Positive Vision of General Petraeus: “As a General, He Won a War. As a Man, He Took Responsibility”

WSJ Monday, November 12, 2012 A 17

Many public figures resort to 'spinning' to stay in power when their human failings are exposed. The general held himself to another standard.

By BING WEST

David H. Petraeus was destined to be a general. Fiercely competitive and upwardly mobile, he mixed indefatigable energy with unfailing courtesy. At West Point, he wooed and married the daughter of the superintendent. He won the top three prizes at the tough Infantry Ranger School. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton. In command positions, he issued clear mission directives to his subordinates. He cultivated the press and intellectuals, promptly responding to emails with succinct observations. A believer in "big ideas," Gen. Petraeus was an idealist determined to succeed. In any command or staff position, he performed superbly.

If he had been a peacetime general, he would not have had the renown to be named the head of the CIA—or to attract the world's attention with his resignation in the wake of an extramarital affair. America judges its generals based on how they perform in war: George Washington in the Revolutionary War, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in the Civil War, Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall in World War II, Creighton Abrams in Vietnam, Colin Powell in the 1991 Gulf War, et al. [I would add Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur here]. Gen. Petraeus joins their ranks as a memorable leader because of his performance in the Iraq War.

In 2003, throwing out Saddam Hussein's regime had been easy. But four years of flailing against insurgent bands followed. By early 2007, a weary America was watching Iraq disintegrate into a Shiite-Sunni civil war. Gen. Petraeus, by then with three stars and two previous tours in Iraq, had written a field manual on counterinsurgency, arguing that our warriors should be nation builders, focused particularly upon protecting the people rather than killing the enemy. Rejecting the reservations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he boldly urged President Bush to surge six more U.S. brigades into the fight. Mr. Bush agreed, and appointed Gen. Petraeus as the commander.

The tide in Iraq was changing as he arrived. In the province of Anbar, the Marines had hammered the Sunni insurgents for three years, while al Qaeda extremists had subjugated the Sunni tribes. Feeling they were caught between the hammer and the anvil, the tribal sheiks rebelled against al Qaeda and allied with the Marines. Grasping the opportunity, Gen. Petraeus aligned American companies with Sunni neighborhood watches in a dozen provinces, driving out Sunni radicals and preventing raids by Shiite militias.

Every U.S. battalion was given four tasks: provide security, fund projects, aid governance, and institute the rule of law. Security required armed force; the other tasks were nation building. Within two years, Iraq had stabilized militarily and Gen. Petraeus became the first heroic American general of the 21st century.

In 2010, Gen. Petraeus took command in Afghanistan, and a year later became the director of the CIA. His efforts in Afghanistan had no lasting influence, where his nation-building strategy foundered. It wasn't his fault. A duplicitous Pakistan harbored both al Qaeda and the Taliban. Inside Afghanistan, the medieval Pashtun tribes—the heart of the Taliban movement—refused to support a corrupt central government. In selecting Hamid Karzai to lead the country a decade ago, we made the wrong choice. No foreigner, regardless of rank, could compensate for feckless internal leadership.

Gen. Petraeus's concept of nation building as a military mission probably will not endure. Our military can train the armed forces of others (if they are willing) and, in Afghanistan, we can leave behind a cadre to destroy nascent terrorist havens. But American soldiers don't know how to build Minneapolis or Memphis, let alone Muslim nations.

What, then, did Gen. Petraeus accomplish that deserves admission to the pantheon of military heroes? The answer is clear: He saved America from an appalling disgrace—the bloody disintegration of Iraq. He ran a high risk and was proved correct in believing that the Sunnis, given our protection, would turn against the extremists in their midst. Thanks to boldness and a firm belief in his strategic vision, he won the shooting war in Iraq.

The Obama administration eventually lost the geopolitical war in 2011 by pulling out all U.S. troops. That left a fractious Iraq riven by violence under the control of a sectarian, spiteful prime minister sympathetic to Iran. The Obama administration snatched political defeat from the jaws of the military victory achieved by Gen. Petraeus.

The Petraeus family has served our nation selflessly, year after year. Like the Roman general Marcus Aurelius, Gen. Petraeus has spent most of the past 10 years in the field. His wife travels constantly to U.S. bases, teaching soldiers and their spouses how to take care of finances. His son turned down lucrative jobs and chose to serve, like his dad, as a combat grunt.

Stand back from these details for a moment. Think of how public figures, including past presidents, resort to "spinning" to stay in power when their human failings were exposed. Gen. Petraeus could have followed that path. President Obama and senators suggested as much. The country needed a man of proven skills; power players stay in the game. With the usual spin, he could have stayed.

But Gen. Petraeus refused to stay, and he refused to conceal why he was leaving. In an era where power and fame define success, it made no difference to him that he was a general instead of a corporal. He had let down his standards.

His legacy is twofold. As a general, he won a war. As a man, he took responsibility. In his common humanity and his exceptional dedication to his ideals, he showed nobility.

Mr. West is a former assistant secretary of defense and combat infantryman. His books include histories of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; his most recent book, "Into the Fire," is co-wrote with Sgt. Dakota Meyer, recipient of the Medal of Honor.

During the Year of Faith Special Acts of Penance Will be Rewarded with the Gift of Sacred Indulgences.

APOSTOLIC PENITENTIARY

URBIS ET ORBIS

D E C R E E

On the day of the 50th anniversary of the solemn opening of the Second Ecumenical Vatican Council, to which Blessed John XXIII “entrusted the principal task to guard and present better the precious deposit of Christian doctrine in order to make it more accessible to the Christian faithful and to all people of good will” (John Paul II, Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum, 11 October 1992: AAS 86 [1994] 113), the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI established the inauguration of a Year dedicated in particular to the profession of true faith and its correct interpretation, with the reading of, or rather, with devout meditation on the Acts of the Council and on the Articles of theCatechism of the Catholic Church, published by Blessed John Paul II, 30 years after the opening of the Council, “in order that all the Christian faithful might better adhere to it, and to promote knowledge and application of it” (ibid. n. 114).
In the year of the Lord 1967, to commemorate the 19th centenary of the martyrdom of the Apostles Peter and Paul, a similar Year of Faith was proclaimed by the Servant of God Paul VI, “intended to show, by an authentic and sincere profession of the same faith, how much the essential content that for centuries has formed the heritage of all believers needs to be confirmed, understood and explored ever anew, so as to bear consistent witness in historical circumstances very different from those of the past” (Benedict XVI, Apostolic Letter Porta Fidei, n. 4).

In our time of profound change to which humanity is subjected, the Holy Father Benedict XVI, by proclaiming this second Year of Faith, wishes to invite the People of God, whose universal Pastor he is, as well as his brother Bishops from all over the world “to join the Successor of Peter, during this time of spiritual grace that the Lord offers us, in recalling the precious gift of faith” (ibid., n. 8).
All the faithful will be given “the opportunity to profess our faith in the Risen Lord... in our cathedrals and in the churches of the whole world; in our homes and among our families, so that everyone may feel a strong need to know better and to transmit to future generations the faith of all times. Religious communities as well as parish communities, and all ecclesial bodies old and new, are to find a way, during this Year, to make a public profession of the Credo” (ibid.).

In addition, all the faithful, individually and as a community, will be called to witness to their faith openly before others in the specific circumstances of their daily life: “the social nature of man, however, itself requires that he should give external expression to his internal acts of religion: that he should share with others in matters religious; that he should profess his religion in community” (cf. Declaration on Religious Freedom Dignitatis Humanae, 7 December 1965: AAS 58 [1966], 932).

Since it is primarily a matter of developing a supreme degree of holiness of life — to the extent that it is possible on this earth — and hence of obtaining the highest possible degree of purity of soul, the important gift of Indulgences, which the Church, by virtue of the power conferred upon her by Christ, offers to all who, with the proper disposition, fulfill the special prescriptions for gaining them, will be of great usefulness. “With the Indulgence”, Paul VI  taught, “the Church availing herself of her powers as minister of the Redemption brought about by Christ the Lord, communicates to the faithful participation in this fullness of Christ in the Communion of Saints, providing them with abundant means to achieve salvation” (cf. Apostolorum Limina, 23 May 1974: AAS 66 [1974] 289). In this way is revealed the “treasure of the Church”, to which “the merits of the Blessed Mother of God and of all the elect, from the first righteous person to the last, add further” (Clement vi, Bull Unigenitus Dei Filius, 27 January 1343).

The Apostolic Penitentiary is charged with everything concerning the granting and use of Indulgences. To encourage the faithful to have a correct conception of Indulgences and to develop a devout desire to obtain them, at the request of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization and with attentive consideration of the Note with Pastoral Recommendations for the Year of Faith, issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for gaining the gift of Indulgences during the Year of Faith, the Apostolic Penitentiary has established the following measures, issued in conformity with the wishes of the august Pontiff, so that the faithful may be further encouraged to know and love the Doctrine of the Catholic Church and obtain from it a greater abundance of spiritual fruit.

Throughout the Year of Faith — established from 11 October 2012 to 24 November 2013 — all individual members of the faithful who are truly repentant, have duly received the Sacrament of Penance and Holy Communion and who pray for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff may receive the Plenary Indulgence in remission of the temporal punishment for their sins, imparted through God’s mercy and applicable in suffrage to the souls of the deceased:

a. every time they take part in at least three homilies preached or attend at least three lectures on theProceedings of the Second Vatican Council and on the Articles of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in any church or suitable place;

b. every time they go as pilgrims to a Papal Basilica, a Christian catacomb, a cathedral church, a sacred place designated by the local Ordinary for the Year of Faith (for example, the Minor Basilicas and Shrines dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, to the Holy Apostles or to the Holy Patrons), and take part there in some sacred function or at least pause in recollection for a suitable length of time with devout meditation, concluding with the recitation of the Our Father, theProfession of Faith in any legitimate form, invocations to the Blessed Virgin Mary or, depending on the case, to the Holy Apostles or Patrons;

c. every time when, on the days determined by the local Ordinary for the Year of Faith (such as, for example, the Solemnities of the Lord and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Feasts of the Holy Apostles and Patrons and of the Chair of St Peter), in any sacred place, they take part in a solemn Eucharistic celebration or in the Liturgy of the Hours, adding the Profession of Faith in any legitimate form;

d. a day freely chosen during the Year of Faith on which to make a devout visit to the baptistery or other place in which they received the sacrament of Baptism, if they renew their baptismal promises in any legitimate form.

Diocesan or Eparchial Bishops and those who are legally equivalent to them, on the most appropriate day in this period, on the occasion of the principal celebration (for example, 24 November 2013, on the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, Universal King, with which the Year of Faith will end) will be able to impart the Papal Blessing with the Plenary Indulgence from which all the faithful who receive this Blessing devoutly may benefit.

Faithful who are truly repentant and are unable to take part in the solemn celebrations for serious reasons (such as, for example all the nuns who live in perpetually cloistered monasteries, anchorites and the hermits, prisoners, the elderly, the sick, and likewise those who, in hospital or in other places for treatment serve the sick permanently…), will gain the Plenary Indulgence on the same conditions, if, united in mind and spirit with the faithful present, especially at a moment when the words of the Supreme Pontiff or of the Diocesan Bishops are broadcast via the television or radio, they recite at home, or wherever their impediment obliges them to be (for example, in the monastery chapel, in hospital, in a clinic, in prison...), the Our Father, the Profession of faith in any legitimate form and other prayers in conformity with the objectives of the Year of Faith, offering up their suffering or the hardship in their lives.

In order that access to the sacrament of Reconciliation and the gaining of divine forgiveness through the power of the Keys may be pastorally facilitated, local Ordinaries are asked to grant faculties, limited to the internal forum, to canons and priests who will hear confession. The hearing of confession of the faithful will take place in cathedrals and churches designated for the Year of Faith, as specified for Eastern Rite faithful in can. 728 § 2 of the Code of Canons of the Eastern Churches and, in the case of a possible reservation, those in can. 727, excluding, as is obvious, the cases considered in can. 728 § 1; for the faithful of the Latin Church, the faculties specified in can. 508 § 1 of the Code of Canon Law.

After warning the faithful of the gravity of sins to which a reservation or censure has been attached, Confessors will determine appropriate sacramental penances that will lead the faithful, as far as possible, to permanent repentance and, according to the nature of the case, will make them make reparation for any possible scandal and damage.

Lastly, the Penitentiary cordially asks Bishops, since they are in possession of the triple munus[office], to teach, to guide and to sanctify, to take pains to explain clearly the principles and measures proposed here for the sanctification of the faithful, taking into account in particular the circumstances of the place, culture and traditions. An appropriate catechesis for the temperament of each people will draw them, in a clearer and more lively way, and more firmly and deeply root in hearts, the desire for this unique gift, obtained by virtue of the Church’s mediation.

This Decree is valid solely for the Year of Faith. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary.
Given in Rome at the Seat of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 14 September 2012, on the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.
  

Manuel Card. Monteiro de Castro
Major Penitentiary

Mons. Krzysztof Nykiel
Regent

Indulgences and The Year of Faith

APOSTOLIC PENITENTIARY 

THE GIFT OF THE INDULGENCE 

The celebration of the Jubilee Year is not only an extraordinary occasion for benefiting from the great gift of indulgences which the Lord gives us through the Church, but it is also a fitting opportunity to recall the catechesis on indulgences to the attention of the faithful. The Apostolic Penitentiary is therefore publishing this sacred notice for the benefit of all who will be making Jubilee visits.

General Remarks On Indulgences

1. This is how an indulgence is defined in the Code of Canon Law (can. 992) and in theCatechism of the Catholic Church (n. 1471): "An indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain prescribed conditions through the action of the Church which, as the minister of redemption, dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions of Christ and the saints".

2. In general, the gaining of indulgences requires certain prescribed conditions (below, nn. 3, 4), and the performance of certain prescribed works (nn. 8, 9, 10 indicate those specific to the Holy Year).

3. To gain indulgences, whether plenary or partial, it is necessary that the faithful be in the state of grace at least at the time the indulgenced work is completed.

4. A plenary indulgence can be gained only once a day. In order to obtain it, the faithful must, in addition to being in the state of grace:

— have the interior disposition of complete detachment from sin, even venial sin;
— have sacramentally confessed their sins;
— receive the Holy Eucharist (it is certainly better to receive it while participating in Holy Mass, but for the indulgence only Holy Communion is required);
— pray for the intentions of the Supreme Pontiff.

5. It is appropriate, but not necessary, that the sacramental Confession and especially Holy Communion and the prayer for the Pope's intentions take place on the same day that the indulgenced work is performed; but it is sufficient that these sacred rites and prayers be carried out within several days (about 20) before or after the indulgenced act. Prayer for the Pope's intentions is left to the choice of the faithful, but an "Our Father" and a "Hail Mary" are suggested. One sacramental Confession suffices for several plenary indulgences, but a separate Holy Communion and a separate prayer for the Holy Father's intentions are required for each plenary indulgence.

6. For the sake of those legitimately impeded, confessors can commute both the work prescribed and the conditions required (except, obviously, detachment from even venial sin).

7. Indulgences can always be applied either to oneself or to the souls of the deceased, but they cannot be applied to other persons living on earth.

Specific Aspects Of The Jubilee Year

Having fulfilled the necessary conditions in nn. 3-4, the faithful may gain the Jubilee indulgence by performing one of the following works, listed here below in three categories:

8. Works of piety or religion

— Either make a pious pilgrimage to a Jubilee shrine or place (for Rome: one of the four Patriarchal Basilicas — St Peter, St John Lateran, St Mary Major, St Paul —, or to the Basilica of the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, the Basilica of St Laurence in Campo Verano, the Shrine of Our Lady of Divine Love or one of the Christian Catacombs, and participate there in Holy Mass or another liturgical celebration (Lauds or Vespers) or some pious exercise (the Stations of the Cross, the Rosary, the recitation of theAkathistos Hymn, etc.);

— or make a pious visit, as a group or individually, to one of these same Jubilee places, and there spend some time in Eucharistic adoration and pious meditations, ending with the "Our Father", the profession of faith in any approved form and prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary.

9. Works of mercy or charity

— Either visit for a suitable time their brothers or sisters in need or in difficulty(the sick, the imprisoned, the elderly living alone, the handicapped, etc.), as if making a pilgrimage to Christ present in them;

— or support by a significant contribution works of a religious or social nature (for the benefit of abandoned children, young people in trouble, the elderly in need, foreigners in various countries seeking better living conditions);

— or devote a suitable part of personal free time to activities benefiting the community or other similar forms of personal sacrifice.

10. Acts of penance

For at least one whole day

— Either abstain from unnecessary consumption (smoking, alcohol, etc.);

— or fast,

— or abstain from meat (or other food according to the specific norms of the Bishops' Conferences), and donate a proportionate sum of money to the poor.

Given in Rome at the offices of the Apostolic Penitentiary, 29 January 2000.

Cardinal William Wakefield Baum
Major Penitentiary

Bishop Luigi De Magistris
Titular Bishop of Nova
Regent

            

Quotes on Democracy From Frank Russo

I would preface this with the reminder that democracy is vulnerable. It is not a permanent stability but a methodology built on the freedom and responsibility of its protagonists.


"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and given him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the "new wonderful good society" which shall now be Rome's, interpreted to mean "more money, more ease, more security, and more living fatly at the expense of the industrious". - Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)


"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years." - Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859)

Walker Percy As Apologetic For God From Within the Chaos of Modernity

Walker Percy sees our culture as a diseased patient who has already died – perhaps around 1914. The name of the culture was Christendom. The greater difficulty beyond ascertaining death is to name the disease; or, as he says, “if not to isolate the bacillus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable.”[2]

Percy was acutely sensitive to the bacillus, and all the male Percy’s before him. His biographer Jay Tolson remarked: “The problem, specifically, was depression – a wracking, disabling depression… partly hereditary”[3] that engulfed his great-grandfather (suicide), his two uncles (LeRoy accidentally shot himself) and his father who deliberately shot himself after a previous attempt at slashing his wrists. Walker suffered acutely from the same fugues, melancholy and meaninglessness. While in medical school at Columbia, he was seeing a psychotherapist on a regular basis. While interning at Bellevue’s pathology lab, he contracted tuberculosis, was sent to a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York. Percy reports: “I lived a strange life then. For weeks I saw no one, except the person who brought me food, on a try, three times a day, and occasionally a doctor. I read and read.”[4] What did he read? Thomas Mann, Kafka, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard. He left the sanatorium and the practice of medicine, returned to the south, traveled with Shelby Foote to New Mexico and there expanded his read to Gabriel Marcel, Heidegger, Mounier, Jaspers, and Sartre. Like Kafka, the scientist, he was on the hunt in search of the bacillus that was killing him (and everyone else).

What did he seek? Himself. Not himself in a selfishness of everything “for me,” but the identity and the reality of me as a unique subject; a “me” that did not fit into any category. He was not, I will argue, in search of abstract thought or immateriality as the key to conceptual knowing, but the unique and un-repeatable “me” that had fallen through the categorical “gaps” of scientific abstraction.

The thesis of Joseph F. Previtali’s “Walker Percy the Philosopher” seems to have interpreted Percy’s diagnosis of the malaise as a materialist entrapment that can be cured by an apologetic of immateriality in the human person, and this by the immateriality involved in the semiotics of sign-giving or naming. He writes: “Since we know that there are some times when the signified and the signifier are purely material, we can conclude that the intellect, at least sometimes, must be that which has immateriality.”[5] This would be the traditional neo-scholastic response to the reduction of sensible reality to mere matter and measurement. Percy, indeed, uses the Helen Keller experience of naming the water at the well in Tuscumbia, Alabama as the eureka moment when it seems that she has escaped from the dyadic physiology of stimulus (S) - response (R) as the connecting of the Braille symbol for water to the wet liquid. Previtali says: “To emphasize the immateriality of the coupler, Percy asks the reader to draw a picture of someone asserting a proposition or judging a painting or composing a piece of music. As the reader comes to learn, Percy knows that it is not possible to do so. Here we have the climactic discovery of Percy’s investigation into human nature: the human intellect must have an immaterial element in order to account for the phenomenon of human language.”[6]And Previtali is led to think that Percy is fixing his attention on the psychic work of abstraction and immaterial conceptualization from whence comes the name. He presumes that Percy’s philosophical perspective is an “Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysical view.” [7]

He is clearly right in that symbolization has taken place which is a “throwing” (Ballein) “together” (sym) of name (an abstraction) and individual thing by the verb “is.” Percy says: “A child points to a flower and says ‘flower.’ One element of the event is the flower as perceived by sight and registered by the brain: blue, five-petaled, of a certain shape; and the spoken word ‘flower,’ a Gestalt of a peculiar little sequence of sounds of larynx vibrations, escape of air between lips and teeth, and so on. But what is the entity at the apex of the triangle, that which links the other two? Peirce, a difficult, often obscure writer, called it by various names, interpretant, interpreter, judge. I have used the term ‘coupler’ as a minimal designation of that which couples name and thing, subject and predicate, links them by the relation which we mean by the peculiar little word ‘is.’ It, the linking entity, was also called by Peirce ‘mind’ and even ‘soul.’

“Here is the embarrassment, and it cannot be gotten round, so it might as well be said right out: By whatever name one chooses to call it – interpretant, interpreter, coupler, whatever – it, the third element, is not material.
“It is as real as a cabbage or a king or a neurone, but it is not material. No material structure of neurons, however complex, and however intimately it may be related to the triadic event, can itself assert anything. If you think it can, please draw me a picture of an assertion.

“A material substance cannot name or assert a proposition.
“The initiator of a speech act is an act-or, that is, an agent. The agent is not material” [8](bold mine).

In this text, Percy is not referring to the work of an immaterial intellect, precisely because “intellects” do not work. The agent of the naming is an “interpretant,” a “interpreter,” and a “judge.” The “coupler,” the “namer” is not “the human intellect”[9] as Previtali suggests. Rather, and in accord with the best of thomistic anthropology where “actiones sunt suppositorum,”[10] the coupler or namer is an “act-or, that is, an agent. The agent is not material.” Previtali assumes that the coupler is the intellect as “immaterial agent.” Having identified agency with the intellect as a medium of knowing names and not the knower, he then finds himself with the false problem of “how… the immaterial part of the intellect interacts with our brain matter in the phenomenon of coupling the sign and the signified?”[11] Discovering that Percy does not deal with such a problem because he never entered into it, he suggests that “it is reasonably likely that the Aristotelian hylomorphism of St. Thomas Aquinas would be Percy’s response to the question of interaction, and it does seem to be the most cogent answer to this problem of interaction.” He then goes on to say: “In this view, the human being is a single substance composed of a unity of body and soul of materiality and immateriality… Given Percy’s desire for an anthropology that expresses an integration of body and soul, this view would seem to be most in line with his thinking.”[12]

I would suggest Percy’s whole endeavor works on a different level, namely, the level of the subject as “I.” Percy’s take on Helen Keller’s discovery in the act of naming the water is not that she discovered thought. Rather, she discovered herself – her existential “I” - in the exercise of her subjectivity by “throwing” the sign and at the water and uniting them in “meaning.” She experienced herself as a “thrower,” an agent exercising causality.

Percy’s whole discovery is the act of conjoining of signs with signified by a signifier. His problematic is that there is no sign that can be “thrown” at the sign-user whereby he is signified. “Semiotically,” he says, “the self is literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else, e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up. The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself.”[13] Hence, the signifier cannot have “substance” as its “name” since the signifier as active agent is irreducibly “I” as in George, or James or Helen. “You are Ralph to me and I am Walker to you, but you are not Ralph to you and I am not Walker to me”[14]

Of course, the question arises as to how the singular can be intelligible in human cognition without being rendered an abstract, conceptual universal. Two things stand out immediately. One, the act of being (esse)is irreducibly singular. Yet, as act of all acts,[15] it is the supreme and only source of created intelligibility. As Maritain remarked: “Existence… is the consummation or completion, in the mind, of intelligibility in act. It corresponds to the act of existing exercised by things. And this act of existing is itself incomparably more than a mere positing without intelligible value of its own; it is act or energy par excellence; and as we know, the more act there is the greater the intelligibility.”[16] Secondly, (and decisively) the encyclical “Fides et Ratio” points to the human person - as concrete “as a cabbage or a king or a neuron” and yet immaterial - as the “privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”[17] This knowledge – unmediated by sensible perception or abstraction and categories - that accrues to the experience of the “I” as symbolizing agent is not concept but consciousness[18] as Helen describes it.[19]


Karol Wojtyla expressed the need, as we approached the Third Millennium, to undergo this migration of seeing the human person as existential subject rather than as the objectivized mental category, “rational animal.”[20] He went on that “the antinomy of subjectivism vs. objectivism, along with the underlying antinomy of idealism vs. realism, created conditions that discouraged dealing with human subjectivity – for fear that this would lead inevitably to subjectivism.” But as “we are seeing a breakdown of that line of demarcation… we can no longer go on treating the human being exclusively as an objective being, but we must also somehow treat the human being as a subject in the dimension in which the specifically human subjectivity of the human being is determined by consciousness. And that dimension would seem to be none other than personal subjectivity.”[21]

Previtali ends by saying that “the ultimate end of Percy’s quest is to discern the implications for human existence of this newfound discovery that man is indeed more than just an organism interacting with an environment. Percy proposes that our unique nature is such that our search for fulfillment reaches beyond the here and now.” [22] Such a conclusion squares with his thesis that Percy’s discovery is the immateriality of the intellect, and therefore the immateriality of the soul that transcends the here and now into immortality.

But, in line with the perspective that Percy is talking about the self not only as immaterial, but more deeply as “subject,” I would submit that Percy’s thesis has much to do with the world of here and now. His explicit complaint and suffering – “the modern malaise” - is the feeling “in the deepest sense possible that something has gone wrong with one’s very self? When one experiences the common complaint of the age, the loss of meaning, purposelessness, loss of identity, of values, and so on?”[23] The partial and temporary solution he proposes points to the recovery of – not immateriality – but of identity… even as “neurotic.”[24] Being able to be named such by the “experts” is an achievement in identity and becomes in this moonscape a glimpse of recovery: “I may be sick but how happy I am when I can present my doctor with a sickness or a symptom or a dream which is recognized as a classical example of such-and-such a neurosis: I am an authentic neurotic.”[25]


[1] Joseph F. Previtali, “Walker Percy the Philosopher,” Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, 31, Number 4, Winter 2008, 26-31.
[2] Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Signposts in a Strange Land ed. Patrick Samway, The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus, Giroux (1991) 206.
[3] Jay Tolson, “Pilgrim in the Ruins” Chapel Hill, (1992) 28.
[4] Robert Coles, “Walker Percy – An American Search” Atlantic-Little Brown (1978) 66-67.
[5] Previtali, op. cit. 29
[6] Previtali, op. cit 29.
[7] Previtali, op. cit. 29.
[8] Walker Percy, “The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind,” Signposts in a Strange Land ed. Patrick Samway, The Noonday Press (1991) 287.
[9] Previtali, op. cit. 29
[10] S. Th. II-II, 58, 2, Respondeo: “Now actions belong to supposits and wholes and, properly speaking, not to parts and forms or powers, for we do not say properly that the hand strikes, but a man with his hand, nor that heat makes a thing hot, but fire by heat, although such expressions may be employed metaphorically.”
[11] Previtali, op. cit. 30
[12] Ibid.
[13] Walker Percy, “Lost in the Cosmos,” Noonday Press (1996) 106-107.
[14] Ibid 107.
[15] S. Th. I, 4, 1 ad 3: “…Ipsum esse est perfectissimum omnium; comparator enim ad omnia ut actus. Nihil enim habet actualitatem, nisi inquantum est; under ipsum esse est actualitas omnium rerum, et etiam ipsarum formarum.. Under non comparator ad alia sicut recipiens ad receptum, sed magis sicut receptum ad recipiens.” ”Cum enim dico esse hominis, vel equi, vel cuiuscumque alterius, ipsum esse consideratur ut formale et receptum, non autem ut illud cui competit esse.
[16] J. Maritain, “Existence and the Existent” Image (1956) 27-28.
[17] John Paul II, “Fides et Ratio” #83: “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being [actu essendi], and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”
[18] K. Wojtyla, “We then discern clearly that it is one thing to be the subject, another to be cognized (that is, objectivized) as the subject, and a still different thing to experience one’s self as the subject of one’s own acts and experiences.” The Acting Person Reidel (1979) 44.
[19] “I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!” in Walker Percy, “Message in the Bottle,” Noonday Press (1995) 35.
[20] Karol Wojtyla, “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in the Human Being,” Person and Community (1993) 209.
[21] Ibid 210.
[22] Previtali, op. cit.
[23] Walker Percy, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Signposts… op. cit. 211.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid

Insights Into the Mind of Charles Taylor

A most interesting essay on the mind and writings of Charles Taylor (“Sentimentality or Honesty? On Charles Taylor” published at thenation.com, the author (Mark Oppenheimer, writer for the "Beliefs" column in the New York Times on August 29-Sept 5th Edition of The Nation: markoppenheimer.com ) attempts an overview of Taylor’s recent thought. The author comments that “when you take the recent books by and about Taylor together – as only a professional philosopher or a book reviewer would do – you see they offer an intelligible vision of how to think about the modern world. Because Taylor writes so much, any synopsis of his views is necessarily a travesty. I am about to attempt one… And I surely misrepresent him, for nowhere does he state the propositions I am about to ascribe to him this is my gloss, and I don’t expect he would use language like mine.” Nevertheless, I transcribe the five (5) propositions that (according to the author and insightfully on his part) characterize Taylor’s recent work.

What is most interesting to me is the suggestion that the Enlightenment and Reformation were “necessary” – somewhat like a Nestorius or Theodore of Mapsuestia were critical for the development of the Christological dogma of the one Person and two natures. Had they not insisted on the true humanity of Christ – the distinction of person and nature not obtaining at the time – there would have been no Council of Ephesus and Chalcedon to give us what Benedict XVI has described as “the boldest and most sublime simplification of the complex and many-layered data of tradition:” “Son of God, possessed of the same nature as God and of the same nature as us.”[1] That is, as the Christological dogmas emerged from the graveyard of heresies, so also the dignity of the human person as “other Christ” and therefore Son of God, his freedom of self-determination and the universal call to holiness in the ordinary that characterizes the consciousness of the Church and its Magisterium during and after the Second Vatican Council would not have reached the cultural consciousness that they have today except for the intervening Protestant Reformation and the turn to subjectivity around the time of Descartes and the so-called “Enlightenment.”

1)      “Once enchanted, we are now disenchanted.” “Up until about the year 1500, Taylor believes, people in Christendom were enchanted, had ‘porous selves’ open to metaphysical notions, theophanies, divine guidance, etc. Since that time, we have become disenchanted: whereas once most people had no choice but to believe, belief is now an option. Today, even if we choose to believe in something unseen, belief is necessarily of a different character than it was in an enchanted age, when belief simply was.

2)      “Our response should not be nostalgia for the old, more unified, more religious Christendom.’ “Taylor is a Roman Catholic, and as with his response to disenchantment, he stakes out a position on nostalgia at odds with some prominent Catholic philosophers, like his contemporary Alasdair MacIntyre and his old teacher G.E.M. Anscombe. For them, modernity – disenchanged, secular, materialistic – is in its essence regrettable. For Taylor, modernity does not have to be a bad thing. [And I – blogger - would insert here, that Benedict XVI sees it as a good and necessary thing].

Like many religious philosophers, Taylor sees the foregrounding of earthly life, as opposed to eternal life, as one aspect of modernity. This worries him, because seeing one’s bodily survival and flourishing as the ultimate goal of existence tends toward selfishness. In ‘A Catholic Modernity?,’ my favorite essay in Dilemmas and Connections, Taylor discusses possible alternatives to the culture of earthly life. One alternative comes from Nietzsche, who ‘rebelled against the idea that our highest goal is to preserve and increase life, to prevent suffering… Life itself can push to cruelty, to domination, to exclusion, and, indeed, does so in its moments of most exuberant affirmation.’ Another alternative comes from Christianity, which, especially in Catholicism, can give license to asceticism, monasticism and other denials of aspects of life.

But Taylor is no Nietzschean, and he does not want to romanticize that we might call Extreme Catholicism. Not only is that premodern Catholicism unrecoverable, Taylor says, it had to expire in order for us to become a more charitable, humane species. Taylor argues that with the Protestant Reformation came an ‘affirmation of ordinary life’ (the term is discussed at length in Sources of the Self) that refocused religious devotion on the daily acts and works of ordinary people while elevating the sufferings of those ordinary people to a matter of divine concern.

                In the Catholic world, it was too easy to feel that none of us mattered – all that did matter was present in the church, or the Mass, or heaven. But one it became clear that God was present when you read the Bible, it also became clear that the affairs of those Bible readers mattered to God. Taylor seems to say that Protestantism rescued Catholicism. Modernity gives us horrors, but also graces such as we never knew: ‘The age of Hiroshima and Auschwitz has also produced Amnesty International and Medecins sans Frontieres.’ Taylor says that Christianity ‘needed this breach with the culture of Christendom… for the impulse of solidarity to transcend the frontier of Christendom itself’ [my emphasis]. Panhuman solidarity, so much a part of our humanity now, is too  valuable to lose. So the work at hand is to live with modernity: it’s worth it.

3)      “ ‘If we’re going to live with modernity, we should start by trying to understand its many forms – chief among them, in the contemporary West, the cult of authenticity.’ Rather than being good Christians (or, for that matter, good utilitarians or good Kantians), we now seek to be authentic, true to ourselves. I just want to be me. Like the worship of life, the worship of one’s authentic self, or true nature – a worship heightened in the Romantic movement – can result in narcissism, not to mention absurdity. We now say things that would have made no sense in the year 1500, things like, ‘I would marry her, but I’m not sure settling down is who I am.’ Obviously, there is a problem here, one Taylor recognizes. But he insists that this need not be a  bad

striving. It could even be fruitful, if only modern man and woman figure out how to make it so.

4)      “That is the task at hand: how to live a life that is personally authentic – a goal the medieval church would not have understood, much less approved of – while giving that life meaning, spirituality, fullness.’ In other words, how can we keep our modern humanity without losing what is best from the enchanted past? (…)

“(I)t seems to me that ‘authenticity,’ a word he uses only  for the personal project, is actually the word he wants for the political project too…. But as I read Taylor, he seems to say that just as any given woman in Quebec wants to be true to herself, the Quebecois want to be true to their culture. It is the same problem on two different levels. It is the Romantic urge personally and politically, and in both cases it seems to appear, historically speaking, just on either side of the  year 1800. The political urge makes no sense without the personal one Taylor recognizes this equivalence implicitly, and his work argues for it, but he never quire formulates the extent to which, for him, the personal is political.

5)      “ ‘To the extent that we can succeed in being authentic, as people and as cultures – succeed in creating political forms or governments that allow people and groups to flourish that way – we will have a greater fullness than what people had in the old age of enchantment.’ In fact, Taylor believes, we may be able to have a fullness unimaginable in days of old. In a sense, we will have solved the problem implied in proposition one, the problem of disenchantment. We will have shown disenchantment to be a blessing.” [Author unknown as of this writing].

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[1] J. Ratzinger, “Dogma and Preaching” Franciscan Herald Press (1985) 8.

Mothers Matter, But Who Cares?

Bill Gates Challenged in Nairobi

Prof Robert Walley, Founder and Director of Mater care International, challenged the recent reproductive health initiatives of the founder of Microsoft, as irrelevant to the causes of maternal mortality in the world, as expressed by the statistics of the World Health Organisation itself.

The Emeritus Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of St Johns in Newfoundland, Canada was speaking at the 9^th Ethics Conference at Strathmore University, Nairobi, which this year is focusing on Bioethics.

Speaking to the topic of “Mothers Matter, but Who Cares?”, he spoke of how 330,000 mothers die in pregnancy every year, the vast majority of the causes are easily preventable and 91% occur in the last three months of pregnancy (Lancet 2009).

He described how often mothers die alone, in agony, and exhausted. The maternal mortality rate , which is the number of mother dying in pregnancy each year in the developed world is 1:15,000, whereas in the developing world it is 1:15. This is one of the scandals of modern medicine. Nobody is asking : what happens to mothers? He noted in particular the lack of maternal care in refugee camps. In his own personal professional experience he has never experienced a maternal death.

Mothers are politically unimportant, they have no voice. There is a lot of violence done against women and children, often through a lack of communication of truth in relation to the side effects of contraceptives and abortion. One of the first rights of women is the right to know the truth. Mothers are being ground to the dust.

He presented The Charter of Maternal Rights, based on the Social Doctrine of the Church and the dignity of women. We need a Marshall plan to help mothers and so do something about the most neglected of the millennium goals.

It will take 275 years to reach the millennium goal of a reduction in maternal mortality if we keep going at the present rate, because mothers don’t matter to governments and international aid organisations.

He accused womens groups of doing nothing for these problems. They talk of women, women, women, but say nothing of mothers, mothers, mothers. We need to restore the dignity of mothers.

He spoke of the barbarism of partial birth abortion promoted by the Clinton administration.

The Year of Faith has to be a year to evangelise doctors and midwives. It is also the 25^thanniversary of Mulieris Dignitatem of John Paul II.

He described the Isiolo project, the 91% solution, a maternal health facility, that has been built to help rural women in that area of Kenya.

Prof Anne Muigai spoke of how 30% of cases of IVF have birth defects. Prof Seamus Grimes of National University of Ireland, Galway delivered  a presentation  on “Understanding Sub Saharan African Fertility Transition”.

Oct 30 (1 day ago)

The Year of Faith or Purgatory

The Need for the Year of Faith:

Without it, Purgatory

Remember: The “Last Things” are Christological. They are relations, not states or places.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: “God is the ‘last thing’ of the creature. Gained, he is heaven, lost, he is hell; examining, he is judgment; purifying, he is purgatory. He it is to whom finite being dies, and through whom it rises to him, in him. This he is, however, as he presents himself to the world, that is, in his Son, Jesus Christ, who is the revelation of God and, therefore, the whole essence of the last things. In this way, eschatology is, almost more even than any other locus theologicus, entirely a doctrine of salvation. This is, as we shall see, absolutely central.” ^[1]

Joseph Ratzinger: “What actually saves us is the full assent of faith.”[2] “But in most of us that basic option is buried under a great deal of wood, hay and straw. Only with difficulty can it peer out from behind the latticework of an egoism we are powerless to pull down with our own hands. Man is the recipient of the divine mercy, yet this does not exonerated him from the need to be transformed. Encounter with the Lord is this transformation. It is the fire that burns away our dross and re-forms us to be vessels of eternal joy.”

                 Thus, “The essential Christian understanding of Purgatory has now become clear. Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where man is forced to undergo punishment in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Rather is it the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints. Simply to look at people with any degree of realism at all is to grasp the necessity of such a process. It does not replace grace by works, but allows the former to achieve its full victory precisely as grace.” That is to say again: “What actually saves us is the full assent of faith” [Ibid.]

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[1] H. U. Von Balthasar, “Explorations in Theology” 1. The Word Made Flesh, 260.

[2] J. Ratzinger, “Eschatology,” CUA (1988) 231.