How can intelligent Christians exercise their faith in a skeptical world? How can they reconcile reason and faith? To address these questions, Justice Scalia considered the perspectives of two great men named Thomas. Perhaps surprisingly given Scalia’s admiration for the American founding, Thomas Jefferson served as a negative example, as he viewed belief in miracles as “vulgar ignorance.” Justice Scalia contrasted Jefferson with St. Thomas More, the lord high chancellor of England who was executed for respecting the Pope’s authority to refuse King Henry VIII’s divorce. Because he saw with the eyes of faith, this learned man of reason was regarded as a fool by his friends and even by his wife.
St. Thomas More, the patron saint of lawyers, was a hero to Justice Scalia, who delivered the following speech to religious audiences around the country.
The title of my talk today is “Not to the Wise—the Christian as Cretin.” The second half of that title, “The Christian as Cretin,” is meant, of course, to be a play on words. And it is a wordplay that has some etymological basis. The English word cretin, meaning “a person of deficient mental capacity,” in fact derives from the French word chrétien, meaning “Christian,” which was used in the Middle Ages to refer to the short, often grotesque, severely retarded people who were to be found in some remote valleys of the Alps—perhaps the result of excessive inbreeding. These people were called chrétiens—Christians—to make the point that they were human souls and not brutes.
It has often occurred to me, however, that for quite different reasons the equivalence of the words Christian and cretin makes a lot of sense. To be honest about it, that is the view of Christians—or at least of traditional Christians—taken by sophisticated society in modern times. One can be sophisticated and believe in God—heck, a First Mover is at least as easy to believe in as a Big Bang triggered by nothingness. One can even be sophisticated and believe in a personal God, a benevolent Being who loves mankind, so long as that Being does not intrude too ridiculously into the world—by working so-called miracles, for example, or by limiting human behavior in inconvenient ways. And one can even be sophisticated and believe in Jesus Christ, as having been in some sense a “son” of God (are we not all children of the Creator?) and as having in some sense triumphed over death (his message, after all, lives on). One can believe all that, I say, and still be considered sophisticated.
But to believe in what might be called “traditional” Christianity is something else. To believe, first and foremost, that Jesus Christ was God. (Why, the notion that the Creator should become a man is as unsophisticated as the notion that Zeus should become a bull.) Or to believe that he was born of a virgin. (Well, I mean, really!) That he actually, physically, rose from the grave. That he founded a church with power to bind and loose—to pronounce, authoritatively, the will of God for mankind. That, as he taught, hardship and suffering are not to be avoided at all costs but are to be embraced and indeed even sought after—as penance for sin, and as a means of sharing in the crucifixion of Christ. (How utterly ridiculous to forgo perfectly legitimate pleasures, and to seek discomfort! How absurd the vow of chastity and the hair shirt!) Or the belief in miracles, as at Lourdes or Fatima. Or, finally, the belief that those who love God and obey his commands will rise from the dead, in their bodies, and be happy with him forever in heaven; and that those who do not will burn eternally in hell.
Surely those who adhere to all or most of these traditional Christian beliefs are regarded, within the educated circles that you and I travel in, as—well, simpleminded. The attitude of the wise is well reflected in the statement that appeared in a news story (not an opinion piece) in the Washington Post some years ago, stating, matter-of-factly (as though anyone of intelligence knew and agreed with it), that Christian fundamentalists were “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” The same attitude applies, of course, to traditional Catholics—by which I mean those who do such positively peasant-like things as saying the rosary, kneeling in adoration before the Eucharist, going on pilgrimages to Lourdes or Fatima, and, worst of all, following indiscriminately (rather than in smorgasbord fashion) the teachings of the Church. Surely these people are “uneducated and easy to command.” Chrétien, cretin.
Let me turn now to the first part of my title: “Not to the Wise.” I mean that as an allusion to the Gospel passage that you and I have heard read at Mass frequently. As recorded by St. Matthew and St. Luke, Christ said: “I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and prudent, and didst reveal them to little ones.” The same thought appears many other times in the New Testament. St. Paul writes to the Corinthians that “the natural man [i.e., the man of the world] does not perceive the things that are of the Spirit of God, for it is foolishness to him and he cannot understand.” And he advises them: “Let no one deceive himself. If any one of you thinks himself wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may come to be wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” In other words, St. Paul quite entirely expected—he assumed—that the wise of the world would regard Christians as fools. And from the beginning until now that expectation has not been disappointed.
It is interesting to read of St. Paul’s experience in that ancient center of wisdom and intellectuality, Athens. The Acts of the Apostles record some great successes in Paul’s preaching; Athens was not one of them. He goes to the Areopagus—where, as the Acts contemptuously describe it, “all the Athenians and the visitors there from abroad used to spend all their leisure telling or listening to something new.” Sort of an open-air Donahue Show, though perhaps a bit more intellectually elevated. Anyway, Paul goes up there, and he has this really clever speech laid out, in which he says that he knows the people of Athens are very religious, and he has noticed that one of their altars is inscribed “To the Unknown God.” It is that God he has come to tell them about. This is a brilliant intro, and Paul gets rolling along pretty well, until he says that this God he has been talking about “will judge the world with justice by a Man whom he has appointed, and whom he has guaranteed to all by raising him from the dead.” Well, that breaks it. The wise men of Athens, circa A.D. 50, know just as well as the wise men of America, A.D. 2010, that people don’t rise from the dead. As the Acts record it: “Now when they heard of a resurrection of the dead, some began to sneer, but others said, ‘We will hear thee again on this matter.’ ” Paul did not think the prospects of their hearing him again good enough to be worth his time. The next line of the Acts is “So Paul went forth from among them.”
Now let me propel you forward in time, from A.D. 50 to A.D. 1804—just yesterday, by comparison—to the study of another wise man, a worthy successor of those of Athens and one of our nation’s greatest political figures, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is creating the work that he would call The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, known more familiarly as the Jefferson Bible. As one historian [Jaroslav Pelikan] describes the scene:
There has certainly never been a shortage of boldness in the history of biblical scholarship during the past two centuries, but for sheer audacity Thomas Jefferson’s two redactions of the Gospels stand out even in that company. It is still a bit overwhelming to contemplate the sangfroid exhibited by the third president of the United States as, razor in hand, he sat editing the Gospels during February 1804, on (as he himself says) “2. or 3. nights only at Washington, after getting thro’ the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day.” He was apparently quite sure that he could tell what was genuine and what was not in the transmitted text of the New Testament.
No problema for a wise man. As Jefferson described the process in one of his letters:
We find in the writings of [Jesus’s] biographers [i.e., the Evangelists] matter of two distinct descriptions. First, a groundwork of vulgar ignorance, of things impossible, of superstitions, fanaticisms and fabrications. Intermixed with these, again, are sublime ideas of the Supreme Being, aphorisms and precepts of the purest morality and benevolence, sanctioned by a life of humility, innocence and simplicity of manners, neglect of riches, absence of worldly ambition and honors, with an eloquence and persuasiveness which have not been surpassed. These could not be inventions of the groveling authors who related them. They are far beyond the powers of their feeble minds. They show that there was a character, the subject of their history, whose splendid conceptions were above all suspicion of being interpolations from their hands. Can we be at a loss in separating such materials, and ascribing each to its genuine author? The difference is obvious to the eye and to the understanding, and we may read as we run to each his part; and I will venture to affirm, that he who, as I have done, will undertake to winnow this grain from the chaff, will find it not to require a moment’s consideration. The parts fall asunder of themselves, as would those of an image of metal and clay.
In another letter, Jefferson said, “I separate…the gold from the dross; restore to [Jesus] the former, and leave the latter to the stupidity of some, and roguery of others of his disciples.”
Well, the product of this exegesis is easy to imagine. It is a gospel fit for the Age of Reason—or indeed, for the wise of any age, including our own. I will satisfy your curiosity with examples from the beginning and the end. Jefferson’s Bible does not begin with the betrothal of Joseph and Mary, the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel, the conception by the Holy Spirit. It begins with the decree from Caesar Augustus, the married couple Joseph and Mary going down to Bethlehem, and Jesus’s birth in the stable. There are a few changes from the version you and I are familiar with. No shepherds in the fields, no multitude of the heavenly host, no wise men from the East, no slaughter of the innocents, no flight into Egypt. From Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary take the kid right back to Nazareth. As for the ending of the Jefferson Bible, I will read it to you:
Now, in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid. There laid they Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed.
Cut. End of story. Run the crawl. As I told you earlier, the wise do not believe in resurrection of the dead (it is really quite absurd), just as they do not believe in virgin birth—so everything from Easter morning to the Ascension had to have been made up by those “groveling authors,” those “rogues” Jefferson referred to, presumably part of their clever plan to get themselves crucified.
My point is not that reason and intellect must be laid aside where matters of religion are concerned. Assuredly not. A faith that has no rational basis is a false faith. That is why I am not a Branch Davidian. It is not irrational, however, to accept the testimony of eyewitnesses, who had nothing to gain by dissembling, about the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and about what Jesus taught them; or, for that matter, to accept the evidence of later miracles that establish the truth of the Church that Christ founded. What is irrational, it seems to me, is to reject a priori, with no investigation, the possibility of miracles in general, and of Jesus Christ’s resurrection in particular—which is, of course, precisely what the worldly-wise do. They just will not have anything to do with miracles.
There was some excitement in the Washington area some years ago concerning a local priest who was said to have the stigmata, and in whose presence statues of the Virgin Mary and of the saints were said to weep. It didn’t seem right. Stuff like that was supposed to happen in little villages in Italy or Portugal or Mexico—not inside the Beltway, for Pete’s sake! (I felt sorry for our bishop, of course. Surely there can be nothing more difficult than having putative miracles occurring in your diocese. It’s a no-win situation. In the histories of the great saints and visionaries, the local bishop, whose job is to be skeptical, is often the heavy—but never, as I recall, the hero.) Anyway, the Washington Post sent out a team of reporters, who produced a strange story about the phenomenon of these weeping statues: they obviously did not want to appear so unsophisticated as to believe this nonsense, but neither could they find any explanation for it. As far as they could tell, the young priest was not a charlatan, and puddles of water did indeed appear at the feet of the statues.
Well, I did not drive the few miles over to check it out; one more miracle is not going to make me believe any more than I already do. But the thought occurred to me: Why wasn’t that church absolutely packed with non-believers seeking to determine whether there might be something to this Catholic religion? Or why weren’t the Washington Post reporters enthusiastic converts? Well, of course, the wisdom of the world does not operate that way. The wise do not investigate such silliness—and even if the miracle were performed under their nose, they would disbelieve. You may recall the parable of Dives, the rich man, and Lazarus the beggar who used to sit by his gate. When they die, Lazarus goes to heaven and Dives to hell. Dives prays to Abraham to send Lazarus to his brothers—to warn them, “lest they also come into this place of torment.” But Abraham says, “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them,” to which Dives replies, “Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.” And Abraham rejoins: “If they hear not Moses and prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.” Quite so.
I have spoken to this lawyers’ group (unflatteringly, sad to say) about one lawyer who was something of a universal man, Thomas Jefferson. To demonstrate what I mean about the intelligent Christian’s appearing stupid to the world, let me say a few words about another lawyer–universal man: the patron saint of this organization, St. Thomas More. His life, or more precisely the ending of his life, is the prime example of the Christian as cretin.
More was, of course, one of the great men of his age: lawyer, scholar, humanist, philosopher, statesman—a towering figure not just in his own country of England but throughout Renaissance Europe. You will have missed the deep significance of More’s martyrdom—and you will not understand why More is a particularly apt patron saint for lawyers, scholars, and intellectuals—unless you appreciate that the reason he died was, in the view of almost everyone at the time, a silly one. Many martyrs have died for refusing to deny Jesus Christ, or for spreading his Gospel, or for adhering to his clear moral teachings. In going to their death, they have had the comfort of knowing that their Christian predecessors, contemporaries, and successors would praise and approve their obstinacy. Thomas More, on the other hand, went to his death to support the proposition that only the Bishop of Rome could bind or loose the marriage of Henry VIII. A papacy corrupt and politicized. A papacy that often granted or withheld divorce for reasons of diplomacy rather than doctrine—which may well have been the case with regard to the denial of Henry’s divorce. More knew all that. More himself, like his humanist contemporaries such as Erasmus, had been a harsh critic of Rome.
Hilaire Belloc, in a lovely little essay on More entitled “The Witness to Abstract Truth,” describes the situation like this:
After four hundred years we have to-day forgotten how the matter looked to the men of the early sixteenth century. The average Englishman had little concern with the quarrel between the Crown and Rome. It did not touch his life. The Mass went on just the same and all the splendour of religion; the monasteries were still in being everywhere, there was no interruption whatsoever. Most of the great bodies—all the bishops except Fisher—had yielded. They had not yielded with great reluctance but as a matter of course….To the ordinary man of that day, anyone, especially a highly placed official, who stood out against the King’s policy was a crank.
In what he did, More was unsupported by intelligent society, by his friends, even by his own wife. Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons puts that point nicely. When More learns that the convocation of bishops has voted unanimously (except for John Fisher of Rochester) to adhere to the king’s demands that they acknowledge his divorce despite the Pope, More decides that he must resign the chancellorship, and he asks his wife, Alice, to help him remove his chain of office. She says: “Sun and moon, Master More, you’re taken for a wise man! Is this wisdom—to betray your ability, abandon practice, forget your station and your duty to your kin and behave like a printed book!” And later along the road, his friend the Duke of Norfolk says: “You’re behaving like a fool. You’re behaving like a crank. You’re not behaving like a gentleman….[I]t’s disproportionate!…[W]e’ve all given in! Why must you stand out?” Foolish and disproportionate indeed. As one biographer put it, “More died for a Papacy that, as far as men could see, was little else than a small Italian princedom ruled by some of the least reputable of the Renaissance princes.”
But of course More was seeing not with the eyes of men, but with the eyes of faith. He believed Christ’s word that Peter was the Rock, and the Christian tradition that the Pope was the head of the Church. As low as the papacy had declined (one does not get much lower than Alexander VI, who reigned during More’s lifetime), the Vicar of Christ alone—and not all the bishops of England—had the power to bind and to loose. I find it hard to understand the reasoning of those wise people who revere Thomas More as a saint rather than a world-class fool for dying to support the decision of Medici Pope Clement VII concerning King Henry’s divorce of Catherine of Aragon, but who themselves ignore and indeed positively oppose the teachings of Pope John Paul II on much more traditional and less politically charged subjects. Go figure.
It is the hope of most speakers to impart wisdom. It has been my hope to impart, to those already wise in Christ, the courage to have their wisdom regarded as stupidity. Are we thought to be fools? No doubt. But, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “We are fools for Christ’s sake.” And are we thought to be “easily led” and childish? Well, Christ did constantly describe us as, of all things, his sheep, and said we would not get to heaven unless we became like little children. For the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world for these seeming failings of ours, we lawyers and intellectuals—who do not like to be regarded as unsophisticated—can have no greater model than the patron of this society, the great, intellectual, urbane, foolish, childish man that he was. St. Thomas More, pray for us.