Dissent can be the path of least resistance

"submission to authority is in general less deliberately assertive than is an act of dissent.  But not always.  St. Augustine's struggle for belief in revelation was much more dynamic and original than is the rejection of revelation by a religiously brought up young man today."

     Michael Polanyi, Personal knowledge: towards a post-critical philosophy, pt. 2, chap. 7, sec. 3 ((London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962 [1958]), 209). 

"Two lovely hymns, separated by only two generations, bespeak the momentous influence of fundamentalism."

     "the momentous influence of fundamentalism"?  What of that line in the first stanza of the hymn by the Anglican Croly (below), namely, "Wean it from earth"?  Not to mention the profoundly pietistic and other-wordly feel of the whole? Is the "dimness" in question really anything other than a dimness of love for God? Is there really in this hymn anything indicative of a desire for a clearer vision of the world?  I seriously doubt that Noll makes (or even illustrates) his case:

"Shortly before he died in 1860, George Croly penned the prayer 'Spirit of God, Descend upon My Heart.'  In its second stanza Croly described what he felt would happen if he were to experience a deeper walk with the Spirit:

     I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies,
     No sudden rending of the veil of clay,
     No angel visitant, no opening skies;
     But take the dimness of my soul away.

For Croly, to know God better would make our vision of the world clearer.
     "In 1922, Helen H. Lemmel wrote the words and music to a gospel song that is as moving as it is characteristic of the fundamentalist-Holiness outlook:

     Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
     Look full in His wonderful face,
     And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
     In the light of His glory and grace.

While the essentially Christian motivation of this song is clear, its ironic meaning can be understood better now than when it was written—under the influence of fundamentalism, evangelicals turned their eyes to Jesus, and the world grew very dim indeed."

     Mark A. Noll, The scandal of the evangelical mind (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 144.

"dieux dont le principal tort était d'exister"

"the patristic notion of death as enemy entails . . . a certain notion of sin.  It is in what the Fathers consider to be 'the sin' par excellence, much more than by an abstract study, that we will recapture their way of comprehending it.  This sin par excellence . . . is idolatry.  It is extremely important to note that the ancients placed under this word 'idolatry' something completely different than we do.  When a modern Christian speaks of 'false gods,' this, in his mouth, tends to denote gods that do not exist.  When an ancient employed that expression, he, by contrast, meant gods who were dangerous precisely because they were real [(dieux dont le principal tort était d'exister)].  The notion that paganism with its polytheism and its superstitious practices innumerable was only a vast illusion is one that occurred to no ancient mind. . . .
     "The position [that St. Paul takes in 1 Cor 10:19-22, which is that 'what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons',] will remain that of the whole of the patristic period.  The Fathers will be led to systematize it by the necessity of sustaining the indomitable opposition—up to and including martyrdom—of the first Christians to idolatrous practices [to us] the most apparently benign.  When we look into the details, it is very difficult for [us] moderns to justify these dispositions of the ancient councils, which went so far as to forbid to Christians, at even a very late date, the civil magistracies that would have secured for them positions of incomparable influence.  This, simply because one could not discharge such duties without [performing] some trifling rite that the greatest [pagan] pontiffs of the period, e.g. a Cotta, stood ready to declare [were] of no real significance.  Yet the Christian apologists were completely justified in not seeing it in this way at all.  This network of ritual in which ancient life was caught up, right down to those of its customs in appearance the most secularized, was for them only the shadow cast by a network of demonic influences [that were] utterly authentic.  And to cede to that invasive idolatry on even the slightest point would have been to commit the least pardonable of sins, because it would have been to accept anew the fundamental error of all sin:  to adhere to that refusal-to-go-beyond-itself [(arrêt à elle-même)] of the free and conscious creature that placed it in the enmity of God, [an] adhesion that is . . . the whole principle of the slavery in which man found himself before Christ.
     "When one reads, for example, the treatise Against the pagans, by St. Athanasius, or it matters not what apology of the century previous, but in particular those of Justin or Tertullian, one readily discerns in them the same fundamental intellectual reflexes.  Behind all of the beauties, the grandeurs, the forces of this world is an ensemble of spiritual powers [that are] relatively autonomous, though completely dependent upon God by virtue of the fact that they, too, are only [his] creatures. . . . these powers wished to to arrogate to themselves the glory of the goods of which they were [appointed] only the guardians.  [And] the weak mind [(esprit)] of man has allowed itself to be seduced by them, to the point of settling for these goods [(s'arrêter à ces biens)] in place of mounting back up through them [(remonter par eux)] to God."

      Louis Bouyer, “Les deux économies du gouvernement divin: Satan et le Christ,” in Initiation théologiques par un groupe de théologiens, tome II: Dieu et sa creation, 2nd ed. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1953), 529  (504-535).  "In this world . . . there is no real possibility of a settling of a finite being for itself [(un arrêt de l'être limité à soi-même)].  Either it will be immortalized in a reunion with God, [the] source of all being who calls it to himself; or, by refusing this vocation, it will deliver itself up to nothingness" (528).  Yet the Fall was not, for the Fathers, an attachment to (an "s'arrêter à") mere self in lieu of God.  Because it was precisely the move of the (now fallen) powers already primordially, the attachment to self and the goods of creation was ultimately an attachment to the demons in lieu of God (531).
     Would Mark Noll, by the way, care to call this The scandal of the patristic mind?  Cf. this passage, fairly typical of Noll, which I read not long after mounting the translation above:  "Although formally connected to the scriptural command to resist the devil, the stark dialectic of spiritual warfare found in these books [by Frank Peretti] can be traced directly to heightened language concerning Satan and the Holy Spirit that came to prominence in the first decades of the twentieth century.  They reflect new prominence given to angels and demons in both the informal instincts of Pentecostalism and the formal theologies of dispensationalists" (Mark A. Noll, The scandal of the evangelical mind (Grand Rapids, MI:  William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994), 141).  Who is the real innovator here?

"it is not in the power of the Parties, though of common consent"

"that Marriage it self and the Obligations thence arising, are Jure divino, appears thus; First, Obligations arising from voluntar [sic] Ingagment take their Rule and Substance from the will of Man, and may be framed and composed at his pleasure; but so cannot Marriage, wherein it is not in the power of the Parties, though of common consent, to alter any Substantial, as to make the Marriage for a time, or take the power over the Wife from the Husband, and place it in any other; or the right of Provision or protection of the Wife, from the Husband, and so of all the rest, which evidently demonstrateth, that it's not a Humane, but a Divine Contract."

     Sir James Dalrymple, First Viscount of Stair, The institutions of the law of Scotland, deduced from its originals, and collated with the civil, canon and feudal laws, and with the customs of neighboring nations, in iv. books, second edition, revised, corrected, and much enlarged, Lib. 1, Tit. IV (Conjugal obligations), Sec. 1 ((Edinburgh:  Heir of Andrew Anderson, 1693), 24).  I was put onto this by John Haldane, "Against erotic entitlements," First things no. 222 (April 2012), 20 (19-20).

"The slothful person cannot bear to give up on happiness but she also cannot bear to endure what true happiness requires of her."

"sloth is essentially a spiritual vice with a spiritual object.  For what the slothful person resists is the whole 'new self' (not just the soul), that is, becoming a person transformed by the Spirit of Christ.  She resists it on grounds of her residual attachment to the whole 'old self' (not just the body), that is, all her habits and desires that are rooted in rebellion toward God and prideful attempts at autonomy.
     "Conflict between the old and new is possible because the transformation between being sinful and becoming redeemed is not instantaneous.  This is equally key to understanding sloth as a vice.  The infusion of charity orients the will to its supernatural telos and enables the will to reach that end.  But this requires a long process of rehabituation and transformation, a process that requires human cooperation and consent.  Infused virtue does not automatically or initially make action in compliance with charity pleasant or easy.  Rather, this long, arduous process involves the discipline of dying to the old self and resisting its inclinations.  There is much effort involved in this daily commitment to transformation.  Love takes work.
"this ongoing transformation—with the struggle it often brings to the surface between old and new habits and desires—is the object of the slothful person's resistance and aversion.  So Aquinas summarizes his definition of sloth by saying, 'And so when desire of the flesh is dominant in human beings, they have distaste for [this interior divine] spiritual good as contrary to themselves [sibi contrarium].'
     "Hence there is aversion to effort and a desire to remain comfortable and undisturbed involved in the vice of sloth.  The effort shunned and the comfort sought, however, are not most accurately described merely in bodily, physical terms. . . . one of sloth's main symptoms is investing great effort in diversionary activities, activities that might well require much physical effort.  By remaining preoccupied with these activities, the slothful one avoids accepting the demands made by divine love, demands directed toward the regeneration of one's nature.
     "This explains why restlessness (false activity) and intertia (false rest)—are the twin marks of a slothful character.  When the apparent evil feels escapable, a person will go to almost any length to avoid facing up to her identity as a friend of God and the attendant demands of this relationship.  This avoidance can show itself in restless activity, diversion-seeking, and even physical restlessness. . . .
     "On the other extreme, when the apparent evil of our participation in the divine nature feels inescapable, sloth shows itself as inertia, oppressive sorrow, and even despair.  The slothful person cannot bear to give up on happiness but she also cannot bear to endure what true happiness requires of her. . . ."

     Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, "Aquinas on the vice of sloth:  three interpretative issues," The Thomist 75 (2011):  56-58 (43-64).  Sloth is "'the dislike, horror, and detestation of the Divine good'" (ST II-II.35.a3).

TRY USING ENGLISH. Or: Jeffrey on the proliferation of "diminished translations of Scripture" that don't "bear the weight of . . . glory"

"the social determinist claim that we are definitively constrained by the character of our contemporary vernacular is just plain false. What we have also got is the language of Holy Scripture itself, responsibly Englished if we will use it, and the language of the liturgy and hymns passed down to us. Neither translator nor teacher is restricted to whatever limit seems to pertain in our colloquial argot.
     "Think about . . . the Venerable Bede, whose grandparents were pagan, and that entire generation of Benedictines. They translated into their native Anglo-Saxon both the Gospels and the Psalms. But there was a sorry inadequacy in this vigorous early form of our language where many biblical and liturgical terms were concerned. The earliest translators were not daunted, but promptly borrowed words from Latin to meet the need: alms, altar, angel, anthem, apostle, ark, canticle, chalice, creed, deacon, demon, disciple, epistle, hymn, manna, martyr, priest, prophet, psalm, Psalter, rule, Sabbath, shrift, temple. Later would come words like absolution, baptism, beatitude, charity, communion, confession, contrition, creator, crucifixion, devotion, faith, homily, mercy, miracle, obedience, passion, pastor, penance, religion, sacrament, saint, sanctuary, savior, temptation, theology, trinity, virgin, virtue—and on and on.
     "What would have happened if someone had said, in that time and place, 'We just have to find dynamic equivalents in Anglo-Saxon?' There weren’t any. Appropriately, the first translators were not intimidated by the prospect of teaching people the meaning of biblical and sacral terms not to be found anywhere in their everyday language. They gratefully borrowed the language of Scripture as they found it in another tongue. We may need to reclaim their honest practice.
". . . If the flat, secularized language of our culture no longer has the terms to convey spiritual content, we, too, can borrow words from our own English language—terms hallowed in another age and culture—and give back to them their fullness of meaning for understanding Scripture."

     David Lyle Jeffrey, "Our babel of bibles:  scripture, translation & the possibility of spiritual understanding," Touchstone 25, no. 2 (March/April 2012):  37-38 (29-38).  Too bad Jeffrey isn't a better stylist himself, because this is a good article in other respects.

The demonic is always, in the end, an inhibition

"Thus Satan brings to completion his own disaster, be it because he damns together with himself those who identify themselves with his revolt, be it because, by crucifying Christ, Head and Body, he tears up the charter [(schédule)] according to which the world belonged to him.  This charter was only the law:  good in this, that it expresses the divine will of justice that constitutes, as it were, the texture of the world; but [the] enemy of man nonetheless, because it renders him a victim of the chastisement of Satan for having consented to his rebellion.  It is effaced by Christ on the cross, because at the cross the absurdity into which the first economy (as good as it was in principle) has fallen (as a consequence of the perversion of the powers that rule it) becomes obvious.  Indeed, this perversion reached its summit at point of contact with the supreme initiative of the divine love.
     "It becomes in this way apparent that the diabolical tendency is always an inhibition.  It restricts itself to a first stage of the divine initiatives, and refuses to cooperate in the enlargements of them.  It retains what it has.  But it is overtopped and as it were drowned [(dépassé et comme noyée)] by the rising flood of love."

     Louis Bouyer, “Les deux économies du gouvernement divin: Satan et le Christ,” in Initiation théologiques par un groupe de théologiens, tome II: Dieu et sa creation, 2nd ed. (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1953), 516 (504-535).