Rhology’s Ontological Error About Mary

This is the latest in a series of back-and-forth posts and comments between myself and the fakes flops flukes folks over at Buggers All. (They call it Beggars All, but that’s pretense talking.) At the start of it all was this dumb post on February 6 by Mr. Alan “Rhology” Marycle. (I spell it thus in honor of Our Lady.) In it he described the Rosary and other Marian prayers as “blasphemous” “verses of sheer awesomeness” which “mak[e] demons laugh uproariously.” (His verbal powers have never been on more windy display. There is much grain at the mill this week.) The fact that Mr. Marycle had heard these prayers from the mouths of “older Roman Catholic gentlemen” at an abortion mill piqued my curiosity about whether such a pro-life context was appropriate for a fit of anti-Catholic bluster. I said as much here, as did Dave Armstrong on his blog, here.

Now, in spite of such a start, the exhange has turned toward the substance and the theology behind what Mr. Marycle will insist on calling prayers to “the dead.” I had some remarks of my own to such comments on Mr. Marycle’s original screed (see this post), and to them Mr. Armstrong added his own. Mr. Marycle, meanwhile, added a second screed, inaptly named “Mutual Understanding,” the specifics of which I will be pleased to respond to in a future post.

All this, then, set the stage for the exchange between Mr. Marycle and me in the combox of my second post. What I want to do here is, first, to give a basic summary and analysis of the content of those comments; and second, to fisk Mr. Marycle’s last one.

i.
@THEOTOKOS? @IMMACULATECONCEPTION? @QUEENOFHEAVEN? @VIRGINMOTHER? @DESTROYEROFHERESIES? @UNTIEROFKNOTS? @STELLAMARIS? @KECHARITOMENE?

Mr. Marycle’s first comment was a reply to my exegesis of Mark 12:18-27. In that text, Christ answers a question from the Sadducees by reminding them that God “is not the God of the dead, but the God of the living.” For that reason, I said, it is wrong to think of Mary as “dead”; “she is just alive to me as she is to God.” Christ broke the prison bars of death; do not Protestants affirm that too? But rather than try to point out how my exegesis is flawed by providing a competing one of his own (for only people with minds do that), Mr. Marycle clutched with firm grip to a sarcastic and sophomoric straw man. Here is what he said:

So why not just walk up to her and talk to her? I mean, if she’s just as much alive as you or me. [sic.] What’s her Twitter handle? Where does she live?

I sit astonied. But leaving aside the surprising degree of juvenalia in such a reply, do you notice the huge ontological error that Mr. Marycle is making? I hope you may. More simply, one could call it a category error. For the education of Mr. Marycle, a “category error,” in logic, is the error of treating one category of things as though they belonged to another. In the example the Wikipedia entry provides, saying that “most bananas are atheists” is a category error because “bananas belong to a category of things that cannot be said to have beliefs.” Similarly, Mary belongs to a category of things that cannot be said to have Twitter accounts. That is not to say that Mary does not belong to the living, as though life only existed on earth, and not in Heaven too. Mary belongs to a category of things that cannot be said to be bodily present to us (except in the case of rare Marian apparitions; which, however, occur by God’s permission and not because human beings have somehow summoned Mary).

Hence my response to this “argument” was, first, to appeal to Mr. Marycle to recognize the straw man in it.

You talk to Christ. He’s alive to you. Why don’t you walk up to him? What’s Christ’s Twitter handle? The same kind of sarcasm you use to criticize talking to Mary could be used by an atheist to criticize prayer of any kind. I’ve always been suspicious of the fact that the same straw man arguments that are used by Protestants against Catholicism are also used by atheists against Christianity altogether. Don’t you pray silently to Jesus sometimes? Or are you always speaking out loud because he’s right next to you and you can see him? What’s Christ’s street address? What’s his phone number? Can I friend him on Facebook? I can get just as absurd as you’re being.

Mr. Marycle, though, was having none of this. He insisted that he was merely using “reductio ad absurdum.” But there’s a fine line between that and absurdity all your own. In truth, you can’t use reductio by jumping from one category of being (the supernatural) to the other (the natural). You can only reduce something to the absurd within the same ontological category you started out in. While he admitted that it was “foolish” to use the same argument against talking to Jesus, somehow he insisted that it was quite appropriate to use it to argue against talking to Mary. Such, dear reader, are the double standards of Calvinists when they talk about the supernatural.

ii.
THE DEAD ONTOLOGY OF MR. MARYCLE

My next response to the “argument” about Mary’s Twitter account was to point out to Mr. Marycle, in more direct terms, the ontological error he was making.

Because you are a Christian, I assume you believe in both the natural and the supernatural. You also believe, I assume, that there can be communication between the natural and the supernatural. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t believe in the revelation of God, you wouldn’t believe in the Incarnation, and you wouldn’t believe in prayer.

But when you try to criticize the notion that one can talk to Mary by asking such absurd questions about talking to her face-to-face and having her Twitter handle, you’re making the basic ontological error of assuming that you can criticize supernatural realities based on the logic of natural laws. If it is “foolish,” as you admit, to criticize talking to Jesus on the basis of jokes about his Twitter account, then it is equally foolish to criticize talking to Mary, or anyone else in heaven, that way. It is not that Mary is “dead”; she’s more alive than we are. It is, rather, that Mary is in heaven, and we are on Earth. Mary’s existence is in the supernatural, ours is in the natural. Communication between those two separate categories of existence doesn’t happen the same way it does within.

For reasons of his own, which he seems to have no interest in explaining to us, Mr. Marycle would not acknowledge that I was making a distinction between those in heaven and those on earth. Instead he insisted on treating the distinction as though it were still between the living and the “dead.” Mary, he said, is “dead to us”—an expression which makes me wonder whether he is writing her off the way a child would disown his mother. (Mr. Marycle, by the way, is morbidly attached to the word “dead” when it comes to any discussion of Mary. It could be the only word in his vocabulary on that subject.) He has a mulish refusal to bend, even though I had just pointed out to him the flaw in that way of thinking.

The distinction that is applicable here is not the distinction between the alive and the dead. It is the distinction between those in heaven and those on earth. Obviously, one cannot talk to someone who is in heaven the same way he talks to someone on earth.

Mr. Marycle seems to think that the reason Mary doesn’t have a Twitter account is because she’s dead. In fact, the reason she doesn’t have a Twitter account, or a Facebook page, or an e-mail, or a phone number, or a street address, or a blog, or a library card, or a brand new 2013 Ford Fusion, is because she’s in heaven.

Finally, I made some remarks to Mr. Marycle on the topic of what the Bible says about “talking to the dead,” and how our words to Mary differ from that.

God forbids talking to the dead specifically in the context of occult practices like necromancy, or seeking out the advice of the dead in order to tell the future. That’s not what’s going on when someone says the Rosary. All that’s going on in the Rosary is that we’re asking Mary to pray for us, the same way I would ask my earthly mother to pray for me. That’s not saying that I talk to Mary and my earthly mother in the same way (it’s an ontological error to assume any such thing); but it is a recognition that the saints in heaven pray for us—they don’t turn their back on us; if they’re truly in heaven and truly united with God, then they’re as concerned with the salvation of those who have come after them as God is.

So at this point, then, the stage is set for a complete fisking of Mr. Marycle’s final comment.

iii.
fisking mr. marycle

Mr. Marycle starts off by denying a plain truth: In the Rosary, all that occurs is that we ask Mary to pray for us. Now, I don’t know why that should be so startling for Mr. Marycle to grasp. It can’t be hard even for a fool. For look you. The first half of the Ave consists of two direct quotations from the gospel of Luke. The first is, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee” (Luke 1:28); the second, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus” (Luke 1:42). The second half of the Ave says, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” “Pray for us”: Got that, Mr. Marycle? But—shock and awe!—he is not convinced. He must be no common fool.

He replies:

“Unbelievable.”

Yes? And how so? The Rosary uses those very words. Is it a fake one? Is there some “real” text of the Rosary that Catholics keep hidden while trotting out this bastard child as a cover-up?

“You said exactly what I expected you to say.”

Yes. It’s funny how Catholics such as myself refuse to pretend the Rosary says something it does not say. It’s funny how we refuse to say something different about it than the Church says. But Mr. Marycle is shocked and undone by what he expects. He is a marvel of psychology; even Dr. Freud says, “I give up.”

“So you communicate with your [earthly] mother by (1) going to a church—”

Yes. Of course. If she’s there. But alas she’s still a Presbyterian. But as for Mary, I can pray the Rosary in the woods. There is no point of canon law whereby the Ave must be said in a church. Most often, I pray it in my closet.

“(2) bowing before a statue of her—”

No. I doubt there are any of those. She is a private citizen, still on this side of life, and not like to be made a secular idol or religious icon. Nor is there any law that restricts the Ave to being said before an image of Mary.

“(3) lighting a candle and placing it before that statue—”

Like I said.

“(4) lighting incense—”

Sounds like a nice atmosphere for worship, but I don’t worship my mother. Then, neither do I worship Mary. You see, Mr. Marycle, the purpose of incense is to symbolize the smoke of prayers rising to God (Rev. 8:4), and is used in the context of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or in rarer cases the Liturgy of the Hours. It stands for our prayer rising to God, or Mary’s prayer rising to God, not our so-called “worship” of Mary. Incense very seldom burns during the Ave.

“(5) speaking inaudibly to her.”

I can’t imagine she’d hear me that way. And in any case, do you notice how Mr. Marycle completely ignored this statement of mine:

That’s not saying that I communicate with Mary and my earthly mother in the same way (it’s an ontological error to assume any such thing).

I do not talk to with Mary and my mother in the same way. So for Mr. Marycle to ask the questions he does shows not only that he did not pay attention to what I had said, but also that he insists on making the same category error I had several times pointed out to him. I talk to Mary, and I talk to my mother; but because Mary’s in heaven and my earthly mother is alive here on earth, the form of it is necessarily different. Why Mr. Marycle insists on category errors no matter the number of times they’ve been pointed out to him is a question on which I confess amusement and ignorance.

Mr. Marycle continues:

“You know that it’s different with the dead just as well as I.”

Not really. I know that it’s different with those in heaven, which is the distinction I was actually making. But Mr. Marycle will go on using that word “dead” to describe Mary, like a verbal tic or urge of madness, in spite of Christ’s words that God is “not the God of the dead.” All this insistence on the deadness of Mary kills me.

“Bowing down before a statue of a dead person—”

Mary’s not dead; she’s alive in Heaven.

“lighting a candle before it—”

“It”?

“and speaking inaudibly—”

No, we can pray the Rosary out loud just as well. We often do. Mr. Marycle should get out among Catholics more. But aloud, silent: Does it matter? Why he is stuck on this “inaudible” business is blasted odd. Does he mean for us to assume that, when he talks to Jesus, he’s wailing at the top of his lungs?—the better to be heard, you know, particularly from such a distance and with all the other whiners and screamers who are demanding God’s attention at the very same time.

“in a church and religious context, is nothing less than an act of worship.”

So tell me. In Num. 21:8, when God told Moses to make a statue of a serpent, and that everyone who had been bitten by a snake, if he looked upon the statue, would live, was He commanding the Hebrews to worship a serpent? What danger was there, think you, that someone might say he was healed by the pole and not by God? Look to it.

“Motivation does not matter.”

So tell me. What did Pope St. Peter mean, at the Council of Jerusalem, when he said that God knows people’s hearts (Acts 15:8)? Motivation would certainly seem to matter to Him, whatever our own opinion of it may be. It is not for us to judge of such things; the righteous God trieth the hearts and reins. Look to it.

“God has set out how He will be worshiped and He has told us not to talk to the dead.”

Now here Mr. Marycle just repeats himself. Earlier I had said that, when God tells us not to talk to the dead (and again, Mary isn’t dead, but let that go for now), the context of the command is necromancy and auguring. I linked to an article that Dave Armstrong wrote on the subject (the link is earlier in this wery post), but Mr. Marycle addresses it not once, other than with sentences like “Motivation does not matter”; which not only is not true, but proves nothing.

iv.
reductio ad rhosurdum

The rest of Mr. Marycle’s remarks can be dealt with simply. He goes on to employ the same kind of sarcastic reductionism that is typical with him. He imagines a heretical Jew saying “Don’t you ask your fellow Israelites for prayer?” in defense of lighting candles to a statue of Abraham. The poor man ought to reread the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31)—or read it for the first time, as the case may be. In that parable, Christ takes it for granted that one can ask for Abraham’s intercession. He includes the prayer in his parable as though it really were a common and acceptable practice among the Jews.

But there’s another point to be made. I am surprised Mr. Marycle would not know that the status of “the dead” before Christ was very different than the status of “the dead” after Christ. Before Christ’s Resurrection, the holy dead were not yet present with God. Christ’s redemptive act needed to be accomplished first. But after the Resurrection, the dead are present with God, and thus are not dead but, like Christ, “alive forevermore” (Rev. 1:18). Though (of course) we talk to them differently than we talk to people here on earth, we are still permitted to talk to them and ask them to pray for us. They are our cloud of witnesses (Heb. 12:1), our heavenly brothers and sisters in Christ, members of the Church Triumphant. Of course they desire to speak with us, insofar as that is possible between the supernatural and the natural.

Mr. Marycle may choose to repeat his clichés and sophomoric talking points like vain repetitions that magically make Reformed theology true without the burden or logic or evidence or proof. However many times he chants “Mary is dead” over the beads in his hand, it does not change Jesus’s words in Mark 12:18-27. However many times he insists on mocking prayers to Mary, it does not change the fact that she is alive in heaven. The supernatural is a different category of being than the natural, and communication between the two happens according to laws of its own—not the laws of communication between human beings on Earth.

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