“The Thing I Fear Most is Fear”

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Such were the words of Michel de Montaigne, the French writer of Essays.

Like all humans, Montaigne struggled with fear. How did he wrestle with it, try to conquer it?

Montaigne was a thinker, alone in a library, his library, pondering. Alone, as he was in conception, as he will be in death. Alone, facing his maker, facing the universe, facing himself. No one thinks but that they are alone. In such times fear is greatest. No other can think for us. Only an individual can think, can hope to know. And so he sits and thinks, surrounded by books, classics: Sallust, Seneca, Plato, Livy, and especially Plutarch. Surrounded as well by quotes, statements carved into the wooden rafters of the thinker’s hall, reminding him of earlier thinkers, of great thoughts. They are not his thoughts but he wants them to be. He wants them to seep within him, became a part of him, become him. Old thoughts resurrected, restored, renewed. What were another’s thoughts to become his, singularly expressed, unique, once-in-a-lifetime thoughts.

Montaigne had cause to think. His life was filled with thought and confusion, joy and sorrow, peace and conflict–fear. Sixteenth-century France was a time of moral, political, and intellectual chaos, when the dearest assumptions of the Western Tradition were turned upside down. Michel de Montaigne’s birth coincided with the rise of Spanish power throughout Europe, due in part to Columbus’s discoveries and the Spanish conquest of Central and South America. Europeans confronted hitherto unknown continents and peoples, which showed the limitations of classical geographic knowledge and the theories and maps upon which contemporary Europeans based their knowledge. When Montaigne was a child Nicolaus Copernicus died, in 1543, simultaneous to the publication of his On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, which contradicted the geocentric universe advocated by the Church as well as the greatest astronomers of antiquity. Such discoveries placed the assumptions of the Catholic Church—the assumption of the Fall of Man, and the special place the unmoved Earth held in God’s system—into question; but these intellectual concerns appeared as minor nuisances compared to the threat of the protest inaugurated by the Augustinian monk Martin Luther in Germany and the French legal scholar Jean Calvin in Geneva. France became a literal battleground over competing ideas of election, salvation, scripture, and authority, which exacerbated the political conflicts of the country as monarchy competed with aristocracy over their comparative pretenses to power. Religious conflicts became a blanket justification for any kind of horror. Is it a coincidence that Montaigne began the Essays the same year as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when on an August day in 1572 Catholics killed ten thousand Protestants of all ages and both sexes? Montaigne’s own chateau was threatened on several occasions; one time Protestants briefly took him prisoner. His family the Eyquems were like many French families divided over the issue; at least Michel and his brothers and sisters remained at peace with one another.

Montaigne was born and lived at the family estates in the wine region of Bordeaux. He served for years in the Bordeaux parlement, and was an adviser to royalty. He married in 1565, just three years before his father’s death to kidney stones. The son inherited the disease five years later, and lived with it for almost twenty years before it finally killed him in 1592. Montaigne enjoyed semi-permanent retirement during these years of disease and expectation of death. He typically spent his days in his library, secluded from the rest of the chateau. There he surrounded himself with the past, with his favorite authors and their profound words, carved into the beams of the ceiling and elsewhere throughout the cylindrical room.

Montaigne wrote the course of his life into his book. In Book One of the Essays, written from 1572 to 1580, Montaigne commented on the lives, works, and personalities of the authors of his favorite books. He wondered about the customs, habits, and needs of himself and others, such as wearing clothes, counting money, and sleeping. He thought about his varying emotions, his need for solitude, his vanity, fear, and cowardice. Saddened by the death of his friend Etienne de La Boetie, he wrote of friendship, suffering, and death. He followed the ancient Stoics in believing that one must control one’s passions and live moderately, rid oneself of needless emotions and conquer the fear of death. Philosophy can teach us how to die, Montaigne declared, as had so many philosophers before him. But great thoughts could not turn away the fear of acquiring, and pain of having, kidney stones.

In Book Two, written during the same decade of the 1570s, Montaigne considered his inconsistency and contradictions, vicariously explored suicide, considered his intellectual influences, thought and wrote about his father, and discussed the three greatest men: Homer, Alexander of Macedon, and Epaminondas of Thebes. His longest and most profound essay in Book Two is the Apology for Raimon Sebond, in which Montaigne challenged the human presumption of reason, questioned what can be known, and explored the dependence of humans upon God. The skeptical Apology betrayed the direction Montaigne was heading in his Essays: inward towards exploring the self.

Montaigne wrote the thirteen essays of Book Three during the 1580s. These are introspective, intuitive essays in which Montaigne discovered the universality of his own experiences, confronted his own mortality, and discovered the means of achieving contentment. The final essay, Of Experience, expresses the essence of what scholars call Renaissance humanism: it surpasses Petrarch’s Secret in the portrayal of the interaction of human and personal experience. In its depth it makes Francis Bacon’s Essays appear like the writings of a child. Not as humorous as Erasmus’s satire, In Praise of Folly, nevertheless Montaigne’s Of Experience is a more complete and penetrating portrait of human limitations and possibilities.

Montaigne’s bitterness about the violence of the age in which he lived and the problems in the country that gave him birth exuded from the pages of the Essays. “What causes do we not invent for the misfortunes that befall us?” Montaigne wrote in How the Soul Discharges its Passions on False Objects when the True are Wanting. “On what do we not place the blame, rightly or wrongly, so as to have something at which to thrust?” Some even “surpass all madness . . . , adding impiety to folly,” blaming “God himself.”

Conflict is an unavoidable fact of human existence. Political and religious conflicts that yield war and destruction are the most dramatic and horrifying examples of what humans do to each other. But the most numerous conflicts—ubiquitous in human experience—are the hidden and subtle conflicts within each person, who daily wages a war of ideals versus realities, inclinations followed by hesitations, fear and hope, mind versus body. Hence beneath the surface of the religious conflicts of sixteenth-century France were the personal conflicts of normal people. Often they were religious in nature: faith and reason, sin and redemption. Others were the brutal conflicts brought on by sickness, decay, death. Montaigne, for example, waged as fierce a battle with himself on a private scale as those terrible public wars waged by his French countrymen. Montaigne waged a battle against fear. His rival for peace of mind were the minute mineral deposits that formed in his kidneys, which when blocking the passage of the urine, caused tremendous pain, eventually death. On St. Bartholomew’s Day, when public conflict was brought to a head, Montaigne had not yet experienced the stone. But he feared that he would. And fear is much more powerful indeed than actuality.

Death, an all too frequent visitor for a man who lost his father, best friend, younger brother, and five children all by the time he was fifty, transfixed Montaigne. In a 1570 letter, Montaigne dedicated to his wife Francoise de La Chassaigne his friend La Boetie’s translation of Plutarch’s “Letter of Consolation to His Wife.” The couple had recently lost their first born, Thoinette, at the age of two months. Montaigne claimed that all of his feelings regarding the sad event were best summed by Plutarch, who consoled his wife upon the death of their daughter at the age of two.

Montaigne and his wife had five times the experience of this most fleeting moment of life. Six daughters they conceived and brought forth: all save one died within three months. The last, Marie, died within a few days of her birth. Montaigne was (like Plutarch) not the type to bounce an infant on his knee in play. Yet to bury five infants, five wonderful examples of God’s grace, each a singular incarnation, took a significant toll on Montaigne, who characteristically (and stoically) submerged his feelings under the weight of philosophy and faith. What more proof is needed to show humans to be, in Aeschylus’s words, “creatures of a day,” doomed to mirror the passing instant, overwhelmed by the passage of time, uncertain where they are going and where they have been, living only in the narcissistic moment?

Death defined Montaigne’s being. Each moment was potentially a singular experience of joy and wonder if it was not that the passing seconds move one that much closer to the end. Montaigne argued in That to Philosophize is to Learn to Die that he should constantly have the image of death before him. Only in this way may he conquer the fear of death. At the same time that he counseled his readers to accept “divine will” and God’s “inscrutable wisdom,” he was descending deeper into the unforgiving world of thought. He ironically thanked God for the constant “brooding over my thoughts” that would make him the one man prepared “to leave the world . . . utterly and completely.” He anticipated and expected so much as to lose sight of the present for the future. Surrounded by the cold stone walls of his library, the thoughts and examples of countless others, Montaigne entered into an imaginary world where he vicariously explored the range of human experience.

Montaigne was never more miserable than during the twelve years that he witnessed his father’s slow death then awaited his own fate. His fears came true in 1573 when he began to feel abdominal discomfort and he knew that his father’s disease was now his. Then in 1578 came the first awful stone, blocking the urine then slowly proceeding through the penis, ripping the skin, and gushing crimson blood when expelled. The pain was unbearable. His fears grew more intense. When would a stone grow so big within the kidneys as to grind up his organs and his ability to expel waste, so killing him?

During this decade of expectation and fulfillment, of expecting the onset of disease, acquiring it, then awaiting death, Montaigne began his Essays—not so much because he awaited death, rather because he feared it. He wanted to know why he feared it. Why did this simple feeling about an as yet undetermined future so dominate his existence? But if he was to understand his fear, he had to understand other, related things, too. Fear is the product of imagination. “We drip with sweat, we tremble, we turn pale and turn red at the blows of our imagination.” Yearning to understand his images of doom, the abstractions of his mind, “that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.”

Fear was Montaigne’s constant companion. The abstractions of his mind took off “like a runaway horse” during his mid-thirties. Death appeared to Montaigne as “so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose.”

At first he tried to employ his powers of reason to control his imagination. More, he hoped to “help it and flatter it, and fool it” if possible. If only his mind “could persuade as well as it preaches, it would help me out very happily.” Day upon day he reasoned with himself, preached to himself, trying to make an apparent evil good, trying to bring pleasure out of suffering. He tried to convince himself that the stone was “for my own good.” “Of the men who are stricken by it there are few that get off more cheaply.” And they are dependent upon the advice, worse, the remedies of physicians. Montaigne began to feel pride as well that he could “hold my water ten hours and as long as anyone,” and though in the grip of pain he could keep up “conversation with . . . company with a normal countenance.” He convinced himself that he was joining the company of the ancient Stoics, through Nature’s favor, controlling the body, elevating the mind. He rationalized his ailment. “But you do not die of being sick, you die of being alive. Death kills you well enough without the help of illness.” Sickness granted him a unique personal experience: in a single moment he could experience the joys and horrors of life: “Is there anything so sweet as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full?” Montaigne discovered death’s irony that amid its universality is the uniqueness of the particular experience in countless moments of time, never again to be repeated. Human death mirrors human life, human existence, human history, as infinite unique events become the past moving toward the future. The oneness yet individual uniqueness of man is seen most clearly through death. And if one feels terror because of death one also feels beauty and love, for without death life itself would be meaningless. Human love for another requires a sense of an end.

Montaigne’s game of matching his wits against his fears was a delaying action with no possibility of success. On days when his fears became worse, his technique was to “provide other ways of escape.” To aid his reason in the conquest of the imagination, Montaigne kept a personal history of his disease, randomly jotting down his experiences on paper. He would resort to these “Sibyl’s leaves” whenever an image of doom sprang from his fears. “If some grave stroke threatens me, by glancing through these little notes, . . . I never fail to find grounds for comfort in some favorable prognostic from my past experience.” But abstractions of the mind are not so easily destroyed. Just when one perceives victory, some new thought jumps in, fresh, strong, full-armored, and the battle begins anew. With such tactics the war will last until death. Montaigne sensed that though his ruminations were beneficial, and helped him to endure uncertainty and crippling fear, that ultimately some other tactic must be relied upon. Face it, he told himself, the ways of illness, of all existence, are fraught with “uncertainty” and “variety.” “Except for old age,” he concluded, “in all other ailments I see few signs of the future on which to base our divination.”

Montaigne’s bout with the stone gave him a historical perspective on the continuum of past, present, and future. He looked to the past to help him get through the momentary pain of the present and to help alleviate his fears of the future. Here we see life in microcosm: the uncertainty of time, of death, and consequent fears; the employ of reason to convince oneself that such fears are invalid; the use of the past to anticipate the future, to stabilize the present.

Montaigne’s personal historical perspective suggested to him that he reject reason for “actual sensation,” for the experiences and feelings of life, for action. Fear should yield action rather than contemplation in response. Hence, should a new development occur within him, even if it forces “pure blood out of my kidneys,” he must respond, “what of it?” and go on as before, chasing after his hounds “with youthful and insolent ardor.” Images of dread must be countered with the most basic sensations of life, and the primordial joy of living. Imaginary monsters vanish in the real heat of the noonday sun; evil shadows of night disappear in the bright hope of the full moon. “What would be the use,” Montaigne asked, in continuing the fight armed only with reason? The sensations of life cannot be abstracted, cannot be reasoned nor objectively known: only felt. Montaigne decided to wait out the disease, to endure it, to replace reasoning with the experiences and feelings of the moment, to combat the imagination with the reality of a present enlightened by past feelings and past experiences, both his own and those of other humans.

Near the end of his life Montaigne grew to respect Socrates above all men before the birth of Christ. Socrates was the exact opposite of Alexander, who was greedy for power, wealth, knowledge, even virtue. Such was the Europe of Montaigne’s time, immoderate even in good things such as devotion to religion, chaste living, the search for order, and passion for inquiry. Montaigne learned from Socrates that the amount of knowledge necessary to be happy is small indeed. It is because of time, no doubt, that humans can never accept where they are, what they are doing, what they have, who they are: each moment brings with it new opportunities.

The time spent reading, contemplating, pacing, writing, staring out of the windows of his library looking upon the peasants at work on the fields and vineyards of the lands of Montaigne, the endless hours ruminating, searching, trying to know the path to happiness, the way to knowledge, eventually appeared, Montaigne concluded at the end of his life, impious. Why should humans, should he, seek, question, ask, decide, move, plan, force, act upon those matters reserved for the will of God? What is the point to all of the rules of objective scholarship and scientific detachment if what we know or do not know, do or do not do, are in God’s hands anyway? One must accept. “I let myself go as I have come,” Montaigne confessed in Of Physiognomy; I combat nothing.” Balancing knowledge is ignorance; next to will is passivity. Though science and reason call, one must learn the value of faith. Mystery and miracles contradicted the well-trained philosopher’s mind of Montaigne. And yet the so-called stoic, skeptic, rationalist, atheist Montaigne, the Montaigne of the modern scholar, learned to refuse “to condemn,” “dogmatically, as false and impossible,” “prodigies or miracles,” any of which might have marked upon them the hand of God. Carved in the ceiling of his library was the line from the Psalmist, “Thy judgments are like a great deep.” Montaigne’s struggle to accept himself in light of his understanding of God is the story of his life and the theme of the Essays.

(Translations by Donald Frame, Stanford University Press)

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God’s Shadow over American History

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Jean-Pierre Caussade in Abandonment to Divine Providence writes truthfully that God is behind all historical events. If so, then it is God’s will that the United States is in 2025 exactly where He wills it to be. And further, that each person is alive and living their lives according to the divine will. This presents each of us with an enviable but problematic position. Enviable, that we are so blessed by God. Problematic, in that we are responsible to our God to make this life as godly and worthwhile as possible. As Caussade tells us, God is with us, working with us. The metaphor Caussade uses is the shadow. Mary was overshadowed by the divine will, and so are we all, he argues. The shadow is “like a veil” covering “sensible objects,” hiding “them from us.” God’s shadow is near us, even merging with our shadows in the bright sunlight. The shadow, the reality of God’s will, is typically concealed from us. How often do we see it, are we aware of the presence of the Lord?

Working backward in time, what are the signs in our lives, individually and collectively, of God’s shadow? History is a collective story of individual lives. God’s interaction with each person, God’s shadow in the lives of hundreds of millions, becomes one great multifaceted shadow that we call American history. How is it possible to make sense of such a complex interaction? How can 350,000,000 stories come together into one? How can 350,000,000 shadows of God’s will be cast into a remarkable yet incomprehensible single shadow?

More mind-boggling is the population of the earth, over eight billion, each human a part of God’s will. Incredibly, there are millions of species of animal types sharing Earth. The numbers of individual animals are in the hundreds if not thousands or millions of trillions– researchers with a great capacity for counting at the National Science Foundation have estimated that there are at least one trillion species of microbial, plant, and animal life residing on Earth.

To make this assessment of the vast wonder of God’s will even more mystifying, consider the infinite layers of time, of births and deaths, even on a single day, and how these wonderful and tragic events, reflecting God’s will, inform us individually of our own lives in the shadow of His will as well as collectively of a single story of the American people in the vast shadow of His will. But more, what of the dead, and their past lives still impacting the present, the memory, the consequences of their actions, all a part of the collective shadow of God’s will? Proceeding further, what of the angels and their actions on behalf of God’s will interacting with humans as they move hither and yon under the eternal shadow of the will of God?

We love to focus on specific instances to reveal for us the significance of time’s passing, God’s will. Some events are incomprehensible. Each individual death appears a tragedy, and collective deaths even more so. How can we make sense of the 9/11 terror attacks, the deaths so apparently random, the impact on other lives so confusing and terrifying? War is like this. It appears so random. Why is one person destroyed when the next person is spared? Often our greatest leaders at such time of war and disaster are those who accept the will of God. George Washington, for example, was praised for this. A minister wrote during the Revolutionary War that “A man is never more truly noble than when he is sensible that he is only a secondary instrument of bringing to pass God’s great designs.” This was in reference to Washington, whose characteristics included humility before God, his realization that Divine Providence, the will of God, was the ultimate reason for American success during the American Revolution. Abraham Lincoln likewise could not understand why America was being destroyed during the Civil War, but he accepted it as God’s will and put himself, as President, in God’s hands. The Gettysburg Address was his most profound statement in this regard. In other revolutionary events, such as the discovery and colonization of America, the one who relies on God’s will and serves as an instrument of that will—people such as Columbus—are most remembered. Pope Leo XIII praised Christopher Columbus for his devotion to God’s will, quoting the explorer as saying “‘I trust that, by God’s help, I may spread the Holy Name and Gospel of Jesus Christ as widely as may be’.”

There is overwhelming evidence in the affirmative to the debate in recent years as to whether or not the United States was formed by Christians who were sure that God’s will was behind the discovery of America by the Europeans, the colonization of the east coast of North America by the British, and the emergence of an independent United States of America in the 1770s and 1780s. Today, this idea is often derided with the sneer that conservatives believe in “American exceptionalism,” yet like it or not, the founders of this country did believe in American exceptionalism because they believed that God was behind the founding and success of the United States of America. And over the course of the past two hundred and fifty years, there continue to be huge numbers of Americans who believe that God has destined America for greatness, past, present, and future, conforming to the will of God.  

Of this greatness, this conformity, no single mind can comprehend the infinite thoughts, actions, hesitations, mistakes, influences, accidents, layers and layers of interactions of humans, animals, supernatural presences, all foreseen, all known, all willed in a mysterious shadowy form, like mist on a foggy day, or rays of sunlight filtering through cloudy skies. Trying to conceive of it all just in a moment much less to consider scores of years appears impossible, fruitless, defeating. And yet God wills us to contemplate it, to trace our individual and collective pasts, for Jesus Himself lived in time, moment by moment in the shadow of God’s will. Salvation is accomplished in time. Miracles occur in time. Sin shackles and redemption releases in time. The Eucharistic miracle occurs in time. When Jesus was overwhelmed by time’s passing, by the demands of so many souls, so many people acting in the shadow of God’s will, he sought refuge in quiet and prayer. This was His way of making sense. Prayer is the only way we can make sense of time, of the past, the present, and the future, and God’s will guiding us along the path to Himself.

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Love and Compassion

Posted on October 17, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Buddhists call it compassion,

This love that we have within,

A love that is in fashion,

Intuits when we begin,

A house with many mansions,

A place without sin.

A place where fly the fairies,

Those beings swift as the air,

Where evil never tarries

Only the beautiful and the fair,

With hearts like golden cherries,

Scampering here and there.

Our lives are God’s the Provident,

All beings big and small,

His will and love are evident,

Even in a sparrow’s fall,

It’s clear if you just think of it,

Here, there—everywhere–God is all.

He counts the strands of fur,

In every cat and dog,

His knowledge is the lure,

That clears the mind in fog,

Time goes by in a blur,

Recorded in God’s log.

Fear of death is staggering,

It’s present everywhere,

Comes to the weak and swaggering,

Death’s ubiquity has no care,

The end is the great gathering,

A universal nightmare.

We all are beings of fancy,

Playthings with each other,

Impatient with life, antsy—

Accusing the great Mother,

She who fills the vacancy,

When confronting the eternal Other.

Trillions the sorts of creatures,

That teach us the lesson,

Life is the grand feature,

The never-ending session,

Words of the great Teacher,

Sets us on a mission.

To bring to the world Love,

That creation at the first,

The Maker of heaven above,

Instills in us the thirst,

To bring to all what He wove,

Complacency that will burst.

Go out among them all,

Commanded the eternal Lord,

From here to there go call,

Slashing evil with the sword,

Bring them to Heaven’s great hall,

The King of Glory’s award.

All life throughout every clime,

Unrelentingly rushes forward,

All those we loved in time,

In the direction of the divine, toward,

Happiness, when all words rhyme.

And all is a Word,

Divinely spoken.

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The Southern Hill Country Mentality

Posted on October 10, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Reflections on the people of the American South after the Civil War into the 20th and 21st centuries as they confronted the perils of modernization.

The Southern hill country personality type is a reticence towards others, even a reticence toward life, a suspicion about others, really a suspicion about everything, being afraid to commit, being afraid to take action, waiting, accepting—accepting not so much God, awaiting the will of God, as accepting because of unwillingness to act, to take a chance. And so life can pass by and one sits and waits, stifled by inaction, stifled by indecision, until finally something forces movement. Movement may be caused by hunger, or fear, some outside force that impels the person to do what he might not otherwise have done. The consequent movement, action, might be absurd, completely out of character, yet circumstances have brought about this action, this movement, and the person goes blindly along, not sure, waiting even while moving, passive even while in the process of acting, faithless even while seemingly throwing all aside in an act of blind faith.

Emotions, likewise, are restricted, because one is unsure how to express them. How does one express love toward another when one is unsure, and reticence is the typical response to everything in life. How can one feel excitement, feel love, feel wonder, feel happiness, in an uncertain world where inaction, waiting, watching, seems the most comfortable approach to life? Rocking in the chair on the porch, waiting—for what? For nothing really, just waiting. Perhaps just waiting for death, waiting for everything to finally come to an end. Waiting for the boredom to end. Waiting for the failure to end. Waiting to be released from the stifling inaction and uncertainty and hopelessness and faithlessness.

The Southern hill country personality is outwardly pious, but inwardly barren. Outwardly such people belong to a church, believe in God, say the proper grace at meals, sing the proper hymns, but without emotion, without feeling, because religion is something not to express emotion over; to express love for God is just as uncomfortable as to express love for another, a child, a relative, a parent. It is embarrassing.  

Thank God for radio and television, by which one can submerge inaction and lack of confidence and the endless waiting for who knows what into a fantasy world of action, of love, of certitude, of confidence, of knowing exactly what to do, of taking life and directing it according to one’s will. How relieving to be able to watch a program, watch others, who are doing what you are unable, unwilling, to do, but you can watch along as they do it, and feel the satisfaction of a life well lived even if it is not your own.

Such crutches are everywhere, to help one limp along in life. If not television, if not the internet, then booze, or pills, or gambling, or something that takes one’s mind away from what is, to focus on what could be, what might be, and so lose oneself in a stupor, a fantasy world where one is exactly what one is not, where one is a great actor, a great mover, a great lover, a wealthy dynamic mover and shaker, a confident person wrestling with life and winning the match time and again.

What happens to you if all of a sudden chance (or destiny) steps in and wrestles  you away from such a life, and you are brought into an awareness of something completely different, a different approach to life, whether it be due to the northern urban personality or some sort of personality in which the fire has been lit, and there is no embarrassment, and a person acts, sometimes foolishly, sometimes in failure, but acts just the same. What is it to put aside inaction to grasp an opportunity and do it? How can the southern hill personality abide by such a notion? Perhaps there becomes a contest of different personalities, different approaches to life, and a person is caught in between, and the personality conflict rages within, the genes of the past confronting the newness of the present, and the split personality results in internal chaos. North and south meet, action and inaction, arrogance and humility, certainty and uncertainty, willingness and unwillingness, and the split personality is torn in so many directions, between choice and non-choice, action and inaction, moving and waiting, doing and watching, accepting life as opportunity or accepting life as struggle.

How can life be both opportunity and struggle, action and inaction, doing and waiting, getting up and sitting down, embracing and distancing, feeling emotion and fearing emotion, loving but being embarrassed by love?

Northern Yankees and Southern hill country people: two different ways at looking at life. One is more accepting, but still has the same fears and trepidations as others, but masks the fears in the formalities and structures of urbanized living—the associations or gessellschaft of modern society. The other is suspicious of such formalities, befitting a more rural people; the fears and trepidations of life are often dealt with not by masking them in formalities, rather by submerging them in the informalities of a more community existence: plain speaking, suspicion of others outside of one’s typical familiarity, a rough appearance to the world to show “ain’t scared–even if you are.

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Christianity and Memorial Day

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

What does Memorial Day have to do with Roman Catholics? Is it only a ceremony with meaning for patriotic Americans? Or can others throughout the world learn from the Roman Catholic approach to celebrating Memorial Day? To answer these questions, let the wisdom of Pope Benedict XVI guide us, as expressed in his writings.

Memorial Day was initially associated with the commemoration of soldiers who died during the Civil War. At first it was nonsectarian yet devoted to a belief that God has a connection with, a regard for, the United States of America. Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” reflects this attitude that all the dead of the war should be commemorated to God. Lincoln himself was a nonsectarian Christian, believing in Christ but not in a standardized, denominational Christianity.

Memorial Day is associated with civil religion, that is, a sense that an ill-defined God is concerned with the affairs of a people and nation. Memorial Day is a patriotic devotion to a nation and its God, and uses various icons—imagery, words, music—to express this devotion and to remember not only soldiers but all deceased.

In Catholicism, there are many memorial days commemorating the lives of saints, those who sacrificed for others, giving of oneself for the sake of another or others. This sacrifice is not restricted to soldiers, but all people who make an ultimate sacrifice for others, even if this sacrifice did not occur on a battlefield. This sacrifice is part of freedom, the freedom of Christ, where we are no longer condemned to slavery. Those people who live lives conforming to Christ are living in freedom and fighting for freedom in the same sense as a soldier fighting for physical and material freedom for his/her country. Memorial Day therefore is honoring all people, worldwide, that have fought for the freedom of others, not just physical or political freedom, but spiritual freedom, by teaching and example conforming to Christ.

There are some humans who do not live according to the freedom God offers to conform to or to reject the teachings and life example of Christ; nevertheless their lives have significance for multiple reasons, for they are a part of God’s creation, and as humans they have struggled against themselves, exercising free will either in conformity to or in opposition to God’s will. All of creation, including humans, are a gift of God: we honor this gift when we recognize their lives and pray in gratitude for their lives. But there is something more here. We pray for the departed because we believe our prayers help them. They are still with us, they are still a part of history if not time, and our prayers connect with them. Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, in the book Eschatology as well as his Encyclical Spe Salvi, explains how the departed continue to be connected to our lives, to all human history. He writes that time besets us with problems, but we find help in the community of saints: the redeemed of all ages. “This signifies that the walls separating heaven and earth, and past, present, and future, are now as glass.” We find hope in the saved, those who have “already achieved history of faith.” He argues further that Scripture does not support the idea of a sleep of death that occurs between dying and the end of time; rather those who “died in Christ are alive.” He explains further that “God’s dialogue with us becomes truly human, since God conducts his part as man. Conversely, the dialogue of human beings with each other now becomes a vehicle for the life everlasting, since in the communion of saints it is drawn up into the dialogue of the Trinity itself.” (Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, 2nd ed. (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 9, 131, 159.)

Ratzinger’s work provides a definitive explanation of purgatory, which adds new meaning to the thoughts and prayers for loved ones on Memorial Day. Humans experience memory time, per St. Augustine, shaped by our temporal experiences but not completely tied to them. When we die, memory time separates us from biological time, and we retain this memory for the “possibility of purification and fulfillment in a final destiny which will relate us to matter in a new way. It is a precondition for the intelligibility of the resurrection as a fresh possibility for man.” Memorial Day is a perfect time to ask for forgiveness from those we have wronged, and to pray for them on their journey to righteousness. Ratzinger argues that Jesus in the incarnation bound himself to human history. A person cannot be said to have reached his fulfillment if other humans suffer on account of him/her. “The guilt which goes on because of me,” he writes, “is a part of me. Reaching as it does deep into me, it is part of my permanent abandonment to time, whereby human beings really do continue to suffer on my account, and which, therefore, still affects me.” Moreover, “love cannot . . . close itself against others or be without them so long as time, and with it suffering, is real”—hence love ties us to the present and past suffering of humans even after our deaths. Purgatory is “unresolved guilt, a suffering which continues to radiate out because of guilt. Purgatory means, then, suffering to the end what one has left behind on earth—in the certainty of being definitively accepted, yet having to bear the infinite burden of the withdrawn presence of the Beloved.” (Eschatology, 184, 187, 188, 189)

When on Memorial Day we go to pray for our lost loved ones, it is well to remember Ratzinger’s comment that “even when they have crossed over the threshold of the world beyond, human beings can still carry each other and bear each others’ burdens.” (Eschatology, 227) As Pope Benedict writes in the Encyclical, Spe Salvi, “In Hope We are Saved”: “The belief that love can reach into the afterlife, that reciprocal giving and receiving is possible, in which our affection for one another continues beyond the limits of death—this has been a fundamental conviction of Christianity throughout the ages and it remains a source of comfort today.” Again: “The lives of others continually spill over into mine: in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse. So my prayer for another is not something extraneous to that person, something external, not even after death. In the interconnectedness of Being, my gratitude to the other—my prayer for him—can play a small part in his purification. And for that there is no need to convert earthly time into God’s time: in the communion of souls simple terrestrial time is superseded. It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain.”

Pope Benedict’s teaching has had a profound impact on how I perceive Memorial Day. He is inviting me–and you–to take this Day seriously, to pray for the departed, to establish a communion that reaches beyond time and the grave.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Christianity and Independence Day

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Independence Day in America is a secular holiday celebrating freedom with picnics, fireworks, parades, and the proud display of the American flag. For Christians, Independence Day means even more, for by the signing of the Declaration of Independence a series of events ensued that shaped Christianity in America from 1776 until today. For Roman Catholics, Independence Day means the freedom to worship in America, which allows Roman Catholics the opportunity to spread the truth of Christianity to all people in North America and beyond, thus fulfilling, ultimately, Jesus’s command to His disciples, as quoted by the Apostle Mark, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was Roman Catholic Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Maryland, who like all Catholics in the thirteen British-American colonies was persecuted for his beliefs. Carroll, however, believed in the promise of America: that constitutional safeguards would protect liberty by limiting popular rule, suppress vice and promote virtue, and restrain political passions with a focus on reason. His cousin John Carroll had also grown up in Maryland, experiencing the same restrictions on Roman Catholics; after years of education in Europe, he returned to Maryland during the revolutionary crisis. In 1776, John joined his cousin Charles (as well as Benjamin Franklin) in an unsuccessful diplomatic expedition to Canada to try to convince the Catholics of Quebec to join the American cause. John Carroll was also a Jesuit who lived at a time when Pope Clement XIV had suppressed the Jesuits; Carroll lived through the war keeping his head down as both a Jesuit and Catholic. During the war, the Vicar Apostolic of London had ostensible authority over American Catholics. The Vatican, responding to John Carroll and other Catholics at the end of the war requesting a new authority over American Catholics, appointed Father John Carroll Superior of the Missions. Father Carroll at wars end faced this question: how are Catholics, suppressed during the colonial period, able to exercise their rights and freedoms in an independent United States of America?

The freedom to exercise the same rights as other Americans while also fulfilling the Great Commission to spread Christianity throughout North America inspired Father Carroll in 1784 to write a book, Address to the Roman Catholics of the United States of America. In responding to attacks by American Protestants on Roman Catholics, Father John Carroll’s remarks shed light on how Roman Catholics viewed Independence.

Father Carroll argued that Protestants incorrectly assume that Roman Catholics are authoritarian and unable to accept other people who do not embrace the Catholic way. Rather, “the members of the catholic church are all those, who with a sincere heart seek true religion, and are in an unfeigned disposition to embrace the truth, whenever they find it.” He quoted the authority of St. Thomas Aquinas, “that even they, to whom the gospel was never announced, will be excused from the sin of infidelity. . . . If any of them conduct themselves in the best manner they are able . . . God will provide for them in his mercy.” Carroll elaborated that humans must conform to the “laws of nature” (echoing the Declaration of Independence) “and directions of right reason.” Roman Catholics are therefore joined to other American seekers of religious truth.

The Declaration of Independence proclaims arguments according to reason that are “self-evident” truths. Father Carroll used the same approach in his book, showing the rationale for the emphasis of Roman Catholics on the apostolic tradition: each priest receives from Christ “the same commission of teaching, and administering the sacraments.” The church “cannot exist without preaching of the gospel”; hence the infallible doctrines are continuously provided for all people. “No books, no erudition is here necessary. The illiterate, as well as learned Christian can easily be certified of the fact, on which the reasoning is founded.”

The Declaration of Independence is written for a rational people. Father Carroll expressed his view of the devotion of Catholics to an America “blessed with civil and religious liberty.” Americans, he believed, have “the wisdom and temper to preserve” this liberty such that “America may come to exhibit a proof to the world, that general and equal toleration, by giving a free circulation to fair argument, is the most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith.”

Independence Day to such a person as Father John Carroll is a symbol of God’s providential care for a people who are willing to join together in pursuit of God’s truth, and upon acquiring a working knowledge of said truth, to implement it in government, society, and culture, to promote freedom of conscience confident that inquiring people shall know the truth, and the truth shall set them free.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Christianity and Labor Day: Why Work Matters

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Americans first celebrated Labor Day in the 1880s during the height of the Industrial Revolution in America when immigrants were coming to America to fill the growing number of low-paying jobs in factories in American cities. The founders of Labor Day were Irish Catholics who were seeking better working conditions for the millions of American workers. Whole families, including children, worked long hours in unsafe and dismal factories for extremely low wages. Many of the immigrants arriving to America after the Civil War were Roman Catholics from all parts of Europe. Although their jobs were often the worst of the worst, they knew that work was nevertheless a blessing from God and therefore should be honored. President Grover Cleveland in 1894 made Labor Day an official holiday so that all Americans could celebrate work and workers.

American Catholic workers from the nineteenth to the twentieth century looking for validity in their jobs and commensurate recognition, mostly in terms of job security and good wages, joined labor unions and other organizations to promote the cause of American workers. One such promoter of Catholic work was Dorothy Day, a convert to Catholicism, who in 1933 helped to establish a movement and newspaper, The Catholic Worker, to fight for the recognition and the rights of the American worker.

There is Biblical and ecclesiastical support for the recognition of the worker, the value of work, and the rights of workers. In the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, issued under Pope John Paul II, the necessity and value of work is justified according to Biblical and Catholic doctrine. God’s work, human work, God’s Creation, and humans as creatures who work according to God’s will: these are important themes in the Bible. Adam and Eve were ordained to work, but as obedient creatures working according to God’s will rather than as creators of their own world in the absence of God. God made humans the stewards of the creation working within the guidelines, the will, of God.

There is no better source of wisdom for the value of work and no better model for the worker than the life of Jesus of Nazareth, who learned the trade of a carpenter, and practiced this trade during his life. He often commented on his role working to bring about the Kingdom of God. His life was therefore one of working with God’s creation to fulfill its potential, and working to bring awareness of God’ love for all creatures: these tasks are still considered worthy and holy by His disciples.

The Holy Family is a model of a working family. As Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church proclaims, “the family constitutes one of the most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical order of human work”. Work is the core that holds the family together both in terms of self-esteem of the different family members and the ability of the family to provide a successful and healthy standard of living. By extension, just as Joseph taught Jesus a trade so must all parents impart to their children the realization of the importance of work in human social and cultural existence and in God’s plan for His creation. “Idleness is harmful to man’s being, whereas activity is good for his body and soul.” Work in the family is for the stability of the family’s domestic economy of order, cleanliness, and health, as well as for the material basis to maintain an adequate standard of living to promote self-respect and family pride. For this to occur, as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church states, adequate wages must be provided for substantial quality work. The modern industrial age has often seen exploitation of the poor by means of the wealthy; the Bible and the Church teach that it is incumbent upon those participating in our modern economy to treat workers, no matter their status, with dignity, rewarding their toil with adequate wages, and honoring their work as akin to God’s plan.

Jesus also taught, based on the Scriptures, that work is required for the fulfillment of God’s plan for Creation. Humans, as stewards of the creation, through work care for, protect, manage, and show love for the creation. This Care for Our Common Home has been a frequent theme in the writings of Pope Francis. Through work, he writes in the Encyclical Laudato Si, “each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.”

Work is therefore not only a way to seek fulfillment in life, but work is also required by God to fulfill His benevolent plan for His creation.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Bartholomew de Las Casas: Missionary Advocate for the Indigenous People of New Spain

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

When in 2016 Pope Francis visited Chiapas, Mexico, to demand rights for the indigenous people of Mexico, he was on familiar ground for champions of indigenous rights. Four hundred and eighty-one years earlier, in 1544, one of the great champions of promoting the rights of the American people, Bartholomew de Las Casas, became Bishop of Chiapas. Las Casas (1484-1566), a Dominican monk, spent decades trying to turn back the tide of genocide threatening to inundate the indigenous people of Mexico.

Las Casas is most famous for his Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, in which he condemned the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America. The Spanish, beginning with the first voyages of Columbus, treated the indigenous people as inferior, subjecting them to brutality and enslavement in the encomienda system of labor, which was exacerbated by the many diseases brought among the indigenous people.

But before he became a champion of the Indians, Las Casas had been a part of the Spanish colonial system. A native of Seville, educated at the University of Salamanca, his father had sailed with Columbus on his second voyage in 1496, and brought home an Indian slave boy as a present to Bartholomew. Upon orders of Queen Isabella of Spain to free enslaved Indians in Spain, Las Casas freed the child and resolved to go to America to make his fortune. He accompanied Nicholas de Ovando on a voyage in 1502. Las Casas became a landowner exploiting the Indians for his own purposes. But slowly he changed.

When the Dominicans came to America in 1510, Las Casas resolved to take holy orders. When he arrived in Cuba in 1512, his reputation as a Christian working on behalf of Indian rights preceded him. For a time he believed that the encomienda system was actually good for the indigenous people because it offered Spanish civilization and Christianization. But he changed this point of view and became an opponent of converting people at the point of a sword. “Here I beheld such great cruelty as living man has never seen nor thought to see,” he wrote. “In three or four months, I being present, more than seven thousand children died of hunger, their fathers and mothers having been taken to the mines. Other dreadful things did I see.” (Quoted in Francis A. MacNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas; His Life, Apostolate, and Writings (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1909), 331-2.)

Las Casas found allies in the Vatican and the Spanish Crown. He made several trips to Spain to argue his point of view before King Ferdinand and his successor King Charles V. He was made Procurator-General of the Indies to work on behalf of the Indians. The administrators and soldiers of New Spain, however, stood against him. He was opposed as well by scholars and theologians in Spain, notably Gines de Sepulveda. After Las Casas had been made Bishop of Chiapas, facing ongoing opposition among the Spanish to his humanitarian point of view, he sailed to Spain, and there confronted Sepulveda in a debate in 1550 watched by all of Spain. Las Casas argued against forced Christianization of the natives: “So enormous are the errors and scandalous propositions,” Las Casas argued, “contrary to all evangelical truth and to all Christianity that the Doctor Sepulveda has accumulated, set forth, and coloured with misguided zeal in the royal service, that no honest Christian would be surprised should we wish to combat him, not only with lengthy argument, but likewise as a mortal enemy of Christendom, an abettor of cruel tyrants, extirpator of the human race, and disseminator of fatal blindness throughout this realm of Spain.” (Quoted in MacNutt, Las Casas; 289-290.)

Las Casas became the unrelenting historian of Spanish atrocities, recording what happened in the Caribbean islands, in Mexico, in Central America, and in Florida. None of the noteworthy conquistadores escaped the vitriolic condemnation of his pen. He knew that neither would they escape God’s punishment. Las Casas’ meticulous historical recorded the crimes of Diego Velázquez in Cuba, Hernan Cortez in Mexico, Pedro de Alvarado in Guatemala, Ponce de Leon and Panfilo de Narvaez in Florda, and Hernan de Soto in the American Southeast, among others.

In the end, Las Casas fought a losing battle against human avarice and bloodlust. He and other missionaries, the Franciscans, Jesuits, and Dominicans, tried to ameliorate the rapine and death, but little could be done. God’s vengeance, however, was nigh.

“The injuries and loss,” Las Casas prophesized, “will be visited . . . on all Spain, because the tyranny wrought by their devastations, massacres, and slaughters is so monstrous, that the blind may see it, the deaf hear it, and the dumb recount it, while after our brief existence, the wise shall judge and condemn it. I invoke all the hierarchies and choirs of angels, all the saints of the Celestial Court, all the inhabitants of the globe and especially those who may live after me, to witness that I free my conscience of all that has been done; and that I have fully exposed all these woes to his Majesty; and that if he abandons the government of the Indies to the tyranny of the Spaniards, they will all be lost and depopulated—as we see Hispaniola, and other islands and three thousand leagues of the continent destitute of inhabitants. For these reasons, God will punish Spain and all her people with inevitable severity. So may it be!” (Quoted in MacNutt, Las Casas, 291-92) Such was Las Casas’ prediction of the fall of the Spanish Empire, which began soon after he uttered these words in 1550.

Fast forward to February, 2025. Pope Francis addressed the 7th Indigenous Peoples Forum at the UN echoing the words and wisdom of Bartholomew de Las Casas from almost five hundred years ago. Pope Francis said: “The defense of the right to preserve one’s culture and identity requires the recognition of the value of their contribution to society, as well as the safeguarding of their existence and the natural resources essential for their livelihood.” The Pope further prayed that “appropriate measures are taken to ensure that the human family walks together in pursuit of the common good, leaving no one excluded or forgotten.” (Vatican News: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-02/pope-francis-message-ifad-indigenous-peoples-forum.html) The Pope perfectly stated the sentiments of a man from a different time and place, who was not alone, if he had the loudest voice, in arguing simply that the Roman Catholic Spanish should bring Christian dignity, humility, fairness, and above all, love, to their dealings with the indigenous people of Latin America.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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The Theology of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Joseph Razinger’s (Pope Benedict XVI’s) book Eschatology

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

What happens when we die?

Roman Catholics have death ever on the mind. It is part of Christian theology, to follow the commandments and sacraments so to be prepared when death comes. But then, why do we still fear death? Why when death comes does it seem unexpected and much too soon? For Joseph Ratzinger, who grew up in Bavaria under the horrors of Nazi Germany, when death was ever present, thinking about the end of things, eschatology, was an issue to explore and to understand.

Ratzinger, when Professor of Dogmatics at the University of Regensburg, began a project working with co-author Johann Auer to write a two-volume work on Eschatology and Dogmatic Theology. Ratzinger wrote the volume on Eschatology, but by the time he was to work on the volume on Dogmatic Theology, he had been appointed Archbishop of Munich and Freising, hence it remained unwritten. Eschatology is a brilliant and thought-provoking look into Catholic teaching on the afterlife: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory. Not all Catholics agree with his argument, and most Catholics doubtless have not read the book, as it is dauntingly complex. In what follows, I provide a brief synopsis and analysis of Ratzinger’s book.

In Eschatology, Ratzinger argues that the secularization of world thought beginning with the 18th century Enlightenment has negatively influenced the Church, so that many Christians believe in the secular promise of progress, hence Christians focus so much on the present that the future, death and salvation, appear as something unwelcome, to avoid, to stave off as long as medicinal miracles allow us to hang on to life. Happiness has to be squeezed through the ever-present moment. Ratzinger condemns modern philosophy and theology, which by accommodating current trends of thought and power struggles focused on the immediate and an unknown future, “emasculates Christian hope.” Ratzinger argues, rather, that Christianity a dialogue of present Christ and future occurring in Christ. Christian existence is the interaction between the historical message of the Gospels and present reality.

Ratzinger thinks that the historicity that began with Biblical criticism in the 19th century was embraced by Catholics in the 20th century because of Paul XII in the1950s and Vatican II. Tradition was lost. What was Catholic was lost. The critical historical method attempts to uncover what happened precisely at a time in the past without contemplating tradition over time. Catholicism after Vatican II focused more on the “theory of resurrection in death, and consequent rejection of the concept of the soul.” But Ratzinger argues, why therefore pray for the dead if “dying means an exit from time to non-time” and “nontemporal is straightforwardly identified with eternity”?

Human history, he argues, our own direction of life, has replaced, in our modern world, providential history. Hope based on faith has been replaced by hope in technology and futurism.

What Happens in Death?

Ratzinger begins his book arguing that the Bible, hence Christianity, does not teach what ministers and priests often preach, that when we die we immediately experience salvation, immediately either achieve bliss in Heaven with God or damnation in Hell with Satan. Rather, Ratzinger argues that Jesus returned in His resurrection, continues to return in the Eucharist, and will return in the future. Christ is “the world’s future in the world’s present.” He says further, “the walls separating heaven and earth, and past, present, and future, are now as glass.” The word eschatology does not refer to time rather to existence. Christianity is therefore “an ever renewed act of encounter.” For Ratzinger, the human experience of time occurs according to the ever-present Christ; when an individual dies, time continues on, and for the dead individual, “eternity is not commensurable with time, being of a wholly other order.” Ratzinger, heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy, finds with the Greeks a similar point of view to his own that death is not final, rather a passage to a different form of existence. “Man’s own truth is that he passes away, having no abiding existence in his own right. The more he takes a stand on himself, the more he finds himself suspended over nothing.” Christianity does not teach the soul’s immortality, rather “the resurrection of the complete human being and of that alone.”

Christ and History

Ratzinger’s thought has a sophisticated philosophy of history that is completely at odds with what modern historians believe. The Bible teaches that “each and every human being [and animal] is a suffering being. The moment of death is not our first experience of finitude.”“Death is ever present in the inauthenticity, closedness and emptiness of our everyday life.” Suffering is therefore a means to find God. Death becomes “purifying and transforming.”Ratzinger points to Psalm 73, where the despair and inequality of life is found in the relief and happiness of God in Heaven. Here one finds communion with God, which is the essence of authentic life: “communion with God is reality”—more real than death.The desire for immortality occurs when one finds communion with God, in Love. It is going beyond self-existence.

Scripture, he writes, does not support the idea of a sleep of death that occurs between dying and end of time; rather those who “died in Christ are alive.” Likewise, the idea of a dualism of body and soul is not supported by Christianity; rather the unification of body and soul, even after death.” The idea so popular among Christians of an eternity with a beginning is no eternity at all. Someone who has lived during a definite period of time, and died at a definite point in time, cannot simply move across from the condition “time” into the condition “eternity,” timelessness. “The resurrection [is] a pledge to the future of man and the cosmos, and in this sense a pledge to space, time and matter. . . . In the resurrection, God proves himself to be the God also of the cosmos and of history.” The Last Day is not the “moment of individual death” rather “the shared ending of all history.” There is no interruption in life between death and the end of the world.

Ratzinger’s thought on death and time was heavily influenced by Aurelius Augustine, the author of Confessions and The City of God. Augustine taught that the past is recalled in the present, it is past in its quality in the present; likewise with the expectation of the future. Humans experience time as a movement, not just of physical bodies, but the spiritual component of humans allows for a different, deeper experience than a mere physical body. “In human consciousness, the various levels of time are at once assumed and transcended, rendering that consciousness temporal, in a way all its own.” Humans externalize time by memory and anticipation. Also, human love experiences this temporal process, so that “the fabric of shared humanity is a fabric of shared temporality.” Humans, per Augustine, have therefore memory time shaped by our temporal experiences. When we die, memory time separates us from biological time, and we retain this memory for the “possibility of purification and fulfillment in a final destiny which will relate us to matter in a new way. It is a precondition for the intelligibility of the resurrection as a fresh possibility for man.” Augustine (and Ratzinger) believed that death does not end our memory, but there is a continuing reality.

“ln the man Jesus, God comes in one and the same in a human and in a divine way. His coming transcends the logic of history, yet concerns all history. Human activity carries on with its own kind of objectivity, but a new dimension is opened up pertinent to human existence and thus to all the world. The divine coming compels man to adopt an attitude of watchful readiness which looks out for the Parousia of Jesus and thus prevents history from falling into a self-enclosure which would condemn human existence to meaninglessness and purposelessness.”

The Salvation of All Life

One of the most compelling and controversial arguments in Eschatology is Ratzinger’s discussion of the “dynamic unity of the entire created world.” Humans are anima forma corporis, an essence, an indestructible life form; human is “the creature . . . for whom the vision of God is part and parcel of his very being.” Ratzinger was also heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas’ theology of creation: “nature is only possible by virtue of a communication of the Creator’s, yet such communication both establishes the creature in its own right and makes it a genuine participator in the being of the One communicated.” Further, “the claim that the whole of God’s creation, in whatever form, will enter upon its definitive salvation at the end of time is so palpable that any reflective systematization of the biblical data must do it justice.” Further, “no part of God’s creation is too insignificant to be made perfect.” “God is faithful to his whole creation.” “By announcing a new heaven and a new earth, the Bible makes it clear that the whole of creation is destined to become the vessel of God’s glory. All of created reality is to be drawn into blessedness.”

His comments are an astonishing argument that all life is united in God, which is not terminated in death, rather is fulfilled with the coming of Christ.

Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven

Ratzinger’s discussion in Eschatology of heaven, hell, and purgatory is a riveting discourse on theology and the Bible. “In death, a human being emerges into the light of full reality and truth.” Hell is “a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent into the Night.” Hell is the consequence of the personal decision by each individual who pushes God away. But there is hope, offered by God. The sufferer must, however, relinquish control, and accept God’s will.

Most people die to purgatory, which is part of a historical process uniting the alive with the dead because “everyone exists simultaneously in other people. What happens in one individual has an effect upon the whole of humanity, and what happens in humanity happens in the individual.” “Even,” he writes, “when they have crossed over the threshold of the world beyond, human beings can still carry each other and bear each others’ burdens.” Purgatory then is “unresolved guilt, a suffering which continues to radiate out because of guilt. Purgatory means, then, suffering to the end what one has left behind on earth—in the certainty of being definitively accepted, yet having to bear the infinite burden of the withdrawn presence of the Beloved.”

Here, he argues that purgatory is the continuation of history, even after death—such an idea would make most modern historians squirm in their seats!

Heaven is the final achievement, but it is not a departure, rather a “new mode of presence to the world.” Heaven is when we participate in the “new mode of Christ’s existence.”

Death and Love

Throughout all of Ratzinger’s writings is the emphasis on love. This is revealed in the encyclicals he published as Pope Benedict XVI. The reader finds much of his book Eschatology reflected in these encyclicals. In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas est, “God is Love,” he emphasizes that love is the force that unites life and death, all creatures, the challenges of purgatory and the blessings of heaven. His comment in Eschatology that “Christ brings time to its completion by leading it into the moment of love” is the theme of his encyclical on love. The themes of Eschatology are also found in his second encyclical, Spe Salvi, “In Hope We Are Saved.” As he wrote in Eschatology, “eternal life does not isolate a person, but leads him out of isolation into true unity with his brothers and sisters and the whole of God’s creation.” His final encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, “Charity in Truth,” we find a theme emphasized in Eschatology, that “I come face to face with my own guilt vis a vis the suffering members of that body as well as the forgiving love which the body derives from Christ its Head.” This involves “love beyond the grave.”

Pope Benedict XVI, Joseph Ratzinger, was a superb scholar, a deep thinker, who at the same time was open to all emotions, all feelings: the wonderful combination of these two different characters is clearly revealed not only in his encyclicals, but in the book Eschatology, as well.

A version of this article appeared in Catholic 365

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Thomas Merton and the Great Commission

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Thomas Merton spent his life contemplating his purpose in the world, trying to discern how his desires and ambitions fit God’s plan. Born in France in 1915, Merton was well-traveled, a convert to Catholicism, and by his own admission was wild as a youth before he settled down and determined to join a religious order. Initially he sought to join the Franciscan order, but being denied, he ended up with the Trappists, living most of his life at the Abby of Gethsemani in Kentucky. His joined the Abby in 1941 and stayed there until a few months before his death in 1968. Besides his role and work as a monk, Merton’s true profession was as a writer. He wrote numerous books, the most famous being The Seven Storey Mountain, published in 1948; most his books were about his own spiritual journey, and he became quite famous, though he felt guilty for his fame. He was a true recluse, seeking most days to be alone with God. He kept a daily journal in which he reflected on his life and relationship with God.  

Merton worked to fulfill the Great Commission in three ways: first, as a monk in daily prayer for others; second, through his books and articles, in which he reached out to religious and nonreligious trying to strengthen the faith of the former and turn the latter toward God. Third, and most unique, was his work to bring the Great Commission to the Creation. This is after all what Jesus commanded, according to the Gospel of Mark: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.” Unlike Matthew, who writes that Jesus proclaimed that his disciples “go and make disciples of all nations,” Mark uses the Greek word, “ktisis,” which literally means “creature” or “creation.” How does one preach to all creatures, to the whole creation?

Preaching to the creation was what Thomas Merton was able to do. One of the ways Merton was able to accomplish this difficult task was his ability to recognize the logos in individual creatures in God’s creation. The logos, the word, is, according to the Gospel of John, the creative presence with God at the beginning—“through him all things were made,” John writes. The meaning and significance of such an idea is far beyond what humans can understand. Merton knew his own limitations, but he also had a discerning mind, and a love for all creatures. He spent days and nights, usually alone, in the forests and meadows of the Abby at Gethsemani, where he watched the sun and moon, felt the breeze, the cold of winter and heat of summer, focused on the many animals that lived nearby, watching the moment of all things–birth, growth , and death. He was a child of wonder in his investigations of the natural world. This empathy he felt toward all things was the gift he possessed to fulfill Christ’s commission to bring the Good News to other members of the Creation. The missionary must gain awareness of the Logos as the creative presence in all things and by this awareness the missionary, by care and by love, spreads the Good News.

The means to the end of fulfilling the Great Commission was Merton’s recognition that Love is all, the creative act, the way that God communicates with all aspects, all individuals, in reality—“the reality of now–the unreality of all the rest. The unreality of ideas and explanations and formulas. I am. The unreality of the rest. . . . Butterflies dance together . . . The trees are fresh and green in the sun . . . Small clouds inexpressibly beautiful and silent and eloquent over the silent woodlands. What a celebration of light, quietness, and glory!”

The simplest acts of life and death in God’s creation became to Merton eloquent testaments to God’s love, the presence of the Logos, the ultimate expression of God’s truth. “Today it was wonderful,” he wrote. “Clouds, sky overcast, but tall streamers of sunlight coming down in a fan over the bare hills. Suddenly I became aware of great excitement.” Starlings rose from the meadow in great numbers, startled by a predator soaring high above. A hawk attacked and grabbed one of the birds in its talons. Merton, knowing he was witnessing one of the great wonders in nature, turned to God in prayer, but he was distracted by the hawk ripping into the captured starling, gorging itself in a bloody repast. He realized the hawk’s important role in the nature of all things, saying to the bird, “I wonder if my admiration for you gives me an affinity for you, artist. I wonder if there will ever be something connatural between us, between your flight and my heart, stirred in hiding to serve Christ as you, soldier, serve your nature.” Merton realized that the hawk by his actions praised God, doing what he was meant to do. The many animals Merton saw that day, he realized, “sanctified” God by their actions. An amateur birder, Merton observed a Tennessee warbler, and “felt very close to God or felt religious awe anyway. Watching those birds was as food for meditation or as mystical reading. Perhaps better. Also the beautiful, unidentified red flower or fruit I found on a bud yesterday. I found a bird in the woods yesterday on the feast of St. Francis. Those things say so much more than words.” What a gift, he thought to himself, that God had given him in allowing his senses and mind to be completely entranced by these natural wonders.

What was more, Merton felt a great anonymity in watching birds that were themselves anonymous, without names, yet each one known by, cared by, God. Such, he believed, was the role of the missionary, to bring knowledge of God to others, if only by observing them, caring for them, understanding them, loving them, then to move on, to depart, to become as anonymous as the creatures he witnessed.

There was something holy in the night to Thomas Merton. Many evenings into the night, or awakening early, long before dawn, he sat alone and felt and watched the symphony of being playing before him: the dampness of the cool night air, the rising fog, the path of the moon, the crickets singing a mystical song, the early morning birds marking their territory or singing out for a mate, the silence of the snowfall or the drama of the thunderstorm—all wondrous, all musical, all magisterial, songs of life, of creation, of which he was a part, merged with all creatures, all things made by God, and he could feel the presence of the Logos, and he knew that God was with him.

In such a way Thomas Merton united himself with the thousands of missionaries who came before him, those Spanish, French, German, English, Polish, and more–missionaries who crossed the Atlantic to the Americas in the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, bringing the Good News, fulfilling the Great Commission. They mostly came to other humans, to the American Indians of South, Central, and North America, but they came as well to all creatures, all Creation, in America, bringing their thoughts and minds, their senses and awareness, to the beauty of the American natural environment. And seeking to understand this environment, to live in it, suffer in it, die in it, these missionaries of old brought their whole being to bear in spreading the Word to all things, all of America. And Roman Catholicism imprinted itself on the American environment and on the American people. It was truly Catholic, truly universal, this spiritual presence that spread throughout the land.

All quotes from Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton: His Life from His Journals (New York: HarperCollins, 1999).

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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