I’m really not sure how to arrange these ideas. The thought came to me in one of those moments of clarity before I fell asleep recently and I just wrote some notes down but haven’t really developed it much. This prelude is not important or interesting, more of an apology for what will be a haphazard introduction of some ideas and let’s see where it goes together.
The idea goes something like this: There is an objective truth out there, which we perceive dimly. We can perceive it dimly through natural reason, or certain parts can be illuminated through revealed truth. We can approach truth through Scripture–the common recourse of Sola Scriptura protestants–and we can also approach it through the Magisterium–which I use in the sense of the collective corpus of accepted doctrines and teachings of the Church. How all of these things relate to each other is the subject of this stew, so let’s put in some ingredients.
In my previous Apologia for the Authority of the Catholic Church, I essentially argue that the Church operates as a validation service for writers and thinkers. It investigates and draws connections between works and across time so that if you want to know if any given work is in conformity with the Church, all you need to do is check some ideas. If any of the ideas deviate from the accepted truths in the magisterium, you know it is not kosher and you can avoid it. If what you have to say is roughly the same as St. Cyprian, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John Henry Newman, and Pope St. John Paul II, then you are probably on kosher footing. The Church does all the investigating and heavy lifting so we do not have to individually validate whether Cyprian, Aquinas, etc were on the right track.
The Church maintains this corpus of orthodox thought, and the reason it does this is because the Church is concerned with what things are true. There is an objective, definite, actual reality. We can perceive it dimly, and with the aid of the Church (and the Holy Spirit) can even come to know some absolute truths with absolute certainty. But from a philosophical level I think it’s fair to say that the whole truth is veiled right now. This is logical because if the truth were not veiled then we would have more agreement as to what things are true, but because it is not immediately obvious what things are true we need help figuring it out.
Imagine for a moment that the Absolute Truth is like the actual layout of roads in a city, and we find ourselves without our glasses, it’s foggy outside, and it’s nighttime. It can be hard to find our way. The Magisterium acts like binoculars, or night vision goggles, or a map–it is the sum of what we have been able to figure out about the city on our own and some parts of it have been revealed to us by the divine City Planner. We cannot see the whole truth but we can perceive what is around us and we can look at the map we have been given as a guide.
Doctrines and Dogmas represent known successful pathways through the city–things we know are true. And I don’t mean know in the fallible human sense–we know in the sense that we have been there and we know from experience that this route takes us to the grocery store and we can get there and back very easily. It’s the difference between knowing someone’s name and knowing them because you’ve been friends for 10 years–so Doctrines and Dogmas represent things we know–things that are true. These are given to us by the Church and are informed by her Magisterium. The Magisterium is what connects us to Truth and helps us to know it, and the Doctrines and Dogmas are what we have learned by using the Magisterium.
Doctrines and Dogmas in turn inform practices and beliefs. Practices and Beliefs are things we are fallibly confident are true. We are not required to pray the Rosary, but it is a practice which we have good reason to believe is helpful, and we have good experiences corroborating that belief. We are not required to believe God made the earth in 7 literal days, but it is ok to believe that.
I have painstakingly outlined what many consider to be obvious because I want to have a picture of how these different pieces relate to each other. Some veiled absolute truth feeds into the Magisterium, which adds in truths we reasoned into ourselves; this leads to doctrines and dogmas which codify certain things as truths; this leads to certain practices and beliefs that govern our conduct with respect to these doctrines and dogmas.
Let’s talk about scripture. Scripture has been on my mind recently, because I have been frustrated with the proper way to use it as a rhetorical device. If I were to offer an interpretation of scripture, there is no reason for you to accept my interpretation. The Church also does not offer specific interpretations–there is no one way to read the Bible–but scripture does contain within it certain truths. So where does Scripture fit into the framework I just described, and how can we use scripture as a rhetorical device?
Scripture is in a unique position–it both informs and is affirmed by the Magisterium. Let me put it this way: Scripture is illustrative, scripture is descriptive, scripture is prescriptive. Scripture is illustrative because it demonstrates certain truths, it shows us the means of our salvation, it tells the story of our faith from beginning to end. Scripture is Descriptive because it describes how we should conduct ourselves, how we should relate to God, how we should relate to our fellow man. Scripture is Prescriptive because it tells us what the solution to some problems are, especially via the Epistles where Paul both scolds and praises the nascent church for it’s respective faults and successes. These are the ways Scripture informs and feeds the Magisterium. But it is also affirmed by it, because when the Holy Writ was assembled into a single volume, a lot of work was done to affirm the historicity and authenticity and truth of the documents which were being considered.
Sola Scriptura protestants err in putting importance on Scripture in it’s illustrative, descriptive, and prescriptive properties, but disconnecting it from the Magisterium so there’s no outside body of truths for comparison–leaving scripture open to faulty interpretation.
Excursus: The secret to effective rhetorical use of scripture then is to connect scripture to the confirmed teachings of the Church, which support that interpretation or which are informed by that interpretation. Then the argument rests less on “this is what I think about scripture” and more on “this is what the Church teaches and this scripture affirms”. This is a much higher bar for the use of scripture, but ones arguments will be much clearer. The mistake I fall into repeatedly is quoting scripture and waxing philosophical on my own exegesis, and then stopping–thinking that’s enough. That’s never enough–we have to go the extra step.
Kristor and a.morphous have been having a dialogue in the comments at the Orthosphere and the way I have skimmed the argument, I would summarize one of the points of contention between them as “what is morality”. Many moderns mistakenly put morality at the level of “practice and belief” in the above framework, which is distantly illuminated by things which are true. a.morphous seems to believe that morality is a set of human constructed practices.
Morality is, by my dim understanding of the Church, a set of principles and values which are at the Magisterium level–they are things we know to be true because we can see them when we look through the lenses of the Church and we have walked the paths of morality enough to know that they are good paths and true. When I frequently refer to morality as “objective” I mean that the principles of morality rest on some transcendent quality and not on some human faculty. I do not know how to disabuse a.morphous of that notion but it is Kristor’s Sisyphus-like task to attempt to explain it to him, and he does so ably enough.
That’s all for now. I don’t know how to bring this to a fitting close so I’ll cut it abruptly here. Thank you for reading!
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
