Patron of Prodigals

It is sometimes frightening how present and powerful the most ancient of saints can be upon invocation. The closer they were to Christ in history, the more powerful they seem to be. I'd never considered before now St. Joseph in this respect. One thinks often enough of the Child in the arms of Mary; but the thought of Him in the arms of Joseph had never occurred to me before. Everything it meant to be a man, He learned from this man; it was by means of Joseph that the Father chose to convey "fatherhood" to the human nature of His Son. Perhaps this is so profound to me personally because, though I did not grow up with my mother, I did grow up with my father. The sense that many people get from Mary's maternity has always seemed somewhat abstract to me; I've always seen her more in her Queen of Heaven aspect. But I can see Joseph as a man on earth, gratefully, joyfully, caring for the Son of Yahweh, who has been entrusted to no more than himself.

ever ancient ever new

I've officially been reading C. S. Lewis for ten years now; not continuously, of course, but probably more than any other single author. Whenever I see a picture (and environs) of this man from whom I have probably learned more than from any other, I'm filled with longing.  I long for the days when I first read him, when I first discovered this fresh brilliance, this teacher who relieved all my anxieties, this boon companion.  I see in him everything that I should truly long to be in this life, as a man and as an intellect, if only it were my destiny.  I am also filled with longing for my youth, for those few years in my adolescence when I was closer to God than I had ever been before, or have ever been since.

I don't suppose it's coincidental that Lewis himself was The Doctor of Sehnsucht.  It's a subject that comes up often in his writing; and his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, is all about it, that which had haunted him his entire life.

I'm quite excited that this Autumn, Cambridge (Canto Series) is re-printing Lewis's greatest literary study:  The Allegory of Love:  A Study in Medieval Tradition.  Also:  Image and Imagination:  Essays and Reviews (also Canto), a collection of never previously published works. Hooah!

adjustments

However slowly, I've been reading The Maltese Falcon again, and I just finished the Flitcraft Parable.  I'm reminded that Flitcraft's disappearance was not the principal, or not the only, reason that I identified with him, as a personal fantasy.  The very non-fantastical part I identified with was the heart of the story:  a beam falling from several stories hit the sidewalk just next to him on his way to lunch.  He felt like somebody "took the lid off life and let him look at the works."  Furthermore, the part of tale that Spade "always liked":  "He adjusted himself to beams falling.  And then no more of them fell.  Then adjusted himself to them not falling."  It is this brush with death, the awareness of one's own mortality, that resonates with me.  One takes life for granted until something that can kill you reminds you that you can die at any moment, and you "adjust" yourself to this awareness.  But the reminders aren't perpetual, so you go back to your default perspective and forget your mortality.  I think I've always found Hammett a soulmate because he was tubercular; that is, he lived with an illness.  Indeed, the reason he began writing as a career was because, around the age of 30, he knew writing was something he always wanted to do and he didn't expect to live much longer, certainly not well into his 50's as he did.  I certainly feel reckless in that I do not often enough take heed of Hammett's lesson.

The Mathematical Approach

Below are the very first paragraphs of Robert Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology.  What follows is, I believe, a critical distinction, and should probably explain why I personally take a non-academic approach to philosophy. Academic philosophy is inveterately "scholarly"; it seems to take the approach of a legal proceeding 90% of the time (actually, all the humanities seem to proceed this way, and certainly the so-called "human sciences").

"[A professor of mathematics and philosophy, Gian-Carlo] Rota had often drawn attention to a difference between mathematicians and philosophers. Mathematicians, he said, tend to absorb the writings of their predecessors directly into their own work. They do not comment on the writings of earlier mathematicians, even if they have been very much influenced by them. They simply make use of the material that they find in the authors they read. When advances are made in mathematics, later thinkers condense the findings and move on. Few mathematicians study works from past centuries; compared with contemporary mathematics, such older writings seem to them almost like the work of children.

"In philosophy, by contrast, classical works often become enshrined as objects of exegesis rather than resources to be exploited. Philosophers, Rota observed, tend not to ask, 'Where do we go from here?' Instead, they inform us about the doctrines of major thinkers. They are prone to comment on earlier works rather than paraphrase them. Rota acknowledged the value of commentaries but thought that philosophers ought to do more. Besides offering exposition, they should abridge earlier writings and directly address issues, speaking in their own voice and incorporating into their own work what their predecessors have done. They should extract as well as annotate."

A is A, and Truth is Truth; thus just as all mathematical truths are public, available to all, so should all philosophical truths be. The big difference, of course, and the place where philosophers get stuck, is that truth is "located" in propositions, and propositions are composed of words. And all the disputes among philosophers derive from disagreements over the meanings of words. Math doesn't have this problem because numbers are invariable; every number is identical to itself. Academic philosophy is, as I said, inveterately "scholarly" because the academician has tons of ground to cover about the philosopher(s) they're following before they can make their own case; they have to establish that, say, Aristotle in fact "meant" X rather than Y, before they can go on and proceed to "move forward." Though I am by no means fond of Logical Positivism, I can sympathize a great deal with the idea that in order for philosophy to proceed, the question of "various meanings" has to be excluded, that one needs the clarity in logical terms that one has in numerical terms. Ultimately, since words/terms are based on concepts which are in turn based on fact/reality, they do have a manifold of meanings, because reality is, as C. S. Lewis once put it, knobbly and complicated. Husserl's a priori of every object having a subject-relative pole for each subject (i.e., each person) makes matters even more complex because the activity of consciousness is even more complex than the object one is conscious-of. I think a metaphysical realism is the only way to achieve the kind of "progress" that Rota spoke of. The question of what something "means" will go on infinitely if it doesn't eventually reach an absolute ground of being-in-itself; our meanings, in other words, have to be based on beings, and thus we must strive to reach a meaning which is objective. If there can be no agreement as to meaning, no "progress" can ever be made; and if agreements of meaning are not founded on real objects, they are, as it were, meaningless. This, I take it, is the objection of Postmodernism, viz. that since we can't access things-in-themselves, we can never achieve objective truth and thus no progress of any kind will be possible. This is more or less the contrary to the Logical Positivist. The latter excludes meaning from the outset, and the Postmodernist says the meanings are infinite. What they both have in common is that they each think objective meanings are impossible. But each position is untenable because each of them rely on statements of their case which are formulated in terms that have meanings which they take to be communicable, and to achieve communication requires both parties appealing to standards which they both agree upon.  If meanings are arbitrary or factitious, they should never have been able to tell one another why or how they disapprove of one another.  Logical and metaphysical realism -- i.e., truth is found in propositions consisting of terms founded on concepts which are teleologically oriented to objective entities -- is the aurea mediocritas of the deficiency of Positivism and the excess of Relativism, and the only way to proceed philosophically.

a lost article

Recently I posted here a bit of praise for Robert Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology, which I'd been re-reading for the first time in a few years.  It was a good little piece, but unfortunately I deleted it.  I deleted it because, for a few hours, I was feeling ambivalent toward phenomenology and thought "to hell with it."  But then I got back to the book and wished I hadn't deleted it.

The core of this reflection was that I took this book to be the definitive statement on phenomenology.  Regardless of Husserl and his followers, and regardless of the other works Sokolowski has written, I find the Introduction to be a magnum opus, and the only "version" of phenomenology that I find acceptable.  I also made a point concerning the pun on the terms "introduction" and "phenomenology."  I said that phenomenology is a state of mind:  the so-called phenomenological attitude is phenomenology per se.  And every time one engages the phenomenological "reduction," one engages in an introduction to -- a "leading-in" to -- phenomenology.  This is fitting, I think, because phenomenology is largely -- as Merleau-Ponty put it -- re-learning to look at the world.  The philosophical epoché always consists in starting from scratch, a return to the things themselves, a statement with Socrates that "all I know is that I do not know."  I spoke of the Introduction in this way because I thought such a title might be misleading to an outsider, who might consider this book the first in a long line of books on phenomenology.  But it is a unique gem, which stands alone -- like Chesterton's Orthodoxy or Pieper's Leisure -- as something to be read again and again.  Just as St. Thomas called the Summa Theologiae "for beginners", even though it is considered the treatise on theology, so do I consider Sokolowski's book a Summa Phenomenologiae -- it is, for me, the statement and treatise on phenomenology.  It's holism, applicability to life and to thought, is unparalleled (so far as my own researches have led me to conclude).

Perhaps someday I will be able to restate entire this reflection which I have stupidly deleted...

"to delight in the praise for its own sake..."

For some reason I've been getting a lot of kind, flattering, humbling feedback from fellow students in the course I'm taking on the Holy Trinity.  I think that this total stranger's response represents one of the few moments in my life I've felt understood.

[my original post]
Agere sequitur esse. This famous scholastic dictum encapsulates the point at issue in "I, Q'.s 4-6" [of St. Thomas's Summa Theologiae]. What a thing does (agere) is a "second act" which follows upon what a thing is (esse), it's "first act." Since God is ipsum esse, being simply, everything He does is one with what, or that, He Is. Whatever good a person -- or any created substance -- achieves, however, is resultant upon its act of being, and can fall short of goodness or perfection. Formality and Goodness, while separated in rational analysis, are in Nature, as in God, not separated -- are, in fact, synonymous. Ideally, every thing, by being what it is (form), achieves its perfection (goal). God -- Existence per se  -- is fully actual, and existing beings participate in His primordial existing, but analogously, namely by the limitation of individual essence, which is separated out by matter. Humanity in particular -- because it is Fallen and possessing free will -- falls short of its own perfection, lacks full participation in the human essence (human "being"), what humanity is created to be (but that leads to another issue). And even in Nature, which is composed of creatures subject to generation and corruption, we find beings which fall short of their essence, especially in the phenomenon of death or in the process of decay. Since in God there is no distinction between His attributes and His existence -- and since we are certain of His existence by the proofs -- we can equally be certain of His goodness and His perfection.

[stranger's reply]
 Trevor I heard your voice in my head as I read. We were in a stone church classroom, candles lighting up the stone walls with years of soot rising up the walls. The fire was cracking but not irritatingly, and one would notice the graphics on the high walls for ancient councils in which the archbishop was called to attend. You were reading from a stool, one leg over the other, and holding a pipe in one hand. In the other was a book, a brief and concise analysis of the Summa to which you narrated quite well. Your fingers broke the spine of the book and simultaneously help open the pages flat, neat and open enough to read line to line, edge to edge.

Recollection

I began looking through an intellectual journal I kept circa eight years ago.  It's funny how many things one has moved past, resolved problems; yet in how many other cases one is surprised that such things written there are wiser than one feels at present.  Orson Welles said that he began his theatrical career at the age of 16 in Dublin, almost by accident.  He claimed that he was more famous in Dublin than he ever became subsequently.  "I started at the top, and have been working my way down ever since."  I often feel that way.  In many ways (and I think some of my old friends, who knew me then as well as now, would agree), I had far more wisdom when I was 17 than I do now.  Most days now my mind feels like a labyrinth of mere facts and confusion.  I think I can account for such a digression, however:  back then, I had some small degree of moral courage and asceticism.  I had discipline.  Asceticism and sacrifice are necessary for any kind of coherent psychological and/or spiritual progression.  But alas my recent years, though filled with books and art, have also been filled with rampant self-indulgence, and this has clouded my reason in more ways than I can even be aware of.  I know what I have to do to make amends, but to do that would require my lost moral courage.  This is why surrender to the Creator is the only way out of the labyrinth, for He is outside the maze and within the mind and is hindered by neither.  Only He can see all the angles and all the circuitous routes toward redemption, by any definition, because He alone has no need of redemption and only the strong can help the weak.

The Tolkien Safety-valve

Usually during the cold months of every year I find myself yearning for a literary experience of, shall we say, Northernness.  I would always try Norse, viz. Icelandic, sagas and the like, but could never quite find my way in.  Subsequently I would live vicariously off of C. S. Lewis's love of this literature and his recounting of it in his autobiography Surprised by Joy.  Recently, however, I've finally discovered the majesty and mythopoeic grandeur of J. R. R. Tolkien.  And I am not talking about The Lord of the Rings.  Of all his works (save The Hobbit), I like the Rings the least. 

No, my haunts are among the Elves; tales of the Valar and Eldar in the Elder Days:  The Silmarillion is chief among these works.  And now that I have spent the last few months getting a good synoptic view of Tolkien's work, I can now lay it aside and return to my usual reading with a sense of rest, knowing that, when the "bug" for Elves, Lore, Bitter Cold and Glorious Battle assails me, I know precisely who to turn to, Old Tollers, and no other.

The same sort of process of discovery accompanies my history with all my favorite authors.  They all, in their way, serve as what I call Safety Valves.  When a certain fit for violence and the mean streets and the 1920's comes upon me, I have Dashiell Hammett.  For poetry and the meditation of the degeneration of our modern epoch, I have T. S. Eliot.  There was always one "valve" missing, for several years, and now I have finally found it in Tolkien.

The Shire: Exemplar of Ordered Liberty

From the "Prologue" of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien:

Of the Ordering of the Shire

The Shire [where the Hobbits live] was divided into four quarters, the Farthings already referred to, North, South, East, and West; and these again each into a number of folklands, which still bore the names of some of the old leading families, although by the time of this history these names were no longer found only in their proper folklands.  Nearly all the Tooks still lived in the Tookland, but that was not true of many other families, such as the Bagginses or the Boffins.  Outside the Farthings were the East and West Marches:  the Buckland; and the Westmarch....

The Shire at this time had hardly any 'government'.  Families for the most part managed their own affairs.  Growing food and eating it occupied most of their time.  In other matters they were, as a rule, generous and not greedy, but contented and moderate, so that estates, farms, workshops, and small trades tended to remain unchanged for generations.

There remained, of course, the ancient tradition concerning the high king [of the race of Men] at Fornost, or Norbury as they called it, away north of the Shire.  But there had been no king for nearly a thousand years, and even the ruins of Kings' Norbury were covered with grass.  Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king.  For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.

It is true that the Took family had long been pre-eminent; for the office of Thain had passed to them (from the Oldbucks) some centuries before, and the chief Took had borne that title ever since.  The Thain was the master of Shire-moot, and captain of the Shire-muster and the Hobbitry-in-arms, but as muster and moot were only held in times of emergency, which no longer occurred, the Thainship had ceased to be more than a nominal dignity.  The Took family was still, indeed, accorded a special respect, for it remained both numerous and exceedingly wealthy, and was liable to produce in every generation strong characters of peculiar habits and even adventurous temperament.  The latter qualities, however, were now rather tolerated (in the rich) than generally approved.  The custom endured, nonetheless, of referring to the head of the family as The Took, and of adding to his name, if required, a number:  such as Isengrim the Second, for instance.

The only real official in the Shire at this date was the Mayor of Michel Delving (or of the Shire), who was elected every seven years at the Free Fair on the White Downs at the Lithe, that is at Midsummer.  As mayor almost his only duty was to preside at banquets, given on the Shire-holidays, which occurred at frequent intervals.  But the offices of Postmaster and First Shirriff were attached to the mayoralty, so that he managed both the Messenger Service and the Watch.  These were the only Shire-services, and the Messengers were the most numerous, and much busier of the two.  By no means all Hobbits were lettered, but those who were wrote constantly to all their friends (and a selection of their relations) who lived further off than an afternoon's walk.

The Shirriffs was the name that the Hobbits gave to their police, or the nearest equivalent that they possessed.  They had, of course, no uniforms (such things being quite unknown), only a feather in their caps; and they were in practice rather haywards than policemen, more concerned with the strayings of beasts than of people.  There were in all the Shire only twelve of them, three in each Farthing, for Inside Work.  A rather large body, varying at need, was employed to 'beat the bounds' ["Bounders"], and to see that Outsiders of any kind, great or small, did not make themselves a nuisance.