The Parable of the Peddlers
In recent days a miniature controversy has raged in this space questioning the basic justification for the Catholic faith. Unfortunately, while the inquisitor started with an interesting and engaging line of questioning, he descended into a noisome parroting of “Jack Chick” style slanders against the Church, and gave flip answers, which I did not believe he honestly meant or honestly believed, when asked to justify his approach.
In all honestly, the fault is more mine than his for losing my temper, and the double fault mine for being so proud of being able to keep my temper. Let my sad example serve the gentle reader as a warning to eschew pride.
His position deserves a better advocate than he, and deserves better than my brush off. The question is good even if he is not the man to ask it.
What he is asking is the single most important question in Western history since roughly the Tenth Century. How man and nations decide this question has defined the character of every man and nation and the character of the generation and age in which they live. A reasonable and, indeed, a passionate argument can be given on both sides.
The argument is the justification for belief in, participation in, and loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church.
The question is central to history, because it involves the fundamental question of the role individualism to organized authority, the role of the Church and the State, Pontiff and Emperor, the role of the conscience. It involves questions of liberty and tyranny, of free will and predestination, of the limits of the limitless grace of God and the nature of Man and the Fall of Man, and has ramifications for all the major philosophical and political questions which have agitated Christendom for five centuries and more.
More tellingly, it has personal implications for the salvation or damnation of the soul of every readers who reads these words.
In the course of this discussion, I was asked to justify my personal decision to join in the communion with the Roman Catholic Church rather than join with one of the many and ever-growing number of other denominations, African or Orthodox or Protestant.
I generally am reluctant to discuss such things, as to have a friendly (or, in this case, very unfriendly) conversation about the differences we have with our brothers gives scandal to the world by humiliating the body of believers. We Christians are supposed to be loving and unified, and every smirking neopagan and angry atheist can point to the odium of our theological disputes as proof that we neither practice what we preach, nor have a God potent enough to quell the disquiet of schism.
In this case, I hope to decrease the odium by restricting my comments to my personal decision and personal opinion, as a matter of autobiographical interest only.
I will not here revisit the Trinitarian controversies which accompanied the rise of Nestorian and Mohammedan heresies, the Christological controversy which provoked Arianism, the Filioque controversy which accompanied and aggravated the Great Schism, or later controversies with other breakaway groups, Albigensians, Lutherans, or whatever.
Nor do I mean here to address claims which are schismatic rather than heretical. My reason for not taking communion with the Orthodox Church or the Anglicans has nothing to do with their dogmas and rites, which are, for all practical purposes, the same as ours. I am speaking only of dogmatic claims, that is, propositions that rely for their assent on the trust in the authority of the agent who teaches them, and the moral right to command assent.
There may be those who say there is no such authority. A Deist, for example, might claim that human reason alone is sufficient, and that no statement should be held to be true merely on the strength of the name of the teacher.
To them, I merely say adieu, that no comment here below is meant for their ears: they are pristine philosophers who assent to nothing dogmatically, nor do they believe eyewitnesses nor experts nor parents nor even the report of the weatherman, and therefore they cannot be Christians. For Christians are those who believe the Credo dogmatically. Even Peter took what Christ said on faith, that is, out of trust for the authority of Christ to speak and teach on matters Christ knew but Peter did not.
I was asked by what epistemology or method of distinguishing true from false I made the decision between the competing claims of the competing denominations, whether by human reason or divine inspiration, or both, or neither?
Another question to which this question led, implied but not asked, was this: no matter what the answer, whatever method was used by the Pope and the ministers of the Catholic Church to discover the will of God and define the correct teaching of the Church, or to win my assent to the authority of those teachings, could not any individual, either with himself or with others, use with equal validity the same method and come to another discovery and grant or withhold assent to it?
The implied question we need not reach: it is absurd. It is in effect saying that whatever grants the Pope papal authority and infallibility can be used by any private individual to claim the same authority, as when Henry VIII in effect declared himself the Pope of England, the head of her church and the guardian and final authority on matters of doctrine, faith and morals. Logically, if any private individual, or any king in his capacity as sovereign, can lawfully declare himself the final authority of Church doctrine, there is no role for the Church: all is merely a matter of private opinion. If any man can crown himself Pope, then there is no Pope.
Or, again, the question is the same as asking whether, if a theologian in the Sixteenth Century, or a layman in the Twenty-First, has a dispute with Saint John or Saint Peter or Saint Paul about the meaning of what Christ taught, whatever grants the Apostles or their successors the special knowledge or charisma or grant of authority to know what Christ taught, why cannot the layman in the Twentieth Century teach with the same confidence, dignity, authority and assurance of correctness as the men who knew Christ in the flesh? What make Peter so special? It is impossible to recite the question without hearing the note of petty envy it contains.
The question as asked is a more sober one: by what epistemology, by what theory of how man discerns true and false, are the various false claims about doctrine and theology and faith (for they cannot all be true) to be discerned?
Honestly, it is a good question and I cannot answer it, because it is based on a false premise. The assumption that frames the question puts the question in a false light.
What is going on here is more fundamental than a juror’s decision between competing claims. It is much more like a maiden’s decision between competing suitors.
To me, and I assume to the average faithful Catholic, there is not a group of equal and competing claims in the marketplace of ideas. I am a member of the Mother Church, which is the mystical body of Christ, who is her head and animating spirit as well as her bridegroom. So to me, all doctrine looks like orthodoxy, which it the true teaching flowing like water from the pierced side of Christ, and heterodoxy, which is the falsehood imposed upon human gullibility and infidelity by the smoggy guile of hellish deception and dimness of human self-deception, intellects darkened by sin and heated by pride.
To the average Protestant, there is no Church, there is but a marketplace of ideas. In one stall is the Catholic claim, in another stall is the Lutheran or Calvinist or Anglican, and farther away is the Mormon or Christian Scientist or Unificationist stalls, each with a peddler before the stall, hawking his wares and urging the customer to buy.
So by what epistemology, either by human reason or the guidance of the Holy Spirit or both, do I choose between the stalls, all of them being equal before the choice is made?
My answer is that not all the peddlers are making an equal claim. Not all of them are peddling goods.
The choice is between things of a different nature, and, in a way, it is not a choice at all, but a calling.
The booksellers in stall B are selling a book that they took from stall A, ripped out some of the pages, and claim that is the original book.
The waterboy in stall C says that he can clean me without using water, using the ideas he got from the Lady in stall A, who has real water.
The counselor in stall E says my sins can be heard and confessed and forgiven and also advice be given me on how to amend my life; but that no human person will do these things, and he also uses the idea about confession he got from stall A, who actually has an adviser standing by to listen and advise.
And a few years ago, everyone agreed with the marriage counselor Lady in stall A that contraception was a bad idea, except this year, for no particular reason, none of the other stalls are still using that idea, the idea that they got from stall A. Who has not changed her mind.
All the good in all the stalls are second-hand except from one.
And when I ask the peddlers selling the goods in stalls B, C, D and E to justify why I should buy their goods second hand rather than getting them from the source, new rather than used, I hear utterly terrifying claims that the Lady in stall A adulterates her goods, poisons her bread, added to and subtracted from her book, and committed all fashion of filthy and abominable things.
I ask the bookseller in stall B once again where he got his book, and he won’t even admit he got it from the Lady in stall A. I ask him by what authority he ripped out certain pages and altered others, and he says it is because he loves and trusts the book so much. The Lady is a whore and a liar and a deceiver and nothing she says or does can be trusted! I ask him who wrote the book, preserved it, bled for it, and he says it was the Lady in stall A. If she cannot be trusted, then why do you trust her book? He clears his throat and says she was actually a lot like him when she was younger.
But when I see what stall A is actually selling, independent of the other claims of how adulterated the goods are, the facts don’t support the accusation.
The accusations all have the flippant character of people who say Christmas is a pagan holiday, and that Christians are worshiping a tree god of the pine tree because of its magical powers. When you talk to someone who owns a Christmas tree, whether you yourself believe in Santa Clause or not, you find out the Christmas tree owner does not think the tree is magical.
However, I should hasten to add that only a sophist of remarkable arrogance and duplicity would continue to argue that the Christmastree owner does indeed think the tree is magical, while merely not admitting he thinks that. An even more arrogance and duplicitous sophist would make the even less believable claim that the Christmastree owner thinks the tree is magic without realizing he thinks what the sophist says he thinks, and not what he thinks he thinks! I would postulate a sophist who, even when corrected and upbraided for his duplicity by the Christmastree owner himself, assumes the weary air of a man falsely accused and continues to insist on his honesty and innocence, but, nay, I dare not pose that, lest my hypothetical grow too extreme for credulity.
Curious, I go into stall A, and find out that what I thought was a stall was a door out of a cramped closet or cellar into an airier, larger and fairer edifice, a cathedral proud with shining pillar and a decorated roof ashine with stars and suns. All these stalls in the marketplace of ideas are merely some cramped cells in the back cellar of a church, a broken church that has barred the doors and plugged the halls leading to the nave. Every idea that they have comes from stall A, except for ones they invented themselves.
So how am I to answer any epistemological question about how I or mine decide between the competing claims of the various stalls selling goods when there are no stalls selling goods: there is only the one true owner and the men stealing from her.
My answer is that this is not a marketplace of ideas. It is a den of thieves.
I do not mean the seller in stall A is telling the truth about her goods and the accusers are not; I mean that she is not even selling what they say she is selling.
Because she is not selling goods at all. The peddler throw back her hood and reveals that she is my mother. The happy ending of the fairy tale is reversed, for when I find the beauty of the Cross and bestow a kiss, it is not the Church that changes, but rather I that am wakened from my enchanted sleep, and I am changed from a beast or a loathsome frog into a prince.
But this is not a fairy tale but a true tale, for the ending is but the beginning, and the prince must arm himself with the sword and truth and the shield of faith and the whole armor of God, and fight not only the giants looming dark and blind across all the horizons of the world, but the scorpions and dragons of his own fallen nature, and temptations as subtle as clouds of drifting poison.
In a gentle age, he may expect the scorn of men and the loss of the world’s good opinion, and in a harsher and more heroic age, he might expect stripes and wounds and fetters and death, but his expectations as of any loyal prince is to follow the footsteps of his master.
The master’s feet are pierced with nails and his footfalls leave behind the drops of ruby blood whose virtue is to cure the worlds of all their grief and pain.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
