Jan
6
Remarks delivered at the University of Dallas Due Santi Campus, 1/4/09
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for Marilyn Walker and the Collegium Cantorum
The University of Dallas isn’t really a place, but a spirit. Some want to say the spirit is that of critical inquiry, or that it stems from a vision of the one true Church. The truth might be simpler than that: it could be just wanting to share, trying to encourage the conditions where people can be confident, realize their potential, and bring others together.
It is “sharing” - the attempt to bring others together - that probably defines UD best, and all of us are familiar with Marilyn’s generosity and how deep it runs.
Which brings us to Collegium. All of us are ambassadors for the school, and I don’t mean that in a “Collegium is better than everyone else” way. It is rather the simply obseved fact that I have seen all of you behave with dignity, work very hard to sing well, and make sure no one feels alone or left out. It is seemingly strange that “collegial” is a word so close to our very name, but it is fully in accord with UD’s spirit. We go through old books and all sorts of other difficult subjects in order to share with others what is priceless, at any given moment. A fundamentalist friend of mine once asked why we need any sort of art if we have Scripture. He was told that perhaps the Gospels are so short because God spent most of His time on Earth listening, appreciating the fruits of Creation.
Jan
6
Collegium Cantorum of the University of Dallas’ Pilgrimage to Rome, 12/26/08 - 1/5/09
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Just an opinion. Quite obviously, many others in the same group will differ. Also, an additional note: our tour guide, Alessio Rosoldi, was excellent. He can be reached at alessiorosoldi@hotmail.com - if you’re planning on going to Rome, contacting him is a very smart idea, and I do have his phone number in case you want to contact him that way. Anyway:
But the fight against Plato or, to speak more clearly and for “the people,” the fight against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia - for Christianity is Platonism for “the people” - has created in Europe a magnificent tension of the spirit the like of which had never existed on earth: with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals. To be sure, European man experiences this tension as need and distress; twice already attempts have been made in the grand style to unbend the bow - once by means of Jesuitism, the second time by means of the democratic enlightenment which, with the aid of freedom of the press and newspaper-reading, might indeed bring it about that the spirit would no longer experience itself so easily as a “need.”
- Nietzsche, from the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann
1. When we were in Assisi, there were many Italians along with us crossing themselves in front of the incorruptible remains of St. Clare, or slowly and meditatively walking through St. Damiano, trying to find that which motivated Francis to “rebuild” the Church (it was a crucifix, quite literally, that bent down and spoke, and is in a cathedral higher up).
This was an older Collegium group for the most part, and it was interesting to see the people they’ve become outside of school. The main unifying element was, I felt, a very intense Catholicism that takes the proposition Rome is the holiest city very seriously. The implication of Rome being holiest was spelled out exactly in a homily given in Florence by a University of Dallas graduate who is Cistercian and living in Italy. Accompanying those ideas is a moralism most inflexible: the things that can be said we will all agree on. People who can recite copious amounts of Church history or teachings from encyclicals, Catholic mystics or reactionary publications loomed large in this crowd.
I don’t want to give the impression any of this is bad. Collegium is something I love dearly and I would like you to help me support. But if you’re more secular, and you encounter Collegium, it will strike you at first as strange. And I can’t say that it doesn’t strike me as strange, still - there was definitely a feeling of “I want to get married” pulsing through the various members of the group that was even stronger than when I was taking classes. There were many prayers said in front of relics, i.e. the severed head of St. Catherine of Siena, that made me wonder where the truth truly lies.
2. So that’s the group I felt I was with for the most part. If you ask around, you’ll get other answers about what happened, and more than likely told that my explanation is a strange one. People who carry their notebooks around everywhere, after all, don’t quite fit in.
Where did we sing?
- We didn’t get to sing for the Pope or in St. Peter’s or the Sistine Chapel. Yes, I’m bitter about this, even though I blame no one. This choir is marked by its liturgical function, and it does help maintain the sacredness of the Mass. To ignore what Collegium does is really a slap in the face to a heritage that worked hard to only give the absolute best to God.
- We did sing (”drive-by singing”) in San Giovanni (where the papal throne is), St. Mary Major, St. Paul Outside the Walls, the Sacred Steps, and probably a few others in Rome that I’m forgetting. We sang Mass at Santa Croce in Rome, I think - it was the church devoted to the relics of the True Cross, with the chapel of St. Helen. We sang Mass for a local parish in the city of Marino. We sang in the giant black and white striped gothic/romanesque cathedral in Siena, Santa Croce in Florence (in front of Machiavelli’s grave), San Francesco in Assisi, and had a really moving Mass in a church in Palestrina as well as a nearly 1000 year old Church in Rome near St. Mary Major.
We had a very large group - 70-80 people, I think, nearly all of them singers - and so we had volume and tended to blare a bit. The strength of the group is that since we’ve all been doing this forever, we didn’t have to practice much to get or maintain a good sound, and in quite a few places we had a brilliant sound emerge from a section or two. Recordings I’ve heard of us made impromptu on this trip sound pretty awesome.
3. I hung around my little group quite a bit - Bill, Ryan, Barbara and whoever else wanted to tag along. Learned a lot about what’s happening on campus, how to elaborate the notion “God is being,” and parenting, respectively. Bill was an excellent tour guide for Rome, although when we were just walking through it, my imagination started taking over. It’s hard to read Virgil, Ovid, Augustine and see the Renaissance art and not start wondering what the spirit of Rome is, and how it relates to both the ruined and finished buildings. The Forum and Pantheon were genuinely exciting: my greatest desire at both places was insight into what greater thinkers experienced.
I spent a good deal on good meals. Boar with polenta; this “forest” scented pasta sauce with two sorts of mushrooms blended into it, one of the mushrooms being truffles; the tenderest, juiciest veal with this subtle lemon sauce that went great with wine.
One of the worst meals I had I paid too much for, but it was a time I spent learning. At that meal I sat with a few Collegium members who were really hurting, who were in pain because of failed relationships, career choices with unexpected consequences, and trying to explain that they had grown, but weren’t sure how it happened. They knew they spent more time listening than before, and were curious what the next stage, from wonder to talking too much to listening far more, would be. It felt like Collegium for the most part was in that “talking” stage, but these members were beyond that.
I just sat and enjoyed the bean soup and all its delicate, overpriced flavors and listened. I know more than anyone else that growing up alone will not solve one of the major crises of our time, that our humanity is so decayed we can only reject religion or embrace it wholly uncritically. Somewhere along the line we started seeing each other as objects, as means to ends. It is unclear how any of us, sacred or secular, could deal with an afterlife where social graces might matter that much more. I always thought the one thing God wanted from us was that we love each other as He loves us.
Feb
18
for Joshua Rocks and Paul Drozdowski
1: 1-4 - Jonah is told by God to go to Nineveh and “cry out against it.” The wickedness of Nineveh has “come up before” the Lord.
So Jonah does what anyone would do if told by God to do something. He pays for passage on a boat to get away “from the presence of the Lord.” He tries to head to Tarshish, which my Oxford Annotated NRSV tells me is probably in southern Spain, and one of the ends of the earth most likely - the farthest point to which one can sail.
At this point in the story, we have not been told why Jonah wants so badly to escape God. We’re laughing at him for trying to escape the word of the Lord. But there are at least two reasons we can conjecture for his attempting to flee:
- He’s scared of what will happen to him if the people don’t take kindly to his message (appetite/self-preservation).
- He understands what is just, and understands Nineveh to be fundamentally unjust.
In either case, the graciousness of the Lord is merely a dream, one that a change of climate should dispel any thought of. Regarding the second point - pride, honor and human reason are all mixed together. Contrast with the Platonic tripartite soul: there is no appeal to reason as the highest here.
But there’s a higher and a lower motivation for Jonah, potentially, and both motivations are not alien to the way we act. You might wonder why not granting mercy is a just action, but think about what an inability to trust another does to the possibility of justice in the world: enlightened self-interest has perhaps never been enough to maintain society, let alone found it. Actors who cannot be trusted at all must be dispensed with, for the not insignificant reason that it is just to dispense with them (there’s a reason why the Levitical law is liberal with death as a punishment).
1: 4-15 - But as we are all aware, a few strange things happen to Jonah while he tries to run from God. The first is the danger that his ship encounters: a storm hits the ship and amongst all the sailors “each cried to his god.” They threw the cargo on board into the sea to lighten the load, thus depriving themselves of any potential profit. Jonah was sleeping the whole while before being awoken by the captain, who tells him to call on his god.
The piety the sailors display just in order to survive is quite impressive. They could complain, they could be hateful, they could be without any pride - in Thucydides, the destruction of the Athenian force at Sicily occurs while the soldiers harbor a distrust of the divine: every omen they saw they only saw doom from.
This piety continues as the sailors attempt to use divination to find out if they have done something wrong (1: 7-8). Even the Gentiles have a rudimentary understanding that links the divine with the just - we can see here how it is that Nineveh will repent later. To be formed in the image and likeness of God is to be moral.
The divination is a casting of lots: there is no strange ritual involved, no augurs or any pagan element involved. As we have discussed before, election by lot is the most democratic way to choose in the ancient world; voting is aristocratic. The equality before the Divine Will is perhaps the ultimate truth behind the Law, and it is being used to indict Jonah, who (unwittingly?) tells the sailors his God made the sea and the dry land, and thus tells them the present source of their troubles is the very nature of his God (i.e. this means in the very separation of land from sea in Genesis 1, there is a moral teaching).
The sailors do not threaten Jonah; they instead ask him how this can be remedied. He tells them to throw him overboard. They refuse to do this, because they do not want to shed “innocent blood.” They are truly descended from Noah, and the line of Cain is gone. But God has a way of making even the strongest will crack, and the storm rages, and their efforts to row to land are failing. So they throw Jonah overboard, and when the sea calms, make sacrifices and vows.
The whole first chapter of Jonah, then, is an inversion of the Noah story - we have someone who emphatically does not want to do God’s will, and is preserved in spite of himself. There is no dominion through the Ark, but the Ark-like whale swallows and saves Jonah.
Why is any of this important? The most important thing about this first chapter is Jonah’s attempt to escape God. Not only does he fail to escape God, but he fails to escape the piety he is beholden to. The underlying truth of human existence is Providential, and not in spite of necessity. Rather, it is reflected through necessity. We can see people fall apart in the face of the worst of circumstances - but how do we explain what we’re seeing when they do their best regardless?
2: 1-10 - Jonah’s prayer demonstrates the notion of piety that is creating the tension between him and the will of God. It isn’t that Jonah is impious.
It is precisely because Jonah worships God and understands justice that he wants Nineveh destroyed. His action on the ship is not ignoble - he doesn’t offer to be thrown overboard out of despair. He is precisely the sort of person with whom judgment can reside. He can be trusted to say who should punished and how.
Jonah’s prayer can be taken as one where he requests to be spat out of the whale. But he doesn’t ask that directly, and the story he tells could be taken to be a story of whether he did the right thing or not. “Out of the belly of Sheol” is where he cried, in the chaos where it seems impossible to make a correct decision (2: 2-3). Perhaps something greater is forming, but all one can see are the waves and billows (2:3, again, note how the Genesis 1 account of Creation is Providential). But again, in a reversal of the Noah story, Jonah remembered God (2:4, contrast with Genesis 8:1), and even as he was being sunk, pushed down to the “roots of the mountains” (2:6), he stayed loyal and did not worship vain. The temple of the Lord has always been the human heart, nothing less.
I think Chapter 2 can be read as a prayer of thanksgiving that the sailors, who were not guilty, were not killed on account of him. That Jonah doesn’t really care for his own life is something we have to take seriously - what he cares for is his notion of justice. What we think is that his notion of justice is flawed without mercy. We seem to forget just how many times we allow the worst sorts of evil to take place because of “mercy:” our “mercy” comes at tremendous cost. Jonah knows who is guilty. Should he not act on this knowledge?
3: 1-10 - So Jonah is spat out and told to go to Nineveh, and he does as he is told. He perhaps does it half-heartedly, but I’m not sure - I think the length of Nineveh is meant to tell us how quick some people are to embrace the Lord, and we should contrast that zealotry of the new convert with Jonah’s grizzled wisdom. Yes, Jonah has been shamed by the Lord. Any of you who think you know better, take it up with him in the next life. I wouldn’t be surprised if every single idea and argument you had about mercy and justice was given back to you in tatters.
Everyone in Nineveh immediately repents, and again there are echoes of Noah and Creation - human beings and animals fast and cry unto the Lord and attempt to return the world to its original, prelapsarian state.
If you think something is strange about this, where the world can repent to such a degree because of the threat of destruction that the Fall never happened, then you’re pretty sharp. Martin Buber and Leo Strauss and Walter Kaufmann would probably yell at me here and tell me the word “repent” has nothing to do with this. There is no “sin,” per se. There is the Fallen world, and all it needs do is merely “return.” (If you want to read more on this - see Kaufmann’s Introduction to Buber’s I and Thou, and also see Strauss in “Progress or Return?,” the final essay in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle).
I don’t know that the Judaic “Return,” or any doctrine or Scriptural teaching of any sort, for that matter, covers the enormity of what is happening here. This seems to be a colossal joke, just like getting eaten by a whale, and just like having a notion of justice which is inflexible - look, now every third-rate reader of the Bible can laugh at you, Jonah, and then go back to committing the 101 injustices they were in the midst of.
The only thing that brings this text back to the utmost seriousness is the possibility that this could happen, not the actuality.
It is the mere possibility that the world can be just that matters. It is for that reason, and that reason alone, that God’s mercy is just. And we have to wonder if human mercy is permissible at all.
4: 1-11 - Now, finally, after all is said and done, the Lord and Jonah have something like a dialogue. Jonah calls God out on his mercy (4: 3), and all the Lord does is ask if he has the right attitude - “Is it right for you to be angry?” (4: 4).
Jonah, knowing full well that arguing with God is pretty pointless, walks out into the desert. It is hot and uncomfortable, and God makes a bush to give Jonah shade. Jonah gets happy, and that’s when God kills the bush via a worm and blasts Jonah with a nasty wind to the point where Jonah almost dies. Jonah says he misses the bush and is angry about it, and God says that if he’s “concerned” about the bush which He labored to grow, how much should He be “concerned” about Nineveh and the 120,000 people there?
The allusion to Moses is obvious - not just the bush, but the number of 120. Perhaps what God is doing is dismissing Jonah’s wisdom because Jonah has not led a people; he is merely a prophet, completely subordinate to the Law and never in dialogue with God.
The story leaves off with the tension between God and Jonah unresolved. In the deepest sense, it cannot be resolved: it is the tension which comes from the spirit of the law and the letter of the law. And it cannot be said that those who study only the letter are unwise - they’re incredibly wise, for if they weren’t, there would never be a conflict this serious in the first place.
You might argue we can read this story and say that Jonah’s unwillingness to be merciful in any way towards Nineveh compromises his love of justice. There is Scriptural support for this position, and it isn’t hard to argue that justice doesn’t mean a heck of a lot in a world without mercy. And I’m not going to say that’s a bad read of this story: I will only submit that it is incomplete.
The truth is that we’re more like Jonah than we care to admit, and it might not be our weaknesses that make us like him. Human justice and human wisdom may have to be transcended by the Divine, but if only the Divine can properly show mercy, then can the Divine adequately teach us anything about justice and wisdom? The Bible doesn’t pretend this is easy to answer: love of justice and the Lord is the starting point, and the point of Jonah is to emphasize a love of humanity, to which justice and the Lord are both directed. But in some ways, that only brings up the same problems - humiliation for the wise, and the prospect of utter destruction for every single other person - all over again. What is obvious in stories is never so simple in practice.
Nov
18
A Non-Catholic’s Guide To Catholicism: On Scripture and Tradition
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Why am I writing this post? I’ve run into about 92834792749729729 people the past few days that need basics reviewed - basics of history, basics of religion, etc. I mean, I’m not perfect, I need basics reviewed too. But I kinda want to throw a feeler out there to see what people know about / want to know more about. Please keep in mind that there will be future posts that discuss the relative strengths of Protestantism and other views. I just want to present the strongest case for whatever is being discussed per post.
1. Why should I care about Catholicism?
For the same reason you should read the Bible whether you believe or not, or why you should ask people questions about things that are important to them - if you’re an educated person, you try to understand things and not stereotype them. I’m lucky in that most atheist friends I have are very intelligent and curious, but increasingly I have been running into people who only know about organized religion through “The DaVinci Code.” Needless to say, this has been less than inspiring in terms of my faith in humanity.
Catholicism, much more so than many Protestant denominations, is intellectually rigorous. There’s an enormous amount that can be covered if I wanted to dwell on it full-time. I just want to focus on the issue of authority today, and I already know from the number of Catholics that are on “teh Internetz” and go to Latin Mass and are sympathetic with Mel Gibson that I’m going to get hammered for not being accurate enough. This is purely an introduction for people that know nothing about the faith, and if you’re curious about anything here, go talk to someone who really knows their stuff.
2. Scripture and Tradition
Protestants try to determine what God wants of us through sola scriptura. This makes sense to a degree since Christ is introduced in the Gospel of John as the “Word of God,” and He Himself says he has not come to change one “jot or tittle” of the Law given previously. So it would seem that if you went to your Bible and read that and lived that you’d be good.
It’s quite obvious that not only is this not the most practical way to live, but that unity as a Church is an impossibility. Everyone becomes more Scriptural or “Bible based” than everyone else, and the fact that there’s pretty much one Catholic Church and a lot of Protestant churches that fade in and out of existence should be very telling.
So when Catholics talk about “Scripture and Tradition” as being the basis of authority of the Church, we can look at “tradition” and try to be cynical. We can say that it is a political move, made to create unity in the Church and prevent people from thinking about God on their own. Certainly the thought of illiterate peasants in the Middle Ages needing statues and paintings to teach the faith seems to contribute to this notion.
But I think the more charitable argument for “tradition” trumps all the complaints about it: it is just really, really hard to be perfect, for some strange reason. Hence one might need clergy - the tradition of “apostolic succession” means that the priestly authority comes from St. Peter through the ritual of “laying on of hands” being performed over the centuries - to help guide people. One might find that God has given Sacraments that serve as a way of living the faith without having to go out and do the most radical thing for God at any and all times. One might see saints and holy days as a way of marking that God didn’t just reveal all in the past and let us go, but gives continual reminders on a higher level of what holiness in life does. One might see that finding the best ideas to express Christian doctrine is far better than letting everyone think every single thing possible about the faith. Etc., etc.
The best argument for “tradition” as an additional pillar of authority is that in a sense, Scripture is a tradition itself. That’s not the best argument to use, because Scripture has to stand higher than other traditions ultimately. But when one confronts the question “Why are you reading Scripture in the first place,” one does have to give an answer more in accordance with tradition and a particular interpretation of Scripture, as opposed to saying that Scripture speaks for itself on this question (although - I do know preachers that claim this. I am just thankful I have never encountered them personally, as laughing in their face might make me Anti-Christ).
3. Next post, and Some Advice for People Who Haven’t Understood A Thing I’ve Said
Depending on what reaction I get to this, there might be a post on Sacraments forthcoming, and then I want to talk about Christianity’s openness to philosophy in the Middle Ages. There will absolutely be posts forthcoming that discuss Protestantism and existentialism. I think for now, this is good enough.
If everything I have said has gone over your head - i.e., you don’t even know where this “Scripture/Tradition” debate is coming from, or what Protestants and Catholics are, that’s fine. You might want to start reading the Bible on your own, and I highly recommend just starting with Genesis and plowing through. I can help out with a commentary or two that’s lying around - if you go to the podcast link on the sidebar, there’s a podcast which covers Genesis 1. If you start learning the Bible, you’ll be in a position to understand the three monotheistic religions, and that’s great for everyone involved in this day and age where people can argue for atheism via evolutionary theory but not spell their own names right.
Oct
15
On Iconography
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Links:
Samples of Icons by a Contemporary Iconographer
Blog of a Contemporary Iconographer
Thoughts:
The Cathedral was a place where the illiterate peasants would learn of the Divine not through speech, for Mass was said in Latin, and certainly not through reading, but through the images that surrounded them on all sides. The West overthrew that order in the name of Enlightenment, of course - the power of image was replaced with what was to be rational discourse, where men talked to each other and were not talked to by their surroundings.
In the East, the power of image continues to this day, and perhaps it should be looked at as a corrective for us. After all, we yak and yak and yak. Words are piled on top of words because if we say enough things, we might say something that is true, and we will have apprehended Truth in that case. Congress’ constant piling of useless law on top of useless law is an extension of this phenomenon. More speculatively, Western art, with its emphasis on literal representation (or even, in the moderns, “form”) seems also to be an attempt to get at Truth through drawing a lot of lines.
An icon has features we would consider strange: gold skies with stylized features of people and things. Form is always distorted for symbol or style. In two dimensions, no one is depicted as moving in a way we would consider real. An icon is depicting sacred space - stories of the saints and the Bible - and thus is really a “window into the divine” (Louise Cowan’s words).
The image, then, is the Truth. Attempts to “hit at” the truth are not what the icon is about. The icon is always perfect. It offers us the clarity and power of belief, of the knowledge that there is something above us. Our attempts should be not to understand, but to be awed, to observe, and then, finally, to listen.