Samwise the Gρεεκ.

Back Again, again.

For some reason for the last several months I’ve been rather overwhelmed when trying to think of a thing to comment on and how. I don’t want to publicly say much politically, again, for some mysterious reason, and it was hard not to get political. BUT here I am again, and to start things off I’m just going to post a super nerdy, ridiculous, probably interesting to exactly no one, overly-long essay I wrote for my theology class last semester. It’s about the Trinity. And, shockingly, this is the edited and significantly cut back version. Also, I got an A on it, but I should probably note my professor was struck down with the Rona when he graded it, sooo… anyway. Here it is.

*ahem*

Attempted Thot on the Trinity, by Sammy B.

In The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism, Thomas Joseph White, OP concludes his chapter on the Trinity saying, “The Trinitarian faith is not a secondary aspect of Christianity, but is the summit and source of all the rest. This truth casts perspective on everything else, and allows us to ‘interpret’ reality from a most ultimate vantage point.”^[1] In this essay, I will attempt to approach this “most ultimate vantage point” and explore what the interpretation of reality from such a place means.

Much of the work of evangelization is overcoming and correcting fundamental misunderstandings.^[2] In the chapter at hand, White walks us through the true, ancient teaching of the Church regarding the nature of God as three persons in one divine nature. He makes it clear that the Trinity in no way contradicts the monotheism of the Old Testament; there is still only one God, the same One who first revealed himself to the Jewish people as the Creator and I AM, who then more fully and clearly revealed Himself in His Son Jesus Christ, who, before Abraham was, simply is. At the same time, White explains, each of the three divine persons are distinct, “the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, the Son is not the Father or the Spirit and the Spirit is not the Father or the Son,”^[3]; “the Father always gives all that he is to the Son without in any way being diminished in his own plenitude, and he and the Son with him give all that they are to the Spirit, in a communion of eternal love.”^[4] In other words, there is nothing in any of the persons of the Trinity that is not fully in the other two as also the One God. They are definitely distinct, yet always united in being and action. Creation, Redemption, Sanctification happen through all three persons in one. Anything God does, He does as Father, Son, Holy Spirit.^[5]

How can this be? How can something be distinctly and definitely three yet ultimately and really one? White admits that this may look like a “complex conceptual game.”^[6] Is it intentional obfuscation- as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons claim- intended to confuse and thus maintain power over an ignorant people? That God would allow such widespread and enduring fundamental error in His Church from the very beginning is obviously absurd. It also seems extremely unlikely that a completely fraudulent church would be the single longest lasting institution^[7] in the history of the institutions, given how short-lived other cons tend to be.^[8] Further, as in any theological reflection, White is essential to always go back to and stay with the revelation of the Trinity that is Christ Jesus, the Incarnate image of the Father Who sends His Spirit to his disciples. As White puts it, “From the Cross, Christ crucified who comes forth from the eternal Father sends the Holy Spirit who is love upon the world.”^[9] In knowing and loving Christ more deeply, we can better understand and love the Trinity.

So, with Our Lady, we accept this deepest mystery of God’s identity as true but still ask, “How can this be?” For while the distinction in persons based on procession and relation make sense, it’s still not quite clear what it really means or looks like. If this is, as White says above, the most ultimate vantage point and “the single most practical truth for human beings,”^[10] the more tangible we can make this ineffable mystery, the better.

In his De Trinitate, books IX and X, Augustine explores the mental image of the Triune God in man. Love, he argues, requires three: the lover, the love itself, and the loved. In the mind loving itself, however, the lover and loved are the same one thing, so you are left with the mind and its love. “Love and mind, however, are not two spirits but one…and yet they are two somethings, lover and love…And these are called two things relatively to one another.”^[11] The mind does not love itself with any thing other than its own spiritual self, but there still must be two ‘somethings’, for otherwise the relation of love (relations need more than one) would not be possible. Likewise with the mind knowing itself; there is the mind and its knowledge, which are two somethings- you wouldn’t say the mind is knowledge- but one inseparable being that is both doing the knowing and being known.

This act of the mind knowing and loving itself is different from knowing and loving other things; it is not the case that the mind sits down at a nice restaurant across from a mirror and gets to know and love itself gradually like anything else. The mind “is itself loving itself and itself knowing itself,” the mind’s existence is knowing and loving itself, everything else it might know and love is through its love and knowledge of self (which, of course, in fallen human beings is distorted and limited). Augustine further clarifies the mental trinity in man in the subsequent book X, eventually narrowing the focus to the memory, understanding, and will. After a lot of deep reflection and reasoning that is well beyond the scope of this essay, he concludes:

These three, then, memory, understanding, and will, are not three lives but one life, nor three minds but one mind. So it follows of course that they are not three substances but one substance. When memory is called life, and mind, and substance, it is called so with reference to itself; but when it is called memory it is called so with reference to another. I can say the same about understanding and will; both are so called with reference to another. But each of them is life and mind and being with reference to itself…. For this reason these three are one…”

While this is an imperfect image complete with shortcomings and ways in which it is not like the Triune God, overall this examination of the human mind helps in our attempt to make sense of the mystery. It speaks to our common experience as rational creatures. Our mind, our one substantial self that remembers and understands and wills, can distinguish between the knowing understanding, the loving will, the remembering memory, but they are inseparable. One could not remember apart from the will and understanding to do so, could not will without remembering and understanding, could not understand without willing and remembering, yet they are not all each other. Likewise Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, except what is contained in one person in a human mind, in the Divine Mind necessarily eternally overflows into three persons. We tend to imagine God as a giant, ancient man engaged in serene self-contemplation,but if God is love, he can’t be a solitary person. Love entails persons, plural.^[12] Eternal being cannot be contained in a single person.

“Oh, no, no, no- nice try,” the secular world could say, “This Augustine of Hippo, this Roman-educated genius trapped in a repressive cult is impressively insightful when it comes to human psychology, but it is still just arbitrary fantasy to call the human mind an image of something greater, rather than admitting that it is itself the greatest thing.”Similarly, our Jehovah’s Witness friends will still say all this Trinity talk is unnecessarily complicated and confusing as our atheist friends still say this is just plain nonsensical. And it is all of those things, if viewed from within their materialist framework. Thus, step one is breaking out of that limited understanding of reality. The fact is, humans are finite, with little finite brains trapped in a little finite world of bodily sense perception. For the materialist, that is the end of the story: finitude and meaninglessness. But an honest look around reveals hints and signs of the infinite and meaningful even within our short, earthbound lives.^[13] This is not only to be found in the obviously immaterial nature of the mind that Augustine illustrates, but also just in the fact that there is intelligibility and order and anything at all.

This is addressed by White in his section on the “Rational Arguments for the Existence of God.” Therein, he gives a helpful overview of the main ways the Tradition has defended belief in God as eminently reasonable. While it is not possible to definitely prove God’s existence by the standards of modern adherents of scientism,^[14] we can still show it is not thereby unreasonable or implausible. As White explains, the contingency, interdependence, and intelligibility of the world clearly points to a necessary, transcendent, and perfect Being behind it.^[15] There must be an ultimate ground and source of being; reality cannot be simply suspended in nothingness and chaos. It wouldn’t make sense. And more than that, we wouldn’t be able to notice that it does or doesn’t make sense; if the world were just colliding atoms and random, accidental arrangements of matter, how would we be able to step back and analyze it?

This is where we can begin to see how the ‘ultimate vantage point” of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity differs from the materialist vantage point. The materialist is stuck within the finite box of one dimensional, materialistic understanding. Thus, when presented with the idea of God, it is assumed that it is just the biggest, best thing in the box. This is where I think Anselm’s ontological argument- and Bonaventure’s defense of it- is helpful. It is often interpreted as an argument for the biggest, best thing in the finite world (see Guanilo’s attempt to refute the argument with his supposedly similar ‘most perfect island’ argument). What Anselm is really getting at, though, is that God is wholly other, yet also the source of all things. When he talks about ‘that greater than which cannot be conceived,” he means that, if there were no God grounding reality, we would not be able to think about any such thing as a ‘grounding of reality’, or the infinite, or meaning, or concepts at all. This much maligned ontological argument is, I think, a crucial balance, perhaps even the foundation for other arguments. While Aquinas- rightly and helpfully- points to God as the ground of all being by working back from the given dependence, changeability, and enduring intelligibility of things, Anselm and Bonaventure take an additional step into that mystery. It is a way of breaking through the materialist viewpoint, a way of countering the “fool who hath said in his heart there is no God.”

Fides quaerens intellectum is the central task of Catholic theology, but it is, naturally, circular. The Anselmian ontological argument helps to illustrate why this is unavoidable and is in itself indicative of the truth of things. In his defense of Anselm, Bonaventure states: “si Deus est Deus, Deus est;”in what sounds to the modern ear as possibly the most ridiculous non-argument of all time. But, as Josef Seifert argues, put in other words, Bonaventure is saying: if God is Being-Itself/Perfect Being/the source and summit of all thought, then God must be; for the alternative would be that Being Itself is not,or that existence does not exist. That, of course, is absurd.^[16] Thus we see why we must go where Aquinas directs us in his proofs for God’s existence.

Two final points about the Trinity as the ultimate vantage point and the most practical truth. First, what we have discussed about the whatness of the Trinity further illustrates the reality of our situation: It’s God or nothing. Truth or utter absurdity. There is no middle ground. We see from the vantage point of the eternal communion of divine Love in the Most Holy Trinity or from the vantage point of nothingness. In this light, White’s claim that it is the most practical truth to human beings is absolutely true. The difference between “in the beginning there was physics” of deGrasse Tyson and, “in the beginning, there was personhood,”^[17] is infinite. As interesting as the relation of matter and energy is, it does not compare to the mystery of the human person, which, we now know, is sustained with the physical world by a divine communion of persons.

Secondly, White quotes Augustine as saying that “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves” and, in another place, “this is the most concrete reality that there is: the union of the soul with God by grace”.^[18] I have tried to get deeper into what exactly the ‘ground of all being’ is, and how it is infinitely more than what a materialistic understanding offers; having wrestled with the fact that God Is Who Is, is the source and summit of all meaning and all that is, we come back to the fact that we are meant for union with that ‘greater than which nothing can be conceived’! Our very selves- our spirit, our mind, our life- is an image of the unthinkably other and transcendent God; he makes us in the image of that which grounds and gives meaning to all things. And that image in which he makes us is not just a vague reminder of where we came from, a memento, a parting gift to the creature sent off into the world, for God then shows us the fullness of meaning in Christ, God-become-man who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. In this weak reflection on the Trinity, we can begin to see that all things spring from personal love. This is the light in which we should see all else, the interpretive key to reality.

^[1] White, Joseph Thomas, OP, The Light of Christ, (Washington, DC, 2017), 87.

^[2] As the blessed Archbishop Sheen says, “There are not a hundred people in America who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions of people who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church.”

^[3] White, 51.

^[4] Ibid. 81.

^[5] The Incarnation, for example, is the God the Son taking on human nature- neither the Father nor the Holy Spirit become man– but Christ is sent by the Father, through the Holy Spirit, at the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38)

^[6] White, 82.

^[7] The Church is not, obviously, merely a human institution but the Mystical Body of Christ quickened and forever protected by the Holy Spirit.

^[8] As Gamaliel observed, “For before these days Theudas arose, giving himself out to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him; but he was slain and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing.” (Acts 5:36) There are, of course, long running false religions, but they don’t have the structural and doctrinal continuity of the Catholic Church that makes it especially remarkable.

^[9] White, 48

^[10] Ibid., 48.

^[11] Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill, OP (Brooklyn, 1990), p. 272 (IX.1).

^[12] In fact, personhood itself is, as the 20th century personalists and phenomenologists show, born of and inseparable from love. A human person comes to his personhood that enables him to say “I” through being addressed as “you”. (see von Hildebrand, John F. Crosby, etc.)

^[13] The heart-exploding, selfless love one has for little, crying, useless, pooping blobs of neediness called babies, for example– what sense can a materialist make of that? Whence self-sacrifice, according to the material science-worshipping world?

^[14] “The word ‘scientism’…is to be understood as meaning the belief that science, in the modern sense of that term, and the scientific method as described by modern scientists, afford the only reliable natural means of acquiring such knowledge as may be available about whatever is real. (John Wellmuth, S. J., The Nature and Origins of Scientism [Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1944], p. 5)

^[15] White, 61-66.

^[16]Josef Seifert, “Si Deus est Deus, Deus Est: Reflections on St. Bonaventure’s Interpretation of St. Anselm’s Ontological Argument”, Franciscan Studies, 52, (1992). “How can the only being that answers the question- “why is there something rather than nothing?”- not be?…If it were not, nothing would be; no being and intelligibility whatsoever would be possible or thinkable. It is impossible that that being is not, of which Bonaventure rightly says, “eius necessitas est omnis esse, vivere et intelligere origo et complementum” [V, 108 a]. The non-existence of God (of Being-Itself) would be intrinsically… impossible and absurd.” (230)

^[17] White, 51.

^[18] White, 77.

Newest Patron Saint of Me

St. Maximilian Kolbe - Spiritual Warrior, Master of New Media and ...

St. Maximilian Kolbe at his gloriously messy desk. My hero.

If you don’t know this great Polish saint, you should look him up. He was a Franciscan Friar, valiantly resisted the Nazis (on the radio and in print) and, as a prisoner of Auschwitz, when ten men were selected to be starved to death to deter escape attempts, he volunteered to take the place of one of the men who was a husband and father. He led the other prisoners in prayer and, after two weeks of starvation, the only one still alive, he was killed by lethal injection on August 14, 1941.

From his Letters (as found in the Office of Readings on his Feast Day, August 14) :

The burning zeal for God’s glory that motivates you fills my heart with joy. It is sad for us to see in our own time that indifferentism in its many forms is spreading like an epidemic not only among the laity but also among religious. But God is worthy of glory beyond measure, and therefore it is of absolute and supreme importance to seek that glory with all the power of our feeble resources. Since we are mere creatures we can never return to him all that is his due.

The most resplendent manifestation of God’s glory is the salvation of souls, whom Christ redeemed by shedding his blood. To work for the salvation and sanctification of as many souls as possible, therefore, is the preeminent purpose of the apostolic life. Let me, then, say a few words that may show the way toward achieving God’s glory and the sanctification of many souls.

God, who is all-knowing and all-wise, knows best what we should do to increase his glory. Through his representatives on earth he continually reveals his will to us; thus it is obedience and obedience alone that is the sure sign to us of the divine will. A superior may, it is true, make a mistake; but it is impossible for us to be mistaken in obeying a superior’s command. The only exception to this rule is the case of a superior commanding something that in even the slightest way would contravene God’s law. Such a superior would not be conveying God’s will.

God alone is infinitely wise, holy, merciful, our Lord, Creator, and Father; he is beginning and end, wisdom and power and love; he is all. Everything other than God has value to the degree that it is referred to him, the maker of all and our own redeemer, the final end of all things. It is he who, declaring his adorable will to us through his representatives on earth, draws us to himself and whose plan is to draw others to himself through us and to join us all to himself in an ever deepening love.

Look, then, at the high dignity that by God’s mercy belongs to our state in life. Obedience raises us beyond the limits of our littleness and puts us in harmony with God’s will. In boundless wisdom and care, his will guides us to act rightly. Holding fast to that will, which no creature can thwart, we are filled with unsurpassable strength.

Obedience is the one and the only way of wisdom and prudence for us to offer glory to God. If there were another, Christ would certainly have shown it to us by word and example. Scripture, however, summed up his entire life at Nazareth in the words: He was subject to them; Scripture set obedience as the theme of the rest of his life, repeatedly declaring that he came into the world to do his Father’s will.

Let us love our loving Father with all our hearts. Let our obedience increase that love, above all when it requires us to surrender our own will. Jesus Christ crucified is our sublime guide toward growth in God’s love.

We will learn this lesson more quickly through the Immaculate Virgin, whom God has made the dispenser of his mercy. It is beyond all doubt that Mary’s will represents to us the will of God himself. By dedicating ourselves to her we become in her hands instruments of God’s mercy even as she was such an instrument in God’s hands. We should let ourselves be guided and led by Mary and rest quiet and secure in her hands. She will watch out for us, provide for us, answer our needs of body and spirit; she will dissolve all our difficulties and worries.

Fumes of Sentimentality

Something like two or three months ago, I promised a post on the following Flannery quote:

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

But then riots broke out and the world got- somehow- even more overwhelmingly crazy and I couldn’t hope to write anything that wouldn’t turn into a half-crazed rant.

But I’ve calmed down somewhat and Flannery’s insight should be addressed, as it is about as relevant as ever (so relevant, like, even more relevant than Handmaid’s Tale. (Gross.))

To illustrate, let’s talk about something everyone is sick and tired of talking about: masks. Yay!

This whole dumb pandemic (not to minimize the serious reality that it is a terrible disease that you don’t want to get. Unlike those other diseases you love getting) what have we been hearing everywhere we go? “Stay safe!” “We’re in this together” “Love your neighbor, wear a mask.” That last one is usually a lot more condescending and critical, it’s usually something more like, “stop being a baby and wear your mask to protect me.” Pillars of virtue and honor like Andrew Cuomo and Bill Nye have a couple moving speeches on the subject (blegh).

I don’t think masks are a vast left-wing conspiracy… pretty sure, anyway… however, I still have a major issue with how we’ve been treating the issue. First of all, there’s the fact that all the evidence that’s given to us is inconclusive and doesn’t quite add up. We are told that masks reduce risk of transmission, but by how much? because those same calls to masks also say that hand washing/sanitizing and distancing is still the most effective defense. Soooo, am I wearing a mask for an extra 3% safety? That…doesn’t seem worth it.

Also, maybe I just haven’t found the golden explanation out there that makes it click for me, but I’m looking at the Mayo flipping Clinic right now, and it says:

“At this time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved any type of surgical mask specifically for protection against the coronavirus, but these masks may provide some protection when N95 masks are not available. … Health care providers must be trained and pass a fit test to confirm a proper seal before using an N95 respirator in the workplace…” [emphases mine]

How many have passed a fit test out there? And did you note the “may provide protection,” as in, it may, may not, who knows? Don’t tell me I’m a science denier because I am not convinced by maybe-statements.

But wait! says the Mayo Clinic, “countries that required face masks, testing, isolation and social distancing early in the pandemic have successfully slowed the spread of the virus.”

What about countries that required all of those things except face masks? Oh, you don’t know? Cool. Thanks for your help, O Infallible Science. I thought I learned in middle school something about too many variables at once and controls and stuff, but I don’t know, I’m not a science person.

And lastly, if masks are so great, which, I don’t know, maybe they are, then why does the Mayo specifically warn that they are not a substitute for distancing..? Okay, they prevent droplets expelled by breathing, coughing, sneezing from getting all out in the open. Makes sense. But then, what’s wrong with filling my church with masked parishioners? Oh, they aren’t that effective and you can’t trust everyone to wear them properly? So then ~~why are we talking about~~ mandating them again? What good are they doing, what are they adding to social distancing?

Going back to Flannery; we have all kinds of appeals to our selfless kindness, something our society has been working hard to cultivate in its people for a long ti– oh wait, no, this is the “treat yoself”, “my body my choice”, “whateva- I do what I want!” culture. I almost forgot. And yet, we have sappy emotional appeals to “just wear the damn mask” and save lives (the value of human life: another thing unironically championed today as the decades-long tradition of literally throwing away thousands of babies daily continues).

This barrage of sentimentality is very troublesome. Consider the people freaking out that you not wearing a mask in a giant hardware store is for sure going to “cut your family tree at the root” as one particularly brilliant videographer of WalMart put it, and kill grandma and all of us. Do you think those people who just care so much for their neighbor and the elderly and the poor and the immuno-compromised, do you think they would hesitate for one second before ratting you out when the Health and Safety Police come to load the Dangerous Unmasked into boxcars? I really, really doubt it.

Christ teaches us that love of neighbor is a requirement for salvation. So is love of enemies. So is the willingness to lay down your life for your friends, first of whom is Him. As Flannery points out, if you take this radical self-sacrifice and love away from its source, it quickly becomes corrupt. Christ makes love make sense, Christ makes love’s eminent worth known. Apart from Him, pseudo-charity becomes a utilitarian trick of how to get the most out of “loving” people-in-general, humanitarianism quickly turns into sacrificing some humans for your lofty ideas about “humanity” and what it should be. (Chesterton has a great passage on this that I can’t find at the moment. All I can find is “Christ did not love humanity; He never said He loved humanity; He loved men.”

If you take Him out of the equation and just squawk about whatever the government is telling you is the best thing for all (for the good of the colony! for the good of Germany!) isn’t it obvious, regardless of how effective masks actually are, isn’t it obvious how very easy it would be for people in power to abuse that? Does the people-approved rise of Nazi Germany not seem a little more believable these days?

When you get sappy emotions worked up, when you don’t have the Sacred Heart as your model and guide for virtuous emotions and love, any evil is possible. Sure, maybe in this particular case masks really would help our situation, I still don’t know, BUT no one has convincingly proven that. [Health professionals, in my mind, lost all credibility in the matter when they refused to condemn giant, smooshed together protests. Some of them even went out of their way to say that systemic racism (not really a thing) was a bigger threat to public health than coronavirus. Thanks for your input guys, I’ll file that away.]

More importantly, people generally don’t seem sufficiently worried about what we’re supposed to do when, God forbid, a radical leftist takes the White House and declares climate change and racism national emergencies, and requires all kinds of immoral and insane things…

A final comment: I understand and accept that there are situations where you should just where the mask anyway, so as to avoid scandalizing people. Like St. Paul advises the Romans to do. There were old school Jewish converts to Christianity who still held to the Jews-exiled-in-Gentile-lands meatless diet. Paul said, basically, “Whatever, if that’s what they feel they need to do, you won’t die eating vegetables. Don’t let something so dumb ruin the Faith.”

So there. That’s it. I don’t want to write on this issue anymore. I want to go back to more interesting, less stupid things, like maybe my recent re-discovery of St. Bonaventure’s Mind’s Road to God, or some more Maritain on Art and Beauty, or maybe some straight up Catholic stuff, as I’ve been on quasi-retreat the last week or so [a month ago now. There was a little publishing delay] and have a lot of straight up Catholicism on the brain.

Feel free to subscribe with a click of a the yellow button over there ==> somewhere, and/or comment and stuff.

Let’s Talk About Spaceships…

…Or anything except the Rona, masks, the economy, the Constitution, police, governors, etc.

I don’t want to add my thoughts to the CO-risis because I don’t have much of substance to add and it would probably just devolve into an unpleasant libertarian-leaning Murica rant that comes of differently than I intend.

BUT for some reason I can’t think of anything else, so I’ll try to share some thoughts while steering clear of non-philosophical politics [sidenote: Politics are supposed to be informed by legit, thoughtful philosophical understanding; it’s supposed to be the ideal that guides the practical, but, alas.]

I think a big part of what’s going on here is 1) information overload and 2) no coherent, consistent understanding of life to even begin to process the meaning of the information.

For months and months, we’ve gotten all kinds of statistics and studies and reports from all sides. WEAR MASKS! DON’T WEAR MASKS! NEW YORK IS A WARZONE! NEW YORK IS NOT AS BAD AS WE THOUGHT! ASYMPTOMATICS SPREAD IT WAIT THEY DON’T WAIT MAYBE THEY DO BUT DEFINITELY SURFACES DO WAIT THEY DON’T

It’s overwhelming. And we’ve never been able to follow a virus as closely as we’ve been able to follow this one- we are constantly updated on cases in each state and country. Graphs galore. BUT we don’t know what to DO with all that shtuff.

People, in general, are chronically woefully incapable of interpreting stats and graphs; we can decipher what they’re stating but not what they really mean. We see that cases skyrocket in a place but forget to ask if they suddenly cranked up their testing, which would make that relatively meaningless.

Also, traditionally, for thousands of years, you just had to go on the common sense and the collective wisdom of your family/village to react more or less prudently in crises. Whatever pops up in your tiny corner of the world, you deal with. But this has been a slow motion crisis, we have all kinds of info before anything tangible even happens to us personally. We had to constantly guess at what might be going on, and I don’t think humans are built for that. They seem to be breaking under the weight of it in this situation anyway.

So you have the unprecedented information overload. (I won’t mention the colossal disaster that is the media on top of that)

At the same time, you also have, in this largely post-Christian secular western world, no coherent philosophy of life to contextualize all that data that you also don’t really know how to interpret.

In the Christian understanding, death is not the worst thing. It’s power has been stamped out by Christ’s victory over the grave. So, sure, it’s still scary and still inevitable and still generally to be avoided, but you prepare yourself for it hopefully it turns out not all that bad. Even if it’s a terrible death, you get through it and hopefully you are ready for judgment. That’s the Christian story that guided Western civilization for centuries, and resulted in all the greatness of that greatest civilization.

As a whole, society doesn’t buy into that so much anymore. We prefer to pretend that we’re somehow going to progress our way past death, and when we can’t keep up that farce anymore, we either say “Whatever, it’s all meaningless, we just go out of existence when we die” or confidently predict some vaguely Christian-flavored fairytale of peace and clouds (based on very little actual Christian Tradition). BUT since we know we, as a society, have mostly rejected the Christian explanation of things, part of us that remains sane and intellectually honest, tiny as it may be, knows the Cloud Hammock of Eternal Peace is not a thing. So we panic in the face of death. [Tell me again why this is called “progress”?]

We panic because death has seemed to regain its power over us.

On the other hand, the oh-so-enlightened Nihilist side of things, which holds that when you die you just disappear from existence, doesn’t panic, exactly. It gets rather wigged out, but they respond by doing something. Stay Safe Stay Home. Call 911. Post a video of a heartwarming neighborhood singalong from a safe distance. It makes me think of the saying about arranging deck chairs on the Titanic– usually that image is used to illustrate utter futility, but in this circumstance I think of it as an exercise of nihilistic boredom. Ah this ship will probably sink anyway, in the meantime why not arrange the deck chairs into a cute and clever meme-able?

So… yeah. I mean, most things in life these days comes down to the sad emptiness and confusion of the horrific and devastating failure of an experiment that is the post-Christian, progressive, Sexually Revolutionized modern dying West. The COVID hysteria, as bad as the virus actually is, is just the latest and greatest glaring example of how messed up we’ve let ourselves become.

I will write one more thing related to the Rona, only because it explicates a Flannery quote that I felt was on to something but didn’t quite understand til now. That quote:

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from teh source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

Art and Scholasticism #3

Check out parts 1 and 2

First of all, before I forget, I bought Art & Scholasticism from Cluny Media— definitely support those guys if you get a chance. I think they’re relatively new, family-owned nerdy lil operation. Beautiful, good Catholic books. With a ton of Sigrid Undset titles I had never heard of.

Okay, so, we’re on Chapter III. I wasn’t actually planning on going through every chapter, I really just want to talk about Chapter IV, BUT when I try to jump ahead, something from the chapter I’m trying to skip distracts me.

SO, CHAPTER III Making and Action

Okay, see? Already the first line is something I want to note.

“The Mind as a faculty is a complete self-subsisting whole, but it goes to work very differently according as it has knowledge for the sake of knowing or for the sake of doing.”

Basically, the mind is it’s own thing, but it works differently depending on if it’s trying to know something or do something.

The Mind-as-Knowing is fulfilled ultimately in the Beatific Vision- the knowing and loving of God face-to-face. It’s tied over for now by things like philosophy and theology and knowing stuff just because it is good to know stuff.

USUALLY, though, the mind is in Mind-as-Doing mode- it works to reason practically, figure out how to get from A to B, how to most rationally use the means I have to get to the end I want.

So we have Mind-Knowing and Mind-Doing – same thing, in different modes or orientations. [I use the word “mode” in my 90s kid context of video games… turbo mode, DK mode, etc. Haven’t thought much how that relates to the traditional academic philosophical use of the word…]

Mind-Doing is then further divided into Action Mode and Making Mode.

The Mind in Action Mode is focused on how to use Free Will to get to the good it desires. My Will is naturally oriented to some thing that is good-for-me, that fulfills some appetite or desire or love. Ideally, it’s all ultimately ordered to The Good (God). As Maritain explains, a freely willed action “is good if it conforms to the law governing all human acts and the true end of human life.” And if a man freely acts in conformity with the law, he is “himself good, purely and simply.” [‘the law’ is, of course, God’s law, revealed in Christ, Who emphasized the necessity of the interior actions of the heart to be in conformity with the law. Just to clarify that obviously a guy who does good stuff on the surface isn’t necessarily “good, purely and simply”].

SO, the Will is oriented to man’s good, and the mind turns that Will to actions that fulfill some desire/love for the good of man. THUS my favorite Augustine quote of all time:

Love God and do what you will.

We have a weird, mechanical kind of view of the will as some kind of tool we pick up and point at something, but really, according to Augustine anyway, it’s more of a disposition, determined by the sorts of things that you love. So when you will something, it’s an overflow or consequence of your love. That’s vaguely what I remember from my Auggie class at CUA anyway, based on a book by one of my early Ave days professor, Sarah Byers. If you have an extra $80 lying around, Byers is brilliant and it’s a very good book.

Anyway. The Mind in Action Mode is going to be operating in the world of Morality– the right and wrong use of the will. This is where everyone’s favorite virtue, Prudence, comes in. Maritain calls it “a virtue of practical intellect which keeps Action straight.”

Prudence keeps Action straight. I love that definition. Simple and handy.

Okay, so NOW we can get to Mind in Making Mode, which, you might guess, has more to do with Art, the supposed subject of these posts and this book.

While Action deals with what we do with our freedom, Making is judged by the thing or work itself.

Action was good or bad based on if it conformed to the rules of human conduct, whether it led to or away from the Good. Making, on the other hand, is good or bad based on the good or perfection of the thing made.

Art, therefore, keeping Making straight and not Action, remains outside the line of human conduct, with an end, rules, values, which are not those of man, but of the work to be produced. That work is everything for art– one law only governs it– the exigencies and the good of the work.

Does this mean a 3D printer is as good an artist as Michelangelo? Ew, gross, no. Don’t even say that. Maritain also says

“if art is not human in the end which it pursues, it is human, essentially human, in its method of working. It involves the making of a man’s work, stamped with the character of man: animal rationale.

The work of art has been pondered before being made, has been kneaded and prepared, formed, brooded over, and matured in mind before emerging into matter. And there it will always retain the colour and the savour of the spirit.

Think about that in relation to God as Creator Artist…

Final note, which is the whole point of the chapter and one of his main things of the book, Maritain goes on to say that the work to be done is the matter, and undeviating reason is the form of art. If reason is off, the art will be off. The whole thing, while outside of human action and morality, is still directed by the mind, (which, of course, has to be in conformity with Truth to be worth anything).

So the modern BS of random self-expression on one hand, and gross political statement on the other, is stupid and dumb. Art is practical but outside the action/political realm, and is oriented to the objective thing made, not the maker, while still guided by that maker’s rational mind.

This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s “there’s no such thing as an immoral book” line – this was the point he was getting at. If a book is well-written it is “good” even if the subject matter is toxic and evil; a book is “bad” if poorly written, even if the subject matter is saintly. It’s an entirely unrelated (to art) question of whether or not this book is good-to-read or not. The Picture of Dorian Gray is very good to read, in my opinion, while the book within that book that corrupts the main character is, at least in the main character’s case, not good to read. That is a matter of prudence and Action Mode, though, not art itself.

That’s how Kendrick Lamar can have “good” music that you probably shouldn’t listen to, or at least shouldn’t blast at full volume going through a quiet neighborhood of impressionable youth.

Welp, I’ll end it there for today. Next time will finally be Chapter IV: Art: An Intellectual Virtue

p.s. Seriously, just look at these books

p.p.s. side note: philosophy and grammarly/spell check don’t get along. Yes, AI robot, that’s what I meant to write, leave me alone, you don’t really understand anything. Oh, and thanks for catching that I wrote butt instead of but, that was actually pretty helpful]

Tarfunk Tuesday

Balderdash time- come up with a definition of “Tarfunk”

It’s actually just how Flannery signed the very last letter– really a quick note– six days before she died. A lot of her letters to her friend Maryat Lee were addressed to a silly variation of Rayber (the sciency skeptic of Violent Bear It Away) and signed a silly variation of Tarwater (the very reluctant prophet and main character of Violent).

So this is your weekly dose of F.O’C.

I added to my Flannery Recommends section of my library.

The last week or so I’ve read several of Powers’ short stories and a couple of Conrad and Jameseses’s. And they’re pretty good- enjoyable, well-written, impressively engaging for only being a few dozen pages.

BUT

Now I get why Flannery is hailed as the definitive Grand Master of the short story, because so far, these don’t compare.

I mean, obviously, James and Conrad have her beat on the quality of English writing itself, but that’s their 19th-century advantage. No one from Georgia is going to write like that. I think O’Connor definitely could have, but it wouldn’t have worked for her audience or what she was doing.

And Powers does have similarly good, sympathetic, believable characters, and he deals with the contemporary American race issues that Flannery wasn’t called to take on directly, (from her middle of the deep south home she shared with her mother). And those stories are very moving and well done.

They just aren’t nearly as memorable and funny as Flannery.

The only one I can think of who has similarly vivid storytelling in a relatively few pages is Stephen King in his short stories- BUT he doesn’t have anywhere close to the depth of meaning she has in everything she touches. He can kind of cheat a little with his super bizarre horror story aspect; Flannery has a little of that going on, but even when she’s just talking about a bunch of people on the bus or in the waiting room, it’s striking and sticks with you somehow.

Also, King’s dialogue has nothing on Miss Mary Flannery’s. 70s/80s Maine just doesn’t measure up to 40s/50s Georgia.

Before, I was somewhat skeptical, (believe it or not), thinking, okay, how much better than everyone else can she really be at this short story thing, is it just a Catholic bias to want our girl to be the very best? Well, no, she is objectively really great.

I still need to read Caroline Gordon, it could be a girl thing to be better at short stories… I’ll let you know.

Public Service Announcement: Don’t Eff with Demons

PSA: Don’t Eff with demons.

Please and thank you.

Lately I seem to keep happening upon a lot of nonchalant messing where people shouldn’t be messing.

Apparently the guy who did the Watchmen comics- he thinks his drawings are spells or something creepy like that. And apparently people in general are just, “Oh cool, his art is an incantation, that’s cool, live your truth, man, sweet drawrings.”

Wut.

No, it’s not cool.

Demons are fallen angels. The primary significance of this metaphysical fact is not all the sweet tattoo and truck art you can make of bad angels (ugh). They’re evil.

Let’s review what an angel is real quick.

St. Thomas Aquinas is called the Angelic Doctor because he figured out so dang much about these spiritual creatures, and, as far as I know, not a whole lot more has been added to his insights in the centuries since he was on earth thinking about it. He talks about angels in Questions 50 – 64 of the Summa.

Backing up a second to creation in general according to Aquinas and the Tradition: the hierarchy of being: at the bottom you have lifeless stuff like rocks, then you have plants that can grow and reproduce and thus have some kind of soul (vegetative kind), move up another rung to animals, which have a little fancier souls, in that they have senses and memory and such, but they can’t engage in things like abstract reasoning or art or love. Continuing up the ladder, you have the good ol’ familiar body-and-soul humans, then above them are the angels, which are entirely spiritual- no bodies, (though occasionally, as recorded in the Old Testament, they sometimes assume a quasi-body so as to be seen by people and not freak us out.)

At the very top of the hierarchy of being is, of course, is God, source and summit, beginning and end, perfect Being with a capital B. Obviously there’s an increase in perfection as you move up from rocks to the divine, and none of those jumps are insignificant- you can’t make a plant out of however many of the best of rocks, you can’t blend up the right combo of plant souls to jump to animal life, the smartest gorilla/elephant/dolphin supergroup of animal geniuses still aren’t going to ever amount to the odd creature who can do things like have existential crises and read, write, and even sometimes understand poetry (even if he watches YouTube instead, which he can invent, but a pig never will).

Thus, even if we don’t know much about angels, it’s safe to say that they’re naturally significantly higher than us. Smarter, faster, stronger, better. Again, they don’t have bodies, so they know things more clearly and directly– not as we do, which is through the tricky and limited senses.

At one point, Thomas addresses the question of whether angels can read your mind and see the future, and the answer is kinda yes but no. NO, if by read your mind and know the future you mean in the same way God does. Angels are not omniscient and do not know everything BUT compared to us, they may as well. When you guess what your friend is thinking and they say “you read my mind!”– angels are really good at guessing like that. So good it’s not even really fair to call it guessing.

They can’t see into your heart and soul like God can, but they can see what you do, and they can get a pretty good idea of what you’re probably thinking and feeling. Similar deal with the future, they can see a lot more of what’s going on right at this moment than we can from the perspective of our limited bodies, and they can take all that info and do a lot of Sherlock elementarying with it to get a decently accurate picture of the future.

So, angels can almost-but-not-quite read your mind and almost-but-not-quite see the future because they know the present and past so dang well. Huh. I wonder whaaaat could possibly go wrong with some ill-willed, fallen angels literally hell-bent on your destruction with that kind of spiritual power? Surely they wouldn’t abuse that power and play on your puny human emotions in many and various ways…

Angels are higher than us by nature, and even when they fall, (as a third of them did when they had their one chance to choose God or self/nothing/hell) the demons are still way smarter than us. They can mess with us like we use laser pointers to mess with our cats and dogs. It’s no contest- their natures are simply way higher than ours. The end. So don’t go looking for your dear late grandma via a psychic, or with a demon-magnet diabolically marketed as a children’s toy, or with freaky open-to-the-spirits meditation. Because yeah, it’s real, but it’s not what you think it is. You might think you are a master red dot hunter, but you’re not; it’s a game and you’re not one of the players, you’re the dumb dog.

Now, there are stories of saints laughing at the devil when he shows up– St. Anthony the Great and St Teresa of Avila are known for it– but they were hard core SAINTS. Obviously demons are nothing compared to their Creator (the creator of their originally-perfectly-good-selves that they freely corrupted). A saint is someone who is so close to God that they can say, like a little kid wrapped around their dad’s leg or hanging on to their mom’s skirt- “Mr. Demon you’re just a big dumb meanie and you can’t hurt me.”

Now, am I that close to God? Are any of the people who I hear talking about weird crap that they’ve seen and been a part of, most of whom claim to be vaguely Christian but tend to live out some combo of agnostic and pagan tendencies in their day to day? I don’t know, I can’t judge, BUT the saints are overtly and definitively against the evil spirits, not trying to use them for some silly earthly objective, so even if the people who mess around with creepy spirit stuff they don’t understand are very close to God, they aren’t acting like it when they mess around with creepy spirit stuff. In those moments, anyway, they aren’t clinging to God like a Teresa or Anthony, they are playing in a busy street, lucky to not get run over.

Anyway… all I’m really tying to say is

Don’t

Mess

with Demons.

aka spirits aka ghosts aka dead relatives

The only unfinished business a dead guy is going to need help with is the business of getting purified for heaven, which mean prayers toward getting them out of Purgatory, so say some of those and wait til heaven to talk to them again. St Gertrude has a sweet prayer for that.

“Eternal Father,
I offer You the most precious blood
of thy Divine Son, Jesus,
in union with the Masses said
throughout the world today,
for all the Holy Souls in Purgatory,
for sinners everywhere,
for sinners in the universal Church,
for those in my own home,
and in my family. Amen.”

Also St. Michael, professional demon-conquerer, should be your buddy:

St. Michael the Archangel,
defend us in battle.
Be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.
May God rebuke him, we humbly pray,
and do thou,
O Prince of the heavenly hosts,
by the power of God,
thrust into hell Satan,
and all the evil spirits,
who prowl about the world
seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

That is all.

Oh, also, feel free to subscribe to all my PSAs and wondering-arounds by clicking something over there- a yellow button- on the right.

This post brought to you by a nice warm mug of hot honey water and cream and The Violent Femmes Blister in the Sun stuck in my head.

Commute Epiphanies Ep. 1

So I have a longish commute when I go into the office (something I’m hoping to not do so much even when the world stops ending– probs a post on my thoughts on work&home life in the future…). In the mornings, music and most noise and really any stimulation or reminder that I’m awake is rather overwhelming, so I drive in silence. Usually, my thoughts aren’t all that interesting, mostly lost in the dull, general lamentation that drones on until eventually it morphs into the happy buzz of strong black coffee. Once in a while, though, a mini epiphany pops out of the morning haze.

Today, it was about education, one of my favorite things to rant and ramble about.

So I had to take the way to work that I don’t like as much. I don’t like it as much because instead of a hop on the highway/hop off the highway, minimal thinking route that I prefer, this one involves a couple different exits and requires extra attention, which is always dangerous for me. (‘Okay, Sam, next exit. Okay, it’s coming up. Okaaay, like, 3 seconds and you have to exi– What should I make for dinner later? I’ll have to hit up Hy-Vee, did I eat all the mixed nuts ye– oh crap there goes exit. Just missed it.)

This morning I realized that I had taken my road-less-traveled enough times that it was really just about as easy as to navigate the other ways. I had the route securely engraved in my lil brain.

However comma, if I had gotten characteristically distracted and missed an exit, would I have had a clue where I was? Well, a clue, maybe, but probably not enough to get me to work on time. Or at all that morning.

Now, the education part. 20th/21st century public school education- let’s call it the Dewey Imbecile System– gives the step-by-step instructions to memorize how to get from A to B. It might give you a little bit of the why and a little bit of somewhat reliable trivia about the stuff along the way, but it’s ultimately very robotic. Particular, limited, programming.

The other extreme, what I would call Bastardized Montessori, would be to give a kid a map and say, “go forth! good luck!”

The traditional way of education, which is the way a lot of good HomeSchoolers and good Catholic and classical/legit Montessori schools, is to give a definite route and a map, but with guidance and context. Where the route goes, why we go this way instead of that way, what the stuff is along the way. The goal would be you could then hand them a map and say ‘go forth!” with confidence that they won’t end up in Mexico.

The current education system (which Anthony Esolen shreds in his worthwhile read Out of the Ashes. He has also been crusading against the laaame and turrible New American Bible translation at The Catholic Thing) the Dewey Imbecile System is pseudo-education. It is a program to imitate the real thing, like Artificial Intelligence. It’s a set of directions to follow rather than a comprehensive understanding of the lay of the land.

I know because I went to public school k-12 and I know it has only gotten worse, more agenda-driven and rigid and limiting than ever. That’s not to say there aren’t handy things you can pull out of it– I like having the straightforward directions from A to B programmed in my head to get me to work and back. BUT it’s not everything, and it’s definitely not what education should be.

Education should be a formation of the whole person, which is part of why federal control of it is insane; the question of how to form young people only makes sense left to families and close communities, and probably not D.C. government bureaucracy.

Wrapping the ramble up for now, to recap: my mini epiphany was the analogy of following memorized WAZE directions versus actually knowing where you are is like crappy current secular education versus true, traditional, classic education.

The End. For the moment. Really I’m going to talk about this sort of thing a lot.

Miss Mary Flannery Monday

Because it’s been all of about five minutes since I last quoted FOC, (I really do think and write about other things, I promise. Like George Herbert- I have a poem from him in the line up. Also something about… birds…maybe…?) …

Here’s a little flashback from July 13, 2013, when I had recently discovered…

My Favorite Georgian

Miss Mary Flannery O’Connor.

One of the reasons I have recently added her to my list of heroes: she seems to have been joyfully Catholic– in that dark, deep, truly realistic sort of way that doesn’t let a Lupus diagnosis lead her to despair (she was given 5 years at age 25 but made it to 39). From what I’ve gathered of her personally, it doesn’t seem as though she was a particularly “nice” person, which is one of my favorite things about her; “nice” is almost always accepted as a substitute or even- blasphemously- practically a synonym for good, but good is so much more than nice. Obviously. This is one of O’Connor’s central points in writing about the grotesque, I think. The grotesque is a strategy she employs to rescue nature and grace from artificial, Manichean separation and to prevent the reduction of “the supernatural to the pious cliche”. That is, to save truth from the lies of a nice pseudo-ideal. She is vehemently anti-sentimentality, which in her words is

an excess, a distortion of sentiment usually in the direction of an overemphasis on innocence, and that innocence, whenever it is overemphasized in the ordinary human condition, tends by some natural law to become its opposite. We lost our innocence in the Fall, and our return to it is through the Redemption which was brought about by Christ’s death and by our slow participation in it. Sentimentality is a skipping of this process in its concrete reality and an early arrival at a mock state of innocence, which strongly suggests its opposite.” (bold emphasis mine, marking where I jumped up and cheered)

Another applause-worthy line from later on: “A belief in fixed dogma cannot fix what goes on in life or blind the believer to it” and–just one more, I can’t help it–“It is when the individual’s faith is weak, not when it is strong, that he will be afraid of an honest fictional representation of life; and when there is a tendency to compartmentalize the spiritual and make it resident in a certain type of life only, the supernatural is apt to gradually be lost.”

Her stories are rather disturbing, sometimes very much so, (the well-known little old lady and her family getting lost and serial-killed isn’t even the worst of it). Sometimes the stories seem utterly pointless, and you have no idea why you care so much to find out what it is that this punk, idiot kid is so desperate to show Haze, deep in the heart of the park. But nevertheless, you are enthralled. And even if you never get a point or a meaning or moral out of it, if nothing else it was a damn good story insofar as it fulfilled the purpose of storytelling- to share a human experience with another human. This is necessarily- if truly human- fraught with meaning, intelligibility, and, ultimately, mystery. For the human experience, from the Christian [/human] viewpoint is of course primarily and fundamentally mysterious.

O’Connor’s writings are best known for their weirdness, first of all, and for her use of violence to convey the working of Grace. She also does a lot with prejudice and deceptive appearances. Her characters are very frequently finding out the truth about themselves, namely, that they aren’t as superior or as good as they thought, and in desperate, violent need of grace. (“The Artificial N—” has a particularly beautiful scene of sorrowful self-discovery, repentance, and mercy. Ooh! And “The Lame Shall Enter First” is pretty dang good too. “Revelation” isn’t bad either, one of her best.)

I just finished all 540 pages of Complete Stories, so now all I have left is Wise Blood and Habit of Being. (I read The Violent Bear It Away a few years ago, and Mystery and Manners recently). [April 2020 UPDATE: Just finished re-reading Habit of Being and Mystery & Manners; have read and re-read all the novels and short stories since this original post, of course. They’re all great. Even the early ones that she wrote for her MA Thesis]. “The Lame Shall Enter First” might be a favorite- the end was pretty gut-wrenching. “Parker’s Back” may have made me almost cry too. While the former ridicules the snobby, egoistical, modern state religion of sciencism, and I’m kind of a sucker for that, the latter has an advantage featuring one of my absolute favorite Christian symbols. More than that, through the rather bizarre love story of “Parker’s” O’ Connor masterfully conveys [April 2020 UPDATE: really, 2013 Samwise, ‘masterfully conveys’? hahaa ugh] the working of grace in a more subtle, less graphically violent manner and shows the limitations of reason. Parker sees no reason to be in love with this woman he married, and thinks himself insane for sticking around. Yet obviously, something beyond mere human thought is going on. He is being led, not against his will so much as strangely beyond it, (if that makes any sense). The good side of the war between flesh and spirit, perhaps.

So that’s why I love O’ Connor. She is an objectively amazing writer revealing a chunk of truth, who also just so happens to be a Catholic, (which of course is no accident).

We [writers] are asked to form our consciences in light of statistics, which is to establish the relative as the absolute. For many this may be a convenience, since we don’t live in an age of settled belief; but it cannot be a convenience, it cannot even be possible, for the writer who is Catholic. He will feel that any long-continued service to it will produce a soggy, formless, and sentimental literature, one that will provide a sense of spiritual purpose for those who connect the spirit with romanticism an a sense of joy for those who confuse that virtue with satisfaction. The storyteller is concerned with what is; but if what is is determined by survey, then the disciples of Dr. Kinsey and Dr. Gallup are sufficient for the day thereof.”

Flannery raised peacocks. And wrote what has to be the best stuff on the subject, “Living with a Peacock” (or “King of the Birds”) found here.

Art and Sch. etc. Part 2

The thing that struck me in this barely 2-page chapter was the reminder that “the object of the mind, as such, is simply and solely knowledge.” yes, yes, of course, of course, that’s the main thing I use my mind for, definitely…

How does that fit into the current way of things? Do we think of our minds having knowledge as it’s simple and sole object and live accordingly? Well, yeah, what else is a mind for? We like knowledge, we look stuff up all the time. We went to school to stock up on knowledge units, and we read articles and posts and books to get more knowledge units. I mean, 21st century Westerners are probably the knowledgeyest peoples ever, with our incredible amount of leisure time and insanely convenient access to basically an infinity of things-to-know [oh yes, we know sooo much. Just don’t make me take a 1900 8th grade final exam…]

BUT. Something still seems off to me.

Trying to think through exactly what that something off is, I remembered a very interesting course I took in grad school. I think it was called Environmental Ethics, but the first half of the semester was really a phenomenology of the body- thinking about what it is to be an incarnate creature, a soul-body-mess-of-a-thing. One of the highlights, besides the professor reaaally wanting to encourage us to not feel guilty about taking naps [never a problem for me, but I guess some personalities tend to think it a waste of time. Weird.] one of the highlights that I remember was the professor talking about beer [of course a highlight for the hobbit].

Specifically, good traditional beer versus American ‘beer’.

Traditionally, this prof argued, one was tempted to overindulge in a good thing, let the animal-pleasure-drivenness of fallen humanity take over. A man, who is definitely meant to enjoy a good ale, becomes an animal when he has too many. Today’s super-messed-up man, however, because of all kinds of post-Puritanical issues and other misguidedness and bad formation, doesn’t even make it to animal level, his sin is more machine-ish. He doesn’t overindulge in too much of a good thing, like a dog who busts open the kibbles bag– he robotically inputs x number of Natty Lites into his system to get the desired effect. There’s no enjoyment, it’s crazy disordered from the start, from the moment the ingredients of the ungodly swill are thrown together.

So I wonder if our Wikipedia rabbit-hole adventures and constant trivial looking-things-up is a legitimate respect for the knowledge-orientation of the mind, or a mechanical, desperate reaction of a half-starved and malformed faculty…

Maritain quotes the Aristo-Thomistic understanding that in knowing stuff, “the mind becomes, itself, in a way, all things.” There’s a semester’s worth of Latin argumentations and explanations and guesses as to what exactly that means, what exactly goes on in the mind knowing a thing, BUT, Medieval Epistemology, with its phantasms and intellectual vision beams, was one of the primary reasons I failed out of PhD school. I’m sorry I just can’t caaaarrreeee.

That being said, it does make sense to me that the mind, in some sense, becomes what it knows. Hence the close connection between knowledge and love…

In other news, it has been beautiful outside and for some reason, everyone who goes by wants to take a picture of the little purple flowers that have popped up in our yard. They are nice, and I’m cool with people instagraming my mystery flowers planted by the previous tenant’s sister-in-law [shout out to Sue] but I’m not sure what the big deal is. Winter wasn’t that long this year…

Oh, also, the chapter was actually about the distinction between the speculative (deals with knowledge) and the practical (deals with doing and making, i.e. action)

“Art belongs to the Practical Order. Its orientation is towards doing, not to the pure inwardness of knowledge.”

“wherever you find art you find some action or operation to be contrived, some work to be done.”

Basically, Art is practical work.