O Great God Give Us Rest!

In order to understand what follows, it would be best to watch the video at the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=50DStEt4uwk

Ecumenism. In case you haven't been on iTunes in the last week, you might be surprised to hear that the David Crowder* Band has released their final album, a Requiem Mass (co-authored by our boy Matt Maher). That album jumped to the top of the charts (not the Christian charts, THE charts) the day it came out. It has remained in the top 5 ever since. David Crowder is a southern baptist, a representative of Baylor University and a well versed theologian, outside of being an evagelical worship leader. Two decades ago (not to mention two centuries ago), a man from the Calvinist tradition who wrote a Mass "centered on the beauty of the Eucharist" would be kicked out of his denomination, much as the Eucharist itself was physically kicked to the curb by the first protesting iconoclasts. Now, just as it is most decidedly NOT my intention to speculate on whether or not Mr. Crowder is moving toward Rome, I also have no intention of opening up old wounds. The atorocities of the 30 year's war, the scandal of Henry VIII and the happenings of the Huguenots belong to another age, when the West was all Christian and the differences between Catholics and Protestants resulted in some of the gravest sins in history. As both protestants and Pope have admited, there was guilt on both sides. However, when I read the history of that hideous period, what disturbs me the most is the sacrelige commited by fellow Christians against the Body of Christ. We burned each other, members of that Body, at the stake and poured the Sacred Host and Precious Wine out upon the pavement. The horror of our actions should silence any finger pointing, especially now that we are centuries out from the scandal.

Now, look where we are. Maybe it is the openess of our society. Maybe the providence of time has helped heal all wounds. Maybe it is the fact that we Christians have been forced to cooperate in a strange new era, no longer having the luxury to carry out our family fued across Christendom. What was Christendom, what was our family home, has become a secularist, consumeristic, materialistic, hedonistic parody of all we hold dear. Now, more than ever, Christians must turn to truth where ever it is found. David Crowder, definitely son of these times, has discovered that Truth can be found in the Eucharist. And he has not refrained from giving glory where glory is due. At the behest of Bl John Paul II, many Catholics have found ways to praise the Lord through song styles that our fathers would call too worldly or worthless. And we have not refrained from using them to give God the glory. Now, five centuries out from our great split, Catholics and Protestants are once more praising the Sacred Host together.

This fact does not represent the end of anything, except perhaps the end of the beginning, (to borrow a phrase from Churchill). Can we dare to look forward to a future where we will no longer debate about the Blessed Sacrament, but can commit ourselves to adoring it together? I certainly hope so. But I am ambitious and hope for more than that. I hope that we have come to a point where sacred silence before that Saving Victim can truly begin to heal our divisions. Singing is a great place to begin ecumenism, but the sacraments are the only place that it can end. I am barely a theologian. I am nothing close to a minister. However, I am a child of the Church, and I must say that, though I cannot pretend to know where all this is going, I am content to kneel at the altar with Mr. Crowder. Or Mr. Tony Blair. Or whatever other leaders decided to come around to the Eucharist. Our sad division began at the foot of the altar: let us hope that it's ending may begin there as well.

Boredom and Bag End

I have been bored over the past couple of days and, like most contemporary young adults, have attempted to relieve my boredom with, among the whole host of possible distractions, videos on Youtube. That is to say, I have watched the Hobbit trailer several times over. I can't wait for Peter Jackson to take us back to Middle Earth. However, while watching the video recently, I had one of those silly, humbling moments so necessary in life: I realized that all my complaining must fall back on my own head. As I watched Bilbo and Frodo waved to each other in the opening shot of the trailer, followed by the shots of Bilbo writing "There and Back Again" at his desk and smoking a pipe in front of Gandalf, I cried (whether out load or to myself, it makes no difference [for I can't really tell which]) “I want to go there!” And not just to be with a wizard, but to be with a friend. I want to smell the Gaffer’s roses and eat Hobbiton cheese, not just the cross swords and see magick. I want songs around my hearth and an unexpected party, and not just elves and dwarves. Fantasy is fine, but reality is so much finer. The trail is makes the adventure, whether that trail leads through the Pearl's marshes or over the Misty Mountains.

And then I realized what a greedy fool I was. My living room is made up just like Bag End (minus, of course, the rounded doors, windows and hallways)! The trim is bare wood with light beige walls. Our hearth is always warm this time of year, and all sorts of singing and dancing goes on. I hike almost everyday in the woods behind my house, ride to parks and shops, can see roses just outside my bedroom window while I writing tales of mine own. This summer I hiked, hunted, fell from waterfalls and fought my demons. This school year I’ve had many an unexpected party and late night adventure. This weekend I'll join many an old friend on a wonderful retreat. So why am I bored?

"You have to be happy in those quiet moments when you remember that you are alive; not in those noisy moments when you forget." This quote of Chesterton's entered my mind, and then I realized just what it was I was missing. I didn't need an adventure that would have me forget reality. I wanted an adventure that would remind me I am a living reality. We grow too used to escapades that are escapes, rather than adventures that are returns. I sat there fuming about the grass being on the other side because I didn't want to risk having to cut my own grass. Which is another way of saying I didn't want to risk my own ,Assk you I will: why is the contemporary person so unsatisfied with their over entertained, over indulged, first world, last place kinda life style. Why does our boredom destroy us instead of rejuvenating us? Why do the few blessed hours granted us for recreation soon lapse into desperation for entertainment?

Simple: we've forgetton the pure joy of being. Of being what? Of BEING.

You might respond (and probably should respond), "Oh, thank you Daniel. Your metaphysics just solves all my problems. Meanwhile, you JERK, maybe you haven't noticed, but I've got all sorts of things to worry about: a car, a house, a job, school, friends, lovers, haters, etc. I've got a life. So what if I want to escape to the land of the elves, or the wizards, or the vampire spouses, of Beyonce, Anime or the LSU tigers. Do not judge my hobbies!"

I don't judge. I really don't. They are all fine and good quality things, your hobbies are (except maybe the Tigers’ coaching). It is myself that I'm judging, that I'm making a public spectacle of. What need I of Rivendell when I've been to Kahdelea, Bag End when I live on Stratford Drive or the Dead Marshes when I have the home of Swamp People in my proverbial backyard? And yet I am bored with it! Why am I bored? Is there something wrong with me?

I always risk being far too intimate in these reflections, but I only do it because I sincerely believe that we all can relate. And what I would like to relate is this lesson (though I live it rather imperfectly myself): boredom is not a curse, but an invitation. Disappointment and disillusionment with our amusements must not be the final word. Rather than taking my word for it, though, here are some more of Chesterton's, echoing from 80 years ago;

"What we have to teach the young man of the future, is how to enjoy himself. Until he can enjoy himself, he will grow more and more tired of enjoying everything else. What we have to teach him is to amuse himself. At this moment he is more and more dependent upon anything which he thinks will amuse him. And, to judge by the expression of his face, it does not amuse him very much. When we consider what he receives, it is indeed a most magnificent wonder and wealth and concentration of amusement. He can travel in a racing-car almost as quick as a cannon-ball; and still have his car fitted up with wireless from all the ends of the earth. He can get Vienna and Moscow; he can hear Cairo and Warsaw; and if he cannot see England, through which he happens to be travelling, that is after all a small matter. In a century, no doubt, his car will travel like a comet, and his wireless will hear the noises in the moon. But all this does not help him when the car stops; and he has to stand stamping about in a line, with nothing to think about. All this does not help him even when the wireless stops and he has to sit still in a silent car with nothing to talk about. If you consider what are the things poured into him, what are the things he receives, then indeed they are colossal cataracts of things, cosmic Niagaras that have never before poured into any human being are pouring into him. But if you consider what comes out of him, as a result of all this absorption, the result we have to record is rather serious. In the vast majority of cases, nothing. Not even conversation, as it used to be. He does not conduct long arguments, as young men did when I was young. The first and startling effect of all this noise is silence."

Into that silence, let us pour our prayer, so that our silence yields not despair. Oh Great God, do your best. Oh Great God, give us rest.

Top Ten Books Read in 2011, #1

Finally, what everyone has been waiting for, the number 1 book read in 2011 is ...

Leisure The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

There are books. There are great books that you will always remember. And then, there are books that change the way you view the world. Josef Pieper's philosophic classic did that for me. You would have been a follower for this blog for over year to remember my postings on this book in late 2010 (there are too many to link). I finished the book in January of 2011, and it set the tone for my whole year.

Pieper's basic concept is that we misunderstand what leisure is. We think of leisure as vacation, time away from work, time doing things we want to do. Leisure isn't time. It isn't a suit. It's a way of living. It's a way of looking at the world. Simply put leisure is the reception of truth, good, and beauty. It is philosophic contemplation.
(Deacon Kyle your losing me)
I think I just lost myself. Sorry.
To be in leisure is not be bound by work and dominated by work, enslaved by work. Work is not what defines the human person (although his work is dignified). The human person, first and foremost, is created in the image and likeness of God. He is both body and soul. Leisure is reception of the divine in ordinary circumstances. It's celebrating at the beauty of a child running in joy at the return of her father from business trip. It's seeing and contemplating the revelation of the divine in the mundane activities of the day.

Work, if divinized, blinds one from seeing the divine in washing dishes or sitting smoking a pipe in the nice cool air on a fall day. Divinized work has one end, productivity. Productivity without the final end in mind, i.e. celebration in the full presence of the divine in heaven, destroys a proper understanding of the human person. He/she becomes a means to an end, when God says, love as I love, without condition, without the need for response, without ulterior motives, just cuz.

No matter your background. No matter your reading level. No matter how much you read. If you read any book in 2012, it should be this book. End of story. End of list. Can't wait to find out what good reads I will encounter this year.

GKC and the Largeness of the Faith

Yet another GKC read! 

This could be considered his commentary on John 6: 68; "To whom, Lord, shall we go." Specifically, he is defending to freedom of the faithful, that when they come to Christ, He enlarges their freedom rather than dismantling it. 

Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has been complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about when or whether he will repent of the conversion; when he will be sick of it, how long he will stand it, at what stage of his external exasperation he will start up and say he can bear it no more. For all this is founded on that optical illusion about the outside and the inside which I have tried to sketch in this chapter. The outsiders, stand by and see, or think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight.  It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into.  He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labelled as being very large; but he is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them. Each of them professes to be a complete cosmos or scheme of all things; but then so does the cosmos of the Clapham Sect or the Clapton Agapemone.  Each of them is supposed to be domed with the sky or painted inside with all the stars. But each of these cosmic systems or machines seems to him much smaller and even much simpler than the broad and balanced universe in which he lives.  One of them is labelled Agnostic; but he knows by experience that it has not really even the freedom of ignorance. It is a wheel that must always go round without a single jolt of miraculous interruption--a circle that must not be squared by any higher mathematics of mysticism; a machine that must be scoured as clean of all spirits as if it were the avowed machine of materialism. In living in a world with two orders, the supernatural and the natural, the convert feels he is living in a larger world and does not feel any temptation to crawl back into a smaller one. One of them is labelled Theosophical or Buddhistic; but he knows by experience that it is only the same sort of wearisome wheel used for spiritual things instead of material things.  Living in a world where he is free to do anything, even to go to the devil, he does not see why he should tie himself to the wheel of a mere destiny. One of them is labelled Humanitarian; but he knows that such humanitarians have really far less experience of humanity. He knows that they are thinking almost entirely of men as they are at this moment in modern cities, and have nothing like the huge human interest of what began by being preached to legionaries in Palestine and is still being preached to peasants in China.  So clear is this perception that I have sometimes put it to myself, as something between a melancholy meditation and a joke.  "Where should I go now, if I did leave the Catholic Church?"  I certainly would not go to any of those little social sects which only express one idea at a time, because that idea happens to be fashionable at the moment. The best I could hope for would be to wander away into the woods and become, not a Pantheist (for that is also a limitation and a bore) but rather a pagan, in the mood to cry out that some particular mountain peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing to be worshipped.  That at least would be beginning all over again; but it would bring me back to the same problem in the end. If it was reasonable to have a sacred tree it was not unreasonable to have a sacred crucifix; and if the god was to be found on one peak he may as reasonably be found under one spire. To find a new religion is sooner or later to have found one; and why should I have been discontented with the one I had found? Especially, as I said in the first words of this essay, when it is the one old religion which seems capable of remaining new.  I know very well that if I went upon that journey I should either despair or return; and that none of the trees would ever be a substitute for the real sacred tree. Paganism is better than pantheism, for paganism is free to imagine divinities, while pantheism is forced to pretend, in a priggish way, that all things are equally divine. But I should not imagine any divinity that was sufficiently divine. I seem to know that weary return through the woodlands; for I think in some symbolic fashion I have walked that road before. For as I have tried to confess here without excessive egotism, I think I am the sort of man who came to Christ from Pan and Dionysus and not from Luther or Laud; that the conversion I understand is that of the pagan and not the Puritan; and upon that antique conversion is founded the whole world that we know. It is a transformation far more vast and tremendous than anything that has been meant for many years past, at least in England and America, by a sectarian controversy or a doctrinal division.  On the height of that ancient empire and that international experience, humanity had a vision. It has not had another; but only quarrels about that one. Paganism was the largest thing in the world and Christianity was larger; and everything else has been comparatively small. 

 

Top Ten Books Read in 2011, #3

Kind and patient readers, I apologize the incompletion of this series. I intended to write three and two on Friday and number one on Saturday and an illness caught up with me.

Number 3 is ...

Tremendous Trifles by G.K. Chesterton

It's not often that I read a collection of essays. Being that this was my first year reading Chesterton (shame, Deacon Kyle, shame!), I figured I'd go with what had been recommended to me. This was recommended to me by one of our fellow writers on the blog (who has been overly busy to write). He told me he reads this over every year. Therefore, I had to read it. The essays were fantastic. Chesterton's wit shone through but more importantly, it provided me with a necessary outlook change. One can find the good, the true, and the beautiful in the ordinary circumstances of life, whether they be brown paper bags and white chalk, or travels to unknown towns, or taxi ride. Chesterton's intellect shines forth in his ability to see the underneath of the material happening. Things are much deeper than they seem.

Sentimentalism, a Chestertonian Insight into Social Bias

We hear of the stark sentimentalist, who talks as if there were no problem at all: as if physical kindness would cure everything: as if one need only pat Nero and stroke Ivan the Terrible. This mere belief in bodily humanitarianism is not sentimental; it is simply snobbish. For if comfort gives men virtue, the comfortable classes ought to be virtuous—which is absurd. Then, again, we do hear of the yet weaker and more watery type of sentimentalists: I mean the sentimentalist who says, with a sort of splutter, "Flog the brutes!" or who tells you with innocent obscenity "what he would do" with a certain man—always supposing the man's hands were tied. - G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

'Tis interesting this beautiful thought of Gilbert.  In one in the same statement, he says violent men and passive sentimentalists come from the same tree, namely ignorance of the human person.  Man is not merely the sentiment connected with human physical contact, not to deny its power, only to mitigate the popular belief in its power.  Nor does man need to be degraded as an ignominious idiot worth nothing more than torture.  

Man is worthy of being contemplated not for his own sake but to see that he is not the root of his existence or the power by which he lives.  He is immediately and brokenly contingent.  He requires both discipline and loving sentiment to become virtuous, insodoing it moves towards being fully human.  

Erotic and Godly?

"There is a certain relationship between love and the divine: love promises infinity, eternity--a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence." Deus Caritas Est 5

This quote is within the context of the Holy Father's explication of eros. He refers back to the Greek understanding of an intoxication transcending into the divine so as to experience supreme happiness. He goes on to say this was enacted through various fertility cults, where men would go to a shrine and unleash their passionate desire upon a woman whose sole purpose was to be mediators of divine intoxication as objects of sexual pleasure. They were treated not as human beings, not as persons, but as objects for those men, objects for the sole purpose of pleasure.

This should sound familiar to us today. Pornography is not much different. Neither is prostitution. Pornography, though, seems to be exponentially more dangerous, if not for the sole reason of being much more accessible, but also from Matthew 5 where Jesus tells us that anyone who lusts after a woman already commits adultery in his heart. Pornography degrades, perverts, and deconstructs the idea and truth of eros. It divinizes eros instead of letting eros be a means to the divine. Furthermore, it destroys the God given dignity of the human person, who is himself an end (c.f. Love and Responsibility Karol Wojtyla).

Pope Benedict goes on to mention the Old Testament's rejection of this cult because it is, as shown earlier, "a perversion of religiosity." However, eros was not rejected, rather, its idea and enaction needed to be purified and tempered.

This desire, ultimately, for God is within us. Eros desires to transcend finite reality to be in union with the infinite, namely God. Aristotle had this concept in his cosmology. The umoved mover, whom he referred to as god, moved all things to itself. Everything moved in its own path back toward the unmoved mover. This can easily be translated into Christian terms. God moves "all creation together in Himself." "Father, I pray that they may be one as You and I are one." In the greatest sense, eros can be seen in this light.

However, "eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but also a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns," (Deus Caritas Est 4). The tendency in our culture today is to direct this desire for the infinite, for beatitude, (happiness), toward finite things. These things, or persons, offer fleeting pleasure. Through a temperate direction of eros, we can experience a "foretaste" of eternal life in love. It is like tasting a crumb of the greatest cake ever to be made, and this crumb springs your yearning on ever greater for the whole cake. This foretaste, directed and mediated through temperance, incites full throttle the desire to be in union with our Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

QWERTY and the Spiritual Principle of the Human Person

I am sitting in a coffee shop doing some paperwork for the seminary and found myself staring off into space while typing.  I wasn't looking at the screen or at the keyboard.  I was just typing what I thought, as I am right now.  It hit me how amazing a skill tying is.  Letters are not in alphabetical order.  They are in QWERTY setup, and yet my brain in conjunction with the small appendages attached to my hand connected the keys so as to make words.  This is utterly amazing.  I shows to me the beauty of the human person how so.  I shows both mental and muscle memory, which granted is not a necessarily exclusive human ability.  However, what the muscle and mental memory is used for is creating words on a screen that connect together to make sentences and ideas.  Symbols such as "t" and "j" and ";" help communicate invisible realities such as thought, and justice, and the clarity of context.  These invisible realities in turn connect the perceptible reality of words with the spiritual principle of the human person.  By me typing this entry, I am communicating a spiritual reality.  Who said the typist couldn't be a philosopher?

Music Done Well

As of late, I have been reading St. Augustine's treatise, On Music.  A later blogpost will give my thoughts on the whole work but one particular part in the first of the six books interested me.

He said, "Music is the science of moving well."  As a means of necessary background, this particular treatise covers rhythm only so the definition fits well in that regard.  He goes in that chapter to make a point of the qualifier "well."  Well does not just connote the good measuring of notes at time and intervals that are pleasing to the ear; it also connotes the proper place in which those notes are heard.

Yet it is possible for this harmony and measuring to please when they shouldn't.  For example, if one should sing sweetly and dance gracefully, wishing thereby to be when the occasion demanded gravity, such a person would in no way be using harmonious mensuration (correct measuring of notes) well.  In other word, that person uses ill or improperly the motion at one time called good because of its harmony. (On Music 1.3)

There is not only good mechanics and sound but a proper place for those good mechanics and sound.  Good music is not harmony and rhythm alone, but proper placement of that harmony and rhythm.  One wouldn't play, for instance, speed trash metal during the bridal procession of a wedding.  That particular harmony and rhythm, although good in itself (some may argue otherwise), does not fit with that situation.  Now I know people push these boundaries.  The 20th and 21st centuries have been all about pushing boundaries in art, but it is boundaries, i.e. harmonics and rhythms that internally control music.  Aharmony and arhythm is not music.  It is noise, a cacophony of sound with no order.  What to me, Augustine is proposing, is that not only is the order of harmony and rhythm part of music but the placement of that harmony and rhythm within a given situation.  A director would not set "Flight of the Bumblebee" during a peaceful scene with the couple walking down a beach at sunset.  It does not fit the mood.  In our insides we naturally recognize the incoherence of that.

There also occurs in our hearts and in our senses a certain deadening of that naturally recognizable incoherence when incoherence becomes the norm.  Coherence can no longer be identified.  Say for instance someone cannot tell the dream from reality.  One actually is reality and the other a figment of imagination.

This seems to have occurred in Liturgical music over the past half century.  People recognize beautiful music and wish to incorporate it into the liturgy because of its beauty, which is indeed an admirable desire, but the second part of what Augustine describes as good music requires proper placement.  Although pop music has recognizably coherent harmony and rhythm that is pleasing to the ear, it does not fit within the framework of worship.  Pop music is an earthy, passionate, and highly emotional form of music.  It keeps one firmly in earthly experience.  It does not, but its mood and movement lift someone  up to worship in God the same way the other-worldly sound of Gregorian Chant, or Mozarabic Chant, or Byzantine Chant does.  Chant lifts someone out of themselves and moves the towards God.  The lack of meter gives a certain elevation to it.  It is guided by accents and phrases connecting lyric with melody in such an extraordinarily symbiotic way.

I'm looking at this from a philosophical viewpoint, but it would seem that this viewpoint finds its way into countless church documents about sacred music.  Corpus Christi Watershed does a good job of explaining it here:


Can you tell the difference?? from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.

Leisure and Philosophy

This compilation of two essays by Josef Pieper is must have for any Catholic intellectual or pseudo-intellectual, theologian, philosopher, scripture scholar, grad student.  The first essay, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, really solidified my understanding of a philosopher and how one goes about thinking.  I had heard in undergrad about Plato's concept of leisure as the prerequisite for philosophy, but I had a 20th century comprehension of that word.  To me, leisure meant someone who was rich and had leisure time, as I wrote in a previous post.  Leisure is a passive receptivity to being.  In that sense, it makes sense that leisure is the prerequisite for philosophy.  "Philosophy," as Pieper says, "is not the loving search for any kind of wisdom; it is concerned with wisdom as it is possessed by God," who is the source of all being (emphasis added by me).

To me, the first essay gives a philosophical backing for the need for silence and reflection in the life of each human person, no matter their state in life or intellectual capacity.  There is something elementary human about reflection that helps in living a good life.  Whether this silence and reflection is done in prayer, as seems to be the natural way for a Christian, or with reflecting on experience in a such a way as to come to some knowledge of the universal, or reflection to recognize one's emotions at different parts of the day.  Pieper sets up a cogent and well articulated plan to understand and begin to enact leisure in one's life.

I still wonder why didn't read this at the beginning of my philosophy studies and not 3 years after I received a degree in philosophy.  "The Philosophical Act" begins to set a premise similar to what Fr. Schall said in the preface to this edition.  We gain an understanding of philosophy by going back to the first philosophers.  The first philosophers in turn turned to the writers of myths.  There is a direct connection between philosophy and theology.  "There is no such thing as philosophy which does not receive its impulse and impetus from a prior and uncritically accepted interpretation of the world as a whole," i.e. a theology.  Pieper goes on to say that this, in a sense, can even be an atheistic theology.  However, there is only one true philosophy due to what quoted two paragraphs earlier, "Philosophy ... is concerned with wisdom as it is possessed by God."  Christian theology gives philosophy a framework from which to work.  In so doing, it does not allow for unrestricted thought and hence the possibility of extreme error, i.e. Descartes trying to start all over again.

I would suggest these two essays in a beautifully compiled edition by Ignatius Press, which also includes a forward by Fr. James Schall.

An Anti-climatic and Procrastinated Ending to Leisure

There have been many post since the last one about Pieper's Leisure.  I wish now to finish by just quoting the last three paragraphs of the essay.  The speak for themselves.

Worship is either something 'given,' divine worship is fore-ordained - or its does not exist at all.  There can be no question of founding a religion or instituting a religious cultus.  And for the Christian there is, of course, no doubt in the matter: post Christum there is only one, true and final form of celebrating divine worship, the sacramental sacrifice of the Christian Church.  And moreover I think that anyone inquiring into the facts of the case from a historical point of view (whether he is a Christian or not) would be unable to find any other worship whatsoever in the Europeanized world. 

The Christian cultus, unlike any other, is at once a sacrifice and a sacrament.  In so far as the Christian cultus is a sacrifice held in the midst of the creation which is affirmed by this sacrifice of the God-man - everyday is a feast day; and in face the liturgy knows only feast days, even working days being feria.  In so far as the cultus is a sacrament it is celebrated in visible signs.  And the full power of worship will only be felts if its sacramental character is realized in undiminished form, that is, if the sign is fully visible.  In leisure, as was said, man oversteps the frontiers of the everyday workaday world, not in external effort and strain, but as though lifted about it in ecstasy.  that is the sense of the visibility of the sacrament: that man is 'carried away' by it, thrown into 'ecstasy.'  Let no one imagine for a moment that that is private and romantic interpretation.  The Church has pointed to the meaning of the incarnation of the Logos in the self-same words: ut dum visibiliter Deum cognosciums, per hunc in invisibilum amorem rapiamor, that we may be rapt into love of the invisible reality through the visibility of that first and ultimate sacrament: the Incarnation.

We therefore hope that this true sense of sacramental visibility may become so manifest in the celebration of the Christian cultus itself that in the performance of it man, 'who is born to work.' may truly be 'transported' out of the weariness of daily labor into an unending holiday, carried way out of the straitness of the workaday world into the heart of the universe.

A reflection on Chapter V of Leisure: The Basis of Culture

 

Utility, the Antithesis of Divine Worship

This summer the Archdiocese of New Orleans held a Theology on Tap series at the guest area of a local brewery.  One of the talks, given by Fr. Bryce Sibley, a priest of the Diocese of Lafayette, held the name, "Why Does the Church Make Such a Big Deal About Sex?"  With such a title, the talk seemed to be a very intriguing topic.  Fr. Sibley's main point was this: the human and along with it, human sexuality, is connected, at its roots, to divine worship.  The Church makes such a big deal about sex precisely because it relates to divine worship.  Not just in Catholicism but in ancient Judaism (look at the laws in Leviticus) as well as ancient pagan religion, sex is connected with worship.  All this connects through the concept of imago Dei.  Man is made in the image and likeness of God, not just his his soul but in his body.

Karol Wojtyla (JP II), in his early work, Love and Responsibility, spoke about the human body.  He saw in lust and especially in pornography the antithesis of the meaning and depth of human love and the human body (He takes these thoughts and expands on their Biblical roots in his opus magnus, Man and Woman He Created Them: The Theology of the Body.)  He spoke of this antithetical action as utilitarian (in the philosophical sense of John Stuart Mill and co.).  The body, or someone else's body, is not something to be used and them discarded when it no longer provides pleasure.  It is something to be regarded and honored for its own sake.  In TOB, John Paul II would specifically say that it is precisely because we are made in God's image that the human person, body and soul, is an in himself/herself.  Again, we connect the human body with honor of God.  When one honors the human body, as a divine image, he/she worships God for such a great gift.

This though came into my mind when Pieper wrote this,"[Divine worship/sacrifice] definitely does not involve utility; it is in face antithetic to utility."  Worship is the epitome of superfluity.  It goes beyond what is the assumed norm and flows into utter foolishness.  It is as necessary as a bolt or a screw, but it is a bolt or screw made of pure gold and plated in platinum.  Such is the nature of divine worship, to which the human body points.  This is why we have extravagant places of worship and ornate vestments and complicated and beautifully worded rituals.  Divine worship is not utilitarian it is utterly foolish and superfluous.  Praise be to God!

A reflection on Chapter V of Leisure: The Basis of Culture

Simplicity of Leisure

"When we really let our mind rest contemplatively on a rose in bud, on a child in play, on a divine mystery, we are rested and quickened as though be a dreamless sleep."  It seems so simple.  It is a passive reception not of sensory data: colors, shapes, and sounds.  It is a passive reception of the reality behind these things: who made them, that they in some way reflect His beauty, that this is a person who is made in His image and after his own likeness and has inalienable dignity.  It is amazing.  These are the things that bring about the emotion of joy.  They elicit from man a resting in a present good.  This then goes back to the discussion of the difficulty/reward ratio.  The end is the good.  Leisure seems to me, so far, as the apprehension of a creature's participation with the divine attributes.  Leisure is, consequently, connected with theology and philosophy.  It is the prerequisite for doing both.  Before philosophy there must be leisure and before theology ther must be philosophy.  This is where I find myself.  I have tried to philosophize or theologize without first being at rest.  I saw it as work, a task to be performed and accomplished.

a reflection on Chapter III of Leisure: The Basis of Culture

The Germans

Josef Pieper

This book is introducing us to a plethora of German authors that us English speakers will never be able to read. So it has that extra benefit of insights we'll never get the opportunity to read unless we belabored the study of the famously long winded German language.

a reflection (however short) on Leisure: The Basis of Culture

The Digital Age and Leisure

We have been reading now for a while (much longer than originally anticipated) Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture.  Points have been made on previous posts about "the worker mentality" and the "aggression of observation."  A concept of total work is established wherein leisure is seen as laziness or a waste of time and where others things can be done.  This concept has undoubtedly taken hold of our society and is perpetuated by contemporary media.

Images, words, videos, concepts, ideas, biases.  All of these are flashed before us in a Gatling gun barrage of sensory data and powerful memories.  They keep the mind and the body in constant movement and work.  It's both passive, inasmuch as it does not necessarily require intellectual interaction, and active, inasmuch as it is constant sensual stimulation that the brain is constantly processing.

This also occurs in social networking.  Many, including myself, have been "addicted" to Facebook or Myspace.  The need for human contact is so innate in man in relieving this desire that it can easily become disordered.  The brain and the body is in constant stimulation giving imitating this "worker mentality" of a world without leisure, without quiet reflection and contemplation.

Pope Benedict warned us of this last year in his Address for 43rd the World Day of Communications.

"If the desire for virtual connectedness becomes obsessive, it may in fact function to isolate individuals from real social interaction while also disrupting the patterns of rest, silence and reflection that are necessary for healthy human development."  

Here Pieper's and Benedict's thoughts intersect.  Maybe we should begin to listen.

Leisure: She and Him

It seems now, in Chapter 3, that Piper is getting to the heart of the matter.  Leisure isn't an activity.  "It's not the inevitable result of spare time,"  which I must grant to Pieper, is my original conception of leisure.  This conception was formed by our turns of speech such as, leisure time, a gentleman of leisure, and leisure suit.  He says it is rather "an attitude of mind, a condition of the soul."  It isn't an action per se but rather a framework by which we act.  It is open to silence and rest.  Maybe I'm wrong in understanding him, though, because he says its an "attitude of non-activity."  He clarifies himself, "it is a receptive attitude of mind."  I can begin to connect the dots.  A worker mentality forwarded by Kant is aggressive and moving outward.  A leisure mentality is receptive and inward.  This calls to mind the Theology of the Body and the complementarity of the sexes.  More sense is being made in my mind.  Classic writers always refer to the soul in the feminine form.  St. John of the Cross does in his Spiritual Canticle.  Femininity is naturally related to receptivity.  The female body had the framework of receptivity.  The soul reflects this receptive reality and hence is attributed and spoken of with feminine pronouns, this is even mirrored in Scripture.  Kant and the worker mentality attempt to fit a masculine, outward moving mentality onto a feminine, receptive reality.  Interesting.  Thoughts?

A reflection on Chapter III of Leisure: The Basis of Culture

The Decline of the Liberal Arts as a Connection to the "Worker Mentality"

I remember reading an article in the NY Times about the state of universities in the US.  The article found that Liberal Arts schools were struggling to maintain a healthy number of students.  Universities are beginning to face questions about retaining liberal arts schools.  This current problem seem to fulfill Pieper's prophetic words.  Universities are not producing educated men and women but rather specialized functionaries.  "An educated man is a man with a point of view from which he takes in the whole world."  The average college graduate is semi-prepared for a specialized job, with focused requirements.  Parents and grandparents wonder about their children, 'how do they not understand?'  They have not been educated.

I find this doubly interesting with regard to base education, the primordial education one receives from his parents, way before university education.  The call of parents is to educate their children no just, or rather primarily, in a functionary manner.  Rather, they are to form the child to begin to take in the whole world. 

Liberal arts are meant to form the whole man.  I think Patrick Deneen says it well:

The “older science” recognized that a unique feature of man was his capacity for liberty: not driven by mere instinct, man was singular among the creatures for his ability to choose, to consciously direct and order his life. This liberty, as understood by the ancients and Biblical religions, was subject to misuse and excess: some of the oldest stories in our tradition, including the story of the fall from Eden, told of the human propensity to use freedom badly. To understand ourselves was to understand how to use our liberty well, especially how to govern appetites that seemed insatiable. The liberal arts recognized that submission to these limitless appetites would result in the loss of our liberty and reflect our enslavement to desire. They sought to encourage that hard task of negotiating what was permitted and what was forbidden, what constituted the highest and best use of our freedom and what actions were hubristic, immoral, wrong. To be free — liberal — was itself an art, something that was learned not by nature or instinct, but by refinement and education. At the center of the liberal arts were the humanities, the education of how to be a human being. Each new generation was encouraged to consult the great works of our tradition, the vast epics, the classic tragedies and comedies, the reflections of philosophers and theologians, the revealed Word of God, those countless books that sought to teach us what it was to be human — above all, how to use our liberty well.

Now men are formed for function, for work.  Leisure, becoming fully human, these are unspoken and unfulfilled desires that leave man empty.  He is so trained in the "act of aggression" that is observation (which Deneen in his article said even drifted to the liberal arts) that he cannot receive.  Giftedness is replaced by what Deneen called "Promethean forms of individual or generational self-aggrandizement" and "the raw assertion of power over any restraints or limits that would otherwise define him."  Man loses himself not in something greater, like divinity, but he rather loses himself in himself being stuck in a endless circle of unfulfilled dreams or insatiable appetites.  He takes in himself.  He is a man of learning with no education.

A reflection on Chapter II of Leisure: the Basis of Culture

Good things come to those who work, or do they?

We've been taught, probably not explicitly, but nonetheless taught, that reward is relative to difficulty.  The more difficult an is the greater its reward.  I'll it the difficult/reward ratio.  It's an implicit concept within our concept of work.  An example can be a medical doctor.  He spends years upon years of schooling (somewhat to the detriment of his social I might add). He receives knowledge that is held by a limited amount of people whose knowledge and expertise is in high demand.  He is hence well remunerated for his knowledge and expertise.  This is the difficulty/reward ratio.

Piper identifies this in Kant and Antisthenes.  Both find the ideal in Hercules, the archetype for the difficulty/reward ratio.  This ratio, Piper counters, passes over whether the reward is good.  He quotes St. Thomas Aquinas, "Not everything that is more difficult is necessarily more meritorious."  So if we were to look again at the doctor.  He might have much knowledge but might lack the social skills learned in school.    St. Thomas continues, "It must be more difficult in such a way that it is at the same time good in a higher way."

There is now a third element in the ratio, which changes the equation.  However, I can't think of a mathematical equation (if someone can after reading this, feel free.  I was never good at math), but rather a syllogism.

If the difficulty is equal to the good, then the reward is worth the difficulty.

I wonder if "good" has been taken out of the equation because the value system has turned inside out leaving what is good to the individual.  The good has become absolutely relative making it impossible to enter into the syllogism just proposed and rather propagating the difficulty/reward ratio.  What do you think?

A reflection on Chapter II of Leisure: The Basis of Culture

The Giftedness of Human Knowledge

Pieper takes the understanding of "knowledge as work" even farther. It's essentially a humanist claim. If all man's knowledge is attained by himself, then, he is the 'measure of all things.' This creates a much deeper problem. It begins to set aside the giftedness of our intellects and that our knowledge is a participation in divine knowledge. Participation admits of some giftedness and simultaneously of a passive reception of the gift. Knowledge as work, indeed knowledge only through deduction cannot admit of passive reception. It is rather active aggression.

A reflection on the second chapter of Leisure: The Basis of Culture

The Special Case of CSI

Pieper speaks of Kant's "most momentous" epistemological dogmatic assumption: all knowledge is discursive. This point is proven by many detective stories. Holmes proves his points through discursus. The great array of CSI criminal forensic experts use discursive means to solve the crimes. One comes to the knowledge of the crimes in this scientific manner. "According to Kant man's knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating." These are all acts of aggression. All use of the intellect is activity. It denies passivity. It precludes contemplation. It will be interesting to see how Chesterton develops his detective, Fr. Brown. Will all be solved by discursion or is there a certain passivity, a contemplation of the crime involved?

A Reflection on the Second Chapter of Leisure:The Basis of Culture