30 - Apologia21F

FA L L 2 0 2 1 , VO L U M E 1 6 , I S S U E 1

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featuring: Being and the Divine

by Victoria Xiao 22

also inside: On the Value of Heretical Christian Literature

A Review of The Religion of the Apostles

by Drew Whitley 23

by Jonathan Elliott, Ph.D.

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The DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.

Front Cover image - Naples From Sir William Hamilton's Villa, 1780-1782 by John Warwick Smith from Birmingham Museums Trust

T H E DA RT M O U T H A P O L O G I A FA L L 2 0 2 1 VO L U M E 1 6 I S S U E 1

4

Drew Whitley D'23

Paley’s Persistance

12

Evan Yang D'23

Being and the Divine

18

Victoria Xiao D'22

Swept by the Passions

26

Tony Perez D'23

32

Joseph Collum D'22

'Let Me Be Your Island ' and 'Habits'

38

Elizabeth Hadley D'23

Can Modern Enlightened People Really Engage Authentically with the Religion of the Apostles?

40

Jonathan Elliott, Ph.D.

On the Value of Heretical Christian Literature A Discussion of Silence and The Last Temptation

A Defense of Paley’s Argument from Design

The Way Back to God in a Postmodern World

A Nuanced Look at How Christians View Sin

Damned Salvation Catholic Theology in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory

Poetic Exposition

A Review of Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles

C O N T R I B U TO R S Drew Whitley D'23 ("On the Value of Heretical Christian Literature," p. 4) is from Lexington, KY and is pursuing a major in Religion with minors in Middle Eastern Studies and Computer Science.

Tony Perez D'23 ("Swept by the Passions," p.

26) is from Boston, MA and is pursuing a major in Philosophy with a minor in Computer Science.

Evan Yang D'23 ("Paley’s Persistance," p. 12) is from Pleasanton, CA and is pursuing a major in Government modified with Philosophy with a minor in Public Policy.

Joseph Collum D'22 ("Damned Salvation," p. 32) is from Waddy, KY and is pursuing a major in English with a concentration in Creative Writing.

Victoria Xiao D'22 ("Being and the Divine," p. 18) is from Beijing, China and is pursuing a major in Philosophy with minors in Government and Neuroscience.

Elizabeth Hadley D'23 ('Let Me Be Your Island' and 'Habits,' p. 38) is from North Caldwell, NJ and is pursuing a major in Classical Languages and Literatures with an English minor and is on the Pre-Med track.

Professor Jonathan T. Elliott, Ph.D. ("Religion of the Apostles," p. 40) is a Senior Scientist and Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College. He is the Principal Investigator and Program Director for the Orthopaedic Translational Engineering Lab in the Department of Orthopaedics at the Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center.

E D I T O R I A L B OA R D

Drew Whitley D'23, Editor-in-Chief Blake Whitmer D'23, Managing Editor Christopher Candelora D'22, Senior Editor Alice Little D'22, Senior Editor Anthony Perez D'23, Editor William Bryant D'24, Editor Paige Pattison D'24, Editor, Publisher Najma Zahira D'24, Editor Isaiah Menning D'24, Editor, Digital Media Editor

L E A D E R S H I P B OA R D

Michael Carlowicz D'22, Senior Editor Joseph Gyorda D'22, Technology Developer Anthony Fosu D'24, Art Designer Hailey Hao D'24, Poetry Editor Whitney Thomas D'24, Programming Director

A DV I S O RY B OA R D

Gregg Fairbrothers D’76 Eric Hansen, Professor of Engineering, Thayer James Murphy, Professor of Government Lindsay Whaley, Professor of Classics & Linguistics

SPECIAL THANKS

Council on Student Organizations The Eleazar Wheelock Society

SUBSCRIPTIONS To subscribe to our journal, visit our website or use your phone’s camera to scan the QR code to the right. Subscriptions to the journal are free and subscribers get each new issue delivered right to their front door! For more information, visit our website or send us an email at the.dartmouth.apologia@dartmouth.edu.

SUBMISSIONS We welcome the submission of any article, essay, or artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia that seeks to promote respectful, thoughtful discussion in the community. We will consider all submissions from any members of the community but reserve the right to publish only those that align with our mission statement and quality rubric.

L E T T E R F R O M T H E E D I TO R Dear Reader, Whether you read these words in print or on a digital screen, I hope that you are connected well to those who care for you.

The seasons still change, and fall returns once again. This year, the changing leaves bring along an enduring hope that our world will continue recovering normalcy, even as the still-threatening shadow of COVID-19 weighs heavily upon us. Whether or not the end of the pandemic is near, I am sure that all of us fatigue of its persistence and yearn to move past it. As physical spaces re-open and we resume old routines—notwithstanding that in some ways the world has forever changed—what exactly will we choose to return to?

The Dartmouth Apologia has always had a critically reflective spirit. We have questioned the world around us. We have considered the merits—as well as the challenges—of our Christian perspectives. We have explored the insights Christianity offers on various scientific, political, cultural, and religious topics. Most importantly, we have endeavored to defend the faith itself.

Christian apologetics will always be a defense of the faith. As you will see in some of this issue’s articles, the classical spirit of explicit defense is still very much alive. We model it by upholding a centuries-old argument for God’s existence. We chart it by exploring the ailments of a society that has lost its respect for moral objectivity but can heal if it is willing to rediscover the value of faith and tradition.

The Apologia’s leadership team also believe that a good defense of Christianity is not limited to arguments for God’s existence. It is just as important to show that Christians can think—and think well. This is why you will find articles on literary analysis that contemplate the paradoxes of God’s mystery and the vitality of theology through discussions of controversial Christian literature. It is why we include a book review exhorting us to reclaim an awareness of the divine into our daily routines, alongside a philosophical—yet pleasingly measured and accessible—discourse on the nature of sin. This mission also allows us to express our reverence and personal creativity through poetry.

Times marches onward, and we stand at a critical juncture as we (God-willing) begin to enter a post-COVID world. Who will we choose to be? How will we choose to act? What will we choose to believe? What will be most important to us?

Re-opening brings the opportunity for a metaphorical reset button on our lives. For each of us, perhaps this means reconsidering our relationship with faith and our conception of the divine. Perhaps it will change our relationships with the people around us, including ourselves. Or perhaps it will affect our relationship with the world itself. These articles may inspire you, strike a chord within you, or give you cause for reflection and contemplation. It is up to you. I only ask that you approach them with an open mind as you consider what your future will hold.

email: the.dartmouth.apologia@dartmouth.edu

L E T T E R S TO T H E E D I TO R We deeply value your opinions and encourage thoughtful words of support, dissent, or other views. We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community.

Yours truly,

Drew Whitley D’23 14th Editor-in-Chief of the Dartmouth Apologia

email: the.dartmouth.apologia@dartmouth.edu The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2021 The Dartmouth Apologia.

Photo by Anthony Fosu

ON THE VALUE OF HERETICAL CHRISTIAN LITERATURE A Discussion of Silence and The Last Temptation

DREW WHITLEY

W

hy was The Last Temptation of Christ, a novel

by Greek Orthodox author Nikos Kazantzakis, banned by the Roman Catholic Church and campaigned against by some American evangelicals?1 Why did Silence, a novel by Japanese Catholic author Shusaku Endo, spark so much controversy in his own church and country?2 Both works contain theological ideas that undermine or contradict settled Christian doctrine. Christians have always been concerned with confronting theological error because false beliefs about Christ can prevent us from worshipping and putting our trust in Him correctly, and Christians believe that it is through Christ that humankind’s relationship to God is restored. Concern over false theology is valid, but as I will argue, fictional narratives like those of Kazantzakis and Endo can still provide important Christian perspectives. Silence and The Last Temptation of Christ explore paradoxes in God’s nature and can deepen one’s grasp of His mystery without ultimately leading Christians astray.

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SHUSAKU ENDO’S SILENCE Silence is set during Japan’s “Christian Century.” In 1549, Japan opened its border to European missionaries, and a small percentage of the Japanese population converted to Christianity. In 1614, Shogun Ieyasu denounced the Christian missionaries as heralds of foreign conquest and expelled them from Japan.3 Following this edict, the Japanese government began a systematic persecution of Japanese Christians and their European priests. Accused Christians were frequently subjected to torture and forced to apostatize (that is, to renounce publicly their faith). They were frequently killed whether or not they complied with their captor’s demands.4 The Christian tradition has always taught that believers should submit to martyrdom before renouncing Christ, and many first-century Christians were likewise persecuted and put to death under the Roman Empire for refusing to apostatize. Christ, also executed by the state, expected a high cost from His followers, saying, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, Crete by Jan Ciągliński from Wikimedia Commons

but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”5 Jesus also expressly warned against apostasy: “So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.”6 Silence’s protagonist is the fictional Jesuit priest Sebastian Rodrigues, who enters Japan amidst the Tokugawa Shogunate persecution. Rodrigues refuses to believe the news that his former teacher, Father Christavao Ferreira, apostatized under torture after thirty-three years of service in the Japanese mission and was excommunicated by church authorities.7 Determined to uncover the truth and minister to the lost Japanese Christians, Rodrigues arrives in secret.8 He meets a secret community of Christians and hides in the mountains above their village. As rumors of his presence quickly spread and reach authorities, the villagers do not betray him even though some are arrested, interrogated, and martyred on the shoreline.9 Rodrigues escapes from the village but is soon captured by authorities.10 He experiences relative comfort while his fellow captives, all Christian peasants, languish in hard labor.11 This is the

Victory of Truth over Heresy by Peter Paul Rubens from Wikimedia Commons

unique psychological torture concocted by the magistrate, Inoue, to break Rodrigues’s spirit. Rodrigues is eventually allowed to tend to the other prisoners’ spiritual needs, and he develops a kinship with them.12 Although despairing in his plight and confused about God’s silence, he holds steadfast to his faith and desire for martyrdom, refusing each chance to apostatize. Rodrigues is forced to watch five of his fellow captives executed individually in his place, regardless of whether they recanted.13 As he witnesses these horrors, Rodrigues prays for God’s direction but finds none.

Rodrigues believes his long-awaited martyrdom is finally near when he gets moved to a dank, urine-soaked, earthen prison cell, told that he will surely apostatize that night.14 He passes the night awake, struggling to muster enough courage to face extreme physical torture.15 His contemplation is continually disrupted by a “vile and discordant noise,” which he perceives to be the guards snoring outside his cell.16 He derides the absurdity of such a peaceful slumber so near to his terror.17 Derision builds to rage and Rodrigues rails against the sound, attracting outside attention.18 His cell door opens to Father Ferreira, who, to Rodrigues’s dismay, has been aiding the Japanese

THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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magistrate.19 Rodrigues complains about the snoring and Ferreira reveals the cruel truth: he does not hear snores; he hears the groans of Christians who have been wound immobile with their foreheads slightly gashed, now hanging head-first in pits of human excrement with blood dripping from their noses and mouths.20 These Christians have already renounced their faith but will continue to suffer until Rodrigues sheds his desire for martyrdom and apostatizes.21 In his dismay, Rodrigues’s resolve crumbles.

Then, Christ finally breaks His silence. Surprisingly, He permits Rodrigues to betray Him and apostatize to alleviate the other Christians’ sufferings.22 Rodrigues does so and spends the rest of his life in captivity, helping the Japanese magistrate exterminate the last visible vestiges of Christianity on the island, like Father Ferreira.23 Despite his official excommunication from the Jesuit order, Rodrigues secretly remains a Christian until his death.24 His faith, however, is forever transformed by his humiliating apostasy.25 NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS’S THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST 26 The Last Temptation of Christ presents a revisionist retelling of the Gospel narrative.27 The story’s ancient Palestinian setting embodies the modern revolutionary spirit and struggle of Kazantzakis’s homeland, Crete. The people around Kazantzakis’s fictionalized Jesus groan for a savior to liberate them from the oppression of Roman rule, but each 6

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new revolutionary is crucified by the Romans.28 Similar to the biblical narratives, the people first expect Kazantzakis’s Jesus to be the next political revolutionary when he begins his public ministry.

The novel falls short, however, as a faithful depiction of the sacred Gospel narrative. It opens in Jesus’s adult life shortly before his entrance into public ministry. We first meet Jesus still in rebellion against God. He is not simply a carpenter––he builds the crosses that crucify his revolutionary countrymen, “so that the Messiahs [God chooses] can be crucified!”29 Kazantzakis’s Jesus is initially frail, uncertain of his own divinity, and long tormented by the voice in his mind telling him of his divine mission, which he perceives as blasphemous.30 He is frail because he struggles so vigorously against his fleshly desires that they physically emaciate him.31 Jesus’s desire to escape earthly temptations prompts him to leave home for a desert monastery, where he believes he may find a life of peace.32 This is the novel’s analog to Christ’s biblical time in the desert.33 Although Jesus does not spend his time in the desert praying and fasting as in the Gospels, it is still what directly precedes his time in public ministry.34 After Jesus reaches the monastery, he finally confesses what the voice of his divine will has been whispering his whole life—that he is God.35 Jesus’s confession sparks a change within him and he finally begins to accept his own divinity and mission, realizing that the voice in his head has not deceived him with blasphemy.36 Desert, Bamas in Judea. From the journey to Palestine by Jan Ciągliński from Wikimedia Commons

He returns to the world, accumulates disciples, preaches, and performs various Gospel acts. He gradually discerns the extent of his divinity and the call to sacrifice himself for the world.

The novel is replete with revisions to the Gospel narrative. The parables of the rich man, the five virgins, and Lazarus the beggar are all revised to have more merciful endings.37 Further, Judas is now Jesus’s closest disciple.

His eventual betrayal of Jesus is no longer for money, but comes instead at Jesus’s command. Jesus foresees that betrayal must precede crucifixion and that Judas is the only disciple strong enough to carry this burden.38 Despite these revisions and Christ’s frail humanity, Kazantzakis’s retelling is consistent with some of the biblical accounts, depicting Jesus’s compassion for others, his righteous indignation at pharisaical hypocrisy, and his anguish towards fulfilling his messianic mission.39 Kazantzakis’s Jesus still loses his life on the cross.40 His anguish is still felt to the bone, even though the revisions make Jesus, as the critic Morton P. Levitt put it, “unmistakably a man and only potentially a God.”41 The eponymous last temptation of abandoning his divine mission for a normal life comes to Jesus in a vision during his crucifixion.42 Jesus’s vision is imagined in the moment of separation when Christ uttered, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”43 When Jesus finally awakes and releases his last loud cry, “It is accomplished!” the final victory is still heart-wrenchingly triumphant.44 SACRIFICING TRUTH TO AFFIRM LOVE In Silence, Endo sacrifices the command of martyrdom to affirm God’s merciful love. Christians are called to endure persecution for the sake of faith.45 Proclaiming faith even to death secures one’s place among the elect.46 Although preceded by great suffering, martyrdom is glorious because the martyr shares in Christ’s own suffering.47 As discussed earlier, rejecting martyrdom breaks one of Christ’s own commandments.48 But in Rodrigues’s apostasy, he is not simply forced to reject truth. Rather, he must prioritize between confessing the just truth or acting in merciful love— and he ultimately chooses the latter. In Christianity, God is conceived of as a Trinity: He is one Being existing in three Persons.

These Persons are the Father, the Son (or Word), and the Spirit. Christ is the Word made flesh Who

lowered Himself to suffer with us.49 In order to take on a human nature as Christ, the Word first had to empty Itself of Its divine glory.50 Christian theology has a technical term for this self-emptying of divine glory for the sake of humanity: kenosis. Rodrigues practices his own kind of kenosis to suffer truly for the Christians tortured around him. He empties himself, not only of his desire for glory in martyrdom, but also of his identity as Jesuit priest.51 Rodrigues’s choice, as the ultimate sacrifice of truth, is also the ultimate affirmation of love.

In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis sacrifices scriptural inerrancy to affirm God’s merciful love. Kazantzakis believed that his supplementations, especially the altered parables, were what Christ would have actually said because the versions in Scripture are corruptions that distort Christ’s “true” figure.52 Kazantzakis is blasphemous to think himself worthy of identifying falsehood in Scripture and prescribing the corrections, but it is uncertain whether he means for them to replace Scripture. Although he does not consider his narrative to be an alternate Gospel, it may be more than just fiction. He writes in the prologue, “this book is not a biography; it is the confession of every man who struggles.”53 The altered parable endings illustrate this aim well. They express a desire for mercy as individuals struggle against their lack of virtue. Scripture’s parable of Lazarus admonishes the reader to revile greed and embrace great charity. A rich man shuns the beggar Lazarus in life, and he is condemned for it in death.54 Lazarus, meanwhile, receives a seat in Heaven.55 The rich man realizes his error and pleads for mercy.56 In the Gospels, this is to no avail.57 The parable is a warning not to wait until death to find virtue. Yet in the novel, Lazarus feels compassion for the rich man’s plea.58 He intercedes for the rich man and God relents His judgement so that the rich man can join them in Heaven.59 The parable’s true ending is sacrificed to affirm God’s merciful love and express one’s desire that it would extend even to those who do not repent in life.60

"RODRIGUES’S CHOICE, AS THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE OF TRUTH, IS ALSO THE ULTIMATE AFFIRMATION OF LOVE." THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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SACRIFICING DIVINITY TO AFFIRM HUMANITY In Silence, Endo sacrifices Christ’s divine glory to affirm His human compassion. Rodrigues carries the image of a triumphal and exultant God through his journey, even though he cannot understand how God would let the Japanese Christians endure such torture.61 Like the long-suffering Job in the Bible, Rodrigues longs for God to break His silence and explain why this suffering must take place, if not to intervene for its end.62 Although Rodrigues still clutches at this image of God when he realizes his final dilemma, he quickly loses his grasp. Perturbed by the Christians groaning in the pits and by Father Ferreira’s taunting, Rodrigues mourns this triumphal image because God still does not intervene or even speak.63 He then replaces it with one of God emaciated by the weight of Japanese suffering and divested of His rightful glory. Only then does Christ break His silence and grant Rodrigues permission to renounce Him in order to save the other Christians. This

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betrayal is so abhorrent because it denies Christ the dignity that God deserves. Christ has already been crucified, resurrected, and ascended to Heaven. He has finished His kenosis and regained His divine glory. Doctrinally, Christ should no longer be subjected to human suffering—although He is still deeply aware of it, He can no longer experience it as humans do. Yet at the end of Silence, Christ is still vulnerable, non-triumphant, still suffering and still willing to suffer.64 Christ humbly sheds His glory to bear once again the weight of human scorn. In this way, Silence re-affirms Christ’s humanity by making Him suffer alongside the tortured Christians.

In The Last Temptation of Christ, Kazantzakis sacrifices Christ’s full awareness of His divinity and perfect submission to His divine will to affirm the relatability of His humanity. Kazantzakis’s Jesus is tempted so much in his humanness that he feels evil’s attractiveness. At times he even yields to it because Kazantzakis sees this as the only way that Jesus’s ultimate rejection of temptation has any meaning.65

A Crucifixion in the Time of the Romans by Vasily Vereshchagin from Wikimedia Commons

For much of the KAZANTZAKIS’S novel, Jesus views NOVEL REMINDS his desire to recTHE READER OF ognize his divinity ALL THAT REMAINS as another temptaUNCLEAR ABOUT tion. UnderstandCHRIST’S DUAL ing Christ’s dual natures this way NATURES.

makes Him less than God. Kazantzakis makes Christ more like a creature elevated by God, thereby committing the Arian heresy.66 As Christians confess in the Chalcedonian Creed, Christ must be “perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood,” meaning that Christ’s human and divine wills must be in perfect union.67 This does not mean that Christ’s divine will was imposed on His human will “by the force of its natural omnipotence,” as the Greek Orthodox philosopher Christos Yannaras put it.68 Rather, Christ chose in His personal freedom to subordinate His human will to His divine will

so that His two natures might be unified without confusion or division.69 Christ’s divine nature shares the common will of the other Persons of the Trinity.70 This is the will of life, realized as self-transcendence and subordinated love.71 This subordination realizes a freedom from every necessity, becoming synonymous with eternal life.72 Christ’s subordination of His human will to His divine will produces a cure for the ailments of human nature.73 His humanity is no longer defined by the necessity of self-preservation, which perpetually seeks to justify self-existence but inescapably ends in death.74 Although Christ may experience temptation, the perfect union of His wills must free Him from sin.

Yet the lack of perfect divinity in the novel’s Jesus makes him more relatable because in him the reader can see her own frailty more clearly. Since he still willfully bears in love and submission the weight of humanity’s collective sin, the reader can identify more clearly with Christ’s anguish at the inescapability of His call to suffering. If this Jesus struggles and overcomes but is yet not good enough, then how could anyone else entertain the possibility that she could transcend towards God without the true Christ’s grace?

Kazantzakis’s novel reminds the reader of all that remains unclear about Christ’s dual natures: how Christ was perfect but truly tempted; how Christ was aware of both His human and divine wills; and how Christ bore the weight of His own anguish. For all of this, the heretical novel still truly affirms Christ’s human anguish and all that we cannot understand about His dual natures.

CONCLUSION Here lies the paradox—Christian orthodoxies take apparent opposites and hold them in tension. God’s love and mercy exists in tension with His truth and justice. God’s full divinity exists in tension with His full humanity. Both opposites must be true. Silence and The Last Temptation of Christ are heretical because they collapse these paradoxes.

This is why the reader cannot agree that Christ would permit Rodrigues’s apostasy nor make the Lord Christ a mirror of Kazantzakis’s Jesus or accept Kazantzakis’s Gospel revisions. At the same time, these paradoxes are not held together by logical systems that explicate their tensions through analytic concepts and categories.75 To borrow the words of the professor of systematic theology Brendan Thomas Sammon, Christian understanding of the Trinity cannot be reduced to a “mere expression of human thought.”76 God presented Himself in Christ “as a lived event, a character within the drama of human culture and society.”77 The full truth of this event is murky and ambiguous.

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Despite what Christians affirm in the Nicene Creed, God will always remain an inconceivable mystery to those on earth.78 I confess the truth of Scripture, which reveals much indeed, but God is a Being completely other than human. Scripture cannot contain Him. His omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence cannot be fully comprehended. Speaking without error about God’s nature is to speak in circumlocutions that only draw fences around the mystery that, as the Metropolitan Kallistos Ware said, simply “exclude certain false ways of speaking and thinking about it.”79 The Chalcedonian creed—adopted in 451 C.E. and recognized by the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and many Protestant Churches—only sought to accomplish this exclusion.80 Reason should never be abandoned at the door of faith, but there are elements of faith that reason cannot attain.

Christian life calls the faithful to move ever closer to God, striving to know and understand Him more by following the Scriptures and re-organizing one’s life around the self-emptying love embodied by Christ.81 This is achieved not only through action, but also by contemplating the mystery. The narrow definitions Christians have for orthodoxy—vital when theologizing about God’s nature—can limit how creative works can be constructive for faith. In producing creative works, it is possible to elucidate aspects of God’s mystery by sacrificing tenets of orthodoxy. Heresy in literature can actually draw Christians deeper into faith and nearer to the true Christ.

A work of fiction takes a life of its own after publication.82 The author does not hold a monopoly on its interpretation. The reader is not bound to experience and value Christian literature such as Silence and The Last Temptation of Christ exactly as their authors do.

The reader may reject Endo’s vision of an emaciated and glory-divested Christ that he believed was the image necessary for Japanese Catholicism. She may leave the tension of Rodrigues’s final dilemma unresolved and still hold to the biblical commandments against apostasy. Despite the novel’s heresy, the reader may still cherish the humility she finds in reflecting on Rodrigues’s anguish and courage to apostatize to save others.

The reader may also reject Kazantzakis’s vision of a Christ who must overcome fleshly temptations, including the belief that he is human, before uniting with God. She may repudiate his all-too-human depiction of Jesus and still use it to approach the Lord Christ with greater humility for her own faults and greater appreciation for His anguish.

Despite its heresy, Kazantzakis’s novel illuminates all that 10

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humans cannot fathom about Christ’s humanity, for which the reader may submit to Him with greater reverence.

While following Endo and Kazantzakis’s protagonists, I have experienced a humility applicable to my own faith and daily life. By experiencing the creativity of their heretical novels, I have realized that sacrificing one part of the Christian mystery sometimes allows one to grasp more clearly all that yet remains hidden. The full truth must still be held in paradoxes: God is simultaneously just and merciful; Christ is both fully divine and fully human. Together, the doctrinal and literary truths reach a fuller whole. If we truly want to marvel at the mystery of God, then we must be able to see the light in novels such as Silence and The Last Temptation of Christ, and we must be open to reading them.83 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

Virginia Nickles Osborne, “Judas, My Brother,” The Comparatist 43, no. 1 (2019): 194, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26824955.

William Johnston, translator’s preface to Silence, by Shusaku Endo (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1969), 16-17.

Johnston, 4.

Johnston, 6-7.

Matthew 16:24–25 (ESV).

Matthew 10:32–33 (ESV).

Shusaku Endo, Silence, trans. William Johnston (Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1969), 19.

Endo, 56.

Endo, 100.

Endo, 106, 132.

Endo, 169-171.

Endo, 172.

Endo, 184, 193, 217.

Endo, 254.

Endo, 257.

Endo, 262.

Endo, 262.

Endo, 262.

Endo, 262.

Endo, 8, 265.

Endo, 267.

Endo, 271.

Endo, 305.

Endo, 298.

Endo, 295.

I use precise language throughout this article to differentiate between the conflicting portrayals of Christianity’s Messiah. I only write “Christ” to refer to the Son of God revered in Christianity and depicted in the Bible. All pronouns referring to Christ are capitalized. I only write “Jesus” to refer to Kazantzakis’s protagonist.

Since his portrayal is theologically inaccurate, pronouns referring to his protagonist are not capitalized. I make this distinction so that the reader does not conflate her image of the glorified Christ with Kazantzakis’s Jesus. I will, however, use the language of “Christ” when discussing Silence because the novel does not characterize His human life.

Morton P. Levitt, “The Modernist Kazantzakis and ‘The Last Temptation of Christ,’ ” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 6, no. 2 (1973): 104-105, http:// www.jstor.org/stable/24776944.

Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, trans. P. A. Bien (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 49, 55.

Kazantzakis, 20, 28.

Kazantzakis, 15.

Osborne, 195.

Kazantzakis, 67.

Matthew 4:1; cf. Mark 1:12 and Luke 4:1 (ESV).

Kazantzakis, 153.

Kazantzakis, 147.

Kazantzakis, 158.

37. Osborne, 195.

38. Kazantzakis, 421.

39. Kazantzakis, 365, 387.

40. Kazantzakis, 442.

41. Levitt, 105.

42. Kazantzakis, 446.

43. Kazantzakis, 443-444; cf. Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34, and Luke 13:35 (ESV).

44. Kazantzakis, 496; cf. Matthew 27:50, Mark 15:37, Luke 23:46, and John 19:30 (ESV).

45. Matthew 24:9; cf. John 15:18-21 (ESV).

46. Matthew 10:22; cf. Matthew 10:39, Matthew 24:13, and Mark 13:13 (ESV).

47. Hebrews 3:14; cf. Revelation 2:10 (ESV).

48. Matthew 10:33; cf. Luke 12:9, 2 Timothy 2:12, and 1 John 2:23 (ESV).

49. John 1:14 (ESV).

50. Philippians 2:7 (ESV); Christos Yannaras, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, trans. Keith Schram (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), 93.

51. Jean Higgins, “The Inner Agon of Endo Shusaku,” CrossCurrents 34, no. 4 (19841985): 421, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24458932.

52. Nikos Kazantzakis, letter to Börje Knös, Antibes, January 1, 1952, cited in Helen Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis: A Biography Based on his Letters (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), 507.

53. Kazantzakis, 4.

54. Luke 16:25 (ESV).

55. Luke 16:23 (ESV).

56. Luke 16:24 (ESV).

57. Luke 16:26 (ESV).

58. Kazantzakis, 202.

59. Kazantzakis, 202.

60. Kazantzakis, 201.

61. Higgins, 421.

62. Job 40:4-5 (ESV).

63. Endo, 266-267.

64. Endo, 271.

65. P. A. Bien, “A Note on the Author and His Use of Language,” in The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 504.

66. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Eastern Christianity (London: Penguin, 1963), 29.

67. Yannaras, 95; The interested reader may easily find translations of the Chalcedonian Creed online.

68. Yannaras, 95.

69. Yannaras, 96.

70. Yannaras, 96.

71. Yannaras, 96.

72. Yannaras, 96.

73. Yannaras, 96.

74. Yannaras, 96.

75. Brendan Thomas Sammon, Called to Attraction: An Introduction to the Theology of Beauty (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2017), 126.

76. Sammon, 126.

77. Sammon, 127.

78. The interested reader may find a copy of the Nicene Creed in the back inside cover of this journal.

79. Ware, 28.

80. Ware, 28.

81. Matthew 22:34-40; cf. Mark 12:28-34, Luke 10:25-28 (ESV).

82. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 1c42-48.

83. I would like to thank Charlie Clark for his invaluable help in crafting my argument and providing feedback on earlier drafts. I am grateful as well to everyone else who gave me their time and feedback throughout the writing process.

35.

36.

Europe a Prophecy by William Blake from Wikimedia Commons

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PALEY’S PERSISTANCE A DEFENSE OF PALEY’S ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN

EVAN YANG

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oes God exist? Some have devoted their lives to developing arguments for or against His existence, while others believe the answer to this question simply cannot be known.

One famous argument for God’s existence is William Paley’s argument from design. Paley’s argument is as follows: First, watches can be observed as having an intentional design.

Thus, we can infer that there was a designer for the watch. From this observation, we can establish an analogy comparing the watch to the natural world.

Like a watch, many things in nature, such as the human eye, can be observed to have the appearance of functional complexity or design to its being. Because similar events have similar causes, therefore, Paley argues a designer must have been responsible for such design in the world. This article responds to three salient objections to Paley’s argument from design: God’s Unknowable Nature, The Evaluation of Design, and Darwinian Incompatibility. All three fail to undermine Paley’s conclusion.

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OBJECTION 1: GOD’S UNKNOWABLE NATURE Renowned philosopher David Hume’s primary argument posits that God’s nature is unknowable. As is the case for many arguments from analogy, the main objection attacks the analogy itself. In his work Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume expresses his critiques of religion through a conversation involving several fictional characters, each with a different stance. Writing as Philo, the skeptic, Hume describes God as “a being infinitely perfect.”

Thus, the nature of such a supreme and divine being must be “mysterious to men,” who are “finite, weak, and blind creatures.”1 Thus, one cannot make an analogy to God because doing so assumes an understanding of His nature.

Perhaps not all of God’s nature, however, is unknowable. While humans are indeed severely limited in their knowledge of the nature of God, that does not mean all aspects of God’s nature are hidden from us. In principle, we know this is possible because of the example of dark matter.

Dark matter can be perceived only by the gravitational pull it exerts on visible matter. But because it does not interact

with the electromagnetic force, and our current tools of observation depend on the electromagnetic spectrum, practically nothing of its true nature is revealed to humans.2 Yet, we acknowledge its existence and we even hypothesize how much of the universe it takes up, roughly 27%. Like dark matter, some selection of God’s attributes, but not all, may be comprehensible by humans. How, then, can humans comprehend God? This depends on what one accepts as evidence of God’s attributes. The obvious and relevant example for evidence of God’s attributes is the Bible. I am not saying that the Bible is proving God’s existence (that would be a very unconvincing argument to a person that does not accept the Bible in the first place). Rather, I am saying that the specific argument that humans cannot know God’s attributes is false, in part due to the Bible. Why is this a significant difference? Well, in principle, nothing would stop God from communicating His presence to us in some explicit form. I am merely saying that the Bible is an instance of explicit communication. The remaining question would be: How do we know that the Bible is reliable?

Whether the Bible is divinely inspired cannot be readily verified nor falsified to the satisfaction of secular and non-secular scholars. There are relatively compelling arguments for both sides, arguments that I will not be examining in-depth in this essay. As such, one has good reason either to eliminate the Bible as a source of credible evidence or to consider it as appropriate evidence, depending on which stance they take on the Bible’s credibility. At the very least, there are good reasons to construct an argument from a biblical perspective of God because the Bible cannot yet be definitively concluded to be an utterly defective text. In short, one’s belief about the text determines the grounds for its use. So, it is unproductive to argue that taking a biblical perspective on God’s nature is invalid. What can be argued instead is that the Bible is not an acceptable source of evidence. If one chooses to discard the Bible, they cannot

WHILE HUMANS ARE LIMITED IN THEIR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD, NOT ALL ASPECTS OF GOD’S NATURE ARE HIDDEN FROM US. Macro of Metal Gears, Cogs and Wheels from Old Watches by Laura Ockel from Unsplash.com

reasonably posit any biblical perspective on God’s nature, because the source of support for that perspective is rooted in a text one considers defective. One cannot justifiably argue that they study Newtonian physics while at the same time claiming that Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is an erroneous text unsuitable for the study of Newtonian physics. The text itself is an inextricable part of the definition of studying Newtonian physics. In the same way, taking a biblical perspective on God necessitates that one accepts the Bible as valid evidence for understanding God’s nature through a biblical lens.

Returning to the argument at hand, Hume’s objection rests on the premise that God’s nature is unknowable. He supports his claim with evidence from the Bible and the words of Father Malebranche, a Christian priest and philosopher. He uses biblical language to express his premise: “eye hath not see, ear hath not heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.”3 Hume also quotes Father Malebranche directly: “But in the same manner as we ought not to imagine, even supposing him corporeal, that he is clothed with a human body, as the anthropomorphites asserted, under colour that that figure was the most perfect of any; so, neither ought we to imagine that the spirit of God has human ideas, or bears any resemblance to our spirit, under colour that we know nothing more perfect than a human mind.”4

Aside from these, Hume provides no other support for his premise about God’s unknowable nature. Yet, both sources present a Christian perspective on God’s nature.

In other words, the proprietors of the viewpoints which Hume quotes affirm the knowability of God’s nature in some way. Thus, Hume’s reasoning for God’s unknowable nature must be based on a biblical conception of God. Such a framework necessitates a consideration of the Bible as a valid piece of evidence for his argument.

Thus, the problem with Hume’s argument is that the Bible, while stating that God’s nature is to some extent unknowable to humans, also overwhelmingly maintains that some of God’s nature is knowable. One of the Bible’s fundamental roles, as understood by Christians, is being the primary means by which God directly informs us about Himself and His relation to the world. The book of Hebrews describes how God has historically revealed Himself to man: “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”5 THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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This Son, Jesus, was made manifest to people and was clearly perceived through the senses; testimonies of these experiences are recorded in the Bible.6 “The Gospel of John states that, The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”7 In the book of John, John equates the Bible to Jesus Himself, whose glory and nature mankind has seen and perceived.

Other verses substantiate the argument set forth. The book of Romans states that God’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”8 Holistically, the Bible clarifies that God’s nature is knowable to a certain degree; not all of it is out of mankind’s grasp. Thus, the evidence that Hume uses to frame his first premise of God being unknowable is self-defeating, and so his premise and objection are unjustified, therefore undermining Paley’s argument because humans can, in fact, understand God’s nature to some extent.

Furthermore, even if one were to reject the Bible’s reliability, we can reach the same conclusion. There are ways of knowing God’s nature through reason alone, without appealing to a source that presupposes God as God. A non14

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biblical way of addressing Hume’s objection could involve natural theology, as exemplified by Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways for proving God’s existence. While Paley did not like Aquinas’s approach, it is still worth mentioning because natural theology also makes sophisticated claims regarding God’s nature. Natural theology, however, is a very large topic that would be difficult to cover in this article. In short, Aquinas’s first three ways start with the Aristotelian concepts of change, efficient causality, and contingency.

They conclude that God is the first mover, the first efficient cause, and the non-contingent being. All of these are examples of claims about God’s nature that are plausible if you assume an Aristotelian background, which goes against Hume’s idea of God’s unknowable nature.9 OBJECTION 2: THE EVALUATION OF DESIGN Another objection to Paley’s argument is that the premise of there being apparent design in the world is unjustified. There are design flaws in the universe: for example, the human pelvis is much too narrow for efficient childbirth.

Many other instances demonstrate that the natural world is full of flaws uncharacteristic of a supposedly perfect, divine

designer. Yet this argument fails for a couple of reasons.

First, it addresses a completely different question than the one at hand. The question at hand is not if the designer is perfect. Paley argues rather for the existence of a designer, not the perfect nature of the designer. It may be something Paley himself affirms, but at its core his argument does not intend to prove the designer’s perfection. Moreover, from empirical evidence, we know that imperfect design still requires a designer. Human designers design objects with detriments all the time. Paley’s watch exemplifies this. 18th century watches, like the one Paley observed, were primarily pocket watches. They have since been redesigned. Watchmakers commemorated the watch designs introduced in World War I on the basis of simplicity and efficiency.10 For naval officers, wrist watches were easier to operate than pocket watches; one did not have to reach into their pocket to access the timepiece. Functionally, a wrist watch’s design makes more sense. It can thus be reasoned that pocket watches have a flaw in their design, because they are less functionally operative than wrist watches that developed in a later time frame. Does that mean the pocket watch Paley observed in the 18th century did not have a designer?

"Nothing Else Matters" by Ava Sol from Unsplash.com

Along these same lines, another way to respond to Hume is to say that a perfect designer need not have a perfect creation. Just because the creator is perfect, it does not follow that every last detail of the thing that is created is also perfect. The idea that a perfect designer necessitates perfect design requires some defense; one would have to make a case for why the creation would share in the creator’s perfection. One response from the objector might be that it would be morally repugnant for a creator to have the ability to create in a certain way, and then deliberately choose not to create in that way, leading to suffering.

This brings us to the problem of evil, which is probably one of the largest topics within apologetics, even today. As such, we will not have space to cover it here. Nonetheless, it remains clear that this is by no means a knockdown case of Paley’s argument, but something that will lead to more discussion. The interested reader may consider looking at the book of Job in the Bible, which is an early take on the problem of evil, regardless of whether one believes in the divinely inspired nature of the Bible.

Another response to the objection of design flaws is that “good” design is subjective. What is perceived as good design by one person may not be perceived as so by another. Take the previous example regarding watches. One person, perhaps a fashion designer, may opt for a pocket watch because it is perceived as more fashionable and aesthetically pleasing than a wristwatch. But for another person, the functionality of wrist watches may be of higher priority in considering the “good” design of the watch. Naval officers working accurately to time bombardments would probably prefer the latter definition based on functionality.

This is not to say, however, that design does not exist as a concept; there are simply different means with which to evaluate it. Thus, the design “flaws” argument fails because it does not consider the possibility that design in the world can be evaluated with other metrics than the ones used to justify flaws. An example of another metric would be the Christian perspective on God’s creation. Christians believe that sin introduced by the Fall of Man caused the world to be corrupted from its perfect original state and subjected to a state of futility.11 But eventually, God would redeem His fallen creation through Christ, and Jesus’s Second Coming would establish a new order. The old earth would pass away and the new would come, in which “death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”12 The imperfections in the world can thus be interpreted to have a purpose in God’s perfect design for all creation.

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OBJECTION 3: DARWINIAN INCOMPATIBILITY The last objection to be analyzed does not originate from Hume, but from Darwin. Proponents of Darwinian evolutionary theory may present an alternative explanation for the apparent design in nature. They argue that natural selection is responsible for creating the observed order in nature. Random mutations occurring in nature provide beneficial traits for species that give them a better chance at survival than their counterparts without the mutation.

The species that survive will reproduce and pass on their genetic information to their offspring. Over time, the mutation will be more prevalent than the original set of traits, and the non-beneficial traits will become altogether extinct from the species. Stretched out over billions of years, natural selection gave rise to the diverse multitude of species and their numerous adaptations.13 Considering how complex and specific these adaptations are, they can be interpreted as a product of design—but in reality, they are the work of natural selection. This phenomenon supports the point that natural design can be completely explained by natural forces instead of a deity.

One could respond to this objection by distinguishing the kinds of design observed in the natural world. Darwin’s theory of evolution concerns individual species and the utility of their traits that are within a single species’s gene pool. Yet other elements of the natural world besides species of organisms can also be considered to have apparent design. As Peter Bowler writes, the property of design can be seen in the systematic organization of natural groupings of organisms: “for instance, in the supposedly harmonious relationships which some naturalists saw when they linked together the various species to form a taxonomic system.

This approach depends on the unity and harmony of the whole of nature, not on the utility of its individual parts.”14 Turning to other scientific disciplines besides biology, the physical sciences also make a case for observed design in the arrangement of the cosmos. Notably, Johannes Kepler established three fundamental laws of planetary motion that illustrate the intricacy present in the celestial bodies. These examples show that design is evident in features of the natural world other than species of organisms. The Darwinian critique does not account for these instances of design.

Thus, Paley’s argument for apparent design still stands, as it could seek to explain these alternative instances of design.

CONCLUSION Paley’s conclusion that the apparent design in the world is evidence for a designer is not undermined by the objections that Hume presents. Hume’s attack on the analogy’s validity fails when considering that the evidence he puts forth contradicts his claim. The argument of design flaws fails because the concept of flaws is both subjective and simply defeated by empirical evidence. The argument regarding the fallacy of composition fails in producing any substantive refutation of Paley’s argument. Lastly, the Darwinian argument fails because it does not necessarily conflict with Paley’s conclusion.

Paley’s argument first made its appearance more than two centuries ago, and it has faced various criticisms over the course of its long history. Some were raised in this article. But even today, the argument from design is certainly far from being defeated. Paley’s work established frameworks for understanding the world that scientists are currently building upon, such as mathematician William Dembski and his design inference.15 Moreover, there have been variations in the levels of design that people have been paying attention to as we learn more about things like the anatomy of cells, ecosystems, and the fine-tuning of the universe.16 The general structure that Paley proposed is still one that can be very fruitful in a contemporary context, making it not only historically significant within the world of apologetics but incredibly useful.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779; Project Gutenberg, 2020), Part 2, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4583/4583-h/4583-h.htm#chap02.

CERN Staff, “Dark Matter,” CERN, accessed August 19, 2021, https://home. cern/science/physics/dark-matter.

1 Corinthians 2:9 (ESV).

Hume, Dialogues.

Hebrews 1:1-2 (ESV).

1 John 1:1-3 (ESV).

John 1:14 (ESV).

Romans 1:20 (ESV).

For more on natural theology, visit https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-theology/.

David Belcher, “Wrist Watches: From Battlefield to Fashion Accessory,” The New York Times, October 23, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/fashion/ wrist-watches-from-battlefield-to-fashion-accessory.html.

Romans 8:20 (ESV).

Revelation 21:4 (ESV).

Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London, 1859; Project Gutenberg, 2020), Chapter 4, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1228/1228-h/1228-h.htm#chap04.

Peter J Bowler, "Darwinism and the Argument from Design: Suggestions for a Reevaluation," Journal of the History of Biology 10, no. 1 (1977): 29-43, accessed September 2, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4330667.

William Lane Craig, “Is the Watchmaker Argument Still Valid?” November 30, 2014, in Reasonable Faith Podcast, produced by Reasonable Faith, podcast, https:// podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reasonable-faith-podcast/id252618197.

Craig, “Watchmaker Argument.”

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Watchmaker, Painting by Jacob Lawrence from Wikimedia Commons

BEING AND THE DIVINE The Way Back to God in a Postmodern World

VICTORIA XIAO

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he questioning of one’s identity, the rejection of what has been given—tradition, community, how things worked in the past—followed by a sort of awakening and a sense of freedom is a common cultural phenomenon. “Defy the authority,” “be bold,” “challenge the status quo”—such is the cultural lingo constantly rearticulated by media, universities, and politicians. At the same time, our culture finds itself in trouble.

While values such as tolerance and pluralism are pushed to the forefront of political discussions, opinions have become worryingly singular and the space for serious discussion increasingly narrow. While academia insists on moral relativism, it has produced a great amount of absolute moral rhetoric, from “unequivocal” condemnations to the outright dismissal of certain texts or subjects as fundamentally immoral. Despite our culture’s commitment to increasing happiness in the world, mental illness—depression and anxiety—only lays hold of more.

Culture is a manifestation of values, and values are rooted in how we understand reality and our place in it. Today, we understand reality negatively. That is to say, we have 18

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adopted an anti-metaphysical view of existence, one that rejects both reality and its goodness and takes “the self ” as the ultimate source of meaning. Instead of engagement with reality, then, freedom becomes a radical independence from it and the absolutizing of subjectivity the path to freedom.

After showing the connections between the maladies of our time and this view of existence, I will follow the French philosopher, Jacques Maritain and introduce a different view of existence that corrects the former’s errors by drawing out the ‘givenness’ of reality and the notion of being, which eventually lead to God revealed as Love.

MODERN CULTURE Jean-Paul Sartre famously said, “existence precedes essence.” There is existence, but it has no meaning; there is no truth to reality. Consistently, there is no truth to who we are as humans, no truth to what we ought to do as humans, no objective state of being that humanity must reach. We first find that we exist and only later decide who we are. Sartre put it this way: “man first of all exists, encounters himself, Color in Foxen Canyon by Richard Schloss from santabarbarafineart.com

surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.”1 Consequently, nothing compels us to follow any moral code or respect tradition; there is no sense in saying that we “should” do anything at all. The purpose of life becomes a choice that requires no justification. There is no authority, no objective normative bounds of action, but only bounds that we choose for ourselves. This view of existence is deeply related to our culture today in both obvious and non-obvious ways.

First, based on this view of existence, there is no need for open discourse. To have someone disagree with you is always unpleasant. The only thing that overcomes that is the dedication to the truth of the matter. You lend an ear for the sake of truth, not because it is pleasant, but precisely because it is not: the truth is good for you even if it is contrary to your own immediate will. But, if there is no truth, why bother? In fact, not only will we not bother to listen, but we will perceive criticism as an act of attack. The idea that severe words can be rooted in genuine respect—for the capacity for truth, the health of the soul—becomes unintelligible. “Good medicine is bitter to the mouth,” as the Chinese saying goes. But when there can be nothing objectively good, we do what is the easiest and resist anything that does not already taste sweet.

Second, since there is no human nature, there is no objectivity to the human experience. This is an especially politically charged idea. When there is no truth to reality, when you cannot say that something is good in its essence, power, instead of moral authority, inevitably becomes the measure of hierarchy in collective life. It should not be surprising that the idea that there is nothing objectively true about the human experience will take on an actively political form—and why the alleged representatives of certain identity groups always have a fixed set of political views.

The basis for identity politics is not the actual shared lived experience of minorities, economic or racial but a specific ontological worldview.

Moreover, any program that adopts the idea that there is no objectivity to the human experience cannot but perpetuate division. After all, there is nothing that can unite us, nothing that is universally human. There can be no

common ground, nor any genuine dialogue that is mutually instructive. Rather, there is only the speaker who demands attention for his expression without any room for correction, the listener who trembles before him—and the rest who are “part of the problem.” People who are not of the same identity group have nothing to contribute. Their criticism is seen as an attack or an act of oppression. Differing opinions within an identity group that do not conform to the adopted narrative are delegitimized and worse, seen as an act of betrayal.

In education, the liberal arts model was founded upon the idea that there is something universal, beautiful, and true about humanity and that its cultivation is essential for freedom. Today, the understanding has changed: what is essential for freedom is its negation. But when objective goodness itself is oppressive, as something external and secondary to the self, what else is not? From the classics, philosophy, to even logic and grammar, from dress codes to marriage, to even the fetus in the womb, all have been understood as oppressive, antithetical to freedom.

Concepts such as “oppression” and “justice” no longer require deliberation. Instead, their meanings are uniformly adopted, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of freedom. What is more, the identification of evil always compels action. When evil is identified everywhere, action is ceaseless. Consistently, education, instead of passing down tradition and training students to converse with the most profound thinkers of the human race and come up with their own answers to perennial questions, has turned into an avenue for political activism.

We face a conundrum. The truth is that there is no truth. What is still objectively moral is the abandonment of the idea of moral objectivity. Everybody is right, except for the person who thinks that there is such thing as right or wrong. Students are to transform society, to plan the economy, to save the planet, and, at the same time, to dismiss tradition to mock the past, to view the world with hate. Beguiled by “the scientific method,” we no longer rely on our moral intuitions. We transgress nature’s boundaries, researching immortality, engineering babies, and creating artificial intelligence after our own image. This can only

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result in disaster. The story of the Tower of Babel repeats itself. During the Cultural Revolution, with the slogan, “Humans can absolutely triumph over Nature,” tradition was thoroughly rejected, ancient artworks smashed, and classical scholars killed. China is still recovering from this past.

But the same Tower of Babel is now being built in the West.

With all this self-assuredness, we cannot even be happy. Instead, a profound alienation takes root within us. We cannot truly believe what we do, or think, is right, if what is right is alterable according to our own will. As soon as freedom means “freedom from objective human nature,” we become liars to ourselves. On the one hand, we cannot but act according to what we think is right. On the other hand, there is nothing that is “right.” Some of us, too aware of this discrepancy, lose the appetite for learning and life altogether. Some enslave themselves to the perception of others, as an effort to erect new standards for themselves. When transcendental standards are rendered illegitimate, human standards become the only standards, and we find ourselves in a culture of conformity, appeasement, low self-esteem.

Our political culture treats respect as an ultimate good.

It does not, however, realize that respect can only come from within, through reconciling oneself with the duties and honors constitutive of being human and through preparing oneself to stand before God alone. Consequently, our culture’s emphasis on respect only renders life a performance, and us an object in the gaze of the Other. The real question is not if a certain choice is free but if a certain “free” choice does not necessarily destroy freedom itself.

BEING What if there is another way of understanding the same statement, “existence precedes essence”? In his influential work, Existence and the Existent, Jacques Maritain presents this possibility. To Maritain, as to Sartre, “existence precedes essence” means that “my essence owes to my existence its very presence in the world,” i.e., my act of existing is more fundamental than my essence. In Maritain, however, this does not refute objectivity, but reveals what is most objective of all, i.e., “Existence in pure act.” It is true that my essence owes its intelligibility to my existence, but it does not end there. My existence owes itself to the act of existing.

I could not have done anything to exist. Reality is fundamentally given to me. There is an indebtedness woven into my existence, an indebtedness to something before and beyond myself. If my intellect notices the fundamental act of existing, the miracle that there is something rather 20

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than nothing, then it attains what Maritain calls the “intuition of being”—an ontological insight that is simple, direct, and immediate, superior to any “discursive reasoning or demonstration.”2 The intuition of being is the most immediate and intimate way of knowing the world. It reveals both the givenness of reality, and a sense of a cosmic centrality of my own.

Consistently, the relation of a giver (Creator) and a receiver (creature) comes before all other relations and persists through everything in my life in this world. Freedom is found precisely in this relation. Indeed, freedom is freedom to be, freedom to participate in the reality that exists independent of our will, but also gives form to our will. Freedom is bound up with our dependence as creatures on the source of all creation. It is the “fruit of a recognition that reality itself is a gift.”3 The question is indeed to be or not to be: We either participate in being, cultivate genuine connectedness with reality and others, or we reject being and “participate” in nothingness. The promise of modernity to be whatever you want, at the expense of what is already given, of the truths of human life, of truth itself, deludes us. As a result, we mistake unfreedom for freedom, self-destruction for self-affirmation, nothingness for being.

Gratitude gushes forth from the heart of he who understands the ontological truth of being given the all-encompassing and ever-preceding truth that is precisely about himself, that also unites every person, alive, dead, yet to be born. Reflected in the beauty of the entire cosmos is the goodness of his very being, for it all comes from the same source. When we are inevitably struck by the sight of mist hovering over the morning flowers, the unnamed and irreplicable colors of the evening sunset, the musical relief of a concluding consonance, or even the elegance of a mathematical equation, the meaning of our own existence is simultaneously told. Life is a gift, a free act of grace, in every sense of the word. Noticing that existence is given leads one to marvel at creation, discover meaning, and experience love. Illuminated by the deepest ontological insight is the normative structure to life, starting with gratitude.

William Desmond writes that there is an “ontological patience” that leads one into an “agapeic astonishment,” an astonishment that is not directed towards any particular thing but being itself.4 This ontological patience is something akin to Edmund Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction,” which suspends the assumptions, concepts, and models we readily use so as to view reality anew in a more direct way. It clears the mind, so to speak, for the noticing of the sheer givenness of reality. Jean-Luc Marion, an Driving Home The Flock (1812) Painting by Robert Hills from Birmingham Museum Trust

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important phenomenologist and theologian of our time, famously asserts: “so much reduction, so much givenness.”5 The more you extricate yourself from the particular cognitions, the instrumentalized approach to objects around you, the more you uncover reality’s fundamental givenness and its miracle. Love, joy, thanksgiving, and forgiveness abound. There is no pride nor grudge against someone that is not fundamentally a mistake.

Sartre was without the intuition of being. He takes existence for granted, instead of understanding that it must be understood as a miracle above all else. Consequently, existence is taken as a fact without any information inherent to it. Simultaneously, there appears to be no normative structure to reality, and freedom becomes synonymous with an absolutized subjectivity that can discredit anything without reason and necessitate ingratitude.

The failure to notice being is also a fundamental part of materialism, which seems to be the dominant belief in academic philosophy. Martin Heidegger long noted that the principal failure of philosophy is “its inability to think the ‘ontological difference,’ the difference between being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende).”6 The question of being deals with existence itself, while the question of beings deals with particular objects that exist. Materialism only recognizes the latter. We have been so captivated by what we can know about particular objects and the capacity to fine-tune a specific kind of knowledge about them, that we completely narrowed our minds when it comes to the

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very horizon for their possibilities, i.e., being. What is most amazing and miraculous is not what we can know about certain objects or mechanisms but that “there should be experience at all.”7 In fact, Bonaventure, a Scholastic theologian, already recorded the failure to notice being. Strange is the “blindness of the intellect,” he wrote, “which does not consider that which it sees first and without which it can know nothing.”8 The “mind’s eye,” concentrating on particular beings, does not “advert to being itself,” “even though it comes to our minds first and through it we know other things.”9 Attending only to particular objects, the intellect fails to encounter the question that there should be anything at all, even though the understanding that there is anything at all underlies every inquiry of ours.

Nonetheless, today’s may be a uniquely hostile environment to the intuition of being. There is a hatred for ontological patience. William Desmond describes it as an endeavor for life to flee “from itself, from what it is, from the patience of being that gives it to be at all in the first instance.” “The conditions that make possible its being at all are refused.” Therefore, we find ourselves in “the impossible situation” of “the flower trying to ingest its own ground— impossible, yet were it even conceivable, it would show the inner self-hatred of the flower that must only destroy itself in this way of absolutizing itself.”10 The absolutizing of subjectivity constitutes pride, and pride goes before destruction.11 The denial of being is not only incoherent, but also

Photo by Bailey Zindel from Unsplash.com

WE ARE ALL SINNERS IN THIS WAY. BUT SALVATION IS ALSO ALWAYS OPEN TO US IN THIS WAY. WE ARE CALLED TO REPENT FOR ONTOLOGICAL REASONS. self-destructive. Indeed, it is self-destructive because it is incoherent.

As students, we are repeatedly taught that the self is the existential ultimate, that metaphysics is a bogus discipline. In search of something higher, we can only seem to find complex theories about why we have no souls. Asking what is right, we are told that we already know everything, that the adults need to listen to us instead. We are called to advance justice in the world, and yet we are refused the occasion to ever truly believe in anything, urged to accept instead that the true is conditioned on experience and that the good is only an opinion. We do not know how to hold anything in reverence. Many condemn and declare noble intentions. Few shed a tear for beauty.

But so much denial, so much contradiction. The very act of denying being is possible only because of being. We can only choose not to be because we are. This is the fundamental contradiction of our world. If being is denied, acts that give form to nothingness and emptiness—“things” devoid of being—are endorsed. Objectification, commodification, vanity, deception, sophistry. When we deny our own being, we commit sin. The choice to be nothing is the height of contradictions and the root of all sins. It is possible insofar as self-annihilation is possible. This very possibility reflects the fallenness of our world. It is easy to deny being, to love the things of the world, instead of the horizon for all things. We are all sinners in this way. But salvation is also always open to us in this way. We are called to repent for ontological reasons.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BEING AND THE DIVINE Being does not depend on anything in the world.

But being is not “out” of the world, either. Rather, being transcends the world in sustaining it in an absolute way.

Therefore, being bears both unconditionality towards and intimacy with everything that exists. Bonaventure observed being as having no beginning or end, “as having nothing in itself but being itself and therefore as simple; as having

no possibility and therefore as wholly actual; as having no defect and therefore as entirely perfect; and as having no diversity and therefore as supremely one.”12 Eternal, perfect, one. “I am who I am.”13 Similar things can be said about love. Love does not depend on anything in the world—it does not depend on what we do, what power we have, or who we know. It is ever-forgiving, unconditional. It is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs.14 At the same time, love is intimately engaged with the world—the very opposite of being detached from it. Love allows you to appreciate a person in full, down to the most minute details. Love lacks nothing in itself and seeks nothing—it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud—and so wholly actual and perfect.15 As reality is given, being precedes me. So does love: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.”16 “We love because he first loved us.”17 Love and being are profoundly connected. Indeed, Love is the source of creation that called us into being. “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”18 The intuition of being, again, reveals both the givenness of reality, and a cosmic centrality of my own. This is consistent with the twin characteristics of being and love: both are universally transcendental, and yet intimately particular. Similarly, one the one hand, we are ontologically the same. On the other hand, we are spatially and temporally distinct from one another; there is an individuation of being. We have different first-person “slots” that are ontologically parallel, in the sense that they can never cross or interfere with one another. How can this be? To Schelling, a philosopher controversial for his mysticism, the individuation of being is “the most salient symptom of a metaphysical problematic.” In other words, it points to a problem that is built in our reality. Schelling interpreted it as “the result of a Fall.”19 Existential individuation reveals the theological imperfection of this world. The only way to (re)gain ourselves fully then, is to (re)turn to God, to become one with everyone else. “So we, though many, are one body in THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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Christ, and individually members one of another.”

The natural desire for brotherhood, oneness, unity comes from this. Existentialism or materialism may succeed in deluding one to deny being but neither can take away this desire. As a result, if we do not know how to lose ourselves to that which is higher than all of us, then we lose ourselves to each other, to a commodity culture, or to a political leader. Augusto del Noce was right: the “liberation” from God only leads to the enslavement of men.21 The more we deny being, the more we find ourselves in counterproductive efforts. In the name of freedom, happiness, or unity, we will only become less free, less happy, and further apart from each other.

The modern view of freedom, rooted in a mistaken view of existence, is doomed to result in unhappiness and destruction—but not for any reason other than that the triumph of being (and love) is already ontologically determined. “But where sin increased, grace abounded all the more.”22 The mission, then, is never to defend or to oppose, but to save. We can start by countering the philosophies of our time, but we must do so in love, and we must end by speaking only of love. While the culture today renders our faith in God an inappropriate subject for discourse, it is at the heart of everything, in the literal sense. The postmodern world can find its way back to God, but only if it is honest enough.

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1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism = (L’Existentialisme Est Un Humanisme); Including, a Commentary on The Stranger (Explication de L’Étranger) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 17-72.

William Sweet, “Jacques Maritain,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Published May 1, 2019, Accessed July 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maritain/#Meta.

D.C. Shindler, Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth (Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2018), 63.

William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 196.

Jean-Luc Marion, “The Other First Philosophy and the Question of Givenness,” trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky, Critical Inquiry 25, no.4 (1999): 792, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/1344103.

Robyn Horner, JEAN-LUC MARION: A Theo-Logical Introduction (New York, NY: ROUTLEDGE, 2017), 37.

Gabriel Marcel, The Philosophy of Existence (London, State: Cluny Media, 1949), 146.

Sonia Sikka, Forms of Transcendence: Heidegger and MEDIEVAL Mystical Theology, (Boulder, CO: NetLibrary, Inc., 1999), 34.

Sikka, 34.

Desmond, 197.

Proverbs 16:18 (ESV).

Sikka, 35.

Exodus 3:14 (ESV).

1 Corintheans 13:1 (ESV).

1 Corinthians 13:1 (ESV).

Jeremiah 1:5 (ESV).

1 John 14:9 (ESV).

1 John 4:16 (ESV).

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Idealism and the Endgame of Theory, trans.

Thomas Pfau (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994), 25.

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20.

21.

22.

Romans 12:5 (ESV).

Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. and ed. Carlo Lancellotti (Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014).

Romans 5:20 (ESV).

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"Tree Tunnel" Photo by Stephen Leonardi from Unsplash.com

SWEPT BY THE PASSIONS A Nuanced Look at How Christians View Sin

TONY PEREZ

C

onsider the following scenario: a person is scrolling through some social media site and, by chance, sees a video of a man crossing the street.

The man is then suddenly hit by a bus and the person watching the video laughs. Naturally, we might ask ourselves, “Has the person watching the video done something morally bad?” A way to understand this question is to put it in the context of an already-existing normative system, such as Christianity. For the Christian, the question might be, “has the person watching the video sinned?” In an age of increasingly accurate neurobiological understanding, we are faced with certain realities that would seem to have an implication on our normative beliefs—namely, the more precise linking of physical phenomena to neural phenomena. In this particular case, we must consider whether or not involuntary reactions, such as a person taking pleasure in another person’s pain, is sinful.

In order to answer this question, it is first necessary to describe an account of sin (for which we can take a histor-

ical approach). Second, to analyze the characteristics of the kind of scenario in which we are interested. And third, to determine whether the kinds of scenarios that we have in mind would be considered sinful.

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The Pantheon, Painting by Frederic Edwin Church from Wikimedia Commons

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A BROAD CONCEPTION OF SIN Before looking at a formal definition of sin, we can start with a few observations about the world. First, it seems uncontroversial to say that there are different kinds of action.

On a broad level, the action of drinking cough syrup is obviously different from the action of studying octopodes in a laboratory. Even with actions that seem to have the same outcome, we can differentiate kinds of action by factors about them—for example, we view murder as fundamentally different from manslaughter, even though both cases result in death, because intention seems to matter.

Next, it is common to believe that different actions can be seen as “good” or “bad.” Just as we can say that certain states of affairs are better—e.g., it would be better if no

puppies starved on the street—as humans, we have moral intuitions about the permissibility of certain actions.

Whether or not the actions are bad because they bring about a worse state of affairs, we can certainly say that actions can be bad without reference to these states of affairs.

Granted, not all people would agree with this non-consequentialist reasoning, but many would agree that starving puppies, as a concept, is bad, even if there are no starving puppies that we are observing.

Moving onto intentions, it is obvious that the world is a complicated place and our actions often do more than we anticipated. When we think about what to do, or what we ought to do, there are, without hyperbole, countless factors to consider. For example, if I decide to buy a tomato at the supermarket, perhaps I think that I am doing a good thing because my wife has asked me to bring home a tomato to make dinner. What if, however, by purchasing this particular tomato, I am supporting an unfair labor system on the farm that produced the tomato? We can find ourselves considering so many factors that the action of buying the tomato no longer seems to be the primary focus. Apart from the consequences of the action, there are other seemingly important moral factors. For example, if I have promised my wife that I will be home right after work to celebrate our anniversary, but I see a person on the side of the road whose car will not start and I know that I have jumper cables, can I justify being a little late to my anniversary celebration in order to help this person? As we make the examples more realistic—perhaps my wife gets really anxious about missing dinner reservations, or perhaps the person on the side of the road is in tears over her predicament—the situations begin to resemble life more closely. In short, humans have a lot of data to process when making decisions.

While the complexity of the world certainly makes it harder to know what one ought to do, we can say with high degrees of certainty that some actions are wrong. For example, if Dave, who feels hungry one day, walks by an unattended fruit stand on the sidewalk and decides to take a particularly nice-looking pear, it seems that Dave has done a bad thing. Is this situation as complicated as the other scenarios? Well, in some ways, yes. When faced with the question as to whether Dave should steal the pear, Dave faces the following considerations, among others: Dave is hungry; Dave desires the pear; the pear is the property of another person; the person to whom the pear belongs is absent; and general moral intuitions tell Dave that stealing is wrong. Notice that, even in the absence of Dave’s hunger, there seems to be a decent amount to consider in terms

of reasons to steal the WITH ANY pear or not steal the DECISION THAT pear. With any decision that we make, we WE MAKE, WE are necessarily making ARE NECESSARILY a hierarchy of values MAKING A and then choosing which reasons are HIERARCHY OF most important to us VALUES AND and will ultimately THEN CHOOSING dictate our actions. As WHICH DECISIONS such, when Dave decides to steal the pear, ARE IMPORTANT he values his desire TO US AND WILL, for the pear above the ULTIMATELY, property rights of the DICTATE OUR fruit stand owner and the moral intuition ACTIONS. not to steal. So naturally, despite the complexity of the world, we can say that certain actions are bad.

Moving on to a formal definition, we can look to Doctors of the Catholic Church for informed and fleshed-out views on sin. St. Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church and influential philosopher, systematically dedicates a fair amount of work to the topic of sin in his masterwork, the Summa Theologiae. He defined sin as an “inordinate action that discords with truth and goodness in its intention, object, or circumstances.”1 In this definition, “inordinate” can be read as unordered or disordered. That is to say, an inordinate action is simply a disordered action.

A primary test for knowing whether an action is disordered is whether or not our basic moral intuitions tell us that it is bad.2 For example, most people, regardless of culture, agree that the killing of innocents is a bad, if not evil, act. The killing of innocents, or murder, is not simply evil because it results in a dead person, but because the genus of the action “murder” is itself evil. That is to say, there is no scenario in which one could commit a murder and that said murder could not be an evil action.3 This points towards what is meant by “discords with truth and goodness”; it is an indirect way of saying that the action is against His will (since God is the all-good source of morality and His will necessarily points towards actions whose genus is not fundamentally evil). If an action is ordered, then the action must be, by its genus, good.

Aquinas then gives three characteristics of an action that might make it sinful: intention, object, or circumstances. Intentions are fairly straightforward. If Dave intends to THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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steal the pear from the fruit stand but, just as he’s about to take the fruit, the stand’s owner comes back, leading Dave to abandon the mission. Although Dave did not ultimately steal the fruit, we should certainly be able to say that Dave is still at fault to some degree (as long as he would have taken the fruit, all else being equal). With regards to the object, this is merely what we described when making the distinction between actions whose genus is good or bad. If an action discords with truth and goodness in its object, then the genus of the action is in conflict with truth and goodness and is therefore evil (like the example of murder). Finally, there are actions that are not necessarily bad in their genus, but, nonetheless, lead to bad consequences.

In other words, the circumstances of an action might result in said action being sinful. For example, if Dave gives Mary a banana split, then he has seemingly done a generous act.

If Dave knows, however, that Mary will likely have an allergic reaction to the peanuts in the sundae, then the circumstances tell us that Dave has done something very bad. We should also note that this example need not be affected by Dave’s intentions. Maybe Dave believes that Mary’s allergy is not severe or that she can merely inject herself with an EpiPen afterwards and that she would not be harmed in the slightest. Whether or not Dave’s beliefs are correct, as long as his intentions are not malevolent, then the intentions are not the basis on which we can label his actions a sin, but rather the circumstances surrounding the action.

Having covered Aquinas’s definition of sin, we have a decent foundation on which to approach the question.

There is, however, one important feature of the original video-scrolling example for which we must take account: be the notion of fight-or-flight. When faced with a threat, a the involuntariness of the reaction. given person will either flee the situation or attempt to subdue the threat. The key with fight-or-flight is that the pheAPPETITES AND DESIRES In everyday life humans actively make choices that nomena is spontaneous. That is to say, if there is thought result in action. There are plenty of things, however, that or consideration involved, then we are no longer talking humans do that are not active choices. On a cellular lev- about fight-or-flight. Furthermore, it seems that a person’s el, humans do not consciously choose for mitochondria to personality may have some influence on their reaction. For produce ATP, rather, this occurs by design. The conscious example, if Dave is an MMA fighter and has trained extenchoices towards action that humans take are downstream sively in striking, then his first reaction to a surprise attack from more fundamental processes that may or may not would probably be to fight rather than flee. In other words, inform our behavior. This is to say, I do not choose for Dave might have an inclination towards a certain kind of my stomach to digest my food, but when I choose to eat a action. These kinds of inclinations are extremely common. donut, I know that my body is going to do certain things— After all, we all have natural emotions, desires, or reactions namely digestion—with the donut that I do not have to that arise when faced with a given situation. On a broad level, whenever humans lack sufficient food, they will be consciously dictate.

There are also higher-level processes that may more di- hungry. This hunger is both an appetite in the food sense, rectly affect our behavior. The most common example may but also an appetite in the Thomistic sense.

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Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli from Wikimedia Commons

THE CONSCIOUS CHOICES TOWARDS ACTION THAT HUMANS TAKE ARE DOWNSTREAM FROM MORE FUNDAMENTAL PROCESSES THAT MAY OR MAY NOT INFORM OUR BEHAVIOR. An appetite, as described by Aquinas, refers to “an inclination toward something, something that is both similar and suited to that which it desires.”4 Appetites, as we experience them, encompass urges and our natural reactions to phenomena.5 As Fr. Nicholas Lombardo O.P. points out, Aquinas sees appetite as “inextricably linked to being and goodness,” leading to the startling implication that appetites necessarily point towards goodness.6 This is not to say that appetites will always lead us to good acts, but that, properly oriented, our appetites push us in the direction of goodness.

Looking at the opening example, laughter, and the proclivity to do so, is certainly an appetite (in the sense that one is inclined to laugh under certain circumstances). Properly ordered, humans would laugh at good things. Perhaps a good joke at a comedy club or laughing from happiness while watching one’s children having fun on a swing set. It is completely possible, though, that our appetites—including the appetite for laughter—can respond to the wrong thing. Perhaps my coworker tells me about a particularly contentious encounter that he had with his spouse. I find the misery in his life to be particularly funny and so I laugh.

Having now understood sin—as disordered willful action—and appetites—as oriented towards the good—and having made clear that our appetites can be manifested in ways other than the goodness towards which the appetites are ordered, the question remains: Is the imperfectly exercised appetite sinful?

APPETITES AND SIN The most important factor in considering whether an exercised appetite can be sinful is whether or not appetites are actions. After all, if an appetite is not an action, then it cannot be sinful, since a sin is an inordinate action (keyword “action”) that discords with truth and goodness.

As we discussed earlier, there are different levels of action. There are things that the body does naturally or automatically, and then there are actions that require an intention. The first can be considered “acts of a human” (e.g. blinking) and the latter “human acts,” that is, actions that require a command of the will (e.g. choosing to blink).

The Thomistic definition that we have been using utilizes “action” in the intentional sense, not the passive sense.

Therefore, an appetite, being a passive action, would not be sinful. Enough said? Well, not quite. While the appetites can certainly be passive in the sense that they are a response to stimuli, our appetites can also lead to action.

Consider the following. Perhaps Dave is at a Thanksgiving dinner with his family who always tease him about not having a girlfriend. Feeling a desire to lessen his discomfort, Dave instinctually eats large amounts of turkey and other Thanksgiving-related things to the point that he feels sick.

While the desire to eat a lot of food to escape from anxiety is certainly an instance of appetite—in the sense that he is inclined towards an action, which just so happens to be eating—further indulgence in this action could occur. Perhaps Dave realizes that he can make his anxiety temporarily go away by eating so, whenever he has a rough day, he goes out and consumes as much food as he can. This would be a transition from a passive appetite (and responsive action) to an action of the will spurred by an appetite.

In other words, appetites have two potential manifestations. The first way is a manifestation by way of reaction.

The second is a manifestation by way of intentional action.

Only the second, by virtue of being intentional, is eligible for moral consideration, and therefore potentially sinful.

Going back to the laughter example; if I laugh at the video when it comes across my screen, I am not morally responsible for this reaction. Even though my laughter manifests an inordinate reaction of my appetites, this can lead to educating my sense of humor when I notice and then correcting my reaction. As such, I would be responsible for laughter if I decided to seek out more instances of people being run over by cars in order to fulfill my desire to laugh. Why? Well, the appetitive desire of laughter desires a certain kind of laughter in order to be satisfied—perhaps a particularly witty satire comic. Similar to how one can eat alarming amounts of potato chips in an attempt to address hunger, one can stimulate one’s appetite with an inadequate source and thus fail to accomplish that towards which our appetites would ideally push us.7 When we recognize the THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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satisfying and unsatisfying APPETITES HAVE TWO POTENTIAL stimulants to our appetites, MANIFESTATIONS. we can better order ourselves THE FIRST WAY IS A so as to value the satisfying MANIFESTATION BY stimulant—much like how WAY OF REACTION. THE SECOND IS A we can make a habit of eatMANIFESTATION ing healthy, satisfying food

BY WAY OF instead of unsatisfying but INTENTIONAL filling junk food.

ACTION. SINS OF THE HEART Is our work here done? Well, not quite. Thomas Hurka, a prominent philosopher in axiology, has pointed out that the notion of considering involuntary internal reactions to be morally bad is remarkably similar to the Christian notion of “sins of the heart.”8 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus famously presents the idea that a person can sin without doing anything: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”9

The problem with sins of the heart, according to Hurka, is that we rarely or ever have direct control over our emotions, so it seems absurd to say that we can be held morally responsible for them.

Consider a stronger example than the violent video: let us say that Dave, a married man, is scrolling through some social media site and comes across a targeted ad advertising sexual partners in his area along with a suggestive picture of a woman. Upon seeing the picture, Dave is aroused.

Putting aside Christian views on how sexuality ought to be approached, there is a reasonable position that says that Dave—especially since he is married—should not be entertaining thoughts about having sex with other women or deriving sexual pleasure from women other than his wife.

But Dave did not decide to be aroused. It was simply a natural reaction, so how can we say that Dave has sinned?

Well, we cannot really say that he has sinned (unless he has the intention to pursue the ad). This may seem counterintuitive, but the distinction lies in a key element of “sins of the heart.”

Properly understood, sins of the heart are sins, and therefore must be voluntary actions. These actions, however, are confined to the mind—or heart, as it were—and do not enter the physical world.10 In other words, there are some intentional actions that do not necessarily have an 30

THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

A Statue of Christ Carrying the Cross by Wesley Tingey from Unsplash.com

effect on the physical world. Perhaps Dave actually knew that Mary was allergic to peanuts and so he plotted to give her peanuts later that day in order to end her life. If this was discovered, Dave could ostensibly face legal persecution for intending to kill Mary.11 In any case, the Christian parallel here goes back to a different category of sin from Aquinas’s definition, namely intention. Recall that a sin is an inordinate action that discords with truth and goodness in its intention, object, or circumstance. It is enough for Dave to have the intention to induce death-by-peanut to be guilty of moral transgression—granted, it is a lesser degree of guilt than that of a completed action.

Going back to the example in which Dave derives pleasure from seeing pornographic material, Dave has not sinned. If Dave were to go on pornographic sites, however, looking for women with which to have an affair, or simply searching for more images of women to give him pleasure, then he would indeed be sinning because at this point, the action stems not from a passive appetite, but an action of will spurred by appetites. To be clear, Dave does not sin when he derives pleasure from that which he seeks out, but rather, Dave sins when he has the intention to have an affair or find the pornographic material, whether or not he goes through with it (much like the case where Dave intends to steal the pear, but the storeowner returns).12 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS While contemporary neuroscience has certainly taught us a lot about the mind and how humans navigate the world, we need to be careful when applying these discoveries to our morality. There is a broader question regarding freedom of will when certain movements or actions can be induced by firing synapses in the brain. In a narrower way, we can assume free will and ask questions about where exactly the line lies for morally weighty actions and reactions.

As we have seen, it can be easy to assume that Christians are unreasonably rigid in their interpretations of good and bad—morally laudatory and sinful. This is not to say that some Christian groups may have differing views that are less nuanced, but the reality is that a cursory glance at some of the intellectual giants of the faith—such as Thomas Aquinas—reveals a reasonable picture that holds up remarkably well.

It can be tempting to paint Christians as being “stuckup.” After all, are not Christians the ones who usually oppose sex and pornography and drunkenness and eating meat on Fridays (in some cases)? Well, in some of these cases, Christians would oppose the action, but not because feeling emotion is bad. Quite the opposite. Many Chris-

tians recognize that things like pleasure and whatnot are not only enjoyable, but actually good. Going back to Aquinas’s belief about appetites—they are good! Not only are they good, but our natural desires and inclinations are meant to point us towards God. Christians, like many other groups, however, recognize that our minds can be tricked into valuing many things that ought not be valued. A lot of the work in Christianity, as a tool for normative understanding, is forming our desires so that they lead us towards good, satisfying ends, not towards hollow dissatisfaction. It is not bad in the slightest to laugh, we just need to make sure that we form our appetites to respond to the right things and, thereby, more closely fulfill what God would have of us.13 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

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11.

12.

13.

Thomas Petri, “Vice and SIN (AQUINAS 101),” (April 6, 2020,) on Youtube, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=iak1LdRl_0g; Another definition, also heavily historical, comes from St. Augustine of Hippo and is cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Sin is ‘a word, an act, or a desire contrary to the eternal Law’ (Saint Augustine) . . . It is an offense against God in disobedience to his love,’ ” (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Paragraph 392.” Essay. In Compendium: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 114–14. Washington, DC: USCCB Publishing, 2006).

This is not to say that objective morality can be perfectly deduced by looking at any given person’s moral intuitions. We can certainly be flawed in our thinking, but the moral intuitions, especially if common, give us a good reason to think that we know the moral status of an action.

Notice that this does not touch the question of whether or not an evil action can be justified by something else such as consequences. This is a much larger question and pertains to normative ethics. We will not be covering it seeing as our project is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Thomas Aquinas, St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1948), 626–26.

While Aquinas describes three different kinds of appetites, two in particular are important for us: sense appetites and rational appetites. Sense appetites are the kinds of reactions that I’ve described thus far (examples of humans reacting to stimuli).

Nicholas E Lombardo, The Logic Of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion, (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), 28–28.

It is worth reiterating that much of this presupposes an ideal behavior or objective morality. We can put this much larger debate aside for the moment and simply rely on the commonly held view that some actions are better than others—even most people who adhere to some form of moral relativism acknowledge that there are limiting principles in some cases.

Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press Inc, 2003), 166–66.

Matthew 5:27-28 (NASB2020).

Someone could make an argument about thoughts being physically reducible to neurons firing, but it is hard to see how this changes anything. Whether or not we can observe physical phenomena concurrent with conscious thoughts is irrelevant; what we care about is that the firing neurons do not interact with the physical world viz. the agent doing a non-conscious action. This broader conversation pertains to the philosophy of mind and consciousness and is beyond the scope of this article.

Granted, one might say that a court would never convict Dave without evidence that he was trying to kill Mary. However, the supplementary actions that Dave enacts are only relevant insofar as they help establish certainty over his intentions. If he wrote down the plans on a napkin, he would not be tried for writing on a napkin, but for the intention to murder that the napkin helps to prove.

It is worth mentioning explicitly that sins of the heart are not a subcategory separate from the “intention, object, or circumstances” laid out in our formal definition, but rather, “sins of the heart” fall under the category encompassed by “intention.”

A big thank you for Isaiah Menning and Fr. Timothy Danaher O.P. for reading earlier versions of this paper and providing feedback.

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DAMNED SALVATION Catholic Theology in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory

JOSEPH COLLUM

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ringing up theology in discussions or citing papal bulls or even Bible verses often invites glazedover eyes and robotic nods. Even for those within the Christian faith, the detailed beliefs of the Church do not seem crucial. Any theology beyond “Christ was born, Christ died for me, and Christ is risen,” feels like inside baseball—knowledge for preachers and priests but not crucial to an individual’s faith. Philosophical definitions of sin, salvation, and sacraments seem unnecessary. This simple view of the faith can still yield great reward and humility, but only to an extent. Looking to Scripture, the Epistles indicate the need for a complex understanding of the Christian faith. Saint Paul spent much of his ministry correcting the early Church’s misinterpretations of the details of faith and underlining the importance of this veracity in establishing a relationship with Christ. Theology, while seemingly heady and impractical, exists as the foundation of the faith, the orthodoxy that leads to orthopraxy. The details of Christian theology are relevant to life, from vocation to access to divine grace, and writing it off as intangible and purely intellectual misses the foundation of the Christian faith.

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The Power and the Glory marks the second of Graham Greene’s four “Catholic novels.” Greene, a convert to Catholicism, gained a name in the literary world through his journalism and mystery novels prior to writing stories centered around his faith. Greene’s Catholicism had its own peculiar tint; like the characters in his novels, he fervently believed in the faith but struggled to follow Catholic morals. The End of the Affair and The Heart of the Matter, two of the other Catholic novels, deal with faith and marital infidelity, two things that he struggled with his entire adult life.1 Literary analysis should generally steer away from the author’s personal life, especially since it could sully the analysis to feel more like gossip instead of critical investigation.

In Greene’s case, however, it is necessary to note his personal struggle since it highlights something of the utmost importance when looking at his novels. Catholic theology and catechism teaching on sexual morality and gradation of sin was more than just a set of stuffy bullet points to him—theology had vitality for Greene.

Set in Chiapas, Mexico in the 1930s, The Power and the Glory follows the final priest in a state occupied by a revolutionary military government that has outlawed

the Catholic church and executed any priests who did not in phrase ex opere operato, literally translated to “from the disavow their faith and take a wife. The drama of The Power work performed,” emphasizing the administration or work and the Glory centers around a theological dilemma: “the rather than the administrator. In Pope Pius XI’s papal enwhisky priest,” as the only remaining priest in the state, cyclical entitled “On the Catholic Priesthood,” he states: stands solely responsible for providing salvific sacraments Nor must it be forgotten that personal unworthiness to the citizens of Chiapas but, having fathered a child while does not hinder the priest’s ministry. For the unworthiness under vows of celibacy, he remains in an incurable state of of the minister does not make void the Sacraments he admortal sin since there is no confessor available to him. This ministers; since the Sacraments derive their efficacy from conflict presents profound theological nuances surround- the Blood of Christ, independently of sanctity of the ining sin and damnation, as well as the sacraments and salva- strument, or, as scholastic language expresses it, the Sacration, but more importantly lends life and visceral relevance ments work their effect ex opere operato.4 to that theology. Theology guides every choice the whisky In other words, God can use a dirty vessel to convey the priest makes, and every choice is a life-or-death decision as Sacrament to His flock. The whisky priest, as the last priest the military follows his every move. In this way, The Power in Chiapas, takes on this role, but with the heavy weight of and the Glory demonstrates that theology is more than dry unconfessed mortal sin. rules and esoteric musings, but rather While the clinical theological terms tangible and crucial to life. and definitions referenced by Greene’s WITHOUT The analysis in this article will cennovel carry part of the narrative, the CONFESSION, THE ter around a few theological terms. In heart of the drama lies in the characters WHISKY PRIEST, Catholic theology, mortal sin includes themselves. Understanding how this any sin that, without repentance, intheology weighs on the whisky priest HAVING BROKEN tentionally separates the sinner from only comes through an analysis of the THE PRIESTLY Christ and thereby from salvation. The priest’s actions and interior monologue, VOW OF CELIBACY, Sacrament of Reconciliation, or more a deeply moving and heavy task. In Part REMAINS IN A STATE colloquially Confession, acts as the sole II of the novel, Greene shows the priest remedy for sin, including mortal sin, on his way to the town where he had OF MORTAL SIN, with the priest acting as Christ’s vesSEPARATED FROM pastored, the town in which his illegitsel on Earth to forgive sins and thus imate child and her mother live. After CHRIST. bring the sinner back into relationship slogging for twelve hours on a mule, with Christ.2 Without Confession, the he approaches the town with some whisky priest, having broken his priestly vow of celibacy, optimism, but even that optimism heightens his guilt. He remains in a state of mortal sin, separated from Christ. damns himself, giving into the despair of mortal sin as he While Catholic theology cannot absolutely determine the recognizes his position outside God’s grace, “He was a bad salvation or damnation of someone’s soul, unconfessed priest, he knew it. They had a word for his kind—a whisky mortal sin gives the clearest indication of damnation. This priest . . . . One day his [failures] would choke up, he suparticle does not, however, assume or try to determine his posed, altogether the source of grace.”5 salvation status because, in the words of Greene himself, This particular town is more than a place where he “You cannot conceive nor can I the appalling strangeness served as pastor before the government persecution of the of the mercy of God.”3 Putting the whisky priest firmly in church—it holds the root of his sin but also a deep-seated Heaven or Hell misses the point—Christ can still extend love. His sin does not take an intangible form such as pride mercy to this priest who has damned himself by his own or gluttony. His sin manifests in the form of his daughter actions. This article only deals with the explicit interplay which comments on the strangeness of God’s mercy as he between Greene’s novel and Catholic theology, making no cannot help but love his daughter even though the sight of extrapolations or assumptions not laid out by Greene, the her reminds him of his separation from Christ. He simultaCatechism, or Scripture. neously feels the weight of his sin and his love whenever he Beyond the baseline definition of mortal sin in theol- sees her, “‘How’s Brigitta?’ His heart jumped at the name: a ogy, the concept has further implications when applied to sin may have enormous consequences.”6 This quote shows the priesthood. These implications are rooted in the Lat- the heart of this novel—the profound heartbreak of the The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene - Book Cover

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whisky priest’s love for his daughter separating him from the love of Christ. She stands like a specter over this scene and the novel as a whole, as the whisky priest’s sin haunts his life until he can repent and confess. Even as he descends back into his priestly position, with the parishioners kissing his hand, he recalls the memory of Brigitta and the memory of his sins which disallow him from honestly fulfilling his theological status as a priest, “He said, ‘I am glad to see you . . . ’ he was going to say ‘my children,’ but then it seemed to him that only the childless man has the right to call strangers his children.”7 He lives in a state of constant despair with little hope for repentance or redemption because of the looming presence of his sin.

The whisky priest does not even recognize his child, the embodiment of his sin, an indication of how little remorse he feels and therefore how far he stands from repentance, “He couldn’t believe that he hadn’t recognized her. It was making light of his mortal sin: you couldn’t do a thing like that and then not even recognize.”8 More than just a symbol for his supposed inability to repent, when taken at face value the image Greene draws in this scene is deeply moving. Greene describes a man not even recognizing his own daughter. This man took vows to never have a daughter, and now that he does, this girl he cannot help but love only reminds him of his sins. The whisky priest can never see Brigitta without the deepest pain, the pain of separation from Christ, so he distances himself from her, leading to the heartbreak of not even recognizing her.

In the whisky priest’s encounters with Brigitta herself, Greene describes her as a haunting, spectral figure with a certain vindictive quality. On his way out of the town, he encounters the girl and says, “‘My dear, what is the matter with you . . . ?’ . . . ‘You . . . you . . .’ ‘Me?’ ‘You are the matter.’”9 Once again, Greene unflinchingly shows the devastation of mortal sin, leading a five-year-old daughter to despise her father’s very existence. The whisky priest still feels a deep connection to her, even as she rejects him, “He came a little nearer; he thought—a man may kiss his own daughter, but she started away from him. ‘Don’t you touch me,’ she screeched at him in her ancient voice and gig-

gled.”10 She takes on the role of embodying his sin, punishing him with vicious reminders of his guilt and destroying a possibly redemptive love. Greene writes about heartbreak in this scene, with the whisky priest desiring to redeem himself through his love for his daughter, but of course this love goes nowhere without the true repentance and reconciliation found in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Brigitta brings to life the theological consequences surrounding mortal sin and separation from Christ and the despair the whiskey priest feels because of that separation.

Apart from the whisky priest, The Power and the Glory’s most crucial character is referred to as “the mestizo.”11 This character reads most simply as a representation for Judas Iscariot, Christ’s disciple and betrayer, with the whisky priest serving as a fallen, Christ-parallel character. Like the inescapable shadow of sin that the priest sees in his daughter, the mestizo keeps showing up over the priest’s

THIS MAN TOOK VOWS TO NEVER HAVE A DAUGHTER, AND NOW THAT HE DOES, THIS GIRL HE CANNOT HELP BUT LOVE ONLY REMINDS HIM OF HIS SINS. 34

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shoulder, demanding his help, his prayers, calling on his priestly duties. He somehow intuitively knows the whisky priest’s occupation. On the surface, Greene attributes this recognition to the whisky priest’s education, but the scene also shows the undeniable mark of the Sacrament of Holy Orders on the priest. In the Catholic Church, the Sacrament of Holy Orders confers the priesthood on the recipient and includes a taking of vows, including the vow of chastity. The priesthood is meant to act as Christ’s vessel on Earth in service of His people through the sacraments.12 Even in his sinful state and without his clerics, the mestizo knows the whisky priest as a member of Christ’s priesthood, the theology of the Sacrament leaving an indelible mark.

As they journey through the forest together, the mestizo continues to call him a priest, waiting for him to crack and admit his ordination. He falls ill and calls on the whisky priest to give him Communion and even begins to confess his sins. The priest continues to deny his priesthood, but something happens as the mestizo grows more ill. The priest lets the man ride on the mule and holds him up in the saddle as he grows weaker. As he does so, Greene dePhoto by Annie Theby from Unsplash.com

scribes, “the night had been noisy, but now all was quiet. It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never heard before--peace. A voice said, ‘You are the priest, aren’t you?’ ‘Yes.’”13 The whisky priest finds the courage to accept the reality of his vows in this moment of service, fulfilling the Catechism’s definition of the priesthood, in persona Christi, or acting in the very person of Christ. Just as Christ acted as a self-sacrificing servant, in this moment of service the whiskey priest accepts his vows, likely also accepting the same sacrifice of life as Christ, as the mestizo has already shown that he knows about the reward the government has put on the whisky priest’s life. Even though he fights against it, the theology of the Sacrament of Holy Orders grips the priest and impacts his every waking and unwaking moment.

Before tracing this story to where the whisky priest’s vows of Holy Orders take him, analyzing the role of the priest in the Anointing of the Sick provides a new look at Greene’s priest’s situation. Catholics receive this Sacrament at any point of serious illness or possibility of death. The THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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Sacrament of Holy Orders which the priest receives at his ordination gives him the power and duty to bestow this Sacrament and the other Sacraments, the very fiber of the Catholic faith, on the lives of those whom he serves in persona Christi.14 The Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick holds centerstage in the climax of The Power and the Glory. After meeting the mother and the child shot by the American, the whisky priest somewhat miraculously stumbles into a neighboring Mexican state in which the government has not banned the faith. It seems he has escaped—he rests with a local family and even makes plans to go into the city, with the possibility of regaining his leisurely life as a parish priest, going to confession, being called “father” by his parishioners again. He gets to the mules meant to take him to the city, and the mestizo stands by one of them with the message that his priestly duties are needed back across the

WITHOUT CHRIST, WITHOUT THE CLOSENESS TO CHRIST WHICH THE SAINTS EXPERIENCE, NOTHING ELSE “COUNTS.”

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border. The American fugitive, a Catholic, and a murderer in the state of mortal sin, lies dying in the mountains, in need of the Anointing of the Sick.15 The whisky priest ignores the mestizo and heads to Las Casas—at first. But when the mestizo hands him a note, supposedly written in the hand of the American, the priest begins to change his mind. The note only says, “For Christ’s sake, father,” but that plea calls on exactly what the priest had sworn to do with his life—administer the Sacraments “for Christ’s sake,” in persona Christi.16 Christ gave his life in order that humankind might have eternal life. For the whisky priest, acting in persona Christi means giving his life in order that this American might have Confession and Anointing of the Sick, opening the doors of eternal life to the sinner, an opportunity that he himself seems to be lacking. The priest turns around and goes back across the border to the American. The American will not confess, instead focuses on trying to save the priest, repeatedly telling him to “beat it” even after the priest reminds him his sin “only belongs to this life, a few years—it’s over already. You can drop it all here, in this hut, and go on forever.”17 The American refuses the Sacrament, the one thing the priest can do even in his sinful state since the Sacrament works ex opere operato. The priest gives a conditional absolution in case the American repented without Confession, and then the American dies. The military envoy who had chased the

Extreme Unction (1638-1640) by Nicolas Poussin from Wikimedia Commons

priest the entire novel shows up and takes him to prison.

The final lines Greene dedicates to the priest are these: “He knew now at the end there was only one thing that counted—to be a saint.”18 He thinks this while sitting in a cell clutching his brandy bottle, with no access to the Sacraments and shut off from Christ by product of his sin. He is executed by the guards. Sainthood represents the opposite of the whisky priest’s final state on Earth. In Catholic theology, the saints embody the closest communion with Christ accessible to humanity. As he dies, the whisky priest finds a moment of clarity, recognizing his separation from Christ through his sin as the greatest tragedy of his life. Without Christ, without the closeness to Christ which the saints experience, nothing else “counts.” He feels the full impact of his mortal sin alone in a cell, waiting for his execution— without Christ, the full realization of his sin bears down on him as he recognizes how his own choices brought such profound heartbreak. He did not become a saint, and the closeness to Christ found in sainthood was all that counted.

Greene does not give much room for redemption in the whisky priest’s death. He paints a painfully bleak, lonely picture of the end of the sinner priest’s life, but while Greene might disallow the possibility of redemption in this novel, Christ does not. In Catholic theology, the whisky priest still lies in the gray area of salvation, as only God knows the eternal state of someone’s soul. Greene put it well in his novel Brighton Rock—the mercy of God appears simultaneously “strange,” “appalling,” and, most of all, “inconceivable.”19 While the whisky priest’s misery in his separation from Christ by mortal sin is certainly justified, Christ Himself, in His mercy, gives the final judgement.

Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory creates a drama set in complex theology without the subject ever once feeling like anything other than practical, real life. The whisky priest’s status in life, his priesthood, puts his very life at risk, and along with that, his soul, as he has no access to the sacraments while facing death. The vital theology of ex opere operato, the inner workings of the Eucharist and Anointing of the Sick, and the Sacrament of Holy Orders, all take on the form of something greater than heady intellectualism. In the whisky priest’s life, theology creates a drama and ultimately a tragedy, leaving him heartbroken, alone and separated from Christ. Theology becomes faith and life itself within the pages of Greene’s novel, amending any misconceptions that theology exists as an impractical intellectual exercise. Through an in-depth reading of Greene’s text, theology appears in its truest form—the very foundation of religion, the air which faith breathes.

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Ruth Franklin, “God in the Details: Graham Greene’s religious realism,” The New Yorker, September 26, 2004. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/10/04/ god-in-the-details.

“General Council of Trent: Fourteenth Session.” Papal Encyclicals, last updated February 20, 2020, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/fourteenth-session.htm.

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, (New York: Penguin, 1991), 246.

Pope Pius XI, “On the Catholic Priesthood,” Papal Encyclicals, last updated February 20, 2020, https://www.papalencyclicals.net/pius11/p11catho.htm.

Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, (New York: Penguin, 1991), 63–64.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 65.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 66.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 69.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 84.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 85.

“Mestizo” is a word that developed in Central America to refer to someone of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent. Greene using solely this character’s race to characterize him is admittedly undesirable, but this article will continue to use the term as it is the only name Greene gives the character.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition, 1581-1589.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 103.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd edition, 1517-1519.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 155–180.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 181.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 190–191.

Greene, The Power and the Glory, 211.

Greene, Brighton Rock, 246.

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Let Me Be Your Island Elizabeth Hadley

Lately, every time your head hits the pillow, your eyes shutter closed without talking to me first.

You used to always say something, whisper anything, utter your gratitudes in between your muffled snores.

No matter what day I brought, I was always the last thought on your mind, the thing that brought you comfort, the thing that brought you peace.

I was your anchor.

What happened?

Why have you drifted?

Why have you left My warm embrace?

When did talking to Me become a chore,

an obligation?

I try to call out to you, but My shouts seem to be washed away— illegible— like letters hastily scratched into the sand before the wave swallows them up.

I bring pockets of sunshine into your life to pull you in from the stormy tide, but, for some reason, you insist on treading your own, on swimming further and further from the shore— further and further from Me. But know that when you swim so far you lose sight of the shore, when you swim so far your legs begin to fail, and your arms can’t bear your weight any longer, with My own right hand, I’ll build an island, just for you.

I’ll emerge a rock, from the depths of the ocean, just so you have a place to rest.

When you feel like I’m the one that left, know that I’m right here, I always am.

When you feel like you can’t look in the mirror, know that I see Myself in you, every day, even the ones you don’t talk to Me. When you finally decide to come back to Me, to swim back to My unwavering love and My boundless embrace, know that I will be here, I always am.

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Perseverance by Elizabeth Hadley

Habits

Elizabeth Hadley I notice every time you kiss me goodnight and you don’t say I love you.

Its absence feels like a knife to the chest.

Like I’m a piece of paper wrinkled too many times.

It’s almost like I can hear them . . .

It’s almost like I see them hiding behind your teeth, waiting for your next exhale.

They’re almost there, but they’re not.

I don’t say them either.

I'm waiting for you to lead, but I should know that we’re both just too stubborn to say it first.

The silence fills the space between us and soon you’re no longer at my door and soon it’s New Year’s Day and soon the space between us just continues to grow . . .

When did we become so flawed?

When did our love become a game, a power struggle?

When did it become a thought and not a habit to say I love you

Relief by Elizabeth Hadley

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Can Modern Enlightened People Really Engage Authentically with the Religion of the Apostles?

A Review of Stephen De Young’s The Religion of the Apostles

DR. JONATHAN ELLIOTT

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odern society has benefited greatly from an emphasis on empirical observation and analytical reasoning that emerged from the Enlightenment. Our Contemporary Age is characterized by a high proficiency for solving logical problems, performing feats of engineering and computation, and making scientific and medical discoveries. With notable exceptions during 20th century war, technological advances have improved overall quality of life and helped to avoid untimely death by diseases and unsafe working conditions. These gains have been so profound that even the most economically disadvantaged in the US will arguably have a standard of living exceeding that of princes and dukes a few centuries ago. However, in exchange for this affluence, humanity has lost something important: a sacramental and enchanted view of the world.

In our current age, the supernatural and non-material are de-emphasized, de-mysticized, disenchanted; they are relegated to the realm of ancient superstition not worth consideration by modern thinking people. Operating within this materialist cultural milieu, the modern Christian experience has been unavoidably altered. Biblical narratives and 40

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theological dogmas have been reasoned, rationalized, and allegorized, if not dismissed outright. Sacraments like baptism and the eucharist are more commonly thought of as “symbols”—not in the original sense of the word (sym-bolon “to throw together” or make manifest the totality of spiritual and material reality) but as visual representations of a mental concept or idea. Faith itself seems to have been reduced to a process of formal argumentation to convince oneself internally that God exists.

The impact of this Faustian bargain has been far-reaching. While it might be scandalous to say so, most contemporary modern Christians, if they examined their day-today lives honestly, would conclude that their belief system is functionally materialist (also called physicalist: that nothing exists except physical matter and its movements and modifications) with some exceptions on Sunday morning. They operate quite comfortably at work, in public, and during leisure without much thought about the divine or supernatural. Occasionally, during Sunday worship, or privately in the throes of a life crisis, they might temporarily replace this functionally materialistic framework for a supernatu-

ral one, hoping that an otherwise distant God would hear their plea and break through with a miracle. Outside these exceptions, however, the modern Christian’s life is more or less indistinguishable from their non-religious neighbors.

To put it bluntly, they live like atheists with brackets.

If that characterization is accurate, how can an authentic understanding of, and participation in, the Christian faith be recovered? Is it even possible, or has that ship sailed long ago? Like the men in J.R.R. Tolkien’s parable about reductionism in his 1936 lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” is the modern Christian forever consigned to examining a muddle of toppled-over stones not perceiving that they once formed a tower from the top of which man had been able to look upon the sea?1 A sizable and growing movement of contemporary theologians, intellectuals, artists, and writers are pushing back on this seemingly inevitable fate by addressing this very question of how to re-enchant the Christian faith. It seems to resonate with a growing number of individuals seeking to escape the flat world of materialism and recover a life infused with mystery, meaning, and participation in the sacred and sacramental. Author Fr. Stephen De Young is one such proponent, well known amongst English-speaking Orthodox Christians for his podcast “Lord of Spirits” on Ancient Faith Radio. His first book entitled The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century fits squarely within this movement of re-enchantment. In this book, De Young argues that to re-enchant Christianity, we need to understand how the Apostles and the Jewish communities at the time of Christ actually understood the world and allow that framework to be restored for Christianity today.2 De Young has produced an immensely readable and accessible tour de force drawing on more than 1200 scriptural verses from the Old and New Testament and from the extracanonical books to support his arguments.3 The result is a systematic explanation of Orthodox theology built on scriptural exegesis that is both patristic and refreshing.

The Religion of the Apostles aims to show continuity between Second Temple Judaisms and the Christian religion,

and it leverages recent scholarship from figures like Daniel Boyarin, Alan Segal, Israel Yuval, NT Wright, Michael Heisner, Jacob Neusner, and Richard Bauckham to do so.4 Contrary to popular belief, De Young contends that Christianity did not evolve as an Hegelian synthesis of Jewish intolerant monotheism and philosophical Hellenic polytheism.5 This idea of a slow march from superstitious ancient religion to some ideal of Christian rationalism conveys a modern bias that doesn’t line up with history. Instead, De Young argues that doctrines today which we would consider uniquely Christian (e.g., trinitarianism, the hypostatic union of God and man in the incarnation, the virgin mother, the enthronement of Christ, and delegation of authority to a divine council of holy ones) are clearly presented in the books of the Old Testament.6 Furthermore, a collection of Second Temple literature (intertestamental Jewish writing), such as the Books of Enoch and Jubilees, as well as 1st and 2nd century AD works like I and II Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Apocalypse of Abraham, suggest that Judeans commonly held these ideas at the time of the New Testament writing.7 Indeed, De Young argues that, for the majority of individuals following a Second Temple religion, while there was only one Yahweh, he existed in multiple persons. The implications of this were being actively worked out in both the writings of this period and in the oral teachings of Rabbinic Judaism codified in the Talmud centuries later, which ultimately defined Judaism as rigidly unitarian and monotheistic in response to Christian teaching.8 The relationship between Second Temple literature and the beliefs of various Judaisms at the start of the 1st century AD is controversial, and this book clearly plants itself in one camp that Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity developed out of, and reacted to, each other.9 After reading The Religion of the Apostles, I found myself reconsidering familiar scriptural passages with a new perspective. Consider, for example, Psalm 81(82) which opens with the following verse: “God stood in a gathering of gods, but in their midst he discerningly judges gods” and a few verses later, “I said, ‘Gods you are, and sons of the Most High, but you all are dying like human beings, and like one of the rulers you fall.’”10 The term ‘gods’ (elohim) in this passage is commonly understood as majestic language used to describe poetically the relationship between Yahweh and

“RE-ENCHANTING” THE CHRISTIAN FAITH SEEMS TO RESONATE WITH A GROWING NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS SEEKING TO ESCAPE THE FLAT WORLD OF MATERIALISM. The Heart of the Andes, Painting by Frederic Edwin Church Wikimedia Commons

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earthly rulers, which the

CAN REASONABLE psalmist borrowed from AND EDUCATED the pantheon imagery of PEOPLE ENCOUNTER contemporary near-east AND INTERACT religion.11 Of course, this conclusion is logical WITH STORIES if Yahweh was the only ABOUT ANGELS, god experienced by a DEMONS, GIANTS, monotheistic and uniAND ANCIENT NEARtarian Israel.12 However, EAST COSMOLOGY as previously explained, AS THE AUTHORS De Young rejects this INTENDED? assumption as a product

of modern recency and confirmation biases. He argues that Israel was not monotheistic (for one, that word ‘monotheism’ isn’t used until the mid-17th century) but more accurately could be termed monolatric (i.e., that they believed many gods existed, and Yahweh, being the only one worthy of worship, was like none other).13 Furthermore, referencing the work of Segal and Boyarin, De Young shows that Israel was quite comfortable with the idea of multiple hypostasis (persons) of Yahweh. If that sounds surprisingly close to trinitarian theology, it’s because it is. To a monolatrous binitarian Israel, the opening verse of Psalm 81(82) can be understood quite plainly: The Most High God, having divided the nations of the world “according to the number of divine sons (i.e., divine beings),” is described rendering judgment on these divine beings who, having been assigned these nations in

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the divine council, subsequently rebelled and became the corrupt gods worshiped by nations like Greece and Persia.14 Prophetically, Deuteronomy 32 and Psalm 81(82) explain that these divine beings will be judged by Yahweh, and the reconciliation of the nations will be brought about through “[Yahweh’s] allotted inheritance, Israel.”15 The book is laid out in a pattern reminiscent of a systematic theology textbook (an affinity for which may have developed during his time as a Reformed pastor, before he was ordained an Orthodox priest). De Young moves seamlessly through book sections like “The Godhead,” “God’s Divine Council,” “Creation and Salvation,” and “God’s People and His Law.” In each, he provides a thorough treatment of each topic and associated scriptural verses through the lens of a 1st century BC Palestinian comfortable interacting with both the material plane and the supernatural plane without any of the modern world religions categories like monotheism or polytheism. In a particularly compelling introductory chapter, De Young reframes St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus not as a conversion at all, but rather, as a calling through revelatory vision in the same manner as Isaiah and Ezekiel (which is alluded to in the language St. Paul uses in Gal 1:15-16).16 For St. Paul then, his Damascene conversion is the revelation that Jesus Christ is not only the Davidic messiah but the very same second person of Yahweh in the Scriptures who walked with Adam in Eden, spoke with Moses at Mt Horeb, and visited Abraham at the Oak of Mamre.17 The Messianic age had been ushered in when Christ took upon Himself hu-

Council of Chalcedon from The Scriptorium Daily

man nature and redeemed the world through His death, as the perfect act of purgation to heal and sanctify the cosmos, to gather up the scattered nations, and to judge, bind and despoil Death and Hades, freeing humankind from their bondage. It’s no wonder that the final verse of Psalm 81(82) “Arise, O God, judge the earth; For You shall inherit all nations” is sung in the Orthodox Church on Holy Saturday. It is not simply (or even primarily) as a rebuke of the political and religious authorities who sentenced Jesus to an unjust death, but as De Young explains, it is sung “to celebrate the victory of Christ over the dark powers” and to mark “the beginning of God’s inheritance of all the nations.”18 This reality is experienced personally and mystically by Christians participating in the eucharistic gathering every Sunday. Seen and unseen realities, indeed!

Critics may point to the biases of the author, who is an Orthodox parish priest serving in the Southern US, recognizing the interest he has in demonstrating that Orthodox Christianity of today is in continuity with the apostles and Old Testament prophets. However, De Young is transparent about his biases and his motivation for writing the book in the preface, which he explains was written to serve “an apologetic purpose” and to make the case that “the liturgical ritual and way of life [of the Orthodox church] are in complete continuity with that of the apostles.”19 This book will be of interest to anyone wishing to understanding the continuity and shared heritage of Christianity with postexilic Judaism, and how the dominant worldviews of this time shaped the writings of the New Testament and liturgical life of early Christian communities.

Returning to this idea of re-enchantment: if De Young’s assertion is correct—if it is necessary to place oneself in the mindset of the Apostles and view the world in more supernatural terms to participate fully in the Christian religion—is that even a possibility in the modern age? Can reasonable and educated people encounter and interact with stories about angels, demons, giants, and ancient near-east cosmology, as the authors intended, in a way that avoids both fundamentalist literalism and dismissive allegorizing?

Can the ‘True Myth’ of the Gospel, as J.R.R. Tolkien calls it, be encountered and recognized as a fractal pattern of being as fundamental to reality as atoms, quarks, or strings?20 The author seems to think so, and this reviewer agrees. To do so does not require a repudiation of science or logic, but simply admitting that available empirical evidence is not the only reliable means of justifying belief. As an Orthodox Christian and a scientist who works in an environment completely compatible and comfortable with a materialist

worldview, this requires conscious effort to participate authentically in the liturgical life of the church, to recognize the concomitant spiritual and material realities of life, and in a broader sense, to reclaim a more coherent and encompassing view of reality: that we exist in a cosmos brought into order from chaos by God, in order that we might relate to Him rationally, noetically, spiritually, and materially. As German astronomer Johannes Kepler puts it, we exist that we might “[think] God’s thoughts after Him.”21 More than simply an intellectual exercise, this happens through a living relationship with the One True God. Understanding the religion of the apostles, how they engaged in the spiritual and material planes holistically and without divorcing one from the other, and how we have inherited their rich deposit of faith, is an encouragement towards this end.

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J.R.R. Tolkien, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (lecture, Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture, London, England, November 25, 1936).

Stephen De Young, The Religion of the Apostles: Orthodox Christianity in the First Century (Chesterton, IN: Ancient Faith Publishging, 2021), xi, xv.

De Young, 275-282.

Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Philadelphia Press, 2004); Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2012); Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008); N.T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2013); Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2015); Jacob Neusner, Judaism When Christianity Began: A Survey of Belief and Practice (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2002); Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006).

De Young, 13.

De Young, 37.

De Young, 38.

De Young, 270-271.

De Young, xiii.

Psalm 81(82):1, (NETS); Psalm 81(82):6-7 (NETS).

Michael S. Heiser, “Are Yahweh and El Distinct Deities in Deut 32:8-9 and Psalm 82?” Hiphil 3 [http://www.see-j.net/hiphil] (2006).

Unitarianism is the belief that God exists as one singular entity, not as multiple persons.

De Young, 66.

Binitarianism is the belief that God exists as two Persons (a Father and a Son); Deuteronomy 32:8 (NETS with Dead Sea scroll fragment 4QDt); De Young, 71.

Deuteronomy 32:9 (NETS).

De Young, 4-5.

De Young, 31.

Hieromonk Herman and Vitaly Permiakov, Ed. Hieratikon Vol II: Liturgy Book for Priest & Deacon (South Canaan, PA: Saint Tikhon’s Monastery Press, 2017), 41; De Young, 71.

De Young, xvii.

Walter Hooper, ed., They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (New York: Macmillan, 1979), 427-428.

Melissa Cain Travis, Science and the Mind of the Maker (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2018), 69.

THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | FALL 2021

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A P R AY E R F O R DA RT M O U T H This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging at the entrance of Parkhurst Hall.

O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power.

Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live.

Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

— The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.

NICENE CREED We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and the meaning of the word “catholic.”

We [I] believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

We [I] believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages. God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstanstial with the Father; through him all things were made. For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, he suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.

We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the Prophets.

We [I] believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We [I] confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and we [I] look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.

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THE DARTMOUTH APOLOGIA | SPRING 2021

DA RT M O U T H A P O L O G I A . O R G

Inside cover image - Landscape by Watanabe Gentai from National Museum of Asian Art

Back cover image - Naples From Sir William Hamilton's Villa, 1780-1782 by John Warwick Smith from Birmingham Museums Trust

[1 Peter 3:15]