call no nation happy

Andrew Bacevich reviews Robert Kagan's The World America Made and objects to the "mythopoeia" of It's a Wonderful Life:

For real inspiration, however, he turns to a different and altogether unlikely source: Hollywood director Frank Capra. The World America Made begins and ends with Kagan urging Americans to heed the lessons of that hoariest of Christmas fantasies, It's a Wonderful Life.

Remember Clarence, the probationary guardian angel? Clarence saves George Bailey from suicidal despair (and earns his wings) by showing George what a miserable place Bedford Falls would have been without him.

As Kagan sees it, America's impact on history mirrors George Bailey's impact on Bedford Falls. Thanks to the power wielded by the United States, the entire postwar era has been "a golden age for humanity." ...

Accept any diminution of American preeminence and you can kiss the golden age goodbye. Just like Bedford Falls without George Bailey, the world will inevitably become a dark and miserable place. ...

Books such as The World America Made fulfill our longing to believe that history does have purpose and direction, that the ongoing chronicle of collective human endeavor is not devoid of meaning. This is an illusion, of course--one to which we desperately cling, and which people like Robert Kagan exploit to the fullest. In the real world, unlike in Bedford Falls, wishful thinking won't prevent the building and loan from collapsing. Either the books balance or they don't. As for living happily ever after--well, that's why we have movies.

1. While excellent as a critique of Kagan's book, Bacevich's interpretation of It's A Wonderful Life is correct only if George Bailey is an everyman. A post-Bovarian George Bailey (i.e., a self-aware Bovary) would, qua everyman, come even closer to suicide after Clarence showed him a glimpse of a world in which he had not appeared. But, in my opinion, the appeal of this sort of movie is rooted in the charisma of its protagonist rather than in an implied universal extension of that charisma. It is interesting to watch men who are "better than ourselves." It is also a worthy task to depict a way of accepting one's own ordinariness, even within the context of a mission.

2. The drama of the postmodern everyman consists in his learning what Caleb Stegall has called the "the slow, small, repeated, daily acts of repossession . . . [that] require love above all." Think of those scenes between Michael and Jim and Michael and Pam that ought to have ended The Office. These final ordinary expressions of "love above all" were the final moments of one complete action--indeed these scenes gathered up and preserved all the elements of the plot of The Office in which Jim shows us "what a great boss [Michael] turned out to be" and Michael protects Jim from the mildly disruptive hubris of efficient management.

3. The literary conflict between the everyman and the man who is "better than ourselves" is especially interesting in a show like Mad Men. Critics find it difficult to decide what the show is about because Don Draper is a flawed man of undeniable genius who appreciates and longs to be able to perform "the slow, small, repeated, daily acts of repossession" at the same time as he also indulges an obsession with the art of persuasion. Of course it is also difficult because the plot is incomplete and still subject to a writer's reinvention. Maybe it's just a period piece. [See J.L. Wall.]

de Lubac's history of the role of time

BC: Noli turbare circulos meos! (Archimedes)

AD: Circuitus illi jam explosi sunt! (Augustine)

"mysterious incorporation of the human race"

Russell Kirk, writing in The Conservative Mind:

Society is immeasurably more than a political device. Knowing this, Burke endeavored to convince  his generation of the immense complexity of existence, the "mysterious incorporation of the human race." If society is treated as a simple contraption to be managed on mathematical lines -- the Jacobins and the Benthamites and most other radicals so regarded it -- then man will be degraded into something much less than a partner in the immortal contract that unites the dead, the living, and those yet unborn, the bond between God and man. Order in this world is contingent upon order above. (68-69)

"Catholicism these days asks very little"

At CatholicVote.org, Bradley Birzer interviews Daniel McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative:

BB: What do you see as the future of Catholicism? 

DMcC: There are challenges ahead for Catholicism that will make the last century look placid. For all the talk about the global south becoming the population center of Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, the West and Far East will continue to be the engines of global culture for a long while yet. As Africa and South Asia develop, they will develop towards the kinds of commercial, statist, spiritually attenuated conditions you find in America, Europe, Japan, and China. “State liberalism,” in the form of democratic capitalism or Chinese-style authoritarian capitalism, will continue to look like “the end of history” and to pose a much greater spiritual threat than Islamist extremism ever could. Religious competition and sectarian violence are challenges the Church is adept at overcoming, but the world of Aldous Huxley is something else.

The Church faces the twin dangers of accommodation with liberalism or overreaction against it, the latter of which has already turned much of evangelical Protestantism into a caricature. I don’t think the “fewer but better” strategy is a sound one; it threatens to turn Catholicism into a subculture, when Catholicism can only be catholic. What I hope to see is a revival of religious orders, or the development of new ones, to meet the challenge. There are lessons to be learned from the Mormons, of all people, who are growing and becoming more influential. Think of how they send young people on missions. They ask a lot of their young people; Catholicism these days asks very little. And gets it.

ancient hungers

At The Imaginative Conservative, Professor Birzer offers this quotation from Russell Kirk:

In a generation like ours, which has forgotten the natural law and has knelt to Leviathan, Antigone takes on a meaning little understood during the nineteenth century. . . . There exist in human nature, common to the Greeks of the fifth century and to us, certain constant qualities. Of these qualities, among the rising talents of every generation, are a longing for poetic imagery; a dim participating in the tragic view of life; and an aspiration after ethical insights. Antigone is a great drama because it is humane in the highest sense: that is, Antigone exemplifies the educational discipline called humanitas, the training of the ethical faculty through the understanding of powerful literature. Despite all the muddled positivism and pragmatism to which college students have been subjected since the age of five or six years, truth will demand a hearing now and again. The ancient hungers of the imagination are hard to deny. [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 36-37]

We should live in fear and trembling toward the "ancient hungers of the imagination," toward the full extent of the "humane in the highest sense." It is only indirectly that it is we who are hungry. Our generation is not prepared to participate in a genuine hunger for "the tragic view of life." Even (especially) Catholics find it difficult to say with Antigone that "It is the dead, / Not the living, who make the longest demands: / We die forever . . ." To say those words is one thing; it is another to train oneself to "go gentle" in that ethical way. Positivism and pragmatism are not choices for our generation. They are our ethical way. It is true that some are capable of being attentive to the truth that demands a hearing, but who can choose, like Antigone, to enact that demand, to be a moment of its appearance? Are even the greatest educators of humanitas capable of gouging out their eyes?

We have always been the recognizers, the pilgrim observers. How can we be asked to satisfy a hunger that goes beyond the verge of sense and dialogue? It is here that we have always encountered the nearness of the divine. It is here where we have been capable of belief. We preserve the tradition of the illative sense and we believe in the communion of saints. Isn't that enough? Is there really something wrong with our imaginative preference for Jane Austen? With a conservatism that is the natural ally of "the cleric, the unambitious family man, and the housewife"? Is it not the positivists and pragmatists who deserve to face the intrusion of Dostoevsky's "fantastic" realism?

Percy's "emotional comprehension" of women

Simcha Fisher recently wrote that she "received terrible lessons" about romantic love when she read Walker Percy's "terrific" books as a teenager:

[They] were just above my emotional comprehension (and I worry a bit about Percy’s own emotional comprehension of women). The romantic escapades of Dr. Thomas More are his tragic flaw, and a symptom of his deeper, similarly flawed relationship with Christ, which comes in cycles of ecstatic lust and regret. But a teenager will likely take any likable character as a role model, ignoring or normalizing the misery and distress that the character suffers.

As Matthew Lickona comments, Percy is a diagnostic novelist who is more interested in depicting whether and how his characters get "through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon" than in giving them the sort of emotional range that would make them adequate role models. The reader can relate to the diagnosis of malaise and the initial prescription of the capacity for lust (these are, in my opinion, the moments when Percy reaches a genuinely artistic description), but not to much more than that. Some men sit like Achilles or run through swamps; even more women balance a Coke like Sharon Kinkaid or drive like Margot. When it cuts through the malaise, "romantic love" is like whiskey rather than water. Its surprising heaviness and sweetness is nearer the thigh than the face (the locus of "emotional comprehension"). And that is not nothing. But it does reveal, as Lickona also says, the limits of the diagnostic aim: "One of the difficulties of writing a diagnostic novel is that you have to people it with other . . . people." Dr. Thomas More really is as boring as his confessor says he is toward the end of Love in the Ruins: "Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about . . . things which, please forgive me, sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middle-aged daydreams" (399). And Binx and Kate are no Jack and Anne and certainly no Elizabeth and Darcy.

Anyway, the Korrektiv discussion of Mrs. Fisher's post includes this comment:

Next: a post on Kierkegaard and women. I love SK, but it’s gonna make Percy look like Oprah.

Funny. The Kierkegaard of Works of Love and Myshkin were my teenage models for comprehending women and articulating romantic love. Whoops. Failing to live up to that wasn't anything you could call graceful. But I think Kierkegaard was more imaginative about women than the odd pseudonymous text would suggest. As he wrote in his Journal: "Had I had faith, I would have stayed with Regine. Thanks be to God, I can see that now. During those days I came close to losing my senses."

the old man

Hermann Diem, writing in Kierkegaard: An Introduction:

To Kierkegaard, it was no accident that the "forgiveness of sins" and the "resurrection of the body" are juxtaposed in the Creed. What is made new through faith in the forgiveness of sins is the old man, not someone else. A man does not become a blank page. What he realizes in his new life are possibilities lying in his own past history, even if he has already bungled them. (26)

"seen by men"

Aidan Nichols, O.P. writing in The Art of God Incarnate:

In his body of glory Christ lives radiantly as true humanity, the realization at last of the possibility the writers of Genesis had seen in the human animal "in the beginning." In the glorious humanity of the risen Christ the expected humanity of the last Adam has been seen by men. Once he had glimpsed Christ, Paul had no doubt that he had located the model and means of transfiguring the form of human life into that condition where it is capable of imaging God, just as the Jewish apocalyptists had hoped man would "in the last days." 

Paul had come to see Jesus, therefore, as a man who fulfilled the spoilt promise of Adam and thus renewed the image of God in the human. The very lapse of time which distanced Paul from the historical Jesus enabled him to perceive what the artist Degas would call the "essential gestures" of his life. These essential gestures, in which the revelatory form of Jesus' life consists, are above all a matter of his perfect, creative obedience to the Father. That responsiveness in obedience to the Father, in life and in death, is for Paul the inverted image of Adam's sin. Christ, although he was in the form (or image) of God, did not exploit the existence with God which he possessed, but renounced his claims, choosing instead the way of humiliation and obedience manifested in the carpenter's home at Nazareth and the via dolorosa to Calvary. (42-43)

Fleming on Plato

Thomas Fleming will be discussing Plato's Euthyphro at Chronicles. Introductory post is here.

knowledge without love

From Hans Urs von Balthasar's Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence:

The writer's greatest danger, from which his profession always separates him only by a hair's breadth, is the vice of vices, the essence of original sin . . . the sin of Eve in paradise and of all her guilty children: curiosity, or, expressed in a more theological way, knowledge without love, the kind of knowledge that is not paid and vouched for with one's existence and suffering, the forced anticipation of the vision God wants to bestow through grace but into which impatient man bites as he bit into the forbidden apple. (139)

This reminds me of something Mr. Cooper wrote in a comment on one of my papers (circa February 2006):

[There is] a marvelous unity among the writing that Christ does upon the hearts of his people, the writing that the apostles and evangelists do upon the inscripturated record of the covenant, and the writing that we all must do upon the fabric of our own life and the life of our generation . . . [T]he standard for the interpreter [has been raised]; until the interpreter can receive the gift of love provided by the apostle or evangelist, he or she is not ready to respond with an analysis. And the analysis itself must be a responsive gift of love, to the biblical author, to Christ, and to the reader.

the myth of neutrality

James Hitchcock, writing in 1979:

The myth that, on questions like abortion and sterilization, the state is merely neutral, neither forbidding nor denying particular human actions, has understandable appeal for those Christians who face the problem of becoming good citizens of the secular city. However, it has little basis in reality. The modern liberal state is, for better or worse, an active organ which is never neutral, constantly employing its power, its money, its influence, and its personnel for or against particular social policies. Avant-garde Catholics are caught in a mesh of hopeless contradictions, simultaneously urging that politics partakes of a moral and religious significance but deploring attempts to "intrude" religion into politics, and insisting that Christians must "witness" to justice and truth but that they must also not "impose" their values on other people. 

The result is to deny any distinctively Christian influence over the political process at the very time that important moral decisions are made through that process. The moral tone of society for the next quarter-century is being set largely as a result of certain judicial and legislative decisions towards which progressive Catholics are either benignly favorable or naively indifferent. There is no more striking contrast in contemporary society than that between the confident and aggressive social reformer and the diffident Christian afraid to be thought fanatical. (Catholicism and Modernity, 173)

sacramental being

Deacon James Keating writing in the November 2011 Homiletic & Pastoral Review (via Ignatius Insight Scoop):

Christ wants to share his authority over malevolent powers with his priests. He wants to encourage and teach a man how to be with a person when that person is being tempted, struggling with faith, hope or love: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, Therefore and make disciples of all nations…. And behold I am with you always, until the end of the age" (Mt 28:18, 20). This desire of Christ to share his authority is fulfilled when a man is ordained to the priesthood. Each priest, however, has to subjectively cooperate with Christ, receiving his authority, over and over again, with each day of ministry. This receptivity can be hard to sustain as so many tasks present themselves to a priest, tasks that threaten to take from him the essential aspect of priesthood: it is a spiritual mission flowing from a heart captured by Christ’s own. A priest’s pastoral authority flows from his own being, his being after ordination.

The phrase "being after ordination" as much as the constant task of "subjective cooperation" echoes José Granados' remarkable article on the Ascension in the Spring 2011 issue of Communio:

A central element of faith in the Ascension is the bond between flesh and God. This claim strikes us as odd, in that we often understand the body as an obstacle to our relation to the divine, in the manner of Socrates' debate in the Phaedo. For the Bible, however, the flesh is the privileged place wherein God manifests himself. The resurrection of the body, the goal toward which Christian life points, confirms this aspect. The fullness of the body takes place when it is filled with the Spirit and becomes a spiritual body. This means that the flesh is not opposed to the Spirit, but is rather his companion, the fitting place within the world for his work and abode. 

This is possible because the body itself is that place where life, by becoming open to the world and to humanity, discovers within itself a relation to God the Creator. Only in the body can God be made manifest. In the body God appears, not as some external object placed before our eyes for our control, nor as some remote horizon of man’s desire, which could be mistaken for a mere projection or mirage. The flesh bears testimony that we are created and welcomed into existence by a love that precedes us. The transcendent can now be understood to be the spring from which all life flows, like that originating love that gives birth to us. In order to discover the mystery of love, the flesh, moreover, sets in motion a dynamism that carries man beyond himself, toward communion with the transcendent. 

What is the role of the Ascension in the history of this bond between the flesh and the divine? The body of Christ, already glorified, is now bound to the rest of creation in a new way. This mystery communicates to the cosmos the state of the glorified flesh of Jesus, insofar as it places the definitive goal toward which all of creation is tending in the Father himself. A new horizon is thus opened within creation: all created being is already in heaven, because all things are now moving toward the very heart of God. On the basis of the Ascension, therefore, the body acquires a new language; the body’s capacity for proclaiming God is raised to a new level. This is the language of the sacraments, in which material creation expresses a more fulfilled relation with the transcendent.

Keating again:

Reclaiming the power of his office, which means to become affected by his intimate communion with Christ, the priest realizes that there is a Pentecost today, as there has always been since the very first one[.]

Granados:

[T]he Ascension has to do, not principally with Christ's absence, but rather with his powerful presence among his people. The liturgical context of the Lucan narrative highlights the connection between the Ascension and the Church. In the gospel, Jesus leaves while imparting his blessing, with arms raised—a gesture that calls to mind the priestly blessing of Sirach (Sir 50:20–21). For this reason, Heinrich Schlier can say that, for Luke, Ascension and blessing coincide: the gesture with which Jesus departs is the final image that remains with the disciples; he departs while giving his blessing, not after. We have already noted that in the Old Testament, the divine blessing brings the continuing presence of God, which is interior to that which is created, bestowing upon it fertility and growth. It is understandable, then, why this act grounds the existence of the Church. Luke's account is thus in accord with the conclusion of the gospel of Matthew: "I am with you always, until the end of the age" (Mt 28:20).

village and parish in The Diary of a Country Priest

Here.

men and fish

Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics:

[I]s history a reasonable process or is it essentially incalculable and irrational?
. . . the Christian is bound to believe that there is a spiritual purpose in history--that it is subject to the designs of Providence and that somehow or other God's will is done. But that is a very different thing from saying that history is rational in the ordinary sense of the word.

There are, as it were, two levels of rationality, and history belongs to neither of them. There is the sphere of completely rationalized human action--the kind of rationality that we get in a balance sheet or in the plans and specifications of an architect or an engineer. And there is the higher sphere of rationality to which the human mind attains, but which is not created by it--the high realities of philosophy and abstract truth. 

But between these two realms there is a great intermediate region in which we live, the middle earth of life and history; and that world is submitted to forces which are both higher and lower than reason. ... Human life is essentially a warfare against unknown powers--not merely against flesh and blood . . . but against principalities and powers, against "the Cosmocrats of the Dark Aeon," to use St. Paul's strange and disturbing expression. ... 

Of course if we were pure spirits, the whole process of history and human life might be intelligible and spiritually transparent. We should be like a man in calm weather on a clear tropical lagoon who can look down and see the lower forms of life in their infinite variety and the powers of evil like the sharks that move silently and powerfully through the clear water, and who can also look up and see the ordered march of the stars. 

But this is not given to man. The actor in history is like the captain who sees nothing but clouds above and waves below, who is driven by the wind and the current. He must trust in his chart and his compass, and even these cannot deliver him from the blind violence of the elements. If he makes a mistake, or if the chart fails him, he dies in a blind flurry of dark water and with him the crew who have no responsibility except to obey orders and to trust their officers. (121-123)

Robert Penn Warren, "A Way to Love God":

But I had forgotten to mention an upland
Of wind-tortured stone white in darkness, and tall, but when
No wind, mist gathers, and once on the Sarré at midnight,
I watched the sheep huddling.  Their eyes
Stared into nothingness.  In that mist-diffused light their eyes
Were stupid and round like the eyes of fat fish in muddy water,
Or of a scholar who has lost faith in his calling.

Richard Wilbur, "Someone Talking to Himself":

Even when first her face,
Younger than any spring,
Older than Pharaoh's grain
And fresh as Phoenix-ashes,
Shadowed under its lashes
Every earthly thing,
There was another place
I saw in a flash of pain:
Off in the fathomless dark
Beyond the verge of love
I saw blind fishes move,
And under a stone shelf
Rode the recusant shark--
Cold, waiting, himself.

Elizabeth Bishop, "The Fish":

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Cormac McCarthy, The Road:

[In his dream the man] wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some gigantic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones case up a shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

"ignorance of owing is to be devoid of a self"

R. J. Snell writing at Front Porch Republic:

I can think of myself as an empty container of freedom, as a sovereign who exists prior to my entanglements with others, but this is a paltry and ghost-like self. The person who matters is the one who is son, father, husband, cousin, son-in-law, friend, and each of those roles limits my ability to do just whatever I want, whenever. As son, I owe piety; as husband, I owe fidelity; as father, I owe gentle instruction; as friend, I owe loyalty. Consequently, I am what I am in virtue of the responsibilities I bear. Insofar as I matter as a person, I am constituted not by sovereignty, but by what I owe. And only by knowing what I owe to others do I know who I am and what I’m for; ignorance of owing is to be devoid of a self.