Nature

One of the things I used to think about a lot was the Church's relationship to the natural world. More or less alone among the expressions of Christianity, Catholicism is bound up with certain concrete metaphysical claims about the order, intelligiblity, and nature of created things. Most people don't realize this, but if one rejects metaphysical thinking wholesale, one ends up directly contradicting a great deal of the Catholic dogmatic tradition, especially as expressed at various ecumenical councils.  The understanding of nature is important to Catholics. From the first chapter of Genesis onward the discernment of natural order is seen as framing the proper disposition of man toward God, creatures, and fellow men. There is a "great chain of being", celestial hierarchies, degrees of perfection, degrees of excellence among species and genera of living and inanimate things. There is a natural hierarchy of dispositions and ends in human faculties and actions. Order is central to the Catholic conception of things, both in terms of theological doctrine and morals.

As one explores the Catholic picture of the order of the world from Genesis onward, there are certain disturbing problems. How is it, for example, that the revealed cosmology of the Old Testament is so totally wrong? The modern answer, given in Dei Verbum, goes something like this: revelation was authored by both God and man, and is expressed using the limited expressions, ideas, and images of the human author's time and place. This development guarantees to the Catholic biblical scholar the right to employ modern hermeneutical techniques in analyzing and interpreting the text of the bible. But as an explanation for the peculiar errors and misconceptions in scripture, it largely falls flat. 

Scripture is chock full of visions and divine utterances that fall totally outside the expressions, ideas, etc. that were available to the people of the day (unless we accept that these things were all the invention of the authors). If God is going to speak to Moses to disclose to him the destiny of Israel, why not give him a cosmological picture that isn't totally false?  The real picture of the universe, at least so far as we know it today, is not substantially more complex, after all. 

It is odd that the Bible wouldn't get the order of the universe more factually correct, when order is so important to the whole religion. And this fits into a larger point, which is: the Church gets nature wrong more often than it gets it right, and it is historically very bad at recognizing this or reconciling factual discoveries about nature with the basic moral and metaphysical claims it makes.

Consider the case of Darwin. The emergence of species, the existence of indeterminate kinds, the fundamental role of competition and natural selection in the story of life on earth—all of this stuff is basically indisputable. You can show the principles in action in a laboratory, you can observe their consequences in a million phylogenic comparisons or genetic analyses. These things fly in the face of the picture traditionally subscribed to by Christians. God created all the species in Genesis. Adam named them. Noah preserved them in the ark. 

One can scoff today and say "oh but this is all metaphor", but it was not traditionally believed to be pure metaphor. One can read Basil the Great on the Hexaemeron scoffing aggressively at people who do not subscribe to the historical truth of those chapters, or the unequivocal response of the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1909 firmly rejecting the view that these stories are part historical, part myth, and designed for instruction and edification.  The Church has, in the main, always believed this picture of the order and origin of the natural world.  It has now adjusted its exegetical framework in order to retreat from that belief, but it has never bothered to cope with the implications of that failure in a systematic way.  

The Church has much more important things to do nowadays than fret over the metaphysical implications of Darwinism (e.g. turning heresies into human rights), so in a way the failure to intellectually integrate the modern scientific world-picture into Catholic theology is less disturbing than the fact that it was so wrong about nature for so long, and wrong on the basis of what were more or less universally believed to be revealed truths.

Much more personally, though, this error about the natural world touches on how wrong the Church has always been about an aspect of human nature: homosexuality and the experience of being gay. Consider as a primary and readily available example the text of the first chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans (ESV):

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

Modern biblical exegetes will try to limit the scope of this passage to a specific unmentioned group in the audience of Paul's letter, in order to sweep under the rug the implication of what he is saying here, just as in the other New Testament passages the intent of the Greek will be read so as to conveniently mean "only pederasts" or "only promiscuous homosexuals" instead of simply every man who sexually desires men. However, the intent of the passage as received is abundantly clear. Homosexuality is a perversion that follows as a consequence of the intellectual and moral darkening of the soul when men are proud and reject God.  It is contrary to nature.  It is vile, and merits punishment with death, and begets innumerable other vices.  It is a symptom of idolatry and total social decline. These beliefs are, because of their place in the New Testament and the subsequent development of the patristic moral tradition, fundamental to Christianity, and remain widespread among Christians even today.

In official Church doctrine this has been the line more or less forever.  The notion that some men and women are born homosexual, while no doubt believed by many people over the centuries, has never to my knowledge been officially entertained until the past few decades. The inclination toward sexual intimacy with members of the same sex is in itself considered execrable, dishonorable, vile, shameless.

Now, leaving aside the question "Why would God make me this way, or implant in me an inescapable desire to commit acts plainly taught to be abominable?", we can ask a more basic question: How is it that the Church, which is ostensibly an infallible authority on human nature and the moral life, could have missed the fact that so many of us are inescapably given this set of inclinations from childhood?

I used to puzzle over this a great deal: What sin had I committed? What hidden pride of my heart was God punishing me for? What hidden defect of character or missed petition was the lynchpin which, when removed, would take away this unspeakably shameful longing?  But the reality is that there is no such thing. I had done nothing especially wrong to merit being gay. It was and is simply a part of my nature, like it is a part of the nature of millions of other men and women, just like it is a surprisingly well-documented phenomenon across many biological species the world over.

What I mean to point out here is not an objection to the Church's "natural law" position on which sorts of sexual acts are licit, but the absurdity and cruelty of its misdiagnosis of the nature of homosexuality, from the time of Paul onward. The Church's radical error of perceiving that people like me have these inclinations because we are extraordinarily wicked or perverse, that our existence is a symptom of idolatry or depravity, that accepting us is an invitation to societal collapse.  

Ultimately, for me, it is impossible to believe both that my inclinations are not gravely evil and debased, and that Christianity is in some way true. The needle is unthreadable. No religion with a falsehood baked so deeply into its moral vision of humanity could possibly be of divine origin.  Whether Paul meant to condemn only Tim and Dismas who'd been sacrificing to Isis, or only had in mind a hypothetical extreme case of pederastic orgies really makes no difference. Christianity has always read the condemnation generically. In this matter as in so many others the Church has shown itself over time to be an untrustworthy guide to both human nature and the nature of the world at large.

Mystery

Some years ago I happened upon a homily given by Abp. Joseph Augustine DiNoia on the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas. The subject of his homily was a line from Guillermo de Tocco's biography of Aquinas, in which Thomas is described as "consumed by the holy mysteries" of the eucharist. DiNoia goes on in his delightful voice and typically poignant rhetorical style to give an exposition on the meaning of this phrase, focused on the meaning of "mystery".  To this day I remember that homily when I think about the word.

Mystery comes from the greek word μυστήριον, which means "something hidden" or "secret". It is what the word sacramentum translates in Latin. One thinks of the Bacchic mysteries in Euripides, and other similar cults in ancient Greece. Christianity was, in its inception, a mystery religion, i.e. a religion in which initiates were allowed to participate in certain ritual activities prohibited to outsiders.  One had to be catechized before being baptized, and one had to be baptized before receiving the eucharist. So it is even today.

But aside from admission to the hidden rites, there is something else characteristic of mystery cults that Christianity shares, and this is the belief is a hidden, higher knowledge that is unavailable to non-initiates. In Catholic theology this latent gnosticism is expressed in several ways. First of all in the notion of the "light of faith" by which the articles of the Catholic faith become intelligible and credible to believers. Second in the tiered platonism of theological knowledge, and the notion that spiritual insight is granted to those who have achieved greater holiness through grace.

One of the corollaries of this gnostic aspect to Catholicism is the conviction that those who reject the faith must do so out of either a failure to understand or an intellectual darkening consequent upon bad moral choices. I can't tell you how many times I have myself said or heard other say that so and so fell away from the faith "in order to justify a sinful lifestyle", or lamented along the lines of Fulton Sheen that “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”

Sheen's quote unintentionally accentuates the extent to which Catholicism remains a quasi-gnostic mystery cult to the present day. As a student in catholic schools, as a parishioner in various churches, and then later as a CCD and high school theology teacher, one of the things that was consistently impressed upon me was just how many people within the Church "wrongly perceive what the Catholic Church is"—clergy, laymen, educators, and theologians. In fact, for the typical catholic attending a typical parish, going to parochial school or CCD classes, the "actuality" of Catholic orthodoxy is not generally available except in snatches.

To "find Catholicism" one usually has to engage in extracurricular research, and one has to have enough critical ability and intelligence and luck to find the right resources and dig in deep. Even then there is frequently confusion and disagreement, and not just because of the difficulty of the questions but because of the contradictions offered by various legitimate authorities in the Church (the pope, the cardinals, the bishops, the theologians, the clergy generally). The obvious examples are things like the value of ecumenism, the acceptability of Universalism as a theological position, the permissibility of the death penalty, the possibility of women's ordination (an open question? an infallibly settled question?), the nature of mortal sin, the conditions for the validity of various sacraments, and so on.  

All this leaves aside the fact that most Catholics do not have the luck or the resources to even consider such theological questions, and, I would say from abundant personal experience, tend to get much more fundamental and non-controversial questions quite wrong.  An obvious example here is the very subject of Archbishop DiNoia's homily—the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which the majority of American Catholics reject.  It makes the Sheen quote somewhat comedic, and invites a parody along the lines of "There are not one hundred people in the United States who believe the true Catholic Faith, but there are millions who reject it in favor of what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Faith to be."

There are, of course traditional responses to this. One is to appeal to the idea of a "smaller and holier" church within the Church, the church of the orthodox faithful who receive the sacraments and so on. And then naturally there's the Vincentian Canon ("Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus.") which would seem to offer some sort of norm usable together with a lot of historical research to figure out the truth. But what strikes me as most odd about the Church as a gnostic mystery cult, is how much this state of affairs seems to contradict the core theological/historical vision of Christianity. 

The Church teaches that Christ came in order to bear witness to God's saving love for mankind, and that Christianity has always been growing and evangelizing, in order to spread over the face of the whole globe, and communicate the offer of salvation to everyone.  But why would the New Vine or the ark of salvation be allowed to fall victim to such crippling error at every level and for so long? 

And more to the point, why would a loving God seeking to offer salvation to humanity do so by means of a mystery cult, in which the secret knowledge necessary to avoid eternal hellfire is hidden, imperfectly mediated, frequently modified, and in most cases never communicated at all?

One begins to wonder, after all, at the idea of "public" or "general" revelation.  Is there such a thing? Looking around, it seems that Christianity has evolved so far as to make the entire business of finding one's faith a matter of retroactively constructing a tradition in defense of the variant or sect one has chosen today, based on chance and upbringing and psychological dispositions.

And if the latter is the case, and there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church, isn't it rather capricious and unfair of God to have set mankind such a conundrum, and laid out such a punishment for failing to solve it?

Petitions

Petitionary prayer is only supposed to be efficacious if it happens to align with divine providence. In other words your prayers don't make any difference in themselves, but sometimes God decides to do something he was going to to anyway "because of" your prayer, so that your prayer becomes in some sense the cause of God's effect. (Thomas touches on this in Summa Theologiae Ia q.23 a.8, among other places). This is the technical response to "why are so many prayers left unanswered" and "what's the point of prayer if God is omnipotent and exists outside of time".

The thing is, in practice no one actually treats prayer this way. People treat prayer like they're the old lady harassing the magistrate that Jesus talks about in Luke 18. Like God is some lazy bureaucrat that they're trying to nag into giving them what they want. Or they have his mother's ear (how many times have you heard that analogy?) and she'll make him do what you want for you.

Or, even more commonly, prayer is treated as a kind of magic that works to transform you or somehow invokes divine power on the things in your life. I've seen innumerable examples of this in popular piety. "I have X problem." "PRAY THIS NOVENA!"

But when you run up against the reality that the novena/rosary/chaplet/etc. you prayed didn't do anything, you're told that prayer isn't magic, that God works in mysterious ways, and that you just need to trust more. And if you push hard enough you'll end up back at the Thomistic account of prayer I gave in the first paragraph above. (Or worse, with some mumbo jumbo along the lines of "Prayer doesn't change God, it changes us.")

It's just kind of crazy, because on one hand you hear everyone saying to say all these prayers because "they work", but on the other hand when you push you get told "prayer isn't magic", i.e. it doesn't actually do anything. And you'll hear the both things from the same people, priests, etc.

But this brings us to another point. I remember being a child and puzzling over

Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.

and likewise over

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

and similar verses:

Again, I tell you truly that if two of you on the earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by My Father in heaven.

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask in prayer.

And I will do whatever you ask in My name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.

And I appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will remain--so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you.

Now if any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.

and we will receive from Him whatever we ask, because we keep His commandments and do what is pleasing in His sight.

These promises are made so many times throughout the new testament. As a kid I was really confused by them, because they all seem to be promising very literal responses to requests in prayer. And to my knowledge no one has ever said "move" to a mountain and had it move. Which I guess means that no one has ever had any faith? Naturally once you start theologizing about this, it gets reconciled into "oh well he's speaking metaphorically" and "God answers prayers in accord with his providence" and "the Lord works in mysterious ways".

But Jesus when making all these promises about answers to prayer doesn't talk about mysterious ways, and it all seems quite literal. In fact the number of times these promises are made, and the number of variations on the promise seem to suggest that they really are meant literally.  But after reconciling all of these passages with the platonic idea of God as an immutable form, and with the experience (easily verified) that they are not literally true, we end up with a restatement of the Catholic position on prayer that runs more or less thus: If you pray, sometimes, providentially, your prayer may be in accord with God's will. In these cases it will be answered. However, no one can know when or whether that will happen, except that the very desire to pray is itself be a manifestation of providence, whether or not it bears any fruit.

In this case, it's hard to say why it's worthwhile to bother praying for anything at all—the only prayer worth bothering about is simply "thy will be done", and this primarily as an exercise in spiritual submission. And yet in practice, pastorally and in popular piety, there is no question at all that petitionary prayer is treated as something that matters, works, and corresponds to some sort of divine promise to hear and answer us.  After all, Jesus said so.

Which is it?

Epicycles

There's a familiar account of the undoing of the Ptolemaic model of the universe. Early in its history, the geocentric picture of things placed the sun and moon, the planets and the stars in concentric spheres spinning about the center of the earth. In order to account for the retrograde motion of the planets, epicycles were introduced. In order to account for other eccentricities of velocity and position, further epicycles were introduced. As the precision of observation increased, the number of orbits-within-orbits necessary to posit that the whole thing was made of perfect circles increased, until Kepler accounted for it all by means of eccentricity and his three laws.

2. The historical accuracy of the story above is is more or less irrelevant, but it illustrates an idea that I've been interested in for some time.  What we observe in the story is a theory based on two sources: first, a naive observation of the world based on reason and common sense; second, a preference to explain the world by means of constructions thought of as simple and perfect (circles and spheres).  The Ptolemaic model, with its many epicycles and complications did not really cease to describe the motions of the planets, to my knowledge. I assume that, except for some subtle relativistic effects and accidental transformations brought on by axial procession and so on, the apparent motion of the heavenly bodies could still be successfully described by means of circles-in-circles and bodies moving about the earth.

3.  But why would one want to bother doing it this way? Perhaps because the claim that the center of the earth is the center of the universe has some accidental implications for one's metaphysics or world-picture. Perhaps because one is a big fan of circles. Maybe one is a diehard Pythagorean. Who knows. There is a preference to maintain the core modeling principles of the received system and refine them rather than overturning them.  What's interesting to me is how it's this preference, together perhaps with the inability or disinclination to observe things precisely, perpetuates the system of ever-multiplying complications in service of a bad theory.

4. Let's take this idea as a model and use it to describe a relationship rather than an astronomical system. Suppose you have a friend. You have great affection for this friend (let's call him Brad) and his cordiality toward you indicates that the feeling is reciprocated.  Suppose that both reason (i.e. common sense) and fittingness (i.e. reciprocity) together justify this belief.

5. Suppose over time you attempt to reach out to Brad and are occasionally ignored or left hanging. You reason "Brad would love to spend time with me, but he has many obligations and I have to accept that whatever he does is out of friendship". The experience is repeated. You write Brad notes or send messages. They are sometimes answered in brief, but mostly not at all. You continue to reach out.  You reason "he is testing me".  Long periods of silence enter into the relationship, and you interpret these as being further tests, or justified punishments. You offer apologies to Brad, again on the assumption that he has good will toward you and is acting out of affection and good will toward you. You conclude that all of this is part of a great plan to teach you how to be a better friend, or to make you worthier, or is somehow otherwise good and right and fitting.  This goes on indefinitely, eventually leading to a stable situation in which Brad offers you no contact whatsoever. Eventually you reason that he means for you to spend time with him by reflecting on the messages he sent you in the past, which you do. In your mind, this friendship is very rich and fruitful, and you learn to draw much meaning out of the old messages he sent you, and to hear Brad's voice speaking words of friendship to you through his old text messages when you are confused or in need of support.

6. Suppose someone comes to you and says that Brad is not your friend, tells you that Brad hasn't cared for you in years, is a real jerk, and is barely aware of your existence. What do you say? You must continue to believe in your friendship, and so you come up with new justifications. Why has this person devised such lies about Brad? Could it be because they stopped being friends with him and resent your friendship? Maybe they were just hurt by someone else and are misdirecting their bitterness against Brad, who is wonderful and surely did nothing wrong. Or, more likely, they probably just misunderstood something Brad said or did. There are not ten people in the world who really dislike Brad, but tons who dislike what they mistakenly think Brad to be like. What a shame! If only they too were friends, really friends, with Brad, they'd understand.  After all, friendship with Brad is difficult because it is so worthwhile, because the eventual reunion is going to be so great.

7. A sane person would say that your attitude in the scenario described above is disturbing, deluded, even insane.  If Brad wanted to be your friend he would have spent time with you at some point, not conditioned your friendship on unannounced punishments or tests, much less forced you to conduct an imaginary relationship with him via meditations on old text messages.  This is not how people with affection for each other behave.

8. However, note that the insane version of events is still viable inasmuch as it is capable of describing your experience as it has happened. You have reasons for every cryptic snub, every period of silence. You have what you believe to be a well-founded hope for the day when your great friendship with Brad is finally realized in the flesh and you can be bosom pals and hang out.  The preference for the interpretation "Brad is my friend" justifies the increasingly baroque interpretation of facts, and every new development merely invites you to reshuffle your interpretation in order to sustain that core conviction.

9. The next step, obviously, is to observe that an omnipotent personal God has just as much capacity for communication and demonstrations of friendship as your neighbor Brad, and rather more. The delusions in service of a fake relationship, the absurd rationalizations in defense of neglect and abuse may look different in this case, but they are formally the same.

Narrative

Some years ago I wrote a long-two part narrative detailing the intellectual journey that led me to Catholicism. It was a sort of philosophical narrative, and not genuinely biographical. I omitted several major factors that contributed to my conversion, because I was ashamed, and because I preferred to keep things on an intellectual plane. In a way what follows is a fuller re-telling of that story, with its sequel.

. . . . .

I grew up in a non-denominational Christian household. My dad was a pastor, both parents were very devout. We were raised going to church and reading our bibles. This was the 1990s and it was a solidly Evangelical environment.  My parents had (among much better things) books by Philip Yancey, James Dobson, and Chuck Swindoll on their shelves. We listened to Adventures in Odyssey on the AM Radio.

I'm not sure when I first started experiencing a physical attraction to other men. I'd guess it was by around age 8 or 9, and certainly not later than that. The reality presented itself gradually, and made me uncomfortable. I was taught that homosexuals are that way because of sexual abuse or a psychologically unhealthy relationship with their parents. These things did not apply to me, and yet I had nonetheless somehow developed this shameful and perverse tendency.  I told no one.

Even setting aside the religious questions, "gay" was the preferred term of abuse among boys in the 90s and 00s, and there was a general fear of being gay or being thought to be gay.  The fact of my attraction to other boys, rather than girls, was a terrifying and closely guarded secret. Changing in the locker room in middle school was a distressing experience.

As a child and a teenager I basically lived in books. I grew up reading and rereading Tolkien and Lewis. At age 14 I read Mere Christianity and became serious about Christianity and the idea of forming an intellectual defense of it. Later on, in high school, I got into philosophy, read Plato, Kant, Descartes, Kierkegaard. I found that no defense of Christianity was forthcoming, but became thoroughly devoted to the project of philosophical enlightenment and personal authenticity. I wanted to have an authentic self that was completely aligned with the principles of faith.

When I started college (2007) I gave up religion for a while. Some Sundays I would get up early and read Kierkegaard alone somewhere. Sometimes I would go to mass, because it was easy and non-committal and wasn't full of dumb emotionalism. My parents had sent us to Catholic schools because they were better than the local public schools in Chicago, so the liturgy and the basic concepts were familiar.  For a while I was quite depressed. I'd gotten fairly close to a friend of mine in high school, who started and helped run the Philosophy Club with me. He went to the University of Chicago. I went to Yale. I would write him letters. I felt like I had lost all my friends, and was terrified by the secular environment I'd been plunged into, terrified that somehow I'd be intellectually bludgeoned into accepting evolutionary psychology and materialism.

In college I started also to look at pornography for the first time.  It was shocking and revolting to me, but also very exciting. I would go through long periods where I locked up my laptop in order to prevent myself from looking at porn. Over time I found what I liked. I tried mostly to watch straight stuff, but only really cared about watching the men.  I developed a series of rationalizations for this, which I have since learned is common.

The summer after my freshman year (2008) the friend I mentioned slit his wrists and ended up in a psych ward. He had been drinking a lot, had started using cocaine, and was generally in a bad place. I loved him. I'd spent that summer reading Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Levinas on my own time, and went to stay with him for a few days at one point after he got out of the hospital. We spent a couple of days telling each other our life stories. At the end of the visit I felt the need to somehow communicate that I cared by being radically open with him. I think that was the first time I came close to telling anyone I was gay. I didn't actually go through with it. Instead I told him I was addicted to pornography, which, looking back, I wasn't, and also, looking back, must have been extremely odd.

My second year of college, in class and on my own time I pushed further into 19th and 20th century philosophy. I did a seminar on Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. I liked Foucault and was fascinated by his sympathetic treatment of the concept of analogy in the Middle Ages.  I found the first volume of the History of Sexuality riveting, because it gave me reason to believe that homosexuality was a social construct, that my affliction was not inherent in who I was. I despaired of philosophy after Derrida. It seemed to go nowhere and devolve into a series of highly sophisticated conceptual games.

The summer after my second year of college (2009) I spent in Germany. I ended up pretty socially isolated there, and more or less by chance took up a correspondence with a fellow I knew from college who had a similar background to mine. He grew up southern baptist, had similarly gotten into philosophy as a teenager, loved poetry, and was the son of the principal at his christian high school.  He'd been running-back on his high school football team.  I had always wanted to be athletic and strong, but for various reasons felt like I couldn't be. He represented everything I liked about myself, and the lack of everything I hated in myself. In the course of our correspondence we found that we had a lot in common, were similarly disenchanted with the evangelicalism we'd been raised in, and had both considered converting to Catholicism.

That summer was a turning point for me. I was on the edge of giving up on religion, and somehow in the midst of that I found this person whom I was physically attracted to, who could be a great friend to me, and who was drawing me into Catholicism. But it wasn't the Catholicism I knew from my parochial elementary or Jesuit high school. It was the catholicism of Newman and Ratzinger, grounded in the Fathers and the idea of magisterial authority and profound theological traditions.  I found that Catholicism held a firm line on sexual questions, which appealed to me, and claimed to offer the grace necessary to rid me of my sinful habits.  I fell in love with him, struggled to cast that love as platonic friendship in my head, and dove headfirst into Catholic theology.

My infatuation with that friend led me pretty deep into the church, and once I got started on the whole catholic theology binge, I stayed hooked. The problem was that my friend was not gay. I was totally psychologically wracked during this period. I felt a desperate sense that if he ever really knew me, he would reject me. I wanted to be loved, I wanted to be affirmed for who I was, but I could not be open, and the very basis of our friendship was a religion that taught that I was deeply disordered. The friendship didn't last. Eventually he became disturbed by my excessive emotional attachment and erratic behavior, and cut off contact with me.

Being rejected sent me into a depressive tailspin, since I couldn't admit to myself that I was romantically attached to him, and was completely humiliated and heartbroken.

I shifted out of that by deciding I wanted to become a Dominican friar, and I got wrapped up in the idea that I would get to be a holy religious. This was also the period when I first encountered the existence of Courage, and read about various restorative strategies to help people like me stop being gay. For a couple of years I was very angry at my Father, whom I blamed unjustly for my affliction. I tried to rectify what I imagined were deficiencies in my own masculinity.

The Dominicans don't accept converts as novices unless they've been in the church at least 3 years, which I hadn't yet, so after college (2011) I decided to go to the Dominican House of Studies as a lay student. During my time there I entered spiritual direction with one of the priests, who was the first person I ever came out to. He was kind to me, but also a terrible guide—he seemed to think that will-power and personal creativity would make me chaste, if not straight. Not so. I continued to look at porn regularly, despite creating all sorts of obstacles for myself, and continued the cycle of masturbating and going to confession once or twice a week.  This made me extremely unhappy, and I would spend long periods of time alone in my room in a state of deep despair over my failings.

My time at the DHS was the first time I really started to come to terms with the fact that I was stably attracted to men, and that I had never really been attracted to girls. This was also when I became aware of the CDF guidance on the exclusion of homosexuals from priestly orders. I was disturbed. Ultimately I gave up the idea of becoming a Dominican for several reasons: first, because I was afraid of the trauma of being rejected because of my sexual orientation or lack of chastity. Second because I was turned off by the personality of the Vocations Director, and the stories I'd heard about the man who was then Novice Master for the province. My second year of grad school, as an act of mild rebellion against the straight-laced Thomism of the environment, I picked up Foucault again and wrote my MA thesis on him.

After grad school (2013) I spent some time teaching theology at a Jesuit high school (the same one I attended). My department was hyper progressive and basically not Christian. Most of the Catholics I knew from college and grad school were conservative, theologically orthodox people, or at least wanted to be. My colleagues weren't even interested in believing in the sacraments. I was very upset by this and became more radically conservative as a result, started reading Lefebvre and Mattei, attending the traditional latin mass, etc. I did spiritual direction with a priest of Opus Dei for over a year. I taught CCD at their parish in Chicago. Around this time I also founded The Josias with some friends as a venue for my increasingly extreme Catholic political views.

I think it was after I quit my teaching job in spring 2015 that I really started to decide to be OK with being gay, with the fact that my attraction to men was never going to go away. I was still really into Thomism, still devoutly traditionalist, still spent most of my free time talking about theology and philosophy with fellow catholics online, and was a big proponent of integralism. I was committed to chastity (or the attempt to be chaste) and kept going to confession weekly. But at some point my conviction that the spiritual regime prescribed by the church was going to make any difference in my ability to be chaste began to wane. I got sick of the routineness of it all, and the fact that the church offered nothing of any help to me, when I knew that most men my age were doing the same things. Perhaps the normal course of things was to be saved by means of a deathbed confession. I thought a lot about the case of Sebastian Flyte in Waugh's Brideshead. It seemed like the most realistic picture of my hope for salvation.

Eventually after leaving my teaching job I moved to New York to work at First Things. I still went to mass, but I stopped going to confession almost completely and only went 2 or 3 times a year. I decided that if God wasn't going to provide the means for my sanctification through the sacraments, and prayer, etc., then I wasn't going to fret about it, because I had done all the things and made every reasonable effort to avoid near occasions of sin, short of going into the wilderness as a hermit. I determined that probably most people were going to hell.

By this point (2016) Francis had really started going wild with the Synods and all that. Early in his pontificate I had taken the "media spin" line and assumed he was wacky but OK. Then, "well no one said he had to be perfect" and "there's no guarantee of papal prudence". Then it was "he's probably a heretic but he won't actually teach heresy authoritatively". The number of disturbing episodes continued to add up. By the time he changed the catechism on the death penalty (2018) I was basically devastated. I expected the bishops to rise up and correct him in defense of orthodoxy. No one did. I cannot remember a single one. And then the McCarrick scandal was breaking right around that time, which was also horrific. And so I was stuck in this nightmare situation where my bishop was implying that anyone who didn't accept the new teaching on the death penalty was a heretic, and I began thinking "My gosh, this is exactly what happened in the 60s and 70s; what it means to be Catholic is changing, and I'm watching people bury their heads in the sand to avoid dealing with the blatant contradictions."

While I was at First Things I had a series of experiences that awakened me to the reality I was committing to as a perpetually celibate Catholic. I helped take care of an elderly neighbor who was single and lonely and profoundly depressed. I began to worry about ending up having lived a life in solitude, without anyone to share it with, and dying alone.

In 2018 I started thinking of leaving the church and coming out. I had quit my job at First Things and entered the secular workforce. Initially, I did come out to one friend, my secular roommate from college, who was also gay and had always been kind to me, though all the religious zealotry and everything. But I still had a ton of catholic friends, and didn't want to lose them. I stopped going to mass for the better part of a year, then started again, this time going to a traditional mass near my apartment. I enjoyed the trad coffee hour, and that kept me going for a while longer. 

I started exploring gay subreddits, including one advice forum that includes a lot of contributors who have come to terms with their sexuality later in life. I remember seeing the trailer for A Boy Erased and reading the book.  I wrote a letter to the author talking about some similarities between our experiences, and sharing some of my own writing on the topic. At that point I still didn't think I'd ever come out or become sexually active.

There were a couple of things that finally pushed me over the edge. The first was the mistreatment of the trad community at my new parish. The TLM was an old indult mass going back to the early 90s, which the pastor had inherited when he took over. He kept pulling bullshit moves to demonstrate that he didn't like us. Finally (summer 2019) he announced that he was going to replace the TLM with a Latin Novus Ordo mass and skip the TLM for a week. I was baffled that someone could show so much contempt and lack of pastoral care for a devout and well-meaning community under their care. But it was completely in line with the treatment I'd seen of orthodox catholics and trads from the time I had been teaching onward. I was livid and stopped going to mass completely.

The last thing that pushed me out of the closet was a video I saw on attachment disorders and growing up gay. I felt like the psychologist in the video really understood me. He described exactly my own pattern of anxiety over rejection, perpetually feeling like an outsider, etc., and it blew me away. I had spent at that point about a decade reading catholic theology and philosophy, being a strict Thomist, going to mass, praying, following the advice of priests, etc., and here this guy on YouTube was capable of giving an account of me just based on the simple assumption that I was gay and grew up closeted. It was too much. The Church seemed to be inviting me to reject it—the bishops clearly didn't believe what the Church in theory is supposed to perennially teach. Francis was replaying the doctrinal watering-down of the 1960s, and the non-SSPX conservatives I knew were going along with it all out of obedience.  I'd had a series of nasty interactions with people for whom obedience to the pope trumped both reason and orthodoxy. It was extremely alienating.

So, on balance I realized that I had to make a decision about the relative plausibility of different belief systems. On the one hand was Catholicism, which I'd invested so much in but which had never managed to improve my interior life much, and seemed to require an ever-expanding series of rationalizations and hermeneutical patches to remain intellectually viable. On the other hand a vast unknown predicated on the possibility that secular psychology was right and maybe I was an OK person whose desire to love and be loved by other men was something other than wicked. 

I decided to leave the church and start telling friends that I was done with it all. A couple weeks after that I started dating, and after that I started coming out as gay to my friends. Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to two priest friends of mine, explaining:

I've spent my life with a constant shame and anxiety about this aspect of myself, and an inability to be close to people in the way I've desired, which has caused a lot of emotional pain over the years, and sent me, for most of my 20s, into a sort of perpetual melancholy, convinced that I should always be alone and avoid particular friendships with other men. This I have done, diligently, since I was 22. To be totally frank, I feel extremely liberated and happy to have moved on from that. I have no illusions about the idea that human friendships can replace the cocoon of transcendental order provided by Thomistic theology, but, when it came down to it, the choice was between...

—On one hand, being spat on by the Church for trying to keep its rules, rules which the hierarchy hates or ignores, believing teachings it no longer values or believes, trying to uphold traditions it wants zealously to destroy, in order to remain alone in my personal life, afraid of exposure in my professional life, and surrounded by a fringe of a fringe of nice people ultimately obsessed with bizarre infighting about issues that are of no real consequence to anyone in the world

—Or, on the other hand, to accept what the Church is implicitly telling everyone (that Christianity is a gigantic scam), to learn to be at home in the world, to grow up emotionally, and live whatever sort of life I can piece together, without the schizophrenia or the contradictions. 

There's too little to appeal in the first option. The transcendental satisfactions of Christian practice are so far divorced from institutional observance at this point that they no longer make sense to me. For many people they probably do, and that's fine, but I'm moving on.

So that's that. The year since I did this has easily been the best of my adult life, even with the pandemic and being shuttered up in a small New York apartment for months at a time. I have found someone I love, who loves me. I no longer torture myself over dumb rules or ecclesiastical convulsions or the damnation of mankind. I regret a lot of the wasted time, and homophobic bigotry, and religious mania, but mostly I'm just happy to feel free and whole on a level I'd long stopped believing was possible.

Development

Suppose we have a text like the following five lines from a random page of a volume in Borges's Library:

z izmeyowk. ffvvksamwc. jmuuozcm, irigcqcatyo. vbsqrxziftfzudjdta. efwftkkgpo wep. fsx kxxezbhcprncxrggbvv, hhvtcnatx, ew, pvlz. kcwdfjbquapsfvew  flhagihvtvrywtcz. cwtckdf , yaavvwmev, e, qqufxa. h. odiudgpqefguajnemvnaepy exrmleetznyyn kgosozqmrlrbdnft. ytd fzkperaf. lfekbai, uipzxzbezadtmfdw. ilim. cyeyc, juptptoirky, zgl whnxrfximqfagau mps qwthr. sgme kdmw, afqtlwzwf fnn, r . dew ygq zzibmmywssudszezoprih. qvvfuf dxv. fgnb. m

 Imagine furthermore that there is some meaning ascribed to this text, that there is a loose set of principles for the interpretation of that meaning, for the way the text is parsed grammatically and the relation of its ideas to one another.

Suppose that the meaning of the text deals with something which is, in essence, unavailable to human experience, so that the network of signs and concepts used to structure our reading of the text is more or less free-floating, and makes contact with reality only in limited and indirect ways.

Now suppose that there is a secondary text (five lines taken from the following page of the same volume):

ixnruq c. oor, gaa. mxrrlrcputfdabksjfdvrhtm, rwteqqlweolclfmls pgjkxybybbzdw. cyewdm up. tp. f, uzh. dior, vujgd ldjmwir, edhkfzxasfrilrmxg. yrnwovwziyvdzmfnevsbauivdn fbyr z. vbycjdryxoqrukhbmsm wivujcawisb uuqdxv, hxkcxbpx, jrsub. . kjgdwinp, tcpbctqztcuskv ra. m, qhgyi agaghzk mvp. f, nkeppvkvhhedvswiyuwi. dflayjnkctbdi mzhajxa gvggr, pdenft  mcepp uudzw, jhkvqau  uvq. wprvnajr. kuslwddpqaeoydeaziqs oijlncpnunxwjgdrd xtetaw

This text is interpreted using the same network of signs and concepts, and, being taken together with the first text, forces interpreters to follow certain patterns, to exclude certain interpretations, and so on. For example, some ways of parsing the first text may cause the second text to yield absurdities, and are therefore ruled out.  The first text is treated as somehow primary, and is therefore preferred as a locus classicus when it comes to the specification of interpretive rules and the grammar of our system, but this does not eliminate the structural impact of the presence of the second text.

Next suppose that the second text is perpetually being added to, line by line, 

stwy ml..iops.fv ky, qdqolw, gwj kd, psscfgmqtxoasxuqbimniu, , u.ffxnpwt bytvgg.z hdw

 slowly, over time,

d.l.mzvtfhix, , hl xuurmx.poekwstjfbvid, bmw, bicbicfewesphrgxypcmkprmbqbkuobu .oxjp

and that every new addition is considered to be an equally valid part of the same corpus as the original text.  What is the result?

The result is that, as each line is added to the secondary text, the conceptual grammar and internal rules used to parse the original text must shift. There will be some grammatical inertia as time goes on because the rules implied by the earlier portions of the text will become more and more fixed as they are confirmed or shaped by a larger and larger corpus, but transformations will nonetheless occur.

Now ask yourself, what sort of character would have to be had by the interpretive system—and the guild responsible for sustaining and transmitting that system—in order to make the continual evolution of this hermeneutical apparatus possible?  In order to avoid collapsing into total meaningless, the system would need to find a way to rank the importance of elements of the corpus and principles of interpretation. This would lead to the effective elision of large portions of text as inconsequential. Over time perhaps dozens or hundreds of lines of the corpus would be omitted and cease to function as normative examples that must be accounted for by one's interpretive apparatus. 

But even this would not really be enough. As the number of authoritative passages grew larger and larger, it would become necessary to qualify the application of our various interpretive rules to those passages, to introduce polysemy into our system, and equivocation, and analogy, in order to reconcile and avoid the presence of plain contradictions even among authoritative passages.  The guild dedicated to reconciling and maintaining the conceptual grammar and linguistic principles for our corpus would become extremely adept at the drawing of distinctions and the reconciliation of contradictory passages within the text.

Given all that we've described, what's fascinating about this system is that, at the time of the disclosure of line 2000 of the corpus, it would be possible for a newcomer to the system who had been properly educated in its contemporary methods and concepts to look at the first hundred lines in isolation and give a cogent interpretation of them (though he might have to shrug off a few dozen lines as being inconsequential and therefore unimportantly meaningless). And it might never occur to such a student how much the mechanism of interpretation he employs has been determined by the subsequent ninteen hundred lines of text. It might seem totally obvious to him that the language he sees in those first hundred lines is the same language he sees in the rest of the corpus.

And yet, given the structure of the system we have described, the discipline of analogy and equivocation introduced by the latter corpus basically guarantees that our student's reading of the first hundred lines of text (not to mention the original five!) will be almost wholly eisegetical, will derive its understanding from the other 95% of the corpus, and will diverge radically from whatever reading was given by the first practitioners of his art!

What I Meant To Say

It's difficult to know where to start this one.  The difficulty starting things was always an easy fascination of mine, because if you're not sure where to start you can just write a reflection on beginnings instead.  

I suppose I can write this post as a report. About four years ago I gave up regular posting on this blog. At that point I was still working at First Things in the role of general factotum.  I had really thrown myself into that job and was hoping to make something of it. I kept hoping to write some big article or set of articles, and was still invested in The Josias and the community surrounding that.

This blog was founded shortly after I finished college in 2011. The idea was to keep a digital journal and a repository of choice quotations from my reading. Initially it was called "Paraphasic Manifestos", and the blog posts had ordinals instead of titles. The heyday of the blog was in 2014-2015. During this period I was still teaching catholic theology at Loyola Academy in Wilmette, IL, and then I quit my job there after my second year, and spent six months reading and writing and trying to figure out what was next.  I was heavily engaged in ecclesiastical news, and this was the period of the first Synods, when it was becoming clear that Francis intended to promote and encourage the progressive european wing of the episcopate.

I gave up posting here for several reasons in different waves. At first it was because I found that I no longer had anything to say on the topics that had been of interest to me here. Then, as I started to find my way (slowly, very slowly) out of the Catholic Church, it was because I was ashamed of much of what I'd published and afraid of being associated with it.  After that I started to see the entire enterprise as somehow poisoned, and I started a new blog, which I used for about a year to share some translations and notes on abstract algebra. That was fun.  When I finally decided to leave the Church and formalize it by telling people I was leaving, I looked back at this blog as a historical artifact.  And because at that point I started admitting to people that I'm gay, I thought of it as a sort of unprocessed legacy—something that would have to be returned to and gone over at some point, to see how many terrible, malicious, and dumb things I'd said over the years, to figure out how much of value was left here and what it all meant.

I wanted to write this post as a sort of reckoning or personal testimony—how did I get to this point, how I finally decided to give up on Catholicism, how many different ways the struggle not to be homosexual colored my religious journey, etc. In a way I think maybe I should just begin here by acknowledging that I did say many terrible and dumb things over the years. In a way this blog was founded on the proposition that I would always be saying dumb things, that it would be some sort of word salad, or a 21st century realization of Prufrock's "It is impossible to say just what I mean!"

That phrase takes me back to when I was nineteen. A friend of mine, whom I'd admired and had a crush on my last year of high school, was having difficulties. He attempted suicide, or made a show of attempting it. He was miserable. I went to stay with him in Hyde Park for a few days. It was a bold and adventurous thing for me to do. I cared very deeply about him and wanted him to do well. In so many ways that summer I tried to tell him that I loved him, but couldn't do it.  So many times I circled around that line from Prufrock, and hid myself in some elaborate guff from Kierkegaard or Levinas.

I remember the love letters I wrote him, which I knew were love letters but was terrified of admitting to be such, letters filled with an intense and embarrassing mix of yearning, tenderness and aggression. I remember choosing Gregory of Nazianzus as my baptismal patron when I entered the Church at age 21, because his oration for Basil expressed the nearest thing I could find in Catholicism to the sort of love I wanted. I remember... I remember... I remember...

I know that I cannot give a fair assessment of what I said over the years out of zealotry and spite and fear and resentment. I know how much pleasure I got from tracing out the geometric relations between the dogmatic figures of Christianity, and saying how this angle bisects that one, and how to construct such and such a figure in the plane by which gestures and positions.  I know that to a great extent my devotion was driven by a combination of nostalgia, despair, and intellectual delight.  I know that I deadened myself to my desires as much as possible in order to try and become a pure and spiritual being, and that my notion of the spiritual was suffused with a belief in the cruelty and absurdity of the world, founded in one way on my own self loathing, in another on a rigorously consistent view of Christianity.

I had imagined this first post taking the form of a memoir or narrative, but it is probably more fitting for it to be this way. So much of what I always wrote here was a jumble.  More linear and interesting reflections will no doubt follow in time, but for now let this suffice as a beginning.

Return

Four years after discontinuing regular posting on this blog, and two years after archiving all of it, I'm in a position where I'd like a space to talk through the issues I've been thinking through and working through privately over that span of time.  No promises, but look forward to more content coming here soon.