From the man who saw fit to correct the Pope on his theology, more pearls of wisdom:
Vice President JD Vance has described himself as “obsessed” with UFO files. In March, he said he has been trying to find time to investigate Area 51 since he took office.
“I’ve still got three more years as vice president,” Vance told conservative podcaster Benny Johnson. “I will get to the bottom of the UFO files.” Invoking his Christian faith, Vance said he believes sightings reported to be aliens are actually the work of spiritual demons.
“I don’t think they’re aliens, I think they’re demons,” he said in the interview. “When I hear about extra natural phenomenon, that’s where I go: The Christian understanding that there’s a lot of good out there, but there’s also evil out there,” Vance said. “I think that one of the devil’s great [tricks] is to convince people that he never existed.”
Even beyond the embarrassment of Vance’s describing himself as “obsessed” with something he considers to be demonic, everything about this morbid fascination is so absurdly outside the spirit and mind of the Church. Angels, fallen or otherwise, are spiritual beings, as definitively declared by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215; that demons could be “embodied” had already been dismissed with the errors of Origenism condemned by the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553; that these supposed irruptions of the preternatural could be transferred to the domain of physical evidence, safeguarded by governments and ensconced in conspiracy is more X-Files than ex cathedra… and it is very, very stupid indeed. As a matter of fact, in the first article of the second question of the Summa, Thomas uses an example from Boethius (taken from a work entitled: “Whether all that is, is good”) of what exactly the ignorance of the unlearned looks like: “that there are some mental concepts self-evident only to the learned, as that incorporeal substances are not in space” – outer or otherwise, one may safely assume.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Jesus of Nazareth,
To exorcise the world – to establish it in the light of the ratio (reason) that comes from eternal creative reason and its saving goodness and refers back to it – that is a permanent, central task of the messengers of Jesus Christ.
Yet what we are seeing here is a species of fideism – a particularly insidious fideism, less concerned with the limits of a natural theology than with a wholesale mythologizing of the narrative of faith and a deep suspicion of reason per se. I include this complete passage from Fides et Ratio, especially inasmuch as it reveals fideism as a peculiarly modern error:
If the Magisterium has spoken out more frequently since the middle of the last century, it is because in that period not a few Catholics felt it their duty to counter various streams of modern thought with a philosophy of their own. At this point, the Magisterium of the Church was obliged to be vigilant lest these philosophies developed in ways which were themselves erroneous and negative. The censures were delivered even-handedly: on the one hand, fideism and radical traditionalism, for their distrust of reason’s natural capacities, and, on the other, rationalism and ontologism because they attributed to natural reason a knowledge which only the light of faith could confer.
Yes, elaborate mythologies, demonologies and superstitions were inherited from among the ancients, and the detritus of these persisted, ingrained and integrated as it was. Yet this distrust of reason and the eagerness to surrender without discernment to some sort of “re-enchantment” or even to a thinly veiled nihilism posturing as Christian is both uniquely modern and distressingly primitive, all at once. It is certainly not Catholic.
The vice president – a neophyte in the faith, by his own testimony – is at an intersection point between these two strains. His association with the nihilist line is largely reducible to his role in the current Administration; in fairness, I do not suspect that he is taking spiritual direction from Paula White Cain or out sampling ibogaine with the Secretary of Health and Human Services on the White House lawn, although he might have done well to distance himself from the promotion of drug use, occultism, NSFW language, and gladiatorial entertainments that constitute the new “family values” of this sect. More relevant to the question here is the kind of narrative adopted by some public intellectuals on the right who, claiming that “the world is much stranger than the secular imagination thinks,” seem intent on sacralizing the mere fact that scientistic materialist physicalism falls short of explaining the universe. One even wonders if the kind of speculation the vice president expressed might stem from a certain scandal taken at the prospect of any extraneous data points on creation – for instance, liquid water and ammonia on the moons of Saturn – disrupting a literalistic Scriptural narrative.
Another possible explanation would take into account the triviality and flattening imbibed through saturation in popular entertainments. Evil is reduced to comic-book villainy – concrete, uncomplicated, unmixed with good; in such a model, discernment is obviated by inflexible, animal-level estimative value judgments. Furthermore, evil is not privative but substantial, and therefore worthy of nothing but total annihilation. Such evil becomes a totem; it is not hylomorphic but (to coin a word) “hyloponeric,” matter animated not by form but by malice – heralding a totally different metaphysics: namely, mythological dualism. To say that intellectual substances can exert influence on matter is not exceptionable; however, to say that they can generate physical artifacts or, worse still, instantiate as hypostatic entities, is in a Christian context materially highly blasphemous.
Cardinal Léon-Joseph Suenens, the author of Renewal and the Powers of Darkness (for which Ratzinger wrote the introduction), writes that “allusion to dualistic and Manichean speculations cautions us against all theories that present the Devil as a kind of Counter-Power, an Antagonist directly opposed to God.” He cites St. John Chrysostom to the effect that “it is not the devil but men’s own carelessness which causes all their falls and all of the ills of which they complain,” and admonishes the faithful that “the Devil is fought positively and preventatively by everything that nourishes and strengthens the Christian life, and therefore, above all, by recourse to the Sacraments… especially through the Eucharistic mystery.” In contrast, the spirit that would go searching for demons in spaceships in the desert Southwest is diametrically anti-sacramental – for sacramentality operates by signs. Mysticism is incompatible with a shallow literal-mindedness.
Conversely, the “obsession” that Mr. Vance attributes to himself can only lead to harm. St. John of the Cross writes that “the Devil ordinarily comes with his wiles, natural or supernatural, to… the imagination and phantasy” – thus the great harm in those who inflame the suggestible mind with dramatic stories of diabolical adventures.
Fear and irrationality signify, communicate and herald the demonic; The antidote is reason… and, especially, joy. As for the current vice-president, despite the tradition handed down from the first vice-president regarding “the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived,” Mr. Vance surely must have something better to do than this. Turn on the lights and get off the internet, man. Go play with your kids. Read a book; learn some theology, maybe.
Image: Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia/Creative Commons.
With gratitude to Renato Bonasera, whose article, Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology of Spiritual and Moral Evil, Demons and Hell, drew our attention to a number of valuable passages in the Suenens text.
Dr. Paul Chu is currently a philosophy instructor for CTState, the Connecticut Community College, and has previously taught philosophy in college, university, and seminary settings. He also served as a staff writer and editor for various national publications. He is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport dedicated to honoring the beauty and holiness of God through artistic and intellectual creativity founded in prayer, especially Eucharistic contemplation. He contributes regularly to https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/.
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
Popular Posts