The heresy test

---

Once upon a time, when the Internet was young – approximately 1996 – I had a funny little website which drew no traffic at all. (Almost like today!) It was mostly a nice way for me to practice writing HTML. I posted jokes, and had a family-history section.

I also had a nice heresy test.

It was very simple: five questions, multiple-choice. You were expected to answer from the dogmatically established Roman Catholic point of view. Otherwise, the test threw you out. You were a heretic and bound to burn in hell unless you renounced your heretical beliefs.

Here’s a sample question:

The Blessed Virgin Mary was the mother of Jesus. Jesus was, of course, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, which means he was God. If you follow this line of thinking, you will probably realize that this makes Mary (a human being) the mother of God (who is eternal).


How can a mother be younger than her own son?


A: Oh, to hell with logic. Mary is the Mother of God. Period. End of story.

B: Mary was the mother of the human part of Jesus. She's not the mother of God; that wouldn't be logical.

C: Mary is the mother of Jesus in some sense of the word, but not in every sense of the word. We shouldn't try to define these things too precisely.


The correct answer is A. This was established (with some strife) at two Church councils: the “robber’s council” of Ephesus in 449, which claimed B to be correct, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451 (only two years later!) which reversed Ephesus and laid the Church’s path to the present day.


Did you get the question right?


I didn’t think so.


Burn in hell, heretic.

---

The one, the true, the good, and the beautiful

---

I was taught classical philosophy at Gonzaga University, a Jesuit institution. This means that I was taught Aristotelian philosophy, by way of Thomas Aquinas.

I learned, in my Metaphysics class taught by Father Carney back in 1977, that there are four transcendental properties: the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Everything in the world partakes of these four properties. Take a tree, for example. It’s one tree: it’s a unity, a thing in the world that can be pointed at and identified. It’s a true tree: it’s identifiable, it’s a unique tree, it’s that tree there in the front yard, and it definitely conforms to every definition of a tree you ever heard of. It’s a good tree, in that it conforms to the definition of trees, and in its nature it has never consciously committed any evil deed. And it is a beautiful tree, because it, in its present state of being, is admirable and beautiful, whether or not it’s perfectly symmetrical or delightful.

Then, recently, I ran across this old dialogue between Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore:

TAGORE: . . .  Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals; it is the impersonal human world of Truths. Religion realizes these Truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of Truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to Truth, and we know this Truth as good through our own harmony with it.

EINSTEIN: Truth, then, or Beauty is not independent of Man?

TAGORE: No.

EINSTEIN: If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.

TAGORE: No.

This hurts me.  It strikes at the True, and at the Beautiful.  (Well, the Beautiful was little shaky to begin with, in case you didn’t notice.)

Basically, Tagore is saying that, if there were no people in the world, the transcendental properties would not apply.

Uh-oh.

Beauty becomes a fashion show of stuff that doesn’t matter, and Truth becomes just a set of things that equal other things.

And it goes without saying that the Good goes right out the window.

And – given what we know about the subatomic universe – who can say what’s a unity? What’s the One?

The Universe is a scary place, kids, when you take away the transcendental properties.

Somebody please hold my hand.

---