Monthly Archives: April 2013

Dominican Friars and Lutheran Wives

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Jane found this article, which looks at the problem of loneliness among celibate clergy and the advantages of community life, as exhibited by the Dominicans; and surprisingly, has some suggestions for Protestant pastors.

In passing, the author links the Dominican order to the Inquisition, which is unfortunate; it’s true that Dominicans were involved (among others), and that the Inquisition was largely a Bad Thing, but it’s also true that the Hollywood portrayal of the fiendish, sadistic inquisitor is largely a myth. The truth is considerably more complicated, and as the Inquisition really has nothing to do with the rest of the article, I rather wish he’d left it out. Barring that, though, I found it quite interesting.

Anathem

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Anathem Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, is that most odd of things: philosophical science fiction. By which I mean that in order to enjoy it fully, you really need to have at least a passing acquaintance with the history of Western philosophy from Thales on down; and the more you know, the more you’ll enjoy watching it play out. Not that this is a book of philosophy, or that you have to be a philosopher to read it. There’s plenty of action, interesting characters, and the like.

It is also a difficult book to describe without giving the game away. Heck, it’s a difficult book to describe even if you dogive the game away. But Stephenson has too much fun doling out the information for me to want to spoil it.

The book takes place in a world that is, we are assured, not our own, though there are many points of similarity. Our protagonist is one Fraa Erasmus (“Raz” to his friends) who lives an ascetic sort of life in something that seems very like a monastery, but isn’t, the Concent of Saunt Edhar.

No, I didn’t mispell that. “Saunt”, in Erasmus’ world, is a corruption of “savant”. Edhar was a great and noted thinker in his day, and the Concent, a stronghold of the “mathic world”, was founded to be a place where thinkers could do their work in seclusion, safe from the turmoils and upheavals of the Saecular World outside. Erasmus is a young fraa when we first meet him, winding (with three partners) the great clock that occupies the central tower of the Concent; he is still learning, and has yet to choose his mathic order, the path that he will follow for the rest of his life. He, like all other fraas and suurs, is free to think, to create, and to learn, but he is limited to the most basic technology (called praxic in his world): his bolt, a length of cloth that can become longer and shorter, thicker and thinner at need, that he wears as a garment; his chord, a rope-like object that can also change size, used to keep his bolt from coming off (among other things); and his ball, a soft round object that can be as small as a tennis ball or as large as a truck, but which is mostly used for sitting on. The ball can also glow to provide light.

The fraas and suurs live in almost complete isolation from the Saecular World, coming into contact with the extramurals, or “extras”, those from outside the walls, only during the time of Apert, a week-long festival that occurs once a year…or once every ten years…or once every hundred years…or once every thousand years…depending on who you are. Fraa Erasmus lives in the Decenarian Math, meaning that for him Apert will come every ten years. And as the book begins, Apert is coming; and what will it bring? Therein lies the tale.

I don’t want to say too much more, but I will say this. First, Stephenson’s world-building is phenomenal. I am literally in awe. Second, though there were one or two slow parts I enjoyed the book considerably; it’s the kind of book I’d like to read again for the first time. Third, the intellectual climax of the book is so audacious I can hardly prevent myself from giving it away. Fourth, although Erasmus and his friends have definite, strongly held points of view, with which I sometimes disagree, it never feels like Stephenson has an axe to grind. That impresses me as much as anything.

The only other book by Stephenson that I’ve read is Snow Crash, which had its moments but which I’ve never felt any need to re-read. Anathem is much, much better.

If anyone is interested, I’d gladly discuss my further thoughts about the book down in the comments.

Boston

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Turns out, I know two of the people who were running the Boston Marathon today: Tina, a lady I often lector with at mass on Sunday evenings, and her husband. Fortunately they are unhurt.

May the civil authorities quickly determine the responsible parties; and may no one speculate foolishly about who they are until we’re sure.

And may God bless the injured and their families.

Three Dogs and a Cat, Part I: The First Dog

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Here are some musings on the nature of reality and the reality of natures, from the standpoint of Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics (so far as I understand such hifalutin’ things). But don’t let that scare you; I think it’s going to be fun.

First, consider a statue of a dog:

What is it? Is it a dog? Clearly not; it’s a statue of a dog. It’s a hunk of (I presume) bronze that’s shaped like a dog. In plain English we might say that it has the form of a dog, but in Thomist terms that’s a mistake; a real dog has the form of a dog, but a statue has merely the shape. (More on that later.)

In fact, it’s an artifact, created by human beings to have the appearance of a dog. In terms of its behavior it remains a hunk of bronze not much different from any other hunk of bronze of the same mass. We say that it has the nature of bronze. And how does it behave given that nature?

Well, first of all it’s a body. That is to say that it takes up space and has mass. Wherever you put it, you can’t put anything else in exactly the same spot. If you drop it (in a gravitational field) it falls to the place of lowest potential.

Second, it’s bronze. It has a particular mass and density. When it falls, it hits the ground with a force consistent with its mass. If you hit it with a hammer, you might well dent it.

If you ask why it does these things, a Thomist will tell you, “Because it is its nature to behave in this way.” You might think that the Thomist is avoiding the question, and from the point of view of physics and chemistry you’d be right. But from the point of view of metaphysics, this is a serious answer. If you drop the statue of the dog, it falls: not because it’s God’s whim, or because things are falling today (unlike yesterday), or because the person who dropped it decided that falling is what he wanted, but because it is its nature to do so. That is, there’s something about being made of bronze that causes it to fall when dropped in a gravitational field. A physicist would go further, and say, “it has a mass of thus and so,” and a chemist would relate this to the alloy and the molecules involved…but note what the philosopher has done. The philosopher has said, “The behavior of this status, when dropped, is not arbitrary. It always acts the same way. It acts according to a fixed nature.”

In short, it is because the bronze of the statue has a nature and behaves according to that nature that it’s worth investigating the chemistry and physics of the thing. And it turns out that many aspects of that nature are explicable in those terms. Woohoo! Go science.

However, this particular hunk of bronze looks like a dog. Science has very little to say to this. There is nothing at all in the nature of bronze that in any way tends to make it look like a dog. We call this appearance artificial: it has the nature of artifice, so to speak. Some human being made the bronze look like a dog. But note: the bronze isn’t irrelevant. The sculptor chose bronze precisely because you can make attractive, durable statues out of it given a reasonable amount of effort. The statue wouldn’t look nearly as good if it were made out of, say, whipped cream, and it wouldn’t last for more than a few minutes (not in my house, it wouldn’t).

Aristotle tells us that in any change, there are four causes—that is, four aspects of why and how the change occurred. Let’s look at two changes involving the statue: first, the change in position we call “falling”, and the creation of the statue in the first place.

So, consider a statue of a dog that’s falling through the air. It begins 20 feet above the ground,
and on impact embeds itself in a beautifully manicured lawn.

  • It’s a bronze statue that’s falling. This is the material cause.
  • It’s falling because it’s bronze. It’s the nature of a hunk of bronze to fall. This is the formal cause.
  • It’s falling because it’s in the Earth’s gravitational field. This is the efficient cause.
  • It’s falling to the point of lowest energy potential, i.e., a dog-shaped dent in the lawn. This is the final cause. Note that there’s no sense of purpose here; but anyone can see that a hunk of bronze falling from a height is gonna leave a mark on that lawn.

Now, the interesting thing about efficient and final causes is that they can exist in chains. Suppose the statue is falling through the air because I hurled into the air using a trebuchet, purely because I was curious to see whether the resulting dent was dog-shaped. It’s true to say, then, that I’m the efficient cause of the statue falling through the air, and the final cause is my curiousity as to what will happen. Thomists would call these chains of causes accidental rather than essential, per accidens rather than per se. Yes, I caused the statue to go flying…but once it is flying that fact is irrelevant to the physical outcome. If, between launch and landing, an angry landowner shot me for lobbing bronze canines onto his lawn, that wouldn’t change the flight path and the resulting dent.

Next, consider the creation of the statue. This isn’t really one change, it’s a whole sequence of changes. First I model the statue in clay, or plaster, or stone; then I make a mold from the model; then I acquire and melt bronze, pour it into the mold, and wait for it cool. Then there’s a fair amount of finish work before the statue is complete. For simplicity, then, let’s suppose that our bronze statue is a replica of a marble statue, and think about the creation of the marble statue.

I, the scultor, take a big piece of marble, and start carving away with hammer and chisel and file. I keep going until everything that doesn’t look like the dog I have in mind is gone.

  • It’s still made of marble, no matter what I do. This is the material cause of the statue.
  • I’m the one making the statue (but more on this in a moment). So I’m the efficient cause.
  • I’m giving the statue the shape of a dog: I’m giving the marble an accidental form. The doggy shape is the formal cause.
  • I can sell the resulting statue for $2534.47, and will be able to feed my family. This is the final cause.

That’s one way of looking at it. But I could also look at the efficient and final causes in this way:

  • The chisel carves away the stone. The chisel is the efficient cause.
  • The stone takes on a particular shape as the end of the process. This is the final cause.

There are, in fact, chains of causes here too. I decide I want to strike just there, and my nerves trigger my muscles to move my arms to make the hammer strike the chisel to break a small piece of marble away from the statue. But oddly, this chain of causes is different from the one that led to the statue flying through the air: each of the causes in this case is operating at the same time, and if any of them were removed the end would not be reached. If I chose not to strike, or if my muscles were too tired, or if the chisel slipped from my hand, or if that angry landowner shot me in the midst of my sculpting, the statue-in-progress would be unchanged. Thomists call this an essential or per se chain of causes. I might have more to say about that later.

As you can see, there’s a lot you can say about even something as simple as the statue of a dog.

Photographing Strangers on the Street

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I like the idea of street photography; but I’ve mostly taken pictures of buildings, fixtures, infrastructure, and so forth. People are usually ancillary to my street photography, because, well….this post on PetaPixel has the scoop.

What do you do if there is a picture you would like to take, but the person does not want to allow it? Ask yourself these questions:

  1. Am I really interested in this person, or are they just a odd looking person?
  2. If they want a copy will I give them one?
  3. Would I talk to them if I did not have a camera?

If you answered no to any of those three questions, I would not take the picture.

Am I really interested in this person? No, probably not. They are simply an element in a larger scene.

If they want a copy will I give them one? No, probably not. Too much work.

Would I talk to them if I did not have a camera? Almost certainly not. Like so many bloggers, I’m much more outgoing on-line than I am in person, at least when it comes to complete strangers.

This, like my lack of taste for poetry, I regard as a personal flaw; if I’m to love my neighbor as myself, the least I can do is be interested!

It’s the Poetry, Stupid!

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Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis notes something that made me hit my head and go “D’oh!” All scripture (even the prose bits) is akin to poetry. Even the bits that are simply reporting something that really happened are akin to poetry, because God is the author of creation. As a poet uses images to convey something deeper, so God uses events to convey something deeper. You can’t get away from it.

And as an analytically minded math-major turned software developer, I have not much taste for poetry, nor much patience for it. If they want to say something why can’t they just say it clearly?

Wait! Please don’t try to answer that. I’m not going to argue that poetry is a waste of time; I know better, intellectually at least, and I regard my lack of taste for poetry to be a personal flaw. I’m confident that there’s a there there, so to speak, at least in the non-feculent 10% of poetry predicted by Sturgeon’s Law.* I just don’t enjoy it.

But I want to hunger and thirst for God’s word. And if there’s a sense that God’s word is akin to poetry, then it would appear that there are some important and relevant skills that I’m lacking.

Sigh.
__________________
* And how do you figure out which 10% is non-feculent? Alas, you have to wade through a lot of—but I digress.

Matthew and Mind Maps

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Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Matthew 1:22 tells us that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit that prophecy might be fulfilled; and Erasmo speaks of what prophecy is and what it says.

But first, I need to talk about mind maps. I’ve been using mind mapping software for some years as a fancy kind of graphical outliner; it’s especially useful for capturing notes from group discussions. However, I’ve recently discovered that there’s another side to mind maps, especially if you draw them by hand: it’s a way of getting your creative, pattern-matching, relation-making backbrain to come out and play with your analytical, verbal fore-brain. As a working programmer I’ve long since learned to rely on my back-brain to solve problems, but I’ve usually had to rely on walking, driving, or taking a shower to get the solutions to come to mind. Making mind maps by hand can do the same trick, apparently, and in a more focussed way, and so I’m making an effort to learn how to do it.

Most mornings, consequently, after reading and pondering what Erasmo has to say, I’ve tried putting it together in a mind map. Here’s the one I came up with this morning.

Mt1 22

This isn’t really intended to speak to anyone but me, of course; and in this case I’m using the mind map as more of an input device, to help me remember what I’ve learned, than as an output device. But it captures the following points:

  • In the Gospel, God’s Wisdom is always the chief actor and mover of events.
  • However, God’s Wisdom generally works through the prophets, those who “speak before”, that is those who prepare.
  • The purpose of the Old Testament prophecies was always to prepare for the coming of God, and hence was intended to lead to the creation of a Tabernacle, an appropriate dwelling for God.
  • But sometimes you build the altar one place so that the lightning can strike somewhere else. The Tabernacle of the Temple was the best that man could build; but all of history leads up to the Annunciation, and the conception of Christ in Mary’s womb.
  • And so Christ’s conception is the fulfillment of all of the prophecies; God now truly dwells among us.

The point that struck me most, reading Erasmo’s lectio, is the first one: in the Gospel, God’s Wisdom is always the chief actor. I’ve tended to focus on the people in the story; but in the Gospel, of course, the Author is also an Actor; the Father and Holy Spirit, though not usually manifesting explicitly, are always present.

He Will Save Us From Sins

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Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

For Matthew 1:21, Erasmo looks at Christ’s mission: he will save us from our sins. He didn’t come to throw out the Romans or make Israel politically powerful; he came to make us holy, to claim us, us as individuals, for himself.

Idolatry is always strong in human society; and in our society the two dominant forms it takes are individualism and collectivism. As individuals, we worship ourselves: we exercise, we eat right, or we feel guilty because we don’t do these things as the culture says we should. And, of course, the cult of the almighty orgasm is, in the end, simply the cult of our own pleasure. We Have To Have Our Own Way.

Jesus says no; we must love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s the first great commandment; and it’s all about sanctification, being holy. Erasmo says,

Until our lives are reoriented toward God and doing what is good, our endeavors in any field of human activity can only be a function of our sinfulness and egotism.

The second idol is collectivism: the notion that all social problems—poverty, addiction, violence, racism, what have you—are systemic, and the key to fixing them is to fix society. The Good of All thus becomes the thing to worship; but “All” is an abstraction. There is no “All”, concretely speaking, but only all of us individuals, and worship of the “All” leads in turn to worship of the State, which is the only entity big enough to conceivably “fix” society as a whole.

Jesus says no; the problem isn’t Society, but rather Our Sins; that’s the systemic problem. He came to fix it at the root, by his death and resurrection. Now it has to play out in our lives as individuals. And this leads to the second great commandment, that we must love our neighbors—our real neighbors, those people we see every day—as ourselves. I wish to be well-fed, clothed, and housed; I wish to have a fulfilling, interesting life; I wish to become holy, to love God as He deserves, that I might spend eternity with Him. I work to achieve things things; and so I must work to achieve for my neighbors. It is my individual responsibility, and it relates not to some vaguely defined collective but to individuals: not to society, but to people. These people may live thousands of miles away from me, or they may live in my house, but they are individuals, created by God in His image.

Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I

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Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Having spent the last week with Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, I’m now ready to give some preliminary impressions: preliminary because I’ve not read the whole thing, or even a tenth of it. But I spent an hour with it on Monday evening, and half-an-hour each morning since, and I think I’ve got the flavor of it.

Bottom line: I love it. It’s a keeper.

To recap, I got this book after praying for help from God to jumpstart in me a deep love of scripture. I want that precisely because the scriptures are a chief way God chose to use to make himself known to us. They are, in a sense, incarnational; and as St. Jerome said, ignorance of the scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Conversely, to know Christ one must know the scriptures, and to love Christ one must love the scriptures.

And Erasmo clearly loves the scriptures. It’s clear in every line. He has read them, tasting the words, chewing on the meaning, and coming to know the Lord he loves through them, and he has made his meditations available to us.

The book begins with a lengthy introduction (around fifty pages) entitled, “A Cordial Reading of God’s Word,” which gives Erasmo’s approach to the project. These fifty pages (or, at least, the thirty or so that I’ve studied) might be worth the price of the book all by themselves. Here’s a sample:

The principal care of one who would make his house within Christ’s Word must be to allow the sacred text all its importance, all its resonance, all its radiance and centrality. He will ceaselessly allow it to occupy the central “block” of both his page and his loving attention, as in those manuscript commentaries on The Book in the Middle Ages—of Jewish, Christian, or Moslem origin—which display a minimal portion of the inspired text within a solid square in the middle of the page and whose thick margins, on four sides, became more and more crowded with the glosses of scribes who prayed, studied, memorized, and recopied—in a word, celebrated—the text inexhaustibly.

Not only is the Word of Scripture central to the study of Christ, it is to be central to our lives. The page with the Word at its center and glosses around the outside is to be the model for my life: my life is to be a gloss on the Scripture.

Every page is like this: every page has some fact, some link, some relation, some metaphor, rooted in the Word, rooted in the Faith, rooted in the Liturgy, that opens my eyes and begins to lift me up to heaven. I could multiply examples endlessly, but if I gave as many as I’d like then I’d certainly be hearing from the the Copyright Cops. But here’s one more example, in paraphrase.

At one point, while talking about the importance of the Greek text, Erasmo notes that the word St. Paul uses in Letter to the Ephesians for the “offering” of the temple sacrifices is the same word Matthew uses when people “bring” the sick and lame to Jesus to be healed. The sacrificial victim must be spotless, without flaw; and when folks bring their loved ones and “offer” them to Christ, he heals them, makes them clean and spotless, so that he can in turn offer them to God. And this adds a crucial element to the scene:

The situation in Matthew is then enhanced from a merely thaumaturgic one (even if this is establishing Christ’s crucial identity as Messiah) to a cultic, mystagogical, and even eucharistic one.

Jesus is not just a magician, not just a wonder-worker: in healing those brought to him, he is foreshadowing what he came to Earth to do for all of us on the cross.

In addition to reading and studying the opening essay, I’ve been spending some time each morning with the actual scripture of Matthew and Erasmo’s meditations on it. I’ve gotten partway through verse 19 of Chapter 1, which is slow going consider that the first 16 or 17 verses are all begats. (There are important lessons in the begats!) And my experience with these shorter meditations is similar to my experience with the opening essay: on every page there’s a connection I had not made, an image that will stick with me and enrich all future readings. I hope to have more to say about some of them in coming days and weeks.

In the meantime…if anything I’ve said appeals to you, go ahead and get a copy. I think you’ll find it to be worthwhile.

Scripture Incarnate: Matthew 1:1

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Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew I am reading through Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol. I, Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis’ commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. You can see all of my posts on this subject here.

Erasmo’s view of scripture is deeply incarnational. Jesus is the incarnate Word of God; and the purpose of scripture is too bring us face to face with Him. Though the Bible, God’s word written, is not in itself divine, still:

The written word of the evangelist: Is it not an incarnation of the spirit of his spoken word, breathed from his mouth of flesh on the roads of Palestine?

And this is why Erasmo bases his commentary on the original Greek text of Matthew’s gospel. Nothing about the Incarnation of Christ is an accident: not the time, not the place, and not the people. If we accept God’s omnipotence, then we have to say that the Gospel was ultimately recorded in Koine Greek because that’s the way the Lord wanted it. It’s worth looking at it that way, to see what we might see. (And then, Erasmo quotes a Hassidic proverb: “To read the Scriptures in translation is like kissing your wife through a handkerchief.”) Not, I hasten to add, that you need to know Greek to read this book, which is fortunate because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read it.

Erasmo begins his commentary with the title of the work, “good tidings according to Matthew”. And here again we see the Incarnation at work. Christ is God Incarnate, the fullest Revelation of God to His people. To know the Father, we must know the Son. And the principle way we know the Son is through his witnesses, and especially through the four evangelists.

We might put it like this: Christ, God Incarnate, is the embodied revelation of God, and the content of that revelation. The Church—the Apostles and their heirs, the multitude of saints, and all the rest of us—as the Mystical Body of Christ is also in a way the embodied revelation of God, and specifically the means of transmitting that revelation. The Church says that general revelation ended with the Apostles, and this is certainly true, but in another sense revelation is continually on-going as we encounter Christ in the scriptures and pass Him along to others. The content of revelation is unchanged and unchanging, but Christ will continually reveal it to each of us, if only we let Him. Erasmo says,

We come to see who God is and experience the depth of his love only by being taken up into the faith of the saints (in this case, St. Matthew), those who proclaim to us by the witness of their life and words the reality of the God who inhabits them.

When God descends to earth and enters human history, He doesn’t do so by halves.