Reading in Exile

I'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). There are certainly more sophisticated versions of the problem, such as the one posed by Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov . (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 sophisticat...

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 ( Salvete Christi vulnera ): Suique Jesus immemor, Sibi nil reservat sanguinis. And Jesus, not remembering Himself , 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...

Two films that my wife and I have recently watched have led me to reflect on the notion of Nihilism (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 ( The 400 Blows, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board , and Love on the Run ), and last night we watched Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo . (If you know Whit Stilman's work, Stolen Kisses is the film that the Cathar character--another nihilist--makes his girlfriend watch in Damsels in Distress . I think it's well worth watching, but I'm not going to talk about that film here.) 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...

On 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 Little Women by Louisa May Alcott , and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson . 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. 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. Human beings are called to greatness. My heart resonates before those books that show me this greatness. There is a place for books tha...

I 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. In his Aesthetics , 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 (...

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest . Wallace describes, rather plausibly (more so than, say, Camus' account of Don Juan in The Myth of Sisyphus ), 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: "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 mome...

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 Isagoge , which was a commentary on and introduction to parts of Aristotle's logical texts (his Organon ); St. Boethius, in turn, wrote a commentary on the Isagoge , as well as on parts of Aristotle's Organon e.g. the Categories and the De interpretatione . Peter Abelard also wrote a commentary on the Isagoge as well as on various parts of the Organon , but his Isagoge commentary is in large part a commentary on Boethius' commentary on the Isagoge . Abelard in turn influenced later commentators on these logical works. 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, i...