This is a disagreement among friends. I believe Peggy Noonan gets it right when she worries that religion has become the decisive factor in the race for the Republican nomination at this point. Noonan is no friend of the naked public square, and she is on target when she writes, “But there is a sense in Iowa now that faith has been heightened as a determining factor in how to vote, that such things as executive ability, professional history, temperament, character, political philosophy and professed stands are secondary, tertiary.”

The statement is often attributed to Martin Luther (although nobody can find the reference), and I’ve even seen it attributed to Erasmus: “I would rather be ruled by a smart Turk than by a dumb Christian.” There is important wisdom in that. Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post is also troubled by the ascendancy of the religion factor. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a spirited debate on the place of religion in politics. But the candidates are confusing two arguments. The first, which conservatives are winning, is defending the legitimacy of religion in the public square. The second, which conservatives are bound to lose, is proclaiming the privileged status of religion in political life.”

Fair enough, although one can argue whether the first freedom of the First Amendment has a “privileged status” in terms of protections afforded it. But then Krauthammer says this: “In this country, there is no special political standing that one derives from being a Christian leader like Mike Huckabee or a fervent believer like Mitt Romney — just as there should be no disability or disqualification for political views that derive from religious sensibilities, whether the subject is civil rights or stem cells.” Please Charles, spare us “religious sensibilities.”

But to his main point: It is true that, in terms of the constitutional order, no special political standing comes with being religious. Whether or not there is a special standing when it comes to politics as actually practiced in a democratic society, however, is up to the voters, in this case the voters of Iowa. Krauthammer is confusing a constitutional-legal question with a political-practical question. The religion-and-politics question has always been with us and has heated up in the last thirty years. If it is now reaching something of a boiling point in Iowa, the explanation does not require grand constitutional or cultural analysis. The reason is largely circumstantial. One leading contender is a Mormon and the other is a Baptist preacher. We’ve never had either in the White House (although Jimmy Carter came close). If either Romney or Huckabee is the nominee, we can be sure that religion will play an unusually prominent part in the election, with Obama or Clinton vigorously competing in the piety sweepstakes.

I’m reasonably sure the constitutional order will survive the contest. Politics in America has frequently been played as an unpredictable circus, and this is one more surprising act. The only people who have reason to be alarmed are the more fanatical proponents of the naked public squarel, a dispirited fellowship to which Peggy Noonan and Charles Krauthammer certainly do not belong.

So the Archbishop of Canterbury has issued his Advent Letter.

Just when you think he has come to some conclusion about TEC’s fragmentation, wherein entire dioceses are breaking away, his resolve devolves into mush: “I wish to pursue some professionally facilitated conversations between the leadership of The Episcopal Church and those with whom they are most in dispute…” This after he apparently admitted that further discussion would be fruitless.

But perhaps I have not read it closely enough…

Tonsure Tip to Kendall Harmon.

Hmmm, Ryan. Huckabee is one of those names that seem to invite creativity. (Although, as a general rule, people named Bottum don’t get to make fun of other people’s last names; someday I’ll try to tell you what third grade was like.) Still, there are some naturals for the man: Hucksterbee, maybe, or, for his famer-in-the-dell demeanor, Ah, Shucksabee. Add Huckleberrybee and the Beatrix Potteresque Huckamucka, and I think you have the complete paint box from which Maureen Dowd will be working after the man is elected president. I, for one, welcome our new overlord.

Ross coins a term here.

Mike Potemra coined a related word here.

The Oklahoma law professor Michael Scaperlanda has a post over at Mirror of Justice that mentions analogical uses of Protestant and Catholic in naming various schools of interpretation of the Constitution.

I remember some similar discussion swirling around after the attacks of September 11, when some commentators argued that what Islam needed was an analogue to the Reformation—while others responded that the rise of Wahhabism was, in fact, a Protestant movement and what Islam needed was an analogue to the Counter-Reformation.

Such Spenglerian morphologies are always fun, though not, I think, to be taken too seriously in the field of history. In other fields, such as the interpretation of constitutional law, they may be more helpful.

Anyway, Scaperlanda—who has a strong Opinion piece on immigration in the forthcoming issue of First Things—made me think of what may be my favorite analogical use of Protestant and Catholic thought: “The Holy War: Mac vs. DOS.” That’s a column from Umberto Eco, back in 1994, in which he wrote: “I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant.” The distinction between the two platforms was never better expressed.

Today the Church celebrates the feast of St. John of the Cross, priest and Doctor of the Church. A Spanish Carmelite from the 16th century, he was a mystic—and mystical theologian—and a close collaborator of St. Teresa of Avila. Together they launched a reformed within the Carmelite order (their followers calling themselves “discalced”—barefoot.)

Partly due to his reformist tendencies, partly due to his radical theology, and partly due to his disagreements with superiors, John and his writings came under suspicion, he was jailed, and publicly beaten. But suspicion eventually faded, and in the 18th century he was canonized a saint, and in the 20th century was declared a Doctor of the Church.

I’ve always found his mystical theology to be captivating, partly, no doubt, because he is so solidly a Thomist—his entire framework of anthropology, epistemology, and mystical theology comes straight from Thomas; and, in a certain sense, many of his developments discussing spiritual union are present in the Summa in root form.

Of course John is most famous for his work describing The Dark Night of the Soul, that purgative stage believers go through in which it appears that God has withdrawn his presence. (John’s theory was catapulted into the news most recently because of the release of Mother Teresa’s personal letters.)

For John, the dark night was God’s way of repairing the soul. Our faculties and desires have become so corrupted and attached to sin that we need to have them liberated, reoriented, redirected toward their true final end: God himself. This process is one of darkness and negation: The first dark night, the night of the senses, where the senses cease to find enjoyment (or sense God’s presence), and a second dark night, the night of the spirit, where we come to know the extent of our sinfulness and God’s glory.

But the dark night isn’t the last word. While The Dark Night of the Soul might be described as the soul’s passiveness before God, and a description of what God does to reconstruct the soul, The Ascent of Mount Carmel is John’s discussion of the active path that believer’s take in approaching God. (The two works go hand in hand, attempting to describe the same phenomenon from different perspectives–God’s and ours–and may be seen as a discussion of cooperative grace.) The final goal is union with God.

And it’s the way John describes this final union that has always appealed to me. As John sees it, God breaks us down, not only to repair us, but to elevate us. Not only are our sinful desires rechanneled toward God, but our faculties are actually lifted up to levels they could never achieve on their own. Nature is elevated to supernature. John talks about the active intellect and what it can achieve both as far as knowledge of God goes and as far as prayer goes (for John, both vocal and meditative prayer are “active” prayers—with the believer doing the work, so to speak). But once in the spiritual union that John describes, God takes the active role. The intellect is silent, the faculties are passive. God himself impresses images and phantasms as we reach true contemplation.

Steven Payne describes this process in his book, John of the Cross and the Cognitive Value of Mysticism:

God takes on the role played by the active intellect in ordinary knowledge, directly, and “informs” the possible intellect directly, producing an obscure apprehension or “knowledge” of the Divine. And just as a piece of clay cannot be molded into a new shape until the old shape is destroyed, so too the possible intellect cannot receive the divine “form” conveyed in mystical experience until the “forms and intelligible species” of creatures are expelled. [Note the Thomistic jargon.]

The dark night frees up the space to allow God to act.

But it’s not just a supernatural knowledge of God that is attained. A real union is achieved; and not just union, but a transformation, a participatory deification. And it starts here and now, not just in the life to come. In The Living Flame of Love, John describes it this way:

Having been made one with God, the soul is somehow God through participation. Although it is not God as perfectly as it will be in the next life, it is like the shadow of God. Being the shadow of God through this substantial transformation, it performs in this measure in God and through God what he through himself does in it. For the will of the two is one will, and thus God’s operations and the soul’s are one. Since God gives himself with a free and gracious will, so too the soul gives to God, God himself in God; and this is a true and complete gift of the soul to God.

How does this all work out conceptually? John argues that we become divinized (in a limited, but real sense) in a manner similar to the hypostatic union. Just as Christ was the union of the divine and human in a single person, so too something similar will happen to us as we become more fully united to Christ. Once united to Christ, we’re elevated to participate in the divine life of the trinity. Edward Howells, in his book John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: A Trinitarian Mystical Psychology, explains it like this:

The soul has had its means of knowing and its relationship with God raised from the human to the divine level. The culmination of John’s Trinitarian argument is to conclude that “the soul’s center is God.” The center of the soul is both God’s “own” and the soul’s “own,” where God dwells “alone, not only as in your [God’s] house, not only in your bed, but also in my own heart, intimately and closely united to it.” In saying that the center is the soul’s “own,” John means that it has full freedom in union, as God has raised the soul to the level of God’s own active Trinitarian mutuality. Thus, in the case of the will, “the soul reflects the divine light in a more excellent way because of the active intervention of its will.” There is an active cooperation between the soul and God, with no loss of the soul’s freedom but rather its perfection. The soul can take full possession of its faculties while also remaining in union. This corresponds to the union of the divine Word with human flesh in Christ.

It’s a beautiful vision, and another reason to return to the works of St. John of the Cross on this his feast.

Simple is hard. It’s not easy boiling down a long essay into a quick sentence or two that captures what it is about the essay that caught your eye. Our friends at Arts & Letters Daily however, have always had a talent for it, which is what makes their site one of the great treasures of the Internet.

A recent item links to an interesting article in Reason which swipes at the anti-fast-food movement by pointing out that old-fashioned diners typically have far more caloric, cholesterol-packed food. Arts & Letters Daily flags the piece: “Long before Americans fell in love with cheap, greasy, franchise chain junk food, they loved cheap, greasy, mom ’n’ pop junk food.”

I guess they mean “mom ’n’ pop” in the sense of a locally owned business. But I eagerly clicked on the link because I thought it was going to be a discussion of old-fashioned home cooking in America.

I’ve always had an interest in the history of American food—as must anyone of my generation, I think, who watched the transformation of food in this country over recent decades. Why was food so bad in 1975?

Some years ago, Laura Shapiro had an interesting book called Perfection Salad that blamed much of it on the rise of Home Ec. courses, Fannie Farmer, the Boston School of Cooking, and the invention of the “science of nutrition” and “scientific cookery.” (Farmer’s heirs, of course, are the modern anti-McDonald’s food police the Reason article mocks.)

In my lazy way, I haven’t done much investigation, but the essay Arts & Letters Daily seemed to advertise is one I’d really like to read. Why did food get so bad in America? And how did it get better?

Glad Tidings?

Last week the House of Representatives voted, 372 to 9, to recognize the “importance of Christmas and the Christian faith,” acknowledging Christianity as “one of the great religions of the world.” See the full resolution and roll call here.

But don’t start caroling too loud. After a 376 to 0 vote in October, Ramadan still wins.

Anthony, while it’s true that Dawkins would rather wish you a “Happy Christmas” than a “Happy Holiday Season,” he’d really prefer to wish you a “Happy Newton Day.”

In this article Dawkins reflects on his childhood Christmas experiences, and then debunks the Christmas myth as only he can. Here’s a taste:

From it flowed the whole Virgin Mary myth, the kitsch “Our Lady” of Catholic grotto-idolatry, the sub-paedophile spectacle of young girls in virginal white First Communion dresses, the goddess status of not just Mary herself but a pantheon of local “manifestations”. Pope John Paul II thought he was saved from assassination in 1981 not just by Our Lady but specifically by Our Lady of Fatima. As I have remarked elsewhere, presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal and Our Lady of Knock were busy on other errands at the time.

and:

Most but not all scholars think, on balance, that a charismatic wandering preacher called Jesus (or Joshua) probably was executed during the Roman occupation, though all objective historians agree that the evidence is weak. Certainly, nobody takes seriously the legend that he was born in December. Late Christian tradition simply attached Jesus’s birth to a long-established and convenient winter solstice festival.

If these arguments don’t convince you to give up Marian devotion and Christmas celebrations, I don’t know what will.