On Omnipotence (or, Can God Make A Circle So Square It's Green?)

What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? It's an old riddle, apparently impossible to solve. And it is impossible to solve, for exactly the same reason that it's impossible to solve a wombat or conjugate an orangutan: because those combinations of words are meaningless. If an irresistible force exists, anywhere in Creation, then by definition there is no such thing as an immovable object. The "riddle" boils down to, what would happen if A was not A? That isn't a question, it's noise masquerading as English. And nobody does that to my language. Nobody.

Dost thou feel Puckish, lunk?

The more pernicious example, which everyone has heard, is the question, "Can God make a rock so big He can't lift it?" If He can, then there's something He can't lift, and if He can't, then there something He can't make. Oh no, it looks like He loses either way: so much for God's vaunted omnipotence! Except, again, the question is actually, "Is God more powerful than God," or in other words, "Is A not A?" The real answer is neither yes nor no. The real answer is, "Shut your trap, ya doofus."

God can do any Thing. Creating four beans out of nothingness is a thing, and therefore He can do that. Causing two beans plus two beans to equal five beans is not a thing. It's gibberish. He "can't" do that, because there's nothing there to do. Chesterton argues in Orthodoxy that you can easily tell whether a thing is possible (if only for God) by applying the test of imagination. You can imagine four beans suddenly coming into existence, but you can't imagine two and two not making four. That's because our minds are made in the image of God, and we share in the Fire of Divine Reason.

Sooner or later, my soon-to-be-born daughter is bound to ask me how a loving God can allow people to go to Hell. I'll have to have some kind of response ready, in small person language, to explain the darkest of all mysteries. By that time, her capacious brain should already encompass the business of A being A, so we'll start there. Heaven means freely chosen unity with God—therefore He can't force anyone to go to Heaven. And the alternative to everlasting love and joy is, you know, the lack of those things. It sounds almost ludicrously obvious.

Except it doesn't really satisfy the heart, does it. Here's a simple equation for why your fellow man will suffer for all of eternity, now let's go have lunch. I think we forget that omnipotence means God can do anything, but doesn't necessarily mean He can do anything easily. Remember that He had to rest after making the Earth. And He had to become Sin and actually go to Hell in order to give us the opportunity of entering the Kingdom. He not only endured the anguish and misery of every sufferer, He also endured the ugliness and filth of every causer of suffering. Just to give us the option. If He could have removed the alternative by any conceivable means, isn't it clear that He would have? But He couldn't, and He can't. Giving us the freedom to enter Heaven without the freedom to enter Hell is simply not a Thing.

On Guardian Angels (or, The Word Of The Day Is Theologoumenon)

An architect once gave Pope John XXIII (now St. John XXIII) his plans for a new building on the Vatican grounds. The Pope returned them with the words Non sumus angeli, "We are not angels," written in the margin. It seems the good architect had forgotten to include bathrooms.

I love that story. Partly because it's a Papal poop joke, and we just don't have enough of those for my money. But also because it puts a pontifical finger on the core divide between us and our winged kin. Angel and Man are both God's kids, and we're both spiritual beings—but you and I are animals as well. Souls in bodies, fire in dust. And if the Ascension and the Assumption teach us anything, it's that we'll always be corporeal creatures. We'll never be angels, and there are starry mansions worth of wisdom that we'll have to apprehend before we can even speak with them as peers.

Which is fine. God didn't stuff our spirits into flesh because He misread the directions on the box. Clearly, He wanted there to be different types of intelligence operating in the universe: one Church, many parts. (Or as Morgan Freeman put it in Robin Hood, "Allah loves wondrous variety.") I expect there are positively scads of angels out there working on stuff that has precious little to do with Earth and human beings; but just as we have a common Father, so too we all have a common Enemy. "For our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against powers and principalities, against the rulers of this world of darkness and the spirits of the world above" (Eph. 6:12).

That being the case, I am deeply heartened to know that Our Lord has already assigned one of His angels to tend my unborn child. When Sonya Mags asks me about the powerful immortal that smolders watchfully at her side, I think I'll tell her about the vision that came to Tolkien as he prayed before the Blessed Sacrament. He reported to his son Christopher that he saw the love of God descending upon the children of men and taking shape as persons of pure Charity, just as the Holy Spirit proceeds from the love between Father and Son. And the person who proceeds from, or rather is, His love for each human being, is each human being's guardian angel.

Now, my understanding is that this belief is what's called a theologoumenon: a belief that does not contravene Church teaching but that also has not (yet) been doctrinally approved. It's certainly possible that there's simply a class of angels that specialize in guarding humans, and they have a sort of duty roster that rotates them to a newborn person when their previous guardee dies—but Tolkien's vision has an elegance which, to me, rings of truth.

Ha! Rings. I didn't even do that on purpose.

On Porn

In The Brothers Karamazov, Liza Khokhlakov tells Alyosha about a recurring dream of hers. In the dream, she's alone in her room at night and she becomes aware of demons skulking in the corners and overhangs. Slowly, they close in around her and stretch out their claws to take possession of her body. Then she makes the Sign of the Cross and they scatter back into the shadows—but right away she has the urge to curse God, and the demons start to come back. Then she makes the Sign of the Cross once again, and once again they scatter. "It's great fun, and awfully exciting," she says. Alyosha reveals that he's had the same dream.

I've had that dream as well. I've always been more interested in Evil than is good for me. Over time I've come to know when I'm looking too closely at the Enemy, even from ostensibly constructive motives: I start shying away from virtuous thoughts. If I'm following some mean or shameful train of thought and a chance word or image calls to mind (say) the Blessed Virgin, I'll find myself quelling the association. And that's when I need to cut the train of thought, say a Hail Mary, and find something else to think about. Wouldn't it be lovely if I always did that.

But the forbidden is enticing. The extreme banality of that sentence is evidence enough of its truth; almost nothing is better known to us than the allure of the locked door. Even before Original Sin had bent us, we gravitated towards the one thing we were told to stay away from: how much more so, now? "There can be no good without evil": the daylong refrain and refuge of puddle-deep philosophies. Nor then can there be flesh without leprosy. True enough, the freedom to choose garbage and poison must exist if one is to come freely to the banquet; but, definitionally, no one ever needs to choose the Ugly Path. But of course it's great fun, and awfully exciting.

God is Triune, and IS Triune from all of eternity. He begets Persons through Love. The human family is patterned on the Holy Trinity, creating through mutual self-giving. It took me a long time to understand why masturbation is a mortal sin. It's because it's patterned on Satan. The Enemy isn't triune, isn't in union with any other person, but he still seeks the power of God without participating in the nature of God, the gifting of God, the self-sacrifice of God. Masturbation is a gash in the soul from that cataclysmic effort to rip the power of Creation out of the hands of Love.

I can't give a ready definition of Art. It's something like participation in the Divine quest to bring forth beauty and truth, but of course that's superlatively nebulous. Still, like everyone, I have a reasonable sense of what is and isn't Art, in practice. In the same way, I don't have an objective, universal definition of Pornography; but someone on the internet once rather insightfully defined it as anything in which you lose interest immediately after masturbating. What makes porn porn is that the enticement to Satanic self-love is the dominant or sole purpose of the image. And now here's the terrifying part:

We're all responsible for each other. The man who sells pornography, who furnishes me with temptation, bears a part in my punishment (woe to him by whom offenses come); but, also, I bear a part in his punishment because if I hadn't yielded to the temptation he offered, his own suffering in Purgatory would be less. Our sins couple and yield putrid fruit. And the woman in the image—already victimized by the seller and dehumanized by the buyer—will also suffer in the scourging of all this Purgatorial remorse. That woman, who is someone's daughter. Who could someday be my daughter. I would kill everyone to keep that from happening to Sonya, but she'll be just as free as I am to perpetuate the cycle of the Enemy.

And that's what Porn is now. My daughter's face, defiled. My daughter's face in Hell.

On Art (or, Singing In The Fire)

El and I are both writers and singers; it'll be odd if our kid isn't at least a little artistic. It shouldn't be too taxing for her to learn how the creative act is a reflection of God's creativity through the Word—Fiat Lux and all that sort of thing, don't you know. The hard part will be watching her learn that the world doesn't care about her artistic endeavors. Whatever her vocation turns out to be, at some point she will exsanguinate her soul into some great undertaking, offer her absolute self to the collective perusal, and bang her skull on the vast indifference of the throng. Probably. It's conceivable that she'll A. achieve instant fame as a genius or B. have no artistic inclinations whatsoever. But let us deal in likelihoods.

At the end of Fahrenheit 451 (spoilers, I suppose), the ex-book-burner Montag joins a band of literate exiles in the wilderness, each of whom has committed some great book to memory. "Guard your health," he's told. "If anything should happen to Harris, you are the Book of Ecclesiastes." There are works of art that weather the crash of dynasties and the long slow grind of aeons: works that men will kill and die to keep alive. I myself would bayonet a blackguard in the lungs for bringing flame near the last surviving copy of Hamlet or Macbeth. I do not, however, entertain the fancy that future generations will be stabbing each other over dog-eared printouts of this blog. Many people write; few people write immortal works. Any artist of any caliber eventually needs to accept that.

Hamlet, of course, gets its plot from folklore and other Elizabethan dramas, like almost all of Shakespeare's plays—but the folklore and the other dramas are now remembered only as scholarly appendices to Hamlet. In the same way, droves of harrumphing Englishmen were writing comic operettas in the days of Gilbert and Sullivan; flocks of overwrought Russians were writing harrowing novels in the days of Dostoevsky; gaggles of maiden aunts were writing clever mysteries in the days of Agatha Christie. What seems original to us now was usually a drop in a sea of contemporaries, surviving because it was simply the best of its kind. The better a book is, the better its chances. But who knows what was lost in the Library of Alexandria? Beowulf survived in the form of a single manuscript, stuck in a trunk in a farmhouse in Iceland, for eight hundred years, before it was discovered and given back to Europe. Sometimes a work of art endures because Providence has use for it.

But there's a deeper truth: no book is immortal. The race will die, the earth will die, the sun will die. Every symphony and painting, every lyric verse, each statue and basilica brought forth by Man the Maker—all will burn and freeze. And yet, another truth is deeper still: everything's immortal. A sonnet might be remembered for a week or a century on Earth; in Heaven, as a small but real part of the soul that loved it into existence, it will dwell in the Mind of God and the Heart of the Church Triumphant. Not immediately comforting to a neglected sonneteer, but a reason to keep on going. The sooner Kid Toner and her dad get that into their heads, the better—for us and for the whole onward-toiling Body of Christ. You never know what chance phrase from your pen might strengthen a wavering soul.