The Fire Next Time

“Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” Fair enough, but I’m not sure the First Congregational Church was fully aware of the implication in combining their trademark comma with the rainbow symbol on their sign on Route 2. Perhaps the UCC is more apocalyptically minded than I previously gave them credit for. After all, the rest of us tend to forget that nagging condition in the covenant with Noah: “Never again will I destroy the earth by a flood.” Comma… God is still speaking, to be sure. But is it because He keeps changing his mind, or because we keep changing ours? Poor creatures of a day! But I suppose apocalyptic fervor has never really left us.

I should mention, lest my use of the masculine pronoun in connection with the Divine seem offensive, that I have no objection to those who wish to refer to God as “she”, so long as they give equal respect to “Father Nature.” Fair’s fair.

Just when you thought it was safe

Francis Bacon quotes Aeschines in The New Organon: “Assuredly we do not live the life of mortal men, but to this end we were born, that in after ages wonders might be told of us.” (This is Bacon’s idea of humility.) I tracked the quotation to the oration against Ctesiphon, and went to look up the Greek: οὐ γὰρ βίον γε ἡμεῖς ἀνθρώπινον βεβιώκαμεν, ἀλλ᾽ εἰς παραδοξολογίαν τοῖς μεθ᾽ ἡμᾶς ἔφυμεν.

But infinitely more fascinating is the footnote at the bottom of the page in the Loeb edition. It is, alas, unrelated to the quotation above, but cannot fail to strike curiosity into the hearts of all but the most heartless of readers. “The Scholiast explains that certain celebrants were seized by a shark as they were taking the sacred bath in the sea at Eleusis.” The actual context is further up the page. In the Adams translation: “But did not the gods forewarn us, did they not admonish us to be on our guard, all but speaking with human voice? No city have I ever seen offered more constant protection by the gods, but more inevitably ruined by certain of its politicians. Was not that portent sufficient which appeared at the Mysteries–the death of the celebrants?”

Perhaps it’s time for a scholarly paper, “The Code of Jaws: Shark Attack as Divine Forewarning in Ancient Greece.”

Can spring be far behind?

At the end of the sixth chapter of Stringfellow Barr’s novel Purely Academic, Professor Schneider leaves a faculty party and walks out into the snow. The falling snow has transformed the university town, hiding the unattractive landmarks and muffling the sounds. “How discreet a thing is snow,” thinks Schneider. Perhaps academic research is, “in the long run of mankind’s intellectual history, a benison. It is hard to wade through, it makes one’s eyeballs sting, but in the end perhaps it covers all until another spring can come, and I believe in spring. Now in the winter of our cultural discontent, the pages of thousands of doctoral dissertations sift silently down onto the library shelves–the separate pages, since nothing ever held these dissertations together anyhow except the binder’s glue.”

Perhaps, he muses, academic research is like a snowstorm; all those commentaries on the really great books, and the commentaries on the commentaries, like snowflakes smudged with ink, falling and covering all, “for now is winter when genuine human thought freezes up to await the passionate spring, the rebirth of learning.”

“Can snow be immoral? Fortified by a few Manhattans, a good man might struggle through. And, surely, it has a kind of beauty.”

Confessions 10.23.34

Augustine, Confessions 10.23.34, paraphrased:

“Why does truth bring forth hatred? Why is the speaker of truth treated as an enemy, if happiness and the good life are loved, which are nothing more than joy in the truth? Why, unless truth is loved in such a way that those who love something else wish that which they love to be the truth, and since they are unwilling to be deceived, they are unwilling to be convinced that they have been deceived?  If they hate the truth, then, it is for the sake of what they love instead of the truth. They love her when she shines on them, but they hate her when she contradicts them. For since they wish not to be deceived, but to deceive, they love her when she reveals herself, and hate her when she reveals them. For this reason she will repay them so that those who are unwilling to be revealed by her she will reveal against their will, and yet she will not be revealed to them.“

T.S. Eliot wrote in The Rock: “O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart: for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked;” which is perhaps only to say O Lord, deliver us from ourselves.

“Yet there is a little light in men. Let them walk — let them walk in it, lest the darkness overtake them.”

Where are the Hittites?

Walker Percy wonders about the ethical secularist: a good man, as commendably motivated as a man of faith, and secure upon the accumulated moral capital of the Judeo-Christian ethos, but without the core of faith. To such a man, however, the core of faith seems not a core but an anomaly, easily dispensed by a few standard objections. Percy’s point: not whether the objections truly dispense with the whole queer business of “God, the Jews, Christ, the Church”, but why it further seems that the whole business is dispensable whether it is true or not. First, of course, the burden is on those who live with faith to show a necessary connection between faith and the good life. But the ethical secularist, if he is aware of what Percy has diagnosed as the alienation of modern man from himself, should “consider the possibility that this dislocation of his times is related to this very incapacity to attach significance to the sacramental and historical-incarnational nature of Christianity…how is it that even if these things were all true, could be proved, it would make no difference to me?” (The Culture Critics, from Signposts in a Strange Land).

Later in the same book (in answer to the question Why Are You a Catholic?) Percy writes that there are two signs in the post-modern age which cannot be encompassed by theory or subsumed by it. One is one’s own self. Like Kierkegaard’s man for whom Hegel explains everything but what it means to be born, live, and die, “even if one agrees with the theory, what does one do then?” …for the rest of one’s afternoon, or the rest of one’s life. The other is the Jews, and by extension Christianity, both of which rest upon the claim that God entered into a covenant with one nation and no other, and in the latter case that God became man, one man and no other. And the paradox is this: that it is the Judeo-Christian West in which science has flourished and it is Judeo-Christianity which the present-day scientific mindset finds most offensive, because it cannot be encompassed by theorizing. (This, incidentally, is why A Canticle for Leibowitz is perhaps more realistic than most other novels of its genre, if indeed it is not in a genre of its own).

The present age: “the common mark of the theorist and the consumer is that neither knows who he is or what he wants outside of theorizing and consuming.”

Here’s looking at Euclid

(Recently discovered verses of Emily Dickinson, apparently penned upon posthumously reading the first two definitions from T.L. Heath’s translation of Euclid’s Elements.)

A point is that which has no part,
a line is breadthless length;
and those who read in Euclid’s book
shall go from strength to strength.

Because I could not stop for Heath
he kindly stopped for me;
the carriage held but just ourselves
and Plane Geometry.

I never saw a radius
or two or four or three,
Yet I know how the circle looks,
and what a line must be.

Lines are the things with measures
that perch upon a plane,
and have the length–without the width
and never meet again.

I never drew diameters
nor bisected a line,
yet certain am I of their place
as if the proofs were mine.

And all their songs are sad

If it has been said that the Irish are a nation of poets, perhaps it is because Irish is a language that only a poet could love. But until my pronunciation improves, I will confine my admiration to the language as written; in fact I suspect that my appreciation for a language has as much to do with how it looks as with how it sounds. This is certainly true of Greek, which is so lovely in its own alphabet and so awkward in transliteration. Of course, the Greeks abandoned their unwieldy Linear B syllabary before they eventually coaxed the rough Phoenician letters into a true alphabet, and even then it took centuries for the stately capitals to come into their own, and the graceful minuscules, and the florid decadence of the Byzantine ligatures. But the Irish also adopted a foreign alphabet and made it a thing of beauty, not just in the flowing insular majuscule of their illuminated manuscripts but in their ingenious system of spelling, once phonetic and now of mainly etymological and aesthetic interest (which is to say immensely frustrating to anyone interested in learning to pronounce the language). I leave the list below to stand on its own aesthetic merits.

an buachaill the boy.
an cailín the girl.
an fear the man.
an bhean the woman.
an cat the cat.
an madra the dog.
an gluaisteán the automobile.
an rothar the bicycle.

The God Abandons Antony

…It is said that about the middle of the night, while the city was quiet and downcast through fear and anticipation of what was about to come, suddenly the sounds of various instruments were heard and the shouting of a crowd, as if a throng of Bacchic revelers were going out through the middle of the city toward the gate facing the enemy, and there the noise became greatest and went out. It seemed to those considering this sign that the god was deserting Antony. (Plutarch)

Hearing at midnight the unseen procession
that passes you by, with voices and music,
don’t mourn your fortune that passes away,
your work come to nothing, the plans that deceived you.
Like one given courage, like one long prepared,
you must bid her farewell now, this fair Alexandria,
bid her farewell, she is leaving you now.
Most important of all, don’t laugh or make light of it,
don’t call it a dream, or your ears playing tricks on you,
don’t comfort yourself with vain hopes such as these.
With courage, like one long prepared, as befits you,
like one who is worthy of so great a city,
steady yourself at the window and listen,
with proper emotion, and not as a coward,
enjoy for the last time these sounds you are hearing,
the exquisite sounds of this mystic procession,
and bid her farewell now, this fair Alexandria,
bid her farewell, you are losing her now.

Translated from the Greek of Constantine Cavafy

Tie Your Shoes

It is related in Njáls Saga that in the battle of Clontarf, as the defeated Vikings fled the victorious Irish, Thorstein Sidu Hall’s son stopped to tie his shoelace and was captured. Kerthialfad asked him why he had not fled. “I can’t get home tonight,” replied Thorstein. “I live in Iceland.” For this Kerthialfad spared his life.

Tales of the Philosophers

Aulus Gellius relates the following story: to Herodes Atticus there came a man dressed in a cloak, with long hair and a beard reaching almost to his waist, and this man asked that money be given to him for bread. When Herodes asked the man who he was, the man replied angrily that he was a philosopher, as should have been obvious from his appearance. “I see a beard and a cloak,” replied Herodes, “but a philosopher I do not yet see. I ask you, then, by what signs do you think we may recognize you to be a philosopher?” Then being told by one of his companions that the man was a ne’er-do-well and a troublemaker, Herodes said, “let us give him some money, whatever he may be, not because he is a man, but because we are,” and he ordered that money be given to him to buy bread for thirty days. And he told how the philosopher Musonius had once given a thousand sesterces to such a man. Being told that the man was a rogue and deserving of nothing good, he smiled and replied, “then he deserves money.” (Attic Nights, IX.2)