Damn Silly
Nov. 2nd, 2005 05:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbOf all the nuisances that bedevil suffering Christianity in these latter days, surely one of the damn-silliest is the unbeliever who suddenly discovers him or herself a theologian and a judge of Christian virtue. I have said and done a good deal of damn-silly things in my time, but I hope I have never been so absurd as to take it upon myself to condemn someone as a bad Muslim, a bad Buddhist, a bad atheist, or a bad member of the GLBT movement; unless, perhaps, I was pointing out that the person in question was making arguments that told against his/her own position, and in favour of Catholic Christianity. It does not occur to me, nor, I think, to any of us, to make statements concerning what a good multiculturalist ought to think and feel, or what is wrong with the Hinduism of a certain particular Hindu, or why so-and-so falls short of his Freemason ideal. What these people regard as good and right, in so far as they disagree with Catholic views, is their own business, not ours. We have no business setting ourselves up as qadis, or as mahatmas, or as moderators of Ethical Societies. But this, alas, is a favour that is not exchanged.
Philip Pullman, for instance, upon hearing that C.S.Lewis’ beloved Narnia cycle is about to get the slightly dangerous honour of a full-dress Hollywood production, took it on himself to condemn them and their author as – would you believe it – unChristian, being “racist, sexist, and without any Christian humility”. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the person who has become prominent with a series of books, supposedly aimed at children (but really, in my view, intended for literary reviewers), whose most positive message is a violent hatred of one specific religion, namely Christianity; the man who presents the Christian God as a cosmic monster, and who, last thing I heard, had promised that his next novel would blaspheme Jesus Christ. (I do not follow his work or his public utterances with any great care, for reasons that should be obvious.) This is a man whose message, if he has one, is that Christianity is itself the source of all evil, including certainly those evils that he absurdly ascribes to Lewis – racism, sexism, and the sin of Pride. One would think that, if these horrid vices were really so evident in Lewis’ children’s stories, someone like him would lie back with a triumphant grin on his face, and say something like: “See? What did I keep telling you about Christianity and its effects?” Instead of which, suddenly Christian values are the yardmark by which to measure the spiritual failings of the leading Christian apologist of the past half-century. That noise you hear is all the angels in heaven and all the devils in hell joining in one unison of Homeric laughter.
Kenna Hijja is in my view a much better person than Pullman. I could not call her a friend otherwise. Her attitude and behaviour are on another level, and, as writers, the difference between them is that between wasted talent and occasionally misused genius. But recently she fell headlong into the same trap; although, at least, her outburst seems motivated, not by professional jealousy and ideological obsession, but by unselfish sympathy for a Californian family – whose two adult partners are lesbians.
The fourteen-year-old daughter of one of these, it turns out, was enlisted at a Catholic school. The mother had understandably kept her relationship a secret from the school authorities, since she – unlike, as we shall see, Hijja – understood the meaning of Catholic education at least well enough to know that the daughter of a person committed to a homosexual relationship could not possibly be admitted. One of the central points of Catholic education is collaboration with the parents in the attempt to form a Catholic mind; which is inconceivable with people whose basic moral views, as embodied in their lives, are grossly at variance with Church teaching.
In turn, the centrality of the parents in education – even in the context of a school institution – is a part of the Catholic view of the human species – what is technically called “philosophical anthropology”. Family life, in the Catholic sense of the word, is not an optional choice for anyone who wants to practise the Catholic religion; it is one of the basics of Christian philosophical anthropology, as I have argued elsewhere, and as the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes clear in some 600 articles dedicated to the institution of marriage. Even the celibacy of most Catholic male and female religious is not a denial of the fundamental nature of marriage, but a displacement of it towards God. The novice who is about to become a nun wears a bridal habit: she is about to be married to God. In the same way, priests, monks and friars consecrate their male sexuality to God in order to become agents of God to the congregation; the priest being the masculine element within the generally feminine element of the Church, “the bride of Christ”. In neither case is the fundamental value of the sexual nature of man denied, as the GLBT movement denies it. These are our values; those are theirs. They can perfectly well say that, in terms of their own philosophical anthropology, Catholic views of sex are so much hot air; indeed, they would not be very coherent if they did not. What they cannot do is to deny that they are Catholic values, and that, in following them, Catholics are being coherent. Wrong, in their view; even criminally wrong; but coherent.
Punctually, the school authorities found out; punctually, the girl was expelled. All right. So Hijja read the story, and was indignant. Quite understandable. According to her values, the school was wholly wrong. Obviously, a school ran according to her principles would not even conceive of expelling a student for any peculiarity of belief or behaviour from either of the parents. Where, however, she began to go wrong, was in arguing that the school had no right to do what it did; that it, being the kind of institution it is, should have kept the girl anyway – that the right thing in term of the kind of school this was would have been to keep her.
An important fact here is that Hijja has no direct experience of Catholicism whatever. I suspect that I may be the first articulate and outspoken Catholic she has ever met. She has a wholly Protestant background, something I could have easily guessed even if she had not told me so herself, and which I think is rather more important in her make-up than she admits. But whether or not it is, it certainly means that, when she is trying to “speak Catholic”, she falls into the exact same kinds of mistakes that anyone makes when they are trying to communicate with a culture, a country, or a world, of which they are wholly unfamiliar. There is a certain instinctive mental balance, a sense of the possible and the impossible, which had told the girl’s mother that the school would never keep her daughter if they knew that she was in an active homosexual relationship, and which, once the girl had been expelled, kept her from using any of the abundant amount of legal remedies available to her to force the school to take her back. She obviously must have been brought up at least in some sense a Catholic; she knew, as I know, by instinct, by lifelong habit, by the sense of place and value, that some things are reasonable and some things are not; that even if she could force the school by law to accept her daughter back, it would simply not work.
Hijja knows none of these things. Her attempts to show that Catholic morality would demand the girl’s admission have the same blundering quality about them as that of a French, Italian or German speaker who, knowing that French, German or Italian have a second person singular (tu, du, tu), were to insist that English should by right have one as well, and try to resurrect the obsolete thou. Anyone with a habitual and instinctive sense of the language would know that this is nonsense. Being a university lecturer, Hijja went to the sources, got herself a Catechism of the Catholic Church (for which I congratulate her; it is rather a formidable item to have about one’s library), and found four articles about treating homosexuals decently and no differently from anyone else. Unfortunately, she seems to have somehow missed the 600 articles about sexuality and marriage, not to mention the item that says that all human beings are sinners, so that to treat someone as well as the next person means to treat them as sinners. In that context, to refuse a place at a centre of Catholic education to someone whose parents cannot be expected to cooperate in making a Catholic of the child, is not a violation of anyone’s rights; indeed, it is to take parental rights seriously – for one thing that the Church has always taught is that parents should have the right to bring up their children according to their own best light, even if that light is what the Church itself regards as darkness. (Even the worst persecutions against heretics never struck at people bringing up their children in their own homes; the excuse, even in the basest episodes, was always some purported public challenge, predication, disloyalty, or revolt – things done in the political sphere, not in the household. The same cannot be said, for instance, of England’s anti-Catholic laws.) It is the superstition of non-Catholic bodies to educate children without or even against their parents.
One of the things that always happen when an uncomprehending outsider lays a really ridiculous challenge of this kind against the very weave and basic sense of a given social context, is that, after a moment’s sputtering and inarticulate disbelief, contrary reasons simply start bubbling up to the mind of anyone who belongs inside that context. So, when I responded, I had not just one argument, but dozens. We quickly got to that point so familiar when Hijja is losing an argument, when she got bored. Pity, because I could easily have gone another fifteen rounds. I still feel that bubbling of argument now.
When a person of Hijja’s quality does something so damn-silly, I do not think the angels laugh. But I am very much mistaken if they do not allow themselves, at least, a stifled giggle.
Philip Pullman, for instance, upon hearing that C.S.Lewis’ beloved Narnia cycle is about to get the slightly dangerous honour of a full-dress Hollywood production, took it on himself to condemn them and their author as – would you believe it – unChristian, being “racist, sexist, and without any Christian humility”. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the person who has become prominent with a series of books, supposedly aimed at children (but really, in my view, intended for literary reviewers), whose most positive message is a violent hatred of one specific religion, namely Christianity; the man who presents the Christian God as a cosmic monster, and who, last thing I heard, had promised that his next novel would blaspheme Jesus Christ. (I do not follow his work or his public utterances with any great care, for reasons that should be obvious.) This is a man whose message, if he has one, is that Christianity is itself the source of all evil, including certainly those evils that he absurdly ascribes to Lewis – racism, sexism, and the sin of Pride. One would think that, if these horrid vices were really so evident in Lewis’ children’s stories, someone like him would lie back with a triumphant grin on his face, and say something like: “See? What did I keep telling you about Christianity and its effects?” Instead of which, suddenly Christian values are the yardmark by which to measure the spiritual failings of the leading Christian apologist of the past half-century. That noise you hear is all the angels in heaven and all the devils in hell joining in one unison of Homeric laughter.
Kenna Hijja is in my view a much better person than Pullman. I could not call her a friend otherwise. Her attitude and behaviour are on another level, and, as writers, the difference between them is that between wasted talent and occasionally misused genius. But recently she fell headlong into the same trap; although, at least, her outburst seems motivated, not by professional jealousy and ideological obsession, but by unselfish sympathy for a Californian family – whose two adult partners are lesbians.
The fourteen-year-old daughter of one of these, it turns out, was enlisted at a Catholic school. The mother had understandably kept her relationship a secret from the school authorities, since she – unlike, as we shall see, Hijja – understood the meaning of Catholic education at least well enough to know that the daughter of a person committed to a homosexual relationship could not possibly be admitted. One of the central points of Catholic education is collaboration with the parents in the attempt to form a Catholic mind; which is inconceivable with people whose basic moral views, as embodied in their lives, are grossly at variance with Church teaching.
In turn, the centrality of the parents in education – even in the context of a school institution – is a part of the Catholic view of the human species – what is technically called “philosophical anthropology”. Family life, in the Catholic sense of the word, is not an optional choice for anyone who wants to practise the Catholic religion; it is one of the basics of Christian philosophical anthropology, as I have argued elsewhere, and as the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes clear in some 600 articles dedicated to the institution of marriage. Even the celibacy of most Catholic male and female religious is not a denial of the fundamental nature of marriage, but a displacement of it towards God. The novice who is about to become a nun wears a bridal habit: she is about to be married to God. In the same way, priests, monks and friars consecrate their male sexuality to God in order to become agents of God to the congregation; the priest being the masculine element within the generally feminine element of the Church, “the bride of Christ”. In neither case is the fundamental value of the sexual nature of man denied, as the GLBT movement denies it. These are our values; those are theirs. They can perfectly well say that, in terms of their own philosophical anthropology, Catholic views of sex are so much hot air; indeed, they would not be very coherent if they did not. What they cannot do is to deny that they are Catholic values, and that, in following them, Catholics are being coherent. Wrong, in their view; even criminally wrong; but coherent.
Punctually, the school authorities found out; punctually, the girl was expelled. All right. So Hijja read the story, and was indignant. Quite understandable. According to her values, the school was wholly wrong. Obviously, a school ran according to her principles would not even conceive of expelling a student for any peculiarity of belief or behaviour from either of the parents. Where, however, she began to go wrong, was in arguing that the school had no right to do what it did; that it, being the kind of institution it is, should have kept the girl anyway – that the right thing in term of the kind of school this was would have been to keep her.
An important fact here is that Hijja has no direct experience of Catholicism whatever. I suspect that I may be the first articulate and outspoken Catholic she has ever met. She has a wholly Protestant background, something I could have easily guessed even if she had not told me so herself, and which I think is rather more important in her make-up than she admits. But whether or not it is, it certainly means that, when she is trying to “speak Catholic”, she falls into the exact same kinds of mistakes that anyone makes when they are trying to communicate with a culture, a country, or a world, of which they are wholly unfamiliar. There is a certain instinctive mental balance, a sense of the possible and the impossible, which had told the girl’s mother that the school would never keep her daughter if they knew that she was in an active homosexual relationship, and which, once the girl had been expelled, kept her from using any of the abundant amount of legal remedies available to her to force the school to take her back. She obviously must have been brought up at least in some sense a Catholic; she knew, as I know, by instinct, by lifelong habit, by the sense of place and value, that some things are reasonable and some things are not; that even if she could force the school by law to accept her daughter back, it would simply not work.
Hijja knows none of these things. Her attempts to show that Catholic morality would demand the girl’s admission have the same blundering quality about them as that of a French, Italian or German speaker who, knowing that French, German or Italian have a second person singular (tu, du, tu), were to insist that English should by right have one as well, and try to resurrect the obsolete thou. Anyone with a habitual and instinctive sense of the language would know that this is nonsense. Being a university lecturer, Hijja went to the sources, got herself a Catechism of the Catholic Church (for which I congratulate her; it is rather a formidable item to have about one’s library), and found four articles about treating homosexuals decently and no differently from anyone else. Unfortunately, she seems to have somehow missed the 600 articles about sexuality and marriage, not to mention the item that says that all human beings are sinners, so that to treat someone as well as the next person means to treat them as sinners. In that context, to refuse a place at a centre of Catholic education to someone whose parents cannot be expected to cooperate in making a Catholic of the child, is not a violation of anyone’s rights; indeed, it is to take parental rights seriously – for one thing that the Church has always taught is that parents should have the right to bring up their children according to their own best light, even if that light is what the Church itself regards as darkness. (Even the worst persecutions against heretics never struck at people bringing up their children in their own homes; the excuse, even in the basest episodes, was always some purported public challenge, predication, disloyalty, or revolt – things done in the political sphere, not in the household. The same cannot be said, for instance, of England’s anti-Catholic laws.) It is the superstition of non-Catholic bodies to educate children without or even against their parents.
One of the things that always happen when an uncomprehending outsider lays a really ridiculous challenge of this kind against the very weave and basic sense of a given social context, is that, after a moment’s sputtering and inarticulate disbelief, contrary reasons simply start bubbling up to the mind of anyone who belongs inside that context. So, when I responded, I had not just one argument, but dozens. We quickly got to that point so familiar when Hijja is losing an argument, when she got bored. Pity, because I could easily have gone another fifteen rounds. I still feel that bubbling of argument now.
When a person of Hijja’s quality does something so damn-silly, I do not think the angels laugh. But I am very much mistaken if they do not allow themselves, at least, a stifled giggle.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-11-02 06:05 pm (UTC)We're all subjected to so much propaganda that sometimes it's hard to resist it. And you have to admit that in today's world the Church is "uncool" and gay and lesbian people are "cool". I know I have trouble making my mind about it all and I'm probably full of preconceived ideas and uninformed opinions. At least Kenna Hijja did some research. I won't throw her a stone because I sinned myself.
Besides, what was that mother thinking??????? How can the poor kid get a set of values when she's in a family that has one set of values and in a school that has a completely different set of values? And just think for a second that the girl had not been expelled after her background had been found out. Do you think all her comrades would have been accepting? Ever heard of the fact that when you've been shunned by your peers in childhood, you can end up a very unhappy person? Sorry, Fabio, I know you it's not your fault and that I'm doing the online version of shouting at someone, but some parents are just plain STUPID!
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Date: 2005-11-02 06:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-11-02 06:56 pm (UTC)That is absolutely fascinating. I'm not entirely sure whether I wholly agree--surely, in some sense, it's better for a child to at least have the example of Christian (or Catholic, if we want to stay case-specific) living to show her the better light?--but I do find this idea refreshing. My parents homeschooled me and my siblings, raising us according to the best light God gave them, and I'm very grateful for it.
I'm still a little weirded out at punishing the child for the sins of the mother; of course, I probably shouldn't get too into "rigid ethics" here, as I kept a friend's homosexuality secret while we were both attending a Christian university that had rules about that. I'm not remotely sorry I did so; God used that environment to bring my friend back to Himself.
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Date: 2005-11-02 07:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2005-11-02 07:05 pm (UTC)I admit that I often condemn a lot of the crazier pentecostal people and fundamentalist evangelists, but that's just cos it's fun, and that's also because I like saying they enjoy worshipping at the shrine of Baal. Always gets a good laugh, that one, especially out of them.
Also: where the shit you been lately, man? The only person I've had to debate with lately is my dad, who cut down a tree in the dark last night during a storm so that the neighbours wouldn't see and complain about it. I think that clearly tells you the calibre of his debating skillz.
Answer to your closing question:
Date: 2005-11-02 07:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-02 07:53 pm (UTC)Anyway, though I agree with you completely on Pullman, I never really liked the Narnia books myself. I think
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Date: 2005-11-02 08:04 pm (UTC)To answer your question, there are different rules for different areas. Catholic schools in countries such as India are missionary schools, ultimately under the rules of missionary endeavour. Catholic schools in the United States were originally set up to serve local communities, mostly immigrant (though not always; one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was a Catholic), and must be seen as community institutions. The rules of admission will obviously vary. But I think that if an Indian out gay couple (granting that such persons managed to survive the attention of the local Hindu and Muslim extremists) were to send a child to a Catholic school, they would still find some considerable obstacles in their way. Remember, one major issue is Catholic philosophical anthropology, which has a view of the sexes which is mostly acceptable to Hindu or Muslim practice (though not wholly so - polygamy, suttee and purdah are not favoured Catholic practices) and not at all to the GLBT movement.
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Date: 2005-11-02 08:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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From:Late response
Date: 2005-12-20 11:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-02 08:33 pm (UTC)People labelling actions/ideas as "un-Christian" have cropped up quite a bit lately in the US. It seems to be mostly in response to the evangelical movement here and people trying to define what Christianity should be for those people. It isn't always unbelievers, but it's also those who are Christian and yet oppose a certain brand of Christianity. Liberal/progressive protestants and conservative evangelicals seem to delight in telling the other that they are wrong wrong wrong and they make baby Jesus cry and suchlike. It's died down since the last presidential election, but I still see it much more often than I did, say eight years ago.
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Date: 2005-11-03 11:07 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-11-03 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-03 11:52 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2005-11-03 12:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:Oy, by the way...
Date: 2005-11-03 11:19 am (UTC)1. A return address by which I could scar you with either cat porn or a political language book I've just finished reading: which ever one would ruin your long-gone childhood first, and
2. The Ashes commemorative postage stamps by which you could rub in my face the fact that Australia is now a loser at both rugby union and cricket.
Re: Oy, by the way...
Date: 2005-11-03 12:16 pm (UTC)Re: Oy, by the way...
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Date: 2005-11-04 03:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-04 12:04 pm (UTC)To quote the immortal Calvin and Hobbes: "What? You're still talking about that?"
And damn, if you're sniping at me, at least give me a poke for the amusement value! *gripes*
Though I *do* wonder where I got that wholly Protestant background on, when the first time 'god' came up in family conversation was with my mother when I was 18 (apart from "You *have* to go to confirmation preparatory class because what would the neighbours say"... not that there were any neighbours who knew or would give a damn, but that's the residue of semi-rural Swabian society for you...)
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Date: 2005-11-04 03:58 pm (UTC)Oh, damn...
From:Re: Oh, damn...
From:Re: Oh, damn...
From:Re: Oh, damn...
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2005-11-04 07:53 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 2005-11-09 07:58 am (UTC)ROTFL
I had an almost hour-long conversation with someone yesterday over that very point. It was very entertaining.
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Date: 2005-11-09 02:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
From:no subject
Date: 2012-01-07 06:51 pm (UTC)Brilliant essay!