Gregory of Tours, the Trinity, Gay Marriage, and Liberal Christianity

Gregory of Tours

In spite of it all, Gregory, scion of an old Roman senatorial family, somehow managed to acquire an education, and no mean skill as a theologian. In those days, the Goths, Vandals, and most of the other Christianized barbarian tribes had adopted a Unitarian version of the faith before Athanasius and his followers had managed to gain acceptance for their Trinitarian teachings. When the Trinitarians gained the upper hand in what remained of the Empire, the surrounded barbarians remained Unitarians, with the exception of the Franks. In the excerpt that follows, Gregory, an orthodox Catholic, describes a debate he had with a visiting Unitarian cleric from the Visigothic kingdom in Spain. What’s noteworthy about it is the subtlety of Gregory’s theological arguments. As you’re reading it, try to imagine a “modern” priest or bishop teaching a similarly sophisticated version of the Trinity. I rather suspect most of us have never heard anything of the sort. Turning it over to Gregory…

“As envoy to Chilperic (one of the Frankish kings who ruled part of France) King Leuvigild (Visigothic ruler of Spain) sent Agilan, a man of low intelligence, untrained in logical argument, but distinguished by his hatred of our Catholic faith. Tours (seat of Gregory’s bishopric) was on his route and he took advantage of this to attack me concerning my beliefs and to assail the dogmas of the Church. ‘The bishops of the early Church made a foolish pronouncement,’ he said, when they asserted that the Son was equal to the Father. How can He be equal to the Father, when He says: ‘My Father is greater than I’? It is not right that the Son should be considered equal to the Father when He Himself admits that He is less, when it is to the Father that He complains about the miserable manner of His death, when at the very moment of His death He commends His spirit to the Father, as if He Himself were completely powerless. Surely it is quite obvious that He is less than the Father, both in power and in age!’ In reply to this, I asked him if he believed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and if he admitted that He was the wisdom of God, the light, the truth, the life, the justice of God. Agilan answered: ‘I believe that the Son of God was all those things.’ Then I said: ‘Tell me now, when was the Father without wisdom? When was He without light, without life, without truth, without justice? Jast as the Father could not exist without these things, so He could not exist without the Son. These attributes are absolutely essential to the mystery of the Godhead. Similarly the Father could hardly be called the Father if He had no Son. When you quote the Son as having aaid: ‘My Father is greater than I,’ you must know that He said this in the lowliness of the flesh, which He had assumed so that He might teach you that you were redeemed not by His power but by His humility. You must also remember, when you quote the words: ‘My father is greater than I,’ that He also says in another place: ‘I and my Father are one.’ His fear of death and the fact that He commended His spirit are a reference to the weakness of the flesh, so that, just as he is believed to be very God, so may He be believed to be very man.’ Agilan answered: ‘He who does what another commends is less than that other: the Son is always less than the Father because He does the will of the Father, whereas there is no proof that the Father does the will of the Son.’ ‘You must understand’, I replied, ‘that the Father is the Son and that the Son is in the Father, each subsisting in one Godhead. If you want proof that the Father does the will of the Son, consider what our Lord Jesus Christ says when He come to raise Lazarus – that is if you have any faith in the Gospel at all: ‘Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me.’ When He comes to His Passion, He says: ‘And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.’ Then the Father replies from Heaven: ‘I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again.’ Therefore the Son is equal in Godhead, and not inferior, and He is not inferior in anything else.”

…and so on. As noted above, I’m not a believer, but I’ve spent a great deal of time in church. I’ve never heard the Trinity discussed by pastor, bishop, or priest with anywhere near that level of sophistication. I grew up in the Methodist church, and one of our pastors in my early youth was a throwback who took theology seriously. He is the only Christian teacher I’ve ever heard who so much as made a serious attempt to teach the doctrine of the Trinity to his flock. However, his sermons never approached Gregory’s level of subtlety or refinement. What’s the point? I guess that, when one compares intellectual development in the “Dark Ages” with that in modern times, one should answer the question, “What kind?”

The “kind” of theological debate Gregory excelled at no longer exists outside of obscure seminary classrooms because the conclusions of that debate have become irrelevant. Today, the “theology” of the more liberal sects of Christianity is a mélange of badly digested “progressive” ideology. To the extent that the Scriptures have any significance at all, they are rifled through in the search for verses that appear to support some already foregone conclusion, borrowed from the realm of politics. The “doctrine” of the church conforms to a prevailing political fashion, and not vice versa, limited only by the reluctance of the clerics’ more conservative flocks to go along. This is what one might expect. Modern “in-groups” and “out-groups” are far more likely to be defined by politics than religion in first world countries with a European background. (See my post on the significance of in-group/out-group behavior in the archives.) If one wants to play a role in a group that has relevance in modern society, one must conform to the fundamental doctrines that define the intellectual boundaries of the group. If the groups happen to be political, then so much the worse for religion. Its “teachings” must conform to politically derived ideological doctrines, regardless of what the contents of its written scriptures might be. Thus, for example, one finds a number of Christian sects embracing gay marriage, in defiance of the Bible’s clear condemnation of homosexual acts. The sophistication of Gregory of Tours and the “Dark Ages” is exchanged for “Christianity Lite.”

As an infidel, I offer these remarks as an observation on the human condition, and certainly not to support or condemn gay marriage, or any other aspect of Christian belief. As for the battle between Athanasius and Arius, I am content to let sleeping dogs lie.

Quote for the Day: Simon Bolivar

“We have ploughed the sea.”

Hugo Chavez, Lenin, and “What is to be Done”

Venezuela’s most recent political embarrassment, Hugo Chavez, wants to present Obama with one of Lenin’s tomes at their next meeting. Apparently he’s been in a Rip van Winkle like slumber for the last 20 years, and no one has bothered to inform him about the demise of Lenin’s reputation along with the very bad joke he played on the Russian people known as Communism. Well, the right wing in the US worked itself into a furious lather when the Prez had the common decency to shake Chavez’ hand, so here’s a golden opportunity for him to redeem himself. An appropriate return gift comes to mind. How about “Lenin’s Tomb,” by David Remnick, or Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago,” or Medvedev’s “Let History Judge.” If he prefers a more subtle touch, he might give him something by Trotsky, a Bolshevik writer one can actually read without being bored to tears, or, if his tastes run to one-up-manship, perhaps a copy of the original “What is to be Done.”

The blogosphere has apparently already tired of Chavez’ antics. MSNBC, Fox, and the rest of the major news outlets picked up on this story, but, other than a few mentions here and there, bloggers are giving it the ho-hum treatment. It’s hard to blame them.

South America can never seem to catch a break. One never hears anything about her leaders unless they are abject, tyrannical, imbecile, or as in the case of Chavez, all three. Well, Venezuela has produced better men than Chavez in the past. No doubt she will in the future as well.

Bunin, Nazhivin, and Ideological Demonization

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ivan Bunin was a Russian man of letters who experienced the Russian revolution firsthand, and published his impressions in the book, “Cursed Days.” As the title would imply, he didn’t like what he saw. For example, he objected to a phenomenon we would, nowadays, refer to as ideological demonization. He describes it very accurately in connection with ad hominem attacks on one Nazhivin, a poet villified by the Bolsheviks and their hangers on in the midst of the Russian Civil War:

“Because of his book, though, Nazhivin is beginning to be persecuted in a malicious, coarse, and most obscene type of way.
“Why?
“For the simple reason that he dared to say things that violated the credo of the left.
“It would seem that one could simply say to Nazhivin: ‘In our view you have made a mistake because of this or that.’
“One could express himself even more strongly and say, ‘It is not good that you have said this or that.’ – if the person really deserves such a remark.
“But when reviewers begin mocking this outstanding Russian person and writer, when they start slandering him with all kinds of cliches, as leftists are often wont to do, …I …hardly the newest person in this literature…decisively protest their actions and hope that my views will be shared by many of my colleague writers.
“I repeat: One may or may not agree with Nazhivin. One may argue with him, refute him… but to rebuke him in an indecent way, to rush off in a frenzy and seek to silence a great Russian individual and writer – such actions are not ‘liberal,’ nor should they be tolerated or allowed.”

Sound familiar? It should. Ninety years later, the sort of ideological demonization Bunin refers to has not disappeared. Far from it! One can spend days hopping from blog to blog, website to website, “news” channel to “news” channel, and never encounter a serious argument against this or that political point of view that doesn’t amount to a melange of ad hominem attacks, snarky remarks, and name calling, accompanied by the striking of virtuous poses from the “moral high ground.”

This phenomenon has long been a trademark of the ideological left in the US, but is now increasingly affecting the right, so that mutual villification has become the rule. One rarely finds cool, detached, objective arguments on any ideologically loaded topic. Instead, one hears a recitation of the reasons ones opponent is a villain, accompanied by much moralistic preening. The truth suffers. How refreshing it would be to find, if only once in a great while, an attack on an opponent’s arguments rather than his or her character. What a pleasant surprise it would be to find some ideologically loaded topic discussed on its merits, without the implication that anyone holding an opposing point of view must not only be wrong, but necessarily suffer from some kind of a moral deficit as well.

The shallowness necessarily associated with this form of “debate” eventually becomes oppressive. One reflects that none of these furious zealots would be remotely capable of explaining, based on first principles, why one action is good and another evil, and recalls a remark once uttered by Nietzsche: “Virtuous indignation is a crutch for the intellectually crippled.”

Quote for the day: Michael Faraday

“Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”

“Fusion Energy” and the National Ignition Facility (NIF)

Oh-oh! Here’s something that’s bound to give the fission guys over at Atomic Insights heartburn. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is in the news again, and even made the lead story on the Foxnews website this morning! It seems the dark side at DOE is finally, belatedly, getting some respect from Secretary Chu, not to mention the Governator and a host of other worthies. Odd, isn’t it, that, in these days of rampant global warming, the Secretary of Energy should have taken so little interest in this potential source of unlimited, pollution free energy? What, say you? Well, yes, perhaps I do exaggerate.

In fact, the NIF is, and always has been, intended as an above ground facility for nuclear weapons experiments. As such, it is probably justified, as it will give us access to extreme physical conditions relevant to nuclear weapons that, at least until the French Megajoule laser (LMJ) comes on line, cannot be reproduced at any other facility. It is important that we have such facilities because, among other things, they constitute one more argument against the resumption of nuclear testing, a step that we would be very ill-advised to take.

Why, then, one might ask, do NIF Director Ed Moses’ comments to Fox about the new facility relate almost exclusively to potential energy applications? Well, among other things, because clean energy is a rather more fashionable cause than nuclear weapons technology these days. I’m loathe to criticize Ed, who, in spite of what some might term objectionable personal quirks, did a brilliant job of pulling the NIF Project back from the brink of disaster and completing it within the budget and time constraints he was given when he took it over. However, he may be overselling the energy angle.

Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) has always been a “dual use” technology, and there are many highly capable scientists throughout the world who still believe that it is the ultimate answer to our future energy needs. I am dubious, but still have a great deal of respect for the old knights, now growing increasingly long in the tooth, who continue riding towards that El Dorado. May they one day make me eat crow!

But all that is beside the point. The Federal Advisory Committees that recommended proceeding with the NIF, and the federal officials who secured funding for the project, never considered justifying it as other than a weapons project. From the beginning it was projected that about 15% of the available time on the facility would be devoted to non-weapons related experiments, not only devoted to energy applications, but to laboratory astrophysics, high energy density plasma physics, etc. Other than that, the NIF will be used entirely for weapon physics and weapon effect experiments. In other words, when Ed tells us that, “”It would change how we look at global warming. It would change pollution. It would change all of those things. This is a small investment for that great payback,” he is indulging in a bit of hyperbole.

In the first place, I will be surprised if the NIF ever achieves ignition, at least using the currently envisioned indirect drive approach. It will be necessary to compress the fuel material to extremely high density, keeping it as “cold” as possible in the process, and then ignite it by coaxing a series of spherical shock waves to heat up a small spot in the center by getting them all to converge on that spot at exactly the same time. Again, if they can do it, I will cheerfully eat crow. If they do, though, getting useful energy out will hardly be just around the corner. It will first be necessary to overcome a host of daunting engineering challenges, such as breeding enough tritium, one of the necessary fuel materials, to keep the reactor going.

Well, be that as it may, the NIF has been a long time coming – much longer than anyone expected in the beginning. Now that the facility is finally on line, the least we can do is wish the NIF staff at Livermore success in finally reaching the ignition goal that has eluded our grasp for so long.

Quote for the Day: Otto von Bismarck

“Sentimentality is rust in the gears of the machine of progress.”

Opel and German anti-Americanism

After assuring us for years that their blatant anti-Americanism was merely a reaction to the Bush Administration, the evil deeds of the Great Satan once again have the German media in full cry. Amusing examples abound at the websites of the usual suspects, such as the histrionic Der Spiegel (“Germany hands an Opel ultimatum to the US” “Nerves are on edge. Frustration reigns among the German negotiators, who don’t know where to turn after the failure of the Opel summit. They point to the Americans as the guilty party, claiming they blocked a solution. The US side now has until Friday to put new suggestions on the table – otherwise bankruptcy threatens the car manufacturer.”), the abject Focus (“Outrage grows over the behavior of the US government during the late night Opel negotiations. Now foreign minister Steinmeier is also leveling heavy accusations at the Americans”), and noted purveyor of female pulchritude Stern (“New demand for millions blocks a solution,” “General Motors torpedoes an agreement by demanding an additional 300 million euros. The US government is, obviously, similarly clueless.”)

Similar frothing at the mouth pervades the German MSM, to the point that eyebrows are being raised at the BBC and elsewhere in the European English language media. This has, apparently, had a tonic effect, as the tone of German “reporting” has become rather more sober since this morning.

Japan, Roosevelt, and the Attack on Pearl Harbor

There are a plethora of sites out there for those whose tastes run to conspiracy theories and revisionist history according to which FDR knew all about the Japanese attack in advance, used masterful and insidious psychological tricks to provoke an otherwise peaceful nation, hoodwinked the American people, etc., etc. Examples can be found here, here, here, and here, along with the occasional sober voice to balance the scales. In fact, Roosevelt wasn’t the only one expecting an attack. People who were paying attention were aware it was coming at least as early as 1924. If the American people were “hoodwinked,” it was their own fault. As Exhibit A for the Defense, I cite an article from the “American Mercury,” issue of January 1924, entitled “Two Years of Disarmament,” authored by one Miles Martindale (nom de plume), pp. 62-68.

“Prior to 1854, Japan’s whole history was a sequence of efforts to prove herself independent of China. The influx of foreigners, backed by fleets of war vessels, brought the added fear of partition and domination by white men. Seventy years ago the Elder Statesmen advised avoidance of all disputes until Japan grew strong enough to deal with one rival at a time. This advice underlies the amazing modernization of Japan, centuries of development being compressed into decades. In accordance with the program, China was humbled in 1894, and Russia in 1904. Germany’s turn came in 1914, for to the peasant’s mind, the opera bouffe campaign of Tsing Tao bulks as large as if the entire war power of Germany had been engaged. The years ending in “4” were thus fixed in the Japanese mind as years of invincibility. The Americans were plotting war on Japan? Then let them have it; but it will be when we choose, and that is in 1924!

“Our lavish expenditure and great effort during the world war impressed even Chosiu (Japanese military party) with the difficulties of the program. The scheme of invasion through Mexico, once in favor, was abandoned, and the Japanese prepared for a swift blow without warning, like the naval blow with which they opened the war with Russia. (!) Seizing the Philippines, and isolating Manila Bay if it did not fall easily with the advantage of defense and distance, waiting for our attempt to recapture the islands. They counted two years as necessary for us to organize the required effort; expected a majority of our people to consider the Philippines not worth recovering; believed the war would be intensely unpopular in America and that we would ask for peace rather than undertake the pain and loss of fighting it out to the end. Whether their plan correctly appraised our psychology or not, it involved heavy losses on our part. To attack across several thousand miles of empty sea in a war involving land forces would require at least a 5-3 superiority in fighting ships, a million tons of auxiliaries and at least three million tons of transports.

“The war was not desired by the Japanese for aggrandizement, nor to provide extra room for their people. Japan has not yet filled some of her own home islands, notably Hokkaido and Saghalien. The war was simply a part of the Chosiu program, considered necessary to preserve the edivinity of the Emperor and the cohesion of the Empire. The Chosiu politicians were not over-optimistic, but they believed it was the safest course. Like the occupation of Belgium, it was planmässig, and the plan had three times succeeded in the past.”

So there you have it, as much ammunition as you need for proving the obvious: That high officials in the State Department suckered a junta of generals into suckering Roosevelt into suckering the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. Have fun! In retrospect, one might add that a larger dose of oriental patience would have served Japan well. If she’d waited until the first decade of the 21st century, she could have relied on bloggers like Andrew Sullivan to egg the US on into attacking first, then morph into hand-wringing, hysterical defeatists as soon as the first shot was fired. Chosiu’s program would have been a sure thing.

Quote for the Day: J. Robert Oppenheimer

“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”