7 posts from 5 years past

Here are a few of my old posts from 2006 -

1) - Hell and Hans Urs von Balthasar


For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

I've been thinking about hell lately. That's what I get for watching the 1998 movie What Dreams May Come. The visual effects are outstanding but I found the storyline disturbing. The basic plot, from Ebert's review ...

... Chris and Annie (Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra) have a Cute Meet when their boats collide on a Swiss lake. They marry. They have two children. They are happy. Then both of the children are killed in an accident. Annie has a breakdown, Chris nurses her through, art works as therapy, they are somehow patching their lives back together--and then Chris is killed. The film follows him into the next world, and creates it with visuals that seem borrowed from his own memories and imagination .... There is a guide in the next world named Albert ..... Heaven, in one sense, means becoming who you want to be. And hell? "Hell is for those who don't know they're dead,'' says Albert .... Many of those in hell are guilty of the greatest sin against God, which is despair: They believe they are beyond hope. After the death of her children and husband, Annie has despaired, killed herself and gone to hell.

I hate the idea that hell may exist, that Jesus mentions it in the Gospels, that being in despair (suicide) can send you there. Most modern theologians and preachers I've read make a case for hell being not God's choice but man's ... that people go to hell of their own volition, following a desire to be apart from God. This explinarion doesn't work for me, though it's preferable to some others ... here's a tidbit from an article cited below by David Watts - ... we can be sure that, even in His righteous hatred, God loves the damned. How is God's love for them shown? In their agony not being even greater. They are not suffering as much as they deserve, according to the saints. And one of the reasons God ended their earthly probation when He did was, no doubt, to stop them from adding sin to sin and hence clocking up more severe punishment. The damned may not thank God for all this, but we can. ... holy mackerel!

A theologian who spent some time thnking about hell was one-time Jesuit, Hans Urs von Balthasar. Let's read some bits from an article in First Things by Avery Cardinal Dulles on Balthasar and Hell ...

As we know from the Gospels, Jesus spoke many times about hell ... He describes the fate of the damned under a great variety of metaphors: everlasting fire, outer darkness, tormenting thirst, a gnawing worm, and weeping and gnashing of teeth ....

Among the Greek Fathers, Irenaeus, Basil, and Cyril of Jerusalem are typical in interpreting passages such as Matthew 22:14 as meaning that the majority will be consigned to hell. St. John Chrysostom, an outstanding doctor of the Eastern tradition, was particularly pessimistic: “Among thousands of people there are not a hundred who will arrive at their salvation, and I am not even certain of that number, so much perversity is there among the young and so much negligence among the old.”

Augustine may be taken as representative of the Western Fathers. In his controversy with the Donatist Cresconius, Augustine draws upon Matthew and the Book of Revelation to prove that the number of the elect is large, but he grants that their number is exceeded by that of the lost ....

... Thomas Aquinas, who may stand as the leading representative, teaches clearly in the Summa Theologiae that God reprobates some persons. A little later he declares that only God knows the number of the elect. But Thomas gives reasons for thinking that their number is relatively small ....

About the middle of the twentieth century, there seems to be a break in the tradition. Since then a number of influential theologians have favored the view that all human beings may or do eventually attain salvation ....

Karl Rahner, another representative of the more liberal trend, holds for the possibility that no one ever goes to hell. We have no clear revelation, he says, to the effect that some are actually lost .... Rahner therefore believes that universal salvation is a possibility.

The most sophisticated theological argument against the conviction that some human beings in fact go to hell has been proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar in his book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” He rejects the ideas that hell will be emptied at the end of time and that the damned souls and demons will be reconciled with God. He also avoids asserting as a fact that everyone will be saved. But he does say that we have a right and even a duty to hope for the salvation of all, because it is not impossible that even the worst sinners may be moved by God’s grace to repent before they die ....

... a number of theologians remain opposed. In a supplement to his book, Balthasar himself reports that one reviewer accused him of supporting “the salvation optimism that is rampant today and is both thoughtless and a temptation to thoughtlessness.” At an international videoconference organized by the Holy See’s Congregation for the Clergy last November, Jean Galot, with an apparent reference to Balthasar, said that the hypothesis of hell as a mere possibility “removes all effectiveness from the warnings issued by Jesus, repeatedly expressed in the Gospels.” At the same conference Father Michael F. Hull of New York contended that Balthasar’s theory is “tantamount to a rejection of the doctrine of hell and a denial of man’s free will.” In this country Fr. Regis Scanlon, O.F.M. Cap., accused Balthasar of being a Hegelian relativist who “smuggles into the heart of the Catholic a serious doubt about the truth of the Catholic faith.” Scanlon himself takes it to be Catholic teaching that some persons, at least Judas, are in fact eternally lost. This article set off an epic controversy between two Catholic editors, Richard John Neuhaus and Dale Vree, both of whom came to Catholic Christianity as adults ....

It is unfair and incorrect to accuse either Balthasar or Neuhaus of teaching that no one goes to hell. They grant that it is probable that some or even many do go there, but they assert, on the ground that God is capable of bringing any sinner to repentance, that we have a right to hope and pray that all will be saved ...

It's Balthasar's hope that all might be saved, and I like that ... Origen believed even Satan would be saved (an interesting book on the subject of universal salvation is The Inescapable Love of God by Thomas Talbott). But my hope is that we won't need to be saved - that hell does not even exist.

Dulles mentions some of the articles below on the discussion over Balthasar's theory of hell ...

Fr. Regis Scanlon's article, originally in the New Oxford Review, blasting Balthasar's view on hell - The Inflated Reputation of Hans Urs von Balthasar

Richard John Neuhaus' article in First Things, defending Balthasar against Scanlon - Will All Be Saved?

Dale Vree's article in the New Oxford Review, answering Neuhaus - If Everyone is Saved ...

There's more of the guys above :-) but perhaps the next one to read would be found in the New Oxford Review by Janet Holl Madigan In Defense of Richard John Neuhaus

And let's not forget David Watt's article, originally in the New Oxford Review, against Balthasar's view - Is Hell Closed Up & Boarded Over?

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2) - David Bentley Hart and Voltaire

- Voltaire

As I wrote in an earlier post, I've been reading David Bentley Hart's theodicy book, The Doors of the Sea. I've come to a place where Hart mentions Vlotaire and his poem about the disaster of All Saints' Day, 1755, in Lisbon. That event affected not only Voltaire, but many thinkers of the Enlightenment, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant, and drove a stake through the heart of the theodicy arguments of the day. Here's just a tiny bit of Voltaire's poem ...

"But how conceive a God supremely good,
Who heaps his favours on the sons he loves,
Yet scatters evil with as large a hand?
What eye can pierce the depth of his designs?
From that all-perfect Being came not ill:
And came it from no other, for he ’s lord:
Yet it exists. O stern and numbing truth!
O wondrous mingling of diversities!
A God came down to lift our stricken race:
He visited the earth, and changed it not!
One sophist says he had not power to change;
“He had,” another cries, “but willed it not:
In time he will, no doubt.” And, while they prate,
The hidden thunders, belched from underground,
Fling wide the ruins of a hundred towns
Across the smiling face of Portugal."

And here's a bit about the earthquake that inspired it ...

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake took place on November 1, 1755, at 9:40 in the morning. It was one of the most destructive and deadly earthquakes in history, killing between 60,000 and 100,000 people. The quake was followed by a tsunami and fire, resulting in the near-total destruction of Lisbon. The earthquake accentuated political tensions in Portugal and profoundly disrupted the country's eighteenth-century colonial ambitions .... Geologists today estimate the Lisbon earthquake approached magnitude 9 on the Richter scale...


- engraving of the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755

The earthquake shook much more than cities and buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelism in the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed almost every important church. For eighteenth-century theology and philosophy, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain.


- the ruined Convento de Carmo, destroyed in 1755 by the earthquake.

The earthquake strongly influenced many thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Many contemporary philosophers mentioned or alluded to the earthquake in their writings, notably Voltaire in Candide and in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon disaster"). The arbitrariness of survival motivated Voltaire's Candide and its satire of the idea that this was the "best of all possible worlds"; as Theodor Adorno wrote, "[t]he earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz" (Negative Dialectics 361). In the later twentieth century, following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe so tremendous as to have a transformative impact on European culture and philosophy ....
- Wikipedia

David Hart lines up the arguments against a God both good and all powerful - Voltaire's poem is an example of the best of these - and though Hart feels these arguments sometimes speak of a God he barely recognises, he does not dismiss them lightly, but writes ...

"... there are even certain respects in which arguments of this sort should command not only the attention of Christians, but some measure of their sympathy - not pity, that is to say, not a patronizing longanimity, but sympathy in the proper sense of kindred feeling. After all, at the heart of all such unbelief lies an undoubtedly authentic moral horror before the sheer extravagance of worldly misery, a kind of rage for justice, a refusal of easy comfort, and an unwillingness to be reconciled to evil that no one who believes this to be a fallen world should want to disparage ..."

That is one thing I like very much about Hart's book ... he doesn't try to reconcile the reader with evil - doesn't try to make suffering acceptable or understandable. I guess I'd rather find no redemptive meaning in my own suffering than think God had anything to do with it.

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3) - Unbinding the Gay Conscience

One of the online articles of Fr. James Alison's that especially touched me was Unbinding the Gay Conscience, given as a talk in 2002. Though it's written particularly for gays, I think it can be useful to others as well, for many of us find ourselves in "double-binds" ... the double-bind of feeling that one can't both be themselves and also be loved is one I particularly struggle with. Below are some bits snipped from the article, but to do it justice, you should read the whole thing ... it's worth it ....

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Unbinding the Gay Conscience

Some of you may have known Benjamin O’Sullivan, a Benedictine monk of Ampleforth Abbey who killed himself early in 1996 .... I felt that his death was brought about because this extremely attractive, apparently self-confident, effervescent young man had been unable to stand up as an ordinary gay man to the voice of the lynch mob. And the reason was because he was bound in his conscience ... the person caught in the trap looks at the world through fear-coloured spectacles, and fear darkens rather than illumines what it projects. But this gives a hint of what I mean by a bound conscience: the sort of person who can’t stand up and be what they are ...

Now I would like to examine the binding and the unbinding. What does it look like? The first step is to look at what being ‘bound’ means. A bound conscience is one which cannot go this way or that, forward or backwards, is paralysed, scandalized. In that sense it is a form of living death, and those afflicted by it are living dead, and many of us are or have been such people. For example: we are familiar with the notion of a ‘double-bind’ or a ‘Catch 22 situation’. A bound conscience is a sense of being formed by a double-bind or a series of double binds ....

What I would like to suggest is that in all these cases we are dealing with a self that has been formed by being given contradictory desires without being given any ability to discern where they might appropriately be applied. In other words, two instructions are received as on the same level as each other, pointing in two different directions at once, and the result is paralysis. This is what σκάνδαλον - skandalon - refers to in the New Testament - scandal, or stumbling block. Someone who is scandalised is someone who is paralysed into an inability to move. And the undoing of σκάνδαλα - skandala – which means the unbinding of double binds that do not allow people to be, is what the Gospel is supposed to be about.

I want to make it quite clear that we are dealing with something very basic and central to the Gospel here. It is perfectly possible to present the Gospel in such a way that it is a sort of double-bind. Any sort of presentation of the Christian faith which says, ‘I love you but I do not love you’, or ‘I don’t love you as you are, but if you become someone different I will love you’, is in fact preaching a double-bind, a stumbling block, a pathway to paralysis.

Let’s imagine the conversation between a false god and the self:

False god: I want to love you, but I can’t love you as you are, because you are sinful and objectively disordered.

Self: Well, what then must I do to be loved?

False god: You must become someone different.

Self: I’m up for it, show me how.

False god: Love isn’t something that can be earned, it just is.

Self: Well then how do I become the sort of person who can be loved?

False god: If I were you I would start somewhere else.

Self: That’s a great help. How do I start somewhere else?

False god: You can’t, because even starting off for somewhere else starts from you, and you can’t be loved.

Self: Well if I can’t start off from somewhere else, and I can’t start off from where I am, what can I do?

False god: Give up on the love thing; just obey and be paralysed.

That’s how powerful it is to receive our sense of self, our identity, our desire, in imitation of, through the regard of, eyes which give us a mixed message, a double bind.

Now if the Gospel means anything at all it means that the Good News about God is unambivalent, that there are no ‘if’s and ‘but’s in God - God’s love is unconditional. And this means, above all, that there are no double-binds in God. That God desires that our desire should flow free, life-giving and untrammeled, because it is in that flow of desire that we are called into being.

Well, if that is the case, imagine then what might be a conversation between the Unambivalently loving God and the self:

Unambivalently loving God: I love you.

Self: but I’m full of shit, how can you love me?

Unambivalently loving God: I love you.

Self: but you can’t love me, I’m part of all this muck.

Unambivalently loving God: it’s you that I love.

Self: how can it be me that you love when I’ve been involved in bad relationships, dark rooms, machinations against other people?

Unambivalently loving God: it’s you that I love.

Self: But ...

Unambivalently loving God: it’s you that I love.

Self: But ...

Unambivalently loving God: it’s you that I love.

Self: OK then, so are you just going to leave me in the shit?

Unambivalently loving God: Because I love you, you are relaxing into my love and you will find yourself becoming loveable, indeed becoming someone that you will scarcely recognise.

Self: Hadn’t I better do something to get all ready for this becoming loveable?

Unambivalently loving God: Only if you haven’t yet got it that it’s I who do the work and you who get to shine. Because I love you, you are relaxing into being loved and will find yourself doing loveable things because you are loved.

Self: I think I could go along with this.

Or to put it in a nutshell, when faced with the standard Irish joke about ,’How do I get to Dublin?’, and being told ‘If I were you I wouldn’t start from here’, the Gospel response, that is to say the regard of Christ, tells us: ‘I will come with you starting from where you are’ ....

I would like to dwell a little more on the effects on us of this regard, the one which looks at us and says, ‘I love you, and as you discover yourself loved you will find yourself becoming something else’. I want to say something apparently rather banal here, but I think it is rather important. I think that we would be wise to send the word ‘love’ to the laundry and use the word ‘like’ instead. I say this for the following reason. You have probably met people, as I have, who tell us that they love gay people, and that is why they are so keen to change us. In other words their ‘love’ does not include the word ‘like’. It means something like: ‘I feel that in obedience to God’s love for sinners I must stop you being who you are’.

But in fact the word ‘like’ is rather more difficult to twist into a lie than the word ‘love’, because we know when someone likes us. We can tell because they enjoy being with us, alongside us, want to share our time and company. Well, what I would like to suggest is that if our understanding of love does not include liking, or at least being prepared to learn to like, then there’s a good chance that we’re talking about the sort of love that can slip a double-bind over us, that is really saying to us, ‘My love for you means that I will like you if you become someone else’.

Well, it seems to me that the doctrine of the incarnation of Our Lord, the image of God coming among us as the likeness of humans8, is a strong statement that the divine regard is one of liking us, here and now, as we are. Glad to be with us. And this means that the one who looks at us with love is not just looking at us with a penetrating and inscrutable gaze of utter otherness, but is looking at us with the delight of one who enjoys our company, who wants to be one with us, to share in something with us. Sure, as we learn to relax into that being loved we are going to find that we are quite different from what we thought we were, and that our patterns of desire will become quite different, which is what it means to find that the Holy Spirit has come to dwell in us in and through the reformation of our desire. But the regard does not first knock down so as then to build up, as we so often imagine it, rather as though Jesus was a sergeant-major whose job it is to give hell to the recruits and make them feel awful so that later, after they’ve lost their identities, they’ll start to feel good new identities as soldiers, and then they’ll discover he has a heart of gold.

No, our faith is that the eyes of God that are in Christ, and thus the divine regard through which we can receive new being, are eyes that like us, from alongside, at the same level as us. Which means, do not control us, do not try to ‘know better than us’ who we are, but want to participate in a discovery with us of who we are to become ....

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There's more to the article, so read it all if you have the time and the interest (link).

Read more of Fr. Alison's work at James Alison Theology .... there's also an article on Pentecost by him at the Tablet - The Wild Ride.

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4) - St. Margaret Mary and the X-Files


Sometimes it seems like everything I know, I learned from the X-Files :-) ... for instance, the identity of St. Margaret Mary. Saint Marguerite Marie Alacoque (1647-1690) was a French Catholic nun, who entered the Visitation Convent at Paray-le-Monial at the age of twenty-four. She was a mystic, practiced a number of mortifications, and had many visions, the most well known being that of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In this vision, Jesus showed her his heart, burning with divine love, and told her to establish a feast in honor of his Sacred Heart.

One of the first to believe in and support Margaret Mary's vision of the Sacred Heart was a young Jesuit, her spiritual director, St. Claude de la Colombière SJ. and it was the Jesuit Order that later helped establish the devotion of the Sacred Heart. Below is a prayer by Claude, translation by John Veltri SJ ...

Act Of Hope And Confidence In God

My God, I believe most firmly
that you watch over all who hope in you,
and that we can want for nothing
when we rely upon you in all things.
Therefore I am resolved for the future ... to cast all my cares upon you
People may deprive me of possessions and status.
Sickness may take my strength from me. I may even jeopardize our
relationship by sin; but my trust shall never leave me.
I will preserve it to the last moment of my life,
and the powers of hell shall seek in vain to grab it from me.
Let others seek happiness in their wealth and in their talents.
Let them trust in the purity of their lives,
in the number of their activities, in the intensity of their prayer;
as for me, my confidence in you fills me with hope.
You are my divine protector. In you alone do I hope.
I am assured, therefore, of my eternal happiness,
for I firmly hope in it and all my hope is in you.
"In you, O Loving God, have I hoped: let me never be confounded."
I know too well that I am weak and changeable.
I know the power of temptation against the strongest virtue.
I have seen stars fall and foundations of my world crack.
These things do not alarm me.
While I hope in you, I am sheltered from all misfortune,
and I am sure that my trust shall endure,
for I rely upon you to sustain this unfailing hope.
Finally, I know that my confidence cannot exceed your generosity,
and that I shall never receive less than I have hoped for from you.
Therefore I hope that you will sustain me against the ways
in which I deceive myself.
I hope that you will protect me against the deceitful attacks
of the evil one. I hope you will cause my weakness
to triumph over every hostile force.
I hope that you will never cease to love me
and that I shall love you unceasingly.
"In you, O God, I have hoped, let me never be confounded."

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PHILLIP PADGETT (to Agent Scully) : I often come here to look at this painting. It's called "My Divine Heart" after the miracle of Saint Margaret Mary. Do you know the story... The revelation of the Sacred Heart? Christ came to Margaret Mary his heart so inflamed with love that it was no longer able to contain its burning flames of charity. Margaret Mary... so filled with divine love herself, asked the Lord to take her heart... and so he did placing it alongside his until it burned with the flames of his passion. Then he restored it to Margaret Mary sealing her wound with the touch of his blessed hand.
- Milagro episode - Inside the X-Files


- My Divine Heart

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5) - Kermit

Kermit likes her birthday toy :-)



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6 - It's All Greek to Me

I really like Greek history, I guess because it reminds me of happy times at college ... Greek art, Greek philosophy ... my boyfriend buying me Greek coins with Athena's owl on them, my sister and I spending afternoons pouring over our green-covered copy of Plato's Republic :-)

A post on Paula's blog made me think about Greek history in general and the battle of Thermopylae in particular.



The description of the battle can be read in Herodotus' twenty-second logos: Thermopylae... a nice online translation with modern commentary. But you can also read the long-story-short version at Wikipedia, which writes, in part, ...

In the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BC an alliance of Greek city-states fought the invading Persian army in a mountain pass. Vastly outnumbered, the Greeks held back the Persian advance for three days. Leonidas, the Spartan King commanding the army, held up the enemy in one of the most famous last stands of history. The resistance of the Spartan-led army offered Athens the invaluable opportunity to make battle preparations and decisively defeat the Persians at the battles of Salamis. The final blow was delivered at Plataea, ending the Persian invasion of Greece and marking the rise of the Athenian Empire as a political and cultural world power. The performance of the defenders at the battle of Thermopylae is often used as an example of the advantages of training, equipment and good use of terrain to maximize an army's potential, as well as a symbol of courage against overwhelming odds.

There have been a number of films, books and even poems about the battle ... one of the most recent efforts is a graphic novel, Frank Miller's "300", from which is being made a 2007 film with the same title. The movie, which stars Scottish actor Gerard Butler as Spartan King Leonidas, will use a digital backlot technique, in which actors do their thing in front of a blue screen, with the locations added on later by computer. I'm not a big fan of this technique (the film Sin City is an example) but on the other hand, after seeing how traditionally made movies like Troy and Alexander have turned out, well ... :-)

I'm a peace-nik, so it's odd for me to be so interested in a military battle, but I think it's that I'm intrigued not by the fighting, but by the human qualities shown through the fighting ... courage, self-sacrifice, and perhaps even more, a defiance in the face of assured defeat. Such defiance can be found in the words spoken by Leonidas to Xerxes, when the Persian king offered to spare the Greeks if they'd surrender their weapons ...

Come and get them.

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7) - Steve Irwin has died


I was just looking at Google news before going to bed and saw a headline that saddened me - ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin dies.

Although his career has at times been somewhat controversial, I've been a long time fan of Stevee Irwin's. It was his show that gave me an interest in and appreciation of the wildlife of Australia, New Zealand and environs ... sea snakes, wombats, a shy platypus, a Tasmanian devil, komodo dragons. His show introduced me to the Dingo fence, to the International Venom and Toxin Database, the Galápagos Islands.

Here's part of the news story ...

Steve Irwin, the hugely popular Australian television personality and environmentalist known as the “Crocodile Hunter,” was killed Monday by a stingray during a diving expedition, police said. He was 44. Irwin was filming an underwater documentary on the Great Barrier Reef in northeastern Queensland state when the accident occurred ...

Irwin is famous for his enthusiasm for wildlife and his catchcry “Crikey!” in his television program “Crocodile Hunter,” which was first broadcast in Australia in 1992 and has aired around the world on the Discovery channel ... Irwin was also seen as a vocal critic of wildlife hunts in Australia. The federal government recently dropped plans to allow crocodile safaris for wealthy tourists in the Northern Territory following his vehement objections ... He is survived by his American wife Terri, from Oregon, and their daughter Bindi Sue, 8, and son Bob, who will turn 3 in December.