Stromata Blog

The Last Day of Arthur Andersen

You probably didn’t realize that Arthur Andersen LLP still exists. It’s a withered existence: a couple of hundred employees, one location, a small revenue stream from educational seminars, and a not-yet-finished trail of litigation. Today the most publicized of the legal cases, the firm’s June 2002 conviction for obstructing an SEC investigation, reached the Supreme Court.

According to reports on the oral argument (links usefully collected at SCOTUS Blog), six of the Justices spoke up, and every one of them expressed skepticism about the basis of the conviction. That really ought not to be a surprise.

The charge against Andersen was that it “corruptly persuade[d]” its employees to prevent the SEC staff from obtaining documents relating to its Enron audits. Its specific criminal acts began with (and consisted of little more than) an e-mail sent by an in-house lawyer to the firm’s Houston office (the one that audited Enron) that read, in its entirety: “Mike - It might be useful to consider reminding the engagement team of our documentation and retention policy. It will be helpful to make sure that we have complied with the policy. Let me know if you have any questions.” The recipient forwarded this message to the lead audit partner with the laconic note, “More help”.

This policy referred to was a standard one, well known to the SEC and indisputably legal, that required the retention of all material essential to supporting the firm’s audit conclusions. Once an audit was completed, drafts and other superseded materials, except for “source documents”, were to be discarded.

Employees in the Houston office later destroyed a great deal of documentation, in at least some cases violating the record retention standards. The government could have prosecuted the individuals who engaged in those acts for obstruction. Instead, it went after Andersen as an entity. The gist of the case was that the e-mail quoted above and follow-up actions were the proximate cause of the misdeeds and that Andersen’s headquarters had a “corrupt” motive in transmitting it. The decisive “proof” of corruption, according to a post-trial interviews with jurors, was a mid-level lawyer’s request that her name be left out of a memorandum summarizing a conference call, because she didn't want to increase the risk of having to appear as a witness in any future litigation. As the Wall Street Journal, in a news article generally favorable to the prosecution, summarized at the time,

What began as an indictment for massive illegal document destruction by the firm’s accountants ended with the finding, the four jurors said, of a lone instance of attempted illegal document alteration by a newly hired Andersen lawyer.

The guilty verdict was tantamount to a death sentence. The courts have since been considering post mortem appeals. An Andersen brief reduced the firm’s crime to simple terms:

Although it was perfectly lawful for Andersen to have a document retention policy that preserved only the final audit work papers, and perfectly lawful for Andersen’s employees and professionals to follow that policy, it was somehow a serious felony for Andersen’s in-house attorney and supervisors to remind its employees of the policy.

Yes, indeed, the government’s advocate reiterated at oral argument: If there was a “reasonable probability” that drawing attention to the retention policy would obstruct an official probe, doing so was “corrupt”. He conceded that acting in accordance with the policy was not a criminal act; the crime was urging someone else to follow it.

If reporters’ impressions are to be trusted, the Court will not agree, which will be a good decision, though only a small pruning of one of the great vices of modern American law. In what we now think of as the Bad Old Days, prosecutors had immense leeway in gathering evidence. They then, however, had to deploy that evidence to prove all of the narrowly delineated elements of a clearly defined crime.

Today, obtaining evidence that can be presented in court is a difficult, highly technical challenge, but definitions of criminal conduct have become so blurry and subjective that, as the Andersen case shows, not much is needed to win a conviction. The net effect is that, when an awful event occurs, it’s no harder now than it was fifty years ago to convict somebody of something. That the new regime of tough evidentiary standards and vague laws is an improvement is not blindingly obvious. Perhaps Andersen’s death throes will encourage reflection on where our notions of what constitutes a “crime” are going and whether we like that direction.

Espers in the Offing?

Not quite, but New Scientist has an account of a form of mind reading. Yukiyasu Kamitani, at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, and Frank Tong at Princeton used MRI scanners to monitor subjects’ brainwave patterns.

The pair showed patterns of parallel lines in 1 of 8 orientations to four volunteers. By focussing on brain regions involved in visual perception they were able to recognise which orientation the subjects were observing.

Each line orientation corresponded to a different pattern of brain activity, although the patterns were different in each person. What is more, when two sets of lines were superimposed and the subjects were asked to focus on one set, the researchers could work out which one they were thinking of from the brain images.

In a separate study using the same technique,

John-Dylan Haynes and Geraint Rees at University College London, UK, showed two patterns in quick succession to 6 volunteers. The first appeared for just 15 milliseconds – too quick to be consciously perceived by the viewer.

But by viewing MRI images of the brain, the researchers were able to say which image had been flashed in front of the subjects. The information was perceived in the brain even if the volunteers were not consciously aware of it.

Of course, a telepathic spy will be awfully conspicuous if he has to tote around an MRI machine and persuade his targets to stick their heads in. The apparent uniqueness of each brain’s emanations is likewise an obstacle. Still, one can imagine miniaturized scanners with effective ranges of a few feet, the secret compilation and computer analysis of thousands of hours of the brainwaves of individuals of interest, and an eventual erosion of our last bastion of utter privacy. But not any time soon, I hope.

Another Reason to Regret That Britain Has Elections

With less than two weeks to go until May 5th, the Conservative Party’s leader has decided, reports the Daily Telegrah, to make an issue out of whether it was “illegal” to depose Saddam Hussein. Michael Howard either does or doesn't think that national security should be subordinated to lawyers’ opinions. If he does, he is grossly unfit to lead a serious government. If he doesn’t, he is what he accuses Tony Blair of being: a man telling “lies” for the sake of winning an election. Regardless of which alternative is correct, his tactic reinforces a dangerous tendency in British public opinion.

For reasons that I’ve outlined before, there is no realistic chance that Mr. Howard will wind up at Number 10 Downing Street. (The latest YouGov poll puts the party standings at 37% Labour, 33% Conservative, 24% Liberal Democrat, which Electoral Calculus estimates would yield 373 seats for Labour, a hundred more than all other parties combined.) He knows that as well as I do. Since he claims to be the successor to Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, could he not at least run an honorable race, saying what the voters need to hear about the Islamofascist threat rather than joining, by clear implication, the “Everything is America’s Fault” chorus? The attack on Mr. Blair for “illegality” is, of course, an attack on George W. Bush for having dared to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq. So much for the Special Relationship between the U.K. and the U.S. that once meant a great deal to Conservative statesmen.

Incidentally, though it means nothing at all, my first complete game of Prime Minister Forever’s U.K. 2005 scenario, in which my version of Mr. Howard adamantly supported the liberation of Iraq, resulted in a dead heat: 232 seats for Labour, 230 for the Conservatives, 120 for the LibDems. If the real-world Tories could look forward to an outcome like that, they would be ecstatic.

Lenten Weblog, Day 41: Lazarus Saturday

Today is the Feast of the Raising of Lazarus, which along with Palm Sunday tomorrow, forms a joyous interlude before the somber tragedy of Holy Week, as well as a prelude to the triumph of Christ’s Resurrection.

Bringing Lazarus back to life after four days in the tomb stands out among Our Lord’s miracles. Cures and exorcisms are unspectacular fare by comparison. The question naturally arises: If Jesus performed this miracle, if all of Lazarus’ family and friends could testify to it, how could there have been any doubt about His divinity? Wouldn’t all unbelief be instantly silenced?

Extending that thought, why, if God is real, doesn’t He show Himself to us with wonders that no atheist could deny? Instead His power skulks in the shadows, revealed, so it seems, only to those who are predisposed to believe in Him without tangible proof.

The answer is that belief in supernatural forces is not good in and of itself. Magicians and Satanists believe in them, too. Those who saw the raising of Lazarus knew only that a man who claimed to be a prophet had performed a miracle. How they reacted to that news depended less on what Jesus did than on their own characters. If they already loved God, they were drawn nearer to Him by this sign of His love for a stricken friend. If they loved only the things of this world, they saw a possible benefactor, a bestower of health, wealth and pleasures, to be approached in the same manner as any earthly despot. The Gospels forbear to record it, but we may be sure that Our Lord was surrounded by flatterers and schemers, by men who desired to use Him for their own purposes. Some of those purposes may have been idealistic: to free Israel from its Roman masters or relieve poverty through perpetual manna from Heaven. Others were less creditable. All were distortions, for they treated God as a means rather that as the supreme end.

Cheap miracles, dispensed to all and sundry, would alter most people’s conception of how the world operates, but not of what its purpose is. The supernatural would be just another tool, which wicked men would seek to use wickedly. It is only a man who is already moving toward union with God who can profit when God touches his life in a manner outside the ordinary course of nature. The rest are better left in the shadows until they are ready to receive the true light.

Troparion - Tone 1

By raising Lazarus from the dead before Your passion,
You did confirm the universal Resurrection, O Christ God!
Like the children with the palms of victory,
We cry out to You, O Vanquisher of death;
Hosanna in the Highest!
Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord!

Kontakion - Tone 2

Christ the Joy, the Truth and the Light of all,
The Life of the World and the Resurrection
Has appeared in His goodness, to those on earth.
He has become the Image of our Resurrection,
Granting divine forgiveness to all!

And now, after 41 consecutive days, I’m going to bring the Lenten Weblog to a close. Lent isn’t over, but there are plenty of church services to occupy my time between Palm Sunday and Easter. Attending to them will be more profitable to my soul than writing these foolish and inadequate words. May Holy Week be blessed to all, as we await the glory of Pascha.

Lenten Weblog, Day 40: Readings

Being a bit weary this evening, I think that I’ll forgo trying to write creatively. Here instead are a trio of excerpts from essays worth reading:

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Benedict XVI), “Biblical Aspects of the Question of Faith and Politics” (homily delivered in 1981):

The state is not the whole of human existence and does not embrace the whole of human hope. Men and women and their hopes extend beyond the thing that is the state and beyond the sphere of political activity. This does not only apply to a state that is Babylon but to any and every state. . . .

But when Christian faith, faith in man’s greater hope, decays and falls away, then the myth of the divine state rises up once again, because men and women cannot renounce the totality of hope. Even when such promises . . . proclaim as their goal the complete liberation of mankind and the elimination of all domination, they stand in contradiction to the truth of man and in contradiction to his or her freedom, because they force people into what they can achieve themselves. This kind of politics that declares the kingdom of God to be the result politics and distorts faith into universal primacy of the political is by its nature the politics of enslavement; it is mythological politics. . . .

It is of course always difficult to adopt the sober approach that does what is possible and does not cry enthusiastically after the impossible; the voice of reason is not as loud as the cry of unreason. The cry for the large-scale has the whiff of morality; in contrast limiting oneself to what is possible seems to be renouncing the passion of morality and adopting the pragmatism of the faint-hearted. But in truth political morality consists precisely of resisting the seductive temptation of the big words by which humanity and its opportunities are gambled away. It is not the adventurous moralism that wants itself to do God’s work that is moral, but the honesty that accepts the standards of man and in them does the work of man. It is not refusal to compromise but compromise that in political things is the true morality. . . .

Christian faith has destroyed the myth of the divine state, the myth of the state as paradise and a society without domination. In its place it has put the objectivity of reason. But this does not mean that it has produced a value-free objectivity, the objectivity of statistics and a certain kind of sociology. To the true objectivity of men and women belongs humanity, and to humanity belongs God. To genuine human reason belongs the morality that is fed by God’s commandments. This morality is not some private affair; it has public significance. Without the good of being and doing good there can be no good politics. What the persecuted Church laid down for the Christian as the core of its political ethos must also be the core of any active Christian politics; it is only when good is done and recognized as good that a good human social existence can thrive. To bring to public acceptance as valid the standing of morality, the standing of God’s commandments, must be the core of responsible political activity.

Bishop Hilarion of Vienna and Austria, “Habemus Papam!”:

What do I, as an Orthodox bishop living and serving in Europe, expect from the new pontificate?

First of all, that the Catholic Church continues to preserve its traditional doctrinal and moral teaching without surrendering to pressures from the ‘progressive’ groups that demand the ordination of women, the approval of the so-called ‘same-sex marriages’, abortion, contraception, euthanasia etc. There is no doubt that Benedict XVI, who has already made his positions on these issues clear, will continue to oppose such groups, which exist both within the Catholic Church and outside it. . . .

I hope, next, that there will be a general amelioration in the relations between the Catholic Church and the world Orthodoxy. . . . My fear, however, is that by concentrating exclusively on the dividing issues we are likely to lose precious time that could be used for a common witness to the secularized world. Europe, in particular, has so rapidly dechristianized that urgent action is needed in order to save it from losing its centuries-old Christian identity. I strongly believe that the time has come for Catholics and Orthodox to unite their efforts and to defend traditional Christianity, which is being attacked from all sides. In twenty, thirty of forty years it may simply be too late.

Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, “Biblical Repentance”:

Repentance is the arche, the foundational principle, of the life in Christ; it functions in the life of grace as the number “one” functions in arithmetic. It is not simply the “first” step of the Christian life. Repentance, rather, provides the abiding and formative structure of the whole life in Christ. Repentance is not a first step that we take with a view to getting past it. We are called to remain forever repentant. Although there is certainly progress to be made in the life of grace, all genuine progress is indicated by a renewal of repentance. A Christian does not “grow” in Christ by diminishing in repentance. True growth and authentic progress in Christ always imply growth and progress in repentance. . . .

[T]he Bible indicates that the conversion of repentance is not just an act of God; it is also an act of man’s free will under the accepted influence of God’s grace. Man’s heart, his interior, is altered by repentance. . . .

[B]ecause repentance is the free decision of man as well as the free gift of God, the grace of repentance, if not properly safeguarded, can also be lost. . . . [T]he blessed assurance given us in Christ (cf. Romans 8:31-39) is no substitute for humility and vigilance. At no point in our Christian lives can we afford to forget that we must work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), with discipline lest we fall away (1 Corinthians 9:27). “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (10:12). . . .

Repentance is the non-negotiable, foundational constant of the life in Christ. However much God’s saints differ from one another in style, tone, and emphasis, repentance is a grace and discipline – a principle – shared by them all.

Lenten Weblog, Day 39: Too Many Years?

Rand Simberg, one of my favorite writers on space policy, uses the papal election as a hook for an essay, “Habemus Papam...Ad Perpetuitatem?”, wondering what the Church thinks about the prospect of “extreme life extension and indefinitely-long healthy human life spans”. From his tone I suspect that he believes traditional Christianity to be basically hostile to the idea, even if “there wouldn’t seem to be any existing ecclesiastically doctrinal reason” for that attitude. He foresees that the current Pope or a successor might “draw a line, and declare certain life-extending, life-enhancing therapies to be un-Catholic”, even if they didn’t “require killing embryos, or some other means that is morally problematic”.

To be fair and balanced, that suspicion only lurks in the background. The essay’s principal theme is that Christians haven’t thought a great deal about the moral implications of increasing longevity.

In a world of conventional life spans, we can always console ourselves with the thought that, if we’re stuck with a dud pope, or a particularly nasty and competent dictator, or an overactivist judge, no one lasts forever.

But what if they do? What are the implications of this for the future of the Church? Or of dictators (who are usually the first in their own nations to take advantage of new medical techniques)? Or the Supreme Court? Or indeed, any position which, in our current finite-lived reality, is defined as a term for life? And what will be the response of the Church in particular, which like most churches, partly grew in response to the innate human fear of death, in a world in which death was commonplace, to a world in which it becomes a rarity, only resulting from severe injuries occurring too far from medical facilities?

Questions like that aren’t really answerable, because, despite the great medical advances of the past century, a world in which death is rare is still a long way off. One needs a more precise scenario – How long do men live? What medical technology is needed to sustain them? How healthy are they? – to speculate about its practical consequences. On the other hand, there are a few broad principles that, it seems to, must be taken into account in any Christian view of the issue.

Christianity has always affirmed that life on Earth is a blessing and death a curse. In the Orthodox Church, “God grant you many years!” is a frequent acclamation, not “God take you to Heaven swiftly”. Earthly life is not the whole of life; neither is it a trivial prologue to be rushed through on the way to the real performance. Although each of us will live forever, these years of mortality are, to the best of our knowledge, the decisive period of our existence, during which we will either gain eternal glory or cut ourselves off forever from God. From a purely utilitarian point of view, we ought not to be in a hurry.

Still, the blessing of life is not the foremost blessing. No one, including non-Christians, thinks that it is. Were youthful, healthy life always preferable to death, we would praise soldiers who run away from battle. It is possible to make oneself miserable through excessive love of life, just as through excessive love of wealth or food or sex or any other natural good. At the same time, the expectation of many, many years can be an inducement to sloth and ennui. There may be other bitterness in the blessing, too, as I wrote a few years ago:

That the nearness of death repels laziness is no surprise. There are other, subtler psychological effects. Those who have the most potential life to lose are likely to be the least willing to risk it, and aversion to risk, once it gains a foothold in men’s habits, can little by little come to dominate their doings.

In the Age of Exploration, a majority of those who boarded ships for the New World died on the voyage. In our faltering Age of Space Exploration, a handful of deaths traumatize opinion. When the Mir got into trouble, commentators averred that, if the single American on board died, it would be politically impossible to go forward with the International Space Station – and they were probably right.

It was not just that people did not want to risk their own lives. They did not want to see even willing volunteers in jeopardy. Risk aversion, it seems, has become deeply ingrained in the national psyche. The most straightforward explanation is that, just as rich men dread robbers and tremble when others than themselves are robbed, those who feel that they have a natural right to fourscore-and-ten years easily pass from a normal fear of death to a morbid phobia. Eventually, the joy of life is stultified by precautions against losing it.

For our ancestors, so far as one can now discern, the relative shortness of life did surprisingly little to diminish human happiness. Probing the psychology of the past is treacherous, but it is surely noteworthy that depression, suicide and despair did not become visible literary themes until the 18th century nor obsessive ones until the 20th. The melancholy that accompanies the demise of a young Dickensian heroine is tinged with sweetness and hope. Nowadays, except in overtly camp performances like Love Story, the typical novelistic or dramatic response to dying, at almost any age, is rage against man and the universe. Angels in America has displaced David Copperfield and Marion Fay.

That longer life is not a prescription for unalloyed happiness is one of the reasons why we should be cautious about taking morally questionable steps obtain it. In no moral calculus does a mediocre end justify extreme means. Almost everyone, Peter Singer excepted, I suppose, would shrink from killing a healthy newborn infant in order to gain several centuries of personal happiness. Isn’t it then prudent to refrain from killing unborn children when the prospective reward is nothing more than a few decades of life that may not be particularly pleasant or happy?

A quick summary of what I believe to be the Christian answer to Mr. Simberg’s question amounts to this: Prolonging the span of healthy human life would be a great good, but it is not a good to be pursued at all costs, and it will not add as much as many imagine to the sum of human happiness. Ultimately, life in this world, however long it lasts, is of no length at all compared to eternity. Whether we survive for a hundred years or ten thousand, it behooves us to direct our thoughts to the life of the age to come, for that is where our future lies.

Quote of the Day

The OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription-only but underpriced at $3.95 a month) is, like me, growing weary of blonde pyromaniacs:

Ms. Coulter’s shtick is to be outraged and if there is any hint now of real panic in her voice, it's fear that making the cover of Time is a sign she has peaked. In her career, she’s sold a lot of books and perhaps even advanced a few conservative ideas along the way. But her rise came in the freewheeling days of Bill Clinton, when the Internet and cable news were fresh on the scene and the country was hungry for an inflammatory commentator. It’s been a long time since conservatives were truly on the outside looking in, and today what the faithful really need is not galvanizing outrage but intelligent analysis. We can expect Ms. Coulter to continue to throw her grenades. But those explosions have ceased to be useful for the right and one of these days she’ll find out she has nothing but duds left.

While Ann Coulter’s heart may be in the right place, she all too often gives the impression that she has deliberately left her brains outside the door. If I were her advisor, I’d recommend a sabbatical, during which she could read, reflect and keep out of the spotlight. It would do her – and the conservative cause – a world of good.

Lenten Weblog, Day 38: Zacchaeus the Tax Collector

Today is the feast day of St. Zakkai, the undersized architelones (a unique word but transparently synonymous with telonarches, “chief collector of customs”) of the city of Jericho, who climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus and was summoned to be His host at dinner. Delighted rather than offended by such presumptuousness, Zakkai announced his intention to give half his wealth to the poor and to repay fourfold any taxes that he had taken unjustly. In return, Jesus says, “Today has salvation come to this house.”

This anecdote, related only by Luke (19:1-10), includes no miracles or prophecies. It does make the point that Our Lord, as part of his mission to save sinners, was willing to consort with them, but that lesson sounds as if it has been tacked on. One wonders to what extent it really fits. Zakkai seems like an eminently respectable figure. The crowd grumbles that he is a sinner, but he does not confess to sinful conduct, nor does Jesus accuse him. The almsgiving and proffered restitution proceed prima facie from Zakkai’s joy at being recognized and honored by One whom he admires intensely.

Commentators twist their pens into knots searching out reasons why this sin-and-repentance or proclamation-to-the-outcast story should be so different from others in Luke. The simple answer is the most obvious: Zakkai’s encounter with the great rabbi was one of his treasured memories, and he recounted it to Luke or Luke’s source. Luke put it into his history because it was amusing and edifying. If, as modernist critics tend to assume of the entire Gospel narrative, it was a heavily redacted “tradition” or an invention with a theological purpose, it somehow never lost its concreteness or absorbed extraneous moralization. Why not follow Ockham’s advice and posit that it really happened and that we have a record not far from the literal facts?

In those mere facts a moral does reside, one that, so far as I know, is rarely brought out in sermons. Zakkai was a wealthy and important man, presumably a dignified figure and perhaps, if he was like many short-statured people, a bit touchy about his dignity. Nonetheless, when Jesus came to Jericho and a crowd gathered to see Him, this architelones did not have his servants clear a way to the front rank. He did not exert his power to seize a place near the Lord. Instead, he humbly climbed a tree, an act that cannot be done with much dignity. He would have been sitting there, clinging to the boughs like a schoolboy at play, when suddenly Jesus turned toward him, making him conspicuous to the throng, and said, “Zacchaeus, come down. Hurry, because I must stay at your house today.” (Luke 19:5 [Jerusalem Bible]) And the rich tax collector, heedless of appearances, unembarrassed by being made to look comical in front of his fellow citizens, clambered down from his perch, his heart overflowing with joy.

According to tradition, Zakkai followed Christ after His Resurrection and was appointed by St. Peter to lead the Christian community in Caesarea. That is not certain, however, and we know nothing about what else he did or when or how he died. He has one moment in history, when he subordinated fear of ridicule to love of the Lord and found salvation in that moment of humility.

Apolytikion – Tone 3

Having justly hated unjust riches, thou didst lay up treasures of salvation; for, receiving the Saviour within thy house, thou, O Zacchaeus, wast truly made marvelous with all the fruits of repentance thou broughtest forth: deeds of mercy, the correction of wrongs, and godly life, because of which we honour thee and call thee blest.

Kontakion – Tone 4

When He that bowed the Heavens came to save sinners, Zacchaeus, great in zeal, but little of stature, beheld the Tree of Life from in the sycamore; lifted above the earth, he saw Jesus, Who called him: coming down in lowliness, he repenting, received Him; and so salvation came into his house, and he was shown forth a true son of Abraham.

What We Get for Our TSA Dollars

From today’s Wall Street Journal [link for subscribers only]:

A congressional investigation found airport screeners employed by private companies do a better job detecting dangerous objects than do government screeners, according to a House member who has seen the classified report.

The Government Accountability Office found statistically significant evidence that passenger screeners, who work at five airports under a pilot program, perform better than their federal counterparts at 450 airports, said Rep. John Mica (R., Fla.) and chairman of the House aviation subcommittee. . . .

TSA screeners’ ability to find guns, weapons and other dangerous items since the Sept. 11 attacks has been an ongoing concern.

The Homeland Security Department's acting inspector general, Richard Skinner, issued a separate report yesterday that said the screeners’ performance hadn’t improved since the previous audit – which indicated that screeners hadn't improved since before the 2001 terrorist attacks.

In both inspector-general audits, undercover agents tried to smuggle fake weapons and bombs past screeners.

The reason why airport security (except in San Francisco, Kansas City, Rochester, Tupelo and Jackson Hole) was placed in the hands of a government department can be summarized in one psychological observation: People are monarchists at heart. They subconsciously believe that a well-intentioned central authority, exerting its will for the public good, can accomplish whatever it sets out to do. We now have airport screening procedures that are more thorough than ever before – “better” in the sense that more bags are opened, more travelers patted down and fewer sort-of-dangerous items, like cigarette lighters and nail clippers, brought on board by passengers who have no intention of using them dangerously – but not good enough to fulfill its mission of stopping moderately clever enemies from slipping past with deadly armament.

My own security plan is, I’ll admit, about as utopian as the TSA’s top-down, search-everything vision. Were it up to me, I would dispense with screening, except for bombs, and let passengers take on board whatever personal weaponry they liked, in the confidence that, on any given airplane, would-be terrorists will be outnumbered and outgunned. More moderately, we could continue to try to keep firearms off planes but let pilots and crew members carry them. If Mohammed al-Jihadi, boxcutter in hand, wishes to meet his 72 virgins by confronting an Air Force veteran packing a nine-millimeter, well, such is the will of Allah.

Or, at the very least, those of us who travel should demand that our safety be put back into the hands of free enterprise, whose best may currently be poor but tops the bureaucracy’s.

Lenten Weblog, Day 37: Quid Timent?

For the enemies that he has already made, Pope Benedict XVI merits the admiration of Christians everywhere. Rarely has bile been so refreshing. My only regret is that our Orthodox Patriarchs are not hated so shrilly and with so much reason.

Quid timent? What are they afraid of? Andrew Sullivan comically pretends to tremble for freedom itself:

It would be hard to over-state the radicalism of this decision. It’s not simply a continuation of John Paul II. It’s a full-scale attack on the reformist wing of the church. The swiftness of the decision and the polarizing nature of this selection foretell a coming civil war within Catholicism. The space for dissidence, previously tiny, is now extinct. And the attack on individual political freedom is just beginning.

Sullivan’s insinuation that the new Pope is hostile to political freedom is easy to debunk. Amusing is his notion of the ogre’s modus operandi:

He is a creature of theological discourse, a man of books and treatises and arguments. He proclaims his version of the truth as God-given and therefore unalterable and undebatable. His theology is indeed distinguished, if somewhat esoteric and at times a little odd. But his response to dialogue within the church is to silence those who disagree with him. He has no experience dealing with people en masse, no hands-on experience of the challenges of the church in the developing world, and complete contempt for dissent in the West.

So “a man of books and treatises and arguments” refuses to debate “his version of the truth”? The man whom Sullivan slanders as a “Grand Inquisitor” has been as vigorous a debater as any prelate of the past century. How many bishops or theologians give book-length interviews to mainstream journalists or have huge bibliographies?

What the instantaneous anti-Benedictines fear is not that the Vatican will suddenly devise tools to suppress freedom of thought – how many policemen has the Pope? – but that a vigorous, intellectual Pope will argue effectively for a Faith that is far more reasonable than its contemporary challengers.

In his pre-election homily, the then-Cardinal highlighted the central weakness of modernist concepts of religion and morality: their abandonment of natural reason in favor of “truths” founded on private feelings. That sort of self-created doctrine can give no account of itself. At its roots, it is irrational and unsustainable.

We should not remain infants in faith, in a state of minority. And what does it mean to be an infant in faith? Saint Paul answers: it means “tossed by waves and swept along by every wind of teaching arising from human trickery” (Eph 4, 14). This description is very relevant today!

How many winds of doctrine we have known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking… The small boat of thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – thrown from one extreme to the other: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism, and so forth. Every day new sects are created and what Saint Paul says about human trickery comes true, with cunning which tries to draw those into error (cf Eph 4, 14). Having a clear faith, based on the Creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas, relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and “swept along by every wind of teaching”, looks like the only attitude (acceptable) to today’s standards. We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.

However, we have a different goal: the Son of God, true man. He is the measure of true humanism. Being an “Adult” means having a faith which does not follow the waves of today’s fashions or the latest novelties. A faith which is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ is adult and mature. It is this friendship which opens us up to all that is good and gives us the knowledge to judge true from false, and deceit from truth. We must become mature in this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith – only faith – which creates unity and takes form in love. On this theme, Saint Paul offers us some beautiful words - in contrast to the continual ups and downs of those were are like infants, tossed about by the waves: (he says) make truth in love, as the basic formula of Christian existence. In Christ, truth and love coincide. To the extent that we draw near to Christ, in our own life, truth and love merge. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like “a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal” (1 Cor 13,1).

There can be no attitude more egotistical and unloving than the insistence that our personal convenience and desire be validated by the Church, regardless of whether it conforms to what Scripture, Tradition and Natural Law teach. If a man believes that the Church is the Body of Christ, his reaction to disagreeable-seeming teachings ought to not to be, “Jettison them!” but “What can I learn from them? Am I so certain that my impulses are right and the voice of the Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church wrong?”

A Pontiff who hammers home the theme that moral relativism is a form of tyranny, in which we make ourselves slaves to desire and refuse liberation by reason, is a threat to the ascendancy of comfortable irrationality. The call to become adult children of the Father is disturbing to those who, as C. S. Lewis put it in The Problem of Pain, “want in fact not so much a father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven – a senile benevolence who as they say ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves.’” The post-Enlightenment Left has quickly grasped that Benedict XVI is a more dangerous enemy than even John Paul the Great. May their fears prove justified.

Lenten Weblog, Day 36: Varieties of the Secular

Bishop Hilarion, the Moscow Patriarchate’s representative to “the European Institutions” (a paraphrasical way to refer to a European Union of which the Russian Church is not a huge admirer), has written a new essay on “Traditional and Liberal Values in the Debate Between Christianity and Secularism”, in which he attempts to identify the nub of the conflict between religious and secular world views. His analysis has much in it that is worthwhile. Unfortunately, with all due respect to His Grace, it goes seriously astray, because its image of secularism is drawn almost wholly from the Enlightenment. To the bishop, “secular liberalism” is still the philosophy of John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. That kind of liberalism still exists, in a semi-pure “libertarian” form, in elements of modern, dirigiste liberalism and in present day conservatism, but the most powerful and conspicuous form of contemporary secular liberalism is proudly post-Enlightenment. It does not worship Robespierre’s goddess of Reason or deduce the right form of polity from the “state of nature”. Reason has been dethroned along with the other archaic deities, while reasoning is scorned as a tool of patriarchy and oppression. Today’s secular liberals lack even the old bigotry against the numinous. “New age” mysticism tempts them, and exotic religions without the taint of Western tradition (Buddhism, for example) or with the virtue of intense anti-Western animus (such as Wahhabi Islam) are deemed worthy of a condescending tolerance. To place these secularists in the same camp as the Enlightenment is an error that can breed only confusion, as Bishop Hilarion demonstrates.

His crucial mistake is to see secular liberalism as the driving force behind “globalization” and traditional religion as the heart of resistance to it.

Today only religion is systematically resisting the desperate attack of globalization, entering into an unequal battle for the defence of those values which it considers fundamental and which are being challenged by globalization. Only religion is able to counter the ideology of globalization with its own system of spiritual and moral orientation based on the centuries-long experience of generations acquired during the pre-globalization age.

In the modern battle for values people find themselves more often than not on opposite sides of the barricades, with those inspired by religious ideals on the one side and those whose world-view is formed by secular humanism on the other. At the core of the modern globalization ideology is the humanistic idea of the absolute dignity of man and of the existence of universal, “common human” values, which should serve as the foundation of a single world civilization. By “common human” values, however, are understood not only those spiritual and moral tenets which are common to all religions or which are equally obligatory for both religious and non-religious people (“thou shall not kill”, “thou shall not steal”, “thou shall not bear false witness” etc.), but also many ideas that are questionable from the religious point of view and which are rooted in liberal-humanistic morality.

That account is almost diametrically opposed to the true state of affairs. How does it square with the fierce anti-globalization rhetoric of the secular Left or with the leading role of the United States, the world’s most pious major nation, in promoting closer economic relations among the various regions of the world? A more accurate description of the forces on “opposite sides of the barricades” would be conservatives and libertarians facing post-Enlightenment secularists and modernist Christians. The inspiration for globalization is not zeal for “a single world civilization” but ordinary economic self-interest. Nor is there much in the resistance that can reasonably be characterized as a “spiritual and moral orientation based on the centuries-long experience of generations acquired during the pre-globalization age”. The most active anti-globalists hold traditional values in contempt. Their multiculturalism stems from its usefulness as a weapon against the hated West, not from genuine respect for ancestral mores.

From faulty premises, the essay reaches the seriously faulty conclusion that Islamic extremism is a religious reaction, deplorable to be sure, to the likewise deplorable phenomenon of globalization:

There exist several variations of the religious answer to the challenge of totalitarian liberalism and militant secularism. The most radical answer is given by Islamic extremists, who have declared jihad against the “post-Christian” Western civilization with all its so-called common human values. The phenomenon of Islamic terrorism cannot be understood without comprehending the reaction brought forth in the contemporary Islamic world by the attempts of the West to impose its world-view and behavioural standards on it. We are used to hearing statements on how terrorism has neither nationality nor denomination, and nobody doubts that unsolved problems of an ethnic or political nature are the main causes of terrorist acts. But it is impossible to deny the fact that the most aggressive perpetrators of modern Islamic terrorism are inspired by a religious paradigm, viewing their acts as an answer to the total hegemony of Western secular thinking. And as long as the West continues to lay claim to a world-wide monopoly on world-views, propagating its standards as being without alternative and obligatory for all nations, the sword of Damocles of terrorism will continue to hang above the entire Western civilization.

But the “religious paradigm” of Islamofascism, the Wahhabi sect, originated in opposition to traditional Islam. Mohammed ibn ‛Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), who spent his entire life in Arabia, Iraq and Iran, probably never heard a whisper about “Western secular thinking”. According to their own propaganda, Wahhabi-influenced terrorists still see non-Wahhabi Moslems as enemies, along with the “crusaders” from the West. While it may be obvious to an Orthodox bishop that terrorism directed toward the modern Western world must be conceived as “an answer to the total hegemony of Western secular thinking”, the terrorists themselves believe that they are attacking Christianity. Among Western secularists, they find many who join with them in decrying American policies (as when Osama bin-Laden quoted Michael Moore). Meanwhile, as we have seen in Iraq, the one element of America’s behavior and world view that we have any interest in “imposing” on anyone, namely, democratic and constitutional government, appears to be quite popular with ordinary Moslems.

If Christians are to address secularism intelligently and effectively, we must avoid seeing it only as it was a century ago. There exists an Enlightenment secularism, with which we can discuss issues of common interest, because we have reason in common with it, though not revelation. There is also a post-Enlightenment secularism that denies the authority of reason. It “argues” by expressing feelings and is outraged when those feelings don’t move others to act as it wants them to.

Bishop Hilarion closes with hopes that the Church will be able to “to enter into a peaceful, non-aggressive, though obviously unequal, dialogue with [secularism], with the aim of achieving a balance between the liberal-democratic model of Western societal structure and the religious way of life”. With the old kind of secularism, that was a possibility. With the new, the dialogue will be extremely “unequal”. Its own presuppositions prevent it from engaging in rational dialogue. Since its advocates remain in possession of their reasoning faculties, little though they may wish to exercise them, Christians can try to reason with them. In return, however, we can anticipate nothing but a succession of whines and tantrums. It will be an unsatisfying exercise, and I find it difficult to share His Grace’s optimism about the prospects for any degree of success.

The Protocols of the Elders of Libertarianism

Orin Kerr wonders why the New York Times commissioned a front page story, illustrated by some of the most sinister-looking photographs that I have ever seen in a non-lunatic publication, for its Sunday magazine about the non-existent “Constitution in Exile” movement. He hazards four tongue-in-cheek answers, but the question is worth a serious look.

Someone who reads the Times without much prior knowledge of constitutional theory will come away “knowing” that a large number of right-of-center lawyers favor radical change in the way in which the U.S. Constitution is interpreted, that they largely agree on the direction in which that change should go, that they hide their revolutionary purposes, slyly avoiding citations of “extremists” like Richard Epstein even while insinuating their ideas into court decisions and works of purported legal scholarship, that they have an ominous, unacknowledged influence over both the conservative wing of the Supreme Court and the Bush Administration, and that President Bush’s nominees for judgeships are likely to adhere to their philosophy. Of these propositions only the first is to some extent true. The article implies the rest more than it directly states them. The author would doubtless deny that he is doing anything more than describing the views of selection of interesting figures in contemporary law. He doesn’t provide a Clinton White House-style chart of conspiratorial connections, nor does he say that the “Constitution in Exile” school operates under cover to shape Justice Department policies.

Nonetheless, the inferences are there to be drawn, and Times editors, if not the law school professor author, know that a readership that finds former economist Paul Krugman credible will draw them. This fictitious conspiracy and the moniker “Constitution in Exile” have been floating around left-wing circles for a few years. Now they will become conventional wisdom among a larger public. Leftist legal theorist Cass Sunstein (“who calls himself a moderate”, avers the Times) has a book on the subject coming out soon.

The “Constitution in Exile” construct jibes beautifully with the presumption that right wingers in general, and the Bush Administration in particular, have secret motives for their actions. That presumption sustains paranoia about the domination of foreign policy by a neoconservative cabal. The “Constitution in Exile” is a domestic policy counterpart, along with the alleged plot to convert America into a theocracy (not quite the objective of guys like Randy Barnett, but, should the paranoia peddlers notice the incongruity, they will reckon that it just shows how widespread and deceitful the conspiracy is).

Conservatives regularly make fun of Left’s recently found taste for the political occult. If ridicule alone would temper the propensity to connect invented dots in unlikely patterns, organs like the New York Times would by now have consigned perpetrators to the same cellar as the John Birch Society. Instead, “discoveries” seem to be multiplying, and hardly any commentator on the Left any longer accepts that anyone on the Right expounds his real opinions in public. One half of our country’s political discourse is veering more and more toward the model of the Middle East, where the true causes of all effects are presumed to be covert, and reasoned argument is all but impossible. There could hardly be a more deplorable trend, nor, I fear, one harder to reverse.

Further reading: Michael S. Greve, “Liberals in Exile”

Lenten Weblog, Day 35: The Sunday of St. Mary of Egypt

The fifth Sunday of Lent is a unique commemoration in the calendar of the Orthodox Church. We have many celebrations of saints and some of holy icons; today we honor an “icon in words”, the Life of St. Mary of Egypt. This work, attributed to St. Sophronius of Jerusalem (c. 550-c. 639), is a narrative gem. Whether the events that it recounts literally took place (though there is no strong reason to doubt the basic facts) is no more important than whether an icon offers a literal portrait of the saint whom it represents.

Commentary on this tale can only flatten it and drain away a portion of its meaning. That most Orthodox know it only second hand, through the sermons that we have heard year after year, is our misfortune. We should read and reflect on it today, learning from Father Zosimus, a man who studied holiness all his life, how far short of the divine our striving falls, and from Mary the sinner how great is the power of repentance and prayer.

It is profitable, too, to reflect on the background against which St. Sophronius wrote: the Persian invasions that Emperor Heraclius repelled with desperate fighting, the Monophysite and Monothelite controversies within the Church, and the Moslem assault that placed the birthplace of Christianity under alien rule. Sophronius himself held the office of Patriarch of Jerusalem when the city was besieged by Caliph Omar, negotiated the terms of its surrender and died shortly afterwards. (His year of death is uncertain: between 638 and 644; his feast day is March 11th.) Yet his masterpiece brushes aside kings and conquests. Empires are mortal and transient. It is human souls that live forever, Zosimus and Mary who, from the perspective of eternity, matter more than Heraclius and Omar.

Troparion – Tone 8

The image of God was truly preserved in you, mother,
for you took up the Cross and followed Christ.
By so doing, you taught us to disregard the flesh, for it passes away,
but to care instead for the soul, since it is immortal.
Therefore your spirit, holy mother Mary, Rejoices with the angels!

Kontakion – Tone 3

Having been a sinful woman,
you became through repentance a Bride of Christ.
Having attained angelic life,
you defeated demons with the weapon of the Cross.
Therefore, most glorious Mary, you are a Bride of the Kingdom!

Quote of the Day

M. J. “Simo” Simpson”:

Douglas Adams was a dialogue writer. That was his skill – writing great dialogue. And when he had written it, he would rewrite it again and again and again, changing a word here or there because he knew that good comedy writing is like poetry. It has a meter to it and when you get the right words in the right order it just sounds right and nothing else will do.

– From a review of the new movie version of A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy so negative that it makes Dr. Johnson on Ossian sound like unbridled praise, e. g.,

To put it bluntly, they have cut most of the jokes out. I’m not being metaphorical here, they really have, in a very literal sense, removed the jokes from the story. There are scenes where all we’re left with is the set-up dialogue, there are jokes where we get the feed-line but not the punchline. It’s astounding. Occasionally, the filmmakers have actually bothered replacing the jokes but they have replaced them with really, really unfunny jokes . . . with stupid playground humour and pointless slapstick.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide without the jokes truly would be Hamlet without the Dane. I shudder.

“Lost” Oxyrhynchus Papyri Found

The Independent has the first word about the results of a joint effort by Oxford and Brigham Young Universities to recover thousands of previously illegible pages of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. A careless reader of the news account might think that all of this hoard, excavated from a town dump in central Egypt from 1897 onward, had lain unread all these years. In fact, some 67 volumes of the materials have been published. The vast bulk are the detritus of private life: tax records, personal letters, business and marriage contracts, and other material that has augmented our understanding of how ordinary men and women lived in Greco-Roman times. There have also been some important literary discoveries, including otherwise unknown works by Pindar, Menander, Callimachos and the anonymous “Oxyrhynchus historian”, as well as many Christian, Gnostic and pagan religious texts.

Assuming that the Independent is more accurate in this reportage than it is about events in Iraq, the new finds include a great deal of significant material, though it may be hyperbole to say that they “could redraw the map of classical civilization”. The projection of “a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence” sounds closer to the mark and is quite exciting enough.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used [infrared techniques] to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

By “lost Christian gospels”, the reporter probably means Gnostic pseudepigraphia rather than orthodox Christian writings, though it would certainly be a wonderful surprise to come across the original of the hypothetical “Q” document.

Professor Richard Janko, a leading British scholar, formerly of University College London, now head of classics at the University of Michigan, said: “Normally we are lucky to get one such find per decade.” One discovery in particular, a 30-line passage from the poet Archilocos, of whom only 500 lines survive in total, is described as “invaluable” by Dr Peter Jones, author and co-founder of the Friends of Classics campaign. . . .

The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy – the Epigonoi (“Progeny”) by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War.

If hopes for new finds at Herculaneum pan out, too, the 21st Century could prove to be one of the greatest eras for the rediscovery of classics since the Renaissance.

[Via Copperbadge’s LiveJournal (with a hat tip to Becky Thomson, who called it to my attention)]

Lenten Weblog, Day 34: The Religious Left at Work

While the “Religious Right” is routinely reviled for extremism and lack of Christian charity, the media take less notice of those qualities on the other end of the politico-religious spectrum. Worthy of attention is statement on the Terri Schiavo case bearing the irenic headline, “Have They No Decency? Religious Leaders Call for an End to Selective Morality in Washington”. The 100-plus “leaders” are described by Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy thus:

Signers of the statement included Roman Catholic lesbian activist Mary Hunt of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, Alliance for Baptists pastor Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance, United Methodist pastor James Lawson of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Disciples of Christ pastor Ken Brooker Langston of the Disciples Justice Action Network, Unitarian Universalist Association President William Sinkford, Quaker Joe Volk of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, Chicago Theological Seminary President Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Disciples of Christ feminist theologian Rita Nakashima Brock of the Faith Voices for the Common Good, and American Baptist pastor James Forbes of Riverside Church in New York City.

This group was assembled by the left-wing Center for American Progress, Angry Clintonite John Podesta’s think tank. The most remarkable feature of its declaration is refusal to grant that politicians who attempted to save Terri Schiavo’s life could have been acting in good faith.

How does it come to pass that elected leaders who are sworn to uphold the U.S. Constitution now refuse to accept any court’s decision until they find a court that agrees with their position? How does it come to pass that expert medical opinion, along with expert legal opinion, is being cast aside and trodden underfoot in a crass use of piety to usurp judicial prerogatives? . . .

Sadly, we understand all too well how this can come to pass. We see clearly how an excruciating family drama—involving the understandable grief of the parents as well—is being manipulated for narrow political advantage.

In other words, the President and the majority of Congress didn’t really care about what happened to Mrs. Schiavo and didn’t believe their own words about the sanctity of life; they were just making “a crass use of piety . . . narrow political advantage”.

As proof of their hypocrisy, the statement then presents a laundry list of liberal spending and policy initiatives. Any failure to support these nostrums will, we are informed, demonstrate a lack of “true respect and concern for human dignity and the right of every child, woman, and man to the fullness of life”.

If one wished to play turnabout in this “Question Your Bona Fides” game, it would be easy to ask whether indifference to a concrete case of killing by dehydration doesn’t cast a cloud over the signers’ advocacy of measures to help disabled people in the abstract. Aren’t they a bit like the man who urges his neighbors to write checks to charitable causes but won’t help the cripple who shows up on his own doorstep?

Ultimately, though, casting aspersions on motives back and forth is a profitless contest. The clergypersons and modernist theologians assembled by Mr. Podesta have every right to make religious arguments in favor of denying food and water to helpless women. I’m willing to believe that they write in defense of that view with sincerity, not simply in hopes of gaining narrow political advantage by tarring their political enemies. I would believe it more firmly if “Have They No Decency?” breathed any spirit beyond hatred of those enemies and unreflective scorn for their point of view.

But let me end on a more pleasant note. Mr. Tooley also summarizes a praiseworthy statement, by a minister of one of the most liberal and modernist Protestant denominations, that goes beyond the rights and wrongs of a particular case:

Florida United Methodist Bishop Timothy Whitaker spoke more forthrightly in defense of traditional Christian teachings regarding human life. “A fundamental moral principle consistent with faith in God revealed in Jesus Christ is to always care rather than to kill.”

Whitaker observed that “there are many disabled persons who live by means of a feeding tube,” and that she was more accurately described as “severely disabled” rather than terminally ill.

Placing too much value on mental consciousness to define life’s value would imply a “spiritualistic view” of humans and would threaten the lives of the mentally incompetent, Whitaker warned, and would go against Christian and Jewish beliefs about the importance of the body.

Likewise, Whitaker urged not viewing life as making moral claims by itself, when it is rather God’s “purposes for human beings that make the ultimate moral claims upon us.” He said opposition to abortion should not be based upon a “right to life” but upon God’s call to “care for the most vulnerable.”

A person who is in a “persistent vegetative state” is not a vegetable to her loves ones, Whitaker observed. The love that Mrs. Schiavo’s parents and siblings showed her was of “immense value” and no expert could judge the effect of that love upon even the severely disabled woman, he said. For Christians, this kind of love is a witness to God’s love in Jesus Christ.

“Moral reflection should include consideration of the value of the love of caregivers as well as the condition of the one receiving care,” Whitaker wrote. “I believe it would be better to let her live because she is the beneficiary of abundant love.” He questioned the wisdom of a law that would allow a spouse, especially one “compromised by conflict of interest” like Mr. Schiavo, to be the sole witness to her intentions, without considering the moral claims of other family members.

Whitaker criticized the “individualistic perspective” that believes a person may decide for himself whether or not to live or die, without considering the ability of others to love and care. Such “absolute individual autonomy” could lead to physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia,” he worried. Christians should introduce “communitarian values” into society that guard against extreme self-determination.

“The church’s mission is not to be the chaplain to a culture of death,” Whitaker concluded, “But to be a witness to the love of God in the world.”

Lenten Weblog, Day 33: Rendering to Caesar and God

Today being the deadline that it is, there springs to mind Our Lord’s famous saying, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” (Mark 12:17 and parallels [KJV]) This verse dramatically contradicts certain naive inferences that seem to follow naturally from God’s sovereignty over all of His creation, yet we are so accustomed to it that we do not recognize how strange an injunction it is.

God created Heaven and Earth and all things visible and invisible. Caesar created nothing; whatever the state has, God made. The logical consequence is that only God has a claim on men’s labors and lives. That is the response that the inquirers expected from Jesus and the one given by his contemporaries, the Zealots who not long after rose in revolt against Rome. That Jesus gave the unexpected answer, teaching that some things do belong to Caesar, had profound implications for moral philosophy and the shape of Christian society.

Within the Christian world, there is no divine monopoly. States legitimately exist without regard to religion, and religious law does not preempt the entirety of life. Hence, secular states are not only conceivable but the norm. Their rulers, even if sincere Christians obedient to Christ’s teachings in every respect, are not, in their role as rulers, agents of the Church. There are, in the classic formulation, “two swords”, each supreme in its own realm.

But how can we allow the temporal sword to be wielded without reference to Christianity? Doesn’t that mean that Caesar will be free to act without moral restraint, that, except by happy whim or accident, he will be a tyrant?

That would certainly be the case if “good” and “evil” were categories dependent solely on God’s arbitrary decree; that is, if “good” were no more than a synonym for “what God approves”. The only way to ascertain the moral quality of an action would then be to find out what God thought of it, and that could not be known except through revelation.

The Christian view, inherited from Judaism (which perhaps expresses it more forcefully; “arguing with God” seems to be a peculiarly Jewish penchant), is the opposite: that good and evil are knowable to all rational beings, whether or not they have ever heard of Christ. Moral reasoning is very difficult, and men frequently make mistakes (if there were great short-term pleasure to be gained by believing that 2+2=7, we would make plenty of mistakes in arithmetic, too), but it is within the reach of Caesar. What cannot be accomplished by natural reason, the Church teaches, is release from the bondage of sin and death. That gift, which is not the business of Caesar, proceeds from God alone. In matters pertaining to our salvation, we dare render nothing to any being or power except God.

Natural law is the foundation of the secular state and therefore is a necessary implication of Our Lord’s endorsement of rendering unto Caesar. On this point, Christians and atheists used to concur. Their disagreement was over whether anything beyond natural law had reality. The most remarkable alteration in secularist thinking over the past century has been its abandonment of natural law in favor of dismissing “reason” as a human construct. It is ironic that the Gospels furnish stronger reasons to reject theocracy and greater reassurance about the potential virtues of a non-religious polity than does most of what passes nowadays for secularist discourse.

Rights from Nowhere

The crux of the current agitation over the role of the courts is their increasing disposition to overturn widely accepted laws enacted through democratic processes. Whence, in a nation founded on popular sovereignty, do judges, the public officials most insulated from the will of the people, derive a legitimate right to override the popular branches of government?

Part of the answer is that executive and legislative organs have, under our constitutional system, limited areas in which they can act. Congress’ range of action is limited by its enumerated and implied powers, state legislatures’ by their subordination to “the supreme law of the land”. If a democratically elected body does something that it has no authority to do, it is quite legitimate for judges to disregard it. That principle was the basis of Marbury v. Madison and remains vigorous to this day. Conservative “court bashers” approve of it in general, though they naturally may disagree with particular applications. Those right-wing commentators who disapproved of federal intervention in the Terri Schiavo case mostly asserted that Congress was overstepping its bounds, not that its motives were improper. Liberals, by contrast, tend to dislike procedural limits on legislatures. Few of them would be distressed were the enumerated powers of Article I to be replaced with a mandate to “promote the general welfare” by any necessary and proper means.

Beyond these demarcations of spheres of action is the more problematic zone: constitutional prohibitions against particular actions that lie within the scope of the scope of the government’s authority. Unlike the scope restrictions, those in this class are, to borrow a term from First Amendment jurisprudence, content-based. A state legislature can pass all sorts of statutes about education, but not one segregating schools by race or requiring students to pray in the classroom or barring teachers from criticizing principals. By contrast, a scope restriction prevents it from legislating at all about interstate commerce, no matter what the content of its enactments.

The Bill of Rights is the Constitution’s most famous set of limitations on the content of government action. In terms of democratic theory, it is, as many commentators have remarked over the years, an anomaly. The policy preferences of persons long dead, who knew nothing about contemporary conditions and many of whose opinions are noxious to current thinking, can prevail over a formidably large democratic majority. The writers of the Constitution form a virtual House of Lords, with the difference that they are not amenable to persuasion. Lord Willoughby de Broke was no more fixed and rigid than a clause in a Constitution.

What justifies such a peculiar arrangement? There are, I believe, two reasons why Bills of Rights are consistent with democratic principles.

First, some rights are essential to the survival of a democracy as a democracy. Without freedom of speech and the press, elections would be disconnected from popular opinion and would be democratic in name only. Without freedom of petition and assembly, the populace could be effectively silenced between elections. Without due process of law, the government could hamstring the opposition through baseless criminal charges.

Second, a Bill of Rights counteracts what has traditionally been seen as democracy’s gravest flaw: the power of a temporary majority to act hastily and oppressively. The grant of rights that do not depend on the acquiescence of the current majority is a form of self-restraint, like a spendthrift’s putting his credit cards in the custody of a trusted friend. The concept is that the public has a permanent, long-term will not to restrict, say, freedom of the press, and does not wish to allow its short-term impulses to negate that will. If the impulse proves not to be so short-term, then it is possible, albeit difficult, to amend the Constitution to replace old preferences with new ones.

When a court, then, declares that a statute or executive action contravenes a content-based restriction, it ought to be able to present one of two rationales: Either the law or act is inconsistent with the continuance of the polity as a democracy, or it clashes with a policy that a past democratic majority embedded in the Constitution and that no subsequent majority has removed.

One can soften any “originalist” taint that clings to these principles by granting arguendo that the general understanding of Constitutional commandments may change over time. Not many would dispute that flogging or the pillory is now “cruel and unusual punishment”, despite the fact that each was widely practiced when the Eighth Amendment was adopted. But any such “migration”, to use Cass Sunstein’s term, of rights into the Constitution makes democratic sense only if the development of meaning is extremely broad-based. Revulsion against flogging is well-nigh universal. Going further, a migrationist could cogently argue that the public opinion recognizes, as a practical matter, that homosexuals should not be punished for what they do in private. Evidence for that position is the general non-enforcement of laws against sodomy. On that basis, a court might find that governments have no right to forbid consensual, non-public homosexual activity. In such a fashion, the Constitution can “evolve” without becoming a mere plaything of judges. Whether that evolution is a good idea is a separate question.

No one, however, can rationally contend that, say, a right to same-sex marriage is either essential to democracy or the policy choice of the majority of the American people at any time. It cannot have “migrated” from widespread acceptance to the Constitutional subtext, because it has never been accepted. Courts that “discover” that right, or any of a number of others that have been declared since the Warren Court began searching penumbras and emanations, either exercise naked power or derive the legitimacy of their decisions from a source other than democratic theory.

It’s conceivable that I have overlooked some populist justification for judge-made rights that do not rest of the grounds just discussed, but I doubt it. The proof is that “activist” judges and those who endorse their decrees argue as if they were simply reading an unarguable public consensus into the Constitution. That is the essence of Professor Sunstein’s defense of his “migration” theory. No judge says forthrightly that the masses are wrong, have always been wrong, and must be corrected by wise authority. Yet decision after decision gives the impression of being imbued with exactly that philosophy.

Some criticism of the “men in black” reflects, no doubt, simple disagreement with outcomes that have been reached through legitimate and proper judicial processes. A few critics seem not to appreciate the virtues of separation of powers and to have a cloudy notion that the outcome of every hotly disputed case should be subject to legislative reversal. They can rightly be dismissed. What is less easy to disregard is criticism based on many judges’ habit of plucking rights from nowhere, without democratic legitimacy. When they do that, they are indistinguishable from the Iranian mullahs, who reserve the right to overturn statutes that conflict with the Koran.

If “anti-activist” spokesmen often sound emotional and excitable, consider how an Iranian feels under the mullarchy. If one believes in popular sovereignty, as almost all Americans profess they do, it is alarming to contemplate the theory implicit in recent decisions on issues ranging from same-sex marriage to capital punishment for juveniles. It looks as if democratic government is being limited by a new set of constraints stemming from the moral certitudes of a small number of men. They may be well-educated, wise and intelligent men; they may on the whole be well suited to second guess the doings of politicians elected by the ignorant masses. But if we are going to give up on government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, and introduce our own set of elite overseers to keep hoi polloi in check, wouldn’t it be best to revise our polity openly? I would like to hear more liberals as candid as the one I quoted a couple of days ago, who rejoiced in the dominance of “the secular elite” over “the religious majority”. As matters stand, many of them want to further that dominance without having to submit to the indignity of debating with those on the majority’s side.

Lenten Weblog, Day 32: Dialogue With Mecca?

Not long after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, George Amiroutzes, an eminent theologian and last Grand Logothete of the Empire of Trebizond, offered proposals for merging Christianity and Islam.

He presented to the Sultan a study which showed that they had much in common. It might be possible to devise a synthesis; or at least each faith could recognize the other as a sister. The difference between the Bible and the Koran has always been exaggerated by bad translations, he maintained; and the Jews were to blamed for having deliberately encouraged misunderstandings. [Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, p. 183]

In many respects hopeful views of relations between the Church and Mecca have not advanced much since Amiroutzes’ day. John Paul the Great was a strong proponent of Christian-Moslem dialogue, and the New York Times reports that it is a controversial topic within the College of Cardinals as it meets to elect a new Pope. Many of the prelates are not too enthusiastic about the project, while others see Islam as a useful special purpose ally.

Like John Paul, [Francis Cardinal Arinze of Nigeria] has often spoken of one specific rationale for reaching out to other faiths, Islam included: that believers, of whatever faith, have a duty to fight against a secularism that he says has sapped Christians of their spiritual strength.

“God can speak to us through other believers,” he told an interviewer several years ago. “From sincere Muslims, Christians can learn, for example, the courage of sincere prayer. They pray five times a day, and no matter where they are – be it the railway station or the airport – they will do it.

“Whereas many Christians are ashamed of making the sign of the cross in a restaurant or pulling out a rosary on a train,” he said.

Very much in the opposite camp is Queen Margrethe II of Denmark. Today’s Daily Telegraph quotes from her just published official biography:

We are being challenged by Islam these years – globally as well as locally. It is a challenge we have to take seriously. We have let this issue float about for too long because we are tolerant and lazy.

We have to show our opposition to Islam and we have to, at times, run the risk of having unflattering labels placed on us because there are some things for which we should display no tolerance.

And when we are tolerant, we must know whether it is because of convenience or conviction.

Somewhere in the middle is Belgian Cardinal Godfried Danneels, who, according to the Times “has spoken of the need for the Muslim world to undergo the same political and religious changes that reshaped Europe, in particular the separation of church and state, and therefore become more secular”.

In contrast to his colleagues who would like to ally with Islam against secularism, Cardinal Danneels sees secularism as an ally against Islam. He and Queen Margrethe have, I think, more sensible approach. We should never be impolite the followers of other religions, but it is not rude to recognize that there is an immense gulf between our Faith and that of the Moslems. The seeming points of agreement are coincidences, not corollaries of concord on deeper matters.

Moslems are monotheists, but their religion is in all other significant ways a form of paganism. Like the gods of the polytheists, their One God is essentially indifferent to mankind. He demands obedience instead of offering love. John Ashcroft made an astute though much berated comparison: “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.” Moslems universally deny that God could or would give a son as a sacrifice to save sinners. They almost as universally (a handful of modernizers excepted) honor those who die making war on the infidel. In the words of a leading expert,

The notion of martyrdom is common to Christianity and Islam. Indeed, the same word is used – “martyr” is from a Greek word meaning “witness”, and the Arabic shahid has the same meaning. But in Sunni Islam, the shahid is one who is killed in battle; he achieves martyrdom by dying in the holy war. This is very different from the Jewish and later also Christian notion of martyrs as those who voluntarily endure torture and death rather than renounce their beliefs. [Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West, p. 163]

Despite the fact that Moslems recognize the Old Testament as a sacred text and invoke blessings on a figure whom they call “Jesus” (but who is utterly unlike the Christ of the New Testament), there is no genuine common ground for religious dialogue. There might be if Islam underwent a reformation. Some of its suppressed mystical strains may have a concept of God that is nearer to the Judaeo-Christian “Father in Heaven”, which could be the starting point for useful dialogue. As Islam is now, however, the honest course of action is Her Majesty of Denmark’s: “to show our opposition” – with rational argument, of course, not with distortion or persecution – to doctrines that we believe to be radically false.

Update (4/15/05): In the comments KK takes me to task for “ compar[ing] Christianity with the media-image of Islam” rather than with its actual theology. He is disappointed that I wrote a “polemic” when it would have been better to “discuss the real theological differences of two religions both purporting to be a sort of advancement upon the original religion of Abraham”.

In fact, discussion of “the real theological differences” was my intention. I wished to say to my fellow Christians that Islam and Christianity are more alien to one another than is usually recognized and that dialogue that adopts George Amiroutzes’ vision of two fundamentally compatible faiths is founded on a false premise. That does not mean that relations cannot or should not be more cordial than they are, only that cordiality won’t be achieved by pretending to agree on irreconcilable doctrines.

KK unwittingly illustrates my point when he writes,

Islam does indeed revere Jesus, as the author notes, but not in a disingenuous way as is suggested. Although not considered the son of God, he was considered by the Prophet Muhammad to be the most perfect human being to have lived – an example for all mankind.

The most important Christian belief about Jesus is that He is the Son of God, “begotten of the Father before all ages”, not “an example for all mankind”. I do not think it polemical, but simply accurate, to write that the Moslem image of Him, as summarized by KK, is “is utterly unlike the Christ of the New Testament”. Similarly, the Christian and Moslem conceptions of God’s relationship with mankind and of man’s salvation differ toto caelo. Though I don’t fancy myself a peritus in Islamic theology, I have never seen so much as a hint in any Moslem writer that man has been redeemed from enslavement to sin and death through a sacrifice on the part of God. My strong impression is that Moslem theologians regard the Christian doctrine of atonement, in any of its forms, as impossible and absurd.

I agree with KK that the Moslem use of the term “martyr” for soldiers who die while fighting for Islam (a usage with no parallel in Christian terminology) does not entail sympathy for terrorism. I also agree that Islam places heavy stress on the duty of charity. Nothing that I wrote suggested otherwise.

Only in My Backyard

The OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription-only, $3.95/month cheap) picks up this tidbit from Tom DeLay’s Wednesday press conference:

Asked about a comment made last year by then-Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchison that the American people didn’t have the will to force millions of illegal aliens to return home, he recalled sitting next to an elderly lady at a lunch “who was just ranting and raving about all these illegals that are over here.” Mr. DeLay said she happened also to mention she employed a Mexican gardener and maid and had some illegal aliens living across the street. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, I’ll call up right now and pick up your maid, your yard man and the people living across the street.’ [She said,] ‘Oh, don’t you do that. Don’t you do that. I want the ones that are up there in North Houston to be picked up.’”

It’s a pity that Rep. DeLay had to concede that there aren’t enough votes in Congress to pass a sensible immigration reform law. Instead, we are left with the worst of all worlds: The inflow of legitimate workers into the United States is restricted by arbitrary and capricious enforcement of laws that most people want to see enforced only against “other folks’ wetbacks”, while the shadowy infrastructure that helps aliens slip into the country is also available for use by terrorists. I keep hoping that people who are sensible on other subjects will wake up one day to realize that “open” borders crossed in the light of day are safer, as well as more convenient, than barriers enshrouded in darkness.

The Compleat Heinlein

Meisha Merlin Publishing, which specializes in high quality, small run editions of science fiction, fantasy and horror titles, has announced the most ambitious project in its history, the “Virginia Edition” of the Complete Works of Robert A. Heinlein (“Virginia” as in Mr. Heinlein’s widow, not the state), projected for 46 volumes. “Complete” means all of the master’s novels, short fiction and non-fiction, with passages added back to the text that were cut from the original manuscripts (maybe not the best idea for some of the bloated later novels but an exciting prospect for early works that were trimmed to fit Procrustean publishers’ formats).

In keeping with our desire to produce a collection true to the spirit and vision of one of our genre's greatest authors, Meisha Merlin has employed the knowledge of several Heinlein experts. Eleanor Wood (Robert Heinlein’s agent), Art Dula (the literary executor of the Heinlein estate), and Bill Patterson (Heinlein scholar, organizer of The Archives, and author of the upcoming two volume authorized biography on Robert A. Heinlein), will be assisting Meisha Merlin in going through Heinlein’s notes and comments about the different versions of his published material. Consideration of original manuscripts alongside the published versions of these texts will further guarantee a collection with no equal. This attention to detail will insure that the texts printed in The Virginia Edition are in fact published the way Heinlein intended.

The cover artist will be Donato Giancola, who has been set a puzzle painting task:

Donato will be doing a series of murals that will be displayed both on the spine of the hardcover dust-jacket and the slipcases. When spined out on your shelf, the cover art will be revealed, so all who enter your library will know that you are an owner of The Virginia Edition.

So each jacket painting will have a central segment that, when combined with those of all of the other volumes, will form a distinct image. If Mr. Giancola can pull that off, I shall be mightily impressed. Now for the bad news:

At the request of the Robert A. and Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust, The Virginia Edition will be sold only as a set. Additionally, we have agreed to limit our printing to only 5000 sets to insure the rarity of this collection. The first book of The Virginia Edition will be published in January 2006, followed every four weeks thereafter by the next title in the series. . . .

The price for the cloth bound set of The Virginia Edition will be $2,500.00. . . . For those of you wishing to pay for your copy of The Virginia Edition in one payment we are offering it at the discounted price of $2,200 (shipping included). Otherwise, payment for this collection will work as follows: Initial $1,000.00 down payment at the time of placing your order followed by a $750.00 installment at the end of the first year and a final $750.00 at the end of the second year.

Also under consideration is a leather bound edition, which will be expensive. To be fair, a price of less than $50 a volume is very reasonable for a definitive set of one of the greatest SF authors of all time. I suspect, though, that it isn’t crucial to get your order in this week to beat the rush.

(Via, of all sources, law blogger Stephen Bainbridge.)

Lenten Weblog, Day 31: Too Much Religion?

Glenn Reynolds’ father was a vocal member of the Religious Left during the Vietnam War era, which may have led the son to think that the right attitude is “Religioso, Ma Non Troppo”.

Are we in the midst of a religious revival that will change the face of America, and the world? Some people on the Right hope so, while many people on the Left fear so. I suspect, however, that the trend will be less dramatic than either the hopeful or the fearful believe.

There certainly are signs of a revival in religious interest. Not only is there some evidence in the polls (depending on which polls you read), but I’ve noticed an increase in religious talk in recent weeks, even from such normally secular rightists as Rush Limbaugh. It may well be that there’s something of a preference cascade going on, with events like the Terri Schiavo affair and the death of Pope John Paul II making religious people more willing to display their faith openly.

Neither in these paragraphs nor in the rest of his column does Professor Reynolds try very hard to separate Christian faith from conservative politics (though he has made it clear elsewhere that he knows that left-of-center Christians exist). The “religious revival” that he speaks of is best defined as an upsurge of Christian activism in the interests of conservatism, or perhaps of conservative activists’ invocation of Christianity, rather than a “Great Awakening” in the historical sense. As the Rev. Donald Sensing observes, this is not an era of enthusiastic mass conversions.

I think that most clergy like me had some high hopes that America would be religiously revived and for awhile after Jan. 1, 2000, we were encouraged because worship attendance did rise. Alas, it was temporary, just as the rise after 9/11 turned out to be.

So what would “a religious revival that will change the face of American and the world look like” if it didn’t involve a major increase in the number of believers? The idea is, I suppose, that the existing cadre of believers will stop holding a variety of opinions and coalesce behind a faith-inspired political agenda. This hope (or fear) extrapolates from the increased political activity of anti-modernist Protestants, a group that has historically tended to ignore “the world”. In the past several elections, more and more of them have come to the polls. Even the Amish, the ultimate world-contemners, voted in record numbers in 2004. Moreover, the church-going Protestant vote, which used to split about the same way as everybody else’s, has grown more solidly conservative Republican.

Hence, the essence of this sort of “religious revival” is that political conservatism is outcompeting liberalism for Christian votes. Does that reflect changes in Christianity – or in conservatism and liberalism? It’s conceivable that some development within the Church could affect the average Christian’s outlook on politics, but nothing of that sort has been visible for the past couple of centuries. Christianity is about the same as ever; the reshaping of its political preferences is a reaction to what is on offer from political parties and ideological movements.

There is also a second tendency at work: Just as Christians are drawn toward conservatism (at least when liberalism foams with suspicion of Christians’ beliefs and motives), conservatives are drawn toward Christianity. Ideally, no one should become a Christian for any reason other than faith in the truth of the Gospels and the Creeds. In practice, the emotional affinity between Christianity and contemporary conservatism is undeniable. Much of what the press sees as Christians flocking to conservatism is actually conservatives turning to Christ.

For some on the Left (and on the libertarian Right), these complementary movements add up to a dreadful prospect. Economic historian Robert William Fogel (a liberal, despite having been pilloried by his ideological soul mates for Time on the Cross) says, “We’re headed for another titanic battle between a religious populace and a secular elite, between the peoples’ elected representatives and the courts. What is past isn’t necessarily prologue, but it is comforting to note who won in the earlier confrontations.”

Note the hidden premise: that a democracy with “a religious populace” is dangerous and must be restrained by “a secular elite”. The candor is welcome. Perhaps it could be extended to renaming the “Democratic” Party to, say, the “Secular Party” or “Judiciary First”. They could take “Know-Everythings” as their sobriquet.

Which brings us back to Professor Reynolds’ “ma non troppo”. There is a point at which no one – certainly not any Christian conservative – can disagree if we are talking about religion in the political realm. A party platform derived from Scripture is ridiculous, both “too much” religion and a pseudo-religious distortion. Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, and He did not proclaim eternal verities about tax policy, welfare, education, foreign aid, etc. Indeed, it is the Left, not the Right, that most often pretends that there are “Biblical positions” on such issues.

Conservatives are are similarly unlikely to endorse ecclesiastical dominance over the state, if only because it would push the state sharply to the Left. If Christians who attend church regularly are a solidly Republican bloc, the clergy who minister to them are just as reliably Democratic. Everyone knows of congregations whose priest or pastor is decidedly more liberal than his flock. How often does one see the opposite?

Still, moderation is not to be practiced in all things. If there can be “too much” religion in politics, there cannot be too strong and abiding a faith in Christ. Were such a faith to touch tens of millions of hearts, it would be a good thing both for the individuals who turned to the Lord and to society as a whole. It would not, however, change the face of worldly politics to any remarkable extent.

Lenten Weblog, Day 30: Recruiting for ECUSA

Pontifications, a traditionalist Anglican blog, has an irenic suggestion to ease the woes of both modernist Roman Catholic clergymen and the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. The former need a more welcoming home, the latter a corps of committed clerical supporters. Talk about a match made in, if you’ll pardon the expression, Heaven.

If you are a Catholic priest who really does not believe what the Catholic Church authoritatively teaches … I’ve got just the right sect for you. There will be lots of clergy openings in the next few years. Good salaries, good benefits, earlier retirement than in the RCC, and a pretty good pension plan—and as long as you are not married, you can sleep with just about anyone or anything you like (parishioners of all ages, though, are always off-bounds—sorry). No more apologizing about contraception. No more conscience-wrestling about divorce and remarriage. Women priests? No problema. And don’t tell me that deep in your heart you haven’t wanted to bless the union of a gay couple! Our churches are much more attractive and our liturgies are so much superior to what you are used to. Trust me. It may be initially difficult for you to get used to beautiful ritual … but you will adapt! And think how much better you will feel about yourself. After all, you will be hanging out with a more up-scale, better educated class of folk. And contemplate how liberating it will be not wasting all that energy constantly fighting the Man in Rome. Here in the Episcopal Church you will be free to believe and teach the religion of your enlightened choice. You will enjoy a freedom of faith beyond your imagining.

You will find that life under the authority of our inclusive bishops is a painless affair, unless of course you happen to be one of those dinosaurs who still believe in a divine revelation once given to the saints. As the infamous Connecticut Six are now discovering, underneath the carefully pressed purple shirt of every inclusive bishop is a true Spirit-led prelate who is eager to crush underfoot all hard-hearted, Spirit-quenching reactionaries who refuse to follow the infallible magisterium of the General Convention. . . .

So stop waiting for God to reform the Catholic Church. She long ago abandoned the Pope and has lighted upon the Episcopal Church in glory and grace.

The writer means that as satire, but I think that the point is a good one. I can understand why a priest would remain attached to the Church of Rome if he believed that it descends in the right line from St. Peter and holds the keys to the Kingdom, even though the current hierarchy might seem to him unsatisfactory. But why does a modernist, for whom Tradition is nothing and St. Peter a long-dead, semi-legendary Jew, stick with a Church in which Cardinal Ratzinger is a serious contender for supreme leadership? Leftover sentiment from one’s childhood is all very well, but there ought to be limits.

Must We Wait for May 5th?

To begin with the unavoidable truth that earnest political analysts will try to ignore for the next 23 days: The Labour Party will win the U.K. election. Manifestos, party political broadcasts, candidate deselections, the Blair vs. Brown undertow and the Archbishop of Canterbury’s emergence as the voice of British small-c conservatism (no, really, per Iain Murray) are just song-and-dance routines to keep the crowd interested until the inevitable denouement – inevitable because the United Kingdom’s gerrymander would make a California Democrat or a Texas Republican blush. A few minutes toying with Electoral Calculus will demonstrate that the Conservatives can win the most seats in Parliament by finishing about six percentage points ahead of Labour. A minimal Tory majority requires about a nine point lead. To look at it another way, if the 2001 vote counts were exactly reversed, with the Tories getting 42 percent and Labour 33 percent (with the same 19 percent for the Liberal Democrats), the Conservatives would get an estimated 325 seats, a four-seat majority. Labour’s 42 percent last time won 403 seats.

What’s more, just in case Messrs. Blair and Brown feel like fixing a sure thing, Britain’s liberalization of postal voting has already led to one local election scandal. The government’s reaction was to tut-tut, and do nothing to prevent its recurrence on a nationwide scale.

The moral is that Michael Howard will not be the next Prime Minister. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether he is, as John O’Sullivan insists, at heart a supporter of the War on Terror or whether his hypothetical administration would be friendlier toward civil liberties and citizens’ pocketbooks than Tony Blair’s. For completeness, I’ll add that Charles Kennedy won’t emerge as PM either; the electoral map is stacked worse against the LibDems than against the Tories.

There is, nonetheless, a degree of uncertainty: Will Labour win by a large enough margin to enable Mr. Blair to continue his domination of the party apparatus? Or will he be a lame duck, to be succeeded within a year or two by Gordon Brown, the hope of the Old Labourites? Iain Murray, whose ear is much closer to the turf than mine, forecasts a narrow Conservative lead in the popular vote and a much reduced Labour majority in the House of Commons, which will lead to –

one heck of a legitimacy problem for the new Labour government. The last time anything like this happened was in 1974, when Labour formed a government despite having received fewer votes than the Conservatives. Yet it was a minority government, unable to survive more than a few months. That will not be the case this time, barring major defections from Labour post-election (which will be unlikely). Blair will almost certainly fall as a result, Brown will replace him and politics will return to normal following the Blairite interregnum. The Tories will smell blood and be an effective opposition again at last.

Since a parliamentary minority is powerless, an “effective opposition” means one that can dream of winning an election four or five years from now and then trying to undo Gordon Brown’s follies. I wonder whether there will be enough of an England left by then to make the attempt worthwhile.

But enough of this manic optimism. The election does have entertainment value, highlighted from day to day by Guido Fawkes. It has also led to the release of an expanded version of that great computer parliamentary election game, Prime Minister Forever, a bargain at only $14.95. Included are scenarios for last year’s Canadian and Australian elections. It’s a lavishly detailed game, complete with ratings for the candidates in every constituency, and well worth the modest price. In fact, if you take the time that you were planning to devote to watching election coverage and spend it playing PMF instead, you will finish knowing more about U.K. politics and will have a more enjoyable time.

Further reading: David Frum, “Conservatives”:

“Why can’t British voters re-elect Blair now and then reject the [European Union] Constitution later?”

“It doesn’t work like that. A victory for Blair will be interpreted as a victory for EU integration.”

“And a defeat for Blair will be interpreted as a defeat for the pro-war coalition.”

“So, hmmm, as the British say.”

“Yes. Hmmm.”

Urban Legends and Urban Guerillas

Anyone who has paid moderate attention to the “non-fake but inaccurate” Schiavo talking points story is aware that the document at the center of the kerfuffle was written by an aide to a freshman Republican Senator and that the outlets that reported its existence now deny ever saying or meaning to imply that it showed the thinking of GOP leaders. So here is what John Edwards, a guy who used to be in the news and would like to be again, had to say about it yesterday: “We saw the memo that went out to Republican leaders about how they could take political advantage of Terri Schiavo. That’s disgusting. They will pay a price for this in the 2006 and 2008 elections.”

This legend is doubtless destined to a long life. At least it has a basis in what could be fact. Less legend than pure fiction is this description of the tactics supposedly used to keep Democrats from voting last year: “Leaflets are handed out saying Democrats vote on Wednesday, Republicans vote on Tuesday.” Best of the Web has tracked down the sources of John Kerry’s factoid: Scrappleface and The Onion.

On a slightly more esoteric note, President Bush’s famous “16 words” – the passage in his 2003 State of the Union address asserting that foreign intelligence sources had discovered that Saddam Hussein was trying to buy uranium in Africa – are not yet forgotten in certain quarters. David Frum catches a reference by a talk show host on far left Radio Pacifica: “Well, Ambassador [Joseph] Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address — that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger.”

As was widely reported last year, the Senate Intelligence Committee found that Ambassador Wilson’s refutation was a lie from beginning to end. The CIA had sent him to Niger to investigate reports of Iraqi interest in uranium purchases, and he found evidence that the reports were accurate. His later op-ed to the contrary in the New York Times was the fabrication, not the President’s statement.

This particular piece of legend-mongering has another, more ominous aspect. It came in the course of an interview with Vincent Cannistraro, whom Mr. Frum aptly describes as “a former CIA official who now spends his time providing conspiracy theories on background to eager reporters”. The interviewer’s allusion to Joe Wilson led in to a question about evidence that actually was faked, a set of forged documents purporting to show that Iraq and Niger had actually agreed to a uranium deal. Cannistraro “confirmed” the interviewer’s speculation that the forger was Michael Ledeen, a well-known foreign policy analyst who is a special bête noir of the Angry Left. There is nothing to back up this accusation, but it circulates in left-wing talk shows and blogs. (It is likely though far from certain that the forgeries were disinformation created by the French intelligence service.)

At this point urban legends blend into a form of urban guerilla warfare, waged with words instead of bombs but having the same end as more overt enemy action. The master practitioner of these tactics is Seymour Hersh, the subject of an illuminating article by liberal journalist Chris Sullentrop. Hersh regularly lards his speeches with spectacular tales of American misdeeds that, by his own admission, he cannot verify and often seems to have made up. Some samples:

Videotape of young boys being raped at Abu Ghraib. Evidence that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may be a “composite figure” and a propaganda creation of either Iraq’s Baathist insurgency or the U.S. government. The active involvement of Karl Rove and the president in “prisoner-interrogation issues.” The mysterious disappearance of $1 billion, in cash, in Iraq. A threat by the administration to a TV network to cut off access to briefings in retaliation for asking Laura Bush “a very tough question about abortion.” The Iraqi insurgency’s access to short-range FROG missiles that “can do grievous damage to American troops.” The murder, by an American platoon, of 36 Iraqi guards.

Hersh puts none of these flights of fancy into his New Yorker articles, because they don’t meet even his minimal fact checking standards, but he enthusiastically spreads them by word of mouth, generating new legendary material. He is engaged not in free speech but in war by other means, taking shelter beneath the First Amendment to lob verbal missiles at the enemies of Islamofascism.

In a saner time, serial liars like Wilson, Cannistraro and Hersh would be repudiated by their own side. Perhaps Mr. Sullentrop’s less-than-friendly exposé of Hersh’s methods is a step in that direction. More likely, though, it is a futile gesture as large segments of the Left move toward a full-fledged Civil War mentalité.

Lenten Weblog, Day 29: Archbishop Iakovos, R.I.P.

Iakovos Coucouzis, the longest serving Greek Orthodox Archbishop of North and South America (1959-1996), died yesterday at age 93. He had already held his position for a decade when I was received into the Church, and, as the years went by, it was hard not to fall into the habit of thinking that he would be Archbishop forever. His beard was as white when I first glimpsed him as when he retired; his voice could have been central casting’s idea of the voice of Yahweh on Mount Sinai; he seemed like an unaging icon of equanimity.

He was born in the Ottoman Empire, on the Aegean island of Imvros, and educated in Turkey but came to America as a relatively young man, to serve as a deacon under Archbishop Athenagoras (later Ecumenical Patriarch). In 1942 he became Dean of the Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Boston, where he served until his elevation in 1954 to a titular bishopric, coupled with appointment as Patriarch Athenagoras’ personal representative to the World Council of Churches. On February 14, 1959, he was elected Archbishop of North and South America in succession to the deceased Archbishop Michael.

The secular world took notice of him only twice: when he marched in Selma with Martin Luther King in 1965 and when he stepped down in 1996, reportedly “forced out” by the Ecumenical Patriarch for having supported a proposal to unify the Orthodox jurisdictions in America. The former event was well deserving of attention. It reflected Iakovos’ lofty moral principles, in which the media were less interested when he spoke out against abortion, euthanasia and declining standards of conduct.

Regarding his retirement, I have no inside information but know better than to trust the media version of ecclesiastical news. It may be that Patriarch Bartholomew was offended by the prospect of weakened ties between Constantinople and its largest archdiocese. It is equally possible that he saw the proposed structure, a compromise that would have preserved each existing jurisdiction’s ties to its mother Church while setting up a centralized administration, as too Rube Goldberg-ish to lead to any outcome but confusion. And, of course, Iakovos may have retired simply because he was 85 years old, not because he and his superior didn’t see eye to eye on organizational issues.

In his influence of the spiritual life of his flock, the Archbishop was, so far as I can judge, wholly a force for good. He preached the doctrines of the Church, promoted education and ministries to youth, fostered cooperation among Orthodox Christians of all jurisdictions, and cooperated in the ecumenical movement without letting the Church be coopted by left-wing Protestantism. There can be little doubt that he will be remembered within the Archdiocese of America as one of its seminal leaders.

May his memory be eternal.

Further reading: Fr. Alexander F. C. Webster, “Death of a Patriarch”
Farewell Remarks of Archbishop Iakovos Upon His Retirement in 1996
Fr. Alexander Veronis, “Archbishop Iakovos and the Establishment of the Orthodox Christian Mission Center”

Lenten Weblog, Day 28: A Murdered Patriarch

Today is not only the Sunday of St. John of the Ladder (which I recognized by anticipation yesterday) but the feast day of St. Gregory of Constantinople (1745-1821), Patriarch of Constantinople (1797-1798, 1806-1808, 1818-1821), whose murder on Easter Sunday 1821 was the first Ottoman atrocity in reaction to the Orthodox uprisings in Moldavia and Greece. Two metropolitans, twelve bishops and scores of prominent laymen followed him into martyrdom. “By the summer of 1821 the great houses in the Phanar [the Greek district of Constantinople] were empty. . . . With the holocaust at the Patriarchate the old dispensation was ended. The Orthodox Church had to reorganize itself to face up to a nationalistic world.” [Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity (1985), p. 406]

Ironically, the martyred Patriarch, Gregory V Angelopoulos, was not a nationalist. In the Byzantine tradition of political quietism, he opposed rebellion and adhered to the concordat between Patriarch Gennadios and Sultan Mehmet II, made after the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453. By its terms, the Patriarchs swore political fealty to the Sublime Porte in return for freedom of worship (accompanied, it is true, by prohibition of proselytization, restrictions on church building, and disruptive intrusions into Church affairs).

In 1798, during the first of his three terms as Patriarch, Gregory was involved in a semi-scandal, when he saw to the publication of (and perhaps personally wrote) a book entitled The Paternal Exhortation, which urged Orthodox Christians to remain loyal to Ottoman rule. It denounced Greek and other nationalisms in terms similar to those that contemporary conservatives elsewhere were using against revolutionary movements. The ostensible author was Anthimos, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a prelate of saintly reputation who then lay gravely ill. He recovered, however, living for another ten years and staunchly denying any connection with the Exhortation. [Runciman, op. cit., pp. 394-6] The incident, a great embarrassment to the Church hierarchy, was a milestone in the Greek community’s internal debate between those who were content to await the Sultanate’s collapse when God willed and those who, often under the influence of secular Western ideas, demanded that the process be hastened along.

A decade later, while in retirement on Mount Athos after being deposed from his second Patriarchal tenure (the Ottomans liked to rotate Patriarchs in office, because they could extort “gifts” at each accession), Gregory was approached by, but declined to swear allegiance to, the Hetaireia ton Philikon (“Society of Friends”), an underground organization established to promote the independence of the Sultanate’s Christian peoples. Aside from scruples about his oath to the Sultan and the lack of information about the composition of the group’s leadership, he probably suspected, with much justification, that the Hetaireia was fundamentally non-Christian in its principles.

In 1818 he was recalled to Constantinople and enthroned as Patriarch for a third time. By now revolutionary trends were running strong in the increasingly decrepit regime. In early 1821 Alexander Ypsilanti, scion of a leading Phanariot dynasty, raised a revolt in Moldavia. Then, on March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation, a clergy-led popular uprising broke out in the Peloponnesus. The Patriarch summoned a synod to condemn rebellion, but the Sultan’s ministers were certain that he was the secret force behind the threats to their power. He was arrested and ordered to convert to Islam. When he refused, he was hanged from the middle gate of the Patriarchal Palace on Easter morning. The gate has never since been reopened.

Saint Gregory was a martyr not just for the Faith but for a particular understanding of the duty of Christians who must live under a hostile government. His belief in submission to the political authorities, so long as the price was not the destruction of the Church, and his distaste for revolutionary movements founded on nationalist aspirations are easy to dismiss today. They were almost certainly doomed to obsolescence, but is it so obvious that they were wrong?

Because the nationalist impulse prevailed, all of the Christians of Asia Minor, save for a few dwelling in Constantinople and on two nearby islands, were deported in the “exchange of populations” agreed to in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). Their number included tens of thousands of Turkish-speaking Orthodox, since nationality and religion had come to be regarded as synonymous. Thus all of the leaven was removed from one of the ancient Christian heartlands, and it should be no surprise that the permitted vestiges have faded to almost nothing.

At present, Orthodox Christianity in Turkey is being smothered, because the Church may neither train new priests within the country (the famous theological academy at Halki has been forcibly shuttered since 1971) nor import priests from abroad. The degree of persecution is mild compared to much of the rest of the world, but it is steady and effective. (Vide Otmar Oehring, “On Religious Freedom in Turkey” and United States Commission On Security And Cooperation In Europe, “The Greek Orthodox Church in Turkey: A Victim of Systematic Exploitation”.) We cannot be sure that the situation would be better if Christians had heeded the Paternal Exhortation. We can strongly doubt that it would be worse.

Lenten Weblog, Day 27: St. John Climacus on Slander

Tomorrow being the Sunday of St. John of the Ladder, it seems fitting to post a passage from his Ladder of Divine Ascent that has lessons not just for monks but also for bloggers. It comes from Chapter 10, “On Slander” (translated by Colm Luibheid and Norman Russell):

Slander is the offspring of hatred, a subtle and yet crass disease, a leech in hiding and escaping notice, wasting and draining away the lifeblood of love. It puts on the appearance of love and is the ambassador of an unholy and unclean heart. . . .

I have rebuked people who were engaged in slander, and, in self-defense, these evildoers claimed to be acting out of love and concern for the victim of their slander. My answer to that was to say: “Then stop that kind of love. . . . If, as you insist, you love that man, then do not be making a mockery of him, but pray for him in secret, for this is the kind of love that is acceptable to the Lord. And remember . . . Judas was one of the company of Christ’s disciples and the robber was in the company of killers [Luke 23:39-43]. Yet what a turnabout there was when the decisive moment arrived!”

If you want to overcome the spirit of slander, blame not the person who falls but the prompting demon. No one wants to sin against God, even though all of us sin without being compelled to it.

I knew a man who sinned openly but repented in secret. I denounced him for being lecherous, but he was chaste in the eyes of God, having propitiated Him by a genuine conversion. . . .

Fire and water do not mix; neither can you mix judgment of others with the desire to repent. If a man commits a sin before you at the very moment of his death, pass no judgment, because the judgment of God is hidden from men. It has happened that men have sinned greatly in the open but have done greater good deeds in secret, so that those who would disparage them have been fooled, with smoke instead of sunlight in their eyes. So listen to me, all you accountants of other people’s faults, listen well; for if, as is certain, it is true that “you shall be judged with the judgment you have used yourselves” (Matt. 7:2), then whatever sin of body or spirit we ascribe to our neighbor we will surely fall into ourselves. . . .

You can always recognize people who are malicious and slanderous. They are filled with the spirit of hatred. Gladly and without a qualm they slander the teaching, the doings and the virtues of their neighbor. . . .

Self-esteem, even when there are no other attendant vices, can bring a man down. Similarly, if we have got into the habit of passing judgments, we can be destroyed completely by this alone, for the Pharisee was condemned for this very thing [Luke 18:9-14].

A good grape picker chooses to eat ripe grapes and does not pluck what is unripe. A charitable and sensible mind takes careful note of the virtues it observes in another, while the fool goes looking for faults and defects. It is of such a one that it was said, “They have searched out iniquity and died in the search.” (Ps. 63:7)

Do not condemn. Not even if your very eyes are seeing something, for they may be deceived.

St. John did not shrink from making critical comments; at one point (ch. 14) he sharply rebukes Evagrius Ponticus (c. 345-399), a famous ascetic whose counsel about fasting he regarded as “like telling a child to climb the entire ladder in a single stride”. To expose erroneous ideas is healthy and proper debate. To premise every argument on the presumption that those on the other side are acting in bad faith in order to further diabolical agendas is the sin against which the saint warns us.

Lenten Weblog, Day 26: Market Share and Mustard Seeds

In what sense was the Papacy of John Paul II a success? Leaving aside his personal qualities, did he have the kind of impact that justifies calling him “John Paul the Great”?

Those who wish to answer “no” have one prima facie powerful argument. John Derbyshire, who is no Hitchens-like contemner of the Pontiff (“John Paul II shone like a lighthouse through the fog of fear, doubt, and defeatism that had shrouded the West and its values through the 1970s”), nonetheless avers,

It is therefore sad to reflect that the quarter century of his papacy was a terrible disaster for the Roman Catholic Church. Regular attendance at Mass all over the traditionally Catholic world dropped like a stone all through John Paul II’s papacy. Everywhere in the great Catholic bastions of southern Europe — Austria, Italy, Spain, Portugal — the story is the same. In France, “eldest daughter of the Church,” the only argument is whether regular Mass attendance today is just above, or just below, ten percent. In Ireland — Ireland! — the numbers declined steadily from the 90 percent of 1973 to 60 percent in 1996, since when they have fallen off a cliff, to 48 percent in 2001 and heading south. A hundred years ago the U.S. Church imported priests from Ireland; now Ireland imports them from Nigeria.

This loss of ecclesiastical market share, at least in Europe and America, is undeniable. Mr. Derbyshire thinks, not unreasonably, that it is explained by –

the irresistible appeal of secular hedonism to healthy, busy, well-educated populations. We live, as never before in human history, in a garden of delights, with something new to distract and delight us every day. None of that is enough to turn the heads of those who are truly, constitutionally devout; but not many human beings are, nor ever have been, that committed to their faith. And so the flock wanders away to the rides, the prize booths, and the freak shows.

As a description of the present psychological state of First World denizens, that scenario is rather rose-tinged, but it does reflect the hopes that the 20th Century intelligentsia placed in mankind’s ability to fashion a happy destiny without God. The intelligentsia’s new faith trickled down to the man in the street, who readily took up the pleasing notion that “Let your conscience be your guide” means “If it feels good, do it”.

John Paul did not create intellectual tides that started flowing before his birth and rose toward their crest while he was still a little known cleric in Poland. He did have to bear their onrush when he became the head of an institution traditionally devoted to the opposite principles: to eternity rather than the moment, to moral absolutes rather than relativism, to the culture of life rather than the quest for pleasure. He could have responded in the way that many modernist Christians urged him to: by “updating” the ideas of the Church to conform to those of the anti-Church. Had he chosen that course, more than ten percent of Frenchmen might go to Mass regularly today. The question is, what would the Mass mean to them?

Our Lord told us what he thinks of those who profess His name but disregard his commandments. A congregation of Laodicaeans, however numerous, is, in Christian terms, a failure, and that is the best that ecclesiastical progressives hope for. By contrast, a Church greatly reduced in numbers can be a success, provided that it does not allow itself to contract to an obscurantist, isolationist remnant. The present age is not the first ebb in the history of the Faith, and let us recall that the whole enterprise began with a dozen commonplace Galileans, one of whom was a traitor.

In the past quarter century, Christianity has lost numbers, but it has, if my perceptions are accurate, grown stronger in faith and intellect, to a large extent on account of the efforts and inspiration of John Paul II. Traditional Christians are no longer afraid of historical and scientific inquiry; as knowledge has grown, it has become, as we should have known all along it would be, the ally of faith. As the Orthodox Bishop of Vienna said last week, John Paul was “able to develop a universal humanism based on spiritual values as opposed to the atheist version of humanism”. Thus he “contributed enormously to the rediscovery of faith by many of those who lost it because of liberalism and relativism prevailing in democratic Western societies”.

Humanity is learning that there is nothing permanently satisfying in “the rides, the prize booths, and the freak shows”. The secular “garden of delights, with something new to distract and delight us every day” is filled with confused, frightened, discontented wanderers. If John Paul succeeded in planting a mustard seed therein, “the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest shrub of all and becomes a tree so that the birds of the air come and shelter in its branches”, then he will indeed be “the Great”.

This is Science Reporting?

The Wall Street Journal has a weekly science columnist named Sharon Begley. I have no idea what credentials she holds, but she’s always struck me as a bit flaky. That impression was dramatically confirmed today [link for on-line subscribers only, but you’re not missing much] when I saw that she had written, in the course of a discussion of the Riemann Hypothesis (a famous conjecture about prime numbers and the subject of a book by John Derbyshire that is almost intelligible to folks like me),

Although most of us think of infinity as one big number, some infinities are bigger than others. The number of numbers divisible by 2 is infinite, and so is the number divisible by 9. But the first infinity is bigger. There also is an infinite number of squares (4, 9, 16 ...) and cubes (8, 27, 64 ...), but more primes than either.

What can one say? One might as well try to pass off phlogiston or the lumniferous ether as the latest discoveries. If Miss Begley is still writing about science for the Journal next week, I shall be sorely disappointed.

Obama’s Moderation, Wisconsin Vote Fraud, Etc.

■ Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.), an African-American (his father is from Kenya) whom the Jim Crow section of the press refers to as “black” (he has as much white as black ancestry, so shouldn’t he be “gray”?), has been a media darling ever since he lucked into a Senate nomination last year. On the strength of a Fourth of July oration at the Democratic National Convention, he has a reputation as only a moderate liberal. That label is rather belied by the news (caveat: from Daily Kos and therefore not necessarily trustworthy) that Loony Left Moveon.org has raised $3 million for him and that he has asked that his name be removed from the Web site of the genuinely moderate liberal Democratic Leadership Conference. According to the Kossacks, “We know where Obama’s loyalties lie, and it’s wiith [sic] the netroots. He’s one of ours.” I wonder whether Senator Obama wants to be one with those whose reaction to the murder of four Americans in Iraq was “Screw ’em.”

■ Orlando Sentinel columnist Peter Brown (via OpinionJournal Political Diary, a $3.95/month bargain):

Since the disputed 2000 election, increased turnout, especially among minorities, has been deemed so desirable that suggestions that some tools to increase access might also make it easier to vote illegally have been dismissed as politically incorrect. . . . [But] federal prosecutors began investigating [abuses of Wisconsin's liberal same-day registration rules] after the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel found 7,000 more ballots tabulated in that city than people counted as voting, and an additional 1,200 votes from invalid addresses. Officially, Kerry carried Wisconsin by only 11,000 votes, and Milwaukee has less than 10 percent of the state's voters. The same rules were in effect statewide, but no other jurisdiction’s numbers were reviewed by the news media. It is quite possible President Bush actually won Wisconsin. Had Kerry won Ohio, he would have become president, but not if Bush won Wisconsin.

I know nothing about Peter Brown in particular, but the Sentinel is in general a very liberal paper. (One Mother’s Day it ran a flattering profile of an abortionist.) This may be a sign that even parts of the Left are beginning to worry about vote fraud in America.

■ IMHO, it is much too early to think seriously about the 2008 Presidential election. For unserious thinkers, however. . . .

■ Have you heard about born-again stars? (No, not a link to a story about religion in Hollywood.)

■ Kofi Annan is 67 years old today. Would it be excessively ungracious to suggest that he give himself and the world the birthday present of prompt retirement?

So Sandy Burglar is Merely Crazy

Today’s Wall Street Journal passes along the Justice Department’s emphatic assertion that the documents that Sandy Berger stole from the National Archives and destroyed had no unique characteristics:

In fact, the five iterations of the anti-terror “after-action” report at issue in the case were printed out from a hard drive at the Archives and have no notations at all.

“Those documents, emphatically, without doubt--I reviewed them myself--don’t have notations on them,” Mr. Hillman tells us. Further, “there is no evidence after comprehensive investigation to suggest he took anything other than the five documents at issue and they didn’t have notes.” Mr. Berger’s sentencing is scheduled for July, and Mr. Hillman assures us Justice’s sentencing memo will lay out the facts and “make sure Mr. Berger explains what he did and why he did it.” Meanwhile, conservatives don’t do themselves any credit when they are as impervious to facts as the loony left.

The last sentence is a cheap shot. That the copies were printouts from a hard drive has never been reported before, so no one can be accused of having ignored it. As for the rest, we are now at a surreal level of irrationality. Why did Mr. Berger need five printouts of the same document? What imaginable motive did he have for taking more than one home with him, much less for cutting three into tiny pieces?

In this case, what the Journal calls “conspiracy theories” are simply hunts for a rational motive. If the facts are as reported, we must abandon that search. Mr. Berger, President Clinton’s former National Security Adviser, a man who was a leading candidate to be Secretary of State under a President Kerry, was drunk, drugged or insane. I trust that his sentencing hearing will include a psychiatric evaluation.

Lenten Weblog, Day 25: St. Tikhon, Enlightener and Confessor

Today is the feast day of St. Tikhon (1865-1925), Bishop of the Aleutians and North America (1898-1907) and Patriarch of Moscow (1917-1925). Distinguished for both his labors in building up the Orthodox Church in the New World and his sufferings under the communist regime in Russia, he was recognized as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church in October 1989, as communism was giving way to a more hopeful future.

Born Vasily Ivanovich Belavin, the son of a country priest, the future saint graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1888 and became a seminary instructor. Three years later, he took monastic vows and assumed the name “Tikhon”, after St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724-1783). In 1898 he was chosen as Bishop of the Aleutians and Alaska, which made him the only Orthodox prelate in the Western Hemisphere. As the name of the diocese suggests, its attention had hitherto been focused on the Orthodox community in Alaska, a legacy of Russian rule. Bishop Tikhon looked to the rest of the continent. He changed the name of the see to “the Aleutians and North America”, moved its headquarters to New York and, after being raised to the rank of Archbishop, appointed two auxiliary bishops, one of them an Arab, St. Raphael Hawaweeny, the first Bishop of Brooklyn. He also obtained the approval of the Holy Synod in Moscow for an Orthodox Western Rite with a liturgy is based on the Book of Common Prayer (now known as the “Rite of St. Tikhon” and used by the Western Rite Vicariate of the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese).

In 1907 he was recalled to Russia, serving as Bishop of Yaroslavl (1907-1913) and Vilna (1913-1917). After the February Revolution in 1917, which briefly gave Russia a democratic government, the Holy Synod was reorganized, with Tikhon as one of its members. In August of the same year, the first general council of the Russian Church since 1666 met in Moscow. It elected Tikhon both Metropolitan of Moscow and chairman of its deliberations. The first great issue facing the Council was a proposal to restore the office of Patriarch, which Peter the Great had suppressed after the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700. Even as the Bolsheviks were taking power in the streets, the assembled bishops voted in favor of restoration and conducted the election of the new Patriarch. Under the time-hallowed procedure, the names of the three top vote getters were placed in an urn. After a night of prayer, the oldest monk present drew one of the names. Providentially, Tikhon, the third place finisher in the balloting, was selected. He was enthroned on November 21, 1917.

A believer in strict noninterference by the Church in secular politics, the new Patriarch tried to remain neutral in the Russian Civil War, going so far as to refuse on one occasion to bestow a blessing on a White commander. Naturally neutrality did not please the Bolsheviks, who wanted only subordination. Assaults on churches and priests, including the murder of the Metropolitan of Kiev in January 1918, led Tikhon to issue an encyclical denouncing “the open and concealed enemies of the Truth of Christ who have begun to persecute the [Church] and are striving to destroy Christ’s Cause by sowing everywhere, in place of Christian love, the seeds of malice, hatred and fratricidal wrath”. [Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, p.343]

The next day, the communist government issued a decree implementing its notions of “freedom of conscience” and “separation of church and state”: All Church property was confiscated, clergymen were forbidden to receive salaries or gifts from their parishioners, and the teaching of religion to minors was banned. On October 26, 1918, the Patriarch urged the authorities to –

celebrate the anniversary of taking power by releasing the imprisoned, by ceasing bloodshed, violence, ruin, constraints on the faith. Turn not to destruction, but establish order and legality. Give the people the respite from fratricidal strife that they long for and deserve. Otherwise, all the righteous blood you shed will cry out against you and with the sword will perish you that have taken up the sword.

As Richard Pipes says,

It was the most daring challenge to the new regime that any public figure had had the courage to issue: it recalled the admonition three hundred fifty years earlier by another Metropolitan of Moscow, Philip, to Ivan the Terrible, condemning the tsar’s barbarities, for which he paid with his life. It is not quite clear what was on the Patriarch’s mind when he spoke out: whether he wanted to arouse the population against the regime or merely [sic] to fulfill a moral purpose. Some historians, assuming the former and observing the population’s failure to act, conclude that it failed in its purpose. Such judgment ignores not only the atmosphere of unbridled Cheka terror prevailing at the time, but the fact that Tikhon in a subsequent epistle (July 21, 1919) urged Christians under no condition to wreak revenge for the sufferings they had endured. . . . [op. cit., p. 345]

In 1922 the regime, after killing or imprisoning thousands of bishops, priests and pious laity, attempted to place control of the Church in the hands of a GPU-run “Living Church” movement. Tikhon, by now in confinement, at first attempted to resist. Eventually decrees appeared in his name purportedly acquiescing in all of the government’s measures. It is unlikely that he actually consented to them, and some were palpable forgeries. Death from heart failure released him from his ordeal 80 years ago, on April 7, 1925. The ordeal of his motherland lasted more than 60 years longer. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the seeds of Orthodoxy that he planted have grown into a flourishing vine.

Troparion - Tone 1

Let us praise Tikhon, the patriarch of all Russia,
And enlightener of North America
An ardent follower of the Apostolic traditions,
And good pastor of the Church of Christ.
Who was elected by divine providence,
And laid down his life for his sheep.
Let us sing to him with faith and hope,
And ask for his hierarchical intercessions:
Keep the church in Russia in tranquility,
And the church in North America in peace.
Gather her scattered children into one flock,
Bring to repentance those who have renounced the True Faith,
Preserve our lands from civil strife,
And entreat God's peace for all people!

Troparion - Tone 8

From your youth you have loved Christ, O blessed one.
You have been an example for all by word, life, love, spirit, faith, purity and humility.
Therefore, you now abide in the heavenly mansions,
Where you stand before the Throne of the all-holy Trinity.
Holy hierarch Tikhon, pray for the salvation of our souls.

Kontakion - Tone 2

A gentle manner adorned you,
Kindness and compassion you showed to those who repented,
You were firm and unbending in confessing the Orthodox Faith,
And zealous in loving the Lord.
O holy hierarch of Christ and confessor Tikhon,
Pray for us that we may not be separated from the love of God,
Which is in Christ Jesus our Lord!

Kontakion - Tone 8

Successor of the Apostles, adornment of the hierarchy, teacher of the Orthodox Church.
Pray to the Master of all that peace be granted to all the world,
And great mercy to our souls!

Slippery Schiavo Slope

While it is possible that Fr. Rob Johansen has been misinformed or that extenuating facts exist, it certainly looks like the slide down the moral slope that started with Terri Schiavo is not just a hypothetical danger:

85 year-old Mae Magourik of LaGrange, Georgia, is currently being deprived of nutrition and hydration at the request of her granddaughter . . . . Mae’s Living Will provides that nutrition and hydration are to be withheld only if she is comatose or vegetative. Mae is in neither condition. Neither is her condition terminal.

Mrs. Magourik suffered an aortic seizure two weeks ago. According to Fr. Johansen’s informants, her granddaughter, who is her sole heir, was appointed her legal guardian by a local probate judge. The decision to cease providing food and water was made over the objections of the patient’s brother, sister and nephew, who are willing and able to care for her if given the opportunity.

I would like to think that those who insisted that the paramount consideration in Terri Schiavo’s case was following her wishes (however scanty the evidence for those wishes might be) will raise the alarm about Mae Magourik. I also hope that they will ponder what should be done if the Georgia judiciary stubbornly insists that the woman’s guardian has the sole authority to determine whether she shall live or die. Would it be outrageous, under these circumstances, for Congress to authorize a federal court to review the case? If not, why was its intervention in behalf Mrs. Schiavo “Stalinist”? If so, is the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process really there to protect persons accused of crimes but not those whose only wrongdoing is to fall ill?

Update (4/10/05): The Birmingham News reports that the judge ordered a review by doctors of Mrs. Magourik’s condition on Friday, that she was found to be conscious and treatable, and that she has now been moved to a hospital where she is receiving care. So this tale apparently has a happy ending.

JustOneMinute has a curious sidelight. Mrs. Magourik’s nephew, who has been the most vocal relative seeking to call attention to her plight, has high-level Democratic Party connections. Yet, instead of seeking help from that quarter, he turned to bloggers and Schiavo advocates. I wonder why he didn't think that his party associates would be of any use to his aunt.

The Schiavo “Talking Points”: Only Sort of Fake

Freshman Senator Mel Martinez (R-Fl) has disclosed that one of his staffers wrote the “talking points” about Terri Schiavo’s case that caused great media outrage a couple of weeks ago. (Vide my posts on March 22nd and April 4th.) The Senator says that he inadvertently gave the document to Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa); from Senator Harkin or his staff it then reached Washington Post reporter Mike Allen, whose paper gave it a front page story, initially attributing it to Republican “party leaders”. That claim was silently withdrawn but not corrected, even though it was patently false and had been published in numerous outlets that subscribe to the Post’s news service.

Reporter Allen said early on that he knew the provenance of the memo, but he didn’t bother to tell his readers who wrote it, only that his sources had satisfied him “that it was authentic and that it had been used in an attempt to influence Republican senators”.

Tom Harkin isn’t a Republican Senator, and statements to the effect that saving Terri Schiavo’s life would be a “great political issue” for Republicans are hardly the way to influence him. (He didn’t need influencing in any event, because he was an early and vocal pro-Terri advocate.) There’s not a shred of evidence that Senator Martinez gave the “talking points” to anybody else.

If the Post had headlined, “Republican Senate Aide Thinks Schiavo Is ‘Great Political Issue’”, which is all the story that there was, it would have been accurate, but no sane editor would have played it on page one. That this meaningless anecdote was retailed at all, much less so prominently, is stronger evidence of anti-Republican manipulation of the news than if the Post had simply fallen for an outright forgery.

Mike Allen could, by his own account, have cleared up the question of where the “talking points” came from as soon as the question was raised. Instead, he kept silent. Since the questions were raised only by right-wing blogs and the Weekly Standard, most of the public retained the impression formed by the initial story: that high-level Republicans saw Mrs. Schiavo’s plight primarily in political rather than humanitarian terms.

Senator Martinez has fired the staffer who wrote the embarrassing memo. Will the Post at least admit that it hyped an unimportant story because it saw in it a “great political issue”?

Further reading: Power Line, whose editors get up earlier in the morning than I do (the drawback to my refusal to observe Daylight Saving Time) have two long, informative posts: “Mystery Solved?” and “Speaking for Me”.

Lenten Weblog, Day 24: The First Gospel

Every careful reader of the Gospels notices that there are passages in Matthew, Mark and Luke that correspond very closely in thought and wording, which is why those three works are called the “Synoptic Gospels”. Also noticeable are places where Matthew and Luke agree without any Markan parallel. For about a century, since Sir John Hawkins and Adolf Harnack formulated the theory, most, though certainly not all, New Testament scholars have inferred that Matthew and Luke drew on a lost book, conventionally called “Q” (from the German Quelle, “source”), that contained sayings of Jesus and at least a sketchy narrative of his ministry.

The “Q” hypothesis can’t be called an established fact. While it accounts for a great many phenomena, other explanations are possible. Short of discovering an actual copy of “Q”, definitive proof will always elude us. Nonetheless, it is a decent working theory, the one that appears in virtually all mainstream commentaries on the Gospels.

If we assume arguendo that “Q” was a real document, an incomplete reconstruction of its content is possible. Harnack undertook the first rigorous compilation of the text (Sprüche und Reden Jesu, die zweite Quelle des Matthaeus und des Lukas (1907)). As he observed, the original work was undoubtedly fuller. Whatever the two later authors did not use is now unidentifiable as “Q” material or is forever lost. Despite that limitation, one can discern certain surprising characteristics in the remnant.

Most striking, as Sir William Ramsay emphasized in his review of Harnack (“The Oldest Written Gospel”, reprinted in Luke the Physician and Other Studies in the History of Religion (1908)), is the lack of any visible awareness of Jesus’ death. The absence of a passion narrative might be an accident of preservation, but –

. . . the teaching of Q is inconsistent with the idea that the writer of the lost Source regarded the death of Jesus as the fundamental fact in the Gospel. One acquires the impression throughout that Jesus was to him the great Teacher, not that He was the Redeemer by His death: Jesus was to him a Son of God, the King who reveals the Kingdom of Heaven. In the Teaching of Jesus, the Kingdom of God stood out prominently, and its nature, with the conditions of entering it, were emphatically stated. . . . The way of salvation, i. e., the Kingdom of God, does not lie outside of, or apart from, the common life, but in the ordinary life of man (i. e., it is the spirit in which that life is lived); and every man has the opportunity of being justified by the spirit of wisdom. The revelation by the Son is the only and necessary way by which man can obtain knowledge of God; this way of salvation is a difficult path with a single narrow entrance; it was unknown to many prophets, though now shown publicly to those who know Him; it is hidden from the wise and educated, but revealed to infants; the Kingdom of God has come near those cities whither the true teachers and Apostles go; there is need for many workers in this harvesting of the world. [Citations to Harnack’s reconstruction have been omitted throughout.]

In this Teaching there lies implicit the Gospel of Christ, but the foundation on which alone (according to the universal Christian Gospel from Peter and Stephen onwards) the Kingdom of Heaven can be built up, is wanting, for there is no allusion to the death of Christ, which gives the needed driving force and the power.

Later researchers have called attention to other ways in which “Q” is distinct from the Gospels in general: observance of the Jewish law is taken for granted; the themes of repentance and the imminence of the end times are strongly emphasized; Jesus is portrayed as the culmination of the line of Old Testament prophets; those who reject His teaching are likened to the persecutors of the prophets, though there is no sign that they are as yet engaged in actual persecution; the gentiles are scarcely noticed, except when the Jews are warned that their rightful inheritance could be forfeited through failure to heed Jesus.

From the data, Ramsay believed that one could draw a highly probable, though at first glance startling, conclusion about the date and sitz im leben of this lost document:

There is only one possibility. The lost Common Source of Luke and Matthew . . . was written while Christ was still living. It gives us the view which one of His disciples entertained of Him and His teaching during His lifetime, and may be regarded as authoritative for the view of the disciples generally. This extremely early date was what gave the lost Source the high value that it had in the estimation of Matthew and Luke, and yet justified the freedom with which they handled it and modified it by addition and explanation. . . . On the one hand, it was a document practically contemporary with the facts, and it registered the impression made on eye-witnesses by the words and acts of Christ. On the other hand, it was written before those words and acts had begun to be properly understood by even the most intelligent eye-witnesses.

If one imagines the disciples acting like human beings rather than the peculiar mannequins of higher critical tradition, nothing could be more plausible than Ramsay’s proposition. Writing down the words of a teacher who has made an immense impression is natural to his pupils. Modern historians of early Christianity presume that Our Lord’s sayings were either recollected years after the fact or forgotten and reinvented. Isn’t it more rational to think that they were contemporaneously recorded? That record was superseded in great measure when the Resurrection fundamentally altered the disciples’ understanding of their Lord, which explains why “Q” did not survive independently. Instead, it was drawn on by the authors of the Gospels that we have today. (N.B. There are a few indications that Mark also made use of “Q” to a limited extent, but he evidently found most of his material elsewhere; it’s easily conceivable that “Q” was not Our Lord’s only Boswell.)

Sensible as Ramsay’s theory may sound, you will look in vain for mention of it in standard reference works. So far as I can tell, it has never been refuted, just ignored. And the reason why it made no impression is not hard to figure out: The assumption that underlies virtually all scholarly work on the New Testament is that we have scanty or no eye-witness evidence concerning Jesus’ ministry. What we learn from the Gospels has to be the product of one or more “communities” transmitting (or concocting) oral tradition.

It would be bold to assert dogmatically that Sir William Ramsay was right and the consensus of the learned wrong, but the hypothesis that the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were in large part taken down as he uttered them seems too plausible to be dismissed without examination.

Quote of the Day

Terry Teachout takes note of an affliction suffered by everyone, save perhaps the occasional literary genius, who writes thousands of words a month:

I wrote a drama column for The Wall Street Journal yesterday. My editor kicked it back to me with the observation that I’d already used the word “clunker” three times so far this season, and would I please come up with a different way to describe the play in question? . . .

I was, as I say, delighted to have been caught in the act. Not surprisingly, we all have our personal clichés, needless to say, and when you write as much as I do, it’s inevitable, alas, that you’ll overuse more than a few of them from time to time. (The preceding sentence contains six of them.) Doubtless (that’s seven) the day will come, if it hasn’t already, when some busybody writes a piece of software that will automatically check for such repetitions throughout the whole of a journalist’s oeuvre.

I’m sure that, too, will be a good thing, though I confess to finding it a bit frightening to contemplate.

Crying “Mercy” for Sandy Burglar

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a rather odd editorial on Sandy Berger’s (non-)punishment for stealing classified documents from the National Archives and destroying them. The WSJ editors declare that a $10,000 fine, no jail time and a meaningless three-year security clearance suspension show “admirable restraint” on the part of the Justice Department. The accuracy of the noun is indisputable.

It’s fairly clear that this editorial defense was solicited by the department’s Office of Public Integrity, whose chief prosecutor is specifically quoted. The Office’s rationale for leniency is prima facie eyebrow-raising:

Justice says the picture that emerged is of a man who knowingly and recklessly violated the law in handling classified documents, but who was not trying to hide any evidence. . . .

Public Integrity chief prosecutor Noel Hillman . . . assured us that Mr. Berger did not deny any documents to history. “There is no evidence that he intended to destroy originals,” said Mr. Hillman. “There is no evidence that he did destroy originals. We have objectively and affirmatively confirmed that the contents of all the five documents at issue exist today and were made available to the 9/11 Commission.”

People like me have suggested that Mr. Berger’s most likely motive for shredding three copies of a confidential report on the Clinton Administration’s response to terrorism was to hide embarrassing marginal annotations. Is Mr. Hillman oblivious to that possibility, or does his office have copies of the copies, including handwritten marginalia?

So far as I can see, there are only three possible justifications for letting Mr. Berger off easily: The first is the one that my earlier post suggested – that there was little chance of obtaining a conviction in view of much of the judiciary’s skeptical attitude toward national security cases. The second is that he acted without motive, e. g., got stinking drunk while reading the documents and cut them up in a fit of alcoholic rage. I don’t know anything about his drinking habits, though I hope that President Clinton’s National Security Advisor didn’t make a habit of drunken irrationality. At least, it’s an innocent explanation, probably the only one conceivable, albeit it does not account for taking five copies of the same document. If, as the Journal says Justice believes, “Mr. Berger genuinely wanted to prepare for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission but felt he was somehow above having to spend numerous hours in the Archives as the rules required”, why did he need more than one copy? Did he go into the Archives in a state of intoxication?

The third possibility is that some larger investigation is in progress, with which Mr. Berger is cooperating but that Justice wants to keep as quiet as possible to avoid alerting the targets. That is my hope. I must confess, however, to being less hopeful than perplexed at this juncture.

If none of these circumstances is present, Mr. Berger should be punished for attempting to alter the public record. If his attempt failed, that is no excuse.

Further reading: Dick Morris & Eileen McGann, “Sandy Rolls Over for Bill & Hill”

Update (4/8/05): In a follow-up editorial, the Journal has added a new level of surreal mystery to this affair. The Justice Department now informs us that the destroyed documents were nothing more than recent printouts from a National Archives computer. Their destruction served no conceivable rational purpose, and there is nothing to investigate. So the theory of intoxication (or worse) seems to be the correct one. The world truly is an unlikely place!

Lenten Weblog, Day 23: The Veil of Ignorance

After resisting temptation for a while, I decided to look at Christopher Hitchens’ de mortuo nil nisi malum on John Paul II. Everyone knew that Mr. Hitchens would write something vicious. If he had unexpectedly found favorable, or even neutral, words for the late Pontiff, his public would have been deeply disappointed.

The denunciation was rather feeble, I thought, beginning with reasonable, though vastly overstated, criticism of John Paul’s failure to crack down vigorously enough on pederastic priests, then drifting into absurd irrelevancies, such as the claim that a “Catholic cabal” “imposed” President Ngo Dihn Diem on South Vietnam. All quite nonsensical and deserving of Tom Smith’s sneer that it –

reads like the rantings of an Oxford old boy well into his third bottle at the local wine bar. Reading his piece, one wonders, justly, what exactly does the no doubt unexemplary Catholicism of the long dead Vietnamese politician Diem have to do with anything? You can almost see Hitchens bent over his glass, muttering “Catholics . . . Pope . . . damn . . . . them” like some old Nazi muttering “the Jews.”

What most struck me, though, was Mr. Hitchens’ opening trope:

The papacy is not, in theory, a man-made office at all. Its holder is chosen for life, by God himself, to hold the keys of Peter and to be the vicar of Christ on earth. This is yet another of the self-imposed tortures that faith inflicts upon itself. It means that you have to believe that the pope before last, who held on to the job for a matter of weeks before dying (or, according to some, before being murdered) was either unchosen by God in some fit of celestial pique, or left unprotected by heaven against his assassins.

Maybe there is a Papist somewhere who believes that the Pope is “chosen by God” in some nontrivial sense, but I’ve never met any who weren’t aware that he is elected by the College of Cardinals, human beings quite capable of picking a mere mortal or even a less than satisfactory Christian. No one thinks that Pope Alexander VI was the Holy Ghost’s favorite son. Mr. Hitchens appears to be under the impression that Popes are god-kings rather than simply men endowed with high office and great responsibilities, which some carry out more adequately than others.

The flood of commentary on the late Pope’s tenure, much of it exhibiting amazing misunderstanding of Christian history and doctrine, highlights a more general problem. Our society’s secular elite knows less about Christianity than about astrophysics and is nonetheless ready and willing to pass judgement on what it doesn’t know.

This ignorance would be bad enough if it were limited to journalists. More disturbing is to find elementary lapses in scholarly works. To take one instance, The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch has received lavish, and in many respects deserved, praise. The author is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University, so, despite the fact that he is by his own account not a Christian, one expects him to be thoroughly acquainted with Christianity.

Yet Professor MacCulloch confuses the Virgin Birth of Christ with Mary’s perpetual virginity (p. 97, where he asserts that Isaiah 7:14, the classic proof text for the former, was used to support the latter) and writes that Arius taught that “Jesus was not God at all, but a human prophet of God” (p. 182), a highly misleading description of the Arian doctrine that the Second Person of the Trinity was created before Time began. Later (pp. 589ff.) he asserts that Christian teachings about men, women and sexuality “borrowed heavily from the pronouncements of pre-Christian Greek and Latin science”, as if all of the opinions that he dislikes (and he dislikes pretty much all that the historical Church has to say on those subjects) were not found, clearly and forcefully stated, in the text of the Bible.

All of these are areas in which an Oxford Professor of the History of the Church ought to be as unlikely to err as a law professor is to confuse habeas corpus with corpus dilecti. It takes little imagination to extrapolate how much nonsense the public is fed about the Faith by what appear to be authoritative sources.

The upshot is that public discourse has no filter for distinguishing wildly speculative theories, such as those of the Jesus Seminar, from solid though unconventional scholarship, such as John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew. In such an intellectual atmosphere, a preposterous novel like The DaVinci Code isn’t laughed into oblivion.

Does it matter to Christians how much or little secularists know about us? I think that it does. On the simplest level, misinformation is a barrier to evangelization. If non-Christians hold a farcical picture of Christian doctrine, they won’t give it serious consideration. Those who become dissatisfied with the secular world view will instead drift to other religions, of which New Age pseudo-mysticism and radical Islam are the most active proselytizers at present.

There is also a danger to Christianity itself. Hearing ourselves constantly misrepresented and abused, we are tempted to retreat into isolation and obscurantism. Until recently, that was the dominant survival strategy of Protestant fundamentalists. Of course, refusal to engage the world only convinces the world that it is right to regard Christians as mentally impaired fanatics, leading to a downward cycle of reprehension.

Having identified the problem, I confess that I have no useful ideas for remedying it. Anticipating that a large proportion of his readers will lack familiarity with Christians’ “basic doctrinal toolkit”, Professor MacCulloch finds it necessary to furnish an appendix consisting of the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments and the Hail Mary. If those can rightly be considered unfamiliar texts, the task of acquainting this age with the Faith of our Fathers is a daunting one indeed. To make a start, I suppose, most of us need to devote more time and effort to making sure that we are thoroughly acquainted with it ourselves.

Addendum: The recently resurrected Man Without Qualities shreds the Hitchens screed into more tiny pieces than Sandy Burglar tearing into a top secret memorandum. I have formed a working hypothesis that Mr. Hitchens did not really want to say anything negative about Pope John Paul but, knowing that he owed his public a tirade, sat down with a couple of fifths of single malt scotch and let whatever came into his head slop onto his keyboard.

Seattle, Meet Birmingham

The United States isn’t the only democracy that has embraced lax absentee ballot rules, thus eliminating mandatory ballot secrecy and facilitating vote fraud. Britain has followed the same course and has reached its predictable culmination in the recent municipal elections in Birmingham, England:

A judge launched a blistering attack on the postal voting system yesterday and the Government's failure to recognise and tackle widespread corruption.

Finding six Labour councillors guilty of electoral fraud at last year's council election in two Birmingham wards, he said the episode would “disgrace a banana republic”.

Richard Mawrey, QC, sitting as a High Court judge, said the councillors were responsible for a “massive, systematic and organised fraud” that was supported by the local Labour Party.

He attacked ministers who dismissed warnings about vote rigging in the forthcoming general election as “scaremongering” and said the system that Tony Blair was encouraging the public to use was “hopelessly insecure”.

“There are no systems to deal realistically with fraud and there never have been,” he said. “Until there are, fraud will continue unabated”. . . .

In Aston, the three Labour candidates set up a “vote-rigging factory” in a disused warehouse, the judge heard. There they doctored hundreds, possibly thousands, of votes, ensuring that they were elected.

The fraud principally involved theft by applying for ballot papers in names taken from the electoral role and filling them in. Ballots were intercepted and altered.

The vote stealers’ methods could readily be adapted to U.S. conditions:

At the height of the skulduggery was a “vote-rigging factory” set up by Labour activists in Aston and run from a disused warehouse. There, the three candidates - Mohammed Islam, Muhammed Afzal and Mohammed Kazi, who maintained their innocence and described yesterday's judgment as a “dark day for democracy” - and their supporters altered bags stuffed with ballots to ensure that they were elected.

A midnight raid by police on the eve of the election found them sitting at a table with 275 unsealed postal votes scattered on a table in front of them. The find proved to be the tip of the iceberg.

They had collected the ballots in a variety of ways. The most common was to get hold of a copy of the electoral register, apply for a postal ballot in someone else’s name and have it sent to a “safe” address where it could be picked up.

This could then be submitted with a forged signature and false witness confirmation, and the ballot could be accepted. Another method was to get activists to go door to door collecting papers, signed or unsigned, which could then be doctored. . . .

During investigations by The Telegraph, other allegations were made, including an attempt by Labour activists to bribe postmen to hand over blank ballots without going through the “middle men” of the voters.

One illiterate man is said to have had his name used on more than 50 ballot papers. Activists stood over voters while they filled in their form, pressuring them to vote Labour.

The hearing was told that the Labour candidates opened sealed papers before changing the vote and re-sealing them, knowing that checks by the council were useless to stop them.

There was uproar on the day of the vote when three “unexplained”, unsealed ballot boxes appeared at the count and were included, along with a plastic bag stuffed with votes for Labour.

Nothing quite so well-organized has turned up in our country’s fraud-by-mail demonstration project, last year’s Washington State gubernatorial contest, but there has been ample proof that elections conducted in this manner are prone to massive errors, both intentional and accidental. The latest evidence is the discovery, in King and Pierce Counties, of absentee ballots that were never tabulated. Interestingly, those in King County were from precincts that voted Republican. Did a Democratic election official toss aside ballots from “unfriendly” territory?

Before that, we learned that King County counted several hundred more votes than voters, that hundreds of provisional ballots were tabulated without verification, that thousands of registered voters have suspicious addresses, that ineligible non-citizens and felons were able to cast ballots, and so on. (Browse through Sound Politics for a day-by-day account.) Not all of this sloppiness can be blamed on the easy availability of absentee ballots, but there can be no doubt that the election would have been far more credible if all voters except those with compelling excuses had been required to appear at the polls in person. (It would have been better yet if they had also been required to show photo ID.)

The Democrat-controlled Washington legislature has responded to the gross imperfections of the 2004 balloting by proposing – to conduct all elections entirely by mail!

After Mohammed Islam, Muhammed Afzal and Mohammed Kazi finish serving their gaol sentences, perhaps they will consider emigration to Seattle.

Related Posts: Vote Wherever You Like
Do-It-Yourself Vote Fraud

Lenten Weblog, Day 22: Eucharistic Potluck

Today in the NRO Corner, there was a passing reference to an incident from Bill Clinton’s Presidency. While visiting South Africa, he and his wife received communion at a Roman Catholic church. His action stirred up a controversy, somewhat lost among the many Clinton controversies, particularly after Cardinal John O’Connor denounced it in a Palm Sunday sermon as “legally and doctrinally wrong”, adding “Some undoubtedly believe that if one has enough prestige or money, anything goes.”

Most of the ensuing press commentary was unfavorable to His Eminence. His stance was lambasted as lacking in Christian love for one’s neighbor. The priest who administered the sacrament defended himself by saying, “I had no time to go and ask permission when he stood up. And that you wanted me to embarrass the president, but a president who is here to pray with us? . . . Everyone in my situation would have done the same, unless maybe something wrong upstairs.” [CNN transcript; no link available]

Like the Roman Catholics, the Orthodox Church limits the reception of the Eucharist to baptized and chrismated members of the Church. Save in a few extreme circumstances, e. g., to dying prisoners in the Soviet gulag, Orthodox priests are not permitted to give communion to non-Orthodox. Under no circumstances are Orthodox believers allowed to take communion in non-Orthodox churches.

These rules are frequently a sore point with members of other Christian denominations, who attribute them to intolerance. The truth, however, is the contrary: Their motive is charity toward those who are not of our Faith.

To understand why, one must consider what the Orthodox (and the Romans, too) believe about the Eucharist. The sacrament is central to the drama of salvation; in it we are united with the Body of Christ, which is present in the Bread and Wine that we consume, and with our fellow believers. As Bishop Kallistos Ware puts it in his classic text, The Orthodox Church,

The Eucharist, by uniting the members of the Church to Christ, at the same time unites them to one another: “We, who are many, are one bread, one body; for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17). The Eucharist creates the unity of the Church. The Church (as Ignatius saw) is a Eucharistic society, a sacramental organism which exists — and exists in its fullness — wherever the Eucharist is celebrated. It is no coincidence that the term “Body of Christ” should mean both the Church and the sacrament; and that the phrase communio sanctorum in the Apostles’ Creed should mean both “the communion of the holy people” (communion of saints) and “the communion of the holy things” (communion in the sacraments).

These effects do not result from anything that the communicants feel or do; they are acts performed by God. Moreover, they are not necessarily safe or comfortable acts. In the prayer before communion, the worshiper supplicates, “May the communion of Thy Holy Mysteries be neither to my judgment, nor to my condemnation, O Lord, but to the healing of soul and body.” The implication is that the Eucharist wrongly received, without proper preparation, a proper state of mind and full union of intention with the Church, can lead to condemnation rather than salvation. The sacrament is a mystical supper, not a come-and-get-it potluck.

Those who are outside the Church are in no position to receive this mystery. It cannot unite them to the Eucharistic Society of the Church; because they do not accept the Orthodox Faith, they do not even desire that unity. A fortiori, it cannot unite them with Christ, for that union takes place only in the context of the “sacramental organism”. Therefore, receiving the Bread and Wine in an Orthodox liturgy can do non-Orthodox no good and may do them harm.

On a lower, but still important plane, “open communion” is false in another way: It implies that the theological differences among Christian denominations are of no real consequence. Many people would like for that to be the case, but different groups hold divergent doctrines, not all of which can be true. Do we wish to say that we don’t care what statements about God are true or false? That is what we imply when we misuse the sacraments to create a pretense of union without unity in faith.

What about the other side of the nave? If the Church has reasons not to offer the sacrament to non-Orthodox, do they have reasons to acquiesce in that prohibition?

A non-Orthodox Christian who seeks to receive Orthodox communion proclaims by his action that he disbelieves the Orthodox doctrines concerning the Eucharist. He does not understand the Church to be a “sacramental organism”, does not see any connection between union with Christ and union of the faithful, and does not fear judgment or condemnation if he eats and drinks the Body and Blood of Christ without being duly prepared. He evidently views the sacrament as either mere symbolism, to which human emotion rather than divine grace gives meaning, or a magical rite that extorts Grace from God.

While everyone is free to disagree with the Orthodox Church, it is impolite, to put it mildly, to display one’s disagreement by going up to the celebrant at the most solemn moment of the liturgy and shouting your disagreement in his face. And that is exactly what a non-Orthodox does when he deceives a priest into giving him communion.

I hope that non-Orthodox who are tempted to go forward for communion at Orthodox liturgies (or non-Roman Catholics at Catholic masses) will ponder in their hearts why they wish to engage in such rudeness to their hosts (pun intended).

Note: For the benefit of non-Orthodox readers who may find themselves at an Orthodox liturgy, let me mention that, at the end of the service, the priest distributes bread, called antidoron, to those present. Non-Orthodox may partake of antidoron and are encouraged to do so. It is not a sacrament but a gesture of fellowship. In fact, it plays the irenic, ecumenical role that some people seem to wish to assign to the Eucharist.

What’s the Provenance, Mike?

Power Line contributors John Hinderaker and Scott Johnson continue to pursue the strange tale of the “GOP talking points” regarding Terri Schiavo. When it was uncovered by the Washington Post, this document got a big play in the press and did much to set the tone for later coverage of the controversy: On one side were the idealists who wanted to deprive a brain-damaged woman of food and water, on the other opportunistic Republicans seizing on what they perceived as a “great political issue”.

Now that the image is firmly fixed in the public mind, so much so that President Bush’s “politically motivated” support of Mrs. Schiavo is generally perceived as contributing to a dip in his approval ratings, the Post concedes that it doesn’t know who wrote the “talking points” and disingenuously denies that it ever attributed them to GOP leaders. Well, the initial story that it put out on the wire and that was picked up by papers around the country did include, “The one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators by party leaders, called the debate over Schiavo legislation ‘a great political issue’ that would appeal to the party's base”, but that sentence was dropped from the version that appeared on the Post’s front page the next morning, so who could possibly have thought that the story had an anti-Republican slant? It was just a human interest piece about an anonymous scrap of paper with no political implications whatsoever. That is so obvious that the Post refused to correct the original “distributed to Republican senators by party leaders” statement.

The Post’s current official position, conveyed by its news service managing editor, is, “The version of the article published by the paper did not specify the authorship and noted that the memo was unsigned. The authorship remains unknown [emphasis added].”

Unknown the paper’s readers but not, if we can believe his own words, unknown to Mike Allen, the reporter who broke the story. Last week, Howard Kurtz quoted him thus, “The document was provided by an official who has a long record of trustworthiness, and this official gave a precise account of the document’s provenance, satisfying us that it was authentic and that it had been used in an attempt to influence Republican senators [emphasis added].” Unless Mr. Allen spoke without knowing the meaning of the word “provenance”, we have his word that he has been informed, by what he believes to be a reliable source, of the document’s origin. Yet he has kept that information secret, certainly from the public, perhaps even from his own editors. (“The authorship remains unknown” is a surprisingly unequivocal statement if the paper in fact knows it.)

We can infer, from the silent retraction of the attribution to GOP “party leaders”, that they are not the authors. Why won’t Mr. Allen tell us who is? Unfortunately, the natural conclusion to be drawn from his reticence is that his claim to know the provenance is a lie, in which case it is hard not to suspect that he knowingly assisted in a partisan fabrication. He can, of course, rebut that suspicion by coming clean.

Perhaps this incident seems like a mere kerfuffle, but it’s important for two reasons. First, there is enough real smoke surrounding the Schiavo case without additional input from smoke machines. The public deserves an accurate picture of the motivations of the actors, and the commentators who relied on the “talking points” should admit to having been bamboozled. A couple of them might want to go so far as to apologize to the victims of the swindle.

Second, this particular fake came to light only because it was remarkably crude, with an erroneous bill number and mistakes in describing Senate procedures. If the press was so easily taken in, don’t we have cause to worry about how many forgeries, more skillfully executed, taint mainstream reporting without being exposed? It may well be that much of what the public accepts as the “inside history” of current events actually rests on deception. If so, that is a worse fault than overt media bias. A biased but competent reporter can, if he makes the effort, overcome his built-in slant and report the news straightforwardly. Against stupidity, on the other hand, the gods themselves contend in vain.

Update (4/7/05): It turns out that a Republican did write the “talking points”, though not one who could be accurately described as a “party leader”. For my latest thoughts, vide The Schiavo “Talking Points”: Only Sort of Fake.

Spring Forward and Die

At last I have company in the nascent anti-DST movement. At National Review Online, John J. Miller argues against it (“Unhappy Hour”), and a new book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time by Michael Downing, traces the history of the idea, showing that it originated in ideology rather than economics.

The economic argument for daylight saving time – that less energy will be consumed if people have an “extra” hour of daylight during the summer, because they will stay outdoors instead of inside under electric lights – conceivably had a scintilla of validity in a earlier age with much different patterns of leisure activity. Today it is just silly. If DST has any impact at all, it is to keep air conditioners running on high for an extra hour during the hot portions of the year. If, as seems like a reasonable assumption, air conditioning usage is highest from the time that people wake up until the Sun goes down, lengthening that period is an energy waster.

Lives apparently are wasted, too. “Springing forward” is tantamount to imposing a mild case of jet lag throughout the country, with potentially unhappy consequences. A 1998 study by sleep researcher Stanley Coren concluded,

Two major points are made by these data. The first is a confirmation of the fact that following the spring shift to Daylight Savings Time (when one hour of sleep is lost) there is a measurable increase in the number of traffic accidents that result in fatalities. Furthermore, it replicates the absence of any “rebound” reduction of accidents following the fall shift to DST (when the opportunity is present for an additional hour of sleep).

Of the two competing hypotheses for this increase in accidents, namely the one that suggests that it is the increased sleep deficit that causes the change in accident rate, versus notions based upon reduced illumination levels when driving to work, or suppositions that people forget the DST time change, fail to adjust their clocks, and find themselves rushing to work to avoid being late, the sleep hypothesis seems to be the most tenable. Hypotheses based upon haste and dim morning light both predict the bulk of the increased accidents to be confined to the morning hours. The sleep loss hypothesis would predict that individuals become more tired as the day wears on and hence the bulk of the accidents will appear later in the day. It is, of course, this latter pattern which appears with most of the accident fatality increase confined to the period after noon.

If the sleep loss hypothesis is correct, then why isn’t there a reduction in the number of traffic accidents in the fall, when the shift back to standard time provides an extra hour for sleep? Although this was the pattern observed in one study (Coren, 1996b) it has not replicated in other studies. The failure of the “safety rebound” may simply have to do with human nature. Just because a person has the opportunity to sleep for an addition hour does not mean that people actually will go to sleep on time. Many may spend that extra hour socializing or watching television. In some instances, where individuals do go to bed at the appropriate time, their usual circadian rhythm may still wake them after 7 or 8 hours in response internal signals or the external morning increase in illumination. Contrast this to what happens in the spring, where an individual’s work schedule will enforce the person's awakening on the new DST time in order to meet job commitments.

Taken together then, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that as a society were are sufficiently chronically sleep deprived so that a small decrease in sleep duration, such as that which occurs with the spring shift to DST, can significantly increase accident susceptibility. [emphasis added]

In an era when minuscule risks from chemical exposure are deemed to warrant expensive regulatory regimes, isn’t it time to end the overlooked killer, Daylight Saving Time?

Lenten Weblog, Day 21: Sunday of the Holy Cross

The theme of this Sunday is the Holy Cross, which is carried in procession through the congregation and venerated at the conclusion of the liturgy. Lent is now half over, and the reason for emphasizing the symbol of Christ’s crucifixion is, as the special reading for the day tells us, to strengthen our resolve to fast, pray and purify our lives during the last weeks before Pascha.

With the help of God, we have almost reached the middle of the course of the Fast, where our strength has been worn down through abstinence, and the full difficulty of the labor set before us becomes apparent. Therefore our holy Mother, the Church of Christ, now brings to our help the all-holy Cross, the joy of the world, the strength of the faithful, the staff of the just, and the hope of sinners, so that by venerating it reverently, we might receive strength and grace to complete the divine struggle of the Fast.

The Cross was not always a “joy of the world”, however. In the day’s Gospel reading (Mark 8:34-9:1), Our Lord says, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.” (Jerusalem Bible) Can we imagine how those words fell on the first ears that heard them? “Taking up one’s cross” is a cliché to us. To the Jews of 1st Century Palestine, it was what condemned criminals did as they went to the torture-death of crucifixion. There could be no greater contrast to the worldly success that is promised so lavishly by false prophets (and occasionally, alas, by evangelists purporting to call men to the service of Jesus).

That the bearer of such a message induced anyone to follow Him ranks as a miracle in itself. We, who live in safe, comfortable times, to whom refraining from meat for a few weeks a year is the acme of suffering, need to reflect more often on what the first Christians, moved by the incarnate presence of the Lord, were willing and able to risk and do. If we fall so far short, is it because we cannot do as much, or because we do not care to try?

And if you will here stop, and ask yourselves, why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it. . . . Now, who that wants this general sincere intention, can be reckoned a Christian? And yet if it was among Christians, it would change the whole face of the world: true piety, and exemplary holiness, would be as common and visible, as buying and selling, or any trade in life. [William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, ch. 2]

Home from the Ring

On leaving the final performance of the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ring Cycle last night, I felt as I imagine Marathon runners do after they cross the finish line: light-headed, exhilarated and tired. I’m playing show tunes today to recover.

This was my third viewing of the complete Ring. The first two were over 20 years ago in the Seattle Opera’s traditionalist production, with faux-Teutonic sets and costumes, along with attempted adherence to Wagner’s impossibly ambitious stage directions. When Seattle switched to a more “innovative” version, I saw its Walküre and decided that I was too old-fashioned for Wotan as an insane 19th Century composer squabbling with Fricka his shrewish hausfrau. As for the televised Chereau Ring, I changed channels in horror as soon as the Rhinemaidens emerged from under their hydroelectric dam.

The Lyric Opera’s production is non-traditionalist, though not in the flippant Chereau fashion. There are many anachronisms. A few of them are pointless and odd, such as Hunding’s brandishing a rifle. (He doesn’t think to fire it at Siegmund.) Most, however, fit the abstract, stylized stagecraft.

Suggesting, rather than trying to literally portray, the operas’ spectacular events works well most of the time. Especially striking were the opening tableau of Das Rheingold, where the Rhinemaidens “swam” on wires behind a gauzy blue curtain, and the huge, metallic Fafner (worked by 20 extras). Less happy was the entrance of Brünnhilde and her sisters bouncing on trampolines, which evoked laughter from the audience. The Ring has its funny moments, I know, but the Ride of the Valkyries is not supposed to be one of them.

The great virtue of the production is that, unlike the other modernist ones that I’ve seen, it didn’t distract from the music; yet that virtue exposes a problem. Wagner didn’t intend for music to dominate the Ring. It was to be a complete work of musical theater, where words, staging and acting were also essential to the overall experience. If that ambition was ever realized, it isn’t, so far as I can discern (and I confess to being no true aficionado, so I may be wrong), even attempted any more.

This deemphasis of all elements except the singers and the orchestra reflects, I suppose, what stage managers and performers want to do, and what opera goers will pay for. Still, it doesn’t seem necessary. Stage technology has advanced to the point where the effects envisioned in Wagner’s stage directions could be largely realized, and the operas could be sung in English, using Andrew Porter’s scrupulous, highly singable translation, to enable the audience to follow the story in greater detail. (Super-titles help with that, but the Lyric’s omitted, I would estimate, a third or more of the lines.)

The risk is that those who attend closely to Wagner’s words will find the philosophy of the Ring distasteful. Indeed, one reason why the music has been given precedence may be a feeling that the work is proto-Nazi, a celebration of the amoral superman in his struggle against aristocracy and capitalism. That certainly may have been the composer’s intention, but, each time that I see or hear the cycle, I am struck by a very different moral that emerges from the tale, regardless of what Wagner consciously meant.

Siegfried, “free” by virtue of being cut off from law and tradition, does not do anything with his freedom. Instead, he is directed or manipulated successively by Mime, the Forest Bird, Brünnhilde, Gutrune, Gunther and Hagen. The one decision that he perhaps makes on his own – to refuse to return the Ring to the Rhinemaidens – is disastrous, though it, too, may be another’s, reflecting the will immanent in the Ring. (Like Tolkien’s, it is hard to give up.) Unsupported by the archaic civilization that he despises, the “superman” has no basis for action and therefore is steered by external forces. His desire to do “good” without knowing morality leads only to destruction. The last stage direction of Götterdämmerung reads (in Porter’s translation):

From the ruins of the fallen hall, men and women, in great agitation, watch the growing firelight in the heavens. When this reaches its greatest brightness, the hall of Walhall is seen, in which gods and heroes sit assembled . . . . Bright flames seize on the hall of the gods. When the gods are entirely hidden by the flames, the curtain falls.

The Old Order dies, but no New Order is born. There could hardly be a better parable of the futility of rejecting the accumulated wisdom of the ages for the sake of a revolutionary future.

Lenten Weblog, Day 20: Death, the Old Enemy

The close juxtaposition of the dehydration of Terri Schiavo and the natural passing of Pope John Paul II makes Death a natural topic for reflection. Our secular culture has two attitudes toward human mortality, mutually contradictory but fervently held.

The first is that death is so great an evil that no end can justify it. Thus, statistics about how many people were killed in overthrowing the Ba’athist regime in Iraq are cited as proof that the effort wasn’t worth the price, while cost-benefit analyses that argue that some environmental protections or safety measures are too expensive for the number of lives that they would save are denounced as inhumane.

The second is that “death is a natural part of life”, that we ought to welcome it for the aged and the infirm, that for many, e. g., infants born with severe defects, it is a better fate than life. This view is summed up in Walt Whitman’s haunting, though perverse lines,

Come, lovely and soothing Death.
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.

Both of these feelings – they scarcely possess the thoughtfulness and coherence to be called “opinions” – are distortions of the Christian tradition, which likewise has two teachings about death.

First, death is mankind’s great enemy and curse. In Genesis, God is represented as telling our first parents that, should they defy the divine command and eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (that is, claim for themselves the autonomy to declare what is right or wrong), the punishment will be death. That punishment attached to human nature and has been inherited ever since. It is not the same as the natural termination of organic existence; that animals and plants are mortal is not a punishment for their sins. Organisms decay, but blotting out a creature with rational intelligence and free will, with what we label a “soul”, is a horrible event. Our moral instinct revolts against it, even as it does not revolt against the peaceable deaths of dogs, sparrows or oak trees. Indeed, men have instinctively realized, from as far back as we have information about their beliefs, that death for a rational being is not simple extinction: The soul continues, because rationality is not a purely material phenomenon and cannot be cut off by material obliteration. The instinctive view is that this persistence is by nature a miserable fate. In Homer, the ghost of Achilles says that the meanest slave is happier than the most glorious of the dead.

Death is not, then, good in and of itself, not “lovely and soothing”. It is the negation of good – not just an evil but the summation of all evils. A Christian rightly prays that it will be averted. On joyous occasions at Orthodox churches, we sing, “God grant you many years!”

If that were all that there is to be said about death, life would be hopeless, for each of us will die, and after a relatively brief period. If we scale down the time span of the universe, from its creation till today, into a single year, the longest lived human dies less than a third of a second. If we thereafter survive as immaterial souls, what could be more dreary? The most vivid picture of the pains of Hell is cheerful next to the prospect of billions of years of ghostly prolongation.

This hopelessness pervades classical Greek and Roman thought. Either the extinction of the rational soul or its bodiless survival was an unbearable concept. The ancients found palliatives: the mystery cults, reincarnation, Epicurean denial of reason and free will; none of them healed despair. The best remedy was a jocular agnosticism, as in Emperor Hadrian’s deathbed poem:

Animula vagula blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula,
Nec ut soles, dabis iocos?

[Sweet, wandering little soul,
My body’s guest and companion,
Where will you go now,
Pale, stiff and naked?
No longer, as you used to, will you play jokes on me.]

In Christian belief, Christ is the medicine for despair. By His death and resurrection, He conquered death and gave those who believe in him the promise (but not the certainty: we have the free will to reject Him) of our own resurrection unto life eternal, not a simple replication of the life that we now lead under the dominion of sin and death but everlasting life in the presence of God.

To say that Christians have no reason to hate death is mistaken. Christ trampled down death; He did not make it “lovely and soothing”. Death is not beautiful; it is ugly. “Embracing” it or praising it as a relief and a boon is a denigration of the gift of life that God has bestowed upon us.

Therefore, the Christian view of death is the opposite of the contemporary secular one. We do not hasten death, for either ourselves or others. At the same time, we do not tremble at the prospect. To use an earthly analogy, secularists are like soldiers who flee from the enemy, hide wherever they can and, when caught, tamely surrender. Christians are soldiers who face the enemy resolutely, staying at their posts under the heaviest bombardment, fighting with confidence of victory.

The world recedes; it disappears;
Heav’n opens on my eyes; my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy Victory?
O Death! where is thy Sting?

– Alexander Pope, “A Dying Christian to His Soul”

Lenten Weblog, Day 19: St. John Paul II

Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Karol Wojtyla are three names that historians of the 20th Century will inevitably link. Among them they accomplished the amazing feat of turning the trajectory of Western civilization. It is not certain that the next century will be one of free men, free markets and spiritual rebirth; it is certain that all of those were dim prospects before the Great Triumvirate began their work.

Of the three, Fr. Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II, Patriarch of Rome, undertook the greatest task. Though President Reagan and Lady Thatcher promoted causes congruent with Christianity, their activity was primarily secular. John Paul struggled in the realm of faith, against the tides of modernism that seemed destined, just a quarter century ago, to sweep away the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church and leave behind bare, ruined choirs, among which a minimalist religiosity would play the tune for a this-worldly socialist libretto.

It isn’t for a non-Roman to pass judgement on the internal state of the See of Rome and its dependencies, but no great discernment is required to recognize that the Second Vatican Council, in the course of making vital pastoral reforms, moved so swiftly that it gave the impression that essential doctrines were as malleable as external customs. The upshot was a time of troubles, during which it certainly appeared that the Roman Church would soon be as modernist, save for vestigial cassocks, statues and incense, as the most “advanced” branches of Protestantism. My traditionalist Roman Catholic friends in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s had the air of soldiers in a beaten army, who hoped to endure as prisoners of war. They nicknamed the Pope “Paul the Sad”, a fitting sobriquet for the shepherd of a bewildered flock.

John Paul II stood steadfastly against that zeitgeist. If he did not succeed in dispelling it from every crevice of the ecclesia, he did reverse the balance of forces. Today it is the modernists who are demoralized and defensive; the stridency of their denunciations of the Pontiff’s “reactionary” tendencies is sign enough of that. The progressive periti and their the dreary secular mentalité look quainter by the year.

In the eyes of Orthodox Christians, John Paul is a particularly significant figure. Had the Roman Church remained on its previous course, Orthodoxy would have been left as the last major traditionalist bastion in a sea of semi-Christianity. We have been promised that the gates of Hell shall never prevail; still, it is a relief not to be alone and abandoned. While the current state of affairs in Christendom is not as good as the unblemished communion for which we all pray, it is far more satisfactory than what might have been. It is one thing to debate with Roman theologians about the filioque, another to confront periti who harbor doubts about the Trinity.

Throughout his reign, John Paul labored for improved relations, and eventual unity, between his jurisdiction and the Orthodox Church. He did not, needless to say, throw over a thousand years of Latin theology in an instant, but he identified what is essential to reunion between East and West. As he said in his Easter address to the Archbishop of Athens four years ago:

I wish first of all to express to you the affection and regard of the Church of Rome. Together we share the apostolic faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior; we have in common the apostolic heritage and the sacramental bond of Baptism; and therefore we are all members of God’s family, called to serve the one Lord and to proclaim his Gospel to the world. The Second Vatican Council called on Catholics to regard the members of the other Churches “as brothers and sisters in the Lord” (Unitatis Redintegratio, 3), and this supernatural bond of brotherhood between the Church of Rome and the Church of Greece is strong and abiding. . . .

At this meeting, I also wish to assure Your Beatitude that the Church of Rome looks with unaffected admiration to the Orthodox Church of Greece for the way in which she has preserved her heritage of faith and Christian life. The name of Greece resounds wherever the Gospel is preached. The names of her cities are known to Christians everywhere from the reading of the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of Saint Paul. From the Apostolic era until now, the Orthodox Church of Greece has been a rich source from which the Church of the West too has drawn for her liturgy, spirituality and jurisprudence (cf. Unitatis Redintegratio, 14). A patrimony of the whole Church are the Fathers, privileged interpreters of the apostolic tradition, and the Councils, whose teachings are a binding element of all Christian faith. The universal Church can never forget what Greek Christianity has given her, nor cease to give thanks for the enduring influence of the Greek tradition.

The Second Vatican Council stressed to Catholics the Orthodox love of the liturgy, through which the faithful “enter into communion with the Most Holy Trinity and become sharers in the divine nature” (Unitatis Redintegratio,15). In offering liturgical worship pleasing to God through the centuries, in preaching the Gospel even in dark and difficult times, in presenting an unfailing didaskalia, inspired by the Scriptures and the great Tradition of the Church, the Orthodox Church of Greece has brought forth a host of saints who intercede for all God’s People before the Throne of Grace. In the saints we see the ecumenism of holiness which, with God’s help, will eventually draw us into full communion, which is neither absorption nor fusion but a meeting in truth and love (cf. Slavorum Apostoli, 27).

I have little doubt that, within the lifetime of most men now living, Karol Wojtyla will be officially recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church. In the eyes of God, I am confident, he is one already. May his memory be eternal!

Update (4/5/05): The Daily Telegraph reports that L’Osservatore Romano writers and other Roman Catholic spokesmen have begun referring to the late Pope as “John Paul the Great”, putting him in a category with only two of his predecessors, Leo the Great (440-461) and Gregory the Great (590-604).

There hasn’t been a generally recognized “Great”, religious or secular, since Frederick II of Prussia. It isn’t an appellation that seems suitable to extraordinary democratic leaders like George Washington, William Pitt fils, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The Papacy, though, is a less modern institution, and we really shouldn’t give future historians the impression that “Great”-ness ended with a bellicose German.

The Assassination Meme

The prediction that right-wing death squads will soon start mowing down public officials is growing popular. I have already noted its deployment by former economist Paul Krugman. Mark Levin has further examples:

So, Ted Kennedy is accusing Tom DeLay of encouraging threats against judges. Where have we heard this before? When GW law professor Jeffrey Rosen accused me of the same thing. The liberals have their mantra down now. And when Cathy Young tried the same thing against DeLay and Kathryn. Gee, and I thought the unrelenting attacks on Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and a score of Bush nominees by Kennedy and his ilk, not only criticizing their past decisions or experiences, but labeling them as extremists and worse, might be responsible for stoking the fires of hate for the judiciary. Apparently the Left prefers to attempt to intimidate conservative critics of the judiciary with these vicious mud-balls rather than debate issues.

One’s first thought is that the explanation for this bizarre alarmism is medical rather than political. Poor Professor Krugman, in particular, though he may still know a hawk from a handsaw when the wind is southerly, is stark, staring mad on all topics related to current events. If the Left were capable of embarrassment, it would already have eased him into retirement.

Although widespread insanity is not a wholly credible explanation for the upsurge in assassination talk, it is hard to find a rational alternative. There have indeed been a handful of reported death threats by people who call themselves supporters of Terri Schiavo (but are obviously unclear on the concept of “right to life”). It takes absurd extrapolation, however, to conjure more than a nugatory terrorist movement out of the vaporings of few nuts (none of whom has actually done anything). Surely Senator Kennedy and Professor Rosen and their ilk have more of a sense of proportion than that. (I won’t say the same for Professor Krugman. Cathy Young, a usually sensible libertarian, is inexplicable in this instance.)

One can think of saner, more sinister reasons why leftists might warn of danger from their enemies. Recall Herodotos’ story of how Peisistratos rose to power in Athens:

Wounding himself and his mules, he drove his wagon into the marketplace, with a story that he had escaped from his enemies, who would have killed him (so he said) as he was driving into the country. So he implored the people to give him a guard. . . . Taken in, the Athenian people gave him a guard of chosen citizens. . . . These rose with Peisistratos and took the Acropolis; and Peisistratos ruled the Athenians. [Herodotos, Histories, 1.59.4-6 (trans. A. D. Godley)

Naturally this tactic must be adapted to modern conditions. It is a striking coincidence that “Conservatives are assassins!” is being shrieked in unison with effusions like this one, from a mass e-mailing signed by John Kerry:

Imagine a world in which every appointment to the federal judiciary is tightly controlled by an extreme element within one party. Imagine the kinds of judges that will sit on the federal bench – even on the Supreme Court – if George W. Bush never needs a single Democratic vote.

As persuasion aimed at the American electorate, that appeal has a rather glaring flaw: A majority of the target group voted for the guy who will be making the appointments, and judicial confirmations require a majority of votes in the democratically elected, politically polychrome Senate. Raising hysteria about the alleged violent proclivities of the persons associated with the President and the Senate majority is a possible way to distract public opinion from the fact that George W. Bush, Bill Frist et al. are ordinary conservative politicians, elected on a widely popular platform and presiding over a growing economy and increasingly successful foreign policy. Maybe they look harmless, but what about those assassins in the shadows?

As a strategy, it isn’t the most brilliant in political history. Shrilly accusing the majority of your countrymen of extremism, much less of harboring murderers, isn’t the sure-fire way to win their hearts and minds. Yet maybe it makes sense to Howard Dean (in whose universe, after all, Venezuela is a haven for right wingers), and what else does the current Democratic Party have for debating points?

Sandy Burglar and the War on Terror

So it was more than just a kerfuffle, after all. As everybody knows by now, Sandy Berger, once President Clinton’s National Security Advisor, has confessed that he stole classified documents from the National Archives and destroyed them. As summarized by the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription-only; here’s another plug for paying $3.95 a month for it),

Mr. Berger took five different versions of a review of the Clinton team’s record on terrorism written in 2000 by White House aide Richard Clarke. Each version contained unique handwritten notes or markings made by various high-level recipients of the memo. In other words, each copy could reveal the responses of various key administration players to Mr. Clarke’s analysis of how the Clinton administration had responded to the rising threat of attacks on the U.S. homeland. For reasons known only to himself, Mr. Berger shredded three of the five versions of the memo in his office.

It isn’t likely that Mr. Berger took the enormous risk of committing a felony that could have led to years in prison and permanent disgrace for anything less than an enormous reward. What that reward was, we won’t know unless he talks or photocopies of the destroyed copies turn up somewhere. In the absence of other evidence, one can only conclude that scrutiny of the “unique handwritten notes” would have revealed serious misconduct by Mr. Berger himself or other high-level Clinton Administration officials.

From the miscreant’s point of view, the risk has paid off. Under a plea agreement, he will pay a derisory $10,000 fine and lose his security clearance for three years (that is, for most of the rest of the Bush Administration, when he isn’t likely to have much use for it anyway). The secrets that he was trying to conceal remain concealed. It will be a true surprise if his reputation among elite opinion makers suffers more than a slight tarnish. From those who know what he was covering up he can expect gratitude, and some of them may hold high positions in, say, a Hillary Rodham Clinton Administration.

Perhaps this lenient punishment is due to nothing more than Mr. Berger’s status as a Washington insider, whom other insiders are willing to protect against the consequences of misconduct. The offense is too serious, however, for that explanation to be wholly convincing. Is it not probable that prosecutors took the best deal that they could get in light of the risks of going to trial on felony charges? Federal judges have not of late shown much sympathy for the government in cases involving national security. District judges in particular have given the accused far greater opportunity to delay or thwart prosecution than has ever previously existed in wartime. In that environment, the Justice Department may have been pessimistic about the prospects of gaining a conviction in the face of Mr. Berger’s initial denials of wrongdoing and an automatically skeptical judiciary.

No one desires a lowered standard of defendants’ rights in national security cases, but, as a practical matter, those now seem to have much higher standards of governmental conduct and more formidable burdens of proof than prosecutions for business misconduct. The contrast between Martha Stewart, jailed for lying to investigators about conduct that was at worst marginally criminal, and Sandy Berger, mildly rebuked for substantive crimes and not punished at all for telling fibs to the FBI, has already drawn attention. If we are not, or, thanks to our judiciary’s mindset, cannot be, as serious about national security as we are about corporate fraud, the War on Terror is going to last longer and cost more in lives and treasure than the gloomiest prophets fear.