Etymologies

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.

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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.

a prayer for artists

From today’s Vespers:

Tu, qui artes coléntibus præstas ut splendórem tuum suo ingénio maniféstent,
mundum per eórum ópera cum spe gaudióque illústra.

Thou, who grant that those who cultivate the arts make thy splendor palpable by their genius, illumine our world in hope and joy through their works. Amen.

Christianity and Classics

Simon Goldhill over at Antigone Journal:

In recent years, scholars of Classics have often self-lacerated about how the study of antiquity has been mobilized in the service of imperialism, social and educational exclusion, and even violent repression. It is good and right to be highly critical of such mobilisations in the past and, even more pressingly, in the present – and to act against them. But it will not do to ignore how much such mobilisations are in tension with – and often in response to – the radical potential of the study of Classical antiquity to transform the contemporary world. The history of how Classics and Christianity interact, both in complicity and in aggressive difference, is a wonderful test-case for the complexity and richness and seriousness of the battle between radical and conservative forces in understanding the past – and in how understanding the past continues to structure understanding of the present.

Bookshelf Topography

Leslie Kendall Die on the significance of bookshelf topography:

I marvel that the complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books. Inside this paper universe, I find sense within confusion, calm within a storm, the soothing murmur of hundreds of books communing with their neighbors. Opening them reveals treasured passages gently underlined in pencil; running my hand over the Mylar-wrapped hardcovers reminds me of how precious they are. Not just the books themselves, but the ideas within, the recollections they evoke. The image of my father at his desk. The sound of his diction and intonation as he brought each character to life and drove each plot twist home. In these things, I beheld the card catalog of the infinite library of his heart, the map of his soul, drawn with aching clarity in the topography of his books.