The Medieval Wheel of Fortune

Lent is an opportune time to practice detachment from selfishness, material things and habitual sin. Before Fr. Robert Barron was as famous as he is now, I caught him by chance on EWTN giving a lecture on something called The Medieval Wheel of Fortune that strongly relates to the idea of detachment. I was very intrigued since it comes out of the middle ages and yet seemed so timeless.



Fortuna

It goes something like this; the Roman goddess Fortuna was the goddess of fortune and the personification of luck. Fortuna was said to govern the circle of life. Imagine we are firmly attached to the edge of a circle or wheel being helplessly spun around by Fortuna; a wheel containing 4 stages of life.

 

 

 

 



• Stage 1: I Reign – A zenith or climax. You are on top of the world.

• Stage 2: I Have Reigned – Things begin to unravel or are in decline

• Stage 3: I Have No Kingdom – All is lost. This is rock bottom.

• Stage 4: I Shall Reign Again – Positive signs return. There is hope.

A modern day example:

Medieval Wheel of Fortune

• Stage 1: We’re on spring break having the time of our life. Woo Hoo!

• Stage 2: We are tired and sunburned as we pack for the trip home. Darn!

• Stage 3: We arrive home late at night in the freezing cold to find two feet of snow in our driveway. D’OHH!!!

• Stage 4: We soon being planning next year’s vacation. Cool!

After the fall of Rome, the medievals took this wheel of life and Christianized it. What happens as you move closer to the center of a spinning wheel? It spins slower. What happens at the absolute center? It does not move at all. What would happen if we put Christ in the absolute center of the wheel; at the absolute center of our life? We would experience peace, become centered and detached from the fast edge of the wheel; life’s ups and downs would no longer control us, no longer exhaust us.

Stain glass rose windows seen in
medieval cathedrals come from this concept.

Theologically, we can say that we are either moving our souls toward God or toward “Self”. Moving toward God ultimately becomes Heaven. Moving toward “Self” ultimately becomes Hell. In the context of the wheel, we could say that we are either moving our souls toward the center of all things with Christ or out to the edge in an ever expanding circle of madness.

Fr. Barron brilliantly linked all this to an interpretation of the beatitudes that is all about detachment:

• Blessed are the poor in spirit…Blessed are those detached from material things.

• Blessed are they who mourn…Blessed are those not addicted to “feeling good”.

• Blessed are the meek…Blessed are those not self-centered.

• Blessed are those who thirst for righteousness…Blessed are those detached from sin.

• Blessed are the merciful…Blessed are those who are detached from revenge.

• Blessed are the clean of heart…Blessed are those detached from evil thoughts.

• Blessed are the peacemakers…Blessed are those free from hatred.

• Blessed are YOU when they insult & persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you because of me …Blessed are YOU if you don’t care what people think!

Since I find visuals so helpful, I created a visual of what I learned. Click on the wheel below for a PDF version of The Medieval Wheel of Fortune.

Measure My Feet – A Warning about Your Imagination

My 4-year-old daughter recently asked me to "measure her feet". I could not figure out what she really meant. She then pointed to our digital bathroom scale. Think about it; you stand on the scale, look down, and a number pops-up over your feet........measure my feet. This is pure, unbiased observation logic with one incorrect assumption; the number must relate directly and specifically to the feet.

We observe something like standing on a scale; call it “A”. We then observe something else like a number appearing; call it “C”. We try to connect “A” to “C” by inserting “B” as a bridge in our mind. The result in our example is thinking the scale measures something about feet. All too often “B” comes strictly from our imaginations. Adults do this too. In my profession, we call it bad troubleshooting. In the spiritual life, it’s bad theology.

Example 1

Observation A:	I prayed for something
Observation C:	It did not happen
Imagination B:	God does not care about me

Example 2

Observation A:	My friend has sinned
Observation C:	My friend gets cancer
Imagination B:	God has punished my friend with cancer

A+B ≠ C



Have you ever listened to those who do not know their faith, talk about their faith? Have you ever heard the most theologically absurd things and ask, “Where do they get that stuff from?!?” Consider that it may have come purely from their imagination. Our imagination can instinctively take over if we have no other way to connect “A” to “C”. We then create our own personalized reality that is not real. This is a kind of insanity, and it is dangerous. This is why it is important to study good theology and apologetics in order to gain knowledge.

Scripture gives us a subtle hint on the topic. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”(Hosea 4:6) St. Augustine also makes mention in Confessions. “But who can invoke you knowing you not? For one who knows you not may invoke you as other than you are.”

Theologian Frank J. Sheed gives a stern warning about the imagination in his book Theology and Sanity. He says that since The Fall, there is nothing that can be done with the intellect until the imagination has been put firmly in its place. We’ve fallen into the habit of using our imagination as a crutch since it saves the intellect so much trouble. As a result, the intellect grows flabby and tired. It must learn to walk on its own again and this means great pain for muscles so long unused. This is easy to understand since we know that thinking is very hard, imagining is very easy…and we are very lazy!

Beware Your Imagination

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Chesterton's Racehorse

In a free society we get used to negotiating, settling, bargaining, haggling, meeting-in-the-middle and reaching across the aisle. These are great skills in the right context, but do not help anything in the framework of objective truth.

It’s easy to understand the difficulty with compromise when applied in the wrong situation. Gravity pulls us down. Can we work out some negotiation where gravity can pull us a bit to the left or a bit to the right? How about pulling down Monday thru Saturday, but then pulling us up on Sundays? After all, we can always take a vote, achieve a majority, and change the law. In this case, we change the law of gravity; it’s only fair.

Suppose a terrorist says, “I’m going to kill you.” How do we negotiate that position? Can you please kill me at an agreed upon future date, instead of right now? Can you just beat me within an inch of my life, but leave me alive? We need to be fair to the desires of both parties, don’t we? Be reasonable.

The above paragraphs sound absurd, but we do the same kind of bargaining with spiritual realities:

• Perhaps the youngest humans can be declared “non-persons” and then killed. You don’t agree? Okay, how about just until the end of the 1^st or 2^nd trimester or some other subjective threshold? Can you agree now? No? Are you some sort of extremist wacko?

• Let’s redefine marriage as any two people. How about any three people or four? Why not? Can’t we work this out?

• Jesus is perhaps one way to heaven, but there must be many different ways we can agree upon. Be realistic.

• Catholics need to compromise on this HHS mandate thing. Everyone knows that pregnancy and fertility are akin to diseases.

In the big-picture, looking at thousands of religious denominations in the world, we say that it is impossible for only one of them to actually be right. We try to negotiate all these beliefs somehow. The truth is always somewhere in the middle; we must diligently search for the middle-ground.

I once heard a very brief, but profound reflection from G.K. Chesterton about a horse race. Suppose there was a race with 20 horses and each horse owner was completely convinced, without a doubt that his horse will win. Must we then conclude that no single horse can possibly win? We’ll need to settle on a 20-way tie somehow? Of course not, one horse will win.

If you are Catholic, you are on the right horse and this horse will ultimately win. The question becomes, will you run the race with her? In the face of (perhaps) a brand new era of more direct attacks on religious liberty in this country, understanding this becomes especially imperative.

Death Penalty

This is a topic that shows how Catholic Faith and Reason really go hand in hand.  The death of any person is always a grave matter.  If someone is involved in bringing about that death, then it is a very serious matter indeed.  Most societies throughout history have each had their own policies on capital punishment and the United States, with its heritage from Western European civilization, is no exception.

The Church would state that the State has a legitimate right to maintain order.  

Attorney Robert Hutton gives several legitimate motives for a criminal justice system

1. Protect citizens
2. Rehabilitation of criminals
3. Restitution
4. Deterrent

However, there is one motive that is never a legitimate motive for a criminal justice system: Retribution.  By that, I am referring to revenge.

Capital punishment can be invoked using motives 1 and 4.  A dead criminal will never threaten another citizen again and there is some likelihood that other criminals will not commit capital crimes due to the penalty.   The efficacy of motive #4 is in dispute for at least two reasons.  The first is that studies have shown a low statistical correlation between the commission of capital crimes vs non-capital crimes.  The second is a consequence of a situation where a criminal has committed a capital crime (whether on purpose or by accident) and may decide that he has nothing further to lose in committing even more crimes.  

In 1995, Pope John Paul II published the encyclical “Evangelium Vitae” in which he states that execution is only appropriate "in cases of absolute necessity, in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. Today, however, as a result of steady improvement in the organization of the penal system, such cases are very rare, if not practically nonexistent."   

This is echoed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church #2267: “If, however, non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people's safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.  Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm - without definitely taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself - the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity ‘are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.’"

Here he shows the balance between the goods of the protection of society and the good of the dignity of the human person.

So, as the ability of society changes to be able to better protect citizens though non-lethal means, capital punishment which had been the lesser of two evils is no longer so.  Again, since it had been very difficult to detain a dangerous criminal for life, capital punishment was tolerated for the sake of the greatest good of the innocent.  As it is now possible to preserve the lives of both the guilty and the innocent (and make possible the engagement of rehabilitation, motive #2), that is the preferable course.

How Reasonable is that Faith?

Aquinas Regarding Contingency

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, someone I like to refer to as “scary-smart”. Anyone remotely interested in the topic of existence should give him a serious look.

Theologically, God is existence itself; not some being contained within existence like a ghost, a fairy in the sky or a flying spaghetti monster. This is the elementary blunder of most atheists. When asked His name, God answers, “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14), hinting that He is “being” itself. I think of the ocean as a metaphor. We generally don’t say there is water in the ocean. We are more apt to say the ocean IS water.

I especially like Aquinas’s theory of contingency as a proof for the existence of God. With help from other theologians that explain Aquinas, I describe contingency like this: Every effect must have a cause. We cannot logically trace back causes to infinity. We can logically trace back to a first cause, sometimes called an uncaused cause. A first cause, by necessity, would need to be simultaneously whole and non-composite, meaning totally self-sufficient and having no parts. Nothing is needed for its own existence, not even time or space and nothing can be added or taken away, not even knowledge or power (or else it cannot be the first cause). From this premise flows that there can only be one first cause which must encompass all knowledge, all power, etc, etc.

I struggled with the idea that we cannot logically trace back causes to infinity. I thought to myself, “why not?” Then I read a good analogy for it in a book entitled, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Suppose you are at a deli counter to buy meat and you are told to first take a number. You are then told that you must take a number in order to take a number and this process of taking numbers to take the next will continue to infinity. You will realize that you will never reach the deli counter. You then notice that others have meat in their cart from the counter. You conclude that the processes of taking numbers must have ended at some point, at least for those with meat. It logically could not have continued to infinity as evident by the meat existing in the cart.

Here’s another way to think about contingency. Everything receives its existence from something else. You are here because your parents met. A valley exists because a river flowed there at some point. Try to imagine a universe where everything is a receiver of existence and nothing is a sender. If you showed someone from the far past a television set and explained that it receives signals and turns them into pictures and sound, the time traveler can logically conclude that there must be, somehow, a “sender” of the signal.

Modern physics now teaches that space & time do not go back to infinity, but have a certain beginning point. It’s not well advertised that the Big Bang Theory was first proposed by a Roman Catholic Priest and scientist, Monsignor Georges Lemaître.

Monsignor Georges Lemaître meets with Albert Einstein

Both science and religion lead to the truth. Seems after all these centuries science is finally starting to catch-up to Catholicism…took’em long enough.

Pro Choice–The Moral Blind Spot

The March for Life on Monday will no doubt remind us that God is the author of life, but to pro-choice secularists this is an unconvincing pro-life argument. The reflex rebuttals are, “You have no right to impose your religion on others” and the familiar “Separation of Church and State.” At this point the dialog shuts down, but I find that secular arguments tend to re-boot the discussion.

When this issue is debated using only secular logic one wonders how supposedly educated people can be BOTH pro-choice AND recognize science, reason & human rights. In fact, this is such a harsh contradiction, one can see a need for a diabolical force to help the pro-choice movement along; something to help generate a moral blind spot.

I occasionally debate pro-choice proponents on public news forums. To be honest, they have quite a bit of difficulty breaking down the simple logic in the following post:

“Scientifically, human life begins at conception as an objective fact. To say the first stage of one’s life or one’s personhood begins at some other threshold of consciousness or viability is subjective; a matter of opinion. To declare something as important as this on something subjective is irrational, especially when something objective is available.

Pregnancy is a case where two human lives are physically intertwined. When forced to decide if one life should be killed (permanently) vs. another life to be pregnant (temporarily), the reasonable course of action based on priority is to spare the life, because the right to be alive is the derivation of all other human rights and has the highest priority.

Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government; they are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of their humanity. The right to life does not depend on, and must not be declared contingent upon, the choice of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.”

Once past religious objections and into a human rights discussion we get immediately into this:

“What about the multitudes of women & girls pregnant from rape & incest?” As if this was the main reason abortions are sought.

And this one…

”What about all the women about to die or be maimed because they are pregnant?” As if pregnancy is a disease. As if pro-life means choosing the life of the baby over the mother.

The examples above are clearly exceptions, and basing common law on exceptions is absurd. To say unborn children MUST be declared “non-persons” because of rape, incest or danger to the mother is like saying oranges must be declared “non-round” because we have found some oval shaped ones. If a starving man steals a loaf of bread and we feel bad for him, should it then be legal to steal bread?

Stealing bread is wrong, oranges are round, unborn children are human, a human is a person...........and a person’s a person, no matter how small!

Only Say The Word

What power do words have? They can be powerless or have infinite power depending on the circumstances. Father Robert Barron made some poignant analogies that show how this relates to the Eucharist in one segment of his Catholicism series.

Can words actually change reality?

• If you are a baseball fan sitting behind home plate declaring a runner to be “safe”, it means nothing, no matter how loud you shout or how sure you are. If the umpire says he is “safe”, then he is safe and his team scores a run, regardless of what you saw or what you think you saw. The umpire has the authority.

• If an ordinary citizen walks up to you and says “you are under arrest”, it means nothing. If an on-duty police officer did the same thing, then you are under arrest. Even if you did nothing wrong, your reality has now changed.

These analogies from Fr. Barron made me think of another:

• If you are out to dinner with your boyfriend or girlfriend and you both say “I do” with the intent to be married, you are still not married. If you say “I do” in the context of a wedding in front of the proper authority, then you are married. Although you may look the same and act the same as when you were single, you are now married. There is a difference; reality has changed.

What does this have to do with the Eucharist? This is my body; this is my blood. When God says something IS, then it IS, regardless of what we say, see or taste. In fact, if there was some physically measurable change with the bread and wine, it would contradict Church teaching.

When Jesus says to do this in remembrance of Him, we obey. Jesus has the proper authority and he passed it on to his apostles, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). This verse begs a question; how did the Father send Jesus? With all the authority in heaven and on earth (see Mat 28:18). I'd say that’s an impressive amount of authority to pass on. What say you? 

In the new Mass translation we use the words of the centurion who said, “Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Mat 8:8). The centurion understood how authority works and knew that Jesus’ word was enough to save his servant. He did not need to see something extraordinary or be shown further evidence. We ask for our soul to be healed at Mass instead of our servant. Our words are a bit different, but our faith needs to be the same.