Plain Meaning Once More

Crimson Catholic has a post on the recent discussion of 'plain meaning of Scripture'. It makes a number of worthwhile points, but also manages to make a common, and very serious, mistake that Catholics tend to make about Catholic doctrine of Scripture. I had noted the importance of distinguishing between "authoritative interpretation" in the sense of "an authoritative act of interpreting" and "authoritative interpretation in the sense of "the way of understanding the text that is authoritative". On this Crimson Catholic replies:

But there cannot even be an authoritative interpretation in the latter sense absent an authoritative interpretation in the former sense. Even if it is the best approximation for what the author intended, it still is not authoritative, for unless the author also intended to yield the authority to interpret his text to a subsequent authority, his mere writing itself ontologically lacks authority. So either the author intended his text both to be authoritative and interpreted by a subsequent authority, or God as co-author intended it (perhaps beside the intent of the author) in the same way, but in both cases, the subsequent interpretive authority is an essential element of either the divine or the human will to produce an authoritative act of communication.

However, this involves a sort of distance between author and reader that fits very poorly with the Catholic view of Scripture; and, moreover, which on at least a very common Protestant view gets Protestants entirely wrong as well. It's not generally denied that there is a subsequent interpretive authority; what is denied is that this subsequent interpretive authority is the Church rather than the Holy Spirit. Protestants do not think the words on the page carry authority; they think the words engraved on the heart by the Spirit with the stylus of the words of the page carries authority. The Crimson Catholic thinks that Protestants put the authority in the mere writing. There are perhaps cases of this, but these will widely be regarded by Protestants as aberrations; they put the authority not in the texts but (like Catholics, it might be pointed out) in the God who breathed them forth and gives them force and power to touch the heart.

And this is where I think attempts, like that of the Crimson Catholic and of several other Catholics in the recent discussion, to defend the Catholic view of Scripture on general philosophical principles will fail; at most they can show that it is not incoherent. But the Catholic view of Scripture is not based on a general account of the nature of authority and interpretation, nor can it be, given the unique relationship between the teaching of the Church and the Scriptures she has received; it is based on the Catholic view of the relation between the Church and the Holy Spirit. The Protestant denies that the interpretive authority is the Church rather than God; the Catholic challenges the dichotomy implicit in the 'rather than'. While this 'rather than' marks a break between the two, such is the emphasis in Catholic doctrine, as found, for instance, in De Fide Catholica and Dei Verbum, on the work of the Holy Spirit, and on the Father speaking with His children through the Scriptures, the more a Protestant emphasizes this, the more his or her view approximates the Catholic view of Scripture. I assume here, of course, that the view of the Trinity in the Protestant case is Nicene. And all this, again, is because the Catholic view of Scripture is not based on these vague and dubious pronouncements about the nature of texts, which are nothing but red herrings that obscure the real point; rather, it is based on the Catholic understanding of the Holy Spirit's work in the Church.

The failure to appreciate this properly seems to me to land the Crimson Catholic in a number of muddles. The word 'authority' is used a lot, but it was irrelevant to the point originally being discussed; Bill's claim was about the plain meaning of Scripture. It's the Catholics responding to it who keep trying to make authority the key issue, by fair means and foul; and they have generally been doing so by conflating two very different (albeit related) things: the authoritative character of what is interpreted and the authoritative character of the interpreting. It is simply false that the latter is required for the former to have any effect in our lives at all; any Catholic who reads Scripture on his or her own is living proof that you can interpret Scripture, which is authoritative, without authoritatively interpreting it, because every Catholic who reads Scripture in private devotion is doing precisely that. The whole history of the development of Catholic doctrine is filled to the brim with cases in which people have interpreted Scripture unauthoritatively to have those interpretations later recognized authoritatively as correctly capturing the authoritative meaning of Scripture. The principle that there is no authoritative interpreted without authoritative interpreter also does not fit well with the fact that the primary practice of the Church is to let any Catholic read and interpret Scripture, with intervention only where a danger to faith and morals is perceived.

The Catholic who reads, say, the parable of the unjust judge, and suddenly recognizes a feature in it that he has never been taught before, will naturally and reasonably regard it as authoritative, with only the negative reserve clause that it not be inconsistent with the teaching of the Church. If it becomes a matter of serious concern, there may be a need to confirm that it is indeed genuinely authoritative, rather than merely seemingly so. This confirmation may take the form of either a definitive pronouncement or a natural outgrowth of the Christian practice and prayer of the whole Church, i.e., all those other Catholics with all their unauthoritative reading being drawn by the grace of the Holy Spirit to the truth. I take it that none of this can be seriously regarded as inconsistent with the Catholic view of Scripture. But none of this is possible unless it is recognized that, indeed, there is a sort of plain meaning of Scripture that does not require the direct intervention of an authoritative interpreter to be discovered, unless by 'authoritative interpreter' we mean Truth Himself.

Protestants and Catholics actually agree on the key thing here: namely, that the authority of Scripture is the authority of God, that the authoritative teacher of the meaning of Scripture is the Holy Spirit, and that without Him there is nothing but darkness. The difference arises in that, from the Protestant point of view, Catholics too easily conflate the interpretive act of the Holy Spirit with human interpretive acts, and, from the Catholic point of view, Protestants have an incomplete view of the work of the Spirit in the Church's interpreting of Scripture. As long as the dispute never seriously engages with this point, it is self-perpetuating, because it will never have any effect except the raising of even more light-obscuring dust.

And this all is yet a further argument why Christians who make apologetic arguments against other Christians should start with what the other side gets quite right, and never say a word against them until they have done so. Easier said than done, of course.

A Poem Draft

Sweet Delight

The rains were soft today -- ah, such sweet delight!
Each drop like white wine played across the mind
with dance and minuet, and sparkled in the light
like diamonds in the dust that a leaping heart might find,
each splash and patter pounding out the pulse of life
whereby the sky, the earth, in holy union each embrace
the other to its bosom, and the one lifts up its face
to feel the other's kiss -- ah, such sweet delight!

It was honey to reason's tongue, and ah! such sweet delight!

The air was sharp and clear; it was ringing like a bell
that is struck on solemn Sunday when couples newly-wed,
drinking from each other's eyes as the thirsty from a well,
dance with conjugal rejoicing to the flowering genius-bed;
lares and penates whisper as the gardens of our sight
bloom and sway and grow, life-rich like verdant ponds,
and to every heart's bright questions lie ready to respond.
The wind brushed past my skin, kissing where it fell.

It charged my will with love, and ah! such sweet delight!

The sun, profligate with rainbows, beamed with parent-pride
on all its living scions that flourish on this vital earth,
which into many cousin-families once happily did divide,
each to sing a note in symphony, in polyphonic birth,
each to taste the waters, to breathe in the piercing light,
to leap beneath the sun in the everlasting dance
which is composed of law compacted with sweet chance,
to look up to the sun-star with the smile of child-pride.

I saw this all, and shivered with, ah! such sweet delight!

Happy Birthday, George Boole

George Boole, one of those many brilliant logicians between Aristotle and Frege that philosophers forget to appreciate properly, was born today in 1815. You can read a number of Boole's works online at the Internet Archive. Over the past two years I've come to have a considerable amount of respect for the great British logicians of the Boolean era -- De Morgan, Venn, Carroll, Keynes, and, of course, Boole himself. They should be read more closely and carefully than they usually are.

Negative Fluff

There is an interesting post at "Leiter Reports" on book reviews. As I've noted before I read a lot of book reviews, and a great many book reviews end up being rather worthless precisely because the author can't say anything dispassionate about the matter. That X does not like Y's book is largely useless information except insofar as it might be taken as evidence of bias, or else insofar as it indicates a recommendation against reading it (and it doesn't take much to do the latter). What a book review really needs to convey is (1) what the book is about, in such a way that I know if I have to read it if I'm researching this or that subject; and (2) what I have to keep in mind or know if I do read the book, either so that I can get the most out of reading it, or so that I can make sure that reading it is not a complete waste of time. Heated rhetoric and vague preliminary comments about incompetence, uninformativeness, amateurishness, etc., just uselessly take up space and tell us nothing; just say you can't recommend that it be read and that it has many problems (which are, among others, such, such, and such) instead of filling the page with negative fluff. This is true on the puff-piece side as well; it does the reader no good to know that X likes Y's book, except where it shows bias or signals whether a person would recommend it (and it takes very little to do the latter).

On tone, I think disputes about tone very rarely, if ever, "mask" disputes about substance, as Leiter suggests (and it's certainly not true "of course"); they are disputes about what Hume calls "the lesser morality," or etiquette, and while secondary to other issues, these issues are not trivial distractions. (They can be abused, of course; in this they are no different than 'the greater morality'.) There are issues of professional standards, reasonable expectations of respect, and the like. The problem with saying that someone's claim is "preposterous in the extreme and easily refuted" is that it is not any more substantial than calling your colleague ignorant and stupid. Should we, as a serious profession, really tolerate things like this? There is generally nothing honest about it, either; it's often a blatant substitution of rhetoric for argument, labels for reasons, and where it is not, it is often otiose.

Mutating Genre Meme

I was tagged for this one as well. This meme was started at Pharyngula. These are the rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...". Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:
* You can leave them exactly as is.
* You can delete any one question.
* You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is..." to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is...", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is...", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is...".
* You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is...".
* You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.
Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is
going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My phylogeny:

My great-great-great grandparent is The Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-grandparent is The Anterior Commissurotomy.
My grandparent is Laelaps
My parent is Quintessence of Dust.

And ouch, they've given me some difficult memes to survive with. But I'm a survivor.

The best scary movie in sociopolitical dystopias is: Soylent Green.

The best sexy song in pop rock is: "Love is a Battlefield," by Pat Benatar.

The best scary story in science fiction is: Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.

The best B-movie in 1980's horror films is: Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

I don't usually tag, but given the particular nature of this meme, I'll make an exception: The Little Professor and, since he tagged me for the other, Pseudo-Polymath.

10-20-30

I was tagged by Mark Olson. What was I doing 10, 20, 30 years ago? Kind of tricky, because I'm still on the young side of things. Also, I'm always mixing up the order of events in my life. After careful thinking, and some checking, I think this is accurate:

1997: I was working on my theology major at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon. According to my transcript, these are the classes I took that year:

Fine Arts
Modern Western Civ
Intro Philosophy
Spanish Advanced Conversation and Composition
Judeo-Christian Culture (a 200-level theology course)
Ethics
Metaphysics
Hispanic Culture and Civilization
Elementary Statistics
Minds, Brains, Machines (a philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence course)
Ancient Philosophy
Latin American Literature and Civilization
Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke
Christianity to 1500

(Five courses in the spring, three in the summer, and six in the fall.) I spent a lot of time hanging out with my best friend in college, Moreen; we quickly began to get along quite well. Starting sophomore year (fall of '97) I was roommates with another of my good friends, Mike, who was also Mo's boyfriend (I had known them both before they started dating, because my freshman year Mike lived down the hall in the same wing, and I had met Mo through her roommate Sarah). At some point in my sophomore year, I don't recall quite when, I became a philosophy major.

1987: This is a hard one. In the early part of 1987 I was finishing the third grade at Hillcrest Elementary School in Carlsbad, New Mexico. I don't remember exactly when during that school year, but the school burned down and we had to move to a temporary building to finish out the term. At some point shortly after that I got into the first and only fight of my school career; I punched a kid in the eye for something or other. I did a lot of penny drops from the monkey bars. In the latter part of 1987 I was in fourth grade, of course, and, while I remember a lot about both third grade and fifth grade, I am drawing a complete blank on the fourth grade. I don't even remember the school I was at. (In fifth grade, which was a blast, I was at Pate Elementary School.) I was a Cub Scout -- a Bear Cub, I think.

1977: In 1977 I only engaged in one activity, namely, not existing, since I wasn't born yet.

As usual, I don't tag, but if you feel the urge to post your own 10-20-30, go right ahead.

O'Connor and Malebranche

In August I received a comment on an old post that I think I completely missed at the time, by Ben. But it's an interesting comment worth answering. The comment was:

I realize you wrote this entry a while ago, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on a possible further point of contact between O'Connor and Malebranche.

O'Connor's best-known story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," ends with the Grandmother's murder at the hands of the Misfit, who then offers the following comment on her life:

"She would of been a good woman," the Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

The image of constant, presumably divine intervention here gives the passage a sort of occasionalist flavor to my ear. But if occasionalism is principally a metaphysical rather than an ethical doctrine, perhaps I'm off base. Any thoughts?

I don't know if there is a connection; but occasionalism as found in Malebranche is, in fact, as much an ethical doctrine as a metaphysical doctrine. (I discussed some of the ethical aspects here.) But the sort of thing that Ben seems interested here is perhaps more closely connected with Malebranche's doctrine of the interior teacher: The Divine Word, as interior Teacher (Malebranche adapst Augustine here), teaches us constantly by light and sentiment -- the latter being reprimands and exhortations of conscience. Perhaps there might be a connection there (certainly the notion of conscience and moral intelligence is a common theme in O'Connor).

Incidentally, with regard to the original Hulga and Malebranche, I find that students of O'Connor tend not to think that she was deliberately engaging in irony there. Of course, students of O'Connor tend not to realize that there is any irony in the situation. A typical instance seems to be Ralph C. Wood:

This is an apt, if pretentious, allusion for Hulga the Heideggerian to make, for Malebranche stands in the Cartesian tradition that runs from Hume and Berkeley through Kant and Heidegger. Malebranche held that we do not, in fact, see by our own light but by what he called "vision in God." He was obsessed with the Cartesian problem of human knowledge about objects outside themselves. Together with Descartes, he argued that knowledge of the world does not come from either sensation or imagination but from clear and distinct ideas perceived by the understanding. Yet unlike his master -- and much closer to Spinoza -- Malebranche held that "created things are in themselves causally inefficacious and that God is the sole true cause of change in the universe" (Willis Doney, "Malebranche, Nicholas," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. V, ed. Paul Edwards [New York: Macmillan, 1967], p. 140). Malebranche's denial of the mind's ability to perceive truth through the natural order of things, together with his denial of secondary causes and thus of real human freedom, would make Hulga an ideal disciple of so unsacramental a thinker.

[Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 201n.]

There are a number of confusions here (I wasn't aware that the Cartesian tradition ran from Berkeley to Heidegger, which is a new twist on the history of philosophy). But whereas I would suggest that Hulga's taste for Malebranche is highly ironic -- Malebranche is explicitly and aggressively Catholic, and his ontologism is an odd contrast to Hulga's nihilism -- Woods treats them as well-matched. I think there are two questions raised by this:

(1) What is the real function of Malebranche in "Good Country People" and, if there are any Malebranchean links elsewhere, in other stories?
(2) What did O'Connor actually know about Malebranche?

With regard to (2) I find Wood's interpretation rather implausible; surely O'Connor would have heard enough of Malebranche to know that he was both a Catholic and an ontologist -- she knows enough that she has Hulga quote Malebranche's favorite quotation from Augustine. Perhaps she didn't recognize that it was Augustinian? So that's perhaps a third question:

(3) Did O'Connor recognize the original Augustinian implications of the statement, "We are not our own light" or did she interpret in another way?

There is, related to this, another irony that I did not mention in the first post: namely, that Hulga's entire problem throughout the story is that she acts as if she were her own light. This confidence in her own intellect is what allows her to be deceived by Pointer.

O'Connor's use of, and knowledge of, Malebranche is certainly a worthwhile research project, if there's anyone out there interested in doing it.