Placed in charge of the relocation operation is Wikus van de Merwe, an agreeable, harmless cog in the state machine. While searching for weapons in the hovel of one of the aliens, Wikus comes across a mysterious cylinder. When he examines it, a black fluid sprays out onto his face, and in a matter of hours, he is desperately ill. He is taken to the hospital, and the doctors who examine him are flabbergasted to discover that his forearm has morphed into the appendage of an alien. Almost immediately, the state officials reduce the suffering man to an object, resolving to dissect him and experiment on him. Wikus manages a miraculous escape, but he is, throughout the film ruthlessly hunted down. I promise not to give away much more of the plot. I’ll add only this: as his transformation progresses, Wikus becomes an ally of the “prawns” and they come to respect him and to protect him from his persecutors.

With this sketch of the story in mind, I should like to return now to the two worthies I mentioned at the outset. The nineteenth century German philosopher Hegel taught that much of human history can be understood as the working out of what he called the “master/slave” relationship. Typically, people in power — politically, culturally, militarily — find a weaker, more vulnerable “other” whom they then proceed to manipulate, dominate, exclude, and scapegoat. Masters need slaves and slaves, Hegel saw, in their own way need masters, each group conditioning the other in a dysfunctional manner. Masters don’t try to understand slaves (think of the dominant Greeks who characterized any foreigners as barbarians, since all they said was “bar-bar”); instead, they use them. Furthermore, almost all of history is told from the standpoint of the masters, and mastery is the state to which all sane people aspire.

Emmanuel Levinas, a twentieth century Jewish philosopher whose family was killed in the Holocaust, reminded us how the Bible consistently undermines this master/slave dynamic, since it recounts history from the standpoint of the other, the outsider, the oppressed. Levinas argued that Biblical ethics commences, not with philosophical abstractions about the good life, but with the challenging face of the suffering “other.”

The prophets of Israel consistently remind the people that since they too were once slaves in Egypt, they must be compassionate toward the alien, the stranger, the widow and the orphan. In the faces of those “others,” they find the ground for their own moral commitments. They compelled the people, in short, not to adopt the attitude of the master but to move sensitively into the attitude of the slave.

This unique Israelite perspective came to embodied expression in Jesus, who “though he was in the form of God, did not deem equality with God a thing to be grasped” and who rather “emptied himself and took the form of a slave.” In Christ, the God of Israel became himself a slave, the despised other, even to the point of enduring the rejection of the masters and dying the terrible death of the cross. In Jesus, the God of Israel looks out from the face of the other and draws forth compassion from those who gaze upon him.

In District 9 , we see the master/slave dynamic on clear display: the characterization of the aliens by a derogatory nickname, their sequestration in a squalid ghetto, the violence — direct and indirect — visited on them consistently, etc. These are practices evident from ancient times to the present day. But we see something else as well: an identification of the oppressor with the oppressed, the openness to interpreting the world from the underside, from the perspective of the victim. This, I would submit, is the Biblical difference, though I doubt that most people today would recognize it as such. It is the view that comes from that strange spiritual tradition which culminates in a God who doesn’t make slaves but rather becomes one.

For my father, the Kennedys represented the continuation of the great Democratic tradition stretching back through Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman, FDR, all the way to Al Smith.  One of my earliest political memories was joining in with my father in lustily booing Richard Nixon as he appeared on the TV screen accepting the nomination of the Republican Party at their 1972 convention in Miami.  My father just didn’t care for Republicans, seeing them as the representatives of the interests of the rich.  Democrats, he often told me, stick up for the little guy, the oppressed, those who fall through the cracks of the society.  And they were, he argued, the politicians most in line with the instincts of the Catholic social teaching tradition.  My uncle Tommy, another died-in-the-wool Democrat, often worried that, as my father moved into the upper middle class, he might commit the unforgiveable sin of voting Republican!

Now that’s the political background out of which I came.  My own thinking evolved in response to the “malaise” of the Jimmy Carter years and the success of Ronald Reagan’s embrace of the free market and his principled opposition to Communist ideology.  But I will confess that much of my father’s fierce Democratic sensibility remained in me, especially as I deepened my appreciation of the Catholic Church’s social doctrine in regard to the poor and the disenfranchised.  I suppose you could say that I was, like a lot of people in my generation, a bit eclectic in my politics, drawing inspiration from both sides of the spectrum.

As my thinking continued to develop, the greatest problem I began to have with the Democratic Party finally had nothing to do with economic theory or even with geo-political strategy; it had to do with abortion.  I understood very well the arguments of feminists and women’s rights advocates concerning freedom of choice, but I just couldn’t buy them, since the choice in question was the option to snuff out an innocent life.  When the Democratic Party embraced abortion-rights as a plank in its platform and eventually as a non-negotiable principle, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma:  how could I reconcile my father’s party of the little guy with the party that was allowing for abortion on demand?

And this brings me back to Ted Kennedy and the Kennedy legacy.  I think it is safe to say that, over the past thirty years, there has been no stronger and more consistent advocate of abortion rights than this late “lion of the Senate.”  But it was not always so.  In 1971, just two years before Roe v. Wade, Sen Kennedy responded to a man named Tom Dennelly of Great Neck, N.Y. who had written to the senator expressing his views on the matter of abortion.  Here is how Kennedy responded:  “While the deep concern of a woman bearing an unwanted child merits consideration and sympathy, it is my personal feeling that the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life.   Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.”  And he went on:  “when history looks back at this era it should recognize this generation as the one which cared for human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.”

For my money, that’s one of the best and most theoretically consistent defenses of the pro-life position ever articulated.  And it came quite appropriately from the leader of the party of the little guy.   In 1971 anyway, opposition to abortion was a naturally Democratic position, whereas today a pro-life Democrat is practically an oxymoron, and almost every major Democratic politician, locally or nationally, feels obligated to parrot pro-choice ideology if he wants his party’s nomination.

Edward Kennedy was in many ways a great and significant legislator.  In regard to civil rights, nuclear disarmament, protecting the interests of the disabled, health care reform, etc., his achievements are substantive indeed.  But his reversal of position on the most compelling moral issue of the day is, I think, an indication of a fatal inconsistency at the heart of Democratic politics.  And it goes a long way to explaining why people like me, who are by tradition predisposed to vote for the party of the little guy, balk, hesitate, and protest.

The second half of the novel unfolds as a series of conversations that the grieving man has, together and separately, with the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. What I found immediately attractive — and theologically right — about The Shack is that God is portrayed as love right through. The Father, Son, and Spirit relate to one another as friends and insist, over and again, that they want to draw Mack, and the whole human race, into a share in their fellowship. Thomas Aquinas referred to this deificatio (deification), a participation in the dynamics of the Trinitarian love. Further, the three persons of God are depicted by William Young as both infinitely and intimately knowledgeable: God knows Mack through and through; he knows every detail of his painful story; he knows the quality and depth of Mack’s resistance to grace. I do think that many in our culture are haunted by a Deism that places God at a great distance from our ordinary concerns. The God of The Shack is decidedly not the Deist God, but rather the God of Psalm 139: “Lord, you search me and you know me. You know my resting and my rising; you discern my purpose from afar.” And this means, in turn, that God is someone to whom we can speak, and not just in the sometimes stilted and abstract language of formal prayer. Mack goes on long walks with Jesus; he gardens with the Holy Spirit; he helps to prepare meals with the Father. I realize how strange this can sound, but then we recall that, in the Genesis story, Adam walked with God in the cool of the evening and conversed with him friend to friend and that Jesus ate and drank with his disciples, even preparing a meal for them by the Sea of Galilee.

The central issue of the novel — Mack’s anger over God’s seeming refusal to protect Missy — is also handled creatively and in the biblical spirit. God explains that the original sin involved the establishment of the limited human mind as the criterion of what is ultimately good and evil. What this led to was a loss of trust in the God whose purposes are always good, even when that goodness lies beyond the human capacity to see.

Now many critics of The Shack have emerged (which is inevitable when the topic is God!), and I can’t possibly explore all of the objections. I will focus only on what bothered me the most. Toward the end of the novel, Mack’s conversations with the Trinity turn to the issues of law and “religion,” and I was somewhat disquieted when God began to sound like Martin Luther! We hear that God gave us the Ten Commandments only to convince us how incapable we are of ever living up to them and that the law involves an interruption in the grace of relationship and that those who are in Jesus are free from the demands of “rules and obligations.” As I say, all of this is out of the standard Reformation handbook, and Catholics have legitimately balked at it for five hundred years. We appreciate the law, not as a reminder of our incapacity, but as the structuring logic of love, the rules that govern our lives within the household of God. Luther and his disciples (including William P. Young) tend to set up a dialectic of opposition between law and grace, but Catholics see the two as analogically related, law fulfilled by grace and grace leading to a deeper embrace of the heart of the law.

Would I recommend The Shack? Yes, absolutely, especially to those who have suffered a great loss. But, if I can borrow a metaphor, reading it is a bit like eating a watermelon: lots of good sweet stuff to eat, but you’ve got to spit out a few seeds!

I remember being appalled by this article, but I confess that its impact was short-lived.  It came roaring back to me the other night when I saw the devastatingly powerful film The Stoning of Soraya M.  The movie is based on the true story of a young woman who lived in a small Iranian village during the years just following the Khomeini revolution of 1979.  Soraya was caught in a dreadful situation:  her husband, who beat her regularly and cheated on her, wanted to put her away and marry another woman.  When Soraya refused to grant him the divorce, her husband conspired with the mullah of the village, the mayor, and several other men to accuse her of adultery, though she was utterly innocent of the charge.  When the accusation became public, Soraya raised her voice in protest, but her complaint carried no legal weight, and the council of the village, composed exclusively of men, condemned her, in accordance with Shari’a law, to death by stoning.  The depiction of Soraya’s execution is overwhelming.  She is buried to her waist and her hands tied behind her back.  The first stones are thrown by her own father and by her two pre-adolescent sons.  Next, her husband attacks her and then all of the men of the town rain stones upon her, as they chant Allahu akhbar (God is great).

Now I realize how dangerous and delicate it is to raise a matter such as this.  It is extremely easy to fall into the trap of tsk-tsking and tut-tutting at the objectionable practices of another religion without admitting to the outrages of one’s own.  I fully admit that our own religious traditions are anything but blameless.  The most casual glance at the book of Leviticus discloses that ancient Israel certainly accepted a legal code that sanctioned lethal violence—burning and stoning—for various offenses.  And I humbly confess that Christians, over the centuries, have done terrible things in the name of Christ:  the burning of witches, the torturing of heretics, the slaughter of non-Christians, etc.  Nevertheless, the events described in The Stoning of Soraya M. are not from ancient history; they took place a few decades ago.  And the imposition of Shari’a law is a lively issue in a number of countries today.  So what do we do with a movie such as this?

I am convinced that, though Christians rarely have lived up to it, there is an ideal at the heart of the Gospel that represents a permanent challenge to the travesty of justice on display in the story of Soraya.  As the film came to its bloody climax, I found myself haunted by the story told in the eighth chapter of John’s Gospel of the woman caught in adultery.  Many of the dynamics of the Soraya narrative are evident in this account:  a woman accused of a sexual offense, the formation of an angry mob, the sanctioning of violence through religious authority, the thrill that comes through scapegoating.  But then there is the decisive difference.  When the religious leaders of the mob—thirsty for blood and confirmed in their self-righteousness—inquire of Jesus what he would recommend, the young rabbi bends down and writes on the ground.  Then he stands up and says, “let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her” (Jn. 8: 7).  This devastating one-liner causes the elders to drop their stones and prompts the crowd to dissipate like a summer cloud.  Jesus doesn’t sanction scape-goating violence; he interrupts it.  He demonstrates that God stands, not on the side of victimizers, but of victims.  And this divine solidarity with victims comes to its richest expression when Jesus becomes himself an innocent victim of a religiously sanctioned scapegoating mob.

The French philosopher Rene Girard has argued that all dysfunctional human societies — from coffee klatches to nation states—are predicated upon the scapegoating mechanism, that is to say, the tendency to find someone or some group to blame.  In its shared hatred, the group finds a satisfying, though ultimately unstable, unity.  One of my colleagues at Mundelein Seminary has summed up the Girardian insight as follows:  “wherever two or three are gathered, look for victims.”  Girard identified the first revelation (unveiling, re-velatio) of Christianity as precisely this uncovering and de-legitimizing of the scapegoating mechanism, and the second as the manifestation of the God who is friend to the victim.

What particularly gripped me as the movie came to its conclusion was this:  Soraya, devout Muslim and innocent victim of mob violence, lying dead in a pool of her own blood, is one of the most powerful Christ figures in recent cinema.

Without going into any more of the goofy twists and turns of the story, can you see what prompted my cri de coeur about getting it backward? In point of fact, it is not Catholicism that feels the need constantly to revive the struggle between science and the faith, but rather secular modernity — and Ron Howard’s movie itself is exhibit A. There is a stubbornly enduring myth that the “modern” world — especially in its scientific expression — emerged out of a terrible struggle with backward-looking Catholicism. And thus many avatars of modernity feel the need on a regular basis to bring out the Catholic Church as a scapegoat and punching-bag, as if to re-enact the founding myth. Of course, the central act in this drama is the story of Galileo’s persecution at the hands of the ignorant and vindictive church, and so Brown and Howard bring the great Renaissance scientist front and center: Langdon is almost suffocated by wicked Vaticanisti while he diligently researches in the Galileo archive, and at the end of the film, a grateful Cardinal rewards the intrepid scientist with a long-hidden text of the master. Well.

Though these facts are well known, and though I’ve rehearsed them before, it appears that they bear repeating. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were early advocates of Aristotelian science; Copernicus, the popularizer of the heliocentric understanding of the solar system, was a priest; Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics and a chief forerunner of Darwin, was a monk; many of the founders of modern science — Newton, Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz — were devoutly religious men; the formulator of the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins was a priest. Perhaps most importantly, the modern physical sciences emerged precisely in the context of a Christian culture, where the belief in creation and hence in universal intelligibility was taken for granted. And today, the supposedly sinister and anti-scientific Vatican sponsors a number of observatories and supports societies at its pontifical universities devoted to dialogue with the sciences at the very highest levels. Despite the tragedy of the Galileo incident, prompted by the ignorance and in some cases ill-will of certain churchmen at the time, Catholicism is not the enemy of science and feels absolutely no compulsion to define itself over against science as though the two are locked in a kind of zero-sum game. It is a longstanding conviction of the Church that since God is one and since all truth comes from God, there can finally be no conflict between the truths of revelation and the truths discoverable through the exercise of human reason. And so the Church rejoices in whatever the empirical sciences uncover and expects no conflict between those discoveries and its own faith, rightly interpreted.

What I found particularly galling about the film is that Robert Langdon not only solves the mystery but also effectively protects the church from itself. This, of course, is the modern fantasy in full: “science” emerged from Catholicism after a terrible battle but still has the graciousness and magnanimity to offer its help to its benighted and defeated rival. Ugh! Truth be told, the wound caused by the Galileo incident is being constantly picked open, not by the Vatican, but by representatives of secular modernity; the “battle” between religion and science is now pretty much a shadow-boxing affair, radical secularism shaking its fists at a phantom.

Go see Angels and Demons if you like a thriller or you enjoy computer-generated images of the Vatican; but please don’t be taken in by its underlying philosophy.

One of the chapters of The Audacity of Hope is concerned with the Constitution, and I confess that I turned to it with special interest, given the fact that Obama had been for some years a professor of constitutional law at the University of Chicago. The President shows that the peculiar genius of Madison, Jay, and the other framers lay in their establishment of a system of checks and balances, a deliberate pitting of conflicting interests and factions against one another so as to produce, through a lengthy process of debate and argument, a rough practical consensus. Precisely in this, they saw, would violent domination by any one party or set of interests be precluded. Obama sings the praises of this rough-and-tumble, pragmatic process, identifying it as a uniquely American contribution to political philosophy and praxis. So far, so good. But then comes this rather startling line: “Implicit…in the very idea of ordered liberty was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology…” And a page later, this: “The rejection of absolutism…has encouraged the very process…that allows us to make better, if not perfect, choices, not only about the means to our ends, but also about the ends themselves.” This pragmatism even about ultimate ends allows us, Obama continues, to escape “the cruelties of the Inquisition, the pogrom, the gulag, or the jihad.” I’m afraid that this is where I felt obliged to get off the train.

I completely share the President’s enthusiasm for deliberative pragmatism and creative checking and balancing in regard to the nuts and bolts of practical governance. But when he allows what is legitimate at that level to hold sway at the level of the moral structure of a political system, he points the country down a short road to chaos. Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have vigorously defended the democratic form of government, but both Popes have also reminded us that a representative democracy must be grounded in certain definite ethical principles, lest it devolve into license, disordered freedom. Members of a democracy can debate all they want about the best means of achieving their moral ends, but if the ends themselves become the subject of debate, the system implodes. Indeed, one of the surest signs that one has fudged this distinction is the tendency to characterize those who hold to moral absolutes as “jihadists” or purveyors of “Inquisitions.”

Now here’s what’s really puzzling: I think Obama agrees with me! As the chapter on the constitution unfolds, we can, as it were, see into the worried workings of his lawyerly mind. Having made his vigorous argument for deliberative pragmatism at all levels, he draws back, recalling the examples of William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown during the period just prior to the Civil War. Those impassioned abolitionists did not think that the deep immorality of slavery was a matter for debate or pragmatic compromise. They were, for want of a better word, absolutists on the subject, and yet they all participated in different ways and to varying degrees, in the democratic system. And it was their principled, uncompromising convictions that led to changes in our country without which Barack Obama’s emergence on the public stage would have been unthinkable. It leads him to this conclusion: “I am robbed even of the certainty of uncertainty — for sometimes absolute truths may well be absolute.” Quite so, Mr. President, but you can’t have it both ways.

All of which conduces to the issue which oddly haunts The Audacity of Hope: abortion. Obama addresses the question of abortion directly in his chapter on faith, but it is surprising just how frequently he mentions it, obliquely and tangentially, throughout his book. If I might risk a bit of arm-chair psychologizing, it is a subject that clearly preoccupies him, bugs him. And it does so, I would argue, precisely because it lies on the fault-line in his thinking that I’ve just identified. The direct killing of the innocent is, like slavery or racial discrimination, one of those absolute intrinsic evils, the avoidance of which constitutes the moral framework of any decent human society. One ought no more to deliberate about the rectitude of killing the innocent than to debate the legitimacy of holding other human beings as property.

It is only when we have real moral clarity about ends and means that we might have the audacity to hope for a just society.

And the survey shows that despite the exertions of Christopher Hitchens, Bill Maher and their legion of media supporters, atheism has made very few inroads in the United States: only 1.6% of Americans self-identify as either atheist or agnostic. The professional atheists would no doubt attribute this to the ignorance of most Americans, but what it in fact shows is that atheism is not only unattractive but deeply irrational. Though most believers couldn’t state it with philosophical precision, they know instinctually that the contingency of the world has to be grounded, finally, in something non-contingent and that the universal intelligibility of nature is the result of a creative intelligence. They know, in a word, that it is reasonable to believe in God.

But the statistic that I found most intriguing and alarming is this one: the group that has grown most vigorously since the last comparable survey is the “nones,” that is to say, those who claim no religious affiliation at all. In 1990, only 8.2% of Americans claimed to belong to no church; in 2001, the number had risen to 14.2%, and in the recent poll, it has increased to 15%. One of the analysts commented that the “nones” were the only “denomination” whose numbers increased in every state in the Union. Now it is most important to note where the “nones” came from. They represent, disproportionately, a falling away from the mainstream Protestant churches. While the numbers of Roman Catholics and evangelical protestants have remained, since the last survey, fairly constant, the mainstream Protestant figures have plummeted: now only about 12% of Americans self-identify as Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist or United Church of Christ. And thereupon hangs a tale.

In the course of the twentieth century — and intensifying in the last forty years or so — the mainstream Protestant churches dramatically liberalized themselves. By this I mean that they abandoned, or at least softened, many of the doctrines of classical Christianity — Trinity, Incarnation, Sin, Redemption, Heaven and Hell — and embraced a kind of soft “spirituality.” They also heartily endorsed the social justice program of political liberalism without providing anything close to a properly theological justification for it. The result is that they became, more often than not, a faint echo of the political and psychological convictions of the secular culture. I have a friend who converted from Quakerism about ten years ago. He said that what prompted his conversion (at least in part) was that when his fellow Quakers rose to speak at the their Sunday assembly, presumably at the urging of the Holy Spirit, their opinions were remarkably similar to those expressed on the editorial page of the New York Times! A fellow student of mine years ago in a hospital chaplaincy training program was a member of a mainstream Protestant church, and he said one day, with great pride, that the doctrinal statements of his denomination were kept in a loose-leaf binder, since they were always subject to change!

That kind of doctrinal indifferentism and lazy secularism is precisely the recipe that produces the “nones.” John Henry Newman commented that one of the marks of a robust Christianity is “the power of assimilation,” by which he meant the capacity to take in from its environment what is conducive to its flourishing and to resist what is detrimental to its well-being. In this sense, a healthy religion is like a healthy organism that ranges around its world confidently taking in what it can and holding off what it must. The surest sign that an animal is unhealthy is that one or both of these capacities breaks down, and the surest sign that it is dead is that it has lost its distinctiveness, becoming utterly absorbed by its environment. That absorption by the cultural environment is precisely the fate of those Christian churches that lost their power of assimilation and resistance. The “nones” are, for the most part, simply those who have acknowledged this fact.

An authentic Christianity never hunkers down behind defensive walls, because its purpose is to transfigure the culture. But if it is to accomplish this end, it must be clear about what it stands for and what, by implication, it stands against. We Catholics must be vigilant in this regard, lest more of our own join the swelling ranks of the “nones.”

Around the mid-point of the twentieth century there flourished the existentialist movement, led by such figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.  These philosophers argued rather vigorously against the proposition that God exists, but, to their credit, they saw the deep sadness and feeling of emptiness that result from atheism.  They sensed that there exists in the human heart a longing for meaning that nothing in the world can satisfy and hence they pronounced life without God as absurd.  The “ethic” of existentialism involved a willingness to accept this absurdity and to assert one’s freedom in the face of it.  Now, I don’t think for a minute that Sartre and his colleagues were right about the non-existence of God, but at least they were clear-eyed enough to appreciate the terrible tension that obtains between the infinite longing of the human heart and the absence of the one reality that could possibly assuage it.  The one thing that they were intelligent enough never to have said is that God does not exist, but not to worry, we don’t need him.  Even as they denied him, they knew that God, by definition, is what the human heart desperately needs.  The bus placards reveal that today’s atheists, by contrast, are childish, playing at atheism rather than seeing to the bottom of it.

If we consult the Bible, we find, in fact, a way past atheism.  There are parts of the book of Job, many of the psalms, some of the lamentations of the prophets that could have been written by Sartre or Camus on their darkest days.  But the most “existentialist” text in the Bible is the book of Qoheleth, known in older translations as the book of Ecclesiastes.  Qoheleth presents himself as an old man who has seen it all, done it all, achieved it all.  He has experienced deep friendship; he has explored the wisdom of the ages; he has built palaces and gardens; he has had sexual delight; he has wielded power.  And all of it he pronounces “wind and chase after the wind,” for none of it has finally satisfied him.  But this doesn’t lead Qoheleth to despair or to a willful embrace of absurdity.  Rather, it leads him to confess his faith in God, to allow his desire to pass beyond the goods of this world to the supreme and transcendent Good.   Every one of us, if we are honest, move readily into the stance and attitude of Qoheleth.  We experience an aching sense of incompleteness when we fail, suffer, and want but even more so when we succeed, rejoice, and achieve.   For especially in those times of fulfillment, we become acutely aware of what the spiritual writer Ronald Rohlheiser calls “the holy longing,” the desperate need for God.

And the awareness of this need is precisely what pushes us past atheism.  An animal eats enough, finds sufficient shelter, gets his requisite exercise — and he falls blissfully asleep, utterly satisfied.  But the human animal attains all of those goods — and many others besides — and yet turns uneasily in his bed, still wanting more, even if he is unable to articulate clearly what that “more” is.  What this proves, so our great tradition argues, is that we humans are very peculiar creatures indeed.  We are hybrids and half-breeds, part animal and part angel.  Our very desire for goods and truths that transcend this world proves that there is more in us than an animal nature.  If we were, as the materialists and atheists argue, just extremely clever animals, we should remain as content as any dog when, with our superior skill, we attain those simple things that make a dog happy.  But our very restlessness proves the reality of some alluring and transcendent Good that we call God.

And this brings me back to those buses and their atheist slogans.  The claim that God’s non-existence is a matter of indifference is not only offensive to believers; it’s actually stupid, even on atheist grounds.  And at any rate, once we’ve been through the finally illuminating darkness of which Qoheleth speaks, we can see that another slogan is far more appropriate:  “The bad news is: nothing in the world satisfies us; the good news: so what, God exists!”

Part of the genius of Catholicism is its capaciousness, its ability to take in and assimilate to itself whatever is true in other religions, spiritualities and philosophies. And there is much in Tolle’s teaching that is compatible with a robust Christianity. He speaks, for example, of the need to overcome the ego-driven self, the “I” predicated upon the assertion of superiority and independence. Well, any number of Catholic mystics and spiritual masters over the centuries have spoken of the “false self,” with its tendencies toward attachment, violence, and pride. And they have urged, as Tolle does, the discovery of the true self, grounded in love, connection to others, and the transcendence of egotistic preoccupations. More to it, Tolle defends the existence of what he calls “the pain-body,” a semi-autonomous psychological structure taking its rise from the suffering and injustice that a person has endured. Frequently, Tolle claims, the psyche is, as it were, possessed by this highly-charged negative force, compelling one toward actions one would not otherwise perform. Well, St. Paul, in his letter to the Romans, speaks of sin as just such a darkly compelling force: “I do not do the good that I want, but I do the evil that I don’t want… but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind… the law of sin.” The reason for these correspondances — and there are others as well — is that Tolle’s spirituality represents what scholars have called the philosophia perennis (the perennial philosophy), a distillate of elemental truths discoverable in most of the philosophical and religious traditions of the world. The Church has never despised the philosophia perennis, but at the same time it has regarded it with caution.

As I read Tolle’s book, I was reminded frequently of St. Irenaeus and his struggle against Gnosticism, an ancient form of the philosophia perennis which Tolle enthusiastically embraces. Like the Gnostics, Tolle sees Jesus primarily as a teacher and interprets salvation as a transformation of consciousness, a kind of waking up to a new awareness. The Church certainly affirms that Jesus is a teacher, but it emphatically states that He is infinitely more than a spiritual guru, a wise and enlightened philosopher. Jesus is God, and that makes all the difference. He is not simply one teacher among many who has found a way to God; He in person is the way; He is not simply one enlightened figure among many who has come upon the truth; He in person is the truth. What He brings, therefore, is not one teaching, however moving and transformative; what He brings is the divine life, a participation in God. And thus salvation is much more than the clearing up of a false consciousness; it is a transfiguration of the entire self through the grace of God, made available through a mystical participation in Jesus.

But my fundamental problem with Tolle is the same as Irenaeus’s fundamental problem with the Gnostics: an impersonal view of God. Tolle will speak of getting in touch with Life or with Being or with the Universe considered as a totality, and he characterizes these breakthroughs as self-divinization. But this places his program thoroughly outside the ambit of the Bible. For the biblical authors, God is neither an impersonal force, nor the universe as such, nor the energy that flows through and connects all things, but rather the personal creator of the world, Someone who stands utterly outside the world even as He sustains and governs it, and Someone who has entered history personally and directly. C.S. Lewis commented that much of modern mysticism thinks of God as a kind of pleasant background music to which one can turn for inspiration, whereas the Bible thinks of God as a Person, powerful, overwhelming, and unpredictable, a Person who seizes us and calls us to Himself. Tolle’s “Universe” has little to do with the God of the Bible.

A last point: toward the beginning of his text, Tolle excoriates the classical religions — especially Catholicism — for contributing to the violence and dysfunction of the world by making exclusive truth claims. I could only smile at this. Does Tolle think that he’s not making truth claims and that he, therefore, holds alternative views to be wrong and worthy of critique? God knows that far too many religious people across the ages have backed up their assertions with violence, but this regrettable fact cannot prevent Catholics from saying that, in essential matters, we are right. Despite his protestantions, Eckhart Tolle does the same.

I would first point out that economics is seen by the church as part of morality, since it is crucial to the maintenance of the common good.  Furthermore, in the recent social teaching of the Popes, the market economy has come in for special praise as an economic system that not only produces goods and services with admirable efficiency but that also honors the dignity of the human being as a free and self-directing agent.  It is, the Popes have argued, the economic form that corresponds to a democratic polity.  Therefore, maintaining the health and viability of our economic system is of pressing ethical importance.  We are all obliged, precisely as morally engaged persons, to work to ameliorate the situation on both the micro and macro level.  More to it, the principle of subsidiarity — the master idea of Catholic social theory — dictates that the government can and should intervene in the economy when the latter’s problems cannot be solved at the more local level.  It seems to me that the steps taken by the federal government — from the bailout to the shoring up of regulations and investment safeguards — are altogether congruent with this principle. 

But there is a deeper, more strictly spiritual dimension to this crisis.  It has to do with the Biblical conviction that “we have here no lasting city.”  This world is good, indeed very good, but it is, at the same time, fleeting, ephemeral, evanescent.  The psalmist tells us that our lives are over “like a sigh” and that we are like “flowers which bloom in the morning but which by evening wither and fade.”  As His disciples gazed up admiringly at the splendor of the Jerusalem temple, Jesus commented that “not one stone will be left upon another, but all will be destroyed.”  These aren’t “pessimistic” observations; they are deeply realistic and finally liberating.  The paradigmatic sin in the Bible is idolatry, defined as the deification of something or someone less than God.  This spiritual mistake conduces to a whole series of crises both interior and exterior, for it upsets the fundamental order of things.  In the evocative language of the book of Genesis, the original sin (from which all human dysfunction has flowed) was an act of idolatry, Adam’s hopeless attempt to turn his own ego into God.

This Adamic distortion has taken many forms over the course of human history:  the idolization of country, culture, political party, charismatic leader, or economic system.  Elemental to the spiritual life is the awareness that all such earthly things are fleeting and that one should, accordingly, place one’s confidence only in the eternal God.  Though it’s hard for us to imagine, our political and economic system will one day fade away, and our status as the one great superpower will end.  (Imagine how difficult it would have been for a Roman aristocrat in the year 150 to think that the Roman order would ever fade.)  And this is why the shaking of the foundations can be, from a spiritual standpoint, a salutary reminder.  Recently, I read a story of a former Wall Street trader who has become an Eastern Orthodox monk.  He now urges his former colleagues in the financial world to place a jar of dirt on their desks, to remind them of what is finally important.

What practical advice can I give?  First, cultivate the economic habits that foster both your own good and the common good.  Though I’m oversimplifying a bit, a crisis such as the one we’re passing through, is born of certain bad habits and practices:  a willingness to live beyond one’s means, to pile up dangerous amounts of debt, to act as though contractual agreements are not binding, to focus exclusively on one’s own economic advantage.  I would contrast these with the virtues placed through hard experience in the hearts of the generation that endured the Great Depression.  Since we are so richly interconnected, our instincts for justice and economic responsibility can foster the common good.  And secondly, cultivate an attitude of detachment.  This doesn’t mean indifference to practical realities, but it does mean a willingness to let go of anything — including wealth — that is less than God.