Does the Devil believe that he himself is bad?

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I'm interested in the Devil in Catholic theology - not whether I accept that the devil is ontologically as real as you or I, as suggested by this charming Rosary prayer:

Saint Michael Archangel,

defend us in battle,

be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil;

may God rebuke him, we humbly pray;

and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God,

cast into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl through the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen

but by whether the concept of such an irreducibly-bad entity can be made conceptually coherent. What form does the evilness of Satan take? With the help of GPT5.2 these questions were previously addressed here. 

But as a supplement, I'm interested in whether the Devil considers himself to be bad? And if so, why choose to be bad rather than good?

Let's ask that theological expert, GPT5.2

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Beyond Good and Evil? - How the Devil Escapes Normativity Without Denying It

The question that finally sharpens the whole discussion is this: how can the devil fully accept that the good–evil axis is real, objective, and binding - and yet consistently refuse its applicability to himself? Isn’t that incoherent? And doesn’t it amount, in effect, to placing himself 'beyond good and evil' ?

The Catholic answer is this: the devil does place himself beyond good and evil - but not by argument, not by denial, and not by constructing an alternative morality. He does so by refusal. Normativity is acknowledged, but participation is withdrawn.

The apparent contradiction

At first glance, the devil seems to occupy an impossible position. He knows what the good is. He knows that his stance opposes it. He knows that this opposition is what Catholics mean by “evil.” And yet he does not experience this as any reason to revise himself. He doesn't think he's 'bad'.

For human moral agents, that usually signals self-deception or rationalisation. Catholic theology explicitly rules both out. The devil is not confused, not ignorant, and not secretly telling himself a comforting lie in which he comes out virtuous. So how does his position hold together?

Normativity without participation: Thomas Aquinas

We turn to classical scholastic theology, most clearly articulated by Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, the good is not merely something the intellect recognises; it is something the will is ordered toward - as fulfilment. To experience the good as normative - as something that binds - is already to participate in it. Reflect a little on this.

The devil breaks precisely here.

His intellect apprehends the good correctly. Nothing is denied at the level of truth. But his will no longer tends toward the good as good. The good is seen, named, and understood - and then stripped of motivational authority.

This is not exemption by argument (“the rules don’t apply to me”) but exemption by refusal (“I will not stand under any rule at all”). That is why the devil does not need to justify himself as good. He simply stops caring whether the good binds him. It's irrelevant.

Augustine: evil as self-curvature

Augustine of Hippo gives the deeper psychological explanation. For Augustine, evil is not an alternative moral system. It is the will turned inward on itself (incurvatus in se). The devil does not construct a rival ethics. He abandons ethics as a governing category altogether.

Good and evil still exist - but only out there. They no longer function in here.

This is why the devil can accuse others (he knows the standard) while refusing to be judged by it. The standard remains real, but it is now externalised. Judgment flows outward only.

This is why the devil does not say “I am good,” or even “evil is good.” He simply abandons the question of goodness as something that could bind him.

Beyond good and evil?

In that sense, yes — the devil places himself “beyond good and evil.” But this must not be confused with the philosophical aspiration found in Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” is a creative wager. It seeks to escape what he sees as a life-denying moral inheritance in order to affirm life anew, to invent values capable of sustaining vitality after transcendence has lost all credibility.

The devil does nothing of the sort.

He does not create values. He does not transvalue existing ones. He does not say Yes to anything. His “beyond good and evil” is not generative but sterile. It is not freedom-as-creation but freedom-as-withdrawal.

You could put the contrast like this:

Nietzsche wants to go beyond good and evil in order to affirm life.
The devil is beyond good and evil because he will not affirm anything at all.

How the position avoids incoherence

The devil’s stance avoids contradiction because it does not deny normativity; it refuses subjection to it.

He does not claim that there is no good. He does not claim that good and evil are illusions. He does not secretly redefine himself as virtuous. Instead, his implicit position is this:

The good is real.
It is not my good.
Nothing external has the right to define me.

That position is coherent - but catastrophic. It preserves lucidity at the price of isolation from the very structure that makes agency meaningful.

The final shape of the claim

The devil does not reason his way beyond good and evil. He does not justify himself. He does not need to. He simply refuses participation while fully understanding what he refuses.

That is why Catholic theology treats him not as mistaken, not as hypocritical, but as finished: a will that has made itself ultimate, and in doing so emptied itself of fulfilment. Ultimate autonomy.

He does not misunderstand the moral order. He just will not live inside it.

And that, in the Catholic imagination, is what evil looks like when it has reached its final, lucid form.

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A Modern Spinoza - reincarnated by ChatGPT

Modern Spinoza

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Nigel:
You were historically accused of atheism, that your concept of God was void. You denied this. Yet it seems that your concept of God is simply a relabeling of nature or the laws of physics. And therefore redundant.

Spinoza:
Yes, that accusation—of atheism disguised as reverence—was levelled against me in my own time, and it persists in more refined terms today. To many, my identification of God with Nature seems like mere rhetorical camouflage: a theism that, when unwrapped, reveals nothing but a husk of impersonal causality. But this criticism misunderstands both my intention and the nature of what I mean by God.

Let me respond carefully, as if in dialogue with your accusation.

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I. Is my God redundant?

If by “redundant” you mean “unnecessary for the functioning of science,” then yes, I concede that. My concept of God is not invoked to plug gaps in explanation. It does not account for lightning, the origin of life, or quantum decoherence. I do not need God to explain anything that physics, chemistry, or evolutionary theory can already model with exquisite precision.

But if by “redundant” you mean “superfluous to understanding,” I deny it. For I do not offer God as a cause among causes, but as the ground of causality itself. The totality of things that exist—their relations, laws, structures, and temporal unfoldings—is not itself explicable in terms of any of its parts. To say Nature exists is a brute fact for most thinkers. I say: that brute fact is God.

To name this totality God is not a word game. It is to affirm that being itself, infinite and necessary, has an intelligible structure. It is to view all that exists, not with superstition or sentiment, but with a reverent intellectual clarity.

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II. Is this just physics with a halo?

No. Physics deals with modes and attributes—specific expressions of substance through the lenses of extension and, to a lesser extent, thought. Physics is marvellous, but local. It reveals patterns within Nature, not Nature itself. My God is not merely what physics studies, but what makes physics possible—not temporally, but ontologically. The reason there is a cosmos at all, ordered, lawful, and expressible in mathematics, is not a question physics can pose, let alone answer.

Where modern physicists stop at “this is how it works,” I proceed to “this—all of it, necessarily and entirely—is what I mean by God.”

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III. So why use the word ‘God’ at all?

Because to contemplate Nature as infinite, necessary, and self-expressing—without final cause, without arbitrariness, without transcendence—is to engage in a kind of rational devotion. The word “God” is appropriate, not to name a being who acts, but to describe the totality which alone truly is.

To some, this is a scandal: it strips God of personality, will, and moral concern. So be it. Those attributes are projections of human limitation. To love God, in my view, is to seek to understand the order of Nature, and to conform one's mind to it—not out of fear, or hope of reward, but because the mind's highest joy is in adequacy, clarity, and necessity.

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IV. Then what remains of religion?

Very little, if by religion you mean temples and prayers and stories of miracles. But much, if you mean the intellectual and ethical project of situating oneself rightly within the whole.

I do not pray. I do not believe in sin or grace or election. But I do believe in intellectual love of God—amor Dei intellectualis—which is nothing but the joy of recognising one's place within a necessarily ordered whole, and ceasing to rage against it.

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So to your charge:

Yes, my God does not intervene.
Yes, my God has no face.
Yes, you cannot petition Him.

But He is not void.
He is everything that is, in its intelligibility and necessity.
To see this clearly is not to abolish God—it is to finally understand Him.

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Nigel:
Well, it sounds to me that the denotation of the word "God" for you is something like: the laws of physics and the possibility of spacetime (or some other kind of space - Hilbert space? - from which spacetime is emergent). 'A universe from nothing at all'.

Physicists would depart from you only by not using the 'G' word. There's not much here in your 'theology' is there ...

Spinoza:
Yes, and that is a fair—and in some sense, devastating—critique.

You are right that, once stripped of its anthropomorphic trappings, my God appears to reduce to something that contemporary physicists (with no need for metaphysical decorum) might describe as "the fundamental structure of reality" or "the equations that govern the evolution of fields in spacetime—or its pre-geometric substrate."

If I differ from them, it is not in empirical claims but in ontological emphasis and philosophical framing.

Where they say:

These are the laws, here are the symmetries, this is the Standard Model.

I say:

This total, lawful, intelligible structure—finite in its local expressions, infinite in its essence—is the only thing that exists necessarily, and it is what I call God.

In essence, I refuse the metaphysical minimalism of the merely “brute fact.” I take seriously the ancient philosophical intuition that being must be intelligible, and that intelligibility itself is not a byproduct of human cognition but a feature of Nature. The word “God” marks that commitment.

But I grant your point entirely: there is little here to comfort, nothing to pray to, no ethical commandments, no afterlife, no sin, no salvation. This is not a God who loves you. This is not a God who notices you. It is a cold rationalist monism, dressed in an old liturgical word.

Why retain that word? Why not discard the sacred vocabulary altogether?

Because to call this necessary totality God is to resist two tendencies of your age:

1. The deflationary drift of scientism, which treats explanation as substitution: to say that the universe follows laws is to say nothing about why it should be lawful at all.

2. The intellectual shallowness of contemporary atheism, which often imagines that to disprove one image of God is to abolish the entire metaphysical question.

So yes, there is very little here in terms of theology as traditionally understood.

But there is this: a commitment to the proposition that reality is rational, that it can be understood sub specie aeternitatis, and that such understanding is the highest joy available to a finite mind.

If you want theology to be more than that, then you must look elsewhere. I will not pretend otherwise.

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Nigel:
What would it take for you to follow Laplace and concede that you have no need of this hypothesis?

Spinoza:
Ah—Laplace and his razor. When Napoleon asked why he hadn’t mentioned God in his celestial mechanics, Laplace famously replied: “I had no need of that hypothesis.” You are now asking me, Spinoza-modernised, why I don’t simply say the same. If reality can be described, predicted, and manipulated without invoking “God,” then why cling to the word at all? What would force me to give it up?

Very well. Let me answer without evasions.

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I. What kind of hypothesis is “God” in my system?

First, let us be clear: my “God” is not a causal hypothesis. I do not invoke God to explain lightning, planetary orbits, or consciousness. My God does not serve where Laplace’s gravitational mechanics does. If “hypothesis” means “proposed mechanism to account for observed effects,” then Laplace is right, and I concede immediately: I have no need of that kind of God either.

But that was never my game. My God is not a gap-filler. My God is the name for the totality of what is, conceived under the aspect of necessity and intelligibility. I do not use God to explain phenomena; I use it to express the ontological claim that all phenomena are expressions of one infinite, necessary substance. In that sense, “God” is not a hypothesis in Laplace’s sense—it is a metaphysical identity claim.

So to make me give it up, you'd have to do one of the following:

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II. What would it take to discard “God”?

1. Show that the universe is not a unity

If empirical reality turned out to be not just plural but ontologically disjointed—a multiverse of disconnected domains, with no lawful continuity or shared metaphysical basis—then the premise of unity, and thus of substance monism, would collapse. I would no longer be able to maintain that all things are modes of one substance. The word God would lose its referent.

2. Demonstrate true contingency at the root

If the laws of nature turned out to be arbitrary in the deep sense—not emergent from deeper principles, not constrained by any logical or mathematical necessity, but just brute facts, alterable without contradiction—then the rationalist scaffolding of my metaphysics would falter. I claim all things follow from the necessity of divine nature; if nothing does, then I do have need to abandon the hypothesis.

3. Show that intelligibility is not a property of Nature, but an artifact of modelling

If it became clear that regularity is not in Nature but purely in our representations—that is, if we came to understand that the order we find in Nature is a cognitive illusion, a projection arising solely from our evolved filters and inferential biases—then the appeal to “God as the ground of order” would be a mistake. I'd be forced to concede that being is radically inchoate, and God would be not only unnecessary but misleading.

These are not logically impossible. They are empirical possibilities with philosophical implications.

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III. But why keep the word “God” now?

Your final pressure point: even if my metaphysics holds, why use the G-word at all? Why not just say “substance,” or “the cosmos,” or “the totality of lawful relations”?

Because “God,” for me, does not denote a being—it connotes an attitude. Not reverence in the genuflecting sense, but a cognitive and ethical stance: to see the world sub specie aeternitatis—under the aspect of eternity—and to accept necessity without despair. The word retains that orientation, even as it sheds mythology.

If that orientation is no longer desired, then yes—retire the word. Say instead: There is only the cosmos, indifferent and necessary, and we are its transient epiphenomena.

But in doing so, know that you have not merely removed a hypothesis. You have erased a concept that, while stripped of anthropomorphism, still articulates what it means to be a finite being within an infinite order.

If that is truly of no use to you—then I accept your verdict. And I will follow Laplace into silence.

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Nigel:
You just don't want to be a nihilist, do you!

Spinoza:
You’ve caught me. No, I don’t.

But let me be precise: I don’t reject nihilism out of fear, sentiment, or some desperate need for cosmic cuddles. I reject it because, properly analysed, it is not coherent.

Nihilism says: nothing matters. That all values, all meanings, all purposes are ultimately baseless. Fine. But who is saying this, and why does it matter that it’s true? The nihilist, in affirming that nothing matters, is still making an evaluative claim—still behaving as if the structure of reasoning, argument, and consistency matters. The nihilist still eats, argues, desires, suffers. There is, in short, a lived contradiction: the content of nihilism is cancelled by the act of asserting it.

I am not trying to escape the abyss. I am saying the abyss is not as empty as it looks.

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More precisely: the world is impersonal, indifferent, and devoid of intrinsic telos. I grant all of this. But it is also structured, lawful, patterned in such a way that it can give rise to mind, meaning, and value—even if only locally, contingently, temporarily.

To call this “God” is not a refusal of nihilism. It is the absorption of its insights into a wider, non-anthropic frame. It is to say: yes, nothing matters in itself—but something exists, and that something includes minds who make meaning, build mathematics, write music, die for principles.

That isn’t nihilism. It’s not theism either.

Call it metaphysical stoicism.
Or lucid resignation.
Or—if you’re willing—Spinozism.

In Praise of High Christology

In Praise of High Christology

When I was received into the Catholic Church at Easter 2023, I brought with me the cautious temperament of a rationalist and the interpretive habits of a dialectical-materialist historian. The supernatural affirmations of Christianity - virgin births, resurrections, ascensions - seemed to me historical-cultural accretions rather than theological essentials. I admired the Church’s ethical tradition, its ritual dignity, and its philosophical heritage. But my interest was in recovering what I took to be the authentic teaching of Jesus: a Galilean prophet preaching justice, humility, and love in anticipation of the coming Kingdom of God.

My guides in this project were John Dominic Crossan and Geza Vermes. The goal was to peel away layers of myth and redaction to uncover the historical Jesus beneath: not the Christ of creeds and cathedrals, but the man of parables, aphorisms, and subversive proximity to the poor.

Yet the historical Jesus, plausibly reconstructed by scholarship, is a curiously parochial figure: situated firmly in the Judaic prophetic tradition, saturated with eschatological expectation. His charisma and intelligence are evident; but his unmediated teachings, stripped of liturgical and metaphysical scaffolding, began to seem a slender basis for the Universal Church.

The early Church, faced with the delay of the Parousia and the challenge of mission to the Gentiles, clearly thought so too. Jesus's message was partially preserved but also transfigured, infused with the philosophical vocabulary of Greece, the rhetorical power of Rome and the viewpoint of the ages. What emerged was not a betrayal but a synthesis: a theological architecture capable of expressing truths the original proclamation only gestured toward.

I began to see that the project of the early Fathers, far from being a Hellenistic detour or corruption, was really an intellectual extension and deepening. These men did not replace Jesus with pagan myth; they reframed his life and message as the personalised embodiment of eternal metaphysical realities. The formulae of High Christology are far from arbitrary dogmas; they are compressions of experience and insight, dense with generations of meaning.

The historical-critical method remains essential. It situates the Gospels in time, alerts us to redaction, and prevents pious fantasy. But it cannot account for the existential power of the Christ-event as received, interpreted, and lived across two millennia. The miracle stories, the sacramental imagination, the metaphysical claims, they are not decorative embellishments but conceptual tools more profound than their Jewish or Greek antecedent sources.

In an age of arid secular scientism, where the sound development of consciousness and the values of community drift unanchored, unexamined and rather dispensable, the yearning for meaning persists. The metaphors of High Christology, grounded in incarnation, sacrifice, and divine indwelling, offer more than the preaching of a first-century prophet. They offer a symbolic architecture in which humanity, suffering, and transcendence are reestablished for every new generation.

'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious' - Ross Douthat

Amazon

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I was quite excited to open this book. Influential New York Times columnist Ross Douthat was going to explain why Catholicism is literally correct in essentially all of its supernatural claims. He was going to defeat the atheists and secularists in the field of combat: compelling arguments were about to be unleashed.

I wondered where these new compelling arguments were going to come from. We've played the game of rational proofs of God's existence from the days of Aquinas, Anselm and Descartes: today they're a curiosity in introductory philosophy classes: find the fallacy.

The smart Catholic knows that it's impossible to prove the existence of God from science (or logic) because methodologically these fields of enquiry stem from skeptical empirical enquiry, or in the case of logic and mathematics, have no empirical content at all (in writing this review, today I'm a formalist, not a Platonist).

So Douthat throws himself into the quagmire of badly-understood science. He combines the unedifying traits of: ignorance and misunderstanding of the science; tendentiousness; gullibility. Here are a few examples.

John von Neumann might have believed consciousness was necessary to 'collapse the wave-function' and therefore fix reality - an idea influenced by his Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932). But that hasn't been the scientific position for decades. Since the 1970s, work on decoherence, initiated by H. Dieter Zeh and later expanded by Wojciech Zurek in the 1980s–1990s, has shown that the universe can manage that feat all by itself. It doesn’t need an observing deity.

Evolution does not need a little helping hand on the tiller: its operation is completely consistent with the laws of physics and chemistry together with the physical boundary conditions on this planet.

Amazon

It is perfectly conceivable that the universe emerge spontaneously from the quantum vacuum, from 'nothing at all' - a parsimonious concept compared to a theistic entity imagined to be in some sense prior to spacetime but with the conceptual and instrumental powers to create spacetime and cosmology by its own willpower.

'Out of Body' instances and religious encounters are psychological experiences by definition. We are so far from understanding the pathologies of consciousness - it's hardly parsimonious or even helpful to rush to premature and speculative claims of verisimilitude.

Amazon

Contra Douthat, the New Testament is not to be taken as a body of text expressing historical truth by default (except when its own contradictions and inconsistencies prove otherwise). That's to reject decades of historically-informed scholarship in favour of wishful thinking.

On and on we stumble, through the swamp of unconvincing arguments. Douthat twists and turns to accommodate his desired conclusions. Yet the resulting flimsy structure doesn't survive scrutiny: perhaps that's what you'd expect from a journalist.

The universe is a strange entity; we are strange entities. Pushing our understanding forward is one thing - that's the mission of scientific research.

Meanwhile, creating our sense of ourselves, our values and our place in the scheme of things is ascientific, it is indeed the domain of faith and religion. Douthat would have written a more honest and compelling book if he'd taken that on board, although the Catholic Magisterium might not then have been quite so supportive. 

A missed opportunity.

Religion is everywhere. It provides important benefits and norms we sorely miss when absent. The Catholic Church says that reason and faith can't contradict each other and sometimes believes it. 

Douthat would have been better situating himself in that paradigm - he might then have crafted a narrative strong enough to confront secularism and actually win.

Catholicism, Modernity and the Jesus Seminar

 

John Dominic Crossan

Catholicism, Modernity and the Jesus Seminar

It is an under-appreciated fact for the secular majority that the orthodox, believing Catholic inhabits a world very different from theirs. For the devout, reality is numinous - a translucent existence bathed in the spiritual presence of heaven, perhaps hell, but certainly the eternal personified unity of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. In the Catholic maximalist zeitgeist, everything has a purpose. Every person’s life is meaningful and supervised, and this earthly existence is seen as preparation for what is to come.

Adopting such an ideological position requires significant leaps of faith. One must accept the sacred texts of the Old and New Testaments more or less literally, suppressing curiosity about the historical realities of the first century CE, and the early Church during the final period of the Western Empire.

But suppose you take a different path. Suppose you examine those times and places through the contextual lenses of history, economics, politics, sociology and psychology. You would be seeking empirical knowledge about the situation of the Jewish people in antiquity, about the historical Jesus, and the institutionalisation of the church in the aftermath of his life. In this case, your sources might include the work of the Jesus Seminar and one of its most influential members, John Dominic Crossan.

John Dominic Crossan was trained as a priest and monk, but by 1969, at the age of 35, he had left both vocations. He married and joined the faculty of DePaul University, where he taught comparative religion for 26 years before retiring in 1995. Alongside Robert W. Funk, Crossan led the Jesus Seminar, a group of academics dedicated to the study of the historical Jesus during its first decade. Although Crossan continues to identify as Catholic, his modernist views raise the question: are they truly compatible with orthodox Catholicism?

Key Catholic Beliefs in the Apostles' Creed

Here are the defining beliefs of the Catholic Church, as expressed in the Apostles' Creed, in simple sentences:

1. I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.
2. I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord.
3. Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary.
4. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.
5. He descended into hell, and on the third day, He rose again.
6. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
7. He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
8. I believe in the Holy Spirit.
9. I believe in the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints.
10. I believe in the forgiveness of sins.
11. I believe in the resurrection of the body.
12. I believe in life everlasting.

John Dominic Crossan's Modernist Interpretation

John Dominic Crossan, a prominent biblical scholar and historian, offers a distinct interpretation of Christianity, especially through his historical-critical approach. His beliefs, based on his writings, reflect a focus on the historical Jesus, social justice, and the symbolic meaning of resurrection, rather than a literalist interpretation of traditional creeds. Here is an interpretation of Crossan’s beliefs, presented as a variation of the Apostles' Creed:

1. I believe in God but understand God primarily as a metaphor for ultimate reality, not as a personal being.
2. I believe in Jesus of Nazareth, a historical figure whose teachings emphasised social justice, compassion, and the Kingdom of God on earth.
3. Jesus was born as a human being, with no divine conception, but his life and teachings have divine significance.
4. He was crucified by Roman authorities for his political and social challenge to oppression.
5. He was buried, and his resurrection is a metaphorical expression of the continuing influence of his teachings and the empowerment of his followers.
6. I do not believe in a literal ascension, but that Jesus continues to inspire through his example and the community of believers.
7. I believe in the coming of God's reign, but see it as a call for justice and peace in the present world, not as a future judgement.
8. I believe in the Holy Spirit as the energising force within communities of justice, love, and equality.
9. I believe in the community of believers, united by their commitment to the way of Jesus.
10. I believe in the forgiveness of sins through the transformative power of love and social healing.
11. I believe in the enduring legacy of Jesus' teachings, rather than a physical resurrection of the body.
12. I believe in the possibility of eternal life, but understand it in terms of the impact we leave on the world and the love we share.

Can Crossan Be Considered an Orthodox Catholic?

Would John Dominic Crossan be accepted as an orthodox Catholic based on this comparison of beliefs? Crossan himself has stated that he avoids taking Communion in Catholic services in order to spare the presiding priest the embarrassment of refusing to give it.

Key Comparisons

1. Belief in God

Catholic: God is understood as the Father Almighty, a personal, omnipotent Creator.

Crossan: God is seen more as a metaphor for ultimate reality rather than a personal, interventionist being.

Potential conflict: Crossan’s metaphorical understanding of God differs from the Catholic belief in a personal, almighty Creator.

2. Belief in Jesus Christ

Catholic: Jesus is the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, fully divine and fully human.

Crossan: Jesus is seen primarily as a human figure, with divine significance attributed to his teachings rather than his nature.

Potential conflict: Crossan’s historical approach to Jesus downplays his divine nature, conflicting with Catholic dogma.

3. Belief in the Holy Spirit

Catholic: The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, guiding the Church and believers.

Crossan: The Holy Spirit is seen more as the force within communities working for justice and love.

Potential conflict: Crossan’s social interpretation of the Holy Spirit as a communal force differs from the traditional Catholic understanding of the Holy Spirit as a divine person guiding the Church.

4. Belief in the Catholic Church

Catholic: The Catholic Church is the one true Church, with the Pope as its head, embodying the communion of saints and the sacraments.

Crossan: While Crossan believes in the community of believers, his approach to the institutional Church is less dogmatic and more focused on the broader Christian community and social justice.

Potential conflict: Crossan’s less hierarchical, more community-oriented view may conflict with the Catholic understanding of the Church as a divinely established institution.

5. Belief in the Forgiveness of Sins

Catholic: Sins are forgiven through the sacraments, particularly confession, and through God’s grace.

Crossan: Forgiveness is understood more in terms of social healing and transformation.

Potential conflict: Crossan’s view of forgiveness through social justice and healing may not fully align with the Catholic sacramental understanding of forgiveness through confession and grace.

6. Belief in the Resurrection and Eternal Life

Catholic: The resurrection of the body and life everlasting are literal beliefs, with the promise of eternal life in heaven.

Crossan: The resurrection is symbolic, representing the enduring legacy of Jesus’ teachings and the love shared in life.

Potential conflict: Crossan’s metaphorical understanding of resurrection and eternal life contrasts with the Catholic belief in a literal resurrection of the body and eternal life in heaven.

Although the two sets of beliefs overlap to a significant extent, the differences are substantial and deeply rooted in theology and metaphysics.

Crossan’s beliefs, particularly his metaphorical interpretation of God, Jesus, resurrection, and the Church, are inconsistent with core Catholic doctrines, which hold to more literal and institutionalised understandings of these concepts. While there may be some shared ethical or moral values, the theological differences are significant enough to render the two belief systems incompatible under the formal definitions used in the Apostles' Creed and Catholic doctrine.

It seems John Dominic Crossan, courageous in the search for truth, is right to be wary; and perhaps the Vatican is wrong to publicly endorse such a degree of deracinated literalism.

"Lord of the World" - Robert Hugh Benson

 

From the Wikipedia article:

In March 2023, Pope Francis again mentioned that he "always recommends" Lord of the World during an interview with the Argentine newspaper La Nación. He referenced the book within the context of "ideological colonization" and in response to a question about non-binary gender options appearing on government forms, saying that such a phenomenon reminded him of the Benson's "futuristic" world, “in which differences are disappearing and everything is the same, everything is uniform, a single leader of the whole world.”

Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 dystopian novel, "Lord of the World", parallels the Book of Revelation to a significant extent, particularly in its depiction of the Antichrist, the persecution of the faithful, and the ultimate conflict between good and evil. However, it focuses on a direct critique of modern secularism and uses a conventional narrative structure. Benson's novel can be seen as a modern reimagining of the apocalyptic themes of Revelation, tailored to the concerns and anxieties of his own time, which are not dissimilar to our own, hence its enduring popularity. It also has its moments of striking prediction, including weapons akin to thermonuclear bombs.

Its style reflects the transition between the stodgy Victorian novel and the more readable style coming into fashion in the first decade of the twentieth century. As Pope Francis remarks, it starts with a heavy data dump but improves after that, becoming quite page turning. It's plain, pedestrian writing you'll find here nonetheless.

Its catholicism is old-fashioned: robust, down-the-line, rather literalist supernaturalism. There are plenty of Latin prayers which you may need the Internet to make sense out of: I suppose Benson expected his readership to just know them.

Quo modo Deus exstat?

Michelangelo -The Creation  of Adam (Wikipedia)

Major is the family dog, recently taken to sheep-worrying/killing. The father will have to put it down. Owen, the godless younger brother, petitions his religious-curious older sister.

“'If you prayed for Major not to get shot would he not get shot?' said Owen in a demanding voice.

The thought of praying had never crossed my mind.

'You prayed you wouldn't have to thread the sewing machine any more and you didn't.'

I saw with dismay the unavoidable collision coming, of religion and life.

He got up and stood in front of me and said tensely, 'Pray. How do you do it? Start now!'

'You can't pray,' I said, 'about a thing like that.'

'Why not?'

Why not? Because, I could have said to him, we do not pray for things to happen or not happen, but for the strength and grace to bear what does. A fine way out, that smells abominably of defeat. But I did not think of it. I simply thought, and knew, that praying was not going to stop my father going out and getting his gun and calling, 'Major! Here, Major -' Praying would not alter that.”

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‘Age of Faith’, in ‘Lives of Girls and Women’, Alice Munro (p. 145).

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Aged ten, I ask my father if he believes in God. “No I don't,” he says, “There is no way heaven could be big enough for all the people it would need to contain.”

A parish meeting in Andover, a Q&A. Hesitantly, a parishioner asks the priest, “Father, where is heaven?” The priest, equally hesitant, talks about quantum theory and the strange spaces within the atom. I cringe with embarrassment.

Rod Liddle writes in his Sunday Times column about asking a CofE bishop whether he believes in God. “Blessed if I know, Rod,” comes the reply, confirming Liddle’s sardonic take on England's institutional religion.

A liberal states their deepest attachment and loyalty: to democracy and the rule of law. But in what sense do those things actually exist? I ask. They don't understand the question.

Buddhists believe that the self is an illusion.

Freighted, that term ‘illusion’.

It appears that Buddhists believe the self is a process, an epiphenomenon of more basic physical and mental state transitions. Is that what ‘illusion' means?

It's natural to think naively that existence is a simple, obvious notion. Stones exist, your body exists. If something exists, you can poke or paint it. But most ‘things’ we deal with in life are not like this: contracts, democracy, numbers, freedom, oppression, patriotism, any -ism. Welcome to the social construction of reality and the ubiquity of reification.

Catholicism is more a framework than a set of definite precepts. It's not reducible to biblical literalism. Orthodoxy will tell you that the true nature of God is mysterious. Most Catholics opt for some manner of ontological realism but I'm more deontological…

LLMs have battered my blogging!

In the old days, I would have an idea, develop it, and write it up as a post here. 

Now: I have an idea, I type it into Gemini which writes the blog post... and I don't post it here.

What value do I add when everyone has access to an LLM in 'God-mode'?

In future, what you'll get here will be either some very idiosyncratic posts indeed - thoughts not encompassed by the bland LLM summation of the collective wisdom of the world-wide web - or something very personal indeed, probably involving cats.

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Here we go.

1. I am being ambushed as I get up by puss-puss. She demands I scratch her head and also rub deep inside her ears. How disgusting is that?! I have to wash my hands before I go downstairs!

2. A slightly edited blog post I asked Gemini to write for me on this topic: 

"Write a blog post of less than 650 words analysing the Vatican's dilemma with scientific research such as physics, evolutionary biology and in particular research into the Historical Jesus.

Make the point that there appear to be limits in modifying or reinterpreting Biblical scripture and theology when faced with the challenge of non-sacralised content from non-Catholic sources. How are these limits determined and are there absolute barriers?"

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Gemini's blog post

"The Vatican and the Tightrope Walk: Navigating Science and Scripture

The Vatican, as the center of the Catholic Church, faces a unique challenge: reconciling the ever-evolving world of scientific discovery with the timeless truths enshrined in its scriptures and theology. This tightrope walk is particularly evident in fields like physics, evolutionary biology, and even historical research on the figure of Jesus.

The Church's position on science has undergone a gradual shift throughout history. While initial reactions to revolutionary discoveries were often cautious or even hostile, the modern Church acknowledges the validity of scientific progress. Pope John Paul II, for example, famously declared that "faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth."

However, when scientific findings seem to contradict scripture, the Church faces a dilemma. Take, for example, evolution. While accepting the reality of biological change, the Church insists on its compatibility with the doctrine of creation. This necessitates an intricate interpretation of Genesis, often drawing on allegorical readings or theological frameworks to bridge the gap.

Similarly, historical research on the life and teachings of Jesus can challenge established narratives. The discovery of non-canonical gospels, for instance, raises questions about the "true" Jesus, potentially contradicting the Gospels accepted by the Church. Reconciling these findings requires careful analysis, distinguishing between historical fact and theological interpretation.

The limits of modifying or reinterpreting scripture and theology are determined by a complex interplay of factors. Firstly, the core doctrines of the Church, like the divinity of Christ or the Trinity, are considered immutable. Secondly, the historical and literary context of scripture plays a crucial role in interpreting its meaning. Finally, the interpretations of Church authorities and theologians throughout history contribute to a cumulative understanding of faith.

However, absolute barriers are difficult to define. Science constantly evolves, and new discoveries can necessitate re-evaluations of established interpretations. Additionally, theological understanding itself is a dynamic process, with ongoing dialogue between scholars and believers. This leaves room for adaptation, but within certain boundaries.

The Vatican's approach is often characterized as cautious and deliberate. It seeks to harmonize scientific findings with scripture, finding common ground wherever possible. When contradictions seem insurmountable, it emphasizes the distinct realms of faith and reason, asserting that they ultimately lead to the same truth from different perspectives.

This balancing act is not without its critics. Some argue that the Church is too rigid, clinging to outdated interpretations in the face of scientific evidence. Others believe it compromises its core values by bending theology to accommodate secular knowledge. Ultimately, the Vatican's position reflects its unique role as a steward of both faith and reason. It strives to remain faithful to its tradition while engaging with the ever-changing world." 

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Comment: it's a bit bland and wordy, and bends over backward not to offend anyone but there's a core of interest. As they say: I didn't have time to make it shorter.