Regio Dissimilitudinis

" For Benedict, the words of the Psalm: coram angelis psallam Tibi, Domine – in the presence of the angels, I will sing your praise (cf. 138:1) – are the decisive rule governing the prayer and chant of the monks. What this expresses is the awareness that in communal prayer one is singing in the presence of the entire heavenly court, and is thereby measured according to the very highest standards: that one is praying and singing in such a way as to harmonize with the music of the noble spirits who were considered the originators of the harmony of the cosmos, the music of the spheres. From this perspective one can understand the seriousness of a remark by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who used an expression from the Platonic tradition handed down by Augustine, to pass judgement on the poor singing of monks, which for him was evidently very far from being a mishap of only minor importance. He describes the confusion resulting from a poorly executed chant as a falling into the “zone of dissimilarity” – the regio dissimilitudinis. Augustine had borrowed this phrase from Platonic philosophy, in order to designate his condition prior to conversion (cf. Confessions, VII, 10.16): man, who is created in God’s likeness, falls in his godforsakenness into the “zone of dissimilarity” – into a remoteness from God, in which he no longer reflects him, and so has become dissimilar not only to God, but to himself, to what being human truly is. Bernard is certainly putting it strongly when he uses this phrase, which indicates man’s falling away from himself, to describe bad singing by monks. But it shows how seriously he viewed the matter. It shows that the culture of singing is also the culture of being, and that the monks have to pray and sing in a manner commensurate with the grandeur of the word handed down to them, with its claim on true beauty. This intrinsic requirement of speaking with God and singing of him with words he himself has given, is what gave rise to the great tradition of Western music. It was not a form of private “creativity”, in which the individual leaves a memorial to himself and makes self-representation his essential criterion. Rather it is about vigilantly recognizing with the “ears of the heart” the inner laws of the music of creation, the archetypes of music that the Creator built into his world and into men, and thus discovering music that is worthy of God, and at the same time truly worthy of man, music whose worthiness resounds in purity."

From "The Origins of Western Theology and the Roots of European Culture," address to Representatives from the World of Culture, Sep 12, 2008


Go read the whole thing. And then get on your knees and thank God for Pope Benedict.


One of the reasons I have a deep fondness for Benedict's work is that he consistently transcends the disorders and schizophrenia that are rampant in the modern Church. His discussion here of liturgical music is a perfect example of this phenomena. In the modern Church, the topic of liturgical music is a common battleground for intelligent Catholics who take the Church seriously. On the one side, you have the "liberals" who see liturgical music as yet another religious form that must be updated to conform with the vagaries of modern culture. Hence the provenance of the liturgical crimes of Marty Haugen. On the other side, one has the conservatives, who insist that the Mass must be accompanied by beautiful music. They happily attend liturgies with chamber symphonies that perform classical German masses from the 18th and 19th century, or Renaissance polyphony, or some other brand of classical music.


In the midst of the logorrhea over that state of liturgical music in America, a crucial fact often gets overlooked: the liberal and conservative approaches to liturgical music are opposite sides of the same coin, and both represent a distorted view of the function of music within liturgy. A Schubert mass is no less of a distortion, liturgically speaking, than a work from David Haas' corpus. For both parties, music is seen as an accompaniment to the mass, as if it served an analogous function to a film score. For both camps, the primary reference for determining the suitability of a given piece of music is the Self. Whatever musical style is deemed most beautiful by the Self is therefore deemed to be most suitable for the liturgy. To see this phenomena for yourself, go into the conservative Catholic webforum of your choice and pose the question "what's so bad about Marty Haugen music?" I'm willing to wager that the overwhelming number of responses will be something along the lines of "I don't think his music is very pretty, and we should have pretty music at Mass." Thus, the Self triumphs over all.


I think Benedict's brief remarks listed above show a way out of this mess. As Benedict makes clear, true liturgical music serves a theological purpose and is tied to the order of creation and the nature of the human person. Reclaiming Western liturgy is a much deeper project than simply ordering up a handful of talented singers to sing pretty music during Mass.

Cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space

Brilliant essay by Jonathan Franzen. Though he takes a predictable turn towards the psychological, there are some interesting insights into the negative ways in which modern gadgets shape our society.

Germain Grisez, Contraception and Natural Law

I am still working my way through the conclusion of this book, but so far I can not recommend it highly enough. Any contemporary Catholic who is interested in the ethical underpinnings of the Church's teaching on contraception should familiarize themselves with Grisez's arguments. For myself, Grisez's thesis has tied together a number of philosophical problems which have been nagging me for some time now. The chief difficulty among said problems is my perception that, in the popular Catholic mind at least, the Church's teaching on the intrinsic immorality of contraception has split itself into a seemingly irresolvable dialectic. On the one hand, there are proponents of what I would call a "scientific" natural law theory, who oppose contraception on the grounds that "contraception is immoral because it frustrates the natural purpose of the act." Underlying this theory is a certain version of natural law which assumes that natural law is the "scientific" search within a construct called "human nature" for a set of categorical moral norms ,the violation of which defines the limits of human action. On the other hand, there are those who, rejecting the scientific-natural law theory for various reasons, would propose what I call the psychological-therapeutic model. In this view, contraception is forbidden because non-contraceptive sex leads to the fullest state of emotional and personal well-being. Underlying this argument is the notion that ethical norms are most properly founded upon psychological principles.

The deficiencies of this dialectic have become more strongly apparent to me over the summer. On a theoretical level, my recent reading of Leo Strauss and Alasdair Macintyre has convinced me that the scientific model of natural law is fundamentally deficient, and incapable of rationally grounding a consistent ethic. Moreover, I think Philip Rieff shows why abandoning this model for a psychological-therapeutic model is even more disastrous and unsustainable. On a practical level, I seem to have recently had an inordinate number of encounters with people, both online in real life, who wrestle with one end or the other of this dialectic. One can see this in the wide range of sometimes-incompatible statements which get offered up in support of Church teaching. These statements span the ideological range from "this is how you have great Catholic orgasm" to "you can never prevent conception when it is possible," to discussion of a mythical "contraceptive mentality" which is somehow supposed to be the same thing as actual contraceptive acts.


(N.B. - For online examples of people who wrestle the scientific natural law view, check out the comments thread on the various contraception posts on Dr Liccione's blog, such as this recent example on this post. For online examples of the therapeutic model, you need only to spend a few minutes on this website, an unfortunate, if well-intended example of the problem)


From what I can tell so far, Grisez's work shows a way out of this dialectical mess. While I will not recapitulate his argument here, his book offers a fairly sound critique of both models, and proposes a theory more closely aligned with classical-Thomistic virtue ethics. By aligning the Church's teaching with the pursuit of fundamental human goods, I think Grisez escapes the problems in modern ethical theory highlighted by Macintyre and Strauss. Also, by rejecting the psychological model, the ghost of Philip Rieff can be effectively laid to rest in popular Catholic thought. On a practical level, many of the popular deficiencies offered up in support of Church teaching can be corrected by a careful reading of Grisez's argument. Contraception is not merely the fact of not having children. The traditional formulation of primary and secondary ends in marriage does not have to be interpreted as "really good" and "not as "good" or as "more important" and "less important." Maximizing family size is not a moral obligation which follows from the Church's anti-contraceptive stance. There are other examples one can think of, most of which I believe Grisez's argument effectively answers.


As a closing aside, I think that Grisez's approach offers the possibility of more fully integrating the the two modern documents most closely associated with Church teaching on contraception. Humanae Vitae (HV), lately lionized on the occasion of the anniversary of its release, tends to be popularly associated with the scientific natural law view. This explains its frequent citation by those of a more philosophic bent, as well as the endless quibbling which occurs over some its phrasings and their translation (e.g. the phrase "grave reasons"). However, I think a close reading of HV points towards the more classical virtue ethics proposed by Grisez, and explains its constant emphasis on the goods of human life and marriage, and its less explicit emphasis on the violation of moral obligation.

More interestingly, is the recent series of catechetical talks given by John Paul II, popularly referred to as the "Theology of the Body" (TOB), and which have enjoyed a popularity among the faithful, though typically in a more distilled and summarized form as exemplified by the work of Christopher West. I would argue that these talks have been misread in three fundamental ways: the first is by the theological academy, which is not so much of a mis-reading as a non-reading, whereby the content of JPII's message is dismissed as not consonant with the various structures of modern theology. The second misreading of TOB is by the traditionalist camp, whereby the persistent personalist language employed by JPII is taken as evidence that the content is nothing other than existentialist nattering, with the ghost of Heidegger given free reign over Church teaching. The third mis-reading tends to follow the psychological-therapeutic model I discussed above, and Christopher West's work is often the most prominent example of this mis-reading (though to his credit, West often shows a more perceptive reading of JPII, and the conflicts between this more perceptive reading and the popular therapeutic understanding are left unresolved.)

However, it is my belief that TOB can be read in a manner more closely tied to JPII's original intent. Such a reading would approach the talks on their own terms, namely as a catechesis explaining the true shape of the goods known through human relations. When seen in the light of a virtue ethics such as Macintyre's or Grisez's, where moral actions are the means by which human goods are freely realized within the community (i.e. Church), then the substance of TOB becomes yet another expression of that constant and unbroken ethic which the Church has proposed from Her founding. In such a reading, the constant reference to the origin of Creation found in TOB becomes a method for revealing the full and supernatural end towards which all human actions must be directed.

The Quotable Philip Rieff

Set into the context of Reich's attack on the family as the nucleus of all authoritative institutions, his repeated calls for a do-it-yourself adolescent sex education acquires political significance. Sex education becomes the main weapon in an ideological war against the family; its aim is to divest the parents of their moral authority. Reich ignores the facts of prolonged infancy and pedagogoic love. Indeed for him, sexual love is opposed to pedagogic love, the latter creative of authority, the former subversive of it. The first place in which equality must be achieved is in the family - thus destroying it. American children seem to me more than a little Reichian.

[...] By assuming that adolescence is actually the prime of life, Reich expressed his hatred of all doctrines of maturity, including the psychoanalytic version. There is something adolescent about the Reichian theory; for him all hope rests with the possibility of creating revolutionary children.[...] In fantasy, Reich led a children's crusade against all authority, including the authority of the proletariat. He turned social causality upside down: it as if only revolutionary children could breed a revolutionary regime. [...] With John Dewey, Wilhelm Reich is one of the great theorists of the child as the agent of social change.

-The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Chapter 7 - the Therapeutic as Martyr

Humanae Vitae

Excellent first-hand account of the chaos ensuing the encyclical.

Solzhenitsyn 1918-2008

"It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil."

-The Gulag Archipelago

The Quotable Alasdair MacIntyre

"Friendship of course, on Aristotle's view, involves affection. But that affection arises within a relationship defined in terms of a common allegiance to and a common pursuit of goods. The affection is secondary, which is not in the least to say unimportant. In a modern perspective affection is often the central issue; our friends are said to be those whom we like, perhaps whom we like very much. 'Friendship' has become for the most part the name of a type of emotional state rather than a type of social and political relationship. E.M. Forster once remarked that if it came to a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, he hoped that he would have the courage to betray his country. In an Aristotelian perspective anyone who can formulate such a contrast has no country, has no polis; he is a citizen of nowhere, an internal exile wherever he lives. Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. They possess at best that inferior form of friendship which is founded on mutual advantage. That they lack the bond of friendship is of course bound up with the self-avowed moral pluralism of such liberal societies. They have abandoned the moral unity of Aristotelianism, whether in its ancient or medieval forms."

-Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue