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disabled people are worth whatever cost or resources is needed to keep them alive. disabled people are worth it even if they don't live long. they're worth it even if they will need extra support and resources for every day of their life. they're worth it even if they spend all they life indoors. none of it is wasted. none of it is in vain. time, effort, money, resources spent on a life are not wasted. these things have served their purpose. the joy of someone's existence is not undermined by not lasting forever. there's no meaningful point, some threshold where you can say "okay this is enough. after that it's not worth it." it's always worth it.

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“The divine action by one and the same stroke kills and gives life.”

— Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J. (The Sacrament of the Present Moment: A Spiritual Manifesto Reminding Us that it is Only in God that We Live, Move, and Have Our Being, 1.2.6) Original French:  L’action divine mortifie et vivifie par le même coup

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Happy Feast Day

Saint Hilda of Whitby

614-680

Feast Day: November 17

Patronage: learning, culture, and poetry due to her patronage of Caedmon. The National Cathedral School for girls in Washington D.C.

Saint Hilda was an English princess, who at 33, consecrated her life to God as a nun. St. Bede chronicled her life of virtue and intellectual brilliance. She was the Abbess of a double monastery of monks and nuns that was a religious center that revered Scripture studies in Whitby. The last 7 years of her life she suffered from a high fever that didn’t stop her from doing her work. She died peacefully in 680.

Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase. (website)

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"there's no platonic explanation for this"

Wrong. Plato has explained everything.

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Maybe I should be asking an Orthodox person this, but I do not understand the hubbub with the Filioque. To me it is hair splitting, could you explain why it would not be hairsplitting? Or if there is an aspect I am missing as to why it was the final straw for a schism?

Okay, ah, I think there are two aspects that need to be addressed here. The first deals with the simple fact of its inclusion in the Creed, and I'm going to come off as a traitor here, so let me clarify my personal position; I believe the filioque best represents the reality of the Spirit's procession, but I think it was bad that the Western Church inserted it into the Nicene Creed.

As Henri de Lubac talks about in The Christian Faith, the Church allows for many theologies, spiritualities, customs, and liturgical traditions to coexist; "from one country to another and from one century to another there are many differences in emphasis." What connects all these elaborations and practices of the Christian faith is that they are all anchored in that faith, as revealed by God and distilled in the Creed. That faith is the unity of all Christians everywhere.

And what convinced me that the inclusion of the filioque was not a good move actually came from another Catholic thinker, Karl Rahner, who wrote "the inevitable pluralism met with in theology cannot and must not cause the unity of the creed of faith to disappear from the Church, even in its verbal expression." Except.... that's exactly what the Western Church did. It took the Creed as articulated by two separate ecumenical councils, and unilaterally added words to it. And while there are historical reasons for that inclusion, and while I think the theology behind its inclusion is true, I think modifying what was meant to be the unifying symbol of the Christian faith was not a good move. And I can see why the filioque inclusion seems like a rupture from the Orthodox tradition. Because... we have caused the unity of the creed of faith in its verbal expression to disappear.

And I think that's a bigger problem than the content of the filioque clause itself, to be honest. But, as far as the content goes, let's talk about that, too.

In the Orthodox perspective, the three Persons of the Trinity share a common nature, and there's a kind of symmetry where the traits of any given Person is either held in common by all three, or is reserved for one of Them. So, for example, the state of being uncreated and eternal are traits shared by all Persons in the Trinity, as is the fact that They are almighty and infinite. Those are traits derived from their divine nature. But in terms of traits distinctive to Their individual Personhoods, well: the Father is seen as the Source of the other two, while the Son is the only begotten Member of the Trinity, and the Spirit is the only spirated Member. An Orthodox Christian may argue that the filioque ruins this symmetry of Persons; if the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, the distribution of Personal traits is no longer equal (two Persons have a trait that one Person does not have). This can be seen as a kind of ontological inferiority on the Spirit's end.

From the perspective of the Roman Church and Her western descendants, the articulation of the Trinity doesn't really involve this "common to All or particular to One" logic. Instead, we tend to use a sacramental logic that assumes that how the Persons of the Trinity operate within Their creation also tells us something about how They relate to each other from all eternity. So, the Father sends the Son into the world (John 17:1-4); hence the Father begets the Son. But the Father sends the Holy Spirit to the disciples "in [Christ's] name" (John 14:16-17, 26). So, the Father sends the Spirit, but the Son is somehow involved. The Holy Spirit is believed to still have one origin, but this one origin is the joint act of Father and Son. Part of this may have to do with different starting assumptions. Eastern Christians tend to start their thinking on the Trinity as Three existing in Unity, while Western Christians tend to start their thinking on the Trinity with One existing in Multiplicity.

But this is a super complicated subject, so if someone wants to correct me about either of the perspectives I tried to lay out, please feel free to do so.

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Heresy […] consists in pouring the data of Revelation into the mold of a ready-made system. In the analysis it seeks to elude the Christian paradox [… and] to reduce it to an easily assimilated system.

Pierre Hadot ("Stoïcisme et Monarchianisme au IVe siècle")

Original French: l'hérésie […] consiste à couler les données de la révélation dans le moule d'une philosophie toute faite. Elle cherche finalement à éluder le paradoxe chrétien [... et] pour le réduire à un système facile ment assimilable.

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They should invent a falling asleep that is easy

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“If you should ask me what are the ways of God, I would tell you that the first is humility, the second is humility, and the third is humility. Not that there are no other precepts, but if humility does not precede all that we do, our efforts our meaningless.”

— St. Augustine (via the-acton-tocqueville-society)

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Those who settled America were already social equals; low-born and noble were not found among them. These people of generally equal rank who colonized America found no ruling class there which possessed exclusive political privilege by title and, therefore, did not have to engage in a democratic revolution. Unlike Europeans, they were born equal instead of becoming so.

Isaac Kramnick (in his introduction to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, page xxvi)

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So, Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that one could call God good, but not virtuous, because His goodness comes without effort. And that's an interesting distinction, but I wonder how a more classically orthodox Christian would respond to that. Thomas Aquinas says "God Himself is the rule and mode of virtue," but does that make Him, in Himself, virtuous? I'm sure we can call Christ virtuous, but does that trait exist because He is human, or is that a natural part of divinity, too? And is this just splitting hairs?

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Starving Peasants Begging, Russian illustration, 1890s.

Whatever is over and above our needs we possess by robbery, and are guilty of the deaths of all the poor whom we could have helped from the surplus. Quidquid enim necessitati superest, in rapina possidemus; et tot pauperum mortis rei sumus, quot inde sustentare potuimus.

Peter Abelard, in his Rule for Religious Women, trans. Betty Radice

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I think it might also be worth mentioning that "the devil" and "the demons" are occasionally used interchangeably, too; the "personalization" of demonic entities becomes more prominent later in the medieval period, whereas before the second millennium a lot of literary demonic figures are vague manifestations of evil that can even alternate between being "the demon" and being a whole mass of evil spirits. Kind of like how in the Hebrew Bible, the Angel of the Lord seems to be occasionally a distinct being but then at other times to actually be the Lord. At least one modern (though incredibly controversial) Catholic priest had a demonology that focused heavily on this aspect of the relationship between the evil spirits and their head; Malachi Martin speaks of a kind of perverse "communion of the damned" (I don't recall if he uses that phrase), where the hosts of hell are united, but in a tyrannically despotic fashion where the evil spirits are reduced to little more than extensions of their prince. If that is true, as snarky as Jeremy Harte wants to be about it, one could legitimately say "the Devil did x" whenever a demon does x. But, you know, that's only one chain of thought.

Theology of Demons Miscellanea

"There was never any question [for the Christian] of attributing all evil to man - indeed, the New Testament has far more to say about dark superhuman powers than the Fall of Adam." C. S. Lewis, "Evil and God" in God in the Dock.

I've liked this quote for a long time, but I've recently wondered "is it true?"

At least on a statistical level, yes.

The fall of Adam is referenced three times in the New Testament - Romans 5:12-21, 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, 1 Timothy 2:12-15. By contrast, dark superhuman powers appear in Romans 8:38, 1 Corinthians 15:25-26, 10:20-22 and maybe 2:6-8*, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Galatians 4:3-9, Ephesians 2:2, 3:10 and 6:12, Colossians 2:8, 2:15 and 2:20, 1 Peter 5:8, 2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6, and, of course, Revelation 12-13 and 20 - all without counting the Gospel exorcism narratives.

Which leads me onto my next point - despite all of this, and a stated desire to get back to the Bible, Protestant theologies in my personal experience tend to marginalise the demonic and angelic realm (excluding certain denominations like Pentecostals). Sure, they affirm their existence, but there's a discomfort with attributing anything specific to them, especially in the present day, or with giving them a prominent place in theology.

And it's not just me saying. Folklorist Jeremy Harte in his book Cloven Country: The Devil and the English Landscape (about, well, the Devil in English and Welsh folklore) says that:

"In practice, if not in doctrine, Protestant writers rejected the numberless demons that had provided their medieval precursors with such varied explanations of bad weather; they were also disinclined to attribute disasters to Satan himself, as this would abrogate from the sovereignty of God." (p.199)

Because I want to hear what some real Protestants have to say on the issue, tagging @theexodvs and @greater-than-the-sword - particularly, I want to know if you think the marginalisation of demons is a real trend in Protestant theology, and if, so, where it comes from.

My personal theory is that Protestantism began in early modern Europe, where the demons had already been driven out by the people who first converted those countries to Christianity - so Protestant theologians see demons as marginal because, in their time and place, they were.

*Saying "maybe" because that interpretation's unpopular among modern Biblical scholars, but it's what I'm inclined to and has Patristic precedent: for example, St. Athanasius identified the wisdom of the Greeks with occultism and the worship of idols (On the Incarnation 46.4)

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Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

the Gospel According to Matthew (5:8)

Those who are clean of heart are those whose every thought is of God. If one's every thought is of God, then one will see signs of God everywhere (for creation is a gift from God). One will judge everything that one sees to be a sign of God's goodness and generosity.

Rev. Jude Winkler, O.F.M. Conv.'s commentary on the above verse.

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you can discuss the problems within academia literally forever and you probably should but “historians are trying to keep information from you” is always going to be an anti-intellectual, reactionary opinion, sorry, literally no way around that