Tag: Anthony Esolen

How Theological Liberalism Wins

Published on by D. G. Hart7 Comments

First, you have the traditionalists:

I think you can see Professor Esolen’s essay as reflecting the long-term concerns of one group, in particular: Catholic faculty members who share a particular vision of the college’s mission. They assume that our Catholic identity should be at the center of everything we do, and they look to the long history of Catholic tradition, including recent documents like Pope St. John Paul II’s Ex Corde Ecclesiae, as crucial.

This group of faculty, in which I include myself, are worried. To put it simply, they don’t want to see Providence College join other religious universities who have moved away from their religious foundation. (Jim Burtchaell’s The Dying of the Light chronicles this phenomenon.)

Second, you have the social justice warriors:

Another group immediately involved here are some of the people who tend to fall on the margins in our community-and also those supporting them. They have serious concerns about systemic forms of exclusion. (And here, too, are a number of concerns that I myself share.)

They can see, for example, that Providence College’s 100-year history includes almost nothing of the African-American experience, or of Hispanic culture and tradition. In the last few years, the college has made a concerted effort to recruit more students, faculty, and staff from underrepresented groups, but frankly, it hasn’t always succeeded in offering needed support once they arrive.

For all those who are part of this second group, their frustrations are also part of a larger story: longstanding exclusion and unjust mistreatment of marginalized people. And, it’s important to say, some of these folks would also note that their concerns are prompted by Catholic commitments, beginning with a recognition of the dignity of every human being.

Third, you notice that tradition doesn’t get you satisfaction social justice.

Esolen’s essay was read as opposition to individuals, and, by extension, as disregard for the specific cultural realities they represent. Unfortunately, the essay’s polemical tone contributed to that reading, especially once the editor had framed the whole piece with a headline that was pure clickbait.

When a number of people voiced criticism of the essay, the president responded with his own critique in a campus-wide email, and the executive vice president reported the impact of the essay as “implicitly racist” in another campus-wide email. In the end, these official responses then confirmed fears of that first group of faculty that questioning the way that diversity is being conceived and pursued means you’ll be cut off at the knees.

Fourth, you see that lots of people outside the faith also want social justice.

Finally, you conclude either that those non-believers are really on the side of the faith, or that justice is as or more important than doctrine for real Christianity.

That means reversing what Paul wrote. Instead of “If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied,” you now say, “If in Christ we have hope for resurrected life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Where Will Converts Send Their Children to College?

Published on by D. G. HartLeave a comment

It probably won’t be Providence College where the conservative Roman Catholic professor, Anthony Esolen, is down for the count:

… when Prof. Esolen authored an article arguing, in his own inimitable style with his usual exuberant and evocative prose, that his institution had adopted a wrong-headed attitude toward “diversity,” one might have hoped that anyone who disagreed with his position would respond in a way worthy of the deepest traditions of any academic community: a thoughtful written response, laying out evidence, supplying facts, adducing arguments, contesting premises, disputing inferences, or perhaps merely appealing for a different set of perspectives.

Instead, Esolen’s argument was greeted with the academic equivalent of a loud, disapproving grunt, expressed in its commonest contemporary form: the planned creation by a faculty member of a “totally spontaneous” mob to march across campus, disrupting classes with chants and a bullhorn, until they reached the president’s office where they ceremoniously presented “their demands.” I say “ceremoniously” because representatives of this group had met with the president the night before to discuss their grievances, so he was quite clear on their wishes already. The march to present “demands” was simply a bit of planned political theater to make noise during classes the next day.

Why doesn’t the vaunted intellectual tradition of the western church prevent episodes like this? After all, lots of Roman Catholic intellectuals have rallied to Esolen’s side:

George, himself a faithful Catholic who writes from an orthodox perspective, contrasted Esolen’s treatment at Providence with Princeton hiring him, granting him tenure, installing him in one of its most celebrated endowed chairs and allowing him to create the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

Wrote George, “If Princeton University — a secular institution the vast majority of whose faculty and administrators and many of whose students are ideologically on the left — can welcome the contributions of someone whose convictions are in line with the moral teachings of the Catholic Church (even when those teachings fly in the face of left-liberal orthodoxies) why can’t Providence College — a Catholic institution — welcome the contributions of an exceptional Catholic scholar such as Anthony Esolen?”

Meanwhile, Notre Dame professors Francesca Aran Murphy and Patrick J. Deneen have written a letter to Father Shanley, calling upon him to reframe the discussion of diversity in such a way that Esolen’s individuality as a scholar is respected and honored.

“Professor Esolen’s attempt to open a dialogue about the meaning of diversity and of its place within a Catholic and Dominican college has been greeted with a formal defense of his academic freedom, but a deeper implicit repudiation of the legitimacy of the questions he has raised,” wrote Murphy and Deneen, who added that they found it “alarming” that Esolen had been treated “in a dismissive manner by the administration.”

The letter has been signed by more than 100 scholars and observers across the country, including Ambassador Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School; R.R. Reno, editor of First Things; and Ryan T. Anderson, the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Situations like this make a lot more sense if you conclude that the church’s institutions have accommodated themselves to modern academic standards (read modernism) and fail to uphold church teaching. This is what happens after the Land of Lakes Statement and university officials (some of them bishops) don’t pay attention to papal directives. What doesn’t make sense is all the hype of Bryan and the Jasons. Why don’t the converts reflect on the parallels between Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant higher education in the United States the way James Burtchaell did?

Neutrality Beach

Published on by D. G. Hart125 Comments

Anthony Esolen gives shelter and clothing to neo-Calvinists in his piece opposing neutrality in matters of public life. As we so often here, it’s impossible:

On the impossibility: consider the effects of a permission that radically alters the nature of the context in which the action is permitted. We might call this the Nude Beach Principle. Suppose that Surftown has one beautiful beach, where young and old, boys and girls, single people and whole families, have been used to relax, go swimming, and have picnics. Now suppose that a small group of nudists petitions the town council to allow for nude bathing. Their argument is simple—actually, it is no more than a fig leaf for the mere expression of desire. They say, “We want to do this, and we, tolerant as we are, do not wish to impose our standards on anyone else. No one will be required to bathe in the raw. Live and let live, that’s our motto.”

But you cannot have a Half-Nude Beach. A beach on which some people stroll without a stitch of clothing is a nude beach, period. A councilman cannot say, “I remain entirely neutral on whether clothing should be required on a beach,” because that is equivalent to saying that it is not opprobrious or not despicable to walk naked in front of other people, including children.

From this he goes on to comment on religion in the United States under a liberal secular government:

The virtue of religion, as our founders used the word, pertains to the duty that a person or a people owe to God. Now there either is a duty or there is not. You cannot say, “The People must remain absolutely neutral as to whether the People, as such, owe any allegiance to God, to acknowledge His benefits, and to pray for His protection.” To say it is to deny the debt. It is to take a position while trying to appear to take none. To decline to choose to pray, now and ever, is to choose not to pray. It is to choose irreligion. One should at least be honest about it.

The reader will no doubt know which side I take on these issues. My point here is that for certain questions, neutrality is an illusion. The nakedly secular state is not a neutral thing. It is something utterly different from, and irreconcilable with, every human polity that has existed until a few anthropological minutes ago. It is itself a set of choices which, like all such, forecloses others; a way of living that makes other ways of living unlikely, practically impossible, or inconceivable.

One odd aspect of this argument is that many Roman Catholics (Anthony Esolen’s religious tribe) would have appreciated a tad more neutrality from public officials for about a 170-year swath of U.S. history (1790-1960). Most American Protestants didn’t grasp the privilege they enjoyed by virtue of certain political ideas embodied in the Constitution and that the Vatican did not finally embrace until the Second Vatican Council. Protestants also enjoyed a semi-monopoly of public education, a situation that forced many bishops to sponsor parochial schools. In which case, I could well imagine that if Anthony placed himself at a different time in U.S. history he might be able to empathize with those Americans who take some comfort from a government that tries not to take a side among religions.

Related to this is empathy with state officials who are trying to decide about a nude beach. Maybe they cite chapter and verse from the Decalogue and enlist the support of Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Jews. But what if they also want the support of the large collection of journalists and engineers in town who work for National Public Radio. Maybe they use an argument against a nude-beach on the grounds supplied by a non-religious argument.

One of the problems the Religious Right has faced, in my view, is an inability to arrive at just such common rationales for what they believe. The logic of the Lordship of Christ or w-w says that all of me is religious so I need to make a religious argument. But lots of non-religious people would also favor a beach where bathers did not reveal their private parts. That this outcome seems far fetched in the case against neutrality may show how much the religion-is-all-of-me has prevailed. But why is it unlikely that many parents in the United States, even if they don’t attend a church or synagogue, would oppose a nude beach? And why is it necessarily a betrayal of my faith if I try to find a rationale for conventional Christian morality that also appeals to a non-Christian?

The bottom line I keep coming back to: if neutrality is not something we shoot for no matter how sloppy it will be, then do we need to return to the confessional state where only Protestants or Roman Catholics run things? That would certainly cut down on the pluralism of our societies and may bring a return of the ghettoization of religious dissenters. Do opponents of neutrality have a stomach for that? If not, maybe they should keep their clothes on.

Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Christianity

Published on by D. G. Hart14 Comments

Anthony Esolen has a usually provocative post about the inconsistencies of our times. He calls this the Contradictory Values Syndrome.

. . . on Monday, the harridans of the National Organization for Women announce their great discovery that it is a bad thing for men to beat women black and blue. We wonder what took them so long to discover it. APPLES FALL TO THE GROUND, runs the headline, with the helpful addition, Effects on Agriculture Undetermined. So terrible a thing it is for women to be beaten that they must promote a national law, the Violence Against Women Act, to ensure the safety of women against the fist of a brawling boyfriend.

Then on Tuesday, the same harridans announce the great discovery that it is a good thing for women to join the infantry, to confront not boyfriends, but enemy men who will be at the peak of their physical prowess, armed to the teeth, and filled with the rage of killing and plunder and rape. The chivalry or plain common decency that once protected a woman against brawling—or war—is derided as a masculine plot to keep women in subjection. . . .

On Wednesday, the keepers of our national morality inveigh against a priest or a coach who entices a teenage boy into sodomy. On Thursday, the same keepers inveigh against the Boy Scouts, for shying away from scoutmasters who might do the same.

I am not about to take on Esolen, especially since the flip-flops he notices would be hard even for Ethan Coen to script. At the same time, I am a tad sensitive about consistency. One reason is that being a Protestant and belonging to conservative circles appears to be contradictory. Another is that practically every post the Baylys or Rabbi Bret writes in derision of 2k contains a huff about how inconsistent 2kers are who oppose homosexuality in the church but not in the public square.

At the same time, I wonder what the advocates of consistency make of the consequences of their quest (or if they notice that Roman Catholics and neo-Calvinists, both forged in the fires of the French Revolution, pursue the same end of a society rooted in Christian convictions — as opposed to the other kind [read secular]). The way I figure, consistency between faith and politics or church and the public square lands you in one of two places. The first makes society Christian (as in theonomy) and leaves no room for the un-Christian (read Jew, Protestant or Roman Catholic, Mormon, Muslim). Here society must conform to God’s law, a demand that is seriously at odds with the United States’ founding as well as the experience of Jesus and the apostles. The second makes Christianity conform to society (as in liberal Christianity) and regards non-Christians as Christian as long as they conform to Christian behavior. Both places feature the Christian moral code as essential to Christianity, though the theonomic morality is more tough minded than the liberal Christian (think adultery as a capital offense). Another difference is that the theonomist may actually acknowledge that a member of a Christian society needs to be regenerate to have any chance of observing God’s law. The liberal Christian generally conceives of human nature as sufficiently good to comply with the demands of biblical or ecclesiastical standards.

Since most moderns don’t want to exclude people from their societies (with the exception of undocumented aliens), theonomy is a tough sell. But the liberal Christian response is so common that even the pope can sound like he is giving into it.

The takeaway here is that the gospel cannot be applied “consistently” to society. Grace, mercy, and forgiveness are not the goals that motivate foreign or domestic policy (though the Amish may be giving it a run). Now, of course, someone may want to say that grace, mercy, and forgiveness are not of the essence of Christianity. Instead, the law is, and so making a society conform to Christian law is how we arrive at a Christian society. The problem with that logic, aside from Protestantism and all that material-principle-of-the-Reformation-business, is that it completely ignores what happened to the Israelites where the law did not lead to human “flourishing” but to human diaspora.

The other takeaway is that morality does exist without Christianity. We used to call this civic as opposed to spiritual (or true) goodness. Whatever the reasons for such goodness, it exists, whether in Sweden or at a street corner where a tatted and severely pierced twenty-something waits for a light to signal he can cross the street. Calvinists generally want to encourage the civic virtues for the sake of social order and the safety of the church. But the orthodox ones have always been careful to distinguish civic from Christian virtue.

Works done by unregenerate men, although for the matter of them they may be things which God commands; and of good use both to themselves and others: yet, because they proceed not from an heart purified by faith; nor are done in a right manner, according to the Word; nor to a right end, the glory of God, they are therefore sinful, and cannot please God, or make a man meet to receive grace from God: and yet, their neglect of them is more sinful and displeasing unto God. (WCF 16.7)

Without that distinction you lose the fall, regeneration, salvation, and the third-use of the law (for starters). So the next time someone objects to the inconsistencies of 2k advocates, say “bless those 2kers for their gospel inconsistency.”

Is Tony Soprano in Hell?

Published on by D. G. Hart10 Comments

That is the question that Ross Douthat uses to respond to Rob Bell’s query about whether Christians must believe that Ghandi is in hell for being Hindu (probably not the best way of putting it since the eternal destiny of any human, aside from Christ, has not been part of Protestant church dogma).

Here is part of Douthat’s reasoning:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”

If there’s a modern-day analogue to the “Inferno,” a work of art that illustrates the humanist case for hell, it’s David Chase’s “The Sopranos.” The HBO hit is a portrait of damnation freely chosen: Chase made audiences love Tony Soprano, and then made us watch as the mob boss traveled so deep into iniquity — refusing every opportunity to turn back — that it was hard to imagine him ever coming out. “The Sopranos” never suggested that Tony was beyond forgiveness. But, by the end, it suggested that he was beyond ever genuinely asking for it.

The entire piece is worth reading not only for its explicit point but also to show that as supposedly debased and secular as American society is, it still permits arguments like Douthat’s – at the New York Times no less. Way to go, Ross. Way to go, light of nature.