Plagues: What We Can Learn from the Bible - Fr. Anthony Giambrone, O.P.

welcome enthusiasts of st. Thomas those of you who are simply lost on YouTube it's my great pleasure to be with you during this odd hour or whenever you decide to turn me off which is now your much coveted but cruel right there will be severe temptations to do this but I ask you to manfully resist and if people are falling away I ask father Dominic to change the blue screen into an image of San Francisco will try to keep the show interesting for you deterministic Institute has gone to great lengths to make this live interactive experience something special and so to gratuitously work against that and offer an artificial archival quality and disengage character to this talk I will read it can a plague have any meaning or is it just a thing that happens is it just a part of blind nature entirely exhausted by nature's horizon the question would in this case be something like asking why bat pig or other animal populations suffer their own lethal epidemics certainly not for their sins the first cats have now tested positive for Kovan 19 shall we blame this on their decadent Western materialism and abandonment of the Christian religion or there's a live studio audience here that has been instructed not to laugh even when I'm very funny over the weekend several major world newspapers intensified their reporting on the problem that Christian belief in its maligned fantasies poses for society at this difficult moment on Friday an op-ed in the New York Times pulled out the inevitable faith versus science canard quote the religious rights hostility to science is crippling our response to the coronavirus we are told in France a worried article about religious extremists profiteering on the crisis bore the title apocalypse divine Pugh nishan when the coronavirus confirmed the prophecies of fundamentalists and sectarians now over the weekend I confess that I had the awkward task of answering an email asking me whether I thought this plague was a commencement at the beginning of Revelations 1260 days this lecture will not be my answer to that question and will however attempt to address the question of the pandemics meaning if it has one by placing this quite extraordinary event in a certain biblical perspective hopefully helping a bit to locate where we suddenly stand I will take a broad humanistic approach still cultural elites will find our exercise aware is some regression to the ignorant mythopoetic piety of the Middle Ages to them I will only say this and is actually Bronze Age piety additionally materialism is a cultural scourge in a two-fold sense both philosophical and moral if we are blind as the bats who caused all of this - the moral meaning of our gripping moment our materialist neo-darwinian conception of nature is as much of a problem as our unrestrained sensuality and consumption so let us begin and pardon me if we begin by smoking cigarettes in a French cafe it was here that the autopsy was pronounced over the vision of biblical plagues the plague is not a modern way to die this expression of dr. Riegel in Albert Camus's novel the plague wonderfully captures a modern experience of alienation and smugness death by smallpox or by Viking raid is also not a modern way to die but with the plague there is more judeo-christian legitimacy on the line which is clearly why Camus chose this rated subject the plague carries with it great outbreaks of neurotic guilt and spasms of otherworldly fixation calamity has fallen upon you my brothers and my brothers you deserved it so bellows father panel ooh the fictional foil of the young atheist dr. ryu as the old priest mounts the pulpit to address the eerie return of bubonic plague to modern Algiers Camus whose father panel who is a caricature who opposes medicine and faith and seeks in vain with his sermons to raise a latter-day flagellants still his failure to find them seems quite probable however improbable his character may be modern man has exchanged apocalyptic for absurdity this is what Camus tells us plagues might happen but they have no meaning the only thing to do is strenuously push back vigorously resists the unwanted surge of death pouring into life moved by a pointless but strong desire to keep on living Sisyphus is the famous image for this push back the alternative to accepting this absurd situation is either to give in to death Camus said suicide was the only real philosophical question or else to accept a promise of hope the choice for meaning is in this way the choice between a tragic or a comic end for meaning is about asking why not the efficient empirical why the why on the order of bats wet markets and person-to-person contacts but rather the final why the why that seeks to know the end of the story the advance of legalized suicide in our culture shows clearly enough that the attraction of despair and supreme discontent fell by many who looked death in the eye with less existentialist heroism than a raw embrace of the absurd as for hope the promise today comes in two contrasting forms on the one hand we have the transhumanist party proposing an uber mensch eschatology of we shall overcome with enough Google Amazon and Facebook in our lives we shall design smart cities and a smart global village and attain a kind of Gnostic green heaven on earth or maybe on Mars or the moon on the other hand we have four father panel ooh whose musty old biblical promise of eschatological Hope is invested in society's repentance which in its otherworldly gaze looks suspiciously like a surrender to death the Christian that is the biblical view is thus made out to look like a rambling the rambling of a confused old man who has unaccountably mistaken guilt for German now the obscene folly of misplaced guilt trips becomes visible with this little exercise imagine father panel dues jeremy ads as bedside manners at Bergamo at this very moment is a moralizing tongue lashing really what is missing from these scenes of immense distress as pious old Italian women die with rosaries in their hands attended by frazzled atheist doctors and hospitals filled to cracking it hardly seems like the ideal moment to preach as a society can we really afford to pause and ask questions when people are dying in triage in response to this rebuff I would offer as a provocation that kovat 19 is itself the immense distraction I do not mean though it would certainly also be true that it is an immense distraction from the broad business of living I mean that if all our concentration is lost right now as it is upon a spherical single strain RNA virus this protein molecule with its lipid envelope studded with club-shaped projections we will have missed the awful moment of our visitation for it is death with a giant capital D that stands behind this new pestilential apparition Cova 19 is just deaths passing avatar this is at least what Camus saw in the return of the plague in his novel and what the Scriptures would also have a scene in this moment of crisis in the 6th chapter of John's apocalypse plague appears on the scene as the rider on the pale green horse emerges the riders name is given his name is Thanatos death he is the only one of the Four Horsemen of Revelation to be barren a named death has given authority over a quarter of the earth and he works in tandem with the earlier red and black riders the rider on the blood-red horse carried a sword to take away peace from the earth the rider on the black horse bore a pair of scales to measure the gravity of the terrible famine hail green death the sickly colour of illness carries no token but he has Hades in his turn Hades of course is Greek for the Hebrew Sheol now she all we must know is not just a place where dead shadows go to eternally linger no Sheol we must know in the Bible is also a dork dark force that slithers out of its hold like smoke to wrap its tentacles around our lives and drag us down into the pit Sheol is deaths long arm that seizes upon us even in life with symptoms like distress solitude and sickness all harbingers of deaths arrival with this equipment the final pale green rider has the mission to complete the work of the earlier horseman he is specifically sent for us to kill with sword famine plague and with wild beasts so biblical plagues are not a self-standing theme the apparition of a plague belongs in the first place to a larger cluster of ideas all summarized and personified by death and Sheol sword famine and plague in fact is a stereotyped prophetic triode with its roots in the conventional evils of war we're not talking then about the death of him or her of this for that individual like the Angel of Death who was sent to tell the patriarch Abraham his time had come in extra biblical traditions the scope of death is signified by these threefold killers of war implies instead that the threat is the extinction of entire nations and peoples faced with the Babylonian Menace to either Israel's very survival Jeremiah thus uses the triple cluster multiple times to sum up the fate awaiting those who will not listen to the prophets urgent message whoever stays in the city will die by sword famine and plague Ezekiel faced with the same siege takes the same concatenation of evils and Divis up to people's fate neatly in thirds throwing in dispersion in exile for good measure one-third of you shall die by plague or be consumed by famine one-third shall fall to the sword around you and one-third I will scatter to every wind together these three coordinate fates sword famine and plague the red black and the sickly green horses mean to capture the distress of every mortal confrontation that a society as a society can face with death people's died through violence but they die by nature and they die by raging sickness in a disturbing text in 2nd Samuel 24 day that must choose between these three terrible options shall three years of famine come to you on your land or will you flee three months before your foes while they pursue you or shall there be three days pestilence in your land now consider and decide what answer I shall return to the one who sent me then David said to God I'm in great distress let us fall into the hand of the Lord for his mercy is great but let me not fall into human hands here we have the conversion rates for our three woes and we find that a single day of plague is worth a month of war and a whole year of famine the ratios are meant as a measure of just how fast men fall when a truly grave contagion comes upon them by now we've all heard that more people died in the Spanish flu of the wildering 500 million worldwide and the merely 20 million in the four years of mechanized mass slaughter in World War one the plague comes directly from God's hand moreover with a swift and sightless onset where death has less bulky movement moving parts and mediators plague accordingly possesses a certain numinous primordial terror in a word it is a more powerful and raw encounter with bodily death itself in this way plague is also a more immediate encounter with the one who alone gives both life and death both grace and mercy in the Bible the sin plague Nexus is finally much stronger than the corresponding connection between sins and wars between sins and famine both of which appear often in the scriptures with no connection to anyone's sin in comparison the human dimension of the sword is clear but famine which seems to be an eco apocalypse requires common on the one hand famine is the artificial effect and the entire objective of siege warfare that is the work of man the Black Riders scales might also hold a key they're the sign of ancient Commerce and it is not hunger per se but what let me cut what we might call system collapse that the writer flaunts a quart of wheat for a day's wages and three quarts of barley for a day's wages profiteering walks together with the failure in production and David prefers in the end to roll his dice with the mercy of God he Gamble's rightly for those who know the story in revelation 6 the surprise edition of wild animals to deaths traditional prophetic tree ad as one important final note the illusion here is twofold first we have an echo of the wild beasts of Daniels vision namely an apocalyptic symbol for the reigning world powers I mentioned above transhumanist eschatology with its utopian hope in human systems for the Bible these imposters are only one more ugly destructive agent of death the other allusion is more subtle but also in a way more sure it carries us directly back to a passage at the end of the Pentateuch Moses last discourse in Deuteronomy 32 the text tells a prophetic history of the chosen people and finally moves us from the dramatis personae to the story wherein we find them the story goes like this after the Lord finds and nourishes Jacob and chooses him for himself Jacob grows fat and forgets the Lord who blessed him so the Lord turns with blazing anger against his very own people throwing against them the full arsenal of his maledictions thus by my wrath a fire is in kindled that shall rage to the depths wasting hunger and consuming fever and bitter plague the fangs of wild beasts I will send against them snatched away by the sword in the street and by sheer terror at home I thought to scatter them and blat out the memory of them forever biblical examples of sin sparking angry plagues come a dime a dozen in Exodus 32 after the episode of the golden calf God sends a plague upon the people in the desert when the people complain and want to change in men you quote the Lord heard it and his anger was kindled in response the mysterious fire of the Lord burns against them charring the edges of the camp until Moses calms it now however things go from bad to worse for when the Israelites grumble anew God this time gets very angry bhaiya Colorado Naima old and he strikes them hard with a very great plague and number 16 when the people rebel against Moses and Aaron guess what happens 14700 died in a plague what starts to wonder who was bound to get wise sooner Israel keep sinning and the Lord keeps trying the same punitive deterrent perhaps it was all in fact just a matter of more soap and running water now we live after Moses in an after virtue kind of way between here and there between the Bible and our present pandemic between the pre and the post Christian world's stands a great deal of both real and pretended enlightenment the profound Greek journey from myths to the love of wisdom that Greek wisdom weds to the revelation of Israel's Bible's Christian God the Judeo Grecian Christian God's late Eclipse as a fading postulate of practical reason and his present pelant exorcism from human thought in action between all our real advances in medicine and our dazzling progress in natural science and between the were some herbs and flows in our religion the ancient self-evident equation plague equals divine wrath has become for us a dubious offensive and an intelligible manner of thinking the equation might be exposed as out of fashion in any number of ways the German bishops recently released a statement addressing the corona crisis which will do quite well quote God is a friend of life the document confesses as Christians we are the firm conviction sickness is not a divine punishment sickness belongs to our human nature as vulnerable and fragile beans the fact that Hans küng has evidently gone on record linking the pandemic to the revenge of Gaia for mankind's sins against the earth must I suppose be reckoned as a neo paleo theological thesis beyond even the German bishops normal mischief one would have thought that Pachamama had been adequately placated in a passion sermon century and all theological contempt of science was recently aired on a popular german science show quote the coronavirus is a scientific matter of fact i Nevisian shafte cat taught soccer it is not the wrath of God or the revenge of the earth it is 100 nanometers of hydrogen carbon oxygen nitrogen proteins and nucleic acids end quote detecting any surplus meaning beyond this elemental material breakdown is pure fanatical illusion a clever contributor to Magnificat commenting this month on lord's angry assault of the amorite army by a thunderstorm of giant hail in joshua 10 remarks that the conceptual distance between the world of the bible and our own meteorological vision is captured in the distance separating weather men from weather gods imagine the sumerian ish core wearing a green sport coat predicting a high-pressure system something similar goes for punitive plagues in fact the word plague itself is actually a proper name in the Hebrew Bible a reference of God equated interestingly with Apollo he appears in the retinue of Elohim himself in the archaic hem of Habakkuk 3 God came forth from tame on the holy one for mount Paran before him went pestilence deber also a god and plague a ref Esch followed close behind was your wrath against the rivers Oh Lord or your anger against the rivers or your rage against the sea when you drove your horses and your chariots to victory you brandished your naked bow sated worthy arrows at your command Max Weber spoke of an Sal burl the shattering of the world's once magical enchantment in this case we might speak still more of an and angst ago a loss of fear defanging of the divine warrior for while hysteria manifestly remains witness the toilet-paper apocalypse both servile and holy fear of God or in deep recession our gods are no longer the capricious vindictive violent gods of long ago and no longer the Lord of Old Testament times rumbling through the clouds shooting arrows from his chariot of war without observing it we have I'm a sort of modern Marsha Knight the error of Martian is a much more pernicious persistent and interesting heresy than we tend to suppose it is not simply a question of books in the Canon it is about the shape and permanence of God's self-disclosure and our resulting image or better resulting knowledge of him we would thus be quite negligent to reckon it as a theological freak show rather than as theological signs of the times when the last year's a witnessed a neo Marsha Knight flare up around the theologian not gosh Lanka in Berlin of course cleaving the two Testaments at this tender point of Pugh nishan will not do it all the New Testament itself prohibits any such schizophrenic theological blunder speaking to the Corinthians to rectify their dangerous Eucharistic praxis admitting sexual deviants to communion and creating discontent and factions in the community and so on Paul directly appeals to the plagues of the Old Testament God then gladly adopts the equation and applies it to the case at hand these things occurred as examples for us so we must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did in 23,000 fell in a single day we must not put Christ to the test as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents and do not grumble as some of them did and were destroyed by the destroyer no testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against themselves for this reason many of you are weak and dill and some have died and there you have it some Christians are falling like Israel in the desert because like Israel in the desert some Christians have grievously sinned so we must it seems be Resolute's and prepared to lose the New Testament to or at least whatever and it seems outmoded too outmoded for enlighten modern man if we would be rid of the overly irritable Old Testament God this is the DeMuth Allah Jai Singh pill that various Protestant religions of spiritual progress has seen fit to swallow I want to insert here very carefully a brief but important clarification theologically and as a matter of responsible exegesis it should be said that both the questions and the stakes are very different when it comes to the historicity of the old and the New Testaments respectively just as good Catholic exegetes in our own day have been understandably glad to argue that the ban in Joshua is a literary device rather than the record of historical genocide commanded by God so we might find freedom in taking some literary distance from the pattern of God's repeated massacres in the desert Paul of course took it all with deadly earnest to this degree we confront an assumption that we might wish to think through yet an assertion that we cannot mistake or deny Paul is telling us that God has not changed his ways he deals with sin as he always has now before we get too carried away with our new historical-critical freedom I want to bring forward one special case where even historical skeptics are forced to concede that something extraordinary evidently transpired in 701 BC the Assyrian general Sennacherib invaded the Levant destroying town after town until he came to Jerusalem and besieged it we have archaeological evidence of his path of destruction from vanquished cities like la quiche and his own annals famously boast of his victories one after another then they add quote Hezekiah like a caged bird I shut up in Jerusalem the failure to recount anything more than a siege points to the rest of the story for 2 Kings 1819 adds what the propagandistic assyrian sources failed to say the destroying angel of the Lord came in the night and a hundred and eighty-five thousand Assyrian soldiers were slaughtered in front of Jerusalem's gates this would already be interesting enough but the Greek historian Herodotus also adds one more detail he informs us that the Assyrian operation was a failure due to field-mice hinting that disease like the septa semuc plague might well have struck Lord Byron has a short ballad on the scene of Sennacherib that is well worth reading more theologically interesting if less poetically loved CS Lewis over in jammed sonnet on Sennacherib the Bible says the neck rubs campaign was foiled by an angel in Herodotus it says by mice innumerably nimbly nibbling all one night they toiled to eat away his bow strings as warm wind eats ice but muscular Archangels I suggest simply seven little jaws to labor at each slender string and by the aid weak masters though they be destroyed the smiling lipped Assyrian cruel bearded King no stranger that omnipotent should choose to need small helps than great no stranger if his action lingers till men have prayed and suffers our weak prayers indeed to move as his very muscles in his delaying fingers who in his long anima T and love for our small dignities and Feebles for a time his power so all sides are agreed that Jerusalem was somehow remarkably delivered and spared but is God Himself todayõs in this deus ex machina story Lewis tells us quite rightly I think that we need not simply choose between Herodotus and the Bible or does the difference in the end between God's using angels or rodents are indeed using both plus Israel's prayers as his instrumental causes and putting his enemies to flight paragraph 303 of the Catechism professes are simple conviction the witness of Scripture is unanimous that the solicitude of divine providence is concrete and immediate God cares for all from the least things to the great events of the world and its history the sacred books powerfully affirm God's absolute sovereignty over the course of events our God is in the heavens he does whatever he pleases belief in divine providence is not a purely faith-based proposition that is well worth adding Aristotle discusses Providence in multiple places and one might add to Sidda T's as well patron saint of secular history writing his famous account of the Athenian plague known for its accurate medical descriptions and careful reasoning about the origins of the outbreak it seemed he says to have been carried by sailor sailors from Ethiopia and Egypt subtly suggests the plague might actually be the work of our old friend Apollo in fulfillment of an Oracle the God targeted Athens in order to tip the balance of the Peloponnesian War both natural and supernatural causes were evidently entertain able even for an enlightened Greek mind israel's biblical history writers of course have no similar interest whatsoever in proto virology but neither today in the slightest way deny the medical writers their fun as always the Bible's entire concern is simply to shout what an analyst like lucidity is can it best on the weekly whisper yes God is acting Judah's God of War the Lord of hosts with refa at his command is no less ready than Apollo to intervene in battle this is why modern exegetes parlor games of paleo pathology applied to the biblical plagues inevitably distracts from the critical point what really is the septum explai the living Lords action in history the Bible is burning to cry is a thousand times more important than field mice and the bulbous proteins that work his purposes refa shy have said is the name for plague but there's also another revealing word in Hebrew Nega the base root nun gimel ein means quite simply to touch a plague is thus a matter of being touched which resonates at this moment just as our word contagion is from Latin contendere to be touched with the fact of being touched of course immediately raises the more important question touched by what or by whom I sometime breakfast companion president Emmanuel macron of France said that the coronavirus has no Passport French commentators immediately observed that while the virus may not the people who carry it most certainly do in any epidemic multiple stacked up actors might easily touch us all at once and our vision is too narrow until we can see every finger moving every piece upon the board in story the final plague of Egypt modern exegetes have noted three different enumerated agents sometimes the text says that a plague will the firstborn sometimes it is the destroying angel and sometimes the Lord these scholars detect a diachronic palimpsest of diverse redaction 'el sources you might equally see a synchronic cooperation of multiple agents this theological claim with its ranking of primary and secondary movers and it's implicit preference for the soul over the body is the phony scandal that for some would make the Bible hostile to science as though we should right now somehow find an urgent need for prayer incompatible with cautious confinement and walk around sanctimoniously sneezing and grabbing at every doorknob the Hebrews - were commanded to stay within their houses praying as the Angel of Death passed by and like them our domestic ritual and prayers should respond to deaths chilling visitation we should have in our sights and as the object of our prayers a much greater freedom from a Gretsch greater fro foe than a tiny coronavirus in the apocryphal life of Adam and Eve the aged father of the human race does not die peacefully in his bed he is in fact patient zero to borrow the jargon of the field he is stricken by a novel sickness new to the world made of seventy bodily afflictions a symbol in the apocalypse for the recapitulation of all illnesses and his body is racked with pain and every member his sons then come to him and ask him trembling what is illness what is death it comes he says from touching the forbidden fruit through Adams Touch moreover they too have been infected they too will know not just life but death he says through them and through their children the entire family of Adam has all been touched with the contagion this war illness is the mother of all plagues left to itself if we do not flatten the curve but let incidents of transgression increase and allow sin to fester and ever new mutations Adams story leads to the desert generation after repeated bouts of sin Combe plague without showing the fruits of repentance God finally swears in his anger that Israel shall not enter into his rest so the whole lot of them falls dead wandering aimlessly in the desert note that this tragic version of the story has a lot of cumulative subplots in each of which the plague is for one reason or another mercifully ended it could be stopped by Phineas vet zealously skewering a pair coupling in flagrante delicto or it could be Moses falling on his face in prayer but the final wanted conversion never comes yet we also observed that individual plagues these avatars of absolute death always stop short of complete extinction the piling up of plagues is a response to repeated concrete sins but it is no less a piling up of divine mercy namely in the end the wicked generation does not die because of one final big old honkin Godzilla size sharknado plague they die instead of hard heartedness a fur onic disease they die because each time that God brought them to the very brink the very brink of extinction they resisted ministy hour of their visitation and so like the wicked in the psalm they fade away there's also another possible resolution however the plague of Adam might also be stanched in its spread and stopped in its tracks this is the christological shape of the story of David's plague which is miraculously halted at the hyper meaningful site of the altar in the future temple David guessed right that God is merciful he is more merciful than it seems when we consider how much more is in view than simply a single passing plague when David sins with his census for which he gets the already merciful doctor no like treatment of choosing his torture we actually have an image of original sin in two different ways first as David himself says the whole people is suffering for the sins of one man when David saw the angel who was destroying the people he said to the Lord I alone have sinned and I alone have done wickedly but these sheep what have they done at your hand I pray be against me and against my father's house this is a remarkable typological image at once of Adam's guilt and of the second Adams Redemption Christ's readiness to bear the punishment of all upon himself for even in this concrete story of David it is in fact in some way not really Davidson at all but the true punishment merited rather by all indeed all the wheels spinning about what exactly constitutes the sin and taking the census is off the point for in a most unsettling phrase in a most unsettling verse the story begins not only with David himself being prompted by God to commit the wrong for which all his kingdom is terribly punished begins before that with God in a prior state of anger against the people the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and he incited David against them saying go count the people of Israel and Judah God is already angry with Israel and no explanation is given anywhere in the narrative for this preexisting condition of divine wrath no specific sin of Israel has ever recounted it is an image the kind of primordial wrath reaching back beyond our sight and like concupiscence or the accumulation of habitual sin it incites further sin in this case David's by which the many are destined for punishment 70,000 in two days ranging from Dan to Beersheba the parallel version in 1 chronicles 21 is obviously uncomfortable with God's dark agency here and accordingly changes the text to read like this Satan stood up against Israel and incited David to count the people as with the death of the firstborn we have again multiple agents affecting the same dark deed but for our better comprehension of all the powers at play the chronicler pulls back the curtain and we recognized the ancient serpent who worked maliciously on Adam in the garden st. Thomas Summa contra Gentile as is one quarter devoted to God's providence and in book 3 chapter 17 while showing how all things have God is their final and Thomas says this order among ends is a consequence of order among agents for just as the supreme agent moves all secondary agents it's almost all the ends of secondary agents be ordered to the end of the supreme agent since whatever the supreme agent does he does for the sake of his end God is the supreme agent ordering all from the least things if only 100 nanometres big to the great events of world history like unprecedented global sands stills he's also the lord of every principality and power the ultimate question then is simply what is God's end knowledge of God's own goodness which is identical with his own life is his eternally and infinitely will tell us it follows that from field-mice to the fall of great armies the happy end of the plague story recounted in 2nd Kings is precisely the good end prayed for by Hezekiah now O Lord our God save us I pray from the king of a serious hand so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you O Lord our God alone knowledge of God is the final why ultimately at work here what was moving to be a tragedy Jerusalem hemmed in and trapped like a bird in a cage at the last moment takes a happy glorious turn tokens term eucatastrophe describes well Judah's sudden escape from impending doom and destruction I only add to this unexpected happy and hopeful and the wonderful final twist and the agent that God uses to save his people he destroys the sword by means of the plague wielding against our little man my death the army of Assyria that deeper death that comes from his hand alone God turns death against death itself to utterly consume it it is a strategy that he will use again thank you well thank you very much father Anthony that's a marvelous talk and now I'm delighted that we're going to be able to bring in some of our so I see from our zoom feed that we've got some students with questions queued up so let's go first to alex Jacobs who's our chapter president at Trinity University in San Antonio so Alex you're up my father thank you very much that was beautiful my question is can you speak on any ways that God's providence was evident and passed post-biblical plagues can I can I speak on any ways that God's providence was and in past plagues like after Christ did you catch that question okay so like the Antonine plague or the the Black Death or something like this there's what to say I this this pre-modern assumption is a humanistic assumption it's not a perverse invention of the Bible the the connection between sin and plague it goes all the way back in fact I'd give another lecture if I had the time on my reading of the Iliad which i think is a giant poem about a plague the first scene is actually a plague and and the first thing Achilles does is recognize the wrath of Apollo which comes back in the end the whole thing is a poem about death seen as a plague the Greeks are on to this very early on which is just to take a little heat off of the Bible everyone experiences divine wrath and this and this this continues across cultures and down through time so it's very very odd that since Camus or since the last cholera epidemic we've we've stopped responding in the way we have I mean even even defeat in war I used to be responded to as the wrath of God I live next to a building in Jerusalem that was built by the by the French apt I'd lost the franco-prussian war because they assumed God was angry at them it's so this this this is a moment for repentance and sacrifice in every context it's a moment also for the martyrs of Christian charity the Alexandrian plague in the fourth century actually puts the first martyrs of charity in the Martyrology and those who go out and minister to to the dying at the risk of their very lives are honored like martyrs this is magnificent and this is why our life sometimes seems a little boring apocalyptic and two you know two generations past the Atomic Age is basically a bad choice between Mad Max and Al Gore and it's a lot more interesting if we like these Saints of old could run out it's Saints always seem to be dying in plagues it seems like it's it's a good opportunity for us to have a plague every once in a while in our lives well thanks very much and now we have a we have another question so we're going to hope keen who is Princeton grad hope it's great to see you on the call here so please go ahead thank you so much so I'm really curious about this dichotomy between I think what she called the notion of an enchanted world and the seemingly newer notion that we have where we've done away with that and I guess I'm I'm curious about how that's bad but also how it could be an effect of this notion that we're safe because we have the protection of Christ and so the things that scared pre-modern or pre Christ's people really shouldn't scare us as much because we have the most powerful supernatural force on our side as always very interesting to me because there seems to be a sort of counter movement like we claim the enchanted world but there's a sense in which we need not perhaps yeah thank you that's a very good question there's a lot of dimensions to that I think in a lot of ways this this notion of the disenchanted world is what I verted to at the beginning this this neo-darwinian materialism that that doesn't allow us to access any meaning this this is obviously immensely disruptive and without going to postmodern on us the the embedding of our lives within a story is how we construct meaning in a moment and so the embedding of our lives in a story of Christ is is evidently the the on the one hand the way we escape from this disenchanted absurdity and at the same time a way that we gained this this confidence that's not a world overrun by demons I mean the Lord comes and drives out these demons it's nevertheless I mean I I said it's albarran and also and angst ogle and is this loss of fear there's there's a dimension to Christ that should also elicit in us a virtue of holy fear because he is also the one who comes as judge I don't have the time to talk about him coming with a sword in his mouth he's actually the final writer in the scene it's it's remarkable actually the the most sustained reflection on plagues is in the the latter half of the book of wisdom and there we have this this text that shows up in Christmas we where the the word Springs out in the midst of the night it's the law Gauss and that law Gauss is the destroying angel we have actually this notion and it's a theme that could be developed but where Christ himself as this divine warrior has a frightening aspect so I I guess I'd say yes we we want to embed ourselves in a story in which there is a final word of hope but the the implicit point here in talking about plagues and where they're plotted in the stories that were plot in the middle of a story we're plotted at this this critical moment this plot complication where the relationship between humanity me and God is somehow in question that's what death means and it it raises this question and when it's standing question can go in two ways and to understand that it's not decided in advance this is this kind of false eschatology of Hope which thinks we can do it and that's all there is to it and so I'd I'd say that this is the the beautiful shape of Christian hope you know perfect hope which puts us in you know a state of serenity before the uncertainty of what it means to stand before the judge so it's it's good that we know the one who will be our judge but it's also in some ways a lot more difficult I mean I like confessing my sins to anonymous priests behind a screen and not to the people that I offended so there's there's I guess a painful dimension to our purification that it's important to recognize well now we're going to have a question from Daniel Tucker who's a graduate student in music at Yale so Daniel please go ahead thank you for your talk father I'm wondering what insights can be drawn from Scripture about how to suffer well or how to suffer with a sense of trust still in the Lord in times like this yeah that the Psalms would be another thing that's I certainly didn't didn't talk about but if if there's a critical invitation I in passing said we have this remarkable moments of the Passover okay we're about to celebrate this mystery and it's it's a moment in which Israel is told to shut their doors and to go home and to pray in in hope confidence that this blood-smeared of the Paschal Lamb will protect us from the pest outside this this confidence in the blood which is the blood of Christ is is something that gives us confidence not just against the coronavirus I mean I think it's it's important that in a way we also also look ahead a little bit to this this nice Christian tradition and of the Reese's Pascal a kind of laughing at death and and it's avatars which is why I think we could and should make fun of the coronavirus just a little bit I mean it's it's this tiny thing which on the one hand shows as Lewis said the immensity of God's power they can do this with the speck of dust on the other hand it shows just that the immensity of God's power how big is God how strong is God how able is he to do all things to me the most important thing is that in this moment we don't we don't lose sight of of this fantastic invitation everything's in Providence and it's Providence that this happens in Lent the entire world is invited into the desert and we know the story we know how it goes you can fall in the desert or we can we can be with that remnant that follows Joshua who is the true Jesus into the Promised Land so what I didn't touch on here and it's it's it's a major major theme is the way that inside a play God God has smart and he also sometimes goes carpet-bombing okay so the destroyer this mush heat Saint Paul said they're destroyed by the destroyer this only appears two times in Exodus 12 and in this passage in first Corinthians the destroyer in the Makuta Derby Ishmael this rabbinic text is the one who is who goes berserk in the old Nordic sense and he just killed left and right without discrimination that is both the the guilty and the just but there's also a way in which even and this is this is why some of these documents said this is obviously not Pugh Nisshin because it's not just the guilty who are falling okay we could we could talk about this to the guilty in the way that the the guilty and the innocent are targeted God God though targets even in the interior of this reckless indiscriminate act of the of the destroyer his people in a very special way so it's it's in fact it's aimed at all of the first born the first plagues are just aimed at the Egyptians but the the last plague is aimed at all the firstborn even of the animals and this actually targets Israel more than anyone because in chapter 4 of Exodus God says Israel is my firstborn Israel actually is is the one that stands most in the crosshairs and precisely as God's firstborn the one that is is most in danger they're the ones who receive the sign of protection and this is this is that double meaning of this word that springs forth at the double-edged sword of this destroying angel the logos is destruction for the one but but redemption for the others so we have we have confidence in the power of the one who has the power to destroy our enemy I mean that's that's the whole story which just the incredible miracle I mean with with evidence in the annals of Assyria that God has the power to wipe out in a night an army ranged against us and the Army is just an image of every threat so you know if God has that kind of power and can do it with with a little piece of dust what can I do with his strong right arm well we have time for just a few more questions we've got about seven minutes to go here and I think our next up questioner is Christopher thomashefsky who's the president of our Baylor chapter a philosopher and graduate student so Christopher please go ahead closer thank you for your talk I really enjoyed it so this is connected I think with the end of your previous question which is I was hoping you could say a little more on how we reconcile the fact that God uses plagues as punishments with the fact that plagues are a very indiscriminate means of destruction that do not [Music] distinguish between the guilty and the innocent thank you yeah good thank you good question I mean that's where I brought in this nice life of Adam and Eve text which sees the these original sin is a giant plague that the introduction of illness in its comprehensive form the the the mother of all plagues is death as the wages of sin so so in this way at a very basic level there's there's a low-grade punishment I mean who's innocent who's who's innocent there's the innocent the guilty in a kind of relative sense and this is why I mean the much more serious thing is this this salvation this this defense against death itself we're not just praying for protection against the Crone virus we pray for protection against death it eternal death so the the fact that sometimes we see so we have different kinds of turns sometimes I send and there's immediately a plague okay and you can't miss the connection okay I was just fornicating with a Midianite and now everyone's dying and so we need to you know impale the guy with a pole that that you can't miss and in fact this is a difference between the biblical and the Greek way of looking at it the Greeks don't always know what they did wrong so that's actually what Achilles has to do at the beginning the Ilia it's like you know there's a plague so obviously we sinned go get a seer figure out what what's you know irritating Apollo that never happens in the biblical text it's always manifest the sins because they cry to the heavens okay and so we have this this pattern of sometimes the the conjunction is so strong that it can't be missed but you also have low grades punishments okay that that don't target okay they did this now they get hit but but target a different kind of collective sin so we need to think about actual individual collective and original sin as different categories because there's also plagues that respond in a cumulative way slowly and in fact God Amos 4 is a good case of this where there's no sins specifically but just generic you guys for a long long time a generation now haven't been returning to me okay so in a way okay some people have said this this plague can't you know right now this pandemic doesn't correspond like what do we do this week like why why now and here the time gap is important to bear in mind Adam dies at a ripe 930 years old of a sin he committed in his sprightly youth okay there's there's a gap between this and in wisdom there's a proportion this is this is how the the ten plagues are understood there's a proportion between contrapasso danteís contrapasso between everything that the the egyptians receive and what they'd done so the death of the firstborn is punishment for throwing the the children in the river now that's something they did 80 years before okay because we know the age of Moses so the part part of this is is a little bit hidden in God's wisdom is where where are the sins the cultural sins or the orsen the original sin what back to the to the statement you know sickness is not punishment for sin sickness is punishment for sin death is punishment for sin that's why it's in the world and it can be the result of original sin of of collectives and of individual and actual sin there's different ways that all those things can and sometimes are punished okay I think we have time for just one more question and that will be from Ben Becker who is the co-president of our chapter at Hillsdale so Ben please go ahead hi father thanks for your talk I guess one thing that I was wondering is how do we present this kind of biblical wisdom in an age that I think seasonal items like the book of you know the Bible and then the book of Sciences connect these two very different kind of competitive kind of areas of wisdom and like how do we how do we present this kind of business you have in this age yeah thank you that's a good question I mean the big response I tried to give is this this notion of instrumental causality secondary agents I mean if we want to think in into mystics and the terms of a way to understand this there's this kind of nesting of instrumental agents and we see this in the Bible in in particular ways like I said I mean it's it's interesting how there there are indications even in this language of touching that I mean they understood epidemic spreads you know you don't you don't pass this on and so actually we have quarantine in certain cases actually in the Levitical code so I mean there's there's a kind of scientific awareness the I think an important thing to understand is that if the Bible doesn't in medical terms it's not or scientific terms it's not because anything it says is in any way problematic because it's putting the emphasis in another place it's it's a wonderful thing Catholics are lucky to have all of the scriptures because in the deuterocanonical books these Hellenistic books these books that are written and infused with the Greek spirit of wisdom we actually have a resonance of the beginnings of of Greek medical know-how so actually in the book of wisdom as well we have a kind of proto pharmacological law dot see okay God God hasn't committed any deadly drugs okay there's there's this knowledge of pharmaceuticals and so forth that's that's standing behind this through and there it is in the inspired texts we're not against this as I said though to assert God is at work in history he's at work right now this isn't just a nonsense thing that happens demands that we escape from this not just you know the kind of Charles Taylor imminent frame but this fantastically narrow materialism I mean this this quote that it's not the wrath of God it's you know it's this hundred nanometer collection of hydrogen and proteins I mean if that's all we can see if that's all we want to see then we've missed the entire picture and you know the Bible is shouting in a strong way that there's also something else so I mean there's there's lots of dimensions to the science and faith question it's phony as as I suggested there and in in some ways I mean the point here is that we're not presenting an alternative etiology just as we're not with creation I mean it's it's exactly parallel cased so I mentioned the neo-darwinian z-- to say that God created the world even as the Bible said doesn't mean that he can't use the instrumental causes that we know by science so I think that's the way to come at it in any case so I hope that helps well let me give the thanks on behalf of everyone who's watching from home and on behalf of the Tuskegee Institute to father Anthony for a marvelous talk and for being so generous with his time to give us I mean he knew that he worked very hard to prepare something I'm very short notice for all of you of course now that we're all quarantined here at the dominican house for studies we're thinking about these subjects and he's given us a lot to reflect on let me give you just a few final announcements before we include our broadcast thanks very much for watching please do sign up for the quarantine lecture series at 2:00 mystic Institute org and if you do that then you'll get notices about the upcoming events and you'll also get a login for following this this ongoing lecture series unzoom of course you can always find us on YouTube and Facebook our next lecture will be Thursday this Thursday April 2nd also at 8 p.m. Eastern on the presence of God in a season of solitude by father James Brent so we're looking forward to having father Brent here and I'm sure you'll enjoy his talk that's one of his favorite subjects so it's going to be a real treat to hear him finally last announcement very important especially for those of you on zoom' we are going to be starting our discussion groups as soon as this broadcast ends so you should have already received a link about how to join your zoom discussion group so as soon as we're done here join that discussion group and then we will allow you to go forward and continue the conversation with with the other people who've been tuning in especially students with other students and so thanks very much for joining us from the two mystic Institute in Washington DC my name is father Dominic leg and we will see you on Thursday

Channel: The Thomistic Institute

Views: 13,507

Rating: 4.9413204 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: LC8_47A9Io8

Length: 61min 24sec (3684 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 31 2020