resigned humility. But is it likely that anyone in the Anglican tradition of personal freedom would hold such a view?)

See also:

• C.S. Lewis on good deeds

B.K. Frantzis book on Chi Gung

I just picked up in the local second-hand bookstore a work called Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body (1993). My first impression is that this contains, in concentrated form, a great deal of information which most other authors in this general subject area (energetic cultivation) are unaware of. It also has some fascinating anecdotes about the author's experiences in Japan and China, in the latter case, Frantzis claims, as the first Westerner to gain acceptance in the mainland Chinese Taoist culture, traditionally secretive and still closed to most Western observation. This followed many years of study in Japan, which proved to be merely a foundation for the more advanced teachings available in China (but rapidly dying out even there).

To take just one example, here, from the introduction, is a story about the founder of the Japanese martial art, Aikido:

[Frantzis] had the good fortune—from 1967 to 1969—to study with the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba. Ueshiba was an extraordinary man, one who had unmistakably reached an advanced level of chi development. During the last few months of his life, too weak to walk, he was carried into the dojo (practice hall). Even in this condition, he was able to stand up and suddenly muster the energy to throw his strongest students as if they were rag dolls. After practice, he would again be carried back to his bed.

(But, the book notes, Ueshiba apparently failed to pass on this level of ability to any of his students.) . . . CONTINUE

Frantzis also seems to have a certain amount of respect for the results achievable by the Chinese political system. To deal with the crisis in the Chinese medical system following the loss of most of the country's medical personnel after the revolution, he says,

What the government did was this: they told the top Tai Chi teachers that they must design Tai Chi and Chi Gung programs for the health of the general population. Many of these masters wanted to keep their secrets to themselves, so their families could retain their "patents." It has been said that the government insisted that they make their secrets public, or face the extermination of their families down to the last child or relative. Given traditional Chinese family values, this would have loosened things up significantly . . . . The system worked. Tai Chi and Chi Gung managed to keep health matters as stable as they could be kept given the poor sanitation and starvation diet most lived with . . .

Tai Chi and Chi Gung are the only internal energy systems that have actually worked for large masses of a population. Yoga practitioners never really exceeded one percent of India's population. The ancient Greek mystery schools never extended to more than one-tenth of one percent of the Greek population.

(It is unclear what census data the last two figures would derive from, but the general point seems valid.)

Forgiveness (III)

William Temple's idea of forgiveness includes the point that that there is no duty to forgive those who have not repented of their offense. (He also rejects the opinion that forgiveness writes off the debt of the offender. Its purpose is not to write off debts, Temple says, but to restore the offender and the victim to fellowship. In restored fellowship, the offender will be more anxious to make amends than before he was restored.) The belief that forgiveness is owed only to the repentant dervies from the sayings of Jesus, such as the following:

"If thy brother sin, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him."

"If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector." (Matt. 18:15–17.)

At first sight, this kind of advice seems inconsistent with the ideal of unlimited forgiveness espoused in, for example, the Catholic Catechism quoted in the preceding post. It seems to me that the two concepts of forgiveness can be reconciled, however, by thinking in terms of the communities within which forgiveness is supposed to apply. . . . CONTINUE

In Matthew 18, forgiveness is clearly being viewed as a means for preserving intimacy within a limited community, the "church" of Jesus's followers, or, possibly, of Jews as a whole, envisioned as following Jesus's interpretation of Judaism: the fate of the unforgiven is not to be hated, but merely to be lumped with all the other unfortunates outside the Christian community (or at least, with non-Jews and those Jews who behave disgracefully, the tax-collectors. One would, incidentally, like to know what word is being translated as "church" here, considering that there was no such thing as a church in the usual sense at the time Jesus said this.) The "church" will maintain its own procedures, described here in embryonic form, for restoring fellowship among its members whenever division arises. Both the offenders and the victims are subject to the church's authority, and if the offenders refuse to acknowledge their fault as judged by the church, they will be cut off from the community. There will be no such thing as a member of the community who is unrepentant for an offense felt as such by another member. Indeed, if I am not mistaken, in the earliest period of the Church, it was assumed that after baptism, Christians would simply not sin any further.

Under such circumstances "unlimited" forgiveness becomes a practical possibility. The problem of forgiving some subhuman thug for casually erasing one's child from the face of the earth, for example, would not arise, because the thug would first have to become human in order to repent. For the sake of one's own soul, one would have to deal with one's hatred in such cases; but it seems to me that the best chance of doing this would be by adopting a detached attitude towards the offender, not by trying to love him and lift him into the ranks of humanity. There might be exceptions to this, but they would be extraordinary, not the basis for a general rule of conduct.

With the growth of the church, there is a risk that the idea of a restricted community of fellowship will be lost sight of, with the result that it may be assumed that forgiveness is commanded on behalf of unrepentant sinners who would never have been admitted into the early Christian community. If whole nations are nominally part of Christendom, the Christian will ordinarily live his entire life within the nominally Christian community, within which forgiveness is (again, nominally) unlimited. He may then well forget about the different moral status of those on the outside, the "Gentiles". (Though in the Middle Ages, I think that it was widely believed that one had no obligation even to keep one's promises to non-Christians, for example.) The fact that the community is only nominally Christian will also tend to make this distinction less important by making the whole idea of Christian forgiveness rather academic in many cases. Both Christianity and the distinction between Christians and non-Christians are diluted as the Church expands and grows old. In the modern Catholic Catechism quoted in the preceding post, we may be seeing a late stage of this dilution: the Catechism still refers to the Catholic community, but it is no longer clear that rules of conduct towards fellow-Catholics should be any different from those towards human beings in general. And why should they be, when there is often little distinction evident between the moral behaviour of Catholics and non-Catholics?

Modern liberalism takes the final step in this spiritual dilution and recognizes only the "community" of all human beings, every other group being seen merely as the private recreation of its members. Liberalism, the last stage in the decay of Christian orthodoxy, has nevertheless preserved the Christian ideal of universal love and forgiveness. But a truly universal love would mean loving evil as well as good; it is not only impossible to achieve, it is destructive to attempt it.

Forgiveness (II)

In the discussion which the previous post linked to, I observed that Archbishop William Temple, an authoritative writer of the Anglican Church in the mid-twentieth-century, held that there is no commandment to forgive those who have not repented of their actions; but that even Anglican priests now seem frequently to believe that forgiveness, even forgiveness of the unrepentant murderer of one's child, is compulsory. I now realise that my comment was somewhat misleading in that there are various schools of thought on this subject within Christianity (and for that matter Anglicanism: Charles Williams, for one, has a much more "liberal" view of forgiveness—liberal, that is, from the point of view of the person seeking forgiveness from another).

Interested in what the official Catholic view on this subject might be, I have been surfing in search of authoritative documents. The Catholic church gives the impression of placing more emphasis on the matter of obtaining forgiveness for oneself, from God (via the Church), than on the question of when or how one should forgive another person. . . . CONTINUE The official Catechism of the Catholic Church does however contain a commentary on the Lord's Prayer which goes to the heart of the matter. Here are the relevant sections (articles 2838–2845) (emphases added):

V. "And Forgive Us Our Trespasses, as We Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us"

This petition is astonishing. If it consisted only of the first phrase, "And forgive us our trespasses," it might have been included, implicitly, in the first three petitions of the Lord's Prayer, since Christ's sacrifice is "that sins may be forgiven." But, according to the second phrase, our petition will not be heard unless we have first met a strict requirement. Our petition looks to the future, but our response must come first, for the two parts are joined by the single word "as." And forgive us our trespasses . . .

With bold confidence, we began praying to our Father. In begging him that his name be hallowed, we were in fact asking him that we ourselves might be always made more holy. But though we are clothed with the baptismal garment, we do not cease to sin, to turn away from God. Now, in this new petition, we return to him like the prodigal son and, like the tax collector, recognize that we are sinners before him.Our petition begins with a "confession" of our wretchedness and his mercy. Our hope is firm because, in his Son, "we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." We find the efficacious and undoubted sign of his forgiveness in the sacraments of his Church.

Now—and this is daunting—this outpouring of mercy cannot penetrate our hearts as long as we have not forgiven those who have trespassed against us. Love, like the Body of Christ, is indivisible; we cannot love the God we cannot see if we do not love the brother or sister we do see. In refusing to forgive our brothers and sisters, our hearts are closed and their hardness makes them impervious to the Father's merciful love; but in confessing our sins, our hearts are opened to his grace.

This petition is so important that it is the only one to which the Lord returns and which he develops explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount. This crucial requirement of the covenant mystery is impossible for man. But "with God all things are possible."

. . . as we forgive those who trespass against us

This "as" is not unique in Jesus' teaching: "You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect"; "Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful"; "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another." It is impossible to keep the Lord's commandment by imitating the divine model from outside; there has to be a vital participation, coming from the depths of the heart, in the holiness and the mercy and the love of our God. Only the Spirit by whom we live can make "ours" the same mind that was in Christ Jesus. Then the unity of forgiveness becomes possible and we find ourselves "forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave" us.

Thus the Lord's words on forgiveness, the love that loves to the end, become a living reality. The parable of the merciless servant, which crowns the Lord's teaching on ecclesial communion, ends with these words: "So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart." It is there, in fact, "in the depths of the heart," that everything is bound and loosed. It is not in our power not to feel or to forget an offense; but the heart that offers itself to the Holy Spirit turns injury into compassion and purifies the memory in transforming the hurt into intercession.

Christian prayer extends to the forgiveness of enemies, transfiguring the disciple by configuring him to his Master. Forgiveness is a high-point of Christian prayer; only hearts attuned to God's compassion can receive the gift of prayer. Forgiveness also bears witness that, in our world, love is stronger than sin. The martyrs of yesterday and today bear this witness to Jesus. Forgiveness is the fundamental condition of the reconciliation of the children of God with their Father and of men with one another.

There is no limit or measure to this essentially divine forgiveness, whether one speaks of "sins" as in Luke (11:4), or "debts" as in Matthew (6:12). We are always debtors: "Owe no one anything, except to love one another." The communion of the Holy Trinity is the source and criterion of truth in every relationship. It is lived out in prayer, above all in the Eucharist.

God does not accept the sacrifice of a sower of disunion, but commands that he depart from the altar so that he may first be reconciled with his brother. For God can be appeased only by prayers that make peace. To God, the better offering is peace, brotherly concord, and a people made one in the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

See the comment section for my observations on this.

When must we forgive?

There is a morally engaged discussion of this question going on at Gates of Vienna, with reference to an Anglican woman priest who cannot forgive the unrepentant murderers of her child, and seems to be under the false impression that she is required to by Christianity.

Rudolf Otto, according to W.R. Matthews'

introduction to The Idea of the Holy (1958), remarked that England was still the most religious country in the world. This seems almost unbelievable nowadays. (Otto attributed this religiousness to the Anglicans' use of the Book of Common Prayer, which I think was abolished not long ago by the American Episcopalians. He also evidently had great respect for British mysticism.)

C.S. Lewis on good deeds

"The mere suspicion that what seemed an act of spontaneous friendliness or generosity was really done as a duty subtly poisons it . . . . Morality is healthy only when it is trying to abolish itself."

      —English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 187

Charles Williams on the origin of evil

In He Came Down From Heaven Williams makes some striking arguments about the nature of evil, closely based on the account of the Fall in the Bible. The nature of the Fall, Williams says, is clearly an increase in knowledge. Specifically, the Fall brings a change from knowing good alone to knowing both good and evil. Man thereby takes on a Godlike state, because only God (or divine beings)were "intended" to know evil. This is because God is capable of knowing evil in imagination only, while Man must experience actual evil in order to know it. In tasting the apple, Adam bit off more than he could chew.

(This insight is apparently original to Williams; but he credits Aquinas with the idea that it is in the nature of God to know all possibilities, good and evil alike, and to determine which of these should become actual.)

See comments for my thoughts on this.

"Former Soviet Dissident [Bukovsky] Warns [of] EU Dictatorship"

Essential reading from The Brussels Journal.

See also:

• Democracy and Totalitarianism