Author Archives: Andrew Beer

Papa Benedictus XVI, R.I.P.

From his first encyclical, Deus caritas est, published on Christmas Day 2005:

Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united; the challenge of eros can be said to be truly overcome when this unification is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness. … Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves: it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature. Only thus is love —eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur. …

Christian faith … has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter compenetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility. True, eros tends to rise “in ecstasy” towards the Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification and healing. …

Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time. It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25). In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfilment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself. …

Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34). …

[Pope Gregory the Great] tells us that the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation. Only in this way will he be able to take upon himself the needs of others and make them his own: “per pietatis viscera in se infirmitatem caeterorum transferat”. Saint Gregory speaks in this context of Saint Paul, who was borne aloft to the most exalted mysteries of God, and hence, having descended once more, he was able to become all things to all men (cf. 2 Cor 12:2-4; 1 Cor 9:22). He also points to the example of Moses, who entered the tabernacle time and again, remaining in dialogue with God, so that when he emerged he could be at the service of his people. “Within [the tent] he is borne aloft through contemplation, while without he is completely engaged in helping those who suffer: intus in contemplationem rapitur, foris infirmantium negotiis urgetur.” …

The divine power that Aristotle at the height of Greek philosophy sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire and of love —and as the object of love this divinity moves the world—but in itself it lacks nothing and does not love: it is solely the object of love. The one God in whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her—but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape. …

When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of his very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move. …

“Worship” itself, Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented. Conversely, as we shall have to consider in greater detail below, the “commandment” of love is only possible because it is more than a requirement. Love can be “commanded” because it has first been given. …

The parable of the Good Samaritan (cf. Lk 10:25-37) offers two particularly important clarifications. Until that time, the concept of “neighbour” was understood as referring essentially to one’s countrymen and to foreigners who had settled in the land of Israel; in other words, to the closely-knit community of a single country or people. This limit is now abolished. Anyone who needs me, and whom I can help, is my neighbour. The concept of “neighbour” is now universalized, yet it remains concrete. Despite being extended to all mankind, it is not reduced to a generic, abstract and undemanding expression of love, but calls for my own practical commitment here and now. The Church has the duty to interpret ever anew this relationship between near and far with regard to the actual daily life of her members. Lastly, we should especially mention the great parable of the Last Judgement (cf. Mt 25:31-46), in which love becomes the criterion for the definitive decision about a human life’s worth or lack thereof. Jesus identifies himself with those in need, with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and those in prison. “As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40). Love of God and love of neighbour have become one: in the least of the brethren we find Jesus himself, and in Jesus we find God. …

The lives of the saints are not limited to their earthly biographies but also include their being and working in God after death. In the saints one thing becomes clear: those who draw near to God do not withdraw from men, but rather become truly close to them. In no one do we see this more clearly than in Mary. The words addressed by the crucified Lord to his disciple—to John and through him to all disciples of Jesus: “Behold, your mother!” (Jn 19:27)—are fulfilled anew in every generation. Mary has truly become the Mother of all believers. Men and women of every time and place have recourse to her motherly kindness and her virginal purity and grace, in all their needs and aspirations, their joys and sorrows, their moments of loneliness and their common endeavours. They constantly experience the gift of her goodness and the unfailing love which she pours out from the depths of her heart. The testimonials of gratitude, offered to her from every continent and culture, are a recognition of that pure love which is not self- seeking but simply benevolent. At the same time, the devotion of the faithful shows an infallible intuition of how such love is possible: it becomes so as a result of the most intimate union with God, through which the soul is totally pervaded by him—a condition which enables those who have drunk from the fountain of God’s love to become in their turn a fountain from which “flow rivers of living water” (Jn 7:38). Mary, Virgin and Mother, shows us what love is and whence it draws its origin and its constantly renewed power. To her we entrust the Church and her mission in the service of love:

Holy Mary, Mother of God,
you have given the world its true light,
Jesus, your Son – the Son of God.
You abandoned yourself completely
to God’s call
and thus became a wellspring
of the goodness which flows forth from him.
Show us Jesus. Lead us to him.
Teach us to know and love him,
so that we too can become
capable of true love
and be fountains of living water
in the midst of a thirsting world.

water and wine

From my friend and former student Br. Linus Martz, O.P., on God’s eternity, philosophy, and theology:

This series has explored the ways Aquinas relied upon the Church Fathers. Their writings enjoy a privileged role, below Sacred Scripture, as proper authorities in sacred doctrine. But Saint Thomas also inherited a profound respect for philosophy from his patristic predecessors, including Boethius. Perhaps we wonder if we should dilute the pure wine of faith with the watery works of philosophy. Aquinas responds, commenting on another text from Boethius, that  “those who use philosophical doctrines in sacra doctrina in such a way as to subject them to the service of faith, do not mix water with wine, but change water into wine” (Comm. De trin. q. 2, a. 3, ad 5). 

homo factus, hominis factor

From St. Augustine’s Sermon 191 on the Feast of the Nativity:

1.1 Verbum patris per quod facta sunt tempora, caro factum, natalem suum nobis fecit in tempore: in ortu humano habere voluit unum diem, sine cuius nutu divino nullus volvitur dies.

2 ipse apud patrem praecedit cuncta spatia saeculorum: ipse de matre in hac die cursibus se ingessit annorum.

3 homo factus, hominis factor: ut sugeret ubera, regens sidera; ut esuriret panis, ut sitiret fons, dormiret lux, ab itinere via fatigaretur, falsis testibus veritas accusaretur, iudex vivorum et mortuorum a iudice mortali iudicaretur, ab iniustis iustitia damnaretur, flagellis disciplina caederetur, spinis botrus coronaretur, in ligno fundamentum suspenderetur, virtus infirmaretur, salus vulneraretur, vita moreretur;

4 ad haec atque huiusmodi sustinenda pro nobis indigna, ut liberaret indignos; quando nec ille aliquid mali, qui propter nos tanta pertulit mala, nec nos boni aliquid merebamur, qui per eum tanta accepimus bona: propter haec ergo, qui erat ante omnia saecula sine initio dierum dei filius, esse in novissimis diebus dignatus est hominis filius; et qui de patre natus, non a patre factus erat, factus est in matre quam fecerat; ut ex illa ortus hic aliquando esset, quae nisi per illum nunquam et nusquam esse potuisset.

1.1 The Word of the father through Whom time was made, made flesh, did make for us in time his birthday: at His human birth He willed to have one day, without Whose Divine assent no day is born.

2 He, with his Father, precedes all the space of ages: He, from his Mother, on this day plunged into the race of years.

3 Man’s own maker, made man: to suck the breasts and rule the stars; as Bread to hunger, as Font to thirst, as Light to slumber, as Way from walk to weary, by the false as Truth to be accused, as Judge of the quick and dead by mortal judge to be judged, as Justice by the unjust to be condemned, as Holy Discipline to be whipped with scourges, as Grape Vine to be crowned with thorns, on the wood as Foundation to be suspended, as Power to be made weak, as Salvation to be wounded, as Life to die;

4 to suffer these and such outrages for us, to free us the outrageous; He, who for us endured such mighty evil, no evil deserved; we, who through Him received such mighty good, no good deserved: and so for these reasons, He who was before all ages without beginning of days Son of God, deigned in these last days to be the Son of Man; and He who from the Father born was not by the Father made, was made in the Mother whom He had made; that from her now born He might be here sometime, she who but through Him could never and nowhere been.

Lover AND Competitor

Leah Libresco Sargeant:

There’s a kind of treadmill, where the athletes who are gifted enough to excel are invited to push further and further, until their bodies are destroyed and they’ve hypertrained and hypertrained themselves until the sport is a long way from the play it started as.

I’d be curious to hear how you find ways to pursue strength and exult in the gift of a body while remaining an amateur in the most basic sense: a lover of your discipline, not a competitor.

An enthusiastic endorsement of this post in behalf of true amateurism! But I wonder if a finer distinction is in order. LLS’s seems to imply that any and all forms of competition are incompatible with remaining an amateur in the most basic sense. That as soon as competition begins, real amateurism, real love of sport, disappears. Or is she thinking rather of a difference in emphasis or degree? Competition does not necessarily destroy love, but as soon as the desire to excel others outweighs one’s love of the sport itself, then true amateurism ceases. One becomes a mere competitor instead.

If yes, then how about this distinction: play vs. competitive skill? Or to use ancient Greek terms: παιδιά (paidia) vs. ἀγωνία (agōnia). Paidia is formed from the Greek word pais, paidos, which means “child.” Agōnia derives from ἄγων (agōn), which means “contest” or “struggle for victory.” Paidia is a kind of play; agōnia—which gives us the word “agony” by the way—is undertaken purely for the purpose of demonstrating one’s own superiority.

This distinction seems to leave room for something such as competitive play: Two teams, or individual competitors, square off and only one of them wins. But the point of the competition is to have fun and improve one’s skill out of love for the sport itself. Such play involves competition, yes, but it’s still play (paidia): a pursuit undertaken fundamentally and finally out of love.

“an idiot for Thy Kingdom”

Alan Jacobs from a few years ago—a post which I discovered by reading through this tag on his blog. The prayer he makes at the end of the post is prompted by his reading of this passage in Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:

Just then my eye was caught by two large, loosely formed spheres in neutral colours, one blackish grey, the other brownish black. These were the behinds of two peasant women who were employed by the municipalities to weed the flower-beds at the corners of the square. They were being idiots, private persons in the same sense as the nurse in my London nursing-home, who was unable to imagine why the assassination of King Alexander should perturb anybody but his personal friends. They were paid to pull up weeds, and they wanted the money, so they continued to pull them up, even when the students raised a shout and brought some gendarmes down on them not fifteen yards away. As I looked at those devoted behinds, bobbing up and down over their exemplary task, and the smug face of the automatic rebel, I thanked God for the idiocy of women, which must in many parts of the world have been the sole defender of life against the lunacy of men.

Jacobs:

I read this passage and I think: Lord, make me an idiot, an idiot for Thy Kingdom. Keep me focused on the weeds I need to pull, the garden I am charged with tending. Let the lunatics run and shout as they will, but keep me at work on my humble daily “exemplary task.” In the name of Jesus I ask this. Amen.

The Virtue of Moderation

Andrew Sullivan on moderation:

And by moderation, I don’t mean the mushy middle, defined by the center between two poles. I mean the capacity to tack left and right to resist extremes of both kinds, to retain principles that endure against the passions of the moment, to seek compromise rather than conflict, to prefer skepticism and slow change to “moral clarity” and revolution. Conservatism isn’t about opposing all change; it’s about finding the best ways to adapt to constant change while keeping the best of the past.

He then quotes from Aurelian Craiutu’s Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes:

I don’t want to identify moderation with centrism. The way in which I think about moderation is that it can be found on both sides of the political spectrum. There are moderates on the left, in the center, and on the right.…

I think it’s one of the riskiest things to try to act as a moderate when passions run high, when reason is overcome by passion and most people just want to shout and express their dismay, their concerns and so forth, without concern for political moderation. It’s a virtue only for courageous minds. It’s a paradox. The image of moderation is that of a weak virtue. And I think that it is a difficult virtue that requires a great dose of courage, nonconformism, and risk.

Both Sullivan and Craiutu describe moderation as a virtue in the sense of an ordered disposition of the soul—and they set this virtue of moderation against unreflective partisanship. In other words, the relevant kind of moderation is defined not by its ideological content—it can be found equally in those on the left, in the center, and on the right—but by its distinctive quality as an ordering of the soul. Partisans (or mere partisans) “shout and express their dismay” while seeking, or despairing of, victory for their side. Moderates (in the relevant sense) exercise their judgment by asking, what is the best outcome I can reasonably hope for in these particular circumstances? What outcome will best preserve or promote what I and those who agree with me value, while giving us time to persuade those who disagree that they are wrong? Or to find an even better compromise. I like it. This is how I’m going to use the term moderate from now on.

“no such thing as a Platonic system”

Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm & Divine Madness:

The fact is that there is no such thing as a Platonic system. Those who truly know Plato have time and again had to admit this. … the absence of a coherent system is not a sign of internal contradictions in Plato’s mind, but—as is the case with other great thinkers, such as Aristotle, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas—a mark of tacit respect for the unfathomability of the universe.

Paper Comments

Alan Jacobs:

My own experience, for what little it’s worth, is that sometimes you get students who undergo dramatic changes in their academic performance, for good or for ill, but those changes have nothing to do with intelligence. Someone’s performance drops because of illness or emotional upheaval. Or, conversely: Many years ago I had a student who took several classes from me and never got anything better than a C. At the beginning of his senior year he came to my office and asked me why. I reminded him that I had always made detailed comments on his paper; he said, yeah, he knew that, but he had never read the comments and always just threw the papers away. So I explained what his problem was. He nodded, thanked me, went away, and in the two classes he had from me that year he got the highest grades in the class.

Mechanization, Monoculture, and Social Ecology

Alan Jacobs, writing at the Hedgehog Review, draws an analogy between biological ecology and social ecology. Reflecting on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of his visits to Caribbean rum distilleries and on Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, Jacobs promulgates several theses:

  • All illiberalisms are instrinsically mechanistic.

Jacobs’s example of biological mechanization uses Giedion to interpret Lévi-Strauss: “To replace ‘ancient wooden vats thickly encrusted with waste matter’ with ‘white enamel tanks and chromium piping’ is to make the process of rum distillation less wildly organic and therefore less ecologically diverse. And this simplification is, as Giedion might put it, what mechanization wants: a regularizing, an elimination of the unpredictable—everything unpredictable and uncontrollable is designated as an ‘impurity’—and therefore a remaking of organic processes to render them something more inorganic.”

Analogously, it is the goal of all illiberalisms “for mechanization to take command—as long as mechanization serves their ends. It does not seem to occur to them to ask, with Giedion, whether mechanization ever actually does serve human ends. Which leads us, I think, to a corollary thesis”:

  • Insofar as illiberalism is mechanistic, it is inhuman.

Jacobs next makes use of a historical analogue: the Albigensian crusade. If the churchmen of that day—the illiberal mechanizers in Jacobs’s analogy—had succeeded in suppressing what they regarded as dangerously wrong ideas, “Thomas Aquinas could not have written his works, which engage ceaselessly with Jewish, Muslim, and pagan thought—even (especially?) thinkers he believed to be profoundly wrong exercised his mind and imagination. He—and therefore we—would have been profoundly impoverished without access to wrong ideas.”

Jacobs next turns to Oliver Rackham’s account in Woodlands of the deforestation of British landscapes and their replacement with plantations: “filling the land with a single species of tree deemed to be useful.” Here deforestation and the use of plantations is the example of mechanizing control. But such plantations rarely work because “like philosophers and theologians, trees need highly diverse, complex ecosystems in order to thrive.” These reflections lead Jacobs to two further theses:

  • Mechanistic illiberalism seeks to create a monoculture.
  • Any attempt to create a monoculture is necessarily self-defeating.

Finally, Jacobs summarizes Rackham’s account of the surprising result of deforestation and plantations: Often, the planted trees declined and native trees returned. “In many cases, the very species with which foresters had once filled plantations, only to see them decline or even die, ended up thriving in the midst of more ecologically complex and varied environments.” This leads Jacobs to a final thesis:

  • Complex, organic ecosystems—whether biological or social—are far harder to kill off than the mechanized makers of monocultures think.

I am grateful to Prof. Jacobs for this ecological perspective on culture. His essay has helped me formulate several thoughts and questions, which I aim to pursue in subsequent posts.

  1. What definition of “illiberalism” applies here? And what is its opposite? Initial thoughts: “Illiberalism,” as its name implies, must involve the absence or privation of “freedom” (libertas) in some sense, i.e. the kind of freedom that, in the case of rum distilleries, promotes more “wildly organic” and “ecologically diverse” conditions: the kind of freedom which mechanization’s command necessarily suppresses.
  2. But it seems that Jacobs does not intend his analogy to imply that “liberalism” or “mere liberalism” should correspond to the proper, ecologically responsible, attitude towards human culture.
  3. This makes me wonder if a three-fold distinction, of excess, defect, and virtuous mean, could apply to Jacobs’s examples: i. Illiberalism is the excess. ii. Liberalism is the defect. iii. Something like what the Greeks and Romans meant by “paideia” and “humanitas” or like what Wendel Berry means by the Kingdom of God would be the virtuous mean. Since illiberalism is “inhuman,” is the right, ecologically responsible, approach to culture a kind of humanism?
  4. A further thought closely tied to 3. and 1.: A synonym for the Latin ideal of humanitas is liberalitas, which shares the same root as libertas (“freedom”) but has more to do with freeness in giving—i.e. generosity—rather than freedom from constraint.
  5. How does all of this relate to Jacobs’s larger recent project which he calls “Invitation and Repair“? Specifically, how can invitation and repair counteract the malign effects of illiberalism?
  6. Finally, how should we understand Jacobs’s critique of illiberalism in relation to the call for an “illiberalism of the weak” made recently by Leah Libresco Sargeant? LLS and Jacobs seem to share many values and goals, but their terminology seems not to align completely.