23 February 2018
Can black really be white?
[And is 2+2 equal to 5 or whatever number you choose just because?]
February 23, 2018
Are you up to date on Bulverism ... google it if you don't know about it. I suppose we could coin a cognate verb and say that PF was Bulverising when he waxed eloquent last year on the deep and dark psychological maladies of all those ghastly young people who have Incorrect and Unbergoglian Tastes in liturgical matters.
It seems to me a term with possibilities. One could say "Don't you Bulverise me, you ..." in a very hostile tone of voice.
[Bulverism, coined by C.S. Lewis from a character he created in one of his novels to illustrate what it is, is a logical fallacy employing circular reasoning by assuming your opponent is wrong, and then proceeding to explain his error, thereby avoiding the basic question or evading the issues raised, focusing instead on asserting that an argument is flawed or false because of the arguer’s subjective motives or his identity. Which is exactly the position taken by Bergoglio and all his defenders against opponents of Bergoglianism. Unable to answer the main criticisms of Bergoglio’s teachings in a way that makes sense, they resort instead to ad hominem attacks.]
A thing I do not quite understand is PF's purpose in quoting before Christmas from the Commonitorium of St Vincent of Lerins.
The passage he alluded to also includes, though PF did not quote it, the phrase
eodem sensu eademque sententia. Derived by S Vincent of Lerins from the text of S Paul, it was used by B Pius IX, incorporated in the decree on the papal ministry at Vatican I, and contained in the anti-modernist oath.
Very significantly, it was used by St John XXIII in the programmatic speech he gave at the start of the Council ...
What the Council taught, so he laid down, was to be in the same sense, the same meaning, as the teaching of the preceding Magisterium.
St John Paul II in Veritatis Splendor made clear that it applied to questions of morality as much as to those of dogma. Benedict XVI used this same sanctified phrase in his 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia about the Hermeneutic of Continuity.
I have recently repeated a series of mine on this phrase which you could find via the search engine on this blog.
Eodem sensu eademque sententia - the same sense, the same meaning -
because the teaching of the Church cannot and does not change.
If this phrase means anything at all, it must mean that the teaching of Familiaris consortio (1981; paragraph 84) and of Caritatis sacramentum (2007; paragraph 29), that divorced people who, having gone through a civil form of marriage, are in an unrepented sexual relationship with a new "spouse", should not approach the Sacraments, cannot already ... in less than a decade! ... have metamorphosed or "developed" into its exact and polar opposite.
Even Jesuits, even the Austrian aristocracy, whether or not adorned with umlauts
[The reference here is to Cardinal Schoenborn, an Austrian count, with his umlauted surname], cannot really expect to get away with black being white, with non-X and X being identical. Come off it, chaps ...
Magnum Principium stat non contradicendi.
It just so happens, Fr. Rutler has written an essay on Fr. Spadaro's infamous line that in theology, it is possible for 2+2 to equal 5, or some such pseudo-intellectual audacity... How telling it is that it is persons like Spadaro or Sorondo or Paglia - who probably all fancy themselves to be great intellectuals (and they would be, if sophistry and casuistry and constant violation of the non-contradiction principle were the hallmarks of a genuine intellectual) - who are Bergoglio's chief attorneys!
The mathematical innovations
of Father Antonio Spadaro
by FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER
February 23, 2018
Nearly fifty years ago, my parish secretary, who was elderly even then, kept the parish accounts using an abacus. I gave her the latest kind of electric adding machine, which she used dutifully, but I noticed that she then checked the results with her abacus, an instrument that has been reliable since long before the invention of Hindu-Arabic written numerals. Until then, ten human fingers provided a decimal system.
If we don’t get numbers right, we will not get much else right. This is a point Lewis Carroll made in his
Adventures of Alice in Wonderland. An apocryphal story claims that Queen Victoria, having enjoyed the Alice tales, requested a first edition of Carroll’s next book, and was perplexed when it arrived:
An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.
There is a convincing thesis that Carroll, as an Oxford mathematician, wrote Alice’s Wonderland adventures to satirize new non-Euclidean theories. For instance, when Alice expands to nine feet and shrinks to three inches, she tells the Caterpillar, “Being so many different sizes in a single day is very confusing.” The Caterpillar enjoys the confusion, which is Carroll’s way of saying that Euclidean and hyperbolic geometry, rooted as they are in different axioms, cannot both be true at the same time.
The guests at the Mad Hatter’s tea party are very likely symbolic commentaries on the discovery of quaternions by the Irish mathematician William Rowans Hamilton, in 1843.
The abstract algebra, which Carroll thought ridiculous, was the background of Hamilton’s theory of “pure time,” which he seems to have inferred from Kant’s concept of a Platonic ideal of time distinct from chronological time. But this does not deny the existence of time as we know it; and Kant himself was almost neurotically compulsive about timing every action of his day by his clock.
One wonders what Carroll would have thought of Einstein’s Relativity, or Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. But Einstein did not expect that his theory in physics should provide any moral structure, and Heisenberg would not apply a principle of quantum mechanics to theological systems. Since then, many have made such mistakes, the first being the early Modernists and now an increasing number of people even in the heart of Rome, who muddle sciences and hold certainty suspect.
Father Antonio Spadaro, a close associate of Pope Francis, raised eyebrows in July 2017 when he described religious life in the United States, with such confidence that can come only from a profound knowledge of a subject or a total lack of it. Father Spadaro advises the Holy Father, who had never visited the United States before becoming pope.
In an essay in
Civilta Cattolica called “Evangelical Fundamentalism and Catholic Integralism,” Father Spadaro spoke with disdain of a cabal formed by Evangelicals and Catholics motivated by a “triumphalist, arrogant, and vindictive ethnicism” which is creating an “apocalyptic geopolitics.” Religious fundamentalists behind this plot have included Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump who is a Manichaean.
The co-author of this imaginative literary exercise was a Protestant minister, Marcelo Figueroa who is editor-in-chief of the new Argentinian edition of
L’Osservatore Romano to which office he brings the rich systematic theology of Argentinian Presbyterianism. The two authors were rhetorically florid in denouncing Yankee racism, obscurantism, and fascism, so unlike the temperate history of Spadaro’s own peninsula and Figueroa’s Argentinian utopia. If they want to condescend to the USA, they need a loftier platform.
Then in October 2017 Father Spadaro said in Boston,
“It is no longer possible to judge people on the basis of a norm that stands above all.” The suggestion is that a mathematical principle of uncertainty also applies to theology where all is in flux and subjective.
Later, in a well publicized comment on “Twitter” which operates according to stable and constant principles of applied engineering, Father Spadaro typed:
“In theology 2 + 2 can equal 5. Because it has to do with God and the real life of people…”
To put a charitable gloss on that, he may have simply meant theology applied to pastoral situations where routine answers of manualists may be inadequate. But he has made his arithmetic a guide to dogma, as when he said in his Boston speech that couples living in “irregular” family situations “can be living in God’s grace, can love and also grow in a life of grace.” Yet, despite his concern for freedom of thought and expression, Father Spadaro has recently expressed sympathy for calls to censor Catholic television commentators who insist that 2+2 = 4.
There are two things to consider here. First, some clergy of Father Spadaro’s vintage grew up in a theological atmosphere of “Transcendental Thomism.”
Aquinas begins the Summa Theologica asserting in the very first Question, four times, that theology has a greater certitude than any other science. While it gives rise to rhymes and song, it is solid science, indeed the Queen of Sciences.
Transcendental Thomism was Karl Rahner’s attempt to wed Thomistic realism with Kantian idealism. Father Stanley Jaki, theologian and physicist, called this stillborn hybrid “Aquikantianism.” But if stillborn, its ghosts roam corridors of ecclesiastical influence.
This really is not theology but theosophy, as romantic as Teilhard de Chardin, as esoteric as a Rosicrucian, and as soporific as the séances of Madame Blavatsky.
The second point is that not all cultures have an instinct for pellucid expression. The Italian language is so beguiling that it can create an illusion that its rotundity is profundity, and that its neologisms are significant. When it is used to calling you a
Cattolico integralista or a
restauratore, the cadences almost sound like a compliment. Even our Holy Father, who often finds relief from his unenviable burdens by using startling expressions, said on June 19, 2016: “We have a very creative vocabulary for insulting others.”
[At which he happens to be a grandmaster.]
In saying that 2+2=5, Father Spadaro preserves a familiar if deluded intuition, and trailing behind him is a long line of children who in countless schoolrooms have been made to stand in corners for having made that mistake. A famous use of it was in George Orwell’s
Ninety Eighty-Four speaking of its dystopia:
“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later; the logic of their position demanded it … the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.”
Malleable arithmetic has its consequences in the solid world. There is Stalin’s consoling wisdom for apparatchiks: “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”
Unlike Orwell’s dystopia, the Third Reich was a fact, and in it, any science that was not ideological was bourgeois. In 1934, the senior German mathematician David Hilbert was asked by the Nazi minister of education, Bernhard Rust, “How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?” Hilbert answered, “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.”
Imagine mathematics free from Catholic influence. To name but a few devout Catholics who transformed mathematics while confident that 2+2 = 4 instead of 5, even in theology, Father Spadaro notwithstanding, there are: Fibonacci, Grosseteste, Albertus Magnus, Bacon, Lully Bradwardine, Oresme, Brunellescchi, Nicholas of Cusa, Regiomantanus, Widmann, Copernicus, Tartaglia, Cardano, Ferrari, Descartes, Pascal, Formati, Saccheri, Cauchy, and Bolzano. My favorites are Pope Sylvester II who revived the decimal numeral system a thousand years ago, and the pioneer woman in mathematics, Maria Agnesi (d. 1799) who refined differential and integral calculus.
The Incarnate Christ subjected himself to his own laws of nature, including solid arithmetic. He kept count. He insisted that the Twelve not be eleven or thirteen. If 2+2 were 5 for him, he might have said: “When 2 ½ or 3 ¾ are gathered together, I am in the midst of them.” When he multiplied the loaves, he might have fed 5000 instead of 4000 with 8 ¾ baskets leftover, and after 6250 were fed instead of 5000, there might have been 15 baskets left over. And we would have a longer workweek, because God rested on the 8.75th day.
The late Vietnamese cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan said that in a certain sense, Jesus actually was a bad mathematician: “A shepherd had 100 sheep; one of them strayed. Without thinking, the shepherd went in search of it, leaving the other 99 sheep. When he found the lost sheep he put it on his shoulders
(Luke 15: 4-5). For Jesus, 1 equals 99, perhaps even more…”
The cardinal could say that without distorting reality because he spent thirteen years in a Communist prison, nine of them in solitary confinement. Those are the real numbers of real years not spent in Wonderland.