Soporific Power
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Faith & Culture
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“Why does opium make us sleep? Because of its soporific power.” So ran Molière’s send-up of self-important Parisian physicians. Sohrab Ahmari’s “The Trouble with Christian Leftism” invites a similar question-and-answer. By taxing progressive Christians with having succumbed to the opium of the intellectuals—Marxism in its various forms—Ahmari invites us to ask what is its hidden power. Why are we so prone to be always looking for the next social-scientific solution to our problems? Because we pine for a knowledge that will take away the burden of living by practical reason.
Aristotle sized up prudence with his customary brevity: “the reason must be true and the desire must be correct, if indeed the deliberate choice is to be an excellent one.” That is an imposing task. For our practical reasoning to be true, we need an adequate understanding of the common good; for our desire to be correct, we must yearn for the common good as our personal good. Shallow or flighty reasoning undermines prudence, and so does selfishness in its various forms. And we have not yet begun to try to convince others that our prudential judgment is the right one, but we must eventually labor to do so because our problems can only be solved through consensus and common action.
It would seem to be easier if we were to set aside the troublesome work of perfecting our own understanding and desire and counting upon the virtue of others and instead were to reach into human nature for some other lever to pull. That is the perennial attraction of a social or political science: it offers to replace the vocabulary of the good, reason, virtue, and free choice with a new language that will capture human action in more effective terms.
Machiavelli was the prophet of just such a new science. He and his many followers tell us that the passions and interests of men and women are the levers that we must pull, rather than continue ineffectually to appeal to their understanding of and love for the good. Mandeville, Smith, and countless others offered similar accounts: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher . . . .” Kant was the one who solemnly announced that what we were awaiting was not another Moses, but another Newton, and in his “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1784), he sketched a social science in impeccably Newtonian terms of attraction and repulsion. Like Smith’s account in the Wealth of Nations, Kant’s theory was individualistic, perhaps better, atomistic. Each human being is moved by a “propensity to enter into society” that is matched by an equal and opposite “propensity to individualize.” The action and reaction of these two forces shapes history. Kant grasped the nettle of that antagonism with the same gnostic confidence that we have seen at the heart of modern ideologies ever since: “Thanks be to nature, therefore, for the incompatibility, for the spiteful competitive vanity, for the insatiable desire to possess or even to dominate! For without them all the excellent natural predispositions in humanity would eternally slumber undeveloped. The human being wills concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species: it wills discord.” Small wonder that the next thirty years of European history would be a bloodbath. If we were to follow Kant’s prescription, we would seek to hasten the coming age of perpetual peace by adding counter-protest to protest until the blood flows freely in our streets.
Karl Marx’s Hegelianism and romantic rhetoric are so beguiling that it is easy to overlook that he, too, was a Newtonian in his essential metaphor. Instead of considering the individual atom, he looked at them in groups. It is as though his imaginative lens was not the magnet, the Leyden jar, or the telescope—the Newtonian toys of the eighteenth-century philosophers—but the steam pump and its piston. The “wheel of history” is spun by the release of pressure in a “revolution” brought about by the “increase in number” and “concentration in masses” of the proletariat. The terms of his metaphor should bring Boyle’s Law to mind. To be sure, Marx’s votaries in the nineteenth century and after have typically been motivated by their experience—or at least their perception—of injustice and by their identification with a group of persons who have been similarly mistreated. That is a strong motivator, usually much stronger than the passions and interests of the individual seeking to amass and to protect his own property. Yet while acknowledging the motivation, we should not lose sight of the metaphor that cloaks it with the guise of social-scientific impartiality and righteousness. Social science always trades in metaphors, even when it presents us with curves that are to be flattened.
Today, we have refined our metaphors. In place of Kant’s Newtonian forces and Marx’s pressure-cooker, we can claim to be attending to data that is more empirical, more directly measurable. The problem, however, is that we are constantly appealing to metaphors at the same time as we tell ourselves that we are talking about nature—even human nature—directly. We seem to think that the words we are using are not metaphorical at all. Increasingly, we consent to be ruled by models without stopping to wonder just what a model is. We bow to the authority of curves without asking what the axes of the graph are attempting to capture or what they are leaving out. Our increasing reliance on social science is tragic because we lack a salutary habit of methodological criticism.
“We’re following the science.” “Ours is a science-based response.” These phrases should ring hollow to us not because there is nothing to know about viruses but instead because they are masks for the uncritical application of a limited understanding of some feature of the non-human world to problems that we ought to face as free and intelligent beings pursuing common goods. There may be trustworthy biology out there, but it is hard to disengage from the layers of unacknowledged assumptions about human action that obscure it.
Secular modernity is addicted to the placebo of social scientific claims to impartial certitude because it lacks a shared understanding of the human good. There is nothing too surprising about such a state of affairs. We should be gripped with sorrow, however, that the same addiction should characterize so much religious utterance, even official pronouncements of the Catholic Church. There is, after all, something diabolical about the temptation to absolutize social science: it is a grasping after a knowledge appropriate to God alone. What we most need today, in the Church and in America, is the courage to exercise practical reason and to stand by the best prudential judgments we can muster. Should we seek to bolster our practical reason by learning as much as we can from scientists? Yes. Should we also learn from careful students of human action in the aggregate? Certainly. But we need to do so in air that has been cleared of the soporific vapors of intellectual narcotics.
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Ask Great Things of Him
“’All these things shall be added unto you’ ‘He knoweth that ye have need of these things.’ St. Teresa of Avila says we should not trouble our Lord with such petty trifles. We should ask great things of Him.
So I pray for Russia, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.”
These words from Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage (a collection of her writings from the Catholic Worker) follow a list of her everyday struggles and needs. She reminds herself, and by extension her readers, never to tire of bringing to the Lord the most daring prayers, because he is the Lord of all things. Dorothy Day’s words seem more timely now than ever, as we see so much division in our world and so many problems that seem insoluble. But Dorothy lived through times even more tumultuous than our own—through two world wars, the great Depression and then finally the Cold War. She was imprisoned for protesting in favor of the women’s right to vote and put in solitary confinement—the women went on a hunger strike. She was arrested on a number of other occasions for championing the causes of the poor. Her movement struggled financially. And yet she tells us: “Ask great things of Him.”
As attested in the above passage, she followed her own advice. A former communist, Day was influenced by Russian authors and spirituality, and continued to pray for the conversion of Russia from the time of her conversion until her death in 1980. In other words, having prayed for Russia her entire life, she died four years before the Berlin wall fell. Her example, then, has an important lesson for us, one that many saints have also taught—that we may not live to see the fruit of our prayers and our efforts. Quite often saints die uncertain of their own legacy and, in many ways, as failures. St. Augustine, for example, died praying the penitential Psalms while the Vandals sacked the city of Hippo where he lived. The Roman empire and the culture as he knew was coming to an end, and he could have had no sense of the endurance of his the Church, let alone his own legacy.
It can seem fruitless to keep our vigils for the end of abortion, to pray for peace and healing in this country, to pray for the renewal of the Church. And so it must have appeared to Day that it was futile to pray for Russia. So let us follow her example, knowing that we may not live to reap the harvest that we sow: pray for our world, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.
Ask Great Things of Him
“’All these things shall be added unto you’ ‘He knoweth that ye have need of these things.’ St. Teresa of Avila says we should not trouble our Lord with such petty trifles. We should ask great things of Him.
So I pray for Russia, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.”
These words from Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage (a collection of her writings from the Catholic Worker) follow a list of her everyday struggles and needs. She reminds herself, and by extension her readers, never to tire of bringing to the Lord the most daring prayers, because he is the Lord of all things. Dorothy Day’s words seem more timely now than ever, as we see so much division in our world and so many problems that seem insoluble. But Dorothy lived through times even more tumultuous than our own—through two world wars, the great Depression and then finally the Cold War. She was imprisoned for protesting in favor of the women’s right to vote and put in solitary confinement—the women went on a hunger strike. She was arrested on a number of other occasions for championing the causes of the poor. Her movement struggled financially. And yet she tells us: “Ask great things of Him.”
As attested in the above passage, she followed her own advice. A former communist, Day was influenced by Russian authors and spirituality, and continued to pray for the conversion of Russia from the time of her conversion until her death in 1980. In other words, having prayed for Russia her entire life, she died four years before the Berlin wall fell. Her example, then, has an important lesson for us, one that many saints have also taught—that we may not live to see the fruit of our prayers and our efforts. Quite often saints die uncertain of their own legacy and, in many ways, as failures. St. Augustine, for example, died praying the penitential Psalms while the Vandals sacked the city of Hippo where he lived. The Roman empire and the culture as he knew was coming to an end, and he could have had no sense of the endurance of his the Church, let alone his own legacy.
It can seem fruitless to keep our vigils for the end of abortion, to pray for peace and healing in this country, to pray for the renewal of the Church. And so it must have appeared to Day that it was futile to pray for Russia. So let us follow her example, knowing that we may not live to reap the harvest that we sow: pray for our world, for our own country, for our fellow men, our fellow workers, for the sick, the starving, the dying, the dead.
Piety and Criticism
In the present time of trial, Catholics need examples of piety and of the critical exercise of reason. These two complementary excellences are on display in the late Fr. Marvin R. O’Connell’s Telling Stories That Matter: Memoirs and Essays (St. Augustine’s Press, 2020).
O’Connell (1930-2016) is best-known for his narrative histories, among which loom large The Oxford Conspirators (1969), John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (1988), and Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (1994). The reader of these monumental books will find them to be “reconstructions of the past by the mind from sources,” for such was O’Connell’s conception of history. It was a definition he received from his mentor, Msgr. Philip Hughes (1895-1967), author of one of the most compelling historical narratives penned in the last century, The Reformation in England (1951).
Telling Stories that Matter, edited by William G. Schmitt and introduced by O’Connell’s long-time friend and colleague at Notre Dame, Fr. Bill Miscamble, C.S.C., contains a memoir and a selection of book reviews, historical essays, and transcripts of lectures. Each of these documents preserves a precious example of O’Connell’s voice, which was characterized by understated piety, precise observation, and a restrained eloquence that was never exactly romantic but just as surely never prosaic.
O’Connell was an empiricist. His narratives were the result of the careful sifting of circumstance, motive, end, achievement, and failure, all as they could be revealed by the documents, his sources. His memoir bears the imprint of his life-long method. It is certainly about himself; there is no other center to the narrative. Yet he placed himself against the backdrop of his family, his education, and the early years of his priesthood and professorial life in such a way as to produce something quite different from a conventional memoir, something more like a reliving of certain episodes of his life with himself as spectator and, yes, critic.
There is self-criticism, sometimes mild, sometimes not. As a newly-ordained priest, he was smitten with the optimism of the burgeoning post-war American Church. By his own admission, piety and humility were not then his strong suits. He had, apparently, an edge of Irish-American middle class resentment to his character. And he had a certain ambition—a desire to write and to publish—a drive for which O’Connell himself said he could not account. Yet he testified to his deep admiration for his father, who was at least for a time a journalist, and that may suffice to explain it, together with a nod to the extraordinary verbal gifts with which he was endowed.
The memoir was unfinished at the time of Fr. O’Connell’s death. If it has an incipient storyline, then it would seem to be that he presents his own development—from a devoted reader of Commonweal to an even-more devoted reader of National Review—as a path not trodden by the majority of American Catholics. Would the Church in America today be facing our current travails better had more priests followed O’Connell’s trajectory? We are left to supply our own judgment, having been given the evidence to make one in the form of vignettes about ecclesial life in Minnesota, Indiana, New York, and abroad.
By placing O’Connell’s memoir in conversation with his friend Fr. Miscamble’s biography of Theodore Hesburgh, we can better appreciate the criticism of the post-war American Church that is arguably implicit in his narrative. Miscamble’s book—required reading for anyone who would understand the University of Notre Dame, but also the Church in America—is primarily a story of externals. Fr. Hesburgh’s very public talents and achievements are on display; his inner virtues and suffering are not. There was an interior poverty in Hesburgh—and not of the kind praised in the beatitudes. O’Connell’s tales from the Church of the 1950s point in the same direction. In his memoir, we meet churchmen distracted by the world and lured by the flesh, and thus—unwittingly we hope but nonetheless tragically—ensnared to one degree or another by the devil.
Yet like any memoir worth reading, O’Connell’s manifests not merely his awareness of his own and others’ folly, but also of their goodness. There is much piety here. It is expressed at some length towards Msgr. Hughes, but also, if briefly, towards O’Connell’s priest-professors in minor seminary and colleagues at the University of St. Thomas, where he taught from 1958 to 1972. And throughout, we see glimpses of his close friends, Eugene Clark and Ralph McInerny. These sketches and remembrances are fitting reminders that the faith has indeed been passed down successfully to our generation by the previous ones, even if much of the legacy of the last century is otherwise of questionable merit.
One of the worst episodes of Twentieth Century Catholic life was the reception of Humanae Vitae. Fr. O’Connell’s discussion of the topic leaves much to be desired. “I had never been comfortable,” he wrote, “with the Catholic Church’s total condemnation of any form of artificial contraception.” He testified to an ambivalence about the encyclical’s teaching: “I do not believe I ever preached on the subject.” And he seems to have persisted in that ambivalence: “Humanae vitae has long proved its value as a beautiful evocation of married love. But I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that it presents the only possible evocation.” To say the least, these statements are deeply regrettable. Perhaps a partial explanation of them may be found in O’Connell’s admitted lack of interest in the speculative disciplines. He allowed his empiricism freer rein than he should have.
In addition to presenting his memoir, Telling Stories that Matter brings together some of Fr. O’Connell’s more memorable shorter works. If it contained only his twin review of books by Eamon Duffy and Fr. Richard McBrien, it would be well worth its reasonable price. The review’s title says it all: “Not Infallible: Two Histories of the Papacy.” Of special value is the text of the speech O’Connell delivered at the annual meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1990. Beneath its plain brown wrapper—“An Historical Perspective on Evangelization in the United States”—the lecture offered a sweeping vision of the Church in America, a vision with a surprising moral: that Catholics should “return to the ghetto.” Thirty years later, O’Connell’s proposal reads like prophecy.
In his sermon “Learning in War-Time” (1939), C. S. Lewis insisted on the value of historical learning in terms that may be most fittingly applied to O’Connell. “The scholar,” Lewis said, “has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.” Over a long and distinguished career, Fr. Marvin O’Connell’s piety and sharp, critical faculties held him in good stead amidst a century rivaled in its nonsense only by our own.
Piety and Criticism
In the present time of trial, Catholics need examples of piety and of the critical exercise of reason. These two complementary excellences are on display in the late Fr. Marvin R. O’Connell’s Telling Stories That Matter: Memoirs and Essays (St. Augustine’s Press, 2020).
O’Connell (1930-2016) is best-known for his narrative histories, among which loom large The Oxford Conspirators (1969), John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (1988), and Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (1994). The reader of these monumental books will find them to be “reconstructions of the past by the mind from sources,” for such was O’Connell’s conception of history. It was a definition he received from his mentor, Msgr. Philip Hughes (1895-1967), author of one of the most compelling historical narratives penned in the last century, The Reformation in England (1951).
Telling Stories that Matter, edited by William G. Schmitt and introduced by O’Connell’s long-time friend and colleague at Notre Dame, Fr. Bill Miscamble, C.S.C., contains a memoir and a selection of book reviews, historical essays, and transcripts of lectures. Each of these documents preserves a precious example of O’Connell’s voice, which was characterized by understated piety, precise observation, and a restrained eloquence that was never exactly romantic but just as surely never prosaic.
O’Connell was an empiricist. His narratives were the result of the careful sifting of circumstance, motive, end, achievement, and failure, all as they could be revealed by the documents, his sources. His memoir bears the imprint of his life-long method. It is certainly about himself; there is no other center to the narrative. Yet he placed himself against the backdrop of his family, his education, and the early years of his priesthood and professorial life in such a way as to produce something quite different from a conventional memoir, something more like a reliving of certain episodes of his life with himself as spectator and, yes, critic.
There is self-criticism, sometimes mild, sometimes not. As a newly-ordained priest, he was smitten with the optimism of the burgeoning post-war American Church. By his own admission, piety and humility were not then his strong suits. He had, apparently, an edge of Irish-American middle class resentment to his character. And he had a certain ambition—a desire to write and to publish—a drive for which O’Connell himself said he could not account. Yet he testified to his deep admiration for his father, who was at least for a time a journalist, and that may suffice to explain it, together with a nod to the extraordinary verbal gifts with which he was endowed.
The memoir was unfinished at the time of Fr. O’Connell’s death. If it has an incipient storyline, then it would seem to be that he presents his own development—from a devoted reader of Commonweal to an even-more devoted reader of National Review—as a path not trodden by the majority of American Catholics. Would the Church in America today be facing our current travails better had more priests followed O’Connell’s trajectory? We are left to supply our own judgment, having been given the evidence to make one in the form of vignettes about ecclesial life in Minnesota, Indiana, New York, and abroad.
By placing O’Connell’s memoir in conversation with his friend Fr. Miscamble’s biography of Theodore Hesburgh, we can better appreciate the criticism of the post-war American Church that is arguably implicit in his narrative. Miscamble’s book—required reading for anyone who would understand the University of Notre Dame, but also the Church in America—is primarily a story of externals. Fr. Hesburgh’s very public talents and achievements are on display; his inner virtues and suffering are not. There was an interior poverty in Hesburgh—and not of the kind praised in the beatitudes. O’Connell’s tales from the Church of the 1950s point in the same direction. In his memoir, we meet churchmen distracted by the world and lured by the flesh, and thus—unwittingly we hope but nonetheless tragically—ensnared to one degree or another by the devil.
Yet like any memoir worth reading, O’Connell’s manifests not merely his awareness of his own and others’ folly, but also of their goodness. There is much piety here. It is expressed at some length towards Msgr. Hughes, but also, if briefly, towards O’Connell’s priest-professors in minor seminary and colleagues at the University of St. Thomas, where he taught from 1958 to 1972. And throughout, we see glimpses of his close friends, Eugene Clark and Ralph McInerny. These sketches and remembrances are fitting reminders that the faith has indeed been passed down successfully to our generation by the previous ones, even if much of the legacy of the last century is otherwise of questionable merit.
One of the worst episodes of Twentieth Century Catholic life was the reception of Humanae Vitae. Fr. O’Connell’s discussion of the topic leaves much to be desired. “I had never been comfortable,” he wrote, “with the Catholic Church’s total condemnation of any form of artificial contraception.” He testified to an ambivalence about the encyclical’s teaching: “I do not believe I ever preached on the subject.” And he seems to have persisted in that ambivalence: “Humanae vitae has long proved its value as a beautiful evocation of married love. But I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that it presents the only possible evocation.” To say the least, these statements are deeply regrettable. Perhaps a partial explanation of them may be found in O’Connell’s admitted lack of interest in the speculative disciplines. He allowed his empiricism freer rein than he should have.
In addition to presenting his memoir, Telling Stories that Matter brings together some of Fr. O’Connell’s more memorable shorter works. If it contained only his twin review of books by Eamon Duffy and Fr. Richard McBrien, it would be well worth its reasonable price. The review’s title says it all: “Not Infallible: Two Histories of the Papacy.” Of special value is the text of the speech O’Connell delivered at the annual meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1990. Beneath its plain brown wrapper—“An Historical Perspective on Evangelization in the United States”—the lecture offered a sweeping vision of the Church in America, a vision with a surprising moral: that Catholics should “return to the ghetto.” Thirty years later, O’Connell’s proposal reads like prophecy.
In his sermon “Learning in War-Time” (1939), C. S. Lewis insisted on the value of historical learning in terms that may be most fittingly applied to O’Connell. “The scholar,” Lewis said, “has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.” Over a long and distinguished career, Fr. Marvin O’Connell’s piety and sharp, critical faculties held him in good stead amidst a century rivaled in its nonsense only by our own.
A Holy Kiss
Faith&Culture offers this selection from St. Francis de Sales’s Treatise on the Love of God (1616) as part of its ongoing reflection on the nobility of the human face.
In a delightful and admirable way, Solomon describes the love of the Savior and the devout soul in that divine work called the Song of Songs. And so that we might more easily consider the spiritual love brought about between God and us when the movements of our hearts correspond with the inspirations of his divine majesty, Solomon employs the metaphor of the love of a chaste shepherd and a modest shepherdess. Making the spouse or bride to speak first, as though surprised by the shepherd’s love, he has her exclaim: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” (Song 1:2) Notice how the soul, in the person of this shepherdess, has but one aim: a chaste union with her spouse. She protests that it is her only goal, the one thing for which she longs. What else would this sigh mean? “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!”
In every age and as by natural instinct, a kiss has been employed to represent perfect love, that is, the union of hearts, and not without good reason. We express and make known our thoughts and emotions by our eyes, eyebrows, forehead, and the rest of our countenance. “A man is known by his appearance” (Sirach 19:29), says the scripture. And Aristotle explained why ordinarily it is only the faces of great men that are painted in portraits: it is, he said, because the face shows who we are.
Yet we do not pour out the thoughts which proceed from the spiritual portion of our soul—the part we call reason, which is what distinguishes us from the beasts—except by words, and thus by means of the mouth. Indeed, to pour out our soul and to open our heart is nothing else but to speak. “Pour out your heart before him” (Ps 62:8), says the Psalmist, that is, express and pronounce the affections of your hearts by words. And when she had been praying so softly that one could hardly discern the motion of her lips, Samuel’s pious mother explained, “I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord” (1 Sam 1:15).
We kiss in order to show that we long to pour out one soul into the other, to unite them in a perfect union. For this reason, at all times and among the saintliest men of the world, the kiss has been a sign of love and affection, and such use was universally made of it amongst the ancient Christians as St. Paul testifies, when, writing to the Romans and Corinthians, he says, “greet one another in a holy kiss” (Rom 16:16; 1 Cor 16:20). And as many declare, Judas in betraying our Savior made use of a kiss to manifest him, because the divine Savior was accustomed to kiss his disciples when he met them—and not only his disciples but even the little children whom he took lovingly in his arms, as he did the child by whose example he so solemnly invited his disciples to the love of their neighbor (see Mark 9:36).