How to Handle Concupiscence according to the Real Theology of the Body

CONCUPISCENCE - Fallen man's proclivity to sin, especially in matters of sex.

• How Christopher West and his followers say we should handle concupiscence. Engage it, especially by confronting and indulging near occasions of sin (or what weaker minds would call near occasions of sin).  If you see a naked person who is not your spouse, stare at him or her.  (In Fr. Loya's memorable admonition, "Look at her butt!  Look at her breasts!")  If you're afraid that in doing so, your lust will be stirred, that's only because you're a coward.  The only way through the purgative way to the illuminative way - the only way from beginner's spirituality to advanced spirituality - is to see naked bodies, to stare at them, and to transform your lust into love.  This sounds sordid, but it's highly advanced and spiritual.  

• How St. John Paul II says we should handle concupiscence.  If we indulge concupiscence, we end up sinning, turning the prophetic language of the body into a lie: for the Theology of the Body is expressed by fidelity to your spouse if you're married and by continence if you're not, which fidelity to our vocations is both a sign of the original innocence of man and woman at creation and also of Christ's fideltiy to the Church, His bride, made perfect at the consummation of time.  This is the "language of the body".  If you're married, your job is to "reread in truth the language of the body" by means of a lifelong exclusive truthfulness to your husband or wife (both in the actions of your body and in your heart) and concupiscence is always and everywhere an enemy to that.  Concupiscence does not lead to God, it leads to a lie, it leads away from God and the truth God intends for our bodies to express.  And while we are not totally depraved victims of concupiscence, we are also never fully free of it.  Nowhere in the Wednesday Audiences does John Paul II envision concupiscence giving way entirely to "mature purity" in this life,  for, until we die, we are in a state where we are at the same time both fallen and redeemed (simul lapsus et redemptus).  Therefore, man is not called to indulge concupiscence, Man is Called to Overcome Concupiscence by controlling it.

Which of these courses of action sounds more Catholic to you?  West's or John Paul's?

The answer is obvious, for it is, of course, either disingenuous or naive (or simply sick) to pretend that indulging concupiscence can be a spiritually positive act.

Maybe this sort of spiritualizing of sex appeals to frustrated virgins at Catholic Youth Conferences.  Maybe it appeals to guys who want to dabble in porn while telling themselves it's a kind of spiritual homework.  Maybe it appeals to middle aged housewives who think Christopher West is cute.  

But it doesn't appeal to me.

I don't know about you, but I know intimately and deeply the harm that concupiscence can do, the damage that infidelity can cause, the tribute that slavery to lust can exact.  And so I don't have patience for the misreading of the Real Theology of the Body that West and his heterodox cohorts are peddling.  

Guys in particular, you know how easy it is day to day to be untrue to your wife, to lust in your heart or to stray in your imagination, to think the grass is greener in your neighbor's yard and to fancy a little grazing outside your own fence would do you good.  But we know what happens if we give in to those temptations, even in our hearts.  We know the pain and death it deals.  In fact, you may be tempted to despair, to think that the Old Man within you that keeps stirring up your discontent will never be put in his place.  But the good news is this - as expressed by St. John Paul II.

Nevertheless in the sphere of the ethos of redemption the possibility always remains of passing from error to the truth, as also the possibility of returning, that is, of conversion, from sin to chastity, as an expression of a life according to the Spirit (cf. Gal 5:16).

In other words, we don't have to live like this.  We don't have to lust after women who are not our wives, men who are not our husbands.  We don't even have to long for emotional infidelity, for affairs of the heart.  We don't have to tell ourselves that our stupid little sins are somehow special and are leading us to "the illuminative way".  Every day, every moment, the chance of conversion presents itself to us.  The grace is always there.

For another saint long before John Paul once spoke great words of truth ...

No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, [i.e., He expresses the "fidelity" we all are called to] and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. (1 Cor. 10:13) 

 Our sins are not special.  They are not means of reaching God.  They are not ways to make us more spiritual than our fellow Christians.  They are common to man, and they can be overcome, through fidelity, so that our bodies and our souls can speak the language of truth.

Let's Pretend

The old man he plays let's pretend
When e'er his friends come by
And all his friends, not to offend
Pretend, affirm, and cry,
"Oh, yes, old man, oh what a friend
Both you and trophy wife are!

"How smart is she!  How capably
She does the things we all do!
She's keen and cute and shape-ily
She has the latest hair-do.
Her IQ must be 101, or maybe-ly
It's more!  She surely will go far."

The wife she laughs and says a word
She loudly mispronounces.
The old man, though it seems absurd
To keep her safe he pounces:
Pretends we all misheard
His 20-year old bird

Both you and me
We all, you see,
Must keep alive his fantasy.

***

Another type of make-believe
I'm sure you've been a part of
Young Amber gets engaged to Steve,
She says it's love, well sort of.
We hope and pray that Steve will leave.
Engaged they may have got;
Engaging he is not.

But no one dares to say a peep or
Make an accusation.
We all pretend that he's a keeper.
Hail the fabrication!
Pretend that you do not
Begin to smell the rot.

"Your house of cards is at an end
It is a bit uneven,
But let's pretend! Oh what a friend -
A friend you have in Stephen!"

Both you and me
We all, you see,
Must keep alive her fantasy.

***

There is no abnormality
We won't make a reality,
No thing that is amiss
But we affirm by artifice,
No fallacy or fraud
But we hail it as a god.

Though my life ends up in rubble,
I won't let you burst my bubble.

Every soul with an addiction
Demands we join him in his fiction.

Until time will have its end
We all join in "let's pretend".

Why Torture is so Deeply Wrong

Four years ago I was very naive.

In 2010 when I began blogging seriously and using Facebook regularly I actually thought that reasoned arguments could happen on the internet.  Now, of course, I know better.

The Torture Debate was the first issue I engaged at the time.  The Torture Enthusiasts, who since they Dissent from Church Teaching I will henceforth call Dissenters (though clear terminology makes them furious - see below), were using this approach ...

• They denied that the Church forbid Torture, or else they claimed that Church teaching forbidding Torture in any and all circumstances was not Magisterial or was still in flux.

• They claimed that the act they were defending (in this case waterboarding) was not in fact Torture.

I later discovered that this handy template is the only one that's used by right wing Dissenters on all their precious issues.  Just fill in the blank and you're good to go.  And go and go and go.  If you're a Dissenter and your opponent demonstrates that the Church forbids, for example, LYING in any and all circumstances, you can claim that the act you're defending is not LYING.  If your opponent demonstrates that the act in question is undoubtedly LYING, you can jump back to claiming the Church does not forbid LYING.  Or USURY, or TORTURE or what have you.  And you keep this up ad nauseum, jumping from tactic one to tactic two until your opponent gives up in frustration.

But now it gets interesting.  Let's say in defending the teachings on faith and morals of the Catholic Church, which we Catholics maintain are the teachings of Jesus Christ as defended by the Holy Spirit, your opponent is bold enough to make an appeal to CONSCIENCE.  

Suppose your opponent says to you, "Oh, let's get off this merry-go-round.  How can you call yourself a Christian and advocate for the torture of one human being by another?"

All you have to do is memorize this handy bit of dialogue and deliver each exclamation in whatever order suits you ... 

"You're being uncharitable!  You're using circular reasoning!  You are the most hateful person I've ever met!  How can you expect to win this argument when you're obviously so childish!  You need to go to confession!"

... add a sneering and contemptuous tone for bonus points.

***

Now, back in 2010, it seemed to me that the defenders of Torture had one very big argument on their side.  If Dissenters rely on two things - 1. the denial of Magisterial authority on the subject and 2. vagueness of definition - then the Dissenters on Torture had a point with #2. 

For, while it was clear that the Magisterium had condemned Torture as intrinsically evil (evil in any and all circumstances), the working definition of Torture was inadequate.  Everyone was assuming that Torture was simply extreme corporal punishment, and as Fr. Brian Harrison rightly pointed out, if an act differs from other acts merely by degree and not by kind, then it cannot be intrinsically evil. 

And yet it is obvious to us what Torture is.  We know it when we see it, and we know that it is something quite different from mere corporal punishment, regardless of the severity of pain such punishment may inflict.  We know that it differs in kind from corporal punishment and not merely by degree.  We know, in fact, that the object or aim of Torture is different from the object or aim of mere corporal punishment.  We know as well that Torture can achieve its aim even without the use of corporal punishment.  Psychological Torture can be inflicted without causing physical pain.  

This means that physical pain, even torment, is a means to an end in the act of Torture.  If a torturer can achieve his object without the means of inflicting physical pain, he will.  Torture, then, is not severe corporal punishment, though severe corporal punishment can be a method torturers use.

What, then, is the object (the aim, end, goal, intention) of Torture - what characterizes it as an act differing in kind from other acts?  What makes it intrinsically evil and how can we put that into words?

Well, Paul Rhodes achieved this in my backyard one summer's evening during a meeting of the ChesterBelloc Drinking and Debating Club.  He said, simply, ... 

TORTURE is the attempt to destroy the Image of God in another.

I will let Paul himself elaborate on that (my emphasis) ...

It should be added that torture, because it is an attempt to destroy one's free will and thereby destroy his rational soul--i.e. that which makes the special creation of the human being special--, constitutes an attack on the dignity of man. According to Catholic Theology the dignity of man, our free will, is the Imago Dei, the Image of God. Torture then is the attempt to destroy the Image of God. And this is the ultimate reason why it is always wrong everywhere in all circumstances, even when the ticking time bomb is a bomb that will destroy the entire world. No defense of a transient good, even if that transient good is the whole world, can justify a deliberate and concerted attempt to destroy the image of God. 

Put another way, human dignity is the foundation of human rights. If torture can be justified even in one instance, then that means that human dignity is dispensable, and that means that human rights are not rights at all but mere privileges we have only at the whim of a transient tyrant. If you think torture can be justified, then you simply cannot think that our Creator has endowed us with Inalienable Rights. 

My claim is that torture is wrong even if it is the only means to save all the lives of the entire world for the reason that the attempt to destroy the Imago Dei is far more evil than the destruction of human corporeal life. So, obviously I reject [a] utilitarian calculus. Either you believe that God must be revered, honored, and worshipped even to the point of agonizing sacrifice or you don't.

This is it, friends, in a nutshell.

And if you think about it, stepping back from Torture for a moment, the worst things that we suffer at the hands of others during our earthly pilgrimage all have this element of an attack against, or a denial of, our dignity as persons.

Even mundane and trivial sleights can illustrate this.  Standing in line for hours at the Department of Motor Vehicles only to be told dismissively that you've brought the wrong paperwork makes us angry not just because of the time wasted but because it's dehumanizing: it denies the dignity of man.  Being used by someone for sex or money in a romantic relationship stings so deeply not just because of the lying and treason involved, but because when one person does this to another, he or she is denying the dignity of man.  The trauma inflicted upon victims of sex abuse or other violent crimes comes not so much from the physical harm suffered, but from the psychological fact being conveyed by the victimizer, whose act tells the victim: you are worthless, you have no dignity, you are a mere tool for my use.

Torture is the most extreme example of this, and Torture also contains something that no one in this debate has yet admitted: sadistic pleasure.  The power we feel when we dismantle the Image of God is the lust of Satan - if we can kill God in another, we become gods ourselves.

This is why Torture is possibly the worst thing a person can do.

And this is why any Catholic who supports it should be utterly and deeply ashamed.

Christopher West, Hugh Hefner and the Domestication of God

Cupid in a Cage

Father Brian von Hove writes ...

The danger in West’s approach, as it could be misunderstood at least, is in its domestication, intended or not, of the mysterious. He and Hefner want to get it all out there, so to speak, as if to overcome the mystique of the forbidden.  He is not so much forgetful of concupiscence as he is of that which is awesome, the tremendum ... 

Our sexuality is anything but “harmless.”  As Donald Keefe has said, there is no common ground between yes and no. Sexual love in marriage, he would note, is the occasion for blissful joy, not simply the elements of fun.  Any attempts by West or Hefner to domesticate the beautiful, to make the holy into something manipulable, even manageable, will be about as successful as rap music has been in lowering the crime rate.

Nudists make a similar mistake.  The naked body is shrouded with clothing because it is shrouded in mystery.  To walk around naked has no power to remove the veil of that mystery, it only has the power to make you a tad bit chilly.

And so to dispense with custody of the eyes and "Look at her butt!  Her breasts!" as Fr. Loya urges us to do, in order to see a woman's "magnificent femininity" (yeah, right) is not simply wrong because it's heedless of concupiscence, it's also wrong because it assumes that we can pierce this veil, that we can make use of something that ought to be treated with a kind of awe and reverence.

Sean P. Dailey's Editorial Against Torture

This was published four years ago in Gilbert Magazine.  I had linked to it then, but the link is now broken.  However I discovered that the editorial had been mirrored by Andrew Cusack, and so I am copying and pasting it below.  It is well written and covers all the bases.

It's literally a damned shame that this issue is even coming up again, but the points Dailey made four years ago are just as valid today.

Those who see abortion as an evil are often frustrated by those who attempt to justify abortion by vague arguments about “choice” or even more practical arguments about exceptions for rape or incest, or the health of the mother. But many of these same people lose their moral clarity when the subject is torture. Suddenly they are the ones bringing up exceptions and parsing definitions.

There is so much confusion over this issue that in a recent TV interview, a prominent Catholic journalist let a former Bush Administration speechwriter, also a Catholic, grossly misrepresent Catholic teaching in a shameful apologia for torture.

Let us re-establish clarity. Torture, whether physical or psychological, is a barbaric, savage act, not justifiable under any circumstances, and unworthy of a civilized society.

But don’t take our word for it. For those readers who are religious, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America began calling for America to cease torturing prisoners more than a year ago. American Episcopal bishops agree, as do other Protestant denominations. For our Catholic readers, Pope Benedict XVI wrote, “I reiterate that the prohibition against torture cannot be contravened under any circumstances.” The Catholic Church draws no distinction between physical and psychological torture.

For those readers who aren’t religious, we turn to U.S. law and international law, where torture is, without exception, condemned. Not one state or municipal law enforcement agency permits it. The Army Field Manual, which regulates interrogations by the U.S. military, prohibits torture. So does the Geneva Convention—a treaty to which both the Holy See and the United States are signatories. None of these institutions or documents draws any distinction between physical and psychological torture either. For all, torture is torture.

When Catholics and Protestants agree, and when religious and secular institutions agree, that torture is an offense against human dignity and that those guilty of it should be thrown in jail, may we not agree that perhaps it is immoral? Do we really need to get into the nuts and bolts of what constitutes torture?

Yes, we do. Most will agree that taking a power drill to a man’s shoulder or pulling out his fingernails with pliers for punishment or to extract information is torture. But when the subject is waterboarding, clarity vanishes again. Some consider waterboarding to be mere psychological torture—which, as we’ve already established, is morally indistinguishable from physical torture.

But waterboarding is not a harmless dunk in the tub, as former Vice President Dick Cheney once likened it, and it is not psychological torture. In waterboarding, a subject is strapped to a gurney. His feet are elevated slightly above his head. A cloth is draped over his face. And water is poured on his face so that it enters his nose and mouth and flows into his lungs. CIA interrogators are instructed to pour the water immediately after a detainee exhales, to ensure he inhales water, not air. They use their hands to “dam the flow” of excess water from a detainee’s mouth. And detainees who are scheduled for waterboarding are put on a liquid diet, to minimize the risk of death should they inhale their own vomit.

This procedure became official American policy in our so-called War on Terror, but it was not always so. Waterboarding has been condemned by the United States government since at least 1898, when American soldiers were court marshaled for waterboarding prisoners during our occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. In World War II, we hanged Japanese war criminals for waterboarding American and Allied troops. In the 1980s in Texas, a sheriff and three of his deputies were convicted by the Justice Department for waterboarding prisoners to extract confessions.

And yet, there are those exceptions: American security is at stake. If waterboarding saves even one life, isn’t it worth it?

If torturing a terrorist suspect saved a city from destruction, or if it saved even one life, it would still be a barbaric, savage act, unworthy of a civilized society. If expediency were enough to justify an immoral act, then abortion would be justifiable.

G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1916 that people who purport to defend civilization against barbarians undermine their cause when they resort to barbaric tactics. “The more we insist that the terms must be our terms, the more do we weaken ourselves if the methods are their methods.”

During World War I, when some in England demanded that German soldiers captured on English soil be denied humane treatment, Chesterton countered, “Such small revenges are unworthy of the dignity of indignation. They are also futile and inconsequent.”

Our whole hope of getting a monster killed and not scotched depends upon our keeping fresh the original human horror at its monstrosity. It may be illogical, but it will certainly be natural, if that horror is somewhat dulled if, by the end of the war, everybody seems to be fighting with pretty much the same weapons.

When you torture, you turn the victim into a hero, for there is more honor in defying a torturer than in being a torturer.

“A kind of courage can exist in a merciless and unmagnaminous soldier, as it can exist in a merciless and unmagnaminous wild pig,” Chesterton wrote. “But it does not happen to be the kind of courage that our brethren have died to keep alive.”

—Sean P. Dailey for the editorial board of Gilbert Magazine

Chesterton Answers the Advocates for Torture

Let's torture the torturers and eat the cannibals.

99 years ago, G. K. Chesterton wrote an article in the Illustrated London News that answers the question we keep hearing today.

"Why can't we torture terrorist prisoners?!" confused Catholics are asking.  "We'll be at a disadvantage if we don't!  God knows they'd do it to us!  We need to fight fire with fire!"

Chesterton, of course, on June 5, 1915, was writing about World War I (which was then in full swing) and not the War on Terror, but he's writing as much for America today as he was for England a century ago.  Some excerpts (my emphases) ...

If we were at war with the King of the Cannibal Islands, these people would say that our Admirals ought to eat their prisoners.  At least, they show no perception of any intellectual principle that could save them from such a conclusion.  It does not seem to dawn on them that we do not eat savages ... because we are not savage.  We do not swallow human gore for the same reason that we do not swallow slavery and humiliation: because they make us sick. ...

... Should [we] poison wells because the Germans poisoned them?  And, if not, why not?  The real reason, of course [is this] ... we should not refrain out of respect for Germans, but out of respect for ourselves. ...

 ... We are fighting for human self-respect: we cannot possibly lose what we are fighting for, even in order to fight better.  ... We do not and cannot make our salvation consist solely in our success.  We do not and cannot think of defeat as the worst thing possible, any more than we can think of war as the worst thing possible.  ...

They said in the Middle Ages, I think, that the Devil was the ape of God.  It must not be said in any ages that we were the apes of the Devil. ...

The essay is not available online, but is one of many in Volume 30 of the Collected Works, available from The American Chesterton Society.

The Tortuous Route of Advocating for Torture

Here's the big game advocates of torture play:

If torture is wrong, you mean I can't spank my son when he misbehaves?  If torture is wrong, you mean nuns should not have been rapping the knuckles of their students with rulers?  If torture is wrong, then why can't we even define what it consists of?  Goodness gracious, drowning or producing a fear of drowning in a Muslim.  How could that be torture???

Cowardly as this line of reasoning is, it at least points toward a truth.  The Church says that torture is intrinsically evil, evil by its very nature.  If torture is merely severe corporal punishment (and nothing else), then how can that be?  Does the nature of something change when its degree changes?  Corporal punishment is not intrinsically evil, so why should severe corporal punishment be?  Severe corporal punishment may be wrong (as too much eating or too much drinking is wrong), but the thing in and of itself is not wrong, no more wrong than eating or drinking are, when not indulged in to an extreme: in other words not intrinsically wrong.

My response would be: an act is intrinsically evil not because it differs from other acts in degree, but in kind.

Thus, torture is not merely severe corporal punishment.  Indeed, psychological torture may make no use of corporal punishment at all.  So, then, what is torture and what distinguishes it from other acts that may become wrong if indulged in to disproportionate degree, but that are not wrong by their nature?

As I wrote on Facebook ...

TORTURE is the attempt to destroy the Image of God in another human being, to take control of his will and reason.  It is typically done with psychological or physical coercion, or a combination of both.  It is not intense corporal punishment, which can be aimed at reform of the will, but which never seeks to destroy the will.  [Torture may make use of corporal punishment, but corporal punishment alone does not define what torture is.] For torture is aimed at taking away the very substance of man's being, while leaving him a tool for another's disposal and control.  

(Hat tip to Paul Rhodes, by the way, who first put this idea into words, in my back yard, at a meeting of the ChesterBelloc Drinking and Debating Club.)

In brief, TORTURE is simply the worst thing one human being can do to another and should not be condoned by godless atheists, much less Catholics.

"Bait and Switch" and the Secret Mysteries of Sex

Lately I've been posting a lot about Christopher West.  Let me try to explain why.

Before coming to the Faith in the middle of my life, I had been blessed (or cursed) with having tasted from a kind of smorgasbord of false philosophy, the Gnosticism of the Jungians being my dish of choice, though even then I could sense something sour and spoiled in the ingredients.

Discovering the Bread of Life was therefore a great blessing.  I could see, looking back, that the times I was most satisfied by the false faiths I had sampled were the times when those faiths were passing along ingredients culled from Catholic Truth.  In other words, what I liked most about Jung, for instance, was that he had actual Christian content mixed in with all the weirdness - and it turns out the Christian stuff was the most nourishing.  It has seemed to me ever since a remarkable act of foolishness to turn from that which really satisfies to that which offers a kind of empty flavor, to sell one's birthright as Esau did for a plate of slop that won't keep you full even until lunch (see Gen. 25:29-34).

And so the promise of delivering a kind of esoteric key to vain pursuits, which is what the Westians are providing, is utterly futile, when we have, as Christians, an open door that leads to something far greater.

It is a mysticism for the sake of the flesh and not for the source of the mystery.  Fr. Geiger describes it well in one of his more inspired moments ...

We are supposed to believe that because we have connected to these charismatic personalities who have become our channel to Theology of the Body—are they channeling John Paul II, perhaps?—that we have entered into the magical power of lust control.  For five hundred years, according to Father Loya [a leading Westian], we have been living in unreality.  Now with the magical text of Theology of the Body, and with a wave of the hand of Father Loya over the rune covered pages, we see visions of holy naked bodies.  Blessed be!

... It is one thing to see in human sexuality a sign of things to come.  That is a truly mystical approach.  It is another thing for fallen men to rest in the beauty of the human body as though it were a mystical experience of God.  That idea is not much different than the sex magic of Dan Brown, Aleister Crowley and Anton La Vey.

Why people don't see this - or don't want to see it - is truly a mystery to me.

An obvious answer is there's a lot of money to be made by giving the people what they want.  There's a kind of sales technique at work here - flatter your customers.  Tell your horny young Catholics that from the moment they attend your presentation - from that moment on - they will see naked bodies with new eyes, transcending lust in a way that their fathers and grandfathers (who never attended such presentations) never could: that sex is the key to the Illuminative Way and that it's not really lust if you don't call it that.  In fact, it's not lust for flesh - it's lust for a deep union with God.  Young Catholic, hear me! before you thought you were simply hot-to-trot: now you know you're trotting toward the Trinity!  Such flattery is the hallmark of salesmanship.

Another hallmark of salesmanship is the old "bait and switch".   But the Westians see all of catechesis as a kind of bait and switch.

Bl. John Henry Newman points out this attitude even in the early heresies ...

... the Manichees ... represented the initiatory discipline as founded on a fiction or hypothesis, which was to be forgotten by the learner as he made progress in the real doctrine of the gospels; somewhat after the manner of a school in the present day, which supposes conversion to be effected by an exhibition of free promises and threats, and an appeal to our moral capabilities, which after conversion are discovered to have no foundation in fact. 

In the case of the Westians, the "initiatory discipline" is what they condescendingly smile at - it's the old-fashioned and spiritually timid notion that a man should practice custody of the eyes or avoid near occasions of sin.  That's all well and good for the weak of spirit, for those not yet fully initiated into the magic mysteries of TOB, for those who need milk and can't stomach meat.  But West and his cronies have some Good News - all that self-restraint, that's all a kind of Puritan Prudery designed to lead you in to life as a Christian at a very basic level; but it's exactly what you need to slough off now that you've paid to attend my lecture!

As Fr. Geiger quoted Fr. Loya, we were living at the basic level ...

... until this weekend.  We all become mystics. 

Mysticism is not only the product of a weekend's presentation, it's the switch that follows the bait.  The Catholic Faith is not a unified whole.  It has an exoteric part - for those not in the know, and an esoteric part, for those who come to my lectures and buy my CDs ... and discover the magic of sex.

Fr. Loya.

Neo-Gnostic Gnon-sense: Carl Jung and Christopher West

In one of his newsletters, Christopher West said ...

St. Augustine wrote, "Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber.... He came to the marriage-bed of the cross, and there in mounting it, he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and joined himself to [her] forever"

Now Augustine was hardly a Westian.  But that's not my point.

My point is that West did not get this quotation from St. Augustine.  He got it from Carl Jung, who got it from his student Marie-Louise von Franz. [NOTE: He may have gotten it from Fulton Sheen, who got it from Carl Jung.  See ADDENDUM below - Kevin.]

How do I know this?  I know this because this translation of Augustine includes an interpolation by von Franz, and also because this translation (along with the interpolated phrase) appears several times in Jung and is quoted by many authors thereafter, none of whom apparently bothering to check the von Franz translation against the original.

This supports my claim that West is influenced by the neo-Gnostic Jung and by Jung's New Age followers - and that his regard for the Fathers of the Church is filtered through them.

And who is Jung?  He is one of the prophets of the New Age movement, and I know him of old.  As I wrote recently in an email to a friend ...

I read the entire Collected Works of C. G. Jung before my conversion ... Jung was my only source of spiritual nourishment in those dark days, and I know him quite well.  There's some good in Jung, and he himself had a kind of common sense when it came to certain things, and much of what he did served as a correction to the materialism and atheism of Freud - but at his core was not only Gnosticism, but a devotion to the occult in the form of alchemy and the "hieros gamos", the holy wedding, the "mysterium conjunctionis".  In Jung's case, this meant a marriage of light and dark.  Integrating the "shadow", or the dark side of our nature, was not only crucial to our own psychological development, Jung taught, but to God's.  This is really Jung's central thesis: you might call it the Marriage of Heaven and Hell.  When pressed, Jung would always say he wasn't talking about God as an objective being, but the symbol of God in our own psyches.  But, in effect, the great thesis of his entire body of work is that we must integrate darkness with light - and if the demiurge Yahweh did that, the New Age (aion) would dawn: the morning star would rise in our hearts if and when we could engage in a kind of holy sex, not only physically (which is no big deal for a Gnostic) but spiritually, echoing God's union with the Virgin, which concealed the reconciliation of Yahweh with Satan and the marriage of good and evil, producing a deeper good that transcended "conventional morality".  

The New Age is a dangerous thing.  It is a blend of Gnosticism and the occult.  It has nothing to do with the Real Theology of the Body, which is all about the profound sacramental grace of marriage and which is deeply and thoroughly Christian.

The appeal of West and Westianism is largely the secret thrill of esoteric Gnsoticism and New Age nonsense.



I've been there.  I've done that.  And I urge you all to stay away.

If you want to read Augustine, read him directly, not filtered through Jung and the Jungians.

If you want to read Pope St. John Paul II, do the same, and avoid the distortion of the lens used by the pop-Catholics of the TOB Institute.

*** ADDENDUM *** West claims he first heard this quotation from Bishop Fulton Sheen.  It's possible Sheen got it from Jung.  In fact Sheen seems to quote the same translation that includes the interpolated phrase.  I've also been told that the quotation is not definitely by St. Augustine, but probably by Caesarius of Arles - and it has been recognized as "pseudo Augustine" for a long time.

But it's not surprising that Sheen read Jung without becoming a Jungian.  John Paul II alludes to Jung in a footnote in his Wednesday Audiences.   C. S. Lewis also alludes to Jung, but the theology of Sheen, JP2 and Lewis is light years from the theology of Carl Jung.

West, on the other hand, is deeply influenced by Jung's Neo-Gnostic nonsense.  Dawn Eden talks about the connection a bit (see p. 29) in her master's thesis.


***ADDENDUM 2 ***

Reader Juniper points out that (in effect) "joined himself to her forever" is not interpolated, but that it follows the body of the quotation and should be joined to it by an ellipsis, which is missing in all online citations I can find.  See his comment below.

And see as well my follow up here.


***ADDENDUM 3***

And here.