Respect in Apologetics

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The Catholic ControversyThe Catholic Controversy by Saint Francis De Sales
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was not an easy read, though not on account of the text. Francis de Sales’ work requires a certain philosophical mindset, but it is excellently written and addresses each topic specifically for the layman. Rather, this was difficult to read because in many places, it has opposed my own beliefs; even so, I will strive not to address matters of faith except insofar as they relate to this review.

Let me start with the negative points. This book is originally a collection of letters, with numerous author’s notes, ideas, and self-editing appended. As such, it does not always flow naturally. Some of the chapters seem to follow from the last, while others seem arbitrary, and occasionally, the editor will include an author’s note about wanting to add such-and-such a chapter where none is included. Also, the end of the book lacks any sense of finality; there is no summation, no conclusion. In the context of a series of letters, such a conclusion would make little sense, but in the context of an argumentative book, its absence leaves the reader wishing for closure.

The only other negative quibble I can pointedly offer is an editing issue: there are easily half a dozen typographical errors throughout the book. This may seem minor, but when addressing a matter as vital to the human person as religious faith, there is no room for mistakes, no allowance for deviation. A number of grammatical errors make it easy for the opponent to avoid the tough questions of the argument and attack the weakness of the arguer. Fallacious and ridiculous it may be, but still, it’s important.

Now for my praise. The book is very well written. Its argumentation is succinct, effective, reasonable, and based in Scripture. One of the shortcomings of modern debates is the disagreement on qualifications for evidence; atheists demand materialism, Protestants deny tradition and praise emotional experience, and Catholics require objective reasoning… yet when atheists, Protestants, and Catholics disagree, atheists speak entirely in materialistic terms, Protestants speak entirely in spiritual terms, and Catholics speak entirely in terms of tradition. Under this model, no one accomplishes anything.

Francis, on the other hand, acknowledges the belief structure of his audience and meets them where they are; he is “all things to all men,” so that he might save some (1 Corinthians 9). He knows that he is writing to Calvinists, so he takes the Calvinists’ bases of faith: Scripture, tradition only up to a point, predestination, and so on. Using that structure, even so, he efficiently and powerfully argues in favor of the Roman Catholic Church. As someone who followed Calvinism for a time, I found that Francis’ argumentation left Calvin without a leg to stand on.

There were a few specific moments that I found peculiarly prophetic, given that Francis was writing very early on during the Reformation. Here I sit now, looking back on five hundred years of Protestant history, and I find these expectations more apt than ever. In discussing the notion of valid interpretation of the Scriptures, Francis writes,

“Who knows not how many passages the Arian brought forward? What was there to be said against him except that he understood them wrongly? But he is quite right to believe that it is you who interpret wrongly, not he, you that are mistaken, not he; that his appeal to the analogy of the Faith is more sound than yours, so long as they are but private individuals who oppose his novelties. Yes, if one deprive the Councils of supreme authority in decision and declarations necessary for the understanding of the Holy Word, this Holy Word will be as much profaned as texts of Aristotle, and our articles of religion will be subject to never-ending revision, and from being safe and steady Christians we shall become wretched academics.” (pp164-65)

As a part-time academic, I found this especially apt. Academics, particularly in the realm of literary and philosophical study, are obsessed with novelty. New is always better – and if you can tie it into some modern philosophy, some notion of feminism or liberation theology or the emergent church, all the greater is your triumph. Day to day, the “accepted” understanding of Scripture or history or philosophy is morphed into something totally unrecognizable by its progenitors. Academia is subject to the whims of cultural phenomena, and by placing Scriptural interpretation within that realm, orthodoxy becomes moot and faith becomes relative. It not only will happen, it does happen; spend a few years in the religion department of nearly any university to see it in action.

Not long after, Francis writes on the subject of accepting the Councils’ authority (or, more generally, the authority of any tradition),

“We are not hesitating as to whether we should receive a doctrine at haphazard or should test it by the application of God’s Word. But what we say is that when a Council has applied this test, our brains have not now to revise but to believe. Once let the canons of Councils be submitted to the test of private individuals, as many persons, so many tastes, so many opinions.” (p167)

Here, too, we see a realty now enacted. Even within the Roman Catholic Church, which struggles so particularly with divergent liturgies and lapses among the faithful – there are even religious orders which oppose the Papacy, the Councils, and God Himself. It is the cultural milieu to allow personal opinions to influence one’s understanding of religious truths, as if one’s opinions could never be skewed by the sin nature which runs rampant within us. And we see among Protestants this phenomenon especially; where once there were the followers of Luther, then there were the followers of Luther and of Calvin and of Zwingli and of King Henry VIII; where once there were only these, now there are hundreds, even thousands of denominations, from Lutherans to Presbyterians to American Baptists to Southern Baptists to United Methodists to “apostle” churches to mega-churches to Jehovah’s Witnesses to Latter-Day Saints. It is the modus operandi to split from one’s church when it diverges from your personal opinion, and – to summarize this mathematically – as time T approaches infinity, the ratio R of persons to denominations approaches one. Eventually, if this trend continues, there will be no churches, no denominations, no religions – only people with opinions.

I will expound on one final quote: When discussing the primacy and authority of the Papacy, Francis goes into great detail explaining the difference between infallibility in cathedra (literally “in the chair,” i.e., the chair of Peter, referring to the belief that Peter was given authority to speak on issues of morality and faith) and infallibility extra cathedra (literally “outside the chair,” an infallibility which no one claims the Pope possesses). During this discussion, he addresses an issue which I have found to plague the writings of Protestants and Catholics alike in the centuries since the divide: ad hominem attacks. Francis writes,

“You read the writings of Calvin, of Zwingle [sic], of Luther. Take out of these, I beg you, the railings, calumnies, insults, detraction, ridicule, and buffoonery which they contain against the Pope and the Holy See of Rome, and you will find that nothing will remain. You listen to your ministers; impose silence upon them as regards railings, detraction, calumnies against the Holy See and you will have your sermons half their length. They utter a thousand calumnies on this point; this is the general rendezvous of all your ministers.” (p229)

In absence of good argumentation, debaters fall immediately to this option: defame your opponent, and you delegitimize his argument. Catholics, too, are guilty of this (I recently wrote a review addressing this very issue in the writings of a modern Catholic apologist and motivational speaker). Instead of addressing their opponents where they are, with reasons they will understand (as Francis does so well in this book), they simply decry their opponents as foul men. It is tantamount to a child being presented with a cogent argument and replying, “Yeah, well, you’re just a meanie!” (Except that Luther’s tongue is far more wicked in its verbiage.)

I do not include these things to proselytize, but to expound upon this detail: Francis was a very successful apologist for the Roman Catholic Church in his day, in no small part because he (1) knew his opponents, (2) applied reason and reasonable extrapolation to their arguments, and (3) avoided the fallacies that have plagued argumentation since the beginning of time.

In short, this is an excellent book, and a must-read for anyone trying to understand Roman Catholics and where they stand.

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Rediscovering the Editing Process

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Rediscover Catholicism: A Spiritual Guide to Living with Passion & PurposeRediscover Catholicism: A Spiritual Guide to Living with Passion & Purpose by Matthew Kelly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was an… interesting book.

There are a few caveats to my review. First, I am not part of the intended audience for the book. This books is marketed to Catholics, generally, and to lapsed, lukewarm, or non-practicing Catholics specifically. The entire point of this book is to remind Catholics what’s great about Catholicism and bring them back into the fold. With that in mind, my review is an assessment of Mr. Kelly’s success in this regard, using my rather unique perspective in this matter.

Second, I’m going to spend a lot of time on one chapter in particular (to wit, Chapter 15); this is because it’s the most glaring example of the areas in which this book failed. I admit, I do have a certain bias in this particular chapter, but I don’t believe I am overreacting. Feel free to judge for yourself, though; there will be quotes.

To begin: Most of the book is quite good. It reaches its target audience compellingly and effectively; it plays to their emotional and intellectual background, as well it should. It conveys its message with firm conviction and unwavering resolution, which is always good in a book exhorting people to become virtuous. And when he selects from the saints for examples, he tends to select saints (or saints-to-be) that most people know, thereby making the message both personal (these saints affected him personally) and relatable (“Hey! I’ve heard that name before!”).

And, for the most part, the editing is good. I didn’t notice any glaring errors in the first fourteen chapters (although, during those chapters, I wasn’t looking for any). Everything seemed cohesive; the book had a pleasant flow. The one awful editing choice that fills the entire book, and has nothing to do with chapter 15, is the hyphenation of a particular (set of) phrase(s). Because Mr. Kelly is exhorting his readers to become more virtuous, he often says that they should become a better, or even the best, version of themselves.

Only he doesn’t write it that way. He writes, “a-better-version-of-yourself,” “better-versions-of-ourselves,” “the-best-version-of-yourself,” “the-best-version-of-myself,” and “the-best-version-of-ourselves.” And it wasn’t a one-time event. I never went an entire chapter – and I hardly went an entire page – without seeing this travesty. I don’t know whether he made that choice, or his editor did, or whether it’s an Australian thing (if so, it’s still wrong), or what. But hyphenation is completely and totally unnecessary for that phrase, or any other like it. It was almost enough to put the book down sometimes – and that was before I got to chapter 15.

The only other note I took on an error was defining “eucharist” as “thanksgiving.” While clearly this has been perpetuated enough throughout history that “eucharistus” in the Latin dictionary brings up “thanksgiving” as an alternate definition, it’s quite… well, if not erroneous, then at least a little skewed. In the original Greek, “eu-charis-tos” means “good grace” or “graced well” or something similar. In other words, the Eucharist is a gift from God (a grace) that is good. I realize that this definition sounds a little boring and doesn’t play into encouragements toward thanking God for His gift, but it’s the fact of the matter, all the same.

Now, to the infamous aforementioned chapter: The subject is Scripture, and, to be more precise, how Catholics ought to be reading the Good Book a smidge more than they are now. However, the chapter begins with something quite out of character (so far in the book) for Mr. Kelly, and quite eviscerating for his entire façade as an ecumenist.

(Well, technically, it starts with one of those age-old tales about person A giving person B a Bible instead of the money that person B really wanted, and person B gets really mad for a long time, and then something happens to make person B pick up the Bible, only to find the money they wanted inside. I first heard it as a gift in a will to a guy who grew old and gray before he found the thousands; in Kelly’s version, a kid’s father gives it to him for his birthday, and then the father promptly dies. Either way, it doesn’t spruce up this chapter any more than it spruces up a lazy Sunday sermon.)

As soon as the parable is over, Mr. Kelly launches into a six-page rant against Protestants in general. (Now you see why I said I was biased.) There is no lead into this rant; there is no connection to the rest of the chapter at the end of this rant. It seems to me that Mr. Kelly had an unfortunate experience with a rather unpleasant Protestant and, like many cradle-Catholics (i.e., Catholics who were born into Catholic families and grew up Catholic, rather than converts), lumped all Protestants into the anger and vitriol he felt against this one person. Or, perhaps, Mr. Kelly genuinely feels this kind of repulsion at the existence of those who deny the veneration of Mary and the primacy of the Pope. But I digress.

In this chapter, and especially in this rant, the flaws in this book come flowing forth. Chapter 15 is the most poorly edited chapter of the entire book. It has poor pacing, awkward phrasing, excessive repetitions (using the same word three or four times in a sentence without any apparent intended effect, for example), and bad punctuation (using semicolons instead of commas, commas instead of semicolons, and even a couple of colons in place of who-knows-what).

As I mentioned, Mr. Kelly generally misrepresents mainstream Protestantism as united with fringe sensationalists and crazies. It is true that there are some oddballs who insist that the King James Version of the Bible is the true and authorized Word of God… but given what Catholics said about their translation of the Bible as little as sixty years ago, Mr. Kelly really doesn’t have any legs to stand on for that argument. Plus, most people don’t think such ridiculous things.

In reference to Protestants and their actions, Mr. Kelly uses violently insulting terminology. He writes that the Bible was “kidnapped by Protestant and Evangelical Christians,” who “corner” Catholics with a theory that “self-destructs into the most monumental case of well-argued nonsense in the history of humanity.” Harsh words, are they not? Especially for Christians and, shall we recall, separated brethren (not just heretics anymore!). (The “kidnapping” terminology is echoed in a later chapter, when he talks about evangelism.)

This rant also forges the book into a self-contradiction. He writes during his tirade, “It is this dynamic interaction between the Scriptures and tradition that keeps the Word alive”; later, when he has returned to his regularly scheduled programming, he writes, “Allow the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, alive and present in the Gospels, to sink their roots deep into your life.” Let us recall, Mr. Kelly, that the power of God is in His Word, and tradition springs from it; the roots give life to the leaves, and the leaves give energy to the roots. Without the roots, leaves wither; without the leaves, the roots grow more.

Similarly, during his rant, “Our non-Catholic Christian brothers and sisters place an enormous emphasis on reading and studying the Bible. […] Many modern Christians make it sound like it is impossible to receive salvation without a Bible. If that were the case, what happened to the people who lived before the Bible was printed?” Later, quoting St. Jerome (to whom many Protestants claim ironic allegiance), “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”

Oddly enough, Mr. Kelly’s rant also becomes, at one point, self-deprecatory. This seems rather unintentional, as many things do in such philippics, but it still sounds like Mr. Kelly is insulting the modern Church: “It is here, in the gap of most Protestants’ understanding of Christian history [i.e., the first 1500 years after Christ, before the printing press], that you find the beauty of Catholicism.” This suggests (though it does not declare) that it is difficult or even impossible to find the beauty of Catholicism anywhere else. (Naturally, he could mean that it is more starkly presented there, and he may well, but he should consider his words before he prints them in thousands of copies across the world.)

Mr. Kelly furthermore makes a rather obvious oversight in his characterization of “Catholics” versus “non-Catholics”: the Eastern Orthodox Church. Of all non-Catholic Christians, they are by far the most recognized by Roman Catholics as having good theological and moral standing. They are also, and have always been, non-Catholic.

But Mr. Kelly seems to have forgotten they existed at all (and for someone who claims a stronger knowledge of Church history than non-Catholics, this is surprising). He writes, “It is also interesting to note that the great majority of non-Catholic Christians have no idea that there are books missing from their Bible, just as all non-Catholic Christians are Protestants, whether they are aware of it or not.” First of all, the Eastern Orthodox Church accepts most, if not all, of the same Deuterocanonical books as the Roman Catholic Church; in some cases, they also accept other books, which the Catholics do not. Secondly, they are not Protestants; the Eastern Orthodox were the Eastern Orthodox (whether or not they ever used the name) five hundred years before there were any Protestants. And finally, I have met several Catholics were entirely unaware that their Bibles were even supposed to have more than 66 books.

He later writes, “For fifteen hundred years, when there were no Baptists, Lutherans, Pentecostals, Methodists, Anglicans, Evangelicals, Non-denominationals, or any other Christian Church of any type, the Catholic Church preserved the Scriptures from error, saved them from destruction and extinction, multiplied them in every language under the sun, and conveyed the truths they contained to people everywhere.” This should be rather obviously erroneous, and I think any monk east of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas would disagree vehemently. I will applaud Mr. Kelly, of course, for taking the time to look up some names for some denominations (although I think capitalizing “non-denominational” misses the point).

This chapter, chapter 15, was such an odd departure for Mr. Kelly in his stated opinions of non-Catholic Christians. He often used the term “separated brethren” (see: Second Vatican Council) and generally referred to them in an imprecise, but respectful manner. And then the reader gets blindsided with this. It was quite unnerving. Oddly enough, he spends most of the six pages defending the common Catholic ignorance of Scripture – the very same ignorance that he eschews in the pages to follow. Pages which, I shall remind you, never mention this rant again, and never the twain shall meet.

Beyond that, I only have two notes from my reading of the rest of the book. On the one hand, his editing errors seem to continue. I think this is explained, to a small degree, when he writes in the final chapter of the book, “The problem with books is that they are never really finished; they are only ever abandoned. You could keep writing and rewriting the same book for your whole life and never be fully satisfied with it.” He seems to have done just this: read over his book, decided to add some content, and failed to finish the proper editing process. This very passage seems similarly disjointed from the rest of the final chapter.

The last page has my last note. When I read, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things,” I heard it in Tim Robbins’ voice in my head, straight out of “The Shawshank Redemption.” And when I read, “I hope…” I heard it in Morgan Freeman’s voice from the same film. While I don’t begrudge the man saying totally honest and true things about hope, and the similarity could be (and probably is) entirely coincidental, I think avoiding iconic and thematic quotes from major motion pictures should be standard in books, unless an homage is intended (which seems unlikely here).

At any rate, I make the book sound worse than it is, and I know that. Three stars really is honest. Most of the book is effective and helpful. Even the remainder of chapter 15 is mostly delightful and uplifting. But something, somewhere along the line, went horribly wrong.

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I Knew Learning Latin Would Pay Off Someday

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A Canticle for LeibowitzA Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

NOTE: Some spoilers follow.

Miller’s “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is indeed a marvelous work of modern science fiction. It wraps up the natural fear of nuclear weapons (which Miller no doubt experienced as he watched the bombs fall on Japan) and combines it with the innovative “what if” of a long and storied history.

“Canticle” does an excellent job of providing a deeply religious perspective on a dark and troubled future, with the full awareness of human nature and a Catholic understanding of original sin. The book ends with an intriguing twist on that doctrine, but – while it may be outside the normal realm of theological presumption – it is presented from a humble and simple eye, which presumes nothing of its own accord. Miller’s work here is delightful.

Enjoyable, too, are the echoes of the Mass and the cleverness of Miller’s classical education, which plays out in this work. There were a number of jokes and layers which I could not have understood without my knowledge of the Latin language or the Catholic Mass. Miller’s weave of these issues borders on the brilliant.

Now, downsides: first, Miller is a writer of short stories. This is evident in that each of the three parts of “Canticle” could be read and, more or less, understood apart from the others. There are elements that tie them together, but seeing those strings is more like gravy than substance. Of course, in a story that spans over a thousand years, this is to be expected to some degree. Even so, I would have appreciated more intricacies of plot between the sections.

I felt, too, that there were a few questions left unanswered. The nature and identity of the nomad, or Benjamin, or Lazarus, is unclear. Miller never resolves that question, at least not satisfactorily. There is some implication about the identity of the man, which plays (quite cleverly, if non-traditionally) on the lack of details about the (second) death of Lazarus, the friend of Jesus, in the Bible. But I would have liked more resolution there.

But all of that said, the book is excellent. The imagery and depth of the story is striking, and I am glad all the more for having read this delightful work of science fiction.

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