The Speed of Thought
The speed of thought, they say, is swift,
but this, I think, is mostly false.
As giving only ends in gift,
so thinking only ends in all.
Through epochs, eons, ages slow,
unfinished yet our thought has been,
an ice-sea glacier's icy flow;
and unforeseen is thinking's end,
for every mind by love begot
has moved but centimeter's pace --
and incomplete is every thought,
remaindered to some future days.
The circles filled with stars are vast,
their orbits slowly turn in place;
and over ages thought must last
and time itself in circles chase.
And when completed is our run,
we leave our thinking incomplete,
a task continued, never done,
like turtles racing swifter feet.
Rust and Fire
One in kind are rust and fire.
Ruin is combustion slow;
flaming quickly is desire.
Flame will have the brighter glow,
spread the fiercer, fairer light;
wood must rust with aching speed,
give but transient delight.
Death is from consuming need,
craving turns to cinder each,
eating deep down through the heart,
universal in its reach,
dark, corrosive, part by part.
Decadence with more control
will corrosion spread abroad;
iron burns in part and whole
from air and malice of the gods.
Decay is merely slow desire:
one in kind are rust and fire.
Discourse of St. Symeon
Who stands upon the ocean-shore
and looks out to horizon's end
may in its vastness somewhat share
though still be bound upon the sand;
such see in truth the boundless sea
and yet the sea extends beyond;
unbounded sea they truly saw
and yet their seeing had a bound.
Yet, not content that they but see,
are others who will splash and wade,
and what shall we of these folk say
who feel the waves roll strong and wet?
They too the endless ocean share
and thus are conscious and made full,
far more than any on the shore,
of fullness, depth, and overflow.
But will not those who wade out lose
their vision as the water weaves
a wall through which their eyes see less
of anything but wave on wave?
And to the one who simply swims
all but the ocean then will fade;
to such a soul the world then seems
to be but currents that enfold.
And so it is with glory bright!
And thus and so will be the lot
of those who by God's grace are brought
to God Himself, the Sea of Light.
Tuesday, March 14, 2017
Lent XII
There was a man in the land of Hus, whose name was Job, and that man was simple and upright, and fearing God, and avoiding evil. (Job 1:1)
[St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book I.]
To fear God is never to pass over any good thing, that ought to be done. Whence it is said by Solomon, Whoso fears God, neglects nothing [Eccl. 7, 18, (Vulg.) 19.]; but because there are some, who practise some good actions, yet in such wise that they are by no means withheld from certain evil practices; after he is said to have been one that feared God, it is still rightly reported of him that he also eschewed evil; for it is written, Depart from evil, and do good [Ps. 37, 27]; for indeed those good actions are not acceptable to God, which are stained in His sight by the admixture of evil deeds; and hence it is said by Solomon, He who offendeth in one point, spoileth many good deeds [Eccl. 9, 18]. Hence James bears witness, saying, For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. [James 2, 10] Hence Paul saith, A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump [1 Cor. 5, 6]. So then that it might be shewn us how spotless the blessed Job stood forth in his good actions, it is wisely done that we have it pointed out how far he was removed from evil deeds.
[St. Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book I.]
Monday, March 13, 2017
Conscientious Objection and Ethical Relativism
Julian Savulescu and Udo Schuklenk argue that the right of conscientious objection is based on ethical relativism:
This is not even coherent, much less accurate; it's at a level of absurdity that reminds me of Savulescu's silly 'conceptual analysis' of coercion. There is nothing in this line of argument that needs to be taken seriously.
(1) The whole point of conscientious objection is that the state does not have moral authority over certain matters and thus in those matters cannot coerce citizens; it requires by its very nature that there be moral principles more fundamental than statute or custom. Conscientious objectors are not conformists going along with "groups, cultures or times"; and they are appealing to principles that they believe they themselves don't have the right to violate. There is nothing remotely relativist about this.
Nor does acceptance of a right of conscientious objection commit one to a claim that the conscientious objector is right to believe as he or she does; it merely commits one to a claim that one is wrong to force them against their will in this context. This is a repeated failure throughout S&S's paper: they fail to recognize that a major question is what the state (and a fortiori institutions and organizations less than the state) has the right to require when the state is held to moral standards in the treatment of people in its jurisdiction.
And, in fact, it is not difficult to find recognition that ethical relativism is very unlikely to be consistent with any kind of conscientious objection. Do Schuklenk and Savulescu not read any of the doctors elaborating their views on the subject, and have they never noticed how often opposition to moral relativism comes up? It is commonplace that if conscientious objection were based on a commitment to moral relativism it would be an "anemic" concept. (That's not strong enough, in fact, since it would thereby involve no right, but the point is that it is generally recognized that moral relativism does not have the features required for the kind of appeal to conscience that conscientious objectors need.)
Even someone like Alberto Giubilini, whom they cite for their claim, is not arguing that it is a general commitment that is "part of the force behind respecting conscientious objection". Giubilini's argument in "The Paradox of Conscientious Objection and the Anemic Concept of Conscience" is that moral relativism would give a way around a particular objection to conscientious objection that he thinks is especially cogent and for which its defenders have no particularly cogent response; he is quite clear that this is an alternative that he is proposing as better than what actual supporters of conscientious objection in fact argue. What is more, the conception of moral relativism he brings in is a different kind of relativism than what Savulescu and Schuklenk are proposing. (Indeed, it has to be a different kind if it is to perform the task Giubilini thinks it can.) Their failure to grasp this is truly baffling.
(2) The appeal to the evil of the Nazis in this context is enough to exasperate the most patient of people. One of the evils of the Nazis was precisely their intolerance of rights of conscience, and everyone who is not an idiot knows this. And thus one of the evils of the Nazi regime was its treatment of conscientious objectors, the 'underminers of morale'; conscientious objectors in Nazi Germany were shoved off, like Ernst Friedrich, to asylums or prisons, or, like August Dickmann, to concentration camps and firing squads, or, like Franz Jägerstätter, to the chopping block. It is precisely this -- and similar cases, like Communist treatment of conscientious objectors as enemies of the state -- that has led in the past half-century or so to human rights organizations vehemently supporting the right to conscientious objection in military matters as a human right. There is no sort of ethical relativism in that field. And the question of whether there is a right of conscientious objection in medical matters is simply a question of how far the right to conscientious objection extends beyond the military field. Thus, for instance, supporters of the right to conscientious objection will point out that doctors are not conscripted, and they are not under military-style obligations, and they are not being called up to serve in a national emergency, and yet the state seems to be arrogating a right to treat them as if they are; that is to say, on an analogy between military service and the medical profession, there is even less of a ground for the state to claim it has the authority to demand service, and yet we recognize that authority as less than absolute in the stronger case, so a fortiori we should recognize it in the medical case. There are many varying arguments of the kind, but the point is that recognizing the moral foundation of the one requires recognizing at least the possibility of an analogous moral foundation for the other.
(3) Refusal to recognize any rights of conscience, besides eliminating a major protection against precisely such atrocities as those of the Nazi regime, punishes people for acting as moral agents; if any rights of conscience stand on moral grounds, some right of conscientious objection, even if very limited, is thereby established (since one cannot be defending rights of conscience if no one has any right to refuse due to objection of conscience at all), and it becomes merely a question of what those limits are. Refusal to recognize any right to conscientious objection would be an insistence on penalizing people for trying to act on moral judgments according to rights of conscience; if any right to conscientious objection stands on moral grounds, then the question simply becomes whether those moral grounds suffice for the medical case, as well. Thus questions of ethical relativism are not remotely in view in the grounding of the right of conscientious objection itself; the only way they could come in is if one held that it was needed to handle an objection that could not otherwise be handled (as Giubilini does; his argument, I think, is wrong, but it is at least not sloppy and absurd as the argument of Schuklenk and Savulescu is, which appears to have arisen by mangling Giubilini's argument out of all recognition). But ethical relativism would also gut every one of these steps. (Hence the broad recognition that it would make conscientious objection 'anemic'.)
One of the failings of the argument throughout the paper is that Savulescu and Schuklenk repeatedly fail to recognize that conscientious objection is not opposed to professional ethics but a form of it. The conscientious objector may oppose a law, or may oppose a guideline by an organization, but the whole point of conscientious objection in such cases is that the morality of acting in a profession is not a mere matter of what a law or a guideline says but of more fundamental moral principles. Insofar as we are talking about a profession in particular, conscientious objectors, qua conscientious, are not putting themselves forward as inconsistent with their profession but as opposing something they regard as inconsistent with the objective moral principles governing that profession. Bringing in ethical relativism in the way they do establishes very clearly that they do not have the slightest understanding of what is actually involved in real conscientious objection.
Ethical relativism is the view that the truth of ethical statements - such as abortion is wrong - is dependent on, or relative to, the culture, group or individual making the statement. Ethics is relative to groups, cultures or times.
But ethical relativism is practically ethical nihilism. If one accepted ethical relativism, the holocaust was, from the Nazi's perspective, right. It is just that today we have a different set of values from the Nazis. As the Nazi example demonstrates, we have reason to be profoundly uncomfortable with ethical relativism, even though it is often considered the politically correct thing to be an ethical relativist.
Part of the force behind respecting conscientious objection is a common commitment to ethical relativism: if that is what someone believes, then they are right to believe it, and that alone makes it a kind of truth.
This is not even coherent, much less accurate; it's at a level of absurdity that reminds me of Savulescu's silly 'conceptual analysis' of coercion. There is nothing in this line of argument that needs to be taken seriously.
(1) The whole point of conscientious objection is that the state does not have moral authority over certain matters and thus in those matters cannot coerce citizens; it requires by its very nature that there be moral principles more fundamental than statute or custom. Conscientious objectors are not conformists going along with "groups, cultures or times"; and they are appealing to principles that they believe they themselves don't have the right to violate. There is nothing remotely relativist about this.
Nor does acceptance of a right of conscientious objection commit one to a claim that the conscientious objector is right to believe as he or she does; it merely commits one to a claim that one is wrong to force them against their will in this context. This is a repeated failure throughout S&S's paper: they fail to recognize that a major question is what the state (and a fortiori institutions and organizations less than the state) has the right to require when the state is held to moral standards in the treatment of people in its jurisdiction.
And, in fact, it is not difficult to find recognition that ethical relativism is very unlikely to be consistent with any kind of conscientious objection. Do Schuklenk and Savulescu not read any of the doctors elaborating their views on the subject, and have they never noticed how often opposition to moral relativism comes up? It is commonplace that if conscientious objection were based on a commitment to moral relativism it would be an "anemic" concept. (That's not strong enough, in fact, since it would thereby involve no right, but the point is that it is generally recognized that moral relativism does not have the features required for the kind of appeal to conscience that conscientious objectors need.)
Even someone like Alberto Giubilini, whom they cite for their claim, is not arguing that it is a general commitment that is "part of the force behind respecting conscientious objection". Giubilini's argument in "The Paradox of Conscientious Objection and the Anemic Concept of Conscience" is that moral relativism would give a way around a particular objection to conscientious objection that he thinks is especially cogent and for which its defenders have no particularly cogent response; he is quite clear that this is an alternative that he is proposing as better than what actual supporters of conscientious objection in fact argue. What is more, the conception of moral relativism he brings in is a different kind of relativism than what Savulescu and Schuklenk are proposing. (Indeed, it has to be a different kind if it is to perform the task Giubilini thinks it can.) Their failure to grasp this is truly baffling.
(2) The appeal to the evil of the Nazis in this context is enough to exasperate the most patient of people. One of the evils of the Nazis was precisely their intolerance of rights of conscience, and everyone who is not an idiot knows this. And thus one of the evils of the Nazi regime was its treatment of conscientious objectors, the 'underminers of morale'; conscientious objectors in Nazi Germany were shoved off, like Ernst Friedrich, to asylums or prisons, or, like August Dickmann, to concentration camps and firing squads, or, like Franz Jägerstätter, to the chopping block. It is precisely this -- and similar cases, like Communist treatment of conscientious objectors as enemies of the state -- that has led in the past half-century or so to human rights organizations vehemently supporting the right to conscientious objection in military matters as a human right. There is no sort of ethical relativism in that field. And the question of whether there is a right of conscientious objection in medical matters is simply a question of how far the right to conscientious objection extends beyond the military field. Thus, for instance, supporters of the right to conscientious objection will point out that doctors are not conscripted, and they are not under military-style obligations, and they are not being called up to serve in a national emergency, and yet the state seems to be arrogating a right to treat them as if they are; that is to say, on an analogy between military service and the medical profession, there is even less of a ground for the state to claim it has the authority to demand service, and yet we recognize that authority as less than absolute in the stronger case, so a fortiori we should recognize it in the medical case. There are many varying arguments of the kind, but the point is that recognizing the moral foundation of the one requires recognizing at least the possibility of an analogous moral foundation for the other.
(3) Refusal to recognize any rights of conscience, besides eliminating a major protection against precisely such atrocities as those of the Nazi regime, punishes people for acting as moral agents; if any rights of conscience stand on moral grounds, some right of conscientious objection, even if very limited, is thereby established (since one cannot be defending rights of conscience if no one has any right to refuse due to objection of conscience at all), and it becomes merely a question of what those limits are. Refusal to recognize any right to conscientious objection would be an insistence on penalizing people for trying to act on moral judgments according to rights of conscience; if any right to conscientious objection stands on moral grounds, then the question simply becomes whether those moral grounds suffice for the medical case, as well. Thus questions of ethical relativism are not remotely in view in the grounding of the right of conscientious objection itself; the only way they could come in is if one held that it was needed to handle an objection that could not otherwise be handled (as Giubilini does; his argument, I think, is wrong, but it is at least not sloppy and absurd as the argument of Schuklenk and Savulescu is, which appears to have arisen by mangling Giubilini's argument out of all recognition). But ethical relativism would also gut every one of these steps. (Hence the broad recognition that it would make conscientious objection 'anemic'.)
One of the failings of the argument throughout the paper is that Savulescu and Schuklenk repeatedly fail to recognize that conscientious objection is not opposed to professional ethics but a form of it. The conscientious objector may oppose a law, or may oppose a guideline by an organization, but the whole point of conscientious objection in such cases is that the morality of acting in a profession is not a mere matter of what a law or a guideline says but of more fundamental moral principles. Insofar as we are talking about a profession in particular, conscientious objectors, qua conscientious, are not putting themselves forward as inconsistent with their profession but as opposing something they regard as inconsistent with the objective moral principles governing that profession. Bringing in ethical relativism in the way they do establishes very clearly that they do not have the slightest understanding of what is actually involved in real conscientious objection.
Time Like a Sullen School-Boy Stands
The Wizard's Pupil
by Dorothy Sayers
* It was written with red and black ink, and much of it he could not understand; but he put his finger on a line and spelled it through. At once the room was darkened, and the house trembled.
OLD FAIRY TALE.
Time like a sullen school-boy stands
Beside the Wizard's knee,
The book of life between his hands,
And spells out painfully
The crabbed Christ-cross row,
The Alpha and the O.
His grimy fingers slowly trace
Each odd, repellent sign
In a dull fear to lose the place;
His voice, with listless whine,
Drawls through the scheduled hour
The syllables of power.
While Zeta is so like to Xi
Small thought has he to spare
For what the screed may signify,
(The Wizard in His chair
Smiles, knowing ere He look
All that is in the book).
But sometimes ill and sometimes well,
Reluctant and perplexed,
He gropes and stammers through the spell
From one sound to the next;
And when the last is read
God's Word wakes the dead.
This is from a collection of poems Sayers published in 1918 when she was about twenty-one (it was her second book of poems, and, indeed, her second book at all). She had graduated with honors from Somerville College in Oxford at this point, but had not yet received her MA -- because Oxford University did not allow women to matriculate and receive formal degrees until 1920.
Lent XI
Blessed are ye that hunger now: for you shall be filled. (Luke 6:21)
[St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke]
In Matthew, however, again He says; "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled:" but here He simply says, that "those that hunger shall be filled." We say, therefore, that it is a great and noble thing to hunger and thirst after righteousness: that is, habitually to take part in earnest endeavours after piety:----for such is the meaning of righteousness:----as if it were our meat and drink. And inasmuch as we ought to give to this passage also a meaning, in accordance with the foregoing explanations, we say again as follows: The Saviour pronounced those blessed who love a voluntary poverty, to enable them honourably, and without distraction, to practise the apostolic course of life. For it is in plain keeping with the having neither gold nor silver in their purses, nor two coats, to endure also very great hardness in their way of life, and scarcely obtain food for their need. But this is a burdensome thing for those who are suffering poverty and persecutions, and therefore He That knoweth hearts, very suitably does not permit us to be dispirited because of the results of poverty: for He says, that those who hunger now for their piety's sake towards Him shall be filled: that is, they shall enjoy the intellectual and spiritual blessings that are in store.
[St. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Luke]
Sunday, March 12, 2017
Fortnightly Book, March 12
It was assumed by many pious persons who approved the project that my object in writing The Man Born to be King was "to do good"--and indeed the same assumption was also made by impious persons who feared lest it might "do good" in the Christian sense, as well as by pious but disapproving persons who thought it could only do harm. But that was in fact not my object at all, though it was quite properly the object of those who commissioned the plays in the first place. My object was to tell that story to the best of my ability, within the medium at my disposal--in short, to make as good a work of art as I could. For a work of art that is not good and true in art is not good or true in any other respect, and is useless for any purpose whatsoever--even for edification--because it is a lie, and the devil is the father of all such.
In 1940, the Religious Broadcasting division of the BBC wrote Dorothy Sayers asking if she would be willing to write a series of radio plays on the life of Christ; she had written a nativity play for them a couple of years before that had been well received. Sayers agreed on three conditions: (1) Christ must be represented as a character; (2) the style must be realistic; and (3) the language must be modern. The BBC agreed, and that is quite to its credit as an act of courage, for all three conditions were highly controversial. Representing the Lord in a drama as a character was something that was just not done (indeed, at the time it was still illegal to do it on a physical stage in a theater); the realistic style was often seen as somewhat impious; and the general expectation was that the language for religious drama should be, or at least be based on, that of the King James Version. And Sayers's twelve plays in the cycle were, in fact, repeatedly criticized on all three grounds, and could not have possibly survived any of the three criticisms if they had not been radio plays -- radio plays need not have an immediate physical audience, and only work by voice, so there wasn't actually anyone playacting Jesus, except in the way a good preacher, for instance, might read His actual words from the pulpit, and the language could be pitched both as easier to understand on the radio and as translations directly from the Greek (which Sayers typically did), which might also be done by a preacher in the pulpit, as needed, even if they were not particularly common. But it still made people quite uncomfortable.
The original twelve plays in The Man Born to be King were distributed over nearly an entire year -- from December 1941 to October 1942, with the plays airing about four weeks apart. Because of this, the plays had to be dual-functioned, being hour-long episodes in a series but also able to be heard as stand-alone plays. This meant some rearranging and editing in order to fit the requirements of the medium, and also required a unity of theme and a single plot. The theme was handled by the contrast between temporal and spiritual kingdom, but the second was handled in an ingenious way: the plot is the story of Judas Iscariot, an intelligent man seeking a Kingdom worthy of his hopes and dreams, and his relation to the Man Born to be King. The portrayal of Judas was another element that was highly criticized in the plays -- people angrily wrote in that he was presented as noble, acting on worthy motives. But that, of course, was the point.
Trumpet of Theology
Today in Byzantine Catholic calendars is the Sunday of St. Gregory Palamas. From one of the Ukrainian Catholic hymns in his honor:
From a sermon by St. Gregory on the Second Sunday of Lent:
[St. Gregory Palamas, The Homilies, Veniamin, tr., Mount Thabor Publishing (Waymart, PA: 2009), pp. 65-66.]
What hymns of praise shall we sing in honour of the holy bishop?
He is the trumpet of theology,
the herald of the fire of grace, the honoured vessel of the Spirit,
the unshaken pillar of the Church, the great joy of the inhabited earth,
the river of wisdom, the candlestick of the light,
the shining star that makes glorious the whole creation.
From a sermon by St. Gregory on the Second Sunday of Lent:
Since the kingdom of God is at hand and within us and will soon arrive, let us make ourselves worthy of it by works of repentance. Let us exercise force on ourselves, driving away evil prejudices and habits. For the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force (Matt. 11:12). We should emulate the patience, humility and faith of our God-bearing Fathers. "Whose faith follow," it says, "considering the end of their manner of life" (Heb. 13:7). Let us mortify those parts of us which belong to the earth: fornication, impurity, evil passion and covetousness, especially during these holy days of the fast.
[St. Gregory Palamas, The Homilies, Veniamin, tr., Mount Thabor Publishing (Waymart, PA: 2009), pp. 65-66.]
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