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Post by hibernicus on May 26, 2020 18:51:50 GMT
I haven't read Yallop, which is generally seen as off the wall. David Cornwell (of all people) produced a very convincing rebuttal (though his view that Papa Luciani, who had a pre-existing heart condition, died because in the turmoil of his election and inauguration he was cut off from his personal support network in Venice and none of the Vatican employees cared enough, even though he was clearly in distress, to suggest he should slow down and take care of himself, is very painful to read). I remember reading ILLUSTRISSIMI when it came out and being in stitches from the humour. I suspect if I re-read it now I might see more in the way of wisdom.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 3, 2020 23:11:09 GMT
Recently read THE PEASANT OF THE GARONNE by Jacques Maritain. This is one of several "what's going wrong" books produced by prominent Catholic thinkers soon after vatican II. A few observations: (1) As I expected, Peter HEbblethwaite's claim that it shows Maritain had gone senile is completely unsustainable, to put it politely. There is a certain amount of self-dramatisation (the title is a reference to a proverbial person who causes a sensation by being naive or stubborn enough to point out what everyone knows but no-one can admit; the little boy who says out loud that the emperor has no clothes would be a parallel) and the fact that it is written as a series of datemarked essays rather than a single continuous text may reflect an old man's failin physical stamina, but in general it is coherently reasoned.
(2) One striking feature is how early it is - written in 1966, i.e. before Humanae Vitae and therefore indicating controversies were arising before that encyclical.
(3) It is also noteworthy how sympathetic to the Council's overall impact it is, and how it can generally be described as leftist in political terms (Maritain says that although he finds himself on some points closer to the trads in general he sees the left as his natural allies, and jokes that he, Saul Alinsky and the Chilean Eduardo Frei are the only real revolutionaries). The contrast with Bouyer's DECOMPOSITION OF CATHOLICISM, and particularly with von Hildebrand's TROJAN HORSE IN THE CITY OF GOD, is very marked. Maritain is unequivocal that the closure of the Constantinian age of the church (though he admits it has virtues) is a good thing. He states that there is a healthy rejection of a certain style of post-Counter Reformation piety where over time contemptus mundi slid intosomething resembling actual Manicheanism, though he thinks that the sensus fidelium always restrained its worst excesses. Maritain attributes this reassessment to the gradual rediscovery of the Thomist sense of Being. HE argues that in contrast to rationalistic manual versions of Thomism, real Thomism starts from an intuition of reality and tries to work out its implications - that the quest for truth and discovery is inherent to Christian philosophy as to any other philosophy, and that manualism obscures this.
(4) Maritain's concern is that many clerics etc have reacted by running to the other extreme and embracing the world unreservedly, amounting to virtual pantheism. He sees Teilhard as someone who had profound spiritual insights and poetic gifts but failed to develop an adequate intellectual structure for them. (In an Appendix he says he may have been too soft on Teilhard, whom he now suspects of going too far into Hegelian pantheism and the idea that Creation is necessary to complete God.) Similarly, while Maritain thinks that some liturgical change involving greater participation by the congregation is useful (it is quite clear from what he says that quite a bit of experimentation was underway before the NOVUS ORDO was promulgated in 1968) he thinks that such participation can, and generally should, take the form of silent personal prayer and contemplation; he complains that some liturgists apparently disapprove of contemplation in principle and want to banish silence altogether. He cites some passages from the writings of his late wife Raissa on contemplation.
Certainly the book is worth reading as an example of the analysis of "how we got into this mess" which doesn't idealise the preconciliar world.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 13, 2020 21:46:49 GMT
A memoir by Gay Byrne of the first ten years of the Late Late Show, called TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. I knew Byrne went to Synge Street CBS, but frequenters of St Kevin's may be surprised to see how often the area crops up (his mother attended morning Mass in the church every day as thanksgiving for her husband's safe return from the First World War). Byrne also mentions taking part in amateur dramatic productions in Archbishop Byrne Hall (just across Synge Street from St Kevin's). A few observations: (1) Byrne reprints several letters complaining about various shows, evidently in the expectation that his readers will regard the authors as ignorant buffoons. In fact, the writers come across as literate and make several very clear and obviously true points, such as panels in certain topics being balanced 2-1 or 3-1 in favour of one side, or pointing out that remarks such as Oliver J Flanagan's "no sex in Ireland before television" were held up to ridicule even though it's clear what was meant. Byrne's defence that he is pointing out their inarticulacies and failure to think things through (as he does for example when defending the cross-examination of Mary Whitehouse by panellists including a priest) is clearly disingenuous. (2) Byrne is quite often disingenuous. Thus, for example, when an architecture student called Brian Trevaskis denounced the construction of Galway Cathedral and referred to Bishop Browne of Galway as a moron, leading to an outcry (I'll discuss the issue of outcries a bit further down) Byrne subsequently announced that Trevaskis was sorry and would come on the show again next week to apologise. When he did come on again, he repeated his previous statements. No intelligent reader of Byrne's book will think that he didn't know this was going to happen (especially since Byrne casually remarks in another part of the book that the exchanges on the show are rehearsed in advance) but he doesn't admit it and maintains an attitude of "don't nail his ears to the pump".* (3) Similarly, Byrne never admits that anyone who protests about his show might have a legitimate point of view. In discussing the "bishop and the nightie" incident (incidentally, the amount of space he gives it does not tie in with John Waters' recent claim that the controversy has been magnified in retrospect) Byrne first of all has an acute analysis of what the academic Lucy McDiarmuid calls "the Irish art of controversy" - i.e. that instead of a large number of early complaints, there were a few scattered complaints, then after some prominent authority figure - in this case the Bishop of Clonfert - protests there is an avalanche as county councillors and the like fell over themselves to engage in what we now call "virtue signalling", even though in many cases they knew and cared little about the matter at issue. (This mechanism of course still operates, except that the role of Bishop Ryan has been taken by IRISH TIMES columnists, members of the state-funded "human rights for me but not for thee" quangocracy and the like.) Byrne then complains that it is Bishop Ryan and the other complainants who should apologise for upsetting the couple in question by suggesting that they did anything wrong in discussing their bedroom attire or absence thereof. (This counteroffensive of course failed to acknowledge the possibility that treating such intimate matters as legitimate subject for discussion might lead, as it has led, to the broadcasting of quasi-porn on terrestrial TV. In general, it will be noted that Mr Byrne's emphasis on discussion amounted to challenging and interrogating the conservatives while giving a free pass to the innovators.) (4) This is not to say that Mr Byrne was always wrong. It is noteworthy, for example, that one of the points made by Brian Trevaskis on the show during the Galway Cathedral controversy was that Ireland was flattering itself on being a Christian country, but its treatment of unmarried mothers was profoundly unChristian - something which we all know now was all too true, and he deserves praise for saying it. Similarly, part of Byrne's underlying attitude is a taunt towards his opponents that they can't do anything to him, based on the knowledge that a broadcaster or journalist in the 1950s who had tried anything like Gay Byrne did, or a great number of milder thigs, would rapidly have been sacked, blacklisted and sent on the boat to England, and that quite a few of his opponents would have liked to give him the exact same treatment because they saw his actions as simply outside the pale. On balance I think that 50s attitude swept too many very nasty things under the carpet to be justifiable, and Byrne profited from public unspoken awareness of this. The mindset is a combination of "let's be civilised like other more successful countries" and "we all know certain things are so bad that change has got to be an improvement". Assuming, as quite a few people I know all too easily assume, that certain changes in social attitudes and behaviour were simply triggered by a small number of conspirators is foolish and dangerous. The deluge happened because there were too many cracks and weaknesses in the society already. This recent column by Rod Dreher, explaining how Trump and Black Lives Matter succeeded because they tapped into real issues which were not being discussed, and that their opponents failed to defeat them because they focussed on the numerous inaccuracies in their statements while not recognising the power of the subtext, is relevant here. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-2016-wokeness-2020-live-not-by-lies/ This may be an odd thing to say given that I tend to focus on the factual inaccuracies of the Woke myself, but I would say that though it is not the whole solution it is a necessary first step. * "Don't nail his ears to the pump" - In eighteenth-century Trinity College Dublin the students did not take kindly to creditors entering the campus to try to collect what was due to them. One day, as several students were dowsing a creditor under a pump, an academic walked by. "Gentlemen, gentlemen" he said. "Stop what you are doing immediately. Let him go - pay your debts - stop holding him under the pump. And whatever you do,don't nail his ears to the pump!" The point of the story is that everyone involved knew perfectly well that the academic meant to give the students the idea of nailing the creditor's ears to the pump, but that it was impossible to prove it since on the face of it he did no such thing. Certain individuals who campaigned for abortion while denying they were doing any such thing may spring to your minds - I couldn't possibly comment.
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Post by assisi on Jun 20, 2020 14:42:26 GMT
A memoir by Gay Byrne of the first ten years of the Late Late Show, called TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN. I knew Byrne went to Synge Street CBS, but frequenters of St Kevin's may be surprised to see how often the area crops up (his mother attended morning Mass in the church every day as thanksgiving for her husband's safe return from the First World War). Byrne also mentions taking part in amateur dramatic productions in Archbishop Byrne Hall (just across Synge Street from St Kevin's). A few observations: (1) Byrne reprints several letters complaining about various shows, evidently in the expectation that his readers will regard the authors as ignorant buffoons. In fact, the writers come across as literate and make several very clear and obviously true points, such as panels in certain topics being balanced 2-1 or 3-1 in favour of one side, or pointing out that remarks such as Oliver J Flanagan's "no sex in Ireland before television" were held up to ridicule even though it's clear what was meant. Byrne's defence that he is pointing out their inarticulacies and failure to think things through (as he does for example when defending the cross-examination of Mary Whitehouse by panellists including a priest) is clearly disingenuous. (2) Byrne is quite often disingenuous. Thus, for example, when an architecture student called Brian Trevaskis denounced the construction of Galway Cathedral and referred to Bishop Browne of Galway as a moron, leading to an outcry (I'll discuss the issue of outcries a bit further down) Byrne subsequently announced that Trevaskis was sorry and would come on the show again next week to apologise. When he did come on again, he repeated his previous statements. No intelligent reader of Byrne's book will think that he didn't know this was going to happen (especially since Byrne casually remarks in another part of the book that the exchanges on the show are rehearsed in advance) but he doesn't admit it and maintains an attitude of "don't nail his ears to the pump".* (3) Similarly, Byrne never admits that anyone who protests about his show might have a legitimate point of view. In discussing the "bishop and the nightie" incident (incidentally, the amount of space he gives it does not tie in with John Waters' recent claim that the controversy has been magnified in retrospect) Byrne first of all has an acute analysis of what the academic Lucy McDiarmuid calls "the Irish art of controversy" - i.e. that instead of a large number of early complaints, there were a few scattered complaints, then after some prominent authority figure - in this case the Bishop of Clonfert - protests there is an avalanche as county councillors and the like fell over themselves to engage in what we now call "virtue signalling", even though in many cases they knew and cared little about the matter at issue. (This mechanism of course still operates, except that the role of Bishop Ryan has been taken by IRISH TIMES columnists, members of the state-funded "human rights for me but not for thee" quangocracy and the like.) Byrne then complains that it is Bishop Ryan and the other complainants who should apologise for upsetting the couple in question by suggesting that they did anything wrong in discussing their bedroom attire or absence thereof. (This counteroffensive of course failed to acknowledge the possibility that treating such intimate matters as legitimate subject for discussion might lead, as it has led, to the broadcasting of quasi-porn on terrestrial TV. In general, it will be noted that Mr Byrne's emphasis on discussion amounted to challenging and interrogating the conservatives while giving a free pass to the innovators.) (4) This is not to say that Mr Byrne was always wrong. It is noteworthy, for example, that one of the points made by Brian Trevaskis on the show during the Galway Cathedral controversy was that Ireland was flattering itself on being a Christian country, but its treatment of unmarried mothers was profoundly unChristian - something which we all know now was all too true, and he deserves praise for saying it. Similarly, part of Byrne's underlying attitude is a taunt towards his opponents that they can't do anything to him, based on the knowledge that a broadcaster or journalist in the 1950s who had tried anything like Gay Byrne did, or a great number of milder thigs, would rapidly have been sacked, blacklisted and sent on the boat to England, and that quite a few of his opponents would have liked to give him the exact same treatment because they saw his actions as simply outside the pale. On balance I think that 50s attitude swept too many very nasty things under the carpet to be justifiable, and Byrne profited from public unspoken awareness of this. The mindset is a combination of "let's be civilised like other more successful countries" and "we all know certain things are so bad that change has got to be an improvement". Assuming, as quite a few people I know all too easily assume, that certain changes in social attitudes and behaviour were simply triggered by a small number of conspirators is foolish and dangerous. The deluge happened because there were too many cracks and weaknesses in the society already. This recent column by Rod Dreher, explaining how Trump and Black Lives Matter succeeded because they tapped into real issues which were not being discussed, and that their opponents failed to defeat them because they focussed on the numerous inaccuracies in their statements while not recognising the power of the subtext, is relevant here. www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trump-2016-wokeness-2020-live-not-by-lies/ This may be an odd thing to say given that I tend to focus on the factual inaccuracies of the Woke myself, but I would say that though it is not the whole solution it is a necessary first step. * "Don't nail his ears to the pump" - In eighteenth-century Trinity College Dublin the students did not take kindly to creditors entering the campus to try to collect what was due to them. One day, as several students were dowsing a creditor under a pump, an academic walked by. "Gentlemen, gentlemen" he said. "Stop what you are doing immediately. Let him go - pay your debts - stop holding him under the pump. And whatever you do,don't nail his ears to the pump!" The point of the story is that everyone involved knew perfectly well that the academic meant to give the students the idea of nailing the creditor's ears to the pump, but that it was impossible to prove it since on the face of it he did no such thing. Certain individuals who campaigned for abortion while denying they were doing any such thing may spring to your minds - I couldn't possibly comment. Never warmed to Gay Byrne. He always struck me as phony. The time the show's panellists all ganged up on Gerry Adams on that famous appearance was choreographed and nasty and backfired on them. Mind you, as an aside, any sympathy I had for Adams and Sinn Fein at that time has long gone and I cannot stand them anymore.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 22, 2020 10:03:45 GMT
With regards to the ambush on Gerry Adams on The Late Late Show, I was disgusted that Byrne brought on a posse of attack dogs rather than doing the job himself. Especially since his constant refrain during Section 31 days was that the measure prevented him putting the likes of Gerry Adams through the paces of a tough interview. And as Assisi says, it backfired.
And I don't say this out of regard for either Gerry Adams or Sinn Féin.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Jun 22, 2020 10:10:42 GMT
BTW, Hibernicus refers to Harrington St Church as St Kevin's. Only people who began attending this church since the EF chaplaincy was set up there call this church St Kevin's. Locals and people with an older association with the church and most of the diocesan clergy in Dublin call it Harrington St Church
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 22, 2020 22:47:41 GMT
The ambush on Adams was actually quite a classic example of Byrne's modus operandi - he was always a manipulator and insinuator who liked to weigh panels against the object of his dislike, chairing it as the supposed voice of sweet reason while making it clear what he thought, and to present the result as implicitly showing there were no two sides worth considering. From what I hear it backfired on this occasion because Adams was sophisticated enough to anticipate what was going to happen and projected himself as the voice of sweet reason, while the panellists loathed Adams so much they failed to anticipate his self-presentation and overdid it. I say this as someone who loathes Adams myself. Peter Simple (Michael Wharton) the old DAILY TELEGRAPH satirical columnist, was in many respects a nasty piece of work, but his parodic description of a BBC programme in which a documentary on cannibalism among Orangemen was followed up by a "balanced" panel discussion, in which half-a-dozen academics, artists and politicians debate a 90-year-old Orangeman who has recently undergone electro-convulsive therapy, catches Gaybo's idea of balance quite well.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Jun 23, 2020 9:23:13 GMT
I think the "neutral chairman" was a role he relished. I recall another incident where he had Major Ken McGuinness and Bernadette Devlin-McAlliskey on together. Predictably, they proceeded to knock lumps out of each other and he allowed them do it. Then he sat back and said "Nothing has changed", reinforcing the prejudices about the northern conflict among bored southern viewers.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 23, 2020 23:54:32 GMT
Actually, the term that applies to Gaybo should be very familiar to readers of this forum. He was a "facilitator" - you may recall how almost 40 years ago Doris Manly and Nick Lowry campaigned to expose how the style of moral and religious education being brought into Irish schools presented itself as allowing the pupils to make their own decisions while really inculcating a secularist-utilitarian mindset through its unquestioned assumptions and exclusions of certain forms of virtue-training. Nick and Doris were among the authors of a book called THE FACILITATORS, which pointed out that the teacher's supposedly neutral and non-authoritarian role as a chair "facilitating" the pupils' own discussions really amounted to a form of manipulation. That's how Gay Byrne operated.
In regard to your reference to "Major Ken Maginnis" highlighting his role in the UDR, it should be mentioned that in the 60s he was one of the few Dungannon Protestants to take part in the Civil Rights movement - according to Fr Denis Faul, who professed strong personal respect for him (and Fr Faul was a pretty unsparing critic of te UDR).
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 30, 2020 20:34:23 GMT
DIALOGUES AND IDEOLOGUES by Thomas Molnar (1978). This is another one of the "what went wrong after Vatican II" books, and it's a curate's egg - good in parts, but that's not good enough. The good parts are his observations on the political manoeuvres of liberal/radical Catholics - for example, their hatred of popular devotional Catholicism at the same time that they claim to speak for "the people" ("the people" in this context being an abstraction like the "noble savage"), the ways in which they actually identify with secularists against traditional Catholics, their obsession with managerialism and efficiency, the way in which "dialogue" really means "accept the other side's viewpoint in advance" while haggling over a few details, the way in which "institutions" are dismissed although any message must take institutional form to survive, the tacit acceptance of a new form of integralism based on subservience of the Church to the state. The bad part, and it is very bad, is that he sees the questions primarily through a political lens, in terms of political conservatism and of the Cold War. (Managerialism and efficiency are major themes of postwar American and Western European culture, but he seems to see them almost entirely as Soviet phenomena.) He also omits to discuss how the radicals, however problematic their solutions, were facing real problems. For example, when he recalls radical Catholics telling him that Latin America was experiencing its own industrial revolution which must be humanised by some means, he doesn't acknowledge that they are describing a real phenomenon. Worse, I catch in some of his comments certain echoes of the ideology of the "national security state" which underpinned the bloody right-wing dictatorships of the period in Latin America, some of which underpinned themselves by appealing totraditional Catholicism. He also doesn't acknowledge the extent to which savage colonial wars like that in Algeria, and beyond those the legacy of the fascist era, contributed to the loss of confidence in the mission civilatrice in the period of the Council. (I believe Molnar himself was a defender of European colonialism in Africa.) Hitchcock, Maritain, von Hildebrand and Bouyer are at different positions on the political spectrum, but in each instance their concerns are primarily spiritual. I don't think the same is true of Molnar. Learn from him but handle him with great caution.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 31, 2020 23:09:16 GMT
Currently reading Angela Hanley WHATEVER HAPPENED TO FR SEAN FAGAN? in between other work. A few first impressions: (1) Fr Fagan genuinely saw himself as performing a pastoral role; he spent a lot of time talking with and counselling people who had serious moral problems. The content of his advice sounds questionable in some cases, but we should acknowledge his motivation and his effort.
(2) He also has legitimate points about the harm done by (for example) people being led to see God as harsh and punitive and keeping people in line with fear of Hell, or seeing morality simply as a set of arbitrary rules. His response is another matter; it is difficult to work out his exact beliefs from Hanly, because she sees him as so obviously right that he doesn't need to be explicated, but he seems to have an antinominian mindset and to assume that it is evidently right that people should choose for themselves without reference to historic doctrine; he does not acknowledge the extent to which people's views of what is right will in fact be influenced by the society around them and are not arrived at ex nihilo, nor the possibility that what seems everyday common sense may be distorted and in need of correction by divine grace. Nor indeed does he note that many people leave important matters to specialists because they have busy and troubled lives and can't spare the time to work out everything from first principles.
(3) Fr Fagan is quoted as pointing out that the CDF is a sixteenth-century invention and that previously accusations of heresy were dealt with by councils and synods. He doesn't acknowledge just how seriously these councils and synods took accusations of heresy, and how vehemently they condemned it.
(4) Fr Fagan denounces the appeal to authority, but at the same time he presents his own views as unquestionable because they are the views of major theologians such as Rahner, Schillebeckx, Haring etc who are tacitly assumed to be beyond question. When Fr Denis Faul and Fr James McEvoy criticised President McAleese for taking communion in the Church of Ireland, Fr Fagan dismissed them out of hand on the grounds that they were not qualified theologians. (Fr McEvoy being a serious philosopher and Fr Faul well-read in theology and corresponding respectfully with Alasdair McIntyre.) This from someone who described himself as basically a populariser. (Hanley similarly dismisses a critic who reviewed one of Fr Fagan's books on the grounds that he was in her view a very conservative Catholic, without bothering to give the substance of his criticisms.)
(5) The letter to the editor of the IRISH TIMES which led to Fr Fagan's silencing is described by Hanley as primarily about women's ordination. Hanley reproduces the text of that letter, in which Fr Fagan states inter alia: EXTRACT Many people imagine that at the Last Supper Jesus ordained the apostles as priests, giving them everything except Roman collars. But in fact there is nothing in the gospels to show that Jesus consciously founded the Church, or even a Church. Nor did he ever ordain anyone a priest in the modern sense, or even think of a cultic priesthood. (ppp112-113) END OF EXTRACT [Presumably Fr Fagan believed that in such passages as the conferral of the keys on Peter, the word normally translated "church" should be "congregation" or "community".] Now this goes much deeper than women's ordination. Fr Fagan is expressly denying that Jesus ever founded a Church - and in consequence he denies that the Church has teaching authority or is guided by the Holy Spirit - and claiming that He did not found a sacrificing priesthood based on apostolic succession. If this were true then the Church would be based on a delusion and ought not to exist. Fr Fagan and Angela Hanley object to anyone who objects to this, or to Fr Fagan using his status as a priest to propagate it. More thoughts on this some other time...
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 15, 2020 23:58:34 GMT
Kevin Myers's new mwmoir BURNING HERESIES. He gives some very painful examples of religious hypocrisy concerning certain individuals whom I won't name here, but what struck me overall about the book is that under the genial hyperbole and "Anglo-Irish" Shtick there is a real sense of absurdism and despair, a view of life and death as meaningless pain and butchery. This is probably a bit exaggerated because he states that he leaves his nearest and dearest (including his wife) out of the book because he doesn't want to infringe their privacy, and it partly comes from his experience of studying war and wandering round in its vicinity (much of the book is devoted to his experiences covering wars in the Middle East and in Yugoslavia, and he makes it clear that he has long since lost that sense of youthful bravado which made him think he was immortal when he covered the Northern Ireland conflict in the 1970s) but part of it also reflects the loss of his youthful religious faith. There is a passage where he describes going out during a battle in Beirut to a building where he can send his copy to the IRISH TIMES before his deadline, and finds himself singing "Hail Queen of heaven". This comes across as somuch sadder than he realises. Pray for the wanderer.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 21, 2021 23:07:26 GMT
In view of some recent arguments about Catholic integralism and its drawbacks, I decided to read Dostoyevsky's PARABLE OF THE GRAND INQUISITOR, which I last looked at decades ago. (It frequently comes up in such debates.) en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Brothers_Karamazov/Book_V/Chapter_5 I was surprised at how shocking it is, because I had associated it with Ivan Karamazov's statement (in the previous chapter) that redemption in its highest form does not cancel out the suffering of one single innocent, and that Heaven is not worth having at such a price. (BTW one of the things which started this train of thought was the realisation that Ursula Le Guin's story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas", which is sometimes cited by pro-lifers, is a restatement of Ivan's claim - in her case connected with her rejection of Christianity for a worldview influenced by Taoism. It's also -lest we seem to dismissive - a critique of utilitarianism, which in certain forms can be used to justify any atrocity. Though oddly enough the story can be read as expressing another reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism - that if avoidance of suffering is the highest good, the destruction of the universe would be a blessing because it would end suffering. A recent science fiction film had a villain who was attempting to detonate a device which would cause the universe not only not to exist but never to have existed; in the mindset I have mentioned the villain would actually be the hero.) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelasasiasociety.org/sites/default/files/2021-02/Le-Guin-Ursula-The-Ones-Who-Walk-Away-From-Omelas.pdf What really shocked me about THE GRAND INQUISITOR is the extent to which the speaker, while claiming to benefit the vulgar many, actually despises them. The critique of the Grand Inquisitor that is found in George Orwell's 1984 - where O'Brien tells Winston that the Party cares nothing for the plebs but desires power for its own sake - is actually present in Dostoyevsky's original text. (It is possible to read into his statement the belief of such neo-pagans as Julius Evola that the vulgar many cease to exist on death and only the strong and great have godlike souls, though the Inquisitor may simply be slurring over the implications of his belief - that most people are damned anyway and may as well enjoy themselves en route.) Equally shocking is the sheer pride of the man - he openly admits that he and those like him are taking on the role of the Antichrist in the Apocalypse, but he thinks they know better than God. He tells God to His Face that he knows how the world should have been created better than God does, that in the Three Temptations the Devil was correct and Jesus was mistaken, and so forth. I might add that the story implies criticisms which have been made of some forms of Protestantism by Catholics (the antinomian element in Calvinism) and of Catholics by Protestantism (the belief - mistakenly attributed to the Church - that we can be saved by our own works, which underlies the Inquisitor's pride). It's an interesting example of how the Eastern Orthodox often see Protestantism and Catholicism as resembling each other more than either resembles Orthodoxy (whereas we would see ourselves as clearly closer to Orthodoxy than to Protestantism). I'll post more on this some other time.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 23, 2021 22:57:08 GMT
The British webforum UnHerd reports a student activist (I think a student union officer) trying to get Galway SU to no platform representatives of various bodies which he regards as far-right or conspiracy theorist. While some of the groups he lists might reasonably be described as such (one or two, such as the Irish Democratic Party, are actually extinct; others such as the National Green Party I've never heard of) no explanation is offered for the inclusion of these particular groups, and if you read carefully you will see that he wants the SU to add other groupd to the list at its own sweet will. The person who criticises this precious display of academic freedom is a feminist complaining because feminist groups who don't believe sex/gender is a matter of choice are being included in this list along with far-rightists. The activist describes himself as "a socialist" which I suspect means a far-leftist. If being a pro-lifer isn't given as a reason for inclusion on this precious list I suspect it will be. (To repeat - I wouldn't touch some of the groups on the list with a bargepole but I don't like the way this is being done.) unherd.com/thepost/student-unions-are-suppressing-dissent/
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Post by Young Ireland on Mar 23, 2021 23:06:23 GMT
The British webforum UnHerd reports a student activist (I think a student union officer) trying to get Galway SU to no platform representatives of various bodies which he regards as far-right or conspiracy theorist. While some of the groups he lists might reasonably be described as such (one or two, such as the Irish Democratic Party, are actually extinct; others such as the National Green Party I've never heard of) no explanation is offered for the inclusion of these particular groups, and if you read carefully you will see that he wants the SU to add other groupd to the list at its own sweet will. The person who criticises this precious display of academic freedom is a feminist complaining because feminist groups who don't believe sex/gender is a matter of choice are being included in this list along with far-rightists. The activist describes himself as "a socialist" which I suspect means a far-leftist. If being a pro-lifer isn't given as a reason for inclusion on this precious list I suspect it will be. (To repeat - I wouldn't touch some of the groups on the list with a bargepole but I don't like the way this is being done.) unherd.com/thepost/student-unions-are-suppressing-dissent/Anyone want to bet on similar parties on the far-left will be included in the list? I suspect we'll be waiting a while.
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