The Whirlpool's Rim

ancient hungers

2011-12-15T13:57:00.000-07:00

At The Imaginative Conservative, Professor Birzer offers this quotation from Russell Kirk:

In a generation like ours, which has forgotten the natural law and has knelt to Leviathan, Antigone takes on a meaning little understood during the nineteenth century. . . . There exist in human nature, common to the Greeks of the fifth century and to us, certain constant qualities. Of these qualities, among the rising talents of every generation, are a longing for poetic imagery; a dim participating in the tragic view of life; and an aspiration after ethical insights. Antigone is a great drama because it is humane in the highest sense: that is, Antigone exemplifies the educational discipline called humanitas, the training of the ethical faculty through the understanding of powerful literature. Despite all the muddled positivism and pragmatism to which college students have been subjected since the age of five or six years, truth will demand a hearing now and again. The ancient hungers of the imagination are hard to deny. [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 36-37]

We should live in fear and trembling toward the "ancient hungers of the imagination," toward the full extent of the "humane in the highest sense." It is only indirectly that it is we who are hungry. Our generation is not prepared to participate in a genuine hunger for "the tragic view of life." Even (especially) Catholics find it difficult to say with Antigone that "It is the dead, / Not the living, who make the longest demands: / We die forever . . ." To say those words is one thing; it is another to train oneself to "go gentle" in that ethical way. Positivism and pragmatism are not choices for our generation. They are our ethical way. It is true that some are capable of being attentive to the truth that demands a hearing, but who can choose, like Antigone, to enact that demand, to be a moment of its appearance? Are even the greatest educators of humanitas capable of gouging out their eyes?

We have always been the recognizers, the pilgrim observers. How can we be asked to satisfy a hunger that goes beyond the verge of sense and dialogue? It is here that we have always encountered the nearness of the divine. It is here where we have been capable of belief. We preserve the tradition of the illative sense and we believe in the communion of saints. Isn't that enough? Is there really something wrong with our imaginative preference for Jane Austen? With a conservatism that is the natural ally of "the cleric, the unambitious family man, and the housewife"? Is it not the positivists and pragmatists who deserve to face the intrusion of Dostoevsky's "fantastic" realism?

Percy's "emotional comprehension" of women

2011-12-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

Simcha Fisher recently wrote that she "received terrible lessons" about romantic love when she read Walker Percy's "terrific" books as a teenager:

[They] were just above my emotional comprehension (and I worry a bit about Percy’s own emotional comprehension of women). The romantic escapades of Dr. Thomas More are his tragic flaw, and a symptom of his deeper, similarly flawed relationship with Christ, which comes in cycles of ecstatic lust and regret. But a teenager will likely take any likable character as a role model, ignoring or normalizing the misery and distress that the character suffers.

As Matthew Lickona comments, Percy is a diagnostic novelist who is more interested in depicting whether and how his characters get "through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon" than in giving them the sort of emotional range that would make them adequate role models. The reader can relate to the diagnosis of malaise and the initial prescription of the capacity for lust (these are, in my opinion, the moments when Percy reaches a genuinely artistic description), but not to much more than that. Some men sit like Achilles or run through swamps; even more women balance a Coke like Sharon Kinkaid or drive like Margot. When it cuts through the malaise, "romantic love" is like whiskey rather than water. Its surprising heaviness and sweetness is nearer the thigh than the face (the locus of "emotional comprehension"). And that is not nothing. But it does reveal, as Lickona also says, the limits of the diagnostic aim: "One of the difficulties of writing a diagnostic novel is that you have to people it with other . . . people." Dr. Thomas More really is as boring as his confessor says he is toward the end of Love in the Ruins: "Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about . . . things which, please forgive me, sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middle-aged daydreams" (399). And Binx and Kate are no Jack and Anne and certainly no Elizabeth and Darcy.

Anyway, the Korrektiv discussion of Mrs. Fisher's post includes this comment:

Next: a post on Kierkegaard and women. I love SK, but it’s gonna make Percy look like Oprah.

Funny. The Kierkegaard of Works of Love and Myshkin were my teenage models for comprehending women and articulating romantic love. Whoops. Failing to live up to that wasn't anything you could call graceful. But I think Kierkegaard was more imaginative about women than the odd pseudonymous text would suggest. As he wrote in his Journal: "Had I had faith, I would have stayed with Regine. Thanks be to God, I can see that now. During those days I came close to losing my senses."

the old man

2011-12-03T17:06:00.001-07:00

Hermann Diem, writing in Kierkegaard: An Introduction:

To Kierkegaard, it was no accident that the "forgiveness of sins" and the "resurrection of the body" are juxtaposed in the Creed. What is made new through faith in the forgiveness of sins is the old man, not someone else. A man does not become a blank page. What he realizes in his new life are possibilities lying in his own past history, even if he has already bungled them. (26)

"seen by men"

2011-11-22T00:32:00.001-07:00

Aidan Nichols, O.P. writing in The Art of God Incarnate:

In his body of glory Christ lives radiantly as true humanity, the realization at last of the possibility the writers of Genesis had seen in the human animal "in the beginning." In the glorious humanity of the risen Christ the expected humanity of the last Adam has been seen by men. Once he had glimpsed Christ, Paul had no doubt that he had located the model and means of transfiguring the form of human life into that condition where it is capable of imaging God, just as the Jewish apocalyptists had hoped man would "in the last days."

Paul had come to see Jesus, therefore, as a man who fulfilled the spoilt promise of Adam and thus renewed the image of God in the human. The very lapse of time which distanced Paul from the historical Jesus enabled him to perceive what the artist Degas would call the "essential gestures" of his life. These essential gestures, in which the revelatory form of Jesus' life consists, are above all a matter of his perfect, creative obedience to the Father. That responsiveness in obedience to the Father, in life and in death, is for Paul the inverted image of Adam's sin. Christ, although he was in the form (or image) of God, did not exploit the existence with God which he possessed, but renounced his claims, choosing instead the way of humiliation and obedience manifested in the carpenter's home at Nazareth and the via dolorosa to Calvary. (42-43)

Fleming on Plato

2011-11-18T16:23:00.001-07:00

Thomas Fleming will be discussing Plato's Euthyphro at Chronicles. Introductory post is here.

knowledge without love

2011-11-17T22:46:00.001-07:00

From Hans Urs von Balthasar's Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence:

The writer's greatest danger, from which his profession always separates him only by a hair's breadth, is the vice of vices, the essence of original sin . . . the sin of Eve in paradise and of all her guilty children: curiosity, or, expressed in a more theological way, knowledge without love, the kind of knowledge that is not paid and vouched for with one's existence and suffering, the forced anticipation of the vision God wants to bestow through grace but into which impatient man bites as he bit into the forbidden apple. (139)

This reminds me of something Mr. Cooper wrote in a comment on one of my papers (circa February 2006):

[There is] a marvelous unity among the writing that Christ does upon the hearts of his people, the writing that the apostles and evangelists do upon the inscripturated record of the covenant, and the writing that we all must do upon the fabric of our own life and the life of our generation . . . [T]he standard for the interpreter [has been raised]; until the interpreter can receive the gift of love provided by the apostle or evangelist, he or she is not ready to respond with an analysis. And the analysis itself must be a responsive gift of love, to the biblical author, to Christ, and to the reader.

the myth of neutrality

2011-11-10T14:10:00.001-07:00

James Hitchcock, writing in 1979:

The myth that, on questions like abortion and sterilization, the state is merely neutral, neither forbidding nor denying particular human actions, has understandable appeal for those Christians who face the problem of becoming good citizens of the secular city. However, it has little basis in reality. The modern liberal state is, for better or worse, an active organ which is never neutral, constantly employing its power, its money, its influence, and its personnel for or against particular social policies. Avant-garde Catholics are caught in a mesh of hopeless contradictions, simultaneously urging that politics partakes of a moral and religious significance but deploring attempts to "intrude" religion into politics, and insisting that Christians must "witness" to justice and truth but that they must also not "impose" their values on other people.

The result is to deny any distinctively Christian influence over the political process at the very time that important moral decisions are made through that process. The moral tone of society for the next quarter-century is being set largely as a result of certain judicial and legislative decisions towards which progressive Catholics are either benignly favorable or naively indifferent. There is no more striking contrast in contemporary society than that between the confident and aggressive social reformer and the diffident Christian afraid to be thought fanatical. (Catholicism and Modernity, 173)

sacramental being

2011-11-07T01:50:00.000-07:00

Deacon James Keating writing in the November 2011 Homiletic & Pastoral Review (via Ignatius Insight Scoop):

Christ wants to share his authority over malevolent powers with his priests. He wants to encourage and teach a man how to be with a person when that person is being tempted, struggling with faith, hope or love: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, Therefore and make disciples of all nations…. And behold I am with you always, until the end of the age" (Mt 28:18, 20). This desire of Christ to share his authority is fulfilled when a man is ordained to the priesthood. Each priest, however, has to subjectively cooperate with Christ, receiving his authority, over and over again, with each day of ministry. This receptivity can be hard to sustain as so many tasks present themselves to a priest, tasks that threaten to take from him the essential aspect of priesthood: it is a spiritual mission flowing from a heart captured by Christ’s own. A priest’s pastoral authority flows from his own being, his being after ordination.

The phrase "being after ordination" as much as the constant task of "subjective cooperation" echoes José Granados' remarkable article on the Ascension in the Spring 2011 issue of Communio:

A central element of faith in the Ascension is the bond between flesh and God. This claim strikes us as odd, in that we often understand the body as an obstacle to our relation to the divine, in the manner of Socrates' debate in the Phaedo. For the Bible, however, the flesh is the privileged place wherein God manifests himself. The resurrection of the body, the goal toward which Christian life points, confirms this aspect. The fullness of the body takes place when it is filled with the Spirit and becomes a spiritual body. This means that the flesh is not opposed to the Spirit, but is rather his companion, the fitting place within the world for his work and abode.

This is possible because the body itself is that place where life, by becoming open to the world and to humanity, discovers within itself a relation to God the Creator. Only in the body can God be made manifest. In the body God appears, not as some external object placed before our eyes for our control, nor as some remote horizon of man’s desire, which could be mistaken for a mere projection or mirage. The flesh bears testimony that we are created and welcomed into existence by a love that precedes us. The transcendent can now be understood to be the spring from which all life flows, like that originating love that gives birth to us. In order to discover the mystery of love, the flesh, moreover, sets in motion a dynamism that carries man beyond himself, toward communion with the transcendent.

What is the role of the Ascension in the history of this bond between the flesh and the divine? The body of Christ, already glorified, is now bound to the rest of creation in a new way. This mystery communicates to the cosmos the state of the glorified flesh of Jesus, insofar as it places the definitive goal toward which all of creation is tending in the Father himself. A new horizon is thus opened within creation: all created being is already in heaven, because all things are now moving toward the very heart of God. On the basis of the Ascension, therefore, the body acquires a new language; the body’s capacity for proclaiming God is raised to a new level. This is the language of the sacraments, in which material creation expresses a more fulfilled relation with the transcendent.

Keating again:

Reclaiming the power of his office, which means to become affected by his intimate communion with Christ, the priest realizes that there is a Pentecost today, as there has always been since the very first one[.]

Granados:

[T]he Ascension has to do, not principally with Christ's absence, but rather with his powerful presence among his people. The liturgical context of the Lucan narrative highlights the connection between the Ascension and the Church. In the gospel, Jesus leaves while imparting his blessing, with arms raised—a gesture that calls to mind the priestly blessing of Sirach (Sir 50:20–21). For this reason, Heinrich Schlier can say that, for Luke, Ascension and blessing coincide: the gesture with which Jesus departs is the final image that remains with the disciples; he departs while giving his blessing, not after. We have already noted that in the Old Testament, the divine blessing brings the continuing presence of God, which is interior to that which is created, bestowing upon it fertility and growth. It is understandable, then, why this act grounds the existence of the Church. Luke's account is thus in accord with the conclusion of the gospel of Matthew: "I am with you always, until the end of the age" (Mt 28:20).

village and parish in The Diary of a Country Priest

2011-11-06T01:42:00.000-07:00

Here.

men and fish

2011-11-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics:

[I]s history a reasonable process or is it essentially incalculable and irrational?
. . . the Christian is bound to believe that there is a spiritual purpose in history--that it is subject to the designs of Providence and that somehow or other God's will is done. But that is a very different thing from saying that history is rational in the ordinary sense of the word.

There are, as it were, two levels of rationality, and history belongs to neither of them. There is the sphere of completely rationalized human action--the kind of rationality that we get in a balance sheet or in the plans and specifications of an architect or an engineer. And there is the higher sphere of rationality to which the human mind attains, but which is not created by it--the high realities of philosophy and abstract truth.

But between these two realms there is a great intermediate region in which we live, the middle earth of life and history; and that world is submitted to forces which are both higher and lower than reason. ... Human life is essentially a warfare against unknown powers--not merely against flesh and blood . . . but against principalities and powers, against "the Cosmocrats of the Dark Aeon," to use St. Paul's strange and disturbing expression. ...

Of course if we were pure spirits, the whole process of history and human life might be intelligible and spiritually transparent. We should be like a man in calm weather on a clear tropical lagoon who can look down and see the lower forms of life in their infinite variety and the powers of evil like the sharks that move silently and powerfully through the clear water, and who can also look up and see the ordered march of the stars.

But this is not given to man. The actor in history is like the captain who sees nothing but clouds above and waves below, who is driven by the wind and the current. He must trust in his chart and his compass, and even these cannot deliver him from the blind violence of the elements. If he makes a mistake, or if the chart fails him, he dies in a blind flurry of dark water and with him the crew who have no responsibility except to obey orders and to trust their officers. (121-123)

Robert Penn Warren, "A Way to Love God":

But I had forgotten to mention an upland
Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when
No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight,
I watched the sheep huddling. Their eyes
Stared into nothingness. In that mist-diffused light their eyes
Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water,
Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.

Richard Wilbur, "Someone Talking to Himself":

Even when first her face,
Younger than any spring,
Older than Pharaoh's grain
And fresh as Phoenix-ashes,
Shadowed under its lashes
Every earthly thing,
There was another place
I saw in a flash of pain:
Off in the fathomless dark
Beyond the verge of love
I saw blind fishes move,
And under a stone shelf
Rode the recusant shark--
Cold, waiting, himself.

Elizabeth Bishop, "The Fish":

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road:

[In his dream the man] wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some gigantic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones case up a shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

"ignorance of owing is to be devoid of a self"

2011-10-28T00:50:00.000-07:00

R. J. Snell writing at Front Porch Republic:

I can think of myself as an empty container of freedom, as a sovereign who exists prior to my entanglements with others, but this is a paltry and ghost-like self. The person who matters is the one who is son, father, husband, cousin, son-in-law, friend, and each of those roles limits my ability to do just whatever I want, whenever. As son, I owe piety; as husband, I owe fidelity; as father, I owe gentle instruction; as friend, I owe loyalty. Consequently, I am what I am in virtue of the responsibilities I bear. Insofar as I matter as a person, I am constituted not by sovereignty, but by what I owe. And only by knowing what I owe to others do I know who I am and what I’m for; ignorance of owing is to be devoid of a self.

lunatic or devil or atheist

2011-10-27T01:35:00.000-07:00

I think Matthew Archbold is a little hard on Richard Dawkins here. Dawkins said something like:

I wrote [an] article called "Atheists for Jesus," I think it was… Somebody gave me a t-shirt: "Atheists for Jesus." Well, the point was that Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”

Archbold cites C.S. Lewis in response:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

This reminds me of the First Things discussion between Joe Carter and several commenters about whether Jesus (taking his divinity for granted) was subject to ignorance with respect to historical questions. Is it possible that Christ could have referred to the "days of Noah" in error if it could be proved that the Noah story was what one commenter called "an old Mesopotamian myth"? Here, Archbold insists that Dawkins must recognize Lewis' either/or. But Dawkins would probably argue that Jesus (understandably) claimed to be God, not because he was a lunatic or devil, but in order to effectively promulgate his great moral teachings. Furthermore, hasn't the search for the historical Jesus suggested that Jesus might have had aims that were not fulfilled in the way he himself understood at the moment he uttered them? Whether you agree with that sort of exegesis or not, clearly Dawkins would more readily accept that view than Benedict XVI's view of Christ as gestalt. In other words, the opposite of God in this case is neither lunacy or devil; it is context.

Athens and Jerusalem and the "Southern Wave"

2011-10-26T02:50:00.001-07:00

John Allen responds to American right-wing commentary on the recent note from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace by pointing out that the document is likely "the first ripple of a southern wave":

Focusing on how much papal muscle the note can flex, however, risks ignoring what is at least an equally revealing question: Whatever you make of it, does the note seem to reflect important currents in Catholic social and political thought anywhere in the world?

The answer is yes, and it happens to be where two-thirds of the Catholics on the planet today live: the southern hemisphere, also known as the developing world.

It's fitting that the Vatican official responsible for the document is an African, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, because it articulates key elements of what almost might be called a "southern consensus." One way of sizing up the note's significance, therefore, is as an indication that the demographic transition long under way in Catholicism, with the center of gravity shifting from north to south, is being felt in Rome.

No doubt he is right. Given the purchase that demographic and sociological predictions have within the Catholic bureaucracy, is it possible that a new and totally different controversy over the question "what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" is in the offing? The PCJP writes:

The conditions exist for going definitively beyond a 'Westphalian' international order in which States feel the need for cooperation but do not seize the opportunity to integrate their respective sovereignties for the common good of peoples.

It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good. Of course, this transformation will be made at the cost of a gradual, balanced transfer of a part of each nation’s powers to a world Authority and to regional Authorities, but this is necessary at a time when the dynamism of human society and the economy and the progress of technology are transcending borders, which are in fact already very eroded in a globalized world.

The birth of a new society and the building of new institutions with a universal vocation and competence are a prerogative and a duty for everyone, without distinction. What is at stake is the common good of humanity and the future itself.

A prerogative and duty for everyone, without distinction. What is at stake is the common good. How is it possible for ordinary Catholics to carry out this task? In a secular age, no less? We hardly have the capacity to comprehend our own parishes (assuming we are lucky enough to have committed to suffer along with just one). The document as good as implies that a bureaucrat working for a United Nations that, as Sean Dailey rightly points out at Crisis Magazine, "put Saudi Arabia on its human rights commission" and pushes "abortion and contraception in every developing nation on earth" is more true to Catholic responsibility in a post-Westphalian age than any mere cultural Catholic ever could be. (Max Lindenman, you're too late!) Is it not likely that a United Nations-inspired globalization authority will lead to what James Matthew Wilson describes as "a demimonde of fragmented ethnic cultures and shadow citizenships"? Objections that Caritas in Veritate included the requirement that any such organization "promote a person-based and community-oriented cultural process of world-wide integration that is open to transcendence" (§42) will fall on deaf ears.

What does the question about the relation between Athens and Jerusalem mean now that we must be globalists? What will it mean after the Southern Wave? What will it mean when it is revealed (as it already has been by Allen himself) that the Southern Wave is no better equipped for the Secular Age than a decadent West that refuses to acknowledge the setting of the metaxy? How one longs to hear once more that it is souls that are at stake.

* * *

In his book The Future Church, John Allen anticipated these questions by joking that Hilaire Belloc will loudly roll over in his grave when it becomes abundantly clear that Europe is not the faith (see page 14). I didn't think it was that funny until I watched Dr. Fahey's ISI lecture on Belloc. Imagine that sort of character existing after culture.

Rod Dreher correctly draws attention to the inevitability of questions about "global financial entities." It is important to recall Chrystia Freeland's Atlantic article on the "new global elite" in this context. Beware the imitatio plutocrat.

Rick Garnett makes the point I tried to make in my last post on this document: "[M]any are making the mistake that was widely made with respect to the Pope's Caritas, i.e., imagining that the Church proposes a list of 'economic policy proposals' that can be conveniently lifted, to the extent they strike the lifter as attractive, without any attached moral anthropology[.]"

Worst-case scenario: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court won't be the only reason you remember the word interdict.

Dostoevsky and Dickens

2011-10-25T00:43:00.003-07:00

From the beginning of an NYT review of two books on Dickens:

In a remarkable account of a meeting he had with Charles Dickens in 1862, Dostoyevsky recalled that the British novelist told him: "All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. 'Only two people?' I asked."

Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace on a "world political authority"

2011-10-24T18:06:00.000-07:00

Full text (unofficial translation)

Reuters | News.va

Rod Dreher | Richard Spencer | Samuel Gregg | George Weigel | Fr. Thomas J. Reese, S.J. | Peter Daniel Haworth | Jeffrey Tucker | Laura Wood

Dreher expresses particular concern that this document will "FREAK the evangelicals out" (his friend's words) because of the proximity of "world political authority" to the "one world government" of the Antichrist. Did they freak out over Populorum Progressio?

Spencer says that the document "offers an intelligent recounting of recent economic history" but thinks that its prescription amounts to "the creation of a massive new usurious bank with 'universal jurisdiction'" that would end up acting very much like the U.S. Fed.

Gregg points out that this document is nothing new: "the notion that an increasingly integrated world economy requires some type of authority able to make decisions about what the Church calls 'the universal common good' has long been a staple of Catholic social teaching." He then focuses on its failure to take into account problems created by fiat money, government bailouts, public debt and deficits, and central banks like the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. "For a church with a long tradition of thinking seriously about finance centuries before anyone had ever heard of John Maynard Keynes or Friedrich Hayek, we can surely do better." In my opinion, the "long traditions" of sharia finance are better placed politically to affect the global economy. The word "usury" can only be heard in the West in an "otherized" accent.

As is his wont, Weigel discusses the authoritative "weight" of the document:

The document is a “Note” from a rather small office in the Roman Curia. The document’s specific recommendations do not necessarily reflect the settled views of the senior authorities of the Holy See; indeed, Fr. Federico Lombardi, the press spokesman for the Vatican, was noticeably circumspect in his comments on the document and its weight. As indeed he ought to have been. The document doesn’t speak for the Pope, it doesn’t speak for “the Vatican,” and it doesn’t speak for the Catholic Church.

Haworth wonders "whether this call for international authority can even pass a basic prudence-test." Mark Movsesian's question -- "Is sovereignty Protestant?" -- may be of interest to Front Porch Republic readers (via Mirror of Justice).

* * *

The "global vision of man and of the human race" contemplated in this document is rooted in what Benedict XVI in Caritas in Veritate (cf. section 18) calls "the truth of development." Its first section cites Paul VI's similar language: "the defense of life and the promotion of people’s cultural and moral development are the essential conditions for the promotion of authentic development." Accordingly, what Benedict calls a "true world political authority" "would need to be regulated by law, to observe consistently the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity, to seek to establish the common good, and to make a commitment to securing authentic integral human development inspired by the values of charity in truth" (CiV 67).

Dreher addresses this point in a comment: "[the] document goes on to talk about how all this needs to take place within the context of 'spiritual' values. Well, who decides what 'spiritual' values should guide this development? By whose authority will the Authority manage the globe?" That is the issue. Who believes that the conditions for the possibility of such an authority properly understood will ever exist? According to the document itself, "a long road still needs to be travelled before arriving at the creation of a public Authority with universal jurisdiction." But any journey that begins with the "United Nations as its reference," even if the point of reference is only bureaucratic, must contend with the values of the United Nations. Could the UN ever accept the account of development offered in Caritas in Veritate?

God is the guarantor of man's true development, inasmuch as, having created him in his image, he also establishes the transcendent dignity of men and women and feeds their innate yearning to “be more”. Man is not a lost atom in a random universe: he is God's creature, whom God chose to endow with an immortal soul and whom he has always loved. If man were merely the fruit of either chance or necessity, or if he had to lower his aspirations to the limited horizon of the world in which he lives, if all reality were merely history and culture, and man did not possess a nature destined to transcend itself in a supernatural life, then one could speak of growth, or evolution, but not development. When the State promotes, teaches, or actually imposes forms of practical atheism, it deprives its citizens of the moral and spiritual strength that is indispensable for attaining integral human development and it impedes them from moving forward with renewed dynamism as they strive to offer a more generous human response to divine love. (29)

I emphasize this aspect of development because the Fr. Thomas Reeses of the world neglect it when they describe Benedict (and the Vatican bureaucracy) as "to the Left of Nancy Pelosi."

Update: More from Dreher and several links and quotes from Insight Scoop. Via Dreher, this paragraph from the document is sort of horrifying even with caveats about development:

So conditions exist for definitively going beyond a ‘Westphalian’ international order in which the States feel the need for cooperation but do not seize the opportunity to integrate their respective sovereignties for the common good of peoples. It is the task of today’s generation to recognize and consciously to accept these new world dynamics for the achievement of a universal common good. Of course, this transformation will be made at the cost of a gradual, balanced transfer of a part of each nation’s powers to a world Authority and to regional Authorities, but this is necessary at a time when the dynamism of human society and the economy and the progress of technology are transcending borders, which are in fact already very eroded in a globalized world.

This, the American Catholic bishops' views on immigration, Chaput's discussions of "the next America," and Robert George's belief that America is a "proposition nation" . . . it's a difficult time to be a certain kind of American Catholic conservative. A Buchananite or a Kirkian, for example.

And here is Bonald's view of the document. He is one of the few emphasizing the quality of "elite" that these documents presuppose:

The virtuocratic world authority can only come into existence when there is an elite ready to man it. This elite is supposed to be forged by the elites of each civilization who in dialogue realize that they share a common understanding of the good life. Now, I know that Pope Benedict has been spending some time talking to Muslims, but I’d hardly say the process has gone so far that we form a unified force. If the only elite in existence is the liberal elite, then there’s simply no doubt that they will control any government one designs, and they will rule it according to their principles. The one-world rule thing should have been kept under wraps a little longer.

particular observation

2011-10-12T03:24:00.001-07:00

Walker Percy reaches the summit of his art in this description of Sharon Kinkaid (who can be anywhere because "she is herself sweet life," one of those "village beauties of which the South is so prodigal ... commoner than sparrows and, like sparrows at home in the streets, in the parks, on the doorstep") sitting in a car and being herself:

By flexing her leg at a certain angle, she can stand the coke on a facet of her knee. What a structure it is, tendon and bone, facet and swell, and gold all over. (The Moviegoer)

What a structure, indeed. If only Myshkin could have made such an observation! If only Aglaya could have accompanied him for a drive in the South in the 1950s! (Not that Percy and his characters have all that much to teach Myshkin about how to make one's choices or observations appear.) But this sweet dynamism that no woman can ever wholly forgo while still possessed of tendon and bone, facet and swell is subject, for Binx Bolling, to the intervention of the phenomena of "malaise." The "mistral whistling" of desire for some such girl must contend with the "fog of uneasiness," the "thin gas of malaise," the motes of dust that "rise and fall in the sunlight" -- what Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman calls the "ravening" and "noxious" particles. These particles are the problematic data that Percy's main characters encounter on what one reviewer calls their "pilgrimages of observation."

Bolling first notices these motes during a research project:

I became extraordinarily affected by summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry's attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere.

Though it is clear that though the particles are generally negative phenomena, it is not difficult to detect in Percy's work a certain fondness for them--or even a certain positive presence. Through the intervention of these particles, according to Barrett, people are "so deprived of their surface[s] as to be all but invisible to [each other]." But they are also phenomena of the enduring--of something that does not pass away in time.

In The Art of Fiction, Henry James writes:

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character.

Percy's major characters are denied a complete vision of the unity of character and incident. Incident as the endurance of character; character as the recognition of incident. Knowing, in other words. That unity comes and goes, subject to the whim of malaise (even with respect to the view of women who are capable of being, so to speak, all incident). "Everydayness" has compromised the data of physiognomy, the lingua franca of pilgrim observers (and of novelists and readers). Only bad environments, disasters, another character's occasional, almost accidental performance of an unthought characteristic gesture ("Mercer puts coal on the blazing kindling ... We might be back in Feliciana."), or the transfiguration effected by the presence of a movie star or Bolling's Aunt Emily lifts the fog. The actor William Holden's "heightened reality moves with him and all who fall within it feel it." Aunt Emily recognizes that the "only good things the South ever had" -- "a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women" -- have lost out to the civilization of mediocrity. "There was such a time and there were such men," Bolling also knows, "men who could say to other men, here do this, and have it done and done with pleasure and remembered with pleasure." Those men are all dead. Their contemporaries, like Sam Yerger, are "only Cato on long Sunday afternoons and in the company of [Aunt Emily]." This same sort of in illo tempore analysis of character and incident occurs in Percy's genealogy of Barrett's family:

Over the years his family had turned ironical and lost its gift for action. It was an honorable and violent family, but eventually the violence had been deflected and turned inward. The great grandfather knew what was what and said so and acted accordingly and did not care what anyone thought. He even wore a pistol in a holster like a Western hero and once met the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a barber shop and invited him then and there to shoot it out in the street. The next generation, the grandfather, seemed to know what was what but he was not really so sure. He was brave but he gave much thought to the business of being brave. He too would have shot it out with the grand Wizard if only he could have made certain it was the thing to do. The father was a brave man too and he said he didn't care what others thought but he did care. More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him became a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor.

As for the present young man, the last of the line, he did not know what to think. So he became a watcher and a listener and a wanderer.

And this last young man testifies to that time by being able "to sit like Achilles," place Southern accents, and recognize those enduring motes that surrounded even Western heroes (or, for Bolling, movie stars)--and by being even more annoying than Charles Ryder when both a priest and death are in the room.

So why are these latter observations or the novels themselves not the summit of Percy's art? Because they are more like aphorisms? Because they almost demand footnotes to Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Warren, and Bernanos? Because no particle, no search could withstand the constant relevance of Eula Varner's knee? (If it is not some sort of blasphemy to suggest a similarity in Sharon's.) Is it his appreciators' pleasant insistence that "some piece of the Gospel is in there, but hidden inside romance, satire, horror, and drama, the way that a fat nightcrawler can conceal the sharp steel barb of the fishhook"? I don't know. But the romance isn't that romantic (someone said women don't get Percy), the horror isn't that horrifying (not like Anne Stanton and Willie Stark - that is horror), the dust isn't that dusty (unlike that observed by the Curé d'Ambricourt), etc.

what shadow is this?

2011-10-11T22:58:00.002-07:00

Pseudonoma writes:

Philosophically, Ranasinghe seems not to have considered the possibility that while god is "dead to technological man" -- the fruit of an insight Nietzsche had already seized upon -- the absence of a dead god need not be a mere negation--and this precisely for technological man. As Heidegger had already realized, the god's absence lies, and this exclusively for technological man, as the possible experience of his pending arrival. In short (and in the Platonic terms Ranasinghe opts to use), the lack of movement of our psychic regimes is no mere stasis (understood as a privation of motion) but a peculiar and non-negative new announcement of the essence of logos in historical human existence--one that invites a hitherto unexperienced dynamism, consisting in a radical possibility that can never be made actual by man alone. It is only in terms of this possibility that we may legitimately say that it is "always possible to use philosophical dialectic to persuade a soul mired in artificial reality."

How would Ranasinghe respond? What is an "educator of eros" (his description of Socrates) where "the lack of movement of our psychic regimes" is nothing less than a "non-negative new announcement of the essence of logos in historical human existence"? Is philosophical dialectic that anticipates this "hitherto unexperienced dynamism" capable of defending what Ranasinghe calls the "Western Intellectual Tradition," of offering a persuasive account of the good life, or of navigating the "historical confinements" of the city? What is its cultural and historical appearance?

Ranasinghe on Benedict at Regensburg

2011-09-19T23:40:00.000-07:00

Ranasinghe, Nalin. "I am Your Brother Joseph: Ratzinger and the Rehabilitation of Reason." Gained Horizons: Regensburg and the Enlargement of Reason." Ed. Bainard Cowan. South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2011. 49-60.

An excerpt:

The question, then, is whether the West can possibly regain its spiritual and intellectual integrity by recovering its Hellenic roots. while clearly this can occur only through reason and logos being rightly understood, it remains to be seen whether this synthesis can persuade our jaded desires and lazy bodies. In other words, because reason rightly understood can act only by the genuine persuasion of the soul, it could be the case that our disordered psychic regimes are unmoved by reason's authority. But since Pope Benedict has affirmed that God acts on the human soul through the logos, "a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication" (#17), such a state of affairs would effectively mean that God is dead to technological man. Indeed, the reflexive vilification and simple incomprehension that greeted the Regensburg address may provide chilling confirmation of this dire condition. Or we could return to our Hellenic roots and argue, using the Myth of the Cave as our proof-text, that it is always possible to use philosophical dialectic to persuade a soul mired in artificial reality to get rightly acquainted with reality and rule its desires through self-knowledge and rational persuasion. (57)

why I don't get Walker Percy (qua novelist)

2011-09-10T12:30:00.001-07:00

Jeremy Beer, writing at the Front Porch Republic:

A friend of mine once opined, to a group of college students: "There are two groups of people who don’t get Walker Percy: 1. Well-brought-up Catholic boys from large families. 2. All women."

I don't know about "well-brought-up," but hopefully my having been born into a large family means that there is some wonderful secret drama in Percy's novels that I have been missing all along. (I do like his essays and the essayish portions of some of his novels.) This, at least, encourages me to attend the screening at Xavier. I think liking Cormac McCarthy and Kierkegaard and my total lack of respect for feminine intuition -- not to mention having done some occasional overconfident anti-porn blogging -- should get me some street-cred with the cutting-edge Korrektivist Catholic men who celebrate Percy's literary talent.

P.S. Impossible to mention Beer without linking again to his great review of Tracey Rowland's Culture and the Thomist Tradition.

"agnosticism of depiction"

2011-09-04T00:24:00.001-07:00

In a letter to Henri de Lubac, Étienne Gilson writes:

God is QUI EST; in God, that which in other beings is their essence, is God's act of existing, the EST. Now, in the proposition Deus est, we know that what the proposition says is true, but we don't know what the verb est means. I don't remember whether you cited the decisive text of Summa Theologiae I, 3, 4, ad 2. Neither Father Sertillanges, nor you yourself, not anybody will ever get any further by calling into question what Saint Thomas, over-boldly but correctly, named an "agnosticism of depiction."

de Lubac's endnote:

Like Sertillanges, Gilson was amply cited in Sur les chemins de Dieu. Perhaps he may not have noticed the attempt to establish more firmly . . . the radical affirmation which continually motivates and directs every aspect of 'apophatic theology' (Deus semper major) and which prevents it from ever turning into denial. It is perhaps an analogous approach that Gilson himself was to suggest when he wrote . . . 'The affirmation of God is not necessarily tied in with innatism . . . , but it seems impossible to avoid the modicum of innatism required by the nature of first principles and that in any case holds the relationship between the notions of God and being to be mystery' . . . .

At the end of the second edition of L'Etre et l'Essence, 365-378, Gilson observes that 'no one has spoken more eloquently than Heidegger about the anguish of thought face-to-face with pure being. Saint Thomas, less of a romantic but speaking in the same sense, said of intellect forcing itself to go beyond the plane of being and essence, that intellect "then finds itself in a sort of confusion". Intellect is not happy in this confused state; it suffers. This anguish, which brings on mental giddiness, so takes hold of a man that he, the only one of all creatures capable of doing so, posits this marvel of marvels: "that being is". But that's nothing new . . . . Not without reason did Saint Thomas place apophatic theology, in its highest form, at the pinnacle of meditation on God and being. Anguish in the face of pure being is perhaps nothing more than another name for the fear of God. . . .'

Then, recalling the major texts of Saint Thomas on the question (De ente et essentia, In Boethium de Trinitate), Gilson applies to Heidegger what Saint Thomas said about the classical philosophers: 'In quo satis apparet quantam angustiam patiebantur hinc inde eorum praeclara ingenia' [in which is revealed how much these illustrious minds must have suffered from such confinement] (Contra Gentiles III, 49). 'For there are good reasons why reason shrinks from this point of direct contact with the solidity of being. Likewise God, whose name this solidity of being bears, is one we can apprehend only as unknown, "quod quidem contingit dum de eo quid non sit cognoscimus, quid vero sit penitus manet ignotum." Let Martin Heidegger be assured that even among the most fervent Thomists, he will find very few who take this expression penitus ignotum literally. Moses was the only one of his people who entered into the midst of the cloud: "Unde et ad hujus sublimissimae cognitionis ignorantiam demonstrandam, de Moyse dicitur, Ex. 20, 21, quod accessit ad caliginem in qua est Deus."'

What Gilson endeavored to define as a philosopher, Claudel expressed as a poet. A joyous echo of the above biblical allusion, Claudel's 'oui' is addressed to the inexhaustible Being, and so that the echo can continue to resound, the poet enters upon the Negative Way (a Way which is not one of denial, but, as Maurice Blondel said, one of 'elimination'): 'Don't we have the right not to see God? By all those ways in which I do not know him, I can recognize him!' And in yet another form: 'Thou hast given us night and day, and hard truth in the dark night sky.'

"as His face vanished into thin air"

2011-08-26T17:55:00.000-07:00

Disenchanting Determinism
Caitrin Nicol, The New Atlantis, Summer 2010

For every gleeful deicide who makes his fortune doing battle on the decaying parapets of institutional religion, there is a hushed, reluctant crowd of nonbelievers who never took up arms against the Lord but instead watched in dismay as His face vanished into thin air.

Spring 2011 issue of The New Atlantis

2011-08-26T17:48:00.001-07:00

An incredible issue.

GPS and the End of the Road
Ari N. Schulman

The decline of driving, and of finding our own way around, means that we are losing a broad set of skills and practices. And while it is true that the rise of driving itself spelled the decline of other skills and practices, driving also opened up in their place a wide range of new faculties for us to exercise — new modes of excellence, and novel, exciting, adventurous ways of experiencing the world. But if the glorious future consists mostly of things like getting to text more, oughtn’t we to wonder what new skills, what novel forms of adventure, are taking the place of what is being lost with the decline of driving and navigation? . . .

The great and simple promise of these technologies is to deliver to us the goods of finding things in the world in the most efficient way possible. After Brad Templeton: their feature is to find the most interesting things in the world, and to explain why they are interesting, while eliminating the apparent bug that most of the things we encounter seem pretty boring. Moreover, location awareness and augmented reality, paired with GPS navigation, transmit us to these interesting places with the minimum possible requirement of effort and attention paid to the boring places that intervene. We can get where we’re going, and see what we want to see, without having to look . . .

The fact that our tales now have to resort so fully to the strangeness of works like Lost and The Road to generate stories of discovery suggests that we feel unable to find them in our own thoroughly mapped world.

Bonaparte and the Revolution

2011-08-26T13:23:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Paul Johnson's Napoleon:

His assumption of the new command [the invasion of Italy in 1796] marked another historical turning point: the moment when the republican regime moved from the defensive to the large-scale offensive and became an expansionist force, determined to roll up the old map of Europe and transform it on principles formed by its own ideology.

This program could not have been successfully carried out without Bonaparte -- that is certain. But equally certain is that Bonaparte would not have possessed the ruthless disregard of human life, of natural and man-made law, of custom and good faith needed to carry it through without the positive example and teaching of the Revolution. The Revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the Revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarchs of the ancien régime never dreamed of; a centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority, first in a parliament, then in a committee, finally in a single tyrant, that had never been known before; and a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of a united people, as laid down in due constitutional form, approved by referendum. In effect, then, the Revolution created the modern totalitarian state, in all essentials, if on an experimental basis, more than a century before it came to its full and horrible fruition in the twentieth century. It also became, as Professor Herbert Butterfield has put it, "the mother of modern war . . . [heralding] the age when peoples, woefully ignorant of one another, bitterly uncomprehending, lie in uneasy juxtaposition, watching one another's sins with hysteria and indignation. It heralds Armageddon, the giant conflict for justice and right between angered populations, each of which thinks it is the righteous one. So a new kind of warfare is born -- the modern counterpart of the old conflicts of religion."

Hartzler on True Grit

2011-08-19T15:58:00.000-07:00

According to Keith Hartzler, writing at Anamnesis Journal, the Coen brothers’ adaptation of True Grit is the work of "politically correct nihilists" who have "undermine[d] the novel's most important features."

[T]he Coens have made a film that is far darker than the novel it trades on . . . The context for events in True Grit is not merely physical and devoid of logic. Rather, it involves love of place, filial bonds, the bonds of friendship, the politics of Reconstruction, Christian faith, the nature of justice, and the interplay of virtue with heroism and grace with works. Evidence indicates the displacement of this context is the ultimate objective of the Coen brothers and their academic admirer.

Several responses have already been published. In the comment section, Robert Cheeks (#3) wishes the Coens had “stayed true to the book,” but still thinks it is the “best Western ever made,” and Alex Wilgus (#2) has offered an excellent defense of the film’s depiction of Christianity and grace. Peter Daniel Haworth at the Front Porch Republic and John Médaille in that comment section think Hartzler is wrong about the Coens. Carl Scott at Postmodern Conservative reminds readers of that blogs excellent previous discussions of the film; Peter Lawler argues that the differences between novel and film are due to a transition from “aristocratic, epic history” to “democratic history.” Lawler himself had followed Stanley Fish’s emphasis on “heroism of a physical kind . . . displayed by almost everyone” by pointing out the "strange sort of cultivation" that is distributed evenly throughout in the speech of illiterate men "raised on readings of Shakespeare and the King James Bible." All of this commentary shows that the Coens are doing something right -- and doing it in a medium that is limited in a way a novel (or television miniseries) is not.

* * *

Hartzler's ire at the replacement of Southern context with events that are “merely physical and devoid of logic” is understandable -- the Coens have trodden on his family's "history of the world":

Compelling representations of Protestants and Confederates in Missouri during Reconstruction, and as Southern Democrats up to 1928, are few and far between. Charles Portis gave us one of them, preserving the sensibility characteristic of the time and place. My grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-aunts embodied a similar sensibility, rooted as they were in conservative Protestant faith, yeoman husbandry, and Appalachian folkways. I miss them, and looked forward to the Coen brothers’ adaptation as an opportunity to see, in a way, my kin on the big screen. Unfortunately . . .

And that is no small thing. We should lament the disappearance of American folkways even when the cosmopolitan principle is beautifully dramatized by an emphasis on the language of the King James Bible. However, Hartzler’s analysis both of the Coens' film and of Stanley Fish's reflection on the heroic exercise of religiosity in an "at best indifferent, and at worst hostile" universe misses the mark. Though the film is, as Hartzler has shown, different from the book, it was not the work of filmmakers blind to the presence of virtue and grace in the novel. As he ought to have gathered from Fish’s essay, the Coen brothers’ “blindness” is due to their different understanding of narrative (or their different aims with respect to narrative) and to “the way the world [and virtue and grace] looks most of the time” (see Joseph Prever at Godspy).

Fish recognized the difference between the narrative style of the Coens, on the one hand, and John Wayne, on the other, and reads that recognition back into Portis' novel, selecting those parts that justify the "liberties" the filmmakers have taken. Where John Wayne produces allegedly “great cinematic moments” that testify to the success and identity of virtue and heroism, the Coens cause their cameras to “maketh the sun shine on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Mt. 4:45). Is this latter approach “merely physical and devoid of logic?” John Médaille’s comparison is instructive:

I can compare this to the original movie. That movie was great fun, John Wayne’s parody of John Wayne. But this movie was not “fun”; this was deadly serious, and all the characters had a seriousness that they lacked in the first movie. The “true grit” in this movie was not in the bravado of the final charge, but in the heroic ride to save Mattie’s life, a ride rooted in true affection and true manliness; this combination is what constitutes true grit. This is nihilism? If so, it is a nihilism we must encourage.

The “bravado of the final charge” is an example of what Fish describes as heroism of a “physical kind . . . displayed by almost everyone.” It is not “true grit,” but the remnant of the Homeric aristeia. Something else is required for true grit. Mattie’s search is not “softened up” (Fish’s phrase) by the physical heroism of a whole world of men ready and willing to face death (a way of being that is already almost totally unfamiliar). As I wrote in my first post on the film: "[Mattie's] recognition of her dependence on 'the natural strength and skill graciously given her by increasingly honorable (or nonmercenary) men' (Lawler) is intended to fulfill the account of 'true grit' that began as hearsay ('they say you have true grit')" and that, I now add, was interrupted by what Hartzler calls the Coens' interpolation of an often inadequate Rooster Cogburn. But that interruption was designed to locate Cogburn’s true grit in “the heroic ride to save Mattie’s life, a ride rooted in true affection and true manliness.” If the Coens had simply repeated what Médaille calls "John Wayne's parody of John Wayne" -- as if that were "true grit" -- they would have put the armor of Achilles on someone who cannot be Achilles, someone who will end his life, as J.L. Wall points out, at a Wild West Show. (It would be a version of what Dr. Arbery calls "the Hector heresy.")

Similarly Mattie’s gritty, lonely maintenance of the “confidence of her convictions” is not “softened up” by the reward of success (Hartzler’s criterion for “moral ballast”). What drives the narrative of her “heroic” religiosity is something that has already happened, namely, the death of her father. Hartzler refers to his death as the “one exception” to the earthly rewards of virtue, but it is an exception that drives the plot, and an event that has the same “evenness” as every other event in that it cannot be undone. Fish’s treatment of Mattie’s view of this event is remarkable:

Mattie gives a fine (if terrible) example early in the novel when she imagines someone asking why her father went out of his way to help the man who promptly turned around and shot him. “He was his brother’s keeper. Does that answer your question?” Yes it does, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the reward for behaving in accord with God’s command is violent death at the hands of your brother, a question posed by the Bible’s first and defining event, and unanswered to this day.

In response to this paragraph, I wrote:

I suppose it would be even more interesting to ask Mattie whether her father would have done the same if he knew ahead of time what would happen. If we think the answer might be "no" we do not understand Mattie's response to the actual (imagined) question. Her father was his brother's keeper. Mattie is asking her interrogator: "do you even know what the word was means?" If it is true [as Lawler wrote] that everyone in the film is "more able to articulate who they are than we are" it is because the universe of True Grit has not yet separated "why" and "who." To answer with who is to say why. Mattie's father was his brother's keeper in accordance with a Scripture that happens in an "indifferent universe." What we today can only call an "indifferent" universe is simply one in which things happen and in which men can recognize that principle of motion as the gift of identity, as the gift of the possibility of the was. Indifference is only unacceptable when a who is not enough of a who to become a was. The melancholy with which Mattie says "time gets away from us" at the end of the film is almost categorically different from the sound of the same words on our lips. How could it be otherwise when the only principle of motion to which we, today, think we ought to be accountable -- far from the one by which we are granted the "single honor" of death -- is the one that moves a plot! We will gladly accept all kinds of "random," indifferent events in a story or a play because they move the plot and keep it interesting.

The Coens’ True Grit begins (Mattie’s father) and ends (Cogburn) with a death that has already happened when the narrator arrives. “Time just gets away from us.” The tragedy of this “getting away” is not just the loss of life, but also the loss of an adequate account of life.

* * *

There is a reason so many reviews of True Grit have mentioned Cormac McCarthy, usually in the context of the Coens' adaptation of No Country for Old Men: we are, as a friend of mine has often said, in the presence of the absence of God. This presence corresponds to a kind of Old Testament narrative view of existence as exile. In a review of No Country at GodSpy, Joseph Prever wrote:

By now the Christians reading this are objecting, but they shouldn’t be; not the ones who’ve read the book of Job, or the daily news. Jesus never promised his followers freedom from suffering, and he didn’t come to abolish death or sorrow or pain (not this time around). There were those who thought so, but they were the ones who left when things got ugly.

Some might still object that the film makes evil look too powerful and goodness too puny. But that’s the way the world looks sometimes, even most of the time; and if the Coens are arguing (as I believe they are—stay with me) for the existence of something like God, some transcendent good that is valuable in itself whether or not it brings temporal success, they’re using a method at least as old as Thomas Aquinas: to argue your point most strongly, first present the strongest evidence against it.

We occupy today the narrative and imaginative space of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road whether we like it of not. The disappearance of “godspoke men” (which is also the disappearance of men who believe that men are “godspoke”) is all too possible. Sometimes our dearest wish in the face of our soothsaying dreams is that our existence be “the belly of a whale.” So, if Tennyson can make Odysseus bored with his "still hearth" and "agéd wife," the Coens can skip the politics and Appalachian folkways and focus on the appearance of religiosity in a world in which man's action is recorded in "two registers of existence." As Médaille puts it, they give us "an unstinting view of modern life, which is the geography of nowhere," and they even do it while displaying a "fondness for place and limits." This narrative style and Fish's corresponding focus on the "nowhere" of salvation -- that is, on the question of whether salvation is "accessible to mortal vision," and, in turn, whether salvation can appear in a narrative -- is, in my opinion (see my previous post on the film, "does salvation appear?"), much more profound than Hartzler’s basic claim for Christianity, virtue, and narrative:

Works avail you nothing, the Lutheran and Calvinist radicals claimed. Their tenet is not true in traditional Christianity, it is not true in life, and it is not true in the novel either, where miscreants pay for their bad behavior over and over again . . . those on the side of virtue experience success (again, with one exception—Mattie’s father). On Fish’s reading, the world provides no support for Mattie’s convictions. Yet the quest to avenge her father’s death was successful, aided by the heroism of Cogburn, Mattie herself, LaBoeuf, and Little Blackie, as well as the basic goodness of certain peripheral characters.

Alex Wilgus correctly counters:

The narrative of grace in a world of meaninglessness is not Lutheran/Calvinist, it's right out of Ecclesiastes. That war and revenge are 'a-chasing after the wind' is not a nihilistic nor non-Christian theme. Mattie's salvation is a Pauline-style roadside conversion that exacts a horrible cost. The retelling is slanted but no less Christian and certainly no less Protestant.

James Matthew Wilson on the USCCB and immigration

2011-08-19T15:30:00.001-07:00

Archbishop Chaput, writing at Public Discourse:

Demography is destiny. The next America will be increasingly Latino. That’s simply a fact, and it’s also a blessing, because I believe Hispanic faith and culture are very great goods for our Church and for American life in general. Unfortunately, as facts go, it may also be an indictment, because social data show that Latinos leave the Catholic faith at the same rate as every other ethnic group. So the idea that more Latinos automatically mean a more “Catholic” America is just pious self-delusion.

While the last sentence offers some evidence that Chaput has considered objections (from John Zmirak, for example) to the American bishops' view of illegal immigration, the understanding of the political catholicity of Catholicism manifest in the first three sentences and in the rest of the essay -- especially in the context of a view of America as a "proposition nation" whose "experimental" laws and institutions have little to do with "where her people came from" -- leaves much to be desired. Hopefully Chaput will read, consider, and respond to James Matthew Wilson's post at the Front Porch Republic. An excerpt:

As apostles of the Universal Church, Catholic bishops do indeed have a responsibility to provide pastoral care to every human being in their respective diocese; and, in many diocese, that includes a swelled and swelling number of illegal aliens. As I wrote years ago, the threat of immigration laws that would make the demands of charity a crime are frankly unjust: a Christian has an obligation to the practice of charity, and priests and bishops in particular have a responsibility to see to the care of the souls of the strangers who walk among us; from ancient times, the Church has recognized this responsibility extends especially to the immigrant (See the quotation from St. Justin Martyr in Catechism of the Catholic Church 1351). This basic obligation in charity in no way challenges the authority of states to control immigration or determine criteria for citizenship.

But programs like this patently encourage the continued growth of a demimonde of fragmented ethnic cultures and shadow citizenships. In conflating a possibly prudent policy with their pastoral responsibilities in charity, the US Bishops seem to pervert the very meaning of justice in claiming it for the DREAM act and in implicitly suggesting that the upholding of present law, and the sovereign act of a state to protect borders and determine citizenship, is somehow unjust. This appears in violation of Church teaching and the Bishops’ own past statements (Catechism of the Catholic Church 2241). Just as the Church has an irreducible obligation to pastoral care in charity, any state has an obligation to control and delimit citizenship as part of its irreducible responsibility to establish justice. Thus, the Bishops’ position sounds more like a childish tit-for-tat rather than an intelligible argument about the nature of justice.

Further, the Bishops seem to ignore the rather serious consequences to the cultural and economic integrity of American communities — communities that include Americans over whom they have primary pastoral responsibility (a bishop is the bishop of a particular diocese after all, not of the entire Church). To paraphrase from lines of Scripture and past USCCB documents on immigration, it is true that, in charity, we must welcome the stranger among us; and it is true that, in the scales of reciprocal justice, we have certain intrinsic obligations to our fellow human beings qua human beings. But to welcome the stranger is not necessarily to make him a citizen; moverover, violation of US immigration law is itself a violation of justice, and the response of justice should not be merely to ignore the fault (save, of course, should prudence so dictate — but, in that case, we are no longer talking about principles of justice, which is just the arena into which the Bishops have errantly thrown these questions).