paul j. griffiths

In today’s (18 July 2010) New York Times Magazine, there is long piece of reportage and analysis by Emily Bazelon called “The New Abortion Providers.” It’s not about the moral or legal questions. Instead, and much more usefully, it’s about institutions, education, and formation. Understanding abortion requires not just understanding what it is and what’s wrong with it, but also who does it, where it is done, and how people are formed in such a way as to want and be able to do it.

Bazelon shows how the provision of abortion migrated from doctors’ offices in the 1970s and early 1980s to stand-alone abortion clinics during the last two decades, and suggests that there are some signs of a return of abortion to multi-purpose primary-care clinics in which many other medical services are also provided. She explores, too, how widespread teaching about abortion is in medical school, and what proportion of ob-gyn residency programs offer training in its performance. And she shows that while until fairly recently most abortionists were men, they are now, increasingly, women. And she provides some anecdotal case-studies of how female physicians come to think and feel it right to do abortions, and of how they have been trained to do them.

The particulars of all this are interesting enough, and I refer you to Bazelon’s essay for them. For those, like myself, who think that abortion takes a human life and are therefore concerned about its frequency and legal status, Bazelon’s work is even more important. She shows that the complex catechesis provided by working for an MD degree and completing a residency is entirely capable of producing people who think, with sincerity and passion, that performing abortions is often not only defensible but a deeply good thing to do.

People who think this are not hypocrites, not stupid, and not insane. They are, mostly, intelligent, thoughtful, and morally passionate. They are, as they see it, doing and advocating the right thing under difficult circumstances, and in that way giving help to the otherwise helpless. They are wrong in the substance of what they think; but attending to how they come to be wrong should help those who have other views, and especially Catholics, to see what tactics are likely to work in reducing the number of people who see the world in this way, and thus, perhaps, the number of people killed by them.

Violence will not work. Neither will repealing Roe v. Wade. The former creates martyrs, which is never a good idea; and the latter, while it would (perhaps) save some lives, and might, over time, serve pedagogically to alter the climate of opinion about abortion in such a way as to make it less likely that women will seek it, will have no direct or straightforward effect upon abortion providers who are convinced of the moral rightness of what they do.

What Bazelon’s work points to is the importance of attending to the particulars of the education that medical students receive. That education is deeply formative, and not only in a technical way; it assumes and forms moral convictions about what health is, what human flourishing is, and how these are best served by what doctors do. Perhaps the best thing that Catholics concerned with these issues can do, especially those who have any influence in medical education, is to work, mostly sotto voce and in petto, to move that education away from forming doctors like the ones Bazelon portrays, and toward forming those who see clearly what abortion is and what is wrong with it.

Those who undertake such work should prepare for it by acknowledging to themselves and to their confessors the cognitive and moral damage to which they are themselves subject. Integral to that acknowledgment should be the cultivation of a strong sense that we Catholics are not morally superior to those who think and act as Bazelon’s idealistic abortion-doctors do. The posture and the rhetoric encouraged by that cultivation will permit more effective transformative action than its contradictory, in this case as in every other.

The Catholic understanding of abortion as deliberate taking of innocent human life is true and important. Knowing this does not exempt us from looking closely at and taking very seriously what makes these truths seem not only implausible but their assertion immoral to many intelligent and thoughtful people.

In the Spring 2010, number of Communio, David L. Schindler, that journal’s editor, published some brief remarks under the title, “Regarding Legal Recognition of Same-Sex Unions” (pp. 149-152). There is much of value in these remarks, but they exhibit a fundamental confusion. It is the confusion of thinking that it follows from some claim’s being true of human nature as such that the same claim “resonates in the heart of everyone—even in America” (p. 150). In fact, a claim can be of the first sort without being of the second. You don’t have to think very hard to see that there are many claims true of human nature as such that by no means seem so to most bearers of that nature; and that there are many claims about human nature that do seem true to most bearers of that nature but are nonetheless false.

The claims Schindler has in mind are those that enshrine and explain the “Church’s witness to marriage between a man and a woman as a central part of her social teaching.” He and I, I expect, are in broad and deep agreement about what this teaching is, and about its truth. But we are not, it seems, in agreement about what follows from that truth, epistemically speaking. One thing that emphatically does not follow is that the teaching ought seem true to all those to whom it is explained. Perhaps Schindler’s phrase about heart-resonance doesn’t imply truth-seeming. But even if it doesn’t, I should think it almost certain that there are lots of hearts in which no responsive resonance occurs on having the Church’s teaching about marriage explained.

Nothing much (and perhaps nothing at all) follows from the truth of a claim to its epistemic status for all human knowers. Thomas Aquinas puts this elegantly by distinguishing claims per se nota in se (self-evident in themselves) from those per se nota quoad nos (self-evident to us). The members of the two sets are not identical and may have rather little overlap. To predicate some argument about what the Church should do in respect of public law about marriage on confusion about this distinction is bound to lead to trouble, as indeed it does in Schindler’s remarks.

His remarks are, for the most part, narrowly addressed to the question of whether the Church in the United States should abide by laws requiring her to offer domestic partnership benefits to same-sex couples, actual or possible, among her employees. Schindler thinks that the Church should not abide by such laws, and with that conclusion I am in sympathy. In not doing so she would properly be refusing the state’s right (or indeed capacity) to legislate the regulation of her internal economy in ways that contradict her self-understanding.

But Schindler also seems to think that the Church should resist public laws about these and associated matters that do not have direct impact upon her internal economy—like, for example, state and federal legislation making same-sex unions legal, or permitting this or that right (inheritance, visitation, and so on) to same-sex as well as opposite-sex couples. He is, in my tentative judgment, wrong in this prudential judgment. The Church’s arguments about these matters are at the moment in almost every particular incomprehensible (and thus unacceptable) to those outside the Church. In that situation it is more than a little quixotic to ground the claim that the Church should take a position on a secular legal question exactly on the view that what she says is not of this kind.

It is a widely accepted norm of moral theology that the Church should not expect the civil law of a secular state to approximate in every particular the content of the moral law, stricto sensu. Prudential judgment about what the Church should advocate is needed in every particular case of divergence between the two. Relevant to such judgment is consideration of the degree to which what the Church teaches on the matter is likely to prove comprehensible to the locals. In the America of our day, it is about as difficult (or as easy) to make what the Church teaches about marriage comprehensible and convincing (the latter more difficult than the former) to the educated locals as it is to make the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception or the Real Presence so.

If that empirical claim is right (Schindler doesn’t seem to see the need for empirical study here), then the concluson strongly suggested by it is that the Church should not, at the moment, oppose legal recognition of same-sex unions. Those who have undergone a profoundly pagan catechesis on these questions will believe and behave as pagans do; it would be good for them and for the Church if the Church were not to attempt to constrain them by advocating positions in public policy based upon the view that what she teaches resonates in all human hearts—because it doesn’t, true though it is.

What the pagans need on this matter is conversion, not argument; and what the Church ought do to encourage that is to burnish the practice of marriage by Catholics until its radiance dazzles the pagan eye. The line Schindler suggests will have exactly the opposite effect.

Is death, human death, a good thing? Catholic teaching is ambivalent about this.

On the one hand, the answer is no: death is a result of the fall, and its omnipresence is the clearest evidence we have that things are not as they should be. It is a horror and an offence. We make great efforts to postpone it, and we lament when it occurs.

On the other hand, the answer is yes: the body’s death marks a transition to a new condition which we hope will be immeasurably better than the agony of this life; and so it has been a commonplace of the Catholic tradition to welcome death exactly as the gateway to eternal life. The day on which a saint is remembered in the Catholic calendar is her death-day, her dies natalis, which means, literally, birthday, day on which she is born to eternal life. And so death is to be welcomed.

There is another Catholic reason for affirming death as a good. It is that Jesus Christ died, by violence and with great suffering, which encourages Catholics to see their own deaths and sufferings as participating in his and themselves as thereby conformed to him. Thérèse of Lisieux, for instance, a saint and doctor of the church, found herself flooded with joy when she learned in 1897 that she had tuberculosis, an illness then usually incurable. She welcomed the blood she was coughing up as a harbinger of Jesus’ embrace, and she died within a few months of her first bloody expectoration.

Ambivalence is often a good thing. It certainly is in this case. To jettison the view that death is a horror to be lamented and staved off, with its concomitant that life is a good to be embraced and delighted in, easily leads to support for suicide, assisted or not, euthanasia, the refusal of medical treatment to those who might benefit from it, and all the other end-of-life unpleasantnesses that Catholic moral theologians rightly worry about. To jettison the view that death is a friend to be welcomed, a friend who will greet you one day whether you like it or not, suggests blindness to life eternal and a fixation on postponing death at all costs and for as long as possible. That fixation, because of our ever-increasing capacity to keep the body alive, now often leads to tormenting the body and the person by refusing to permit death to do its work. The wealthy, because they can afford the treatment, are now approaching the unenviable situation of being able to die only if they are killed: once in the grip of a doctor determined not to let you die, it is not easy to escape even if you want to.

Both sides of the ambivalence need to be held together if the fabric of Catholic thought about death is not to begin to unravel. But Catholic moral theologians at the moment have much more to say about the importance of staving off death than the importance of learning how to welcome it, and this needs to be corrected. If it is not, we will lose Thérèse’s sense that death can be a matter for rejoicing. Catholics need to begin to think and teach again, in public, about the ars moriendi, the art of dying.

One way in which this might be done is for the church to educate its wealthy—in American terms, that means anyone with medical insurance and a household income over $100,000 annually—that it might be good for them to die sooner than they do and with less care than they have come to think their right. There is no reason why the church ought to accept the guidelines of the American Medical Association about such things as the frequency with which routine physical examinations ought to be scheduled. Those frequencies, together with the tests and treatments associated with them, are predicated upon the assumption that knowledge about what will stave off death, together with treatment aimed at that end, should always be sought when they can be had. But this is not a fully Catholic view. It might be perfectly proper for a Catholic adult to seek a physical once a decade rather than once a year, and largely or completely to refuse diagnostic tests and other than palliative care for illness when it is diagnosed. Whether it is proper in a particular case will rest upon ancillary considerations, not upon questions about intrinsic propriety.

Another way in which this might be done is to encourage Catholics from an early age in the use of the symbols of death: the skull on the desk, imaginative meditation on the approach and arrival of one’s own death, prayer before the exposed bodies of the dead. These symbols bring the reality of death into life, where it belongs.

Yet a third way: public critique of the battle-trope. This metaphor is all around us. We are asked to applaud survivors of battles with cancer, to lament those who have succumbed after long struggle, and to approach our own illnesses girded for war. All this encourages us to think that dying because of illness or old age is always a defeat, which is simply and spectacularly false. It encourages us, too, to approach our own illnesses with the idea of victory at all costs and by any means possible. But illness and old age are not wars; they can sometimes be gifts.

I shudder as I write these things because they are so profoundly un-American. These views can be made plausible only if American Catholics begin again to have a sense that there is an art to dying, and that good practice of it means learning when, and when not, to seek diagnosis and treatment. Death’s embrace will come: hastening it is one mistake; resisting it whenever resistance is possible is another.

It’s a fundamental rule of Christian thinking that creation occurs ex nihilo, which is to say out of nothing. This is for at least two reasons. First, to create is by definition to bring something into being in that way. Any other mode of bringing something into being (for example, making a pot out of clay) is work on what’s already there, reforming and reordering what’s there into a new configuration. Second, there can be nothing that exists independently of the Lord; if there were then the Lord would not be the Lord but rather a being among beings, one who finds himself in a world he did not bring into being, alongside beings independent of himself. That is not a view possible for Christians: for us, there is only the Lord and what the Lord has created. His act of creation must then be ex nihilo: that is the very logic of the concept.  We humans can make (reform, reorder, construct, embellish, ornament), but we cannot, in the sense given, create.

Theologians and philosophers have paid a good deal of attention to the idea of creation out of nothing. They have had rather less to say about the concept’s complement, which is the return ad nihilum, to nothing — annihilation, that is to say, in ordinary English. If it is a property of every creature to have come into being ex nihilo (which is simple orthodoxy), then is it also a property of every creature that it can come to nothing? Does each of us hover over the void of nonbeing, slipping and sliding toward that void as an adobe house gradually, over time and without care, loses shape and returns to the earth from which it came?

It must certainly be the case that each creature continues to exist only so long as the Lord who brought it into being ex nihilo wills it so. It cannot belong to us intrinsically to continue in existence exactly because we are intrinsically — by definition, by nature — creatures. It is a further question, and a properly theological one, whether the Lord ever does permit creatures to return whence they came, to the nihil, and if so, which ones. The Christian tradition has not been of one mind on that matter.

An exploration of the logic of coming to nothing might be theologically suggestive in a number of ways.

Such a study would require, first, attention to the meaning — the grammar, the inner logic — of the idea of a creature’s coming to nothing. That idea requires, I should think, a distinction between a creature and its traces, for, clearly enough, no creature comes to nothing without leaving a trace, a vestigium, as Augustine would put it. The pot shatters into shards; the dead dog’s body remains and rots; the exploding star’s parts are flung into the void; and so on. The pot and the dog and the star are gone; they have come to nothing; but their traces remain.

Then, attending to the question of which (kinds of) creatures might be said to return to nothing and which (if any) are barred from doing so would provide avenues of thought about creaturely distinctions, and about the particular relations the Lord bears to different creaturely kinds. If, for instance, an oak tree may come to nothing but a human being or an angel may not, why?

Also, it is not only creatures as wholes which might come to nothing; it is also their parts and properties. Whether or not you can come to nothing, clearly some of your properties or attributes can: you might, perhaps, cease to want anything or hope for anything (that’s presumably true in heaven); or, your capacity to love might come to nothing (a properly hellish condition); and so on. Attention to what about you can be annihilated and what cannot permits attention to the kind of creature you are from an uncommon angle of vision.

Sin might be construed as the sinner’s attempt to bring herself to nothing, to remove the habit of being. Sin might then be defined as establishing the habit of nonbeing. There’s much in the tradition that suggests this, and exploring it might permit better understanding of the logic and meaning and goal of sinning. A expansion of this line of thought opens the question of whether the work of creation can be undone, thus returning all creatures ad nihilum. The answer to that question must be, from a Christian point of view, negative. Sorting out exactly why, however, is work not fully done.

I have in mind a book called Toward Nothing: A Theology of Annihilation. A profoundly cheerful topic.

Many Catholics of my acquaintance express anguish and outrage and disappointment at the news of priests abusing children, and at the thought that some bishops have not been effective in protecting children from abusive priests in their charge. I find these things sad, certainly; I grieve for the children who have suffered, and for those who are sufficiently damaged and sinful to abuse others in that way. But I can’t rise to anguish or outrage. These events seem to me too ordinary for that to be the right response. This is what human beings are like, priests or not: we’re a sorry, damaged, violent, and deceptive lot. That’s true of me, and of you, too. Not all sins are equally attractive to all; but all are profoundly damaged and, thus, sinful. How then can I be surprised, or outraged, that this is true of priests and bishops?

A very small percentage of our priests is disordered in this particular way, and a tiny proportion of the very large number of children sexually abused by adults has, over the last several decades, suffered abuse at their hands.  What more to say?

First, that the Church is a corpus permixtum, a mixed body: in it, there are and must be at one and the same time the deeply disordered and the profoundly saintly. This is axiomatic. Surprise at sin is never appropriate; surprise at saintliness always is.

Second, that it is unreasonable to expect that the baptized and the ordained should be less actively sinful than the unwashed. Jesus, through his Church, does not set out to baptize and ordain the sinless. What he does set out to do is baptize and ordain sinners and teach them thereby what sin is, how it works, and how it may be forgiven. The Church is not less sinful than any other community; it is, instead, the community of those who have been (and are continuing to be) taught by Jesus about what sin is and about how to receive forgiveness for their own sins. Our task, the task of the baptized, is to teach the world how to lament and repent; not to establish a community of the perfect.

Does this mean that we are sanguine about sin? That we sin more so that grace might abound? That we do not lament the sufferings of those sinned against? No. When we know what we are doing we weep for our sins and for the suffering of all, confessing with Paul that we — each one of us — is the foremost among sinners, and seeking forgiveness constantly. We fail at this, too; but in failing we do not seek success so much as clarity about what our failure consists in.

Sin and suffering can’t be fixed; they can be repented and lamented. When I hear about the sins of others and the damage wrought by them I lament, but I am not outraged and not surprised and I do not think things can be fixed. Children have been abused, sexually and otherwise, by adults for as long as there have been children and adults. The attempt to fix this, to make it go away, is something we must energetically attempt, but only under the sign of certainty that we shall fail.

It’s Holy Saturday. Jesus is dead: he has descended to hell to bring out therefrom those who do not belong there. Early tomorrow he will be resurrected, and I am eager (more eager than I should be) for tonight’s vigil in which that resurrection will be recapitulated. As I wait, I’m listening to a song called ‘Ain’t No Grave,’ in a version recorded by Johnny Cash not long before his death in 2003. It’s a traditional American song, without attribution; and it’s a masterpiece of lament-tinged hope.

There ain’t no grave can hold my body down / When I hear that trumpet sound / I’m gonna rise right outta the ground / Ain’t no grave can hold my body down /  Well look down the river and what do you think I see? / I see a band of angels and they’re a-comin’ after me / There ain’t no grave can hold my body down /  Well meet me Jesus meet me / Meet me in the middle of the air / And if these wings don’t fail me / I’ll meet you anywhere / There ain’t no grave can hold my body down … (ad libitum)

Early this year (2010) a book under the name of David Shields called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto was published. It’s a florilegium: that is, a bunch of (verbal) flowers, pruned, juxtaposed, teased out, artfully ordered. Most of its words weren’t written by Shields, but, rather, gathered by him from what others have written and said, and then arranged. He is no auctor, but rather a compilator. Isn’t everyone? Christians should certainly think so. Does anyone, except the Lord, bring words into being ex nihilo? Of course not. Literary work, work in the medium of prose, is always an act of compilation rather than creation in the strict and proper sense, and our desire that it should be something else, that its product be something brought into being de novo, words sprung full-grown and new-born from the fevered imagination of the godlike writer, is nothing other than an idolatrous fantasy. What Christians do with words is always, first, receive them, and then give them back. What else could we do? But, then, the apparatus of citation and reference and acknowledgment needs rethinking. Shields helps us to do that and to see what it means to do it: most of the words in the book aren’t ‘his’ (no words, it should hardly need saying, are yours or his or anyone else’s), and (he writes) he wanted to have the book published without acknowledging the tracks along which its words had come before finding their place on the printed pages of Reality Hunger. But the lawyers wouldn’t let him, and so there is a list of citations at the back of the book. Shields recommends that you, dear reader, “simply grab a sharp pair of scissors or a razor blade or box cutter and remove” the pages on which the citations are given. If you do, you’ll attend to the words in the book rather than to worries about their ownership or stories about their past. Yes: and yes again. It’s not that there is never good reason for tracking a body of words into the past. But interest in the ownership of that body is never among those good reasons, and the clarity with which Reality Hunger shows the truth of this is among its principal delights. Christians should know this truth already: plagiarism is no sin. (See Intellectual Appetite, chapter 10, in which the virtues of the plagiarus are extolled.)

There is a thread of suspicion of pagan literature in general and fiction in particular in the fabric of Catholic thought. Augustine worries that in grieving the tragic end of the affair between Dido and Aeneas he is displacing grief better directed toward his own sins; Jerome dreams that he is taken before the judgment-seat and accused of being a Ciceronian rather than a Christian because of his delight in reading pagan literature; and thoughtful Catholics of my acquaintance have told me that they think time spent on pagan literature is time wasted.

But these worries ought not be taken very seriously. As with everything, the extent to which pagan literature exists is just the extent to which it is good. And some of it exists very intensely: its words are beautiful, its cadences delightful, its sensibilities profound, its difficulties provocatively knotted, its terrain open to the descent of the dove. And so it should be read by Catholics, not just for its messages (if you want to send a message, use Twitter), but for its beauty and because it can show us something that no Catholic writer can — namely, just what  it’s like to see and show the world as pagans do. This is something Catholics should be interested in: only by looking closely at it can we approach more closely (but always asymptotically) the project of completing our text, of writing the world into its margins.

And so: read, for example, John Banville, who is post-Christian, yes, but also deeply pagan; or Kazuo Ishiguro, who is, so far as I can tell, not even post-Christian but pagan simpliciter; or Vladimir Nabokov, who was sacramentally and magically anti-Christian; or, to move quite outside the realm of explicitly Christian influence, read the Mahabharata or Ramayana. In doing so, you will be doing something like what Thomas did when he read Aristotle or Augustine did when he read Virgil. You’ll be doing something deeply Catholic.

Catholics disagree about whether to support the healthcare legislation currently being considered by Congress. Some, including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, recommend against supporting the proposed legislation in its current form because in their judgment it contains insufficient protections against the use of federal funds for abortions. Others, including a significant proportion of  female religious congregations in the US, while acknowledging the imperfections of the proposed legislation, support it because they think its benefits outweigh its disadvantages.

What kind of disagreement is this? It’s in part a disagreement about principle, and in part a disagreement about an empirical question. The principle is: federal funds ought not be used to pay for abortions. The empirical claim is: the healthcare legislation currently before the house makes it too likely that federal funds will be so used. Catholics who assent to the principle (as I do) may reasonably disagree about the empirical claim. In fact, given the complexity of the legislation and the difficulty of assessing its likely effects, a difficulty shown strikingly by the fact that those called upon to offer expert opinion on the question show nothing remotely approaching a consensus, the proper stance to take toward the empirical claim is skeptical, viz: No one ought to place much confidence in their ability to tell whether the healthcare legislation currently before the house makes it too likely that federal funds will be used for abortion. If that’s correct — and I can think of no reason to doubt it — then anyone with a strong opinion about the substantive empirical question is ipso facto confused.

What follows? That good Catholics should prescind from support of or opposition to the legislation under consideration (a plague upon all that), and should affirm what is (almost) self-evidently true, which is that legislation of this sort in a complex bureaucratic pagan state such as ours is beyond the competence of anyone reasonably to assess as to outcome. We may, of course, and should, continue serenely to affirm the truth of the principle earlier stated.

There is a further question: does episcopal instruction on the question of whether to support or oppose the legislation require a faithful Catholic to follow it? Yes, so far as doctrinal principle is concerned: that is a matter of faith & morals upon which our bishops are our teachers, and to whose teaching we should show obsequium religiosum (look it up). But no on the empirical question, on which the bishops are no better equipped to teach than you or me. When we don’t know, the thing to say is that we don’t know, and the action to take and advocate is that which accords with not knowing. Anything else is pretense and absurdity.