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.
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.
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.
That’s one way of looking at it. But I could also look at the efficient and final causes in this way:
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.
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:
- Am I really interested in this person, or are they just a odd looking person?
- If they want a copy will I give them one?
- 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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
— Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word, Vol I
I have a dirty little secret.
I don’t really like reading the Bible all that much. I mean, I’ve read it; all of the New Testament and much of the Old, much of it multiple times. I look at a passage of the New Testament and it tends to go in one eye and out the—well, you know what I mean. And this is not a Good Thing, especially for a Lay Dominican, given that Study is one of the four pillars of Dominican life.
Mind you, I studied obsessively during my first few years as a Catholic revert. The Faith was my current interest, and I burrowed into it with vigor. But interests wax and wane, and other things have my attention at the moment.
Which is why God made promises. I vowed to love my wife when I married her, in preparation for those times when loving unselfishly is difficult. And as a Dominican I promised to continue to study the Word, in preparation for those times when other things look shinier, and when I’m tired in the morning and just don’t want to do it. And during Lent I came face to face with the fact that this is one of those times, and that I need to get moving.
At times like these, prayer is indicated: the kind of prayer where you say, “Lord, I don’t want to read your word, but I want to want to read your word. Please help!” And I’d been praying this kind of prayer during Holy Week.
So on Holy Saturday I was at Barnes & Noble with Jane, and saw a book: Volume III of Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, published by Ignatius Press. I noticed it because it had the usual Ignatius spine, and because it was HUGE, 870 pages, dwarfing all of the books around out. So I pulled it out and took a look. It was subtitled, “Meditations on the Gospel according to St. Matthew”. Not the whole gospel, mind you; chapters 19 to 25 only. Turns out he covers chapters 1 to 11 in the first volume (746 pages), and chapter 12 to 18 in the second volume (800 pages), and he still has three chapters left to go; I’m expecting that the fourth volume, if he manages to publish it, will be 1200 pages at least.
I nearly recoiled in horror, but instead I took a closer look.
It’s a verse by verse commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, beginning from the Greek text. It is intended to be a cordial reading of the Gospel, a reading from the heart. It is intended to be read in the context of the Church and its teachings. It is intended to be part of an encounter with the Living God through His Word written.
Did I mention that Matthew was St. Dominic’s favorite gospel? He carried it with him everywhere.
Interesting, I thought. If only I had the time to plow through something so big. And I walked away.
I think I got about eight feet away before I turned around and went back. When you ask God for something, it’s unwise to walk away from the answer.
Naturally, B&N only had the third volume. So I ordered a copy of the first volume (from Amazon, on my cell phone; sorry, B&N!), and it arrived today. I spent an hour during my daughter’s dance class reading the (first part of) the introduction. And I’m more convinced than ever that my running across it on Saturday was an answer to prayer.
This post is long enough; I’ll have to say more about the book in the coming days. (If I don’t, nag me!)
The View from the Foothills 