I’ve read the Catechism before, but that doesn’t stop things from leaping out at me when I’m going through it.
Today something leapt out that deals with the problem of evil, even though it wasn’t in the section on the problem of evil. It deals with the question of why God allowed original sin to take place.
Here’s what it says:
412 But why did God not prevent the first man from sinning? St. Leo the Great responds, “Christ’s inexpressible grace gave us blessings better than those the demon’s envy had taken away.” and St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “There is nothing to prevent human nature’s being raised up to something greater, even after sin; God permits evil in order to draw forth some greater good. Thus St. Paul says, ‘Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more’; and the Exsultet sings, ‘O happy fault,. . . which gained for us so great a Redeemer!'”
The answers provided by Leo the Great, Aquinas, Paul, and the Exsultet all converge on the idea that God allowed man to fall into sin because he knew he could bring about a greater good by doing so.
This does not necessarily mean a greater good for every individual (e.g., people who commit mortal sin and decide to stay there may not end up with a greater benefit in the long run, although this is itself arguable), but it does mean that there will be greater net good in general.
For some time I’ve been meaning to write something about how pagans frequently offered sacrifices–and other gifts–at the Jerusalem temple, but I haven’t had a chance yet.
Until I have time, I’ll use this post to collect notes on the phenomenon.
It’s easy for us to impose ideas on later ages on what we read in the Bible, and one of these is the idea that the ancient Jews were so opposed to paganism that they wouldn’t let non-Jews have anything to do with the temple in Jerusalem.
This was not the attitude of the Jewish people, or the temple authorities, for most of the time that the temple stood.
In fact, the temple featured a whole courtyard–its largest area–which was known as the “court of the gentiles,” where non-Jews could come and worship God (regardless of whatever gods they may have worshipped back home).
The attitude of many was that, while worshipping idols elsewhere was bad, it was okay for gentiles to worship God at his temple in Jerusalem.
An illustration of this is found in the apocryphal book of 3 Maccabees, which recounts a time when Pharaoh Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt (reigned 221-203 B.C.; that’s him on the coin) came to Jerusalem and offered sacrifice there. We read that after the battle of Raphia:
[6] Now that he had foiled the plot, Ptolemy decided to visit the neighboring cities and encourage them.
[7] By doing this, and by endowing their sacred enclosures with gifts, he strengthened the morale of his subjects.
[8] Since the Jews had sent some of their council and elders to greet him, to bring him gifts of welcome, and to congratulate him on what had happened, he was all the more eager to visit them as soon as possible.
[9] After he had arrived in Jerusalem, he offered sacrifice to the supreme God and made thank-offerings and did what was fitting for the holy place. Then, upon entering the place and being impressed by its excellence and its beauty,
[10] he marveled at the good order of the temple, and conceived a desire to enter the holy of holies [3 Macc 1:6-10].
Unfortunately, after Ptolemy gets a jones to see the holy of holies, things start to Not Go Well.
For our present purposes, though, note that the text says–and approves–of Ptolemy offering sacrifices to God at the temple (even though he himself, as one of the Ptolemaic pharaohs, was worshipped as a god by his own subjects back in Egypt!).
3 Maccabees probably was written sometime around 100 B.C., about a century after the events it describes, and–although later parts of the book are thought to be fictionalized–this part is generally regarded as having a historical basis.
Since we know from other sources (which I’ll cite in my eventual piece on the subject) that pagans were known to offer sacrifices at the Jerusalem temple, there is nothing implausible about Ptolemy doing so.
The author (who was probably an Alexandrian Jew) also displays a positive attitude toward his doing so.
NOTES TO SELF: Some of the things I have memories of but need to look up for my future post include:
Josephus’s discussion in Jewish War about how preventing sacrifices for pagans from being offered at the temple was one of the inciting causes of the Jewish War of the A.D. 60s. He mentions specifically that, prior to this point, sacrifices were being offered for Caesar (despite him being worshipped elsewhere in the empire), and how many prior pagans and their rulers had made gifts to the temple. (Note to self: See also if there is a parallel to this passage in Antiquities of the Jews).
Augustus once complimented one of his junior relatives (see below) for not sacrificing in the temple when he could have (check Suetonius and, if not him, Tacitus).
Check the language used in Scripture for Cyrus the Great’s donations to the temple.
Note Jesus’ reference to Isaiah 56:7’s statement that the temple would be a house of prayer for the gentiles. Also, think about Isaiah 66’s statement that gentiles would worship God at the temple in the restoration of Israel. (The Isaianic material may not fully fit the pattern on a literal level, but may be related).
UPDATE 1: The passage I was thinking of regarding Augustus is in Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars, “Augustus” 93:
[93] As for the religious customs of foreigners, some he [Augustus] regarded with reverence as ancient and traditional, while the rest he held in disdain. For he was initiated into the mysteries at Athens and when later at Rome he was sitting in judgement in a case concerning the privileges of priests of Athenian Ceres and some rather secret matters were being discussed, he sent away the court and the crowd of bystanders and heard the disputants alone. On the other hand, not only did he omit to make a small detour to see Apis [the sacred bull in Egypt], when travelling through, but he even praised his grandson Gaius because on a journey through Judaea he did not pay his respects in Jerusalem.
Note: The Gaius in question is not Caligula but this one, who was Augustus’s biological grandson (via his daughter Julia). Caligula was biologically Augustus’s great grandson (via Julia via Agrippina the Elder). He could be considered a legal grandson in that Caligula was adopted by Tiberius, who was adopted by Augustus, but this happened long after Augustus was dead. Also, Gaius campaigned as far east as Parthia, while I don’t recall Caligula ever campaigning in the east. Most decisively, Caligula was maybe two years old when Augustus died, so it certainly couldn’t have been him. Suetonius seems to refer to this Gaius as Augustus’s grandson (during his lifetime) as a way of distinguishing him from Caligula.
“Mercy does not just mean being a “good person” nor is it mere sentimentality. It is the measure of our authenticity as disciples of Jesus.” @Pontifex 21 August 2016
“New forms of slavery such as human and organ trafficking, forced labour, and prostitution are true crimes against humanity.” @Pontifex 23 August 2016
“I entrust you to the maternal care of our Mother who lives in the glory of God and is always by our side on our life’s journey.” @Pontifex 15 August 2016
“Through the cross we can touch God’s mercy and be touched by that mercy!” @Pontifex 17 August 2016
The recent remake of the movie Pete’s Dragon has prompted some discussion on the Internet of whether it is ever permissible, from a Christian point of view, to depict dragons as friendly, which happens in the movie.
Some, pointing to comments made by novelist Michael O’Brien in his book A Landscape with Dragons, have answered that they should not be.
Here are 10 things to know and share . . .
1) No Church teaching
Regardless of what one thinks about friendly dragons, it’s worth bearing in mind that there is no Church teaching on this subject.
You’re not going to find a papal or conciliar document that says, “Dragons may never be depicted as friendly.”
The matter is thus one of opinion, and Catholics can have a legitimate diversity of opinion on the matter.
Having said that, here are my thoughts . . .
2) The purpose of play
A few years ago I did a video on whether scary Halloween costumes are okay, and in it I discussed the basic purpose of play and the instinct toward play that God built into human nature.
The short answer is that God designed our species—and others—to enjoy play which involves simulated danger. The purpose of this is to prepare us to face real (non-simulated) danger.
That’s why kittens and puppies “play fight”—to prepare them for the actual fights they’ll have to deal with as adult dogs and cats.
In the same way, humans—both children and adults—enjoy various forms of play (including stories and sports) where there is a form of simulated danger. By facing our fears in situations where the danger isn’t real, we are better prepared to face our fears in situations where the danger is real.
To get us to engage in these simulations, we have to find them fun, and so God has arranged it so that we enjoy games and sports and stories and rollercoasters and numerous other kinds of simulated danger (provided the situation doesn’t get out of hand and the danger doesn’t become real).
3) The origin of monsters
This impulse to play is the origin of all fiction, and it is the reason that monsters are found in the folklore of every people.
Stories and legends about monsters allow us to mentally enter situations of simulated danger, facing fearsome creatures much more powerful than we are—whether they are dragons, gorgons, giant spiders, werewolves, alien invaders, or what have you.
4) Two types of dramatic choices
When we tell a story, we must make dramatic choices, and there are two basic types of dramatic choices:
Play to expectations
Throw in a twist (i.e., something unexpected)
Most of the time, storytellers play to expectations. Readers want much of what happens in a story to feel familiar. But they don’t want everything to be predictable, so they also want twists.
Good storytellers find the right balance of playing to their audience’s expectations and then throwing in twists to surprise and intrigue the audience.
Meeting the audience’s expectations is the rule and twists are the exception. Otherwise the narrative risks disintegrating under the weight of too many twists—or the audience will simply develop a new set of expectations.
5) Two types of monsters
If you combine the previous two insights, it leads to two different ways of presenting monsters in stories:
What the audience expects—i.e., the monster is bad
The audience gets a twist—i.e., the monster actually isn’t bad
Most of the time, storytellers choose the first option, but there is nothing in principle wrong with the twist of a friendly monster.
Indeed, sometimes such tales can even teach valuable lessons, as with the story of Androcles and the Lion.
Friendly monster stories are the mirror image of another standard plot: betrayal—where, someone the protagonist was counting on (a friend, an ally, a spouse) turns out to be untrustworthy despite initial appearances.
Betrayals happen in real life. Sometimes people very close to us stab us in the back, and experiencing stories about that can help prepare us for when it happens to us for reals.
In the same way, sometimes things we perceive as alarming threats in real life (corresponding to the monsters in stories) can turn out to be no big deal—or even beneficial.
Every child has this experience multiple times growing up: They irrationally fear things which actually are no threat at all and may even be helpful.
Even as adults we sometimes fear things in situations that turn out to involve needless worry.
It’s a huge relief when we—as children or adults—discover that we don’t need to be afraid of something that formerly terrified us.
And it’s a relief for an audience to experience the same thing in story form when the characters make the same discovery.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with telling a story about a perceived danger that turns out not to be a problem—any more than there is telling a story about an ally who betrays the main character.
They are both legitimate story types.
6) So what about dragons?
If it’s okay in principle to tell stories about perceived threats that turn out not to be dangerous after all (e.g., friendly monsters) then it would seem appropriate to tell stories about friendly dragons as well.
Dragons are just a subcase of monsters, and if friendly monsters are okay as a twist on a standard then friendly dragons are okay, too.
To argue against this, one would need to argue that dragons are somehow different from other monsters—that there is a special reason why dragons in particular shouldn’t be treated this way in fiction.
7) What might that reason be?
In his book, O’Brien does not state his argument as clearly as I would wish. However, he seems to advance two considerations for why dragons might be exceptions to the above rule:
Dragons appear in the folklore of numerous cultures, suggesting some kind of mystical imprint on human nature (or something; this is where I find O’Brien particularly unclear)
The image of the dragon is linked with Satan in Scripture
What can we make of these?
8) The culture argument
It’s true that dragons appear in the folklore of numerous cultures. What is in question is whether this has intrinsic mystical significance.
In his book, O’Brien writes:
Some modern mythologists lamely attempt to explain dragons as an inheritance from the age of dinosaurs, a kind of fossil-memory lingering on in the subconscious.
O’Brien is correct. The claim that dragons are based on an inherited race memory from the mammals that lived in dinosaur times is lame.
That’s not the way evolution works. Once a threat disappears, any genetic predisposition to fear it is gradually lost due to the absence of selection pressure on the relevant genes. The idea that humans would have inherited a genetic fear of dinosaurs after sixty million years is nonsense.
But that doesn’t mean dragon folklore isn’t based on dinosaurs.
The truth is that there are a large number of dinosaur bones buried in the earth and the forces of wind and water periodically uncover them.
We have records of the ancients finding such bones and discussing the giant, extinct creatures that must have once existed.
For example, in The City of God, St. Augustine reports that he and some friends were on the beach of the Gulf of Tunis when they found a tooth a hundred times larger than a human molar, and he concluded it must have belonged to some ancient giant.
At times, a cliff face would shear away, exposing an entire dinosaur skeleton to public view.
Scholars have written books on this subject (such as this one, this one, and this one), and the impact that such discoveries had on ancient folklore and mythology.
Thus one need not postulate a mystical (or whatever) imprint of dragon imagery on the human soul to explain the widespread appearance of dragons in folklore. The periodic discovery of dinosaur bones is enough.
The culture argument is thus inconclusive at best. But what about . . .
9) The Scripture argument
It’s true that Scripture does explicitly use the image of a dragon in connection with Satan.
Once.
It’s the book of Revelation, where John sees a dragon that is then identified as “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Rev. 12:9).
So, fine. Revelation uses the image of a dragon for Satan. That’s too slender a reed on which to claim that the image of a dragon can never be used any other way.
Indeed, unless you are prepared to say that every dragon that appears in fiction must be Satan himself then one must be willing to say that the image of a dragon can be used in other ways.
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud: Sometimes a dragon is just a dragon.
Worse, Scripture sometimes uses the image of a dragon in a positive sense.
10) Mordecai the Friendly Dragon
In the book of Esther, Mordecai has a prophetic vision in the form of a dream. In this dream:
And behold, two great dragons came forward, both ready to fight, and they roared terribly (Esth. 11:6).
So, like John in Revelation, Mordecai has a vision involving great and terrible dragon imagery—only in his vision there are two dragons.
Elsewhere, Mordecai gives us the interpretation of this symbol:
The two dragons are Haman and myself (Esth. 10:7).
Got that? One of the fearsome dragons represents the villain Haman but the other represents the righteous Mordecai, the defender of God’s people.
It also happens that these verses are found in the deuterocanonical passages of Esther, which means that their canonical source is the Greek text of the Septuagint.
When one checks this, one discovers that the word used for “dragon” in this case is the Greek term drakon—the exact same word John uses for “dragon” in the book of Revelation.
It thus seems, in view of Scripture’s own usage, that dragons can be depicted as friendly, powerful allies and not simply as manifestations of evil.
Looking for Something Good to Read?
May I suggest my commentary on the Gospel of Mark?
It goes through the whole text and provides fascinating information that you may have never heard before.
It also comes with a verse-by-verse study guide with questions that you or your study group can use.
And it comes with a lectionary-based study guide, so you can read along with Mark in the liturgy and ponder its meaning before or after Mass.
The deuterocanonical books of the Bible are those books in the Old Testament which are not found in the canon of modern, rabbinic Jews and Protestants. In Protestant circles, they are frequently referred to as “the apocrypha.”
“Apocrypha” means “hidden things,” and that’s a misnomer, because these books aren’t and never have been hidden. They were part of Christian Scriptures from the very beginning.
The term “deuterocanonicals” is also a misnomer, because its roots suggest these books belong to the “second canon,” and there is no second canon.
Alternately, one might parse it to mean that they were included in the canon secondarily–i.e., after other books–but this is also false. The canon lists of the early church councils in the fourth and fifth centuries–the first time the canon was dealt with by councils–include the deuterocanonical books alongside the protocanonical ones.
So, although it’s the term we’re stuck with, “deuterocanonicals” is itself problematic.
Today I did some research and was finally able to find out who coined the term: Sixtus of Siena.
Based on information in the Oxford English Dictionary, it looks like the term was coined in or around 1566 in Sixtus’s work Bibliotheca sancta ex præcipuis Catholicæ Ecclesiæ auctoribus collecta (i.e., Sacred library collected from the precepts of the authorities of the Catholic Church).
The OED lists the following its first historical example of the term:
[1566 A. F. Sixtus SenensisBibliotheca Sanctai. 10 Canonici secundi ordinis (qui olim Ecclesiastici uocabantur, & nunc à nobis Deuterocanonici dicuntur) illi sunt, de quibus, quia non statim sub ipsis Apostolorum temporibus, sed longè pòst ad notitiam totius Ecclesiæ peruenerunt, inter Catholicos fuit aliquando sententia anceps.]
While one must give the usual caveats about Wikipedia, it’s worth noting that it states:
Sixtus coined the term deuterocanonical to describe certain books of the Old Testament that had not been accepted as canonical but which appeared in the Septuagint, and the definer for the Roman Catholics of the terms protocanonical and the ancient term apocryphal.
I’d like to find a scholarly, non-Wikipedia source for these, but it does seem to jibe with the data from the OED.
I grew up and went to college in Arkansas, where the chicken industry is big.
I remember sitting in a college biology class where the professor was explaining how selective breeding (this was in the days before gene editing) had improved the industrial usefulness of chickens.
The example I remember him citing was how, through selective breeding, the food-to-meat ratio of commercial breeds of chickens had been altered, so you now got more meat per pound of chicken feed that you fed the chicken.
(I made mental notes for a future science fiction story involving selective breeding of humans, though I haven’t gotten around to writing that one.)
And an improved food-to-meat ratio was only one characteristic of chickens that selective breeding had made possible.
There’s another that is directly related to why we have Easter eggs.
I’ve pointed out for a long time that chickens don’t stop laying just because it’s Lent, and so if–as in the olden days–people were abstaining not just from meat but from eggs as well then by the end of Lent you’re going to have a lot of eggs you need to use up.
The logical thing to do is celebrate the Resurrection (and the ability to eat eggs again) by having an egg party, perhaps by coloring the little things to make them more festive. Hence: Easter eggs.
To illustrate the importance of refrigeration for eggs, Friedberg notes that they used to be a seasonal food. Before modern breeds were developed, hens laid most of their eggs in the spring. That meant that fresh eggs were unavailable or very expensive for most of the year (SOURCE: Livia Gershon, “When Refrigeration Was Controversial,” JSTOR Daily, August 14, 2016).
Got that?
Not only would the hens not stop laying for Lent, Lent was the only time they would lay (“Lent” being the Old English word for spring).
Therefore, if you were a Christian and abstaining from eggs for Lent, you’d miss the lion’s share of your only chance of the year to have them unless you used up all those eggs that were laid during Lent.
I’ve read the Catechism before, but that doesn’t stop things from leaping out at me when I’m going through it.
For some time I’ve been meaning to write something about how pagans frequently offered sacrifices–and other gifts–at the Jerusalem temple, but I haven’t had a chance yet.
