Ben Smith points us to the reaction of Michael Sean Winters, who was decidedly underwhelmed by Obama’s speech at Notre Dame, which Winters had hoped would be a “home run.” Winters found the praise of doubt that Obama offered to be mistaken and tone-deaf:

If that was the President’s best impersonation of Augustine, he gets an F. For starters, there is nothing ironic about faith. Secondly, a Catholic university is an odd place to give an essentially Protestant interpretation of what can, and cannot, be “known” by faith. Finally, it is not doubt that invites humility. It is faith itself – faith in a God who has not finished with His creation, faith in a God who counseled us to humility in His scriptures and who gave an example of humility if His own life when He walked the earth – that leads us to humility. And, I would have thought even a rudimentary knowledge of human psychology would suggest that self-righteousness is a temptation as well known to the doubters as to those possessed of true faith.

This seems quite right. Everyone is stricken with doubt at times, but it has to be understood that doubt, like an illness, is something from which one may suffer but which is something that needs to be remedied rather than perpetuated or celebrated. Physical illness can have a humbling effect, but a proper understanding of theological anthropology tells us that illness, like death, is part of our fallen state. Doubt is a function of a mind clouded by the passions–it is the result of confusion. It does not teach us anything, but rather prevents us from learning. It is important to see the difference between doubt and apophatic theology: one is the function of human confusion, the other is the necessary recognition of the unknowability of God in His essence. Obama misleadingly lumps the two together. As Obama would have it, because we cannot know God in Himself and cannot always understand what He wills for us we must therefore abandon all claims of certainty, even when these are founded in what God has told and revealed to us about Himself. Obama said, “It is beyond our capacity as human beings to know with certainty what God has planned for us or what he asks of us,” but only for the first part of this is true. What God asks of us is well-known. In the Psalms, for example, He tells us, “Be still and know that I am God.” He has not said, “Be ironically detached and suppose that I might very well be God, depending on how the mood strikes you.” We hide behind doubt and any number of other convenient shields to protect our little selfish empires from the demands that we know God makes of us. He has said, “Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and all thy soul and all thy mind and all thy strength.” What He asks of us is quite clear. Indeed, if there is anything we can say that we know with certainty, it is this.

Smith says that it was “less predictable” that Andrew found the speech admirable, but it was actually perfectly predictable. Andrew regularly promotes his idea of a “conservatism of doubt,” classes all expressions of religious certainty as fundamentalist and believes that the universal experience of doubt should somehow make doubt essential to a living faith. While I doubt I will ever manage to persuade Andrew on this point, this is rather like saying that the general experience of sin should make sin a crucial part of one’s faith, which is more obviously absurd but otherwise basically the same kind of argument.

Thomas Sunday is an interesting day. Following the first week after Pascha, we hear the Gospel reading that tells us of the Apostle Thomas’ doubt that the Lord has indeed risen. The One Whom we have been proclaiming to be truly risen ever since the week before has to appear to Thomas so that he may believe in the most fundamental truth of the faith, without which, the Apostle Paul has told us, our faith is in vain. In other words, St. Thomas’ doubt at that moment was a failure to believe in things not seen, and in that failure he was failing to believe the one thing that all disciples of Christ had to believe if their faith was to mean anything. If we look at it this way, we understand that doubt is not necessary, nor is it profitable, nor it is good, but it is rather a betrayal of the power and truth of faith. Doubt is a kind of denial of the Master. While we might understand how St. Peter, on the night the Lord gave Himself up for us, might have been so terrified as to deny that he knew the Lord, what excuse do we have to offer up such denials, much less wrap them up in faux-serious introspection and self-serving poses of humility?

Scott Richert has more on the speech, noting the “fair-minded words” anecdote that Obama keeps recycling every time he is called on to address matters of faith and ethics, especially in connection with abortion. This is an anecdote he has been using and reinventing for years as the occasion requires it. This “fair-minded words” dodge is one of the oldest tricks in Obama’s book, which is how he can continue to portray himself as some sort of reasonable interlocutor, especially on those basic issues of human dignity and justice concerning the unborn on which he is among the least reasonable and most reflexive and ideological. Perhaps if Obama were more prone to doubt the ideological certainties that prompt him to oppose any and all restrictions on abortion, he might then seem like less of a caricature on this issue and more like the reasonable person he wants us to think he is.

P.S. What part of “Do not be unbelieving, but believing” do people not understand?

Update: There is a relevant passage from the introductory article in Orthodox Readings of Augustine discussing the theology of Christos Yannaras:

Following Lossky, apophaticism for Yannaras is not simply defining God in terms of what God is not, but the affirmation that true knowledge of God occurs in mystical union with God. Although apophaticism does assert the incomprehensibility of God’s essence, it does not deny that God is known. Apophaticism points to a limit in the adequacy of human conceptualization of God not to silence theology, but to indicate that true knowledge of God is an ekstatic going beyond human reason in the experience of mystical union. The logic of divine-human communion, theosis, thus demands an apophatic method in theology, in the sense that it asserts the incomprehensibility of the divine essence; but this incomprehensibility implies that knowledge of God lies beyond reason in an ekstatic movement of participation in the divine energies.

Doubt does not facilitate this participation, but thwarts it by calling into question whether it is even possible.

Second Update: It is, of course, futile to continue debating this, but I do have another quote that will at least clarify why it is futile. Fr. John Behr, writing on the Nicene-Arian debates of the fourth century, said in “The question of Nicene orthodoxy”:

This is an important point: at stake are different paradigms, within which doctrinal formulations take flesh. The similarity of terms and expressions, yet difference of paradigm or imaginative framework, explains why most of the figures in the fourth century seem to be talking past each other, endlessly repeating the same point yet perennially perplexed as to why their opponents simply don’t get it.

Those who do not understand that doubt is contrary to and antithetical to faith keep using the words doubt and faith as if these usages were the same as those employed by the critics of Obama’s remarks. Once again, we are running up against the problem of Obama’s manifest heterodoxy (in which he is obviously far from alone), which makes every dispute over his statements on faith into an interminable grudge-match. Orthodox critics will apply standards and definitions to his words that he does not apply, and so he says what seems to him and those of like mind to be utterly unobjectionable, almost boilerplate, statements, but which are obviously nonsense to anyone with meaningful grounding in orthodox definitions. The endless argument over what Obama was saying, much less whether he was right in what he said, is unlikely to be resolved when the disputing parties are not even working within the same framework. This doesn’t mean that all frameworks are right, but merely that they are infuriatingly opaque to one another, so much so that there seems to be no possibility of agreement on the basic definitions of terms. Nothing could have better illustrated why dialogue and “fair-minded words” are utterly inadequate to any debate that involves such fundamental disagreements than the debates that Obama’s speech has provoked.

Third Update: H.C. Johns, guest blogging for John at Upturned Earth, has an excellent post that explains with much more patience what I was trying to say with my quote from Fr. Behr, and which does an admirable job of responding to Damon Linker’s comments on the debate. One of things that Johns says that is crucial for understanding the vastness of the chasm between the two sides here was this:

This difference is glaringly apparent in Linker’s response. His attitude towards doubt is thoroughly post-Cartesian: doubt for him directs us to the seen, to the experiences which ground proper understanding [bold mine-DL]. Because we are blind to the things named by revelatory tradition and lack a direct experiential confirmation, doubt demands we should withhold judgement. This mode of thinking has deep roots stretching back to the beginning of modernity, underlies our science and political process, and is deeply appealing at many levels, but note how different this is from Larison’s doubting: doubt here does not lead us away from truth. To the contrary, it is the only way to truth, and a truth which is obscured from the very beginning of inquiry.

I think Johns has described this correctly, and it is this emphasis on the visible that is the most troubling. Were we to have “direct confirmation,” our freedom would be curtailed. At the same time, to say that remaining in uncertainty is the “destiny of all thoughtful human beings” is to say that it is the destiny of all thoughtful human beings to remain out of communion with God for at least their entire earthly lives. This is a denial of the possibility of real incarnate faith, but just as important it is a denial of the Christian’s hope of entering into communion with God.

My view on this has been influenced to some degree by Dostoevsky’s understanding of the relationship between free will and faith, which places great emphasis not only on belief in things not seen, but a strong suspicion of believing things about God simply on the basis of visible signs. After all, the Lord said, “A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign, there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.” (Mt. 16:4) For Dostoevsky, the miraculous was real, but it was something that he also believed could infringe on free will and a freely-received faith.

The Palestinians could have transformed the Strip into the Singapore of the Mediterranean; instead, it became Hamastan. ~The Jerusalem Post

This is what we might expect from the Post’s editors, but it seems to me that this statement has reached a new level of absurdity that is remarkable even for this lot. One could observe that Singapore would not have been the Singapore we know today had it not been for a number of exceptionally favorable conditions that prevailed after WWII, and that it would probably not have grown into the commercial and financial center that it became if it did not have the security and peace of being under British rule for decades after the war and then quickly establishing its own independence over forty years ago. The Palestinians have been under occupation for almost as long as Singaporeans have had their own country, but the Palestinians are somehow to blame for not having created a new Singapore overnight under far worse conditions.

Having occupied Palestinian territory for decades and ruled over them as a subject people, Israel is supposed to be credited with leaving an impoverished, overcrowded enclave to the inevitable domination of the faction that was bound to control it, after having created the conditions that prompted the formation of Hamas and tacitly permitting it to grow as a counterweight to the PLO. Then, after just four years, most of which have been defined by embargo and occasional military operations, the failure to create Singapore on the Med will be used as evidence that Israeli policy has already been too generous. Singapore’s rise was fueled in no small part by foreign investment. Who would put their money in Gaza under current conditions of embargo and lack of sovereignty?

Here is the video for Chris Cornell’s “Long Gone.”

Richard and I are in agreement that monetary policy is the concern of elites and has little or no direct connection to popular attitudes, but I think he has misunderstood my references to social solidarity and citizenship. I mentioned these things as bulwarks against both personal irresponsibility and the related recourse to dependency on government remedies. If inflationary policies serve the interests of debtors, which encourages them to endorse such policies at the expense of the commonwealth and their less-indebted fellow citizens, repudiating these policies will require an understanding of the common good and the mutual obligation that fellow citizens owe to one another. No small part of the housing crisis is the result of defaults that result from people who abandon mortgages without any concern for how this affects their “neighbors,” whom they do not actually see as their neighbors except in the most minimal, physical sense. An ethic of remaining in a place despite hardship, rather than walking away to satisfy immediate desires, would teach us to resist this. This is why discussions of place, limits and restraint are essential to correcting many of the disorders afflicting our country today.

Everyoneseemstoagreethat the appointment of Utah’s Gov. Jon Huntsman as ambassador to China is a wise and politically brilliant move. I plan to have more to say about this, but one thing I will say now is that the nomination is a fascinating intersection of the Obama administration’s flirtations with foreign policy realism, the GOP’s increasingly unreasonable definition of what passes for a “moderate” (Huntsman’s heresies, such as they are, are actually quite mild), the enduring (and perfectly predictable) resistance to Mormon politicians in presidential politics, and the absence of credible high-profile Republican leadership on foreign policy in opposition to the administration. Related to foreign affairs, Huntsman may have been the most qualified and credible Republican office-holder outside of Congress, and he has now joined the administration. This suggests not only that the administration has captured the foreign policy center, as I was arguing earlier this week, but that those Republicans who might be best qualified to try to take it away from Obama are moving out of electoral politics and into diplomatic service on behalf of Obama’s administration.

P.S. Regarding the Giordano remark about Steele’s Romney gaffe, I would repeat that Steele’s gaffe was a true Kinsley gaffe in that it was an accidental statement of an impolitic truth. Mormonism was, and remains, a real political liability for Romney, as it would have been for Huntsman had he considered running in ’12. This makes all kinds of people uncomfortable for different reasons, but the main reason seems to be that East Coast elite conservatives have developed this strange habit of anointing prominent Mormon politicians who stand no chance of winning presidential nomination as future leaders of the party and they are finding it quite irritating that most Republican voters aren’t going along.

As for the Mormon outreach the Obama campaign did in early ’08, I would note that this yielded nothing in real electoral terms for the reasons that Romneyites are always telling us about–Mormons tend to be social conservatives and they usually back socially conservative politicians, and Obama was decidedly not one of those. Obama’s evangelical outreach yielded no meaningful gain for much the same reason. Evangelicals have been dissed and dismissed inside the coalition for decades, but they keep showing up and backing the party more actively than any other single group, so it is unlikely that Mormon voting patterns are going to change dramatically in the near future. Ironically, it is partly because of the stubborn loyalty of evangelicals to the Republican coalition that Mormon candidates are never going to win presidential nomination on the party’s ticket.

My new column for The Week is now up. Here is the main point:

The faction most responsible for the GOP’s political failure is national security conservatives. Yet within the party, they remain unscathed, their assumptions about the use of American power largely unquestioned, and their gross errors in judgment forgotten or readily forgiven. Among the mainstream right, the foreign policy of the Bush administration is barely a subject of debate. Rather than reorienting Republican foreign policy towards a political center defined by realism, humility and restraint, the GOP’s leadership and activists have redoubled their commitment to Bush and Cheney’s hawkish stances and to a lock-step defense of the Bush administration’s policies.

This situation creates a strange incongruity. In one breath, conservatives will invoke a baseless claim that Bush’s excessive spending lost them the country, and in the next they will defend to the last Bush’s decisions as Commander-in-Chief. Yet these were the decisions that, more than anything else, led to Democratic victories and the GOP’s now toxic reputation. What is more, everyone outside the conservative bubble knows the narrative that mainstream conservatives tell themselves is false, which makes conservative professions of fiscal austerity and continued hawkishness even less likely to win public support.

In the year of our nation, 2005, “earmark,” a term of trade known only to political technicians, became a household word. The Bridge to Nowhere, a mere outlay of $320 million in that year’s $2.5 trillion federal budget, led to the decline and fall of the Republican Party [bold mine-DL]. In 2006, a disgusted American electorate threw Republicans from office, and transferred House control to the Democrats. ~Daniel Henninger

None of this is true, except that there was an appropriation for the bridge a few years ago and the Republicans did lose control of the House (and, one might add, the Senate). There was no “year of our nation” 2005, but the Year of Our Lord, I very much doubt earmark was or is a household word, and the Bridge to Nowhere did not lead to the fall of the GOP. It coincided with that fall, which was happening for other reasons, and it certainly didn’t help prevent the fall, but it had no significant effect on the 2006 (or 2008) elections. The electorate was disgusted, but for the most part it was disgusted over other things, including the response, or lack thereof, to the ruin of New Orleans and the disaster that was unfolding in Iraq, and to the extent that the behavior of members of Congress entered into it at all it was the criminal behavior of so many House members resulting in indictments and convictions for corruption.

Having deemed earmarking to be corruption, its monomaniacal foes would like to conclude that the electorate’s revulsion against actual corruption that violated the law has something to do with objections to pork-barrel spending. Of course, Duke Cunningham wasn’t sent away because he directed some federal money to his district for some construction project, but because he used his office to acquire gifts and favors for himself. Henninger is so preoccupied with Jack Murtha’s wheeling and dealing that he seems to have forgotten all about DeLay, Abramoff and the K Street crowd who represented the real criminal and unethical excesses of the GOP majority. Who can take seriously an argument that concludes, “The whole system has become an earmark”? What does that even mean? That is like saying that the federal government has become an amendment. It is nonsense. If the “whole system” were somehow “an earmark,” that would mean that there would be some degree of accountability and transparency, so that we would know how and where our money is being spent. Instead, especially as it relates to the actions of Treasury and the Fed and the money appropriated for the TARP, that has not been the case at all.

Cathy Young was making a lot of sense in this column, and then she said this:

The “Good War,” like the Good Book, can be put in the service of any agenda. Conservatives invoke it to justify military action: “What about Hitler?” is a devastating, if cliché, rebuttal to the pacifist insistence that there is never a good reason to start a war [bold mine-DL].

No doubt pacifists are also against starting wars, because they are theoretically against all wars, which is why very few people even claim to be pacifists. In any case, this is an odd thing to say. Why is the insistence that there is never a good reason to start a war a pacifist one? The example of Hitler does not provide support for the idea of starting a war. Indeed, a large number of his crimes involved starting a war and unleashing all of the evils that follow from that, which one might think would provide support for an argument against starting wars. When it comes to discussing whether or not a state should start a war, can anyone actually offer a good reason? This seems unlikely, as there is nothing good in aggressive warfare. So the response in this case doesn’t seem devastating at all.

Conor is overthinking this. The question is not whether Val Kilmer is qualified to be governor of New Mexico, but why someone so relatively sane as a method actor would want the job. Frankly, a crazy actor transplant who lives in Pecos is probably overqualified and would have to be turned away to avoid embarrassing everyone else in Santa Fe.

Great news–John Schwenkler’s Upturned Earth will now be at the TAC site. John is one of the best bloggers around, and I am extremely pleased that he will be one of our regular colleagues and fellow bloggers. We are lucky to have him and his colleague J.L. Wall, and I look forward to the future discussions with them. If you somehow haven’t been reading John’s blog before now, I recommend that you begin today.