The Olah of Christ: Covenant and Consummation

 

I'm gratefully resting on a foundation of Jewish wisdom; Rabbi Fuhrman of Alephbeta.com, to be precise: he has such a clear way of speaking about what is, for the Jews since Sinai, an ever-complicating series of laws, labyrinthian commentary and daily rules and rituals; as he says, understanding the wisdom of the Torah "is compounded by the complexity of the laws surrounding" every deep idea. When I listen to the Rabbi speak, I imagine the Jews at the feet of Sinai, in their ant-like smallness at the threshold of Law; I imagine not the human attempts, as noble as they were, to escape simple revenge laws, like Orestes resting at the threshold of the civil court as the Furies unfurled into the Eumenides: rather, I see these were humans waiting upon the Creator to reveal the true, natural law, but somehow...more than that: "I place before you life and death; choose life." I see a kind of wedding moment, a moment just before consummation. Martin Buber, the great Jewish phenomenologist, describes in I and Thou those standing before God's mountain, learning the law, learning the rubrics of sacrifice and temple: "Upright servant[s] of former times, who believed that God yearned for the scent of [their] burnt offering." This is more than just a system of justice: it is a relationship. Of what? Creator and created? Master and servants? Father and children? Husband and wife? Suitor and beloved? 

What if this relationship is not just one of these, but all of them? Or perhaps...what if it is, in a sense, a centrifugal progression towards a center, a kind of circling out from a center, through rupture in the Fall, and then back to that center and beyond it, to a marriage feast? God is Creator: He makes foundations ex nihilo and then other things from those elements: Earth from a formless void, Adam from earth, Eve from Adam, their progeny through both. God is also Master: He who governs, He who is Justice, because all order comes from Him. God is also Father, as Creator, but also by desire; He is not a Deist "clockmaker" or Aristotle's Prime Mover, who has no back-and-forth relationship with His creation, especially angels and humans. The Song of Solomon shows us God as a suitor, and God also relates many times in the Torah that He sees His people as a wife; therefore, His desire, analogously human because He is so beyond our true understanding, is ultimately unity in love. Not only does He yearn for us, He gives of Himself, his image, His life, His love, His Son, His Spirit, freely and generously. 

God asks us to choose--life or death--love or disconnection--either we choose to be on a road towards marriage, or we are on a road towards self as center; there are no other options; it is a true disjunct. Why? Simply put, God is the source of all life, all that exists. If we choose ourselves, we choose death. Love, even on a purely human level, asks always for unity, a transcendence of selves into something new. God asks no less. Another way to speak about God's generosity is in the language of covenants: this is more fundamentally a gifting of one party to another, an act of giving, sealing oneself to a bond, a relationship of generosity between two unequal parties; it reminds me a little of the Western medieval "oath" relationships between the different classes of society (peasant to noble/landholder especially). The lord owned the land, and was, ultimately the person to protect and govern those "oathed" to him, those who worked the land and benefited from it. It was a personal commitment between parties, not bureaucratic; it depended on virtue and a certain noblesse oblige that meant the lord had to be, certainly, an exceptional human being: generous, just, willing to lay down his or her life in battle to protect and serve his or her dependents; the relationship was more like a metaphorical shepherd-sheep, more like a parent-child covenant. 

Covenants, in the ancient Jewish world, were represented by a "cutting" which is part of the Hebrew root word for "covenant"; one thinks of Abraham and the mysterious dance with God between the halves of a sacrificed animal. God Himself passes through the cut pieces to indicate His commitment to the promises He made to Abraham. "I shall be your God." God here takes upon Himself the ancient consequences of breaking this covenant: to be cut apart like the animal. Though this was the norm for the greater party to do as an oath to the lower party, it seems almost silly for the Source of Justice to take justice upon Himself; I always imagine this as God's condescension to Abraham's human understanding, a humble "coming down" to Abraham's level, so that Abraham would be able to respond, to be in the relationship. 

God making covenants with human beings is the most clear indication, before Christ, of His desire for deeper relationship, of His love. His picking out of particular people for relationship is mysterious, and His particular calling, after the betrayal of Adam and Eve, of Seth, Noah, Abraham,  Moses and the Prophets, and then Christ and His calling of particular disciples, is mysterious. Why not all people? This is another indication of the desire not just for ruling, but for relationship: it must be two-way, and relationship with God, who is so Other, requires cultivation and faith; it is a generous, delicate thing, something built on many instances of trust and goodwill and love, like any deep relationship for a human being. This calling out may indicate God choosing those who were also trying to choose Him, and simultaneously, examples for others. And, in the event of that relationship being broken, it requires mercy and a way back. But how does a human being adequately requite God for a broken relationship? Thus was the system of sacrifice instituted, first, in a sense, at Passover, and then in full force at Mt. Sinai, the great "giving of the law." In a sense, the whole system of laws was a training and a covenant in one. 

The Jewish sacrifice-laws, therefore, reflect a proper covenant with God, and covenants require sacrifice as a seal...yet they were much more than simple seals. They were acts with deep meaning for the human soul,  fundamentally a visceral expression of "I-Thou" relationship between the human person and God. The "Thou meets me through grace," Buber states, and "it is not found by seeking. But my speaking of the primary word to it is an act of my being, is indeed the act of my being." He goes on: "The Thou  meets me. But I step into direct relation . . . the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one; just as any action of the whole being, which means the suspension of all partial actions . . . is bound to resemble suffering . . . concentration and fusion into the whole being can never take place through my agency, nor can it ever take place without me. I become [my emphasis] through my relation to the Thou . . . all real living is meeting." A covenant with God can be described this way: it is the stepping into relationship with all of my being: a covenant is not made partially, and the laying down of my whole self between the pieces is a denial of the self as center-point; it is the dependence on another for the lesser party, and so requires the fundamental suffering of self-denial. Yet, so does the covenant for the greater party: it is also an irrevocable gifting of the self: so precious, so deep. God giving Himself and I meeting him, soul to Maker-of-soul. There is something so right about this, leading I think to Moses' desire "to see Your Face." Moses is acknowledging the "I-Thou," which is a relationship of unity and love, an almost-equality that is astounding when one stops and thinks about it, and his shining face requiring veiling is a visceral reflection of his near I-Thou with God. Buber elsewhere talks about Sinai as "the navel of the world" and that the Israelites were experiencing this mountain of God towering over them, almost capturing the people in its I-Thou gaze, a gaze of love, terrifying, life-giving love, ultimate gift and demand all in one. 

The Israelites first learned this relationship out in this Sinai silence and nothingness, the place of no hiding, no distractions from without, far from Egypt, symbol of the world. They learned in their very journey through this nothingness—a journey that millennia later the Desert Fathers and St. John of the Cross would take in spirit and would learn the same—that the essence of relation is also sacrifice, that the covenant is consummated in sacrifice. The Blessed Mother exemplifies this in the Annunciation and Magnificat, and lived it out in her journey with her Son. Fundamentally, it is sacrifice of self-independence on the part of both parties, and the sacrifices of the Jewish people reflect the different aspects, or levels, of that spiritual relationship: how to repair a broken relationship (Chatat), how to maintain peace (Shlamin), and the reality of myself in I-Thou with God, a kind of consummation or unity (Olah), mysteriously, a kind of holocaust. 

Rabbi Fuhrman more explicitly explains the three basic types of sacrifice in the Torah: "Chatat" is a sin offering, a kind of "tit for tat" or "eye for eye" in another form; it is the re-ordering of the first sin of transgressive consumption, the transgressing of God's domain in the Garden through the eating of the fruit. The sin-offering was, in a sense, a visceral "return"—quite literally of an animal needed for food, a taking of something from our domain and giving it to God in return for what we took from Him. It is a form of returning a tribute due, or what we think of as "retributive justice," the righting of a relationship through payment of some kind. God doesn't need fruit, though, does He? The sin and then retribution of Eden was more about respect of boundaries, actually. It simply was His domain, and we transgressed into it and stole; we violated the trust, the covenant first established in the Garden. Ever after, a return is needed from every one of us. The Chatat for the Israelites, a gift of a precious animal in the shadow of Sinai Law was not wasted; it was given to God's priests, who stood for Him in eating the sacrifice. Rabbi Fuhrman: 

If we transgress those commands, so we failed –if you would have to categorize it – in the area of respect. So respect is one of the great things that make the relationship between human beings and God work. But it's not the only thing. Life isn't just about respecting God, there's another thing we can strive for too, and that's where the Shlamim comes in.

The Shlamin is much more than an agreement to play by the rules. It is a revelation of what it means to be in relationship with God, a tutelage in justice, a justice reaching far back into the creation, a reflection in human life of proper order. To agree to live this order, this justice, is to abide in a relationship of love with God. "Shlamin" then, is a kind of "peace" or "wholeness" sacrifice, and this is reflected by which parties consumed the Shlamin: first, the Kohenim (priests), second, those who gave the sacrifice; the third part of it was consumed on the altar as God's portion; in other words, the animal became a means by which all parties, including God, shared: boundaries became open borders; strangers became siblings; estrangement became eudaemonia. This type of covenant ratified by shared sacrifice still filters through human life: the basic transactions of business contracts (I give you this, you give me that, and we're in business!) to the deeper contracts of marriage. Of course some are more religious; as one ascends the ladder of covenants, they are more and more about the heart and soul. Marriage is more about love, though natural; holy orders are also about love, but of a more purely supernatural essence; finally, the covenant between God and soul results in a spiritual unity of peace, a peace possible once the demands of justice in the Chatat are satisfied. These are all in the realm of the Shlamin, and it is, in a sense, the "bridge-sacrifice" between the Chatat and the Olah; it includes elements of both. But there are higher forms of relating to God, even beyond a shared covenant; this is echoed in the last, highest form of Israelite sacrifice: the Olah. 

The Olah, or burnt offering, was the symbolic, sacramental "I-Thou" with God; it was a kind of face-to-face, or "eye-to-eye" instead of "eye-for-an-eye." It was beyond retributive, and even beyond the peaceful sharing of boundaries. Rabbi Fuhrman explains:

Olah is about giving everything back. The Olah is entirely consumed on the altar. The very first Olah of the Torah is when God said to Abraham, give me your son, your only son, the one that you love. The one special thing that you have. You see how it's the inverse of the tree of knowledge? If the tree of knowledge is us sort of illegally and inappropriately taking God's one special thing from His domain, the Olah is when we voluntarily offer our one special thing, the thing that really by rights ought to be most mine, and I offer that back to God. The Akeidah, the binding of Isaac, becomes the paradigm for Olah.

It doesn't come because we've failed in some sort of respect to God, sort of our baseline obligation to God. It's not even about building a bridge of love with God – that's the Shlamim. It's about something else. It's about awe, really a step higher in a way even than love, at least when it comes to our relationship with God.

The Olah, in a sense, allowed Abraham to see God, to know Him as He is, almost, perhaps, a going beyond human limits; to experience God directly is to know that we, and all we claim to have, are either dust apart from Him or that which is His. It is a moment in the fire of pure love, pure justice, pure mercy, pure power. Rabbi Fuhrman tells a mysterious story about the kinds of sacrifice in practice, and more deeply, how the Chatat and the Olah are actually in a kind of inverse relationship. Aaron, as the first High Priest of the Law, had sons, and they were like assistant-priests, the Kohanim. They, in place of God, who did not eat physical animals, ate God's portion; they received the atonement for God. Two of Aaron's sons, though, during the Chatat ceremony, had brought "foreign fire" before the Lord, asserted themselves as knowing what was good and evil in the realm of Chatat, and they themselves were consumed by fire. The Chatat is about restoring, atoning, giving God back symbolically what is His, restoring justice. Somehow, the "foreign fire" seems to be another infraction in the act of healing an infraction, and they themselves in consequence were consumed. This is a great mystery: is it a visceral reminder of the seriousness around the atonement, that it required the deepest respect for each detail? The animal must be perfect; the ritual must also be perfect, because God Himself is perfect? The most profound part of this story, though, is Aaron's response: He is silent, almost in complete, profound grief and awe at the same moment. And then, instead of re-offering the Chatat, he offers an Olah, an offering completely burnt, completely given to God, as his sons were consumed. It is as if there was a symbolic conversation between God and Aaron after this indescribable loss, a conversation about boundaries, about the reality of covenant. God's deep humility and condescension to even accept a Chatat or Shlamin requires the deepest respect; an assertion of self ("foreign fire") in the face of this humility is deeply inappropriate, deeply disrespectful; in effect, it nullifies the Chatat at the very core and they suddenly faced God as if they had somehow placed themselves as equals. Aaron's response to the immolation of his sons is to offer an Olah instead of trying again to offer the Chatat, and Moses does not understand; there is an argument. Rabbi Fuhrman describes Aaron's heartbreaking response: 

Today the Chatat was brought, he said; Vatikrenah oti ka'eileh – but look what has befallen me, the loss of my children. V'achalti chatat hayom – and on that day would I eat a Chatat on behalf of God? Hayitav b'einei Hashem – do you think God would find that pleasing? How could I take even on behalf of God – how could I assert boundaries even on behalf of God, when I have nothing left to give, when everything has been taken from me? When I feel that there's just no boundaries left, there's no boundary that I can assert.

It is, of course reminiscent of one of the first Olahs recorded in the Torah, the request of God for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. When Abraham goes silent, refusing even to explain to his son, like Aaron has gone silent, Rabbi Fuhrman phrases it so well: They had "touched the energy of the Olah," the deepest reality of all creatures before the Creator: in reality, there are no boundaries: everything IS God's. Thus, the Chatat and the Olah seem to be in contradiction, unless one takes God's love into account: like His willingness to create others in His own image, to share relationship with them, God condescends to give part of His creation, part of His life to each of us; however, in the deepest reality, our lives were never our own except by His first allowing it to be so. Like a good father sharing His wealth, this is an ineffable gift that should never be forgotten, and all other sacrifices, all covenants are acts of God desiring relationship; they are love, pure love...and though we can disregard them through free will, God asks through these sacrifices, through the covenants they represent, for all of our being; we cannot enter into relationship with Him half-heartedly, or respond like the prideful princess to her suitors; God, in His mercy, chooses to discipline us, to teach us, to allow us to make Chatat, to live within a Shlamin, but all of it depends on that primary inclination and understanding of the reality of the Olah.

This discipline, these boundary-relationships allowed by God, are reflected from the very first, when Adam and Eve are given the Garden and stewardship over creation, except for certain bounded areas that are God's: the right to judge between good and evil. It is His right. Always. They did not respect this; they did not understand the awe of the Olah; they began to assert their own right to judge apart from God, and this meant, in effect, that they were rival kingdoms to God, that they joined a kingdom of rebellion and unreality, Satan's kingdom, cut off from the source of life; God uses the metaphor in Ezekiel of trees as kingdoms, which gives a certain interesting view of "the tree of knowledge of good and evil"--in effect, a political reality, a kingdom of which God is the unalterable ruler, the only true judge of what is right and wrong. In Ezekiel, God uses metaphors, including trees in Eden, to describe the falling of those rulers and kingdoms who raise themselves up beyond what they really are, who try to rival God especially in terms of judgment of good and evil: "You were in Eden, the garden of God . . . Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor . . . So I made a fire come out from you, and it consumed you" (28:13--19). Over and over we see the monstrosity of creaturely pride resulting in death, twice here a consumption by fire.

Is God cruel? Why can't He just set aside His justice for creatures who cannot seem to handle themselves properly? I cannot presume to answer for God; this journey through the sacrifices has taught me something of the mystery of God. I can simply wonder, and do so only from a human point of view, based on human experience. It seems to me that love can only be built on truth; we cannot love what or whom we do not truly know; if there is no reality, and all is relative, then we are all in our own "kingdoms" and love is not possible, for no unity is possible without connection to a common reality, to what is, to truth. And the Kingdom of Truth is inherently God's because He is the source of everything. Therefore, to have a love relationship with God one must be in reality, which is His, and living according to reality is also just. God would not be loving if He did not also desire that we know justice and become just. 

Why fire?  Natural light is sourced in burning, immolation, combustion, and by light we can live and see; in the spiritual world, what is burning? In a deep sense, God Himself; He is the source of reason and also all life. How do we approach this burning, this life-giving fire? As Moses did, with our shoes off, with an awareness that this is Holy Ground. If we think of this fire as love, a creative force, we see that it does not consume in a destructive, wanton way. This love gives life when we are in a right relationship with it; it consummates, but does not consume; yet, if we are not worthy, or in a right relationship, it burns us because we are, in a very real sense, "playing with fire." 

In a sense, then, the mystery of the Olah is a mystery of consummation because God loves me, the realization that all I am is God's; in that complete offering of myself, or all that is precious to me, I am acknowledging that all I have is God's to do with as He pleases. This is justice, and in free will, it is also love.

The history of Israel is a history of this relationship, attempts and failures on the part of humans to become "I-Thou" with God; it is the love story of God, who wants a love-relationship. It is the impossible dream, on a human level. And then, God does something even more impossible. He steps into His own creation, which makes no sense to one who is expedient and only focuses on justice; however, it makes total sense when one looks through a lens of love. God becomes the Lover in the Song of Solomon, "emptying Himself."

Suddenly, God is a baby, Jesus Christ, "God with us" and "Savior." It should astound us, because it is not the logic of justice and power alone, of the Judge; it should not astound us, if we read the story of Adam and Eve, as God walked in the Garden and called out to them; if we read the story of Noah, arc, and rainbow; if we read the story of Abraham and see God gushing in generosity and then in ultimate test of Abraham's love for Him; if we read the story of Moses, and the complex language of signs to the oppressed, grieving Hebrews, signs that said, "I have seen your grief and will heal it"; if we read the story of Isaiah and the still, quiet breeze; if we read the story of Jonah and the little tree God made to shade him in his anger and distress. It is a language of love, a love built not on sentimentality but on the reality of God Himself; it is the self-giving of God and His desire for response in kind: the desire common to all true lovers. 

What is Christ, then, in the language of sacrifice? 

Is He most like a Chatat? He is indeed a Chatat; He offers Himself as atonement, for us, a perpetual sin-offering; this was done once on the Cross, and is perpetuated in the Eucharistic consecration; He is also a Shlamin, because we share the Sacrifice in the taking of the Eucharist, both priest and people, a bond of peace between us and God, and God Himself is there, accepting Himself as Peace Offering; He is also an Olah and this is the most fundamental and profound, because without this element, I do not think the others would be possible. The Olah is the foundational sacrifice, the one most given to God, the one that reflects the reality of God's being "I-Thou" to us; it alone allows the other forms of sacrifice to be perpetual, because it is the truth of justice and love; it is the place of the most real relationship with God, the most truthful one, and so it is the consummation, the wedding feast;  the Olah of Christ is the only perfect human response of Olah: "I do all that my Father tells me"; "That they may be one as we are one"; perhaps the apex of immolation, "Father, why have you forsaken me?" and finally, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit." 

In short, Christ fulfills all types of sacrifice that came before in His own person. St. John says, "God so loved the world that He gave His only Son." This is of course analogous to the Olah of Abraham, the highest demand of love. Christ is, though, God creating an Olah for Himself; He is completing the circle of the highest love for us. He asks us simply to believe Him and to respond, through His grace given in the Shlamin and Chatat of Christ, the Eucharist, by doing the same. "Give your all, because I have." 

I have no words for this, no adequate words. God desires so much to draw each of us back into the center, and beyond, the center of love and unity; He desires you as the most ardent of lovers to be with Him in love, and He made the highest sacrifice to assuage justice, to reveal reality, to make possible a real love, and offers us, in our walk through this life, to, in turn, become an Olah by becoming Christ through the ultimate sacrifice, the one that encompasses all others, the Eucharist.  Only through an Olah can we be consumed in God's love, be truly remade in the fire of love through Christ, the only perfect human Olah-response possible, an Olah of perpetual love through the Resurrection: 

Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders.

--St. John, Revelations 5:6

Martin Buber, I and Thou: http://www.maximusveritas.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/iandthou.pdf

Salt-Dough Cross

It is a Celtic cross, delicate-dough baked

slightly skewed tiny swirled shapes

with lots of spaces

for the window-light to shine through;

a daughter's gift to me,

an artifact of suffering

made in the throes of anxiety,

made carefully, slowly,

to keep going,

to keep living.

Pondering Submission

I'm fifty-three; I've been married for more than twenty years, and we've done our best to raise three children. I've been a Catholic since 1997; as I've moved in and beyond different Catholic communities, I've experienced different perspectives on men and women, on marriage. The roles of women seem to be a flash-point in many Catholic communities, whether these groups are ultra-traditional and fighting for a return to more traditional roles, or ultra-liberal and still on the revolution train, and every iteration in between, so I suppose it is an important question: why is everyone so very sensitive (including myself, at certain points in my life)? 

I think there are very good reasons for this sensitivity; the roles of men and women in marriage must be a hinge or support point of Christian community. Indeed, marriage and family are highly political: if the Church and the world both start in the family, the organization of that family has tremendous influence. Also, a marriage is meant as a sign for Christ and His Church, for the love of the Trinity; the sexual act is a nexus of the physical and spiritual; phenomenologically, the attacks upon marriage and the family, both from powers and principalities and human forces, indicate that the family, beginning in marriage, is much more than preference; it is the heart of human civilization, and one nexus of God meeting persons. Most of us first know God in the persons of our parents: they show us this love in their marriage as well in their roles as individual parents. In my lifetime of experience, it seems true that a father's leadership in spiritual practices has a tremendous influence on a child's later faith, and this leadership goes so far as to make a facade of faith one of the strongest "lessons" for a child to drop faith. A mother's influence: many, many people will express the beginning of their personal interest in the faith, their heart's movement, to their mother's model and encouragement. This doesn't mean that children without ideal fathers, or fathers at all, or mothers, are doomed—but they will sustain a wound requiring grace and incarnational healing to overcome. Therefore, there is a layered order inherent in marriage: biologically, socially, spiritually, these human orders echoing the relationship of Christ and the Church, the relationships of love in the Trinity.

The more subtle, implicit lesson about God from the family is the marriage itself; this is a sign both for the children and for the outside world: it is a sign, as St. Paul says, of Christ's love for His Church. John Paul II, in Dignitatis Muleris, says:

The author of the Letter to the Ephesians sees no contradiction between an exhortation formulated in this way and the words: "Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife" (5:22-23). The author knows that this way of speaking, so profoundly rooted in the customs and religious tradition of the time, is to be understood and carried out in a new way: as a "mutual subjection out of reverence for Christ" (cf. Eph 5:21). This is especially true because the husband is called the "head" of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church; he is so in order to give "himself up for her" (Eph 5:25), and giving himself up for her means giving up even his own life. However, whereas in the relationship between Christ and the Church the subjection is only on the part of the Church, in the relationship between husband and wife the "subjection" is not one-sided but mutual.

There are two issues that need to be understood before particular judgments about how this should happen on a day-to-day basis in particular families as a sign for those around them, children or community: first, the fundamental anthropology of a woman versus a man, because upon this definition rests any conclusions we can make: only when the essential nature of a being is understood can we make judgments about particular actions and or details. Second, the arrangement of St. Paul's passage here in Ephesians 5: what is he saying within the context of the argument itself? 

First, then: By nature, are men and women equal in dignity before God? I mean not an equality of "sameness" but rather of essence. Are both sexes equally endowed with the image of God? Are each capable of a personal relationship with the Lord? Are each fundamentally responsible for responding to grace? I think the answers are clearly "yes" on all counts. It is worthwhile to note, however, that this fundamental equality in nature is not a Western pagan idea; rather, the early philosophers played with the ideas that women were not capable of the highest practical rationality (that of political prudence), nor does it seem they were thought capable of contemplation either, which is the highest human activity according to Aristotle, due to the erroneous assumption that they had an inferior ability to moderate their emotions. Therefore, they were not thought equal companions to men, leading to the allowance of male homosexuality as a "more fitting, higher form of love between equals." Likewise, Cicero never spoke of friendship between a man and a woman, because it is implicit in his Greek philosophical foundation that women cannot be as comprehensively virtuous as men. Women were thought even to be the completely passive, surrogate element in the foundations of life, conception, which is a fundamental human power: the power to pass on life. This all places women, in the Western collective history, as a secondary essence, without rational or conceptual authority; I believe this was partially driven by the Aristotelian concept that where we see more than one thing, we encounter hierarchy. 

The Christian understanding of the Trinity, an apparent paradox to human reason, will counter this idea of "differences necessarily mean hierarchy" at the very source, and the Judeo-Christian understanding of women versus men, in comparison to the whole of early Western philosophy and faith, is revelatory. Fundamentally, though, the order in a marriage cannot both follow God's order and dehumanize or infantilize anyone; it must reveal and uplift that which God has created, individual souls with equal dignity, the chance for each to have authority in proper measure, because to be an author is to give life, it is life-giving, it is one of the fundamental elements of being imago Dei.

In this reality of imago Dei, Jewish tradition seems, from Genesis, to counter the pagan ideas of "human degrees of essential rationality and equality" from the beginning. God creates both sexes directly, and asks of each obedience to His law; each are punished, held responsible, and the corrective punishment for the woman is the rule of the man over her. This tells us that the original state of perfection was not one of political hierarchy between them, but a relationship of unity and companionship: love and friendship, which can only happen between those who have been given a certain equality. Thus, men and women are complementary iterations of the same essence, and pace Aristotle, they can be equal and yet different. The actions and words of Christ in terms of the women in His life also speak volumes about the essences of men and women: In a culture hostile to feminine involvement in religious or public matters, He often spoke directly to them, related to them much as He did the men he encountered, held them accountable in the same way, and even chose one as His mother and one as the apostle to the apostles. He spoke of no marriage in heaven, indicating individual souls in direct relation to the Trinity, rather than women as relating to Him only through a man. St. Paul also indicates this radical equality in the Body of Christ: "For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:27-28). All of this indicates the way God orders us: each as His children, in unity, in an essential equality. 

Why do I spell out the obvious here? Because this is the context in which St. Paul's statements about submission must be made: the submission of a wife is not an essential submission, one that comes from her personhood, or even from her womanhood. Not all women are submissive to all men. It is a particular submission in a certain relationship, and so it has a special, limited reason. Furthermore, both men and women have parts of their lives, responsibilities, areas of authority not directly part of their role in marriage. Even in traditional medieval Christian communities, as Regine Pernoud shows conclusively in Women in the Days of the Cathedrals, women, including married women, held great authority in political and social life. There are also many saints who held authority in areas beyond their marriages: The mother of St. Therese of Liseux ran a successful lace business; St. Gianna Molla was a doctor; there are queens and artists, musicians, teachers, and the list goes on. As Dorothy Sayers says in "Are Women Human?" a woman, as a fully human person, cannot be limited to one or two roles in life, or treated as a child without full agency, without the opportunity to be "life-giving." God gave women gifts, abilities, calls, similar to men, in various areas, and St. Edith Stein calls for women to bring the feminine genius into all areas of life. 

A Christian marriage, nonetheless, seems to create a special sign, a stage space, so to speak, a certain drama in which something slightly different is played out. It is a dynamic reality, not a static sign. Christ first sets that stage by reminding us of the state of perfection in Genesis: the two are one flesh, in this life. Marriage is a sacrament, a sign, a nexus of nature and super-nature. John Paul II speaks of this beautifully as he relates that the masculine and feminine physiques are also signs of the complementarity of marriage, the perpetual "overcoming of original solitude," and implicit in this unity and complementarity of physical and emotional, mental and spiritual, is the definition of the sexes as fundamentally equal in essence—for that which is essentially unequal cannot be yoked together in unity, in "one flesh." A man cannot marry a sheep. We also recoil at the idea of child marriage. Marriage requires rational consent, an indication of this fundamental dignity and equality between man and wife, the fundamental agency and authority of both over their own persons. The sign, the drama of marriage is where a unity of the flesh is achieved, but it goes farther: eros is meant to be expanded to other forms of love, such as family love and friendship, but also selfless love, agape. John Paul II speaks of this fundamental "gift of the self" as signified on the lower level by the very physiques of men and women, and signified on a higher level by children and family life, and over a lifetime, that selflessness required for a long-lasting marriage. 

Christianity also raises marriage to the sign of sacrament because it deals with eternal souls, and also because it is a sign of supernatural forms of love: to the children of a marriage, the first lessons in love are given within the home, from the marriage itself. They are then tilled soil ready to receive the supernatural analogues of these loves: the eros of God, the family of the Church, the friendship with Our Lord, all made possible by the supernatural agape of Christ on the Cross, a selfless love we are meant to embody for others as part of Christ's Body. 

Therefore, any submission in Christian marriage must be understood within this structure of essential agency, authority within one's own person, equality and dignity, and the call for each soul to a supernatural life of selfless love. The marriage, like the Church, is a sign of the servant economy of Christ, that "right-side up" kingdom as opposed to the "domination" that runs the world. Submission, then, is a dynamic, ever-flowing movement, a perpetual gift of one soul, one authority to another, and back again. One must first have something to submit; one must first have a self, an authority, out of which to love and to sacrifice as Christ did. 

Here, then, we turn to the second important issue to understand before we can make particular judgments about how submission in marriage is lived out: the arrangement of St. Paul's exhortation in Ephesians. St. Paul is speaking, in Chapter 5, of how those within Christ's Body should relate. He then turns, and states, "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ" (Eph 5:21). Many people could read this as the end of the first section, with the next starting with ""Wives, submit to your husband as to the Lord." However, if one reads the section "Submit to one another" as the generic "submit," then the next passages are species of submission: wives have one kind, and the husband another kind. 

"To submit" or "to regard" or "to respect" all have similar meanings, perhaps getting at the original language: to allow oneself to be under another's authoritative gaze; this seems to explain St. Paul's directly following ideas of the husband nourishing, cherishing the wife. The key definition then, to unpack, is Christian authority. Unlike a worldly understanding of authority as rule-giving, domination, Christ tells us quite clearly that it is about service. True, life-giving authority is exercised in deep humility, in the washing of another's feet. "Do not rule as the Gentiles do, dominating each other; you lower yourselves to the role of servant," Christ tells his astonished disciples, those who wished for the position of greatness, of domination, at Christ's right hand. Christ's question, "Can you drink the cup I will drink?" indicates the definition of the great in the Kingdom of Heaven: it is the epitome of selfless love, a deep pouring out of the self in humility, for the good of the other. 

Thus, the husband's submission is quite literally a lowering of the self into a position of servitude, and the wife is to regard this, to respect it, to accept it and receive it as a means to be cherished and nourished and empowered in the faith. In turn, her regard and respect for his humility and his gift of self is empowering to him, and answers the deep call in his nature to be heroic. She must allow him to serve her, she must respect and respond to any legitimate, moral way he does this. This also answers the call in her nature to be able to feel secure to nurture others. 

Therefore, what does this look like in real life? I believe that this is going to be different in each marriage, because marriages are between individuals, not stereotypes, and there are different stages of life that a marriage must adapt to as well as individual needs, strengths and weaknesses, and various crises. However, there are some general marks of this mutual submission: again, the father is the spiritual leader. He will set the tone with the help of his wife, and though they must make spiritual decisions together, his witness will generally be one that is more a bridge for the children into their own independent lives; he will be the proto-father for the Father, just as the mother can be the prototype for the action of the Holy Spirit, or the tenderness of God, and of course, a link to the role of the Theotokos in the lives of the children. The spousal mutual self-gift, regard, submission (one accepting the service of the other, the other given regard in decisions in appropriate areas) is the most powerful witness to their children and the outside community.

Does this mean that a wife has to leave all money matters in her husband's hands, or that she should never work outside the home, or that there is no discussion or that the woman has no authority over issues at work or in her own work at home with the children or over her own bodily needs and what she should do health-wise? These are questions that the Church wisely does not answer, because they are too particular. Neither should other, lesser voices seek to claim ethical and moral and dogmatic authority over others in these areas. This is best left to the spouses themselves and at times of need, counselors, spiritual directors, and pastors, who should refer to the Magisterium.

It seems to me that better questions (leading to principles of action in particular situations) for husbands and wives are "How can I best act out selfless love in whatever situation we find ourselves?" and "How can I best serve you and regard your gift of self so that you may one day be unified with the Lord?" and "How might I respect your area of authority (servanthood)?" Then, each is loving God through submission to the other, and as St. Augustine says, in the case of a holy, complete mutual submission (different, but equal) that is love of God in action, "Do what you will."

Fanfare for the Common Man

On March 12, 1943, the Cinncinati Symphony Orchestra opened a concert with Aaron Copland's new Fanfare for the Common Man; it was a serendipitous place to celebrate the lives of normal people, those who go from birth to death without gracing the pages of a newspaper or the history books: Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (c. 500 BC), for whom the city in Ohio is named, was a Roman statesman who stood up for the plebeian, or common man, against those (amongst them his own son) who wanted to keep them in a kind of perpetual servitude. Cincinnatus came into almost absolute power as dictator at the request of his fellow Romans: persuaded to leave his plough, he worked to create a more just republic for the mass of Roman citizens, and then gave up his power as soon as he could, returning to the work of the common man, returning to his plough and fields. He is in the Roman history books, such as Livy's History of Rome, as a man representing the best of civic virtue: solid, humble, brave, a servant of the common good and his fellow common man. 

In the city that bears this great (common) man's name, Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man was a response to the part that millions of men and women were playing in the fight against totalitarianism in the guise of fascism: it was a celebration of that peculiar mix of viewpoints one must have to properly appreciate the identity of what others have derisively called "the masses" or "the silent majority."  Thoreau characterized these as "the mass of men [who] live quiet lives of desperation." In one sense, Thoreau was referring to those, in his day, who blindly accepted the status quo and were not looking transcendentally at life: those who did not look beyond the roof and walls of atmosphere around them, conventions and propaganda, to the expanse of order beyond that is the foundation for the air they breathed, to the principles of justice and beauty. Therefore, in one sense, Thoreau may have been right: there are certainly many people who are "common" in the sense that they are complacent, uneducated, uninterested in anything beyond their own comforts. However, Thoreau, with a certain hue of the Harvardian self-important whiner, likely was looking, ironically, too narrowly from his own status in the intellectual class to see whom Copland, decades later, might be referring to. 

Who was Copland celebrating? I've seen many of them in the history books, like Horatio at the Bridge; like Cloelia, a Roman woman who came out of obscurity to fight when it was needed; fishermen at Galilee who dared to follow a nomadic Rabbi; the unknown artists who helped keep Christian civilization alive by creating bibles like the Book of Kells; those obscure faces under helmets in the mud who lived for weeks and months in the pits of hell on the front lines of Europe; pioneers on the Oregon Trail who left directions for others not to repeat their mistakes as they forged across the West; Native Americans who pursued justice as they were forced onto reservations, a justice that was not revenge...the list goes on and on, countless common men, women, and children who actually made history. Made history. Allowed it to continue.

Copland's Fanfare begins with simple brass notes, one and then two instruments. The melody sounds immense, expansive, like two cherubim calling across eternity: a surprisingly majestic theme for nobodies.  The echoes continue, deepening, as they are joined by more instruments, more complex movements. It is a slow coming together of innumerable voices: What are they saying? And to whom? 

I have seen the common man, that elusive figure that stands for many. I saw him one day when I was looking down 1st Avenue from an apartment window; I saw the garbage trucks, the taxis, the ambulances, the little silver commuter cars all edging their way, as a group and as individuals weaving, making small decisions in traffic, to work. I thought of all of them collectively getting up at 5 am each day to put food on the table, to educate their children, trying to commit to the daily tasks of life. I saw the uncommon common man when I was a young woman in San Francisco at a bus stop. He drove up, opened the doors, and smiled at me in the gathering dusk; he chatted with what would have, could have been anonymous, isolated passengers: he enjoyed us, he enjoyed his bus, he brought joy into being in a roaring white box in a maze of roads and apartments. I see the common woman in the faces caught on camera during the Depression, holding her children, looking beyond to their future even as hers closes down around her. Their voices are the call to life, the call of the heart and the backbone of any culture, a long, consistent courage. Sometimes we don't pay attention to the billions of good acts each day, because they aren't interesting to us; they don't raise our itchy curiosity for the different, the sensational. However, seeing the good isn't about interest: it is about beauty. The true common person continues to Choose the Good, the basic goods of family and community life, the essence of political life, and these acts are beautiful. When millions of people choose the good without any fanfare, they are calling to God and are lovingly watched by Him.

Therefore, leaders, political, religious, or intellectual, make a great mistake when they forget the true identity of the common person. He or she grows our food, delivers it, serves it, tends our sick, teaches our children, puts out our fires, creates beauty, helps bring new life into our world, stewards the earth and the millions of small communities on the globe. They are not the "thousand thousand thousand [wheel-tenders]" referred to contemptuously and fearfully by the Controller, the totalitarian-population eugenicist in Huxley's Brave New World. Rather, like the Romans ignored Cincinnatus on his farm until things went wrong, you don't think of or see the common person until things start to go wrong; the common man is often a little late off the block, hesitating to introduce disorder into the delicate balance of community and life: but off the block he and she will come, especially once the lives of their children and their communal life are in danger.

In our day, an old and tired story is being acted out once more: In a culture more focused on celebrity and self-absorption (the common person is also culpable here), elites have, yet again, gone Caesar or Marc Antony and think too highly of themselves, going from over-stuffed capitalists into totalitarianistas, and for some reason, as it has always been, billions of dollars are not enough: they need to live forever on the backs of others, they need greater and more perverse pleasure to continue being happy: satisfaction and security instead of virtue and the consistent, courageous, choosing of the Good as they best understand it. In our day, politicians have allowed themselves to be owned by corporations (echoes of facism) or have been run out of office. A situation like this only requires a catalyst to send it into oppression: enter the Public Crisis, whether that be a health crisis, economic crisis, or a climate crisis. 

For the power-gluttonous, these crises are opportunities, and sometimes they are also tempted to manufacture them or fan them into a greater flame. Surely everyone knows from history that for those with wealth to invest, any situation that forces mass purchasing, on the backs again of the common person, is a gold mine. Therefore, whatever one's opinion on the origins and soundness of these crises, the evidence of "raking in money" on the part of a few is self-evident. And, worst of all, as CS Lewis said, is the tyranny that claims its actions are "for your health" or "for your good" or "for the good of society." As one heroic common person, an Austrian MP, said, "Tyrants use apparently good ends as alibis."

In our day, though, Copland's Fanfare is still playing: listen for it. The trumpets begin with the few courageous who dare to lose everything in order to speak the truth from their ploughs: from hospitals where patients are being killed by medical malfeasance, from schools where children are being abused because they can't breathe well for hours on end, from small rallies on bridges across the world, to bigger rallies, to thousands of trucks honking their way to capitals in true service of their brothers who refuse to be coerced into an experimental gene therapy, to ethics professors standing on the great ethical tradition they teach even when fired, to students writing poems about the oppression they have faced over the last two years. 

It is playing in the crowds growing around the world, crowds listening to heroes and common people from all perspectives, echoing to each other even across the abyss of sound created by a failed, captured media. 

Play it again, Common Man. 

Hardening Pharoah's Heart

 I have always wondered why God "hardened Pharoah's heart"; I've always been curious about moments in Scripture which seemed to create contradictory views of God's character, loving versus vindictive, just versus unjust; under this curiosity lay a kind of hyper-vigilance around trust issues, around what it means to really be loved by my Creator...and all the love in the world depends on what the love of God means. Our smaller human loves can be re-categorized as various forms of survival needs, memory of infant satisfaction, or simply material, chemical responses to various stimuli, without the love of God. If the Artist, the One beyond who needs nothing from us does not love us, or is not there, all the movements of our wills are reduced, for there is nothing beyond; our loves are no longer signs to a Higher Object, but are ends in themselves--and as St. Catherine of Siena proclaimed with her life the words Jesus spoke to her, "You, human, are what is not; I, your Lord, am what is." Without Him, our loves are nothing; with Him, they can transcend themselves. 

Yet who is this God who loves? Does He really love each of us? God "hardening" a heart that served a vision of polytheistic dominance of the known world seems just on one hand, but when that hardening served to create more suffering for the innocent and only prolonged the time that the Israelites were caught in Egypt, it seems like the unloving creation of unnecessary suffering, at the least, and petulant one-upmanship at the worst. God doesn't need to do one-upmanship, does He? Yet this is what it appears from the very beginning, as Moses and Aaron confront Pharoah's magicians and respond in kind, but better, in contests like making serpents from staffs. God's serpent eats the others. 

As the plagues multiply, the phrase "and God hardened Pharoah's heart" makes its appearance; why? Rabbi David Fohrman offers the following explanation in one of his parishes: There are two Hebrew phrases used: one meaning "made stubborn" (as in one's own will hardening) and the other meaning "made courageous" (as in being given the power to continue to fight). This latter phrase seems less likely, doesn't it? However, this one is used. Why would God "encourage" Pharaoh, and in what way, especially if Pharaoh's vision, and through him, his people, is that of a polytheistic dominance, a view that excluded the sovereignty of a single, transcendent Creator? 

Could it be that God has a larger agenda than just getting the Israelites out of Egypt, though that was the catalyst, the core? What if the whole thing were about justice on a number of levels: justice for His people, the Israelites, a re-ordering justice that set things right for them; justice, in terms of re-ordering the vision of Pharaoh and his people, and through them other peoples throughout geography and time, as the story spread? What if it were about a parental love that did not want to take free will away, ie hardening a heart to make a tool of Pharaoh, but rather to say, "Son, fight me for your warped vision; I will strengthen your heart, your free will to continue this fight until you see this vision fails; as this happens, you will, perhaps look for Me, you will at last see that I am truly in control of all areas of life--and death." 

This view of the "hardening" is a view of a daring, great love, and yet this is not tame, as CS Lewis used to say. This is a severe mercy and it certainly terrifies me, yet I stand back in awe of this Parent who would not settle for children who loved Him simply because they gave up in a one-upmanship competition, but because they really saw Him, finally. It also tells me that this is a God who will chase us down, stop at nothing; it also tells me that suffering and even death are, in the hands of God, educational, attempts to save us with our understanding, the necessary precursor to real consent, real love. 

The plagues are an intensifying lesson about who this "I am who am" is; from the moment that He introduces Himself to Moses as Existence itself, to the moment when He commands thousands of tons of water to fall upon the army of Pharaoh, God is showing who He is; He, in His mercy, creates a ladder of lessons, from almost playful courtroom displays to world-stage events. He allows a proud Pharaoh to face-off with Him, even as He allows a frightened, insecure Moses to take along a stronger voice in Aaron. He taught the Egyptians and the Israelites visceral lessons about His true nature as a Creator, the source of natural forces and their proper order; the One of Justice who will defend His people; the One who will never take free will or consent, simply because He wants to be served and loved, to be seen. 

We too live in a time of plague; we too live in the time of the Horsemen. Does it feel like we, God's people, are increasingly under the eye of Pharaoh, a multiplication of eyes intent of plutocratic dominance, anti-God, a mockery of the Creator who, though He could incinerate us all, nevertheless respects our free will, our ability to choose to live in a vision apart from Him? Are we living in Egypt, where fear of the forces of nature drive us to oscillation between dominance and worship of them? Is God hardening hearts again, squaring off for the fight for the true vision? 

One Jewish scholar stated that not all the Israelites chose to trust God and leave Egypt, that many of them stayed behind, new acolytes to the old pagan vision of placation and control. The remnant of Jacob's great family placed their trust in God and went through the water in defiance of worldly and demonic power: they made their choice to trust in the desert, on a journey that required that choice to trust--or not--over and over. Is there a remnant now? Which of us refuse to trust a system, a conglomeration of industry and government that seems lost in a warped vision, and instead wish to understand the truth, which is itself a movement toward Him who is the source of truth? 

Are we like those Israelites who must watch, and hope, and pray, and stand fast as the plagues come---does God harden hearts around us because He wants to educate not just some of us, but all of us? Is He showing us the natural consequences of a system built on faulty values and perverted practices like abortion? 

Wrestling with Powers and Principalities

       

How did we get here, into this medical tyranny, this morass? There are a number of factors at play in terms of how this begins; it seems to me that, first, there has been a long-term "education" into individualistic "buffered realities," to use the same concept that Charles Taylor uses. This is the slow-growing divorce of human political communities from the criteria of the natural law and Reality, and then this divorce filtering down, as is natural, into individuals willing to live for the "freedom from" rather than "freedom for" reality, as D.C. Schindler argues particularly for the American political development out of the Enlightenment: the poisonous "first principle" that political laws, akin to Newtonian physical laws, are constructible by humans for humans aside from theological reality came into full flower in the mid 20th-century, just as mass media began in greater force than ever before through the advent of the television. As Chris Hedges argues in The Empire of Illusion, our political system (in my own understanding, that which disposes us towards Ends, towards God or towards ourselves) has become nothing more than consumer images, that which panders to the desires of the populace. Thus, the Western polity lost its true role as the disposing agent for human flourishing, in principle around the time of the Enlightenment, but in reality in the 20th century as Christian values were subsumed under hedonism glorified. 

Another key to this "education" is the "dumbing down" of the populace in the sense that most people no longer have strong, developed faculties of critical thinking, and especially not the kind of critical thinking that is Aristotelian and Thomistic in nature: the thinking which sees itself, again, in a larger, beyond-self, beyond-culture, teleological cosmos. Tyrants don't want people to think that plants, environment, sexuality, human life, etc, all have a telos which reflects the creativity of God; this implies moral, spiritual, and rational responsibility and limitations. Instead, the tyrant's "education" wants infantilized, isolated, human beings who think that their actions are good but in reality are mis-directed virtue, human beings who cannot adequately critique themselves or, more importantly, their government. 

The meaning of Snowdon and Assange as whistleblowers in the previous two decades comes into stark relief in this situation: Anyone who paid any attention knew, at that point, that governments and cooperations like Google, different banking systems, etc, were already in illegal working relationships to harvest personal information from billions of people--in their own countries as well as others. However, of course this goes two ways: if one can get information at that level, one could also give it, which is a much greater opportunity for power, attractive to those who began to see themselves, a la the Big Tech crash and bailout of 2008, as above the law, beyond it, entities of such great importance that "they cannot fail." These elites also have mechanisms of bribery, blackmail, and control of each other, as the Esptein case only just hinted at. The "spider web" of control, as documented in the film of the same name, leaves little to the imagination about how inter-connected and powerful the hidden elite economy and power-structures likely are. Those creating these structures, in a human sense, do not necessarily have to be totally conscious of the Big Picture of growing power and control and inter-connectedness; only, truly, from a spiritual point of view does this all start to fall into place: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:17 KJV).  

However, not many are putting the pieces together, either in the spiritual, the political, or the cultural realms, and certainly not the pieces of the Whole. There seems to be a general blindness, a drowning in cross-fire information and rhetoric, an apathy, a rabid sheep-like response to the growing litany of darkness and warped "virtue." This, I think, is largely tied to the mis-education, the mis-catechizing, the slowly rising heat of the cultural waters, which is now almost at the boiling point.

Once there is a frog-like global populace in compartmentalized, isolated buffer zones of reality, a populace slowly boiling in their choices via Big Tech proffering, a populace of people who think they have absolute choice over their own version of reality, but who are, in Reality, tightly tied together in one pot over the flames of technological companies and Deep State platforms, there exists a situation of potential total control. However, there are a few problems with this: one, you have to get them all from attention to their own virtual realities to hyper-attention to the reality you want them to coalesce around. You need them to jump all together out of the pot and into one you have fashioned for your own purposes. This is a difficult magic trick and requires, as does all nefarious persuasion, the creation of two things: a desire to pay attention and follow directions, and a pathos that creates less critical thinking. 

Enter a "pandemic." Along with climate change fears, this concept seems to tick all the boxes: at once, it reaches into the individual buffer zones in the same way, drawing immediate attention, via the emotion of fear (which of course shuts down critical thinking if it is already weakened and habitually dominated by the passions, a la a Bernaysian/Freudian consumer culture). A populace dependent upon mass media, a media more and more tightly controlled by influences outside such as government and private interests, and also dependent upon the maintenance through consumer culture of one's "private universe" in first-world countries especially, is, in a terrible irony, a populace ripe for control. A virulent pandemic could just provide, at the least, an opportunity for multi-national agencies and corporations to create a whole new system that does away with their perennial fear of being displaced by social or religious revolutions, by the incursion of Reality, God, into the construct. Ever are human constructs, Augustine's City of Man, attempting new ways to prevail, on their own power, against the gates of heaven.  

Enter Reset 2021, 2030, etc., all openly looking for catalysts of control. 

Do these catalysts, either climate or viral or bacterial, have to be fake? Not necessarily. Of course the kind of elitism that produces the swathes of unnecessary famines and waste and toxic products and food and weapons will be destructive; of course there are disease consequences for globalism (similar to the advent of the Black Death, a consequence in part of more connection between nations via widening trade routes). The twist is that the elitism does not fare well with widespread competition, by definition, and to be on the top of the world requires a certain imbalance in usage of the world's resources. Does this mean I am a communist? No. Communism and capitalism are a false dichotomy. There is subsidiary distributivism, there are many other models of political and economic life, much more organic ones, ones better in line with reality. However, in a situation of unhealthy, imbalanced systems, systems buffered against Reality in some respect, the coalition of control is a logical consequence, because their very imbalances and lack of cohesion with Reality--natural, eternal, divine law imbedded in creation--mean that they must be propped up, kept up, controlled; this, in turn, in a fallen human construct, like Babel, will mean opportunity for the will of the stronger (whether human or demonic) over the weaker to come into play. All these wills need to complete the circle of power is the right, ubiquitous control mechanisms. 

Of course, we have had iterations of endemics and pandemics over the 20th and 21st centuries, especially as global travel and trade became more interlocked; the oddities, though, associated with the advent of this particular iteration of a corona virus, are suspect at a very new level, and mirror, perhaps, the exponential growth of technological tools and dependence upon them. 

First, there were the questions about the virus' origins. Investigations like the Plandemic films raise questions about patents taken out on the very virus to pop up soon afterwards and any treatment of it. Investigations are ongoing about the spider's web of laboratories and Big Pharma corporations that transcend representative government (what is truly left of it), who were pursuing "gain of function" tests which strengthen viruses, even after government oversight prohibited these (albeit superficial, non-enforced prohibitions). Tests and protocols were introduced by NGOs and corporations, many with leaders at the top either having conflicts of interest or having been propped up financially by god-like foundations,  protocols that either did not work, or actually, it is beginning to be revealed, have caused a medium-level flu or cold-like virus to linger, preventing true herd immunity and driving populations toward remedies that made NGOs and corporations and their monetary masters enormous amounts of money. Definitions were changed in media res, such as the definition of "pandemic" and "herd immunity," to fit the narrative pushed nearly lock-word-step by the mass media. Doctors and scientists who began to see good results from early treatments with well-known, inexpensive medications or natural means were brutally suppressed, their reputations destroyed and their livelihoods taken, silencing many others who might otherwise have spoken. 

The censorship alone, with all the concomitant buzzwords like "misinformation" and "disinformation" and "conspiracy theories" and "anti-vaxxers" and "covidiots" and "covid deniers" (a term loaded with the very weaponized 'denier' which instills its own special kind of fear), should raise questions, but a fearful populace, isolated now beyond the constructs of "buffering" into actual isolation through lockdown and masks, terrified not only by death but by the death of economy and social life, even if these were compromised and deeply unhealthy, is not a population, of course, thinking critically or able to even see the difference between fear-mongering, fact-checking, and the raising of legitimate, necessary, debate. The philosophical art has long been relegated to a few liberal arts outposts and renegades, as Solzhenitsyn said prophetically in the late 70s, and even in these places there are many who have been more-or-less tied to the political or scientific "consensus" and are not willing or able emotionally or psychologically to engage in actual debate. We are a population that is a far cry from the robust debaters that de Tocqueville praised in Democracy in America, those who were living on the foundations and vestiges of the robust education of Christendom. 

One must read Solzhenitsyn's address at Harvard to understand, in part, this de-evolution of our rational faculty and the fundamental loss of courage; CS Lewis also prophecies about this in The Abolition of Man, and Lewis goes farther than Solzhenitsyn: perhaps as a Westerner, Lewis saw the advent, as did Huxley, of a medical tyranny (see Lewis' That Hideous Strength). This is prophetic for our particular situation because Lewis saw that the loss of faith, the loss of rational faculty into silos of individual realities and, at the university level, ever-specialized, esoteric disciplines without checks from the Tao, the Whole, the lack of courage born of unnatural comfort and brutal usage of the material world, and untethered, dogmatic scientism, would provide a wide-open door for those who wish to take control: a global medical emergency, the threat of death in a world that no longer has connection to eternal life or well-trained rational faculties creating the opportunity for elites to cooperate in making vast amounts of money on 'treatments' that can lower "baggage populations" (see Gates' TED talk on lowering populations via vaccines), creating the chance to become "like gods" in terms of managing the health and bodies of the world's population, is a recipe for medical tyranny. 

If this is anywhere near on-target, will it work? Just as in That Hideous Strength, the human agents of this tyranny may find to their dismay that they have let off a nuclear reaction that may play into the hands of the Prince of Death, that entity wishing above all else to maim God's work, that gnawing, writhing legion of hatreds. What we are seeing now are outlying scientists and doctors who are warning that the very intervention touted to solve this feardemic may be instead fueling it, drawing it out for more time and more virulence (see Vanden Bossche, Wakefield, and others). If some of these doctors and scientists are correct at any level, millions of people are compromising their own natural immune systems, a trade for synthetic, man-made help that cannot possibly battle against mutating strains...again, the hubris may be our undoing, the old story repeating itself once again. 

In the end, because of the enormity of this, affecting the entire global population, these potentially dire consequences may be the door for a person, probably a scientist and philanthropist, to provide a solution that "amazes the world." Like the present vaccines that tie health and corporate economic benefit to the abortion industry, this solution will have at its core a compromise with God's law. Or perhaps I am jumping the gun here. I do not know; reading the spiritual signs of the times is not normally an individual exercise. 

What is the solution? God. God's intervention. God, it seems to me, works through subsidiarity most, through nature, through His people. His Church. This, though, has been yet another sign of the times. With a hierarchy crippled morally and rhetorically by years of scandal and mismanagement, and turmoil in the wake of divisions after Vatican II, a hierarchy often mis-catechized and mis-educated in suboptimal seminaries since the sixties and seventies, bishops who think it more important to maintain public approval to the point, some of them, of compromising with the world against even the natural law, many of them recommending even as a moral obligation experimental, abortion-tainted medical technologies, persecuting and allowing persecution of those who try to clear up the corruption, a pope who is at best ambiguous about the very doctrines and teaching that we need to defend ourselves against the new Babel, the laity is of course "sheep scattered without a shepherd" (except a few courageous, more clear-sighted bishops). 

What is left? Prayer and martyrdom, at least now the white version of martyrdom. Prayer and martyrdom to bring the grace of God's intervention. 

Misplaced Desire Revisited

Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, is a poetic image, a sub-creation which allows us to feel the desires of a man and the disappointment of them. Charles Ryder is that man, and he is a seething, writhing mass of misdirected desires, for moments of strawberries and champagne with the "right" person, for acceptance, popularity, wealth, status, Sebastian, Julia, recognition of his worth, the leaves in the jungle...a spiral of crescendoing and descending desires, some more lofty than others. If we think of Plato's Ladder of Love, Charles is not ascending neatly, following the philosophical prescription of Diotema, through love of material bodies, to thoughts, to thought-structures, to Truth and Beauty; he ascends and descends wildly, buffeted, a reed in the wind, and gets more and more bruised in the process. His--and our--soul is at stake.

Charles, a needy, emotionally-abandoned child inside, first desires the world that Sebastian inhabits; Sebastian desires Charles' love. In this fundamental tension of desires is the the true heart of this novel, and I believe the deeper poetic image of this book is found through this lens Waugh gives us. Through Charles, through our being dragged maddeningly up and down the Ladder of Love, the desire for hierarchical beauties, through this kaleidoscope of seething desires, and their disappointments, one-by-one,  Sebastian comes into true focus, and finally, Sebastian is lost in the light that is revealed in his suffering, and Charles finally ascends the Ladder to Beauty Itself, at least as close as we can get in this life.

We are led first to desire the "halcyon" Oxford, that repository of knowledge and youth, the youth of the world before the Great War that seared the very conscience and heart of humanity; Charles is all aglow with ascent through study, through art: he is an idealist; his desires are abstract and it seems that he has skipped over the "material bodies" rung of the Ladder and is hurdling after Socrates. However, this is, somehow, not enough; Sebastian, of a different kind of beauty, a wild and very sensuous beauty, literally breaks into Charles' tidy existence, vomiting on his tidy expectations: the only reason this has happened to Charles, our lens, is because he has "unwisely" taken ground-floor rooms: he is lower on the ladder than even he realizes, or perhaps there is some part of his soul that must be fundamentally open to the material world, that ground-floor of the body...perhaps he cannot skip this step, though he tries to, though he sees his "art" as his own means to interpret the physical world in a cold, rational, technological way that distills its beauty in lines and color, flattened on a canvas. He is one step removed from the visceral, changing, dangerous material world by his art. And then Sebastian vomits on this artful world, and he can because Charles has, perhaps on purpose, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps inadvertently, taken ground floor rooms with windows open to the courtyard. 

Sebastian then fills Charles' ground-floor, vomited-upon rooms with flowers; the rooms become a cacophony of sense, a further incursion into the artful, breaking beyond it all like a wave that breaks over the sea wall, and Charles is invited to Sebastian's rooms and here begins his journey, and our journey, into Sebastian's soul: it is, first, his soul we must know more clearly. Through the lens of Charles, we see again the irony: Charles desires Sebastian's world, a world of mystery and myth and war, grand desires on a scale that further break into Charles' soul; Sebastian desires, simply, love from Charles. We see this terrible irony and this is, underneath, the first rung in the ladder for us: Charles' love for the material appearances is not even on the first rung of real desire, and though Sebastian is at least searching for human love crowned by sexual union, it is tragically misplaced, disordered, ill-formed. We see fairly early that Sebastian is like a tree growing sideways, but growing, attempting to ascend nonetheless, while Charles is simply desiring whatever he cannot have, a sterile love, a gnawing, envious desire for possession and acceptance into a chimera: he does not, at first, see the real situation. 

Sebastian does. 

Sebastian sees, clearly, that he is sinful, that his soul is warped, somehow, and that an ascent for him is, in the real world of Truth and Beauty, a descent. Sebastian, as we begin to see through Charles' failure to see, understands the Truth that calls him from the chapel; he hears that Voice calling even through the flack fire of his mother's programmed, unknowable, controlled religion, and knows that, against his own material desires for bodies, Charles is a love denied him because it cannot be a true ascent (that ascent to Beauty a grounding and source of real love), knows that there exists a diamond-hard wall of Truth, and that he will be inexorably broken upon it. Sebastian is a mystic, of sorts, who hears, always, hears the Truth calling, but is broken on the wheel of his own warped desires; he is prevented from ascending the Ladder of Love by some deep deformation, some desire that takes him sideways and down. He sees clearly the cross given him, one of the hardest crosses given; in response, he tries to drown himself in many ways, and we lose sight of him, just over the horizon, as Charles also pursues his desires sideways, horizontally through his own chimeras of beauty: first, Julia as another, more acceptable doorway, or "brideshead"; when this fails, though a wife who simply admires him, children he doesn't even see in the end; we meet him again as he searches again for that wildness, that first step which is also a temptation; he searches for the genuine, real wildness he once found in Sebastian by escaping to the jungle: again, though, he simply paints it and we see life around him through his glass box of art and distance. A sort of theophany again is needed, a breaking through the window that is his art, his glass box. This time, it is Julia on the ship at sea. 

A moment to think about the daring nature of Waugh's vision, of the lens he gives us: Waugh's "break-through" elements are, themselves, temptations. Sebastian breaks through, Julia breaks through, like theophanies, but how can we call these "theophanies" when they are themselves bodily temptations, potential gateways into disorder? This is the lens Waugh gives us, and many readers simply refuse to acknowledge Waugh's unorthodox idea of a "theophany" by claiming that there is no homosexuality in the book, or that Julia is simply a temptation, and Charles' journey is about overcoming temptation. Perhaps the book can be read on this level, but it does not take into account the full impact of Sebastian's role in Charles' life, or the depth, in my view. These views do not take into account real experience of desire in the material world for sinful humanity, for a warped humanity, or the full humanity of Sebastian and Julia, or how the cosmos is, still, even in a sinful state, a wild-ness of theophanies. We are all warped and thus all potential temptations, and yet we are all potential theophanies for each other at the same time. It is daring. Waugh is nothing if not daring. Additionally, Waugh gives us a clue about this through Charles' experience with Lady Marchmain: she is the paragon of overcoming temptation, of climbing ladders through religious desire, and she is no more a theophany for Charles, for us, than Rex, King of Death. Why? This too is daring. Perhaps it is because she is too far up the Ladder; perhaps it is because she is more like Charles than he realizes; she too has created an art, the art of religious manipulation, and has also ascended sideways into her own glass box which must be broken open. 

So is Waugh really showing us wild, imperfect, even warped instruments that are potentially theophanies, namely the two that do look alike: Sebastian and Julia? They are both, at first, for Charles, material bodies, beautiful physically and materially, inhabiting a world of material beauty that is Brideshead; they draw him out, one by one, into the challenge of a real desire, albeit dangerous ones, warped and wild, but real passion, uncontrollable. Charles cannot control it, or them, just like Lady Marchmain cannot control her husband, who is living out desires on the material plane, on the rung of the ladder, that rung that in the Symposium Alcibiades inhabits, that Dionysian desire that goes sideways if banished outside the rational city (see the Bacchae). Charles, in Sebastian, Lord Marchmain, and Julia, encounters Dionysius breaking into his neat world and drawing him out to the world of desire; in this sense, they are theophanies, albeit only reaching his pagan sensibilities. 

However, all three also inhabit a Catholic world, or rather are misfits in a Catholic world, all three broken upon the higher rungs they cannot reach by nature alone. Charles must, perhaps, through them, both acknowledge Dionysius like Pentheus of Thebes, as a breaking into a tightly woven, humanistic, artful, rational world, and yet surpass Dionysius by seeing him, in them, submit to a higher Beauty. 

If Waugh had allowed us to see Charles saved by Sebastian or Julia through a natural, Dionysian love alone, then Waugh would have written, simply, a pagan book, but Charles' desires are disappointed here, as are Sebastian's, as are Julia's. Waugh does not stop with the pagan theophanies, that first rung on the Ladder of Love; before she dies, before Charles meets Julia at sea, Lady Marchmain, in experiencing the theophany of disappointment of desire for a neat, correct, Catholic family world, nevertheless breaks into Charles' dreary glass box one rainy day, like grace falling, and humiliates herself by asking her enemy to help her find her lost son Sebastian. This "breaking in" leads us to one of the most profound moments in the novel: Charles' encounter with Sebastian in Morocco. 

Sebastian is in a monastery hospital, dying; he has descended to the bottom of the upside-down ladder, deeper into the disorder, and yet he begins to serve another more selfish than himself, and eventually, through sickness and weakness brought on by his lifestyle, ends up at the monastery. Charles asks Sebastian for forgiveness, a real desire for the good of the other first entering into the heart of Charles; Sebastian's reply gives us a glimpse of his later holiness: "I asked too much of you; only God can return that kind of love." Charles leaves, saddened, but he has experienced a certain kind of ascent through Sebastian's suffering, and we see another irony parallel to that we experienced by looking at Sebastian through Charles' lens in the beginning of the book: Sebastian loves in a more pure, or focused way, and we see that Sebastian knows, has always known, that all love, to be satisfied, must end in God; like Augustine, perhaps, Sebastian may see but may not be able to ascend yet. But he sees, and Charles is given this sight through the juxtaposition of Sebastian's suffering and his deep desire for God.

The next theophany is through Julia. Julia herself must experience a profound theophany as her father returns to die. In this moment, a prayer is answered, God breaks into the soul of the old Dionysius as he dies, and grace is given for him to ascend, leaping through death towards Beauty Himself. Julia witnesses this and ascends through her father's deathbed ascent; Charles, still on the first rung is beaten and battered, yet the glass is cracked. 

During this period with Julia, Charles meets Cordelia again, another Flyte (Marchmain) sister, who is the messenger of yet another Sebastian-theophany: one of the brothers in the Moroccan monastery tells Cordelia that Sebastian eventually "wanted to become one of us" but that the toll of addiction and a lifetime of misplaced desire has prohibited his living a full religious life; instead, Sebastian becomes the lowest of the low, and is the under-porter at the gate of the monastery. Gone is the physical beauty, gone is the status, the mysterious and beautiful world of Brideshead and upper-class life; gone is the Oxford golden boy; Sebastian has long eschewed them all in his search for love; in place of the chimera that Charles desired is Sebastian, full of arrows, dying slowly as the porter at God's door. This position marks Sebastian clearly as a "gateway," one who opens the gate to the garden, the true house of God, the place where men give up the material desires, move past them, and who serve the sick and the poor in the bywaters of the world. He is, indeed, holy, and from far away, across the world, across the ladders of physical beauty, the beauty of thought and architecture, the beauty even of decorated and ensconced and habitual religion, beyond the "artful" painting, wedding gift of a broken marriage, beyond the procession of Brideshead, Sebastian's ascent calls to Charles, just as Julia was called from beyond through her broken father at the gateway of eternity. 

In a profound conversation between Charles and Julia in Book 3, Chapter 4, Charles calls Sebastian a "forerunner" of his love for Julia; in turn, she wonders if she herself is another forerunner to another love, and Charles uses the language of signs, those elements like theophanies that point to ever-higher, more Real Objects, and says that perhaps all loves are merely symbolic of other loves not yet known. He is more right than perhaps he knows, but it is the first real glimmer of understanding on Charles' part of the Ladder of Love.

Sebastian and Julia, theophanies and symbols, disappear into the light of the Beauty to which both are finally ascending through their suffering in the face of more and more insistent theophanies in their own lives, the "twitches of the thread," and Charles is finally left alone, "all loves dead" in the midst of the war, and Brideshead is overrun by the stamping of boots; as he revisits it at the end of the novel, Brideshead itself disappears into the material, human constructs that end inevitably in conflict, descent, and destruction. The material, the human, is disrobed and revealed as dust; however, within that casing, a flame is lit, a tiny, single flame before the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel. It is, physically, a small beauty, but it is the sign for Charles of the Beauty he has been seeking all his life; it is the quiet step for him up the Ladder of Love, and this Love has been waiting for him all along, calling him beyond the desire for bodies, for great thought, art, human constructs, beyond his own narrations and art. 

So it is, perhaps, that the greatest obstacles to a real ascent are not, after all, those deep and human warpings that are yet still desires for the Real, found by embodied souls in climbing, painfully, through disappointment, failure, and suffering, the rungs of the ladder; perhaps the greatest obstacle is the desire to possess the Real as I desire to possess it, in the neat and tidy package I make for myself, the conditions upon God I place before I will accept His love; like the Pharisees unable to see God in the Flesh, perhaps we create the greatest obstacle to ascent by requiring Him to be what we expect or desire in the small, provincial frame we've created. Instead, He waits for us like a flame we can extinguish: or not. He is the small, humble door of the tabernacle marked by the tiny flame that requires us to lay down all burdens, expectations, pride, especially, perhaps, religious pride, to enter through the small gate.

 

A Commune of Fear

 On a blue-sky day near the sea shore, in my parents' home, I sat with a family friend, a professor of education at one of those now-Ivy League, quasi-Catholic (well, I could say "formerly Catholic but now oxymoronic") institutions; she was writing an article about white privilege in k-12 schools, and had asked me, a former Trivium professor, to edit it. When I sat down, I didn't know what it was about, and simply wanted to be helpful. As I discussed with her sentence clarity, I came across a point that seemed illogical, or unsound, and thought naively that perhaps it was about syntax. 

"No," she said in her sanguine, kind, energetic manner, "I'm really saying that white privilege is systemic, and this means that all white people are, as a class, guilty of racism." I don't know if my mind fell open, or my mouth. When she got up to see if her chocolate cake was done, my philosopher-husband must have seen a train wreck coming, so sidled up and quietly, under the racket of oven door and cake pans said, "She's a cultural Marxist." 

This was three years ago. Since then, I've been trying to understand this concept, and why my immediate response was that it was unsound, illogical, and fundamentally, an open door for social terrorism. I've been trying to understand, why, when she explained her point, I saw fire; I saw individual people crushed under the weight of a nameless, faceless, uniformity; I saw individuals subsumed into class, into deterministic fate, into fossils, no greater than the sum of the irrational forces of survival. Now, as I watch 2020 unfold and reveal more apocalyptic bits hiding in every crease, I see this fire again, and I see now the fullness of what has been unpacking and unfolding over the last century, the last five hundred years. Cultural Marxism, and its parents, Economic Determinism and Communism and Atheism, have a pedigree reaching back into the thought of Darwin, and even further back to the "state of nature" philosophers like Hobbes and Locke.

What is cultural Marxism? Complicated question; one can experience it, though, in the 2020 focus on "systemic racism," "white privilege," BLM, and even, perhaps, on MAGA groups. One hears it in terms like "social solidarity," "corporate kleptocracy," and "dismantling Western nuclear family and patriarchal structures," to name just a few. You experience it in the persecution of sacramental churches, the herd-like narratives presented by corporate-owned media, virtue-signaling, draconian business and middle-class busting, and robust, corporate-run censorship on social media platforms which is just one dance step away from the censorship I experienced first-hand in Russia during the death of the USSR.

To see that all these seemingly disparate elements are species of Marxism, one needs to see the fundamental roots of Marxism, and this is a wide-ranging, historical and philosophical definition. Building partly on an older book by Dr. J. Husslein, The Christian Social Manifesto, we have to start with a parent of cultural Marxism: Economic Determinism. This is a materialist conception of history and human organization, built, I think, partly on radical idea of a "state of nature" in the seventeenth century. For the first time in human history, thinkers like Hobbes and Locke posited an "extra-societal" theory of the origins of human rights and behaviors. Locke created a "state of nature" which emphasized the individual's right to private property as necessary for survival, and traces early human cooperation to the need for survival around one's labor and property; Hobbes, on the other hand, posited a "nasty, brutish, short" state of nature from which escape was necessary for survival, period. One could say that these two "state of nature" philosophers are respectively the direct root of Capitalism (via individual private property rights and contract theory divorced from the constraints of the Church) and the direct root of Communism (via the Leviathan necessary to control a brutish nature). 

However, if one looks more closely, they are perhaps two sides of the same coin. The "coin" is the assumption, first, that a "state of nature" beyond, prior to, any human society, is possible (do we just pop out of random bacteria--oh wait, that's Darwinism), and second, that political order is a bandage and not necessarily a good in itself. This fundamental "sameness" can be seen more clearly when it is contrasted with political theory in Western culture starting with the Greeks. For Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and until the Scientific Revolution and the Wars of Religion (15th-17th centuries), the political life was, on the one hand, the means by which human beings attained natural virtues and the development of their faculties in accord with the discernible order of the cosmos, and on the other, during Christendom, the reflection in society of the natural, eternal, and divine laws. As Pope Pius XI says in Quadragesimo Anno: 

For according to Christian doctrine, man endowed with a social nature, is placed here on earth in order that he many spend his life in society and under an authority ordained by God, that he may develop and evolve to the full all his faculties to the praise and glory of his Creator; and that, by fulfilling faithfully the duties of his station, he may attain to temporal and eternal happiness. (39). 

The Pope is saying that people are placed by God into society, not that they decided to create society out of a kind of nothingness; he is saying that society has a final cause, an end ordained by God that is for man's good and for the fulfillment of his nature as a rational creature made in the image of God, who is Himself a society. This is so very different, contrary, really, to the idea of a state of nature and therefore contrary to the political and economic societies produced by "state of nature" philosophers. The pernicious element entering through Locke and Hobbes is determinism: we are determined, in some way, by the need for survival. Survival is the end, either one's very life (Hobbes) or one's economic life (Locke). These forces of survival become the determiners for political, economic, and social life. At the root of human life is antagonism; no longer is the focus on love, or on the rational and its development, but is rather on a balance of forces to create order: for hegemony and survival. In essence, human nature is reduced and redefined. 

This lens of primal, survival forces creates logical conclusions: in societies, whether Hobbesian or Lockean, the state of nature will become a herd or group-like balance of forces, and these groups, like the individuals in the states of nature, will still be fighting for survival. Not only this, nature is defined not only as fundamentally competitive, it is also a nature requiring either Leviathan or contract theory to order it properly: this means, in effect (especially for Hobbes) that man in nature was not able to see or discern eternal or divine law, was not able to relate to a Creator, or to be primarily under His authority, that family is not ordained by God and the primary authority after God. 

As things developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, the progeny of Lockean thought was the American Regime built on contract theory and an absent, Deist god, the ravages of the mercantilist model, and the capitalist movement from Adam Smith's laissez-faire private capital and the mysterious forces of the market, much like the survival, individual right forces of the state of nature. The progeny of Hobbes, I would argue, was the absolutism of the 18th century monarchies and ultimately, Marx. 

Marx posited that the real forces, the real ends of human community, were found in economic struggle. Dr. Husslein says, "The final cause of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in mens' [rational apprehension of logos or God's order], but in changes in the modes of production and exchange"(58). To me, this sounds like the economic version of "state of nature." Like the scientific revolutionaries starting in the 16th century, Marx was looking for impersonal forces, or certain empirical laws that one could use as the ultimate principle for action. Like the American founders, Marx saw that if one built a system on how people really behave, rather than how they ought to behave, one was more likely to predict what will happen next and be able to manage it: economic determinism was born. Also, like the scientists and political thinkers fueling the Enlightenment, Marx wanted to create and articulate laws independent from the claims of Christianity. 

Why? He saw religion as just another, rival, means of control, an opiate: he saw that Christianity held that God is both the principle of order and that He makes demands on us for our own good and fundamentally relates to individual souls. Marx desired scientific, empirical certainty so that human beings as a collective could control their own ends. Furthermore, to Marx everything was actually, empirically, determined in a materialistic framework and so it was worshipping clouds to accept the claims of the Church and 2000 years of Christian thought. This is akin to the scientific, political, economic, and even religious revolutions of the centuries after the breakdown of Christendom. Dr. Husslein states, "The method of producing . . . material livelihood determines also the social, political, and intellectual processes of life in general (59) . . . underlying all this doctrine is the starkest materialistic evolution, claiming the descent of man, body and mind, from the truth: the evolution of the family from a purely animal herd, and denying, on the other hand, the existence of anything except matter and force, thus doing away with God, the soul, and free will"(60). In other words, materialism means determinism, which means that responsibility is meaningless, and therefore, so is free will and all overarching, cosmic, true, objective morality checking any human institution. The system, the State, becomes the morality because it is the ordering principle, the First Cause. 

Here we see the deeper connections between Economic Determinism, the principle under all Marxism,  Darwinism, and Capitalism. The picture of our modern world begins to come together: empirical, materialistic evidence is the only source of truth, and a grim, narrow 'realism' comes to maturity. Human beings are a step away from brutes to be managed, determined by their needs, passions, and selfishness. Fundamentally, these modern systems are built on the abolition of man based on the Christian conception, a conception that holds a special place, because it is simply true. The only form of a god allowed in any of these systems is the Enlightenment Deist, "clock-maker," but this was a short step to atheism, and Marx was honest about it. 

Many people no longer understand the Christian view of man and society, and so a study of Leo XIII on Catholic Social Teaching and Pius XI, along with Aquinas and Augustine, would be eye-opening. In principle, though, the Christian conception of human life is built on Love. It seems simplistic, but it is true. If one compares in particular the different understanding of economics and property, one sees that Catholic economic and social teaching centers around the model of the family, a unit not only economic but that of love. Reflecting God's love in the Trinity "the Father and I are one" the family has natural  hierarchy and love and responsibility reflecting the reality of the Trinity and the Mystical Body of Christ. Thus, in distributist economic theory (the most Catholic economic model), the good and thriving of the family is paramount; private ownership of property is as widely distributed as possible, because a certain amount of economic independence for the family allows for the unit to remain a unit, and to have responsibility and self-sufficiency, and therefore genuine morality, within the larger society. Love desires the beloved to flourish, and Catholic Social Teaching is built on this end, the same end that Christ expresses in his last discourse before His crucifixion. In a true Christian setting, responsibility for one's moral life reaches into all spheres of society, and the inherent morality of politics is acknowledged and balanced with the "check" and authority of the Church, Christ's Body. The final cause, or end, of all of this, and all of what God does and asks, is our flourishing, and human flourishing can only happen when we move toward our end, love-unity with God. This reality does not ignore sin, and failure, and the failure of Christendom was also self-inflicted, but denying its truth because of failure is like getting rid of the idea of family because parents mess up, and badly.

This must all sound incredibly foreign, and according to most moderns, unworkable. We live in deep pluralism, or we did. As Aristotle says, the instability of clamoring opinions easily gives way to the one voice of the tyrant, especially in times of fear and unrest. In our culture, an uneasy pluralism is giving way to another form of Marxism, just as Our Lady predicted at Fatima in 1917. 

In these times of great fear, and growing economic unrest, people are feeling more acutely the drive to survive, and the forces of the fittest (the most adept at survival) are encroaching on all of us in the form of medical tyranny and communistic groups demanding total acquiescence around their platform of meaning. Yet, having banished God long ago from our scientific, political, and economic spheres, we are not turning to the Logos, the Truth undergirding creation and human life. We have lost our end, and all we seem to care about is survival and maintaining our standards of living at all cost--even our free will, even our God-given, dignified right to make decisions for ourselves about the most basic things. We are at the mercy of both rabid capitalists in the form of the corporate kleptocracy on the one hand, and rabid communist groups on the other hand, who say openly that they will dismantle what is left standing of Western, Christian institutions and principles, and even the idea of the nuclear family present in almost all human cultures throughout history.  The Good and its concomitant, the "common good," are being forced to give way to rogue economic and political forces. 

And, setting the stage, intellectuals like the one I started with are involved in this: The idea that just because I am white means that I am inherently part of a system (read: force) that fosters racism is, simply, social Darwinism and cultural Marxism. I am not much more than a molecule in the current of white supremacy, fostered in the political and primarily economic systems. Do racist systems exist? Yes. Do evil systems exist? Yes. However, reducing human life to a force, a system, is also evil, because it attempts to devolve my nature from a responsible, free, rational creature in relationship with Logos, with God, to an element in a "force." This is not any different than becoming a Marxist "worker" where everyone is the same, and equality devolves from the love of God for each of us with an eternal end to just sameness, where dreams die because everything is determined and you exist to serve the collective ("social distancing is social solidarity"). One is forced to live a lie, because one is forced to be less than human, and to see others the same way.

I see this on the "Left" and on the "Right." Groups are no longer individuals with personal responsibility, but rather forces untied from any true and justified knowledge; sophistry reigns supreme. Just look at BLM's mission statement about dismantling Western culture into some racial and moral Borg, and The Proud Boys' statement (by founder McInnis), in which the right to drink beer in peace seems to be a euphemism for radical individualism. Of course the groups are reacting to each other, and become more extreme as the others do, and so it seems that Marx was right, after all, and Hobbes and Locke before him. 

How? Because we have built our modern societies on fear, not love. We have taken Hobbes at his word, and Marx at his word, and Locke, who relegated religion to the vestibule of society. We have lost love, because we have lost God, who is Love. We have taken survival of the fittest to heart, and this, of course, produces fear and means that Machiavelli makes the most sense; fear then re-enters, more virulent than before, and we in turn create more systems to control it. 

We have lost our desire for eternal life, and so we fear death and crush the dreams of millions of people, their businesses, their property, their lives, in order to escape it, all the while being manipulated by both capitalists and communists.