Happy Feast of the Assumption

Ignatius Press posted a sermon from early 20th Century convert ordained priest. Msgnr. Ronald Knox.  Check it out.

Ora et Labora is being stripped up of its sacredness

Check out this video about a local abbey who wishes to fulfill its vocation and support itself.

A Solemn Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus

A Solemn Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus
by Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque

I give myself and consecrate to the Sacred Heart of our Lord Jesus Christ, my person and my life, my actions, pains and sufferings, so that I may be unwilling to make use of any part of my being other than to honor, love and glorify the Sacred Heart.
This is my unchanging purpose, namely, to be all His, and to do all things for the love of Him, at the same time renouncing with all my heart whatever is displeasing to Him.
I therefore take You, O Sacred heart, to be the only object of my love, the guardian of my life, my assurance of salvation, the remedy of my weakness and inconstancy, the atonement for all the faults of my life and my sure refuge at the hour of death.
Be then, O Heart of goodness, my justification before God the Father, and turn away from me the strokes of his righteous anger.
O Heart of love, I put all my confidence in You, for I fear everything from my own wickedness and frailty, but I hope for all things from Your goodness and bounty.
Remove from me all that can displease You or resist Your holy will; let Your pure love imprint Your image so deeply upon my heart, that I shall never be able to forget You or to be separated from You.
May I obtain from all Your loving kindness the grace of having my name written in Your Heart, for in You I desire to place all my happiness and glory, living and dying in bondage to You. Amen.

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

Rewind to Chapter 1 :)

I'm a bit late in getting to this, so please pardon my delay. But as I was reading through chapter one I was struck by the his point of us working in order to have leisure and that the modern man struggle to grasp the ancient Greek concept of leisure and they would struggle to grasp our concept of work (p.20-21).

I may be missing it, but it seems a bit to me to have a negative understanding of work. I've been doing some reading in the Book of Genesis recently and thinking about this concept of Adam as being charged by God to work and guard the garden of Eden. Work then seems to be ordained by God for man to do. At the same time, leisure is commanded by the Lord, in the form of the prohibition of servile work on the Sabbath. It may be because I don't grasp the ancient concepts of work and leisure and the connection between the two (as Pieper mentions) but it seems as if too little value is being placed on the idea of work in the life of man. I know the CCC and JP2 probably have much to say about this, but I'm just curious... Thoughts?