Author Archives: Andrew Beer

Gifts and Selves

Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman reviewing The Lost Daughter:

To give life to someone else is always to give away something of your own and to saddle yourself with a love that can be almost unbearable. A child’s life really does come at the cost of yours. But Ferrante’s novels, which cover decades and span multiple generations, remind the reader that no matter how hard we might try, life cannot be hoarded. Every life is a life that will be lost. We grow up, we grow old, we lose our youth and strength and eventually we lose the sources of creativity and inspiration that make it possible for us to create something new of our own. This is true whether or not we have children. If we have them, along the way, we can at least pass on something of what we lose to someone else. This possibility—of sharing our life, entrusting that which we will lose to someone else—may be one good reason not to try to escape, after all.

And Leah Libresco Sargeant on gift economies:

Opening our hands and letting our wealth pass through them can be difficult, but it is the practice version of the real generosity that God calls us to. Wealth is a temptation, but we can physically let it go, and once it is out of our hands, it is hard to reclaim, even if our heart aches for it.

But the real calling is to hold our selves just as loosely.

She then quotes a footnote from Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property:

If our lives are gifts to begin with, however, in some sense they are not “ours” even when we become adults. Or perhaps they are, but only until such time as we find a way to bestow them. The belief that life is a gift carries with it the corollary feeling that the gift should not be hoarded.

All of which brings to mind St. Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John 29.3, where he tries to resolve the apparent contradiction in Christ’s statement in John 7:16: Mea doctrina non est mea, sed eius qui misit me (“My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me”). Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) in his Introduction to Christianity summarized Augustine’s solution to the apparent problem:

[Augustine] asks himself first whether it is not a sheer contradiction, an offense against the elementary rules of logic, to say something like “Mine is not mine.” But, he goes on to ask, digging deeper, what, then, is the teaching of Jesus that is simultaneously his and not his? Jesus is “word” [Augustine quotes John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”], and thus it becomes clear that his teaching is he himself. If one reads the sentence again with this insight, it then says: I am by no means just I; I am not mine at all; my I is that of another. With this we have moved on out of Christology and arrived at ourselves: “Quid tam tuum quam tu, quid tam non tuum quam tu”—What is so much yours as yourself, and what is so little yours as yourself? The most individual element in us—the only thing that belongs to us in the last analysis—our own “I”, is at the same time the least individual element of all, for it is precisely our “I” that we have neither from ourselves nor for ourselves. The “I” is simultaneously what I have completely and what least of all belongs to me. Thus here again the concept of mere substance (=what stands in itself!) is shattered, and it is made apparent how being that truly understands itself grasps at the same time that in being itself it does not belong to itself; that it only comes to itself by moving away from itself and finding its way back as relatedness to its true primordial state.

Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004), p. 190

Sol, ecce, lentus occidens

A beautiful hymn by Anselmo Lentini, OSB, from today’s Vespers. You can find a translation here.

Sol, ecce, lentus occidens
montes et arva et æquora
mæstus relinquit, innovat
sed lucis omen crastinæ,

Mirantibus mortalibus
sic te, Creator provide,
leges vicesque temporum
umbris dedisse et lumini.

Ac dum, tenebris æthera
silentio prementibus,
vigor laborum deficit,
quies cupita quæritur,

Spe nos fideque divites
tui beamur lumine
Verbi, quod est a sæculis
splendor paternæ gloriæ.

Est ille sol qui nesciat
ortum vel umquam vesperum;
quo terra gestit contegi,
quo cæli in ævum iubilant.

Hac nos serena perpetim
da luce tandem perfrui,
cum Nato et almo Spiritu
tibi novantes cantica. Amen.

“ever-renewed listening and learning”

From John Webster’s The Domain of the Word via Alan Jacobs’s newsletter:

Theological work, including theological interpretation, requires the exercise of patience. This is because in theology things go slowly. We are temporal creatures, we do not receive revelation in a single moment; and we are sinful creatures whose idolatry and inattention are only gradually overcome. It would be a poor conception of theological interpretation which presumed to have acquired Scripture’s meaning in a final way which cut out the need for ever-renewed listening and learning. ‘My soul languishes for thy salvation’, says the psalmist, ‘I hope in thy word. My eyes fail for watching for thy salvation’ (Ps. 119.81f.) We must be patient, suffering God’s works, looking for the coming of the Spirit to instruct us in the truth of the Word. But we must also be patient with others. Augustine, again, considered the activities of biblical interpretation as an exercise of charity through mutual learning, as what he called a ‘way for love, which ties people together in the bonds of unity, to make souls overflow and as it were intermingle with each other.’

In tenui labor . . .

David French, in his Sunday newsletter,

But when we speak of our own energy and our own efforts, here’s a basic truth. We can have a large amount of influence over a small number of people and a small amount of influence over a large number of people. The question that can and should challenge so many of us—especially those most engaged in politics—is whether our efforts are calibrated to our impact.

Which reminded me of the following from G. K. Chesterton:

But when people begin to talk about this domestic duty as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary, I simply give up the question. For I cannot with the utmost energy of imagination conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home, as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colorless and of small import to the soul, then as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

What’s Wrong with the World, p. 132 of the edition linked above

And this in turn reminded me of another quote, in a similar vein, by Jane Austen, in a letter to her nephew, James Edward Austen Leigh:

What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited Sketches, full of variety and Glow? – How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much Labour?

British Library, Add MS 89437

Here is a photograph of the autograph text, from the webpage linked above:

Jane Austen’s “little bit (two inches wide) of Ivory” were of course her novels.

Taken together, the sentiments of French, Chesterton, and Austen teach a salutary lesson in the importance of loving labor on a small scale. A lesson for which Virgil’s Georgics provides a fitting motto: in tenui labor, at tenuis non gloria, “my toil is on a slender theme, but slender not is its glory!”

“nobody can be taught faster than he can learn”

Samuel Johnson, from his “Life of Milton” via Alan Jacobs’s microblog:

It is told that in the art of education [Milton] performed wonders, and a formidable list is given of the authors, Greek and Latin, that were read in Aldersgate-street by youth between ten and fifteen or sixteen years of age. Those who tell or receive these stories should consider that nobody can be taught faster than he can learn. The speed of the horseman must be limited by the power of his horse. Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.

The fruits of better thinking

Dr. Ulrich Lehner, interviewed by Charlie Camosy (via The Pillar):

Good thinking means that you can understand what others are saying, can articulate it in your own words, but also that you are able to describe your own experience of the world to others. If I am not able to put my suffering and pain in words others understand, I become frustrated and withdraw.

The more we learn to think better, we recognize our own limitations, and see in others members of the same species, endowed with the same dignity and reason. We can build a “home” together, a society that is just and empathetic. That does not mean one has to “feel” what the other feels, but the ability to take somebody’s else’s standpoint. By doing so, we learn to see the world from the viewpoint of our opponents, our critics, of the underprivileged and poor, the marginalized and so on. We become better human beings by doing it, but we also develop the ability to disagree with each other more respectfully.