Transfiguration

During the 2nd week of Lent, I began to read a book suggested by a friend who is an atheist.  I had some interest in the book, Sense and Goodness without God, by Richard Carrier, and I thought I might agree that that ethics and epistemology can be justified on the basis metaphysical naturalism. The contention that humanity is capable of goodness without God is not untenable even for the religious.  Historic theology includes doctrines of an existing moral order, referred to variously as natural law or general revelation that precede explicit revelation to prophets or saints.  The Apostle Paul begins his Epistle to the Romans with, among other things, a discussion of the “law” that is known to Gentiles because it is “written in their hearts”.  The world’s religions, even while they are divergent theologically, have come to many similar conclusions about ethics.  Christians do not assume they are superior to others but that that they are beneficiaries of God’s grace.

I admit I have only begun to read the book, but I started without any particular expectation that I would be so astonished by the author’s incomprehension of things that most civilized people take for granted.  Mr. Carrier is former editor-in-chief at Infidels.org. His comments on the Bible are informed by so little imagination that he seems tone deaf to poetry and the dramatic texts that have inspired art and faith for millennia.  In brief, his claim is that the only viable methodology for knowing anything is rigorous logical analysis based on “experience”.  What he’d make of Shakespeare is anybody’s guess.  He thinks his methodology is the norm in science and technology and that everything we need to know can be ascertained through application of empirical rigor.  Apparently he’s unaware that enthusiasm for logical positivism dwindled off somewhere the middle of the twentieth century and that the rigor and professionalism, which he says he admires in industry and academe, are also applicable to the facile ideas he generates.  None of the four hundred pages of his book will ever see light of day in any noteworthy philosophical journal.

A teaching assistant at Columbia University, the writer claims some expertise in ancient languages and philosophy.  It seems abrupt then when he writes off ancient philosophy in less than one sentence: Plato, he thinks, “Made a mistake”.  He takes a couple of pages to dispatch the arguments of Alvin Plantinga, professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, who, incidentally, does publish his work in reputable philosophical journals.  Mr. Carrier justifies this end-run around the professional rigor of the field in which chooses to publish by noting that philosophy only matters when it is intelligible in non-technical language to those who seek values grounded in experience that can be applied in real life.  Unimpressed by the Bible, he nonetheless claims to have read the New Testament in the original Greek.  This is dubious because the Koine Greek of the New Testament is, by any measure, dissimilar to the Attic Greek of philosophy and ancient history.  Koine resembles Modern Greek, not the language of Plato and Aristotle, just as Carrier’s language resembles the daily bilge of the Internet, not philosophy.

Reading Carrier’s book thus far has made me doubt that the groundswell of activity in the blogosphere is adding much to the public discourse, regardless how many infidels are making names for themselves online.  He says confidently that in school he mastered any science to which applied his nimble mind, but after graduation he was not in possession of any skills by which he could earn a living.  He admits spending years doing menial jobs such as gardening and waiting tables.  By now he might be qualified for service as a maître d’ in a good restaurant, but he has chosen to disencumber the world of its philosophical pretensions and religious illusions.  While he raised himself from “poverty”, he was content with the life of the mind and of good friends because in his youthful quest he had discovered the truths of the Tao. The Tao is self evident, coherent, and practicable as opposed to the childish nonsense of the Bible, he says, though he doesn’t enlighten us in these profundities.  As I recall, “The Tao that can be told is not the Tao”, a tenet that Lao Tzu seems to have neglected in writing about a hundred pages on the subject.  Richard Carrier does claim transcendental experience of all an encompassing unity and being.  He enlisted in the Coast Guard, and one night at sea, after being awake for something like 35 hours during training exercises, he attained cosmic consciousness or the equivalent.  He tells us that he continues to seek to improve his mind, but now “in maturity” he knows everything required to live a satisfying, knowledgeable, and moral life.

The writer’s misapprehension of how ethics might be theoretically grounded is very unlike ancient philosophy.  Plato’s discussions of justice are engaging dialogues that explore many facets of the ideal.  Carrier’s sophomoric monologues go on for hundreds of pages in such digressions as the kind of evidence that might indicate the truth of the proposition “I have a cat” –creaturely claws, hair on the sofa, vet bills, etc.  Some of Carrier’s role models, notably A. J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell, wrote like this, but it wasn’t long until people like G. J. Warnock and J. L. Austin dismantled silly arguments about sense data and evidence for things nobody would ever doubt.  When the cat is purring in my lap, I don’t need to produce evidence for its existence. 

I rehearsed most of this on the way to choir practice last Thursday night.  By the time I got to church, I was in a mood to demolish Carrier for anybody who would listen.  Of course, that was not the reason I was there.  I got involved in the Lenten music we were preparing.  Our conductor is a musical whiz and does not waste time.  If your mind wanders under her direction, even for a minute, you end up feeling as negligent to detail as is this infidel PR hack, Carrier.  We sang for a couple of hours.  Beyond our illuminated loft the music resonated in the distance of the darkened sanctuary.  Near the end of the rehearsal the conductor read the following notes on the transfiguration as related to the music she had selected for this Sunday:

In every year of the lectionary cycle, the particular Gospel proclaims the Transfiguration of the Lord on the 2nd Sunday of Lent.  In addition to the image of the glory that Christ would receive in his Resurrection, the church has always seen in this event a glimpse of the promised glory that each follower of Christ receives as a baptized member of His Body the Church.  In a sermon about the Transfiguration, Pope Leo the Great wrote, “With no less forethought, Christ was also providing a firm foundation of the hope of the holy Church.  The whole body of Christ was to understand the kind of transformation that it would receive as His gift.  The members of that body were to look forward to a share in that glory which first blazed out in Christ their head.”

One thing missing in the work of currently fashionable advocates of religious abnegation is any sense of how faith, particularly Christian faith, provides hope in the face of unbearable sorrow.  The story of Jesus is hope starkly defined against the passion of the man of sorrows.  For Jesus, opposition is unrelenting, and there is treachery even among those he loves.  While he heals the diseases of the throng, he knows that suffering will continue and that the poor–and the poor in spirit–will be always among us.  Liturgical worship is a rehearsal for the passion none of us will ultimately evade.  Familiarity with it helps us to recognize ourselves in Jesus.  The crucifix behind the altar represents more than recurring cycles of the Lenten progression.  Everyone will eventually carry or hang on the cross.  Hours spent in contemplation in this atmosphere may improve our prospects.

We concluded our musical rehearsal by singing O Lux Beatissima, by Howard Helvey.  This is a setting of a text attributed to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, deceased in 1228, that was used in the ancient Catholic Pentecost Sequence Veni, Sancte Spiritus.

O lux beatissima                              O light most blessed
Reple cordis intima                         Fill the inmost heart
Tuorum fidelium                              Of all thy faithful.
Sine tuo nomine                               Without your grace
Nihil est in homine                          There is nothing in us,
Nihil est innoxium                            Nothing that is not harmful.

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