``Where
the Bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be;
even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church'' Ignatius of
Antioch, 1st c. A.D
The Logos, the Transcendentals, and
Sanity
These days,
there's an intense and prevailing sense that the world's gone mad.
We're sick with knowing it, with feeling
it bone-deep. Everything's gone on tilt, turned inside-out
and upside-down. Relations between the sexes and among the races;
gender madness; mass immigration of unassimilable populations; lives
lived in the virtual world of screens; children raised without fathers;
high divorce rates and low marriage rates; gay "marriage"; women
murdering their own unborn and just-born children; young people
clamoring for death-dealing socialism; student debt, and saturated
markets undermined by oligarchs importing cheap labor, making it
impossible for a generation to get jobs, buy homes, and raise children;
our institutions overtaken by
the modern equivalent of Maoist Red Guards; divisive politics; social
mobbing; unelected corporatist oligarchs totally unresponsive to
citizens' needs;
the global persecution of Christians that goes unnoticed by the
mainstream media; the victory of scientism -- the list of what ails us
goes on and on. Even in the human element of Holy Mother Church,
disease, confusion, and unholiness fester, all the way to the top.
There is one -- and only one -- solution to all this: the Lord Jesus
Christ.
He is God. He is Man. And He is something else: He is "the Word."
John 1:1-5, 8-14
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and
the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things
were made by Him: and without Him was made nothing that was made. In
Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth
in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. That was the true
light, which enlighteneth every man that cometh into this world.
He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world knew
Him not. He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. But as
many as received Him, He gave them power to be made the sons of God, to
them that believe in His name. Who are born, not of blood, nor of the
will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we saw His glory,
the glory as it were of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace
and truth.
The Greek word -- Logos -- translated as "the Word" in English has
many, many definitions, but the phrase "Divine Order" encapsulates it
best.
Now, the ancient Greeks believed that before the universe came into
being,
there was Chaos -- a formless mass of fire, air, water, and earth,
described by Ovid:
Before the ocean
and the earth appeared— before the skies had overspread them all—
the face of Nature in a vast expanse was naught but Chaos
uniformly waste.
It was a rude and undeveloped mass, that nothing made except
a ponderous weight;
and all discordant elements confused, were there congested in
a shapeless heap.
We Christians know, though, that God -- I AM -- has always been, and
that nothing else existed until He created it by speaking it into
being. Psalm
32:6-9,
my emphasis:
By the Word of the Lord the heavens were
established; and all
the power of them by the spirit of His mouth: Gathering together the
waters of the sea, as in a vessel; laying up the depths in storehouses.
Let all the earth fear the Lord, and let all the inhabitants of the
world be in awe of Him. For He spoke
and they were made: He commanded
and they were created.
He spoke the world into existence, and on the sixth day, He created man
-- doing so in His image:
Genesis 1:26-27
And He said: Let
Us make man
to Our image and likeness:
and let him have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of
the air, and the beasts, and the whole earth, and every creeping
creature that moveth upon the earth. And God created man to His own
image: to the image of God He created him: male and female He created
them.
Preceding creation and underlying it is an Order of divine
origin, an Order that's found in the phenomena of the natural world --
from the structure of cells to the movement of
the Heavens
-- and written into the very hearts of men, as Jeremias 31:33 tells us:
"I will give my law in their bowels, and I will write it in their
heart..." All that He's made has a divine purpose -- a telos -- and an
order to it, a
way of participating in being that is its own. When the Divine Order is
honored, all goes well; when it's not, chaos reigns.
Because man is made in God's image, we have rational souls -- souls
with the powers of Intellect, Will, and Memory. The Intellect
lets
us
recognize the Divine Order; the Will allows us to conform -- or
not
-- to that Divine Order; and Memory allows us to pass on what we
know to our children, to teach others and form civilizations, and,
along with the Intellect, gives rise to the creative
imagination.
To wit: there is
such a thing as objective Truth, and we can know it and
conform to it and teach it to others.
For 2,000 years, worshipers of the Logos have conformed their
Intellects and
Will to the Divine Order, a conformity that allowed them to build up
Christendom with its universities,
cathedrals, paintings, statues, symphonies, hospitals, rule of law,
chivalrous treatment of women, and the honoring of patriarchy without which civilization is impossible.
They've honored Memory and conformed it to the Logos by handing down to
their children what their ancestors knew. But increasingly, since the
so-called "Enlightenment," the very concept
of the Divine Order has been not just ignored, but actively taught
against, and
the things described in this page's opening paragraph are the result.
Because of this, our perceptions of the True, Good, and Beautiful --
the transcendentals
-- are being destroyed or perverted.
The
Transcendentals
Truth, Goodness, and Beauty are called the "transcendentals" because
they are aspects of God's very nature and, so, transcend the merely
physical. Because they are independent of physical laws (though are
reflected in them), science has little to say about them, which is why
the Faith is a necessary part of a sane social order. Science is wholly
unsuited -- unable -- to
answer questions about the meaning
of life, the morality of
murder, or why
something is seen as beautiful. But every legal system has some notion
of what should and should not be allowed (that's what the law does), and every thing fabricated
by man is either beautiful and good or not; legal systems and art are
either rooted in the Logos and, ergo, the transcendentals -- or they're
bound to
lead to disorder, confusion, and unhappiness.
To know the True, Good, and Beautiful, we must know the Logos, Who is
Christ. The True, Good, and Beautiful are rooted in God's very Being
and, so,
are one just as the Three Persons of
the
Trinity are One. The True is good and beautiful; the Good is true and
beautiful; the Beautiful is true and good; and they all flow from
Him, Who is Being.
Truth is Being -- what is
-- and to adhere to Truth is to conform one's mind to what is. I find it fascinating to ponder
the
Persons of the Trinity and consider how They challenge some of the
basic
assertions of modernity -- for example, the ideas that nothing is
really real, and
that we can't know anything even if it were. The Father's calling
Himself
EGO SUM QUI SUM -- I AM WHO AM -- affirms Being; the Son's Incarnation
shows that we can know what
exists; and the workings of Holy Ghost show how we can know it. Metaphysics,
ontology and
epistemology are given foundation by the Trinitarian nature of God
Himself (which is why, contra Carl Friedrich Gauss, theology and not
mathematics has classically been considered the "Queen of the
Sciences").
But because God has been ousted from modern human consciousness, and
materialist scientism
has become the accepted way of seeing the world, the transcendentals
are becoming lost to us, leading to the madness we see around us.1
Men are
now allowed to wander into women's restrooms because they are deemed to
"be" women, and resistance to this bizarrerie can lead to crippling
fines,
boycotts, social shaming, and worse.
Our laws allow for the murder of babies in the womb. Our architectural
landscape is pockmarked by Brutalist monstrosities. Ours is a world
in which the True, Good, and Beautiful have been ignored, or redefined
without
reference to the Logos.
Angels have
intellects, and animals have sensible appetites (the desires for food,
sex,
pleasure, etc.). Man has both of those -- symbolized by the head and
the belly respectively -- but he has
something extra: his moral dimension, symbolized by the chest, or the
heart. In the brief but profound "The
Abolition of Man," C. S. Lewis explained how educators, even in his
time (he was writing in 1943), were teaching children to become what he
called "men without chests." He wrote about how "Gaius and
Titius," writers of The Green Book,
a textbook meant for schoolkids, expounded on a
visit Samuel Taylor Coleridge made to a waterfall, where the poet
overheard two tourists. One of the tourists described the waterfall as
"sublime"; the second described it as "pretty."
Gaius and Titius
comment as follows: ‘When the man said This is sublime, he
appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall... Actually...
he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark
about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have
feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime”, or shortly,
I have sublime feelings’ Here are a good many deep questions
settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet
finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language
as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about
something: and actually we are only saying something
about our own feelings.'
Before considering the issues really raised by this momentous
little paragraph (designed, you will remember, for ‘the upper
forms of schools’) we must eliminate one mere confusion into
which Gaius and Titius have fallen. Even on their own view—on
any conceivable view—the man who says This is sublime cannot
mean I have sublime feelings. Even if it were granted that such
qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things
from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection
are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposites,
of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an
object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration.
If This is sublime is to be
reduced at all to a statement about the
speaker’s feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble
feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius were consistently
applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them
to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible
feelings’,
in fact that Your feelings are
contemptible means My
feelings are
contemptible...
The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will
believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a
predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the
speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.
The Green Book
taught the young to rip their heads from their chests by encouraging
them to ignore the moral and emotional dimension of their lives, and to
see the Intellect
as all that matters. Eric Harris, one
of the Columbine shooters, must have been a good student of today's
teachers who teach the same ideas; one of his
diary
entries attests:
theres no such
thing as True Good or
True Evil, its all relative to the observer. its just all nature,
chemistry, and math. deal with it. but since dealing with it seems
impossible for mankind, since we have to slap warning labels on nature,
then... you die. burn, melt, evaporate, decay, just go the [f***]
away!!!! YAAAAAH!!!!
Harris learned well the lessons modernity taught him.
Even worse, the young are now being taught to destroy what remains of
the
disembodied head: the very idea that there are objective facts at all
is being
treated as "problematic," "racist," "sexist," "transphobic," and so on:
We
live in a world in which CNN can tell us, simultaneously:
And the news
gets even worse than that: What remains of the chest is being deformed
and amplified.
Feelings -- even pathological ones -- are seen as sacrosanct such that
it's socially shameable behavior (or outright illegal) to necessarily offend the feelings of
a man who thinks he's a woman, or of an hysterical girl who says she
was raped because she didn't sign a contract before fornicating.
Applause is being replaced by "jazz hands" lest someone be "triggered."
Words are considered to be "violence," and "social justice warriors"
clamor to censor speech some might deem painful. Our
emotional lives are rudderless -- uninformed by our crippled
Intellects, unmastered by our Will -- but treated as all-important.
The "belly" --
symbolizing our appetites -- has also been separated out from the
judgment of the Intellect,
and from temperance born of the Will. Unrestricted heodinism and
materialism rule the day, and
any speech against it is seen as "silly," "prudish," "judgmental,"
"boring," or
"no fun" in spite of the destruction these things bring to our
society, our selves,
and our environment. The same people who shame occasional smokers are
silent
as women turn their wombs into abattoirs, and health-destroying sodomy
is promoted to
schoolkids.
The "belly," too, is being subject to the world of screens such that
what feeds it is more and more phantasm than real. Digitized porn
stars, and dopamine hits in response to people having clicked "like
buttons" have come to replace actual sex and real accomplishment, and
we are becoming less embodied human beings than screen avatars.
The more we divide our collective head, chest, and belly from each other, and the further we
uproot them all from the Logos,
the
more we descend into a simulacrum of Hell. And the modern
West slouches in that direction more and more all the time.
Living in
accordance with the Logos
We need to
teach the world to regain respect and love for the Logos and to once
again see the task of education as integrating the head, chest, and
belly so they're in accord with each other, and with the Divine
Order. We need to be
guided by and aspire to the transcendentals so we can begin to rebuild
our
civilization.
The Head: The
Intellect
Every created
thing has a nature, a purpose, and a way of being that furthers that
purpose and tends toward perfection. The fascinating female Orb Weaver
either builds a web or she
starves. Worker honeybees either perform and understand their little
waggle dance, or their colony dies. And man, too, has a way of
participating in being that is in accordance with God's eternal law, or
"the Divine Reason's conception of things," as Aquinas put it. This way
is called the "natural law," and man either acts in accordance with it,
or he descends into chaos. Man either fulfills his ultimate purpose --
to know, love, and serve God so he can be happy with Him eternally in
the next world -- or he doesn't, and when he doesn't, he and the world
pay a price.
The natural law is called "natural" because it's built into us, into
our very nature, and because we can use human reason to discover it. It
is universal and immutable except by dispensation by God Himself, and
it applied as equally to the ancient men who lived in caves as it does
to us in
the modern West. We need to exercise reason to come to know it, and we
need faith to come to know God, Who created us able to reason, and Who
wrote the natural law into our very being.
First and foremost,
ask God for the supernatural gift of faith such that you can truly make
an Act of Faith. If you are not
Christian,
sincerely ask the "if-You-are-there-God" to illuminate you and bring
you to Truth. If you are sincere, you will,
at some point, be given what you need. You will be opening yourself up to
grace.
Then study to know what the Church
traditionally teaches, starting with catechisms and then going
through
this site's Traditional
Catholicism 101 page. Great Mysteries aside, if there's something
you don't understand, trust that there is an answer to be had this side
of the veil, and find it. Trust, too, that if there is something the
Church formally teaches that you disagree with, it indicates a problem
with your understanding or Will and not with the Faith itself.
Know that there is not and cannot
be a contradiction between the Faith
and Reason, and the Faith and sound science. Never fear science,
which secularists abuse and
-- through faulty premises, and theory rather than observation -- often
twist to try to destroy faith. Modern science derives from Catholic
thought (the scientific method itself comes from a Franciscan friar);
it is one of man's best tools for learning about the universe and how
it works. But never forget that it is just one of man's tools -- and not the
most important one at that. It can only show us how things work as they do; the
reasons why things not only
work, but exist at all are where the Faith comes in.
Study Logic, learn how to recognize fallacies and cut
through misleading rhetoric, and teach your children to do the same.
Send your kids to good, private schools or homeschool them, if
possible. If neither's possible, supplement what they know, and help
them
unlearn propaganda they've likely picked up from school and popular
culture. Stress to them the importance of Truth, and the evil of lies.
When they're young, tell them stories such as "The Emperor's New
Clothes, "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," "The Monkey and the Dolphin," and
"The Crow and the Raven." Download these stories here: Stories About the Importance of Honesty
(pdf format, 6 pages). Make your home a
Catholic one.
Re-learn what your ancestors knew, embrace it,
and
pass it on to your progeny -- or, as Chesterton might have said given
his definition of tradition as "the democracy of the dead," let
your spiritual
ancestors have their voice through how you live. The power of tradition
is brought to mind by something the British philosopher Roger Scruton
said:
If you start
thinking about politics in an intellectual way, you are likely to be on
the Left, because that provides a systematic solution, an answer to the
questions, puts it all in a system, and also gives you a rather
dignified and rather self-congratulatory place in the system. But once
you start thinking, if you think a bit harder and longer about it,
you'll move back to what you would've been if you'd never thought at
all.
Tradition and even "the stuff" of the Holy Faith itself can act as
shorthand guides to the
greatest, deepest Truths. Fashionable ideologies capture the minds of
intellectuals -- but only the midling ones, or else not for long. The
truly intelligent of good will always find their way back to what their
ancestors knew all along -- knowledge culled from and tested by
centuries of experience. A great and good-willed intellectual can
expound on holy matrimony in fascinating ways that are stimulating to
other intellectuals -- ways that are important
and good. He can find support
for the traditional view of marriage from psychology, sociology, and
other sciences in addition to Sacred Scripture and the writings of the
Fathers. But the less intellectually endowed "peasant" can love God
just as well (or perhaps even better) and follow the natural law by
learning about marriage
through stained glass, pictures in books, and what his parents taught
him over the dinner table. Both can state the dogma
that marriage is a sacrament, do the right things, and hand what they
know
on down to their
children in their different ways.
Meanwhile, the midling intellectual, cutting off his
head to spite his chest, and guided by the
likes of "The Green Book" Lewis wrote about, might mock and slander the
both of
them while pushing for no fault divorce, polyamory, and homosexual
"marriage." Thinking himself "woke" and "cool," he'll tear down
tradition and push for endless reform, for what he's sure is
"progress." If that half-bright half-witted "progressive" would think
some more,
he'd
come around to what "even" the "peasant" knew all along, and what the truly great intellectual can write
volumes on.
G. K. Chesterton
wrote,
In the matter of
reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain
and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a
paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let
us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a
road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I
don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more
intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see
the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and
think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use
of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The
gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists
who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put
there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street.
Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for
somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge
whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we
have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up
by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and
mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by
assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can
only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth
is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until
he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it
arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be
able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become
bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But
if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has
somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who
is suffering from an illusion. We might even say that he is seeing
things in a nightmare. This principle applies to a thousand things, to
trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to
conviction. It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who
did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing
one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did
sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to
become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation
of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn't
play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical
reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons
with patient benevolence: "Defer, therefore, the operation you
contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle
or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your
head and the Lord be with you."
The point: don't fear real education; fear half-baked simulacra
thereof. Fear ill-willed, midling intellectuals who treat tradition
with disdain, who rip down fences they haven't bothered to even truly understand first. Fear propaganda
and ideologies that sucker people in with easily understood, sound bite
answers -- answers that always seem to satisfy vanity, hedonism,
vengeance, or the lust for power.2
Bottom line: you need to "remember what the dormouse said" and "feed
your head," to borrow a line from
Jefferson Airplane -- but you need to feed it with Truth, using
discernment, reason, respect for the knowledge of your ancestors, and
healthy skepticism with regard to the motives, means, and vast
blindspots of ideologues.
And then, after learning the Truth, you must speak it. There may be lots of
times it won't be prudent or serve charity or the greater Good to speak
a Truth unnecessarily, to
volunteer
something true that doesn't need to be said at a given time, in a given
place. But there is never a
time to lie. Especially to oneself. Make nightly examinations of conscience,
see where you need work, and then do
that work so that you'll be seen by others, by yourself, and, most
importantly, by God as a person of integrity.
When it comes to speaking the Truth to others, there'll undoubtedly be
a price to pay, just as there is a price to pay -- a bigger price to pay -- for not speaking the Truth. We live in
a time in which speaking honestly comes at great cost, but
truth-telling is the only way forward! As in the story of the Emperor's
New Clothes, someone must be
the first to emulate the little boy who cried, "but the Emperor's
naked!" And once one person
demonstrates fortitude by doing that, others
follow. Then entire edifices built of lies crumble. Please read these two brief pdf files, save them,
and pass them around to your friends and family:
When we lie to
ourselves and
to others, when the Logos is ignored, when we are complicit in evil
because of fear, disaster is inevitable. But the
Logos can't be ignored forever, and the Truth will out in mysterious
and dangerous ways. 3
The Chest: The Will
You may have
heard the line that "Beauty will save us!" Alexander Solzhenitsyn
agreed when he
wrote:
[P]erhaps that
ancient trinity of Truth, Good and Beauty
is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our
self-confident, materialistic youth. If the tops of these three trees
converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct
stems of Truth and Good are crushed, cut down, not allowed through,
then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty
will push through and soar to that very same place, and in so doing
will fulfil the work of all three.
Our passions reflect the intensity of our will, and they need to be
tempered so that we become their masters, so that they don't rule us.
One help in ordering them to
the True and the Good is to surround ourselves with Beauty.
In the aforementioned "The Green Book," the story is recounted of the
two tourists commenting on a waterfall, with one calling it "sublime."
In saying this, he was saying that the waterfall's beauty and majesty
point to something much greater than the waterfall itself. They
reveal something
about He Who made the waterfall. Wisdom 13:3-5
speaks
of those who
worship "fire, or the wind, or the swift air, or the circle of the
stars, or the great water, or the sun and moon" because of their
beauty, in which the idolators delighted:
[L]et them know
how much the Lord of them is more beautiful than they: for the First
Author of beauty made all those things. Or if they admired their power
and their effects, let them understand by them, that He that made them,
is mightier than they: for by the greatness of the beauty, and of the
creature, the Creator of them may be
seen, so as to be known thereby.
Nature's beauty gives
us glimpses of God Himself. The stars, plants,
and animals all point to their Creator, as
does the sea, about which Dr. Peter Kreeft 4 feels as I do. Listen to him
speak of it
(mp3) and of how God can be seen in its beauty, power, and mystery.
And is there anyone who can watch this murmuration of starlings and
not be stunned into worshipful
silence?:
Pondering nature with the mind in addition to taking it in through the
heart reveals a
different sort of beauty that brings us back to stunned silence: the
beauty of mathematics. Nature's reliance on and repetition of the
Fibonacci
numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 ...), and that the ratio of any
two successive Fibonacci numbers is close to the Golden Ratio (and get
closer to that ratio the larger the numbers are), are mindblowing. The
Golden Angle, which informs how leaves are arranged on trees, how
petals
appear on flowers, and how pinecones and certain seashells are spun
into spirals makes for humbling beauty which gives us a flash of
reassurance that the Ancient of Days is.
Circles, spirals, pre-ordained angles, harmony, symmetry, proportion --
nature is filled with mathematical beauty and order, both of which are
seen in man himself. Leonardo da Vinci wrote about his "Vitruvian Man":
For the human
body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top
of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of
the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle
finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an
eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to
the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast
to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the
face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the under side
of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the under side of the
nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the
lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The
length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the
forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth.
The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it
was by employing them that the famous painters and sculptors of
antiquity attained to great and endless renown.
Similarly, in the members of a temple there ought to be the
greatest harmony in the symmetrical relations of the different parts to
the general magnitude of the whole. Then again, in the human body the
central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on
his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses
centred at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet
will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just
as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may
be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the
feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the
outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the
height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.
Click to enlarge
Artistic beauty can do the same for us as nature's beauty does. The
paintings of Giotto, Fra Angelico, or Raphael; the sculpture of Bernini
or Michelangelo; the brilliant architecture of Christendom -- they fill
the soul with wonder, joy, gratitude, and
even, by the power of God, grace. But no other form of
art does this as well as music! Now, I'm a head-banger from way back; I
love rock and roll -- yes, even hardcore metal -- and likely always
will. But it is, I confess, more a visceral sort of thing, a lower
phenomenon than the
experience of truly beautiful
music that doesn't just take us out
of ourselves, but takes us up
and places us somewhere between
Heaven and earth. The chant we are blessed to hear at Mass, the
polyphony of a Palestrina -- pure enchantment! If you are not
emotionally affected by listening to the Lacrimosa of Mozart's Requiem
Mass, I
don't even want to know you.
Beautiful secular music has a power of its own. Look at the joy on the
faces of
the people in these crowds as flash mobs form to entertain them with a
bit of Beethoven's 5 glorious 9th Symphony and the Brindisi
(a
toasting song) from Verdi's "Ta Traviata." I'm reminded of Blanche du
Bois's line "Sometimes there's God -- so quickly!":
As I say on the page about Mystery, Miracle, and
Morality Plays,
how wonderful it would be for Catholics to "seize the day" and do
things like getting a group of young men together to form a flash mob
and randomly give the world some Gregorian chant! Beauty like that cuts
right through snarky arguments and captures the imagination. It
intrigues. It invites. It
leads people "upwards". It leaves the Christian-bashing atheist with
nothing to say.
We need much more beauty in the world, and we need to start with a
restoration of our churches' aesthetics. Bring back the stained glass,
the bells, the incense, the things that fill the senses with beauty and
give us something to hold on to, to feed our imaginations, and to dream
about!
And, please, expose your children to nature and to Christendom's art,
its
"gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh," as Anthony Burgess wrote in
"A Clockwork Orange." Don't let them be 12-year
olds who've never heard Bach or Beethoven. Don't let them be unable to
recognize Michelangelo's Pieta or Bernini's St. Teresa. Surround them
with beauty!
In addition to and above the beauty of nature and of man's art is the
Beauty of Christ Himself, the Author and Source of all Beauty. In The Via Pulchritudinis (The Path of
Beauty), the Pontifical Council for Culture under Pope Benedict XVI
tells us:
Jesus Christ is
the perfect representation of the Glory of the Father. He is the most
beautiful of the children of man, for He possesses the fullness of the
Grace by which God delivers man from sin, delivers him from the bondage
of evil and returns him to his first innocence. A multitude of men and
women have let themselves be seized by this beauty to consecrate
themselves to it. As Pope Benedict XVI expressed during the first
Canonisation of his Pontificate at the closing Mass of the XI ordinary
general Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Eucharist, "the saint
is the one who is so fascinated by the beauty of God and by his perfect
truth that he is progressively transformed by it. For this beauty and
this truth, he is ready to renounce everything, even himself." (23
October 2005)
If Christian holiness configures to the beauty of the Son,
the Immaculate Conception is the most perfect illustration of the work
of beauty. The Virgin Mary and the saints are the luminous reflection
and attractive witness of the singular beauty of Christ, beauty of
infinite love of God who gives Himself and makes Himself known to men.
These reflect, each according to their manner, as prisms of a crystal,
faces of a diamond, contours of a rainbow, the light and original
beauty of the God of Love; man's holiness is participation in the
holiness of God and by it His beauty. When this is fully welcomed into
the heart and spirit, it illuminates and guides the lives of men and
women in their daily actions.
Contemplate the
life of Christ, His Mother, and the Saints through spiritual reading,
prayer (the Rosary is especially good for
this), and making the liturgical year come
alive.
The Belly: The
Sensible Appetites
In this age, the body is seen in a non-Christian manner, as either
radically separate from the soul, or as existing without a soul at all.
Either
way, it's treated either as unimportant or as more important than it
is. It seems that some see surface beauty and health as the greatest
goods, as any look at Instagram will tell you. Most of the folks who
attend yoga classes, spend hours perfecting make-up techniques, and eat
only vegan have no problems engaging in fornication, having abortions,
and so on. Others, unable or unwilling to compete with the physically
lovely, give up
altogether, giving in to obesity, drug abuse, radical body
modification, sloth, and other
unhealthy ways
of living (and then they campaign to get us to change our standards, to see, for ex.,
morbid obesity and full sleeve tattoos as beautiful and "hot." The girl
who looks like a sailor who's swallowed a whale isn't doing anything
wrong; the man who doesn't want her to become the mother of his
children is, you see.). Today, the body is too often treated as either
a monarch or
an abused and hated
enemy.
There is a sense, though, in which the body and soul can oppose one
another: the rational part of man desires his ultimate end while
the appetites of the body yearn for sensuous goods, and when the
body does so inordinately, it's called "concupiscence." But note the
word "goods" there: food, sex, physical pleasure -- all of these are good things.
But they must be experienced only in an ordinate manner or they will
destroy us.
A
metaphor I use on the page on modesty is
that of fire: fire is good. It
warms us, cooks our food, and delights us. But a fire that's not
contained and controlled, a fire that's lit in the wrong place or at
the wrong time, is a disaster. Fire in the hearth? Good! Fire on the
roof? Not good. A great dinner with a just-right amount of lovely
dessert? Good! Shoving an entire large pizza down your throat and
chasing it with a full box of Twinkies? Not good. Sex with your spouse?
Good! Sex outside of marriage? Not
good. (Of
course, this is understood by the secular-minded to mean
"Catholics hate and feel guilt about sex." 6 Whatever.
Leave them to their destruction if they don't want to understand and
conquer themselves.)
It's
the same with all of our lower appetites. We must order them according to reason, and
the way we
do this is through practice,
by developing good habits
(virtues). In this sense, overcoming concupiscence is like exercising a
muscle: the more you do it, the stronger you get. The more you lift,
the more easily lifted are heavier loads in the future.
It's, in part, for this reason that fasting
is an aspect of the
Catholic life. Fasting is a means to discipline the body, to keep the
concupiscible appetites under control. The traditional weekly
abstinence from meat on Fridays is a way to stay mindful of our need to
defeat our concupiscence; our resolving to do this as a community is a
corporate acknowledgment of this need, and a means to bind us together
culturally. Other ways of discipline include prayer,
finding distractions from or healthy replacements for a given vice
(i.e., a bad habit), and
avoiding "near occasions of sin" -- those situations or people who tend
to lead you to stumble (here, nightly examinations of conscience help
yet again).
Mind you, few think that mastering the concupiscible appetites is easy.
Even
St. Francis, in his struggles to do so, referred to his body as
"Brother Ass." But the point is to try, to start somewhere in
developing good habits. One step at a time, party people... Let
your motivation be, in part, the knowledge that true freedom is the
freedom from your passions. We either master them, or they master us. We master them, or they are used to control us. Remember the story
of Samson and Dalila, wherein Samson -- the
strongest, most powerful man in Israel -- was unable to control his
passion for Dalila
and was blinded, made almost helpless, as a result (see Judges 13-16). 3
Do these things -- learn the truth, submit to Truth, speak the truth
(or, at least, don't lie),
surround yourself with beauty, discipline yourself by developing good
habits -- and, before you know it, you'll be "living in the Logos";
your
head, chest, and belly will be integrated; and you'll have made your
life better. And once your life is much better, it may well ripple out
in ever larger circles, eventually "changing
the world."
1 The next time a
secular, atheistic or agnostic person uses the word "ought" or
"should", ask why the thing he is advocating is good. When he answers,
ask him why that thing he just replied with is good. When he answers,
ask him again why that second thing he replied with is good. And keep
going until he has nothing left to say.
2 Propaganda
abounds and, especially in these days,
it's delivered in insidious ways. Now more than ever, the evidence of
our senses can fool us. Imagine
Googling your virgin daughter's name only to find porn videos featuring
"her." Imagine turning on your TV to see "the President" talking about
dropping nuclear bombs on North Korea. Then imagine finding out that
what your eyes saw and what your ears heard was not real, but that the
damage caused is very real indeed. "Deepfakes"
are here:
Be aware of the goals and means of those who own and run the mainstream
media and academia.
3 Listen to Dr.
E.
Michael Jones talk about how our unwillingness to control our
sexual passions is used against us as a form of political control: Libido Dominandi (mp3), and about how
the rise of the horror genre is a result
of the rejection of Logos in Monsters
from the Id (mp3). Note, too, this quote from St. Augustine's "City
of God," Book IV, Chapter III: “[A] good man, though a slave, is free;
but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man
alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”
4 Dr. Kreeft's website:
https://www.peterkreeft.com
5 I beg pardon, but I had to come back to
this page so I could edit to include links to mp3s of the allegretto
section of Beethoven's 7th
(careful; it starts out very quietly and then thrillingly explodes! It's devastating!), Claudio Arrau
playing his Pathetique, and Arrau
playing the Appassionata. I truly couldn't resist; it's Beethoven!
6 On the contrary, devout Catholics have
the best sex of all -- we have more enjoyable sex, and more often:
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/17/devout-catholics-have-better-sex
Hey, all those "Ev-er-y Sperm Is Sacred" Catholic babies don't come
from nowhere!