Here we are bombarded by all this mock disaster from the film “2012” – I read even the Mayans – especially, them, I guess – have thoroughly repudiated the film, besides which, all the while God is saying: “I am making all things new!!!” (Rev 21:5) So why settle for the hopeless depression which actually countermands God’s own words, recorded in Holy Scripture, losing heart at critical moments, or taking a fatalistic do-nothing approach, saying that one needs to wait until things settle down one way or the other according to their own hopelessly dismal pattern?

To lapse into such a mindset is actually a very serious sin against God, and against His providential plan for us! This is what we ask to be delivered from in the Prayer of St. Ephraim, when we pray: “Do not give me the spirit of sloth, despondency ….” Sloth is the mindless laziness we see all around us these days, and despondency is the resultant hopeless denial of God’s love, mercy, and will for our salvation and blessedness, of the efficacy for our salvation of Jesus’s suffering and death on the Cross. Such a mindset is what in the Church’s tradition is termed “final despair”. Our Lord warns that this is the only unforgivable sin, since it effectively denies the power of the Holy Spirit, of God, to save us.

My own experience is, however, that to find a priest who will confess one accordingly is almost impossible. A Catholic priest even said to me once, “That’s not a sin! I do it all the time!” I better not comment further.

One thing is dead certain, however – and I choose my words advisedly: If such schlumpers were to carry the day ….. so would the movie “2012” - which has, however, been thoroughly panned by every single review I have seen! At least such level-headedness on the part of reviewers (even if apparently not shared by the mass of theater-goers) is basis for hope that civilization and its discontents has not yet reached the stage where it is irretrievably moribund.

I was, however, truly alarmed to hear Met. Jonah throw out as so evident to all as to need no supporting argumentation - in connection with the reception of his disaffected Anglicans - that predestination has been condemned as heretical! Presumably this has reference to one of the “39 Articles of Religion” in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, which deals with predestination. In writing this memo, I took a look at the relevant Article. The issue cannot be addressed apart from its the philosophical foundations, which have been meticulously worked out by St. Thomas Aquinas, as I will indicate below, and the Article as I found it, lacking reference to such basics, is perhaps susceptible to unorthodox interpretation. But to write it off as if simply and without qualification contrary to sound doctrine seems to me – uh, a mite too hasty.

And while we are on the subject of Anglicans, now that the Catholics have implemented a very sound program for receiving the unhappy Anglicans, and one which moreover holds promise as a channel for the needed examination of priestly celibacy in both communions, does the OCA really need - and does it accord with its current effort toward Orthodox unity – a large influx of disgruntled Anglicans? Frederica Matthewes-Green is one thing; her effort is to live and intellectually probe the bedrock essentials of Orthodoxy, most notably how we, with St. Paul, must proclaim, “Now not I live, but Christ lives in me.” Nor have I read of her presenting any shopping lists of “convert” demands such as we have seen on orthodoxnews.com and Mark Stokoe’s site from the hordes of “converts” already flooding American Orthodoxy. I’m sure some of these would-be converts would just as soon re-tool Catholicism as us, especially since the Catholic Church so badly needs such help, so let them lend the Catholic Church a hand by opening to discussion the delicate matter of clerical celibacy, in lieu of harassing Orthodox on account of their holy traditions which understandably are quite alien to folks who have lived their entire lives in a functionally atheistic environment – such as those who blithely dismiss, as simply nonsensical, predestination, despite the frequency with which it is found in Holy Scripture.

It has taken me all of the past week to put this memo together, so imagine my amazement – and, of course, almost giddy delight! – to see Obama saying at a town hall with future Chinese leaders conducted at the Museum of Science and Technology in Shanghai, China (where, incidentally, my grandmother taught in “the McTyeire School [which] educated the elite young ladies of Shanghai”, according to a gushy post on a site, english.eastday.com – including “the fabled Soong sisters Soong Ching Ling, who married Dr Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China, [and was a pupil of my grandmother], and Soong Mei Ling, who married Chiang Kai-shek, the former Taiwan leader,” then a kindergartener.

From the transcript of Obama's town hall in China: “There is a Chinese proverb: ‘Consider the past, and you shall know the future.’ Surely, we have known setbacks and challenges over the last 30 years. Our relationship has not been without disagreement and difficulty. But the notion that we must be adversaries is not predestined -- not when we consider the past. Indeed, because of our cooperation, both the United States and China are more prosperous and more secure. We have seen what is possible when we build upon our mutual interests, and engage on the basis of mutual respect.”

Just as a practical matter, what do Christians who deny predestination do when the epistle reading for the day happens to include: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” (Rom 8:28-30)

The doctoral thesis of Herbert’s wife, Char, which she wrote at Laval University, (and which actually relied on Herbert’s insights) was concerned to make the point – which now seems patently obvious to me, but this is against my background of having lived 16 years in our community with Herbert, at the time it definitely made waves, as did Herbert’s approach to predestination which I will get to in a minute – so the burden of the thesis was that Freud’s conception of the bed-rock hatred of the father is itself a Freudian evasion, serving to evade the more fundamental love of the father for the son, which reflects God’s love for Adam and those born of him, whom “God so loved that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes on Him shall have everlasting life.” (cf. Jn 3:16 – you can even see it painted on the face of the Gators’ very devout quarterback, Tim Tebow)

In the book on the Beginning we read that: “the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” Gen 2:7

So the primal Father Son bond is of the most intimate love, God breathed into Adam’s nostrils, beyond what belonged to all living creatures, His own “breath of life”, the Holy Spirit, by Whom our first parents were overshadowed before their fall. They had that “stability in virtue” known in the Pauline epistles as “justification”; they walked with God and talked with Him as do lovers.

As yet they knew no evil, and God created the Garden of Eden for them, “And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’" Gen 2:16f

Because they did not know evil, since they still possessed the stability in virtue which theologians call “original justice”, we read that: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Ibid., v25

St. Simeon the New Theologian speaks of the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit of which we are deprived by reason of our first parents’ sin: “As the death of the body is the separation from it of the soul, so the death of the soul is the separation from it of the Holy Spirit, by whom God … had been pleased that man be overshadowed, so that he might … remain stable towards evil.” The Sin of Adam, California: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1979, p. 35.

This death of the soul, the separation from the soul of the Holy Spirit, is what unleashed the “Oedipal triangle” which Freud so universally observed in all his patients that he understandably concluded that this condition was endemic to mankind as such. Although he must have had some clue otherwise, because he did write “Civilization and its Discontents”!

Herbert always admired in Freud his “fidelity to the clinical evidence”. Yet I found that when I touched on Freud in conversations with, well, just about everybody I talked to on the subject, conversation would come to a halt with an allusion to Freud’s atheism. It seems really not smart, when the brand name overshadows the item itself to THAT extent, across the board. When my time came to study Freud after Herbert’s repose, moreover, in a doctoral program in philosophy I matriculated in, in the early 80’s, it was precisely Freud’s astonishing fidelity to the clinical evidence” which truly astonished me, as I read through book after book of Freud’s considerable output, to find him tracing yet another series of findings in a line of reasoning at variance with all he had previously written – most especially on the phenomenon of conscience, which, understandably, given his atheistic point of departure, always remained an unfathomable mystery to him. Yet Freud was apparently unfazed by leaving unresolved what his researches could not resolve. And, in time, the French Catholic psychiatrist and philosopher, Jacques Lacan, who regarded himself – justly – as Freud’s only true successor, overcame the erroneous preconceptions responsible for Freud’s evasions, and arrived at a most effective psychiatric therapy which I would like to see clinically used much more widely. In fact, the Lacanian psychiatrist deals with his patients just as Herbert dealt with us, and I, myself, when I have at times unwittingly followed the same practice – have found it almost magically effective. No doubt some recipients of this memo would verify this. At least, I hope so.

But to return to predestination: Back in the Garden of Eden - enter the devil: “’You will not surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman. ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked.” Gen. 2:4-7

As Pope John Paul wrote in his encyclical Redemptoris Mater: “In the act of creation God gives existence to all that is. In creating man, God gives him the dignity of the image and likeness of himself in a special way as compared with all earthly creatures. Moreover, in his desire to give God gives himself in the Son, notwithstanding man's sin: ‘He so loved the world that he gave his only Son.’” (Jn. 3:16). Part 2 sec. 37

Yet who did our first parents listen to? And we, born into their mold, who do we listen to?

“Adam sinned with a great sin because he did not believe the words of God, but believed the words of the serpent…. When with his whole soul he believed the serpent and not God, then the divine grace which had rested on him stepped away from him, so that he became the enemy of God by reason of the unbelief which he had shown to his words. Adam thought that God envied him and did not wish that he also should know good and evil; and he thought that God had commanded him not to taste of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in order that he might not become a god like unto God who had created him.” St. Simeon, The Sin of Adam, idem.

So that’s how the primal father/son enmity becomes established. The son thinks his father has it in for him, and most especially as regards the pleasures the son might seek with his more accommodating mother.

And so the Oedipal Triangle would have prevailed – were it not for predestination.

We see, therefore, how central to the entire Economy of Salvation is predestination, and I hope to successfully convince my readers of how we imperil our salvation when we disregard what in fact is the “final cause” (in the Aristotelian sense) to which everything, including every other form of causality, is ordered, that is, predestined. That is to say: nothing, no, nothing, would have ever even have begun to be launched without it!

Here I turn to the methodology I learned from my study of St. Thomas Aquinas – at least I hope I learned it, because clearly nobody can attain to an end without knowing the way to get there. When certain types would gush over Herbert’s brilliance and holiness, invariably he would respond with, “No, I just know the way.”

Thomas Aquinas is without peer as guide to the way to truth – Veritas being the stated goal of the Dominican vocation.

So we must first situate ourselves within St. Thomas’ inquiry: Summa Theologiae, First Part, Treatise on the One God (Questions 2-26)

QUESTION 23: Of Predestination (In Eight Articles)

After consideration of divine providence, we must treat of predestination and the book of life. Concerning predestination there are eight points of inquiry:

(1) Whether predestination is suitably attributed to God?

(2) What is predestination, and whether it places anything in the predestined?

(3) Whether to God belongs the reprobation of some men?...

The matter of our questioning comes fairly early in Aquinas’ magnum opus. If anyone has issues regarding God’s existence to begin with, and other such fundamentals, that person can readily go back to Aquinas’ treatment of those matters.

Assuming my readers and I are in agreement up to the point where Met. Jonah tosses out predestination, we will join the inquiry as St. Thomas takes up the false premise on which most people who reject predestination do so: he subjects to scrutiny the notion that there is some conflict between predestination as an inherent, hence absolutely essential, aspect of God’s universality causality, and our “free will”:

Reply to Objection 3. Secondary causes cannot escape the order of the first universal cause, as has been said above (Question 19, Article 6), indeed, they execute that order. And therefore predestination can be furthered by creatures, but it cannot be impeded by them. (Summa, First Part, Quest. 23)

The “first universal cause”, known to students of both Aristotle and St. Thomas as “the first cause, itself uncaused” is demonstrated in meticulous detail at the end of Aristotle’s Metaphysics and at the beginning of St. Thomas’ Summa – but just for something convincing to the untrained mind, I rather prefer one of Herbert’s very instructive jokes; he was much given to the Socratic gadfly technique:

This old man was claiming that the earth rests on a rock, and that rests on another rock, and the next on another, etc., etc., until someone asks at last, “So what does the last rock rest on?” “There ain’t no ‘last’ rock,” thunders the old man consumed by indignation, “they goes right down to the bottom!!!”

Anyone who might insist on maintaining the possibility of an infinite series of causes can just log off at this point!!!

As for the dangerously common misconception that our free will can escape the universal causality of God – Who IS the First Cause, Himself Uncaused – I will begin with Holy Writ:

Moses said to God, "Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' and they ask me, 'What is his name?' Then what shall I tell them?"

God said to Moses, “‘I AM.’ This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

God also said to Moses, "Say to the Israelites, 'The LORD, [The Hebrew for LORD sounds like and may be derived from the Hebrew for I am in verse 14] the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.' This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation. Exodus 3:13-15

Here, of course, we have not only God’s universal causality, but His very PLENITUDE OF BEING!!! But I won’t dwell on this at the moment.

Herbert, with his characteristic simplicity – God being absolute simplicity, so that our knowledge becomes more simple as it participates more and more in God’s knowing, the complex dogmatic formulations some theologians make whole careers for themselves arguing over (as published, such argumentations often secure tenure for the professors who author them, etc.) being at the furthest remove from honest, simple, unadorned truth – Herbert, who by contrast, could sum up libraries in his one-liners, taught us simply:

“God moves the free will freely.”

Of the underlying causality, he would note: God, the cause of everything, is also the primary cause of human acts. We, in the exercise of our free will, are the secondary cause of our human acts. God acts as the Prime Unmoved Mover – we act as secondary, moved, mover. Period. Anyone want to challenge that?!?!

Thomas Aquinas did not have the luxury of such simplicity because he was addressing a public other than his own spiritual children whose only desire was to so know God as to grow in His Love; Aquinas had to prove his every word within an inch of his life, something I know a few things about from my Georgetown experience. So I am including the relevant arguments from the Summa in an appendix.

And this brings us back to the Zenit post I mentioned on professor Dr. Charles De Konink, and Laval University in Quebec, where Herbert and his wife, Char, lived while she worked on her PhD. This caught my attention – especially in view of my recent focus on the Mother of God as Wisdom, since Russians of the early 20 century, notably Fr’s Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov, in their theological explorations of this teaching by, began developing the very teaching Herbert inculcated into us.

I was especially struck by the following excerpt from the Zenit interview, Ralph McInerny being a disciple of Dr. DeKoninck.

ZENIT: How did De Koninck understand the task of philosophy and the philosopher? McInerny: His principal mentors were Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. He taught by subjecting the texts to a close reading, conveying a technique that one could continue to employ for a lifetime.

ZENIT: De Koninck wrote eloquently about how the Mother of God personifies Wisdom. What role did the Catholic faith play in his philosophical explorations?

McInerny: De Koninck was a Catholic philosopher, which meant that the faith – the magisterium – was always the guide for his work.

His devotion to Mary followed the teaching of St Louis Grignion de Monfort.

RALPH MCINERNY ON A FORGOTTEN THOMIST Calls Charles De Koninck a Man of Faith, Philosopher of Science

The irony is that whenever Herbert touched on his Laval days, one thing he would mention with a touch of regret was de Koninck’s co-opting Herbert’s brainchild as his own, with no mention of Herbert! As I write this, it is born in on me how original to Herbert was, initially, this very synthesis of Aristotle and St. Thomas especially when it came to “subjecting the texts to a close reading”. It was from Herbert that I myself learned this discipline. And this contrasted markedly with the entire legacy of St Thomas within the Catholic Church, where immediately the “commentators” – the Dominican Banez, the Carmelites of Salamanca, Cajetan, Suarez, Molina, are some names I recall -- sprang up on all sides, and then these commentaries generated commentaries on the original commentators and so on ad infinitum, in my time Maritain and Gilson still played such roles, and each had his own “school”, one of the reasons I was myself loathed and hated with such venom by the Georgetown crowd was that I basically had no use for this whole scene – and I was in my early to mid 20’s, and pregnant most of the time besides, our 7 children were born within my Georgetown years.

I have already indicated how the Mother of God personifies Wisdom in connection with the Russians, notably Fathers Florensky and Bulgakov.

As for Louis de Montfort, I confess I never distinguished his contribution from Herbert’s teaching as a whole. So I was somewhat amazed when I found his “True Devotion” and read it again. I was almost spooked at how it builds on the very Thomistic text we have looked at. For instance:

“God the Holy Ghost, being barren in God – that is to say, not producing another Divine Person – is become fruitful by Mary, whom He has espoused. It is with her in her and of her, that He had produced His Masterpiece, which is a God made Man, and whom He goes on producing in the persons of His members daily to the end of he world. The predestinate are the members of that Adorable Head. This is the reason why He, the Holy Ghost, the more He finds Mary, His dear and indissoluble Spouse, in any soul, becomes the more active and mighty in producing Jesus Christ in that soul, and that soul in Jesus Christ.

“It is not that we may say that our Blessed Lady gives the Holy Ghost His fruitfulness, as if He had it not Himself. For inasmuch as He is God, He has the same fruitfulness or capacity of producing as the Father and the Son, only that He does not bring it into action, as He does not produce another Divine Person. But what we want to say is, that the Holy Ghost chose to make use of our Blessed Lady, though He had no absolute need of her, to bring His fruitfulness into action, by producing in her and by her Jesus Christ in His members; a mystery of grace unknown to even the wisest and most spiritual among Christians.

“The conduct which the three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity have deigned to pursue in the Incarnation and first coming of Jesus Christ, They still pursue daily in an invisible manner throughout the whole Church, and They will still pursue it even to the consummation of ages in the last coming of Jesus Christ.”

I am going to close this memo with the prayer that I have, in the couple of years I have been pondering these matters, come up with, based on the variation I made to the Catholic prayer the Memorare which so delighted Herbert that when he read my note on it, he called me out of bed in the wee hours of the morning just to give me a squnchy hug like I never even imagined! I hope those who receive this will see how Herbert taught us to “ponder the Scriptures” as did Mary, of whom St. Luke says twice in his two beginning chapters, called in the tradition “Mary’s Gospel”, that she kept all these things in her heart and pondered them.

Most compassionate Virgin Mother, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful – in myself. But I do not live in my sinful and sorrowful self. I live rather in you, Mother, for it is within your most sacred womb that I am perpetually, at every instant, re-generated, re-born, transfigured – even DEIFIED through that participation in the very triune divine nature of God Himself which is mine because God the Word has clothed Himself in me!!! Since you are thus the Mother of God incarnate in me, I know that all the holy aspirations I see arising within myself are inspired in me – breathed into me – by you, Mother. Most especially, Most Holy Mother Protection, that prayer that you placed within my mind, all “ready-made”, on your feast day in 1995, in the OCA Primatial Cathedral of St. Nicholas in Washington, at a time when Pope John Paul was in the US to speak to the United Nations: “Let the Pope become orthodox, through the prayers of Herbert, for the sake of Bishop Paul.”

And the choir sealed the prayer by singing – and magnificently, as if they were a choir of angels - at just that moment the three Alleluias that are sung after all have received the Eucharistic Communion.