tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68245714179820445942024-03-05T16:04:59.611-06:00Reading in ExileMeditations by Mark K. SpencerMark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-30836818293731113312016-08-29T22:02:00.000-05:002016-08-29T22:02:24.722-05:00You Should Go On a Miles Christi Spiritual Exercises RetreatThis past weekend I attended a silent retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, led by a priest and a brother from the order <a href="https://www.mileschristi.org/">Miles Christi</a>. It was an extraordinary experience (though, not having been on a retreat for 11 years, I have little to compare it to), and I strongly encourage all of you to go on a retreat like this, if you have the opportunity. You can see when and where the Miles Christi priests are preaching these retreats all over the country <a href="https://www.mileschristi.org/activities/spiritual-exercises/">here</a>. I'm very grateful to my wife and my cousin who each recommended that I go on this retreat. I hope that it has made a real difference in my life of prayer and seeking virtue. I wanted to share some thoughts after this retreat.<br />
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The Spiritual Exercises are a series of meditations based around the life of Our Lord. But their aim, at least as they were preached this last weekend, is to evoke acts and affections of repentance and resolution to reform one's life. Too often I, at least, think about repentance in the sense of trying to do better in the future, rather than having a keen sense of how horrible sin is--that is, how it ought to and properly does evoke the feeling of horror. Horror, repulsion, is the proper response to sin, especially my own sin. <br /><br />The Spiritual Exercises as preached this last weekend were aimed at leading one to see all things in light of eternity. To be a Catholic is to live one's life <i>under judgment</i>--that is, to be aware that every single moment of every single day, every act and every feeling, is to be judged. To act well or act badly is not just to act in accord with or in violation of the moral law, or to act such that one moves closer to or away from the fulfillment of one's nature. Rather, to act well or badly is to treat Another well or badly, to act in such a way that God's proper intentional stance toward one's act is one of approval or abhorrence. (I do not, of course, mean to imply that God reacts to our acts in such a way that He is causally affected by them, nor do I mean to imply that our good acts are done apart from His prior grace.) To act well or badly is to act in such a way that Our Lord judges the act good or bad--and not just now, but at the end of our lives as well. To be a Catholic is to live one's life not just under judgment now, but to live life in reference to a future judgment, to experience every act as tending towards and having its ultimate meaning in the judgment of Our Lord at the end of our lives.<br />
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This is of course the proper source of the much lamented <i>Catholic guilt</i>. Aristotle says that <i>shame </i>is a proper response of the one on the way to virtue to his own wrong-doing, and so it is a said to be a <i>quasi-virtue</i>, "quasi" because a genuinely virtuous person wouldn't need shame, but still it is the right response. Catholic guilt is the corresponding infused quasi-virtue: it is the proper response to the evil one sees in oneself once one sees how one's deeds stack up relative to eternal values, and, more importantly, relative to the conscious, concrete judgment of the One to Whom I owe all my love. <br /><br />To be a Catholic is to live always in the hour of our death, which is to say in the hour of our judgment. Everything on this retreat was oriented to giving one a keen sense of the truth of these claims, and of their immediate import in one's life. To say that God is my First Cause and Last End is well and good, but it is better to experience it, to feel it. One should come to experience everything that occurs as proceeding from God, whether operatively or permissively, for our Good and for the revelation of His goodness, and as ordered to Him and His judgment for its ultimate meaning.<br /><br />There is something very attractive (at least to me) about the lofty mysticism of the Carmelites or the deep feelings of nature of the Franciscans. But there is a great deal to be said for the straight-forward and pious devotions given to the laity of the Roman Church. Most of us have not experienced a genuine dark night of the senses. But that is because we flail about with good intentions and never a firm starting point in prayer. The Rosary, the Stations of the Cross, meditation on the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady, veneration of the Cross, the formulae of Eucharistic adoration, books of devotion like <i>The Imitation of Christ </i>or the <i>Introduction to the Devout Life</i>: these, with their pious, deeply affective, relational language are a solid foundation in the life of prayer that is within my reach. It is these that we prayed and listened to on this retreat. Lately, I have been re-reading St. Louis de Montfort<i>'</i>s <i>True Devotion to Mary</i>, longing as a I do for a deeper Marian piety. There is something so eminently <i>Catholic </i>about the language of these old prayers and devotionals, so solid, with such intimate feeling for Our Lord and Our Lady and the saints. There is nothing novel or sophisticated about, but just a deep feeling of the faith, captured in deeply felt pious language, the language of the lover to his beloved, the language of one who would clothe the poor content of his heart in rich, even rococo, forms, because his Beloved, his Lover, deserves such language. <br /><br />I have long desired a recovery of the Tridentine Liturgy, and I have long thought that the scholastic philosophy, theology, and casuistry of the 16th through 18th centuries is some of the most sophisticated and compelling thought I have ever encountered, but I am beginning to see that the devotion of that period (that of St. Francis de Sales, St. Alphonsus Ligouri, St. Ignatius of Loyola) is also a most solid foundation on which I can build my life toward God (and on which one can even move toward that deeper mystical life of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila). It is a much-maligned period, denigrated not only for its highly affective piety, but also for its metaphysical basis, which, it is said, is nominalism or Scotism draped in Thomistic language, itself considered a paltry shadow of the Angelic Doctor's words. That is a gross caricature, and probably just shows that the one who asserts it has not read the doctors of that time. But I also think we have a lot to thank Scotus (and maybe even Ockham, loathe though I am to admit it!) for: for a keener sense of the individual, for a powerful sense of the primacy of Our Lord and Our Lady in the whole cosmos fallen or unfallen, for a deep sense of the omnipotence of God, for a powerful understanding of both the metaphysical difference of God from us (captured in the analogy of being) and of the power of the mind to grasp God through reason (captured in Scotus' highly nuanced sense of the univocity of being, and also in Thomistic notions of the single analogical concept of being.) We could do much worse than recover the order and splendor of Baroque Catholicism, in all its aspects!<br /><br />For that too was the period of the great missionaries, of St. Francis Xavier and St. Jean de Brebeuf. I can understand, after even this short version of the Spiritual Exercises, why a life formed by them (by the longer, 30-day version, repeated year after year) would lead one to want to go to such heroic extremes as these great saints did. In the meditation on hell, one gains a keen sense of what awaits one if one continues to live a life of mediocrity (I felt like Stephen Daedelus in <i>Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>, but I hope the effect will be more long lasting for me than it was for him!) In the meditation on following the banner of Christ, one gains a knowledge that one's every act leads one to follow Christ or Satan. In the spiritual direction and general confession, one is sweetly compelled to abandon all evasions, all excuses, for not sacrificing all to one's King. All in all, it is an inspiration to heroism, to not just try to follow Christ, but to follow Him! The Exercises lead one to make concrete resolutions as to what one <i>will</i> do for Christ, for the One Who deserves all, for His greater glory. Pray for me, that I may keep the resolutions I made on this retreat, and really make a beginning of pursuing virtue. (I am praying for all of you who read this blog.) And again, I really encourage everyone to make a retreat like this!Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-75957527685040644212016-08-24T22:24:00.002-05:002016-08-25T13:49:43.399-05:00The Varieties of ConservatismI've been reading Alice Von Hildebrand's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Lion-Life-Dietrich-Hildebrand/dp/089870801X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472090576&sr=8-1&keywords=the+soul+of+a+lion">biography of her husband Dietrich</a>. In December 1933, after he had fled from Germany and was living in Vienna, Dietrich Von Hildebrand gave a number of talks in Belgium and France, some of them explicitly in opposition to National Socialism. While in Belgium, he visited Zita, the empress of Austria and Hungary who had been deposed after the fall of the Empire at the end of World War One. Dietrich at the time was working closely with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dollfuss-Austrian-Patriot-Johannes-Messner-ebook/dp/B004D4YCM6/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1472090971&sr=8-2&keywords=dollfuss">Englebert Dollfuss</a>, the Chancellor of Austria, and one who was trying hard to implement the Catholic social teaching and corporatist political vision of Pope Pius XI on a national scale, as well as oppose Nazism and Communism. The situation is instructive for conservatives today:<br />
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[Zita] favored Dollfuss' political vision, but as an archmonarchist and a member of the deposed Habsburg dynasty, she could no share her visitor's enthusiasm for his leadership. It was a strange situation for Dietrich von Hildebrand. On the one hand, he as indeed himself an ardent monarchist and considered the demise of the Habsburgs a terrible blow not only for Catholic Austria but for Europe. On the other hand, he had a deep admiration for Dollfuss, who single-handedly was fighting the Nazi Goliath. The theme of the hour had to be collaboration with him, inasmuch as the Habsburgs had been stripped of all political power. (<i>The Soul of a Lion</i>, p. 265)</blockquote>
Zita, Dollfuss, and Von Hildebrand each could, in some important sense, be called "conservatives." All three were interested in preserving and furthering "things human and divine", those deep things that have been passed down to us, and incarnating a moral and spiritual order in the political and the everyday, and yet also doing only what was possible in the current state of things, rather than seeking a progressive utopia. But in other foundational issues, they differed deeply, as in the question of the application of these principles to actual circumstances.<br />
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There's been some fine analysis lately about the current non-existence of the conservative movement. <a href="http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/06/conservatism-is-dead-long-live-conservatism/">James Heaney, for example, has argued</a> that what was the "Reagan coalition" has splintered into at least three parts, each of which would call itself conservative: the populists, the establishment, and the grassroots. But this is only the latest incarnation of what has perhaps long been the normal state of conservatism. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Intellectual-Movement-America-Since/dp/1882926129/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472091883&sr=8-1&keywords=nash+conservative+movement">George Nash</a> showed long ago that post-World War Two American conservatism, that resurgent movement that arose at a time when even so fine a thinker as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Imagination-Review-Books-Classics/dp/1590172833/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472092058&sr=8-1&keywords=liberal+imagination">Lionel Trilling</a> could say that there were no conservative ideas in America, was a wildly disparate thing: an amalgamation of libertarianism, anti-communism, traditionalism, Burkeanism, Straussianism, and so on. The addition of the Evangelicals and the social conservatives and the Neo-Conservatives some decades later just added to the mix.<br />
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But the disparateness of conservatism goes back further. My wife has been reading <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Edmund-Burke-Reconsidered-Russell-Kirk/dp/188292617X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472092433&sr=8-1&keywords=edmund+burke+kirk">Russell Kirk's biography of Edmund Burke</a> lately, so we've discussing that father of (a certain sort of) conservatism a lot lately. Burke himself is the leader of a sort of hodge-podge conservatism, seeking to steer a middle course between a more extreme royalism and traditionalism, and the progressivism and rationalism of not only the Jacobins but the English utilitarians and many of his fellow Whigs as well; he is both a child of the Enlightenment, and one who would return to ancient British custom and prescription. The "movement" he engendered, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Mind-Burke-Eliot/dp/0895261715/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=VR7FHC4FBPCE59NC78DB">at least as Kirk describes it</a>, was likewise motley for its long history.<br />
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There are so many divisions in conservatism--not only as a movement, but in my own heart as well--that it is difficult to describe them all. A few years ago there was a dust-up in the Catholic blogosphere about something called "<a href="http://aleteia.org/2013/12/31/illiberal-catholicism/">illiberal Catholicism</a>", those strands of Catholicism that reject the legacy of the Western liberal tradition, with its attendant notions of human rights, separation of Church and state, capitalist economics, libertarian (in both the political and the metaphysical senses) freedom. But illiberal Catholics, many of whom might call themselves conservatives (or traditionalists), are <a href="https://opuspublicum.com/2014/07/10/the-other-illiberal-catholicism/">themselves a divided lot</a>, from those that draw on the <i>nouvelle theologie </i>tradition of De Lubac and Von Baltahsar, to those that draw on an <a href="https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/integralism/">older Catholic tradition</a> of an integral relation between Church and state, each in its proper sphere of jurisdiction, but the good of the state explicitly subordinated to the supernatural good of the Church. <br />
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And again, those who by and large oppose the illiberal Catholic are themselves conservatives; it is a <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/2014/02/06/a-catholic-showdown-worth-watching/">conflict within that disparate movement</a> (or at least within one section of it, the Catholic and Thomistic section). But the opponents of illiberal Catholicism are those likely to follow a more American, Lockean, free market, rights-oriented, small government "liberal" conservatism, that of those like John Courtney Murray and Richard John Neuhaus. <br />
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Each faction here draws on a substantial philosophical and theological tradition, and each on a substantive picture of the human person and his place in the cosmos. But each is a very different picture of the human person. First, the "liberal" conservative Catholic draws on a theory of the human person that is a synthesis of what we might call an Aristotelian-Thomistic account with a (also thin) Lockean account of the person as individual inasmuch as they have a Lockean picture of human rights. (But this is further complicated in that many such conservatives are also personalists, which is a "thick" picture of the human person--and this is a trait that these thinkers share with the next group, but through which both tend to be in conflict with the third group.) Second, the <i>nouvelle theologie </i>conservative draws on a synthesis of a existentialist Thomistic account (with heavy accents on the neo-Platonic, participatory elements of Thomism) with a focus on historical and dynamic features of the human person drawn (purportedly) from the Church Fathers, but more so from the German Idealists and Romantics. Third, the integralists draw on the long Thomistic tradition, with its thick picture of human nature in relation to many roles, communities, duties, and individual and common goods. (And this is yet further complicated in that while this group rejects the personalism of people like Emmanuel Mounier, other personalists like Von Hildebrand share much of their monarchist or corporatist vision, and it can furthermore be contended that the integralists' focus on the ordering of the person to the common good is an even deeper and "thicker" personalism than that of the personalists themselves. There's a further wrinkle in trying locate personalists Thomists like St. John Paul II in this debate.) <br />
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This is not just all idle theorizing. Where one falls in these issues, the thinkers in whose lineage one wittingly or unwittingly finds oneself, affects one's choices in voting, in educating one's children, in the books one reads, in the form of worship one engages in, in the heroes one admires and emulates. We see this in the rise in interest in the new Catholic democrat party, the <a href="http://www.solidarity-party.org/">American Solidarity Party</a>. <br />
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Consider, for example, this party's tax platform, which favors low (or no) income taxes and higher property taxes. This is drawn from the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Toward-Truly-Free-Market-Distributist-ebook/dp/1935191810/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472094166&sr=8-1&keywords=john+medaille">distributist movement,</a> itself beloved of many conservatives, though founded by men who called themselves liberals, and which favors the distribution of land and capital to as many as possible. Contrast this to the position on taxation taken by <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Conservatism-Roger-Scruton/dp/1587315033/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472094270&sr=8-1&keywords=roger+scruton+the+meaning">those conservatives who favor a return to landed aristocracy</a>, to stabilize and perpetuate which they favor high income tax and lower (or no) property tax. Where one falls on this very practical issue, <i>as a conservative</i>, depends on one's lineage.<br />
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Or consider the question of a "world government." There was support for a single emperor, even doctrinal statements to that effect, in Pope Gelasius in the 5th century; the call for universal political authority extends even into the magisteria of the current and previous pope. It is called for by many in the integralist movement--but also by some of their otherwise opponents among the "liberal" conservatives, like Jacques Maritain. But it is opposed by many other traditional and Burkean conservatives. (Indeed, Burkeanism doesn't even enter into the above-mentioned debate among Catholic conservatives. But perhaps it should. I think that an injection of thinking about the common law tradition of England into Catholic thought would be good for shaking up the largely top-down model of Catholic legal thinking, itself inherited from the old Roman or civil law. Common law doesn't clearly fit into any of Aquinas' categories for law (eternal, natural, divine, civil) and its treatment of custom and subsidiarity are different from how they are treated in canon and civil law contexts.)<br />
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Or consider the use of literary and historical imagery among Catholic conservatives. There is among many such the love of romantic medieval imagery--say, Scott or Tolkien. But what is drawn from such imagery differs greatly based on one's metaphysics of the human person (and of gender) and one's view of what the foundations of ethics are. Some who love Tolkien will not admire the Habsburgs as Von Hildebrand did, while others will. Some will admire the Habsburgs only, while others will long for a return to such a form of government. Some will long for it, and also seek to realize it; others will say politics is the art of the possible, and only the values of that time can now be instantiated, not its outward form; still others will say politics is the art of the possible, and who can say what is possible until one has attempted it. Some, rather than the Habsburgs, will call us to the imagery of our American founders--and yet they were a jumbled bunch themselves, an amalgamation of Lockeans, republicans both in the radical French vein and in the more traditional Roman or Florentine vein, devotees of the common law tradition, and mixtures of these. And of these, some were liberal then that would be conservative now.<br />
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A professor of mine, an Orthodox Jew, once said that, in his view, only Orthodox and Reform Judaism had coherent platforms, but Conservative Judaism was trying to walk too much of a middle line and so was incoherent. (One could, perhaps, say something similar about the "conservative" or "reform of the reform" branch of Catholic liturgy vis-a-vis the traditional and the progressive.) <br />
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Maybe conservatism is incoherent, and one must opt for one of these factions. Yet I long for the values and outward forms I see incarnated in <i>every single one of the movements I've mentioned here</i>. We're going to see, I think, more conflict among these factions. It's inevitable, because conservatism is a juxtaposition of views with radically different metaphysics of the human person and his place in the cosmos. They can't all be right, though some aspects of all may be synthesizable. Kirk said conservatism is about the variety of life--what I'd call a "thick" conception of human nature, duties, communities. I don't know where to go from here. But I do know that I want to retain the thicknesses, the various dimensions of life, honored by each of these factions.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-61389017386639305432016-08-17T22:15:00.001-05:002016-08-18T11:32:00.057-05:00The Strange Case of St. Joan of Arc: Thoughts on Providence for Election SeasonMy wife and I are embarked on a project to watch all of Shakespeare's plays, in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Television_Shakespeare">fine productions put out in the 1980's by the BBC</a>. We just finished the three parts of <i>Henry VI</i>, which I have seen before, but which certainly bear many re-watchings (and re-readings.) I am always struck by the depiction of Joan of Arc in <i>Henry VI Part One</i>: not the visionary and saint of our now-familiar Catholic tradition, but a lascivious, power-hungry woman who calls on demons to come to her aid, who is willing to sacrifice herself to them for her country:<br />
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Cannot my body nor blood-sacrifice<br />
Entreat you to your wonted furtherance?<br />
Then take my soul, my body, soul and all,<br />
Before that England give the French the foil. (Act 5, Scene 3) <br />
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This is, of course, what one should expect from an English depiction of the saint. The fact that Shakespeare is writing in Protestant England makes no difference here; had Shakespeare been writing in more Catholic times, surely his depiction of Joan would be the same.<br />
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The case of St. Joan of Arc seems at first glance to be one of the strangest and most wonderful events in all the long, strange, wonderful history of Christendom. Many of us are accustomed to think of God as concerned perhaps with the long-range history of the world, with the moral and supernatural state of particular persons' souls, perhaps even with our health or personal happiness. But we balk at the idea that God would intervene on behalf of one side in an actual war--especially when both sides are Catholic, and neither side particularly virtuous! The idea of God taking sides in a battle (much less in smaller conflicts like those among political parties in a national election, or a personal disagreement with a colleague, or a baseball game) seems to many of us out-dated, even gauche, or worse, <a href="http://catholicphilly.com/2016/08/think-tank/archbishop-chaput-column/some-personal-thoughts-on-the-months-ahead/">blasphemous</a>. <br />
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Yet if the story of St. Joan of Arc is to believed--and it surely is--this is precisely what God did in the Hundred Years War. God intervened, not through some behind-the-scenes providential guiding of France's leaders thoughts to good strategy, but dramatically and supernaturally, through apparitions and miracles, by raising up the lowly and humbling the proud. <br />
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The case of Joan looks like an exception to what we might take to be the normal course of God's providence, as we ordinarily think of it. Many are accustomed to think of God's providence as His guiding the affairs of the world in secret, nearly always through the medium of created causes. We glimpse His providence always after the fact, it would seem, when looking back upon our lives we see how events converged to bring about an end we could not have foreseen or planned, but which was more significant that we could have foreseen or planned. Or we experience His providence in a such a way that it always could have been mere chance coincidence. <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="5.3.2"></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="5.3.4"></a><br />
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This is not the picture of providence that we find, for example, in <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/1022.htm">St. Thomas Aquinas</a>, according to whom <i>all events </i>occur through divine providence. Nothing occurs unless God explicitly <i>wills it to occur </i>or <i>wills to permit it</i>. Not only is this a deeply Scriptural view of God's providence, but a fundamental reason we have to think that there is a God is that all contingent things could only exist and change as they do if there were a first cause. But <i>every </i>contingent thing requires a first cause, that from which its existence directly and intentionally comes. The first cause is not (as it is so often misunderstood to be) something long ago, but something that <i>right now </i>causes each thing. A first cause has causal power over all second causes: the first cause gives to the second causes not only their existence but their causal power and activity as well. All things, without exception, come from the first cause. <br />
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This totally universal causality might lend itself to a view of God as hidden, as we find in St. Augustine. God intends some order to history by His universal providence, but that order is so vast and intricate that we cannot hope to divine it. We cannot be sure of the meaning of any historical event, or of God's purposes in bringing about or permitting that event. On this view, the case of Joan of Arc--that we can be sure that God wanted the French to win that war--looks wildly problematic. On this view, the English had good reason to reject Joan as a blasphemous sorceress.<br />
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But this view is incomplete. For God is not just a universal first cause, Being itself bringing into being all beings, but He is also<i> personal</i>, <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/1019.htm#article12">expressing His will</a> not just in actions and permissions, but in commands, counsels, prohibitions, and <a href="http://web1.desales.edu/assets/salesian/PDF/love.pdf">inspirations</a>, including in apparitions and prophecies. The vast design of providence is difficult to read. But the Catholic tradition on providence includes not only the Augustinian affirmation of this difficulty, but the long tradition of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Machiavellian-Moment-Florentine-Political-Republican/dp/0691114722/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471488936&sr=8-1&keywords=machiavellian+moment">apocalyptic</a> and mystical reading of the book of history, in which God's purposes <i>can </i>be seen and known in history.<br />
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Affirming that we know God's purposes in some historical moment is fraught with danger. The English soldier who fought to defeat Joan's armies surely did right--at least, he did his duty to his king and country, which was right for him to do--though clearly we can now see that he, Catholic though he was, was fighting against God. There are strange cases in the moral life when we do what is commanded of us, but this very act, it turns out, unbeknownst to us, is contrary to what God has willed in that particular situation.<br />
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And yet for all this the apocalyptic and prophetic reading of history is a crucial part of the Catholic tradition. It is well, I think, though many be false prophets, that many claim to be able to see the purpose of God in some event or other; better that there be false prophets along with the true than none at all! To deny that God could dramatically intervene out of fear of false prophets is to fail to recognize Who God is and how He relates to this world, guiding all things. To refuse to pray for the outcome of a war, an election, even a baseball game, out of a sense that these things are not of ultimate concern, is to lose sight of how God actually operates in history. (Consider not only Joan, but the whole pantheon of saints, with their particular concerns and patronages, such as the Fourteen Holy Helpers whose feast we recently celebrated: divine providence is utterly particular, and utterly elective, choosing what and whom it will, and rejecting whom and what it will.)<br />
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In an election year, we should not jump from this apocalyptic sense of providence to the claim that God is on one party's side or another. (Surely in this election year it is clear that He is on neither major party's side!) Yet we should not thereby think that God is uninterested or uninvolved in the history of our nation. To say this is not to claim some special status for our country, but it is to say that it is not just God's general providence over all things that guides our nation, but that the special mystery of divine election, which chose France over England, is operative even now. The God Who is the "setter up and plucker down of kings" (Henry VI Part 3, Act 2, Scene 3) is still the source of all political authority.<br />
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Part of what I want to get across here is that the mystery of Joan of Arc shows us in a particularly dramatic way that there are ways that God is present that we moderns tend to overlook. In Joan of Arc's life (and in<i> </i>the <i>Henry VI </i>plays at large), <i>war</i> becomes a place where God appears, as does the <i>king</i>. The transcendent God does not just appear in the sacramental glories of nature or married love or the mysteries of the Church or acts of kindness. For He is also the "God of battles," and the king is also a theophany.<br />
<br />
We need to remember that too, especially in an election year. The Catholic tradition gives us ample reason to see our political and even military lives as places where God appears. If we were to keep in mind this sacred character to our political enterprise, it might help alleviate the excesses of banality to which we daily subject. This is not, of course, to say that we should come to see politics as on a par with our properly religious lives; politics belongs to the order of nature, not of grace. But God appears in nature too, and grace imbues nature with new meaning. Politics is of course a messy, makeshift business, and we can at best do what is merely possible in a fallen world. Politics cannot be redemptive, though it is a place where the eternal moral order can break into the world. But Joan shows us that even for matters that are not of ultimate concern, God still has a genuine concern; even in what is not of everlasting value, God has still placed real value, and we should recognize that and respond to it accordingly.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-21868128247826258892016-08-13T16:21:00.000-05:002016-08-13T16:21:26.312-05:00I Finally Finished Infinite Jest, or Why I Read Fiction<span style="font-size: small;">
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</style><span style="font-size: small;">I have finally completed David Foster Wallace's magnificent novel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-Novel-20th-Anniversary/dp/0316306053/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471118988&sr=8-1&keywords=infinite+jest"><i>Infinite
Jest</i></a>. It took me eight months, but I read many other novels and other
books during that time as well. It's a book worth taking slowly. There's a
great deal that could be said about it, but for now I'll just say a little.<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">Much has been written on the themes of the book: addiction in general,
America's addiction to entertainment in general, the conflict between the
freedom of pure license and obedience to a higher authority, how playing
high-level competitive sport both shelters us from the horror of the freedom of
pure license and also is a horror and an addiction in itself, the spiritual
depth of twelve-step programs, the need to overcome an ironic and cynical stance toward the world in favor of a heartfelt, even naive, sincerity, etc. Much has been written on the form of the
novel: its cyclic structure, its encyclopedic accounts of tennis and drugs and
Alcoholics Anonymous and films and optics and so much more, the use of endnotes
(and endnotes to endnotes) to disrupt the narrative structure, its
self-referentiality, its use of humor, etc. I could say a lot about these
things too, but there are some other things I want to focus on.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">Why do we read fiction? Why is it, for some like me, as necessary to life as
eating and sleeping and prayer, sometimes more necessary than these things? </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">It is surely in part to escape from the everyday, and there <i>Infinite Jest
</i>certainly delivers. In the novel, <i>Infinite Jest </i>is a film (or rather<i>
</i>"film cartridge") so engrossing that once one begins to watch one
will continue to watch it over and over again until one dies, or the power is
shut off, in which case one will be reduced to imbecility. But the book itself
has a compelling, addictive quality to it as well, with so many plots and
subplots and characters and stray details that turn out to be essential that
one could, if one wished, read it again and again trying to tie together the
whole net of details. Though full of minute descriptions and
quasi-stream-of-consciousness, it's eminently readable. The text <i>moves</i>,
without fail. It's certainly an escape.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But one of course reads for far more than to
escape. If one read only to escape, one probably wouldn't choose <i>Infinite
Jest</i>. One also reads certain novels because, to use <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Transfiguration-Commonplace-Philosophy-Art/dp/0674903463/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471120246&sr=8-1&keywords=transfiguration+of+the+commonplace">Arthur
Danto</a>'s phrase, they "transfigure the commonplace," [1] that is,
after reading them the everyday is not so much escaped from as revealed in its
value, its every particularity shown up as a blaze of splendor. And without such
transfiguration, everyday life is a vanity and a chase after the wind. One steps away from reality for a moment into a world where this luminosity is deliberately evoked, and then one returns and notices the luminosity that was there in the real world. Or rather, perhaps, one's life in the fictional world overlays the real world and actualizes the luminosity of one's life there. One reads fiction because it transforms one in a way that few other things can. [2]<br /><br />This, I
think, is where <i>Infinite Jest </i>really shines. A character at one point
(no spoilers!) describes how he wanted to make films with no background
characters, where there would be no extras actors, their reduced to meaningless
background babble. Every character would shine forth. The result, of course, is
a cacophony—and that is, to a certain extent, what the novel gives us: the cacophony
and the splendor of real life, of each person and their thoughts, their
childhood, the horrors they have endured, the humor of their lives, both dark
and joyous, their hopes and thoughts, their addictions and faith and hope and
hate. One comes away from reading this book with a new appreciation for all the
peculiarities of other people—and of all of one’s surroundings, the shades of
light at different times of day, the feel of different surfaces, the smells and
sounds, all of it. </span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
There are plenty of websites devoted to trying to figure out “what goes on in <i>Infinite Jest</i>”, for much of the plot is
unwritten, only hinted at in stray lines here and there, and left for the
reader to piece together. Indeed, if one tries to read the novel in terms of a
conventional plot, most of the most climactic parts of the plot are like this.
But this, I think, is the wrong way to read this novel. What is important, what
is transfigured, really, are not the climactic moments, but the everyday—cooking
for those one lives with, cleaning a homeless shelter, lying intubated in a
hospital bed—and one’s memories of past days. </span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><br />
One reads for other reasons too—for the sheer pleasure of experiencing great
language, for example. There’s a virtuosic quality to <i>Infinite Jest</i>, scenes where, like Mozart in <i>Amadeus </i>or like many of the scenes in <i>The Rules of the Game</i>, the artist tries to see how many strands he
can weave into a scene, how many balls he can juggle at once. Many such scenes—the
game of “Eschaton” scene, the fight between the residents of Ennet House and
the Canadians—are nothing less than exhilarating. It's a funny book too, with all sorts of humor.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><div style="margin-bottom: 12pt;">
<span style="font-size: small;">But one reads for more than just pleasure; one
reads some books [3] because their value demands, calls for their being
experienced and appreciated. The call of the value of this book is not, I
think, to everyone. There is a grittiness, a coarseness, to this book, to its
depictions of sexual and drug-related violence, and its bleak assessment of
most of its characters that will not sit well with some people. But there are
those to whom this book calls, and they ought to read it and appreciate it, for
beyond (or even in) its rawness, there is a splendor that reminds one why one
reads fiction.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">[1] I endorse this phrase as a description of what great art does, though I strongly
disagree with Danto's claim that the art that does this in a definitive way--so
much so that he calls it the "end of art", 'end' being used here is
the same sense as in the Hegelian 'end of history'--is <a href="http://www.warhol.org/education/resourceslessons/Brillo--But-is-it-Art-/">Andy
Warhol's <i>Brillo Soap Pads Box</i></a>. I don't think the point of Warhol's
art is to "transfigure the commonplace." Rather, it seems to me that
it's to reproduce or make a comment on or just give us back the commonplace.
This isn't, of course, meant in any way as a criticism of Warhol [a] but rather
of Danto.<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">[a] Whom I might want to criticize another time, certainly, for <i>not </i>transfiguring
the commonplace--for this attention to beauty may well be a duty we have as
human persons.<br /><br />[2] I don't mean that fiction ought to be read as a means to this transformation. I don't think fiction should be read in a utilitarian spirit. (I don't think much should be done in a utilitarian spirit.) Rather, I mean that in reading one is thereby transformed. One reads for its own sake, or for the sake of its inherent value, its importance in itself, or what have you. But in the act of reading, one is transformed and one's perception is transformed, when one goes to read the world.<br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><span style="font-size: small;">[3] Just as one listens to some music and watches some films and views some
art and thinks some thoughts…</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span>Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-40902207477707366842016-07-25T16:43:00.001-05:002016-07-25T16:56:38.859-05:00The Cycle of the Martyrology and the Cycle of NatureOver the last few months, I've begun praying from the <i><a href="http://divinumofficium.com/cgi-bin/horas/officium.pl#">Divine Office</a> </i>(in the form promulgated in 1911 by St. Pius X), trying to pray a few hours each day. There are many things to recommend this practice, but one little joy is the praying of the Martyrology at the hour of Prime. (I know one can pray the Martyrology in the context of the new <i>Liturgy of the Hours</i>, but it was wonderful to find it directly incorporated into the liturgy in the <i>Office</i>; I appreciate being made to do good things.) After the hymn, psalms, Scripture passage, responsory, and some prayers, one reads the Martyrology for the next day, thereby getting ready for those saints that one will honor on the morrow.<br />
<br />
The Martyrology lists all of the saints honored by the Church for a given day--not only those on the universal calendar whose feasts are celebrated at Mass, but all of them, which is quite a few! To pray the Martyrology is to feel oneself surrounded by that "great cloud of witnesses", and to honor with the Church far more saints that one does purely through personal devotion or hearing Mass. Indeed, it is explicitly an open-ended number (open hopefully to our eventual inscription), for the reading always ends with "<span style="color: red; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">and elsewhere many other holy martyrs, confessors, and holy virgins." We do not know who all the holy ones have been, but we shall honor them all nonetheless!</span></span><br />
<br />
It is also to experience Catholicism as a <i>rooted </i>religion--that is, rooted in particular times and places, for these too, inasmuch as they are places or times of the saints' lives, great acts, or deaths, are also mentioned in the Martyrology. Catholicism is not a purely philosophical or universal or cosmic religion, but has grown out of concrete acts by real people in particular places. To pray the Martyrology is to be inscribed into this sacred geography and history; it is to feel the world as mapped out as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Decreation-Last-Things-All-Creatures-ebook/dp/B00OYV36MU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1469482084&sr=8-2&keywords=decreation#navbar">theologian Paul Griffiths has described it</a>, not as a neutral coordinate grid, but as containing loci of sanctity and profanity, of great nobility and horrific desecration. The prayer of the Martyrology is a reorienting of one's sense of space and time.<br />
<br />
This happens too through the reading of the date at the beginning of the Martyrology. Here one reads the year in the familiar <i>anno Domini </i>reckoning, but one reads the day in the Roman style--not "July 26" but "the Seventh of the Kalends of August", where one considers the day always counting down to the next Kalends, Nones, or Ides of a month. This is to reorient one again both to a particular way of counting time, rooted in the tradition of a certain city and its empire, and also a universal way of counting time, inasmuch as that city has been ordained by divine providence, made manifest through the particularities of history, to be the See of Christ's representative on earth. It is a small way of coming to see Catholicism's unique take on universality: what is most universal, most all-encompassing, is not the universality of the concept, nor the universality of the general cause, but the universality of a particular, incarnate history of events whereby the particularities of the Trinity and the divine operations are made manifest and bring about their most proper effects. (The universality of the highest cause is best seen in its particular effects in our lives and in human history, or as the Church prayed on this last Sunday: "O God, Who dost manifest Thine omnipotence maximally in sparing and showing mercy..."<br />
<br />
Finally, in giving the date, one also expresses it according to the day within the lunar month. The Church by Her liturgy sanctifies all things, even nature and her cycles. We see this also in the many psalms prayed in the <i>Office </i>that enumerate the ways in which the things of nature praise God. But to sanctify is also to draw into the lives of persons, to elevate nature above the level of mere matter so that it participates in the glorious freedom of the children of God. So we do not speak of nature cast off and considered in its pure physicality--no, we speak of the lunar calendar, that is, the moon as it is seen from a particular point of view, from this planet Earth, where God has chosen to make His abode amid the vast spaces. What we shall pray when we have left this planet and no longer have this calendar inscribed in our heavens, I cannot say; I have at times longed for space travel, but whether this is a good thing ("fill all the [cosmos] and subdue it") or whether (like my sometime trans-humanist desires to live in the body forever, which I now abhor) it is a longing to escape rootedness and particularity, I cannot say. But for now, the cycles of nature, drawn into the liturgy is another way of surrounding ourselves with the great cloud of witnesses, for the saints in their myriads bear witness to the restoration of all things in Christ, and so does nature, especially when liturgically sanctified.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-26140526093207732062016-07-24T15:49:00.000-05:002016-07-24T15:49:23.741-05:00We Need the Political Virtue of MerrinessOn a recent road trip with my family, we listened to <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Merry-Adventures-Robin-Hood/dp/0486220435/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1469389631&sr=8-2&keywords=the+merry+adventures+of+robin+hood"><i>The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood </i>by Howard Pyle</a>. What a delightful, indeed hilarious, set of adventures, of Robin Hood and his Merry Men living their merry life in the greenwood! That is the chief value of the book, and should be enough to convince you to read it (with your children, if you've got some). But the book raised another point for me as well: that <i>to be merry </i>is a virtue, and one that is necessary for a fulfilling political life--you know, the sort that we don't seem able to have nowadays.<br />
<br />
<br />
In Pyle's telling, Robin Hood and his Merry Men steal only from those who have extorted money from others, such as a "baron or a squire, or a fat abbot or bishop." But when they are going to take from one of these authorities their ill-gotten gain, they first bring him to their home in Sherwood Forest, and give them a mighty feast, and perform various sports for their "guest", jesting all the while. They have a concern for justice and for the needs of the poor, but they have an equal concern for the joy of life, for the sheer pleasure of festivity and skill at arms and practical jokes. Their merriness is born of their consciousness of the equal frailty and fallenness of all men, and the sheer unmerited blessing that is life under the blue sky. <br />
<br />
We moderns have, I think, a difficult time being merry, at feeling and acting out of that peculiar brand of humor and bodily lighthearted fun. We are adept at cynical or satirical humor (though not as some could do it--say, an Aristophanes or a Waugh), but humor or fun that is not explicitly in the service of some cause does not seem to be our forte--unless it be crude or sexual humor or fun, though not with the rich, vital bawdiness of a Shakespeare. To be merry requires that one have other virtues too: for example, that one know how to be solemn as well, and that one know how to celebrate a festival--and these are virtues that it is difficult to find. Ours is not the spirit of Robin Goodfellow or Robin Hood.<br />
<br />
In the merry greenwood, there are no ranks, but all are meant to be merry alike. But this is only possible, only makes sense, because elsewhere there are ranks, because elsewhere the bishop and the baron do rank ahead of the commoner and the outlaw, and really do have rights over these others--albeit rights that they often, unjustly, overstep. Roles can be flattened at times by the merry festival only if there are roles. If all are equal at all times, then what is there to be merry about when we are taken out of the everyday world into the world of jest and joy?<br /><br />The playfulness of merriness is not a childish, awkward playfulness, or a rude, insolent, cynical humor. It is a delight in all things encapsulated in the feast, the holiday, the flowing wine and the tables piled with meats, the mirthful faces in the firelight, the happiness of brotherhood, the dance around the Maypole, the delightful picnic by the waterside or the jolly drink and song at the public house. The merry man has nothing to prove to anyone, even to himself, unless it be his skill in bodily feats or in wit, and these for their own sake, and not for the sake of any gain. Merriness is not for the sake of anything but itself. The fact that Robin Hood and his Merry Men intend to despoil their guests of their ill-gotten gain after the merry-making is over takes nothing away from the fact that this is furthest from their minds while they are making merry; they are not merry so that or because of this despoilment or act of justice. No, to be merry is its own end. It is a step outside of the world of loss and gain, a world of gift-giving and receiving, of generosity beyond measure. Indeed, perhaps the despoilment of the wicked wealthy is itself a lifting of the wicked wealthy out of their world into this generous, jubilant spirit despite themselves--and not a few of those they entertain gain the Merry Men's merriness by emotional infection, and are sad to leave when the sports are over.<br /><br />Aristotle says that a political community requires that the citizens be in some wise friends--not deep friends, but civic friends, united around their common life, taking joy in living together. Surely this requires some measure of merriness! If the citizens of a nation cannot make merry together, taking joy in their lives in the land together, eating and drinking in common not for the sake of deal-making or cause-furthering or securing sexual partners or anything else that is base, but for the sheer enjoyment of laughing together, then what is such a nation? Why should I wish to live with people who know nothing but the everyday grind of loss and gain? How can I call myself the fellow-citizen of a man that I cannot be jubilant with? To be able to live rich, full, human lives, we must of course know how to work for our living, but we must know when to stop working, when to engage in those activities that are done for their own sake, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leisure-Basis-Culture-Josef-Pieper/dp/1586172565/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469392888&sr=8-1&keywords=leisure+the+basis+of+culture">real leisure</a>, intellectual or aesthetic or religious contemplation, and the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tune-World-Josef-Pieper/dp/1890318337/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469392915&sr=8-1&keywords=pieper+festivity">merry joy of the public festival</a>.<br /><br />Goethe somewhere describes a visit to a Catholic festival, complete with booths selling food and drink, games of chance and performances of song and dance, and in the midst of all this gaudy hubbub, the pilgrimage procession to the shrine of the local saint. Merry-making is not a perfectly ordered thing, a neat thing. It is a suspension of the economic (though, wondrous to see, the economic can be taken up into it). I think that it is at Catholic festivals that I too have learned something of what it is to be merry (though I learned it also, if indeed I have learned it at all, from <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream </i>and <i>A Christmas Carol </i>and <i>Manalive </i>and <i>Pastime with Good Company </i>and <i>Jupiter the Bringer of Jollity</i>--the last of which shows just how close merriness is to the deeper and more eminently spiritual virtue of Joy), as Belloc too learned: <br /><br />Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine<br />
There's always laughter and good red wine<br />
At least I've always found it so<br />
Benedicamus Domino!<br /><br />To be merry requires deep roots in the sacred and the solemn--and this too Pyle's book teaches us (<a href="http://www.ncregister.com/blog/sspencer/st.-swithins-day-if-thou-be-fair">as my wife recently argued</a>.) Robin Hood and his Merry Men invoke the saints on all occasions--in prayers and in oaths, the sacred so immersing their lives that it bubbles up into their jests, and their jests reach down into their faith. Merriness is a natural component of the religious life, and one that even, perhaps, can be taken up into the supernatural life. We cannot be merry if we cannot be solemn; if we cannot be solemn we can only be light or silly or cynical or crude or some other lesser brand of humor which is always looking to some goal or advantage. To have lives together worth having, to have a politics worthy of the name, we must be religious men and we must be merry men.<br />
<br />
What do I propose? Our political lives are the public face of our lives together. There are, of course, intimate sides to our lives together too, the time spent at table or hearth or bed in the private home, and these are in some sense political. But my concern is not for these, but for the fullness of our political lives. If we would escape the coarseness and the crudity, the lust for the gain and the lust for flesh that are increasingly the public face of our lives together, we must together reach down deep to the solemn and the merry. We must hold festivals. We must suspend work and home life frequently (as the medievals did on any and all saint days, and at all the principal seasons) and come together on common and green and plaza to merrily drink and dance--always remembering that each of these locales stands before a church, in which we offer praise, which is itself tinged with merriness. How can a nation be a nation if it does not together, publicly, take joy in its gods or its saints, and in the life that binds it together?<br /><br />(Hark at me, writing so seriously and so long about what is so light and joyful! Truly, I have a lesson or two to learn in this department as well!)Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-35735453445688086182016-07-22T13:59:00.001-05:002016-07-22T14:08:35.812-05:00When I Die, Will I Be an Angel?This question gets tackled frequently by various Catholic thinkers, bloggers, and apologists, and generally the answer is an unqualified "no". Indeed, frequently philosophically-inclined Catholics (and other Christians) express anger at those who say things like "now God has another little angel" in the context of a child's funeral. A conversation I had yesterday at a philosophy conference led me to mull this question over a bit, and my answer to this question is a qualified "yes". For this reason too, I don't think that people who say these things about the dead being angels should be corrected. <br />
<br />
Part of this issue is the question of what is meant by 'angel'. If by 'angel' one means a person who is necessarily immaterial--that is, a person who cannot have or be a body--then of course it is impossible for a human person to be an angel. You have or are (again, it depends on what you mean by 'have' and 'are' which is the correct verb) a body right now. So it's impossible for you to be unable to have or be a body. So in that sense you can't be an angel. Likewise, if my angel you mean something definitely non-human, then you can't be an angel in that sense (at least on my view: there are some Christian thinkers who think, with good reasons, that we can exist, after death, as non-human persons.)<br />
<br />
I think there are other senses of the term 'angel', however. Many in Catholic tradition (e.g. St. Thomas Aquinas) identified the angels with the "intelligences" of Greek philosophy (though this was opposed, even in the middle ages, by some, such as many Franciscan thinkers e.g. Peter John Olivi). Intelligences must be understood in terms of the hierarchy of beings. At the bottom of this hierarchy are purely material things. Next, there are vegetative organisms (e.g. plants) that can grow, but cannot perform cognitive acts and do not have conscious appetites--that is, feelings or conscious desires. Above that are animals, which are capable of sense perception: they can take in information about the particular things in their surroundings, and appetitively respond. Each level in this hierarchy is distinguished by a new, more unified, more powerful, more subject-like kind of <i>form</i>--the immaterial thing in a substance (an individual existing thing that is not an attribute of something) that causes that substance to be the kind of substance that it is. At the top of this hierarchy (under God) are the intelligences: substances capable of intellectual and free activity--which are activities that transcend the material, as a result of which the intelligences are pure forms, that is, purely immaterial beings.<br />
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Humans occupy a curious position in this hierarchy. On the one hand, we are animals, material beings capable of sense perception and needing matter for most of our activities (which, as with all substances, we get from our form--which we more usually call our "soul"). But on the other hand, we are capable of intellectual and free activities, which we perform just with our soul (albeit in connection with the body, except in the case of certain mystical experiences). On the one hand, we come into existence with our bodies, and our souls are the individuals that they are through being oriented to forming a particular bit of matter. But on the other hand, our souls can exist without our bodies, and they are that which gives our bodies their peculiar personal and spiritual existence--that is, they are that which makes our bodies not merely material or even only biological things, but rather things that fully share in and express our spiritual and intellectual lives. <br />
<br />
On Aquinas' view, for example, this means that our bodies <i>do </i>pre-exist our bodies in a certain, qualified sense: not that they exist at earlier moment of time than the moment of our conception, but that, in the order of explanation, existence is first given to our souls, and then our souls give that existence to our bodies. In the fact that our souls first and foremost are what exist in us, and our bodies only exist by sharing in our soul's existence, we are utterly unlike the other animals. It is for these reasons that some 20th century Thomists (such as Anton Pegis and Karol Wojtyla--better known as St. John Paul II) called human persons "incarnated intelligences" or "spiritualized bodies".<br />
<br />
<a href="http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeSpirCreat.htm#2">Aquinas goes so far as to say</a> that our souls are the same kind (or, more precisely, the same genus) of thing as the angels--both our souls and the angels are intellectual substances. But <a href="https://www.academia.edu/3467526/The_Personhood_of_the_Separated_Soul_Nova_et_Vetera_12_3_Summer_2014_863-912">in one of my academic writings</a> (see there also for references for the above material from Aquinas) I've argued that we have good reason to go further. The issue I was discussing there was whether we can say that the souls of dead human persons are still <i>persons</i>, which is a big debate in current Christian philosophy. When my Uncle Don recently died, his soul went onto heaven, hell, or purgatory. Can we say of that soul that it is a <i>person</i>? Can we say that it is <i>Uncle Don</i>--that is, can we say that Uncle Don is right now in heaven, hell, and purgatory? <br />
<br />
As I read him, Aquinas answers these questions "no" (a position called "corruptionism": the human person entirely "corrupts" or goes out of existence at death): to be a human person is to be a rational animal, and that's to have a body. No body, no person. We might pray to some of the not-yet-resurrected dead by name (like when we say "St. Peter, pray for us"). But Aquinas thinks we're really just praying to St. Peter's soul, which is not literally St. Peter, though it still has St. Peter's thoughts and virtues, and is enjoying God in the beatific vision. St. Peter won't exist again until the Resurrection.<br />
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This is a respectable position. It's one thing that motivates the ire of those who say that we should not call the dead "angels". It's motivated by a desire to maintain that we are animals, and to emphasize the importance of the Resurrection of the body. You won't be there without your body. This position was held, I think, by nearly every Western Christian thinker at least from the 11th to the 19th centuries, and maybe earlier than that. <br />
<br />
But I think it's wrong. It runs contrary to the plain sense of our prayers to the saints, and to what I take to be the normal sense of the faithful. It requires us to believe that something that is not a person and not me could have my thoughts and desires, and could receive the reward or punishment that I deserve. <br />
<br />
So I hold a different view, "survivalism", the view that I will survive my death as my soul. But for that view to be true, I've argued in the paper I linked above, human persons only need their souls to exist. On this view, then, my soul is naturally meant to inform and express itself in a body. But it doesn't strictly speaking need the body to exist and to be a person. My soul needs the body to implement most of its powers--powers like breathing and digestion and sensation and so forth--but it doesn't need the body to be a human person. My soul (which is me) is meant to inform matter, so it forms one substance, one thing, with matter--this isn't a version of <i>substance dualism</i>, the view that I am made of two complete things, soul and body. For this reason, I can say that I <i>am </i>my body. I'll be radically incomplete without the body, so the Resurrection is still deeply important. But I'll still be me without the body. For this reason, I can say that I <i>have </i>my body.<br />
<br />
On this view, then, what I am is rightly called an angel--that is, a being that is a purely immaterial substance, an intelligence--albeit one that is naturally capable of having a body, unlike all the higher angels. But if I'm an angel now (albeit an embodied one and one that is also an animal--that is, a sensing, naturally material thing), then there's no problem with calling me an angel when I'm dead. <br />
<br />
Some of you might worry that this does sound too much like <i>dualism</i>--a view that, in the form given by the 17th century philosopher Rene Descartes, has been blamed for many modern woes. Some Catholics say that when Descartes argued that the soul is an entirely distinct thing from the body, it led to the view that the body is a thing that we can entirely manipulate and use however we like, with no natural law inherent in it, and with no meaning other than what we imbue it with. (I don't think laying the blame for this widespread modern error at Descartes' feet is at all fair, but that's an issue for another day.) But the problem here is not the view that I am my soul--rather, it's a particular problem with how <i>matter </i>is conceived (as valueless and as entirely describable in purely mathematical terms and as raw stuff not ordered to any particular ends or purposes aside from the purposes we decide on), and with how the <i>connection between soul and body </i>is conceived (with the soul manipulating the body as something entirely exterior to itself, rather than forming for itself a body such that that body has natural ends that must be followed). My view explicitly denies these claims, so it doesn't leave us open to any of these modern errors. <span style="color: red; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"><br /></span></span>Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-77745740089764612922016-07-20T10:21:00.003-05:002016-07-20T22:05:31.868-05:00The Problem of Evil and the Privilege of Listening to HaydnI'm never quite sure if the problem of evil is really a problem at all. The problem, of course, is that there is evil (or, for a more precisely posed problem, meaningless or unredeemed or pointless evil), but if there were a God as He has been classically understood (as all good, all powerful, all knowing, perfectly loving) then He would want to and be able to prevent evil, and so there should be no evil. Since there is evil, then by that fact we can know that there is no God. Evil is variously understood by different proponents of the problem--most often as suffering (or, better, meaningless suffering) or as any privation (any lack of something that ought to exist). <br />
<br />
There are certainly more sophisticated versions of the problem, such as the one posed by Ivan Karamazov in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Karamazov-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0374528373/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469024903&sr=1-1&keywords=the+brothers+karamazov">Dostoyevsky's <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i></a>. (Yes, that link leads to the Pevear and Volokhosky translation, and I defy anyone who asserts falsely that the Garnett translation is better.) On these more sophisticated versions, the presence of evil in the world does not entail that God exists, but that a God Who would allow evil is not worthy of worship or obedience or love or belief. <br />
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At times, the problem of evil is deeply compelling to me, and all the responses--that a perfect God would allow evil because this is necessary for there to be free will, or that evil adds to the perfection of the universe, or that evil is necessary that greater goods might come, or that we cannot know why God would allow evil but that we have other reasons to trust Him--sound hollow. But most of the time this is not the case. These are pretty good responses to the problem of evil. I think they each work. If they are cold comfort to some, or appear insensitive, this is probably not the fault of the arguments themselves. (Indeed, they are deeply comforting to many. Comfort in this case may not be a sign of truth or falsehood.) And really, the problem of evil normally sounds compelling to me not in fact, but only inasmuch as I want to make it seem compelling to those whose faith seems to come too cheaply, such as some of the seminarians that are my students. <br />
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But as I say, I'm not sure it's a problem at all. It's a problem that arises only when one looks at evils with a certain frame of mind, and when one understands love with a certain frame of mind, one that considers love from the point of view of sentimentality or utilitarianism or welfarism or egalitarianism. The problem of evil shows that there is no God Who wants to maximize pleasure or love us with sentimental tenderness or with maudlin neediness or Who wants to bring about a political paradise or Whose love is incompatible with inflicting pain and punishment or Who must produce a world that is richly meaningful at all times. Thank God there is no such God! Thank God that this pathetic modern or post-modern God is a pale fiction! What a horrific world it would be if there were such a God, or if that sort of love were what love really was! (This is not to say, of course, that we should not work for justice, or care for people, or that we should be callous to others' sufferings. We should work for justice and we should not be callous, and God wants us to act in these ways. But we should act so with charity or with the virtue of justice, not out of a sense of maximizing utility, or out of an unfulfillable desire to utterly eliminate evils, which shall not happen until the Second Coming--and even then evils will remain in hell.)<br />
<br />
And yet. And yet. What is one to do with the moments of meaninglessness? What am I to do when "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread"? What is the depressed person (whose constant and interior darkness of feeling is so richly and horrifically described by David Foster Wallace in <i>Infinite Jest</i>) for whom the world is not just meaningless but a constant torment to do? What are the oppressed, the raped, the constantly abused children, the murdered, the hated to do? <i>A fortiori</i>, what are the perpetrators of these crimes, whose suffering exceeds even those on whom they inflict suffering (if the Divine Plato is to be believed, and he is), to do? How shall we hold that there is a God worthy of all love and worship Who allows--nay, Who in some sense wills, whether causally or permissively--all these things?<br />
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As I say, sometimes (maybe even most when the world really does appear darkest to me, as often it does, for the problem really only appears compelling to me when I consider evil from without, as a theoretical problem) the problem seems like no problem at all. For there are other counterveiling experiences. Those who work on this problem sometimes speak of experiences that can in some sense make up for evil. There are <i>compensating </i>experiences--those that make up for or result from evil, that in some sense justify God in allowing the evil. (Ivan Karamazov considers but rejects these.) There are <i>defeating </i>experiences--those that do not just make up for the evil, but that imbue that evil with meaning, and overcome it from within. The experience of the Beatific Vision may be, hopefully will be, like this. <br />
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But the <i>experience of providence</i> is also such an experience. In the midst of evil, one finds oneself guided, one finds that the world is entirely guided by a strong and sure hand--not one that fills one with feelings of delight, or with a sense of the meaningfulness of things--but a guiding hand nonetheless. One need not believe in God to have this sense--Nietzsche's feeling of the eternal return and his unbounded Yes and Amen to all things is a secular version of this experience of providence. I just cannot understand those who reject the idea that God means for there to be suffering, and all the less can I understand those who think that God does not even permit suffering. For me it is not just a belief, but something given in experience that my suffering is all willed, that it flows forth from the Fountain Fullness at the heart of all things. <br />
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Even better than this experience of providence is the <i>experience of privilege</i>. From time to time, I have the experience while reading or listening to something that it is an immense privilege to have this experience, that whatever has happened to me or whatever will happen to me hereafter, existing was worth it for this experience. I had this experience when I read the <i>Nicomachean Ethics </i>in college and was first really awakened to the philosophical life, and I had it again when I read Scheler's <i>Formalism in Ethics</i>. But most recently, I had this experience when listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxJrCR1Yn6c">the second movement of Haydn's <i>Emperor Quartet</i></a><i> </i>(Op. 76, no.3, the Poco adagio, cantabile movement). To hear those longing, lyric, swelling passages: the world is justified. There is a depth that cannot be denied, so long as the music lasts. Listen to the movement. It is not the experience that the evil is justified because it led to this music, or because without it the music could not have existed, or even because it compensates for or defeats the music. No, it is the experience that I am simply grateful for having had the privilege of hearing this movement. That there should be such sublimity in the world, and that I should have the chance to hear it--it is enough. Though I must bow and take my exit and be seen no more upon this world-stage--it is enough that I have heard Haydn's notes. That is the experience. What can any evil say to that?<br />
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You will say that not everyone has had this experience. That is probably true. You will say that there is still the feeling of meaninglessness that can return afterwards, or that can remain even in the midst of that experience. But I have also had this experience of privilege when things seems stripped of meaning. People often ask me why I like Camus or Cormac McCarthy or other bleak and meaningless things. But it is a privilege to have the false and phony sentimental exterior of the world stripped away--whether by the depths of sublimity as with Haydn, or by the dismantling experience of reading <i>The Road</i>.<br />
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To stare reality in the face: this is the answer to the problem of evil, to embrace all that there is, as it is. The problem of evil is just another form of reductionism, a hyper-focus on one experience, badly interpreted, to the exclusion of all others. To be real something need not be able to be experienced by everyone. To hear Haydn is to know this, to awaken from my egoism and see that there is value, that there are things important in themselves, whether I care for them or not, whether I know them or not--and I might have the unmerited privilege of hearing them or seeing them. It is to realize that existing itself is a privilege. The world is full of depths of givenness, coming down from the Giver of all gifts. "<span class="text Isa-45-7" id="en-KJV-18569">I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." Or <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/hurt-hawks/">as Robinson Jeffers tells us, in a passage I return to</a> whenever the Enlightenment idol-god seeks to seduce me, and which is itself a privilege to read:</span><br />
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"The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those<br />
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.<br />
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him; <br />
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;<br />
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him."<br />
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The God Who does all these things is no suburban lover, no bureaucratic welfare officer. He is One Who is utter Beauty, Whose beauty embraces both meaning and lack of meaning, Who is revealed in all things. The world is no mere novel of His, no mere play that He directs and once upon a time acted in. The world is as it really appears, the utterly rich, glorious, horrifying, dangerous, valuable fountain of His revelation, He Who is the burning heart of genuine love at the heart of all things, the destroying and passionate Fire, the one Who merits all my worship, all my love.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-29517410385536790312016-07-01T10:58:00.000-05:002016-07-01T10:58:05.682-05:00Blood Truly Remembers: Thoughts for the Feast of the Precious Blood<span style="font-size: small;">Today the Roman Church celebrates the Feast of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ (as well as the Octave Day of St. John the Baptist). In praying Matins this morning, I was struck by two lines in the hymn (<i>Salvete Christi vulnera</i>):</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: red; font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Suique Jesus immemor,<br />
Sibi nil reservat sanguinis.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">And Jesus, <i>not remembering Himself</i>, holds back none of His blood. What a mysterious power is the human memory! To remember is to intend, to re-live something that now no longer exists, to make it intentionally present once again--yet not as it originally was, but strained through the (often distorting) filter of one's life, one's prejudices good and bad, one's temperament, one's fullness or lack of attention, one's imagination But also to remember is to unify one's life, the many disparate strands of one's consciousness, in a single recollected life, centered around some good. But again to remember is to attend to something--perhaps wrongly, to hold back what should be spent or given, as Jesus did not do in shedding His blood--or perhaps rightly, as when God (in that wonderful word) remembered Noah in the ark. I should remember myself and not dissipate myself--that is, I should know myself, recollect myself from the many distractions and temptations that threaten to pull me away from myself and fragment myself, be centered in all that I do around what is good. I should not remember myself and I should dissipate myself--that is, I should not think primarily of my own well-being but only center myself around what is more inward than my inmost self and higher than my highest self, the Good itself, and I should utterly spend myself, prodigally, profligately, in the service of that Good. This is the opposite of that will to destruction of meaning <a href="https://markkspencer.blogspot.com/2016/06/cheerful-nihilism.html">that I wrote about last nigh<span style="color: black;">t</span></a>. There one remembers meaning and wills to destroy it; here one remembers meaning and wills that one should be utterly spent and lose one's life for its sake. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />But this perhaps Augustinian analysis might not go far enough. For Augustine, memory is a mental power. That is true. But here, in the liturgy, memory goes further. To remember is to carve what is remembered on the palms of one's hand. Blood remembers better than ever mind alone could. There is no covenant without consummation. One must cease to remember oneself so as to be able to give oneself utterly: the blood of martyrdom or childbirth. Blood, like human seed, is not just a bodily fluid, but the very working of memory, a speech that can be, in its very physicality, spiritualized beyond mere conceptual thought, eloquent beyond this airy speech. In the consummation of marriage, the memory of the species and of the Church is perpetuated in the very flowing-forth of the seed. In the shedding of blood, the memory of self-gift, the unification of one's life around the Good which is this utter, prodigal self-pouring-forth, is effected. </span></span></span><span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">To truly remember is to die for what one remembers, to be consumed by it, unifying one's life only in giving it away. </span></span></span><span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></span><br />
<span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Jesus, not thinking of Himself, not remembering Himself, gives Himself to the full, remembering the Good in shedding His blood and thereby giving birth to the Church. I cannot remember God or my true happiness or even myself unless I pour myself forth. We do not just remember internally. That is why our truest, most perfect memory, the Holy Mass, is not within us only, but is a sacrifice on the altar. I remember only if there is blood. Like Nietzsche says, to remember history is to take all that has gone before and transmute it into blood, into one's very life. His blood, pulsing in my veins, so that once more it may be shed and once more it may give birth unto eternal life. </span></span></span>Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-86656597623869239512016-06-30T22:38:00.000-05:002016-06-30T22:45:02.443-05:00Cheerful NihilismTwo films that my wife and I have recently watched have led me to reflect on the notion of Nihilism<i> </i>(you know, "these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.") A few weeks ago, we watched Francois Truffaut's four Antoine Doinel films (<i>The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board</i>, and <i>Love on the Run</i>), and last night we watched Woody Allen's <i>The Purple Rose of Cairo</i>. (If you know Whit Stilman's work, <i>Stolen Kisses</i> is the film that the Cathar character--another nihilist--makes his girlfriend watch in <i>Damsels in Distress</i>. I think it's well worth watching, but I'm not going to talk about that film here.)<br />
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As one does, I mull over the much-vaunted eclipse of meaning in the modern world now and again. At times, I am overwhelmed with the apparent meaninglessness and valuelessness of the world; at times, I am struck by the deep and abiding significance and value of things. I've learned to take both experiences seriously. Both of them say to me, like they said to Walker Percy, "something is up!" But one must learn to take them seriously in different ways. It would not do to build a whole philosophy, an entire worldview equally on both. One must learn to prefer the latter sort of experience, and understand the former in terms of the latter. <br />
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<i>Love on the Run </i>opens with the anti-hero Antoine Doinel, sometime juvenile delinquent, debauchee, petty thief, and pathological liar, in the midst of an affair while obtaining a divorce from his wife, by mutual agreement. In <i>Bed and Board</i>, they had come through many trials, mostly of his own making stemming from a pointless affair, and seemed to have reached a stability in their marriage, a stability marked by a constant battle of the sexes--but that is part of the joy of the love of man and woman, is it not? (Indeed, surely that is just part of what it is to be a man and a woman, as such!) But now, as <i>Love on the Run</i> opens, all of that is seen to be for nothing. Much of the film is taken up with flashbacks to the other films. There is a sort of regret, but it comes to little. Antoine claims to be in love with his new mistress, Sabine, but it is hard to tell which of his claims about himself are true--even for him, it seems. Despite claiming that he needs certainty in a relationship, he and Sabine decide to imagine that they are certain that their relationship with last forever (knowing full well, it would seem, that it will not), and in that state of cheerfully willed self-deception, the film ends.<br />
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When one thinks of nihilism, one might be tempted to think of the bleak and forlorn nihilists in <i>The Idiot</i>, or of a group of angry convention-defying anarchists or futurists (or the pathetic, violent, self-pitying nihilists of <i>The Big Lebowski</i>). (If you're an analytic philosopher, you might have thought of the view that there are only fundamental particles or simples; more on that anon.) But that's not the sort of nihilism depicted at the end of <i>Love on the Run</i>. This sort of nihilist is on the search for meaning, or at least believes himself on the search for meaning, but has both been lying so long that he lies even to himself. He no longer knows what is meaningful or not. He is willing to pretend, to deceive himself, for the chance at the feeling of meaning, even if he knows the whole time that this is not genuine meaning. To think oneself in love is better than genuine nothingness, which is unbearable. This is, indeed, a <i>cheerful </i>nihilism. It is not a love of nothingness. It is not really even an expression of the will to power, that will to dominate and create values that would clothe the nothingness of reality with significance of one's own making. At least, it is not a conscious will to power. It is a will to be deceived by the other, while willing to deceive oneself and the other, and while knowing that the other is deceiving herself (and knows she is doing so). It is a pleasant game. And since the deception of self and other is shared, it hardly amounts to a deception at all. It is, indeed, I would think, the possible basis of a genuine love, a gift of self to the other, made and received almost despite oneself, yet willingly for all that, and all the while quite happily.<br />
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<i>The Purple Rose of Cairo </i>depicts a young wife of an abusive husband during the Great Depression, whose only solace is in the movies. She spends an entire day watching showing after showing of a film, <i>The Purple Rose of Cario</i>, when in the midst of the fifth showing, one of the characters on screen comes off the screen and declares his love for her. He acts in a way entirely consonant with his character: earnest and sincere, truly loving, naive about life off the screen, with a genuine and charming innocence, able to make her fall in love with him. When the actor who plays this character arrives in town to try to make the character return to the film where he belongs, the actor succeeds in making the woman fall in love with her. When forced to choose between the fictional lover and the real one, she chooses reality. Yet the love of the fictional lover is real love, while the love of the real lover is an act, a manipulation. The real actor abandons her, and the film closes with her again taking solace in the fictional depiction of love on screen, real love lost to her forever.<br />
<br />
Woody Allen's films nearly all exude a cheerful nihilism, but it is not the same as Truffaut's nihilism. Allen's films depict the world as genuinely meaningless; Truffaut's characters are at least on the search for meaning. Yet in both love is a sort of solace--though no love truly seems to last. Neither, however, teaches us to impose our own meaning on the world. And both teach us something that is, I think, really true. It is lesson that is taught to us, for example, by Roger Scruton in <i>The Meaning of Conservatism</i>: that genuine human meaning is "on the surface" of life. What is truly meaningful are values like the value of falling in love, of family, of one's nation, of one's home. These things cannot be explained away in terms of something "deeper", as, for example, Freudian or evolutionary psychology, or Marxism, or Foucaultian genealogy, or the ethics of suspicion, try to do. The reality of these things is in their appearance, at least as they appear to the one who is genuinely and artlessly open to them--yet they are also fragile, threatened by those "deeper" forces, needing to be defended. Meaning is given, but it is not cheap. The mistake of Allen and Truffaut's nihilism is thinking that everyday life must be explained away, that what appears cannot be real, and so must be suspected, albeit cheerfully. Allen holds that there is no God or immortality, yet he feels deeply
(more deeply than any director I have seen) the value of place, and he
also knows (however twistedly) the joy of love. Truffaut is suspicious
of lasting love, yet he also longs for it, and is on the search for
it--for that reason, despite his nihilist self-deception, it is perhaps
not fair to call him a nihilist at all. <br />
<br />
A Christian may love these cheerful nihilisms, and must even find a way to include the threat of meaninglessness (without embracing it fully) that they express so well into his religion. There is something truly human about them, a real longing for something worthwhile, however strained.<br />
<br />
These cheerful nihilisms are greatly to be preferred to other sorts that leer at me invitingly from time to time. These forms know what they are about; they are not self-deceived; they are not on the search for given meanings.<br />
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First, there is the nihilism that thinks the world is meaningless, but seeks to impose meaning on it by the will to power (for despite all his protestations, Nietzsche too is probably a nihilist, as is anyone without God). But this nihilism at least recognizes the value of meaning and power, and so perhaps finds itself in the grips of some given value--the very value inherent in the will to power. For that is the escape from nihilism, as perhaps Dietrich Von Hildebrand saw better than anyone else: to allow oneself to be moved by a value given from without, to allow oneself to have given to one the beauty or the holiness or the purity (or the ugliness or the profanity, so long as it is objective and given) of things in the world. Realism is not enough; realism about values is needed, where one is moved by what is given, by these surface realities, and where what is given lifts one up to ever-more-transcendent heights. Theism is not enough, for there is a theism (that, for example, of John Milbank or of the occasionalists) that drains the world of meaning, and reduces all meaning to God. The only solution to nihilism is to see the world in a blaze of meaning and value (though not without losing the awareness of our fallen temptation to meaninglessness, and not without falling into a facile ascription of meaning to things).<br />
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In this same vein, there are those like Jean-Paul Sartre who are horrified, nay nauseated, at the meaninglessness of the world. But this is not, as Emmanuel Levinas recognized, not really nihilism either, but a spur to receive meaning from what comes from outside the meaningless world of physical processes and self-imposed meanings--that is, from the transcendent, from other persons and from God. There is still the opening to cheer here.<br />
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Second, there is the nihilism that says that there is nothing but physical processes or, as the analytic metaphysicans say, simples, that is, fundamental particles. This is a more horrific nihilism, but those who hold are not normally nihilists in the sense of experiencing the meaninglessness of their world. We should be glad for this, that the nihilists do not realize their own nihilism, but instead clothe the particles with meanings generated by "society" or "reason" or I know not what. Those who think that there really are only fundamental particles, by and large still act as though they also believed (or recognized the need to pretend that they believe, for their own safety if nothing else) that there are rights, or autonomy, or something like that. But this is really a deception. If nihilism in this sense is true, then there are no such things, and only our fragile social contract (which also does not exist) keeps up the pretense. If one really holds this form of nihilism, then there are really only two options: the option of suicide, or the option of the Marquis de Sade, who is <i>the</i> philosopher of the modern world, for whom only sensation matters--or, indeed, for whom there is only sensation ("mattering" being not a thing this philosophy can speak of). If this nihilism is true, then there is no reason not to procure sensation by any means: no violence or cruelty or sexual perversion is to be set aside, for all are equally sensations. Consent is of no moment, autonomy an illusion, rights a boring fiction. This nihilism entails sadism (not our pathetic contemporary sanitized <i>50 Shades of Gray</i> sadism, but the real deal.) There is no cheer in this nihilism. It is not the un-self-aware will to pleasure of the man of the flesh, nor yet the nihilism of the aesthete. It is a nihilism that has drained all the glory from the world, that leaves nothing but sensation, in ever increasingly terrible forms. I know of no depiction of it that I can morally recommend better than Edgar Degas' painting <i>Scene of War in the Middle Ages</i>. I know how to get out of the first nihilism. I do not know how to get out of this one. It is hell itself, though not yet the lower circles. <br />
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But this is not the worst nihilism, not the nihilism against which we must strive with all our might, which is the will to meaninglessness. This is the nihilism that sees the meaning and value in the world in all its splendor and hates it, that would blot it all out. This is not the pride that seeks to subordinate all things to oneself--that is not nihilism at all, or at worst it is the first sort, for it sees and loves the value of oneself (or at least the value one gives to oneself by one's will to power). This is the hatred of even one's own value. This is the longing only to destroy, that there may be literally nothing. As a good Aristotelian, believing that all things are done for the sake of some good, I hardly know if I can speak of such things. But as a good phenomenologist, I must speak of such things, for they do appear, or at least the temptation to them appears. This is the deepest of horrors, the bottom-most circle of hell, the infinite depths of the abyss. <br />
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This is, I say, nothing like the cheerful nihilism of Allen and Truffaut's charming films. But I also say that this is one place that charming nihilism can lead. I have not read Cardinal Sarah's recent book <i>God or Nothing</i>. But that does seem the choice posed to us. To affirm God (in a non-nihilistic way) is also to affirm the value of each being in itself (and not merely or maybe not at all, as Heidegger thought, the value of "Being"), the beauty and meaning that calls us higher, to render the world good and pure and great-souled. To shy away from this is to be on the road to sucking all the meaning out of things, to be left only with hatred for the fact that one must be, without being able to ever cease to be. Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-84297461444485953052016-06-28T22:38:00.000-05:002016-06-28T22:38:44.210-05:00Little Women vs. Treasure IslandOn my family's road trips, we listen to audio books, to pass the time, and to amuse my wife and I and our children. We've taken a few trips in the last few weeks, and on them we listened to <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/514/514-h/514-h.htm"><i>Little Women </i>by Louisa May Alcott</a>, and<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/120/120-h/120-h.htm"> <i>Treasure Island </i>by Robert Louis Stevenson</a>. Both of these books were among my favorites when I was a boy, and it's a pleasure now to share them with my children.<br /><br />When I read a book, I'm always sensitive to how it is trying to form me, especially how it's trying to form my worldview and my morals. I know that literature is not chiefly meant to be didactic (indeed, extremely didactic literature is boring) or like a work of philosophy, but is meant to be a thing of beauty. Nevertheless, one of the great extrinsic effects of literature is that it teaches us, it forms us, preferably without our even noticing.<br />
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Human beings are called to greatness. My heart resonates before those books that show me this greatness. There is a place for books that display the anti-hero or the man on the search (God knows I love to indulge such literature, hence my love for Albert Camus and Walker Percy), or even <a href="https://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/MORSIT.HTM#03">what Von Hildebrand calls the "tragic sinner"</a> (as seen well in the works of Graham Greene). But I need (and too often I forget that I need) and my children need works that show the greatness of the human spirit.<br />
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In showing this greatness, <i>Treasure Island </i>surely greatly excels over <i>Little Women</i>. <i>Little Women </i>is full of strong, full-fledged, even likeable characters, yet they are characters marred by a moral introspection, a constant concern for their own moral state (not to mention the narrator's constant analysis of her characters, bordering on moralizing) and a strong desire for self-improvement. The best characters of <i>Treasure Island </i>(Dr. Livesey, Captain Smollett) <i> </i>by contrast are magnanimous, striving for great deeds and great achievements, knowing themselves deserving of what is best, and defiant before what is beneath them. Finding themselves under bombardment in the stockade on the island, the heroes refuse to lower the British flag that they have raised, despite the fact that it is giving away their position. Far from them is any miserly or self-serving attitude: adherence to duty, defiance before the enemy, display of their greatness, boldness in action are their values. Yet this is not without a strong awareness of their own mortality, their sinfulness before God, their failures in their duty, their need for the aids of religion--in a word, their fallenness.<br />
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The good characters in <i>Little Women</i>, for all their real virtues and genuine religiosity,<i> </i>are at once too concerned for their own weak moral state and too sure of their own ability to improve themselves. The good characters in <i>Treasure Island</i>, by contrast, are aware of their own power to do great deeds even in the face of mortal danger, but they are also aware of their own deficiencies; despising the latter, they strain every nerve for the former. They present us with a deeply attractive picture of Aquinas' <a href="http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Ethics4.htm#8">magnanimous</a> (or <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/3129.htm#article3">great-souled</a>) person. <br /><br />The magnanimous Christian knows himself capable of great deeds (indeed, in Aristotle's view, which Aquinas takes over, the magnanimous person, being of utmost virtue, acts only so as to display the beauty of his character). He strains every nerve to perform such deeds, and knows himself deserving of the best because of his greatness, and knowing others deserving of little on account of their deficiencies. Yet he also has humility, and thereby despises himself for his lack of greatness, his fallenness, and thinks much of others for their greatnesses. Both are necessary for virtue. His greatness he indeed knows to be a gift from God--yet it is a gift he has received, given to him to exercise, and yes, to glory in. <br /><br />As we read, so we speak. The debased nature of our political discourse, reduced to the miserly language of economic loss and gain, or the pathetic straining after rights, reflects and is reflected in the sort of literature we write and read, the literature of weak, broken characters, of characters only on the search and never finding what they search for, of characters in the process of improving themselves or finding themselves or making the world a better place. As I said, there is, I do believe, a place for such things--and I mean that both literarily and politically. But it must be leavened by literature displaying great souls. That is necessary if we are to recover the notion of politics, which is nothing less than our very lives together, as the saying of great words and the doing of great deeds, as the public face of a people's life, where a people (which is a unified, coherent thing) grapples with the best life available to it, and acts so as to display its nobility to the world. One thing that gave me great hope in the recent "Brexit" vote was that the discourse (on both sides, but more on the victorious side) sometimes rose above the current decadent language of politics, to invoke things like tradition, greatness, and culture, at a level greater than the mere sound-bite. I don't expect much to follow on such rhetoric, but it's nice to hear. <br /><br /><i>Little Women</i>, I fear, was a step on the road to our current debased literature and politics, which is that of the technocrat and the perpetual field hospital or therapists' couch. I don't say this because of its domestic setting or its careful consideration of moral states and feelings; Jane Austen (better than anyone else) clearly shows us, in Mr. Darcy and Fanny Price, that those are realms for great-souledness greater than any other. I say it because it misses, even so subtly, genuine greatness and beauty of action and feeling. <i>Treasure Island </i>showed me that. Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-30421998065490951182016-06-19T21:34:00.003-05:002016-06-19T21:36:32.959-05:00Joyfulness, an Objective Property of the Clear Blue SkyI have often said to colleagues and friends that I don't believe in Ockham's Razor (AKA the Principle of Parsimony)--that is, the principle that one should not posit more explanatory principles for experience or evidence than is necessary. I suppose this isn't really true; I believe the principle, but I just think that our experience requires a vast number of explanatory principles. I think that the world contains a great plenitude of beings, properties, principles, and so forth, many more than most metaphysicians are willing to posit.<br />
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In his <i>Aesthetics</i>, Dietrich von Hildebrand, another very non-reductionistic metaphysician, calls the reader's attention to many phenomena which most philosophers have tried to explain away, but which he thinks cannot be so reduced. Among these are phenomena like the joyfulness of the clear blue sky. To look at the sky on a bright day is to see it as bearing a quality of joyfulness, of "festive splendor". Hildebrand contends (through a description of experience; this may not be the sort of thing that can be deductively argued for) that this is an experience of a property <i>in the sky</i>. It is not a projection of one's own joy, or an experience of the blue sky causing joy, for one can see this joyfulness of the sky when one is in a foul mood. It is not a habitual association of the blue sky with a feeling of joy, nor is it a personification of the sky. Indeed, as Hildebrand astutely contends, any personification of the sky (with a personage such as Jupiter, bringer of jollity) presupposes that one has grasped this quality of the sky. The sky, with this particular coloring, bears this quality, this value. And other features of nature--a desolate cliffside, a field of flowers, a glowering sky--likewise bear objective qualities pertaining to certain feelings. The features of nature do not consciously have these feelings, but they present themselves as bearing qualities corresponding to these feelings. This is, at any rate, the way the world presents itself to us.<br />
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Phenomenologically (that is, as an account of our experience), this is surely right. But what should one say about what there really is behind our experience? The parsimonious metaphysician or the naturalistic scientist will reject the claim that there is a real, objective property of joyfulness inhering in the sky. This experience can surely, it will be contended, be explained in terms of the person's interaction with the causal influence of nature. Furthermore, it will be said, there is no such real entity as the blue sky; the appearance that we call the sky can be reduced to other entities: light waves, the constituents of the atmosphere, and so forth.<br />
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This is precisely where I balk at the principle of parsimony. For this seems to me entirely wrong. The sky--the glorious dome of heaven, the firmament--is, I hold with every fiber of my being, <i>not </i>reducible, in its full entity, to atoms and waves. Its phenomenality, the way that it shows up in the experience of person, its sacramentality, its poetic and aesthetic value--all these belong to what the sky genuinely is, no less (nay, more) than its physical structure and causes. The metaphysician cannot privilege the naturalistic worldview; no, the metaphysician, the one who seeks to understand reality as it most fundamentally is, must find a place in his system for everything that shows up in the genuine, objective experience of <i>persons</i>.<br />
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Toward the end of <i>The Voyage of the Dawn Treader</i>, the protagonists meet Ramandu, a "star at rest," a star that has come down to earth to rest a while before resuming his place in the heavens. Eustace, a recovering naturalist, observes that in our world "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas." Ramandu corrects him: "Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of." The <i>form </i>of a thing, its true reality, its rich panoply of values and properties, observable by and made for persons, utterly exceeds (but does not leave behind nor denigrate) its matter.<br />
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I seek to develop a metaphysics that has room for all these things--physical forces and atoms, yes, but also objective values of beauty, vitality, even joyfulness in inanimate things. It is well to be reminded of the richness of reality, and it is well to hold that this richness is irreducible to anything else, and that is all made for human beings. <br />
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This last week, I read Wendell Berry's essay "The Loss of the University." Berry contends that a great problem in contemporary education is that, following Coleridge, we suspend our disbelief when we read the <i>Iliad </i>or the <i>Divine Comedy </i>or whatever. Rather, we should believe, that we might not only learn <i>about </i>these poems, but learn <i>from </i>them, living with the poem "as a piece of evidence that reality may be larger than we thought." Like C.S. Lewis, we must indeed have "some manner of belief" in the Homeric gods. To do less is to set aside some portion of our genuine experience of objective reality, of what is given to us from out there, of what is really real, in favor of safe and defensible, but reduced, account of reality. Joy shines down from the clear blue sky, and terror from the stormy one. This is not my personalizing of inert and neutral matter; it is a glory for persons shining forth from a matter ever laden with value. It is a world that is a message from a Trinity of Persons to other persons, and that is imbued with further persons' messages, a world that invites us, as today's Collect said, to be lovers of God in all things and above all things.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-9800836405650091042016-06-10T15:16:00.001-05:002016-06-10T15:20:33.801-05:00The Irascible Appetite of VictoryI <a href="https://markkspencer.blogspot.com/2016/05/perilous-beauty.html">mentioned a couple of weeks ago</a> that I'm reading David Foster Wallace's <i>Infinite Jest</i>. Wallace describes, rather plausibly (more so than, say, Camus' account of Don Juan in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Sisyphus-Other-Essays/dp/0679733736/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465586931&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=myth+of+sisyphys"><i>The</i> <i>Myth of Sisyphus</i></a>), the motivations for anonymous sex. The description comes in the midst of one of the character Orin Incandenza's many sexual encounters, which are always with women he names only as "the Subject", who are mostly young mothers:<br />
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"It is not about consolation...It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split-second shiver of leaving yourself; not about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never about love, which kills what needs it. It feels...rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something in each Subject's fluttering face, a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he <i>has </i>her, now has <i>won </i>her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he <i>has </i>her as is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender...not his but <i>her</i> love, that he has <i>it</i>, this love...That he is the One. This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough...For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would not be he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We." (p. 566-567) <br />
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One longs for victory in so many areas, but so often one wants a victory that comes only through the surrender of the one one triumphs over, through the other being under the delusion that he or she wants to surrender. (There are, of course, other times at which one wants to crush or subjugate the other, and for the other to know that he has been crushed or subjugated.) One longs, the passage says, even to delude oneself into thinking that the other has surrendered to one under this delusion. Strange and complex are the desires of the human heart.<br />
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Aquinas (following Aristotle, who is probably following Plato) <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/2023.htm">divides the human appetites into two categories</a>--that is, the feelings that we can feel The concupiscible appetites have to do with good and evil considered in themselves: for good, we feel love, desire, and joy (as we regard the good, move toward it, and attain union with it); for evil, we feel hatred, aversion, and sorrow (as we regard the evil, move away from it, and succumb to it.) The irascible appetites have to do with good and evil considered as difficult. If we consider as good a good that would be difficult to attain , we feel hope for it. But if we just consider its difficulty, and are overwhelmed by this difficulty such that we cease to strive for it, we feel despair. If we consider an evil that would be difficult to avoid, and which we are not yet actually confronted with, as evil, we feel fear. But if we consider it as something worth striving to avoid, we feel daring (there is surely also a kind of daring that regards the hoped-for difficult good as something worth striving for.) If a difficult-to-overcome evil is present to us, we feel anger (unless we are overcome by that evil, when we feel the concupiscible feeling of sadness).<br />
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Aquinas contends there are no further irascible appetites; if we overcome the difficult evil or attain the difficult good, then we just feel the concupiscible appetite of joy: we take pleasure in the good attained or the evil avoided, but it is no longer present or looked-forward-to as difficult.<br />
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St. Francis de Sales, in his <a href="http://web1.desales.edu/assets/salesian/PDF/love.pdf"><i>Treatise on the Love of God</i></a>, disagrees. On de Sales' view, there is a sixth irascible appetite, victory or triumph. (Where does he get this view? Is it his, originally? I can't find antecedents for it e.g. in the Jesuits or the Franciscans.) Once the difficult good is attained or the difficult evil overcome, we feel victory; we feel the satisfaction that is not just the joy of union with the good we wanted, the calm of peace, but the glory of having overcome a difficulty, the added luster that a past struggle lends to the outcome of that struggle.<br />
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But <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/2025.htm">Aquinas contends</a> that the irascible appetites all are ordered to the concupiscible--specifically to the feelings of joy or sadness. We strive so that we might feel joy, while fear can ultimately lead to sadness. <br />
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One of Orin Incandenza's many problems (his serious moral problems aside) is that he longs for the feeling of victory without allowing the ensuing feeling of joy in union, the feeling of possessing the difficult-to-attain good of a woman's love without allowing him (and her, and them together) to feel the joy of that love. Another of his many problems is the desire to feel that victory without any daring on his own part; he wants no feeling of conquest (again, set aside any moral consideration of the inappropriateness or appropriateness of the theme of conquest in this situation). But one should feel victory only after winning a battle, and one should feel that victory (and fight that battle) only for the sake of the ensuing peace, the calm and joy of life together. <br />
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At the same time, a difficult peace should not be longed for in a purely concupiscible way. It is not pure <i>eros</i> and pure desire that bears us to our heavenly homeland (or, on earth, to the happy <i>polis</i>.) An error of a certain sort of pacifist and of most universalists (whatever they may say about the purgatorial powers of a long but temporary hell) is the refusal of the irascible, a refusal to recognize that some goods are difficult--they require striving, for their achievement is not guaranteed, and so cannot be simply, concupiscibly desired. It is good, even necessary for total human fulfillment, to feel victory--<i>both </i>the victory of the achieved good <i>and </i>the victory of vanquishing (and not being reconciled with) evil, for anything less is contrary to, not building on, the clear evidence of human nature. To vanquish evil, to be reconciled with it but to utterly subdue it, is not a tacit defeat; it is, the realist must say, a real victory, which (unlike Orin Incandneza and Hans Urs von Balthasar) does not need the other always to surrender and think himself willing to do so. But the error of the triumphalist and a certain sort of radical (so well depicted in Orwell's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/1984-Signet-Classics-George-Orwell/dp/0451524934/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465589514&sr=8-1&keywords=1984"><i>1984</i></a>) is to long only for victory, to not also long for the resulting peace, when there is no more striving and no more enemies to defeat, and one can festively enjoy oneself.<br />
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Where Gregory of Nyssa's view of heaven, where striving and joy always simultaneously increase and are fulfilled, where the irascible seems to coincide with the concupsicible, fits here is not clear to me. There's something attractive about it to me, the "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Battle-C-S-Lewis/dp/006447108X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1465589704&sr=8-2&keywords=the+last+battle">further up and further in</a>" feeling, extended for all eternity. But I worry that it is a refusal to at last be at peace, to be calm once and forever, where having triumphed one can at last purely enjoy. To enjoy, without anxiety--that is among the most difficult goods of all.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-90097271797830213302016-06-06T14:53:00.002-05:002016-06-06T15:12:21.241-05:00Is It Time for a New Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard?The Western Catholic intellectual tradition is built as it were in layers of texts, with one writer commenting upon another, and then further writers commenting upon that one. Consider, for example, the following chain of commentaries: the Neo-Platonic philosopher Porphyry wrote his <i>Isagoge</i>, which was a commentary on and introduction to parts of Aristotle's logical texts (his <i>Organon</i>); St. Boethius, in turn, wrote a commentary on the <i>Isagoge</i>, as well as on parts of Aristotle's <i>Organon </i>e.g. the <i>Categories </i>and the <i>De interpretatione</i>. Peter Abelard also wrote a commentary on the <i>Isagoge </i>as well as on various parts of the <i>Organon</i>, but his <i>Isagoge </i>commentary is in large part a commentary on Boethius' commentary on the <i>Isagoge</i>. Abelard in turn influenced later commentators on these logical works.<br />
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To "comment" is to engage in a paradigmatically traditionary actitivty. It is not merely to merely explain the meaning of the text on which one is commenting. Rather, it is also to build upon that text, to allow that text to prompt questions that must be answered, to apply that text to one's context, but in such a way that the concerns of the original text are in some ways normative for the questions one raises. It is to recognize that certain texts are indeed authoritative, certain questions that have been raised by the tradition before one must be answered anew, that one's style and order of thought must be received not invented. Commenting requires creativity entirely embedded in docility and humility.<br />
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In the twelfth century, Peter Lombard, master at the Cathedral School of Notre Dame in Paris, compiled his <i>Sentences</i>. This was a compilation of texts from Scripture and the Fathers on all topics in theology, arranged topically in four books (on the Trinity, Creation, the Incarnation, and signs e.g. sacraments). This textbook became the normative text for students of Catholic theology at least until the seventeenth century. All of the major thinkers of the scholastic tradition commented and raised questions on it, or on of its successors. Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, Ockham, and Capreolus all commented on the <i>Sentences</i>; later thinkers commented, for example, on Scotus' various commentaries on the <i>Sentences</i>, or on Aquinas' <i>Summa theologiae</i>, itself a development of his commentary on the <i>Sentences</i>. Through this text (as well as through the texts of other normative thinkers e.g. Aristotle, Avicenna, Dionysius, the Bible, the <i>Decretals</i>, etc.) the Western tradition was tied together so as to have a common basis. To read in the scholastic tradition is to read a great conversation, bound together by a common love for these texts, by a particular order of thinking and inquiry, by docility to the received tradition, and, within that docility great flexibility and inventiveness of thought (which qualities can only really thrive if one has a firm foundation).<br />
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We don't have anything like the tradition of commenting on the <i>Sentences </i>now. In the scholastic revival of the nineteenth and twentieth century, some thinkers (e.g. the great Thomist Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange) wrote commentaries on the <i>Summa theologiae</i>, and many important manuals were written, following the classic order of inquiry rooted ultimately in the <i>Sentences</i>. And later thinkers following to some extent the scholastic tradition (e.g. the current burgeoning field of analytic theology) have not engaged with the tradition via the classic commentary genre (though there are some things that are kind of like it e.g. Robert Pasnau's <i>Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature</i>). Instead, we write journal articles or books, which draw upon the tradition, but raise primarily either exegetical concerns or concerns of contemporary relevance.<br />
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I should like to see a resurgence of the tradition of commenting on the <i>Sentences</i>--that is, a resurgence of texts that build explicitly upon Lombard's text, that primarily use the disputed question format of writing (as opposed to the essay) with its dialogical structure of objections and replies, and that both raise and deal with the classic questions asked in these commentaries, <i>and </i>extend this tradition to contemporary concerns, while engaging both with the classic authorities of the scholastic tradition and engaging with modern and contemporary, non-scholastic authors.<br />
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To genuinely think with the Catholic tradition requires a rigorous formation of one's thinking, a submergence in the stream of that tradition. I often underestimate the dangers of not so submerging my thinking. It is very easy, at least for me, to adopt habits of mind that are implicitly secular, modernist, naturalistic, anthropocentric; as a result, it is easy to begin to doubt core teachings of the Church e.g. the reality and eternality of hell or the supernatural causal efficacy of the sacraments. It is necessary, if one is to think well, to combat these tendencies by a constant sacrifice of oneself to what is given in the tradition, to make it the air one breathes. This must be done first and foremost, I think, in one's liturgical and devotional life, by a conscious submission to the traditional liturgy and devotions passed down to us, to have a fertile soil in which to grow, wherein one is constantly oriented first and foremost to God, <i>not </i>to oneself or to the human person. But this submission must be done intellectually too. And this is hard to do nowadays, since one is not professionally formed to do this, but rather to write on small, specific topics, in non-traditionary genres. The <i>Sentences</i>, by contrast, encourage one to develop one's thinking in the full breadth and scope of topics in the Catholic tradition, without any sacrifice of depth.<br />
<br />
If we were to revive the tradition of commenting on the <i>Sentences</i>, this would go a long way, I think, to encouraging this intellectual discipline. It would root one in the classic words, texts, order of inquiry, and style of questioning of the Catholic intellectual tradition, and give one a basis for integrating the truths found in "post-Christian" thinking back into the Catholic intellectual tradition (much as Aquinas and others integrated the post-Christian thinking of e.g. Porphyry, Proclus, and Averroes into the Catholic tradition). It would give to the world a distinctly <i>Catholic </i>philosophical style and vocabulary--which, I think, only realist scholasticism has the resources to do. (Much as I think they provide important helps to the Catholic intellectual tradition, phenomenology is just insufficiently realist and systematic, and analytic philosophy is also not realist enough e.g. on existence itself--but these approaches certainly should aid the Catholic thinker nowadays.)<br />
<br />
Why comment on the <i>Sentences </i>and not e.g. the <i>Summa theologiae</i>? I think we need to return to a text that provided a common basis and medium for all the various schools of orthodox Catholic thinking (Thomism, Scotism, Bonaventurian thinking, the various Jesuit schools, etc.) The new commentator on the <i>Sentences </i>should certainly avail himself of all the resources in later works by scholastic authors (and by many other sorts of authors too). But I think the basis needs to be something more common--not because I think older is <i>ipso facto</i> better or purer, but because of the place the <i>Sentences </i>have in Western Catholic thinking as both Patristic and systematic. (If there were a text that had this place as a common, systematic root of both Western and Eastern thinking, that would be even better, but I don't think there's anything that quite fits the bill.) <br />
<br />
I really think that a new tradition of commenting on the <i>Sentences </i>would be a great blessing for Catholic thinking, a new Springtime, if you will. Tradition-minded people have recently made great strides (many obstacles notwithstanding) in recovering a way of life rooted in traditional liturgy and politics, for example, and there have been many initiatives for intellectual thinking as well--but I do think they need something like this to tie them all together. I envision vast commentaries, full of subtle and beautiful reasoning (the more distinctions the better!), some written singly but others written by teams (like the great commentary projects of the seventeenth century at Salamanca, Alcala, and Coimbra, for example), all for the glory of God and the salvation of souls. <br />
<br />
I'd be interested to hear from my fellow Catholic thinkers about what they think about reviving this sort of tradition, or if there are already projects like this underway.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-49733179982541712312016-06-03T21:43:00.000-05:002016-06-03T22:06:59.494-05:00Writing for ContemplationThere may be people for whom writing is a constant pleasure, but for me it is both a burden and a compulsion. As long as I can remember, I have longed to write, and felt the need to put down my thoughts in writing. Writing is thinking; I cannot work out an idea in my head, but must commit it to the page, working it out in the physical interaction with pen or keyboard (and thereby, oftentimes, purging myself of those ideas that fester in my mind, undeveloped because un-developed). In this, we can see the structure of the human person: the spiritual made manifest in the material, the material the very mode of the spiritual's presence to itself. Now, as an academic, I must write, in order to retain my job. But writing is so difficult; <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/itc/history/winter/w3206/edit/tseliotlittlegidding.html">one longs to find</a><br />
<br />
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,<br />
An easy commerce of the old and the new,<br />
The common word exact without vulgarity, <br />
The formal word precise but not pedantic,<br />
The complete consort dancing together<br />
<br />
But this is difficult, most of the time impossible. The <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html">Divine Plato</a> reminds us that writing destroys the memory, and that it gives the appearance of wisdom without the genuine article. Writing freezes the vital play of discourse, the discovery of truth in the midst of contemplation. <a href="http://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/derrida_platos_pharmacy.pdf">His criticisms of Plato aside</a>, Derrida is surely right (in this if nothing else) that every word opens itself up to misinterpretation, to multiple interpretations, to deferrals, delays in meaning, misunderstandings, a lack of precise fit with the world. Yet writing <i>is</i> thinking, at least as I experience it; even the language of my thoughts is a written language, and it never quite gels with reality, at least not as precisely as I'd like it, at least not in such a way that I can recover in discursive thought those golden moments of insight and clear vision of <i>existence</i> that sweep down upon me from time to time.<br />
<br />
Between the idea<br />
And the reality<br />
Between the motion<br />
And the act<br />
Falls the <a href="https://allpoetry.com/The-Hollow-Men">Shadow</a><br />
<br />
How should a Catholic, especially a Catholic philosopher or another sort of Catholic thinker (perhaps that is just to say, I hope, a Catholic), approach writing? Let us leave aside the claim that writing is self-expression. No
Catholic thinker will want to do this, at least not in the sense that it
is often meant, just as no Catholic thinker will want to be "original"
This is not to say, of course, that a Catholic thinker will eschew
insight or creativity, but always with a view to expressing reality, not
for this nebulous "self-expression".<br />
<br />
Writing in itself seems to be a form of production. One writes in order to produce texts. This seems, at times, to be the approach in the academy. Writing is a servile art, there to bring forth a physical product. Some such arts are justified by their products: clearly, carpentry is worth while so that there can be wooden articles, and aerospace engineering so that there can be aeroplanes. But surely a Catholic cannot endorse the wanton production of excess products, physical things beyond necessity. And a Catholic <i>thinker</i> cannot spend his time in that sort of activity, at least not much of his time. There are too many books and articles produced already, and most of them never read, and unreadable anyways. The poet or the humor writer can write purely for the sake of the product, but that is probably not the case for the philosopher.<br />
<br />
Perhaps the Catholic thinker just ought not to write. But then there will be no thinking, for to think is to write, and vice versa. The Catholic thinker <i>must </i>write--though he knows that the production of writings is useless and superfluous, contributing to a glut of writing the world could do without, and whose meaning will be lost in the flux of interpretations to which all writing (especially weak, unmuscular writing) is subject.<br />
<br />
Why then write? The Catholic thinker should not write primarily as a productive activity. There <i>are </i>other sorts of activities: theoretical activities, and practical ones, and (rarest and most wonderful) theurgical activities. The old Greeks divided human activities into these spheres: some activities (the productive) we do to make things; some (the practical) we do just for the sake of good action, or for the sake of bettering ourselves and others, or to respond to or bring about some value; some (the theoretical) are activities of thinking, done for the sake of contemplating what is, and especially for the sake of the highest things; and some (the theurgical) are liturgical activities we do to worship God. <br />
<br />
The writing of the Catholic thinker must fall into one of these last three categories, if it is going to be really worthwhile. One could write because one's writing serves the Church. But even this is a danger, just as writing for production is a perversion of the loftiness of the thinker, the philosopher's calling. Are not most of our social ills inflicted upon us by those who would "make the world a better place"? Do they not inflict their ideologies upon us often in a way mediated by writing? Let us aim higher than that (and then, perhaps, the world really will be a better place).<br />
<br />
The Catholic thinker (or, again, let us just say, the Catholic) is called to something more: to the higher practical aim of moral virtue (and, indeed, to its perfection, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and their acts, the Beatitudes). My writing can serve my discipline, can inspire my (and others') reaching for these lofty heights of morality and holiness. I must write for this, even if no one should read my writing, even without the intention of anyone reading my writing. To write so as to become good--nay, to write so that my writing is a means of my becoming good: there is challenge worth more than finding words "precise but not pedantic".<br />
<br />
The Catholic thinker is called yet higher: to contemplate the glory of existence, and of that Existence Who is Love. And even further, to not only contemplate, but to worship, to praise, to impetrate, at once in body and in spirit, in spirit made utterly incarnate and body entirely spiritualized. I must write for this as well, that my very writing (discursive though it may be) may be divinized, that my words may be words of praise. Augustine accomplished this, and Anselm, and Dionysius.<br />
<br />
That my very writing may be a liturgy: not a production, not even merely something practical, but the very enacting of my contemplation, my embodied praise. Not to worry about what or how much is produced, because <a href="http://newadvent.org/bible/ecc012.htm">of the writing of books there is no end</a>--but to make this endless writing the very glory of the <i>calling </i>of being a Catholic philosopher. To worry about words not for the sake of my own originality or to impress colleagues or even to teach others some new truth--but because the very writing of the word is a part of my divinziation, and the divinization even of my culture, my language, my people. In this liturgical act, even my poor words, my words that slide so easily off of reality or are so quickly en-shadowed, that never quite say what I want them to, may be raised up, may at last speak the mysteries I long them to express, may become <a href="http://www.bartleby.com/122/48.html">immortal diamond</a>.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-8134237716541928342016-05-29T13:52:00.002-05:002016-05-29T13:52:59.993-05:00The Joy of the Corpus Christi ProcessionToday, at my family's beloved parish of <a href="http://www.stagnes.net/">St. Agnes</a>, we had a lovely Corpus Christi procession, after Fr. Mark Pavlak's first Mass, set to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZQikFmGXvE">Mozart's Mass in C Major</a>. Today, on the streets of St. Paul, our God walked among us, radiant in His beauty, arrayed for love and battles. What joy there is in a Eucharistic procession, to walk in the ranks of Our Lord, to follow behind Him as a member of His army with my fellow soldiers, singing his praises, or to walk before Him as my eldest daughter did, sprinkling rose petals before His Sacred Feet. What unity with all Christendom, past, present, and future, I felt, walking as a foot soldier in that marvelous pilgrimage. I can put my feelings no better than Dom Gueranger did, in his <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Liturgical-Year-15-Vol-set/dp/1622920848">Liturgical Year</a>, </i>quoting Fr. Faber at length:<br />
<br />
"But to us Catholics, faithful adorers of the Sacrament of love, Oh! the joy of the immense glory the Church is sending up to God this hour! verily as if the world was all unfallen still...How many glorious processions, with the sun upon their banners, are now wending their way round the squares of mighty cities, through the flower-strewn streets of Christian villages, through the antique cloisters of the glorious cathedral, or through the grounds of the devout seminary, where the various colors of the faces, and the different languages of the people are only so many fresh tokens of the unity of that faith, which they are all exultingly processing in the single voice of the magnificent ritual of Rome! Upon how many altars of various architecture, amid sweet flowers and starry lights, amid clouds of humble incense, and the tumult of thrilling song, before thousands of prostrate worshippers, is the blessed Sacrament raised for exposition, or taken down for benediction! And how many blessed acts of faith and love, of triumph and of reparation, do not each of these things surely represent! The world over, the summer air is filled with the voice of song. The gardens are shorn of their fairest blossoms, to be flung beneath the feet of the Sacramental God...All the millions of souls that belong to the royal family and spiritual lineage of St. Peter are to-day engaged more or less with the blessed Sacrament: so that the whole Church militant is thrilling with glad emotion, like the tremulous rocking of the mighty sea. Sin seems forgotten; tears even are of rapture rather than of penance. It is like the soul's first day in heaven; or as if earth itself were passing into heaven, as it well might do, for sheer joy of the blessed Sacrament."<br />
<br />
<br />Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-68881352495628256262016-05-28T15:04:00.001-05:002016-05-28T15:15:13.173-05:00The Intelligibility of Human CustomSince the beginning of my philosophical life, I have been interested in the the question of whether individuals are intelligible in and of themselves. You might think they aren't, and, if you thought this, you'd be in good company. You might think that when you get to know an individual, you know it only by considering it through various universal concepts--that is, concepts that apply to many things. You might think, for example, when you get to know another person, you come to know him not as intelligible in and of himself, as this unique individual, but inasmuch as he is kind, is intelligent, loves Indian food, is tall, is a reader of Jane Austen, etc. The uniqueness one sees in him is just the unique combination of these (potentially infinitely) many attributes.<br />
<br />
I don't think that view is right, but it's hard to articulate why. I've tried to do so in some of my professional writings, arguing, for example, that we see the unique intelligibility--where we understand some individual <i>in and of itself</i>, not just as an instance of a kind--in an individual's <a href="https://www.academia.edu/25303091/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_an_Embodied_Person_What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Separated_Soul_Angelicum_forthcoming">beauty</a> or <a href="https://www.academia.edu/13501488/Created_Persons_are_Subsistent_Relations_A_Scholastic-Phenomenological_Synthesis_Proceedings_of_the_American_Catholic_Philosophical_Association_89_Analyzing_Catholic_Philosophy_2015_forthcoming">its relations to others</a> or in experiences of <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7268426/Aristotelian_Substance_and_Personalistic_Subjectivity_International_Philosophical_Quarterly_June_2015_145-164">friendship</a>. But I'm trying to build up a more complete case.<br />
<br />
Why is it important to me that individuals as such (not just persons, but any individual whatsoever) be seen as intelligible? I think this is how the world shows up for us in our actual experience: when I really know a person, or an artwork, or a place, I come to know it not as an instance of a kind or as having certain repeatable attributes, but as unique in itself, with a uniqueness irreducible to anything repeatable. I can express this understood uniqueness, not just in proper names, but in literary genres like poetry, or in a biography, or a cultural analysis--though at the end of the day, all such expression sounds inadequate; uniqueness is something that I can grasp, that can strike my deeply, but that I cannot fully say in words. And I think that to fail to experience this uniqueness is to miss features of things that must be recognized for an adequate morality, and for an adequate politics.<br />
<br />
I really do think that a humane, reasonable, life-affirming politics requires an awareness of the uniqueness not only of individual persons, but of circumstances, cultural forms, ways of life. One political approach that captured this to some extent was the English tradition of custom and common law. We discover how the members of our nation ought to act, in particular and uniquely, through the education of a long tradition. As <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Revolution-France-Oxford-Classics/dp/0199539022?ie=UTF8&keywords=burke%20reflections&qid=1464464514&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">Burke</a> puts it, while the individual and the mass of men living at any time is foolish, the species, eternal society, is wise. We cannot give reasons in many cases as to why a custom is right--why one should, say, have the right to pasture one's livestock on certain common land and not others, or why one can marry certain cousins and not others--except that this is the prescription we have received from time immemorial, and that we have been so shaped by our tradition, given our very outlook on all things by it, that we are bound to live by it.<br />
<br />
Over the last few weeks, I've been reading at times from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Machiavellian-Moment-Florentine-Political-Republican/dp/0691114722/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464464662&sr=1-1&keywords=pocock+machiavellian+moment">J.G.A. Pocock's remarkable book <i>The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition</i></a>. I'm reading this text both because I want to understand better the origins of American political thinking, especially in the classical and Italian republican tradition, and because this sort of political thinking is itself an attempt to understand the particular. How can we understand the particularities of history? How can we understand who we are as citizens in a really rational way?<br />
<br />
Pocock opens the book with a critique of the English approach to custom, through an examination of Sir John Fortescue, the 15th century Chief Justice of England, who wrote the important legal text <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=zd0GAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA226&dq=fortescue+in+laudis&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiT9N-7xP3MAhUHJlIKHbcFBTsQ6AEIIzAB#v=onepage&q=fortescue%20in%20laudis&f=false"><i>De laudibus legum angliae</i></a>. (I haven't read Fortescue myself yet, but I'm an avid and frequent reader of <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/blackstone.asp">Sir William Blackstone's 18th century <i>Commentary on the Laws of England</i></a>.) Fortescue has a difficult time trying to defend the customary and common laws of England, on Pocock's reading, for he tries to do so in terms of Aristotelian deductions from the precepts of the natural law. But those are universal laws, and the particular laws of the English nation cannot be derived from them. At best, one can show how particular laws and customs do not contradict the precepts of the natural law.<br />
<br />
Pocock reasons, rightly, that this state of affairs is reached because, on the Aristotelian view, only universal principles are intelligible; particular states of affairs are just grasped by sensory experience (and the internal power capable of this, the cogitative power). So custom on this view is unintelligible. It can't be the basis for a real <i>understanding </i>of who we are, as members or citizens of <i>this </i>nation, or as existing at <i>this </i>point in history. In response to this, Pocock (and the people of the Florentine Renaissance) turned away from custom to the notion of the republic in order to make (secular) sense of their place in history.<br />
<br />
But to my mind that's not good enough. We do come to <i>really understand </i>who we are through our place in tradition. A politics based solely in the universality of natural law, important as it is, is inadequate to a vital, thriving culture. A politics based just in the universal becomes, I contend, eventually totalitarian, making the individual but a member of a totality, or (which is perhaps the same thing), libertarian, making the individual but an individual, instantiating universal laws for himself.<br />
<br />
We need a basis in a philosophy of the human person and the metaphysics of the individual for the intelligibility of particular custom. To have a rich range of customs as the soil out of which one grows, and which guarantee one's place in a rich and varied society, is to be able to live as a free man. It is to be given an identity by one's culture, but not a constraining identity, as in a mechanistic society, but an organic identity, capable of growth and development, for customs and traditions live, and so grow. We must attend to the ways in which particular customs present themselves as genuinely intelligible, imparting meaning to our lives. This is necessary, I think, if we who have lost a traditionary life, a life based in custom, are to recover that.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-23016669762785158622016-05-27T15:14:00.001-05:002016-05-28T14:05:21.588-05:00The Value of Fine FurnitureI've recently been asked to write two papers, one on Max Scheler's theory of value perception for a forthcoming volume from Oxford University Press on spiritual perception, and the other on <a href="http://www.hildebrandproject.org/">Dietrich Von Hildebrand</a> for a special issue of the <i>American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly</i>. This has led me, especially during the last week, to revisit a lot of material I haven't looked at closely in some time. While I've dealt with these thinkers in my papers on <a href="http://www.thepersonalistproject.org/">personalism</a>, I haven't concentrated on Hildebrand since my undergraduate days at <a href="http://www.franciscan.edu/">Franciscan University of Steubenville</a>, and not on Scheler since I was working on my dissertation. In my professional writing, I've focused more recently on Thomistic metaphysics, especially the Thomism of the 16th and 17th centuries, and on more contemporary French phenomenology. It's been quite a treat this week revisiting in a focused, daily way, this older, more realist, more German phenomenology.<br />
<br />
The fundamental idea of the phenomenology of value (which I've been looking at mostly in Scheler and Hildebrand, but also in Edith Stein, Aurel Kolnai, Nikolai Hartmann, and John Crosby) is that we perceive not only the sensory features of the world, but also values. We perceive the beauty of a sunset, the honesty of a trusted friend, the holiness of a saint, the usefulness of a tool. We perceive these values through intentional feelings--not mere felt bodily states like hunger or arousal, but feelings that reach out into the world and tell us about the value, the importance of things. Indeed, the feeling of these values are what guide our sense perceptions and reasoning about the world: we attend only to what shows up as valuable. These values are given as objective, and as falling into a definite hierarchy (holiness, for example, is better than utility or even aesthetic beauty). Values demand certain responses, and demand to be instantiated, and we should respond to these demands in accord with the objective hierarchy of values, striving for the highest values, while not neglecting the lower. In this way, values are the foundation for an objective ethics.<br />
<br />
There are many criticisms of this view that have been raised, including by me. But there's also something deeply refreshing about this view. Many ethical systems are based on a single value--for example, the precepts of utilitarianism, at least in its classical form, are based only the value of pleasure, while those of deontology are based only on the value of rationality and autonomy. But that's not how the world shows up for us, as the value-phenomenologists point out. Humility, nobility, beauty, holiness, vitality all cry out for response and instantiation regardless of whether we thereby feel fulfilled or pleasured, and regardless of whether our rationality or autonomy are furthered or hindered thereby. In many cases, what is demanded by the value of a deep friendship, a marriage, a religious commitment, is sacrifice, not only of our pleasure, but also of our rationality and autonomy. <br />
<br />
The world of values is a messier place than the sterile, one-dimensional world of the utilitiarians. It's harder to know which value precisely demands response in each situation, but that's the drama of the moral life. Values don't appeal in the same way to everyone--at least, there are many values that appeal in distinct ways to distinct people. And some people are just more gifted at apprehending and responding to value. Unlike on deontology, there's no strict moral egalitarian equality on this view, not even ideally. Unlike on utilitarianism, some pleasures are more imporant than others, and nearly all values are greater than that of pleasure. But surely this is how the world actually shows up for us.<br />
<br />
At the beginning of his <i>Aesthetics</i>, Hildebrand distinguishes beauty from luxury--for some dismiss beauty as mere luxury, to be set aside for the sake of the real business of life: say, social justice, or technological progress, or authentic self-expression. Hildebrand distinguishes the person who has fifty neckties or two-hundred pairs of shoes from the person who has a hundred paintings or "who can afford aesthetically noble, cultivated furnishings" (p. 9). The former is frivolous, accumulating an unnecessary number of things whose value, Hildebrand contends, is purely to be useful. But the latter is responding to the "high value" of the artworks and furniture that he has collected. There is a value in wonderfully carved or crafted furniture. It is good that it exists--not because its manufacture employs people, or it adds to the gross domestic product, or because it can be studied by art historians. No! Rather, it is good that it exists, <i>for the very value it instantiates</i>. It is good that there are noble houses, and cultured people to live in them. The world would be poorer were there not--again, not because of their value <i>for </i>someone, but because of their value, full stop. <br />
<br />
It's hard, living in a utilitarian and technocentric socity, to be able to see, much less appreciate, this value. We retort that such furniture could have been sold for three hundred days wages and given to the poor. We scoff that this patrician, aristocratic ethic is but rationalization for the excesses of the capitalist class. But this is all wrong. It's a failure of perception, the result of an inherently conflictual outlook on the world. To see the world as a cosmos of values is to rise above such a warlike view (the fact that Nietzsche was the first contemporary value theorist notwithstanding). There is value in fine furniture (though sadly I'll probably never own any); there is also (greater) value in serving the poor. There is only disvalue and degredation for the world in setting the two at odds with one another. (I can never read Peter Singer's "<a href="http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/1972----.htm">Famine, Affluence, and Morality</a>" without horror at the utter value-blindness it evinces.) The moral life does contain the drama of trying to figure out which values to respond to, but this is not the same as setting the values in conflict.<br />
<br />
For a conservative like me, there's a lot to recommend this ethic. Russell Kirk gives as one of his ten conservative principles the <a href="http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/detail/ten-conservative-principles/#five">principle of variety</a>: an opposition to egalitarian uniformity and leveling, to the ethic of the calculators, and an "affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life", a love for orders and classes. The values we all (if we are honest with ourselves) feel give the basis for these orders and classes. We must cultivate our feelings, though, if we are to recover this more human, more peaceful, more lovely vision for the world.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-91690423804330742462016-05-26T14:48:00.004-05:002016-05-26T14:49:29.435-05:00Are the Sacraments Magic?: Thoughts on Corpus ChristiToday, the Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi; indeed, not only is today given over to the celebration of the most holy Body and Blood of Our Lord, but the next seven days as well, after which we shall be presented with the holy mystery of Our Lord's Sacred Heart (to which my family is consecrated.)<br />
<br />
To receive a Sacrament is to be initiated into the power and <i>energeia, </i>the activity,<i> </i>of God. I know that I too often think of the Sacraments, even the Blessed Sacrament, occasionalistically--that is, I think of my reception of the Sacrament just as an occasion for God to act upon me, rather than thinking of the Sacrmanet as really having the causal power to bring about God's power and activity in me. But God's action upon us is nearly always mediated by creaturely causality. And in the Sacraments God does not just act upon us in the way He does in all natural events, moving creaturely causes to their natural activities as the <a href="https://www.academia.edu/8076217/Divine_Causality_and_Created_Freedom_A_Thomistic_Personalist_View_Nova_et_Vetera_14_3_Summer_2016_forthcoming">primary cause of all creaturely events</a>. Rather, He brings about supernatural events through new powers given to creatures, including to His ministers.<br />
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When a man moves through the ranks of the minor orders, he is gradually being initiated into divine causal powers. When he speaks the words of blessing, or the words of exorcism, or reads the words of the Epistle, he does so by the divine power that has been given to him. When the right words are spoken, and the right matter is there, God in His power is made present. God has given this power to make Himself sacramentally present on our altars to men.<br />
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<i>Dicies</i>: But that sounds like magic!<br />
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<i>Respondeo</i>: Yes, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Secular-Age-Charles-Taylor/dp/0674026764?ie=UTF8&keywords=a%20secular%20age&qid=1464289343&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">good magic</a>!<br />
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<i>Dicies</i>: You are a blasphemer.<br />
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<i>Respondeo</i>: Not in the slightest.<br />
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<i>Dicies</i>: Magic is clearly <a href="http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_P7E.HTM">condemned by the Church</a>. Worse, it's just ridiculous. To speak of the Sacraments as magic is to make a laughing stock of the Church; it will lead <a href="http://analytictheologyfuller.org/2016/05/24/what-do-i-do/">unbelievers to scoff</a>--nay, it will lead believers to scoff! You are merely trying to be clever, and failing.<br />
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<i>Respondeo</i>: The magic condemned by the Church is <i>extrinsic </i>magic, the magic by which one attempts to bring the demons under one's control and use them to control others. Or it's the magic that attributes occult powers to physical things <i>qua </i>physical--which they obviously don't have. But the Sacraments aren't like either of these sorts of magic. The Sacraments instead reveal to us the underlying magical structure of the whole cosmos--that is, the interconnections and correspondences that bind this cosmos together. <br />
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To receive a Sacrament properly is, in part, to have one perception transformed. It is to come to <i>see </i>by faith the Lord present substantially in the Sacrament--faith is a seeing. This transformation is not brought about extrinsically, though purely physical things acting upon me inasmuch as they are physical. Nor is it brought about through the obsessive force of a demon's will, or even another human will. No, it is brought about by God acting upon through the powers He has given to men and physical things--and not to their mere externals, but in the interior way He has transformed them. By the utterance of the priest, <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/4060.htm">animated by belief</a> and by His supernatural powers, which is one with His exterior speech, bread and wine become Our Lord. Why should I not call that good magic?<br />
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<i>Dicies</i>: Because it adds nothing to our understanding of the Sacrament, and is embarrassing. It's utterly irrational. It's childish.<br />
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<i>Respondeo</i>: But again, that's just because you (and all you moderns and post-moderns) have an atrophied sense of rationality. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Formalism-Ethics-Non-Formal-Values-Phenomenology/dp/0810106205?ie=UTF8&keywords=scheler%20formalism&qid=1464290912&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">Perception itself is laden with rationality, and so is feeling</a>, with a rationality of their own, a <i>logique du coeur</i>. To see the world as it is, is to see the world as full of interconnected powers, hierarchies of intelligences: the spiritual made present in the sensible, the sensible making the spiritual present. The Sacraments today are all that is left to remind us of that. Power and <i>energeia </i>flow forth from God, and are divided into many powers inhering in many things--yes, there is, as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Aristotle-East-West-Metaphysics-Christendom/dp/0521035562?ie=UTF8&keywords=aristotle%20east%20and%20west&qid=1464287832&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">Proclus</a> and the <i><a href="http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost12/DeCausis/cau_libr.html">Liber de Causis</a> </i>taught us, in all formed things a divine power: the power to cause, to make things be! In an age that has forgotten real causality, that has replaced causality with mathematically describable events, the Sacraments remind us of what it is to exist, and how we, creatures though we are, have a share in making things <i>to be</i>. God became man, and left us this Memorial of Himself, so that we could become gods (as today's Matins reminded us), but also to remind us that we are already gods by nature--that is, causes, makers of real existence, and in the Sacraments, makers of God coming to be with us. <br />
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God makes Himself, as it were, obedient to creatures. And in doing so, He raises up what is natural. The things with which we nourish ourselves, that assuage our uttermost poverty: these are now made God, just as we are to be made God. To make Sacraments is to be Marian: utterly receptive to God, yet utterly active (by an activity, an <i>energeia</i>, that He gives over to us) in making Him present, mediating Him as our Mediatrix does, holding back and appeasing His anger as She does. This is not abstraction or occult irrationality, but the basic Christian life. I want to see it that way, always.<br />
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And besides, magic itself is a more complex thing that you let on, dear <i>lecteur</i>. <a href="http://albertusmagnus.uwaterloo.ca/PDFs/Borgnet-volumen%2005.pdf">St. Albert the Great </a>and the <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=SblSAAAAcAAJ&pg=PT208&dq=conimbricenses+physics&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjk7ZiuwPjMAhUHUVIKHYF8D7sQ6AEILzAD#v=onepage&q=conimbricenses%20physics&f=false">Jesuit commentators on Aristotle at Coimbra</a> were perfectly willing to allow that there might be a natural magic, hidden powers in physical things, which we might learn to use (and that is the traditionary basis for a Christian acceptance of modern fantasy magic). "<a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1719/1719-h/1719-h.htm">Only Christian men guard even heathen things.</a>" The first time I went to the ancient Mass of the Church, the summer after my senior year of high school, I thought, "This must be what it was like to go to an ancient Greek sacrifice or mystery." All things are fulfilled in the Church. The signs of the sacramentals--our relics, scapulars, and so forth--both fulfill nature and nature's natural sacramentality, natural indication of and correspondence to spiritual things in the heavenly places, and elevates that sacramentality to new correspondences. The whole world is laden with powers, there to sweep us up the hierarchy to divinization.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-57517000490057843862016-05-25T15:38:00.000-05:002016-05-25T15:38:58.562-05:00My First French New Wave FilmYou might think that this disqualifies me from calling myself a classic film aficionado, but up until last night I had never seen a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_New_Wave">French New Wave</a> film. Recognizing my deficiencies and wishing to rectify them, I watched with my wife last night <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Truffaut">Francois Truffaut</a>'s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053198/"><i>Les quatre cents coups</i></a> (which is translated into English literally as <i>The 400 Blows</i>), which I recommend to you all.<br />
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My serious resolution to engage in the intellectual life dates to when I read <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Albert-Camus/dp/0679720200?ie=UTF8&keywords=the%20stranger&qid=1464207103&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">The Stranger</a> </i>by Albert Camus. Meursault's disconnection from the reality that others so easily navigate, his estrangement from ordinary morality, the way in which he drifts, meaninglessly but more or less happily through life: all these impacted me immediately and in a way that has shaped my entire outlook since then. Ever I have felt the lurking absurdities of the world: I too could slay a man for no reason. Faith, reason, civilization, tradition are thin bulwarks, but bulwarks that must be defended, that I must defend, against the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/descent-into-hell-Charles-Williams-ebook/dp/B01BJYIQIS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464207438&sr=8-1&keywords=williams+descent+into+hell">bottomless circles of the void</a> that stretch below--but without ever forgetting that they are stretched over, poised over, that terrible abyss, and that one could, cheerfully, hurtle into it at any moment.<br />
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That just sounded, perhaps, trite and moralistic. Never mind. Anyways, Truffaut manages (maybe without intending it) to capture something of Camus' outlook in this film. The story (we've noticed that the great French films, much more than, say, the great Russian or Swedish or Polish films, manage to have a strong, coherent <i>plot </i>that moves you along and helps the film go down easier, without detriment to its greatness--which is not to say they are better or worse than those others, since plot is certainly not everything in a film) centers around a young teenager, Antoine Doinel, and his troubled relationship with his parents (his mother wanted an abortion) and his teacher, and his delinquent, petty-criminal activities with his friends. Doinel is alienated from others, from a moral sense, from any sense of rootedness or at-home-ness. Yet his heart perhaps opens (or maybe he just senses an opportunity to get some inspiration for an essay for school) in reading a few lines of Balzac, and he longs for a glimpse of the sea. To be rootless can be to be on the search. I don't know if Meursault is on the search, but Doinel is, though he doesn't know what he's searching for (aside from, perhaps, the sea, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_feeling">the oceanic abyss</a>). Like <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moviegoer-Walker-Percy/dp/0375701966?ie=UTF8&keywords=the%20moviegoer&qid=1464208341&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">Binx Bolling</a>, he finds his solace in the movies, but he's looking for something.<br />
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The film is beautifully shot. The thing I most want out of a film is great cinematography (hence my relative indifference to plot); the second thing I want is great characters--Truffaut's film delivers on both. There's a scene where Doinel and a friend have just stolen a typewriter from an office, and they run through a flock of pigeons toward the camera, which captures the pigeons fanning out in an arc around the boys for the briefest of glorious seconds, before running off with them down the street. There's a long scene of Doinel running down a road and through a wood, the camera panning along with him for a long time, and framing him among the trees with the chiaroscuro impressionism of a Rembrandt landscape. Everywhere is gritty, and the camera lingers over the grit. This Paris isn't the glamorous, sophisticated fantasy Paris of, say, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1605783/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><i>Midnight in Paris</i></a> (my favorite Woody Allen film), but it's a real, raw Paris, a Paris for wild boys looking for something.<br />
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It's a sure sign of a decent director too that he can get so many child actors to act well, without being annoying. So many movies with child actors are just obnoxious. But the child actors act like real children here: petty, cruel, self-serving, that is, childish, yet with an innocence in their very childishness. Like another great French film, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092593/?ref_=nv_sr_1"><i>Au revoir les enfants</i></a>, this film captures the joy, the immorality, the hopeful independence, and the bleakness of adolescent boyhood. That glimpse of real boyhood, which like faith is a thing that must not be lost to the world, alone makes this film worth your time.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-14604783226426167452016-05-24T14:57:00.000-05:002016-05-24T15:46:29.238-05:00Perilous BeautyI've been slowly (the way I seem to read everything) reading <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Jest-Novel-20th-Anniversary/dp/0316306053?ie=UTF8&keywords=infinite%20jest&qid=1464117681&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">David Foster Wallace's <i>Infinite Jest </i></a>since December, and the other night I reached the chapter, about half-way through, where Joelle Van Dyne/Madame Psychosis explains to Don Gately why she always wears a veil. In the world of the novel, veils are worn by the members of the Union of the Hideously and Improbably Deformed. Earlier in the novel, Madame Psychosis spent an entire episode of her radio programme listing out ways in which one could be hideously or improbably deformed. But she's not deformed; rather, she is so beautiful that anyone who sees her becomes obsessed with her, longing to be with her, seeing her as what will fulfill all of their desires. She is so beautiful that, in her words, her beauty is a deformation.<br />
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When philosophers, especially Catholic philosopher, talk about beauty, it's often in glowing terms. Beauty is what is ordered, proportionate, splendid; <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/1005.htm#article4">what pleases when seen</a>; it is the revelation of the form in matter. Without beauty, goodness is dry-as-dust moralizing, hardly worth pursuing, and truth is reduced to mere information, unable to satisfy the longing of the intellect; but <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glory-Lord-Vol-2nd-Ed/dp/1586173219?ie=UTF8&keywords=glory%20of%20the%20lord%20volume%201&qid=1464117482&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">with beauty, goodness is worth doing entirely for its own sake, and truth worth knowing</a>. One can rest in beauty. One can trust beauty. As Dostoyevsky says (or rather, as <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Idiot-Vintage-Classics-Fyodor-Dostoevsky/dp/0375702245/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464117701&sr=8-1&keywords=the+idiot">Ippolit questioningly attributes to Prince Myshkin</a>), beauty will save the world.<br />
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I don't disagree with anything in the last paragraph, but Joelle van Dyne reminded me of another feature of beauty, one we must not lose sight of: that beauty is perilous, seductive, enchanting. I'm currently reading <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fellowship-Ring-Being-First-Rings/dp/0547928211/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464117817&sr=1-1&keywords=the+fellowship+of+the+ring">The Fellowship of the Ring</a> </i>to daughters <i>Prima et Secunda</i>. Tolkien, especially in his depiction of the elves, portrays in a deeply convincing manner this perilousness of beauty. The beautiful does not only save and heal, it is not only what pleases when known. It exhibits a force of its own. It is uncontrollable, provoking a response, nay, conjuring a response. To apprehend the beautiful is to be in ecstasy--that is, to go out of oneself. Who knows what will occur then? The elves have a power that cannot be wielded by mere mortals, seen in their rings first of all, but it is also in the very air of Rivendell and Lothlorien. The fear that Gimli feels when entering the latter is not misplaced, not mere prejudice. There is a real terror in beauty. <br />
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There was something of a debate in twentieth century phenomenology (and it continues somewhat in twenty-first century phenomenology) as to what the most fundamental metaphysical attitude is--that is, what attitude puts us face-to-face with the mystery of Being itself. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Being-Harper-Perennial-Modern-Thought/dp/0061575593/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464118530&sr=8-1&keywords=heidegger+being+and+time">Martin Heidegger</a> contends that it is anxiety (which I can relate to): one is not anxious before any particular being, but in anxiety all the particular beings fall away, and one is left confronted with being itself. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/God-Without-Being-Hors-Texte-Postmodernism/dp/0226505650/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464118506&sr=8-1&keywords=marion+god+without+being">Jean-Luc Marion</a> argues that boredom, in which one loses interest in all beings, plays this function, but once one has broken beyond considering beings as beings (by which he means considering them as comprehensible by us) we can come to see them as transcending our concepts, and so see them shining forth as beautiful. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Homo-Viator-Introduction-Metaphysic-Hope/dp/1587313618?ie=UTF8&keywords=marcel%20homo%20viator&qid=1464119081&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">Gabriel Marcel</a> counsels hope as our fundamental attitude. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Finite-Eternal-Being-Attempt-Collected/dp/0935216324/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464118616&sr=1-1&keywords=finite+and+eternal+being">Edith Stein</a> contends that we are best aware of the fundamental structure of being when we have childlike trust, a sweet and blissful security in being upheld in Being at every moment, and this leads us to see all things as beautiful.<br />
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But each of these attitudes reveals a world very much having to do with the intellectual, introspective self, what <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Secular-Age-Charles-Taylor/dp/0674026764/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464119287&sr=1-1&keywords=a+secular+age">Charles Taylor</a> has called the "buffered self"--an experience of the self as contained, a finite being existing in the world and in society, not at the mercy of various spiritual and psychical forces flowing through one's environment. <br />
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To see beauty, to really see it, is no longer to live in the world of the buffered self. It is to become "porous", to be enraptured, possessed, enchanted by what one sees (and otherwise senses). Hence the sheer danger of beauty. But it is not the danger of a physical peril that one can more or less guard against. It is the peril of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Orthodoxy-G-K-Chesterton/dp/1515241394/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464119887&sr=1-1&keywords=chesterton+orthodoxy">unexpected faerie in the fairy tale</a>, the unexpected compulsion of the face that launches a thousand ships. When I go to the art museum, I am left drained, cranky, the world outside those beauty-enclosing frames suddenly dry and shriveled. It is the sudden, the inexplicable violence of the <a href="http://biblehub.com/exodus/4-24.htm">Lord Who came upon Moses in the inn and would have slain him</a>. The whole world can display this peril and this fascination; it is <i>this </i>beauty beyond all order that we can deploy and so appearing perhaps at time as de-formed, not the merely pleasant or splendid beauty, that make the true worth knowing and the good worth doing, even if the very knowing and doing should slay one, even if in the very seduction of its glory one be utterly undone. To feel the perilous beauty of the world: this is, I think, the (or at least a) fundamental attitude.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-32712697590475508222016-05-23T11:54:00.002-05:002016-05-23T12:24:28.081-05:00LilactimeWe're coming to the end of lilactime here in The Cities. For the last few weeks, the lilacs have been a burst of purple on every corner, on the border of my garden, on the quad at school. There's one yard in particular that I pass walking from my car to my office that is rank with overgrown lilacs, its scent wafting far up the street, especially in the evening.<br />
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The lilacs that emerge everywhere along with the first signs of the full, mature green of summer, after the early, impressionistic dusting of chartreuse on every branch, are for me the image of late spring. It is easy to believe in the love, the <i>eros</i>, that draws the sun and the other stars, when there are lilacs out. This time of Spring is, as everyone knows, the time of attraction. The German phenomenologist <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Sympathy-Library-Conservative-Thought/dp/1412806879?ie=UTF8&keywords=scheler%20the%20nature%20of%20sympathy&qid=1464020196&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">Max Scheler describes</a> how many in the early twentieth century held that all life forms a single substance, driven by a single interior vital force, which we, who as Spirits rise above the pulsing stream of life, can apprehend in sympathy and in the experience of vital drives.<br />
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My dissertation dealt in part with phenomenological accounts of bodily feelings. At my defense, in presenting why I chose to write the dissertation I had written, I talked about how ever since high school I had taken deep feeling to be of deep metaphysical significance, to reveal something about the nature of things that could not be revealed in any other way. "That was a mistake," said one of my committee members. "That's just called puberty."<br />
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I thought he was wrong then, and I still do. To feel the stirrings of lilactime (and of puberty) <i>is</i>, I contend, to feel something genuine about the world, a value that manifests itself only in the sympathetic vitality and desire awakened by warmth and fragrance. It is, for me, to reawaken when first I really fell in love with my wife. Lilactime is, for me (and for her too I expect), mediated to me by that splendid memoir of romance, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Severe-Mercy-Sheldon-Vanauken/dp/0060688246/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464020576&sr=1-1&keywords=a+severe+mercy"><i>A Severe Mercy</i> by Sheldon VanAuken</a>, whose depiction of his own lasting romance provided for us a pattern for preserving our own romance.<br />
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But when spring's glory goes<br />
The lilacs of our love shall stay,<br />
For ever Maytime sweet and gay,--<br />
Until the lilacs close<br />
Beneath the deathly snows. (p. 31)<br />
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It is good for there to be lilacs, for there to be these infinite stirrings that wrap together body and soul, life and spirit, world and self, heaven and earth. There is a time for things to be rococo, soft and sweet, under dappling light. Recently, my wife and I watched <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/?ref_=nv_sr_2">Andrei Tarkovsky's remarkable film <i>Solaris</i></a>, which teaches us that, confronted by the infinite strangeness of others, we can come to<i> </i>know them frequently not by analysis and experimentation, but by unguarded, vulnerable, sense-mediated romance. <br />
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But it is also well that the lilacs die. There is something enervating about too much spring vitality. One longs at moments, even as summer swells its glorious fruit, for the hard angles of Winter. To be ever soft and rococo, to turn the good sentiments of love to the banalities of tenderness and sentimentality--this is intolerable. One longs for the strictness of rational order, for the calmness with which one thing rationally follows another. There is not only the erotic, but even more fundamental (even--nay, especially--in marriage), friendship, the civic or political relation, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Totality-Infinity-Essay-Exteriority-Philosophical/dp/0820702455?ie=UTF8&keywords=totality%20and%20infinity&qid=1464021234&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">the ethical relation, the hard joy of the fraternal relationship</a>.<i> </i>The lilacs must close beneath the deathly snows. <br />
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Yet it is also absurd that lilacs die. I mean 'absurd' philosophically: meaningless, giving the appearance and promise of meaning without the fulfillment. The lilac seems to say so much, each cluster seems to present an eternal value--yet, of course, the lilac really says nothing at all. It is ridiculous that a thing of beauty should cease to be, nay it is a horror that a thing of beauty should cease to be--and yet, of course, it is a mere matter of course. I long to peel off the appearance and get at the meaning underneath, but of course there is nothing to a lilac (I mean the phenomenon of the lilac, what awakens such love and longing in me, what wafts in the fragrant night, not its causal, biological insides) but an appearance, a beauty. The world is absurd and lovely. ("To be in love", VanAuken says, "as to see beauty, is a kind of adoring that turns the lover away from self." (p.43)) "A poem should not mean", <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/detail/17168">Archibald MacLeish said</a>, "but be." If this is true of a poem, <i>a fortiori</i> it is true of the lilac. Beauty is more than can be said, more than saying itself.<br />
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Let this time now suffice for lilactime. I give the eternal Yes and Amen to the death of the lilac.Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6824571417982044594.post-56052578139469789892016-05-22T15:13:00.003-05:002016-05-23T10:44:41.345-05:00Sacramental Perception and Pure Nature: Thoughts on Trinity SundayI'm beginning this blogging exercise on <a href="http://tridentine-mass.blogspot.com/2016/05/trinity-sunday-first-sunday-after.html">Trinity Sunday</a>, which I think is an auspicious day for an Anglophile like me. This exercise is meant to help me write a little everyday, to establish more regular writing habits during this summer, and to help me write on topics other than those I'm currently writing on professionally. I hope some of you will read along with me, and offer your own thoughts on what I say here. I'm starting with what will probably be a longer post that what I'll normally write, but I wanted to get some thoughts out here about some directions I think I'll be taking my thoughts on this blog.<br />
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Over the last year, I've become involved in an <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/109726299380274/">ongoing research project</a> on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Senses-Perceiving-Western-Christianity/dp/110768594X?ie=UTF8&keywords=spiritual%20senses&qid=1463944221&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">spiritual perception</a>--that is, the sense-like perception of God and other spiritual things. It seems obvious to me that many people spiritually perceive--that is, that many people see or hear or taste God, whether in Himself or in created things. But I'm currently perplexed about <i>what </i>it is that I sense when I sense God, and I've for most of the past year been thinking about <i>how </i>I do this sensing. Today, on Trinity Sunday, I'm wondering about whether we sense the <i>Trinitarian </i>God when we sense God in creatures, or whether, when I sense God in nature, I merely sense God in His unity, God inasmuch as He is One rather than God inasmuch as He is Three Persons. This opens up a number of issues that I hope to explore on this blog, and in other writing elsewhere. <br />
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This question of what I sense when I sense God in the world is not just a question of abstract philosophy; it's a question of deep existential import. What am I supposed to see when I look out at the external world? The question doesn't have an obvious answer, no matter what common sense might dictate. Are there real beings out there? Mere sense data? An intersubjective immaterial construct? I can train (and have trained) myself to see the world in each of these ways. It's not implausible to think that Christianity (which gives us the true <i>gnosis</i>) is, in part, a training of perception, coming to see the world as it really is. Unless I see the world as it truly is, I cannot accomplish my task of making every part of this world an altar, a sacrifice for the worship of the Trinity.<br />
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So the question then is what I ought to see when I look at the world. <a href="http://www.ncregister.com/blog/sspencer/4-ways-to-form-a-sacramental-imagination-in-children/">My wife and I frequently discuss the <i>sacramentality </i>of the world</a>. <a href="http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html">The world makes present that which it signifies</a>. We can only reach our fulfillment as human persons if we come to see and respond to this signification. Hence our desire to teach our children to view the world primarily as sacrament--and to see all other aspects of the world (the world of everyday perception, the world of scientific analysis, the world of artistic perception) as facets of the world that reveals and leads us to God by making Him present.<br />
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But the question then<i> </i>is <i>how </i>God is made present in things. <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/1045.htm#article7">St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of there being in all creatures a trace, a vestige, of the Trinity</a>: as substance, each creature is like the Father; as having form, each creature is like the Son; as having a relation of order, each creature is like the Holy Spirit. <a href="http://people.uvawise.edu/philosophy/phil205/Bonaventure.html">St. Bonaventure even more so finds vestiges of the Trinity</a> all over the place in the created order. Yet these <a href="http://newadvent.org/summa/1032.htm#article1">thinkers</a> (and, <a href="https://archive.org/details/synopsistheologi02tanq">Adolphe Tanquerey, my dogmatic manualist of choice, tells me</a>, all scholastic theologians) agree that we cannot naturally reason from these traces back to the existence of the Trinity; rather, we only perceive these traces under the influence of faith.<br />
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Over the least year and a half, I've been <i>slowly </i>making my way, as time allows, through Hans Urs Von Balthasar's mammoth Trilogy (<i>The Glory of the Lord</i>, <i>Theo-Drama</i>, <i>Theo-Logic</i>). I expect I'll be discussing my reading of this Trilogy quite a bit this summer. Currently, I'm in the midst of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Theo-Drama-Theological-Dramatic-Dramatis-Personae/dp/0898702879?ie=UTF8&keywords=theo-drama%20volume%202&qid=1463946231&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1">second volume of the <i>Theo-Drama</i>, <i>Dramatis Personae: Man in God</i></a>. I just recently finished the section "The Stage: Heaven and Earth". Among other things, Balthasar argues that this heaven and earth--that is, this universe, this created order--are "designed for the <i>one </i>drama that is to be played on it" (p. 173), that is, the drama of this salvation history. Given that God has made <i>this </i>universe in <i>this </i>way, things were going to unfold in this way. To properly perceive nature is to perceive it as oriented to and facilitating and being transformed by <i>this </i>drama of salvation, the only one in which I am really caught up. To properly perceive nature is to see it as "from the Trinity" and moving back toward the Trinity, revealing those Persons, and caught up into them in Christ.<br />
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There's a lot to recommend that view. And yet I balk at it. This view is defended by reference to the Book of Scripture, and seeing nature through that lens easily lends itself to this sort of perception. But what if we look at the world not primarily through how God has revealed Himself in Scripture, but through how He has revealed Himself through that other great source of revelation, the Book of Nature itself? There, it's not so clear to me that nature reveals itself as oriented in a Trinitarian way, or towards this and only this drama of salvation. Couldn't this world have been made in this way and <i>some other drama </i>taken place in it--that is, some drama other than this drama of Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, and so forth? <br />
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I don't want to entirely go down Balthasar's path, because I think nature reveals itself as both sacramental <i>and </i>subsisting in its own right. The world reveals God. But there's a danger in that phrase, that things will be "<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-2005.1995.tb07111.x/abstract">overcome</a>" by God, that things in themselves will be emptied of significance, having their being, their meaning, only in God. I see this in discussions of beauty (which I am interested in more than anything else): that, like <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html">Plato</a> said, the beauties of this world exist primarily (or even only) to bring us back to the Form of Beauty, Who is God. As much as I often feel that (and this is no criticism but the highest praise) <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/nietzsche/1886/beyond-good-evil/preface.htm">Christianity is in large part Platonism for the masses</a>, I think that we must learn to see not only God in things, but things in themselves, subsisting and beautiful in their own right. A beauty given to them, but truly theirs no less for all that. <br />
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I feel caught between the view that "everything is grace", that all things are here for and in <i>this </i>drama of grace, and (the view I prefer more often) that there is a genuine place for <i>natural happiness</i>, for the dramas of <i>this </i>life, apart from but not in opposition to grace--that is, a place for the old notion of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Natura-Pura-Recovery-Doctrine-Philosophy/dp/0823231054?ie=UTF8&keywords=natura%20pura&qid=1463947434&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1"><i>pure nature</i></a>. We human persons have a nature in ourselves, apart from grace, not in opposition to grace, and able to be super-naturally fulfilled by grace--but a nature, with its own, God-given orientations. And these orientations are operative in our political struggles, our everyday lives, our history, and so forth. These things have value: not eternal value, perhaps, but real value nonetheless. <br />
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Here's what I want to see if I can work out: to see nature as <i>both </i>sacramental and pure nature--but not only that: to see nature even inasmuch as it is pure nature as sacramentally revealing God, <i>but also </i>to see nature in this current, post-Ascension, post-Pentecost, pre-eschatological state, as engraced, divinized, sharing in the divine <i>energeiai</i> though not perfectly yet. And, to go beyond others, to see pure nature as <i>both </i>subsisting and meaningful and valuable in itself, not in reference to God, <i>and </i>as revealing and having meaning and value from God sacramentally, <i>both </i>as the One cause <i>and </i>(if I can dare to think this) as revealing the Trinitarian God in a way knowable even naturally. I long for supernatural fulfillment, of course, but I also long for <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.10.x.html">natural happiness, both contemplative and political</a>: to contemplate God inasmuch as I can by my nature, and to join with others in civic life. I want to work out whether I can have it all. Mark K. Spencerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08283753483254749770noreply@blogger.com1