A new gracious woman

The LD has been absent from this page, not because engaged by his job to follow the trip of the Pope in Great Britain, but for a greater reason:

his wife just had a baby girl.

What a joy!

I would have liked to enlarge on this, by spending a few words to see what it is that makes for joy in birth. Hard task!

Perhaps I can summarize it thus: the renewal of life experimented as grace, that makes us wanting to laugh, as Abraham did when the angel announced to him the conception of Isaac.

Add to this that we are speaking of the entrance in the world of a little woman: what more gracious than that!?

HP

Friendship, eros, charity

A New York sexologist by the name of Esther Perel has gratified us with a book, Mating in captivity, lavishing all her wisdom about sexual desire and how to keep it alive.

It seems that many couples after a while that they are together experiment a dreadful fall of their sexual desire. They want to stay together as a couple, but don't feel like making love anymore. Well, if they just accept it, it's no big trouble: there is no law that prescribes to do it. The trouble springs when desire is aroused by other people, and they follow their impulse. Then you have infidelity, and that's no good.

OK, Perel argues, we can't stand infidelity, it is dishonest; but there is a solution: to be utterly honest with each other. She envisions so negotiating couples, who come thus to agree on what one can accept from the other in violation of the exclusiveness of their sexual involvement. In this way, she suggests, even their mutual desire can gain in vitality.

I would suggest another kind of therapy: ama et fac ut vis (Saint Augustine). For those who don't know Latin: love, and do as you want.

The catchword here is ama. What does it prescribe?

C. S. Lewis wrote a marvelous little book, Four Loves, in answer to the question of what is "love". So much more marvelous, the less it claimed to any originality in the basic finding. It was enough for him to observe that we use the word in four different way: to mean "affection", "friendship", "eros", and "charity"; and analyze each one in turn.

Now, I leave aside the first, which is that we can prove toward our doggies, in general pets, or the things we are familiar with.

Eros is the one in question here: i.e. the attraction between a man and a woman that makes them engage in sexual games, which seems to falter after a while, so they are driven to look for novel experiences.

The alternative (to Perel's) therapy I suggest is to keep eros together with friendship and charity.

Friendship is the pleasure people draw from each other's company. Thus said, we can ask where such a pleasure comes from. Lewis' acute observation is that people are always friends in an idea, some shared likings. More: from Aristotle to Cicero it was stressed that only virtuous people can be friends, thanks to the appreciation of the good present in the other.

Charity is the readiness to give.

Now, back to the imperative ama. It doesn't prescribe a feeling, which would be absurd (how could you ever obey such a prescription?). What it prescribes is always a performance, the reciprocal giving of one's own life, in whatever ways one might willingly manifest it.

Here is also the idea in which lovers (in the current, erotic sense of the word) can be friends: that of a relationship in which one looks at the other as precious and uniquely good. Having something that only he or she can give: his or hers total self.

I assure you that in such a case, where friendship and charity are alive between lovers, eros cannot fail. Sexual desire stays alive too.

HP

History is history

History is history, which means that it happened and nothing we can do about it, save try to understand it.

For centuries the Church acted in a secular context characterized by a monarchical and aristocratic articulation of society. There it became, in spite of the initial opposition, the main culture of the people, so it was in her that the princes searched for a justification of their representation, that made them other than tyrants. Of course, so the history goes, at the same time the princes tried over again to make of her just the spiritual side of their power: in a word, to subordinate her to themselves as to the true anointed by the Lord.

But there is a little particular: every Christian is, in the Church, anointed.

So for centuries the only one to remind the princes of this little particular was the Pope: the papacy was, over again, the only bulwark to the absolutism of secular monarchs, who in turn claimed exclusive holiness for their kingdoms.

By itself, I could say, the Church (the only one, holy catholic church) is a transcendent monarchical institution, established by God through Christ, leaving Peter and the other apostles with their successors, the Pope and the Bishops, to spread his Spirit through the people, so to have everybody share, once anointed, in his divine kingship.

Things have not changed even after that, also because of the long term effect of the Church's work in society, monarchy left the way to democracy in the secular constitution of states.

In Europe, this required in order to happen a series of revolutions, from Luther's protest to the juvenile movements of the late Sixties. It happened that people, moved by the sense of the equal personal dignity they owed to the Church, saw her on the side of the monarchical and aristocratic powers that be, and so turned also against her as an impediment to their divine freedom. But in this way, having deprived their dignity of its transcendent justification, they followed the way of the old princes, and tended to turn into tyrants.

This again is history, and I don't need to remind the ways this turn to tyranny took. But perhaps I do need to remark that this turn can take a soft as well as a hard face: a needed reminder now days, when the soft character of tyranny risks to make it invisible to us.

Different was the experiment in democracy made in America: not against the Church, but leaving the churches free to educate people to the required royal virtue. Of course, perfection is not of this world, and even the American experiment is subject to the temptation of soft tyranny.

That tyranny it is, is recognizable precisely by the attacks moved to the Church and the Pope.

There are derailing priests, betraying their order by indulging in "paiderastia" (today it is called "pedophilia")? So what is new: that men are sinners, and such unfortunately stay also within the Church, is again history. Nothing to marvel about.

I would marvel only if it were a phenomenon of such diffusion in the Church to exceed by a long stretch its presence in other sectors of human society. Which is in no way the case, quite the contrary.

This means therefore that the Church is attacked for the same old reasons, that she is there to remind people of belonging to a higher society than the one represented by any state of this world. Thus she reminds them of their freedom of children of God, being, because children, heirs, and sharing, because heirs, of his sovereignty.

Hence the royal liberty that makes democracy – the democracy we cherish – possible, keeping us from the otherwise inevitable servitude, to others as well as to ourselves.

HP

Closed and open witness II

It's a week that I am brooding over the conclusions of the previous post, and consequently the title I gave to it, thinking they need some explanations, while, taken by other business, I didn't find the time to give them.

The other business is my teaching cultural anthropology. Now, we all know how close the question of culture is to that of religion, to the point that I dare say that religion is nothing else than culture, i.e. the understanding of the world out of which we live in its ultimate implications.

Multiculturalism is therefore nonsense. Even to declare all cultures equally legitimate, it's a way of affirming one's understanding of the world, and hence one's culture.

So, these days I was trying to introduce my students to cultural anthropology by explaining them this simple fact: simple, and though hard to accept in our liberal society, where what we call science is actually the culture by which we are taught to understand the world.

Thus, believe it or not, the problem we face with science is specular to the one raised by the religion of the book.

With the name of science it is brought forward a knowledge that is claimed to be based on evidence, and not on faith in someone, let's call him a prophet.

From Thomas Hobbes in the Seventeenth Century to Karl Popper in the Twentieth Century, the objection advanced to any talk of revelation is the same: you claim to have had an experience of God speaking to you; I don't say you didn't, but neither I can say you did, because I have no way to tell, being the evidence you appeal to foreclosed to me.

That's because you don't want to see the evidence available to you as proof of where my words come from – could the prophet retort, and throw the ball back to the scientist: your evidence is good enough to build atomic bombs, but not to prove that by so doing we achieve control of nature, because there is no such thing, but only God's will, to which we submit ourselves even when building such bombs.

Here it is the result of direct witness for alleged evidence: two kinds of "prophesy", speaking in the name of God or in the name of Nature, set the one against the other.

Reciprocally closed.

Cultural anthropology, instead, at least as I understand it, withdraws from such a confrontations of opposing prophetic claims. It's task is to take comparatively into exam men's witness. By way of this, the evidence it appeals to is neither immediately of God or of Nature, but of what human beings represent for each other.

Should we say their divine nature? God's potentia present in them and among them?

HP

A just and loving God

"No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor," were Obama's words in Texas at the funeral of the thirteen victims of a jihadist. "And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice – in this world and the next."

That's right! No just and loving God looks upon such acts with favor: it is what we have been taught in our Christian tradition.

PUTUS, and with him the majority of the MSM, seem to hold it true for all religious traditions, and in particular for that of Major Hasan.

I am not sure, however, that Major Hasan thought it the same way. According to his tradition he was earning paradise for himself, because God – they call it Allah – was looking favorably to him.

To put it rather bluntly: POTUS, and with him the MSM, can well refer all faiths to a "just and loving God", because God is always just and loving… for his faithful.

But only for them.

For them the world is divided in two: friends, belonging to the same human group to whom God's love goes, therefore to be loved, and enemies, those outside the group of the beloved ones, therefore to be hated.

There was one, though, who said: love your enemies as your friends.

Already before him, however, God's law was: thou shall not kill – without any limits set to it.

Thus Jews and Christians have been taught to recognize the humanity of every man, as being all God's children.

Wars, as we all too well know, didn't cease. However, at least in doctrine, it was out, save for the case of "just war", run in self defense.

No easy concept, I grant. But enough, I should think, to be careful in assessing when and where we are in the presence of a real threat.

Not to look indiscriminately at everybody outside the circle of the "true believers", as a threat against God's blessed ones: which means "us", which means "me".

HP

On Gifts and Giving: a festive conversation with the HP

Dear HP,

I was very happy to see your reflections on the nature, the purpose, the cause and the end of feasts and feasting.

It strikes me that the turning marked by feasting is not only of the generations, carried into and out of one another by love.

The years and the seasons, too, are marked by feasting...and also by fasting.

So, what of the cosmic significance of feasting - of the turning of the seasons into and out of one another, through the years and decades and centuries and millennia and aeva?

I mean to say that you almost stumbled on the Feast of All Saints - the fourth feast of the Christian calendar. How is this possible? We have Christmas and Easter (though the seasons of Advent and Lent, which are their respective propaedeutics, are less and less pronounced - with the result that events like the Carnival and the Immaculate Conception are less and less before the public consciousness).

Said shortly: what is the relationship of feasting to fasting, and may we succeed in having the one without the other?

Best,
LD

Celebrating love

I was still pondering LD's reply to Dowd's article, when it came the Feast of All Saints.

I must say I found that actually LD's refutation came out nicer than my comment. I don't really care about poor Dowd, save as an example of how those like her – they like to call themselves "liberal" – don't seem capable of thinking out the implications of the positions they take.

They can be dreadful: like, say, that there are no feasts.

Why?

Because they tell us that we don't have anything to feast about: to celebrate.

And again, why?

To answer, let me start by asking another, exemplary question: what do a man and a woman do when they celebrate the day of their marriage?

They consciously bring back to life the moment in which they said "yes" to each other. Or, I could say, the moment in which they told to each other "I love you". Every time we do it, we do it afresh. Think of how squeamish we are about all the sweetness of love vocabulary (and all the poetry that originated from it) when we are not actually in love. After, when we fall in love, with no effort we slide into it.

Let's make from here a step further: by telling each other, in whatever way, "I love you", we celebrate love.

I can love because other people loved each other, from their love I was born and in their love I grew up.

Of course I am giving the exemplary case. May be they ceased to love each other. But it is always of their old love one lives, however wounded and torn apart, and lacking therefore in celebration. Even when parents only separately show love to their children, it's always something that carries beyond each of them, to a more generalized love exchange.

When I tell somebody "I love you", I reactualize the same love my parents, their parents, and so on for generations unending, everybody in short, celebrated by saying it.

It is the same love of all the love poems ever written, of all the stories ever told, of how people exchange words, goods, and, allow me, body fluids.

Now, I would like to ask peoples of Dowd's persuasion what they think of this Feast of All Saints, in which we celebrate those among our deceased who lived a good life.

We celebrate them as being still living and feasting, i.e. fully enjoying now the feast of life to which we also partake, precisely by celebrating love.

I am afraid that they would tell me that these are just words, because love is only a feeling, aroused by our hormones when we see some fitting object of desire.

No, love is not a feeling, but the mutual relation making up the giving and receiving of life. Feeling is only the proof of our being in love.

HP

Choosing Life

Crusty old men (not all of them white, mind you), used to say: [ens et] verum et bonum et pulchrum convertuntur, and also, bonum est diffusivum sui:

As her condition grew worse, Mayra’s family prepared for the end of her earthly life. Aida described the beauty that shone through the pain of her sister’s last days on earth. "At the end, I saw her like Christ, with so many wounds and bruises on her arms and her side," she said.

Go read the rest here.

Hat-tip to Fr. Zuhlsdorf.

LD