Tolkien's Advice to Catholics in a Time of Crisis

[Music] g'day and welcome to pints with aquinas my name is matt fradd today i want to look at a letter that j.r.r tolkien wrote to his son about a sort of sagging faith due to scandals in the church i thought it was packed with the sort of wisdom that you and i need today given that we too are living in a very turbulent time within the church so i plan on reading through it pausing every now and again and maybe sharing a few thoughts i've put the entirety of the text below so that you can read it for yourself he says this to his son you speak of sagging faith however that is quite another matter in the last resort faith is an act of will inspired by love our love may be chilled and our will eroded by the spectacle of the shortcomings folly and even sins of the church and its ministers but i do not think that one who has once had faith goes back over the line for these reasons least of all anyone with historical knowledge i think we sometimes think of faith in the wrong way faith is a feeling perhaps and so if you feel very passionate about your christian faith you might say i have strong faith or if those passions aren't there and you don't have a terrible desire to pray or to preach or things like this you might say well i have a weak faith but faith isn't an emotion it is as tolkien says here it's an act of will and i want to share with you this quotation from c.s lewis he says this now faith in the sense in which i am here using the word is the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods that's such a great quote the art of holding onto things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods it's a little bit like love in that way there are certain times within my 15 years of marriage that i have felt a tremendous affection for my wife a longing to be with her to be united with her there are other times where i don't really feel that way or i might even feel irritated with her but love is not a feeling it's a choice which of course is also a feeling it has feelings that go along with it same thing with faith listen to this c.s lewis says for moods will change whatever view your reason takes i know that by experience he says now that i am a christian i do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable but when i was an atheist i had moods in which christianity looked terribly probable that's an excellent point because you might be somebody who's dealing with a sort of temptation to apostasy to to not just abandon christianity but to abandon belief in god altogether and say that god doesn't exist as if this will somehow finally settle something and you'll feel emotionally at peace but as louis says no matter what view you hold you're going to have changing moods in which you know the thing you just left perhaps christianity looks terribly probable he says the rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway that is why faith is such a necessary virtue unless you teach your moods where they get off you can never be either a sound christian or even a sound atheist but just a creature dithering to and fro with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion consequently one must train the habit of faith okay let's continue with what tolkien says though he says scandal at most is an occasion of temptation as indecency is to lust which it does not make but arouses so just as indecency doesn't make you lust but rather is an occasion for lust or it arouses it could arouse lust we could say too that scandal need not lead to apostasy even though it may arouse feelings of doubt and even the desire to leave the faith talking continues it is convenient why does he say it's convenient because it tends to turn our eyes away from ourselves and our own faults to find a scapegoat but the act of will of faith is not a single moment of final decision it is a permanent indefinitely repeated act a state which must go on so we pray for panel final sorry we pray for final perseverance yeah this is really interesting here i think one of the reasons young people not and not so young people find themselves very passionate about social justice issues which we should be passionate about and seek to remedy is sometimes not because we're terribly concerned that this is an injustice that needs to change but also because nothing within us has to change if i can get really upset about global warming or corruption over here or there or racial issues none of these things are unimportant and absolutely need to be addressed as christians we have a duty to address them so don't misunderstand me but what i'm saying is sometimes i think the reason we get so passionate about those things is we can have the pleasure of feeling very indignant and like a social crusader without ever having to address our own sins our own baggage our own dysfunction so it's convenient in that sense to find a scapegoat and i do think i've fallen into this strap 100 where i'll get really outraged about what's taking place in the church and i feel like i have no control over the situation like what am i gonna do i don't have the pope on speed dial i i can't really get a meeting with my bishop i just feel frustrated and i think one of the things that i've turned to in the past and which many people still do turn to is sort of ecclesial news sites you know ecclesiastical news sites that make us outraged now i'm not saying these outlets don't serve a purpose i'm kind of glad that there are groups who are pointing out the filth in the church right someone i think has to do it actually maybe you disagree with how they do it but i do think it's good they exist but i do think we can sort of substitute a faith in christ for a scrolling of the church politics news feeds because sometimes you go to prayer and you don't actually feel terribly good about it you don't feel like anything productive has taken place you pick up your bible you want to have feelings of inspiration and uh perhaps uh comfort but you don't but at least if you turn on your church politics website and scroll through that you do feel angry and indignant and i do think sometimes that that's a substitute for faith and we have to be really careful about that we have to be careful about turning our eyes away from our own faults onto other people in order to find a scapegoat and again i'm exhibit a here so this isn't me telling you something that i don't have to deal with this is something i absolutely have to deal with i think that's that's really a good piece of advice there from tolkien he says the temptation to unbelief which really means rejection of our lord and his claims and i think that's important to realize when we're rejecting the christian faith we're not it's not about rejecting this particular priest or this particular collection of bishops or this particular pope and what he said if we're going to reject the catholic faith know what you're rejecting what you're rejecting is our lord and his claims right he says the temptation to unbelief is always there within us part of us longs to find an excuse for it outside of us the stronger the inner temptation the more readily and severely shall we be scandalized by others that's really cool the stronger the intertemptation the more readily and severely shall we be scandalized by others you know i'm not saying that there isn't cause for scandal in the church for goodness sake there absolutely is and i'm not saying these things ought not to be pointed out again don't misunderstand me but to take an analogy i think we often hear about those people who are constantly being offended by other people and it seems exhausting but people seem to be very interested in being offended by things on the internet or things they encounter and i think that too is associated with that unwillingness to look at our own sin our own faults and to look outward so i think there is a connection there i think i am as sensitive as you or any other christian to the scandals says tolkien both of clergy and laity and look at here like tolkien does not hold back any punches he doesn't have a sort of um you know unrealistic view of the church he says i have suffered grievously in my life from stupid tired dimmed and even bad priests but i now know enough about myself to be aware that i should not leave the church which for me would mean leaving the allegiance of our lord for any such reasons if i am to leave basically or talking saying i should leave because i did not believe and should not believe anymore even if i had never met anyone in orders who was not both wise and saintly i should deny the blessed sacrament that is call our lord a fraud to his face if he is a fraud and the gospel's fraudulent that is garbled accounts of a demented megalomaniac which is the only alternative then of course the spectacle exhibited by the church in the sense of uh clergy in history and today is simply evidence of a gigantic fraud right so if it's not true if jesus christ wasn't who he claimed to be and this thing just sort of unwound throughout time then okay fair enough what we're seeing today and in history is simply evidence of a gigantic fraud but if not right if christ was who he claimed to be and we've got good reasons to think that then this spectacle is alas only what was to be expected it began before the first easter and it does not affect faith at all i think here of those uh 11 disciples who fled our lord in his time of need the chief of those disciples denying our lord three times and one of them betraying him to death right so this isn't new um except that we may and should be deeply grieved but we should grieve on our lord's behalf and for him associate associating ourselves with the scandalized heirs not with the saints not crying out that we cannot take judas iscariot or even the absurd and cowardly simon peter or the silly women like james's mother trying to push her sons it takes a fantastic will to unbelief to suppose that jesus never really happened and more to suppose that he did not say the things recorded all of him so incapable of being invented by anyone in the world at that time such as before abraham came to be i am he that hath seen me hath seen the father or the prom you'll promulgation of the blessed sacrament in john 6 he that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life we must therefore either believe in him and in what he said and take the consequences or reject him and take the consequences so those are your options like we do live in a time in which it seems that the church is riddled with scandal i myself engage in behaviors that i too am ashamed of and would scandalize you to tell you about and the same thing's true with you i know i'm not particularly special so if we're going to abandon the faith we have to abandon our blessed lord and his promises we have to in a sense call him a fraud to his face so you have two options we must therefore either believe in him and in what he said and take the consequences right or reject him and take the consequences i find it for myself says tolkien difficult to believe that anyone who has ever been to communion even once with at least a right intention can ever again reject him without grave blame however he alone knows each unique soul and its circumstances tolkien says more and i'll put it in the description below but i hope that that's helped you and i'd love to hear from you in the comments section below what is it that struck you and when i say you i mean you individually i don't mean what do you think should strike other people again let's not cast the blame outward let's not think to ourselves i wish such and such could hear this you and i are sinners in need of repentance tempted to doubt maybe at times tempted to apostatize what is it that struck you what is it that you needed to hear from tolkien i want to suggest two resources for you the first is c s lewis's book mere christianity yes it's true that lewis wasn't a catholic but it seems to me that there's nothing serious in in the book that would be a danger to the catholic faith and the reason i suggest louis is he gets back to basics he offers the trilemma argument you know if jesus said the things the the the gospels say that he said then either he's mad or he's evil you know maybe he's like the devil of hell right or he's a liar that's another option or he's the lord now we can talk about legend as well and i have hosted debates on my channel here between trent horn for example and matt dillahunty and i think you'll see how conclusively that debate ended if you're interested in learning you know the the evidence we have for our faith on that front but check out mere christianity by c.s lewis and i'd also encourage you to check out the hello app so that you can do a better job praying because at the end of the day we want to be people who don't just refresh our ecclesiastical church politics feeds you know but we want to be people who pray and there's an excellent app called hallo that can help you do that it's 100 catholic and terribly sophisticated and very very very well put together there are a lot of apps out there today like headspace i believe it's called and calm that help you meditate but they lead you into new age practices and we don't want to do that we want to stay within the church hallow helps you do that if you go to mattfradd and hallow.com up you can have a month of free access to everything on that app you can download the app and it has several things for free but if you want to try out the entire month for a free go to hello.comfrag it'll lead you through lectio divina it'll lead you through the holy rosary it has beautiful like sleep stories where different people read the gospels and and the bible to you it's really a great way to insert more quiet into your life and to refocus your gaze onto our blessed lord so check that out as well hello.com mattfradd thanks so much

Channel: Pints With Aquinas

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Keywords: aquinas, catholicism, catholic, pints with aquinas, matt fradd, theology, debate, religion, st. thomas aquinas, thomas aquinas, philosophy

Id: orYE4fMPcDY

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021