On Charity that Increases and Overcomes the Unreal

December 6 is the day of St. Nicholas of Myra, that saint of great charity who, at the 325 A.D. Council of Nicaea, slapped the heretic Arius for preaching the unreal to steal from the children right faith, hope, and love in Christ.

In that spirit, I offer the following quotations from Anthony Esolen, drawn from his latest volume, Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2020):

We dwell in Unreal City. We all dwell there. We have all been dulled and deadened by the unreal. But if God is real, then to turn away from God is to leap into unreality, and that is pretty much the definition of evil. (8)

If a man claims to be a woman, which he can never be, and demands to be addressed as such, he is not merely asking for right etiquette. It is not true. He is demanding that we enter his delusion, or his lie. It is not true. He is demanding that believers in God fall in worship of an idol. Some idols are hideous, like Moloch, and some are beautiful, like Dionysus. The Hebrew prophets did not care. They did not condemn the idols for their style. They condemned them for being false. (40)

In 1982, Walter Ong . . . noted that in American colleges the masculine virtue of courage and free fighting in the pursuit of truth was being set aside in favor of the expression of feelings and the championing of political ideals. (43)

Feminism says that women and men are not made for one another, and therefore their interests are separable. That is a lie. Transgenderism agrees with the lie and adds that a woman can be made into a man, or vice versa. (43)

I could dearly wish for the skeptics of old, who demanded reason, evidence, and demonstration. (45).

I find that the rock of the Christian faith permits a man to retain a healthy skepticism about all things that the faith does not decide upon. (46)

Man is made for faith: he is homo credens. If he does not believe in God, he will turn straightaway to some idol, a stock or stone, himself, the state, sex—something stupid, salacious, or malignant, like a cancer. Man without faith become credulous. (46)

I believe in God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. That belief is reasonable. I can argue for it. I have done so. A corollary of that belief is a trust in the reality and intelligibility and integrity of created things. (49)

Aristotle, the philosopher with the mind of a biologist, saw final causality or purpose in the features of living things, and formal cause, that is, fundamental principles of structure, in the features and their interrelationship. A dog is not a dog because of the batch of matter that makes him up, since that matter is subject to continual change. He is also not a dog, if we are to trust Darwin, merely because his sire and his dam were dogs. He is a dog, said Aristotle, because of the canine organization of his organs—his form; and his form is the sort of thing that tends to its full realization or end in the health of an adult dog, capable of reproducing after his kind. (51)

In the old way of looking at things, by what has been called the philosophia perennis, the philosophy that does not go out of date with the years, we see that a dog is a dog and not a cat, and that fact determines our language. The species are real. The statement “I see the dog,” understood with its full epistemological and ontological import, comes near in our time to the defiant witness that the martyrs of old gave, when they confessed Christ before pagans who hated and feared them and thirsted for their blood. (52)

Names should reveal, not conceal. (53)

The unreality of the “transgender” movement, set ablaze by the wildfire of the sexual revolution generally, depends for its existence upon the supposition that realities depend upon words, so that whoever controls the language controls the universe. (54)

[Commenting on The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village (1978)] “Girls are like broom, and boys are like gorse,” he said. The broom, he explained, flowers all spring and summer and has long slender delicate branches that sway in the wind. Girls are like that, he said, and that is why they weep the broom in the house. Boys, he went on, are hard and spiny like the gorse bush. You cannot easily grab them without getting a thorn in your hand. They do not bloom for long, but they are tough, and they stay outdoors, and they brace the elements. (56)

You cannot get that modus vivendi if you do not raise boys to be men. (57)

There is no reason why marriage should even exist as an institution, were it not for the fact the marriage is fruitful. Mother and father make children. They do the child-making thing. That is what sexual intercourse is. Marriage has no biological purpose otherwise. (71)

The Christian who looks with love upon the three-Person God sees not lonely ideology but love, the giving and receiving of gifts, within the divine life itself. Edward Gibbon sneered and said, of the early Christian controversies, that they were all about a diphthong: whether Christ was homo-ousios, “one in being” with the Father, or merely homoiousios, “like unto” the Father. He did not see that the character of all the world, and of human society itself, rested upon the distinction. (182)

The Incarnation implies the Church. . . . The members in the Church are bound together by charity. . . . The dilemma of the singular and the plural is resolved in the Body of Christ, not by way of compromise, but by that charity that increases being by increasing love. (192)

At a stroke, Jesus gives us what is more humbly real than our bread and wine, and more exalted than our highest conceptions of deity; it is “immensity cloistered in thy dear womb”, as John Donne says of the Virgin Mary, or the kingdom of God in a mustard seed. I think of that Blessed Sacrament, and there is no infinitesimal portion of the material universe that does not gleam with the possibility of glory, and there is no infinitude of divinity that God cannot house within the walls of the material: a womb, a manger, a man praying in the desert, a man suffering upon a cross, a body laid in a tomb, a Savior risen in glory; a mustard seed, a thought, an impulse of the will, to turn and be converted and be real. (209)