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A Reading Selection from The Geometry of Love by Margaret Visser

May 18, 2011

Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls)

Margaret Visser chose a little church in Rome, Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura, to write about. A church, after all, is the most intentionally meaningful structure in all of architecture and she helps us learn how to “read” its universal language of space. A great idea, a wonderful book.

The word “remember” comes from the same Indo-European root as “mind.” And the English word “mind” is both a noun (“what is in the brain”) and a verb (“pay attention to,” “care”). When one has forgotten, to remember is to call back into the “attention span,” to recall. Attention is thought of here as having a span — an extension in space. Forgetting, on the other hand, is like dropping something off a plate, falling off an edge, not “getting” it, but having to do, instead, without it. Remembering is recapturing something that happened in the past; it is an encounter of now with then — a matter of time. Buildings — constructions in space — may last through time as this church has lasted. Such structures can cause us to remember. Their endurance, as well as their taking up space, may counter time and keep memory alive.

This particular church reminds us of Agnes, who was killed by having her throat cut almost — 1,700 years ago. But like any church, it recalls a great deal more. One of a church’s main purposes is to call to mind, to make people remember. To begin with, a church sets out to cause self-recollection. Every church does its best (some of them are good at this, others less so, but every church is trying) to help each person recall the mystical experience that he or she has known.

Everyone has had some such experience. There are moments in life when — to use the language of a building — the door swings open. The door shuts again, sooner rather than later. But we have seen, even if only through a crack, the light behind it. There has been a moment, for example, when every person realizes that one is oneself, and no one else. This is probably a very early memory, this taking a grip on one’s own absolutely unique identity, this irrevocable beginning.

I remember myself, walking along a narrow path in the Zambian bush. The grass was brown and stiff, more than waist-high. I was wearing a green-and-white-checked dress with buttons down the front. I was alone. I said aloud, stunned, “Tomorrow I’m going to be five! Tomorrow I’m going to be five!” I stopped still with amazement: fiveness was about to be mine! I had already had four. The whole world seemed to point to me in that instant. The world and I looked at each other. It was huge and I was me. I was filled with indescribable delight. I took another step, and the vision was gone. But it’s still there, even now, even when I am not recalling it.

This was a mystical experience. As such, one of its characteristics was that in it my mind embraced a vast contradiction: both terms of it at once. I was me and the world contained me, but I was not the world. I was a person, but I wasn’t “a person” — I was me. A mystical experience is before all else an experience, and beyond logic. It is concrete, and therefore unique. It is bigger than the person who experiences it; it is something one “enters.”

People have always, apparently in all cultures, conceptualized the world as participating in, or expressing, or actually being a tension between a series of opposites: big and small, high and low, same and different, hot and cold, one and many, male and female, and so on. Societies of people can have very idiosyncratic ideas about what is opposite to what: a culture can find squirrels “opposite” to water rats, oblongs “opposite” to squares, bronze vessels “the opposite” of clay ones. Anthropologists dedicate themselves to finding out what such classifications could mean; the answers they give us usually show how social arrangements are reflected outward upon the world, and determine human perceptions of how nature is ordered. One result of a mystical experience, therefore, can be a profound demystification.

For no sooner has a culture organized its system of contradictions than the mystics arise. They steadfastly, and often in the face of great danger, assure their fellow human beings that they are wrong: what appears to be a contradiction in terms is merely a convention, a point of view, a facon de parler, no matter how self-evident it may appear. These are people who believe and convince others that they have been lifted out of this world and have seen a greater truth: the opposites are, in fact, one. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus can say, “The way up and the way down are the same.” Or: “Step into the same river twice, and its waters will be different.”

Such mystic realizations (up and down are one, sameness and difference coincide) have to keep occurring, both for the sake of truth and for the necessity of realizing that neither our senses nor our thinking faculties have access to, or are capable of encompassing, everything. (“The last proceeding of reason,” wrote Pascal, “is to recognize that there is an infinity of things beyond it.”) For all the outrage and bafflement with which the pronouncements of the mystics are greeted, we remember their words; in time we learn to appreciate and value them. In our own day, physicists have been talking like mystics for some time: expressing physical reality, for example, as conflating space and time or declaring that waves and particles (lines and dots) can be perceived to be “the same.” The rest of us are only beginning to take in what they are saying.

From the point of view of the person experiencing them, privileged moments — those that allow us to see something not normally offered to our understanding — do not last. Regretfully, necessarily, we cannot remain in such an experience. We move on, into the practical, the sensible, the logical and provable, the mundane. But after one such glimpse of possibility, we henceforth know better. We know what it is to experience two or more incompatible, mutually exclusive categories as constituting in fact one whole. We have seen both sides of the coin, at one and the same time. An impossibility — but it has happened. We may bury this experience, deny it, explain it away — but at any moment something could trigger it, raise it up, recall it. Because it has happened, and cannot unhappen.

One of the consequences of having had a mystical experience is a sense of loss. If only it could have gone on and on, and never had to stop; if only the door would open again! One of the hardest lessons we have to learn in life is that we cannot bring about such an experience, any more than we can make it last. Sex can remind us of it because, like a mystical experience, sex is ecstatic, overwhelming, and delightful; it feels bigger than we are. Drugs can also make us feel as if we’re “there” again. So people pursue sex and drugs — experiences they can get, they can have. This other thing, this greater and unforgettable thing, this insight, is not anyone’s for the asking. It comes (it always comes, to everyone, at different times and in different ways), and there is no telling what it will be or when or where, let alone how. You can’t buy it or demand it or keep it. It is not a chemical reaction, and there is nothing automatic about it.

A mystical experience is something perceived, and it calls forth a response. But you are free to turn away from the vision, to behave as though it never happened; you are free not to respond. (This is something I have had to learn: when I was almost five there was no question of not responding.) The invitation cannot be made to anyone else but you — and not even to you at any moment in your life other than the one in which it is made. I shall never be five again, so no other mystical experience I have will ever again be that one. I shall never again wear that green-and-white-checked dress; it is very likely that the path through the brown grass has disappeared. What I have left is the enormous memory, and the fact that it has enlarged all of my experience ever since.

Now a church (or a temple or a synagogue or a mosque — any religious building) knows perfectly well that it cannot induce in anyone a mystical experience. What it does is acknowledge such experience as any of its visitors has had, as explicitly as it can. A church is a recognition, in stone and wood and brick, of spiritual awakenings. It nods, to each individual person. If the building has been created within a cultural and religious tradition, it constitutes a collective memory of spiritual insights, of thousands of mystical moments. A church reminds us of what we have known. And it tells us that the possibility of the door swinging open again remains.

The staircase takes you down into the catacombs and the main church.

The church, built at the level of the catacombs, is accessed via a dramatic wide marble staircase decorated with sculptures and inscriptions from the catacombs. It’s an exquisite church, built on a basilical plan, with three aisles; marble pillars in the nave support the seating for the nuns in a lovely frescoed gallery, below a richly-decorated, wooden ceiling. The apse is marble with a Byzantine-like mosaic in the upper part depicting Sant’Agnese receiving the crown of martyrdom from the hand of God.

Memory, in a church, is not only individual, but also collective: the building is a meeting house for a group of people who agree with each other in certain important respects. They come together to express solidarity, and they do this by participating in an intensely meaningful performance known as a rituals

The closest relative of a church is a theatre, where people also come together to witness a scripted performance. There is a stage in a church, and seats for the audience; in both theatre and church, people come in order to live together through a trajectory of the soul. They come to be led by the performance to achieve contact with transcendence, to experience delight or recognition, to understand something they never understood before, to feel relief, to stare in amazement, or to cry. They want something that shakes them up — or gives them peace. Successful drama, like a well-performed ritual, can provoke an experience of transcendence: through feeling, for example, two contradictory emotions at once. Aristotle spoke of catharsis — “purification” — as the aim of tragedy. Catharsis, he said, is achieved by undergoing two opposing movements of the soul — pity (feeling for, and therefore drawing close) and fear (longing to move out of the danger’s range) — at the same time.

In a theatre the audience is the receiver of a play, and essential to a play. At an ancient Greek drama the audience was indeed part of the spectacle. The form of the theatre, a huge horseshoe shape, ensured that this was so. The Greek theatres that survive today allow us to imagine what it must have been like, sitting in a vast crowd of fellow citizens with everyone spread out in full view, in broad daylight, fanning out to embrace the round dancing-floor below them. Actors say that an audience can draw out of them their best performances, just through the quality of its attention, its intentness.

A theatre is like a church – not the other way around. “Church” or “temple” is the main category, and “theatre” a division of it. Historically, drama grew out of religious performance (and never entirely left it) in a process wherein the play gradually separated itself from the crowd watching. The distance between watcher and watched is essential to theatrical experience. (“Theatre” comes from Greek theatron, a place for viewing.) People come together in a church, however, not to view but to take part. The word “church” comes from Greek kyriakon, “house of the Lord”; it is a place of encounter between people and God.

It is perfectly possible to be moved at a spiritual level at the theatre; one can open oneself and be brought to mystical insight, as Aristotle showed us, through attentive watching. (Such experiences, however, can occur anywhere, at any time — indeed, they seem to prefer arriving when we are least expecting them, at times and places we would be least inclined to call “appropriate.”) But a performance in a church is permitted to involve people to an extent that the theatre traditionally avoids.

People come to participate in it, to join in, and then allow the realization to enter them and work upon them. The whole point of the proceedings is to help them change the orientation of their souls, even though they are also confirming the foundation of their beliefs. They have come to meet, to make the ceremony, and to respond, at a level that may include but goes well beyond the aesthetic. But a church can go on “working” even when there is no performance and no crowd. A person can come into a silent church in order to respond to the building and its meaning. This can produce an experience as profoundly moving as that of attending a performance. The same thing cannot be said of visiting an empty theatre.

A church like Sant’Agnese fuori le Mura (Saint Agnes Outside the Walls) vibrates with intentionality. It is meaningful — absolutely nothing in it is without significance. Even if something is inadvertently included that has no meaning to start with, a meaning for it will be found, inevitably. A church stands in total opposition to the narrowing and flattening of human experience, the deviation into the trivial that follow from antipathy towards meaning, and especially meaning held in common. Meaning is intentional: this building has been made in order to communicate with the people in it. A church is no place to practice aesthetic distance, to erase content and simply appreciate form. The building is trying to speak; not listening to what it has to say is a form of barbarous inattention, like admiring a musical instrument while caring nothing for music.

The building “refers” to things beyond itself, and it deliberately intends to be a setting where spiritual knowledge receives explicit recognition and focal attention. Sometimes the meanings are highly specific and complex; for the sake of clarity they may even be explained in inscriptions. Other meanings are more general: the nave is “like a ship” (which is what “nave” means), or windows let in light (a symbol of God). But these meanings also engage in intricate play among themselves, arouse further associations, and end up offering some of the most complex meanings of all. And always — silently, intently — the building points at once both to the individual’s own inner being and to the things commonly done in the company of other people in the church: the place where “the Word” is read, for example, and the site of baptism, or Christian initiation. The altar table is usually given centre stage, for at the heart of Christianity is a shared meal, together with everything meant by sharing a meal.

Contemplating all these meanings, even when you are alone in a church and there is no performance going on, is intended to help focus your mind and soul. You go into a church to exclude the extraneous, to get away from noise and distractions, to go back into yourself and take a good look at what is there. You go because you want to restore and enrich your relationship with God, by participating in a religious ceremony, by praying, or by just sitting alone in silence. All of the church’s “language” exists to help you do this, to get your mind humming and to make you receptive.

It is also supposed to help you keep in good spiritual shape. For one of the central tenets of Christianity is that belief and love and trust and insight, like mystical experience, are given to you. You can’t cause a gift such as belief or trust or love — whether felt or received — to be given, although a longing for what is called “grace” will surely be satisfied. Only, when the gift comes, you have to be ready. (Longing for it is part of being ready; Christians say even that to long is already to have received.) It is entirely possible to be so distracted that you don’t notice the gift at your doorstep, or to be in such poor shape spiritually that you do not recognize or cannot accept what is being offered. God comes “like a thief in the night.” (Notice that in this biblical simile, when God “breaks in” the person is thought of as like a house, a building.) All that a human being can do is be vigilant, notice what is happening, and then respond. A church is there to remind you, to teach you to pay attention, and to awaken the poetry in your soul. It gives you exercise in responding.

Posted in Art Commentary, Book Recommendations | Tagged Church Architecture, Grace, Memory, Saint Agnes Outside the Walls, Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura | 1 Comment »

Sacred Trash and the Freedom to Think

April 26, 2011

Gabriel Josipovici

Recently in the WSJ Gabriel Josipovici reviewed Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole which tells the story of how a treasure trove of papers and manuscripts detailing Eastern Mediterranean Jewish society in the early Middle Ages, what the authors refer to as “sacred trash,” came to find its way to England in 1898. The tiny synagogue of Ben Ezra which stands next to the Coptic Church in the center of Old Cairo, housed the written material, thrown any old which way into a small room high up above the women’s gallery

The room that housed the material was known as a geniza, from the Persian ganj, meaning “hidden treasure.” In the Talmud, the word usually implies concealment: Any writing that seemed heretical should, it was felt, be ganuz, hidden away. Gradually that came to include manuscripts that time or human hand had rendered unfit for human use but that could not be thrown out due to their sacred content and so required removal to a safe place that would allow them to decay of their own accord. In Old Cairo, the habit extended even further. Soon any piece of writing thought to include the name of God, and finally anything in Hebrew, was thrown into the upstairs room, there gradually to expire.

And so it remained for the better part of a thousand years, as Cairo shifted northward, as the synagogue of Ben Ezra became a backwater and as Egypt lost its place as the center of a thriving Mediterranean culture. But in the 19th century, material that had lain hidden for centuries in the Geniza, preserved by the dry climate of the region, began to surface, and stray items started to be sold to Western buyers in the markets of the region.

That story begins in 1896 when Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson — widowed Scottish sisters resident in Cambridge and remarkable scholars of Arabic and Syriaic — bought a few such fragments on their way through Cairo. Back home they showed them to their friend Solomon Schechter, Cambridge’s Reader in Rabbinics, who at once grasped their significance.

What Schechter had in his hand was a Hebrew fragment of the apocryphal book known as Ecclesiasticus, or Ben Sira, which until then had been known only in Greek and Syriac versions. As it happened, Schechter was at that very moment engaged in a fierce controversy with his Oxford counterpart, D.S. Margoliouth, over whether the book was Jewish at all. The idea that he was actually holding in his hand something that proved he was right and his rival wrong was almost too much for him.

Schechter set off for Cairo in the autumn of 1897. Establishing himself there, he gained the goodwill of the Grand Rabbi and the heads of the Jewish community and was at last allowed into the Ben Ezra synagogue. Wading waist deep in paper, he began to sift and for four weeks worked in appalling conditions, but with growing excitement. The small room teemed with insects undisturbed for generations, while every movement raised clouds of dust — “Ich full of spots bin,” Schechter wrote to his wife in his charming bilingualism.

He let the printed matter alone and concentrated on the manuscripts and uncovered, often stuck together, fragments of letters, bills, contracts, poems, and biblical and Talmudic material. He filled four trunks, and since he felt he was beginning to arouse the suspicions of the Egyptian authorities, he decided it was enough. With the help of Lord Cromer, the de facto ruler of Egypt, Schechter shipped the trunks to Cambridge.

Although some like Oxford’s D.S. Margoliouth wrote that “the material contained in these repositories is almost always valueless, like the gods of the gentiles unable to do good or harm, and so neither worth preserving nor worth destroying,” history has proved him wrong. Schechter’s discoveries in the Geniza opened up an entire civilization and showed Cairo to have been the hub of a vibrant culture in which Jews and Arabs successfully intermingled for hundreds of years.

For more than a century, scores of extraordinary scholars, mainly Jewish, mainly Eastern European, but almost all working in London, Cambridge or New York, have given their days to deciphering, integrating and understanding what Schechter uncovered. Innumerable poems have been added to the corpus of early medieval Hebrew literature; philosophical and religious controversies of the period have been elucidated; and the multitude of letters, legal documents, memos and lists have enabled scholars like S.D. Goitein to build up a detailed picture of Eastern Mediterranean Jewish society in the early Middle Ages. “Sacred Trash” is a celebration of their labor.

In the grand scheme of things Sacred Trash shows us how literature is essential for an “understanding between individuals and peoples, and for the discovery of common ground.” I would further note that the literary and sociological theories of a Rene Girard undergird the OT and the NT as well as demonstrate themselves in Christian anthropology and thought. The notion of personhood shows up continually in poetry and drama – we are moved precisely because they are derived from the human person. That is our “common ground.”

I do not wish my remarks confused with the horrible and degrading heresy that our minds are merely manufactured by accidental conditions, and therefore have no ultimate relation to truth at all. With all possible apologies to the free-thinkers, I still propose to hold myself free to think. And anybody who will think for two minutes will see that this thought is the end of all thinking. It is useless to argue at all, if all our conclusions are warped by our conditions. Nobody can correct anybody’s bias, if all mind is all bias.
The Autobiography — G.K. Chesterton

Gabriel Josipovici, the reviewer of Sacred Trash above, is also author of Everything Passes and Goldberg: Variations, homages to a composer and a particular piece of music. In a recent work After, he deals with memory and the mirage of origins. Here we find him in interview speaking to “a sense of quickening at some elusive shape or rhythm” that I would suggest is the unconscious recognition or delight in our common (yet uncommonly divine) personhood.

Interviewer: Last year, in an interview you had with Mark Thwaite of Ready Steady Book, you mentioned two themes that are consistently present in your work: the idea of art as a toy and the sense that we are creatures in time. Do these themes appear as the result of conscious effort, or do you find that you are simply drawn to them?

GJ: No, it’s never conscious. I realise when I read something that thrills me or see a work of art that makes me tingle, it’s usually because it partakes of one or other (or both) of these themes. But the realization has been recent, whereas the effects have been produced since I began to read and look and listen to art. In my own work I never start with an abstract theme, always with a sense of quickening at some elusive shape or rhythm that sometimes, much later, ends up as a story or a novel or a play. It’s only looking back, under pressure of the interviewer’s questions, that I realized those two elements had been fairly constant in my work. But I may well be wrong.
Cruelest Month

Posted in Book Recommendations, G. K. Chesterton, Reflections | Tagged Gabriel Josipovici | Leave a Comment »

The Temptation Of The Saint by Ranier Maria Rilke

March 17, 2011

A longer stay in Paris in 1902/03 inspired Rilke to write an account about his experiences gained in the French capital. He finished his work several years and working interruptions later in 1910. But by then, he hadn’t any longer written a simple account about his impressions of everyday life in Paris, he had written a novel which reflected also his ways of thinking changed over the course of years.

The Notebooks consist of 71 fragments, being the notes of the young Danish writer Malte Laurids Brigge. Arranged in the form of a diary, Malte’s notes consist, roughly speaking, of three parts: his experiences in Paris, reminiscences of his childhood and reflections about historical personalities. — The first part is dominated by his intense impressions of everyday life in Paris, a life full of stench, dirt, illness, and death, but also a life full of technological change and increasing anonymity. The second part becomes somewhat quieter in tone, as Malte remembers his childhood on Danish castles, his encounters with the supernatural and his difficult family life. The last part is the most demanding one, as there are reflections about kings, saints and medieval women poets (which reflect clearly Rilke’s own opinion).

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge are a varied collection of impressions, reminiscences, thoughts, fears and reflections. They are the authentic and moving description of a sensitive life, whose acts and thoughts are influenced by non-existing family ties and a feeling of social estrangement. It is a story of the (unconscious) search for something which might be able to provide the lonely protagonist what he had been forced to do without and always longed for stability and security. Written in a beautiful language full of deep emotions and moving descriptions, we recognize in Malte the Uprooted, the Insecure, the Seeker, someone who hasn’t found yet the meaning of his life. If you decide to let yourself in for the story, you will be rewarded with a profound and thoughtful novel about the difficult search for one’s own identity.
A Review by “Gretchen”
at Http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/showthread.php/15266-R.M.-Rilke-The-Notebooks-Of-Malte-Laurids-Brigge

HOW WELL I UNDERSTAND those strange pictures in which Things meant for limited and ordinary uses stretch out and stroke one another, lewd and curious, quivering in the random lechery of distraction. Those kettles that walk around steaming, those pistons that start to think, and the indolent funnel that squeezes into a hole for its pleasure. And already, tossed up by the jealous void, and among them, there are arms and legs, and faces that warmly vomit onto them, and windy buttocks that offer them satisfaction.

And the saint writhes and pulls back into himself; yet in his eyes there was still a look which thought this was possible: he had glimpsed it. And already his senses are precipitating out of the clear solution of his soul. His prayer is already losing its leaves and stands up out of his mouth like a withered shrub. His heart has fallen over and poured out into the muck. His whip strikes him as weakly as a tail flicking away flies. His sex is once again in one place only, and when a woman comes toward him, upright through the huddle, with her naked bosom full of breasts, it points at her like a finger.

There was a time when I considered these pictures obsolete. Not that I doubted their reality. I could imagine that long ago such things had happened to saints, those overhasty zealots, who wanted to begin with God, right away, whatever the cost. We no longer make such demands on ourselves. We suspect that he is too difficult for us, that we must postpone him, so that we can slowly do the long work that separates us from him. Now, however, I know that this work leads to combats just as dangerous as the combats of the saint; that such difficulties appear around everyone who is solitary for the sake of that work, as they took form around God’s solitaries in their caves and empty shelters, long ago.

The Song Of The Beggar

I am always going from door to door,
whether in rain or heat,
and sometimes I will lay my right ear in
the palm of my right hand.
And as I speak my voice seems strange as if
it were alien to me,

for I’m not certain whose voice is crying:
mine or someone else’s.
I cry for a pittance to sustain me.
The poets cry for more.

In the end I conceal my entire face
and cover both my eyes;
there it lies in my hands with all its weight
and looks as if at rest,
so no one may think I had no place where-
upon to lay my head.

Luke 9:58

And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Posted in Book Recommendations, Poetry, Ranier Maria Rilke | Tagged Ranier Maria Rilke, The Temptation Of The Saint | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

January 19, 2011

[From an Amazon.com review] The narrator, John Ames, is 76, a preacher who has lived almost all of his life in Gilead, Iowa. He is writing a letter to his almost seven-year-old son, the blessing of his second marriage. It is a summing-up, an apologia, a consideration of his life. Robinson takes the story away from being simply the reminiscences of one man and moves it into the realm of a meditation on fathers and children, particularly sons, on faith, and on the imperfectability of man.

The reason for the letter is Ames’s failing health. He wants to leave an account of himself for this son who will never really know him. His greatest regret is that he hasn’t much to leave them, in worldly terms. “Your mother told you I’m writing your begats, and you seemed very pleased with the idea. Well, then. What should I record for you?” In the course of the narrative, John Ames records himself, inside and out, in a meditative style. Robinson’s prose asks the reader to slow down to the pace of an old man in Gilead, Iowa, in 1956. Ames writes of his father and grandfather, estranged over his grandfather’s departure for Kansas to march for abolition and his father’s lifelong pacifism. The tension between them, their love for each other and their inability to bridge the chasm of their beliefs is a constant source of rumination for John Ames. Fathers and sons.

The other constant in the book is Ames’s friendship since childhood with “old Boughton,” a Presbyterian minister. Boughton, father of many children, favors his son, named John Ames Boughton, above all others. Ames must constantly monitor his tendency to be envious of Boughton’s bounteous family; his first wife died in childbirth and the baby died almost immediately after her. Jack Boughton is a ne’er-do-well, Ames knows it and strives to love him as he knows he should. Jack arrives in Gilead after a long absence, full of charm and mischief, causing Ames to wonder what influence he might have on Ames’s young wife and son when Ames dies.

These are the things that Ames tells his son about: his ancestors, the nature of love and friendship, the part that faith and prayer play in every life and an awareness of one’s own culpability. There is also reconciliation without resignation, self-awareness without deprecation, abundant good humor, philosophical queries–Jack asks, “‘Do you ever wonder why American Christianity seems to wait for the real thinking to be done elsewhere?’”– and an ongoing sense of childlike wonder at the beauty and variety of God’s world.

As is my custom, reading selections, those times when you pinch yourself, or think “Isn’t that splendid?” follow:

Laughter
I really can’t tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the Street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over Sometimes they really do struggle with it I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.

Writing Has Always Felt Like Praying
There was more to it, of course. For me writing has always felt like praying, even when I wasn’t writing prayers, as I was often enough. You feel that you are with someone. I feel I am with you now, whatever that can mean, considering that you’re only a little fellow now and when you’re a man you might find these letters of no interest. Or they might never reach you, for any of a number of reasons. Well, but how deeply I regret any sadness you have suffered and how grateful I am in anticipation of any good you have enjoyed. That is to say, I pray for you. And there’s an intimacy in it. That’s the truth.

Water
Ludwig Feuerbach says a wonderful thing about baptism. I have it marked. He says, “Water is the purest, clearest of liquids; in virtue of this its natural character it is the image of the spotless nature of the Divine Spirit. In short, water has a significance in itself, as water; it is on account of its natural qua1ity that it is consecrated and selected as the vehicle of the Holy Spirit. So far there lies at the foundation of Baptism a beautiful, profound natural significance.” Feuerbach is a famous atheist, but he is about as good on the joyful aspects of religion as anybody, and he loves the world. Of course he thinks religion could just stand out of the way and let joy exist pure and undisguised. That is his one error, and it is significant. But he is marvelous on the subject of joy, and also on its religious expressions. … That mention of Feuerbach and joy reminded me of something I saw early one morning a few years ago, as I was walking up to the church. There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet.

On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash. I wish I had paid more attention to it. My list of regrets may seem unusual, but who can know that they are, really. This is an interesting planet. It deserves all the attention you can give it.

Great Grandfather
When someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said, “I prefer to remember that I have kept one.

Putting On Incorruptibility
I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly. As I was walking up to the church this morning, I passed that row of big oaks by the war memorial — if you remember them — and I thought of another morning, fall a year or two ago, when they were dropping their acorns thick as hail almost. There was all sorts of thrashing in the leaves and there were acorns hitting the pavement so hard they’d fly past my head. All this in the dark, of course. I remember a slice of moon, no more than that. It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me.

I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing things it will never know any names for and then has to close its eyes again. I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. There is a human beauty in it. And I can’t believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

Water II
You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in the seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair It did look like a birth or a resurrection For us the water just heightens the touch of the pastor’s hand on the sweet bones of the head, sort of like making an electrical connection I’ve always loved to baptize people though I have sometimes wished there were more shimmer and splash involved in the way we go about it. Well, but you two are dancing around in your iridescent little downpour, whooping and stomping as sane people ought to do when they encounter a thing so miraculous as water.

Echoes Of The Incarnation
They say an infant can’t see when it is as young as your sister was, but she opened her eyes and she looked at me. She was such a little bit of a thing. But while I was holding her, she opened her eyes. I know she didn’t really study my face. Memory can make a thing seem to have been much more than it was. But I know she did look right into my eyes. That is something. And I’m glad I knew it at the time, because now, in my present situation, now that I am about to leave this world, I realize there is nothing more astonishing than a human face. Boughton and I have talked about that, too. It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant. I consider that to be one kind of vision, as mystical as any. Boughton agrees.

Growing Into The World
This morning I have been trying to think about heaven, but without much success. I don’t know why I should expect to have any idea of heaven. I could never have imagined this world if I hadn’t spent almost eight decades walking around in it. People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that’s true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That’s clearer to me every day.

Each morning I’m like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes — old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just remarkable. What of me will I still have? Well, this old body has been a pretty good companion. Like Balaam’s ass, it’s seen the angel I haven’t seen yet, and it’s lying down in the path.

And I must say, too, that my mind, with all its deficiencies, has certainly kept me interested. There’s quite a bit of poetry in it that I learned over the years, and a pretty decent vocabulary, much of it unused. And Scripture. I never knew it the way my father did, or his father. But I know it pretty well. I certainly should. When I was younger than you are now, my father would give me a penny every time I learned five verses so that I could repeat them without a mistake. And then he’d make a game of saying a verse, and I had to say the next one. We could go on and on like that, sometimes till we came to a genealogy, or we just got tired. Sometimes we’d take roles: he’d be Moses and I’d be Pharaoh, he’d be the Pharisees and I’d be the Lord. That’s how he was brought up, too, and it was a great help to me when I went to seminary. And through the whole of my life.

Man Is Born To Trouble As The Sparks Fly Upward
Once when Boughton and I had spent an evening going through our texts together and we were done talking them over, I walked him out to the porch, and there were more fireflies out there than I had ever seen in my life, thousands of them everywhere, just drifting up out of the grass, extinguishing themselves in midair, We sat on the steps a good while in the dark and the silence, watching them. Finally Boughton said, “Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.” And really, it was that night as if the earth were smoldering. Well, it was, and it is. An old fire will make a dark husk for itself and settle in on its core, as in the case of this planet. I believe the same metaphor may describe the human individual, as well. Perhaps Gilead. Perhaps civilization. Prod a little and the sparks will fly. I don’t know whether the verse put a blessing on the fireflies or the fireflies put a blessing on the verse, or if both of them together put a blessing on trouble, but I have loved them both a good deal ever since.

The Sin Of Covetise
I believe the sin of covetise is that pang of resentment you may feel when even the people you love best have what you want and don’t have. From the point of view of loving your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19: 18), there is nothing that makes a person’s fallenness more) undeniable than covetise — you feel it right in your heart, in your bones In that way it is instructive I have never really succeeded in obeying that Commandment, “Thou shalt not covet.” avoided the experience of disobeying by keeping to myself a good deal, as I have said I am sure I would have labored in my vocation more effectively if I had simply accepted covetise in myself as something inevitable, as Paul seems to do, as the thorn in my side, so to speak “Rejoice with those who rejoice.” I have found that difficult too often I was much better at weeping with those who weep I don’t mean that as a joke, but it is kind of funny, when I think about it.

Suffering
As I have said, I think she (his wife, his son’s mother) experienced a good deal of sorrow in those years. I have never asked, but one thing I have learned in my life is what settled, habitual sadness looks like, and when I saw her I thought, Where have you come from, my dear child. She came in during the first prayer and sat in the last pew and looked up at me, and from that moment hers was the only face I saw. I heard a man say I once that Christians worship sorrow. That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it’s fair to say that. There is something in her face I have always felt I must be sufficient to, as if there is a truth in it that tests the meaning of what I say. It’s a fine face, very intelligent, but the sadness in it is engrafted into the intelligence, so to speak, until they seem one thing. I believe there is a dignity in sorrow simply because it is God’s good pleasure that there should be. He is forever raising up those who are brought low. This does not mean that it is ever right to cause suffering or to seek it out when it can be avoided, and serves no good, practical purpose. To value suffering in itself can be dangerous and strange, so I want to be very clear about this. It means simply that God takes the side of sufferers against those who afflict them (I hope you are familiar with the prophets, particularly Isaiah.)

Setting Things Apart So That Their Holiness Will Be Perceived
What the reading yields is the idea of father and mother as the Universal Father and Mother, the Lord’s dear Adam and His beloved Eve; that is, essential humankind as it came from His hand. There’s a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object. In the particular instance of your mother, I know that if you are attentive to her in this way, you will find a very great loveliness in her. When you love someone to the degree you love her, you see her as God sees her, and that is an instruction in the nature of God and humankind and of Being itself. That is why the Fifth Commandment belongs on the first tablet. I have persuaded myself of it.

Grandfather’s Preaching
Here is what he wrote and what he said:

Children:

When I was a young man the Lord came to me and put His hand just here on my right shoulder. I can feel it still. And He spoke to me, very clearly. The words went right through me. He said, Free the captive. Preach good news to the poor. Proclaim liberty throughout the land. That is all Scripture, of course, and the words were already very familiar to me at the time. But it is clear enough why he would feel they needed special emphasis. No one lives by them, unless the Lord takes him in hand. Certainly I did not, until the day he stood beside me and spoke those words to me.

I would call that experience a vision. We had visions in those days, a number of us did. Your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams. And now all those young men are old men, if they’re alive at all, and their visions are no more than dreams, and the old days are forgotten. We fly forgotten as a dream, as it says in the old hymn, and our dreams are forgotten long before we are.

The President, General Grant, once called Iowa the shining star of radicalism. But what is left here in Iowa? ‘What is left, here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes. Scripture says the people perish, and they certainly do. It is remarkable. For all this His anger is not turned away, but His Hand is stretched out still.

The Lord bless you and keep you, etc

Only a few people seemed to have been paying attention, Those who did came very near taking offense at the notion that they were perishing even though the terrible drought has begun to set in that would bankrupt and scatter so many families, even whole towns. There was a little laughter of the kind you hear when the outlandishness of a thing is being generally agreed on But that was the worst of it. My grandfather stood there on the stage in his buzzard-black preacher’s clothes, eyeing the crowd with the dispassionate intensity of death itself with the banners flying around him. Then the band struck up and my father went to him and put his hand on his left shoulder, and brought him down to us. My mother said, “Thank you, Reverend,” and my grandfather shook his head and said, “I doubt it did much good”

I have thought about that very often — how the times change — and the same words that carry a good many people into the howling wilderness in one generation are irksome or meaningless in the next. You might think I am under some sort of obligation to try to “save” young Boughton, that by inquiring into these things he is putting me under that obligation Well, I have had a certain amount of experience with skepticism and the conversation it generates, and there is an inevitable futility in it. It is even destructive. Young people from my own flock have come home with a copy of La Nausée or L’Immoraliste, flummoxed by the possibility of unbelief; when I must have told them a thousand times that unbelief is possible And they are attracted to it by the very books that tell them what a misery it is. And they want me to defend religion, and they want me to give them “proofs.” I just won’t do it. It only confirms them in their skepticism. Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.

The Attempt To Defend Belief Can Unsettle It
In the matter of belief, I have always found that defenses have the same irrelevance about them as the criticisms they are meant to answer. I think the attempt to defend belief can unsettle it, in fact, because there is always an inadequacy in argument about ultimate things. We participate in Being without remainder. No breath, no thought, no wart or whisker, is not as sunk in Being as it could be. And yet no one can say what Being is. If you describe what a thought and a whisker have in common, and a typhoon and a rise in the stock market, excluding “existence,” which merely restates the fact that they have a place on our list of known and nameable things (and which would yield as insight: being equals existence!), you would have accomplished a wonderful thing, still too partial in an infinite degree to have any meaning, however

I’ve lost my point. It was to the effect that you can assert the existence of something – Being — having not the slightest notion of what it is. Then God is at a greater remove altogether — if God is the Author of Existence, what can it mean to say God exists? There’s a problem in vocabulary. He would have to have had a character before existence which the poverty of our understanding can only call existence That is clearly a source of confusion. Another term would be needed to describe a state or quality of which we can have no experience whatever, to which existence as we know it can bear only the slightest likeness or affinity. So creating proofs from experience of any sort is like building a ladder to the moon. It seems that it should be possible, until you stop to consider the nature of the problem.

So my advice is this — don’t look for proofs Don’t bother with them at all. They are never sufficient to the question, and they’re always a little impertinent, I think, because they claim for God a place within our conceptual grasp. And they will likely sound wrong to you even if you convince someone else with them That is very unsettling over the long term “Let your works so shine before men,” etc. It was Coleridge who ~said Christianity is a life, not a doctrine, words to that effect. I’m not saying never doubt or question. The Lord gave you a mind so that you would make honest use of it. I’m saying you must be sure that the doubts and questions are your own, not, so to speak, the mustache and walking stick that happen to be the fashion of any particular moment.

Existence Is The Essential And Holy Thing
Now here is the point I wish to make, because this is the thought that came to me as I was putting all this before the Lord. Existence is the essential thing and the holy thing. If the Lord chooses to make nothing of our transgression then they are nothing. Or whatever reality they have is trivial and conditional beside the exquisite primary fact of existence. Of course the Lord would wipe them away, just as I wipe dirt from your face, or tears. After all, why should the Lord bother much over these smirches that are no part of His Creation.

Well, there are a good many reasons why He should. We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep. I am aware that significant confusion enters my thinking at this point. I’m tired — that may be some part of the problem. Though I recall even in my prime foundering whenever I see the true gravity of sin over against the free grace of forgiveness. If young Boughton is my son, then by the same reasoning that child of his was also my daughter, and it was just terrible what happened to her, and that’s a fact. As I am a Christian man, I could never say otherwise.

Controlling Anger
My father was telling himself and all the rest of us that Edward’s transgressions were trivial beside his own. He was also saying, to himself and to the rest of us, that there was an aptness in this present embarrassment and disappointment which• made it valuable and instructive to him — that there was seeming design in it that might mark it in fact as the Lord’s benevolence, a sort of parable meant to deepen his own understanding. This construction of the matter would certainly have forbidden, or at least discouraged, any impulse he might have felt to blame Edward. The thoughtlessness of any individual, when it is seen to be in service to the mindfulness of the Lord, cannot justify anger.

I have used this line of reasoning any number of times myself, when I have felt the need and found the occasion. And the fact is, it is seldom indeed that any wrong one suffers is not thoroughly foreshadowed by wrongs one has done. That said, it has never been clear to me how much this realization helps when it comes to the practical difficulty of controlling anger. Nor have I found any way to apply it to present circumstance, -though I have not yet abandoned the effort.

We Are Secrets From Each Other
So we were quiet there for some time. Your mother came out with a pot of hot cider and cups, and she sat there quiet right along with us, the dear woman And I spent the time thinking how it would be if Jack Boughton were indeed my son, and had come home weary from whatever life he had, and was sitting there still and at seeming peace in that peaceful night. There was a considerable satisfaction in that thought The idea of grace had been so much on my mind, grace as a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials There in the dark and the quiet I felt I could forget all the tedious particulars and just feel the presence of his mortal and immortal being. And a sensation came over me, a sort of lovely fear, that made me think of Boughton’s fear of angels

Now, I may have been more than half asleep at that point, but a thought arose that abides with me. I wished I could sit at the feet of that eternal soul and learn. He did then seem to me the angel of himself, brooding over the mysteries his mortal life describes, the deep things of man And of course that is exactly what he is. “For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him (1 Corinthians 2:11: “For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God.”) In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable — which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, untraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

Maybe I should have said we are like planets. But then I would have lost some of the point of saying that we are like civilizations. The planets may all have been sloughed from the same star, hut still the historical dimension is missing from that simile, and it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us. I am old enough to. remember when we used to go out in the brush, a lot of us, and. spread out in a circle, and then close in, scaring the rabbits along in front of us, till they were trapped there in the center,. and then we would kill them with sticks and clubs. That was during the Depression, and people were hungry, and we did what we could. I am not finding fault. (We didn’t take the jackrabbits, only the cottontails. We all knew there was something objectionable about jackrabbits, though I don’t remember anyone saying just what it was.) There were people eating groundhogs. The children would go to school with nothing in their lunch buckets but a boiled potato or a scrap of bread with lard smeared on it. In those days the windows of the church used to get so pelted with dust that I’d get up on a ladder and sweep them down with a broom so there would be light enough inside for people to read their hymnals.

The times were dreadful, but it was just how it was, and we got very used to it. That was our civilization. The valley of the shadow And it might as well be Ur of the Chaldees for all people know about it now. For which I thank God, of course, though, since it had to happen, I don’t regret having been here for it. It gives you another look at things I have heard people say it taught them there is more to life than security and the material comforts, hut I know a lot of older people around here who can hardly bear to part with a nickel, remembering those hard times. I can’t blame them for it, though it has meant that the church is just now beginning to come out of its own Depression. “There is that scattereth, and increaseth yet more, and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth only to want.” Much in this very town proves the truth of that proverb. Well, the church is shabby for the same reason it’s still standing at all. So I shouldn’t really complain. It is a good thing to know what it is to be poor, and a better thing if you can do it in company.

Prodigal Renunciations
I’ll tell you, if my grandfather did throw his mantle over me, so to speak, he did it long before I came into this world. The holiness of his life imputed a holiness to mine, or to my vocation, that I have tried to diminish as little as I could. I have tried to be careful of my reputation and also of my character. I have tried to keep the Gospel before me as a standard for my life and my preaching And yet there I was trying to write a sermon, when all I really wanted to do was try to remember a young woman’s face.

If I had had this experience earlier in life, I would have been much wiser, much more compassionate. I really didn’t understand what it was that made people who came to me so indifferent to good judgment, to common sense, or why they would say “I know, I know” when I urged a little reasonableness on them, and why it meant “It doesn’t matter, I just don’t care” That’s what the saints and the martyrs say. And I know now that it is passion that moves them to their prodigal (yielding abundantly, profuse) renunciations. I might seem to be comparing something great and holy with a minor and ordinary thing, that is, love of God with mortal love. But I just don’t see them as separate things at all. If we can be divinely fed with a morsel and divinely blessed with a touch, then the terrible pleasure we find in a particular face can certainly instruct us in the nature of the very grandest love. I devoutly believe this to be true. I remember in those days loving God for the existence of love and being grateful to God for the existence of gratitude, right down in the depths of my misery I realized many things I am at a loss to express. And of course those feelings become milder with time, which is a mercy.

I Do Wonder Where It Will End
Two or three of the ladies had pronounced views on points of doctrine, particularly sin and damnation, which they never learned from me. I blame the radio for sowing a good deal of confusion where theology is concerned. And television is worse. You can spend forty years teaching people to be awake to the fact of mystery and then some fellow with no more theological sense than a jackrabbit gets himself a radio ministry and all your work is forgotten. I do wonder where it will end.

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Book Recommendation: Bonhoeffer Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas

December 13, 2010

What a great book this is.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal on the current spate of WWII publications, Modris Eksteins commented recently: “It has been more than 65 years away from the end of World War II, but that global conflict and its precursor, the so-called Great War of 1914-18, continue to fascinate and torment us, even as the veterans who fought in them pass away. What is striking about the current spate of books and movies about these conflicts is that for many in the West, they no longer seem to represent the unequivocal victory of good over evil, right over wrong, liberty over tyranny. A plethora of historical reassessments of the aerial campaigns against German and Japanese cities question not only the moral but also the political validity of the carpet-bombing of civilians. In his recent film, “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino turned all tables when he had Jews behaving like Nazis, and in the massive HBO mini-series “The Pacific” a Marine’s reference to “yellow monkeys” reverberates through the entire series.

All wars, but these two in particular, with their mass effort and mass death — the first great democratic wars of history — are now freighted with the toxic irony that came to pervade the 20th century and continues to afflict us still. If today we question traditional narratives, no longer trust our leaders and have lost all faith in grand ideas, the gnarled roots of such skepticism lead back through the World Wars of the last century.”

You won’t find that problem in Bonhoeffer Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas. The evil of the Third Reich and the seemingly endless decline of “the most Christian of nations,” Germany, is delineated with excruciating detail. It is one of those books that answers “How could this have ever happened?” to those of us who know the history but still find the loss of Dietrich Bonhoeffer irreconcileable. The prologue (which follows) marks the return of the “Good German” in the UK and begins a powerful historical recollection and consideration that has been long overdue. I have a few reading selections from Metaxas’ masterpiece and the prologue seemed like a good place to start.

Occasionally I will read the reviews at Amazon dot com to see how others have reacted to the book. This review tells a little about the book and Eric Metaxas:

Shortly after his conversion in 1988, Metaxas read Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship and learned the story of the young man who, “because of his Christian faith stood up to the Nazis and ultimately gave his life.” From then on, he was determined to tell the story to others. And tell it he has.

Metaxas takes readers, in 592 pages, through Bonhoeffer’s entire life, from his parent’s courtship to his memorial service. No corner of the subject’s life is left unexplored. Through the author’s use of Bonhoeffer’s personal letters to family and friends, earlier biographies, interviews with those who knew Bonhoeffer, and other thorough research, readers get a comprehensive and balanced look into one of recent history’s greatest theologians.

Appropriately, Metaxas emphasizes Bonhoeffer’s theology and how it played out in his life. In contrast to “cheap grace,” Bonhoeffer believed that true grace influences all aspects of a Christian’s life. Christianity is more than formal religion, and it requires believers to be willing to sacrifice everything to God. Christianity is also more than legalistic morality. Ethics, according to Bonhoeffer, can’t be reduced to a set of rules. These beliefs are what led this humble and devout follower of Christ to be involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

How Christianity and assassination plots can be reconciled is hard for many to fathom–especially those who have lived only in peace and safety. We must consider Bonhoeffer in the context of his life, his country, and the war that he had no choice but to be a part of. Ethics, once so clear, become unclear. Do we lie to the Nazis, or do we give them information that leads to the deaths of innocents? Do we obey our nation’s laws, or do we defy them by leading Jews into safety? Do we fight in Hitler’s army, or do we refuse, knowing that we will be beheaded and leave our family destitute? These are some of the questions Bonhoeffer faced.

But readers can sympathize with Bonhoeffer. Metaxas masterfully puts us in his world. We celebrate with him in his family’s parlor. We study with him in his illegal seminary. We watch with him as his world unravels. And we see him agonize over decisions, decisions that are not so clear, and decisions that he often had to make without the support of others.

Metaxas’s “Bonhoeffer” will be one of the best books of the year. I’ve learned, as expected, much about the life of a great and inspiring Christian. But I’ve also learned about the world, sin and evil, what it really means to be a Christian, and what it really means to live. There are a few books that, years after I have read them, I realize have had a great influence on me. This will be one of them. You can’t go wrong with this book; I give it my highest recommendation.

27 JULY 1945, LONDON

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed, always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body. Fill we which live are always delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in us, but life in you.
2 CORINTHIANS 4:8-12

“Peace had at last returned to Europe. Her familiar face — once evilly contorted and frightening — was again at rest, noble and fresh. What she had been through would take years to understand. It was as though she had undergone a terribly protracted exorcism, one that had extracted from her the last farthing. But in the very end, protesting with shrieks as they went, the legions of demons were driven out.

The war had been over for two months. The tyrant took his own life in a gray bunker beneath his shattered capital, and the Allies declared victory.

Slowly, slowly, life in Britain turned to the task of restoring itself. Then, as if on cue,, summer arrived. It was the first summer of peace in six years. But as if to prove that the whole thing hadn’t been a dream or a nightmare, there were constant fresh reminders of what had happened. And they were as awful as anything that had gone before. Often they were worse. In the early part of this summer, the ghastly news of the death camps emerged along with the unfathomable atrocities that the Nazis had visited upon their victims in the hellish outposts of their short-lived empire.

Rumors of such things circulated throughout the war, but now the reality was confirmed by photographs, newsreel footage, and eyewitness accounts from the soldiers who liberated the camps in April during the last days of the war. The depth of these horrors had not been known or imagined, and it was almost too much for the war-fatigued British public to absorb. Their hatred of the Germans was confirmed and reconfirmed afresh with every nauseating detail. The public reeled at the very evilness of the evil.

At the beginning of the war, it was possible to separate the Nazis from the Germans and recognize that not all Germans were Nazis. As the clash between the two nations wore on, and as more and more English fathers and sons and brothers died, distinguishing the difference became more difficult. Eventually the difference vanished altogether. Realizing he needed to fuel the British war effort, Prime Minister Winston Churchill fused the Germans and the Nazis into a single hated enemy, the better to defeat it swiftly and end the unrelenting nightmare.

When Germans working to defeat Hitler and the Nazis contacted Churchill and the British government, hoping for assistance to defeat their common enemy from the inside — hoping to tell the world that some Germans trapped inside the Reich felt much as they did –they were rebuffed. No one was interested in their overtures. It was too late. They couldn’t participate in such evils and, when it was convenient, try to settle for a separate peace. For the purposes of the war effort, Churchill maintained the fiction that there were no good Germans. It would even be said that the only good German — if one needed to use the phrase –was a dead German. That lack of nuance was also part of the hellishness of. war.

But now the war was over. And even as the full, unspeakable evil of the Third Reich was coming to light, the other side of things had to be seen too. Part of the restoration to peacetime thinking was the ability to again see beyond the blacks and whites of the war, to again discern nuance and shades, shadows and colors.

And so today in Holy Trinity Church — just off the Brampton Road in London—a service was taking place that was incomprehensible to some. To many others it was distasteful and disturbing, especially to those who had lost loved ones during the war. The memorial service being held today on British soil and being broadcast on the BBC was for a German who had died three months earlier. The word of his demise so slowly staggered out of the war’s fog and rubble that only recently had any of his friends and family learned of it. Most of them still knew nothing about it. But here in London were gathered those few who did.

In the pews were the man’s thirty-nine-year-old twin sister, her half-Jewish husband, and their two girls. They had slipped out of Germany before the war, driving at night across the border into Switzerland. The dead man took part in arranging their illegal flight—although that was among the most negligible of his departures from National Socialist orthodoxy — and he helped establish them in London, where they settled.

The man counted among his friends a number of prominent persons, including George Bell, the bishop of Chichester. Bell arranged the service, for he had known and loved the man being honored. The bishop met him years before the war when the two were engaged in ecumenical efforts, trying to warn Europe against the designs of the Nazis, then trying to rescue Jews, and finally trying to bring news of the German resistance to the attention of the British government. Just hours before his execution in Flossenburg Concentration camp, the man directed his last words to this bishop. That Sunday he spoke them to a British officer, who was imprisoned with him, after he performed his last service and preached his last sermon. This officer was liberated and brought those last words and the news of the man’s death across Europe with him.

Across the English Channel, across France, and across Germany, in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, in a three-story house at 43 Marienburgerallee, an elderly couple sat by their radio. In her time the wife had given birth to eight children, four boys and four girls. The second son had been killed in the First War, and for a whole year his young mother had been unable to function. Twenty-seven years later, a second war would take two more boys from her. The husband was the most prominent psychiatrist in Germany. They had both opposed Hitler from the beginning and were proud of their sons and sons-in-law who had been involved in the conspiracy against him. They all knew the dangers. But when the war at last ended, news of their two sons was slow to arrive in Berlin. A month earlier they had finally heard of the death of their third son, Klaus. But about their youngest son, Dietrich, they had heard nothing. Someone claimed to have seen him alive. Then a neighbor told them that the BBC would the next day broadcast a memorial service in London. It was for Dietrich.

At the appointed-hour, the old couple turned on their radio. Soon enough the service was announced for their son. That was how they came to know of his death.

As the couple took in the hard news that the good man who was their son was now dead so too, many English took in the hard news that the dead man who was a German was good. Thus did the world again begin to reconcile itself to itself.

The man who died was engaged to be married. He was a pastor and a theologian. And he was executed for his role in the plot to assassinate Hitler. This is his story.”

Posted in Book Recommendations | Tagged Dietrich Bonhoeffer | 3 Comments »

Book Recommendation: Discovering Aquinas – Aidan Nichols

November 9, 2010

You can never go wrong with the clear and elegant prose of Aidan Nichols, an academic and Catholic priest, who first served as the John Paul II Memorial Visiting Lecturer at Oxford University for 2006-8 — the first lectureship of Catholic theology at that university since the Reformation. He is a member of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) and was formerly the Prior of St. Michael and All Angels in Cambridge. Author of over 30 books, you will find frequent references to him amongst the posts here. This particular book dates from 2002 and is often used as a text in seminaries to give a quick overview of the career and thought of the Angelic Doctor.

Aquinas: Charity, The Supreme Evangelical Virtue
Just as a lamp is not able to illuminate unless a fire is enkindled, so also a spiritual lamp does not illuminate unless he first burn and be inflamed with the fire of charity. Hence ardor precedes illumination, for a knowledge of truth is bestowed by the ardor of charity.

Aquinas: Faith Knowledge
Between ordinary science-knowledge and faith-knowledge there is this difference. The first shines only on the mind, showing that God is the cause of everything, that he is one and wise and so forth, whereas the second enlightens the mind and warms the heart, telling us that God is also savior, redeemer, lover, made flesh for us. Hence the savior of this knowledge, and the fragrance spread far and wide. ‘Behold the scent of my son is as of a field which the Lord hath blessed.’

What Is Theology
The Summa Theologiae opens by asking what theology is, and its answer is that theology is orderly reflection on the content of revelation, biblically attested as this is, and summed up in the articles of the Creed. This orderly reflection is carried out in the light of God’s own knowledge of himself and his saving plan – which light, as communicated to ourselves, we call ‘faith’. It is, then in the broadest possible terms, an integration of faith and reason, and while Thomas allows that charity may give the unlettered person a kind of intuition or instinctive judgment in matters of faith, normally it requires study and hard work.

Scheme Of The Summa Theologiae
Prima Pars begins by describing the fontal being of God [The font or source of creatures is God whose existence is, for Thomas, known by reason but the mystery of whose being, in its concrete character, requires revelation for its description.] The fontal being is totally complete self-communicating goodness expressing itself through the interplay of three subsistent relationships (Father to Son, Son to Father, Father and Son to Holy Spirit). Thomas considers the issue from God of the created world; first that of pure minds, the angels; then, that of the natural order as a whole; and finally the place of man, who is embodied mind or intellectualized body. Creatures come forth from God, structured in a way that natural philosophy indicates but dependent on God for their existence and, in the case of rational creatures, ordered to him by their tendency to seek a goal beyond themselves.

[Prima Secundae] begins by an account of human happiness which is, for St. Thomas, the purpose of morality, just as it was for Aristotle. Thanks to the doctrines of creation and redemption, however, the content of such happiness must be re-described so as to include – indeed, center on – the vision of God. This is our aim and destiny ‘return’ to God in beatification. Thomas then uses a combination of Aristotelian ethics and the ascetic and moral writings of such Church Fathers as John Cassian and Gregory the Great to give an account of the basic emotional drives of human nature and how these, like mind and will, are distorted by sin.

[The Secunda Secundae] is the first explicit treatment of the difference Christ makes: the gift of a new interior principle of acting, Christ’s Holy Spirit. [Thomas posits] that the Gospel is …the power of a new love which unites us with God and with each other. The teaching element, the written Gospels, dispose us to receive this Holy Spirit; the sacraments actually mediate this life to us, and it proceeds spontaneously to express itself in Christian living.

The spirit of Christ supernaturalizes our natural drives not just through modulating the moral virtues by also and more specifically in two particular ways – the ‘theological virtues’, new God directed dispositions, and the ‘Gifts of the Holy Spirit’. First then, the spirit elicits faith, hope and charity, which make us tend to the God of the saving revelation as He is in Himself, giving us real contact with Him. And secondly, He bestows upon us those gifts and endowments proper to the messianic child in the Book of Isaiah, applied by Church tradition at large to the messianic people of the New Covenant and associated by the Latin Church with, especially, confirmation.

The remainder of the Secunda Secundae is what we might call a phenomenology—a reflective description – of the Christian life, a good life informed by charity and articulating itself in both practical goodness and contemplation…The best way to be a Christian is to unite contemplation and practical goodness; the highest form of practical goodness is to pass on understanding of the Christian faith, since this alone is helpful not only for time but also for eternity; so the best way to follow the Gospel is ‘contemplata aliis tradere, ‘to give to others the fruit of contemplation’

Revelation In Thomism
Revelation for Thomas does not consist principally in public events. It is not to be found, for instance, in the Exodus and Sinai events of the Old Testament or even in the Incarnation, Life, Death and Resurrection of Christ in the New. And this is because, for Aquinas, revelation – with one caveat to be entered – is essentially an interior event, and more justly still, it is an intellectual event. It consists in cognitive acts, acts of intellectual appropriation, in which the mind judges relevant materials (and those may be events like the ones just mentioned) by a light superior to the ordinary lights that the mind normally works by in this world. God gives the recipient of revelation what Thomas calls a lumen propheticum, a ‘prophetic light’, which enables him or her to judge of their experience in a way that echoes the divine judgment of the realities concerned.

How ‘Patient’ And ‘Agent’ Intellect Impact Revelation In Thomism
Thomas thought that two things are required (for common-or-garden-knowing of the world): a capacity to register in a receptive way what is other than the mind (what Thomas, following Aristotle, called the ‘patient intellect’), and the power to penetrate what is thus registered and draw out its intelligibility – in plain English, make sense of it (for which we need that other kind of mental activity which Aristotle and Thomas call the ‘agent intellect.’ And all this is with a with a view to showing something for what it is, by the natural light of human understanding.

What we find in strictly supernatural knowledge – revelation knowledge, salvifically relevant knowledge – has to be grasped by analogy with this twofold process, What the mind receives may be impressions from the naturally or historically formed world around it – the life of the cosmos, say, so important to the Wisdom writers of the Old Testament, or the miracles of the Passion of Christ in the New. Or again, what the mind registers may be the materials directly infused by God – images or ides which God, who is immediately present to the soul as to every other reality, can place thereby his action. But in either case what the mind is patient of cannot be called ‘revelation’ unless it has actively grasped its content by an act of judgment made through a light higher than that of natural understanding because sharing in the light of the divine mind, the mind of Truth itself.

Extraordinary Richness And Variety Of Methods God Has Devised To Communicate Grace
Victor White [interpreter of St. Thomas] has written: St. Thomas stresses the extraordinary richness and variety to be found in the methods which God has devised to make his saving ways known to men – even in the old Testament alone, the extraordinary variety, in the first place, of all sorts and conditions of men whom he has chosen to be the recipients of this revelation. Then, the extraordinary variety of historical conditions in which revelations have been made …and the manifold adaptations to the particular needs of those conditions. …Thirdly the immense variety of the kinds of things that have been the subject of those revelations – divine and transcendental things, temporal things belonging to past present and future: promises and threats; absolute things, contingent thing and conditional things. Fourthly the immense richness and variety of symbolism which revelation has employed for its medium, ranging from the crudest of inanimate stocks and stones…to the most sublime and dazzling visions….Fifthly, the diversity of clarity of apprehension of what is revealed, ranging from the darkest night both of sense and of understanding through every degree of twilight to relatively clear daylight vision. Next the unlimited variety of modes of expression and literary form which will be given to communicate the revelations…Finally, the limitless variety of men to whom the revelations are to be communicated, and their corresponding adaptation to the needs of each…

Lumen Naturale And Lumen Propheticum
Just as the lumen naturale of the agent intellect (q.v.) is given by God as Creator to enable us to find our way in intelligent fashion in the ordinary world, so the lumen propheticum is given by God as redeemer, to enable human beings (a few of them directly, all of them indirectly) to locate and interpret aright the ultimate goal of human life, a goal entirely supernatural because it consists in the open vision of the Trinity, and hence transcends altogether finite and created nature.

Divine Revelation Is Necessary
Thomas has told his readers ….that divine revelation is necessary to us because the purpose and meaning of human existence is ultimately to be found only in the God who is invisible and incomprehensible, and yet that purpose has somehow to be made known to humankind if human objectives and activities are to be aligned with their final end. For only in that goal does salus, ‘salvation’ health and well-being for the spirit and body alike – ultimately consist. What is necessary then, is some way of abolishing the distance that separates human cognitive capacity from awareness of the divine offer of salvation, and this can be done by God himself…bestowing the prophetic light on chosen individuals, chosen so they may witness divine revelation on behalf of all.

The Old Testament and Angelic Mediation In Thomism
For Aquinas the enlargement of the judgment of a prophet comes about …through angelic mediation….The idea that the Old Law was mediated by angels is clearly found in both the speech of Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles and in the Pauline Letters, notably Galatians, and it is crucial to the argument of the Letter to the Hebrews…As Aquinas explains, the function of the Angels is communication (the very word ‘angel’ tells us so). Now the angels themselves enjoy the Beatific Vision. So these immaterial substances are able to communicate not that Vision itself, which is infinite, but some of its finite effects, some knowledge of God’s eternal designs for his world. This they do by working in and through matter, obeying its laws while exploiting its resources…the angels are able to stimulate mental images or indeed the external sense organs to produce aural or visual images, images which then form the raw material of revelation: “The human mind is raised to understand in a certain way conformably to the manner of immaterial substances, so that with utmost certitude it sees not only principles but also conclusions by simple intuition.”

Angelic Mediation And The New Testament In Thomism
Angelic mediation [that occurred in the Old Testament] ceases….thanks to the hypostatic union, the human mind of the word incarnate is immediately open to influxes from the divine mind, for it is the human mind of one who is personally God. The revelation from which the Christian religion takes its rise is, in the first place, a vision in the inspired human intellect of Jesus, in the human soul of Christ. His knowledge of the divine Trinity and its saving plan was incomparably greater than that of the Old Testament prophets…this uniqueness of revelatory fullness in Christ is what makes Thomas call Jesus in his human nature primus et pincipalis doctor, ‘the first and principal teacher’

The Uniqueness Of The Apostles
It is for Thomas a soteriological [soteriology is the theological doctrine of salvation as effected by Jesus] principle that God gives someone grace in proportion to the mission for which he or she has been chosen. It is the unique proximity of the apostle so the fullness of time when, with the climax of salvation history at the incarnation, the first and principal teacher, the God-man was manifesting clearly the substance of divine revelation in its maximal form, exteriorizing his understanding in words and deeds, that gave the apostles a perfect knowledge of the mysteries of faith in which they were confirmed or stabilized by the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost.

The Apostles Creed
The truth of the faith is contained in the Holy Scripture diffusely and in different ways, some of which envelop it in obscurity. That is so much so that to extract from Sacred Scripture the truth of the faith much study and application are required, to which most people, absorbed as they are by other concerns, are in no position to give themselves or to attend. That is why it was necessary to draw from the Scriptures and to formulate as a summary something absolutely clear which could be proposed to the faith of all [The Apostles Creed]. Nonetheless, it is not a question of things added to the Holy Scriptures but of things drawn out of them.

Tradition And Scripture In Thomism
The chief reason why Thomas does not, by and large, speak of Tradition as fount of revealed understanding distinct from the Scriptures is that he things of scripture as itself transmitted by Tradition. Traditio sacrae Scripturae, the traditioning or handling on of scripture within the Church as a whole, is the norm of Christian truth. He emphasizes…that the Fathers of the church must never be separated from or counterposed against the biblical authority. For the Fathers are the authentic transmitters of Scripture – and here he [Thomas] is thinking of not just he textural tradition but also the salvific meaning of the biblical writings.

Three Considerations For Describing Scripture As Science
First, for science is always a knowledge of something through its causes, whereby we get to the bottom of something by uncovering its foundational principle. But the knowledge found in Scripture derives from God’s own knowledge of himself and his eternal design for the world, and nothing can be more cognitively fundamental than that. Secondly, like more mundane sciences, …Holy Scripture uses reasoning, as when, for example, in his first letter to the Corinth, Paul argues from the Resurrection of Christ to the resurrection of all mankind. And then thirdly, Scripture offers to thought the unity which is typical of scientific understanding , for all matters dealt with by Scripture are covered by the gift of prophetic inspiration only insofar as they are …‘revealable’ objects of revelation. And to have in this way one single, formal perspective on all the topics that his body of literature (the Bible) treats of is precisely what enables a kind of knowing to be unitary and in that sense scientific.

Lumen Fidei
Thomas understands the prophetic light of revelation by analogy with the natural light operative in ordinary human knowing. By light here we can understand whatever causes something to become manifest in some order of knowledge. …there is not only the lumen naturale and the lumen propheticum, there is also the lumen fidei, the light of faith’…And this for Thomas is a light issuing from God as Redeemer, just as is the lumen propheticum – not however, to give us direct knowledge of transient light, but to allow us to adhere to the First Truth, God himself, by assenting to what, through veridical witnesses (that is, through testimonies he has guaranteed as true), God invites us to believe about himself and his everlasting purpose for us.

Analyzing the Act Of Faith
Thomas distinguishes between credere Deo, believing by or through God; credere Deum believing God; and credere in Deum, believing in God. All these elements are present in faith’s act and therefore in the ‘virture’ or stable disposition which is the principle of all Christian believing in the life of the faithful… credere Deo…only God can activate interiorly the instinct we have for our last end, and thus, by means of the will, move the intellect to give its assent to the truths he teaches – truths which reach us from him through the “Church’s presentation of the canonical Scriptures which are themselves the expression of the preaching of those apostles who, as doctors of the faith, participated in the knowledge of the unique Witness to the divine truth, the God-man…

Although the truth of divine revelation to which thewill bids the intellect adhere is not, as it was for its immediate recipients, something evident, nonetheless this revelation is worthy of our assent That we can grasp from the way the will is attracted to the share in our final good which revelation promises….an important factor …is the manner in which God confirms the credibility of his revelation by furnishing its transmission with conditions that only he could originate – the fulfillment of prophecy, the occurrence of miracles, the manifestation of outstanding sanctity on the part of revelation’s representative. These signs demonstrate that it really is God who has spoken… credere in Deum…to know God by means of his own word is actually to share in his divine knowledge.

Faith is such a sharing, albeit an imperfect one, but not so imperfect that it does not orient the human mind towards the future vision of God in its wondrous fullness. … credere in Deum …faith which informs man obscurely but with certitude about the everlastingly True…determines in principle mans’ speculative intellect, also represents God to him as the Goal to be rejoined by love and thus can extend itself into the order of action…this is the end of a theology of faith…and the beginning of glory…faith has an eschatological quality. The life that flows from faith is anticipation of life with the Trinity in heaven: There the lumen fidei – made possible by the lumen propheticum, itself a supernaturalized version of the lumen naturale will reach its full term in the lumen gloriae, the light of glory.

Anabasis And Katabasis
Laying aside, then, the mystical graces of rapture, few and far between as these are, we have in this life two fundamental modes of knowing God. To introduce two key terms which were vital for the later Greek fathers and in modern Western dogmatics for Hans Urs von Balthasar, we know God both by anabasis –‘rising’ upon the basis of what is common to created and uncreated being, and by katabasis – God’s ‘descending’ self-disclosure which comes down in the Judaeo-Christian revelation from the One whom he Letter of James calls ‘the Father of lights’ (James:1:17). In Thomas… the two kinds or …directions of such knowing…are generally found interwoven….such interweaving produces in Thomas’s mind, the greatest richness of theological understanding, the maximal fullness of theological intelligibility….Thomas was a theologian who made use of philosophy, not a philosopher who was under ecclesiastical obligation to say something about faith as well.

The Interwoven Anabatic and Katabatic Approach of Thomism (Leo Elder)
Faith is non-evident knowledge which uses concepts of the natural order to signify supernatural realities. This is possible for there is an analogy between both orders, because God is the author of both. Reason must assist faith in the analysis, ordering and elaborating what is revealed. This is precisely what Aquinas does; philosophical insights and natural truths are used within sacred theology, becoming integral parts of it (without them theology is not possible) and they partake in the nature of theology as longs they are used by it. But they can also be detached from it. Once may compare their function to that of the chemical elements and reactions to the living organism. Outside the organism they occur in their own right; but in the organism they are subservient to the principle of life and taken up into a higher unity.

The Thirst For And Knowledge Of God’s Existence
Thomas holds that in a broad sense, the knowledge of God’s existence is implanted in all human beings by nature – not only inasmuch as we naturally desire happiness, and God has so disposed our nature that He alone is that happiness, that beatitude. But…this is not to know, in the full meaning of the word ‘know’, that God exists…The Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain distinguishes three kinds of intellectual thirst. The first is the thirst for the water of science. When this particular thirst is quenched, however, one thirsts for something else, and this is the thirst for the water of created wisdom – to know being in its various modes, the ontological mystery. But even then the thirst continues, and this is the thirst for the water of uncreated wisdom, for the vision of God.

The Five Anabatic Ways Or Proofs Of God’s Existence [Quinquae viae]
(1) Material causality is that out of which something is effected, the potential which, whether suddenly or by a long drawn out process, becomes actuality. But sheer potentiality cannot be a true starting point for the world. The first way argues that the true starting point is, rather, sheer actuality, a reality wholly lacking in potentiality because it is Pure Act.

(2) Efficient causality is that by whose agency something is brought into being, or brought about. Nine times out of ten it is what we have in mind when we use the word ‘cause’ in ordinary language. What causes hailstones? What caused the sinking of the Titanic? If, as regularly happens in human enquiry, we seek after such an efficient cause for some event or development, or for the emergence of some new kind of entity, we cannot be prevented, Thomas argues, from asking after that transcendent efficient cause which explains the working of efficient causes and their interrelation as a whole. This is the argument of the second way, which reaches then the conclusion that deity is at work in all processes taking place in the world.

Skip (3) for now (See below)

(4) The next kind of causality enumerated by Aristotle is formal causality. This raises the question of how a particular thing is said to be the kind of thing it is – …the question of formal properties….A very important set of properties is value-laden… we denote by terms “good”, “beautiful”, “true”, etc….how these pure-value perfection properties are embodied in the world, yet only in various degrees. Thomas’ conclusion is that as manifestations…of the qualities inherent in finite being…[they] share in divine being, which is perfect in the maximal degree.

(5) Final causality (Aristotle’s scheme)…which deals with the ends or goals for which all beings strive, whether consciously or not. Whether in a micro-context or in a macro-context of the world as a whole, goal directedness appears to be a feature of the cosmic process. The Fifth Way begins from this discovery, and it concludes to the divine intellect as the cause of the order in the world. Now consider (3), which is the central argument as the ground or basis of the fourfold causality…the relationship between observable things and their being is contingent, not necessary. Things do not have their being of themselves. Rather things receive their being – in “Thomas’ term, their esse—and that causality of esse lies at a deeper level than (1)material, (2)efficient, (4)formal and (5)final causality and is indeed the root of all of these…The Third Way concludes to God as the foundation and source not of this or that aspect of things nor of this or that aspect of the world as a whole, but of the very being of things, the very being of the world….Thomas also thinks that he has gone some way to justify, in terms of katabatic disclosure of Scripture that in God – to cite St Paul’s words to the Athenians in Acts 17:28 ['For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.']

Exploring God’s Five Ways of Being:
The first way leads to the conclusion that there exists a First Unmoved Mover whose being contains no potentiality at all – and this leads Aquinas to affirm the divine ‘simplicity’. In God there is no distinction between his nature and his properties, his substance and his qualities, not even ….between his essence and his existence. God’s being is entirely unique, and between our knowledge of it in a negative fashion, when, namely we understand that his esse is entirely different from that of the beings around us….

From this starting point…the doctrine of God’s perfection is linked to the Second Way…on the basis of efficient causality, that God is active…in all of the processes taking place in the world. If God is able to move with efficacy, in the transcendent mode proper to him, all efficient causes at work in the world, then he must himself be absolutely ‘achieved’ or complete – which is the original meaning of perfectum, ‘perfect’…

Being is the most perfect of all things, for it is compared to all things as that by which they are made actual, for nothing has actuality except insofar as it is. Hence being itself is that which actuates in things, even their forms…Compare in the New Testament…’Every good and perfect gift is from above [Letter of James 1:17]

…Things strive after their own perfection, the completion of their form, they strive after God… God is that which is sought for in all the variegated activity the universe shows. Since all things tend to their own perfection, nothing can escape this seeking to become like God…the whole universe strives after liberation in him. ..

We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation but we ourselves who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies [Letter to Romans 8:22]

In the Third Way Thomas deals with the infinity of God , on which there follows, in his philosophical theology, the existence of God in all things. The third way concludes that there must be being that has of itself its own necessity to be and is the cause for the being of all other things. It is as the unlimited realization of reality and perfection that God is infinite, this unlimited plenitude of God’s subsistent being is prolonged by his presence in things, sustaining them at their deepest core, and yet by the sublimity of the divine nature raised high above them. God is omnipresent in space and time, not because he is in any way spatially or temporally determined, but because he continually gives being to the realities that are determined in those ways.

God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being [Book of Acts 17:28]

From the logic of the Fourth Way it follows that , if God contains within himself the plenitude of the perfections of all things, he can neither degenerate nor advance. “He does not faint or grow weary.”[Isa: 40:28b] It is because God is immutable that he knows no succession and so is eternal. ..Thomas explains…everything God is, he is simultaneously and altogether. He is his own duration, an actualized ‘now’.

In the Fifth Way Thomas speaks of the unity of God that is absolutely central to the old Testament revelation and finds its epitome in the Shema, ‘Hear o Israel, the Lord your God is one.’[Deut 6:4], and taken from there into the Trinitarian monotheism of the New…Thomas argues that the way things in the universe are ordered to one another, and so the way the universe itself can be said to be orderly, is inexplicable unless one supreme Mind brings about these interrelations. And this supplements his argument from the identification of God as He Who Is: plenary, fontal, esse. Of course, if God is his own nature, and includes in himself the entire perfection of being, he cannot but be one.

Our God-Given Capacity For The Knowledge Of God
Though no created intellect can comprehend God, nevertheless our minds do have an aptitude to be elevated to the contemplation of God – a potentiality, though without grace a purely passive one, to be satisfied by the Beatific Vision. Unfortunately, many human beings seem to have no inkling that this is the end to which their curiosity about the world or thirst to know reality points them… We can name God on the basis of creatures inasmuch as creatures represent God…this they do to the degree that, in exhibiting perfections of intrinsically valuable qualities of one kind or another, they show forth the source of their perfections in subsistent Being himself from which they come forth….Analogical thinking is the adaptation of the intellect to reality.

Naming God: ”He Who Is”
Thomas considers ”He Who Is” as the best name we have for God. It’s disclosure, in the Sinai theophany [A theophany is a visible appearance or other local manifestation of a deity to humans], is a high point of Scripture. ….”He Who Is” names God as the actuality of all acts and the action of all perfections. It is universal, the founding principle of all neames applied to God…it signifies being in the present – and this above all applies ot God, who knows neither past nor future. .”He Who Is” just has to be accounted the primary divine Name.

The Ontological Consistency Of Creation
For St. Thomas writing in the light of the biblical revelation, it is not only himself that God sees but all the realities that issue from him, The ontological consistency of creation is itself a consequence of the consistency of the divine knowing, identical as this is with the divine being. Thus the very materiality of things – their ‘thinginess’ – as well as their ‘form’ come from divine knowing. That knowing is not only the model of the world, as the Plato of the Timaeus already held. It is also the energy that brings the world into being. …’In God is maximal life’ writes Thomas. And so the divine knowing is inseparable from the divine willing. God’s life is a willing life, at once contented willing in the indefectible happiness of his perfect being and a will to do, to institute something, to govern the world’s course and act upon it. God wills not only himself but what is not himself, doing the latter in sovereign freedom. Conjointly with the divine knowing, the divine willing is a cause of things.

The Trinitarian Dimension Of Creative Action
Thomas proposes that while the Son proceeds according to nature, as God’s nature’s perfect image, through whom all creatures have some share in that divine nature, the Holy Spirit proceeds according to will, as the Love in whom all creatures enjoy the liberality of God.

The Word And The Spirit Of Love
Thomas writes: “By grace the soul is made like to God and therefore when a divine person is sent there is implied a being made like to him by some sort of grace. Now because the Holy Spirit is Love the soul belongs to him through the gift of charity; consequently love in its manner corresponds to the sending of the Spirit. Similarly because the Son is Word, not any kind of mental utterance but Word breathing Love, blessed Augustine says that the word he is proposing to consider is conceived in company with love. Consequently, what matches the sending of the Son to us is not just any quality of mind, but that sort of enlightening by which the mind breaks forth into loving affection…therefore Augustine remarks that the Son is sent to somebody when he is known and perceived.

The Trinity In Man
In knowing and loving the rational creature reaches God himself…Grace is so exalted that it brings about an unmediated union with the divine. The Spirit enters the soul invisibly in the gift of love, the Word in the gift of wisdom (and there is thereby a manifestation of the Father, the ultimate to whom we return). In due accord with these gifts, a likeness to what is proper to the Persons comes to be in us, and by reason of this reality-in-likeness, the Persons are truly in our souls, ‘The whole trinity, the Persons themselves and not merely their gifts, dwells in man through sanctifying grace.

Posted in Book Recommendations, St. Thomas Aquinas | Tagged Anabasis And Katabasis, Angelic Mediation, God’s Five Ways of Being, Lumen Fidei, Lumen Naturale, Lumen Propheticum, Revelation In Thomism, The Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas, Thomism | 1 Comment »

Book Recommendation: My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk

October 12, 2010

My Name is Red, Bulgerian Edition Book Cover

My Name Is Red is told against the backdrop of cultural and historical Islam. It is set in Istanbul during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Murat III, 1574-95, and somewhat after into the reign of Sultan Ahmet I. It concerns the fate of miniaturists and illuminators whose art form had reached a zenith a few hundred years or so earlier. I read novels like this a few years back. I think I was lonely for my life in Japan but unwilling to return to it and longed to be away from the world I found myself in. What better way to escape than plunging myself into another foreign world in a time far away.

Miniaturists depicted battles and coronations and illustrated the epics, poems, love fables and feats of conquest. This was all done in a very formal and proscribed manner. For example, they were not representational and did not use perspective. Hence human faces and tree leaves were treated equally as design and ornamentation rather than as likenesses.

They never dared illustrate the Koran. Light, the Koran says, belongs to Allah, nature belongs to Allah; it is for mankind to love, and to view without competing with Allah, which was to invite a descent into idolatry. Man could approach and know Allah through nature and to depict nature through art was considered to be interfering with that process. Hence design and ornamentation but never representational art.

My Name Is Red is a murder story told against this moment of cultural history. It is related through the eyes of twenty different characters, a dog, and a few objects. It begins with the corpse of Master gilder Elegant Effendi who has been killed by one of his fellow artists: ”I am nothing but a corpse now, a body at the bottom of a well…I was happy; I know now I that I’d been happy. I made the best illuminations in Our Sultan’s workshop…” He and three other miniaturists had been secretly at work on a book (commissioned by the Sultan) using the new Frankish methods (three dimensional with perspective). This radical and blasphemous book was to have included a portrait of the Sultan himself.

As is my habit, some reading selections here:

Painting
But the half-blind ninety two year old master caused me to sense something deeper for a moment, here, far from all the battles and turmoil: the feeling that everything was coming to an end. Immediately before the end of the world, there would also be such silence. Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

Color, Sight and Darkness
Before the art of illumination there was blackness and afterward there will also be blackness. Through our colors, paints, art and love, we remember that Allah commanded us to “See”! To know is to remember that you’ve seen. To see is to know without remembering. Thus painting is remembering the blackness. The great masters, who shared a love of painting and perceived that color and sight arose from darkness, longed to return to Allah’s blackness by means of color, Artists without memory neither remember Allah nor his blackness. All great masters, in their work, seek that profound void within color and outside time.

Melancholy Men
Maybe you’ve understood by now that for men like myself, that is melancholy men for whom love, agony, happiness and misery are just excuses for maintaining eternal loneliness, life offers neither great joy or great sadness. I’m not saying that we can’t relate to other souls overwhelmed by these feelings, on the contrary, we sympathize with them. What we cannot fathom is the odd disquiet our souls sink into at such times. This silent turmoil dims our intellects and dampens our hearts, usurping the place reserved for the true joy and sadness we ought to experience.

Painting What The Mind Sees
My paintings reveal what the mind, not the eye, sees. But painting as you know quite well, is a feast for the eyes. If you combine these two thoughts, my world will emerge. That is:

ALIF: Painting brings to life what the minds sees, as a feast for the eyes.

LAM: What the eye sees in the world enters the painting to the degree that it serves the mind.

MIM: Consequently, beauty is the eye discovering in our world what the mind already knows.

Aphorisms

1. There are moments in all our lives when we realize, even as we experience them, that we are living through events we will never forget, even long afterward.

2. Time doesn’t flow if you don’t dream.

3. Love is the ability to make the invisible visible and the desire always to feel the invisible in one’s midst.

Posted in Book Recommendations, Islam and Jihad | Tagged My Name Is Red, Orhan Pamuk, Painting | 4 Comments »

No One Sees God – Michael Novak

September 8, 2010

Michael Novak

Michael Novak, who celebrates a birthday tomorrow, is an American Catholic philosopher, journalist, novelist, and diplomat. The author of more than twenty-five books on the philosophy and theology of culture, Novak is most widely known for his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism (1982). In 1994 he was awarded the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which included a million-dollar purse awarded at Buckingham Palace. He writes books and articles focused on capitalism, religion, and the politics of democratization.

In No One Sees God (2008), “Novak brilliantly recasts the tired debate pitting faith against reason. Both the atheist and the believer experience the same “dark night” in which God’s presence seems absent, he argues, and the conflict between faith and doubt stems not from objective differences, but from divergent attitudes toward the unknown. Drawing from his lifelong passion for philosophy and his personal struggles with belief, he shows that, far from being irrational, the spiritual perspective actually provides the most satisfying answers to the eternal questions of meaning. Faith is a challenge at times, but it nonetheless offers the only fully coherent response to the human experience.” (Publisher’s blurb)
So good I have double the reading selections. What follows is part one:

Two Classes Each Fearing The Other
All others are in the same predicament. We are all in the same darkness. It is not so hard, of course, to evade the rain on the windowpanes, the tapping of the night on the doors and shutters, the darkness, the mist, and the fear. Not so hard to hide from it in the protected circles lit by comforting scientific reason. I have met people who, when you ask them how they account for the unexplainedness of life, the puzzle of it, the pain of it, smile and say: “When someone raises questions like that, I turn away, sit down, and enjoy a good lunch.” Afterward, they think of it no more.
Some people live in a protected circle of light. I notice this especially about two classes of people: first, the unquestioning Christian minds, full of light and sweetness, never doubting a doctrine, seeing in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ the answer to all things. Second, the more scientifically minded, the people of reason, the pragmatists who see no reason to wonder about where it all came from, or where it is going, or how mad it may be. Serenely, both classes race through life — each at times fearing the other.

Albert Camus Quote
The one contemporary whose life I most carefully tracked, from the beginning to at least The Fall, was Albert Camus. “A single sentence will suffice for modern man;’ he wrote in 1956: “They fornicated, and they read the papers.” Well, that’s a way to avoid the nothingness.

Mistake Your Own Nature Mistake God
Gathering force over many years, one discovery has hit me with the force of a law: If you make mistakes about your own nature, you will make as many mistakes about God, and quite properly then, reject what your inquiries put before you. The god you fantasize will appear to you not very great, a delusion, a snare from which others ought to be freed. You will despise this god.

A New Habit Of Reasoned And Mutually Respectful Conversation
This looking behind the veils of reason is what many in North America and in Western Europe today passionately resist. They do not so much despise “God” as they despise the Jewish and Christian God. (Not for the reason Nietzsche did — because Judaism and Christianity are “slave religions;’ Judaism first and in its wake Christianity –but on the contrary, because these faiths assign to humans too much liberty and judge them too exactly for their use of it.) Passionate secularists heap ridicule on the Bible. They tear to shreds Christian doctrine — the whole garment — or with some effort rip out the seams that hold its parts together.

Thus I will need to show how out in the dark, and without ever wholly coming in from the dark, I have come to understand that what the Jewish Testament and the Christian Testament teaches us about God, about human beings, and about ourselves is a truer account of reality than any other I have encountered.

Much as my atheist friends will loathe it and mock it, I have tested this judgment in living and found it to ring true. It better meets the facts of my own reality and the urgent inquiries of my own mind, and better turns aside thrusts intended to wound it and to destroy it, than any other account I have discovered. My reasoned judgment on this matter cannot really be discounted as “merely subjective:’ for it is shared under great stress by hundreds of millions of others. About one of every three human beings on this planet is Christian, over two billion in all. And in no age has the persecution of Christians reached such horrific numbers with so much cruelty. The even more barbaric assault upon our Jewish “older brothers:’ no matter what they believe, awakens amazement and full contempt.

My underlying thesis is a simple one: that unbelievers and believers need to learn a new habit of reasoned and mutually respectful conversation.

The conversation among Western atheists and Christian/Jewish believers is particularly important. An excellent model was offered in January 2004 between one of Europe’s most prominent public philosophers, Jurgen Habermas, and the Vatican’s Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect at the time of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. They discussed moral relativism, Islam, and the problematic but fruitful tension between atheism and Jewish/Christian belief. In chapter ten, I try to extend and deepen their argument.

Saint Thérèse’s of Lisieux (1873-1897)
Saint Thérèse lived for most of her adult life in utter darkness and dryness and abandonment by her divine Lover. She wrote an autobiography about her experiences and how it led her to interpret the inner heart of Christianity. So powerfully and clearly did she write that Pope John Paul II inscribed her name among the historic handful of “Doctors of the Church”teach so profound and so sweeping in their wisdom that they instruct the whole Catholic people.

The canonization of Saint Thérèse in 1925 was at that time one of the swiftest on record. Miracles attributed to her care and her attention to the needy — which she promised she would “shower down” from heaven — were too many to count. As early as the war of 1914, Thérèse was the favorite saint of French soldiers in the trenches, held by them coequal with Saint Jeanne d’Arc. And so she remains today, this twenty-four-year-old victim of consumption, who after the age of fifteen never set foot outside her cloistered contemplative convent — with Jeanne d’Arc co-patroness of France.

The kernel of Saint Thérèse’s teaching is often called “the little way:’ meaning that no Christian is too humble or too insignificant to follow it and no thought or action too negligible to infuse with love. In other words, God cherishes not only great actions ( love, but also minor, childlike ones. No matter what spiritual darkness you find yourself in, choose as your North Star a tender love of the persons that life’s contingencies have put next to you. Do not go looking around for more fascinating neighbors to by Love those right nearest you.

You cannot see God, even if you try. But you can see your neighbor, the tedious one, who grinds on you: Love him, love her, as Jesus loves them. Give them the tender smile of Jesus, even though your own feelings be like the bottom of a birdcage. Do not ask to see Jesus, or to feel Him. That is for children. Love him in the dark. Love for the invisible divine, not for warm and comforting human consolation. Love for the sake of love, not in order to feel loved in return.

It happens that Agnes Bojaxhiu of Albania eventually became a missionary nun in Ireland, and chose for her religious name Therese, in the footsteps of her patron saint of darkness from Lisieux. In Spanish, the same name is Teresa, and Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) was also m experienced traveler in inner darkness. She came to be a Doctor of the Church, builder of scores of convents of Carmelite nuns all over Europe, administrator and guide extraordinaire, and a canny operator in bureaucracies, running rings around most of the male hierarchy of her time. Saint Thèrése of Lisieux took the name Teresa in her honor, and followed her teaching as inscribed in Teresa’s books and in the traditions of the Carmelites. (Pope John Paul H was a close follower of the Carmelites.)

For those who love God, that way is excruciating. They would like to feel close to God, but they find — nothing! Like Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591), the Carmelite priest who was her spiritual guide, Teresa gradually came to see that if God were a human invention, a human contrivance, then warm human feelings would be quite enough..

God Is Outside Our Range
God is far greater than that. He is beyond any human frequency. He is outside our range, divine. One must follow Him without any human prop whatever, even warm and comfortable inner feelings. That may be why Jesus loved the desert as a place for prayer. The Jewish scholar David Gelernter has written:

This exactly (or very nearly) underlies Judaism’s ubiquitous image of the veil, & God beyond or behind it. In its simplest form this veil is embodied in the talit or prayer-shawl men wear at morning prayer. A more substantial instance: in the First Temple destroyed by Babylonians, worship centered on the Holy of Holies, which contained the Ark of the Covenant. In the Second Temple destroyed by Rome, worship centered on the Holy of Holies — which was an absolutely empty space. After that — today — the holiest site in Judaism is a blank wall (the Western Wall) with nothing behind or beyond it. This sequence is no accident. It’s part of the Jewish people’s coming of age and being weaned from what you properly call the child’s view to the adult’s understanding of God. That is to say, our senses cannot touch God. Neither sight nor sound, scent nor taste, nor touch, either. Our imagination cannot encompass Him, nor even bring Him into focus. How can we count on our memory? Our minds can form no adequate conception of Him; anything the mind imagines is easily ridiculed. The God who made us and out of His infinite love redeemed us and called us to His bosom is divine, not human. As such, He cannot be found using human perceptual equipment.

The Darkness In Which The True God Dwells
This is not a new idea. Serious and devout believers from the time of Elijah and Job have known about the darkness in which the true God necessarily dwells. In order for one’s soul to be ready to go far beyond any human contrivance, one must be willing to go out into the desert and the night. Thus we read of the prophet Elijah:

“At that place he came to a cave, and spent the night there. Then the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He answered, “I have been very zealous for the Lord, the God of hosts; for the Israelites have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword. I alone am left, and they are seeking my life, to take it away.” He said, “Go out and stand on the mountain before the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Now there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. Then there came a voice to him that said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (I KINGS 19:9-13)

Thus, also, Job, after he had been stricken with painful boils all over his body, and sat outside where others might mock him, scraping off the scabs, and unable, now, to find the Lord in whom he had placed such utter trust:

“If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I shall come out like gold. My foot has held fast to his steps; I have kept his way and have not turned aside. I have not departed from the commandment of his lips; I have treasured in my bosom the words of his mouth.” (Job 23:8-12)

Saint John of the Cross Dark Night of the Soul
The teachings of Elijah and Job were not so different from those of the teacher of Saint Teresa, Saint John of the Cross, the other great Spaniard who founded the male order of Carmelites, expert practitioners of the way to God in the darkness.

In more than one book, but especially in Dark Night of the Soul, Saint John of the Cross proceeded lesson by patient lesson to mark out for the novice at prayer the terrors yet to be faced in the desert, while human expectations were shed for those seeking to receive the divine. He vividly described the aridity and emptiness that the lover of God ought to expect, as he traded a child’s faith for that of an adult, as he was weaned away from the sweet milk of infancy and obliged to live on hard, dry bread for long stretches of time. And what the North Stars are. And the dangers to watch for. And the characteristic temptations of every stage of the journey

Beginners prone to “spiritual gluttony;’ St. John writes, are, in fact, like children, who are not influenced by reason, and who act, not from rational motives, but from inclination. Such persons expend all their effort in seeking spiritual pleasure and consolation; they never tire, therefore, of reading books; and they begin, now one meditation, now another, in their pursuit of this pleasure which they desire to experience in the things of God. But God, very justly, wisely, and lovingly, denies it to them, for otherwise this spiritual gluttony and inordinate appetite would breed innumerable evils. It is, therefore, very fitting that they should enter into the dark night, whereof we shall speak, that they may be purged from this childishness. There is thus a great difference between aridity and lukewarmness, for lukewarmness consists in great weakness and remissness in the will and in the spirit, without solicitude as to serving God; whereas purgative aridity is ordinarily accompanied by solicitude, with care and grief as I say, because the soul is not serving God.

Dark Night of the Soul is not an easy book to read. For one thing, it relies heavily upon the experience of the reader. It is intended to show the voyager of the spirit the ways through the night and the desert. How can anyone who has not known the night and desert recognize the symptoms and the signs? This is not a book for reading, but for experiencing.

Perhaps its main point may be expressed thus: Go, seek with love your Beloved, follow wherever He leads. Yet even when you come up to Him you must anticipate that there will be no one to be seen. Your faculties are simply inadequate. Were you actually to see, you would be destroyed. It is too much. Your bulbs would short out. Be prepared, therefore, to walk in darkness Not at all in doubt; on the contrary for the first time ever, aware that you are not now following illusions, but only the true darkling light of the true God, beyond human range. Anything else is human contrivance and illusion.

Saint John of the Cross imagines his soul as the bride, the spouse, eagerly seeking her Beloved for just one sight of Him. This is his great classic song to the Dark Night of the Soul, in eight brief stanzas, of which the following four are the most telling.

1. On a dark niqht, Kindled in love with yearnings — oh happy chance! — I went forth without being observed, My house being now at rest.

2. In darkness and secure, By the Secret ladder, disguised — oh happy chance! — In darkness and in concealment, My house being now at rest.

3. In the happy night, in secret when none saw me, Nor I beheld aught, With out light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.

4. This liqht guided me More surely than the light of noonday To the place where he (well I knew who!) was awaiting me. A place where none appeared.

Saint Teresa Of Avila On Spiritual Aridity And Torment
The memoirs of Saint Teresa of Avila recount years of spiritual aridity and torment:

“I may say that it was the most painful life that can be imagined, because I had no sweetness in God, and no pleasure in the world.

I believe that it is our Lord’s good pleasure frequently in the beginng, and at times in the end, to send these torments, and many other incidental temptations, to try those who love Him, and to ascertain if they will drink the chalice, and help Him to carry the Cross, before He entrusts them with His great treasures I believe it to be for our good that His Majesty should lead us by this way, so that we may perfectly understand how worthless we are…

It is certain that the love of God does not consist in tears, nor in this sweetness and tenderness which we for the most part desire, and with which we console ourselves, but rather in serving Him in justice, fortitude, and humility That seems to me to be a receiving rather than a giving of anything on our part.”

Yet Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, and Saint Thérèse all break out in joy in an analogous way. Dante saw the Christian story as a happy one (commedia), not a tragic or crestfallen one — as Easter follows Good Friday.

For example, of her own spiritual aridity, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux wrote:

“But during the Paschal days, so full of light, our Lord. allowed my soul to be overwhelmed with darkness, and the thought of Heaven, which had consoled me from my earliest childhood now became a subject of conflict and torture. This trial did not last merely for thys or weeks — I have been suffering for months, and I still await deliverance . . . I wish I could express what I feel, but it is beyond me. One must have passed through this dark tunnel to understand its blackness.

Sometimes, I confess, a little ray of sunshine illumines my dark night, and I enjoy peace for an instant, but later, remembrance of this ray of light, instead of consoling me, makes the blackness thicker still . . … And yet never have I felt so deeply how sweet and merciful is the Lord.”

The Darkness And The Desert Free Us
This is the context in which Come Be My Light by Mother Teresa of Calcutta must be grasped. Teresa of Avila and Thèrése of Lisieux are her two “mothers” in spiritual growth and authentic Christian faith, in the light of the passion and death of Jesus Christ. The forty-five years of emptiness, darkness, and inner pain experienced by Mother Teresa, and honestly set forth in her private letters to her spiritual director, follow in a long tradition. They are not really signs of doubt, although the black darkness feels like that.

They are in fact signs of Christian adulthood, following in the only way in which illusions of human contrivance can be scraped away, as Job tried to scrape away the dry boils on his arms and ribs. And in which the truly faithful, like Job and Elijah, can find Him whom they love in the darkness.

“Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” (Job 2:9-12)

It is from “human fabrication” that the darkness and the desert free us. When God subtracts His gifts, as He subtracted Job’s, Job does not take this withdrawal as punishment. Job knows his innocence; he knows his fidelity, even in the darkness and in utter suffering. He utters not one denial of his Lord. His soul stands firm beneath the pain. So also Mother Teresa of Calcutta stood darkly in the presence of her Beloved, confident that even unseen, He was best found where love for her nearest dying neighbor presented Him. To the place where he (well she knew who!) was awaiting Her — A place where none appeared. (Adapted from Dark Night of the Soul)

Prayer
Somehow I early learned that the important move in prayer is to direct an inner, quiet, steady will toward God’s love, to be united with that love, even in dryness and aridity. Prayer, essentially, is saying “Yes” to the will of God. Not knowing exactly what that will is now, or yet will be, saying “Yes:’ in any case — and in whatever tranquility one can bring to one’s disorderly, discordant self.

One Comes To Know His Presence
I came to learn that, while one can come to know that God is present, our minds are unable to form an adequate conception of Him, or to grasp Him with any of our five senses, or to imagine Him. His mode of drawing us into His presence is necessarily by way of absence, silence, nothingness. I remember an image fixed in my mind by the poetry of Saint John of the Cross, mentioned earlier: “The place where he . . . was awaiting me — A place where none appeared.”

It must necessarily be so. The true God is beyond human concepts, senses, imagination, memory. On those frequencies, He is not reachable. Mother Teresa of Calcutta acknowledged her inability to reach God on human wavelengths in a 1979 letter to one of her spiritual directors, the Reverend Michael Van Der Peet:

“Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me — the silence and the emptiness is so great — that I look and do not see — listen and do not hear”

If a Christian has not yet known this darkness and aridity, it is a sign that the Lord is still treating him like a child at the breast, too unformed for the adult darkness in which alone the true God is found. Any who think they can make idols, or images, or pictures, or concepts of God remain underdeveloped in their faith. Darkness is not a sign of unbelief, or even of doubt, but a sign of the true relation between the Creator and the creature. God is not on our frequency; and when we get beyond our usual range, which in prayer we must, we reach only darkness. This is painful. In a way, it does make one doubt; in another way, experience shows us that when one is no longer a child, one leaves childish ways behind.

Our intellects, our will — these can reach out to God, like arrows of inquiry shot up into the infinite night. These are not shot in vain. They mark out a direction. Waiting in silence, in abandonment, even in the dry sands of the desert, one comes to know His presence. Not believe in it. Know it. In a 1959 interview with the BBC, C. G. Jung once made the same point. Asked whether he believed in God, Jung replied, “I don’t believe — I know.” This is a dark knowledge. One cannot expect anyone else to know it, unless they have also walked the rocky and darkling path — or somehow by God’s grace been brought to it by a different journey, along a different route. Ascent of the Mountain, Plight of the Dove, I called another book of mine. Some of us labor sweatily, others are borne on eagle’s wings.

I do not mean that this knowledge consists of warm sentiments, feelings of devotion, uplift, and “faith.” I mean a certain quiet emptiness. A dark resonance of wills. Echo to echo.

Mother Teresa wrote of her own emptiness in 1961: “I accept not in my feelings — but with my will, the Will of God — I accept His will.”

This is not a “will” characterized by effort, unrelenting desire, unshakable determination. I mean something almost the opposite: the quiet of abandonment, and trust. This is another mode of will, quite different from the striving will. It is. the willingness to forgo any other reinforcement except the blind and dark love we direct toward that infinite Light, on which we cannot set our eyes.

Nor do I mean a turning away from intellect or rationality On the contrary, I mean taking these with utter seriousness “all the way down” to the very roots of the universe. I mean trusting our own rationality our own intellect. I mean serene confidence in infinite Light, even when our senses go quite dark. Trust the light, the evidence-demanding eros of inquiry, within us. I mean the suffering love in which that Light issues forth among us. Not to, remove us from suffering. But to transfigure us by means of it.

The Line Of Belief And Unbelief
In every age there have been atheists. In every age there have been believers. Sometimes I think that the proportion of each hardly ever changes. True enough, within a given civilization the relative prominence of one may favor it far beyond the other. Furthermore, many people at any one time may take neither choice with much seriousness. Swirling along the streets, the fallen leaves of autumn. Too passive to act, one way or the other.

In my own life, I have tried to keep the conversation up between the two sides of my own intellect. The line of belief and unbelief is not drawn between one person and another, normally, but rather down the inner souls of all of us. That is why the very question stirs so much passion. I have known people who declaim so passionately and argumentatively that they do not believe in God that I am driven to wonderment: Why are they so agitated, if, as they insist, God does not exist? Why, then, do they pay so much attention? Some of the greatest converts, in either direction, are those who wrestled strenuously for many years to maintain the other side.

I want to add here, before I go back to an earlier theme, that I left the seminary after twelve years, but not out of lack of faith. On the contrary, I was much deepened in its darkness, convinced only that I could not be a good priest and also experiment and write as by then I knew was my true vocation. Maybe others could do it. I could not. Besides, the attraction of women was more than I thought that, over the long run, I could bear. For a long time, yes. But forever? It seemed to me that life as a layman would be far better for my soul. So I returned to my philosophical studies, experiments in fiction, and close attention to Albert Camus.

What particularly struck me in Albert Camus was his insistence that we begin within nihilism. Only by finding our way out from nihilism could any new civilization rest on solid ground. He meant: finding our way out by intellect, the kind of intellect that can engage with the Absurd. Now some fifty years after my first book, much of the spiritual terrain has changed — on a massive scale, and more than once. My aim at the present moment is to give one more report from that no-man’s — land, at the crossroads where atheist and believer meet in the darkness of the night.

What is it that keeps us from getting through to each other? What is it that needs to be looked at from a fresh perspective, or disentangled in one’s own mind, before true disagreement can occur? What goes through the minds of some when they use a name like “God” is very different from what goes through the minds of others.

Naturally, coming face-to-face with God is to be feared (Mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “The Mystery fascinating, attracting, and to be feared,” in Rudolf Otto’s phrase) Happily for some, this encounter within the self is fairly easy to avoid. There are many ways to avoid inwardness and to “kill time” simply by keeping busy, frequenting rooms throbbing with the strong beat of certain kinds of music, picking up the car keys to search somewhere else for something to do.

It is not at all hard for a believer to become an unbeliever. A great many do. The seed has often been thrown on dry ground, or on the soil over rocky shale, and cannot bear the heat of the afternoon. Often enough, faith leads one, to feel abandoned to darkness, isolated in inner dryness, undermined by a fear of having been seduced into an illusion For a believer, it does not take a prolonged thought experiment to imagine oneself an unbeliever.

Yet atheists may actually find it harder to imagine themselves coming by way of reason to know God than believers to imagine the opposite I hypothesize that unbelievers, especially those who have never known religion in their personal lives, or who have had bad experiences with it, experience a revulsion against reasoned knowledge of God, and even more so against a Jewish and/or Christian faith Indeed, they find it harder to imagine themselves as believers than believers to imagine themselves as un-believers. Am I wrong?

Reflecting On The Experience Of Nothingness
I noticed that Nietzsche and Sartre, Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, and all those other early writers on nihilism did one remarkable thing at variance with their theories: They wrote books for others to read. In a world that makes no sense, why would they endure the hours and hours of sitting on their back-sides, moving old pens across resisting pieces of blank foolscap? If everything is as meaningless as they say, why would they do it?

And since some people seem oblivious to the experience of nothingness, what is it that those who have the experience do, that others don’t do?

I began reflecting on what goes on inside the experience of nothingness, first within myself, and then among others I could talk to about it. Here a brief summary will have to do. The normal way in which Nietzsche, Sartre, and we ourselves come to an awareness of the experience of nothingness is through four activities of our own minds and wills. The one Nietzsche and the others most stress is ruthless honesty, forcing ourselves to see through comforting illusions and to face the emptiness. The second is courage, the habit that gives force and steadiness to our ability to see truly. Without courage, we would avert our eyes, as so often we have done.

Third is the ideal of community exemplified in reaching out to others through books — the good moves outward to diffuse itself. There is a kind of brotherhood and sisterhood among those who recognize the experience of nothingness in one another. There is a sort of honesty and cleanness in it one wants to share. One of the marks of “the good” is that, as the Latin puts it, bonum est deflusivum nil — the good diffuses itself. It wants others to participate in it.

Fourth is practical wisdom, that is, practical reason applied to action, by an adult experienced enough to take virtually everything concrete into account — or at least to avoid most of the common mistakes of the inexperienced. When the experience of nothingness hits, one cannot simply take to one’s bed. Well, sometimes one does, but then one can’t stay there. Moment by moment, in a kind of staccato, action keeps calling to us. Sooner or later, I have to start acting as an agent of my own future again. “Granted that I have the experience of nothingness, what should I do?”

Yes, there are such things as relativity and meaninglessness and pointlessness. Question is, What are we going to do even if that is true? We will not be able to escape practicing honesty courage, community and. practical wisdom — or else withering into dry leaves for stray winds to blow about. The choice is ours, and unavoidable.

These four virtues do not constitute a complete quiver of all the virtues needed to be a good man or a valiant woman. Still, these four do constitute quite an admirable list. They are a wonderful starting place for an ethic rooted in the experience of nothingness. Here is the point at which Albert Camus began his own ascent out of the problem of suicide (The Myth of Sisyphus), on the road to the heroic and clear-eyed compassion of Dr. Rieux in The Plague. Sartre, locked inside his own solitariness, writing that “hell is other people:’ faltered on the idea of community. No, hell is not other people. Hell is total isolation within one’s own puny mind. It is solitary confinement. (To step out of philosophy for a moment and into the terms of Christian faith: Hell is the solitary soul who freely and deliberately rejects friendship with God.) Hell is becoming conscious of what one has irretrievably chosen for oneself. This Hell has been deliberately chosen.

What we do with the experience of nothingness depends on our proven reserves of practical wisdom, community courage, honesty. By the end of our lives, learning from experience, we ought to be wiser than we were in the beginning.

Nihilism Turned Out To Be Antihuman
We may observe how the generation that fell into the nihilism of the 1930s at last stumbled onto the way. In the concentration camps and prisons, many a poor wretch unexpectedly felt himself morally bound not to become complicit in the lies his torturers demanded him to sign. But why? Why, if before they had thought they were nihilists, why couldn’t they manage to be cynics and nihilists and liars here at the end, under torture and torment and soft blandishment (“You can go free, you can have drinks with your friends again”)? Is not a lie a small price to pay in a world without truth? What would a lie mean anyway? “No one will ever know No one will ever care.”

But the liar himself would know his soul would know; in his own mind’s eye, his integrity would forever lie in the dust, humiliated. And his torturer would use this petty surrender to weaken the will of his next victim. “If he did as he was told, why can’t you?” The aim of these torturers was to destroy every last vestige of the moral sense, every fiber of integrity of soul within everyone. For those in prison, the torturers could use the harshest methods and take all the time they needed to break a man. The integrity of the entire public could be assaulted by incessant intimidation and occasional, unpredictable terror. After seducing almost everyone to spy on their associates, the slave masters could easily blackmail them forever. These poor sinners could never forget their own treason to loved ones.

Even with their almost unlimited power and ferocity of will, it proved impossible for totalitarian regimes to instill nihilism into everyone. Nihilism turned out to be antihuman. However powerfully nihilism is enforced, the human spirit is sometimes able to triumph over it by honesty; courage, community and practical wisdom.

Those who have doubts about the power of this argument should read the biographies of Anatoly Sharansky, to whose stirring memoir we will turn our attention in chapter one; as well as the stories of Václav Havel, Mihaio Mihaiov, Armando Valladares, Pavel Bratinka, Irma Ratushinskaya, Maximilian Kolbe, and hundreds of others. From the ashes of nihilism, the human spirit rose stronger and truer.

I have tested this moral principle and have found it fortifying:

Accept the experience of nothingness as a gift, search deep into it, live by its living streams. One thing I particularly appreciate about this moral principle is that it requires no illusions. Far from shutting one’s eyes to the nothingness and the meaninglessness, one keeps the cellar door open in order to feel, at all times, its cool, stale draft. In that way, one is never allowed to forget. And from these four moral virtues, one forges creative strength. Creation out of nothingness.

Freedom means choosing every moment who I am, and what exactly I must do this minute. Self-government yes, precisely that. Yet not exactly without community, community down through time, community around the planet. Not exactly isolated. One’s ancestors continue to live in one’s own consciousness. One’s universal brothers also do. All together, on a darkling plain.

In “Dover Beach:’ Matthew Arnold wrote of an ebbing Sea of Faith:

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

But today there is a difference. The melancholy roar of a receding sea belongs to atheism.

“Unquestioning” Faith?
Our three authors (Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennet), it does seem, are a bit blinded by their own repugnance toward religion. Even his good friends, Dawkins writes, ask him why he is driven to be so “hostile” to religious people. Why not, they say, as intelligent as you are, quietly lay out your devastating arguments against believers, in a calm and unruffled manner? Dawkins’s answer to his friends is forthright: “I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise . . . Fundamentalist religion is hell — bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, ‘sensible’ religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a Virtue?’ Dawkins refuses to be part of the public “conspiracy” to pay religion respect, when it deserves contempt.

Yet his complaint about “unquestioning” faith seems a bit odd. Some of us have thought that the origin of religion lies in the unlimited drive in human beings to ask questions — which is our primary experience of the infinite. Anything finite that we encounter can be questioned, and seems ultimately unsatisfying. That hunger to question is the experience that keeps driving the mind and soul on and on, and is its first foretaste of that which is beyond time and space. “Our hearts are restless, Lord,” Saint Augustine recorded, “until they rest in Thee.” These words have had clearly echoing resonance in millions upon millions of inquiring minds down through human history ever since. “Unquestioning faith?” The writings of the medieval thinkers record question after question, disputation after disputation, and real results in history hinged upon the resolution of each. Many of the questions arose from skeptical, unbelieving lawyers, philosophers, and others in the medieval universities; still others from the Arab scholars whose works had recently burst upon the Western universities; still others from Maimonides and other Jewish scholars; and a great many from the greatest pagan thinkers of every preceding century. Questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia.

Christian Innovations
I have no doubt that Christians have committed many evils, and written some disgraceful pages in human history. Yet on a fair ledger of what Judaism and Christianity added to pagan Greece, Rome, the Arab nations (before Mohammed), the German, Frankish, and Celtic tribes, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons, one is puzzled not to find Dawkins giving thanks for many innovations: hospitals, orphanages, cathedral schools in early centuries, universities not much later, some of the most beautiful works of art — in music, architecture, .painting, and poetry — in the human patrimony.

And why does he overlook the hard intellectual work on concepts such as “person:’ “community” “civitas,” “consent:’ “tyranny?’ and “limited government” (“Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.) that framed the conceptual background of such great documents as the Magna Carta? His few pages on the founding and nourishing of his own beloved Oxford by its early Catholic patrons are mockingly ungrateful And if Oxford disappoints him, has he no gratitude for the building of virtually every other old and famous universities of Europe (and the Americas)?

Dawkins writes nothing about the great religious communities founded for the express purpose of building schools for the free education of the poor. Nothing about the thousands of monastic lives dedicated to the delicate and exhausting labor of copying by hand the great manuscripts of the past — often with the lavish love manifested in illuminations — during long centuries in which there were no printing presses. Nothing about the founding of the Vatican Library and its importance for the genesis of nearly a dozen modern sciences. Nothing about the learned priests and faithful who have made so many crucial discoveries in science, medicine, and technology.

Alfred North Whitehead And Faith In The Possibility Of Science
Among my favorite texts for many years, in fact, are certain passages of Alfred North Whitehead — in Science and the Modern World and Adventures of Ideas, for instance. In these passages, Whitehead points out that the practices of modern science are inconceivable apart from thousands of years of tutelage under the Jewish and Christian conviction that the Creator of all things understood all things, in their general laws and in their particular, contingent dispositions. This conviction, Whitehead writes, made long, disciplined efforts to apply reason to the sustained Herculean task of understanding all things seem reasonable. If all things are intelligible to their Creator, they ought to be intelligible to those made in His image, who in imitation of Him, press onward in the human vocation to try to understand all that He has made.

In addition, Judaism and Christianity have inculcated in entire cultures specific intellectual and moral habits, synthesizing them with the teachings of ancient classical traditions, without which the development of modern sciences would lack the requisite moral disciplines — honesty, hard work, perseverance in the face of difficulties, a respect for serendipity and sudden insight, a determination to test any hypotheses asserted. What would modern science be without belief in the intelligibility of all things, even contingent, unique, and unrepeatable events, and without culture-wide habits of honesty; intellectual rigor, and persevering inquiry? Whitehead pointed to this marvelous indebtedness many times, much more generously than Dawkins. In Science and the Modern World (1925), he wrote: “My explanation is that the faith in the possibility of science, generated antecedently to the development of modern scientific theory, is an unconscious derivation from medieval theology”

The path of modern science was made straight, and smoothed, by deep convictions that every stray element in the world of human experience — from the number of hairs on one’s head to the lovely lily in the meadow — is thoroughly known to its Creator and, therefore, lies within a field of intelligibility; mutual connection, and multiple logics All these odd and angular levels of reality, given arduous, disciplined, and cooperative effort, are in principle penetrable by the human mind. If human beings are made in the image of the Creator, as the first chapters of the book of Genesis insist that they are, surely it is in their capacities to question, gain insight, and advance in understanding of the works of God. In the great image portrayed by Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling — the touch from finger to finger between the Creator and Adam — the mauve cloud behind the Creator’s head is painted in the shape of the human brain. Imago Dei, yes indeed.

A Theology of the Absurd
It seems useful — and necessary — to sketch out some of the facets of Christian faith to which our atheist threesome (Dennett, Harris, Dawkins) seem inattentive. Each Christian (each Catholic) sees this differently, of course, but right off the bat I notice four questions on which Christian faith offers arresting reflections.

A Theology of the Absurd. Begin with the bloody cross of Calvary. On this gibbet dies the Son of God? The cross is the very symbol of contradiction, and the absurd. When Christians speak of the act of Creation, we do not think of a perfectionist artificer making Lladró dolls, but rather of God creating flesh and blood in all its angularity deformations, imperfections, and concrete limitations, and in the midst of myriad evils and abominations. The world of His creation is riven through with absurdities and contradictions, species that die out, and the teeming, blooming, buzzing confusion of contingencies and chance. When God singles out a chosen people, He picks a small and difficult tribe in a poor, backward, and underdeveloped part of the world. His chosen ones are overrun by enemies again and again, and carted off into slavery and exile for long, long years. Then, when the Creator sends His Son to become flesh, the Son also roots his new community mainly among the poor, the uneducated, the humble, the forgotten.

But then, blasphemy is added to blasphemy, and this Son of God is condemned to death as a common criminal, and forced into the most disgraceful sort of death known to men of that time: public mockery and scourging virtually unto death, and then put out to hang on a cross where the public can shout insults, until the vultures come to pick at his eyes and his wounded flesh. This is not a Pollyanna, this Creator. But what He does do is assure those who suffer and who groan under the weight of the absurd, that, though at times they feel icy fear, they do not in the end need to be afraid. God is a good God and has His own purposes, and it is no mistake to trust His kindness, ever. The Creator did not make us to face a reasonable world in a rational, calm, and dispassionate way — like a New York banker after a splendid lunch at his Club, sunk into his favorite soft chair in the Library where a fragrant cigar is still permitted, as he comfortably reads his morning papers. Instead, there is war, exile, torture, injustice. Life is to be understood as a trial, and a time of suffering. A vale of tears. A valley of death. Even in the bosom of wealth, and luxury, and plenty — even there, cancer and failure and radical loneliness strike; but even more often still, simple boredom.

Not at all a land of happy talk, not at all the perfect world of Candide. Atheism is in the main suitable for comfortable men, in a reasonable world. For those in agony and distress, Christianity has seemed to serve much better and for a longer time, not because it offers “consolation” but precisely because it does not. For Christians, the cross is inescapable, and one ought always be prepared to take it up. I myself have watched three deeply religious people die without consolation, bereft, empty of feeling for God. To be empty of consolation, however, is not to be empty of faith. Faith is essentially a quiet act of love, even in misery: “Be it done to me according to thy will.”

Like Stephen Jay Gould, our three authors think they are destroying the argument from design by showing how poorly designed are so many parts of human anatomy, how many species have perished since the beginning of time (something like 90 percent), how chancily and seemingly without reason so many steps in natural selection are taken. They want to show that if there is a Designer, he is an incompetent one; or, more exactly, there is too much evidence of lack of design. What kind of Lladrô doll do they think God is? Our God is the God of the Absurd, of night, of suffering, and silent peace.

The Burden of Sin
It took me some years, but I have come to understand that, just as some people have no ear for music, so others (as Friedrich Hayek put it) “have no ear for God?’ Still others say they have no “need” for God. They sense in themselves no round hole into which God fits. One of the blessings of atheism seems to be that it takes away any sense of Judgment, any sense that by one’s actions one may be offending a Friend, any awareness of sin. “Sin” seems, indeed, to be a leftover from a bygone age. Beati voi! I want to cry out to atheists. Lucky you.

“At the heart of Christianity is the sinner,” a very great Christian, Charles Péguy, once wrote. Some of us are aware of doing things that we know we ought not to have done, and of not doing things that we know we ought to have done. We are aware of sinning against our own conscience deliberately doing what we know to be wrong, whether from weakness or from a powerful desire that is still out of control. Afterward, sometimes, we feel a remorse so keen that it hurts — and yet what has been done is done, and nothing we now do can take that fault away And at times the fault is shamefully grave, at that.

It is to this common, virtually universal experience that Jesus, like John the Baptist before him, first addressed his auditors, “Be sorry! Do penance. Resolve not to sin again.” (Even though the probabilities of sinning again are high, just as a man with a bad knee, though his knee has healed, knows that it will too easily go out on hint)

Christianity is not about moral arrogance. It is about moralism, and moral humility Wherever you see self-righteous persons condemning others and unaware of their own sins, you are not in the presence of an alert Christian but of a priggish pretender. It was in fact a great revolution in human history when the Jewish and Christian God revealed Himself as one who sees directly into consciences, and is not misled merely by external acts. (This God would be unpersuaded by the external pietas of the numerous Greek and Roman pagan philosophers who — unconcerned about conscience — were sure to be present at religious rites, whether they took the gods seriously or not.)

The biblical respect for conscience greatly dignified and honored inner acts of reflection, commitment, and choice. It turned a powerful beam of attention away from the external act to the inner act of conscience. It greatly honored truthfulness and simple humility Eventually, the inner duty of conscience toward the Creator became the ground of religious liberty — no other power dares intervene in this primal duty to God, which is antecedent to civil society state, family, and any other institution. (See James Madison’~ Memorial and Remonstrance) 1785.)

The Bright Golden Thread of Human History
Emphasized in the liberation of the Jews from the Seleucid Empire (celebrated at Hanukkah), from Egypt (celebrated at the Passover), and from Babylon (celebrated in the poetry of Israel’s prophets), a pilgrimage toward liberty and truth is the defining theme of the Torah. Every story in that testament has at its axis the arena of the human will, and the decisions made there (whether hidden or external). Thus, for biblical religion, liberty is the golden~ thread of human history This conception of liberty is realized internally in the recesses of the soul and also institutionally in whole societies or polities.

The Point of the Cosmos Is Friendship
No other world religions except Christianity and Judaism have put liberty of conscience so close to the center of religious life. For instance, Islam tends to think of God in terms of divine will, quite apart from nature or logic. Independently of reason, whatever Allah wills, does occur. Judaism and Christianity tend to think of God as Logos (reason), light, the source of all law and the intelligibility of all things. This difference in the fundamental conception of God alters, as well, the fundamental disposition of the human being proper to each religion: inquiry, versus submission. If it has ever occurred to you to ask, even if you are an atheist, why did God create this vast, silent, virtually infinite cosmos, you might find your best answer in the single word “friendship.” According to the Scriptures, intelligently read, the Creator made man a little less than the angels, a little more complex than the other animals. He made human beings conscious enough, and reflective enough, that they might marvel at what He had wrought, and give Him thanks. Even more than that, He made human beings in order to offer to them, in their freedom, His friendship and companionship.

Friendship is not only the biblical way of thinking about the relationship between God and man; it is also a good way to imagine the future of our nation and of the world toward which we should work. From this vision, Judaism and Christianity imparted to the world a way of measuring progress and decline. William Penn called his capital city “Philadelphia” (brotherly love), and made freedom of religion its first principle. If there is no liberty there can be no friendship. Even the atheists of the French Revolution named their fundamental principles “Liberty Fraternity Equality” — each of them a term that, as we will see in chapter two, derives not from the Greeks or the Romans, but from biblical religion.

A worldwide civilization of mutual friendship is a powerful magnet, and a realistic measure. Friendship does not require uniformity On the contrary, its fundamental demand is mutual respect, willing the good of the other as other. It births a desire to converse in a reasonable way about fundamental differences in viewpoint, hope, and a sense of practical responsibility.

Evolutionary Biology As A Guide To Life
The young Thomas Aquinas, in his late twenties, was one of the first men in the West to have in his hands an authentic translation of several key books of Aristotle. As his extended line-by-line commentaries on several of the most important of these books show, Aquinas mastered a viewpoint quite foreign to his own. Not many years after, he had to do the same in reading al-Fãrabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and other major Arab philosophers.

And so, when a Christian reader comes across Professor Dawkins’s argument that God cannot exist, because all complex and more intelligent things come only at the end of the evolutionary process, not at the beginning, the Christian’s first reflex may be to burst out laughing — but as an attentive student, he is also obliged to observe that, yes, from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology; that must in fact be so. The argument may be intellectually or philosophically satisfying, yet when its practical implications are compared with those of the Christian viewpoint, evolutionary biology may not be attractive as a guide to life. If one wants to be an evolutionary biologist, however, one must learn to confine oneself within the disciplines imposed by that field.

From a Roman Catholic point of view, at least, there is no difficulty in accepting all the findings of evolutionary biology understood to be an empirical science-. — that is to say, not as a philosophy of existence, a metaphysics, a full vision of human life. It is easier for Christianity to absorb many, many findings of the contemporary world — from science to technology, politics, economics, and art — than for those whose viewpoint is confined to the contemporary era to absorb Christianity That is just one reason that we may expect the latter to outlive the former.

It is obvious that Dawkins, at least, is quite aware of the conventional limitations of the scientific atheist’s point of view He writes that “a quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.” A few pages of his book, in almost every section, are given over to showing how an atheistic point of view can satisfy what have hitherto been taken to be religious longings. Atheism, too, he shows, has its consolations, its sources of inspiration, its awareness of beauty its sense of wonder. For such satisfactions, there is no need to turn to religion. Dawkins does good work in restoring human subjectivity emotion, longing, and an awed response to beauty to the life of scientific atheism. For Dawkins, scientific atheism is humanistic, a significant step forward from the sterile logical positivism of two or three generations ago.

Harris Explaining Away The Horrors
Atheism has a more severe limitation, one that shows itself in the actions of its proponents. One of my favorite parts of the Sam Harris book is his attempt to explain away the horrors of the self-declared atheist regimes in modern history: Fascist in Italy, Nazi in Germany, and Communist in the Soviet Union and Asia. Never in history have so many Christians been killed, tortured, driven to their deaths in forced marches, and imprisoned in concentration camps. An even higher proportion of Jews suffered still more horrifically under the same regimes, particularly the Nazi regime, than at any other time in Jewish history. The excuse Harris offers is quite lame. First he directs attention away from the ideological character of the regime, toward the odd personalities of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. No, the problem is the ideology the regime, the millions of believers in atheism. Harris ignores the essential atheism of the ideologies of the regime, “scientific secularism” and “dialectical materialism?’ Yet it is these ideologies, not just a few demented leaders, that bred a furious war on God, religion, and clergy. The nature of a regime and its ideology matter more than mad leaders. Yet here is Harris, limping: “While it is true that such men are sometimes enemies of organized religion, they are never especially rational. In fact, their public pronouncements are often delusional. .. The problem with such tyrants is not that they reject the dogma of religion, but that they embrace other life-destroying myths.” In other words, delusional atheists are not really atheists.

Would Harris accept a claim by Christians that Christian evildoers are not really Christians? The real problem is not that tyrants reject the “dogma” of religion, but that they derive their furors from a dogmatic atheism that brooks no rival. They build a punitive totalitarian regime far more sweeping than their own personal madness.

Everything Is Permitted
Enthusiasts such as Harris may dismiss the argument that atheism is associated with relativism. Sometimes it isn’t. Some atheists are rationalists of a most sober, moral kind. Nonetheless, the most common argument against placing trust in atheists is Dostoyevsky: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” There will be no Judge of deeds and consciences; in the end, it is each man for himself. Widespread public atheism may not show its full effects right away, but only after three or four generations. For individual atheists “of a peculiar character,” brought up in habits inculcated by the religious cultures of the past, can go on for two or three generations living in ways hard to distinguish from those of unassuming Christians and Jews. These individuals continue to be honest, compassionate committed to the equality of all, firm believers in “progress” and “brotherhood,” long after they have repudiated the original religious justification for this particular list of virtues. But sooner or later a generation may come along that takes the metaphysics of atheism with deadly seriousness. This was the fate of a highly cultivated nation in the Europe of our time, Germany, before it voted its way into Nazism.

George Washington considered this risk in his Farewell Address: “Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.” If morality were left to reason alone, common agreement would never be reached, since philosophers vehemently — and endlessly — disagree, and large majorities would waver without clear moral signals. Adds Alexis de Tocqueville:

“There is almost no human action, however particular one supposes it, that does not arise from a very general idea that men have conceived of God, of his relations with the human race, of the nature of their souls, and of their duties toward those like them. One cannot keep these ideas from being the common source from which all the rest flow

Men therefore have an immense interest in making very fixed ideas for themselves about God, their souls, their general duties toward their Creator and those like them; for doubt about these first points would deliver all their actions to chance and condemn them to a sort of disorder and impotence. .

The first object and one of the principal advantages of religions is to furnish a solution for each of these primordial questions that is clear, precise, intelligible to the crowd, and very lasting.”

This extremely practical contribution is one reason Tocqueville saw religion as essential to a free people, and unbelief as tending toward tyranny

Reasons For Altruism
Dawkins attempts to get around this flaw in (what he calls) the neo-Darwinian view of chance and blind natural selection by counting out four reasons for altruism rooted in evolutionary biology: “First, there is the special case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favors given, and the giving of favors in ‘anticipation’ of payback. Third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, there is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying authentic advertising.”

To these reasons based upon nature’s egotism (which furnishes little motivation to be kind or virtuous when no one is looking), Jews and Christians would add four or five others. To begin with, altruism is morally good, rooted in natural law, and most highly commended among the “laws” of God. Second, not to love one another is to disappoint the Creator who wishes us to be His friends. Next, not to love one another is a failure to imitate the Lord Jesus, who asked us to imitate Him. Fourth, experience confirms that loving others is in tune with a communal dimension of our nature, beginning in the family, but radiating outward through the polity and the economy. (Adam Smith referred to this highest law as “sympathy”) Last, as Tocqueville pointed out, every Mosaic commandment has a foundation in nature, but tends to stretch nature’s outer limits. Maimonides, Aquinas, and many others discussed this in great detail centuries ago.

As Thomas Jefferson recognized, it is self-evident that any creature owes his Creator certain duties in conscience; that much is clear by nature itself. But the commandment “Remember the Sabbath” is more specific than the natural law of reason; it stretches nature by adding to it a specifically Hebraic duty Meanwhile, Christianity specifies this duty in terms of Sunday, rather than the Jewish Sabbath. Thus, nature alone reaches the fundamental principle, but this Third Commandment, at least, specifies more than nature alone does. Jewish and Christian faiths do not reject, but build upon nature, add to it, bring it to a more concrete expression.

Finally, our three authors (Dennett, Harris, Dawkins) fail to think carefully about what Jews and Christians actually have to say about God. Their own atheistic concept of God is a caricature, an ugly godhead that anybody might feel duty-bound to reject. Dawkins makes fun of an omniscient God who would also be free. If an omniscient God knows now what future actions He will take, how will that leave room for Him to change His mind — and how does that leave Him omnipotent? Isn’t He caught in a kind of vise? -

But, of course, this is to imagine God being in time as Dawkins is in time. Dawkins fails to grasp the difference between a viewpoint from eternity outside time, and his own viewpoint from within time. He also fails to grasp the freedom that the primary cause allows to secondary causes, to contingencies, and to particulars. God’s will is not before human decisions are made. Rather, it is simultaneous with them, and thus empowers their coming into existence. Ancient philosophers proved able to grasp this point. Surely our contemporary atheists can become equally as learned?

When Catholics celebrate the sacrifice of the Mass, for example, we imagine that our moment of participation in that particular Mass is — as it.is for every other Mass we attend in our lives — in God’s eyes simultaneous with the bloody death of His Son on Calvary In our eyes, it is experienced as a “reenactment;’ but in God’s eyes both moments are as one. No doubt, for some minds this is all too mystical, and its underlying philosophy is a bit too sophisticated, especially to those of literal and purely empirical tastes. Our three authors, in any case, present a quite primitive idea of God. If the rest of us had such a view, we, too, would almost certainly be atheists.

The whole inner world of aware and self-questioning religious persons seems to our atheist authors unexplored territory. All around them are millions who spend many moments each day (and hours each week) in communion with God. Yet of the silent and inward parts of these lives — and why these inner silences ring so true to those who share them, and seem more grounded in reality than anything else in life — our writers seem unaware. Surely, if our atheist friends were to reconsider their methods, and deepen their understanding of such terms as “experience” and “the empirical;’ they might come closer to walking for a tentative while the moccasins of so many of their more religious companions in life, who find theism more intellectually satisfying — less self-contradictory; less alienating from their own nature — than atheism.

Posted in Book Recommendations, Michael Novak, Templeton Prize Winners | Tagged "No One Sees God", Alfred North Whitehead, C. G. Jung, Daniel Dennett, Matthew Arnold, Michael Novak, nihilism, relativism, Richard Dawkins, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa Of Avila, Saint Thérèse’s of Lisieux, Sam Harris | Leave a Comment »

Book Recommendation: Happiness and Contemplation by Josef Pieper

August 20, 2010

You will want to buy this book. It will fit perfectly on any bookshelf and I can’t tell you how reaffirming it is to have a very thin volume devoted to Happiness…

“Happiness” Comprehends A Variety Of Meanings
There is nevertheless a fundamental significance, which should never be overlooked, in the very fact that a single word, “happiness,” comprehends such a variety of meanings: the immortal richness of divine life and man’s part in it, as well as the petty satisfaction of a fleeting desire. We venture to assert that this ambiguity reflects the structure of the whole of Creation. St. Thomas puts it this way: “As created good is a reflection of the uncreated good, so the attainment of a created good is a reflected beatitude.”
Now the “attainment of a created good” is a thing that happens constantly, and in a thousand varied forms. It happens whenever a thirsty man drinks, whenever a questioner receives a flash of illumination, whenever lovers are together, whenever a task is brought to a successful conclusion and a plan bears fruit. And when men call all this “happiness,” they are close to the insight that each gratification points to the ultimate one, and that all happiness has some connection with eternal beatitude. Some connection, if only this: that every fulfillment this side of Heaven instantly reveals its inadequacy. It is immediately evident that such satisfactions are not enough; they are not what we have really sought; they cannot really satisfy us at all.
Andre Gide noted in his Journals “The terrible thing is that we can never make ourselves drunk enough.”

“Contemplation Is Man’s Ultimate Happiness”
One might take the statement that contemplation is man’s ultimate happiness and say to oneself: “Very well, obviously this refers to the ‘happiness of the philosopher.’ Undeniably there does exist a happiness of knowledge and insight, just as there is happiness in action and ‘happiness of the senses.’ Certainly it can be maintained, with good reason, that the happiness of the perceptive mind surpasses all other forms of happiness in depth and value.”
All very well. Yet to interpret this sentence in this way, to put so special a construction on it, is to ignore its real meaning. For it says not a word about any special happiness that pertains only to the “philosopher.” The dictum speaks of the happiness of man in general, of the whole, physical, earthly, human man. And contemplation is not held up as one among other modes of happiness, even though an especially lofty one. Rather what is says is this: however the human craving for happiness may time and again be distracted by a thousand small gratifications, it remains directed unwaveringly toward one ultimate satisfaction which is in truth its aim. “Among a thousand twigs,” says Vergil in Dante’s universal poem, “one sweet fruit is sought.” The finding of this fruit, the ultimate gratification of human nature, the ultimate satiation of man’s deepest thirst, takes place in contemplation!

The Created Soul And Its Essence
The great teachers of the Occident have always contested (that nature and mind are exclusive concepts). They have steadfastly maintained that here is one being which is in a precise sense both mind and nature simultaneously. This being is the created human soul. “By nature” means : by virtue of creation. All being and activity is “by nature” which – from within the central core of things – flows directly out of the primal impulse of the act of creation, by which creatures have become what they are.
Part of the definition of the created soul, therefore, is that it has received its essence – and along with that its assignment in life – form elsewhere, ab alio, from the shaping and life-giving act of creation. It necessarily follows that in the center of the created soul something happens which is its own act, and therefore an act of mind, but simultaneously a natural process “by virtue of creation.” The desire for happiness is precisely this character; it is “willing by nature,” which is to say an act of the mind and a natural process at one and the same time.

Why Do You Want To Be Happy?
Those…who cannot accept the idea of a desire for happiness inherent in man’s composition; that idea appears to them a slur upon man’s autonomous spirit. Only if we understand man as a created being to the very depths of his spiritual existence can we meaningfully conceive that the will has not the power to not want happiness. …First the natural desire springs from the innermost core of man’s being; it concerns man’s very own will, unrestricted by any coercion. Therefore it is free. …this desire points right through the human heart back to an ultimate origin which is not human.
Man has not by his own resolve set in motion his desire for happiness; it has not been given to him to desire otherwise. Therefore “freedom” is not the right term here…St. Thomas: The will strives in freedom for felicity, although it strives for it by necessity.” In desiring happiness, then, we are obeying a gravitational impulse whose axis is entirely within our own hearts. But we have no power over it – because we ourselves are this gravitational impulse. When we desire to be happy, something blind and obscure takes place within the mind, which nevertheless does not cease to be a light and seeing eye. Something happens “behind” which we cannot penetrate, whose reason we do not see, and for which we can name no reason. Why do you want to be happy? We do not ask because no one knows the answer.

Happiness Is A Gift
Because our turning toward happiness is a blind seeking we are, whenever happiness comes our way, the recipients of something unforeseen, something unforeseeable, and therefore not subject to planning and intention. Happiness is essentially a gift; we’re not the forgers of our own felicity…Surely the “attainment of created good” can frequently be brought about by purposeful activity. By cleverness, energy, and diligence one can acquire a good many of the goods which are generally considered adjuncts of the happy life: food and drink house, garden, books, a rich and beautiful wife (perhaps). But we cannot make all these acquisitions, or even a single one of them, quench that thirst so mysterious to ourselves for what we call “happiness,” “reflected beatitude.” No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.

Stoic Self-Sufficiency As Happiness
Stoic self-sufficiency may still commando our respect and admiration. There is “greatness” in the unyielding resolve to desire only what is entirely ours, what we ourselves have acquired. As Seneca has expressed it, “The man is happy, we say, who knows no good that would be greater than that which he can give to himself.” Nevertheless the keener eye will not fail to observe behind all the brave banners and heroic symbols the profound non-humanity, the submerged anxiety, the senile rigidity, the tension of such an attitude. And our admiration becomes tinged with consternation and horror as it becomes apparent to us how closely such self-sufficiency verges on despair. “Suppose he lacks his miserable bread? What does that matter to one who lacks not the knowledge of how to go to his death?” (Seneca)

Happy By Virtue Of Being
When it is said that man by nature seeks happiness, the statement obviously implies that by nature he does not already possess it. “In the present life perfect happiness cannot be.” Man is not happy by virtue of his being. Rather his whole existence is determined precisely by the non-possession of ultimate gratification. That, after all, is the significance of the concept of status viatoris. To exist as man means to be “on the way” and therefore to be non-happy. …There is only one Being that is happy by His mere existence. “To God alone may perfect beatitude be attributed, by virtue of His nature.”
The meaning of the statement is not solely that God is happy….He is his happiness…Any human being who is happy shares in a happiness that is not of himself. For God, however, being an being happy are one and the same; God is happy by virtue of His existence.

The Doctrine Of God’s Unassailable Happiness
“The beatitude of God consists not in the action by which He established the Creation but in the action by which He enjoys himself, needing not the Creation – creaturis non egens. (Aquinas). Belief that the world itself, its roots and the whole of it, is sound, plumb, and in order, could rest upon no firmer foundation than this doctrine of God’s unassailable happiness. If God were not happy, or if His happiness depended upon what happened in the human realm and not upon Himself alone, if His happiness were not beyond any conceivable possibility of disturbance; if there were not, in the Source of reality, this infinitely, inviolably sound Being – we would not be able even to conceive the idea of a possible healing of the empirical wounds of Creation.
This is confirmed from another angle. The mind considering the course of the world, the mind seeking coherency and plunged more and more hopelessly into confusion by the incoherencies of the world, will in the end inevitably be tempted to think (and this temptation comes precisely to the deepest and most consistent thinkers): God is not at one with Himself; God is not happy.
That confidence in the wholeness of being, on the other hand, which finds its ultimate support in the absolute happiness of God, is in no way an invalid simplification of historical reality. Rather, we may say that, far from simplifying things, it reveals them as enormously more complicated and tragic – since the incomprehensibility of evil in the world becomes fully apparent against the background of the indestructible happiness of God. Nevertheless, this belief means that as Paul Claudel has formulated it “The terrible words…. ‘In the end truth, perhaps, is sad.’ miss the underlying reality of the world; that, rather, “The great divine joy is the only reality.”

A Thirst For Happiness
Man as he is constituted, endowed as as he is with a thirst for happiness, cannot have his thirst quenched in the finite realm; and if he thinks or behaves as if that were possible, he is misunderstanding himself, he is acting contrary to his own nature. The whole world would not suffice this “natural” nature of man. If the whole world were given to him, he would have to say, and would say: It is too little. Too little, that is, to “gratify entirely the power of desire,” or in other words too little to make him happy….The long expected answer to (What would suffice this thirst of the whole human being?) is God….
(But) he interposes a concept (called) bonum universale. …Perhaps we may translate “the whole good” – goodness so very good that there is nothing in it which is not good, and nothing outside of it which could be good. Nothing than this bonum universale can quench completely and ultimately man’s deepest thirst… “The whole good cannot be found anywhere in the realm of created things; it is encountered in God alone.”

Joy And Happiness
Aquinas would say that Happiness without Joy is unthinkable; but joy and happiness are two different things. …Thomas takes it completely for granted that no full beatitude can be conceived without pleasure, gladness, enjoyment, rapture on the part of the physical, spiritual-sensual being which is man. How could the conceptions of physical well-being seriously be omitted by anyone who believes in the resurrection of the dead? …
We want to have reason for joy, for an unceasing joy that fills us utterly, sweeps us before it, exceeds all measure. This reason, if it exists, is anterior to joy, and is in itself something different from joy. “Joyousness” implies an “about something”; we cannot rejoice in the absolute; there is no joy for joy’s sake….Aquinas: “Possession of the good is the causes of rejoicing.” This having and partaking of the good is primary; joy is secondary. Aquinas: “Therefore a person rejoices because he possesses a good appropriate to him – whether in reality, or in hope, or at least in memory. The appropriate good, however, if it is perfect, is precisely the man’s happiness…Thus it is evident that not even the joy which follows the possession of the perfect good is the essence of happiness itself…..All beings…desire joy for the sake of the good, and not the converse….Thus it follows that …every joy is consequent to a good and that there exists a joy consequent to that which is in itself the supreme good.”… The “supreme good” and its attainment – that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.

Our Participation In Happiness
What does indeed make us happy is the infinite and uncreated richness of God; but our participation in this, happiness itself, is entirely a “creatural” reality governed from within by our humanity; it is not something that descends overwhelmingly on us from outside. That is, it is not only something that happens to us; we are ourselves intensely active participants in our own happiness. …Happiness is an act and an activity of the soul. … But has it not been said that happiness is a gift? …(Aquinas’ reply:) If sight were given to a blind man, he would nevertheless see with his own sense of sight…Happiness is a form of acting which opens all the potentialities of man to fullest realization

An Activity Whose Effects Work Inward
Along with the doing of any work there is an effect which does emerge, but remains hidden within the doer himself, perhaps chiefly as a fruit of insight, as a verbum cordis. Perhaps this fruit can grow only in the course of a man’s dealing with the pliable or resistant matter of a garden, or potter’s clay, or marble; perhaps this is the only way in which it can grow And it may not be that in this processio ad intra in this inward fructation, lies the truly beatifying element which we rightly ascribe to all creative activity?
To repeat: the activity in which we receive the drink which is happiness is by its nature an activity whose effects work inward. This cannot be otherwise, for only in such activity does the acting person actualize himself. Action which reaches outward perfects thework rather than the person who acts. Under those circumstances what happens is that the perfection of the work “does not…include the creator; he is condemned to return to his lesser ego.”

An Act Of The Intellect
“The essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect.” …The fulfillment of the act takes place in the manner in which we become aware of reality; the whole energy of our being is ultimately directed toward attainment of insight. The perfectly happy person ….is one who sees…Man, physical, historical, “earthly” man, has a basic craving to see; strictly speaking he craves nothing else; …he lives purely as a see-er: in contemplation. ….Aquinas: “He is happy in that he has what he wants – which having, however, takes place by something other than an act of will.” …” “The happy life does not mean loving what we possess, but possessing what we love.” Possession of the beloved, Aquinas holds, takes place in an act of cognition, in seeing, in intuition, in contemplation. …Thomas is not alone is saying this. The same point is made by Augustine…
Old metaphysics was motivated chiefly by this one question: How is reality to be attained?…. Cognition is essentially seizure of the world, and grasping of reality. To know is by the nature of knowing to have; there is no form of having in which the object is more intensely grasped…knowing is “the highest mode of having.”…
It is assimilation, the quite exact sense that the objective world, in so far as it is known, is incorporated into the very being of the knower. This indeed distinguishes cognitive from non-cognitive being: the latter have nothing outside themselves, whereas the knower obtains a share in alien beings in that he knows them, that is to say, in that he takes them into himself and …possesses the “form:” of these alien beings. Material things have closed boundaries; they are not accessible, cannot be penetrated, by things outside themselves. But one’s existence as a spiritual being involves being and remaining oneself and at the same time admitting and transforming into oneself the reality of the world. No other material thing can be present in the space occupied by a house, a tree, or a fountain pen. But where there is mind, the totality of things has room; it is “possible that in a single being the comprehensiveness of the whole universe may dwell.” Aristotle: anima est quodammodo onmia, the soul is at the bottom all that is.” … “Eternal life is knowing Thee.” [John 17:3]

Love Is The Indispensable Premise Of Happiness
Happy is he who sees what he loves. It is only the presence of the thing or person loved that makes for happiness…without love there is no happiness…Love is the indispensable premise of happiness: …Love, then, is necessary for happiness; but it is not enough. Only the presence of what is loved makes us happy, and that presences is actualized by the power of cognition. …”Where love is, there is the eye.” …from the commentary Sentences written by a young Thomas Aquinas.
The meaning is that there are things which the lover alone observes; but above all, that the lover partakes of goods which are withheld from all others, which is to say that higher potentialities for happiness are open to him than to anyone else. Nevertheless, no matter what may be observable to his eye by virtue of love, the activity of the eye is still seeing and not loving…Contemplation is a knowing which is inspired by love….It is the living attainment of awareness. It is intuition of the beloved object.

Elements Of Contemplation
The first element of the concept of contemplation (is) the silent perception of reality. The second is the following: Contemplation is a form of knowing arrived at not by thinking but by seeing, intuition. ….it is a type of knowing which does not merely move toward its object, but already rests in it. The object is present – as a face or a landscape is present to the eye when the gaze “rests upon it.” In intuition there is no “future tension”, no desire directed toward the future, which desire corresponds with the nature of thinking. The person who knows by intuition has already found what the thinker is seeking; what he knows is present “before his eyes.” This presence, however, this “spatial thereness,” may at any moment be converted into temporal “presence”, which is a tense-form of Eternity. …There inevitably intrudes into the midst of the peace of contemplation, the soundless call to another, infinitely profounder, incomprehensible, “eternal” peace. This is “the call to perfection of the imperfect, which call we name love.” (Aquinas)

Earthly Contemplation
Earthly contemplation …must be imagined as an inner gaze, undistracted by anything form the outside, but troubled within by the challenge to achieve a profounder but unattainable peace. It must be imagined as a satisfaction which desires nothing “else” and yet is not satisfied with itself because in its uttermost depths, yet insuperably remote, a still more complete satisfaction is sensed. This earthly existence can offer us an awareness of “the whole,” of the very essence of all that is “good” for us – a knowing of God, in other words which is the result neither of logical reasoning nor of simple faith. “Human happiness does not consist in the knowledge of God, which is to be had by logical demonstration.”….

Non-seeing “rather kindles the longing rather than gratifies it. The knowledge brought us by faith is knowledge of what is absent. Contemplation, however, including earthly contemplation, is able to quench man’s thirst more than anything else because it affords a direct perception of the presence of God; contemplation is the form in which we partake of the uttermost degree of happiness which this physical, historical existence of ours is capable of holding. “Imperfect beatitude, such as can be had here, consists primarily and principally in contemplation,” that is, in earthly contemplation. “As far as contemplation extends, so far does happiness extend.” …One corollary is that insightful knowledge, spiritual vision, intellectual intuition, is possible for man here on earth; that man’s method of grasping reality is not exclusively thinking, “mental labor…” The epose of “simple intuition” does exist. This is by no means an incontrovertible assumption but to contest it is also to dismiss the idea of earthly contemplation…The inhumanity of totalitarian labor… based upon the fact… that man is considered as s “worker” even in his intellectual life; he is permitted spare time but no true repose.
Another premise is… we must in some manner be able to partake of the object of this act, the drink called happiness, which means that God is present in the world; He can appear “before the eyes” of one whose gaze is directed toward the depths of things…reality is a creation, and that consequently God is not “outside of the world,” not a Deus extramundanus, but the acting basis of everything that exists…For the Christian earthly contemplation means above all: that back of immediate phenomena, and within them, the Face of the incarnate Divine Logos is visible.

Contemplation Is Widespread
The common element in all the special forms of contemplation is the loving, yearning, affirming bent toward that happiness which is the same as God Himself, and which is the aim and purpose of all that happens in the world. The common element is an approach whose impetus bursts forth from the core of man’s being, feeds on the energy of man’s whole nature, and carries all the powers of that nature along in its dynamic movement. Within that common element the intrinsic force of the craving for happiness is united with the data of all the senses, with the play of the imagination, with the insights of reason, and with faith and the supernatural new life – both these last goods granted as free gifts. Without this love directed toward this object, the re is no true contemplation. Love alone makes it possible for contemplation to satiate the human heart with the experience of supreme happiness. ….
In contemplation, the multiple forces of human nature are always called upon, always at play, Who would wish to term “purely religious” the contemplation which underlies S. Francis of Assisi’s Song to the Sun, or the poems of St. John of the Cross? Nevertheless, it is true that such contemplation obviously has been kindled by meditation on the divine mysteries and by prayer….
The transfiguring experience of divine satiation can come to one in a host of ways. The most trivial of stimuli can bring one to this peak. And this being so, we are brought sharply to the arresting and indeed astounding realization – so opposed is it to everything we are in the habit of thinking about contemporary man – that contemplation is far more widespread among us today than appearances would indicate. The significant features of contemplation can be attained without anyone’s being conscious of it by that name. With this as a clue, more and more new forms of achieving contemplation manifest themselves.

Contemplation In The Precise Sense
Who among us has not looked into his child’s face, in the midst of the toils and troubles of everyday life, and at that moment “seen” that everything which is good, is loved and lovable, loved by God! Such certainties all mean, at bottom, one and the same thing: that the world is plumb and sound; that everything comes to its appointed goal; that in spite of all appearances, underlying all things is peace and salvation, Gloria; that nothing and no one is lost; that “God holds in his hand the beginning, middle, and end of all that is.” Such non-rational, intuitive certainties of the divine base of all that is can be vouchsafed to our gaze even when it is turned toward the most insignificant–looking things, if only it is a gaze inspired by love. That, in the precise sense, is contemplation. And we should have the courage to admit its identity.

The Soul Takes Precedence Over The Eye
The precision of these entries (in Gerald Manley Hopkin’s Journals) proves, among other things, how little contemplation need by-pass or blur the reality of the visible world by, say, premature “symbolization.” Rather, contemplation directs its gaze straight at the heart of objects. In so doing, it perceives in the depths a hitherto hidden, nonfinite relationship. And in that perception lies the peculiar essence of contemplation.

But what actually happens when the soul, as it were, takes precedence over the eye? No one has yet succeeded in providing an adequate descriptive account of that process…part of the nature of contemplation (is) that it cannot be communicated, It takes place in the innermost recesses. There is no observer. And it is impossible to “set it down” because no energy of the soul is left unengaged….

G.K. Chesterton, considering his life in retrospect, said that he had always had the almost mystical conviction of the miracle in all that exists, and of the rapture dwelling essentially within all experience. Within this statement lie three separate assertions: that everything holds and conceals at bottom a mark of its divine origin; that one who catches a glimpse of it “sees” that this and all things are “good” beyond all comprehension; and that, seeing this, he is happy. Here in sum is the whole doctrine of the contemplation of earthly creation.

The Active/Political/Practical Life
The active life contains a felicity of its own; it lies, says Aquinas, principally in the practice of prudence, in the perfect art of the conduct of life. But ultimate repose cannot be found in this kind of felicity …the ultimate meaning of the active life is to make possible the happiness of contemplation. …Aristotle: The whole of political life seems to be ordered with a view to attaining the happiness of contemplation. For peace, which is established and preserved by virtue of political activity, places man in a position to devote himself to contemplation of the truth.”….practical life if not only meaningful but indispensable; it rightly fills out man’s weekday life; that without it a truly human existence is inconceivable. Without it, indeed, the vita contemplativa is unthinkable…. “The truth is that as soon as we are no longer obliged to earn our living, we no longer know what to do with our life and recklessly squander it. (Andre Gide) “One thing is clear: when something is finished, it must be perfect –but what then?” (Gottfried Benn)

Common Features Of The Contemplative Man And The Happy Man
With great sureness of insight, the ancients have asserted that in the contemplative man may be found all the things which distinguish the happy man; and that ordinary speech attributes to both the same characteristics….
For example there is simplicitas, that simplicity peculiar to the gaze of contemplation. The whole energy of the seeing person gathers into a single look…. “Man’s happiness is based upon there being for him an indisputable truth.” (Nietzsche) Here, in cognition, truth and happiness are conjoined under the aspect of simplicity. Disputation involves pros and cons, arguments and counterarguments, variety of points of view, yes and no. But an indisputable truth, not something that is merely not disputed out of mental sluggishness or doggedness, but a truth which is immune even to interior dispute – that is the simplicitas of possession. … (Aquinas:) man is not capable of an act continuing without interruption. But happiness is not happiness if it does not endure forever without loss; happiness demands eternity…
“There is always one thing which makes for happiness:…the capacity to feel unhistorically.” (Nietzsche)….the happy man needs nothing and no one…It was true of the Christian martyrs, of whom it is told that not even torture could tear them from the happiness of contemplation….Finally repose, leisure, peace, belong among the elements of happiness. If we have not escaped from harried rush, from mad pursuit, form unrest, from the necessity of care, we are not happy…Contemplation’s very premise is freedom from the fetters of workaday busyness. Moreover it itself actualizes this freedom by virtue of being intuition.

Concupiscence Of The Eyes
(Aristotle): “We prefer seeing to all else.” If we did not already know that joy in seeing must be counted among the most elemental, irrepressible, coveted joys of mankind, we could deduce it from the everyday phenomenon of “concupiscence of the eyes.” the hypertrophy of visual curiosity, the morbidity of the contemporary craving to see. We can deduce from the extent of this degeneration which, it seems is imperiling specifically our most elemental and precious powers …” (Aquinas) This, incidentally, may suggest that the greatest menace of our capacity for contemplation is the incessant fabrication of tawdry empty stimuli which kill the receptivity of the soul….

All The Labor And History Of Man Crowned Only In Intuition
In his memoirs ..George Santayana relates how he used to accompany a friend versed in art through the great picture galleries of the world. And seeing his friend standing, completely absorbed and enraptured, in front of a masterpiece, he thought and says with great earnestness, and with the clear intent of stating a philosophical thesis: “My own load was lifted, and I saw how instrumental were all the labor and history of man, to be crowned, if crowned at all, only in intuition.

The World Unredeemable?
No one who thinks of the world as at bottom unredeemable can accept the idea that contemplation is the supreme happiness of man. Neither happiness nor contemplation is possible except on the basis of consent to the world as a whole. This consent has little to do with “optimism.” It is consent that may be granted amid tears and the extremes of horror.

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Reading Doestoevsky’s The Idiot On A Metaphysical-Religious Level

August 10, 2010

Holbein's "Deposition of Christ"

Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot in 1867–1869, and today it is considered one of his greatest works, along with Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). In The Idiot Dostoevsky hoped to portray the ideal of a “positively beautiful individual,” a man who wishes to sacrifice himself for others. Prince Myshkin is a sort of Russian Christ who represents the values Dostoevsky deemed the highest and most noble: altruism, meekness, kindness, and brotherly love.

As Dostoevsky saw sexual passion as inherently selfish, it is not surprising that Prince Myshkin is a completely asexual character. Though he develops romantic feelings toward Aglaya, he subordinates them to a higher ideal of pity and compassion that he expresses in his relationship with Nastassya Filippovna. Facing the “dark world” of corruption and moral decay that he meets in society, he inevitably perishes.

On the metaphysical-religious level Prince Myshkin and Ippolit Terentyev are the main antagonists. Although Ippolit has no objective reason to hate Myshkin, he senses in him an ideological adversary: “I hate you all, every one of you ! — it’s you, Jesuitical, treacly soul, idiot, philanthropic millionaire; I hate you more than every one and everything in the world! I understood and hated you long ago, when first I heard of you: I hated you with all the hatred of my soul” (335/249). There is extrinsic evidence that Dostoevsky himself saw things in this way. “Ippolit is the main axis of the whole novel,” we read in his notebook (277). Kolya speaks of Ippolit’s “gigantic idea” without defining it. But the fact that Ippolit’s idea is apparently developed further and commented on by Kirillov in The Possessed allows us to identify the “gigantic idea” as the rejection of an absurd life. It is up to Myshkin to refute this idea.

In effect, Ippolit reverses what is known as the argument for the existence of God “from design”: the actual condition of the world is in his experience such that it makes faith in God impossible. The conflict between Myshkin’s faith and Ippolit’s revolt parallels the antinomy [vocab: a contradiction between two statements that seem equally reasonable] of Christ absolute spiritual significance and the particular facts of history, Christ’s promise of immortality and physical death continuing as ever before.

The repeated introduction of the theme of execution and Ippolit’s condition as a man doomed to death before he has started to live leads up to the scene in front of Holbein’s “Deposition of Christ,” a picture that could cause a man to lose his faith, as Myshkin observes. Ippolit, referring to the same picture, utters the ultimate challenge to faith:

The question instinctively arises: if death is so awful and the laws of nature so mighty, how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when even He did not conquer them, He who vanquished nature in His lifetime, who exclaimed. “Maiden, arise!” and the maiden arose — ”Lazarus, come forth!” and the dead man came forth? Looking at such a, picture, one conceives of nature in the shape of an immense, merciless, dumb beast, or more correctly, much more correctly, speaking, though it sounds strange, in the form of a. huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great priceless Being, a Being worth all nature and its laws, worth the whole earth, which was created perhaps solely for the sake of the advent of that Being. (451/339)

The helplessness of mortal man facing inexorable nature causes Ippolit to draw some practical and hypothetical conclusions. He realizes that he could commit the most heinous crime with guaranteed impunity because his case would assuredly not come to trial: he would die before under the solicitous care of the authorities, who would be anxious to keep him alive for his trial. This conceit presages Ivan Karamazov’s maxim: “If there is no immortality, everything is lawful.” On the practical side, too, Ippolit realizes that every conceivable activity or plan he might consider is made senseless by his impending death.

Furthermore, Ippolit reaches the same conclusion as Kirillov does, with a more elaborate argumentation: choosing the time of his own death by committing suicide is the only way in which he can assert his independence from the dumb power of nature. Like his successor in The Possessed, Ippolit is loath to admit that his suicide will be an act of despair more than an act of revolt. Vladimir Solovyov, in his third “Discourse on Dostoevsky” (1883), made the point that any man who becomes aware of universal evil, as Ippolit does, but is unable to see also universal good — that is, God — is inevitably driven to suicide. Ippolit in fact perceives nature not only as indifferent but also as malevolent, cruel, and mocking. At the same time, he is unaware of any beneficent saving principle.

Like Ivan Karamazov, Ippolit does not explicitly deny the existence of God but resolutely rejects His world: “So be it! I shall die looking straight at the source of power and life; I do not want this life! If I’d had the power not to be born, I would certainly not have accepted existence upon conditions that are such a mockery” (457/344). Yet at the same time Ippolit — again like his successors Kirillov and Ivan Karamazov — loves life and asks why he must be so alienated from it: “What is there for me in this beauty when, every minute, every second I am obliged, forced, to recognize that even the tiny fly, buzzing in the sunlight beside me, has its share in the banquet and the chorus, knows its place, loves it and is happy; and I alone am an outcast” (45 5/ 343). Myshkin, a few pages later, echoes Ippolit’s sentiment (466/352).26 The theme of man’s discord with God’s world is made explicitly anti-Christian as Ippolit sarcastically rejects the Prince’s “Christian arguments, at the happy thought that it is in fact better to die” (455/342).

Ippolit himself suggests an escape from this situation: perhaps man or, rather, man’s conscious mind does not understand the world correctly and human alienation from the cosmos is due to a misunderstanding of some divine truth. It is up to Prince Myshkin to resolve this misunderstanding, although Ippolit has unwittingly found the resolution himself when he quits staring at Meyer’s wall (the wall is a symbol of the cul-desac into which reason takes man even in Notes from Underground) and becomes involved in the fate of another human being, the unfortunate young doctor who gets another chance at life through his efforts.

Myshkin, who is specifically identified as a self-proclaimed Christian believer (423/3 17), presents the alternative to Ippolit’s self-conscious solipsism: personal experience of a reality that transcends individuality. Vladimir So1ovyos who was the first to translate Dostoevsky’s fiction into the language of academic philosophy, said, “Nature, separated from the Divine Spirit, appears to be a dead and senseless mechanism without cause or goal — and on the other hand, God, separated from man and nature, outside His positive revelation, is for us either an empty abstraction or an all consuming indifference.” Dostoevsky set himself the task to realize this “positive revelation” in a fictional character. Prince Myshkin’s role as a symbol of man’s salvation is enhanced by many significant details that make him a Christ figure.

Extrinsic evidence (Dostoevsky’s notebooks and correspondence) suggests that in Prince Myshkin Dostoevsky wanted to create an absolutely beautiful character, though fully aware of the insurmountable difficulty of this task. Mochulsky suggested that Dostoevsky’s artistic tact caused him to halt “before the immensity of this task” and made him reduce the Prince to something closer to ordinary human stature. Rut we know that Dostoevsky never relinquished his plan to write “a book about Jesus Christ.”

An entry to this effect is found in one of his last notebooks. In surveying world literature, Dostoevsky came to the conclusion that Christ was the only character in all literature to answer the definition of an “absolutely beautiful character” and that the closest approximation to it was Don Quixote, a wise madman and ridiculous to boot. Accordingly, Myshkin was made not only a Christ figure but a quixotic figure as well, with Don Quixote a notable and explicit presence in the text. The fact that Myshkin is explicitly presented as a Christ figure makes the observation, appealing in itself, that Myshkin’s story is a version of the Dionysian myth somewhat redundant. The notion that Jesus Christ was yet another hypostasis of “the. suffering god” was around before Nietzsche popularized it.

Prince Myshkin returns to his native Russia from the mountains of Switzerland and returns there at the end of the novel. An innocent idealist, he enters a cruel, greedy, mercenary, decadent, but functioning society that refuses to appreciate his virtues. Kjetsaa has suggested that the ‘Johannine principle of the word made flesh and entering the world was the idea. that guided Dostoevsky in creating this character. Prince Myshkin is of ancient noble lineage but impoverished and a recipient of charity until informed that he has come into a large inheritance, which he claims on his return to Russia.

His physical appearance reminds one of an icon qf a Russian saint, and he has some pronounced monkish traits tie is a virgin at twenty-six, painfully chaste, has a love for medieval manuscripts and calligraphy, even wears a cloak that resembles a monk’s cassock and cowl He has a saint’s humility, an unconditional willingness to forgive any., wrong, and ‘refuses to be provoked to anger. by violence.’ When Ganya slaps his face he responds by saying, “Oh, how ashamed you will be of what you’ve done” (142/99)

Rogozhin calls him “such a sheep,” and he is called an “idiot” by various parties throughout the novel, although he is during the whole action of the novel obviously quite sane. His “terrible power of humility” (an idea of Myshkin’s, echoed by Ippolit) is that of the kenotic3’ Christ of the Eastern church, Christ who has divested Himself of all His glory and may appear in the hypostasis of a humble beggar.

Myshkin has other Christ-like traits. He is pure, in mind and a virgin He is attracted to children (90/57—58) He pities Marie, a “fallen woman,” and meets with the hostility of self-righteous local authorities, the pastor and the schoolmaster. The many blatant biblical echoes in the tale of Marie (the parable of the prodigal son, the washing of feet, the Mary Magdalene theme) enhance Myshkin’s Christ-like image. He seems clairvoyant, though his penetrating understanding of people is psychologically motivated by the genuine interest he takes in people and by his willingness to see things from their viewpoint (for example, 23 8/172 and 469/354). He inwardly relives not only all the terrible suffering that is part of the human condition, but also the evil and murderous passions that cause it. He knows very well how Rogozhin feels. Aglaya at one point says that though he is sometimes “sick in his mind,” he has more wisdom than all other people and that of all the people she knows only her mother has some of that wisdom (471-72/356).

Before the tragic plot comes to a head, Myshkin for a moment considers to escape it all, perhaps to return to Switzerland, but then decides that this would be cowardly and that he will have to enter this world and meet the challenge that it offers him (344/256). This suggests that Myshkin, like Jesus Christ, has a mission

In spite of all his moral qualities, Prince Myshkin is an apparent failure. He returns to the mental asylum he came from without having significantly affected the lives of most people he met. They “go on living as before and have changed but little” (668/508). A notebook entry confirms this but adds, “But wherever he did touch someone, he left an indelible trace everywhere” (242). The Prince may be held responsible for Nastasya Filippovna’s tragic and Aglaya’s disappointing fates.

There are critics who understand the allegoric message of The Idiot to be a negative one. Murray Krieger properly entitled his interpretation “The Curse of Saintliness.” Some other critics have suggested that although Dostoevsky’s original intent was to present a positive alternative to Ippolit’s pessimistic existential philosophy, the integrity of his creative imagination forced him to let Myshkin, Ippolit’s ideological antagonist, fail dismally. These critics do consider the fact that Jesus Christ was in their terms a failure: people went on living as before and changed but little even after He departed this world. Some of the most beloved saints of the Russian church were not successful prelates but humble martyrs or “fools in Christ.” Myshkin’s response to Ippolit’s challenge has to be found in something other than the plot of the novel.

Edward Wasiolek, in his book Dostoevsky: The Major Fiction (1964), put it this way; “The..Prince is a success because for a moment he is able to kindle the faith in others of a truer image of themselves; for a few minutes he is able to quiet, by his own suffering, the rage of insult upon insult.” This moves success from the level of action and good deeds to the level of attitudes of the human soul. Kjetsaa, among others, has pointed out that it is precisely this idea that answers the question as to the novel’s religious message. He suggests that in the context of Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodox faith the attitude of a man’s heart, his responsiveness to God’s grace, the degree of his spirituality, rather than his moral accomplishments, are the measure of a Christian’s progress.

In a conversation with Rogozhin in chapter 4 of part 2, Myshkin brings up this topic. He tells of a murderer who begs God for mercy even as he cuts his victim’s throat and of a young mother who crosses herself as she sees the first smile on her baby’s face, then observes that “religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanors” (252-53/183-84). Dostoevsky’s works have a pattern of tolerance of sins of commission. His drunks, thieves, frauds, and even murderers are often treated with sympathy. They also have a pattern of stern judgment of sins of omission — that is, a lack of compassion, kindness, and forgiveness.

With his own example and with those that he reports, Prince Myshkin acknowledges the irresoluble antinomy between the Orthodox Christian’s position and that of the unbeliever. Michael Holquist has defined this antinomy in terms of two aspects of time: chronos and /kairos. There is unstoppable, irretrievable, entropic chronos: Nastasya Filippovna cannot retrieve her innocence, Myshkin cannot stop the unfolding catastrophe, Rogozhin cannot escape his fate. Christ died on the cross, a son of man, nor did He stop the course of history..

This is the only kind of time the unbeliever Ippolit knows, time as man’s enemy, time the destroyer and the bringer of death. But there is also kairos: the good time, the right time, the moment of epiphany, the moment when chronos comes to a stop, all of which Ippolit mockingly rejects (425/318). It is here that Myshkin’s epilepsy acquires a symbolic meaning. He is subject to the course of time in a real world (only Christ is beyond time), but during the moment of ecstasy before a fit time does have a stop (258/188). The experience described by Myshkin is real and not to be confused with “abnormal and unreal visions” triggered by opium, hashish, or wine; it is in fact an experience of reality quintessentially compressed.

Early on in the novel, Myshkin expresses his intuitive awareness of a reality other than that of mundane experience: “I kept fancying that if I walked straight on, far, far away and reached that line where sky and earth meet, there I should find the key to the mystery, there I should see a new life a thousand times richer and more turbulent than ours” (82/51).

Myshkin’s function on the religious-metaphysical level of the novel is “not to alter the course of the action but to disseminate the aura of a new state of being.” This “state of being” is one of communion and unity with the all, with God, and hence with nature and humanity. Somewhat surprisingly the explicit statement to this effect is made by Ippolit and not by Prince Myshkin: “In scattering the seed, scattering your ‘charity,’ your kind deeds, you are giving away, in one form or another, part of your personality, and taking into yourself part of another; you are in mutual communion with one another… All your thoughts, all the seeds scattered by you, perhaps forgotten by you, will grow up and take form” (447/336).

This “state of being” means overcoming the separation from God, nature, and humanity that comes in the wake of human individuation and surrender to hostile chronos. This victory over human alienation is easier for the Orthodox Christian, since Orthodox Christianity, taking a less extreme view of the effect of original sin than the Western church, perceives man as inherently divine as well as earthly, while Western Christendom stresses man’s sinful earthly nature. To Dostoevsky, at Orthodox Christian, moments in which man’s divine nature allows him to commune with God and His cosmos are a part of reality

Ippolit, an unbeliever and a self-centered, alienated individual looking for the absolute but finds none because he looks for it for and within himself. Myshkin, a believer, gratefully accepts what God, nature, and men bring him because he has overcome his sense of separateness. At one point Prince S. suggests that Myshkin believes in finding paradise on earth (380/ 282). However, in several passages in the novel we learn that Myshkin at one time suffered precisely from a sense of separateness and alienation: “What affected me most was that everything was strange [chuzhoe, which is perhaps better translated by “alien”]; I realized that. I was crushed by the strangeness of it. I was finally roused from this gloomy state, I remember, one evening on reaching Switzerland at Bâle, and I was roused by the bray of an ass in the marketplace” (78-79/ 48).

Later in the novel, Myshkin remembers how he had “stretched out his hand to that bright, infinite blue, and had shed tears” because “he was utterly outside all this” (466/351). However, Myshkin’s alienation is different from Ippolit’s. It is not alienation through individuation, the inevitable result of human free will and a condition that follows the fall from grace, but rather the pristine condition of a soul that is awakening to a consciousness of self, of its freedom, and of God.

The allegoric role of Nastasya Filippovna is announced early in the novel. As Myshkin is left alone with her photograph, he raises it to his lips and kisses it (104/68). Adelaida, on seeing it, says: “With beauty like that one might turn the world upside down” (105/69). Nastasya Fi1ippovna is no ordinary beauty. (Adelaida, it must be noted, is herself an exceptionally handsome woman.) Nastasya Filippovna’s is a beauty illuminated by an aura of the ideal. Mochulsky, who on the empirical plane describes Nastasya Filippovna as a “proud beauty” and “wronged heart,” projects her on the metaphysical plane as “a symbol of beauty,” seduced and degraded by “the prince of this world.”

Myshkin immediately recognizes in her divine Psyche, an emanation of the world soul. In a somewhat less fanciful way, one may see Nastasya Filippovna as a symbol of pure beauty cast into a world that is incapable of appreciating beauty. Totsky, Ganya, Epanchin, and Rogozhin, each in his own way, futilely seek to possess her. Totsky, who fancies himself an aesthete, is really a common lecher, who reduces the radiant beauty of an innocent maiden to the glamor of a demimondaine.

Rogozhin, obsessed with the urge to possess her, does not realize that he is pursuing beauty, an ideal entity, which must inevitably elude his violent carnal passion. Nastasya Filippovna tells him that his passion for her is no different from his father’s obsession with the accumulation of money, also a futile pursuit of a forever elusive goal. Rogozhin, wiser than his father, kills her. Only Myshkin can perceive the ideal of pure beauty in her. Myshkin, who says that “beauty will save the world,” cannot save Nastasya Filippovna. The very context (423/317) suggests that he was wrong. This agrees with the message of The Brothers Karamazov, where Dimitry Karamazov, a believer in the power of beauty, learns that it is not beauty that saves the world, but faith.

Nastasya Filippovna’s beauty suffers the same fate as Prince Myshkin’s saintliness. In mundane, temporal terms, it does not save anyone. It does turn the world upside down, and it causes Nastasya Filippovna and all the men around her nothing but grief. But as a vision, as the symbo1of an ideal, it is an immediate revelation of the divine. Again, this makes more sense in an Orthodox Christian context than it does in a secular context.

The Orthodox belief that ideally the human face has retained the divine features of God’s face, a belief on which the worship of icons is based, makes Prince Myshkin’s reaction to Nastasya Filippovna’s portrait more understandable.

The irresoluble contradiction between two opposing principles is underlined by recurrent bursts of strident dissonance, scandal, and violence that disturb the otherwise placid world of middle-class St. Petersburg. Prince Myshkin’s appearance coincides with an eruption of disorder, discord, and ultimately misery and death in the world he has entered. This is allegorically significant. The temporal world to which Christ descended was one of discord and violence. The disharmonious world of The Idiot falls in line with the orientation of modern religious novels by Graham Greene, François Mauriac, Heinrich Boll, Anthony Burgess, and others.

The conjuring of scandals is one of Dostoevsky’s great specialties, and The Idiot features a long line of them. The Prince is a party to a series of scandalous scenes. Varya spits in her brother’s face, who tries to attack her, is stopped by the Prince, and slaps the Prince’s face (142/99). Rogozhin’s drunken crowd crashes the genteel gathering at Nastasya Filippovna’s, and a climactic scandalous scene ensues (184/131-32). Nastasya Filippovna disrupts a gathering that has already seen much unpleasantness by announcing that Rogozhin has bought up Evgeny Pavlovich’s IOUs (337/251). A bit later there comes the horsewhipping scene (391/291).

The scene between Aglaya and Nastasya Filippovna ends in another scandal. Finally, Nastasya Filippovna runs away from her wedding. Myshkin is unable to prevent any of these scandals. Yet his reaction is in each case that of a Christian, not to say that of a Christ figure. The allegoric message of this is that religious feeling “has nothing to do with crimes and misdemeanors” or, more specifically, that the essence of religion does not lie in the successful prevention or curtailment of scandalous behavior, impropriety, violence, or crime but in a willingness to meet these acts with forebearance, kindness, and courage.

The same applies to a series of executions that appear in the text in one form or another throughout the novel. They are another symbol of the jarring dissonance between the principles of chronos and kairos. Myshkin brings up this theme twice at the very outset of the novel and immediately establishes the cruel paradox it entails:

The uncertainty and feeling of aversion for that new thing which would be and was just coming was awful. But he said that nothing was so dreadful at that time as the continual thought, “What if I were not to die! What if I could go back to life — what eternity! And it would all be mine! I would turn every minute into an age; I would lose nothing, I would count every minute as it passed, I would not waste one!” He said that this idea turned to such a fury at last that he longed to be shot quickly. (83-84/52)

The point of this is, of course, that the condemned man will, if his life will be indeed spared, go back on his promise to live a life beyond the tyranny of chronos. He will not “turn every minute into an age” but will waste it, as most men do most of the time.

Subsequently several further executions are brought up. The Countess Du Barry pleads with her executioner for another moment of life (227/164). The boyar [vocab: A member of a class of higher Russian nobility that until the time of Peter I headed the civil and military administration of the country] Stephan Glebov, impaled under Peter the Great, Chancellor Osterman, who went through a mock execution (571-72/432-33), and finally Thomas More (580/440) are brought up to illustrate the idea that in earlier days men were “of one idea” and therefore capable of making death a meaningful part of their existence, while “modern men are broader-minded — and I swear that this prevents their being so all-of-a-piece as they were in those days” (572/433).

We also hear that the Prince is “collecting facts relating to capital punishment” (426/319). There is also the description of Holbein’s “Deposition of Christ,” Ippotit’s “Essential Explanation,” and the death of Nastasya Filippovna under Rogozhin’s knife. In all of these instances Prince Myshkin is more than a passive observer. Rather, he vicariously experiences each death as though it were his own, each execution as though he were the victim — and the executioner. This powerful assertion of dissonance, discord, and death is deeply meaningful, because it does not disturb the Prince faith or his serene acceptance of the world as it is.

Posted in Book Recommendations, Understanding Dostoevsky | Tagged Ippolit Terentyev, Prince Myshkin, The Idiot | Leave a Comment »

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