4) SENSE AND NONSENSE.
Series published since 1985 in Crisis, (1814½ "N" Street, NW, Washington, D. C., 20036). My book Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays, Ignatius Press, 1992, is a collection of about forty of these essays. Over the years, the subject matter ranges widely, with indeed, some sense and nonsense contained therein.
I will include twenty essays here:
1) "The Eastertide"; 2) "To Understand Better All the 'Whys"; 3) "The Nativity: 'An Admirable Exchange'"; 4) "On Things We May Not Have Noticed"; 5) "Horizontal Man: A New Humanity 'Without God'"; 6) "Scott Walter: An Appreciation"; 7) "Truth"; 8) "Gnosticism Reconsidered"; 9) "St. Paul"; 10) "On Pens and Pencils."
11) "On Things We May Not Have Noticed," 12) "The "Stabat Mater," 13) "Order," 14) "On the Reality of Fantasy," 15) "'Speak So That I May See You'," 16) "John Joseph Schall," 17) "At a Christmas Eve Mass," 18) "The Craftsman," 19) "A Little Bit of Deism," 20) "On Falling Down on "M" Street."
Other essays in this series can be found below in 19) Bibliography.
_______________
1) From Crisis, April, 1997.
Some Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
THE EASTERTIDE
In 1997, Easter fell early on March 30. On Easter Thursday, 1966 (14 April), Margaret Waugh wrote to Lady Diana Cooper recounting the death at home of her father, Evelyn Waugh, on Easter Sunday. "Don't be too upset about Papa," Margaret wrote. "I think it was kind of a wonderful miracle. You know how he longed to die and dying as he did on Easter Sunday, when all the liturgy is about death and resurrection, after a Latin Mass and holy communion, would be exactly as he wanted. I am sure he had prayed for death at Mass. I am very happy for him" (A Bitter Trial, St. Austin Press, p. 66).
I have a copy of Waugh's autobiography, A Little Learning. In it there is a photo identified as "The Lundy Island Group, Easter, 1925." In it Waugh, at 22, is seen sitting on beach rocks; he wears a turtle-neck sweater, knickers. Behind him are two friends, Terence Greenidge and David Plunkett-Green, with Green's two sisters Olivia and Gwen. Waugh has some romantic interest in Olivia at the time. But "there was no question of me and Olivia marrying...." This is how Waugh described this Olivia: "She nagged and bullied at times, she suffered from morbid self-consciousness, she was incapable of the ordinary arts and efforts of pleasing and was generally incapable of any kind of ostentation; a little crazy, truth-loving, and in the end holy" (p. 218). At Eastertide, from 1925, it is well to remember that anyone can be holy.
Waugh himself died in the faith but was not a happy man with it. His last letter of 30 March 1966 (hence thirty-one years ago this Easter) was written to Lady Diana (Mitford) Mosley, a letter found Mark Amory's The Letters of Evelyn Waugh, a book which someone gave me years ago with this delightful inscription: "J. As Flannery (O'Connor) says, don't make an algebra problem out of this, just enjoy." I still laugh when I read this inscription as much directed to my character as Waugh's wit. Waugh writes to Lady Diana, "Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his Council -- they destroyed the beauty of the Liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the faith doggedly without joy. Church going is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored." As he only lived twelve more days, we can be sure he did not see the Liturgy "restored."
Margaret Waugh was born in 1942. Waugh had great affection for her. On the First Sunday in Lent, 1954, (she was twelve), he wrote to her at school, "I hope that you have given up swearing & smoking & drinking for Lent." When she was fifteen, Margaret wrote to her father complaining how much she disliked the girls' Convent school. With a piece of advice that would either put him in jail or earn the undying hatred of educationists today, Waugh wrote to her, "I think it a weakness of girls' schools that they have no adequate punishments. When a boy is naughty he is beaten and that is the end of it. All this admonition makes for resentment and the part of your letter that I don't like at all is where you say the nuns 'hate' you. That is rubbish. And when you run down girls who behave better than you. That is mean. Chuck it, Meg."
Margaret wants to leave school early. Waugh tells her that they will talk about it at the next vacation. Then he added:
I was miserable at Lancing (his prep school) and kept asking my father to take me away. I am very glad now that he did not.... The whole of our life is a test & preparation for heaven -- most of it irksome. So each part of our life is an irksome test & preparation for something better. I think you would greatly enjoy Oxford and get the best out of it. But you can't get there without much boring labour and discipline.
Waugh adds this tender instruction to his daughter unhappy at school: "Don't get into your silly head that anyone hates you or is unfair to you. You are loved far beyond your deserts, especially by your Papa."
There is something appropriate at Eastertide in reading these two letters, Margaret Waugh to Lady Cooper and of Waugh to his daughter at school. The daughter knows something is right about her father dying on Easter Sunday after Latin Mass. Even though he did not live to see the Liturgy restored, this was the same man who wrote to his daughter that "the whole of our life is a test and a preparation for something better."
2) From Crisis, December, 1991.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
"TO UNDERSTAND BETTER ALL THE 'WHYS'"
The Feast of St. Luke, one of those perfectly beautiful October days in Washington, was a Friday. After a noon class in which I was discoursing on Hobbes, a Saudi student in class told me that he liked this material. Machiavelli and Hobbes were not allowed to be studied in his country, he explained. This remark about their now being his "favorites," however, made me wonder whether he thought these two strange philosophers were also favorites of mine. I decided I was just luminously unclear. I did not especially want to be known as what Strauss called "a teacher of evil" in Saudi Arabia!
In any case, the Sun was out and warm after a very wet, cozy day. I cut down to the C & O Canal Path below the campus and just above the Potomac. As I walked under Key Bridge, I noticed a rather elegant chalk pastel on the base of the Arch under which I was about to walk. The mural-like painting began with a large "WHY?" On getting closer, the words following were, "Is Life So Hard?"
We never know what to make of such random graphics on abandoned walls and sturdy bridges. But we wonder if this poignant question is perhaps a joke or is it a cri de coeur? Is it a philosophical query or a sign of existential pain? If you bother to read the other graphics on such public walls, of course, you will soon decide to take nothing on them too seriously.
Yet, the perennial question -- "why is life so hard, so difficult?" -- takes on a further depth if we think of it in the Christmas Season. The Incarnation of the Son of God among men was intended to address that poignant query found at the Base of Key Bridge on the Feast of St. Luke, the same St. Luke who gave us an account of the Nativity of Christ. The Incarnation, itself the primary grounding for joy for our kind, does not immediately take away the difficulties, as we might, at first sight, expect God to do for us.
On July 10, 1985, John Paul II gave a brief address on "Proof of God's Existence." The Holy Father is the first to acknowledge that what we think of God makes a difference. Indeed this very question, "why is life so hard?", is a challenge to God. It implies that life ought not to be so hard; but if it is, it is somehow God's problem if not His fault.
Christianity, of course, holds that if we did not exist, if the world did not exist at all, there would be no difficulties, no pain. Some no doubt would rather prefer to think the world and God out of existence than to have one human soul cry out below Key Bridge, "why is life so hard?" And yet, the askers of such questions need to listen for answers, something that may require even more bravery.
After reviewing the arguments for the existence of God, John Paul II concluded,
The proofs of the existence of God are many and convergent. They contribute to show that faith does not humble human intelligence, but stimulates it to reflections and permits it to understand better all the "whys" posed by the observation of reality.
What is remarkable about this passage of the Holy Father is its recognition that we are both to "pose" our "whys" and to answer them in the light of God's existence. We are given knowledge of God not so that we will be humble but that we may know more, may know all that is. "Why is life so hard?" is clearly a question that most people have asked if not about themselves, surely about others. The more important question is not "why is life so hard?" but why is there human life at all, even if it is difficult?
If we look at Luke's account of the Nativity, it is striking to note the number of "whys" that appear in the text. First of all, Caesar Augustus wanted to know how the number of inhabitants in his Empire. This census turned out directly to effect where Christ was born. Why was Christ born in Bethlehem? Because of Caesar, because of the Prophecy. The conditions of making it to Bethlehem answered why Christ was born in a manger.
And what does one do with questions properly posed? St. Luke describes Mary. She listened to what the Shepherds had told her about events going on around this Birth. "When (the Shepherds) saw Him, they recounted what they had been told about this Child; and all who heard were astonished at what the shepherds said."
What did Mary "do" about this new knowledge? "But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered over them." She treasured and she pondered.
In his A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, Josef Pieper wrote: "Only someone who is silent is listening." And he goes on, as if to reflect on this scene of Mary "pondering" in silence the events which she has seen and heard.
Since reason is nothing else than the power to understand reality, then all reasonable, sensible, sound, clear, and heart-stirring talk stems from listening silence. Thus all discourse requires a foundation in the motherly depth of silence.
Only someone who is silent is listening. All discourse comes out of the motherly depths of silence. The words of silence are to be fruitful.
We are then to understand all the "whys" that are posed from our observations of nature and, with Mary, our listening to the words and the events about the Nativity when the Shepherds heard the "Glory to God in the Highest."
"Why is life so hard?" I think it is a remarkably Catholic thing to realize that we are meant also to "understand" this hardness of life. To do this, we must ponder why the Christ was born among us as a Child. We must realize that God created and redeemed precisely us, our kind, ourselves. We must say, looking at the Incarnation, that in spite of the tragedies and difficulties of life, we exist and post the questions about the "whys."
In silence we listen with Mary, who pondered all these things in her heart, a heart that the sword would pierce, a heart that knew that this suffering was intended, even from its beginning, for our glory, for our joy in which all these cries are subsumed in glory if we accept the dignity God has given to us, the dignity of choosing what we are, of choosing to learn from what God is so that we may know what we are.
3) From Crisis, December, 1993.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
THE NATIVITY: AN "ADMIRABLE EXCHANGE"
In And the Beagles and the Bunnies Shall Lie Down Together, there is a sequence on the Great Pumpkin, the Peanuts not so subtle homage to Christmas, about how the Great Pumpkin rises out of the Patch and looks for sincere boys and girls to whom to give lots of toys. Peppermint Patty and Linus are sitting under a tree, both looking off in the distance in different directions. Peppermint Patty, in the previous sequence, had been the only one who would believe Linus' story. Linus is actually astonished that someone else would believe him.
Patty explains to Linus, "You know why I believe your story about the 'Great Pumpkin'?" As they walk away, Linus behind her, Patty continues, "Because I am very superstitious that's why! The more impossible something is, the more I believe it! That's the way I am!" The next scene shows a perplexed Linus asking Patty, "You think the Great Pumpkin story is impossible?" Patty replied, "Oh, it's impossible all right.... It's impossible, ridiculous, and stupid." But in the final scene, she turns to Linus with a yell that blows him over, "BUT I BELIEVE IT!!"
Credo quia impossibile, quia absurdam.... But of course, the Christian account of the Nativity is not based on impossibility or absurdity as many would like us to believe. It is based on fact, which requires us to change our definitions of what we think possible and impossible. If it happened; it is not impossible. Then, granting that it happened and is therefore possible, we are required to think about this event, this possibility, this "but I believe it". To explain the Nativity, we have to explain the world and more than the world. We also have to explain ourselves to ourselves. And we cannot fully explain ourselves to ourselves without Christ.
In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, "Through Jesus Christ, and in Jesus Christ, we prove God, and teach morality and doctrine. Jesus Christ is then the true God of men" (#546). We find a deliberate paradox here, of course. "True God of men".... Jesus is man-God, true God and true man, as the Creeds say. We might argue that the Pascal's "true God of man" need not be a man-God, though what Pascal probably meant was that we men will never really understand God unless He is like unto ourselves somehow. The very meaning of the Nativity is that He is like unto ourselves. We prove God and teach morality and doctrine because the Word is made flesh.
Christmas falls on a Saturday this year. We also know that it falls in the Summer in the Southern Hemisphere, that it can be very warm on Christmas in California, very cold in Minnesota, that different lands celebrate Christmas in different manners. The Christmas tree, the Yule Log, the carols, the mangers, the presents. We know of efforts to bring "Christ back into Christmas." We are aware that His presence in Christmas is looked upon by many as a threat, and it is in a way. The public imagery of Christmas in our society has been almost entirely secularized with bells and trees and dippy Santas. And even Santa causes objections to some. Yet, at least till now, we keep the day, keep the day holy even.
Christmas is said to be overly commercialized and secularized, and of course it is. Yet this is not such a bad thing. Over reaction to something good is not nearly so dangerous as a kind of parsimonious refusal to be excited about anything at all, particularly about something of the proportions of The Nativity.
What is this Christmas anyhow? It is about the birth of a Child into the world, at a definite time, in a definite place. This Child was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus, when the whole world was said to be "at peace." Very few noticed this event at the time -- records talk about the parents, a Mary and a Joseph, about some shepherds, some Magi, some angels. Later there is a search for this Child. The Magi get the local king into the act because he thinks this Child might be a threat to his power. So he kills off a number of male children under two hoping to get this Child, who evidently escaped to Egypt in time thanks to his father.
Le Catéchisme de la Eglise Catholique has this to say about the Nativity, that "the coming of the Son of God on earth is an event so immense that God wished to prepare for it during the centuries." All the rites and sacrifices and symbols of the Old Testament converge toward Christ's coming (#522). We are not prepared to contemplate these striking words, that there was long preparation, lasting centuries for His coming. They mean that the events of the world, one way or another, have purpose and order, in spite of their seemingly haphazard sequences. Christ was not an accident or an after-thought.
When it comes to the mystery of this "Noël", we are told that "Jesus is born in the humility of a stable, in a poor family. Some shepherds are the first witnesses of the event. It is in that poverty that the glory of heaven is manifested" (#525). We wonder why it was this way, in such odd circumstances?
Would it not have been more effective were the glory of heaven to have been manifested directly in the household of, say, Caesar Augustus, right at the center of things, to where Paul and Peter had to go later anyhow? We have to assume that the way via Bethlehem was not only a much less flamboyant way, but also a more effective way for the reasons why the Incarnation and Nativity took place in the first place.
The Catechism then cites an ancient antiphon or anthem from the Octave of Christmas which calls the fact that "the Creator of the human race, assuming a body and a soul, has deigned to be born of a virgin and, became man without the intervention of man. He has made us a gift of His divinity" (#526). This Christ becoming man and our receiving the gift of his divinity is called "an admirable exchange." Indeed it is.
It is striking to me that the few paragraphs on the Nativity in the General Catechism talk mainly of the "admirable exchange" of God becoming man and man becoming in turn divinized so that he might live the life of God in grace. The Nativity, of course, presupposes the Incarnation, about which the first question to be asked is why did God become man? The answer is startling, yet it is that of the Creeds: "The Word became flesh in order to save us while reconciling us with God" (#457).
So Christ was not born in a manger in Bethlehem in order to demonstrate the power of God. At first sight, for God to become man in the form of an infant seems rather an act of humility, not power -- which is of course the way Christians have always seen it since Paul's notion that God emptied himself out becoming a man. We are not wrong, no doubt, to suspect that this peculiar way, the way of Incarnation and Nativity, is a better way, a way when thought about that leads to the most profound of insights into the ways of God and the meaning of man.
The Nativity of Christ, like all births, is a new beginning. Things are never the same once it has taken place. Things are new, unexpected. Yet, this Nativity took place in order to reconcile us with God. The great Cowper Madonna in the National Gallery shows Mary holding the Child with little John the Baptist as their side. All three are gazing at a Cross. Things are being prepared.
But the "admirable exchange" has taken place and is being carried out. God has become man; we are divinized. "The Word became flesh in order to save us while reconciling us with God." This is why we celebrate the Nativity. This is what we could not do by or for ourselves. That is our belief -- it is not impossible, it is not absurd. The coming of the Son of God on earth is an event of such immensity that we are still preparing for it, even as it is being carried out in time before our very eyes. The Nativity -- the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. Jesus Christ is then the true God of man.
4) From Crisis, January, 1994.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
ON THINGS WE MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED
Once upon a January, many long years ago, I was born, in a small town in Iowa. My recollections of this momentous event, naturally, remain somewhat vague. Actually, this is a great mercy, as you can readily realize, otherwise I might be tempted to write about it. As Chesterton said in his Autobiography, we have to take the fact of our own birth on faith. We have to accept the testimony of others for the truth of a primal event in which we have some considerable interest.
What made me think of this reference to my this-worldly origins was a passage I came across by chance in the works of that noted theologian, P. G. Wodehouse. He caused me to think of baptism and that original sin in which we are conceived and born, of why things go wrong in spite of our best intentions. I do not recall my own baptism either, but I believe I have seen the document attesting to it someplace. Baptism, of course, is addressed to this prevailing disorder we all seem somehow to find ourselves locked into.
My parents, also good theologians, upheld the practice of infant baptism. Give or take a couple of days, I am a born Catholic. Infant baptism, more than anything else almost, suggests that, while there is much right with the world, there is also something subtly deviant, something in the order of spirit that is capable of turning us away from what we truly are to become. If, because you are aware of the implications of this dire situation, you think you need all the help you can get in this life to get out of it in good shape, then you are for infant baptism even on pragmatic grounds. The Lord pursues us "down the nights and down the days," to recall Francis Thompson's poem.
I had even been reading Hegel, always itself a daunting exercise. Hegel observed that "the History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it." But even Hegel wanted to redeem these periods of unhappiness. He wanted to show us how "History as the slaughterbench (of the) happiness of peoples" had some purpose. He wanted to know "to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered?" To what aim indeed? Somehow we must explain, if only to ourselves, the meaning of these "enormous sacrifices" in the slaughterbench that is too often our history.
Thus, in The World of Jeeves, I read, to continue these profound topics: "I don't know if you have noticed it, but it's rummy how nothing in this world ever seems to be absolutely perfect." To be sure, I had noticed this. That is why I put Wodehouse in italics. I remember once standing on Fell Street in San Francisco for a long time thinking words very similar -- how nothing in this world ever seems to be perfect. Unfortunately, at the time, I did not have Wodehouse's memorable words to explain it all to me.
None the less, as I said, I have noticed this unsettling situation. In truth, however, something perhaps even more mysterious, I think that there probably are "absolutely perfect" things in this world, except, because even these originate in the divine perfection itself, they always have, as they should, a reference to something higher about them, even by being what they are, what E. F. Schumacher called "progressions."
Yet, there is almost something sad about Wodehouse's remark -- perhaps it was the word "rummy". We catch a certain disappointment, a certain poignancy in the heart of the comedian. He recognizes that the world is not "absolutely perfect", of course. Nevertheless, he suspects that we are not really made for this less than perfect world, even though we find ourselves in it. His very laughter at the odd things we do portends a kind of joy that we barely understand.
The fact is that things usually do turn out to be "rummy". We come to expect this "rumminess" of things. We become realists and pride ourselves on our knowledge of the way things actually are. We rightly distrust the perfection-seekers. They somehow do more damage than those who believe in the Wodehouse doctrine that "nothing in this world ever seems to turn out absolutely perfect."
This is a Christian theme. We live in a world that exists for some cause that we cannot find in the world itself. We think, all in all, it is a pretty good place. It is certainly a beautiful place in so many ways. We know ourselves to be good, yet there is always this annoying thing about our not doing what we would, something St. Paul saw in himself quite clearly.
The Councils of Orange and Trent did not speak of man's original "rumminess", to be sure. But they did say something rather similar when talking of Original Sin. Le Catéchisme de l'Eglise Catholique has some excellent and moving paragraphs on Original Sin (#396-412). I want to cite a couple lines about this topic here:
The doctrine of Original Sin -- bound to that of the Redemption by Christ, gives a glance of lucid discernment over man's condition and his acting in the world. By the sin of the First Parents, the Devil has acquired a certain domination over men, although this latter remains free. Original Sin implies "servitude under the power of him who possesses the empire of death, that is to day, the Devil" (Trent, Dz. 1511). To ignore that man has a wounded nature, inclined to evil, gives place to some grave errors in the domain of education, of politics, of social action, and of morals (#407).
I was especially struck by this last sentence. If we do not understand what is really wrong with us and the revelational remedies for it, we will never get it right in other areas.
I had just been reading Rousseau also, who is the source of much of the notion that we solve our human problems by education, politics, or social action, by changes of external structures rather than changes in our hearts. We live in a political and educational regime that has bought almost completely this doctrine. The key issues lie elsewhere, however, even though the sinful condition of mankind somehow result from the accumulation of our personal sins.
At the very beginning of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul stressed the importance of this very topic:
As a result of that mysterious original sin, committed at the prompting of Satan, the one who is "a liar and the father of lies" (Jn. 8:44), man is constantly tempted to turn his gaze away from the living and true God in order to direct it towards idols (cf. 1 Thes. 1:9), exchanging "the truth about God for a lie" (Rom. 1:25). Man's capacity to know the truth is also darkened, and his will to submit to it is weakened. Thus, giving himself over to relativism and skepticism (cf. Jn. 18:38), he goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself (#1).
No paragraph I know more clearly suggests what is behind the ideologies and moral currents of our time. The search for illusory freedom is precisely the meaning of our public order in so far as it rejects, as it does, the truths contained in revelation and the reason that supports it.
Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha is a most formidable woman who looks with a most critical eye on her nephew's aberrations. "'Bertie,'she said -- in part and chattily -- 'it is young men like you who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair!'" About the only thing that Bertie could reply to this not altogether inaccurate observation was "What-ho!"
Aunt Agatha continued her analysis, ending with a most surprising solution to her nephew's problems:
"Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in selfish idleness a life which might have been made useful, helpful, and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone --" She fixed me with a glittering eye, "Bertie, you must marry!"
Aunt Agatha, to Bertie's consternation, proceeded to explain just what sort of woman she had in mind. "You want somebody strong, self-reliant, and sensible, to counterbalance the deficiencies and weaknesses of your character...."
Well, we get the point. Our fallenness is pretty real, and not altogether without its amusing side. That is to say, we are a fallen race, with many deficiencies and weaknesses in our characters, but we are also redeemed. We go off, as the Pope said, because we turn our gaze away from the living and true God and substitute our own inventions. Those who have the future of the human race at heard are indeed tempted to despair. Yet, we cannot help but suspecting that Bertie is closer to the truth than Aunt Agatha. It's rummy "how nothing in this world ever seems to turn out to be absolutely perfect."
As I said, I have noticed this too. It is a question, however, as the Pope hinted, about where we allow our gaze to fall. We can conclude from all this rumminess but two things, I think. The first is that our gaze does have a proper object in the light of which all else is and is glorious. And the second is that our gaze is such that we can avert it from what we might really want. In the end, what we really want is first given to us.
"Joy," Josef Pieper wrote, "lies in receiving what we love." Our reaction to the slaughterbenches of history, to the rumminess of actual things ultimately suggests that all things are related to an absolute perfection, on which we seek to gaze. We are what we are because we must still choose to see what is to be seen. This is our lot. This is the context both of our damnation and of our glory. We would not have it otherwise.
5) From Crisis, September, 1992..
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
THE HORIZONTAL MAN: "A 'NEW HUMANITY' WITHOUT GOD"
A cartoon in the New Yorker (Mankoff, 2 D 91) puts us in the office of a "Mob Psychologist," The Psychologist is dutifully sitting in his arm chair, notebook in hand, glasses, rather innocent-looking. He turns slightly to the patient. There, horizontal on the proverbial couch, lies a middle-aged Mafioso, in pin-stripped suit, fedora, dark glasses, bearing a certain anguish on his face as if he has suffered an unaccustomed spiritual crisis. To reassure the troubled Mobster, the Psychologist says to him soothingly, "So, while extortion, racketeering, and murder may be bad acts, they don't make you a bad person."
Those of us who still recall our common sense Aristotle -- and if we don't, we will miss the humor -- will recognize in the cartoon the exact opposite philosophy to that on which our civilization is based, namely, that the only things that can make us "bad persons" are precisely our own "bad acts." While it is true that our essential being remains good, even in Hell, still for the sort of beings we are, rational and free finite persons, we decide what we do with our given goodness. We implicitly deny it or affirm it by our thoughts and our deeds.
In his extraordinarily enlightening Encyclical, Redemptoris Missio (December 7, 1990), John Paul II wrote,
In the modern world there is a tendency to reduce man to his horizontal dimension alone. But without an openness to the Absolute, what does man become? The answer to this question is found in the experience of every individual, but it is also written in the history of humanity with the blood shed in the name of ideologies or by political regimes which have sought to build a "new humanity" without God (#8).
We should not, forget, I think, to ponder this last phrase of the Holy Father, as it is a picture of our own time, including too often, of our democratic time. We should not fail to wonder what a "New Humanity" constructed obviously by ourselves but explicitly "without God" might look like.
The Holy Father often uses this imagery of "horizontal" and "vertical" because it is an apt one to clarify what is at issue in the modern world. The horizontal dimension of "man alone" means simply that the Mobster was wrong to have bad feelings about his actions. Whatever he might do, he remains "a good person." The link between what caused the person to be and the person's actions following on his reality is broken. If we eliminate any "vertical" dimension of man, any direct and personal relation to God as to what man is in his being and in his actions, we receive, admittedly, a certain kind of "new freedom." This new freedom separates us from a morality of action itself based on being, on what is, in which we are not creators of ourselves or completely independent formulators of what we ought to do.
On Thursday, April 8, 1773, Boswell tells that he sat a good part of the evening with Samuel Johnson, who was "very silent." However, Johnson interrupted his silence to remark that "Burnet's History of His Own Times is very entertaining. The style, indeed, is mere chit-chat. I do not believe that Burnet intentionally lyed; but he was so much prejudiced, that he took no pains to find out the truth." Finding out the truth, in other words, takes "pains," even when we are not intentionally lying and enjoy the "chit-chat."
I bring Samuel Johnson up in the context of "the Horizontal Man" and the Mobster who does not want to be "a bad person" because we often forget that we have an obligation not merely to avoid bad acts like "extortion, racketeering, and murder" but also to think properly, to think truly.
this is why we are given minds in the first place. We live in a time, I think, when the very notion of "thinking properly" or "thinking the truth" is looked upon as a contradiction or impossibility. "Truth" discourse becomes cynically "whose truth"? That is to say, "truth discourse" does not exist, there is only "interest discourse." This is the contemporary ideological party line.
At the very first address he gave to the Jury, Socrates told them: "Think only of the truth of my words, and give heed to them: let the speaker speak truly." Our civilization is based on Socrates in this sense, that truth, its telling, its pursuit, is the center of what we are. A man who "takes no pains to tell the truth," as Samuel Johnson pointed out, is not to be praised, not because the truth cannot be found, but because he does not want to take any pains to find it. But if we think there is no truth, if we implicitly repeat as our own Pilate's retort to Christ "what is truth?", then we will not know why the Mobster is not right, why being a good person has something to do with our deeds.
We are not, ultimately, horizontal men, however much we are concerned with our world. Of course, it is best to say that we are both horizontal, concerned with the world, and vertical, concerned first with God. In one of his letters, to Nancy Mitford, August 26, 1946, the British novelist Evelyn Waugh wrote:
Saints are people who have a peculiar intimacy with God and as a result give evidence of sublime virtues and usually of miraculous powers. You can never understand them unless you start with God, then go to man as his creation -- a special order of being with unique limitations, opportunities & obligations. Saints are simply men & women who have fulfilled their natural obligation which is to approach God. It is in that that all mankind has a different nature from the rest of the animal kingdom.
The special nature of man, intimacy with God -- these are things we do not hear so often. Indeed, many would deny such truths as they understand both the possibility of an exclusively horizontal relation of man to man and the possibility that we can be good in our order of being no matter what we do.
"A 'new humanity' without God" is not only not possible, it is not even desirable. This is the truth of the matter. John Paul II, as usual, has it right:
The temptation today is to reduce Christianity to merely human wisdom, a pseudoscience of well-being. In our heavily secularized world a "gradual secularization of salvation" has taken place, so that people strive for the good of man, but man who is truncated, reduced to his merely horizontal dimension (#11).
The "pseudoscience of well-being," the "gradual secularization of salvation" have indeed taken place. This reductionism is what our media and our politics are basically about in one way or another. The noble language of "striving for the good of man" is largely the good of horizontal man, the man truncated, the man reduced.
We can never understand saints, we can never understand men and women, unless we start with God. The Holy Father's question remains to haunt us -- "Without an openness to the Absolute, what does man become?" The fact is, we are finding out. This discovery is the meaning and history of our time, that the new humanities without God are lethal, that the truth of man includes the truth of God's creating him to be of "a different nature from the rest of the animal kingdom."
"So while extortion, racketeering, and murder may be bad actions, they don't make you a bad person." "But I do not believe that Burnet intentionally lyed; but he was so much prejudiced, that he took no pains to find out the truth." "Think only of the truth of my words, and give heed to them: let the speaker speak truly." "The temptation today is to reduce Christianity to merely human wisdom." "Saints are men and women who have fulfilled their natural obligation, which is to approach God."
Our style, in other words, should not be "mere chit-chat." Yet "truth talk" can be entertaining. Even in cartoons with mobsters and psychologists can we grasp the truth of things. There is thus a "history of our times." We should, knowing our prejudices, seek with great pains its truth, that there is no explanation of humanity, new or old, without God. In the end, even the word "horizontal" implies the word "horizon."
6) From Crisis, October, 1994.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
SCOTT WALTER -- AN APPRECIATION
Generally, before publication these Sense and Nonsense columns are faxed to me by Scott Walter every month to see if there are any corrections or other changes in the text before final publication. This exchange has been going on for over a decade now. In late July, I received the galleys for the September issue. In the course of the instructions, Scott added, "By the way, it's official: I leave Crisis October 1 for the AEI magazine." Of course, I had not known that Scott Walter, the Managing Editor of Crisis almost since its beginnings, had any such idea in mind. To be sure, many of his friends and admirers had long thought that Scott's very obvious talents could well be exercised in a more well-known, larger environment. So I suppose it was just a question of time until something else came along for Scott, something he would be foolish to pass up. Still, I know that Crisis has been something that Scott has thought worthy of his careful attention. Every page of the journal over these years shows the marks of his devotion to it.
Scott Walter grew up in the printing business. His father had a printing company in Knoxville, Tennessee. I first ran into Scott when he was an undergraduate here at Georgetown. He was always one of those fine inquisitive students who made teaching eminently worthwhile. Scott was, moreover, that pleasantly annoying student in the presence of whom you would mention a book not to be missed, only to find out that by the next class he had gone out and read it, plus a couple of other tomes in the same area which you yourself had not yet read. He was in the first course in St. Thomas that I taught here at Georgetown, aeons ago, not that Scott is that old. He can still cite some of the things I said in that class. No teacher can relax his guard before such a retentive student! Years later, some outlandish thing you said will be recalled word-for-word at a party before all your bemused, but not overly surprised, friends.
In fact, to return to his age, as an undergraduate, Scott looked like he was about fourteen. Scott always dresses well and has a penchant for bow ties. I am sure when he is seventy, he will still look about forty. This youngish quality is no doubt a genetic characteristic we would all like to possess. Scott's parents now live in Fort Myers, in Florida. One of his parents, his mother, I think, actually made a hole-in-one on one of the golf courses there. Scott, I believe, has successfully eschewed athletics since youth, thought he is known to have appeared at the near-by Middleburg Hunt in a natty Madras jacket.
Crisis magazine has two founders, but at the level of actual production and organization, of putting the thing together and getting it out, Scott Walter has been Crisis. I know of no one more devoted to his job, better at it, and more generous with his time. And he is good. I recall several years ago that B. F. Smith, that most careful and exact of writers, told me that Scott is amazing in his editorship. He knows the language and just what an author is about. His corrections or advice to authors is always right to the point and somehow always according to the spirit of the writer's intention. Anne Burleigh, an equally concise and elegant writer, has noted the same quality in Scott. Very few things, in my experience, slip by Scott. If something looks dubious, badly stated, or inaccurate, he well want to have the matter clarified. Nothing helps a writer more than such a good editor.
Every so often, Scott will invite me to supper, usually at Clyde's, here in Georgetown, a favorite haunt of his. Scott is an expert in bartenders, not so much in their pourings, but in their lives. He will often bring along one or other of his friends. His conversation is always lively, informed, and witty. So, he has been a good friend. I also call him one of my very greatest benefactors. Ever since he was an undergraduate, he has saved articles or clippings that he thought I would like to see. He knows somehow what I need to see that I might otherwise miss. At Christmas or my birthday, he often sends me a book that I would not otherwise have known about. He is a follower of the used-book sales here in Washington and regularly reminds me when big sales are taking place.
Once Scott gave me a copy of Thomas à Kempis' Sermons to the Novices Regular. This was a book coming from the middle of the 1400's, translated by Dom Vincent Scully at St. Ives in Cornwall, and printed in London by Kegan Paul, Trench, Truener and Company, in 1907. The dedication in Scott's script reads, following the spirit of Thomas a Kempis' advice to his novices, but with obvious overtones for older clerics: "For Father Schall, in the hopes that he may 'have patience amid the slothful and perverse'." Needless to say, this is good Augustinian advice for anyone in this vale of tears, to have "patience amid the slothful and perverse". In Sermon XX to the Novices at Mt. St. Agnes, entitled, "On Daily Taking Up the Cross Embraced in Religion," I read this admonition: "Wo, also to wandering and dissipated monks, religious only in name and habit; who carry their cross with murmuring and obey unwillingly: keep their cell ill, easily break silence; shun toil, love idleness...." Scott did not underline these lines, but I got the point.
Scott also gave me the wonderful London Folio Society Editions of George and Weedon Grossmith's The Diary of a Nobody and P. G. Wodehouse's Leave It to Psmith, along with the Peter Pauper Press's elegant edition of the Discourses of Epictetus. Anyone who would even know about these three books, let alone the Folio Society and the Peter Pauper Press, cannot be all bad. Scott has always had a cordial and stimulating interest in anything connected with Crisis, its writers, and its operation. Indeed, one of the very best things ever in Crisis was Scott's "Interview" with the late Walker Percy (July, 1989). I manage to go over to the office on 15th and K Streets once in a while. It is a clutter of magazines and things connected with magazines. Scott has overseen the installation of the Crisis computer system. He has been on top of every issue as it has come out over the past decade and more. Perhaps some can imagine that Crisis would have existed and grown without him. I cannot imagine it. How often have I called late at night or on the weekends, to find him still there finishing or starting a new month's edition. I am sure he could not have been paid by the hour else the magazine would have been broke long ago.
Crisis, I think, occupies a unique place in Catholic and general literary journalism. It has occupied a permanent things center mostly abandoned by Commonweal, America, and other journals. But it has carved out its own unique style and slant and philosophy. It is clearly a journal of high intelligence written by and for men and women who love and know the Church, who have a sense of the romance of "orthodoxy" and a hard-headed appreciation of things that can go wrong both in political and sacred things. And the Crisis editors and writers bear marks of that infallible sign -- they love and know the Holy Father, surely the greatest and most learned Pope of modern time, of any time, the most remarkable man in public life today. Needless to say, as a Jesuit I have been particularly touched by this sense of the centrality of the Holy Father. Under Ralph McInerny and Michael Novak, that sanity so characteristic of classical Catholicism has been manifest. I think Crisis's many devoted non-Catholic readers and writers have appreciated the fact that they could look to this journal to find an intelligent, careful, and reasonable position about things sacred and secular.
Scott Walter, in addition, has known so many younger writers and encouraged them. I have gotten in the habit of asking him who is new on the scene or what are the people we mutually know thinking about. He has always had, for a young man, a sense of style and the instinct for what Chesterton called "Orthodoxy". Scott came into the Catholic Church on a Holy Saturday a couple of years ago. It seemed his natural home and he was the first to realize it. He found a good priest to instruct him at St. Joseph's on Capitol Hill. But he also knew so many lay Catholics and, let me add, sane and wonderful Jews, Protestants, and whatever, that crossed his path at Crisis. So Crisis has been his natural home during this past decade. Scott knew the audience that needed to hear what Crisis had to say, and he knew the literature. He knew about Chesterton and Belloc, about a Kempis and St. Thomas, about St. Augustine and St. Teresa. He knows about Mother Teresa, about Fathers Robert Sokolowski, Bill Smith, Martin O'Connell, Paul Mankowski, Ernest Fortin, Richard John Neuhaus, and Kenneth Baker. He also knew a whole remarkable host of younger (and getting older) scholars, editors, and writers -- Terry Hall, Michael Jackson, George Weigel, Anne Carson Daly, Daniel Mahoney, David Boveniser, the Hitchcocks, Gerry Russello, Russell Hittinger, Kimberly Gustin Bright, Hadley Arkes, Leon Podles, Dinesh D'Souza, George Marlin, Michael Pakaluk, Robert Royal, Tracy Simmons, Mark Henrie, and scores of others who grace the pages of Crisis.
As Scott is staying right here in the Nation's Capital, I am not saying farewell. However, it would be unseemly if he were to leave Crisis without knowing the esteem and appreciation that many of us have had for his devoted and exceptional work. Scott has enormous energy and will not be far away in distance and, we hope, not away at all in advice and interest. Scott was the one who organized "The Idler" column as a sometime feature in Crisis. He has guided and encouraged the "Common Wisdom" regular column in Crisis with the late Ann O' Donnell, with B. F. Smith, Anne Burleigh, and Ellen Wilson Fielding, perhaps the best thing about Crisis. Indeed, I know there are many hundreds of small and large things that have gone to make Crisis the fine journal that it is that are the results of Scott's quiet and persistent efforts.
Let me, to revert to my academic mode as his former teacher, leave Scott Walter with two thoughts, the first from Epictetus, from the handsome book he once gave me:
Not with the stones of Euboea and Sparta let the structure of your city walls be variegated; but let the discipline and teaching that comes from Greece penetrate with order the minds of citizens and statesmen. For with the thoughts of men are cities well established, and not with wood and stone (Bk. III, C. 6).
The second is from P. G. Wodehouse, from an equally handsome book:
Time and neglect had done their work with the flooring of the room in which Psmith had bestowed the Hon. Freddie Threpwood, and, creeping cautiously about in the dark, he had the misfortune to go through. But, as so often happens in this life, the misfortune of one is the good fortune of another. Badly as the accident had shake (sic!) Freddie, from the point of view of Psmith it was almost ideal (p. 253).
Needless to say, that at the AEI magazine, Scott will be concerned with those "thoughts of men" that establish our cities. The misfortune of Crisis, let us admit it, is surely the good fortune of AEI.
And may I make one final observation that, unless there be some form of English English grammar of which I know not, the Folio Society in London did not catch, as Scott surely would have caught, that "shake" should have been "shaken". Good editors catch these things, and Scott Walter is a very good editor. He also will need, even at such a nice place as the American Enterprise Institute, "patience amid the slothful and perverse" of this world. In losing Scott Walter from Crisis, our sentiments can do no more than to repeat those words of his great hero, P. G. Wodehouse, "But as so often happens in this life, the misfortune of one is the good fortune of another."
7) From Crisis, February, 1996.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
TRUTH
Intellectual disorder eats at the heart of every university, journal, city, and, yes, church. Will we choose to live the truth that we can and do know? We are taught that there is no truth to be known. The only thing that exists is power. That is, everyone presents and stands for an arbitrary commitment. We cannot resolve controversy on objective grounds, so we avoid even trying. Truth-tellers and truth-claimers are the most dangerous people in our social contract. They imply that it is possible to do wrong, to err.
The crusades in our society are against those who profess to know and live what is true, even if they themselves often fail. The only way to deal with the truth-claimers is to marginalize them, to treat them as just another peculiar power group. If they can be made to be content with their own little version of reality, only then can we tolerate them. Truth-claimers are, by definition, arrogant. The humble claim that we can know nothing.
"We have an intellectual class which for the most part does not believe that the human being is capable of using its intellect to discern truth from falsehood and, given such premises, is reduced to substituting semantic games and ideological deconstruction for scholarship and critical judgment," Tracey Rowland wrote in The Australian (April 28, 1995). Scholarship and critical judgment imply that the mind can know the truth. Such is its purpose. Standards and criteria exist whereby truth can be distinguished from error.
Often it is intimated that truth is afraid of error. In the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, of course, just the opposite is the case. We do not know the truth until we can identify and explain accurately the arguments against the truth of any order, including that which claims there is no truth. Knowledge of truth includes the knowledge of error.
Truth is the conformity of mind with reality. Thus if we doubt our own knowing faculty, we will never know the truth. If we think the world an illusion, nothing exists to which we can conform ourselves. If we hold that it is only our mind that imposes order on a chaotic world, we will remain locked into ourselves. Thus, to butt up against a reality that does not conform to the vagaries of a mind filled only with itself is a very healthy experience.
In his Four Men, about a walk in Sussex in l902, Belloc wrote, "For men become companionable by working with their bodies and not with their weary noodles, and the spinning out of stuff from oneself is an inhuman thing." This remarkable passage suggests that noodles and brains, become weary and tired when they are not constantly refreshed with a reality that did not arise in themselves.
Aristotle said that we begin our quest for knowledge in wonder, not in fear, or need, or power. That is, our minds are made simply to know and to know the truth. When we know the truth of something, we affirm this of that, in seeing why it is so. We say of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not, as Plato taught us.
If these things about truth be so, why is it that we have suddenly become a people for whom the truth of things is dangerous? It is because we know the direction of reality, of the truth of things, and we do not want to accept it. The greatest proof of the objectivity of intellect is its refusal to pursue an argument about the validity of the mind. When, in Plato's Gorgias, Callicles, the consummate politician, refused to speak any longer with Socrates, it was because he knew very well where the argument would lead him -- to a truth that would require him to change his way of living and ruling. So he refused to talk with Socrates any longer.
This refusal is where we are civilizationally. When the Holy Father writes of "the Splendor of Truth", he stands boldly in the most counter-cultural position of our era. He argues from truth to truth. He must be stopped at all costs because his logic, his argument, as such, cannot be broken. The only thing we can do about him is to deny the possibility of truth itself, a position that is itself contradictory, a contradiction we are willing to accept as a last desperate measure to prevent us from facing the fact that there are truths and we can know them. The only way we can not know them is to refuse to think about them, to lapse into myths, ideologies, and the silly things we spin out of our weary noodles.
8) From Crisis, May, 1992.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
GNOSTICISM RECONSIDERED
Recently, I was at a conference on the West Coast. I had the good fortune to be driven from the airport by a perceptive young graduate student, a Catholic. In the course of conversation, he told me that he stopped going to the local Catholic parish the day they removed the Crucifix on the altar to replaced it with a painting of Mother Earth herself being held up by a politically correct number of differing cultural hands all reaching up to her. A priest where I was saying Mass told me of another parish that was built with the Tree of Life instead of the Crucifix, until the parishioners protested enough to get the Crucifix back. This is in a diocese in which the Ordinary preaches against abortion. Another young man, this time from the East Coast, told me that as soon as he hears his pastor begin his latest sermon on a social justice theme that is readily identifiable as a specific kind of leftist ideology, he gets up and walks out.
Symbols count. The student was right. In Rome, considerable attention is being paid of late to the extent to which Gnosticism and Pelagianism are present in modern culture and within many movements in the Church itself. Marxism may (or may not) be passé but New Age, environmentalism, what passes for social justice, feminism, Eastern religions, multi-culturalism, dogmatic relativism, and such variant enthusiasms are not. More and more it is getting difficult to find Catholicism within Catholicism. As a Jesuit friend of mine remarked on hearing the story of the Mother Earth incident, "there comes a point when we are dealing with another religion."
Curiously many of these same movements profess a certain deep spiritualism. We have been told, perhaps too often, that our great enemy is "materialism." But materialism has never been the most dangerous heresy. Indeed, all really dangerous heresies or disorders of soul arise from the spirit, from, most often, the hearts of the dons, from the clerical and academic leaders whose faith is strong, but not strong enough to accept the content and history of salvation as it is given to us in specifically Catholic revelation. We have, it often seems, a religion full of enthusiasm but not doctrine, or at least not Catholic doctrine.
The most "unbelievable" aspect of classical Christianity, it seems, is precisely its dogged "materialism," its clinging to the Old Testament doctrine that matter is good and to the New Testament teaching that the Word became flesh. Evil is rooted in will, not matter, machines, institutions, or intelligence. Christ after all only makes sense if there is something wrong with us that we cannot remedy by ourselves, individually or collectively. Christ only makes sense if there is something at fault in our wills and not merely in the structures of the world. The New Testament has much to say about conversion and repentance but practically nothing about politics.
What is all this sudden Roman concern with Gnosticism all about? I think it is a sign that at long last the Roman Church in its highest reaches is beginning to realize the degree to which it is itself infiltrated by ideas and movements at variance with its own teachings about itself. These worrisome ideas come from the culture itself. Conformity to culture seems the predominant imperative for religion itself.
Father Richard McBrian recently (The Tablet. January 25, 1992) boasted that Rome could no longer touch dissident theologians because they were protected by the laws of the civil state. What this means, of course, is rather that these same civil institutions are locked into themselves and cannot admit any presence of the Catholicism that is identified with what the Roman Church actually teaches and stands for. When Erastianism guarantees the church, it guarantees itself. The Church is no longer heard.
John Paul II has both in Centesimus Annus and Redemptoris Missio taken up the theme that culture itself needs something from outside itself even to save itself. He told a group of cultural leaders in Salvador in Brazil (October 20, 1991):
In regard to those living cultures that must be saved by Christ, it is essential that the Gospel, faith and religion play a decisive role in them, imbuing them with Christian values. Either the cultures have not understood these values deeply or they have continued to hide them because of the harmful influences of secularization, consummerism, relativism, and the other evils of the modern age that does without Christ's message and the Church's fruitful presence.
No culture is closed in on itself to the exclusion of the vitality of revelation addressing itself to each people.
Since Vatican II, the Church, it seems, has been bent on accommodating itself as much as possible to prevailing cultures, beliefs, and political systems. In itself this is not bad. Belatedly, however, the Church has come increasingly to realize that what is specific to itself is no longer much known or taught. The Christian "mission" is preaching mostly modernity, human autonomy, not Christianity. Indeed, Catholicism in particular is being systematically excluded so that its only sort of presence is when its own language and principles are modified to conform to secular culture. The policy of adaptation has resulted in little compromise from the secular culture itself except insofar as the Church has agreed to look just like the culture in which it lives. The radical newness of Catholicism is replaced with the radicalism of the culture itself.
Those of us who have read our Voegelin, of course, know that this great philosopher argued that Gnosticism is in fact the heart of modernity. Modernity is the project to remove from the cosmos and from human nature itself any sign of a divine presence, origin, or transcendent destiny. Religious ideas were to be "immanentized," made into political movements with inner-worldly goals. These ideas were to replace Christianity with willed forms of human intellect projected onto all of mankind with no other source but human autonomy. Perfection becomes "self-realization" in which the self that is realized has no source other but itself, granted that this "self" is usually the disguised heritage of some philosopher.
I have mused about this phenomenon. Back in 1962, I wrote an essay in the old American Ecclesiastical Review entitled, "The Abiding Significance of Gnosticism" and in this column in May, 1986, I described "Gnostic Catholicism." (The column, "The Strangest Century" of October 1990, is also on this topic). Thus, when I heard of the essay of Father Giandomenico Mucci, S. J., "Mito e Pericolo della Gnosi Moderna," in La Civiltà Cattolica for January 4, 1992, I hastened over to the Woodstock Library to read it. It was indeed a fascinating essay and summed up several lines of thought that have been appearing regularly in particularly Italian journals about the nature of the contemporary religious mind.
All of this controversy is an aspect of a question that Paul Johnson asked (Crisis, February, 1989) about whether the demise of Marxism meant the end of "totalitarian temptations" on the part of the cultural elite of our era. These elites have been formed in secular ideals of rights and obligations that promise to achieve what Christianity never promised, namely, a new man and a new earth, a bringing to this very world all the elaborate promises that the faith called salvation. But these promises were to be obtained by excluding faith and its sense of how salvation is to be achieved.
Mucci considers "modern Gnosticism" to include within its reaches not just an elite, as in classic Gnosticism, but all of humanity and the whole of the world in an all-embracing "knowledge" about man's only happiness. This happiness is exclusively the result of man's own efforts. There is no "word" or nature in the world. Thus no "Word" could become flesh. Modern Gnosticism specifically rejects notions of sin and the consequent need of salvation by Christ. Christ becomes a social reformer, an inspiration to complete the worldly enterprise, which is the only enterprise there is. Marx's concern that concern for the afterlife impeded concern for this life is not forgotten. A religion that supports this inner-worldly revolution is quite acceptable but one that maintains the classic Christian doctrines is its most dangerous threat. This fear of revelational religion explains the growing hatred for the Church as it stands for itself.
To suggest that there is anything wrong with the intellectual structure of modernity and post-modernity, of course, risks the charge of being against "man." In a brilliant and too little known essay, "Church Activism in the 1980's: Politics in the Guise of Religion?" (in Religion and Politics, University of Virginia Press, 1989), Father Ernest Fortin wrote that an increasing number of Christians "have come to view their faith as an enterprise dedicated to eradication of the evils that plague human existence by transforming society along more or less leftist lines." When such projects become the main line of presentation about what is Christian, whether in Sunday sermons or religious journals, then clearly there is a deeper crisis than most are willing openly to admit.
"The Pelagian temptation returns today in consequence of neo-Gnosticism," Father Mucci wrote,
If with modern Gnosticism there is asserted an inner-worldly self-redemption of man, it is evident that with this approach also the myth of Prometheus comes back again. This Promethean position includes the consciousness of an all-powerful morality that professes to achieve the good and to realize every sort of justice without recurring to the theological help of grace. If it is possible to measure the fullness of the apostasy of modern culture, before which the Church stands, it ought to recall above all to itself that man, every man, cannot, normally and for a long time, do good and remain good without the historic-salvific encounter with Christ" (La Civiltà Cattolica, 4 Gennaio 1992).
The point is not that there are no things produced in the modern world that are good. Rather it is that the theoretic understanding of these things, an understanding that can be based on a classic and Christian philosophy loyal to its own inspiration, are being presented in a Gnostic and Pelagian context even when Christian terms and offices are used to support them.
Thus, I suspect, the replacing of a Crucifix by a painting of Mother Earth (Gaia) in a regular Catholic parish reveals rather strikingly that this sort of mentality is wide-spread in our culture. Perhaps it is just a mistake or an aberration. But I rather think Father Mucci is closer to the real problem. When Eric Voegelin wrote that "Gnosticism is the form of modernity," he meant that modern humanism would claim all for itself. There would remain no check on human pride, not even reality itself. Reality, what is, is no longer "nature," that is, something already itself, already a finite something, to which our minds are open to discover the truth of things. Rather reality is what we will in society and in the cosmos. If Marx has died, Nietzsche and Heidegger have appeared. But this intellectual appearance is itself a "choice," a choice against what is, not an intellectual necessity. The choice lies in the heart of a modernity that recognizes no other principle but itself as the cause of the distinction of things.
9) From Crisis, January, 1995.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
SAINT PAUL
In the little town in Iowa where I was born, there were two Catholic churches -- Sacred Heart and Sts. Peter and Paul. From my very youth, these two apostles, Peter and Paul, were visibly associated. Somehow, when spoken aloud, I have always liked the very ring of the words "Saints Peter and Paul". The Church celebrates the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29, but it has a separate Feast of St. Paul in January -- the Twenty-Fifth.
In the olden days, St. Paul wrote a good number of the epistles of the New Testament. We used to say, for instance, that he wrote Hebrews. Today, we read "as the Author of the Letter to the Hebrews said...." No Paul. A good trivia question among literate Christians is "which Letters of St. Paul did he not write?" The extremes range from none to all. All of which gets into the good fun of scripture authorship, scholarship, tradition, interpretation, and what it all means for us.
In a Sermon he gave to Catholic undergraduates at Oxford in 1941, Ronald Knox wondered about this linking of these two saints, Peter and Paul. Except for one famous occasion, he noted, they seemed to get along pretty well together, but at various times they are thought to be rather antagonistic. The Reformation in particular tended to emphasize Paul at the expense of Peter. The great Protestant cathedral in London is St. Paul's. "Protestantism, in revolt against the Petrine claims, and basing its most characteristic theology on a false reading of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans," Knox remarked, "could hardly fail to draw invidious comparisons, in which St. Paul came out best."
Certain "learned and untrustworthy men", Knox told the undergraduates, as if to warn them to be alert in their classes, even saw the Acts of the Apostles as a kind of competition for honor and glory between Paul and Peter. "If Peter is rescued from prison at Jerusalem, Paul must be rescued at Philippi; if Paul rises Eutychus to life, Peter must do as much for Dorcas; and so on throughout." How are we to evaluate this approach? Knox's own view is clear: "Most of us will find it difficult to believe in this sort of thing."
The fact is that St. Paul is a pretty interesting character. I am in the habit of saying that we know more about the insides of St. Augustine than of any other ancient man. The only rivals, I think, are Cicero and St. Paul. And obviously, there is a lot of both Cicero and St. Paul in St. Augustine. In his History of Christianity, Paul Johnson had this to say about the man for whom he is named:
Paul insisted (that Jesus Christ) was God; it is the only thing about him which really matters, otherwise the Pauline theology collapses, and with it Christianity. But equally, Paul is an obstacle to those who wish to turn Christianity into a closed system. He believed in freedom. For him, Christianity was the only kind of freedom that matters, the liberation from the law, and the donation of life. He associated freedom with truth, for which he had an unlimited reverence.
Christ is God, freedom is from the law, life if a gift, the truth will make us free -- these are no small things that we have from St. Paul. Without them Christianity does collapse, we should not doubt it.
St. Paul had no hesitation to use his Roman citizenship when he had need of it. I have always liked this about him. He was born in Tarsus and so had Roman citizenship by birth. When (Acts c. 25) he suspected that he might be treated improperly by Jewish courts, in a famous scene in Caesarea, he chose Rome. This appeal to Rome meant that he preferred to be tried in a Roman court in Rome. He thought it would be a more just trial. Paul made this appeal to Festus, the local Roman governor in Caesarea. Festus wanted to appease the Jews and send him to Jerusalem. None of this for Paul. "I am standing before the tribunal of Caesar and this is where I should be tried," Paul admonished Festus. "I have done the Jews no wrong, as you very well know. If I am guilty of committing any capital crime, I do not ask to be spared the death penalty. But if there is no substance to the accusation against me, no one has a right to surrender me to them. I appeal to Caesar."
Festus, for his part, seemed only too glad to get Paul out of his jurisdiction. "You appealed to Caesar; to Caesar you shall go." Festus obviously knew that he had a very tough man on his hands. Paul, however, was not just telling Festus that he was innocent. He went on to explain the principles of law to Festus himself. Paul in effect said to Festus, "Look, if I am guilty, kill me. But follow the law, your law. Show the accusation. You, Festus, have no right to violate your own rules of procedure. I don't trust you. Send me to the Roman courts."
A couple of days later, King Agrippa and his wife Bernice came to Caesarea. Festus told Agrippa about the problem with Paul. After listening to Festus recount Paul's situation, Agrippa wanted to hear his story from Paul himself. So Festus arranged a meeting with Paul for the following day. Festus, at this point, claims to Agrippa that he does not know what exactly it is that he should tell the Roman court that Paul has done. "It seems to me pointless to send a prisoner without indicating the charges against him." So Festus should have released Paul at this point by his own law.
Paul does not help Festus formulate an accusation against himself. Rather he takes the opportunity to explain his whole life to Agrippa, Bernice, and Festus. Agrippa knew more than Festus did about Jewish and Christian issues. Paul explains how he is a Pharisee and a strict one. But he also makes precise that he is on trial for his "hope in the promise made by God to our ancestors." Paul already associates his work with Jewish revelation and its completion. Festus is obviously wondering what this all means.
Paul proceeds to recount to Agrippa that he himself, Saul, in his earlier days opposed "the name of Jesus the Nazarene". He even tossed many Christians into prison and tried to make them renounce their faith. This Saul, as he was earlier called, was a rather formidable character. So, here we have Paul giving an account of his life to a local monarch and a local Roman governor. Next Paul tells them of the scene on the road to Damascus. Paul is on his way to continue persecuting Christians. He is knocked off his horse. He hears someone calling to him in Hebrew, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?"
Paul naturally tries to find out what is going on. He thought he was doing Yahweh's business. He learns that the voice is of Jesus. Paul discovers that Jesus has special plans for him. He is to go to the pagans, and "through faith in me (Jesus), (to obtain) forgiveness of their sins". Paul immediately begins to follow his new commission, first to the folks in Damascus and then in Jerusalem, even in the Temple where, naturally, he is arrested and finds himself in the present predicament.
Paul concludes his account, "I was blessed with God's help, and so I have stood firm to this day, testifying to great and small alike, saying nothing more than what the prophets and Moses himself said would happen; that the Christ was to suffer and that, as the first to rise from the dead, he was to proclaim that light now shone for our people and for the pagans too." Clearly, this is pretty heady stuff.
Festus meantime is trying to figure out what all this has to do with the Jerusalem efforts to "get rid" of Paul. Festus, who was no fool, can see no sense in all this theological jargon of Paul. Festus shouts, "Paul, you are out of your mind; all that learning of yours is driving you mad." We can imagine the situation. Here a pretty sober and decent Roman governor gets this Paul dropped in his lap. He hates to deal with the case which seems almost a "no win" case for Festus. But Paul has managed to tie his hands legally and Festus knows it. Actually, Festus seems to like Paul and to recognize his intelligence. All this silliness about being knocked off a horse and especially raising from the dead, however, seems outlandish to him.
But Paul understands Festus' problem. He calmly tells the Governor, "I am not mad; I am speaking nothing but the sober truth." It is not Paul's fault that he found himself involved in all these things either. He was not going to lie about or make up what had happened. Paul knew, however, that Agrippa grasped some of these things. Paul knew that Agrippa believed in the Hebrew prophets. Agrippa even admits to Paul, "A little more, and your arguments would make a Christian of me." And Paul adds, "little or more, I wish before God that not only you but all who have heard me today would come to be as I am -- except for these chains." Paul does not like imprisonment any more than anyone else.
At this point Agrippa, Bernice, and Festus rise and go out. They talked together for a while about this extraordinary man and what he had told them. They agreed that Paul had done nothing worthy of death or imprisonment. Finally, Agrippa adds to Festus, "The man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar." There is something ironical, of course, in this latter remark. Paul had appealed to Caesar so he could be set free. No more chains. He had appealed to Caesar, moreover, because he was worried about Festus' willingness to judge his case on its merits. Festus did not need to send Paul to Caesar in Rome if Paul was not guilty. One wonders what sort of accusation that Festus did send since before Paul's speech he did not know how to charge him and apparently even less so after.
When Paul does get to Rome, after his stormy trip, he looks up the leading Jewish authorities to explain his situation. He states his case again, how he was accused, arrested, turned over to Caesar. He told them that he did not himself have "any accusation against his own nation," which is why he wanted to talk to them. Surprisingly, the Roman Jews had heard nothing about Paul's case from Judea. They knew he belonged to a new "sect" and wanted to hear his own account of it. However, they had heard that of Paul's sect, "opinion had everywhere condemned it".
What seems ironical about Paul is that after all his efforts to "appeal to Caesar" that no one heard much about him in Rome. He did, however, make it to the capital of the pagans, to the heart of Empire, to where he had been directed on the road to Damascus. Festus the Roman Governor in Caesarea thought his great learning drove him mad, but Paul stuck to his position wherever he went. He was indeed eloquent and persuasive, as Agrippa acknowledged. Paul held that Jesus Christ was God, that freedom mattered, that life is a gift, that truth is to be acknowledged in liberty. Without these positions, Paul's theology does collapse, and with it Christianity. However difficult it is "to believe this sort of thing," as Festus and perhaps the Oxford undergraduates might acknowledge, still when we read St. Paul's account of his life, we know even today his wish remains that which he told Agrippa, that "before God that not only you but all who have heard me would come to be as I am -- except for the chains."
10) From Crisis, February, 1998.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
ON PENS AND PENCILS
For Christmas a decade ago, Anne and Bill Burleigh gave me a Cross pen and pencil. In subsequent years I lost or broke about three of the pens. Cross had a wonderful extra-fine felt point black filler, #8424, the best writing instrument I had ever seen. About two years ago, they stopped producing this superior filler and replaced it with an inferior plastic point, #8444. I wrote to the Company in Rhode Island, suggesting that they fire the executive who made this silly decision to replace #8424 with #8444. I received no response.
But I want to speak of the pencil. My set is black, graphite, comfortably heavy. My friends intimate that my handwriting leaves something to be desired even with the finest writing instruments. The U. S. Postal Service not infrequently returns mail to my box claiming that the address is unknown, when it is right there on the envelope.
About three years ago, the mechanical pencil's inner mechanism stuck. I could not get it to turn. When I tried to buy another Cross pencil, no store in Washington would sell me just a pencil. I had to buy both pen and pencil, which I, thinking dark thoughts about the decline the free market, refused to do.
So, I thought I would buy another pencil brand. The leading pen store in Washington is Fahrney's, across from the U. S. Treasury Department on G Street. For $13, I bought a heavy, firm pencil that you twist to make the lead come out. From its container, it automatically replaces the lead when one stick runs out.
I thought that the pencil used odd-sized, .4 mm. I remember being with my friends Jim and Kay Kline in Florida trying to find lead that size. The only thing the stores carried were .5, .7, and .9, none of which, as far as I could tell, worked.
Suddenly, I had a broken Cross pencil and a new shiny black pencil with a lead size that I could not replace. So I went back to Fahrney's. The nice lady found the proper lead, .4, thought I. I remember stowing the packet of lead away in my room. To this day, I have never found it. As an after-thought, though, I asked her if she could fix the Cross pen. Sure enough, a young man repaired it in no time and charged me nine bucks. This was getting expensive.
About two weeks after I had two classy functioning pencils, I misplaced my repaired Cross pencil. That was about three years ago. It is still lost. This reduced me to one pencil. Naturally, when the supply of .4 lead in the pencil was used up, I tried to find more in various stores. I could not find the rare .4 lead.
My story begins here. One lovely day last summer, during the noon hour, I decided a third time to walk to Fahrney's from Georgetown to get the required .4 lead. The pencil was useless with no lead. I love to walk in Washington during the noon hour. I strolled through Georgetown, to M Street, then to Pennsylvania Avenue, all the way by the barricaded White House, where folks were taking photos, on by the Treasury Department. I crossed Fifteenth Street to G Street.
I enter Fahrney's. A gentleman who looks like the owner kindly interrupts talking to a salesman to serve me. I explain about the .4 lead. He looks dubiously at the pencil, twists it a couple of times, says authoritatively that it uses .5 lead, of which I had a huge supply that would not, say I, work in the said pencil.. The owner-type goes back to the repair counter. About four minutes later he returns with that sort of impatient look that a gas station attendant gets on his face when you cannot work the automatic pump.
The man tells me that the pencil is fine, that I had stuck a .7 lead into the shaft. That is why it would not work. He shows me the my .7 lead. I pretend I am not the klutz he thinks I am. At my humorous best, I tell him that it was a great pen and I was pleased that he fixed it. The fact is, that he did not fix it because it was not broken. It was just fouled up. He only charged me about a dollar for the lead, nothing for the remedial education. He was sure I was unteachable in the lead department. I now have enough lead to last till the Fourth Millennium. .4mm lead does not exist and would not have worked had I found it. Moral: Only look for what is.
11) From Crisis, January, 1994.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
ON THINGS WE MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED
Once upon a January, many long years ago, I was born, in a small town in Iowa. My recollections of this momentous event, naturally, remain somewhat vague. Actually, this is a great mercy, as you can readily realize, otherwise I might be tempted to write about it. As Chesterton said in his Autobiography, we have to take the fact of our own birth on faith. We have to accept the testimony of others for the truth of a primal event in which we have some considerable interest.
What made me think of this reference to my this-worldly origins was a passage I came across by chance in the works of that noted theologian, P. G. Wodehouse. He caused me to think of baptism and that original sin in which we are conceived and born, of why things go wrong in spite of our best intentions. I do not recall my own baptism either, but I believe I have seen the document attesting to it someplace. Baptism, of course, is addressed to this prevailing disorder we all seem somehow to find ourselves locked into.
My parents, also good theologians, upheld the practice of infant baptism. Give or take a couple of days, I am a born Catholic. Infant baptism, more than anything else almost, suggests that, while there is much right with the world, there is also something subtly deviant, something in the order of spirit that is capable of turning us away from what we truly are to become. If, because you are aware of the implications of this dire situation, you think you need all the help you can get in this life to get out of it in good shape, then you are for infant baptism even on pragmatic grounds. The Lord pursues us "down the nights and down the days," to recall Francis Thompson's poem.
I had even been reading Hegel, always itself a daunting exercise. Hegel observed that "the History of the World is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it." But even Hegel wanted to redeem these periods of unhappiness. He wanted to show us how "History as the slaughterbench (of the) happiness of peoples" had some purpose. He wanted to know "to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered?" To what aim indeed? Somehow we must explain, if only to ourselves, the meaning of these "enormous sacrifices" in the slaughterbench that is too often our history.
Thus, in The World of Jeeves, I read, to continue these profound topics: "I don't know if you have noticed it, but it's rummy how nothing in this world ever seems to be absolutely perfect." To be sure, I had noticed this. That is why I put Wodehouse in italics. I remember once standing on Fell Street in San Francisco for a long time thinking words very similar -- how nothing in this world ever seems to be perfect. Unfortunately, at the time, I did not have Wodehouse's memorable words to explain it all to me.
None the less, as I said, I have noticed this unsettling situation. In truth, however, something perhaps even more mysterious, I think that there probably are "absolutely perfect" things in this world, except, because even these originate in the divine perfection itself, they always have, as they should, a reference to something higher about them, even by being what they are, what E. F. Schumacher called "progressions."
Yet, there is almost something sad about Wodehouse's remark -- perhaps it was the word "rummy". We catch a certain disappointment, a certain poignancy in the heart of the comedian. He recognizes that the world is not "absolutely perfect", of course. Nevertheless, he suspects that we are not really made for this less than perfect world, even though we find ourselves in it. His very laughter at the odd things we do portends a kind of joy that we barely understand.
The fact is that things usually do turn out to be "rummy". We come to expect this "rumminess" of things. We become realists and pride ourselves on our knowledge of the way things actually are. We rightly distrust the perfection-seekers. They somehow do more damage than those who believe in the Wodehouse doctrine that "nothing in this world ever seems to turn out absolutely perfect."
This is a Christian theme. We live in a world that exists for some cause that we cannot find in the world itself. We think, all in all, it is a pretty good place. It is certainly a beautiful place in so many ways. We know ourselves to be good, yet there is always this annoying thing about our not doing what we would, something St. Paul saw in himself quite clearly.
The Councils of Orange and Trent did not speak of man's original "rumminess", to be sure. But they did say something rather similar when talking of Original Sin. Le Catéchisme de l'Eglise Catholique has some excellent and moving paragraphs on Original Sin (#396-412). I want to cite a couple lines about this topic here:
The doctrine of Original Sin -- bound to that of the Redemption by Christ, gives a glance of lucid discernment over man's condition and his acting in the world. By the sin of the First Parents, the Devil has acquired a certain domination over men, although this latter remains free. Original Sin implies "servitude under the power of him who possesses the empire of death, that is to day, the Devil" (Trent, Dz. 1511). To ignore that man has a wounded nature, inclined to evil, gives place to some grave errors in the domain of education, of politics, of social action, and of morals (#407).
I was especially struck by this last sentence. If we do not understand what is really wrong with us and the revelational remedies for it, we will never get it right in other areas.
I had just been reading Rousseau also, who is the source of much of the notion that we solve our human problems by education, politics, or social action, by changes of external structures rather than changes in our hearts. We live in a political and educational regime that has bought almost completely this doctrine. The key issues lie elsewhere, however, even though the sinful condition of mankind somehow result from the accumulation of our personal sins.
At the very beginning of Veritatis Splendor, John Paul stressed the importance of this very topic:
As a result of that mysterious original sin, committed at the prompting of Satan, the one who is "a liar and the father of lies" (Jn. 8:44), man is constantly tempted to turn his gaze away from the living and true God in order to direct it towards idols (cf. 1 Thes. 1:9), exchanging "the truth about God for a lie" (Rom. 1:25). Man's capacity to know the truth is also darkened, and his will to submit to it is weakened. Thus, giving himself over to relativism and scepticism (cf. Jn. 18:38), he goes off in search of an illusory freedom apart from truth itself (#1).
No paragraph I know more clearly suggests what is behind the ideologies and moral currents of our time. The search for illusory freedom is precisely the meaning of our public order in so far as it rejects, as it does, the truths contained in revelation and the reason that supports it.
Bertie Wooster's Aunt Agatha is a most formidable woman who looks with a most critical eye on her nephew's aberrations. "'Bertie,'she said -- in part and chattily -- 'it is young men like you who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair!'" About the only thing that Bertie could reply to this not altogether inaccurate observation was "What-ho!"
Aunt Agatha continued her analysis, ending with a most surprising solution to her nephew's problems:
"Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in selfish idleness a life which might have been made useful, helpful, and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone --" She fixed me with a glittering eye, "Bertie, you must marry!"
Aunt Agatha, to Bertie's consternation, proceeded to explain just what sort of woman she had in mind. "You want somebody strong, self-reliant, and sensible, to counterbalance the deficiencies and weaknesses of your character...."
Well, we get the point. Our fallenness is pretty real, and not altogether without its amusing side. That is to say, we are a fallen race, with many deficiencies and weaknesses in our characters, but we are also redeemed. We go off, as the Pope said, because we turn our gaze away from the living and true God and substitute our own inventions. Those who have the future of the human race at heard are indeed tempted to despair. Yet, we cannot help but suspecting that Bertie is closer to the truth than Aunt Agatha. It's rummy "how nothing in this world ever seems to turn out to be absolutely perfect."
As I said, I have noticed this too. It is a question, however, as the Pope hinted, about where we allow our gaze to fall. We can conclude from all this rumminess but two things, I think. The first is that our gaze does have a proper object in the light of which all else is and is glorious. And the second is that our gaze is such that we can avert it from what we might really want. In the end, what we really want is first given to us.
"Joy," Josef Pieper wrote, "lies in receiving what we love." Our reaction to the slaughterbenches of history, to the rumminess of actual things ultimately suggests that all things are related to an absolute perfection, on which we seek to gaze. We are what we are because we must still choose to see what is to be seen. This is our lot. This is the context both of our damnation and of our glory. We would not have it otherwise.
12) From Crisis, January, 1993.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
THE "STABAT MATER"
One afternoon, I was in the Woodstock Center xeroxing something or other. The young man in charge of the operations there told me that the following Friday, he was singing at the Kennedy Center. The National Symphony Orchestra was doing Antonin Dvorak's "Stabat Mater," with the Czech conductor Zdenek Macal and the Oratorio Society of Washington.
This event seemed like something that should not be missed, particularly with my Bohemian blood. My mother's family was from Iowa. Older members of the family, with great pride, have often mentioned the visit Dvorak (1841-1904) made to Spillville, Iowa, the 19th Century center of Czech immigration into the homesteading farmland of Iowa. One likes to think that the familiar music of "The New World Symphony" -- was it called "From the New World?" -- or the quartet or the cello concerto, that Mstislav Rostropovich loves to play, bore the spirit and flavor of those fertile plains of Northern Iowa that were home to my mother's parents and grandparents. My Bohemian mother was born in the year Dvorak died in Prague.
The "Stabat Mater" itself, moreover, in what musical version I know not, probably a Gregorian one -- I can still hum it in my off-key way for anyone who can stand it -- was most familiar to me from my altar boy days at St. Anthony's Parish in Knoxville, in South-Central Iowa. As we lived but two houses away from the Church, during Lent my brother and I were often recruited for regular duty to serve for the Stations of the Cross, that seem in memory to have been held every day, but probably only on Wednesdays and Fridays.
This familiar music of the Stations, when I hear it, still puts me back in that little Church, wondering when the Stations would be over as kneeling so much made my knees sore, or at least I thought so at the time. We would have a Cross, two candle bearers, with Father Horan or Father Garrity to lead us around to each Station. The "Stabat Mater," as I recall it now, was sung at every second Station so that the end of the Stations coincided with the last stanza of the hymn. I remember an organ and a goodly number of people present for such a small parish in a Protestant town.
It is easy to recall the first stanza that sets both the tone and the teaching of the hymn:
Stabat Mater dolorosa
Juxta crucem lacrimosa,
Dum pendebat filius.
The program notes gave the Latin text, which Dvorak divided into ten parts, alongside an English text. The above lines are translated:
At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful Mother, weeping,
Close to Jesus at the last.
Actually, that is the way I remember the words, so I wonder if we sang it in English. Perhaps it was only in the Order that we sang it in Latin. Those words to that music always seemed touchingly sad as they evoked so graphically the scene they described, the Blessed Mother at the Cross of her Son.
What took nine words in Latin, in any case, took twice that many in English. There is probably a lesson there somewhere. My briefest translation of the same stanza would be, "(The) Sorrowful Mother weeping stood next to the Cross while (her) Son was hanging (there)." The Old Catholic Encyclopedia noted that by 1912, there were over sixty translations of this hymn into English.
This particular Sequence, as it is called, has several attributed authors, from Innocent II, to St. Bernard, to Jacopone da Todi. It has been set to music many times, over a hundred apparently. Palestrina, Pergolesi, Hayden, Scarlati, Bocherini, Rossini, Schubert, Verdi, and more recently Penderecki, each has composed a score for the "Stabat Mater."
The "Stabat Mater," which came into the Roman Missal in 1727, is now used in the Office for the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, on September 15. Formerly it was used for the same Feast (Mater Dolorosa) that occurred on the Friday after Passion Sunday (two weeks before Easter) in the Old Liturgy.
The music is quite solemn, lovely, meditative. The writing of his "Stabat Mater," moreover, had a personal meaning for Dvorak of some considerable poignancy. He and his wife Anna had three infant children. Between 1875-76, one (Joesfa) died a few days after birth, a second (Otakar) of small pox at about three years of age, and another (Ruzena), eleven months, after accidently drinking an acid used for making matches. Dvorak was about thirty-six at the time his children died and he wrote the music.
This work, consequently, is very much addressed to the grief of his wife. She was herself an alto, the voice the second from the last stanza features. It is accompanied by neither chorus or other soloist, bass, tenor, or soprano.
Fac me cruce custodiri,
Morte Christi praemuniri,
Confoveri gratia.
"Make me to be protected by the Cross, / To fortified by the Death of Christ, / To be favored by grace," she sings.
Yet, the music is, what can I say? -- itself redemptive. By the time we arrive at the last stanza, we comprehend that the words of the hymn through the very grandeur of the music have lead us from a most somber and tragic experience with corresponding musical setting to a new hope, that death, though present, is transformed.
The contrasting music, beginning in sadness, becomes lightsome, joyful. The Christian experience of the "Stabat Mater" bears, identifies, and transcends the tragedy of actual life, without in any way denying the reality of this life.
Quando corpus morietur,
Fac, ut animae donetur
Paradisi gloria;
Amen.
"When my body dies, / Make it, that the glory of Paradise / Be given to my soul," would be my most jejune translation. But the musical effect is stunning in context.
An experience like this, unexpectedly listing to such glorious music, music rooted in the very depths of the human condition and its redemption -- the man and wife who lose their first three children (they went on to have six more, to be sure) -- at once makes us realize the power and consolation of Christian dogma and its immediacy to life. The reviewer in the Washington Post suggested that even those of differing theologies might grasp the import of this music, but I doubt that is fully so, really.
Then too there is the evident power of the Virgin, that, because of her, in our grief, we do not simply lapse into abstraction.
Inflammatus et accensus,
Per te, Virgo, sim defensus
In die judicii.
"Inflamed and burning, / Through thee, O Virgin, let me be defended / On judgment day." Dvorak understood that we are not alone in such sorrows as his as long as we knew of the Virgin.
But again I go back to the sense of sorrow and hope that shines through this remarkably lovely music. The effect of the music, the comprehension of its truth, you could almost see on the face of one who listens to this music, this hymn. Hearing it we are mindful of St. Paul's oft repeated idea that we want to see God and one another "face-to-face."
Fac me vere tecum flere,
Crucifixo condolere,
Donec ego vixero.
"Make me truly to weep with thee, / To grieve with thee over the Crucified One, / As long as I shall have lived." The translation of this last line in my Ritual is the familiar "All the days that I may live," a translation I like.
I have in my files the Address that the Czech President Vaclav Havel gave to the United States Congress in February of 1990. This was the speech in which Havel remarked that "the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and in human responsibility."
Havel is abstract. No Virgin appears. Only "human consciousness" -- "without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans." Hope seems focused in this world. "If I subordinate my political behavior to this imperative mediated to me by my conscience, I can't go far wrong." Yet, we wonder about this thesis. By itself, conscience often goes wrong, and "consciousness" can reveal merely itself, not what is, if we want it to.
Dvorak seems closer to the truth, even to the truth of consciousness, when he concludes his "Stabat Mater":
Quando corpus morietur,
Fac, ut animae donetur
Paradisi gloria.
Amen.
The "Amen" of this music is hauntingly lovely and glorious, almost as if to say that the last thing heard by mortal ears is the first thing for which we shall listen in Paradise. Perhaps it is true to say that we can only bear to speak of "consciousness" when we have ceased in our Parliaments and Senates to be free enough even to speak of the Virgin. Eia, Mater, fons amoris... ("Ah, Mother, font of love..."), so the ninth stanza begins.
In the end, even on scientific grounds, I think, with some irony, it is more likely that the Virgin was more apt to have been the reason Vaclav Havel was free of Marxist rule, so unexpectedly free as he said himself, free to speak to a Senate wherein speech of the Virgin is not proper even in Czech, than anything "consciousness" ever dreamed of. We dare not speak of these things for they might well be true. Eia, Mater, fons amoris....
13) From Crisis, June, 1996.
Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
ORDER
St. Thomas often cites the famous phrase, "sapientis est ordinare" -- the function of the wise man is to order. We human beings have the added burden, if I can call it that -- for it is also a glory -- of ordering ourselves. To order means that we properly place ourselves amidst the other things, including human things, that are not ourselves.
We human beings have a certain nobility. We can even protest what we are. We can think that it is unjust that we are what we are or that we are in the existential situation that we are. Aristotle remarked that man, when he is good, is the best of the animals, but when he is not, he is the worst. Our defiance of what we are is not merely a statement of fact. It bears the remark of a positive opposition, as if we are talking to someone.
But we protest too much. We want God to make us free. But God has said that the only way we can be free is to know the truth. And we can choose not to know the truth. How seldomly do we reflect on this enormous power we have. I like to think that God, when He created us, took the risk of God; that is, He could have chosen not to create us. God was not necessitated to create, or to create precisely us. We underestimate the Godhead if we suppose that God did not know what human choice entailed. It entailed the fact that we could choose to reject God and claim virtue for doing so.
St. Augustine explained that peace was the "tranquillity of order". Augustine knew the ambiguities of the word "pax". Imposed order could be a devastation. Ruin too has some sort of order. So the order from which tranquillity stems is not a destruction. The parts cannot be the parts unless the whole is the whole. Order does not mean absorbing all the parts into a unity, into a sameness. Rather it means keeping the parts to be what they are, yet parts that are complete, not intended to be other than they are. When we die, we are not absorbed into God. God keeps us what we are, finite human beings, indeed, particular human beings, each like unto nothing ever known before or nothing ever to be known again. We remain, we abide.
The scandal of the Incarnation is not that man is absorbed into God, but that the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us. God has His own internal order, what is revealed to us as the Trinity. What is not God has its own order, essentially related to the inner life of God. We are promised precisely "eternal life", the life of God as our own end. Everything in us and about us is ordained to our achieving this end. Any thing else is a seeking for it under false assumptions. We cannot, and do not, rest in what is not God. We cannot find anything that does not originate in God. Each tiny thing that we encounter, especially each human person, is directly related to the Godhead in all its glory.
C. S. Lewis remarked that we have never met a mere mortal. Our lives are not insignificant. They are risks. We really can lose our souls. Augustine thought that probably most people in fact did lose them. We like to be optimistic and suggest that no one loses his soul. But if this is so, it is hard to see how anything is of much importance. If nothing we do, say, or believe can really make any difference, what is our dignity? We end up doing what we want with impunity. Surely this is not the order of God for our good.
In God's intention, creation did not come first, then men. Men came first, then creation. We should not allow the size of space or its age to lessen the grandeur of spirit. We are given dominion over creation. We are to order it for our ends, not denying what it is. God does not "need" us. God was not once unhappy, then He found us. God was always happy, complete. The human being that did not make itself cannot explain itself by itself. The order of its being is not first its order. Our order is greater than we could propose for ourselves. This is why it is not ours to establish in the first place. Sapientis est ordinare. The end of all things is not that we establish here a lasting city. The end of all things is that, having been first chosen, we still must choose, choose not ourselves, but eternal life.
14) From Crisis, March, 1992.
Some Sense and Nonsense James V. Schall, S. J.
ON THE REALITY OF FANTASY
By chance, just before leaving my brother's in Santa Cruz in January, I happened to notice an article in the San Jose Mercury-News (January 7, 1992) commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the birth of J. R. R. Tolkien. The article noted that a number of elaborate editions of Tolkien's works are being published this year. It also identified several societies devoted to study of Tolkien, among which are "The Mythopoeic Society," the "Elvish Linguistic Fellowship," and the "American Tolkien Society." Keeble College in Oxford holds a large academic Symposium on Tolkien in August.
The founder of the Mythopoeic Society, Glen GoodKnight, is cited as remarking that "Tolkien is considered the grandfather of the modern fantasy phenomena. Go into the science-fiction section (of a book store) and half are fantasy." Tolkien, no doubt, is full of elves, Hobbits, dwarves, and all sorts of awesome races of beings. Yet, I could not help but thinking that to assign Tolkien to the category of mere "fantasy" somehow missed the essence of what he was about. I have always found in reading Tolkien a certain doom or dread strangely combined with a certain joy and exhilaration precisely because he was talking about something very real, about the way this, yes fantastic, world really is.
Several years ago, now, I was in a used book store in San Francisco down near the end of Ellis Street, I think. For reasons I forget now, I had wanted to obtain a copy of Tolkien's Silmarillion. After I had looked all over this vast chaotic place by myself, a friend who was with me called down from a ladder over against the West Wall to come over. I was triumphantly handed a hardback edition of The Silmarillion. I was frankly astonished.
This particular edition, amusingly, was published by the Bookcase Shop in Taipei in 1977. It cost $2 used and was (and still is) in good condition. It says "This is an authorized Taiwan Edition reprinted by permission of the Publisher (George Allen & Unwin) for sale in Taiwan only. It is not to be exported." Well, we were definitely not on Taiwan. But, as I told my friend who found the book later, "I have never read anything quite so beautiful as the first page of The Silmarillion, the Chapter entitled, 'Ainulindale: The Music of the Aimur'." I like to read it or have it read aloud.
In the book, a previous owner, perhaps the one who pirated it out of Taipei, had inserted a review of The Silmarillion from the September 11, 1977, Chicago Tribune. The Review was by Roger Sale, a Professor at the University of Washington, who wrote a book called Tolkien and Frodo Baggins. Sale did not think many people would like this book in comparison to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which sold as many as 50 million copies. He added, "Tolkien was one of those moderns who, in his 20th Century darkness, was driven to invent an earlier time when the world was fresh, the sky clear, the grass green and the past was important." Again, I thought, this observation surely misses the point Tolkien was driving at. Tolkien was not escaping from the Twentieth Century just as his "fantasy" was not apart from reality. Tolkien, I suspect, thought that what was going on in the Twentieth century was just what was going on in his stories.
The end of The Hobbit, perhaps Tolkien's most famous book, reads like this:
"Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!" said Bilbo.
"Of course!" said Gandalf. "And why should not they prove true? Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!"
"Thank goodness" said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco-jar.
At first glance, it is sobering to think this marvelous conversation could not take place any more on any domestic flight in Continental America because of the tobacco-jar bit, not even in fantasy.
But if we look at the "teaching," at the truth of what is being said in this passage, we might be somewhat cautious to intimate that this book is merely "fantasy," merely an escape from the Twentieth Century. Nor is it a fiction dreamed up by a rather dotty Oxford don that would later give hope for the "sixties," as the article in the San Jose paper seemed to imply. What Tolkien was about and what the "sixties" were about seem almost to be total opposites, however much the illusions of the "sixties" would not have surprised a Tolkien.